The Death Scene Artist

by Andrew Wilmot

  (Beat)

  But the conversation dragged on. It became a bit thrilling, watching two complete strangers riff on our incomplete scene. The rush of it quickly overwhelmed whatever hesitation I might have felt. When Sarah gave Brill a teasing sneer, it was hard not to draw a possible future for their relationship. I imagined that sneer in later years turning sour and defiant as time passed and the divide between them -- between her fate and his coincidence -- grew from a crack in the pavement to a collapsed sinkhole in the road outside their second mortgage, to a gaping maw straight through from one end of the planet to the other.

  SARAH

  But he's wrong. We were fated to be together. I know it.

  SARAH turns to BRILL. They both lean in at the same time and KISS each other on the lips.

  SILVANA

  How can you be so sure?

  SARAH

  Because the proof that there is a plan is sitting right in front of me. Just look at Alex, Silvana. Look at how he looks at you.

  SILVANA'S eyes flit over to ALEX, who smiles a mix of shyness and seduction. He tightens his grip on SILVANA'S hand.

  SILVANA (V.O.)

  I'd noticed you stealing glances at me all night but said nothing. It was fun, feeling like we were a couple of high schoolers still getting a feel for one another -- away, for a night, from deception, destruction and death.

  (Beat)

  You'd just come off your largest role to date, a full half an act of screen time selling your way through a primrose-and-picket-fence stable of stay-at-home wives and soccer moms -- that is, of course, until the husbands and boyfriends of the neighbourhood discovered your garden-treading ways. They dragged you across the pavement by your ankles, locked you in the trunk of a Camaro and pushed it off the edge of a cliff.

  (Beat)

  You've always had such a knack for bringing people together.

  (Beat)

  I'd driven into town separately and surprised you after work, as you were on your way back to the hotel the studio had set you up in.

  CUT TO:

  INT: FREMONT HOTEL & CASINO / ROOM 612 (FLASHBACK) -- NIGHT

  SILVANA is sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting. The door to the room opens and ALEX enters, his JACKET slung over his right shoulder. SILVANA stands and walks over to him, taking the JACKET from his hands.

  SILVANA

  How was your day?

  ALEX

  Good, honey, real good.

  SILVANA

  Did … did anything special happen?

  ALEX

  No, not really. Just your typical day. But boy howdy, I am beat.

  SILVANA hangs the JACKET up in the closet next to the entrance to the bathroom.

  SILVANA (V.O.)

  You lied so effortlessly. I should have been more concerned about that fact than I was.

  (Beat)

  Later that night, over dinner, you talked insurance sales figures, gabbed about your goals for the month, said that if you didn't meet your quota there'd be hell to pay -- real fire and brimstone, you said, convincing both of us in the moment.

  ALEX and SILVANA sit down on the edge of the bed. ALEX strokes SILVANA'S hair and smiles sweetly. SILVANA returns the smile.

  SILVANA (V.O.) (Cont.)

  You said nothing at all about your on-paper affairs, each one detailed in the script like notches in a headboard. I could see them, though, in the twinkle in your eye, hidden from your wife who wasn't really your wife because this was just how far you were willing to take things. It didn't matter that I'd read the script and knew your character's flaws.

  (Beat)

  What bothers me now, looking back on that night together in Vegas, is how readily I forgave you your non-existent transgressions. Like it was something I was supposed to do. Or expected to do. I did it because I was more Silvana then than I realized.

  CUT TO:

  INT: BELLAGIO RESORT & CASINO / PETROSSIAN BAR -- LATE NIGHT

  SARAH, exhaustion and alcohol getting the best of her, puts her head on BRILL'S shoulder and closes her eyes. BRILL leans back in his seat and SIGHS HAPPILY.

  SILVANA (V.O.)

  They were like a postcard pair on their second honeymoon. I couldn't help but wonder if it had been as happy a seven-year stint as they made it out to be, or if they were, in fact, better actors than even you or I. Soon I began to wonder if that was the case with everyone we met as a pair -- if the individuals and couples who crossed our paths were who they said they were, or if they, too, were living under assumed identities, assumed vocations, mirrors of our own distorted ambition.

  CUT TO:

  INT: BELLAGIO RESORT & CASINO / LOBBY -- LATE NIGHT

  Some time after saying their farewells to SARAH and BRILL, ALEX and SILVANA are wandering the resort's lobby, hand in hand, casually admiring the architecture and opulence. They stop beneath the FIORO DI COMO -- a sculpture comprised of more than two thousand blown glass flowers adorning the ceiling of the resort's lobby.

  M_____ (V.O.)

  We died without ever saying our goodbyes to the walk-on friends we met and pulled -- without their knowledge or consent -- into our tiny, transient worlds. We were living the modern myth of Bill Murray -- popping up out of nowhere, inserting ourselves into the lives of others, giving them a taste of our fiction and disappearing again just as mysteriously. The difference being, no one actually knew or cared who we were. Once you'd gotten tired of the writing or the backdrop of a place, we shelved our skins of different types and moved on to whatever was next for you. You continued to leave notes and script pages for me -- ellipses, bread crumbs guiding our way from one life to the next. They were clues as to your next performance and our next pair of lives. Though we never discussed it, I felt the gradual disappearance of our masturbatory pretense -- gone was the illusion that I was a different person in bed with you each night. Whatever the exterior, I started to feel like we were on the same emotional wavelength, you and I. Our paths to this point had differed, but an understanding had silently been reached.

  ALEX, still holding SILVANA's hand, playfully swings her arm in the air.

  M_____

  (Staring at the ceiling)

  It's beautiful.

  ALEX

  It's something all right.

  M_____ (V.O.)

  I sighed louder than intended -- I could still hear it in your voice, the slight Southern charm you'd used to win the affections of an entire neighbourhood's worth of women. You were still Alex, but I didn't want to be Silvana any longer. I wanted to stare up at that stunning one-of-a-kind ceiling as myself, to keep its memory for myself.

  M_____

  I like it here. It feels right.

  ALEX

  (Slightly frustrated)

  We can always come back, once I've hit my quota for the month.

  M_____

  D____, I --

  ALEX SQUEEZES SILVANA's HAND. She WINCES in pain.

  ALEX

  We'll come back. I promise.

  SILVANA

  (Reluctantly)

  … When?

  ALEX

  Someday.

  SILVANA

  Do you promise?

  ALEX

  On my life.

  SILVANA

  Which one?

  24. The Sum of One’s Life

  Posted: 03/29/2014

  It’s distressing to think that in the early days of the studio system, MGM kept such intimate tabs on their celebrities that they even had a chart tracking the menstrual cycles of all their actresses. Think about that for a second, about that level of control, about how ready they were to create new histories and biographies for all their actors and actresses – about how many changed their names, their very identities, to better market themselves. Marilyn Monroe was born N
orma Jeane Mortenson, Doris Day was Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff, Greta Garbo, Greta Lovisa Gustafsson … The lesson of the day: never underestimate the power of effective alliteration.

  Celebrity couplings have also been scrutinized and picked at and portmanteau’d as much as any other facet of the industry – from Brangelina and the two separate comings of Bennifer all the way back to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, whose Hollywood mansion was, of course, called Pickfair. It was this side of the industry – the public’s adoption and unmitigated worship of celebrity culture – that D____ equally hated and feared. He loved making movies, sure, and being a part of the big machine, but he never wanted the spotlight for himself. Maybe someone would even think him a role model – that would be a hell of a different sort. No, we were never so famous that this was a concern. He was a death scene artist through and through, and I was …

  Well, nobody special, I fucking suppose.

  It does make one wonder, though, how the unwitting players and found friends we accumulated over the short time of our relationship would react upon reading these entries – seeing their memories of us pulled into a new and altogether unflattering light as part of a larger, still mostly unwritten story. I hope some of them are reading this, I really do; in my weaker moments I feel a certain amount of guilt for what we concealed – the falsehoods we presented to everyone we came in contact with, from Sarah and Brill and others like them, to those whose flesh and memories we regularly plundered – and I find myself wondering where they are and what they’re doing. For them, and for so many, this conversation must be frustratingly one-sided; we’re all waiting to hear from D____, wherever he is, whatever he’s doing. If he’s still reading. If he was ever reading this at all, or if it was merely Ezra acting on his behalf. If any part of him feels anything at all about the shadow narrative I’ve pieced together.

  I’m sorry. It’s easy these days to tumble down a rabbit hole of what-ifs: What if I’d never left home in the first place? What if I’d kept my foot out of Hollywood and stuck to the obits? What if we’d never sat next to one another at craft services? What if I’d never gone to meet him that night at the Galaxy?

  When I start down one of these trains of thought, my mind goes to Louise, who used to tell me the world was too short to wonder what if – that there’d be more than enough people who doubted you throughout your life, hitchhikers along your path with nowhere to go and nothing better to do than to make you feel like shit. That you shouldn’t give those people the time of day. “Don’t let the bastards win,” she said once when I was still in high school, while helping me adjust a face mask in the mirror – Tess Chisholm from down the street. Louise had noticed Tess one day, rollerblading by while we were on our way home from Skyline Market with two giant bags of sour keys – something we used to do all the time when we were kids, and still did every time she returned home for a visit or to do a load of laundry. “She’s cute,” she said. “She’d look real nice on you.”

  Aud voiced something similar once. It was one of the rare instances where she dropped all pretense and was, best I could tell, her naked self. I’d just been dumped by another on-set coffee runner who thought they could do better than to date an extra, who chided me for my lack of attention to detail – who, one night, picked at the half-sleeve I wore over just my legs, to give my profile something more than just a straight edge, and said, “Is this the best you can do?”

  “Dumb fucking fuckboys,” she said while wrapping her hair up in a towel. We were in the bathroom in her apartment on Sunset and she’d just gotten out of the shower. I sat on the toilet seat, half watching her, half staring at the space between my feet. “They don’t know a good thing when they have it, ya?”

  “What if he’s right, though? What if I need to be trying harder? What if I’m not enough?”

  And she knelt in front of me, her hair and body wrapped in towels so soft I shuddered at their imagined cost, and said, “I’m going to tell you this, M_____, and I’m going to tell you this once: You are enough. You’re more than enough. You’re the light of my life – and don’t you ever fucking forget it.”

  And I started to cry and was about to thank her when she turned back to the mirror and started admiring herself in profile. “Fuck, I need to get back to the gym. Am I looking soft to you?”

  I stared at her then, tears in my eyes. “You’re perfect,” I said, and I wasn’t even thinking about her skin.

  You were perfect, Aud. And you still are.

  The two of them, Aud and Louise both, they wanted me to know that I was strong, stronger than I believed myself to be. With D____, though, it was different. That night, two Septembers ago, when he corrected me in the Bellagio’s lobby for using his real name, I felt weakened, hollowed out. It was like he’d taken away my strength. I thought that ceiling was beautiful and I wanted to tell him about it. I didn’t know what Silvana thought about it and I didn’t care either. I still don’t. It was the moment that mattered. It was a small moment, but those are what make us us. I wish, right there, in the middle of one of the most watched hotels in the world, that I’d had enough sense of self to claw my way out of Silvana’s sleeve, to leave D____ on his own, holding the limp hand of eight or nine different strangers that had been so worthlessly pieced together.

  * * *

  ††

  Whenever I designed a new sleeve, I pulled from what I knew. Sometimes it was friends and family that served as my inspiration; other times there was more than enough detail written into the script I’d been provided, and all I had to do was find the right patterns and tones to piece it all together. My early attempts were spotty at best, riddled with holes in the designs and loose stitches that if pulled would cause an entire sleeve to unravel like slabs of meat through a deli slicer – to fall apart, to fall away from me. Those initial sleeves were like the characters in a child’s choose-your-own-adventure novel, constructed from branching dialogue trees and abstract, out-of-left-field outcomes. But the core of each design was still me: my thoughts, my feelings, my desires. When D____ tried to subvert that, to depress even the smallest pieces of me …

  For a time – longer than was healthy – I tried doing something different: outlining and designing new potential sleeves for both of us, from scratch, with few or no ties to who we really were on the outside. It was instantly more difficult than I’d imagined it would be; the background minutia required was staggering and I was quickly overwhelmed by all the ways it could go wrong, all the ways it might shatter the illusion if not done with enough consideration. Do you have any idea as to the level of detail required to make a fictitious character seem real? Let’s pull a scenario out of the closet, strictly for shits and giggles.

  We start with the basics: genre. How about science fiction – we’ve not done that in a while. All right now, let’s say we do one for D____, for the type of leading role that twenty or twenty-five years ago might have kicked his career into a different stratosphere: a boy living in a piss-poor part of town tasked with fighting off an alien invasion.

  So what’s first? Appearance, naturally: basic physical structure. We could pull an archetype out of a hat, but that would be a waste of time, and besides, we’re better than that. Let the details forge the flesh, right? Motivation: he’s tough, though not as tough as he thinks, and he feels like he needs to prove himself at all times, which he’ll get to do by defending his home. Why? It’s all he’s got. Survey says: rags; riches alienate younger viewers. An impoverished life is a relatable life – that’s character building 101. Besides, there aren’t enough one-percenters in the world to carry a box office. Now, why’s our boy so railroad-spike tough? Because of his friends, and because of the part of the city he’s from – inner city, slumburbia. How’s he going to react to the extreme circumstances of an alien invasion? Why he’s going to be cool, calm and collected, of course, because he’s inner city, because death and drug abuse and all those scary things are practica
lly nothing to him. So aliens? Fuck aliens – vagina-lipped hunchbacks don’t stand a web-footed chance in hell. For both our protagonist and his friends, the slums are all they got, so this collection of stray dogs is going to fight to protect their lot ’til the bitter climax.

  Next up, background: Why is our hero poor? His mother’s dead and his father’s an absentee junkie who comes home once a week to crash on the sofa and smack his kid around. He puts the “fun” in the “fundamentals of proper parenting.” So who’s our hero living with when he’s not out defending the projects with his very life or busy being a broken beer bottle’s pincushion? Aunt or uncle: aunt means we give him another layer, a dormant one that occasionally rises to the surface when he needs to show just how caring and conscientious he can be when not so concerned with keeping up his tough motherfucker exterior; uncle, on the other hand, hardens him further, and our boy is sent out in the first act, prior to the alien’s invasion, to pick his uncle’s womanizing ass up some booze and smokes. Then, finally, we get back to the specifics: height, weight, race and age, all multi-faceted details in their own right. Each decision contains multitudes of their own for consideration: How will the audience react to a Black protagonist versus a White one? A man instead of a woman? A young adult in place of a teenager? A straight character versus a queer one? Each one of these, along with a few hundred more micro-decisions, will affect and potentially change all previously mentioned possibilities.

  To summarize: D____ never respected just how hard I worked to make our fiction feel real.

  * * *

  ††

  I did something a couple of days ago that I hadn’t done since high school, back when I first started messing around with obit writing: I crashed someone’s funeral. It wasn’t exactly planned; I needed to get away from this blog and do some thinking, so I went out for a long walk (and a short bus ride) and wound up passing Evergreen Memorial. A fair distance from the cemetery’s entrance I saw a large group of people – so many that from where I stood they looked like a swarm of blackflies all hovering around the same piece of meat. My first response was to keep moving, but there was something to seeing so many people hugging one another, holding one another … I couldn’t help myself – I wanted to know what sort of person could’ve elicited such a dramatic response from so many at once. I crossed the cemetery’s threshold and made my way as unassumingly as possible to the perimeter of the swarm.