“I thought you wanted the script.”
“I want to direct the script,” he said. “I know a guy who might produce it. We should prep a pitch. We should pitch it to him together. I’ve worked with him a dozen times. He produced The Mausoleum with me. He’s got a deal with Tru Image.”
“Tru Image. Is that the place that made the Conan spin-off as a reboot?”
“That’s the one!”
“Oh,” she said.
He rubbed his index finger back and forth across his up per lip, polishing it to a high gleam. “We should work on this ASAP. Rob likes things focused. Straight to the point. An elevator pitch.”
It wasn’t exactly the big budget dream Betsey had nursed all these years, but she thought about her finicky stomach and her dwindling funds and nodded.
“I have big plans for us,” he said.
She wanted to believe him.
On her way home, secretly thumbing the button of her pepper spray as she swayed with the motion of Los Angeles’s underused subway train, she decided that Mannie was probably overselling their potential, but that even an immediate release to DVD or the internet would be better than just temping twice a week. Hell, some people made their entire living off cheap horror movies. It might even be fun. She could invite Mannie and Sarah over for a viewing party. She’d decorate with black lights, ghost cookies, and rubber bats strung from the ceiling. She pictured herself in a not-too-distant future, healthy and financially secure, the type of person who could chat up strangers at bars. When someone asked her what she did, she’d take a cool sip of her wine and say, “I write horror movies.” Maybe someday she would call her mother and say, “Turn on channel 150.” Thousands of miles away in Terre Haute her mother would watch the television and spot her daughter’s name in the credits. Her mother might say in a begrudging tone, “I’ll be damned. You did it,” and Betsey would know that her mother would never lecture her again about growing up and turning to real work.
Twice a week, on her good days, Betsey would meet Mannie at his house, and they would spread dozens of index cards out on his coffin table, brainstorming and labeling scenes to alter or add to Betsey’s script. He would always brew a pot of tea, and she would adore that an innocuous beverage was waiting for her, although she fretted over hurting his feelings since she always had to decline the croissants and sandwiches he served.
Throughout her four years of college, she had worked and interned, so she had never relied on the usual social activities of a young adult. Once a season she would tag along with Sarah to a party. Now, without Sarah and without the ability to drink at bars or eat in public, she lacked any social conduit. Having tea with Mannie was the one social activity she could manage. What began as a necessary step to fulfilling her dream of screenwriting became a structured routine, and from that structure, she eventually derived comfort.
Mannie had a creative system. They would spend an hour “rearranging the blueprint,” as he liked to say. They would argue over and finesse the index cards on top of the tattered mummy. Then they would pick a card at random and spend the rest of their session revising the scene that card referred to. Once done, if the sun had not yet set, he would often insist on showing her a random artifact from his attic, or they would sip more tea on the Adirondack chairs in his skinny backyard that overlooked (through the grid of chain-link fence) the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River.
Sometimes Mannie would bring down a box of old films from when he was even younger than she was. He would carefully extend the film from its reel through the projector, and they would sit side by side in the flickering darkness as the past rolled out before them. Usually it was a roughly hewn short about a rubber-masked sea monster or a talc-covered ghost.
When they finished the last scene of the rewrite and the script was finally complete, Mannie drank most of a bottle of wine and then screened a personal film. It was nothing more than gritty eight-millimeter. The young woman within those tiny frames rolled her loose jeans up around her knees and laughed as she waded into the waves. Her hair was wild, unfixed. Her face, without makeup. The camera followed her lovingly, lingering on the sun-crowned edges of her as she ate chowder at a seaside shack. After the film ran out and the projector’s light shone plainly against the wall, Mannie returned the reel to its case. He pressed the canister closed, then rubbed his hands along the edges, wiping away any traces of dust.
“I married that woman,” Mannie said. “Then Peter Minowitz married her.”
“Mirabelle,” Betsey said. It was an antique tabloid headline. A beautiful starlet who bounced from director to director. Even A-list marriages couldn’t save her lack of acting talent. Her last film, a box-office flop about a trophy wife and stepmother who was secretly an alien invader, was shot twenty years ago, and she wore facial prosthetics for half of it.
“Didn’t Cesare Lazzara marry her too?”
Mannie nodded. “And Kyle Platt.”
“Who’s she married to now?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“She sells arm weights on the Home Shopping Network now.”
“She always had great arms,” Mannie said. “Sometimes I think how different things might have been if I’d done better with Phantom. If I’d never let Peter make a fool of me.”
When Betsey was in high school, she fell for a guy in drama class who took her virginity and then came out of the closet. She had spent the rest of high school cataloging every clue she should have noted as a testament to his actual desire. It became an obsession that followed her in a shoebox to her college dorm. When she revealed her stash of love letters, journal entries, and photos to Sarah, her roommate was at first sympathetic but then insisted that Betsey needed to move on with her life. One day Betsey returned from class to discover that the box was empty except for an airplane bottle of vodka, a disposable camera, and a note that said: I stole your shit. Now take new pictures. Love, Sarah. It was too bad, Betsey thought, that now she had a stash of photos with Sarah in them, and Sarah too had left her.
“Mannie,” Betsey said, pulling the canister away from him. “That bitch belongs in the L.A. River.”
“Excuse me?”
“A little snip snip,” Betsey said. “A little fire.”
“Stop joking around,” he said.
“I’m dead serious.” Betsey held up the film canister, well aware of the garish shadows the projector cast upon her. “This is bad juju. Bad celluloid. It’s a one-way ticket to what-if land.”
They pulled apart the film like party streamers. They wrapped themselves like mummies in the dangling strands of eight-millimeter and marched into the night to the concrete bank of the river, that trapped trickle of tainted water. She helped him strip away the memories, piece by piece, and set them ablaze. They threw each flashing ember over the chain-link fence that kept them from the narrow stream, and the flames disappeared even before they touched the ground.
Betsey’s infection took a bad turn. It was three weeks before they could meet again. In the meantime, Mannie scheduled a meeting with his producer friend Rob. It was a month out, and Betsey couldn’t imagine herself being sick for another whole month, even though she found it difficult to ever leave her apartment. Painkillers and fasting were not enough. She resorted to ordering milk and cottage cheese from an online delivery service. She spent much of her time sleeping or wiping down her place with disinfectant.
In the online C. diff support group, Jane from Melbourne posted that she was engaged. She wrote, “Yes, ladies. I found a man who will put up with my shit forever!” Then she posted a picture of her kissing her fiancé in a horse-drawn carriage. She looked wan and frail compared to her beach picture, but she looked happy. Betsey sent her a congratulatory message. “You’re an inspiration!” she wrote, and she wondered if she actually felt inspired.
Betsey found articles published by the CDC about the measures hospitals should take with the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains of her illness. She even found morta
lity rates. She had not known death was a possible outcome, but it seemed statistically improbable.
As a temp worker, she had let her insurance go. The vancomycin her doctor prescribed was obscenely expensive. She put everything she could on her credit cards, rotating judiciously between them.
On a particularly bleak day, she called her mother.
“I sure do wish you lived closer,” her mother said. “I’d make you some pot roast.”
“That’s sweet,” Betsey said, grimacing at the idea of digesting celery and tough meat. “Mom, I normally do okay. You know I never ask for anything, but it’s been real tough lately, being sick and all.”
“I think you should just come home. I could help get you fixed up. And Janie quit, so you could take her job.” Her mother worked as a stylist at Hair Quest, and Janie had been the receptionist.
“But I’m working on something, Mom. With a real director who’s done some big films.”
“Why can’t you do that here?”
It didn’t matter how many times Betsey explained it to her. “Never mind, Mom. I’ll figure it out.”
“I just want you nearby,” her mother said.
“Me too,” Betsey said, “but I can’t leave.”
After they hung up, Betsey called Mannie and asked him if they could practice the pitch by video conference until she got over her flu. He asked if he could come over and bring her soup. She pictured him breathing her spores and told him she’d be over to his place soon, not to worry. Her research sug gested that as long as she never used his restroom, and as long as she scrubbed her hands like a surgeon, Mannie would be safe. She could not be so sure about her apartment. Once a week, she washed everything she touched in Lysol and bleach. For a few hours, maybe, she could have company, but who would ever visit besides Mannie?
After finishing her third round of vancomycin, Betsey felt strong and optimistic. She posted an account of her success on the online support group. Several C. diff sufferers emailed her for advice, and she shared the history of her medications, diet, and probiotics, thankful that she would not be like the college dropout girl. Jane sent her a message congratulating her, but then she explained that she had suffered another relapse. She attached a link to another message board featuring a picture of her distended belly. She wrote, “Pretty far cry from my surfer bod, huh? The doctor said a possible danger for me now is toxic megacolon. I’m starting a band just so I can name it that. Also, my husband is gifting me his shit for a fecal implant. Wish me luck!”
Betsey could never consider such a thing. Millions of germs, millions of parasites, someone else’s parasites, being injected into her body, into unmentionable places. She asked Jane what that entailed, imagining that there would be a convoluted medical process that would minimize the harsh reality of adopting someone else’s feces, but Jane told her that it primarily involved a blender and a turkey baster. She basked in the relief that Jane’s journey to recovery would not be her own. That night, she added a quarter cup of Lysol to her bath water. She soaked until her skin stung.
In order to stave off a visit from Mannie, Betsey finally scheduled a pitch planning session at his house. They had only been practicing for an hour when Betsey felt her insides twist like a charley horse wrapped around her lower spine. Sweat slicked her face as she swallowed back the nausea.
“Excuse me,” she said.
She walked, one stiff step at a time, to the half bath in the foyer and locked the door behind her. She held her head under the faucet and twisted the cold water to full blast, hoping it would push back the urge to vomit. After a minute, she withdrew and dried her face with the dingy hand towel, but its musty odor invaded her nostrils and she barely made it back over the sink before a mix of tea and stomach acid gushed out of her mouth. She aspirated on her own bile, sending her into a series of deep coughs that caused something to seize then release, deep inside. The pain receded as warm wetness spread into her pants and down her leg. It felt thick and lingered in her panties, molding itself to her. Horrified, Betsey realized that she had just shat herself. She, a thirty-year-old woman, had shat herself in someone else’s home.
It seemed a cosmic cruelty that her body would betray her in this way. She cried as she cleaned herself. The C. diff had fundamentally changed her body chemistry so that each bowel movement stunk like rotten eggs. The smell could not be masked.
She rolled her pants into the plastic wrapping of the toilet paper she found under the counter. She stuffed this in her purse and continued crying as she brainstormed options to fix her pantless state with the minimal amount of embarrassment. When she was five, in karate class, she once lingered in the changing room because she couldn’t figure out how to tie the knot of her belt, and everyone forgot that she was even there, so she just sat on the dirty floor, ashamed, knowing that each passing minute would make the discovery of her absence an even harsher indictment. This was like that, but a thousand times worse.
She heard Mannie’s lumbering footsteps and then the knock at the door. “You okay in there?”
“I had a little accident.” She winced at herself in the mirror. “Women’s stuff. You wouldn’t happen to have any sweatpants or a big tee shirt I could borrow while I do laundry, would you?”
Through the door, she heard Mannie say in a strained tone, “I’ll be right back,” and then his shuffling gait faded.
After Mannie slipped the shirt through the door and after she donned it like a nightgown, she stepped back into the living room, clutching her purse.
“Where do you keep your washing machine?” she said.
“In the utility room next to the kitchen,” he said, gesturing.
He looked at her briefly but then focused on objects adjacent to her, like a tarnished candelabra or the black-and-white photograph of Siamese twins framed on the wall behind her.
After she threw her clothes in the wash, she found some Pine Sol and paper towels. She hid them behind her purse as she walked past Mannie, who was now making tea in the kitchen.
She locked herself in the bathroom yet again and set to work disinfecting each surface like she was wiping away fingerprints at a murder scene. She imagined the spores hibernating on the faucets or the cabinet handles, waiting to hitch a ride with Mannie. She scrubbed until her knuckles burned, raw from the chemicals.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Mannie asked through the door.
“I’m fine!”
After she was sure she had saved Mannie from any possible exposure, she hid the Pine Sol under the sink and returned to the kitchen.
“The tea is a little cold,” he said.
“Sorry about that.”
“Listen, I don’t really know how to say this,” Mannie said.
Betsey felt a red flush spread across her face.
“This may not be my place, but I’ve noticed that you’ve lost a lot of weight since we’ve met. And you never eat.”
“Oh my god. You think I’m anorexic.”
“I’ve seen a lot of actresses lose work, even go to the hospital — ”
“I’m not anorexic. I swear.”
He just stared at her.
“You don’t believe me,” she said.
“I just want you to be healthy.”
Betsey began laughing, or at least that was what she had told her body to do, only instead, her eyes welled up and she found herself sobbing. At first, Mannie looked stricken. He edged over to her and patted her on the back. She grabbed hold of him and buried her face in the scratchy wool of his cardigan.
When she pulled away, he handed her a handkerchief em broidered with his initials. And then she told him everything. She used polite euphemisms, but in essence, she told him how her gut had been invaded by a toxic, anaerobic bacteria that nothing could kill. How she felt like a Typhoid Mary full of alien spores that could infect and harm anyone she was close to. How she couldn’t eat before she left the house or she might shit (“unexpectedly relieve”) herself. How she felt like she was falling apart o
n the inside.
Finally, she said, “I’m so embarrassed.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “I’m seventy years old. If you knew half the things I contend with on a regular basis, you wouldn’t worry one bit about what I thought.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you need me to push back the pitch?”
Her debt was overwhelming her, and if she didn’t make a large paycheck soon, she’d have to move back to Terre Haute and admit that her time in Los Angeles had been a waste.
“No,” Betsey said. “I need to do this.”
Mannie drove them to the pitch meeting in his old Volkswagen van. At the gate, the guard took their driver’s licenses. He looked sixteen.
“You only have walk-ons,” he said.
“That can’t be right,” Mannie said.
“That’s what I have you down for,” the guard said, rubbing a red zit on his chin.
“Call and check,” Mannie said.
The guard sighed. “We are at capacity. It’s walk-on or nothing.”
Mannie squeezed the steering wheel. His thrombosed veins threatened the surface of the thin skin that covered his hands. Betsey touched his forearm.
“It’s not a big deal,” she said. “We can walk across the street. Besides, why don’t we grab a soda or some tea at Formosa after?”
Mannie nodded and U-turned the car around the guardhouse. They parked three blocks away. It was an unseasonable hundred-degree day, and Betsey felt sweaty and dizzy as she walked in her high heels along the gum-dappled sidewalk. When Mannie looked concerned, she assured him that she was just anxious, and she thought, perhaps, that this was true. She had learned to tune out the sharp pain in her abdomen, and she could no longer decipher between the spastic cramps of her disease and the sharp pangs of nerves.
As an added precaution, she had worn an adult diaper, and she could feel it chafing against her inner thighs. She wore a thick wool skirt to hide the bulk, but she could still hear the crinkling of plastic when she walked or sat down. She adjusted her stride, aiming for silence.
What Makes You Think You're Awake? Page 8