by Aaron Dries
“When I was…six, I think it was, this film crew rolled into town, can you believe it? I lit up like a Christmas tree. Something from the pictures—and in Leander, boy howdy! They were filming at the Bagdad Cemetery. I saw lots of men with beards—tenderfoots from Austin. They had their cameras and those, like, tracks they put them on. I seem to remember a van. And I just thought this was the greatest thing to ever have happened. And then—it was early in the morning and I was hiding so they wouldn’t see me—they pulled out all of these dead bodies and propped them up on some gravestones. I’d never seen such things. Rotten things. I got scared and ran away. Months later I asked my mother what they had been filming and if I could see it. She said never, that the men were perverts. Years later I found out they’d been filming The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Click. A new slide. This one of a young boy in a tight baseball uniform.
“This is me just before we moved. Look at that face. I couldn’t swing that bat to save my life, but I was an all right pitcher. I hated the game and I hated my Pa for making me play. Those six innings stretched on forever, I tell you.”
Napier stopped for a moment, staring off at the wall. “Keep your eye on the ball,” he whispered to himself.
Marshall felt like he was being led down a long hallway lined with doors, and each door led to a room that was brimming with Napier’s recollections. And he could stop to peer through the keyhole at each one. But it was that act—the voyeurism he had no choice but to indulge in—which frightened him the most… because Marshall knew, as well as he knew anything, that in one of those rooms—those dungeons—he would find himself.
Click.
A black-and-white photograph of a teenage Napier surrounded by six other people of the same age. They were all wearing black clothes.
“Ah, this is the old Saint Mary’s Theatre troupe. That’s me there on the left. I guess I had some flair for the medium, but I eventually gave it up. It didn’t impress my parents all that much that I was prancing around on stages. Plus, too many queers, Marshall. It turns your stomach.”
Click.
“Surprise! That’s me again.” Marshall saw the same dark eyes, offset by the white background. There was something cold in the expression, even then. “I guess by this point, gee, I must have just gone twenty. My old ma and pa, they’d be dead by the time this photo was taken.”
Napier chewed on his lip, lost in thought. His focus returned and he shifted in the chair. He cleared his throat. “They went to God.”
Marshall shivered.
Click.
Each slide drew Marshall farther down the hallway. He wanted to dig his heels into the ground to stop his advance and scream to be taken back.
“I went to South America,” Napier continued. “It was my first time on a plane. Here, this picture is of the Catedral da Sé in São Paolo. That’s in Brazil, just in case you didn’t know. It’s the biggest religious building in the city and it’s the fourth biggest neo-gothic cathedral in the world. Oh, Marshall, it was beautiful. The marble. Arches. It was all just so damn big. Stained glass like you never seen before. You really felt something inside that place. You could hear God’s voice—and loud. It was the statues that made an impression on me. They were nothing like the ones you see here. All through South America—Christ is a battered man. Blood pissing all over the place. You see him as he really would have been and you remember just how He suffered and for whom. Boy howdy, Marshall, it was something else.”
Click.
“I hope you don’t mind me showing you all this. I just thought it’d be nice, you know, seeing that we’re both travelers at heart, travelers who just can’t seem to travel anymore.”
How does he know I travelled? My name—I get. He has my clothes and my wallet was in my jeans. But this?
Marshall tried to remain poker-faced.
“Travelling is angelic, don’t you think? Liberating. You never feel more young than you do when you’re off seeing the world.”
Marshall agreed but didn’t want to acknowledge it.
“Angelic is the only word I can think of to describe it,” Napier said. “And now we find ourselves earthbound and trapped by our doings and our responsibilities. It’s like God reached down and cut off our wings. I miss it.”
Marshall swallowed. It was as though Napier had opened up his skull and peered at his thoughts. He resigned to looking at the next photograph, the light dancing over his face.
“This is me at the summit of Machu Picchu. Boy howdy, did I feel like Indiana Jones that day! All those ruins. The fog. You felt close, you know. You felt close to God. You ever been?”
“No.”
The word slipped out—an innocent lapse in concentration. Marshall hated himself for replying to the madman’s question with such ease.
“Well, that’s a right, honest shame.”
Click.
This photograph was of a thin, dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties. Her shoulder-length hair was full of buoyant curls. She wore a bright pink sleeveless shirt and high-waisted jeans. It almost looked like a late-1980s glamour shot, only the woman’s face was soiled and sad—despite her smile.
“Rosemary,” Napier said. For the first time in his conversation there was the intonation of emotion in his speech patterns. In that single word—nothing more than a half-whispered name—Marshall could hear longing. It was a desperate sound, and one that he recognized with frightening speed.
“This was taken in ’89; the year we met. See, Marshall. You and I are not so different. We both travelled and we both saw the world and we both found something we never thought we’d find. She’s pretty, don’tcha think?”
Marshall held his tongue. He didn’t want to admit that she was.
“Fiery tongue though. And smart! Gee, a brain like a tack. We met in Colombia. She was from Seattle.”
Napier snapped a thumb down on the remote. The projector clanked. A new image slid onto the wall.
“I moved in with her. She felt good. She tasted good. I was…intoxicated by her, Marshall. She was like travelling; she made me feel alive.”
There were tears in Napier’s eyes.
“I wonder sometimes, when it’s late at night and I’m cold, if she was worth it. I guess I don’t really know the answer to that one. Or maybe I just don’t want to know.
“I moved here to Washington State with her. Her parents lived in Oregon. In Portland. They weren’t too fond of me. We were married in Seattle and moved out here to North Bend. I went back to college and studied architecture. By the time I had my degree and I was working fairly steadily, she was dead.”
Napier’s face grew hard. His brow knotted and he lowered his head. “She had the tit cancer.” His voice sounded different—harsher and full of spite. “Spread like wildfire. I remember waking one night to her screamin’, her head all swollen up and her eye resting on her cheek.”
The new picture was of Rosemary and Napier—she was holding a round-faced little baby who was staring at something off camera. The child looked no older than six months.
“Sam was born in ’95, which I guess would put him at two years older than your boy. We lost Rosemary a year later and I was left with a rug rat that I just couldn’t seem to cling to as strongly once she was gone.”
Napier leaned forward in the chair and spoke to his feet. “I don’t know what I did, or why she had to go. And the way she went.” He shook his head, looked up and stared Marshall in the face. His eyes glimmered. “He turned his back on us. God took the good stuff and ran.” Napier flinched a few times, like a nervous tic. “Whatever it was I did, I wish I hadn’t. I want forgiveness.”
Click.
“I dumped Sam with his grandparents in Oregon.” Napier’s voice was less threatening now, but reflective. “Sometimes, a man needs nothing more than time and space. I demanded both, and went travelling again. Six months in South America. Only this time, when I visited all those cathedrals, I saw Christ on his cross, all bleeding ’n’ cut u
p, and I noticed that He wasn’t looking me in the eye. There just didn’t seem to be no life in anything, Marshall; like a can of soda you’ve gone and shook all up. ’Twas flat.
“I went home with my tail between my legs. This would be—” he chewed on the thought, squinting. “’96. I flew from Bogota to Miami and from Miami into Sea-Tac. I took a week or two in the city, kind of wandering around, doing nothing. I didn’t want to see my boy. I camped out in this shitty hotel near Hing Hay Park—”
The silky, even-toned words stopped flowing. Marshall had been lulled into a semi-trance by the monologue, and when it abruptly ended it was like someone had yanked a rug out from underneath him.
Marshall twisted around in his chair, pain forgotten to him now, and fought through the brightness of the projector’s light beam to study Napier’s face. Those deep eyes sucked at the darkness in the room until they looked so dominating and pained, that Marshall thought they would explode.
“I’m a fair man, Marshall. I’ve always thought that about myself, and quite highly so. I’m fair—and I’m not terribly proud. I think proud men find it hard to say they’re sorry.”
Napier looked down. Ashamed.
“My role in The Forgiveness is to torture you to death so that He will hear your screams. I don’t think I earned his ignorance, but I want him back. I need it.
“I’m sorry.”
Napier clicked the remote a final time.
Chapter Forty-Six
The photograph had been taken by a stranger—evident in the awkward, indifferent composition. The Space Needle stabbed the grey underbelly of the clouds in the background. Trees were frozen in time, caught in a blur. Napier was in the foreground, looking tired and thin—but happy. His arm was wrapped around the shoulders of a young woman. Her face was half in shadow, her hair burning bright in the remaining sunlight.
It was Claire.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Marshall saw himself in the chair.
He hovered above his head, looking down at his bound and broken form. It was pitiful. He saw the ropes around his legs and arms, the thick cord cutting into his neck. There was blood on his face from where he’d bitten into Joe’s cheek earlier in the day—
Or was it night?
Marshall didn’t know.
Day and night didn’t exist in the basement. If Marshall wanted day, he could brighten the lights; a night shot required nothing more than a blue filter over the camera lens—a simple (and more importantly, cheap) trick. And even if these shots didn’t match with the material that had already been shot, then that was okay—they didn’t have to spend the extra dollars. It would be a job for the postproduction crew, for Simone.
Simone The Great. Simone: editor extraordinaire!
Marshall zoomed in on his face, nice and slow, until he saw nothing but eyes. Very Serigo Leone, he thought, and giggled. Those eyes stared off into nowhere, lacking comprehension.
Marshall filmed the scene from where he was, floating near the ceiling.
He pulled back, hoping that the camera movement would add a nice emotive suggestion. It was a tired, but effective technique.
The tableaux seemed complete; it was evident that the scene was over. Marshall knew that a good director knew when to end the drama. Self indulgence only served a single man, and film was a medium for the masses.
A good director knew when to fade to black.
Aaaa-nnnn-dddd CUT!
Chapter Forty-Eight
Marshall could see every crack in the ceiling, could count the fibers in the mattresses around the walls. The coil inside the light bulb was bright against the glow like a swirl of blood in an egg yolk. Wind berated the house, drawing screams from the wood—foreboding, as he suspected that soon, it would be he who was screaming under Napier’s blows.
Marshall felt every emotion; he felt nothing. Lost in the echo of Napier’s revelation.
This wasn’t the first time Marshall’s mind had turned to film as a buffer. He recalled the moment when Noah’s head had split open against the mortuary floor, and earlier that same day, when driving home from work, he’d seen the aftermath of a car crash on the side of the road.
The emergency stretcher being carried into the back of the ambulance in slow motion. The sheet splotched with blood. Flashing lights.
It had just happened. Right there in the basement. One moment he was present, listening to Napier’s story and the next he was gone. The film was better; safer.
In the movie of my life, this isn’t happening.
Marshall felt himself being crushed by some invisible weight.
Claire.
He said the name out loud. It was just air.
“That’s right, Marshall,” Napier said, purring. His voice had changed; he was no longer the silver-tongued diplomat; there was a playful edge to his words, now. Something played beneath.
Something seethed.
“We met in Seattle. Just two people in a bar. If it sounds like a stretch, just ask yourself about how you met her yourself.” Napier ran his tongue over his teeth. “That…damaged quality she has going for her—that’s what drew her to me. Were all your girls like that? And you, brave Marshall, comin’ to the rescue?”
Claire waving goodbye in Thailand.
“I bought her a drink, Marshall. She didn’t even say no. Claire told me about you two, and how you’d hit it off and were going to meet up in Vancouver. She said she was scared of you. Of falling too hard, too fast.” Napier leaned in close to Marshall’s face. “Don’t you bite, you hear?”
Marshall didn’t reply but his answer was evident in his face. I get it. Loud and clear. I still don’t believe you, though.
Claire’s face when he proposed. The panic in her eyes. The way her bottom lip quivered.
“I didn’t even need to try, Marshall. All it took was that one drink; she let me taste it. And that wasn’t the only thing she let me taste that night.”
Every downcast glance over the years came back to him. That look of hers that had always disturbed him.
“She told me she wanted to write. I nicknamed her Helvetica, after the font. I told her that every time she came across the lettering in a book, or on the computer, that she’d think of me. Helvetica. I wanted to haunt her.”
“Stop, please—”
“Ah! That’s what she said when she came into my hand. Here, Marshall. Smell my fingers?” He held up his right hand and waved it under his nose. “That’s the smell of I fucked your wife six ways to Sunday and each time she started off not wanting it and ended up asking for more. She’s a bucker, that gal of yours! Boy howdy!”
Napier stuck his tongue in and out of his mouth in quick little jerks. He rolled his eyes back into his head, exposing the whites. And then grew still. Marshall could smell his sour breath in the air.
“She liked my dick better than yours, Marshall. She said it was bigger. Thicker. I would tease her cunt with it. She liked the pain. She said you couldn’t do that for her. She liked the way my hands grabbed her milk shitters, oh yeah she did. Said my hands were bigger, rougher. Man’s hands, she said. She liked the way my calluses felt on her nips.”
“Shut up!” Marshall yelled. This can’t be true—
“Does it hurt, boy?”
“What?”
“Does it hurt to hear this?”
The tears were back, he could taste them. Each breath was a challenge he wasn’t fit enough to win. Things were coming undone.
“It’s supposed to hurt, you white maggot!” Napier roared, shaking himself from side to side, one hand rubbing at the underside of his neck and the other grabbed at the visible hard-on tenting his trousers. “She’s got that mole in the center of her back in the shape of a heart. You know the one. I kissed it, over and over—”
Marshall and Claire in bed in their Sydney house. Shadow curtains painted their bodies. The married couple rolled around on their bed. The perfume of sex in the sheets. He kissed her mole. It tasted of salt.
“I�
�ll kill you!” Marshall hissed. “I hate you!”
“There we go! Let it out. Sing it loud and clear.”
“Fuck you!”
“For three days I rode her. I tore her apart.”
“Stop, oh God stop—”
“God? Ha. Say it louder, white maggot. Call out His name.”
“GOD!” Marshall screamed, the tendons in his neck as pronounced as the scars on Sam’s back.
“Louder, so he can hear you!”
“GOD!”
Napier snapped forward—as quick as a snake. Their noses brushed together.
Marshall and Noah in the living room. Noah was still young enough to kiss his father; young enough to still voice his love. There was laughter. Music. They rubbed their noses together. “Eskimo kisses,” Marshall said.
Napier stared through Marshall, seeming to peer beyond his eyes at something crushed and defeated within. He smiled.
“She was pregnant by the time she got to Vancouver, Marshall.”
Marshall’s understanding was a child’s balloon, almost blown up to its full capacity. It swelled, and in its senselessness, was beautiful. But then the balloon popped and Napier’s words made sense.
I believe you.
Fresh, keen pain filled him.
“You had no son,” Napier said, continuing with relish. “You raised a bastard, Marshall. My cum was inside your gal and she shat out my boy.”
Claire in the hospital, clutching her husband’s hand almost to the point of breaking. She’d floated on an epidural cloud. Men and women in blue uniforms. The overhead light was flickering. Noah’s first cry mingled with Claire’s. The stench of blood and shit.
“She didn’t know, Marshall. I feel the need to tell you that, ’cause I’m a fair man. She left Seattle for Vancouver with a bun in the oven, but she didn’t know it was mine until it came out and she saw it. But she’d suspected it all along.”
Marshall stared, eyes wide.
“She wrote a single letter to me. Said she was scared to tell you the truth.” Napier backed away and crouched down in front of his victim, hands dangling over his knees. He looked casual.