Scream All Night

by Derek Milman

  “‘It’s a busy week! Five! But your weekend looks good!’”

  “‘Wonderful! Set up a game of golf with Trevor the Turnip!’”

  This goes on for longer than it should, till we collapse on the floor, laughing until we’re crying, and crying until it becomes something else: darker, more strained. Because it feels like we’re playing one last carefree game on the deck of the Titanic.

  Before I head to bed, I tiptoe into the hall holding Oren’s pages, shaking them against my leg, anxiously. I want Oren to tell me where he’s going with this cauliflower script, because it feels like one big joke, an all-out meltdown, or something worse.

  It’s late, but several crewmen are carrying furniture out of Oren’s room. I ask one of them what’s going on. He says Oren wanted to paint his room. I peek inside. There’s a splattered tarp on the floor, cans of paint, paint rollers. For some reason he decided to paint his room black. He’s only half done—one side is still yellow. Bumblebee colors. The windows are wide open. A breeze rustles the curtains, scattering loose papers everywhere.

  The only furniture still in the room is his desk and chair. Oren is hunched over his typewriter, wearing a kimono with fat orange lobsters swimming against a crystal-blue background. He’s typing furiously, ripping pages out of the machine as he goes. I cough, loudly.

  He turns around, his mouth still moving. “Dario?”

  I hold out the script. “Look, I’m sorry. This is . . . a total disaster.”

  Oren looks quizzical. “In a bad way?”

  “There is no good way for something to be a disaster, Oren.”

  Oren turns to the typewriter, as if it could offer a different opinion, his fingers still making typing movements in the air. Then he looks back at me, baffled.

  “Dad was very supportive of what he read,” he says.

  “Dad was in late-stage dementia.”

  “I’m still working on it, it’s still forming, it’s getting better every—”

  “Oren. I’m confused. Explain this to me. You’ve watched Dad work for virtually your whole life. You know how movies get made here. There’s a schedule, a known process to the way—”

  “Hmmm.” Oren pulls the kimono around him tighter, pointing his finger at me. “Someone’s getting very power hungry around here.”

  I walk into the room. “C’mon, that’s not what this is about.”

  Oren leaps up. He grabs scattered pages of the script and waves them around, like he’s drying off a layer of invisible ink and underneath will be something better, his real intentions all along.

  “You said it today,” Oren intones. “I’m not Dad. Well, I have to work at my own pace, conform to my own style and aesthetic. Moldavia will have to get used to the way I want to make films.”

  “Moldavia is too financially endangered right now to take that big a risk—”

  “Well, everyone is going to have to give me a chance—”

  “Everyone wants me to shut this cauliflower shit down.”

  His mouth curls inward. His eyes widen and then unwiden.

  “No one understands the script,” I say.

  “You mean the script is so astonishingly innovative—”

  “God, enough of that! Sometimes criticism just means something sucks.”

  Oren strides across the room, his blue kimono flying out and flowing around him, as if it’s trying to chase him and drown him. “It doesn’t matter what people understand,” says Oren. “I’m owed—”

  “You’re owed nothing! Dad appointed me studio chief. I have to make these decisions. It’s not about you and how you had an epiphany from a bowl of arugula—”

  Oren’s eyes go cold. “It was radicchio—”

  “Moldavia is a movie studio, not just a castle filled with moaning mummies and zombie brides. People’s lives depend on us keeping Moldavia afloat. Don’t you get that?”

  “How dare you!” he cries. “You really think I don’t know that? You just waltz in here like—”

  “Waltz? You asked me! You asked me to come back here!”

  He glares at me, fuming. “Because I didn’t think you’d have the nerve or the knowledge about the way this studio runs to try and—”

  “Aha!” I shout, pointing. “There it is! You thought I’d just lie down and you could do whatever the hell you wanted, right?”

  Why am I only now realizing this? Hayley is totally right.

  Oren would never have wanted me to come back here if he didn’t think I was someone he could push around. After everything I went through here as a kid, he has no problem using me for whatever value he thinks my name has, and then not taking me seriously as studio chief. Not to mention he has no idea what he’s doing.

  Oren grabs a fireplace poker and holds it up in the air for a second, menacingly. Then he turns and starts poking at the fire, scattering sparks and embers as logs overturn.

  I cough, waving away smoke. “You’re going to burn this place down.”

  Oren stands stock-still in front of the fireplace, his back to me. He stares at the flames, fire iron at his side. “Your time at that lice nest is over. So you figured, now that you’re homeless, you’d try out your old family again, like an old sock. Give all us flawed, broken souls another chance. How beneficent of you.”

  I slam my fists into my legs. “Dad’s will made me chief. It was come back here or sell this place to Rusty Blade.”

  “But now you’re just out to crush me. Get back at me for—”

  “For what? Tell me, Oren.”

  I want him to acknowledge the past. I want him to truly apologize for not being there for me, for being a shitty brother and a shitty human being, for always putting himself first. I want to hear those words come out of his stupid mouth.

  “Tell me, Oren.”

  He raises his hand without turning around, shushing me.

  I knew he would spin this so it would seem like my goal is revenge. “Tell me you’re not losing your mind. ’Cause I’m getting scared.”

  “I have a few tricks up my sleeve,” he says into the fire.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  Oren sighs, replaces the poker, and turns around, smiling gaily, suddenly tranquil. “It means I know it was a rough start. But it’s all part of the grand plan.”

  I untie my hair so it falls, messily, over my shoulders. I shake it out and lean against his door. “There’s no grand stupid plan.”

  “No, there is,” he says. “Of course there is. My mind is clear.”

  “Oren, listen to me. You better get your deluded ego in check if your goal is to preserve our family legacy. Because you’re the one—right now—who is handing this place to Cassidy Blackwell on a giant platter.”

  “I need to work.” Oren returns to his typewriter, sits down, and starts calmly typing, with ramrod posture, as if I just asked him to outline a sequel. He refuses to listen.

  I slap the door. “We can’t make your film,” I say, not backing down, ignoring his passive-aggressive tantrum; it’s pissing me off.

  “Give me tomorrow,” he says into the typewriter, “and I’ll show you.”

  “What’s going to change tomorrow?”

  “Give me tomorrow. I have a grand plan. I promise you that.”

  I let my exhausted eyes settle on the crackling fire. Fire burning wood is the only thing that makes sense in this room right now. Oren types away. As I leave the room I hear the mocking ding of the margin bell.

  “He doesn’t have a grand plan,” says Hayley.

  “Yeah, I know that, but—look, can I come in?”

  I surprised her, knocking on her door this late. She’s wrapped in one of her shawls, propping the door open only a crack.

  She hesitates. Then she swings the door open. Her room smells vaguely of roses. There are paintings on the eggplant-colored walls—these weird portraits—and framed photographs of her parents, propped on shelves. She has a lot of stuff, but it’s organized in its own way, and everything is sort of femini
ne and pillowy, like we’re inside a scented candle. I point at the stuffed animals piled up on the bed. “It’s kind of girly in here.”

  “They all have names.”

  “I’ll bet they do.”

  She walks over to her desk and snaps her laptop shut. But before she does, I see FaceTime open.

  “Who were you chatting with?”

  Hayley smirks. “Nosy a little?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Nobody.” She sighs. “You know Oren is playing you, right?”

  I wink. “He can’t play me if I’m playing him.”

  Hayley throws her head back. “Christ.” She moves across the room toward her desk. She rummages through a small box. I hear the sound of a lighter clicking. She walks over to her window, cracks it open, and sits on the ledge, taking a long drag on a joint. She waves the smoke away, and holds the joint out. “Want some?”

  I decline, even though I kind of do.

  “Look,” she says, “you two boys better grow up already and get past all this, because things are going to get tiresome around here real fast.”

  “I’m giving him one more day.”

  Hayley exhales a plume of smoke and tilts her head back at me.

  “You said it yourself,” I say. “He really needs to fail. He didn’t get that chance yet. Tomorrow he will. He needs to see for himself. Then we can move on.”

  She points the lighter at me. “I said let him fail only for a day.”

  At first I felt horrible that I was going to break Oren’s heart. But Oren has been using my guilt against me this whole time, to wrest control, get what he wants, and make this stupid-ass vegetable movie. So I’ll give him what he wants—another day. And then he can fail—epically.

  Hayley arches her eyebrows. She knows what I’m up to.

  “What Oren said about finally seeing me as a real brother,” I say, shaking my head. “Bunch of crap. He claims to have something up his sleeve, so fine, let’s see if he can pull this thing together.” I hold my hands out. “I’m only being fair.”

  Hayley folds her body into the frame of the large windowsill. The broken moonlight sprinkles her hair.

  I pick up one of the picture frames. Seeing Hayley with her parents, back when everything was still whole, gives me a twinge in my chest. I glance at the books lined up on her shelves—Oscar Wilde, Yeats, Beckett. There are books on Georgian, Palladian, and Neo-Gothic architecture that are kind of curious.

  I turn to her. “It bothered me what you said.”

  She’s watching me, her pupils dilated, like they’ve consumed their own galaxy.

  “Yearning my whole life for a real family?” I replace the picture frame, a little harder than I intended. It rattles. “Shit, sorry,” I say, straightening it. “Do you and Oren talk about me like that? Like I’m some lonely, unloved orphan boy yearning for a real home?”

  Hayley laughs. “No.”

  “It hurt when I realized Oren didn’t really mean what he said.”

  “Are you sure he didn’t mean any of it?”

  I’m not. But it still stung. I motion for her to pass the joint, and I take a drag.

  “Is he losing his mind?” I ask, my voice doing that squeaky inhaling-pot noise.

  She shakes her head. “Oren is just a narcissistic by-product of being sequestered in the crazy world of Moldavia for too long,” she says.

  The possibility of losing my mind hovers around the fringes of every decision I make. It haunts every thought. I’ve always used Oren as a sort of a barometer—to see if he would lose it too. But using Oren as a set point for normal comes with obvious complications.

  I can’t pretend I didn’t come back here partly to see what was left of my family, and my relationship with Oren; partly to see how much time with Hayley I could have before it all might fade. There were so many loose threads. I’d regret not seeing everyone again while I was still lucid.

  Hayley looks so incredibly beautiful right now. I give her a lopsided grin. “Wanna make out?”

  She throws her head back and sort of laughs-shrugs. “Sure.”

  I hold her around the waist, bending her out the window like I’m dipping part of her into the night. Her hair blows in a breeze that rustles the trees outside. She closes her eyes as I work my way up her throat, to her lips. She blows pot smoke into my mouth, and then I’m kissing Hayley in the night wind. This turns out to be one of my favorite moments ever.

  At some point I right her back on the windowsill and step away, but I don’t remember doing that. Dazed, I gesture at the walls and ask about the paintings.

  “Your mom,” she replies, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear.

  I give her a confused face, I think, but I’m not really sure what my face is doing.

  “She paints.”

  The portraits are strange and pulsing, but I’m stoned now. I didn’t know my mother painted. I feel like that’s something I should have known, but how would I? I’m not a part of her world anymore. Patients in hospitals paint. Sure. That makes sense.

  “She gave me some of them,” Hayley explains, studying them. “She’s gotten really good.”

  My eyelids feel sandy and leaden. “Yeah.”

  “Visits got to be a bit much for Oren. So I visit her now. As frequently as I can.”

  Something else I didn’t know. I take a stuffed animal from her bed—a green plush alligator—and put it in her arms. She hugs it close. “This is Binky.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Why does it bother you?” she says.

  “I don’t care what its name is.”

  “I mean, wanting a real family?”

  I guess families, and never having had a healthy one, is my Achilles’ heel. “Maybe I stayed away too long,” I say, running a hand through my hair.

  “No, you needed to stay away.” Hayley always dismisses my self-doubts.

  “I don’t know. What do you want?” I ask her.

  She chews on her thumb for a moment, studying the ceiling. Her eyes flick over to her closed laptop and then back to me. She shrugs. “Ask me tomorrow.”

  “I totally will.” I really don’t want to leave her room.

  Sensing this, Hayley walks over, leans in, and kisses me lightly on the throat, right under my jawline. I rest my hand against the back of her neck. We press our foreheads together, rubbing noses. After a few minutes, standing there just like that, it becomes apparent that both of us should probably get to bed. So I extract myself, gently squeezing her wrist, and do just that.

  I walk back to my room, thinking about how removed I am from where I came from. And how I’ve always had feelings for Hayley, but probably suppressed them.

  Now that I’m back at Moldavia, I’m feeling stuff I didn’t expect: this need for a real home, and to claim a family I never had, or felt I needed. I feel a weird surge of protectiveness in a legacy I didn’t even know I gave a shit about.

  I want a second stupid chance. I want to fix this place so I can reverse all the pain it caused me. So I’ll always have somewhere I belong.

  I get into bed and will myself to lose consciousness.

  This has been such a long, confusing day.

  “Who knows how long you have?”

  My dad wakes me up, his hand around my throat.

  I hear the sound of my own choking. He lets go and tells me to take a deep breath. I do, gasping, gulping in air. But then his fingers close around my windpipe, tighter this time. “Alastair is slowly dying. Every breath might be his last. I want you to feel that.”

  He lets go of me again. Gasping, I try to push him off me, but he shoves me back down and presses the heel of his hand into my chest, grinding it against my sternum.

  “Every breath is weaker. He’s fighting against death . . .”

  He’s already dead, I want to scream.

  “. . . fighting for his survival. . . .”

  His hands go for my throat again, but I reach out and jab him in the eye. He pulls me out of bed by my wrists; I
go flying and land heavily on the floor. He drags me by the hair into the bathroom. When he lets me go, moves to the sink, and turns the faucet on, he drops a handful of my torn-out hair, which floats down as gently as a snowflake.

  I try and crawl out of the bathroom, but he grabs my ankle. I kick him hard in the stomach. He falls backward but regains his balance, and lifts me up by my shirt collar. Then his arm is curling around my waist, bending me over the sink. “Who knows how long you have?” he says into my ear. The sink is slowly filling up. He pushes me under as I make frantic bubbles in the water.

  The door swings open. My dad yanks my head out of the sink. Oren stands there in a white T-shirt and boxer shorts, looking at us, slowly shaking his head. I reach for him. “Enough of this,” he tells our dad. “You have to stop this.”

  I try to wriggle away, coughing up water, but my dad has an iron grip on the back of my neck. “Help me!”

  Oren takes a step into the bathroom. “You’re hurting him.”

  All it takes is one look from my dad, and Oren freezes.

  Our eyes lock. There’s this pitched moment that slowly deflates. Oren looks at me with an expression of frightened helplessness that slowly turns into disgust.

  “I’m so sick of you both,” he mutters. He backs out. The door clicks shut.

  My dad, still clutching the back of my neck, makes this horrible guttural sound, and it takes me a minute to realize he’s laughing. When his grip softens, I elbow him in the crotch. He grunts and stumbles back. I slip on the wet floor and fall hard on my tailbone. I expect my dad to lunge at me again, but he just sits there, propped against the tile wall under a window, resting a hand on his knee, laughing at me.

  I sit against the door, rubbing my throat, trying to get my breath back. “I hate you,” I rasp. My voice is wrecked.

  “You’re getting so good. You have no idea. The problem is you’re soft like your mom. You have too much of her inside you. But Dario, she went mad. They tie her to her own bed in that hospital. Who knows how long you have? It’s genetic. You probably have a fifty-fifty chance of winding up just like her.”

  “Stop talking about her!”

  He points at me. “That’s Alastair!” he says, grinning, exposing his black and gold fillings, his rotten teeth. “That’s him right there. That desperation. Tiny bursts of broken breath. A thin window of life left that’s slowly . . . slowly . . . closing.” He reaches out, framing me, making a rectangle with his thumbs and index fingers, composing a shot. “He’s trying to hold on in a dying world. Show that to me.” I stand up and grip the doorknob, but it’s too slippery and I can’t open the door. “Show that to the camera tomorrow.”