by Derek Milman
“That’s very generous of you, Oren.” And it is. I’m a little in shock.
“Well, today wasn’t the best eighteenth birthday a man can have, was it?”
Nope. No it wasn’t. I got shot and watched my mom go psycho.
“Aaaaaand here we are!” says the waiter, setting down our frothy strawberry shakes. Oren remembered I prefer strawberry; that’s something I don’t tell everyone. “Your burgers will be out momentarily!” The waiter skitters off in a blur of striped green.
“Mmmmmm!” says Oren, switching from his gross girly drink to the milkshake and then back again in one of the most nauseating maneuvers I’ve ever seen. He dangles the maraschino cherry over his mouth, puckering his lips, making more mmm noises.
“Oren.”
He bites the cherry off the stem and flings the stem over his shoulder, coolly, like he’s in some milkshake–themed Western.
I fold my hands together on the table. “Oren, Mom said some disturbing things about—”
“Not again!” He throws his head back, exasperated. “There are no dead babies buried inside the walls!” he bellows. At least three old people turn around; a few spoons clatter against bowls.
“Keep your voice down. Jesus. I know that. I know that!”
“Mom is mentally ill. And she likes Poe.”
“What?”
“You know, Edgar Allan?” he says. “I used to go there and read to her. I think she was absorbing ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ into her delusions. Next time I’ll read Harry Potter and we’ll have more fun with her. Maybe she’ll think she’s the sorting hat.”
“God, Oren—”
He throws out his hands. “It’s okay to jest sometimes! Things are so horrifying, what else is there to do but jest? So we jest, we can only jest—”
“Stop saying that word!”
He sips his brown drink. “Mom suffers from command hallucinations. That’s what they call it, the voices she hears. They’re not in her head. It sounds like someone’s literally right behind her . . . telling her things.”
I think of the hornets buzzing when things get bad. My palms get sweaty.
Oren holds the napkin in front of his mouth and talks in a deep gravelly voice: “The aliens are everywhere, Dario.”
“Stop that.”
“You’re an alien child. The government knows . . .”
“Seriously, stop.”
Oren folds the napkin on his lap. “Stop what?”
“Oren.”
“They know so little about the mind, it’s almost absurd!” he says. “And the newer antipsychotics aren’t much more effective than the old ones. And the side effects . . .” He throws up his hands, shaking his head.
“Aaaaaand here are your burgers and fries!” says the waiter.
“You look so upset!” says Oren.
“Of course I’m upset!”
“Would you like me to give you a scalp massage?” he says as our food is served in what feels like an hours-long process of plopping down plates and side plates and arranging it all so everything fits on the table. When the waiter finally leaves, Oren sticks a fry in his mouth, leans over the table, and starts vigorously rubbing the top of my head. “There we go. . . .”
“Oren . . . get the fuck off me.”
“Your hair is so soft! It feels like olive oil! Is that pomade? So delicate and fine.”
“Sit back down.”
“Sorry!” says Oren, flopping back down. He glares at his side salad and then pointedly removes all the cauliflowers, setting them on a cocktail napkin, which he brusquely pushes away.
We eat in silence for a few minutes. The food isn’t as good as it looks. The burger is dry. The milkshake is too syrupy. The fries are soggy. Something’s lost its luster here, or it’s just my mood, or I’m just remembering this place wrong. What we thought was so amazing when we were kids doesn’t always hold the same appeal later, I guess.
“You must worry too, right? Or you did at some point?” I ask.
“Worry about what?” says Oren, chomping down on his burger.
“Becoming . . . like her.”
“I’ve thought about it before,” he says, nodding. “Mental illness is genetic, clustered in families. Our grandmother was crackers, but”—he shoots out his hands—“we can only live our lives. I’m still here . . . you’re here. I was always too busy with the studio to really stop and wait for it to hit me. I was lucky that way.”
I dunk a fry in some ketchup, in one of those paper cups that are never big enough. “It was disturbing how much of what Mom said sounded like it was straight from Invasion of the Immortal Wasps.”
“Not my favorite film,” says Oren. He holds up his empty glass and bangs his spoon against it, signaling to the waiter for another slippery nipple. “Mom saw every Moldavia movie multiple times. I’m sure she retained a lot of those wild stories, stored them away somewhere in her unraveling subconscious. Just like she did with Poe.”
“No, Oren. Dad co-opted her illness.”
Oren frowns. “What do you mean?”
“Dad was a master collage artist! He took other people’s pain, tragedies, and illnesses, and used them for his films. You read those letters!”
“I thought Dad was just trying to communicate with Mom in her own language.”
I shake my head. “When are you going to stop defending him?”
“How do you know that’s not what he was doing?” says Oren.
“You collected that stuff, with the Immortal Wasps treatment, and put it all in the folder together!”
Or maybe some of that was Hayley. Maybe she was the one creating that sinister little narrative through the letters, and my dad’s film treatments, so I’d know the truth one day. Oren will do anything to preserve this romantic image he has of our family and how things were.
“Why do you think Mom said I was Moldavia’s greatest horror creation?”
“Mom is delusional,” says Oren.
“Didn’t it ever occur to you that she rejected me, saw me as something alien to her, because I was? Because she didn’t remember making me in the first place?”
“We don’t know that,” says Oren. “We’ll never know what happened.”
I lean across the table. “You said it yourself. You said I was a dirty little crime.”
Oren looks aghast. “I didn’t mean that literally! That’s such a horrible idea. I was so angry, and I just . . .”
“You put Dad on this pedestal—”
“He’s dead,” Oren mutters, choking back emotion, needlessly rearranging everything on the table. “Let me have that, let me keep him there. . . .”
“But Mom is right,” I tell him. “I am Moldavia’s greatest horror creation.”
“Please,” he says quietly, into his plate.
“Dad knew what he was doing; he was fascinated by people he thought were broken in some way. Eventually, he knew Mom would be too incapacitated to look after me. And he knew mental illness was genetic. So he’d have me as a fresh well of inspiration. I’d either go crazy like her or be traumatized by losing her. Either way he’d win.”
It would explain why he pushed me so hard as Alastair. Right to the brink . . .
“You’re saying you were bred to go mad?” Oren exclaims. “That’s nuts!”
See what he did there?
I don’t totally know what I’m saying anymore. Part of it is shit I’ve always feared the most, and part of it is frustration at Oren’s ignorance and denial about Moldavia, and the truth about our dad.
“Did you know about Aida?” I say. “That she lost a baby?”
“No,” says Oren, startled, dropping a fry on his plate. “When?”
“Aaaaaand here we are!” says the waiter, serving Oren his second slippery nipple.
Oren takes a long, pensive sip; a deep ruddiness spreads across his face, blotching his cheeks. “Aida lost a baby?” he asks, quietly.
“Yeah.”
A vein on his forehead becomes visib
le, a strand of cooked spaghetti rising to the top of a boiling pot. “That’s horrible. I didn’t know. Hayley told you that?”
“That’s why Aida played that part in Zombie Children, and that’s why Dad cast me as Alastair. Aida lost a baby. I had recently lost my mom. The movie is about a kid who’s losing a grip on his own humanity, lost in a depraved wasteland. Think about it.”
He does. I watch the realization spreading across his face. He’ll never believe all of it—I can’t even bring myself to fully believe all of it; these are just dark little theories, but I think some level of truth is finally breaking through to him. I feel like I can’t ever truly be close to Oren until it does.
“Maybe I got overlooked because I wasn’t broken enough for Dad.” He laughs. “I wanted to please him too badly. I fell into line too easily. I know you think I just blindly worshipped him. It wasn’t that simple.”
Oren lost out too. But he did blindly worship our dad.
“I was waiting for my chance,” he says. “But now I know he never took me seriously. I should have taken charge of my life. He taught me nothing on purpose. And I let it happen. He didn’t want anyone else to dilute his vision. He was too arrogant to consider a successor, which is why he made a joke out of his will. He’d rather have Moldavia dissolved. It was all about his legacy, Dario. I was always going to be his assistant, not his apprentice.” He downs the rest of his drink.
He’s right. If Oren remained ignorant, my dad could keep making movies until the bitter end. If no one could replicate his process, that meant cinema history would regard him as a true auteur, because you can’t replicate genius.
I think about babies buried in walls and spiders hiding in flowers and the castle digesting us from within like a carnivorous plant.
Outside, as yet another storm descends on the marsh, it’s like I’m looking at some blank lunar plane, bereft of life, filled with moon rocks and curling space mist. Then it becomes a clean sheet of ice, a rink glowing in the murk, and I see Hayley and me skating by, holding hands, keeping our bodies close against the cold. But there’s something else, something bigger. It’s not just about us. . . .
We see the worst of ourselves in our children. . . .
“They have a child,” I say.
Oren looks around. “Who? Who does?”
“Alastair and Abigail. In the sequel.”
He looks astonished. “You want to make the sequel?”
“I think a sequel was a really good idea. What if Alastair and Abigail have a child? Let’s say . . . he turned her into what he is.”
But there’s something familiar about this idea. I’ve heard it somewhere before.
“How would they reproduce?” Oren asks.
“There’s no logic in Moldavia films. Why start now?”
“Huh.” He thinks it over, wiping a milky mustache off his upper lip. I wonder how much of Oren’s whole deal is an act, a shtick to mask all his insecurities. “You and Hayley . . . reprising your roles . . . ,” he says, his eyes wide and smoky as he looks at the roiling, greenish-gray sky outside the window. “You two. It was always obvious.”
“What was?”
“She’s your One. That’s why that scene worked so well in the movie.”
“My One?”
“One True Love. I think we only get one. Dad had one.”
And he lost her. My mom knows Hayley and I love each other. That’s why she told me to leave Moldavia. That’s what she meant when she said Moldavia would keep hurting me. That’s what she thinks is so dangerous. True love caused our mom and dad so much pain in the end. And also, she probably wants the bloodline to stop.
I reach into my pocket and take out the tiny photo of me at two years old that my mom used to keep in her locket. The glue on the back is all hard and yellowed.
“Ah, look,” says Oren, gesturing out the window. The rainstorm has made the wetlands seethe in this shimmering, electric way. “How cinematic.” He peers out the window, framing it with his fingers.
“What about your One Love?” I ask him.
He smiles in a way that makes me think he’s more deeply alone than I ever knew. I never saw that in him before. Or didn’t want to. He’s an incredibly weird man. But I don’t need to be friends with him. I just need to accept him as my brother. And it matters to me that he’s happy, and feels like he belongs.
Oren orders another slippery nipple, then another, and then another after that, slamming them down. Clearly, I’ll be driving us back to Moldavia. That was probably the plan all along. “Look, we can do this,” I tell him, fighting against accepting him as a tragic figure; today was just too much tragedy.
His eyelids look all droopy. “Do what?”
“Save the studio. Make this film. Do it together.”
Oren gives me a sloppy thumbs-up, quickly finishing his last slippery nipple. I’ve lost track of how many he’s had, but enough where he sort of muscularly collapses against the booth, eyes rolled back in his head, like a jellyfish that’s lost its way. “You look so much like Mom.” It seems almost like he’s talking in his sleep, his mouth barely moving. “I bet no one ever told you that before. . . .”
No. But they probably thought it.
I help Oren dig out his wallet and pay, and then I lead us out into torrential rain (Oren left his umbrella in the car), supporting all his weight, his arm wrapped around my shoulder, as we stumble through the mud.
“Don’t worry about the passshtt anymore,” he slurs. “Just consshentrate on yerrr future. Leading the ssshtudio to sssholvenssshy . . . going to collegesh . . . if that’sssh what chew desshhide ta do. . . .”
Oren lies sprawled across the back seat while I get the Bug started. I peel out of the lot, down a bunch of slick, empty roads, and onto the highway, trying to remember the way we came. Then I’m driving on a highway for only the second time in my life.
Cars, wet stains of angry light, whoosh by like white blood cells off to attack an infection. After a few minutes, my headlights reflect off a green road sign that says: Moldavia Studios, 14 miles.
We both laugh. Before he passes out, Oren says that sign is meant for delivery trucks because we’re so secluded; but squeezers also use it to guide them so they can stand outside the gates and leave calla lilies and cards and memorabilia while wondering endlessly what goes on inside, craning their necks for a peek they’ll never get.
Once, many years ago, there was an interloper, an obsessed squeezer who scaled the walls and walked the grounds in abject disbelief he got that far before being tackled by a carpenter. My dad actually stopped what he was doing, ran out there, and shook the guy’s hand. He told the guy, “Thank you for watching our films,” and autographed a poster or some bullshit the guy had on him. Then my dad had him arrested, built the wall even higher, and strung barbed wire across the top like a North Korean prison.
It’s true what they say: never meet your heroes.
Chapter Seventeen
Other People’s Dreams
THERE’S NO GPS IN THE CAR, AND I DON’T WANT TO LOOK AT MY PHONE while I’m driving, but I have a really good sense of direction—thank God—so I manage to get us home okay. The guard at the gatehouse opens the gates; some baffled production designer, measuring tape in hand, lets me inside after I ring the service bell, wet and shivering. I leave Oren curled up in the back seat of my new car, parked in the driveway in front of the castle. According to the grandfather clock in the hall of the Chaney Wing, it’s only eight p.m.
Jude isn’t in our room. I stand there in the dim light, about to rip off my sopping-wet clothes, when I hear something behind me and turn around. Gavin is standing there. I didn’t hear him come in, of course, but I’ve become used to him just spawning from out of nowhere, like a slain video game character restarting from the last checkpoint. He holds a steaming cup of tea on a tray.
“Oh, hey. You can set that down on the bedside table.”
He does. Then he just stands there, swimming in his too-large suit, hands
clasped behind his back. “There are warm, freshly laundered clothes in your closet.”
“Thanks, Gavin. Listen, I need to tell you something.”
“Yes?”
“There are too many secrets in this place . . . don’t you think?” He looks at me as if he wants to answer this question in the way that will please me the most but isn’t sure what that answer is. “It’s about your mom.”
“I was actually thinking about her today,” he says.
This catches me off guard. “What were you thinking?”
He smiles, which always looks unnatural on him, like some app drew it on his face. “I was thinking about her coming back. We look at each other and see how we’ve changed, tell each other everything that’s happened, and we realize nothing’s changed that much. We’re like how we were before, in a way, and it’s all going to be the same, it’s all going to be okay. . . .” His smile fades a little at the edges. “I know it’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid, man.”
“It’s not just today. I have this thought a lot. Like, every day.”
God. This kid still feels hope. I know all too well what it’s like to feel hopeless, especially at that age. I can’t take that away from him. “I just wanted to tell you . . . it’s okay to miss people. It’s okay to want them back, the way they once were,” I say.
Even though that’s not always possible. I finish the rest of the thought in my head.
“Thank you for saying that,” he says after a small pause.
I suddenly get this idea, and as soon as I get it, I realize it’s risky, because I’m being inspired by shit my mom rambled today, which is already putting me down a path well trodden by my dad. “I have this idea for a sequel to Zombie Children,” I blurt out. “Alastair and Abigail have a son. Would you want to act in the movie?”
He hesitates. “To play their son?”
“Right.”
At first, Gavin looks intrigued but then apprehensive. After another small pause, while he mulls it over, eyes on his shoes (he’s clearly read my journal entries about making Zombie Children very closely), he appears touched that I asked him.
“That would be really awesome,” he says. “Thanks for trusting me to do it.” He smiles at me. “You remembered your own idea.”