Time to end the magical mystery tour. I park on West Broadway, a block away from my building, across from an empty bank parking lot. I wait and watch the corner, my corner. There’s nothing happening around my apartment. Cabs trolling the streets, homeless sinking inside their upturned collars and sitting on benches, and pub crawlers are the only ones out.
I take out my cell and flip it around in my hands, giving the fingers something to hold besides the steering wheel. I’m not going to call Jennifer right now. Maybe later. Maybe after I watch the film. Maybe not at all. I don’t care all that much about what happens after the film. I just need to see it before everything falls apart and on top of me.
Phone goes back inside the jacket and the manila envelope comes out. I check that the photos are still inside, that they haven’t run and hid anywhere. The photos are still there, so are the young woman and those three letters. LIT, Tim’s signature. I tuck the envelope under the driver’s seat, a pirate hiding his booty. I don’t know if I’ll be able to reclaim the pictures later, but I want to keep the film and the photos separate, just in case.
I get out of the car and remove a small branch that was pinned under a wiper blade. That’s better. Here, under the streetlights, the damage to the space car looks severe and permanent, more a bite from a pit bull than a bee sting. Bumpers wouldn’t have helped, either.
I unload the screen and projector, the precious cargo. My muscles are stiff and the joints ache from the drive. They don’t want to move and they liked it in the car. Sorry, fellas. There’s work to do.
Screen lying across my shoulders and the projector dangling from my left hand, I hike up the street. I’m some limping and bent documentary director about to see my life’s work for the first time. I have no idea what kind of story, what kind of truth I’ve discovered, documented, even created. I’m afraid of that truth and wish I could hide from it, but I can’t. Won’t. Yeah, I’m a kind of hero, but the worst kind; the one acting heroic only by accident and because of circumstance.
There’s a cold breeze coming off the bay. It’s insistent and gets trapped and passed between the rows of buildings, bouncing around like a ricocheting bullet, hitting me with multiple shots. No tumble-weeds, but wisps of paper wrappers and crushed cans roll on the sidewalks. West Broadway isn’t deserted, but it might as well be. There’s a distinct last-person-on-earth vibe going on. I’m alone and have been for a long time.
I make it to my front door and put my burdens down on the welcome mat. The door is locked, both knob and dead bolt. I feel so protected. My keys fit into their assigned slots and Open Sesame. I should have a flashlight. I should have a lot of things. I lump the equipment inside and I turn on the hall and office lights for a quick peek.
The office and hallway have been cleared and cleaned out, the carcass picked over and stripped. Only the file cabinet and the desk remain in the office. The desk is missing a leg and leans crookedly toward a corner of the room. It’s almost like I was never there. I’m a ghost in a ghost office. I don’t bother to check if any of my files survived the purge. I don’t want to advertise my triumphant return, the not-so-prodigal son, so I shut the lights off. The darkness comes back, slides right in, settles over everything, a favorite blanket.
The ascent up the stairs to the second-floor landing isn’t quite blind, since leftover streetlight spills through the landing window. I huff and puff up the stairs, then put down the equipment next to my door. It’s shut. Ellen’s peeps have already fixed it. I take out my lighter and the half-inch flame is enough to guide my entry into the apartment. Unlike the office, my apartment has yet to be cleaned or even touched. The shambles and wreckage of my personal life are right where I left them, which is nice. Seems an appropriate scene as any for this little movie.
I scavenge some scraps of paper, find an ashtray, and light a small fire. The fire burns long enough for me to find two small candles in the kitchen. I light those. Don’t know if their orange glow can be seen from the street, so I get a couple of wool blankets out of my bedroom and hang them over the windows, tucking and tying their corners into the curtain framing. A makeshift darkroom.
I set the screen up in front of my bedroom door, which is opposite the blanket-covered windows. Next up, quietly as I can, because anyone could be listening, I clear out some space and bring in the kitchen table. Two legs are broken. I experiment with varied hunks of the living room flotsam and jetsam and manage to jury-rig a flat stable surface for the projector. It’ll hold the weight even if I can’t.
I take the projector out of its case, careful, reverential, a jeweler plucking a diamond from the setting of an antique ring. The projector goes on the table. Its dual arms are stubby and upright. I plug it in, turn it on. Out spits a ray of blinding light, a spotlight that enlarges to a rectangle that’s half on and half off the screen. I shut off the projection bulb and small pilot lights glow around the feeds. I read the manual. It has directions in English and French. It seems like straightforward stuff, but then I think I should try the other film I nabbed from Ellen’s store first, just a little film-threading practice. Never mind. I don’t have the time. I make adjustments to the height of the projector. I place the film on the front reel and thread it through the sound head like Ellen showed me. It’s working.
I fear I might do something to tear or snap the tape, this collection of lost memories is so fragile its impossible thinness passes between my fingers, but the film feeds smooth and the take-up reel gathers frames. A quick adjustment to the lens and everything is in focus. I stand next to the projector and the table with its two legs. The projector is doing its projecting. I’m standing and watching. The film is playing.
THIRTY-FIVE
White empty frames are accompanied by a loud hiss, a loud nothingness. Then the white explodes into sound and color. The projector’s speaker crackles with off-camera laughter, laughter that momentarily precedes any clear images. It’s the laughter of boys, full of bravado and mischief and oh-shit-what-have-we-got-ourselves-into? The bedroom is drab with its green bedspread and off-white paint-chipped walls; nightstand and bookcase are splintering and warped. A neglected, dying bedroom in a Southie project. The scene is fixed; the camera is on a tripod.
She sits on the bed wearing her white T-shirt and short denim skirt, but also wearing big purple bruises and rusty scrapes. In color, she looks even more like Jennifer, but an anorexic version. Her arms are thinner than the film running past the projector’s lens, skin washed with bleach. Her eyes are half open, or half closed. I want her to have a name because she doesn’t have one yet. She sways on her knees and pitches in her own two cents of laughter. It’s slurred and messy, a spilled drink, a broken cigarette. She’s not Jennifer.
Off camera, the boys speak. Their voices are boxed in, tinny, trapped in the projector’s speaker.
“Let me take a couple of quick shots.”
“What the fuck for?”
“So he can beat off to ’em later.”
“Fuck off. For cover shots, or promos. It’ll help sell the movie, find buyers. What, am I the only one here with any business sense?”
“You ain’t got no fuckin’ sense.”
“And you ain’t got no fuckin’ dick.”
More of that boy laughter, plus the clinking of bottles, then Tim appears on-screen, backside first. He turns around, sticks his mug into the camera and travels through decades. He fills the frame, fills the screen in my apartment. He’s a kid. Fifteen tops. Dark hair, pinched eyes, a crooked smile.
Ellen was right. He does look like me, like I used to look. No, that isn’t it. He looks like how I imagined my own appearance, my old appearance in all the daydreams I’ve had of the pre-accident me. He is the idealized Mark Genevich, the one lost forever, if he ever existed in the first place. He’s young, whole, not broken. He’s not the monster me on that screen. He’s there just for a second, but he’s there. I could spend the next month wearing this scene out, rewinding and watching and rewinding, staring into that
broken mirror.
Then Tim winks and says, “Sorry. I’ll be quick, just like the boys will.”
Off camera: a round of fuck yous and you pussys mixes in with laughter. Tim turns away from the camera and snaps a picture. He says, “One more. How ’bout a money shot. Take the shirt and skirt off.” The chorus shouts their approval this time. The camera only sees Tim’s back. He completely obscures her. She mumbles something and then the sound of clothes being removed, cloth rubbing against itself and against skin. T-shirt flutters off the bed, a flag falling to the ground. Tim snaps a second picture, then hides behind the movie camera.
No one says anything and the camera just stares. She’s shirtless and skirtless. She opens her eyes, or at least tries to, and says, “Someone gimme a drink.”
Off camera. “When are we gonna start this shit?”
Tim says, “Whenever you’re ready. Start now. I’ll edit out your fuckups later.”
Two bare-chested teens enter the scene, both wearing jeans. Their skin is painfully white and spotted with freckles and pimples. These guys are only a couple of years removed from Ellen’s keepsake picture on the stairs, boys in men’s bodies. Sullivan is on the right and Times on the left; both have wide eyes and cocksure sneers. Unlike in the stair picture from Ellen’s house, Sullivan is now the bigger of the two, thick arms and broad shoulders. He’s the muscle, the heavy lifter, the mover, the shaker. Times has a wiry build, looks leaner, quicker, and meaner. Here’s your leader. He’s holding a bottle of clear liquid, takes a swig.
Times kneels on the bed beside the woman and says, “You ready for a good time?” No one responds to or laughs at the porn cliché, which probably isn’t a cliché to them yet. It’s painfully earnest in this flick.
The new silence in the room is another character. Times looks around to his boys, and it’s a moment when the whole thing could get called off, shut down. Sullivan and Tim would be all right with a last-second cancellation of this pilot. I can’t know this but I do. The moment passes, like all moments must pass, and it makes everything worse, implicates them further, because they had a chance to stop and they didn’t.
Times says, “Here.” He gives her the bottle and she drinks deep, so deep I’m not sure she’ll be able to come back up for a breath. But she does, and hands back the bottle and melts out of her sitting position and onto her back. Sullivan grabs a handful of her left breast and frantically works at the button and fly of his pants with his free hand.
Her right hand and arm float up in front her face slowly, like an old cobra going through the motions for some two-bit snake charmer, and her hand eventually lands on Times’s thigh. She’s like them, only a kid. And she’s a junkie. I wonder if those three amigos could see that and were banking on it, or if they were too busy with their collective tough-guy routine to see anything.
Times says, “Lights, camera, action.”
The sex is fast, rough, and clumsy. With its grim and bleak bedroom setting, drunk, high, and uninterested female star, and two boys who are awkward but feral and relentless, it’s a scene that is both pathetic and frightening at the same time. The vibe has flipped 180 degrees, from should-we-do-this to where the potential for violence is an ogre in the room. Like someone watching a scary movie through his fingers, I cringe because I know the violence is coming.
The camera stays in one spot and only pans and scans. There’s never a good clear shot of the woman’s face. We see her collection of body parts in assorted states of motion but never her face. She’s not supposed to matter, and even if nothing else were to happen, this is enough to make me hate the boy behind the camera and the man he became. Tim says nothing throughout the carnal gymnastics. He’s the silent but complicit eye.
Sullivan finishes first and stumbles out of the scene. He gives Tim—not the camera—a look, one that might haunt me for the rest of my little sleeps and short days. When that kid’s middle-aged version killed himself in the basement of his Cape house, I imagine he had the same look on his face when he pulled the trigger. A look one might have when the truth, the hidden and ugly truth of the world, that we’re all complicit, has been revealed.
Times is still going at her. He’s on top and he speeds up his thrusts for the big finish. Then there’s a horrible choking cough. It’s wet and desperate and loud, practically tears through the projector’s speaker, and makes Brill’s lung-ejecting hacks sound like a prim and proper clearing of the throat.
“Jesus, fuck!” Times jumps off the bed like it’s electrified.
It’s her. She’s choking. I still can’t see enough of her face; she’s lying down and the camera isn’t up high enough. She coughs but isn’t breathing in. Out with the bad but no in with the good. Yellow vomit leaks out of her nose and mouth and into her hair. Her hands try to cover her face but fall back onto the bed. She shakes all over, the convulsions increasing in speed and violence. I think maybe I accidentally sped up the film but I didn’t; it’s all her. Maybe the bed is electrified.
From behind the camera, and it sounds like he’s behind me, talking over my shoulder, Tim says, “What’s fuckin’ happening?” He doesn’t lose the shot, though, that son of a bitch. The camera stays focused on her.
“Oh, fuck, her fucking eyes, they’re all white. Fuck! Fuck!”
Sullivan says, “She’s freaking out. What do we do?”
The camera gets knocked to the floor, but it still runs, records its images. A skewed, tilted shot of under the bed fills the screen. There’s nothing there but dust and cobwebs and darkness.
The bed shakes and the springs complain. The choking noises are gone. The boys are all shouting at the same time. I can only make out snippets, swears, phrases. It’s a mess. I lean closer to the screen, trying to hide under that bed, trying to hear what they’re saying. Their voices are one voice, high-pitched and scared.
Then the three voices become only two. One is screaming. I think it’s Times. He’s says, “Shut the fucking camera off!” He shouts it repeatedly, his increased mania exploding in the room.
And I hear Tim—I think it’s Tim. He’s whispering and getting closer to the camera. He’s going to shut it off, taking orders like a good little boy. He’s repeating himself too, has his own mantra. Tim is saying, “Is she dead? Is she dead?”
The screen goes white. The End. Fin.
The take-up reel rattles with a lose piece of film slapping against the projector. My hands are sweating and I’m breathing heavy. I shut off the projector, the screen goes black, the take-up reel slows, and I stop it with my hand. The used engine gives a whiff of ozone and waves of dying heat. Everything should be quiet, but it isn’t.
“Who is she?” A voice from my left, from the front door.
I say, “Don’t you mean, who was she?”
THIRTY-SIX
Jennifer Times stands in the front doorway. She looks like she did at the mall autograph session. Sweatpants, jean jacket over a Red Sox T, hair tied up into a tight ponytail. It might be the weak candlelight, shadows dampening her cheekbones and eyes, but she looks a generation older than when we were at the restaurant. We’re both older now.
I say, “I don’t remember calling and inviting you over. I would’ve cleaned up a bit first. Maybe even baked a cake.”
She walks in, shuts the door behind her. Someone raised her right. She says, “Who was she? Do you know?”
I say, “No idea. No clue, as it was. How much did you see?”
“Enough.”
I nod. It was enough.
She says, “What are you going to do now?”
“Me? I’m done. I’m taking myself out of the game, making my own call to the bullpen. I’m wrapping this all up in a pretty red bow and dumping into the state police’s lap. Or the FBI. No local cops, no one who knows your dad, no offense. I was hired to find it. I found it.”
Jennifer carefully steps over the rubble and crouches next to me, next to the projector. She stares at it like she might lay hands on it, wanting to heal or be healed, I do
n’t know. “What do you think happened to her after?”
I say, “How did you get in here?”
“I checked the welcome mat and there were keys duct-taped underneath.”
Keys? I never left any keys. I don’t even have spares. Ellen wouldn’t do that either. Yeah, she’s the de facto mayor of Southie, friends with everyone, but she’s also a pragmatist. She knows better than to leave keys under a welcome mat on one of the busiest corners of South Boston. All of which means Jennifer is lying and also means I’m screwed, as I’m sure other unexpected guests are likely to arrive shortly.
Jennifer holds up a ring of two keys on a Lithuanian-flag key chain.
Shit. Those are Ellen’s keys. I say, “How did you know I was here?”
“Why are you interrogating me?”
“I’m only asking simple questions, and here you go trying to rush everything to the interrogation level.”
She says, “I was parked outside of your apartment and saw you. I waited a few minutes and let myself in, then I sat outside your door listening. I came in when I heard them yelling.”
I fold up and break down the projector as she talks. I don’t rewind the film but, instead, slip the take-up reel into my coat pocket, next to the other film. I wrap up the cord and slide the projector into its case, latch the latches twice for luck. I say, “Why are you here?” and walk past her to the screen.
“I needed to see if you were telling me the truth on the phone. I had to know.”
The screen recoils quickly and slides into its box nice and easy. I say, “And now that you know, what are you going to do?”
Jennifer walks past the table and sits on the couch. “How about answering my question?”
“What question was that? I tend to lose track of things, you know?”
“What do you think happened after? After the movie? What did they do?”
My turn to play the strong silent type. I lean on the screen, thinking about giving an answer, my theory on everything, life, death, the ever-expanding doomed universe. Then there’s a short bang downstairs. Not loud enough to wake up neighbors, a newspaper hitting the door.
The Little Sleep Page 18