Monstress

by Lysley Tenorio

  The next morning I reached for Checkers and he wasn’t there. I opened my eyes and found him on the floor, asleep on his stomach. For a moment I thought we were in Manila again, that this was just another of our ordinary days. But then I saw the yellow beanbags on the floor, brighter than anything in our apartment back home.

  I got dressed and went into the kitchen. Gaz was already there, sunglasses on, wearing a tiger-print robe. “Now that,” he said, standing by the window, “is a Hollywood morning.” I looked out. Everything was hazy and bright at the same time.

  Suddenly I realized Gaz was staring at me. “What?”

  “It’s weird to see you this way. In the human flesh, I mean.” He removed his sunglasses. “I remember you in Checkers’ movies, all fancy with your tentacles and boils and lobster claws. Chex got lucky when he found you. You make a good monster. You’re a mistress of monsters.” He chuckled. “You’re a monstress.”

  “I am not monstrous,” I said.

  “Monstress,” he said. “Not monstrous. See for yourself.” He looked behind and above me. I turned around, and then I saw it, tacked to the wall: a poster for The Squid Children of Cebu. “I swiped it from CocoLoco, hung it up this morning. Thought it might make you two feel at home.”

  The edges had yellowed, but the picture was still clear: a dozen Squid Children on the edge of a lagoon, and behind them, lying on the shore, is the Squid Mother, her belly bloated with squid eggs yet to be spawned, tentacles flailing. That costume was sticky and rubbery, but by the end of the day it felt like my own skin. For hours I would roll along the dirty sand, moaning, “Grraarggh, grraargh,” and I remember thinking, This is it, this is my life, as Checkers filmed me from afar. I hadn’t seen the poster since the president of CocoLoco showed it to us, as an example of our failure.

  At noon, we returned to the set to meet the cast. It was trash collection day in Pasadena; garbage cans lined the street, and in front of Gaz’s mother’s house, the parts of a dismantled mannequin lay in a pile on the sidewalk. “We can use this,” Gaz said. “Help me out, Chex.”

  I walked ahead of them, toward the back of the house. The basement door was open. “Hello?” I called out. I stepped inside, heard giggling coming from the bridge. When I turned the corner I found Captain Banner and Ace Trevor leaning against the helm, their arms around each other. They might have been kissing. “Sorry,” I said, my face warm from embarrassment.

  They let go of each other, stood up straight. “We were just going over lines.” The man who played Captain Banner held out his hand. “Everett Noel Dubois. But friends call me E. Noel. This is Prescott St. John, a.k.a. Ace Trevor.” Prescott smiled, straightening his collar. They were the first professional actors I’d met in years, and I worried they would ask about my own acting history; a list of my roles and movies formed in my head, and they made me feel meager, shameful. I wanted to avoid the subject altogether, focus only on the good parts of my life. “I work for a dentist in Manila” was all I could think to say.

  Gaz and Checkers walked in, carrying legs, arms, a torso. They set the mannequin parts on the ground, and Gaz made formal introductions. “Where’s our Lorena?” he asked, looking at his watch. “If it’s one thing I demand from my actors,” he said, “it’s punctuality. Be back in a flash.” He went upstairs to call her at home. E. Noel and Prescott went outside to go over lines.

  Checkers knelt to the floor and started rebuilding the mannequin. He said he was genuinely impressed by what he’d seen so far, but then he whispered his disappointments in Tagalog. “His camera work is unsteady,” he said. “And his composition is so-so. But I have some suggestions for him. Lucky for him I have the experience, right?” He looked up at me. “What? Why is your face like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like this.” He scrunched up his face into a girlish pout and rolled his eyes. “What’s wrong with you?”

  I knelt down beside him. “Maybe we should go home today. Just take the twenty-five hundred before he changes his mind.”

  “Is your head broken? We have almost a week left. The American will need my guidance. This is a Gazman-Rosario Production, don’t you know?”

  I slammed the mannequin hand against the ground; the pinkie finger broke off. “ ‘Gazman-Rosario Production?’ Gazman-Idiot Production! You’ve already done the work he needs. You finished it years ago!” I took a deep breath, made my voice gentle again. “You were finished years ago. Don’t start this nonsense again. If you do …” I should have stopped there, but the poster in Gaz’s kitchen hung in my head like a fateful welcome-home banner, and I couldn’t go back. “If you do, I won’t forgive you this time.”

  Checkers set the mannequin’s right arm on the ground. Then he got to his feet, took backwards steps toward the wall, the way my victims would in his movies, right before the kill. “Checkers.” I held my arms out to comfort him, but he wouldn’t come to me. “Checkers?”

  Suddenly there was cursing and shouting as Gaz came running down the stairs. “Crap!” he said. He kicked a computer console and it flew across the basement. “I lost my Lorena Valdez! She decided she’d rather do some bimbo role for a guy named Roman What’s-His-Face than finish my movie.” He leaned against the wall, slid down to the floor, put his face on his knees. “Where am I going to find another actress who’ll work for free? Crap!”

  Then Checkers started pacing too. “Crap-crap!” he shouted. He went on about the money he would lose, and he wondered how someone who once was great could slip away into a life as dead-end as ours. “I’m sorry,” I said, reaching for him. But he just pushed my arm away, told me to leave him alone. So I went to Gaz instead, and patted his shoulder to calm him down. This was the end of things, I was sure of it; the loss of Lorena Valdez was a sign that this collaboration was never meant to be, and it was time for Checkers and me to return to our real life back home.

  Gaz inhaled deeply through his nose and exhaled through his mouth several times, then took my hand from his shoulder and squeezed it tight. His head rose slowly and he stared into my eyes, almost lovingly. I thought he might try to kiss me, so I freed my hand from his and stepped back.

  “What size space suit do you wear?” he whispered.

  I never wanted to be Lorena Valdez. But Gaz insisted that I was born to play her, and besides, this was the only way to guarantee the deal he’d made with Checkers. “Think of the money,” Gaz said, and though Checkers stayed silent, I finally agreed that it was the only thing to do.

  It was 102 degrees the day we started filming. We were at the bottom of a canyon in Los Feliz, and all morning long, E. Noel, Prescott, and I ran back and forth, pretending to flee from Checkers’ monsters, while Gaz followed us with a handheld camera. Checkers was alone at the top of the canyon by the NO TRESPASSING sign, looking out for cops.

  At noon, we filmed a crucial scene that required me to run up the side of the canyon. “Now you’re fleeing from the stinkiest, oogiest, bat-winged pygmy you’ve ever seen,” Gaz said, “and it wants you for breakfast.” He put his hands on my shoulders, leaned in close. “Think about that as you’re running away. Understand?”

  I had never taken direction from another man before. “I do,” I said.

  Gaz set up the camera at the bottom of the canyon, then called action. I ran. I visualized myself from years before, chasing after me now, fangs bared and claws ready to shred, tentacles wrapping around me, squeezing me to my final breath. I could hear a hiss in my ear, and I shivered in the heat. I ran faster, staggering uphill on my hands and knees, telling myself, Climb. Get to safety. But when I looked up I saw Checkers walking toward me, as though he was trying to sabotage the shot. “Go!” I whispered. “You’re ruining the picture!” For a moment Checkers looked confused, like he suddenly realized he had no idea where he was, but finally backed away.

  I reached the top. I got to my feet, looked straight down into the camera, and screamed my very first line of dialogue ever: “They’re hideous!” Then Gaz yelled cut, cla
pped twice, and proclaimed Lorena Valdez a new heroine for our time.

  The day before I was meant to leave America, we shot the love scene. “Hold her here,” Gaz directed. He placed E. Noel’s hands on the small of my back, then put my arms around E. Noel’s neck. He stepped back, checked the shot.

  It wasn’t cold in Gaz’s mother’s basement, but I was shaking. “You seem nervous,” E. Noel whispered. “First on-screen kiss?”

  I had gouged, bitten, clawed, stabbed. Never kissed. “No.”

  He smiled, like he didn’t believe me. “Well, if you do get nervous, just pretend I’m Checkers.”

  Gaz called action. We started the scene.

  We spoke of our failed mission and our fallen comrades—Ace had been barbecued by the bat-winged pygmies, and the Intelli-Bot 04-26-35 had malfunctioned beyond repair and turned against us —and we spoke of time wasted harnessing comet-tail energy, studying asteroid samples, mining moons for precious metals. “All that matters to me now,” E. Noel said, “is you.”

  “Captain,” I said. “I—I’m frightened.”

  “Of what? That demonic intergalactic menagerie of fanged creatures can’t touch us. Not now. Not with only five minutes of oxygen left.”

  “No. That’s not it. I’m afraid of”—I took a deep breath—“of loving you. Meteor analysis, moon colonization, those things are easy. But not love. Love takes work. Love takes time and we’re running out of it.” I broke free from E. Noel’s embrace, walked toward the observation window, in near-disbelief that these lines, the most beautiful I had ever spoken, were actually mine.

  E. Noel put his hands on my shoulders. “Lorena. Of all the star systems I have explored, of every planet upon which I’ve walked, there is nowhere in the galaxy I’d rather be than here, on the bridge of The Valedictorian, looking into your eyes. If this is my end, then it’s more than I could have ever hoped for.” He pulled me close against him.

  “I don’t know what—”

  He put his index finger over my mouth. “Ssshh. Just kiss me, Lorena. That’s an order.”

  The slick of saliva and flesh of his lips. The running of his fingers through my wig. Our chests and hearts coming together. It all thrilled me, knowing the camera was there to capture the moment.

  Then someone started laughing.

  “Cut!” Gaz shouted. “What the dang is so funny?”

  It was Checkers. “Pardon,” he said, smirking. “Sorry.”

  I let go of E. Noel. I walked off the bridge, toward Checkers. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “With me?” Checkers said in Tagalog. “Do you know what you look like up there? All that corny talk. All that overacting the American is making you do.” He shook his head, started laughing again.

  “That’s enough,” I said. But he kept going, and his laughter turned to cruelty: he said the scene between Lorena and Banner was utterly unbelievable, that no two people would say such meaningless things in what could be the last moments of their lives. “They would try to stay alive. They would fight. That’s what brave explorers of outer space do, right?” He belittled Gaz’s script, insulted my acting, poked fun at the fact that I was kissing an obvious homosexual. “On film,” he said, “you will look like a whore.”

  Sometimes I wonder if he meant this as a warning, a last chance to save me from starring in yet another fool’s movie. I didn’t think this at the time. Instead, my hand went up, then lashed forward, a gesture I’d made dozens of times before in Checkers’ films, and the other actor always knew the precise moment to duck. But this time, I made actual contact and inflicted real pain: I slapped Checkers hard across the face, and my nails left red scratches just below his eye. “Get away from here,” I said.

  Checkers touched his face. He looked at the blood on his fingers.

  “Get off the set,” I said it in English, so that everyone around could understand me, “and let me act.” Checkers moved away, still stunned, then left the basement.

  Gaz called places. “From the top,” he said. We began again, but E. Noel kept stumbling over “demonic intergalactic menagerie,” and there were technical difficulties on the fifth, sixth, seventh takes. Only on the eleventh did we finally get it right: I took E. Noel’s advice and pretended he was Checkers. When we kissed, I managed to shed one single, perfect tear, just as Gaz had written in the script.

  “Slight problemo,” Gaz said the next day. “We’re not done.” Checkers and I were packing for our flight back home. We hadn’t spoken since I struck him, and he did not return to Gaz’s apartment until early that morning. To this day, I don’t know where he was the previous night, or how he found his way back.

  Gaz explained the situation: “You’re in the shot, Chex. When Lorena’s running up the canyon, you’re standing right there like this.” He got up, put his hands in his pockets, and looked around like a lost tourist. “I could try to write you into the script, but at this point”—Gaz sat down, started folding one of Checkers’ shirts—“I need you to stay.” He was speaking to me. “A day or two, maybe three. There are some other scenes I’d like to reshoot. I’ll even pay for your new ticket back. What do you say?”

  Hours later, we dropped Checkers off at the curb. “Happy trails,” Gaz said, patting Checkers on the back, “till we meet again.”

  Checkers stared at Gaz for a few seconds, the way he did the morning they met, then got out of the car. “Five percent,” he said. “Don’t forget.”

  I walked with Checkers to the entrance. “You’ll be okay, right?” I said. “It’s just a few days.” I fixed his collar, smoothed his hair. I leaned in to kiss him goodbye, but stopped at the sight of the scratch marks on his face. They had scabbed over, and I traced over them with my finger. “Fool,” I said, shaking my head and weeping, “look what you made me do.” He grabbed hold of my wrist, put my hand to his lips, and instead of kissing it, he simply breathed in through his nose and mouth, as though I were air to him, his only oxygen. Then he let me go and went inside.

  Gaz handed me a tissue when I got back in the car. “What’s a few days?” he said. What he couldn’t understand was that Checkers and I had never left one another before, and on the way to the airport, I’d daydreamed for us a lovelier farewell scene: just before takeoff Checkers exits the plane, dashes across the tarmac to get to me. We kiss so long and hard, hold each other so tight, that there is no way we can ever be apart.

  Gaz finally titled the movie The Terror of the Fanged Creatures, and the morning after we finished shooting, Gaz showed me the screenplay for his next movie, Pasadena RollerWars. “I’m still looking for my BB San Juan,” he said. “The tough and sexy heroine of the deadliest rink in town. Think it over.” I called Checkers and told him all the things Gaz told me: that once-in-a-lifetime opportunities really are once-in-a-lifetime, that another American role would be good for my career, that we could always use the money. “I’m doing this for us, right?” I said.

  There was a moment of silence on Checkers’ end. I thought we had been disconnected. “CocoLoco wants me back,” he finally said. “They read Dino-Ladies Get Quezon City and they want me to direct it. They said if my old movies can conquer Hollywood, then my new ones can double-conquer Manila. It’s unlucky for you that you’re not around to star in it.”

  I had burned the only copy of Dino-Ladies years before, but I let Checkers talk his talk, because it was better than the truth—I could see him sitting on the couch, in his boxer shorts and dirty undershirt, waiting amidst his mess for my return. “Your chance came again,” I said, “congratulations.” Then I hung up, found Gaz sitting in his kitchen staring at the Hollywood morning, and told him yes.

  After RollerWars, I did two more films for Gaz: The Twisted History-Mystery and Jesse: Girl of a Thousand Streets. Altogether, they took almost three years to shoot. Checkers and I spoke less, rarely returned each other’s calls, and I learned not to miss him by reminding myself that I was a working, professional actress in America; back home, I didn’t know what I was. I never r
eturned to find out.

  But of all the films I did for Gaz, only Fanged Creatures is remembered. I saw it again, just last year at the Silver Scream Theater in L.A., almost twenty years after its original release. I sat alone in the second row; behind me an audience of college students mocked and hooted throughout, laughing especially hard during my kiss with E. Noel. But that scene still moved me—what did those young people know about the world ending all around you?

  Overall, Fanged Creatures was still impressive: the plot was fast-paced, the camerawork was steady, and our reaction shots conveyed all the fear and dread Gaz hoped for. But the back-and-forth shifts between his film and Checkers’ footage was rougher than I remembered: bright Technicolor pictures alternated with yellowish, grainy ones, and Checkers’ monsters moved in a dreamy slow motion: the Squid Mother’s tentacles flowed around her like the tails of kites, the Bat-Winged Pygmy Queen glided through the air like a leaf in the wind, Werewolf Girl looked almost lovely as she bayed at the moon. It had been so long since I had seen myself this way that I was secretly mournful at the end when, after Captain Banner manages to restore power to the engines, Lorena presses the button that drops the nucleotomic bombs on Planet X. “There you are,” Gaz whispered to me, the night of its premiere, “obliterating yourselves out of existence.”

  But what stayed with me then, what loops in my head even now, is what I didn’t see in the movie: that scene in the canyon, the one Gaz said Checkers ruined. I saw it only once, right before Gaz edited it out: on hands and knees I struggle uphill, a filthy, sweaty mess—my wig is a nest of pebbles and leaves, dirt smears my face, neck, and space suit. But it makes no difference to Checkers. He comes to me with open arms, like I am a thing of unequaled beauty. On film, everything looks real. It was true: it did look like Checkers meant to help me up, to pull me to safety, and rescue me from that most hostile of planets.