But I was a virgin until … until Bela, you believe.
No, Jerry, your spontaneous memory answers, you weren’t.
Memories. Your head doesn’t have enough room for all of them at once. When some come up, others need to get pushed to the back. Your thoughts become clouded.
I feel sick. I’m going to fall over. These people around, the ones inside drinking, they’re making so much noise. This blonde … why is she looking at me like that? Who’s that bearded man smiling at us from inside? Why is this balcony moving?
I’m spinning and put my hand on the blonde woman’s waist to steady myself.
‘Oh, J,’ she says drunkenly. ‘You want me again, don’t you? You want that second fuck? For old time’s sake?’ She moves my hand from her waist to her ass. She kisses my mouth and it’s a taste I remember always having desired and always having had. She kisses my mouth and puts her hand on mine, forcing it to squeeze her ass. ‘Oh, J,’ she bites my lip and in that bite, her tooth punctures my flesh and a single drop of blood stirs inside my mouth. In that single drop is my entire life. Bela. Epiphany. My mother and father. Emma. They all come back to me.
I break from her lips. ‘What was the name of the film?’ I tremble.
‘What?’ she says, piqued that someone’s stopped kissing her.
‘The film … The silverware factory set…’
‘Oh,’ she says and returns to kissing my neck. ‘Who cares, Little J?’ Her hand slides down my front until it finds my crotch. ‘Just don’t tell my boyfriend…’
I take her shoulders. ‘What was the name of the film?’ I shout and shake her as if doing so will rattle this memory of hers to the ground, where I can scoop it up and push it though my ear into my mind. ‘What was the name of the film, you stupid whore?’
And Jordan, she begins to cry.
‘What was its name!’
‘Four Men,’ she sobs. ‘It was Four Men.’
44
Rewind
‘What if we’re all the bad guys?’
‘Who is truly good? You?’
‘Momentous events are sparked by free will and petty motivations.’
Four Men is a dialogue-driven movie about four people who wake up trapped in the same room together. Two of them are handcuffed and there are two extra sets of cuffs on the ground. There’s a pad of paper on the floor with directions written on it. In a shallow box on a rollered conveyor belt they find a set of keys and a cell phone with a dead battery. The kicker for these four men is that no one can remember who they are or how they got there. But they all smell gas and one of the handcuffed men has a gun.
And a line of dialogue says, ‘You had it all wrong.’
A line of dialogue says, ‘Fear makes us do all sorts of bad things.’
A line of dialogue says, ‘Sometimes the crazy ones are the right ones.’
After I released my grip on Jordan, after I ran past Phineas and out onto the Promenade de la Croisette, I went from DVD stall to DVD stall. By the fourth one I started to fear I wouldn’t find it. Then I saw one last stall on the opposite side of the Croisette. Its location was relatively poor as most of the foot traffic stuck to the right side of the street. The DVDs were arranged by actor. This vendor, he had all her movies:
The Best Girl.
Before Dying.
The Mechana Effect.
Caribbean Dawn.
All but the one I needed.
‘Four Men?’ I said.
‘Ah, I keep that under “Donald Diamon” since he was the main star,’ the vendor said. ‘Let me see if I still have a copy.’ He flipped through the Diamon section. ‘Most people don’t know that was Seabring’s first role. She played an extra in the background during one of the flashback sequences in the second act. You must be a big fan if you know she’s in it.’ He pulled out the DVD then took my money and nodded towards the photos of her he was selling. ‘Man, what a looker, huh? How’d you like to hit that?’
In my hotel room I sit on my bed, barely breathing as I watch the movie play out. The film consists primarily of close-ups of the characters and the items they find. In the first act the only medium and long shots you get are when you see the characters’ flashbacks – when they suddenly remember something based on an item they find in their wallet or on a shelf or wherever. And then we get to it: the flashback scene of the middle-aged father. The one where you see his fifteen-year-old daughter in the background. Jordan Seabring’s first foray onto celluloid. It lasts all of eight seconds.
After each flashback, when the camera returns to the present you get to see more and more of the room where the men are being held. And even though I’ve never seen this movie before, I’ve seen this room dozens of times. They’re in a silverware factory. The factory is abandoned. Teaspoon after teaspoon rusts in boxes on roller conveyors. Forks dangle from strings overhead. Three furnaces fill the room in the far corner. Their mouths gape, revealing long extinguished insides. Behind them, scorch marks make permanent shadows on the brick walls. The floor planks are stained dark.
A line of dialogue says, ‘Memory is tricky.’
It says, ‘The mind finds ways to protect us.’
It says, ‘Are you sure what you believe is true?’
I pause the screen and such a strain comes over my chest. Bits and scraps of thoughts swim around in my head. They stir in my mind as if shaken in a snow globe. And, as if they’ve only been playing with the idea of coming up for air, now the tiniest little scraps decide to break the surface.
Rewind.
I’m seventeen. My father and I are at the wrap party for Four Men. The party is being held on one of the lots at the old Imagination Studios. People are laughing and smiling all around. The extras are all huddled together in one corner, nervous excitement on their faces, hoping for the chance to talk to someone who might further their career. Phineas is there. So is Roland, only at this time he’s going by the name Rolin. And, unlike the other people at the party, he looks a little worried.
Standing by a lighting rig Matthew and my father whisper to each other, grinning masters of the universe. On the other side of the room there’s a girl around my age. She’s an extra named Jordan. And my father approaches her and speaks briefly. Then he points at me. And Jordan, she walks over, smiling. She asks me to come with her to get something from the dressing room.
In the dressing room we sit on a couch. She looks nervous as we chat about nothing for twenty minutes. I’m nervous too. She’s beautiful. She’s got Hollywood written all over her.
On our way to the party tonight, my dad told me he had a special gift for me. ‘A gift that will make you a man,’ he said. And it doesn’t take me long to realise that Jordan is that gift.
‘OK, let’s do this,’ she says abruptly. ‘My parents are picking me up in thirty.’
She takes off her top. And her breasts are magnificent – as the first breasts you touch always are.
‘Take your clothes off,’ she orders.
I do.
‘Lie down.’
I do.
We don’t even kiss. She pulls on my dick until it gets hard and she climbs on top of me. And this is where I lose my virginity. From underneath her skirt, she slides her panties to the side and puts me inside her. And she rides me like a toy pony. And ninety seconds later, I cum and Jordan climbs off me and plops back on the couch, annoyed and a little disappointed.
‘I’m not sure if that counts,’ she says. ‘It was so quick.’
And for some reason, I want to cry. For some reason, this doesn’t feel right.
‘Well, let’s go again,’ she says. ‘I want to make sure I get the part.’ And she looks at my penis. ‘Go on, get hard.’
I say, ‘I can’t.’
‘Fine, I’ll do it,’ she says and takes my penis in her mouth.
Suddenly there’s a commotion on the other side of the dressing-room door. Someone’s screaming. Then the door bursts open and a black-haired girl in a light-blue dress runs in. She�
�s crying and scared and shaking like a whipped animal. ‘Oh! My! God! Get out!’ Jordan screams, and the girl with black hair darts through a side door.
From the hallway, Rolin’s voice shouts, ‘She’s in the dressing room!’
I’m so petrified that someone I know will see me naked, I take off out the side door, too. It leads through a prop room and out to the studio back lot. And I run in the night, exposed, across the back lot. I run and run until I come to a small building. Inside it’s a set. And I stand in the middle of this set, naked. Shaking. Crying. I’m not who I was before this night. I feel wrong.
The set is made to look like a silverware factory. The oil that stains the floorboards is paint. The silver forks that dangle from the strings are really made of plastic. And from the left set wall – the one that’s constructed to look like the tin siding of a shack with cracked, yellowed windows – the silhouette of a girl runs past. And I hide. Naked and shaking I crawl into one of the big furnaces that look like it’s cast from iron, but really it’s just moulded polystyrene, and I curl up inside. I cry.
And then I see her. The girl from the dressing room. She’s fourteen, maybe fifteen years old. Her frame is petite and doesn’t fully fill the dress she’s wearing. Her face is small and round. Her hair, pulled back tight around her head, is black like a raven’s folded wing. Her skin, white as cream. And her left ear – now it looks like a piece of her lobe was torn right off.
I want to shout, ‘Over here! Hide over here!’ But I don’t. I’m too scared. So I just watch. I watch as this girl looks around frantically. I watch as the black soles of her pale feet give up. They won’t carry her anymore. And I see more silhouettes run past the cracked, yellowed windows, the ones that are made from glazed sugar stained with coffee so they look older. And from my hiding place in the polystyrene furnace, I see Rolin enter. And then Phineas.
They claw at this poor girl like hawks attacking a prairie rabbit until she collapses to the ground. And she struggles on the paint-marked floor; she screams as she’s beaten into restraint. And, as this poor girl is held to the floor, another man enters the set. Rolin and Phineas spread the girl’s legs as this new man forces his hand into her privates. His movements are so rough, so powerful, that each gyration of his arm rocks the girl’s entire body on the floor. And as the girl howls, this man takes his hand from between her legs and beats her on the face. As she bleeds from between her legs, the man orders Phineas and Rolin to drag her away. Then the man stands up and wipes his hand clean.
The man, he’s my father.
45
The Secret History of Epiphany Jones and I
There’s a shark in my bed. He’s got a bullet hole in his head. Then he’s gone, and Emma is in the bed. She’s pale and sick and has cancer. Rachel stands in the corner, her red anime hair glowing. ‘Come to me,’ she says. Then she’s my father. ‘This will make you a man, Jerry.’ And my father becomes LaRouche, who becomes the shark, who becomes Emma.
All of them are popping in and out around the room. I sink next to the nightstand and press my eyes shut. ‘Please leave me alone,’ I cry. ‘Please…’
But they keep coming. Even with my eyes closed and my hands over my ears, I hear them. ‘Stop this! Stop! I didn’t ask for any of this.’ I open my eyes and throw the bedside lamp at my father. And the figments popping in and out, they’re more rapid now. Sometimes three are in the room at once. Now Epiphany is among them too. Emma is standing beside her.
‘Please, Emma, please. Make them go away.’ But it’s Epiphany who walks over and places her hand on my shoulder. And when she does, all the other figments vanish – like they did with Bela. ‘Shh. It’s just you and I, Jerry. No one else is here.’ And that’s when I realise that this is the real Epiphany; the flesh-and-blood little girl my dad dragged off the silverware factory set. She’s got a butter knife in her hand and the hotel room door behind her is ajar.
Epiphany sees the image of the silverware factory frozen on the TV screen. She sees the gun I tried to murder her with sitting on the nightstand. She reaches towards it, but instead of taking the gun she sets the butter knife next to it.
‘Why are you here?’ I shake. My whole body feels as if it’s broken.
It’s several moments before she answers. Then she looks at me with her green eyes and says, ‘Because, for once, I listened to my own voice.’ She takes another moment before cautiously adding, ‘I didn’t kill your friend. You need to know that. You deserve to know the truth.’
No. I won’t believe it. She had to. She had to. There was no one else. ‘You’re trying to mess with my head. You’re trying to trick me,’ I shake.
‘No, Jerry,’ she says softly. ‘No more lies, no more tricks.’
‘Why’d you run, then? On the street, why’d you run?’
‘When I discovered you in the bar, I was going to tell you everything, but then my–’ She stops herself. ‘I suddenly knew you had a gun. So I ran.’ I’m looking at her, unable to utter a word. ‘Jerry, when you held that gun to my face … I had not seen that much pain in someone’s eyes since they took my daughter from me. That is when I realised that you and your friend – you and she are as much victims of trafficking as my daughter and I, and all the others are.’
And before I can ask what she means, she says, ‘You didn’t kill Nico on that pier in Veracruz.’
‘I did.’ It’s like I’ve just been kicked in the gut. ‘I saw him lying, bleeding.’
‘But not dead,’ she says.
A cancer of remorse invades my stomach. I know what she’s going to say. And now something I wished I could have taken back for the longest time, I cry that I didn’t actually do.
Epiphany tells me what happened after I jumped ship in Porto. How she woke the next day. How she figured I’d need to hide in Porto until I knew what I was going to do now that the videotape showed nothing. She had Abdul phone different places to see if I’d rented a room. After a few days of being unable to find me, she knew she had to go on to the house outside of Seville without me. But she arrived too late. The girls had been moved. The only one left in the house was the madam. She was Russian, just like LaRouche. And this madam, after some ‘very firm discussions’, she revealed that there were twelve girls – all special order – all moved to Cannes the day before. The madam told Epiphany that one of the girls had even been kept there, unspoilt, for almost twelve years, aging like a fine wine for just the right occasion. This year was that right occasion. At Cannes, Matthew would be hosting an exclusive party that required only the purest treats.
So Epiphany, she dragged this madam from the house and tied her to a wretched tree that had died this spring in the unusually extreme Spanish heat wave. Then Epiphany went back into the house. It was minutes before she returned carrying a burning cloth wrapped around a stick. Fear came to the madam’s eyes and she pleaded with Epiphany. She told her she had taught her daughter the mother tongue. That she had cared for her like her own.
Overhead, the sun was so relentless that, as Epiphany burnt the house to the ground, the flames hardly added anything to the searing heat of the Andalusian air. And Epiphany, she stubbed out the torch and told the woman that she knew it wasn’t entirely her fault – this life of hers. ‘But let’s see if God sets you free before His sky consumes you.’
Now knowing exactly why her voices had said she needed me, Epiphany returned to Porto. But when she found me that day on my way to the farmers’ market, Nico had found her. By that time he had tracked us to Portugal. As she stood behind a watermelon stand watching me, she and Nico saw each other at the same moment. She fled and Nico pursued. Her flight eventually led her to an alley where she hid. This alley, it was full of cats that seemed to crawl all over her body, making her invisible in the dark as Nico ran past. Then, as Epiphany remained hiding in the alley – desperate and scared that Nico had already gotten to me – ‘as fate would have it’, I walked by with a pumpkin in each hand.
And after our confrontation in that a
lley – after I left with my remaining pumpkin, after I told Epiphany everything she believed is wrong – she realised how mad she had sounded, because she had been so shaken by coming so close to finding her daughter in Spain and then by seeing Nico alive in Portugal. And Epiphany remembered the night in Mexico when she and LaRouche spoke at the kitchen table while I was lying in bed with a freshly stabbed back. LaRouche had tried to explain to Epiphany then that, though she understands so readily what she must do because the voice of God speaks to her, other, more secular, individuals would easily mistake her passion for madness.
So Epiphany tracked me to my apartment. She knew she needed to explain everything then, rationally and in full, if she had any hope of getting me to help her. That was when Paulo saw her outside at four in the morning. Epiphany feared that any man by my apartment at four in the morning might be working with Nico, so she fled. But she returned a few hours later and crept past the sleeping Paulo, up the stairs past the candlelit vegetables. But instead of finding me, she found Nico sitting in the kitchen – and Bela already dead in the bedroom. Instantly she knew Nico didn’t travel to Portugal just for her. And Nico then understood that Epiphany wasn’t with me anymore; that in fact she was looking for me herself. Nico leapt at her. Epiphany shows me where his ring cut her cheek. But she fought back and fled out the back window onto the roof.
‘He followed me. I managed to lose him. But by that time I couldn’t wait any longer for you. I hadn’t heard my voices in days. I needed to get to Cannes,’ she says. ‘When I arrived here, I disguised myself in case Nico followed. And he did, Jerry. He’s here. Every night I’ve been going to the bars to find someone who could help me get into Matthew’s party. I’ve seen him at the Majestic.’
Epiphany Jones Page 30