by Todd Grimson
“Let Christine go. Whatever you and Wanda are doing to her … stop it. Please. Let her go.”
“Why should I? What will you do for me?”
“What do you want me to do?”
His crinkled, intricately inked brown face cracked open in a smile, and he laughed once, harshly, testing her, always testing her. In his room, Lisa could see a director’s chair with some clothes on it—a picture of the Mona Lisa on the canvas of the back of the chair.
“What do I want you to do? I want so much, I have such high expectations … how old are you? You’re twenty-six. That’s two times thirteen. A perfect number. You don’t know this stuff.”
“I don’t know about the numbers,” Lisa admitted, but not really seeing how she could have gained such knowledge, not in the normal course of her life.
“I tell you what. How about we playact? You in the hotel room. We do it for fun. Then we’re all done, I forget about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Explain,” he said to Wanda, making a gesture. “In an hour or so, she can come down to the stage.” And Boro left them, taking his time.
“Boro wants you to be an actress … all you’ll have to do is lie there. It’ll be a painting come to life. Like the headlines, except nothing will be real. Your lurid murder.”
“My murder? Right. I don’t believe this.”
“Nobody will touch you. Do you think he would waste it, waste the theatrical possibilities, the publicity, by killing you like this? He could kill you anytime if that’s what he wanted to see. This will be very beautiful, a composition, and then you can go home with Christine. She’ll be OK.”
“Shit. Like I can believe anything you tell me.”
“Christine is all right. You’ll see. She wanted to do this.”
“What exactly am I going to have to do?”
“Just lie there. You might want to take something, ‘cause Boro has kind of a different conception of time. He might want to look at the tableau for a long time.”
The word tableau wasn’t so rarefied as all that, but in general Lisa was coming to believe that Wanda was more intelligent than she’d thought, and this made her inclined to cooperate, to let things happen according to the obviously prearranged plan.
“I have something with me, in my purse,” Lisa said, and commenced digging through it. They went back to the moon goddess room, now silent—Christine was out of the milky pond, reclining on the cushions, eating, with her eyes shut, her jaw moving very slowly, a piece of cake. She was dry, in a flesh-colored silk slip. Her hair was cut shorter than it had been before she had come here.
Lisa hugged her, kissed her cheek. Christine smiled but did not seem to know who she was. Her blue eyes now looked normal (if filmy), but she still seemed in a deep trance, far away.
In her purse, Lisa located the little packet of pills. TVC15, Heaven 17, Stairway to Heaven—all of those were too strong. Joy Division was supposed to make you feel content and somewhat numb. Somewhere between a tranquilizer and a pain-pill. Lisa broke one in half and swallowed it with her saliva. She held out a Snickers for her friend, and Christine took it from her, biting into it with the wrapper still on. Stubbornly, she didn’t want to let go of it so that the wrapper could be removed. Lisa had to pry it out of her fist. Wanda left them together.
It was dark outside now, but it was still light in this room. The shifting light was much dimmer … the wind chimes, above, continued to clink, but that was the only sound. If there was a real or mechanical serpent in the pond of milk, it did not stir.
The atmosphere was soothing. Very slowly, like a retarded, single-minded child, Christine ate the sweets, letting the crumbs fall as they may. A few tears fell out of Lisa’s hot eyes, but then after a while it all seemed OK. She was neutral. Subdued.
It seemed like a lot longer than an hour passed. Peace. Christine seemed to have fallen asleep. Lisa was apprehensive, scared, but fatalistic. Joy Division.
Ariel came to get her. He was dressed in an expensive pinstriped suit.
“Come with me.”
Down, down, down through the big room with the plants and aquariums, down a stairway to the basement. To the left was a dark passage; they went to the right, going down a narrow hall lit by green fluorescent tubes, the walls seeming to want to meet at the top, throwing off one’s sense of perspective a bit.
After several turns, they came into a dressing room, with a vanity, a mirror … ordinary electric light, in which Lisa recognized makeup that must have been taken from her apartment, and, in an open suitcase, some items of clothing….
“Undress,” Ariel said without affection. He bent over and picked up a newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, only when he showed the front page to her she saw it was a dummy paper; in an instant she knew this, yet she was shocked.
Actress Found Murdered in Hotel Room: “bizarre sex scene … mutilation … ties to stars … “
She couldn’t read it.
Ariel left the dressing room when Wanda came in. Wanda said, “You need to put some makeup on. Sit down there, and I’ll help you. All you have to do is relax.”
Wanda assisted her, coaxing a bit, until Lisa had stripped down to her underwear. She sat obediently as Wanda applied makeup to her face, deep red lipstick, blush, saying once more that she’d done makeup on some films and for some bands.
A lacy black garter belt, snapping onto sheer black nylons, the darker band around the tops always a slightly discordant feature to Lisa’s eye.
“He wants me to look like a prostitute.”
“You shouldn’t say that. These are your clothes. Sure, he wants you to be a prostitute. He wants you to look like what he’s seen in the movies or in whorehouses … pornography. Off with your underpants. Don’t pretend to be shy. ‘Nothing can defile the sacred.’ That’s what Boro has said. This is a performance piece.”
“Is anybody going to take pictures?”
“Why? Do you want some souvenirs? Some documentation?” Wanda laughed.
It was an outfit from Victoria’s Secret. Or Frederick’s of Hollywood. Porn. Code had been crazy about this sort of thing. The tattoos, however, exaggerated the whorish effect. Red stiletto heels, with a double ankle strap, stiletto heels she could barely walk in at all, garter belt and stockings, a matching strapless pushup bra that left her nipples bare. Long, dangly gold earrings with imitation red jewels. A similar necklace. That was all. She was essentially nude.
“Wait a second,” Wanda said, patting her hand. When she came back, a few moments later, music began to play. Funky, seventies-style, stupid jazz. It was evocative of something, Lisa felt. So innocent, in some way, yet sleazy and corrupt. With strings.
“What do I do?”
“Just lie down on the bed. Arrange yourself like you’ve just been fucked. Do whatever you like.”
Shivering a little, but then shameless, seeing it as a part to play, Lisa walked out onto the set. The stiletto heels hurt, and she could only take small, mincing steps. She sought to be expressionless, but her dark eyes were alive.
Beyond the lights and a red velvet rope was an audience, which amazed her for a second, until she saw that they were all zombies, zombies sitting impassively on rows of folding chairs. She didn’t see Boro, she didn’t see Ariel—the lights glittered in her eyes. She lay down on the unmade brass bed. She noticed her lost violet and black minidress hung over a chair.
It was a hotel-room set, with jury-rigged walls, a red neon blinking sign off to the left, out the phony window. There was a clock on the wall, unmoving: 3:35. On a table was a half-empty bottle of Ron Rico rum, two glasses, and half a squeezed lime. Next to the bed, on the nightstand, was a tiny pile of pure white powder, so white it glinted pink and blue, less likely heroin than medicinal-quality cocaine.
And then Lisa just lay there. The sheets were fresh, lavender, smelling of Chanel. She looked up at the ceiling, which was a basement ceiling, except that right over the bed—over her—there was a big mirror. So she g
azed at herself, dispassionately. She rolled over. Stared at her sex for a while. Then forgot. She watched herself breathe.
The Joy Division made it easy to lie still. A lassitude came over her. She could shut out the music for long periods of time, and it changed, but it was always there. She wondered if she was being filmed. If she was going to be raped or killed.
She wasn’t really frightened, not of something like that. She sighed, and watched herself sigh. Did Boro still fuck? She didn’t think so, but it was impossible to be sure. Could the zombies see her very well? Was this all that was going to happen? She shifted her hips, stretching her black nylon-clad legs out—just to stretch—then pulling up her knees a little bit.
Something changed. She was startled, and raised herself up on her elbow, watching, with deep suspicion, as a tall, black zombie in a suit, a zombie she was sure she’d never seen before, appeared by the table, setting down a small rectangular object, like a radio.
His suit was somehow old-fashioned, and there were anomalous touches: a faux-pearl necklace around his neck, glossy pink lipstick on his lips, rouge on his cheeks. Yet he was very masculine, tough-looking, and so tall.
He pressed a button on the tape recorder he’d set down, and a man’s voice—deep, but seemingly Caucasian, almost like a professional broadcaster or an irrepressibly hammy actor, began saying, out of the lo-fi speaker, “I love you. I hate you. I love you. I hate you,” repeating these words, expressively, over and over, a litany that began to make Lisa fall into a trance. She could feel it happening, she was going to be asleep in a moment. She fought it, it seemed darkly monstrous, as her body went utterly relaxed she protested, “No, no… “
“I love you. I hate you. I love you. I hate you.”
She didn’t become completely unconscious, but she couldn’t tell what was going on. She was dreaming, but in her dream she kept telling herself to return to earth, she saw herself reflected in the mirror above the bed in the hotel. I love you. I hate you.
When she came back, she was horribly afraid. She couldn’t feel any pain, but everything seemed very different… she was afraid to open her eyes.
Some of the lights were down. The music was gone. She could feel some sort of wetness, some … she looked.
There was blood—or stage blood, but it stank—all over, far in excess of what she could imagine as realistic. When she moved just slightly, her eyes traveled up to the mirror.
It appeared that she had been disemboweled. There were bloody intestines coming out of her left side, extending out in a warm pile down to her knees. Some internal organs, dark and shiny: a slippery liver, a kidney, something else, she didn’t know what it was. Her vulva was drenched with drying purplish-black blood, her pubic hair slicked down … and there was brown shit on her buttocks, as if she had soiled herself, gross, blood also all over her lower face, around her mouth, sticky, across her throat.
All over the bed, and over the blood everywhere in the room, yellow marigold blossoms were strewn.
Nothing hurt, though. Except, strangely enough, her nipples, which felt as if they’d been bitten rather cruelly. If this blood was all fake, the humiliating thing here was the presence of shit. It didn’t seem like it was hers. But how could she be sure? Ugh.
She started to raise herself up, finding that she was very weak for a moment, her head swam like she might faint. She groaned and pushed herself to the other side of the bed, away from the dark brown pile of excrement. She sat on the edge of the bed, ass dirty, queasy, thinking she might vomit, then stood. She immediately wished that she’d taken off the spiked-heel shoes. But the zombies began applauding her, standing up, batting their hands together while their faces and eyes remained quite affectless and blank.
The tall black zombie with the pearl necklace stood just offstage, with Boro, and with a person in a dark bird suit, the wings serving as arms.
Boro stepped forward, and she went to him, unable to control her horror, tears raining down her face. She was filthy, her legs were so weak, she felt like she could hardly walk.
“How do you like Tomorrowland?” he said. “You want to be Cassandra—now you’ve seen, you’ve lived your own death. Tomorrowland!”
Out of this, Wanda suddenly took her hand in a moment, saying, “There’s a shower over here,” and led her there, over the cement floor. A toilet—she suddenly felt very sick, she threw up. Candy bars and some carbonated beverages. Oh, she had been murdered, yes: a shadow death, a death in mirrors. She got those fucking shoes off and went into the cubicle, stripping the other things off under cold water, it didn’t matter, she washed off the makeup and came out naked— Wanda handed her a big black fluffy towel. Lisa felt irredeemably soiled and, now more than ever, truly afraid of Boro—that gory snuff-movie scene might really be what he wanted from her. Edgar Allen Poe had said that there was nothing so poetically affecting as the death of a beautiful young maiden, this was the highest subject art could attempt to treat. Around the areola of her right nipple there was some red-purple bruising, a sign to her she’d been bitten, bitten hard.
Back in the dressing room, she put on her jeans and blouse and sandals, as quickly as she could. Like a pro. Her hair was still very damp.
Boro and Wanda came in on her, and Lisa said, trying in vain to sound confident, “Now … we go and get Christine.”
“Oh no, I’m sorry,” Boro said. “This was a rehearsal. You’ve seen your own immortal death. Christine will be much better off in communion with the moon.”
“You fucker,” Lisa said, helplessly.
“You belong to me, I love you. In the real scene, it will be more spectacular … your head cut off, your tits.”
Lisa ran. She ran down the corridor with the green fluorescent lights, up the stairs, then, running through the maze of Venus flytraps, she saw Jonathan, some fuzz of dark hair having grown on his pale scalp—he seemed to know her, he was in her way and he was stalking her, he was between her and the next door.
She picked up a plant and threw it at his head. It didn’t faze him. All she could hope to do was fake him out. All zombies seemed somewhat slow.
Simply, she went way over to the left, then, when he was attracted that way, ran swiftly around and past him to the right.
Despite what Boro had said, maybe she could take Christine. In any case, her purse and keys were up there.
She ran up the stairs, athletically—but Christine was not there. Oh fuck. Where could they have put her? Her purse and keys, right by the cushions. So it was OK with them that she leave. It was in their plan.
But why leave? Inadvertently, or intending something else that she had not picked up on, Boro had given her some minor powers. She didn’t know what she could do, or how it worked when she pulled something off, yet… there were certain things she could do. She decided to search up here for Christine. It was distinctly possible she could unlock these doors.
The first door she opened: nothing but raspberry and electric blue horizontal stripes of moving light.
The second: It seemed the same scenario she’d been in down in the basement—she closed the door immediately. But the woman on the bed hadn’t looked like her. Maybe it was a mannequin. It didn’t look quite real. Could she be hallucinating?
Third door: She looked out through a reddish, rocky cave to a desolate landscape and a different sky—interesting, but she had no time.
The fourth door: It opened to an empty room, completely bare, with a door on the other side, near the corner, near a mirror. Lisa went in. She opened the door in the corner, to another empty room, without furniture. Then … she looked in the mirror, on her right, watching the door in its mirror image, and opened it again, like that, watching it open only in the mirror. She stepped inside.
The jaguar couch was there, and the room was almost dark. The couch undulated, quivered, like it was alive. Lisa kicked off her sandals and threw herself euphorically into the couch’s embrace.
In the clearing, beaten-down green grasses, Lisa’s bar
e feet were tougher, she was browner than ever before. She did not have the power of speech, but she could communicate with the mother jaguar very well. In her simple white shift, joyous, she threw her arms around its massive neck and kissed its head, inhaling its musky smell. It let out a friendly growl and then purred.
The jungle was brighter than it had been in Brazil, the colors were sharper—there also seemed to be all kinds of blossoms and plants she’d never seen. The jaguar, a beautiful jaguar, white with black markings, just a tinge of orange-gold at the tips of the ears and the end of the tail, rolled on her back, biting at some flowers, panting, then fixing Lisa with her regal gaze as orange and red butterflies flew by out of the twelve-toned leaves of green. Lisa rolled around with the mother jaguar, both of them laughing, lolling, playful as newborn babes.
Many hours seemed to pass. They shared a luscious baby pig, a boar, which tasted like it had already been smoked. Flamingly colorful birds flew overhead, keeping well out of reach. Lisa lay dozing, safe, her head resting on the breathing side of her adopted, true mother, and she was ecstatically content.
As evening came, it was understood, without words, that the time for instruction was at hand. Watching a kind of movie, Lisa observed Boro—a young, handsome, taller Boro—mutilated, placed in a wooden cage. She saw herself—or the young Nastassja Kinski—as the princess, overseeing the severing of penis, tongue, hands, and feet. Lisa couldn’t watch it all. She turned to find those large jaguar eyes on her, filled with a kind of philosophical sorrow, an acceptance of cruelty as an inevitable fact.
Boro lived. He survived. Shrunken, with new members sewn on. They nursed him back to health. He thrived. The practice of sorcery eased his constant pain, the pain of his missing parts.
She saw him with a machete, cutting off the head of a chicken. She saw this again, and knew.
Embracing the jaguar, eyes closed, mouth open in a silent cry, she wanted to stay, she was happy, this was all she ever wanted … but the embrace dissolved, she went through it … and found herself lying on the couch, in a room lit by one guttering red candle on the floor.