by Moxie Mezcal
“I know,” she protested. “But Alex wants to go there, and he said he’d treat.”
I grimaced. “You know I don’t like it when Alex pays for everything.”
She sighed, “Yeah, I know.” But she was already out the door.
——
I watched it the first time while uploading the honeymoon videos from the Flip onto my computer. Sarah had gone straight to sleep after the airport shuttle dropped us off, but I was forcing myself to stay awake until after dark, hoping that it would reset my internal clock.
Up until that point I’d been telling myself that I would delete the video, but I decided to give it just one look before I did, one time to satisfy my curiosity before consigning it to digital oblivion.
So I clicked play and let it run. Thirty-three seconds. Hardly any time at all. And yet, for some reason, time seemed to stand still. I still don’t know what about it mesmerized me - I was never a fan of her music, nor was I particularly attracted to her. That platinum-blonde-glamor-queen type never did much for me. I also, up to that point, didn’t consider myself to be morbid or obsessed with death. Horror movies, goth music, Faces of Death , none of it was really my thing. But somehow this was different. This didn’t feel macabre or depressing. There was something beautiful about it - deeply, ineffably beautiful.
I let the video run out and then closed the player. I did not delete the file.
I watched it only occasionally over the next couple of weeks. Always at home on my computer, always either early in the morning or late at night while Sarah was asleep. I didn’t think she knew I was watching it or that I still even had it saved. We never talked about what happened after that day; I think she was in too much shock at first, and she always made me change the channel whenever something about the pop star came on the news. Then after we got home, it just never came up.
Gradually, I started watching it more and more. The mistake was loading it on my iPhone so I could watch it at work. I snuck away with increasing regularity to lock myself in a supply closet or bathroom stall and watch it with the volume turned down. Sometimes I’d even watch right at my desk when I had to work late, after everyone else had gone home.
I became obsessed with it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Stopped at a traffic light, I’d picture the pop star walking around the corner, coming into view just in time for me to see her put the gun in her mouth and pull the trigger.
What’s more, I also started realizing that, inexplicably, I was falling in love with her. There was something about the intimacy of seeing her face as she steeled herself for what she was about to do, absorbed in an intensely personal moment, and then seconds later looking up to see me filming it. The more I watched it, the more I saw a change happen in that instant, like a switch being thrown as her facial expression went from anger at me for intruding on her privacy and instead took on an uncanny calmness, like a moment of clarity. I began to imagine that up until that moment she hadn’t yet firmly made up her mind about what she was doing and that somehow me filming her helped her decide, and she was grateful for it.
Whether it was all in my head or not, I felt a connection with her, and it was like my brain didn’t know how to interpret that connection other than make it romantic. I started downloading her songs and went on Wikipedia to read about her life. I googled pictures of her. I saved it all in the same folder as the video, one I kept hidden in an obscure corner of my hard drive where Sarah wouldn’t stumble on it, like my digital shrine to her.
I don’t remember when watching the video went from romantic to sexual, but I do remember the first time I masturbated to it. Sarah and I weren’t having sex much since the honeymoon. She threw herself obsessively into the remodeling to the point where it became her full-time job. Meanwhile, I was pulling long hours at the office, picking up the slack created by a run of lay-offs and trying to make myself as valuable and therefore difficult to down-size as possible. Our rapidly-mounting debt and the tension it created between us didn’t help matters either.
So one night when she spurned my advances and left me feeling frustrated and restless and unbelievably horny, I staggered off to my computer to find something to help me relieve myself. Instead of opening porn, though, I played the video - without thinking, almost by instinct. I put it on a loop, and for the first three or four times it repeated I just sat there, staring intently at the screen, watching her, imaging what it would feel like to touch her skin, to caress her body, to taste her lips. Eventually, I slipped my hand into my boxers and gripped my cock, which was so hard and swollen it hurt. I jerked off quickly and aggressively, grunting as I climaxed, exploding inside my shorts at the exact moment that the bullet ripped through the back of her skull.
When I was done, I felt so dirty and disgusted with myself that I actually deleted the file from my computer. The next morning, though, I realized I still had it on my phone. Still, I told myself I would delete that, too. Later that day, though, I convinced myself that I didn’t have to delete, I would just stop watching it - as a show of my willpower or some bullshit. When that didn’t happen, I settled for seeing how long I could go between viewings, turning it into a game.
My record was two days, nine hours, forty-two minutes.
——
“What have I been up to? Let’s see… backpacking across New Zealand, yachting and diving in Phuket, exploring Machu Pichu, skiing in the Swiss Alps, crab fishing in Alaska. You know, same old same old.”
I looked down at the steak knife in my hand and fought the urge to jam it into my ear.
I never really got along with Alex. There was just something about him that rubbed me the wrong way. He always struck me as too loud, too crass, too obvious. Five years ago, he sold his start-up to eBay and made some savvy investments with the windfall, so that now he was essentially just living off his dividends.
At times it was hard to believe that he and Sarah even came from the same parents. She was like his photographic negative. Whereas his was the kind of personality that instantly dominated any room he entered, she always seemed to be almost devoid of any personality, an empty canvas, as if a childhood spent being constantly overshadowed had stunted her development. She was like the undergrowth beneath a majestic redwood - you’d never even notice she was there until you tripped over her.
I glanced at Sarah, who was hanging on her brother’s every word with rapt attention, laughing at all the right moments, speaking only when strategically timed to spur him to continue elaborating and embellishing his stories.
I shifted my gaze from her, to Alex and that broad oafish grin stretched grotesquely across his face, and then finally to Alex’s date, Vanessa. Unlike Sarah, she didn’t seem too engrossed in Alex’s escapades, nor was she shy about showing her boredom. She hadn’t said more than two words the entire dinner and instead occupied herself with staring off into space with practiced indifference and pounding glass after glass of expensive Sherry.
I liked her.
I was fairly sure this wasn’t the same girl he brought to the wedding. She had a goth or emo style - layered black hair with bleached platinum streaks, thick eyeliner, dark lipstick, big silver hoops through her eyebrow, nose, and lip. Her face wouldn’t otherwise be considered strikingly beautiful - her features seemed somehow off in their proportions - but she was the type who used her unconventional style to her advantage, transforming her flaws into alluringly exotic idiosyncrasies.
When she and Alex had stood to greet us, I noticed that she was wearing an open-back dress to show off her tattoos - a dozen or so butterflies that cascaded down her spine from her right shoulder blade all the way to the small of her back.
Now that dinner was winding down, she took another large gulp of Sherry, finishing off the glass, and caught me staring at her. I found there are typically two reactions people have to this kind of accidental eye-contact - either look away abruptly, or else smile or nod in polite acknowledgement before casually letting your eyes drift off. She did neither, ins
tead meeting my gaze, letting our eyes lock, daring me to look away.
I finally did, glancing down to her hands. She was wearing black silk opera gloves that reached up to her mid-bicep, and she hadn’t bothered to take them off for dinner.
Suddenly I felt a hand on mine and then jerked my head sideways. Sarah’s gaze had followed mine to Vanessa’s gloves, and she had locked our hands together on top of the table.
“So anyways, how was the honeymoon? You were in Paris around the same time that singer offed herself, what’s her name—?”
“Yes,” Sarah answered her brother. “In fact, we were right there when it happened. We even got it on video.”
“No shitting?” Alex marveled. “Do you still have it?”
Sarah looked to me and chirped, “I’m sure you do, right?”
I opened my mouth but my jaw went slack, words failing me as I felt the warm blood glowing in my cheeks. I knew it was completely irrational, but somehow having the video discussed so openly felt like I had been caught with my pants down, like having my porn stash discovered between the box spring and the mattress when I was a teenager.
“Yeah,” I finally squeaked, half choking on the word.
“Why didn’t you sell it? You probably could’a made a fortune off of TMZ or something.” Alex asked incredulously. “She was the biggest singer in the world, every one of her songs was an instant chart-topper. You could’ve called the video Number One with a Bullet or some shit. It would be legendary.”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged, keeping my eyes downcast. “I guess it just seemed in poor taste.”
I hazarded a look up at Vanessa, whose wide eyes sparkled with genuine interest for the first time that night.
“I think that’s cool,” she said. “Why does every single moment of our lives have to immediately get put on YouTube? Some things are meant to be personal, to be private, otherwise they’re not as special.”
“Whatever,” Alex snorted, shaking his head at me. “You could’ve made bank, just sayin’. That mortgage of yours isn’t gonna pay itself.”
I looked from him to Vanessa, who winked at me conspiratorially, as if saying she understood even if he couldn’t, and then finally over to Sarah, who was absent-mindedly drawing shapes with a knife in the sauce on her plate, a subtle, bitter grin fixed on her lips.
——
It started the next morning at work.
I spotted her getting into an elevator on my floor just as I was coming back from our weekly staff meeting. I was too far away to catch her attention without causing a scene, but it was unmistakably her.
“You just missed your eleven o’clock,” said my secretary Anita when I reached my office. “Dark haired woman. I think she said her name was Vanessa. Left this for you.”
She passed me a business card across the reception counter. It was from one of the motels down the street and had a hand-written message on the back:
I want to see it. Come during your lunch. Room 213.
The motel room door was propped open when I arrived. Inside, the room was completely dark except for the light emanating from the blank blue TV screen.
When I found her sitting on the edge of the bed, I stopped dead in surprise and stared at her slack-jawed from across the room.
She said her name was Vanessa , Anita had said. I had to smile.
She leaning back casually, propped up on her elbows, dressed in a short black dress, striped thigh-high stockings, and the same full-length gloves from last night.
Her black-painted lips twisted into a wry grin as she brushed back a few strands of raven hair from her face.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” she purred. “Put it on.”
Using the cable I’d brought from my office, I hooked my phone up to the TV. My joints felt wooden, my fingers awkward and clumsy, my skin tingled with the excitement of indulging a guilty pleasure. Watching the video with another person - especially her - made me feel naked and vulnerable.
I hit play and joined her on the bed. The light from the screen reflected off her pale skin, causing the colors and shadow to dance across her face. She watched silently with rapt attention, her eyes growing wider as the gun came into the frame and slid inside the pop star’s mouth. Her lips parted slightly when the gun went off, just enough to let out a small, barely audible gasp.
The screen froze on the last frame, the pop singer’s dead eyes staring out at us.
“Again.”
I set the video to repeat. She grabbed my wrist roughly and guided my hand onto her thigh, sliding it up under her dress, slowly, teasingly, until finally I felt the bare, freshly-shaved flesh between her legs.
My eyes locked on her. Hers stayed locked on the screen. I glided my fingers into her and began to slide them back and forth in a firm, steady rhythm.
Meanwhile, the video kept playing with its own weird, cyclical syncopation - quiet calm at first, zooming in, tension building, then the gun, then the shot, then the chaos. Repeat.
Calm. Zoom. Gun. Chaos.
Calm. Zoom. Gun. Chaos.
She bucked her hips and crooned a series of breathy staccato moans, each slightly louder than the last, growing in intensity until finally she began to climax.
She snapped her head back and thrusted her pelvis forward, and I felt her body tremble against mine. When she was done, she collapsed gently against me, laying her head on my shoulder so that her warm, heavy breathing tickled behind my ear.
I wasn’t really sure what to do next - or if I should even do or say anything at all. So I sat there motionless on the edge of the bed, staring stupidly at the TV screen.
Once she regained her composure, she stood up, threw on a long black coat, and left without a word.
——
We met regularly after that, usually once or twice a week. It started the same way every time - a note with a motel address and room number. Sometimes I’d find it in my office or tucked under my car’s windshield wiper, sometimes under the check at lunch or tucked into the outer pocket of my laptop case. I never saw her leave them, but paradoxically, I started seeing her everywhere, imagining every dark feminine shape in my peripheral vision to be her. Then I’d turn my head and she would disappear or change back into some random stranger, only ever existing as fleeting glimpses, suspended always just at the hazy edges of perception.
Even when I was with her, she seemed just as insubstantial. We could only ever connect intimately while the video played. It was like a magic spell that was broken whenever I pressed Stop , a bright flame that burned intensely for an instant and then was gone.
When it was over, she wasted no time in getting dressed and getting out. Pillow talk was out of the question. A couple times I insisted that she stay and lay beside me. She acquiesced but hardly made any effort to humor me, remaining stiff as a board as I tried to cuddle against her. Eventually her coldness and unresponsiveness would put me off completely, and I’d just give up and leave.
Once, more out of morbid curiosity than anything else, I tried to skip the video entirely and jumped straight into kissing and groping her. Just to see what happened. She shoved me off unceremoniously and looked at me like I’d just betrayed her, like I’d violated some sacred vow, some tacit understanding that existed between us.
I eventually just resigned myself to an emotionless relationship consisting solely of kinky, no-strings-attached motel room sex - which, once I put it like that, wasn’t so hard after all.
Unfortunately, things with Sarah weren’t nearly as straightforward. Every day she seemed to become even more aloof and withdrawn, completely immersing herself into the remodeling. She started treating our home like a sketch pad, a rough draft, upon which she could pursue any passing fancy exhaustively, just to see if she’d like it, and then casually tear it apart and start over again. She had hardwood floors installed, torn out, replaced with carpet, torn up again, and then replaced with darker hardwood floors. She started designing extensions to the house, having architects d
raw up blue prints for a whole new wing that we could never afford to build, even while our kitchen had sat unfinished and unusable for over nine months.
I was vaguely aware of her deteriorating health. She hardly ever ate, slept even less, and her face was perpetually wracked by nervous tension to the point that I thought she might’ve been making herself physically sick, psychosomatically, like there was something eating away at her from the inside. I never got around to asking what was wrong with her. I always meant to, but I never had the fucking energy.
We hardly ever even spoke, let alone touched each other, and what few conversations we had invariably started off being about the house and ended in a bitter battle over our finances.
One night, after an argument had turned particularly sour, I stormed off and went for a drive just to cool off. When I came home, there was a note on the door from Sarah saying she needed some space and had gone to stay with her parents for the weekend.
I shrugged, went inside, and headed for bed.
As I walked down the hallway, however, I noticed a light flickering under the closed door to my study.
I found her waiting for me inside, sitting in my desk chair and completely naked but for those ever-present gloves. She had hooked up the computer to my video projector, and the video was playing on the opposite wall, blown up larger than life.
The pop star was pulling the trigger just as I walked in. Twenty-three seconds.
She stood up and crossed the room towards me, her right arms outstretched, a pair of metal handcuffs dangling loosely from her index finger.
Before I knew what has happening she was on top of me, kissing my mouth and neck hungrily, ravenously. Her legs wrapped around my waist and I arched backwards to support her weight, then carried her into the bedroom. I threw her onto the bed and pounced on her, her sense of urgency and abandon having spread infectiously, whipping me into a frenzy of blind passion.