by Dan Bevacqua
* * *
If he went once, he went a dozen times.
* * *
He pulled off her comforter, stripped the top and bottom sheets, and then yanked the cases off her pillows. He washed and dried it all in the upstairs washer/dryer and then remade her bed.
* * *
Western Europe and Southeastern Asia Promotional Tour. Turks and Caicos. Shanghai. Breast Cancer Fight for a Cure Foundation. The New York Film Festival.
* * *
He sat in every chair in the screening room. He rubbed his hands on her eating utensils. He stopped keeping himself honest and masturbated in front of the life-size cutout.
* * *
In every room he would lie down on the floor and pretend he was dead. She was old enough to keep photographs of people she knew in shoeboxes. He saw pictures of certain film people when they were young. She had books with pictures of art in them that cost a couple hundred dollars brand new. Old paperbacks on acting. On directing. There was a closet with five neat piles of film scripts. Each of the piles went up to his chest. She owned three thousand DVDs.
* * *
He took a bottle of shampoo home with him. He found her vibrator. He clicked it on and put it up against his cheek. His mouth and teeth and whole head shook. He smelled it, but it didn’t smell like anything. She must wash it, he thought. It’s not like she would be dirty.
* * *
“New York?” High-May asked him. “New York? You never told me about Vancouver.”
* * *
He’d never been there. There was no one around to ask him how this was possible. He’d never flown either. He began to think of his life in terms of adventure. He checked into the Howard Johnson near the airport. The union had set it up. Nobody mentioned Vancouver. There were rules in place to protect his privacy. Taking a cab into Manhattan for the first time in his life, he felt like he was going to have a heart attack. It was so much city—and booming loud—and all of it was worming in and out of itself.
He called his mother. His mother wasn’t home.
“Who is this?”
She was a teenager now.
* * *
Brooklyn. He saw a flash of her. Roger was inside the food truck. He was getting the woks ready for the stir-fry station. He looked out the open rectangle. At first there was no one. A brick wall. He couldn’t perceive depth. Then she passed from left to right like the words on a page. A bunch of feeling like light pulsed out of her. When he recognized her, she started to flicker. Then she was gone.
* * *
The crew was all white ladies. He missed the Mexicans. All the white ladies did was complain. They smoked 100s. They wouldn’t shut up. “Where you from, honey? You’re the silent type, aren’t you? I love that. All the men in this city do is talk, talk, talk. That’s all they do. All day and all night. Talk, talk, talk. Who cares? Not me.”
He did what they told him. He was the wok guy. He was the prep guy. It didn’t matter where they set up. People came over.
“They shootin’ a movie? Who’s in it?”
He told them.
“No shit.”
* * *
He was the driver too. The ladies told him how to get where. Greenpoint, they said. Central Park North. Ludlow and Rivington. Fucking Harlem. Take the FDR. Take the BQE. Wherever they went, he saw the usual machines. The usual flatbeds. The usual pallets of chairs no one ever sat on. The tints. The metallic poles. The soundboards with a hundred different plugs. They would put down wires like speed bumps in the middle of the street. Their hips were walkie-talkies.
* * *
The idea was to meet her. To stop with this version. He was sick of this version. He wanted it to be over. He wanted his real life to begin now. He wanted the life he had inside himself.
* * *
The assistant would come get her food for her. The assistant, or the assistant’s assistant. She was busy. She was the director, the whole thing. He understood. He could wait one more day. Maybe another. But how many? When? He already knew how it would be. It would be easy. “Hello.” “Hello.” He only needed it to happen.
* * *
The ladies told him Grand Central one night—or morning. A two-thirty call time. Skeleton crew. There was just no way for them. He didn’t have a family. He didn’t live there. They didn’t have to go on explaining the differences, but they did.
He parked the food truck on Forty-Fifth Street. He turned the griddle on low. He put the veggies in the silver tubs. He filled the oil bottle. He double-checked for eggs, tortillas.
He walked down to Forty-Second. He looked west down its length. The road was a wave the cars went up and down. He thought there was a law against honking? He saw the heat in the glow of the brake lights and how there wasn’t much of a difference here between the day and night. All of the buildings were clean and black. When he went into the station he thought he’d done something wrong. It looked like a church. The silence surprised and embarrassed him. He felt like he shouldn’t be there. The sound of his boots came back to him from the ceiling. He walked down a slope into the center of the station. He looked up. The ceiling wasn’t quite green. It wasn’t quite blue. It was a painting of outer space. Of the gods. The possibilities.
An hour later they called him on the walkie. She wanted a burrito.
He made it extra careful. He didn’t wrap it too tight. He pulled back the foil at the top so she wouldn’t have to. He locked up the food truck and went back into the station. He saw her against the far wall. She was staring at the ceiling. She raised her hands up. She made them into a square. She looked through it.
When he got to within three feet of her, a man put his hand on Roger’s chest.
“Whoa, whoa,” the man said. He was a young guy. The first AD. He had gel in his hair. “That’s far enough.”
Roger stood there.
“What?” the AD asked. “It’s done. Go back to the truck. I’ve got it from here.”
Roger stared at her. She was right there. She was still looking up at the ceiling. He loved her throat.
He did as he was told. Roger walked away. Five steps later, he turned around.
“I don’t know where they get these people,” he heard the AD say to her. “Did you see that guy? Fucking Igor? Jesus Christ.”
* * *
Back in LA he didn’t leave the house. He stopped going to work. He stayed in his apartment. A month passed. He saw the world more clearly. Life was a story. It went A B C. 1 2 3. Beginning middle end.
* * *
“Where the hell are you?” High-May asked. Every few days he would leave a voicemail. Roger had never considered him a friend. “I’ve got a job for you. It’s PA work, but it pays. Are you alive? Call me.”
* * *
It was called How Clean Are You? and the hosts were two old British ladies. People lived like animals—they were disgusting—and the ladies would go into their houses and make them feel bad. A crew from Compton did the cleaning, but the ladies acted like they were the ones. “Ta-da!” they’d say. It was all product placement. Lysol. Spic and Span. Joy. Clorox with Bleach. Swiffer WetJets. Yankee Candle.
He’d never worked production before. High-May said it would take awhile to get him back in the craft rotation. “You disappeared, man.” The work was the kind of thing any idiot could do. If some asshole needed coffee, he went and got the coffee. They’d send him out on a run, and he’d be gone for hours, drive around and around. As long as the coffee was hot, and the trucks were loaded and unloaded, nobody cared what he did.
* * *
He went to Starbucks one morning, picked up the coffee, and drove into the hills. The road was off Mulholland. Diamond Terrace. He waited for everyone to get there. It was 5:45 a.m. A little house behind a garden gate. The producer came. She needed Roger to start cleaning up. The owner was a woman, the producer said, a real piece of work. The producer didn’t know the whole story. She didn’t get it. Roger walked into the house, and he understood right
away. The woman was tiny and her hair was dyed purple and she was on drugs. Her little dog was dyed purple too. What wasn’t the whole story? What wasn’t there to get? The producer and the woman went outside and smoked a cigarette. The woman wanted to renegotiate. Times were tough.
It reminded him of his mother’s house. All the rooms were full of stuff. Nobody could use the shower because of all the wire hangers in it. The living room floor was covered in paper towels stained with blood. There was dog shit everywhere. You couldn’t see the bed in the bedroom because it was overflowing with paper bags stuffed with clothes. He cleaned out the downstairs bathtub wearing yellow gloves. He picked up a syringe with blood in the gauge. He set the syringe down on the toilet seat. He pawed through the wet stuff in the bathtub some more and found a pregnancy test. It was positive. He set that down on the toilet seat next to the syringe. A pretty girl he worked with arrived and saw the test and the syringe. “This is totally fucked,” she said. “I went to Oberlin.”
The Compton crew showed up. They got it like Roger did. It was the first time he’d talked to any of them.
“Somebody needs to get fired over this shit,” the crew leader said. “There’s no motherfucking way my people are going in there.”
“AIDS. Hepatitis,” a woman said. “You went in there?”
Roger told her that he had.
“That’s crazy.” She took Roger’s hands into her own. She looked at his right hand first, then his left hand. She smelled like something he wanted to call coconut. “You’re good.”
“This is some bullshit,” the crew leader said to Roger and the woman. “Nobody checked this shit out. How do you come out here and not see?” He looked at Roger like they were friends. Like they were the same. “I mean, really, how do you work in reality and you don’t understand reality?”
The producer told Roger to go get cigarettes down on Hollywood Boulevard. If the woman didn’t get her cigarettes, they weren’t allowed to film in her house anymore. She was threatening to back out. There was a special shop that sold her particular brand. She would only smoke those cigarettes. Get going, the producer said. What are you waiting for?
Roger couldn’t find the place. He parked his car and walked up and down Hollywood. First one side, and then the other. He looked at the stars under his feet. He didn’t know half of them. Who was Veronica Lake? Who was William Powell? Who was Gloria Swanson? He found the smoke shop. He bought the cigarettes and drove back up to the house on Diamond Terrace. It turned out they were the wrong brand, but it didn’t matter. He’d been gone for hours. The situation had changed, the producer said. The Compton crew was gone. A HazMat team was going at it. The producer had given the woman two hundred dollars. A man in a Datsun had arrived soon after.
They waited. It was after dark. Finally, the Datsun pulled up. They pointed the camera at the woman, and the British ladies walked her through the house.
“Look at this, dear! Look how much better! Think of the filth! The filth! You were living like an animal, dear. We’ve changed your life. It wasn’t too difficult. A few hours’ work is all. A little elbow grease! Some gumption! Isn’t that what you Americans call it? Hold on to me, dear. You’re falling over, I think. Open your eyes! Look at this floor! You could eat off this floor! You could live a life, if you’d only try! Wash a dish! Keep it tidy! Up by your bootstraps, dear, right? What do you say? Have we cleaned you up? ‘How Clean Are You?’ ”
“So clean,” the woman said, her eyes half closed, her head nodding. “Thank you. Thank you so much. You’re all wonderful. All of you.”
* * *
This was the end. Everything would make sense. It would all come together. Her body. His. That was the story. Girl meets boy. Boy meets girl. He wanted her. What wasn’t there to get?
* * *
Roger had skimmed a book on acting once. He’d stolen it from her library. He’d understood very little of it, but he remembered one thing. The book said an actor could play a character, but he could never be the character. To be the character would be insane. It wouldn’t be reality. You were always you no matter what. If you remembered this, you’d be able to react without thinking. You would be there. Not you, the character, but you, the actor. You could surprise yourself. Every scene, no matter how many times you performed it, would be new. You wouldn’t be thinking. You’d be doing. Thinking was the problem. You only had to be.
* * *
He didn’t bother thinking about the rain. He didn’t bother to bring the placard along. He parked where he always parked. He wouldn’t need the car anymore. LA could have it. It would be one more car on the side of the road.
* * *
He held the knife in his right hand. He walked through the plants at the pace he wanted to. Not fast. Not slow. He let the cacti and the sharper edges of the larger plants cut into him and he bled. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need to be invisible. He could make a sound. The door could creak. The floor. The steps. The blinds could tick against each other.
* * *
He didn’t want her to survive. That would be too bad. She shouldn’t have to walk with a cane her whole life, or be in a wheelchair, or on oxygen with the machine going. She shouldn’t be disfigured. That wouldn’t be right. She should die. She should be all bloody. She should scream. He wanted to hear the sound of metal tearing through muscle. The ftt ftt ftt. He wanted to feel it.
* * *
His mind was gone. There weren’t any lights on in the house. Only the moon outside. Flat light on the windows. Security spot. He passed through the hall using sense memory. He saw her sleeping in her bed. Her face was to him. Her right arm dangled off the edge.
React, the book had told him. Do what comes natural.
“Molly,” he said.
THE NOVEL 2013–1993
12
THE RAIN MACHINE WAS NOT raining. It was a Mack truck with special hydraulic feet welded to the frame. An eighteen-foot-tall steel mast was positioned in the middle of the bed. Hoses of all sizes and lengths were attached to the mast, and water leaked from the hoses down onto the roof of the truck, rivering off into the already flooded street. The machine cost five thousand dollars a day to rent, and all it had done so far was produce deep belching sounds that echoed off the factories there in Greenpoint, and put the shoot, which was already behind schedule, even further behind schedule. It was near to nine p.m. in August of 2013, and Molly Bit stood in the Brooklyn street wearing a Hydrogen Productions baseball cap and green rain boots. She held a bullhorn in her left hand. She looked down at the spotlights reflected in the water around her boots, and then at the moon reflected there too, a blue one, and good luck supposedly, and then back up at the rain machine. Fifty some-odd people, including production assistants, gaffers, grips, best boys, light techs, four police officers assigned by the city, her first AD, her DP, her two young leads—all her people—stood around waiting for her to tell them what to do. The sky was bright and starless.
“I’m asking myself if it has to rain,” she said to the prop master.
“That’s a question,” Tony said. “That’s something you could ask.”
He was a short, almost-sixty-year-old Teamster with a Tom Selleck moustache. She’d known him for fifteen years and adored him in the way she adored men who were around her father’s age but who weren’t her father.
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s your show,” Tony said. He wiped water from off his cheek. “If you say, ‘No rain,’ then no rain.”
“Then no rain.”
“But just so you know, it’ll take me and my guys two and a half hours to clear the street.”
“Do it.”
“All right!” Tony shouted. He didn’t need the bullhorn. Everybody heard him. “Grab the brooms! Grab the buckets! Get that goddamn thing outta here! No rain!”
Everything was money. More to the point, everything was her money. Hydrogen was the only partner she’d been able to secure. They had a small stake in The Last Centu
ry, enough that they could place their name before the title, but the majority of the twenty-three million had come from Molly’s “production company,” which was nothing more than a second mortgage on her house stamped with the name of the road she’d grown up on, Skitchewaug Trail. No one had been interested in the idea of her directing—although they wouldn’t come right out and say that. Instead, they lied.
“Love, love, love.”
“Of course. I was thinking that. I was going to say that.”
“Perfect.”
All the second and third meetings were to pitch alternative ideas.
“The Last Century—is that it?—it’s always on the table as far as we’re concerned. But we’d also like to talk about this remake of Xanadu. It’s family friendly. We’ve got young leads, but we really need someone established to hold it all together. You’d be playing the Gene Kelly role, but you wouldn’t have to dance or sing, and of course you’d be a woman.”