The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (13 page)

“Sure.” Justin shrugs. No questions asked—that’s what Jackson likes about him. Justin consults his computer and chicken scrawls an address on the back of an old receipt.

“Thanks, man. I owe you!” Jackson snatches the paper, spins, and sprints for the door.

“Hey, who is she?” Justin calls after him.

“Carrie Linden!” Jackson slams through the door, answering only because he knows Justin won’t believe him.

The name written over the address Justin gave him is Karen Finch. The address isn’t five blocks from the pharmacy. Jackson runs the whole way, heaving his bulk, dripping sweat, legs burning, breath wheezing. It’s worth a heart attack, worth the return of his childhood asthma, worth anything.

The street he arrives on is tree-lined and shadow-dappled. Cars border both sides of the road, dogs bark in backyards, and two houses over a group of children run in shrieking circles on an emerald lawn.

Jackson approaches number forty-seven. He’s shaking. His mouth is dry in a way that has nothing to do with his mad, panting run. His heart pounds, louder than the dying echoes of his fist knocking against Carrie Linden’s door. What is he doing? He should leave. But
Kaleidoscope
isn’t that kind of movie. It isn’t a movie at all. It’s an infection, deep in Jackson’s blood.

The door opens; Jackson stares.

Light frames the woman in a soft-focus glow, falling through a window at the far end of the hall. Her hair is dyed dark, but showing threads of gray (or maybe they’re dirty blonde). The ends are split and frayed. She isn’t wearing sunglasses, but shadows circle her eyes, seeming just as large. She is thin—not in a pretty way; her cheekbones knife against her skin. But she
is
Carrie Linden, and Jackson forgets how to breathe.

The second-most-famous scene in
Kaleidoscope
is the carnival scene. It’s the one most viewers (not Kaleidophiles, mind you) rewind to watch over and over again. It’s spawned numerous chat groups, websites, message boards, and one doctoral thesis, which languishes untouched in a drawer.

The scene goes like this: the characters go to a carnival—Carrie, Lance, Mary, and Josh, even Elizabeth, even though her face is horribly scarred (but not Lucy, because she’s dead). The carnival is abandoned, but all the lights are on and all the rides are running. The night flickers with halogen-sick lights, illuminating painted rides and gaudy-bright games. The whole scene drifts, strange and unreal.

The gang rides the funhouse ride. But it’s not just a funhouse—it’s a haunted house, a hall of mirrors, and tunnel of love all rolled into one. The cars crank along the track, but jerk to a stop in the first room, as if the ride is broken. They wander through the ride on foot. And this is where the movie gets weird.

It fragments. Time stops. (Do any two viewers see the same scene?) The camera follows scarred Elizabeth; it follows meathead Lance. It follows Carrie Linden. Voices whisper, words play backwards, things slide, half-glimpsed, across the corners of the film, at the very
edges
, spilling off the celluloid and into the dark. (Is it any wonder the movie house burned down?)

The funhouse is filled with painted flats and cheesy rubber monsters loaded on springs. But there are also angles that shouldn’t exist, reflections where there should be none.

There are odd, jerky cuts in the film itself, loops, backward stutters, and doubled scenes, as if bits of films are being run through a projector at the same time. It’s impossible.

Everyone is separated, utterly alone. The strange twists of the mirrored corridors keep them apart, even when they are only inches away. And here debates rage, because something happens, but no one is quite sure what.

Maybe Carrie Linden steps through a mirror into the room where Elizabeth is raking bloody nails against the glass, trying to escape. Some viewers claim that it isn’t really Carrie, because she stepped through a mirror too. (Inside the funhouse, is anyone who they used to be?) What follows is brutal. With eerie, cold precision Carrie tortures Elizabeth. Accounts vary. Is blood actually drawn, or is the pain more subtle, more insidious than that? (What did
you
see? What do you
think
you saw?)

What makes the violence even more shocking is that up until this point in the film, Carrie has been utterly passive. (Is it possible to watch her push a sliver of mirrored glass through Elizabeth’s cheek and not feel it in your own?) Elizabeth’s face fills with terror, but oddly, she doesn’t seem to notice Carrie at all. Her gaze darts to the mirrors. Her panicked glances skitter into the shadows.

She look straight at the camera, and tears roll silently from her eyes.

Four people leave the funhouse at the end of the scene—Carrie, Josh, Elizabeth, and Lance. (Do they?) Mary is never seen again. Her absence is never explained. It’s that kind of film.

The crux of the movie hangs here. Kaleidophiles know if they could just unravel this scene, they’d understand everything. (Do they really want to?) When she leaves the funhouse, what is Carrie holding in her hand? Was there really a reflection in the mirror behind Elizabeth’s head? When Carrie leans down and puts her mouth against Elizabeth’s ear, what does she whisper?

“Can I help you?” The woman’s voice snaps Jackson back to himself. His skin flushes hot; panic constricts his throat.

The woman flickers and doubles. Carrie Linden (or Karen Finch) is here and now, but she is there and then too. Jackson shudders.

Something passes through the woman’s eyes, a kind of recognition. It’s as though all these years Jackson has been watching her, she’s been looking right back at him.

“You’re Carrie Linden,” he says. His voice is thick and far away.

Her expression turns hard. Jackson sees the cold impulse to violence; for a moment, she wants to hurt him. Instead, she steps aside, her voice tight. “You’d better come inside.”

Jackson squeezes past her, close enough to touch. He catches her scent—patchouli, stale cigarettes, and even staler coffee. Her posture radiates hatred; her bones are blades, aching towards his skin. When they are face to face, Jackson glimpses the truth in her eyes—she’s been expecting this moment. Carrie Linden has been running her whole life, knowing sooner or later someone will catch her.

She shuts the door—a final sound. Jackson’s heart skips, jitters erratically, worse than when he ran all the way here. Carrie gestures to a room opening up to the left.

“Sit. I’ll make coffee.”

She leaves him, disappearing down the narrow hall. Jackson lowers himself onto a futon covered with a tattered blanket. Upended apple crates flank it at either end. A coffee table sits between the futon and a nest-shaped chair. The walls are painted blood-rust red; they are utterly bare.

Carrie returns with mismatched mugs and hands him one. It’s spider-webbed with near-invisible cracks, the white ceramic stained beige around the rim. The side of the mug bears an incongruous rainbow, arching away from a fluffy white cloud. Jackson sips, and almost chokes. The coffee is scalding black; she doesn’t offer him milk or sugar.

Carrie Linden sits in the nest chair, tucking bare feet beneath her. She wears a chunky sweater coat. It looks hand-knit, and it nearly swallows her. She meets Jackson’s gaze, so he can’t possibly look away.

“Well, what do you want to know?” Her voice snaps, dry-stick brittle and hard.

Jackson can’t speak for his heart lodged in his throat. There’s a magic to watching
Kaleidoscope
(unless you watch it alone). The people on screen dying and fucking and screaming and weeping, they’re just shadows. It’s
okay
to watch; it’s safe. None of it is real.

Motes of dust fall through the light around Carrie Linden—tiny, erratic fireflies. The curtains are mostly drawn, but the sun knifes through, leaving the room blood hot.

“All of it,” Carries says, when Jackson can’t find the words.

“What?” He gapes, mouth wide.

“That’s what you’re wondering, isn’t it? That’s what they all want to know. The answer is—all of it. All of it was real.”

Jackson flinches as though he’s been punched in the gut. (In a way, he has.) Should he feel guiltier about the cracked light in her eyes, or the fact that his stomach dropped when she said, “That’s what they all want to know”? He isn’t her first.

Carrie Linden’s hands wrap around her mug, showing blue veins and fragile bones. Steam rises, curling around her face. When she raises the mug to sip, her sleeve slides back, defiantly and unapologetically revealing scars.

“Well?” Carrie’s gaze follows the line of Jackson’s sight. “Why
did
you come, then?”

She bores into him with piercing-bright eyes, and Jackson realizes—even sitting directly across from her—he can’t tell what color they are. They are every color and no color at once, as if her body is just a shell housing the infinite possibilities living inside.

“I wanted to talk about the movie. I thought maybe. . . .” Jackson glances desperately around the bare-walled room—nowhere to run. In his head, he’s rehearsed this moment a thousand times. He’s
always
known exactly what he’ll say to Carrie Linden when he finally meets her, but now it’s all gone wrong.

I’m sorry, he wants to say, I shouldn’t have come, but the words stick in his throat. His eyes sting. He’s failed. In the end, he’s no better than Justin, or Kevin. He’s not a Kaleidophile, he hasn’t transcended the sex and gore—he’s just another wannabe.

Unable to look Carrie in the eye, Jackson fumbles a postcard out of his coat pocket. The edges are frayed and velvet-soft through years of wear. It’s the original movie poster for
Kaleidoscope
, wrought in miniature. Jackson found it at a garage sale last year, and he’s been carrying it around ever since. He passes it to Carrie with shaking hands.

As Carrie looks down to study the card, Jackson finally looks up. Like the movie, Jackson knows the card by heart, but now he sees it through Carrie’s eyes; he’s never loathed himself more. His eyes burn with the lurid color, the jumbled images piled together and bleeding into one.

The backdrop is a carnival, but it’s also a graveyard, or maybe an empty field backed with distant trees. A woman studded with fragments of glass lies spread-eagle on a great wheel. Between her legs, Carrie lies on an altar, covered in writhing snakes. Behind Carrie, Elizabeth’s blood-sheeted face hangs like a crimson moon. From the black of her wide-open eyes, shadowy figures seep out and stain the other images. They hide behind and inside everything, doubling and ghosting and blurring. The card isn’t one thing, it’s everything.

“I’m sorry.” Jackson finally manages the words aloud.

Slowly, Carrie reaches for a pen lying atop of a half-finished crossword puzzle. Her hand moves, more like a spasm than anything voluntary. The nib scratches across the card’s back, slicing skin and bone and soul. She lets the card fall onto the table between them, infinitely kind and infinitely cruel. Jackson thinks the tears welling in his eyes are the only things that save him.

“It’s okay,” she says. Her voice is not quite forgiving. For a moment, Jackson has the mad notion she might fold him in her bony arms and soothe him like a child, as though he’s the one who needs, or deserves, comforting.

Instead, Carrie leans forward and opens a drawer in the coffee table, fishing out a pack of cigarettes. Something rattles and slithers against the wood as the drawer slides closed. Jackson catches a glimpse, and catches his breath. Even after forty years he imagines the beads still sticky and warm, still slicked with Elizabeth’s blood.

Carrie lights her cigarette, and watches the patterns the smoke makes in the air, in shadows on the wall. They don’t quite match.

“I’m the final girl,” she says. The softness of her voice makes Jackson jump. He doesn’t think she’s even speaking to him anymore. She might as well be alone. (She’s always been alone.)

“What?” Jackson says, even though he knows exactly what she’s talking about. His voice quavers.

“It’s fucking bullshit, you know that?” Her voice is just as soft as before, if the words are harsher. “I wasn’t a helpless fantasy at the beginning; I wasn’t an empowered hero at the end. I was just me the whole time. I was just human.”

She stands, crushing her cigarette against the cupped palm of her hand without flinching. “You can stay if you want. Or you can go. I don’t really care.”

And just like that she’s gone. Jackson is alone with Carrie Linden’s blood-red walls and her battered couch, with her beads hidden in the coffee table drawer, and her autograph on a worn-soft postcard. When she walked onto the screen, Carrie Linden stopped Jackson’s heart; walking out of the room, she stops it again.

He sees Carrie Linden doubled, trebled—bony-thin hips hidden beneath a bulky sweater; the curve of her naked ass, teased by long blonde hair as she saunters across the screen; a hunted, haunted woman, glancing behind her as she darts into the drugstore.

Jackson has sunk so low, he can’t go any lower. (At least that’s what he tells himself as he leaves to make it okay.)

At home, Jackson hides the postcard and Carrie Linden’s beads at the bottom of his drawer. He covers them with socks and underwear, wadded T-shirts smelling of his sweat and late-night popcorn, ripe with fear and desire.