The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (35 page)

BLOOD AND SYMPATHY

Later you return to the scene of your crimes. You wonder at the silence, whether it is absolute or only the hour. There are no signs that the magazine has been closed down. Still you feel strange stepping out of the elevator and into an unlit corridor. That the hour is past midnight doesn’t help.

Tony’s door is closed and dark. There’s a light on in the Department of Victual Falsification. Elaine is at her desk. She looks up when you come in, but she does not seem surprised. You tell her that you’ve come to get your things. “Don’t bother,” she tells you. Then: “I’ve been waiting here all day for you.” Waiting for what? “You could have called.” That is when you notice that your desk is clear. The photo on the wall looks down on nothing. You don’t need to look to know that the drawers are empty.

“We had more trouble here this morning,” Elaine says. “A search warrant.” Now you realize that she is holding a pistol in her left hand. “Tony says it’s over. Done. Finished.” The pistol looks like it might be loaded. “What do you think?”

You want to tell her the truth. Instead you say: “I think it’s only just begun.”

She’s smiling. The pistol is back in her purse. “I thought you might want these.” Four plastic cases. “My secret stash.”

You hold up the first of the videos, factory fresh and labeled:
Revenge of the Dead.
It is Pupi Avati’s
Zeder
. You deep-breathe and feel your nostrils go like ice.

“Elaine.” She raises her eyebrows. Now you are committed. In the elevator, you ask her where she wants to go.

“How about your place?”

You walk and walk and at Fifth Avenue, just past the Flatiron Building, Elaine takes your hand and leads you into a Chinese carryout, where she orders dim sum for you both. From the restaurant you walk toward Union Square. Each step takes you closer to your apartment, to the place where Miranda lived. Where Miranda died. This was your neighborhood. That boarded-up storefront was your grocer, the next your video store. Now the vista has gone upside down, and nothing will ever be the same.

“Best bonfire in the city,” Elaine says, pointing to Union Square. A trio of National Guardsmen in urban camouflage huddle with their cigarettes. They watch over a graveyard of concrete and ash, circled with rolls of barbed wire. The fragrance reminds you of the mornings after Black Wednesday, when you woke to the smell of the corpses burning, the perfumed ghost of Miranda sleeping beside you. It seems a lifetime ago, but still you can see her sleeping, the flicker of flames across the face that wasn’t there.

Soon Elaine is lying next to you in that same room, her dark hair a shadow on the pillow. The only light is from the small bedside television. After
Zeder
you watch the uncut
Apocalypse Domani
, and after that she opens your shirt, her hand against your chest. You watch the TV screen go black, then grey, and in the moments before you try, but fail, to make love, she says: “When there are no more films, we’ll have to make our own.”

SOMETIMES

A VOGUE

NATION

You wake up with a severed head on your chest. Its lips are moving, but you can’t hear the words. After a few seconds you realize that the head isn’t talking—it is chewing. A hand rises into view, clutching a fistful of entrails. The clock on the VCR blinks a continuous 12:00. That would be noon, judging by the sunlight that zigzags through the blinds. The last thing you remember was that Elaine was sleeping while you watched the final moments of Deodato’s
L’ultima cannibali
. The tribesmen had split Mei Mei Lay open from groin to breastbone, dug out her organs, and sewn her back up for cooking. You have the feeling that you may have missed something good.

You remove the little television from your chest just as Doctor Butcher begins to rev up his band saw. The shot is static, almost matter-of-fact. The stage blood, when it comes, is orange-ish, surreal. You would have given the scene depth, momentum—not simply shock, but true anguish. There is a note on the nightstand, a few lines in black ink; you read it and smile a thank you to Elaine. You are on your second cup of coffee and the final moments of
Doctor Butcher, M.D.
when the telephone rings. It’s Joe D’Amato. He wants to take you sightseeing, probably tonight or tomorrow, sometime after 10. He’ll call again. You tell him you’ll be waiting.

Then you hit the streets, in search of a sandwich and today’s
Daily News
. You wonder what Jay will do for lighting and whether you will need your tripod. At your favorite Greek diner, you order chicken salad and more coffee. When you spread the newspaper across the counter, you learn that the first of the Still Dead, a thirty-three-year-old black male from suburban Chicago, otherwise unidentified, came back last night and was trepanned with a surgical power saw. Life is still imitating art. Doctor Butcher would have been proud.

Across a few more streets and down an alley is the backdoor to Forbidden Planet. You keep your head down, feel like you look guilty, and shove your hands deep into your pockets. Money talks and bullshit walks. You need an extra battery for your camera, and maybe somebody at the Planet will be selling.

“Got what you want,” someone says, though it’s hard to hear over the noise of a boom box, an incessant orgy of doom thrash metal. The kids lean into the walls and don’t look at you. They wear their biker jackets, black t-shirts, and jeans like uniforms.

“Say man.” A skin-headed nymphet in torn fishnets twists down the volume, raises her paste-white face to you. “You know where we could get some stuff?”

“Stuff?” You want to keep walking, get this over with as quickly as you can. Who knows who might be watching.

“You know.” Her eyes, black circles scored at their far corners with silver, dart around, mock fugitive. She sucks at her cigarette, blows back smoke and the word of the hour. “Some good g o r e?”

“No can do.” Your hands seem caught in your pockets. These are your readers. Your public. They sent you letters, sometimes. But you never thought of them when you wrote, not really. You thought about something else, something. . . .

“Like
New York Ripper
?”

“No.” But you can’t walk away. You are. . . .

“
Eaten Alive
, maybe?
Man from Deep River
? Some cannibal. . . .”

“Listen, I. . . .”

“I do,” she says, and for the first time she is alive, truly alive. She bites at her purple lips, finally works up a smile. “Like, we know where we can score something, but we don’t got the dollars. You wanna go in with us, maybe?”

You look at them, and they look back at you, expectant—a line of lost moviegoers, waiting for what you can show them. You tell yourself that you are not this desperate. You are looking for a battery. That’s all. At last you shrug and start to walk away. She turns the music back up, and now that rotten Johnny Lydon is ranting away:

This is what you want

This is what you get

This is what you want

This is what you get. . . .

You feel them pulling at you, pulling you back. But it’s not them, not really. You want so desperately to see. You came here in search of something, something you thought you wanted, but now you aren’t sure. You wonder if you ever were sure. You want to give in to it, let it take you away again to that place where you never need to be sure.

Whether you want to or not, you think about Miranda. You try to remember the way she was before Black Wednesday, before the night she died, before the dead came back and the apartment walls went red with blood. And before everything was whitewashed back into this thing they call reality.

THE NIGHT

SHIFTS

You are hungry and you are thirsty; you need to see something, but you’re not sure what. Nothing hidden on your bookshelf is enough anymore.

You walk down into SoHo, past all the empty restaurants and art galleries, a showplace of spray paint and shattered glass. When you cross Prince Street, a walkie-talkie crackles at you from the darkness. A cough and clipped voices. Soldiers are on the street corners. All of the city seems armed and ready. Like the morning after Black Wednesday.

At first you could not believe that Miranda was dead. Now you find it hard to believe that she was ever really alive. That you were married. Shared wine and loud music and laughter. That there ever was anything but this.

You decided long ago not to think about that day. It was months after the first reports came in from the Pennsylvania countryside. About the dead that came back to life. The dead that walked. The dead that ate the living. You had your doubts about the stories, even when it was Dan Rather who told them. After all, this was the stuff of horror movies.

Before it happened, you had never thought about Miranda’s death. You were too young, too happy, to think about it. You spent no time in anticipation of it, because death was something that would not happen, could not happen, at least until you yourself were old and tired and ready.

Helicopters flutter overhead. Their searchlights bite holes in the darkness. At Houston you find a market that is still open, buy a carton of beer, and head back to the apartment.

“Do you love her?” your mother had asked that first, and last, time the two of you visited. You didn’t know what to say. Of course you loved her. You had married her, hadn’t you?

You thought you would faint when you came home that night, in those long lost moments of shadow and flame. Miranda had been beautiful. That was the way you wanted to remember her. Like in the photographs her parents had sent, now on the mantle of the apartment, taken when she was younger than you had ever known her.

You could have given her life eternal through the lens of your camera. Video. Film. Pictures. You could have loved her forever. How could you explain the feeling of being misplaced, of always standing to one side of the world, of watching the world as if it existed only when recorded and replayed on tape, and wondering if this was how everyone felt. You always believed that other people could see more directly, could actually see and understand the world through their own eyes, and didn’t worry quite so much about why. You could see it only through a lens, through what you could record and edit and assemble into a tangible, meaningful whole, locked safely and securely within the four walls of a picture. Then, and only then, could you see and understand . . . and yes, love.

You drink more than one beer on your trek back to the apartment, and once there you drink more than one more. You slip another video into the deck. Deodato again.
Camping del terrore
, although for once you prefer the English title:
Body Count.
More beer and another video, and then another and another, and after a time the images blur and bleed into a single color.

Sooner or later the telephone rings. It is time.

GONE

The barricades are back up at the major intersections, and the city has become very small. Your head is hollow, cracked and scooped out like an oyster on the half shell. You followed the flicker of red video across the television screen in pursuit of some kind of answer. Then the tapes ran out; as you watched the last line of credits, superimposed on a staggering horde of zombies as they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, you suddenly saw yourself in hideous close-up, gape-mouthed in worship before a forty-inch altar of flickering light.

You caught the telephone on the second ring. Through the noise and a distant sound that sooner or later you realized was gunfire, you heard that it was Jay, that he wanted you to meet him at Patchin Place. This is not a test. Your presence, and your video camera, are required. You told him you’d be there in minutes, and now you’re there, camera in hand, and you can feel it about to happen.

The alleyway is awash in the yellow spray of flares and flashlights. Elaine stands in the shadows, her pistol pointed into the night sky; at her side is some black guy with a shotgun. Jay is watchful, waiting, waiting. Finally he looks at you.

“Do it,” he says and then gestures grandly to the others. “Lights.” Shadows twist over a gas generator; a ratcheting, a cough, and a spray of white cuts the alley into an urban dreamscape, the stuff of Lang and Reed.

“Something’s happening, uptown and down. . . .” He wears a joker’s grin, a shotgun in his black-gloved hand. “Could be Black Wednesday all over again.” You hear a shout, footsteps racing on wet concrete. He shrugs and nods into the darkness. “Someone has to shoot the picture.” His hand busses your shoulder. “So do it,” he says again. “Sound,” he announces; and, as he walks away, “Speed.” Then you’re alone, with your finger on the trigger.

Through the viewfinder, you see the world, your world, the world made flesh on the grey-silver screen. Mad shadows chase one of Jay’s nerdy protégés into view, and he dances before you, arms in flight, and mugs breathlessly for the camera. Finally he leans in at you and cries: “They’re heeeeer!”

Then he is gone, and your world is the world of the dead. The first one is an old-timer, work shirt and spotted trousers, shuffling around the corner in vague pursuit. The left side of his face is gone, eaten. You can see the teeth marks as you smash zoom in on him. From somewhere to your left comes the bullroar of the black guy’s shotgun. The top of the old-timer’s head lifts away. You watch him fall and see your take replayed endlessly on the monitors of an editing bay. Perfect. Picture perfect. He collapses to the sidewalk in an unceremonious and uncinematic heap.

You slide the camera over the corpse and up the wall, where the shadow of the next one spiderwebs nicely into POV. “Got him,” you hear Elaine call. This one is a kid, your random Puerto Rican street punk, and he looks fairly fresh. You hit him with a medium close-up just in time to catch the jagged line of bullet holes that Elaine punches into his chest. Craters erupt—grey skin, blood, and squirming maggots—and you zoom into one then out just in time to catch the headshot as the black guy steps in stage right, swings his shotgun up, and lets both barrels go. The body cartwheels back, out of the light, and you’ve lost it to the black beyond.

“Take . . . it . . . easy.” Jay sounds anxious and upset. “Not . . . so . . . fast.” But there are sirens in the distance and the sound, you think, of radios and marching feet. White noise and distant voices. Order is about to be restored. You don’t have much time.

You peek over the viewfinder, and there is another shadow climbing the wall. Elaine is twisting a speedloader from her belt. Shell casings pingpong down the alley. You look in again and see shadow turn to skin. It’s a woman. Tall. Long blonde hair. Pale skin. As you squint and let the focus go, ready for a soft fade-in, you hear her footsteps stumble forward. Your finger finds the autofocus as you let the lens sweep the pavement slowly to her feet. Black Keds. Then up. Bleached jeans. Slowly. White blouse, half-unbuttoned, a tiny pearl necklace at her throat, and pale, pale skin. Slowly up to her face. Her beautiful face. A small clicking sound is coming from your throat. The picture shivers once, twice, then dims. Finally you hear your voice: “Mir-an-da!”

You pull the shot away from her and left. Elaine kneels, stiff-arms the handgun. You hear sounds like belches and swing your eyes, the camera, back. Miranda’s left forearm angles impossibly, then breaks, strands of flesh stretching, then snapping, hand clutching at empty air as it spins and floats away. You see the shot in slow motion, a mad Peckinpah pirouette, suddenly shattered in mid-turn as the force of a shotgun blast kicks out her legs. You fall to your knees with her, losing your balance, nearly dropping the camera; still you hold onto the shot. You have her now. She can’t escape you. You feel the urge for a close-up, but you cannot risk moving from the medium shot as Miranda rears back into frame. Another roar, and the top of her right shoulder explodes. A great brown geyser of blood erupts. Grey flesh and bone graffiti the alley wall.

Somehow she stands, keeps walking. Her head jerks to the right as the black guy chunks in another round; the shotgun kicks again, a miss that showers a sudden snow of brick and dust. You swing the camera down then up from her bullet-blown knees in time to catch Elaine’s next volley, three shots that spit through Miranda’s chest and neck and crease her cheek. Her mouth opens wide in response. You don’t know if it is a laugh or a scream.

Still she is coming, past the black guy, past Elaine, who looks at you with angry fear. They can’t fire now, not back at you and Jay and the rest of the crew. Your shot is steady, sure, a reverse zoom that frames her just so, the alley seeming to widen behind her as she approaches. Now your back is against the wall and the lens is open wide; she walks on and gives you your close-up. She is yours, all yours.

A flash of movement cuts the picture; the camera is nearly lost from your arms as she skitters backward. Then you see the muzzle and hardwood butt of the shotgun, and Jay’s gloved right hand as he hits her again, and you hold the shot as she falls and you’re down on the ground with her, the camera looking up across her body into a night sky punctured by distant stars. You can see her tongue through the open left side of her face. One of her eyes is blinking, out of control; the other one is gone. You know she has never been more beautiful than now. She is yours, and will be yours forever.

You watch as Jay joins you at her side. He lowers the shotgun; the barrel slides along her stomach, her chest, her neck, to the tip of her chin. Finally its hot and smoking mouth kisses hers. And as you hold her in lingering close-up, he shoves the barrel down. You hear the crack of teeth and bone and then the shotgun kicks and there is a shriek and you are caught in a warm wet rain that washes over the lens until you can see nothing, nothing, nothing at all but red.

You hear laughter, and you know that it is your own. You can no longer see, but you can run, and you drop the camera, hear the shatter of glass and plastic, the whir of the eject as you grab at the tape and you run, you run and run into the darkness, into the night until at last you can see a distant light, and you run in its direction. You hold on to your tape and run.

Finally you see the sanitation trucks lined before you on this side of Union Square. You watch as body bags are carried out by men in gas masks and white camouflaged parkas and dumped onto the fire, sending smoke, and the smell, over you. No matter how far you run, the smell will follow you. It recalls you to another morning. You arrived home from the magazine after drinking most of the night; Miranda had called just before midnight, wondering where you were. When you arrived, the apartment was steeped in this same aroma. The soldiers stood warming themselves around the flames. Miranda was gone. You could count the bullet holes across the lobby, the stairway, and the walls of the apartment itself; you could count the bodies sprawled in the streets, fuel for the flames. You had seen it all before; you had seen it all, but you had never believed in it. It wasn’t real; it could never be real. But it was. The films, the videos, were just the coming attractions, a sneak preview of the epic now playing around the clock in the world outside.

You approach the last of the trucks. A sanitation worker hefts another body bag from its wide belly, drops the heavy plastic cocoon unceremoniously to the pavement.

“Dead.” This is what you say to him, although you meant to say something more.

“What was your first clue?” He turns and walks toward the Square. The fire rages high, a false dawn. The workers, and the soldiers who guard them, look at the flames, and not at you.

You get down on your knees and tear open the body bag. The smell of the corpse envelops you. When you touch it, your hands find something soft and wet. The first bite sticks in your throat and when you try to swallow, you almost gag.

You will have to go very slowly.

You will have to forget most everything you have ever learned.

for Stephen R. Bissette