They're Watching (2010) (3 page)

Keith's version of the story was leaked to the tabloids, and I was smeared with such cold proficiency that I never felt the guillotine drop. I was a has-been before I'd really been, and my agent recommended a pricey lawyer and dropped me like a sauna rock.

No matter how hard I tried, I could no longer find the interest to sit at the computer. My writer's block had become fixed and immobile, a boulder in the middle of that blank white page. I suppose I could no longer suspend disbelief.

Julianne, a friend since we'd met eight years ago at a small-time film festival in Santa Ynez, had thrown me a lifeline--a job teaching screenwriting at Northridge University. After long days spent avoiding my stagnant home office, I was thankful for the opportunity. The students were entitled and excited, and their energy and the occasional spark of talent made teaching more than just a relief. It felt worthwhile. I'd been at it only a month, but I was starting to recognize flashes of myself again.

And yet still, every night I went home to a house I no longer felt I belonged in, to a marriage I no longer recognized. And then came the legal bills, more listlessness, the mornings waking up on the downstairs couch. And that feeling of deadness. The feeling that nothing could cut through. And for a month and a half, nothing had.

Until that first DVD fell out of the morning paper.

Chapter
5

"Do it," Julianne said, rising to refill her mug from the faculty lounge's machine. "One time."

Marcello riffled his blow-dried hair with a hand and refocused on the papers he was ostensibly grading. He wore tired brown trousers, a button-up and blazer, but no tie. This was, after all, the film department. "I'm sorry, I'm just not feeling it."

"You have a responsibility to your public."

"For the love of Mary, relent."

"C'mon. Please?"

"My instrument isn't prepared."

Standing at the window, I was checking Variety since I'd gotten distracted from the Times' Entertainment section earlier. Sure enough, page three carried a fluff piece on They're Watching--production had just wrapped, and anticipation was through the roof.

I said, over a shoulder, "Marcello, just do it so she shuts up already."

He lowered the papers, letting them tap against his knee. "IN A WORLD OF CONSTANT NAGGING, ONE MAN STANDS ALONE."

The voice that launched a million movie trailers. When Marcello uncorks it, you feel it in your bones. Julianne clapped, one hand rising as the other fell to meet it, a hee-haw display of amusement. "That is so fucking fantastic."

"IN A TIME OF OVERDUE GRADES, ONE MAN MUST BE LEFT ALONE."

"All right, all right." Wounded, Julianne came over and stood next to me. I dropped Variety quickly to my side before she could see what I was reading, returning my gaze to the window. I should've been grading papers, too, but in the wake of the DVD I was having trouble focusing. At a few points in the morning, I'd caught myself studying passing faces, searching out signs of menace or masked glee. She followed my troubled stare. "What are you looking at?"

Students poured out of the surrounding buildings and into the quad below. I said, "Life in progress."

"You're so philosophical," Julianne said. "You must be a teacher."

The film department at Cal State Northridge draws mainly three kinds of faculty. There are those who teach, who love the process, turning young minds on to possibilities, all that. Marcello is such a teacher, despite his well-cultivated cynicism. Then there are the journalists like Julianne, wearers of black turtlenecks, always rushing from class, on to their next review or article or book on Zeffirelli. Next, the occasional Oscar winner enjoying the dusk of his career, basking in the not-so-quiet admiration of adoring hopefuls. And then there's me.

I watched the students below, writing on laptops and arguing excitedly, their whole disastrous lives in front of them.

Julianne pushed back from the window and said, "I need a smoke."

"IN AN AGE OF LUNG CANCER, ONE SHITHEAD MUST TAKE THE LEAD."

"Yeah, yeah."

After she left, I sat with some student scripts but found myself reading the same sentence over and over. I got up and stretched, then walked to the bulletin board and flipped through the pinned flyers. There I stood, perusing and humming a few notes: Patrick Davis, the picture of nonchalance. I was acting, I realized, more for my own sake than Marcello's; I didn't want to admit how much I was disquieted by the DVD. I'd been numbed for so long by dull-edged emotions--depression, lethargy, resentment--that I'd forgotten what it was like when sharp concern pricked the raw skin beneath the calluses. I'd had a rough run, sure, but this footage seemed to be signaling a fresh wave of . . . of what?

Marcello cocked an eyebrow but didn't glance up from his work. "Seriously," he said. "Are you okay? The screws seem a little tight. Tighter than usual, I mean."

He and I had forged an accelerated intimacy. We spent a good amount of downtime together here in the lounge, he'd been privy to plenty of my and Julianne's conversations about the state of my life, and I found him helpful in his sometimes brutal and always irreverent incisiveness. But still, I hesitated to answer.

Julianne came back in, cranked open a window irritably, and lit up. "There's a parent tour. The judgmental stares wear on me."

Marcello said, "Patrick was just about to tell us why he's so distracted."

"It's nothing. This stupid thing. I got a DVD delivered to my house, hidden in the morning paper. It kind of weirded me out."

Marcello frowned, smoothing his neatly trimmed beard. "A DVD of what?"

"Just me."

"Doing what?"

"Brushing my teeth. In my underwear."

Julianne said, "That's fucked up."

"Probably some kind of prank," I said. "I don't even know that it's personal. It could've been some kid skulking around the neighborhood, and I was the only jackass taking a leak with the shutters open."

"Do you have the DVD?" Julianne's eyes were big, excited. "Let's look at it."

Minding the fresh divots on my knuckles, I removed the disc from my courier bag and slid it into the mounted media unit.

Marcello rested a slender finger on his cheek and watched. When it finished, he shrugged. "A little creepy, but hardly chilling. The production quality sucks. Digital?"

"That's what I figure."

"Any students you've pissed off?"

That hadn't occurred to me. "No standouts."

"Check if anyone's failing. And think if there are any faculty members who you may have rubbed the wrong way."

"In my first month?"

"Your track record's hardly been exemplary this year," Julianne reminded me, "when it comes to . . . well, people."

Marcello waved a hand to indicate the building. "Department full of folks who make movies. Most of them just as accomplished as that one. Suspects abound. I'm sure it's nothing more than someone having a little mean-spirited fun." Losing interest, he returned to his papers.

"I don't know. . . ." Julianne lit a fresh cigarette off the end of her last. "Why inform someone that you're watching them?"

"Maybe they flunked spy school," I said.

She made a thoughtful noise in her throat. We watched students trickle out of our building below. With its giant windows, colonnades, and a metal swoop of roof, Manzanita Hall always struck me as oddly precarious, seeing that it was a product of the rebuilding effort after the '97 quake.

"Marcello's right. It's probably just harassment. If so, who cares? Until it becomes something else. But the other possibility"--she blew a jet of smoke through the window slit--"is that it's an implicit threat. I mean, you're a film teacher and a screenwriter--"

Over his papers, Marcello volunteered, "Screenwroter."

"Whatever. Which means whoever did this probably knows you've seen every thriller in the Blockbuster aisle." Wrist cocked, elbow to hip, cigarette unspooling--she looked like a film noir convention in her own right. "The recording-as-clue thing. It's Blowup, right?"

"Or Blow Out," I said. "Or The Conversation. Except I didn't accidentally happen upon this. It was delivered to me."

"But still. They'd have to know you'd pick up on that movie stuff."

"So why do it?"

"Maybe they're not after the usual."

"What's the usual?"

"To reveal a long-buried secret. To terrorize you. Revenge." She chewed her lip, ran a hand through her long red hair. I noticed how attractive she was. It was something that took effort for me to notice. From the first we'd had a sibling-like rapport. Ariana, even with her southern Italian sensibilities, had always been notably unjealous, and justifiably so.

"Someone at the studio could be behind the DVD," Julianne added.

"The studio?"

"Summit Pictures. There is this little matter of a lawsuit. . . ."

"Oh, yeah," I said. "The lawsuit."

"You have a lot of enemies there. Not just executives but legal, investigators, the whole posse. One of them could be fucking with you. And they've certainly made clear they're not on your side."

I mused on this. I had a friend in Lot Security who it might be worth risking a visit to. The DVD had been hidden in the Entertainment section of the paper, after all. "Why not Keith Conner?"

"True," she said. "Why not? He's rich and nuts, and actors always have plenty of time on their hands. And shady entourage members to do their bidding."

The chimes sounded from the library, and Marcello exited, giving us a parting bow at the door. Julianne accelerated her inhales, the cherry glow jerking its way down the cigarette. "Plus, you did punch him in the face. I've heard movie stars don't like that."

"I didn't punch him in the face," I said wearily.

She watched me watching her smoke. I must have had a longing expression, because she held out the butt, ash up, and asked, "You miss it?"

"Not the smoking. The ritual. Tapping down the pack, my silver lighter, a smoke in the morning, in the car, with a cup of coffee. There was something so soothing about it. Knowing you could count on it. It was always there."

She ground out the cigarette against the edge of the window frame, her eyes never leaving mine. Puzzled. "You trying to give something else up?"

"Yeah," I said. "My wife."

Chapter
6

When I pulled in to our driveway, Don Miller strode out his front door. Like he'd been waiting. It was just before ten o'clock--popcorn and Milk Duds for dinner at the Arclight cineplex. I'd promised a student I'd go to this pseudo-indie film he was ripping off for his assigned short, which was good because I'd seen all the other releases. It beat time at home.

As I walked over to grab the mail, Don met me at the curb. A broad, confident guy, ex-athlete handsome. He cleared his throat. "The . . . ah, the fence at our property line is falling down. Section in the back there."

I shifted the dry cleaning slung over my shoulder. "I'd noticed that."

"I was gonna have my guy fix it. Just wanted to make sure that's okay with you."

I looked at his hands. I looked at his mouth. He'd grown a goatee. Animal hatred bubbled to the surface, but I just nodded and said, "Fine idea."

"I . . . ah, I know things have been a little thin for you lately, so I figured I'd just cover it."

"We'll cover half." I turned to head inside.

He stepped forward. "Listen, Patrick . . ."

I looked down. His boot was across the pavement line, in my driveway. He froze and followed my stare. His face colored. He withdrew his foot, nodded, then nodded again, backing away. I watched until his front door closed behind him. Then I continued up my walk.

I went inside, dumped the mail and dry cleaning on the kitchen table, and chugged down a glass of water. Leaning against the sink, I ran my hands over my face, doing my best to ignore the mounting stack of dignified taupe envelopes on the counter, from the Billing Department of my lawyer's firm; his evergreen retainer had dipped beneath its thirty-thousand-dollar threshold yet again and needed refreshing. Beside it sat a forgotten dry-cleaning tag, set out by Ariana yesterday; in the morning commotion, I'd neglected to grab it. Despite everything, we were still trying to split our chores, maintain civility, dodge the mines floating beneath the calm surface. She needed that suit for a big client meeting tomorrow. Maybe by some miracle, the dry cleaner had pulled it with our other laundry. As I crossed to check, the little mound of mail caught my attention. The red prepaid Netflix envelope looked different, altered somehow. Blood moved to my face, warming it. I walked over, picked it up. The outside flap had been lifted and retaped. I tore it free, tilted the envelope. A blank sleeve slid out.

Inside was another unmarked DVD.

My hands shook as I fed the disc into the player. I was doing my best not to overreact, but my skin had gone cold and clammy. As much as I hated to admit it, I was as creeped out as a kid listening to a camp-fire ghost story, the ragged unease starting in my bones and moving outward, eating me up in reverse.