We Eat Our Own (12 page)

It's just that he's never asked us to work without specs before. Without materials, without a lab. If I'd known, I would have insisted we build the bodies at home and ship them down.

That's not his process.

What about
our
process? We need a vacuform. We need
life casts, alginate, clay medium, a spray booth, everything. We need a
supply
store, Paolo.

We'll make it work.

But not if he keeps revising the script. Agata can feel herself getting frantic. He doesn't even know how many of the characters will die.
How
they'll die. No director's ever asked us to work this way before, Paolo.

An actor quit and he doesn't know how the recast will go. He's revising. It can't be helped.

Then he should be adjusting faster. That's all I'm saying. He shouldn't be stringing us along while he figures it out. She twisted her wedding ring, tensed her jaw. I thought you felt the same way. Earlier. You seemed like you were frustrated, too.

I was angry today. Paolo said, softer now. But he'll tell us how many bodies to make soon. He'll settle on a number, we just have to be prepped.

She studied the vein in his temple like the needle of a fuel gauge on low, deciding whether to speak.

She decided: But what if he doesn't?

Paolo prodded the remote and didn't respond. Agata pretended it didn't bother her. She focused harder on the
TV
. It was thirty centimeters square with a broken contrast knob and a washed-out picture. It gave off the only light in the room: the producer had warned them that the diesel for the generators was expensive to ship, to stick to candles, don't run hair dryers, don't waste power running the electric lamps if they could avoid it. Agata didn't understand—why this hotel had a generator at all, why there was blue carpet on the floors when there were acres of mud outside, all this incongruous technology. She slumped lower in the bed and stared at the white-blue wash of static on the screen.

I'm scared of what could happen here, she said, tired.

You'll get over that, Paolo said, firmer now.

It's just that—why did he have to bring us
here
?
Agata's wedding ring was stuck to her skin by sweat. She couldn't stop turning it, working the band toward her knuckle. He could have shot this movie anywhere and he chose Colombia. Did you see the papers in the airport?

No.

This is supposed to be a dangerous country right now.

Paolo jerked his wrist, prodding a button on the remote. There won't be any of that down here.

The wedding ring sucked hard at the base of her finger. Her hands went limp in her lap, sore and empty.

I know that, she said. I know. But even if there isn't—­something's off about this project, Paolo. You feel it, too, I can tell.

We just have to be professionals.

How can we be?

Agata—

If he fires us, how do we get home?

Agata, Jesus.

Will he
care
how we get home? Or will he be so focused on this fucking movie that he'll leave us to rot—

I can't listen to this.

We don't have any money. That American who quit at the airport, I don't think he even gave him cab fare.

Come on, what's cab fare? And the new American's already here, you know that.

My point is that if the actors are that replaceable to him, we are, too.

No, we're not. We're specialists.

But I'm worried, Paolo. I really am.

You're worried? Paolo sparked a cigarette.
You're
worried?
Christ, Agata, if I had a partner who could keep it together for two days, maybe I'd feel a little better, too.

That was all it took: just that little rise in the volume of his voice. It hit her like a slap. Okay, she said. Okay. She rolled to face the window and pulled the sheet up to her ears. She stayed that way until she couldn't stand it, and then she threw it off.

It's too damn hot to sleep in this country.

His voice softened. I know.

Would you turn off the
TV
soon? I swear it makes the room warmer.

I will. Just give me a minute.

And please put the mosquito netting down.

Okay.

He sparked a cigarette. The generator droned louder. The picture on the screen changed, or at least that's what Paolo thought, when he squinted at it. He could see an object congealing in the static, its edges blurred by white. He stared until he could name it: a barn in the center of the field.

• • •

In the morning, Agata was not in bed.

By the time Paolo got to breakfast, she was already in the mess tent with the actress. They sat on the same side of the picnic table, their forks tending toward the same plate of papaya. Agata was whispering and the actress was chattering, both of them speaking in English.

Speak Italian, Paolo said, plunking down his bowl. You know I don't understand.

She's Swiss. She doesn't speak the same Italian as us, Agata said. And besides, she needs to practice her English for the movie. Irena, tell him the idea you had. For the body problem.

Paolo ate. The mango was syrupy and meaty, bruised in transport. It was so sweet it made him pucker.

Meat is a good idea, the actress said, in theory. But I think something like beef won't look stringy enough, you know?

He extracted the words
good
and
cooked,
but nothing else. He chewed, thought,
Why is she talking to a fucking actress about the body problem?

Agata furrowed. Why does it need to look stringy?

The actress lit up. Think about it. If you want—what's the word—
gristle
? Fat? Like, when the cannibals take a bite out, so you can really see the muscle fiber in their teeth.

The girl demonstrated, a clenched jaw and a quick jerk of the neck. It was savage and convincing, unnerving Paolo in a way he couldn't name. She ended the motion with a little laugh.

Agata nodded. Okay, I see. Maybe roots? Shredded roots?

Roots could be good.

But they wouldn't
taste
good.

I don't care about that. The actress laughed. Teo's the prissy one, he might give you trouble.

Well,
you
wouldn't eat the bodies. Agata laughed back. You would be the ones getting eaten.

You never know! The actress mock-shoved her. Ugo has some crazy ideas. He could change the whole script tomorrow.

He didn't ask, but Agata translated for him. What do you think? She smiled, joked. Should we make twenty, thirty spares? Are we up to it?

When Paolo looked at her, he felt a vein flutter beneath his left eye. When he stood, he took his plate with him.

When the actress smiled, her teeth were speckled with pulp. She spoke in loud English, aimed at Paolo's back.

Who's that guy? she said. What's his problem?

• • •

His problem was this: he respected his wife too much. Too much to see her fail like this, crying over mosquito bites and mudslicks.

No, his problem was: they had made aliens out of polyurethane and car parts. His problem was that he knew her, that she could make actors look like they'd been impaled on anything—pikes and fenceposts and the needle at the top of a skyscraper, the red light at the tip still flashing to warn off low-flying planes. On their last project, a mondo rip-off of
House of Wax,
they sculpted actresses into breathable tallow torture chambers and painted exact replicas of their faces over the masks, then melted them with a butane torch. Agata had done the sculpt. They were better than anyone else in this industry—­really,
Agata
was better, incredible with an airbrush, impeccable at fabrication. She had been his student at the effects school, an instant prodigy, the best he'd ever taught. His problem was this: they were better than a few bodies, basic shapes and edible parts.

If Agata would just focus.

They were back in the jungle, Paolo slamming a matte paint cake into a rock to break it up. He did it too hard and too many times. A blue cloud extended from his fist like poison gas, staining the edges of his shirt cuff. Agata bit her lip until she could summon the courage to speak to him.

Baby, let's take a break. Go help the set dressers.

Paolo kept pounding.

You can finish it tomorrow. She ran her hand over his elbow. Ugo will be fine without us. They don't need the head till shot 19. Vanni needs help with the tree of hives.

We're not fucking set dressers, Agata.

We're fabricators, though. It's the same thing. She tried to mask the frustration in her voice. You know everyone needs to help everyone out.

I'm
not a set dresser, Paolo said again, but by then he'd put the blue paint cake down, strode, already, halfway to the tree line.

Agata followed him, ten paces behind, careful not to let her gaze land too long on the stripes in his shirt. Here, at the end of two years of marriage, she'd finally begun to accept that marriage wasn't going to change Paolo: he was still the dark shadow behind her stool in the studio, squinting over her shoulder, finding the hairline rip in the cowl and tearing it the rest of the way, to force her to fix it. She'd finally learned how not to flinch when he shouted: Do it again. No, she'd learned an even better way to be around her husband; distant but there, at the outermost valance of his genius, nudging at the energy field when he wasn't looking.

She followed him into the trees. This was how she had learned to help her husband, when he was too angry to be kind to her: she followed him wherever he was going, and then she handed him tree fronds. She helped him weave them into fabric. She gave him an abstract process to complete precisely and in silence, and she waited for his blood to cool.

There were two dozen people working with them, lashing limbs together into one-legged ladders, climbing up into the lower branches of the trees. Most of them were workers from the village, or at least, they weren't Italian; they spoke a language Paolo didn't understand. The town, he knew, sat at the corners of three countries, on the Colombian side of the vertex where the borders of Brazil and Colombia and Peru all converged, and sometimes he could intuit the different slants on Spanish and Portuguese in the lunch tent, the hoofbeats of obvious cognates running through their phrases. But the
language the locals spoke was different. It had low diphthongs, long chains of glottal consonants, too many vowels in a row. Maybe it was pitched? Paolo thought it must be pitched. It reminded him of quarreling birds. It was soothing, because it was so easy to tune out as he wove.

After a while, Agata looked at him cautiously, out of the corner of her eye, and swallowed once. She swiped a swarm of buzzing specks out of the air between them and tried to make her voice bright: Vanni told me he wanted to construct the villages based on local building practices.

He didn't want to hear her, so he squinted at the leaf. He realized that its fibers ran in a set direction, like wood, following a grain.

I mean, there are exaggerations, she whispered, but this is more or less how these people actually live. In the trees. Isn't that fascinating?

Paolo interrupted her. We need more material.

It's amazing how—

Could you just get it? I'm in the middle of this. Please?

As she walked, Agata glanced at the men working. The tree of hives was only partly done, colossal, the lowest dwellings only half completed. She'd seen the set dresser's sketches: when it was done, it would be impressive, a dozen human-sized pods, each hacked in half and suspended in gridlike cells like a beehive, a rough doodle of a cannibal leering out of each one. She watched the women weave vines and brambles into enormous cups, scraping their fingers as they did it, flecking blood into the mud. None of them ever stopped working. None of them complained.

So what is wrong with me?
Agata thought.

Ten meters away, a man set a nest on the ground and crawled into it, to measure. Then he scrambled out, hoisted the
thing up the ladder, and placed it in the cleavage of two limbs, lashing the edges around and around. Each of the branches was thicker than the man himself and probably weighed more than he did, too. They wouldn't break when the nests were hung, or even when the set dressers climbed inside to test them out.

Then why was Agata holding her breath?

Why was she waiting for the gunshot sound of a branch breaking?

Paolo didn't look up. He thought over, under, over.

The branch leaned and moaned. A cut of light opened in the trees and it stunned her.

The man in the nest shouted Whoa! Whoa! Easy! But neither of them understood the language he was speaking.

Neither of them heard the director, shouting their names from the beach.

Neither of them heard until he was there, in mud-drenched hip waders and smeared glasses. Neither of them saw him until he was shouting—that he needed the effects team, the prosthetic fell off, where the fuck have they even
been
all morning?

By the time Agata saw Ugo striding straight up to Paolo and shouting demands, both men were red-faced: Ugo with shouting, Paolo with shame and silent rage. By the time she'd jogged up to meet them—yelling I'm here,
we're
here, hey, what's the problem?—by then she was too late.

Paolo didn't even look at her as he spoke, his voice so much steadier than his expression.

It was my wife's idea to leave and go help the set dressers, sir.

Behind them, the nest lolled too far off the branch and someone yelled in Italian: less slack,
less
!

I won't let her make these decisions anymore, Paolo said. It will not happen again.

Agata didn't get to say what she wanted to say, then:
But
we're partners.
She barely even opened her mouth.