We Eat Our Own (13 page)

Because the instant he heard her begin to object, Paolo wheeled around and slapped Agata, his palm clapping over the hinge of her jaw and her entire ear. Agata heard her teeth snap together in her mouth with a sound like a thick branch breaking. Her gaze landed on the ground and she left it there, too stunned to move her head.

The director looked away from Paolo and Agata, indifferent or embarrassed, wiping his lower lip like the slap had landed on him, too. A skein of tears hung over Agata's eyes; Paolo's hand had left a smear of blue paint across the corner of her lips.

The director looked up at them for one second more, and then said, Figure it out.

Paolo stared at Agata one second more, but she didn't look up to see his expression. She studied her own hands: wet bark, blue paint. Then she heard Paolo's footsteps as he moved away from her, following the director back to the beach.

• • •

Two hours later, the crew returned to the canoes for load-out. By the time Agata reached them, there was one crowded boat left and Paolo was not on it. The sun was gone, too, and she was grateful for the darkness: she did not want anyone to see her crying.

She squeezed onto a bench with the actress Irena, let the men in the bow and the stern take the oars. Agata tried to close her eyes and pretend she was alone, but the river kept swaying, pulling the two women closer together, pulling them apart, together again. Neither of them could see the gunwales to grab onto. The water under the boat groaned. Agata stiffened her posture, to keep them from touching.

But then the actress was leaning into her, her lips close to Agata's ear. Where is your husband? Irena said, conspiratorially, a girlfriend at a slumber party. She was speaking Italian; even if she'd been speaking English, Agata had no excuse to say she had not understood.

He took an earlier boat, she murmured.

The actress smiled. He's still being a dick?

Agata didn't answer.

I heard Ugo chewed you two out today for leaving set without permission, Irena said, twisting the ends of her hair.

No, Agata lied. We're fine.

Did you figure out how you're going to make the bodies? The actress twisted the ends of her own hair between two fingers. Is that what Ugo was so mad about?

We haven't, no.

Because when he stormed off set to look for you guys, we all thought—

We're fine.

Agata bit off the words, curt. The actress stared at her and shut up. The space between them filled with the low sounds of the rain forest, night birds, water, growling. Agata kept her eyes on her own hands, blue-black and too bony in the darkness. The longer she was quiet, the more she could feel the actress' expression deflating, boredom moving swiftly through the actress' body.

Well, tell me if I can help, Irena said, studying her own fingernails. You can make a mold of me if you want. Whatever you guys need. She gazed out over the river, searching for something more interesting.

Agata tuned slowly and looked at the line of the actress' jaw. We don't need to do that, she said.

They didn't need to do that, because she knew everything
she needed to know about the actress. It wouldn't be necessary, because for weeks before they'd left, she had sketched the actress' skeleton in the back of a notebook, used the costumer's measurements to figure out the approximate diameter of her rib cage and her skull. She didn't know any of the new American's measurements yet, but she would do it somehow: she would build a body for him. She would do it in a day, an hour, however fast the director asked, and if it wasn't right, she would tear it down and build it up again. To keep Paolo happy, she had to do impossible things like this. Even if the director decided that none of his characters would die in the end, Agata had to be ready. She looked at the actress. She would approximate what this woman's organs looked like. She would make an exact copy of her heart.

The actress dragged one hand lazily through the water, humming to herself.

And suddenly Agata was angry. It came on her quickly as a heat storm and raised her body temperature until she wanted to shake. She thought of the actress' body, measured and inscribed in a tidy numbered row, in her own handwriting. She watched the actress' vague shape in the dark.

Furious thoughts surged through her mind, thoughts she had to fight not to shout into the actress' ear.

Thoughts like: You brought me here.

Thoughts like: If it weren't for you, I wouldn't be here, and none of this would have happened.

It made no sense and she knew it; what was happening between her and Paolo had gotten worse for months, film after film, and it would keep getting worse until one day it broke. It was not this film's fault. It was not this actress' fault.

But a part of Agata still wanted to push the actress off the boat and watch a swarm of silverfish devour her.

A part of Agata wanted to cry into the actress' thin shoulder
and tell her she had started to hate working with her husband, that it was ruining her marriage.

Agata stared exhausted at the bare sweep of the actress' neck in the dark and realized: she wanted to do both things. They were the same emotion.

She looked at the actress in the dark and decided. She wouldn't try to do what Paolo wanted. She wouldn't try to make him happy anymore. She wouldn't wait.

She would make the bodies herself.

• • •

In the morning when Paolo woke, the window was shut, and Agata was not in bed with him again.

Paolo had rolled onto his back and was waiting for his head to clear when he heard the rush of static. He sat up. He'd fallen asleep with the television on. He rubbed his eyes until an image appeared in the blue glow, clearer than before, shapes bleached down to outlines. It was a woman in a long skirt, running across a field of grass.

He had been planning his apology to Agata, before he'd fallen asleep. It'd been welling up in him all day yesterday, as he jogged after the director to the beach, as he repaired the prosthetic on the actor as he was told, as he repainted the clotted blood under the fingernails of all the extras. Steadily, just like Agata knew it would, his rage had dimmed while he worked. And then his guilt had begun to rise: an image of his wife, blue paint on the hinge of her jaw.

Paolo was not the kind of man who knew how to put words to feelings like this. All he knew was that he had to stay awake until she got home. He turned the television on. He tried to keep his eyes open. But it had gotten so late, and then he had
thought he was dreaming the sound of the door, the shift in the level of the mattress and the rustle of the sheets as she lay down.

In the morning, Paolo climbed out of bed, his headache tight like a swim cap over his skull. He opened the curtain but there was nothing outside it but the lunch tent, bustling with people.

When he turned back to the
TV
, the woman on the screen was gone. There was a long shot of water rushing through a narrow channel.

• • •

Agata hadn't been in bed, because she hadn't slept all night.

She paced around the parking lot, planning what she'd do. She made herself go back to the room, to sleep just a little while, but she only lay on her back and searched the ceiling. She waited until near sunrise and then she went walking in the village. She walked until the village woke up, and then she found someone who could help her.

The man had a pig on a leash, and he told her he was taking it to the river. Or at least that's what Agata thought he said, when he spoke to her; she didn't understand Spanish, but when he talked slowly, she could parse the basics. It worked the other way, too: she said, Is twenty pesos enough, and he said, Sí.

She said, The whole animal?

He said, Claro.

But when Agata said, I want it butchered, the man's brow furrowed. He picked at a scab by his ear and said back, Mascota? She didn't understand, so she said it again—Butcher, butcher, macellare—but he just held out his hand.

She put the money in it. Her mouth was dry, but she took the leash from him.

• • •

Paolo found Agata in a tiny clearing she'd made fifty meters from the lunch tent, the bush hacked back to give her space to work. He was going to ask why there, but then he saw the blood on her hands, the ground, the trees. She had already made most of the prototype.

She didn't look up at him. She worked and murmured, I tried to cut the bacon thicker. He watched her crane her wrist under the skin and dig for an intestine.

The grease will show better if the bacon is thick, she said. You want the muscle to look fresh, right?

Paolo watched his wife wind the wet meat around the tree limb, the white fat spiderwebbing as it stretched. Her hands were covered in blood and sinew and a thin, white oil he didn't know the name of.

He had planned to tell her that the director had found him in the breakfast tent, where he'd gone to look for her. He had planned to lie to her—to say that director had apologized for the day before, for getting carried away, that their jobs were safe, they were safe, that he had overacted and he was sorry.

He wanted to make her feel better, but what the director had really come to tell them was that he had some thoughts about the new actor. The American. The replacement for the idiot who hadn't even gotten on the plane.

Paolo could have said, We need to talk about what happened yesterday.

He should have insisted.

But the director had a sleepless look about him that morning, a bruisy purple at the corners of his eyes. It unsettled Paolo. He kept squinting at the light beyond the tent like it hurt him, his gaze settling too long on the middle distance.

I'm sorry we don't have the body form done, Paolo stuttered. I know you gave us a deadline.

I doesn't matter. I don't know if I'll kill him yet.

Paolo furrowed. Are you sure?

The director laughed. No, of course not.

Because if you decide you want one, Paolo said, we really need to know two weeks out. Three, ideally. I'm sorry I told you we could do it faster. Do you know when we'll shoot—

He might survive, Ugo said. He might not, I don't know yet.

Paolo paused. You mean his
character
might survive?

I've been tired, lately. Ugo had a weird, questioning lilt to his voice; he tipped a sugar shaker over his coffee and watched it stream. This production schedule, he said, it takes it out of you. Don't you think?

The sugar poured for a three count, four, five. There was something about his face. A single wrinkle running across it at a firm horizontal, like a scar. Paolo stared at it. He couldn't look the man straight in the eye.

So when the director laughed, the wrinkle deepening and spreading, it startled him like a shove.

You remember when we worked on
Savage Rites
? Ugo said. You remember that fucking—what did I ask you to do, the scene where the girl got her eyeballs gouged out with the arrow­head?

That was nothing. Glycerin and champagne grapes.

It looked so real.

It wasn't hard.

It wasn't hard! Ugo laughed. See, you had your shit together then.

He kept laughing. He kept stirring the upper centimeter of his coffee. Shame burned through Paolo and he put all his energy into hiding it. He stared at the director's cup and pictured
mounds of sugar heaped at the bottom, still as underwater mountains.

I want us to push ourselves, Ugo said. For once. All of us. I don't want this to be just another . . . fucking mondo, gory, exploitation, schlocky piece of—

That's what we do.

I know this is hard on everyone, Ugo said, and did not apologize.

By the time they got on set, Ugo would have assembled himself again, patted down his hair and thrown a steely expression up. He would be all commands, ordering the set dressers to rethatch a waterlogged roof, contorting the actors into positions they didn't understand, for scenes he hadn't yet put on paper.

This was Paolo's only chance to speak.

But Paolo didn't say: I still need the specs.

Paolo didn't say, You shouldn't have attacked my wife and me.

Paolo didn't say what he'd planned to: It was not her fault. I was wrong.

He didn't say anything. He watched Agata, her arms streaked in the pig's fluids. He looked at the pig's head where she'd thrown it off to the side, the ragged cut she'd made. He felt something inside himself shift out of its proper position.

I wonder if I whipstitch it, she said. Will the cannibals be able to tear it off?

When she looked up at him, her eyes were bright with something like love, but still uncertain.

Paolo swallowed, knelt down next to her. Said: I think that it will work.

RICHARD

Ovidio

T
he first time you see the body, you're eating pineapple spears in the lunch tent and playing a Colombian card game you won't remember the name of. You don't realize what you're looking at, at first. You just see the couple who does special effects staggering out of the jungle with something hoisted between them, the woman's cropped black hair mussed with sweat and something else, the man looking rattled and grim. Whatever they're carrying is red and wrapped in a clear plastic tarp. It's only when the woman stumbles and curses—Cazzo Madonna—that the tarp slips open and you catch a glimpse: a flayed red shoulder, skinless and slick.

You startle, bite down on your tongue hard and the man wraps the body back up.

Across the picnic table, Irena smiles and tilts her head behind her cards. I think that's your corpse, Richard, she whispers, and you laugh and grin back.

• • •

By now, you're starting to tell yourself a story about Irena, about the friendship the two of you have struck up. In quiet moments, you find yourself practicing in your head how you'll explain it to Kay when you get home: Pretty much no one talked to me for six weeks solid, but my costar, Irena, she was a really cool girl. You can hear just how you'll say it, the casual intonation, the smile and the shrug. You never ask yourself why it needs rehearsing.

You met Irena in the lunch tent your first day on set, thirteen minutes after you saw an extra hack off Fabi's leg, twelve minutes after you vomited all over a kapok tree and the shoes of a nearby cameraman. Fabi himself had been the one who trundled you over there, who'd explained that he was fine, who'd shown you, with bizarrely articulate gestures, how they'd buried his real leg in mud and placed the prosthetic just under the rolled cuff of his jeans with a blood balloon strapped to the joint. He'd called over the woman from the effects crew and showed you the props: a mannequin leg just like the one you saw in the river and what looked like a latex condom filled with viscera. Fabi showed you the fake machete, too, knocking it against his forearm a few times to demonstrate that it was dull. He found a
PA
who spoke English to help him explain that he's a producer, yes, like he told you, but also an actor; the budget couldn't pay for both.

He'd told you to relax and have some lunch, that they'd call you back up later.

But instead you'd just sat, humiliated, on a folding chair. You watched iodine tincture mushroom and settle in your water glass, trying not to look up at the crew as they filed past you for the buffet. You closed your eyes and wished that you were home, and that was when you heard Irena's voice behind you: I know how you feel.

You looked over your shoulder. Brown hair, an unlit cigarette
behind her ear. She pulled up a chair next to yours. I know it's strange, she said, how Ugo just shoves you into a scene like that.

Then, with a half smile that killed you: And the blood, it does look real.

Here is something you'd never tell Kay:

That Irena flirted from the start. That she spoke with an American accent that you knew right away was fake, to tease you, to see how long you'd let her go on. That you'd flirted back. That she told you, of all things, that her name was Gayle, which you'd learn later was the name of her character, and though you knew she was lying about something, you kept playing along with the joke. Irena had all the easy tells of a method actor refusing to drop character between takes: her head listing to the left when you asked her a question, her gaze following a beat behind the motion. Her smile was just a millimeter too wide, her accent off only a touch on the palatal consonants. She told you how she'd gotten used to Ugo's method after the second time he'd shoved her into a scene without a script, and then she'd mixed in a story about growing up in Delaware, burst out laughing and dropped the ruse when you asked her to name literally any town in that state.

You laughed with her, so hard your stomach ached. Still, you didn't ask her real name.

Here is something else you won't tell Kay:

That it was not just that Irena was nice to you. That it was not just that she was the first person you'd met since you left New York who had treated you like a friend.

This girl-who-was-not-Gayle stayed with you for the rest of the day, through three more scene shoots and the wrap-up, catching you up on the three weeks of production that you'd missed. You walked for hours together up and down the tree line, your eyes scanning the ground to dodge the creeper vines
reaching out from the bush. You will never admit to Kay that you glanced, just as often, at the deep sandal tan lines burned into the tops of Irena's feet above the tongues of her sneakers. That the shape reminded you of a bird in flight.

You and Gayle-who-was-not-Gayle sat together on the canoe ride back from the set, the man from the props crew glaring daggers into your back whenever you forgot to row. She sat with you on the bus ride from the river mouth to the hotel, too, and told you about everything: about prop skeletons delivered in enormous wooden crates, hauled out of mounds of Styrofoam one-handed and tossed on the beach like they were weightless. Her voice was low and easy as she described the rape and murder scenes they'd already shot, how they made her heart whip against her ribs for hours. It was her first movie, just like you. She was an acting school grad, too, from a conservatory in southern Switzerland you'd never heard of but pretended you knew all about; you had no idea that people from Switzerland even spoke Italian, but you pretended you knew that, too. On the walk from the bus to the hotel, Irena kept her fingertips in the tiny pockets of her shorts, her shoulders hunched sweetly. She paused in the center of a laugh and pointed to the dimming tree line: twenty feet above the mud, in the vertex between branch and trunk, a clutch of orange birds.

Was it subconscious or overt: the tape that settled on the spool in the back of your thoughts and started murmuring? Did you consciously try to convince yourself that this actress' face was unremarkable, that she was the sort of girl who is only sexy for the way she moves, whose entire appeal would be dismantled in a photograph? Even now, after two days together, you can't figure it out. She has flat brown eyes and wide thin lips and dark hair parted and jagged up the middle, chopped at the collarbone. She's skinny in a sort of gawky way, her knees
too bony and her belly round like a teenager's. Maybe she
is
a teenager. You couldn't tell; you still can't, and you haven't asked.

Was it deliberate or not: how long you smiled in that pause, both your eyes on those orange birds, how close you leaned in behind her?

I have a secret, she said suddenly. Do you want to know it?

Yes.

My name is not Gayle. I lied to you before.

It wasn't just that she'd dropped the accent that she'd been slipping in and out of all day: her voice sounded different than it did earlier. Soft and vicious, somehow. A child with a spider in her fist.

I'm Irena. She smiled. It's nice to meet you, Richard, she said, and held out her hand to you.

• • •

You don't know why Irena has been calling you Richard. You haven't asked, and you haven't corrected her. You took her hand and you shook it. You let her fingertips stay too long on the inside of your wrist.

And here is the truth: you
did
think about Kay, for once, in this moment. Here is the memory her touch sparked, though at first you weren't sure quite sure why:

Sharp rust on a doorknob. A crane-necked faucet that spat a brown coil the first time you asked it for water. The sound your suitcases made on the hardwood, the hardwood the landlord painted over with discount-sale maroon house paint that had been gradually peeling away for ten years. Kay's hair, white-blond on maroon as she lay on the floor. It's perfect, she said. I don't think we'll even need a bed.

You made it five and a half weeks before the first big fight. If
you could call it a fight: you, standing in the center of the room with your hands at your sides, Kay, on the bed you'd bought last week, staring at the wash of sleet in the window. She'd found a job at an architecture firm in Midtown five days after you'd arrived. You had picked her up there that night, for a date you couldn't pay for, and that was when it happened.

The architecture firm had broad sweeps of steel everywhere, exposed girders and angular drafting tables and long strips of metal rimming all those massive window panes. Someone was paid to polish everything; Kay didn't do it, and certainly not this coworker she introduced to you now, this Coe, his glasses rimmed in the same steel as everything and polished to the same glow. Coe's hands were covered in
X-
Acto knife cuts, and he held one out to you. He shook your hand and—that's it—his fingers glanced off the inside of your wrist in the same peculiar way Irena held your hand.

You looked him in the eye and faked a smile, a feeling like cold water spreading in your lungs. You took the elevator with Kay in silence, and told her that you didn't want to go out anymore, and took the train home nine silent stops and hiked up six silent flights of stairs before you started to yell.

Kay didn't yell back. Coe is my coworker, she said, her voice whispery and hurt. I don't understand why you're saying these things.

Why did he shake my hand like that, then?

Her face was like a crumpled paper bag. Shake your hand like what?

The floor of your apartment was full of ragged mouths, spreading snags in the maroon latex. You looked at them, and then you tightened your jaw and stared her straight in the eye.

Here is something you'll regret: that you didn't even think about being kind to her. You didn't realize, then, that this can
be the first thing to erode, after you've settled into loving someone: you lose your obligation to be kind.

Here is what you didn't say: that you'd booked a tour upstate that morning, a tour that paid nothing. That it set off a rush of guilt in you that you couldn't process, so you reversed the situation: you told her that she had already done the thing you were about to do to her, that your leaving was her fault. The next day, while Kay was at work, a refurbished school bus that stank of biodiesel pulled up outside your building. The bus had long rows of Mardi Gras beads stapled across the ceiling in three places, each strand like a rib in a Technicolor rib cage. There were bricks of hash stashed under the seats, and a girl, of course a girl, named Zephyr. The company was into the theater of cruelty. You didn't even have any lines; you played a chair, a pillar, a couch that other actors sat on and delivered monologues from Artaud. But in your head, you were not the kind of person who would do this—who would leave the girl he loves to play a chair. That was not something that you could admit to yourself, and certainly not to Kay.

So instead, you said: He shook my hand like a man who was fucking my girlfriend, is how.

You said: I can't live like this. I can't live with someone who doesn't respect me.

You showed up in the apartment again six weeks later, your body wrecked from the show and reeking of fryer oil and drugs even after the gas station shower. You didn't tell Kay that you slept with Zephyr, because you didn't: Zephyr sat on your shoulders for thirty minutes a night and shouted about the apocalypse, her mime makeup sweating off the backs of her calves and onto your black sweater. You told Kay you were sorry, and that's all you had to say. She took you back. Easy as that.

Here is another thought that your brain rejects: that you are in Colombia, shaking hands with a girl with brown eyes that turn gold-black as the sun goes down. That you are in Colombia, and over the course of the next two days, you'll spend all day on set with her, palling around while the director doesn't call either of you up to shoot. That you are in Colombia, and you're doing it to Kay all over again.

• • •

In the lunch tent, you sit with Irena and watch the effects crew haul the prop body through the back doors of the bus.

Hey, how do you know it's my body? you ask Irena, flipping a card, tilting your head toward the lot.

She squints. Well, it's a little fat, she says, and you punch her in the arm.

Seriously.

Irena laughs. Well, I don't know. But if Ugo doesn't shoot with you again soon, he's probably about to kill your character off.

You sneer. He wouldn't kill me off.

Oh? And why not?

Because I'm the fucking lead. You say it like a brag, puffing up your chest.

She cackles.

What! you say. My agent told me!

Your agent hasn't met Ugo.

If I'm not the lead, why'd they fly me three thousand miles to be here?

He's done it before.

He's flown someone three thousand miles and then just replaced them with a pile of hamburger meat?

Irena stops laughing, tosses a peso in the small pot, and looks you straight in the eye. You really still don't know anything about this film, do you, Richard?

I really don't, Irena-Gayle. You toss your peso in the big pot. And I don't know why you keep calling me that.

She turns a card, a little grin playing across her face. Well, then. Let me tell you who you are.

• • •

Richard Trent. He's the lead reporter on the film crew, the one whose idea it was to shoot the footage within the film. The film's working title is
Jungle Bloodbath
; the footage is labeled
Reels 1-4,
twenty-minute spools of Super 8 locked in gray canisters, ostensibly discovered on a recovery mission seventy-­nine days after the crew disappeared. Irena says everything you shoot here will be presented like that: as found footage, white text on a black screen: What You Are About to See Is Real. This Footage Has Not Been Edited or Altered in Any Way. The Whereabouts of Richard Trent, Gayle West, and Joe Michaelson Remain Unknown.