We Eat Our Own (24 page)

The fadeout starts on the screen, and the priest is still over the man, stabbing. The face in the window is dim and unchanged.

You're a psychopath. The man's voice is low from the hall.

Hank coughs once to steady himself, sighs. Kid, he says, however you may have felt about your little dead girlfriend, don't let it make you stupid. He flops down on the couch,
shoves a fistful of popcorn into his face and yells over his shoulder. There's no such
thing
as murder in the jungle.

Hank turns to Ugo. Switches back to English. Now, Hugh, where were we?

He leans forward and swipes at the lens with his thumb; the face on the screen, a piece of remarkable dust, is gone.

• • •

When he gets back to the hotel tonight, Baldo will be waiting for Ugo in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette at the picnic tables. He will not whisper when he talks, when he says that he is furious. He won't lower his voice when Ugo tells him to, when he says that no, it can't wait, they need to finish the conversation that they started this morning.

No, it's not just about the fire.

It's about what they're all doing here. It's about making sure they're safe here. Especially in the town at night.

I just went for a walk, Ugo will say.

But Baldo thinks too many people are going for walks. Baldo's even followed some of the actors, once or twice, after midnight when they run out of beers to drink in the parking lot or their rooms. He'd seen the actress go into the American's house. He'd seen her go out into the jungle and not come back for hours. Of course the actors could do what they wanted—that actress, she seems like a wild one, they probably couldn't stop her if they tried—but suppose something happened to one of them? To Ugo, even?

Suppose that what paid for everything in this town wasn't just canoe rides and nature walks?

Suppose they had more to worry about than just snakebites, out there in the bush?

And this is when Baldo will finally lower his voice, will lean conspiratorially close to Ugo, and stare urgently, trying to catch his eye. I know it doesn't feel like it, but we were lucky with what happened to Paolo, he will say. He lived. We're out an effects crew and I won't let you pull anything like that stunt ever fucking again, but ultimately, on-set accidents are what we have insurance for. What I worry about is off set. What I worry about is the town.

Ugo doesn't respond. He studies the line where the light from the hotel rooms meets the darkness of the bush, an abrupt blackening two-thirds of the way across the lot.

If something happens to one of us, and the insurance doesn't pay out, Baldo says, I need you to know, it won't be me. I won't lose my shirt on this. Especially the actors. Especially the American.

Ugo murmurs: What about him?

Baldo brings the cigarette to his lips, chews the filter for a second in thought and spits it out. We don't know anything about where he's from. If he has family. What if he's, I don't know, the son of an international lawyer, a million-dollar trust fund? What if he's
someone
?

He isn't.

You don't know that.

They found him at some acting school. He isn't anybody.

What if he is? Eh? Baldo points the lit end of the cigarette like a laser. What if something happens to him and it's our fault?

Ugo sniffs.

You know he's been hanging around with the actress, Baldo will say. If she gets him into the same kind of trouble she's been fucking around with, that's international press, right there. It's not the same as one of these Colombians, shit. Even one of
the Italians. Our courts don't let us sue like theirs. American lives are worth something. Real money. Don't tell me you don't agree. If the American is in any danger, Baldo will say in a harsh whisper, then I'm out. I need to know right now that you will do everything you can to keep him insulated from this place.

Baldo will wait for a response.

• • •

But Ugo will have the same feeling at this moment as he does now, a rage that does not belong to his brain. A thought crawling out of him despite his better judgment, hand over hand from his gut to his mouth, slick with bile, intent on coming. He will look at Baldo the way he looks at Hank, across the darkness. He will be queasy with the thought, but when he speaks, his voice will be slow and sure.

In the lot, he will say it to Baldo with the softness of a genuine question. Then maybe we should care a little bit less about American lives?

In Hank's living room, for now, he holds the feeling in his throat. He can hear the man's footsteps striding down the hallway, out the slamming door. He feels the weight of the reel in his hand like the body of a small, dead thing.

He says: About what you said earlier, Hank.

The reel settles on the spool. He pulls out the film to thread it. He pauses to swallow, to study this new, flashing thing that spans the air.

What you described before, how the movies are all the same—we have a word for it in Italian. I think in English it is
camp
.

Yeah, Hank said. That's the word, you've got it.

It is for the stupid. Ugo feeds the sprocket. His hands are
shaking but his voice is not. It is the thing you use to make them watch. For most filmmakers, that's enough. For most audiences, that's enough. Most audiences are that simple.

On Hank's side of the room, there is a change of temperature, an inaudible frequency set wailing. Ugo can't stop talking.

And see, I need stupid people. He winds the reel. I want them. Even if I didn't, I would have them, because the world is full of them: stupid, violent people who want to watch girls being shot in their heads and men cutting out the eyelids of boys and children tortured—oh, but stylized, giallo, always giallo, so they can stomach it and heckle at it and eat while they watch it in a dark room with their hand on their lover's thigh and never
really
feel it—

He switches the projector on.

These are the ones who will come see my film.

And you're gonna make them
really feel it
?
Hank chuckles. Guy, I've seen your movies. You can't do any better. You don't have a better idea in your head.

This film I'm making now is different.

How's it going to be different? Huh? What's the big revelation? What's the
real
way to make a horror movie?

Ugo can feel his heartbeat in the bones of his face. He looks toward Hank, slouching into the shadows on the couch, and he speaks slowly.

What do you think? It will show them what you do to people in this town.

It is too dark to see Hank's expression. The room is quiet, and he does not apologize. He does not stand and scream in Ugo's face. He does not force Ugo to admit that he understood every word he said to the guerilla in the hall. He does not call out a name, and a man with a pistol does not charge through the door to beat Ugo senseless with the grip. All these things
are possible, Ugo knows they are, but none of them happens. Ugo looks at Hank's vague expression in the dark, and thinks about the American actor, and how he will make him die. The answer comes to him in a rush and he holds it there, tight and hot in the fist of his brain.

He has his thumb on the switch, and next to the switch is a dim red light that flares like a pulse.

Ugo, Hank says, pronouncing the name perfectly. Where are you from?

Dust motes swarm in the blue of the projector beam.

Genoa.

It's supposed to be real violent over there right now. Hank smiles. At least the last time someone brought me a newspaper three goddamn months ago, it was. What was it called, the Red Armies? Red Brigades? Some other terrorist groups, communists and nationalists and everything fucking in between, blowing up half of Rome. He chuckles. Those are your people, right? Almost as bad as this shit down here in Colombia, huh?

The screen is full of darkness and names.

So I'm wondering, Ugo—what space have you got to judge? What makes you think you're one to talk about violent people?

Ugo focuses on the movie. When he speaks to the American, he pronounces every word.

Remind me, he says. Where are
you
from?

RICHARD

Ovidio

F
or the three nights after you film the village-burning scene, you skip the bus home from the river mouth.

Ugo is keeping you on the sidelines all day. There's no explanation of why, no mention of a rewrite or announcement that you've been fired, just a quick gesture with his arm: stand over there, we don't need you. The first few times he does it, the crew tries to keep you occupied: the costumers fuss with your hemlines, someone who's filling in for the makeup and effects team pads a glare-proof foundation over the perpetual sunburn on your forehead. But soon they don't bother. The script supervisor whispers to you: You can probably go for a walk, but don't go far.

So you stay. You watch everything.

You start to overhear the rumors. That Baldo is mad at Ugo because of what happened to Paolo, the effects guy. That Baldo is back at the hotel pouting because Ugo won't cut stunts that the insurance won't cover. That without Baldo there to keep him on track, Ugo has thrown out the whole script.

Whatever happened, no one talks about it, and Paolo doesn't come back from wherever they've sent him.

Ugo arranges extras in a circle with drums and palm fans, makes them do a tribal dance with choreography Ugo made up. Ugo makes an Indian row out to the center of the river and stand upright in his canoe for an hour, pretending he has just spotted something coming downriver. Ugo has Irena sprint down the beach, screaming, pursued by no one. Every shot takes hours for him to get right, and then three days later he shoots it again, this time with the Indians naked instead of in grass skirts, this time in mid-morning light, this time at the beauty hour. It's surreal, watching the movie in parts like this, everything repeated and out of order and strewn out over so many days, the drama flattened by randomness, by how goddamned long it all takes. It's like watching the worst kind of art film, the kind designed to test your endurance. The sun beats down on the part in your hair. Your heels ache from standing, so you crouch. By the end of each day, you feel nauseous and insane and convinced that this is a form of intentional torture. You tell yourself, on your walk back from the river mouth, that tomorrow you just won't come to set. No—that the instant you get back to the hotel, you'll demand your passport back. You'll demand a flight. You won't forget what happened to Paolo, even if everyone else is acting like it never happened. What happened to Paolo will not happen to you.

But every morning, you get back on the boat.

Irena tries to visit with you sometimes, when Ugo's getting establishing shots or has finally allowed you all to get lunch.

It's strange between two of you now, since the night in the lunch tent when you cried into her shoulder, since she broke her promise to help you talk to Ugo. You've felt strange
around
Irena, ever since you saw her climb into Ugo's boat after the village burning scene, since you heard her laughing with him in the dark.

You want to ask her to explain, but Irena chatters, sunny and bright and oblivious. Oh, it's always like this, she tells you, ladling hogao sauce over rice. He's an auteur. This is just how he works. It's how a lot of directors are.

You chew. Has he told
you
what we're doing next?

No—she laughs—he had me go out in the jungle and practice running while he critiqued. He says I'm bad at it. He says I flap my hands like a weirdo.

Why does he make you practice it in the jungle? I thought he was shooting that scene on the beach.

She shrugs. He doesn't want me distracted, I guess.

You exhale as you laugh. That's fucking nuts.

Why?

He doesn't even tell you what the scene is? Do you even know what you're rehearsing for?

Not really, no.

How do you decide how you're going to play it, then? How do you pick your motivation?

She looks at you, puzzled and smiling. I just run. God, you're weird lately.

After a few nights, Irena tries to get you to ride the bus back with the rest of the crew, to sit in one of the back rows with her. You refuse, say you need the walk. You bend down to tie your shoelaces so you won't have to look her in the eye.

But tonight she pauses as she climbs the stairs to the door, gives you a look that you can't avoid or parse: innocent but with something off about it. The little turn at the corner of her mouth, her eyes a little too open and shining black in the dark. Her eyes find you again once she's in her seat, staring through the window as the bus pulls away.

You stand a moment alone at the river mouth after they're gone, trying to decide what the look meant. Then you walk,
listening to your own footsteps, the chewing sound of gravel and the suck of mud.

You remind yourself of the things you know: I have a return ticket in four weeks and it is zipped in the inside pocket of my suitcase, safe. I have a life I can go back to. I can find a way to get my passport back from whoever has it now. I will go home.

But your mind wanders to things it shouldn't: fires and women with eyes like animals, gangrene spreading over a kneecap, a plane surging toward the ground. They're the same things you've been thinking of all day, sidelined on set, your paranoia rising every time Ugo calls for a new take and doesn't ask for you to be in it. There's a question at the back of your mind that you can't shake: Why is Ugo keeping you around? What is Ugo going to do to you?

When you get back to the hotel, you go to the main office first and ask if you can use the telephone. I need to call my girlfriend, you say, and when the woman behind the desk just smiles, you say it again, gripping an invisible receiver to your ear. She stares at you for a long time, and then she shakes her head. No teléfono.

In acting school, your teacher used to freeze you in the middle of scene work, straight onto the stage, and crouch down to whisper questions in your face: How do you feel right now, in this instant? She did it just as your thumbs found the pulse points in Desdemona's throat, as your Willy Loman careened off the stage and the guy in the booth cued the car crash sound. Stop. Now. How do you feel?

Joyful, but in a bizarre way, you'd tell her. Anxious. Hungry. Like something terrible's about to happen, but if I try to guess what it is, it'll make it real.

Usually, though, your emotions were still roiling. You couldn't think of anything to say at all.

Back at your room, you slide the key into the door a tooth at a time. You take in a last mouthful of humid air. You ask yourself a question, and then you step into the room.

• • •

How do you feel right now?

The lights are all on, three half-dead bulbs simmering. The television is running, too, the rabbit ears aimed so they register a dim Latin soap opera. The picture is bright and corroded by static. The characters have no nostrils and their eyes are faint black under the snowdrift.

And then the door swings open another inch, and you see her: Irena, her feet golden on the bedspread, her tan a gradient fade as it moves up her legs and over the bend in her knees and under the little white shorts she always wears. The mosquito netting is tucked up, and her back leans against the wall, her head just underneath the framed macaw. She is laughing, and that sound is what sends your nerves crawling toward the surface of your skin.

How did you get in here? you say.

She keeps cackling, doubling over, her face buried in her bent knees. You have to watch this, Richard, she says.

You take a step into the room and ease the door closed.

Enrique just told Ymelda that he's her long-lost twin, but if they're brother and sister, that means the matador they
both
slept with is—oh, God, it's too
funny
—

You don't know where to sit. She's in the exact center of the bed.

Irena sighs, collecting herself. Hey, she says. I'm sorry you've had a rough few days. Her eyes are glittering and dark and she's grinning, her lower lip bitten a brighter pink by her upper teeth. I've been thinking about you.

Above her head, the cross-stitched macaw's eye is a stitched black X; not a circle, but an X, like an eye sewn shut.

You sit down on the bed next to her.

• • •

Here is why Irena came:

To tell you that she's sorry she didn't help you talk to Ugo, a week ago, after you found her in the lot and cried that you were scared. To tell you that she couldn't talk about it before, but she's been conferring with Ugo on her own, and Richard—Richard, I think I've convinced him to do something amazing.

She's convinced him to make Gayle and Richard lovers.

You look at her: the hungry expression like a kid with a birthday cake, her bare feet dirty on your bed.

Irena explains. Since the first draft, Ugo has made Gayle lovers with nearly everyone in the cast—Joe and even a few of the villagers, a mud-orgy scene with most of them, which, in the end, they hadn't been able to properly choreograph. But when you arrived, when Ugo saw the two of you walking on the beach, playing cards in the hotel these last few days, he started to think that maybe he'd found the right partner.

She imitates Ugo's matte-eyed thousand-yard stare, his voice murmuring in Italian around a pantomimed cigarette. Then she translates what he told her: Get to know him tonight, Irena. Keep getting familiar. Tomorrow we shoot a love scene.

• • •

No matter how it starts, this is how it ends:

Her tongue, slick against the inside of your cheek. Her arms around your neck, skinny ankles crossed on the bed, at the base of your spine. She paws at your shirt buttons. She laughs into your open mouth.

You tell her no, at first. You tell her this is crazy.

She tells you, of course it is. That's why it's fun.

But what you meant is that it shouldn't be this easy: to let her convince you. To forget the mix of nausea and fear that you've been swimming in these past few days and kiss Irena back. To forget Kay so completely as you lean closer to Irena, to say Okay, okay, we can. You do not think of Kay as you hustle out of your underwear. You do not think of her as you dig into Irena and stir, a wide circle and then again, like you could scrape her body out. Kay, every piece of her hair alive in the wind. Kay soaked and blue, opening her eyes to find you in a flare of light.

When you kiss Irena, you do not close your eyes.

Here is something that does not happen:

Guilt finds you, finally, in your sleep. It shakes you, makes you look at what you've done, insists that what you've done is real, that you were the one who did it.

Here is what you dream of:

Irena. Still Irena. The topographic perfection of her body. The pockets of shadow that pool in the crooks of her elbows and the hollow between her breasts. A gentle eddy of hair below the navel. A thin scar arching over the hip. The dream has a distinct temperature: the molten core of a planet, suspended in the airless dark. The hotel room smells like wet carpet and suntan lotion and something else—something melted, melting—and as your eyelids twitch awake, the scent enters your brain without your permission.

Tomorrow:

You wake, an awful current of heat still spreading in you, shimmering. Irena is not there.

You felt guilty, didn't you? You felt guilty, and that's why you pushed her off you, why you said what you said next.

Irena, go back home. I have a girlfriend.

You said it. Didn't you?

I can't do this. It's not fair. Everything that's happened—I just feel so fucked up, and I—

But she smiled. Richard. Richard, listen.

She traced the outer shell of your ear and wet-whispered into it.

I am your girlfriend here.

How did you feel?

However you felt, this is what you did: you swallowed once, an enormous effort. You tried to say it as gently as you could: Please put on your clothes, Irena. It's late.

• • •

You do shoot the love scene. Three days later.

The movie is shot out of order, but of course you don't know what the real order is. In the final cut, Richard makes love to Gayle a full forty-five minutes before he burns down the village, an entire hour before the climax of the film. No one tells you just how long this scene comes before Richard finds Veronica, before the final showdown at the rival village. You don't know about the showdown. You don't know about anything. No one gives you the context for the love scene.

You are not prepared.

When you ask for a script, Ugo says fuck a script, that the script is what he tells you.

And really, what difference would it make: if you knew Richard's motivations, if you knew why
anyone
does the things they do?

By the time you shoot the love scene, Irena has not spoken to you for three days—not a word since she left your hotel room at 3 a.m., straightening the hems on her white shirt. When you tried to talk to her, she pretended she couldn't hear, shouted a loud joke to Fabi in Italian, or threw her arm around a cameraman and nuzzled close.

On set it was the worst, because Baldo, you were sure, was definitely gone, and Ugo had suddenly ditched all the scene work, decided it was better to feed you individual lines that you couldn't tessellate into a story. Here we are at the edge of the world—cut. Put it on the fire!—cut. Film it! Keep filming!—cut.
You felt each line flare in you and then pass, like your emotions were sample licks you could call up from the tape deck, play for four seconds and then switch off, toss another on the reel. You felt Irena on the edges of the shot, shouting scattershot lines to her own cameraman: Richard, they're ­coming!—cut. Richard, I love you! Don't do this!

At first, you had tried to plan what you'd say to her—I didn't mean it, or About the other night, or I'm sorry, I should have let you stay. You were going to apologize the very next morning, but the silence that Irena threw up between you was total and bizarre. She would not speak to you, but she
smiled,
any chance she got. Her mouth kept moving, throwing out the punch line to a joke in Italian that made everyone roar, but her gaze stayed fixed on yours, straight across the four feet of dusky water between canoes, a look on her face like she'd just found a kitten on the side of the road.