What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [69]
She’d stood in ketchup, movie paint, and all manner of liquids, the special-effects guys watching how it pooled around her feet, mixed with the water, and here it was. Chocolate syrup—but in black and white, it was a terrible river.
Start dancing. To the right. Slowly.
She sees herself face the back of the shower wall and clenches in her seat as the knife comes down, despite the pantomime.
Her feet turning, the river churning now in deep, horrible color.
I want to see the fingers. Show me the fingers. She showed them, and there they were, out of focus.
The silhouette exited the bathroom forcefully. An angry, venal exit.
Her hand again, extended like a starfish. And now she saw the power of repetition.
Keep your hand there and turn slowly. She did so with a look of resignation, her body slumping into the tub.
Reach out. Extend all your fingers. Hands did everything here: tore up, cleansed, revealed, resisted, murdered. Now it was a single hand, reaching, with nothing for it to hold but the shower curtain. The Las Vegas girl, her breasts barely in focus.
From overhead, like before, it was easy to see she’d had nowhere to go. Yet it had happened, the way God looks down at everything and lets it happen.
The hooks on the shower curtain popped off in release, twirling around the shower rod, one by one, like dancers releasing their movements in sequence.
She slumped near the toilet, the hardest part of all, the rim of the tub lodged in her ribs.
The showerhead looked down at everything.
The blood streamed down, second by second, the tub being rinsed clean. It spiraled into the drain, disappearing.
And then her own eyes, in a close, tight focus and a slow, painful pullback, trying not to blink. But it had been worth it, her face frozen in the stupor of cruel death, the close-up of her eye. A spiral, a circling. The slow dance in the tub repeating. Such brutality meant erasure, a cold, unblinking eye, a woman lying in a pool of her blood, which was draining away, vanishing. The bathroom in near silence, save the flow of the water, as the camera glided over to a newspaper concealing the stolen money.
The Actress watched the rest of the film in disbelief, terrified at the shock, but strangely satisfied at her last, unblinking appearance, her face registering—for the first time she could remember in a film—that a death meant something. An absence. There was something unsettlingly gorgeous about the slow spiral of her eye, the movement gradually coming to a finish, the way a dance ends.
She wasn’t in the rest of the picture, and yet she was.
At the close of the film, she stood up proudly as the people in the screening room—the other stars, some of the crew, some of the studio people—congratulated one another on a job well done. She knew she had nailed it. A death scene, what every actress wanted. Even if it wasn’t a hospital, a slow and wasting disease.
This had a dark beauty to it. The character worked because of everything that had come before, the suggestion she’d granted to her in the quiet, strange flashes of feeling across her face. The Actress shook more hands, proud, grateful. Might this ever come again, the chance to make a woman out of nothing but words on the page? The woman had to live before she could die. It was as simple as that. Even if it was the vulgarity of real life—the needs and the mistakes, but also the desire to correct them, the effort toward a forgiveness of herself. A woman like that. All those lonely hours. All the things people do to try to escape.
Part Three
Ten
When had she picked up the habit of faithfully reading the Los Angeles Times every day? Not the Californian, the local newspaper she glanced at while at the kitchen table or in the motel office or swiping down the café counters, but the print from over the Grapevine, the pulse of the large city but a couple of hours away. At the café, Arlene had always been left to clean up the discarded copies of Modern Screen and Look that the girls left behind, and for a while she took these home with her on the sly, the magazines