This Location of Unknown Possibilities (21 page)

Between one call and the next Marta realized another plus: she'd write off the entire as moderately interesting, a novel anecdote for the Speck family Labour Day barbecue that would be hobbled somewhat by the fact she could hardly claim to be rubbing shoulders with tabloid-worthy, tantrum-prone celebrities. Still, she could bank on the story being better received than another account of conference proceedings—“dishwater dull,” her mother's verdict—or book chapter progression (“In English, please?”); even low-budget B-movie-making possessed greater mystique than academia ever could.

And for once she might forestall her older brother's annual jibe—“Rrrriing, it's the Venetian, sis.
They're looking for a Joan Rivers replacement. Are you free?” For as long as he'd been saying it, Marta had suspected that beneath the jokey utterance lay half-baked sublimation, a tough shred of inert anger about her panicked grad school decision that never dissolved. He'd cure those supposed bleeding ulcers of his if he'd let go of issues like that. Lester wanted to be known as Les Speck, and tolerance for the attendant jokes and Zero as a nickname was his prerogative; an umlauted “e,” one discarded consonant, and legal paperwork had given Marta sublime peace of mind for a time.

Driving around with tourist bonhomie remained a solid alternative, true. Instead, Marta thought that arriving at Joan's after an unhurried people-watching breakfast at the O-K would be satisfying—well, satisfying enough. She'd miss the genteel winery tours and raucous jet skiing promoted by the local tourist board, but liked the idea of that routine. Owning the unrestricted leisure of a contented ghost, she could show up and disappear to suit her whims. If she awoke one day with a craving for a family vineyard and flights of tart small-batch wines, those choices would be recreational too: which estate, when to go, what to wear? The production wouldn't miss her—a dogsbody VUP, the quintessence of non-vital personnel—at all when she slipped away.

Unplanned and all-expenses-paid, the stay in the valley could be called a workation, she concluded, one whose day began with chirping birds and startling blasts from the noise generators farmers invested in to prevent those sugar-loving marauders from swallowing their entire livelihood. Marta had risen early for years; her body's internal alarm ran automatically, turning it off required medication. And if her mind relented and sleeping in occurred, the blazing perimeter appearing around the drapes each morning penetrated as inescapably as the mechanical bird-scattering commotion; even a night mask couldn't stop a response to the sun's infernal nudging. The Star-Lite indeed.

WRENCH

1.

“P
roblem, boss man.
A biggie. Shitstorm's arrived, more like it,” Lora telegraphed from behind the desk as Jake fussed with Joan's obstinate front door.

That the tumult of words—and skier-facing-an-avalanche pantomime: spread hand high in the air, a doomed self-preservation effort—preceded his assistant's customary seize the day greeting of “Good morning, boss man, want me to send out for coffee?” informed Jake that the set schedule had already plummeted into the mud, even before he'd clicked on the laptop or punched in a single call. And since there'd been no head's up en route, he gathered that whatever bad luck had dumped in his lap the pile fumed angrily.

“Now we have to pull a rabbit out of our asses.”

“Well, that's news from left field,” he said, crouched to fist pound a hinge.

Along with everyone else at the office, Jake had long been resigned to the inevitable: something always fucked up and without fail fires needed extinguishing. Ho hum, that was the nature of the job. Cold sweat resulted from the severity—how many hours to fix it? How many dollars would it siphon from the budget?

“Okay, what's up? Who did what? Who didn't do what?”

“Seems our Dol'rez slash Lizzie needs replacing—pronto,” Lora replied, still at the desk and evidently on hold. “Good morning to you, by the way, strong coffee's on.”

“Bring me up to speed.” Jake strode to close the distance. Coffee could wait a minute; Lora's bellowed news broadcast had shattered the morning's blue sky calm.

“Okay, from what I've heard it went down like this: crew guys were setting up and sound was running into a technical glitch that was taking up tons of time, business as usual in other words, and that's when they heard ‘Omygodomygodomygod' and a shriek. Turns out that Dol'rez had shown up at the crack of dawn and was ‘getting a feel for the scene'—Little Miss Method—and when the crew started making noise, the airhead got huffy and told them she ‘needed space,' so wandered off toward one of the fields in the back of the Hebe place. . . .” She raised an index finger.
“Okay, okay, sayonara to you too, buddy,” Lora said, slamming down the receiver with hammer force. She grabbed her bucket hat, jetted the chair back, and began a hasty offensive toward the front of the building, spitting out “Hold on a sec” as she strode by Jake. A moment later she paced the sidewalk.

In the kitchen Jake sniffed the coffee. Watery or strongly acidic, Lora's brews pleased their maker alone.

“Anyway, sorry, taxi drivers aren't FedEx, not by a bloody long shot.” Lora rushed in and used a dish cloth to dry agitated hands. “It's so goddamned hot already, who the hell can take it, Christ!”

“The chair, Lora.” Jake recognized incipient meltdown. “Let's ease up on momma's little helper for a couple hours. Alright, Betty Ford?” Even though experience had taught Lora the wretched results, she chain-drank coffee the instant Category
4
stress manifested.

“Okay, okay, I hear you.” Lora sat, hands on lap.

“Can you continue now, my little hummingbird, or are your nerves shot,” Jake asked, arms crossed and back at the kitchen counter. “Need some agua? A nibble of Klonopin?”

“I'm just fine, thank you.” Lora tore off the hat and pitched it toward her desk. “Oh, where was I? Right, okay, Dol'rez screaming, I'm there,” she said, resenting Jake's kindly but firm nurse routine. “Apparently—this comes from Baby Dick, who by the way is in fine form today—she'd seen an old irrigation thing, you know, a flume, like a small aqueduct, I guess farmers had built one high on the hill decades ago and then left it there to rot after they got the modern system. She went to check it out. I have no clue why, maybe she thought laying hands on a relic would help her get into character. Who can say? Then—get this—just a few feet away she slips on something soft and totally freaks out, thinking it was a rattlesnake. The woman—and I'll quote her resume: ‘an ex former model based out from Europe'—was born in Manchester and now lives in Burbank, so I doubt she'd recognize a rattlesnake if she did step on one.”

“A snake attack?” Jake snorted: when asking Nicos about snakes he hadn't been serious.
The budding smile died as he pictured the actress's tainted blood racing as she tore through the grass, venom creeping stealthily toward an unsuspecting heart: between media attention and insurance payouts, this accident could be fatal in more ways than one.

“Nope. Who knows, it was a cow pie probably. You ready? When she spazzes out, she takes off screaming down the hill and veers off into a little rocky area and trips.” Lora's grin spread. The hassle of it all aside, the situation didn't exactly inspire shock and dismay. What snake-fearing fool wanders off alone when she's in rattler country? “Mind you, she also told me that she'd been a ‘hare's breath' from being the spokesmodel for Chanel, so you gotta wonder.”

“Okay, so, sprained an ankle?” Jake guessed. No big deal, they could work around that. “Broke it?” Less fortunate, crutches would be a hurdle.

“Nope, way worse. She fell, face-planted actually, into cactus. Rocketing at full speed. Brittle prickly-pear cactus, they're called—that's more info from Nicos. They grow wild in patches here. Long stiff needles pin-cushioned her entire face. Keyword: she's a hot f-ing mess.”

“Fucking Christ!” Jake tapped his fingers on the desk. “Just her face, though, that's good.”

“Um, no.
They jabbed right through her robe and into her scrawny carcass. She's allergic, not to mention skinny as the rails I hear she's fond of snorting on weekends. Apparently, Dol'rez looks like a piglet ambushed by a rabid porcupine, then drowned. That's Baby Dick's call on it. First Aid's arranged for the ambulance trip already. She's totally out of the picture. Totally.”

“You have got to be joking. Crap!” Jake turned for his office. “Man, looks like I need to make some calls. Where the fuck is Chaz? Where is everyone? I need some real coffee, then set. Maintain the fort till I wrap my call, okay? Is Nicos in the vicinity?”

2
.

J
ake lowered the receiver, feeling the gratifying flush of reward.
Good ol' dopamine
, he thought. Brain parts had been humming in unison—problem to spatialize and resolve; motivating fear of humiliation, failure, and punishment; duress of the ticking clock—and in congratulation a few extra squirts of a feel-good chemical currently flooded neural corridors. He hoped the feeling wasn't a champagne toast at midnight,
SS Poseidon
-style.

“Okay Lora, we've MacGyvered something,” he bellowed, closing the laptop. “We're going to meet about the details. Can you hold down the fort?” The question required no answer.

A BAITED HOOK

1.

T
he day's earliest plan: to grab a quick breakfast with Chaz. He'd told Marta she could ride shotgun afterward while he drove all over hell's half acre. Chaz had hinted that the intermittent quotation from Tarantino and vintage double-bills, the director's stock-in-trade, was meant as jest. Marta didn't believe that for a minute. Winked references saved him from the appearance of sincere
Easy Rider
worship, she knew—guilty herself of a similar attitude when it came to the conservative yearnings for
Kinder und Küche
wrapped within the DNA of the chick lit she dipped into now and then before sleep—but Marta found that mapping Chaz's interior life as a hoard of fantasies built atop macho scenes of B-movie anti-heroism made sense. She'd bet that
Mad Max
iterations represented a key part of the man's Halloween costume history, donned with claims of ironic intent, naturally. Right now a cache of the remainders might well be hanging in his condo's storage cage.

Chaz knocked a few minutes early and waited outside as Marta rushed to finish dressing, all-weather jeans now an emblem of cemented honorary crew membership.

“Change of plan for me,” he murmured, voice close to the security chain. Lacking an alternative, they'd planned to eat at the O-K. “Problem at HQ.”

“Oh, really. What's happened?” Marta spoke loudly toward the closed door.

“One of the actors freaked out or something. Lora didn't go into gruesome detail. ‘Get in here asap' was her message for me, basically.”

“Who melted down?” Marta brushed her hair and peered into the bathroom mirror.

“That Irish chick with black hair,” he said, now at the window.
“You know, the one playing the maid.”

“Dol'rez Chase, she's English.”

“That's the one, yeah.” He breathed asthmatically into the door frame, “Leia, my daughter, the Force commands you to move with great haste.”

Marta unfastened the chain and swung the door open. “Thirty seconds, alright? I need to apply sun block. Then I'll drop you off, how's that? I'll make my way to the O-K. I can get you breakfast to go if you'd like.”

“Sure thing. That rocks.” Warm air rushed into the room. “Chuck me the keys, alright. I'll wait in the car and get the AC blasting.”

2
.

M
arta parked near Joan's and waved after Chaz said, “Catch you later.” She watched his nimble gait—rapid, a hustling stride about to accelerate into a trot—before securing the car. A few paces along, she halted. She'd stowed the tote in the back seat; the script in it would be handy over breakfast.

“Top of the morning, Dr. Mar,” Luna said as Marta chose a booth. “Hot enough for you?”

“It's not bad so far.”

“Just you wait, the day's young. Where's your friend?”

“He was with me until three minutes ago. There's trouble on set.”

“Oh wow, what happened?”

“Apparently there was an accident of some kind. I really can't say more.”

“Okay, my lips are sealed.” Luna mimed a zippered mouth. “The usual?”

“Yes, please.”

Marta removed
The Battle of Djoun
and flipped through pages marked with coloured tabs. Back when she'd actively planned to attach scenes and words as beneficial as fish oil, Marta had pored over and annotated the mutated script while wearing, she supposed, a catalogue of expressions that ran between ire, amusement, and confusion. Defeat would have shown there too.
She'd paid closest attention to the transformations of Lady Stanhope of course; as for the re-purposing of the bit players, those she noticed as well.

Unlike the rest of the crew Marta had hands-on awareness that with the exception of her indispensable Mrs. Elizabeth Williams, the former flesh and bone servants of Lady Hester Stanhope had been condemned for eternity in trans-continental dispatch exchanges filed in humidity-regulated storage deep within the Victoria and Alberta Museum's Special Collections Department. She'd visited those insulated storerooms during one of two research trips to London, where thrift had turned out to have as much importance as the contents of the acrimonious and sporadically paranoid letters.

Lady Stanhope's procession of servants had been characterized wholesale in damning ink as shiftless and rude gossips, or as petty thieves who connived and resisted authority—another bundle of proof that victors write history. The letters accused the alleged laggards of not knowing their place; line by line they became synonymous with problem children whose constant misbehaviour practically begged for the harsh reprimands and occasional bouts of corporal punishment meted out by their imperious governess. Scrubbed of distinctions they languished in near invisibility, skulking background figures, interchangeable, vaguely malevolent, and as irritating as bottle flies.

The Battle of Djoun
kept the unwashed mass as extras that swept, gardened, and cooked, existing primarily as mobile edge-of-frame scenery before the predatory alien's grand entrance. They were dispatched horror film-style soon after, unsuspecting and one by one—and silently too: speaking roles cost a mint. The alien enjoyed their deaths like low-calorie hors d'oeuvres, biding its time before ascending the social food chain, intent on savouring the tastiest morsel—finely marbled aristocratic flesh tartare—last.

The script dispensed with steadfast Mrs. Williams altogether while amalgamating the servants' surplus of reputed bad qualities and stuffing all of them into Lizzie, a vain first-rate conniver granted no family name. Charcoal eyes squinty with schemes, face drawn habitually to reflective surfaces, and feckless grasping hands forever slipping pricey baubles into impoverished hand sewn pockets, she owed her existence, Marta concluded, to Iago and that free-floating population of maligned figures, from Cinderella's step-sisters to Leona ‘only the little people pay taxes' Helmsley, whose resolute jowls relayed a steady conviction of being owed a princely sum, far greater than the pittance their owner felt life had supplied.

And like those reality-TV contestants who proclaim “Winning is my destiny” to any nearby microphone and without a modest blush of hesitance—as an indisputable fact, as though the very cosmos would overturn timeless, absolute laws to assure the outcome and confirm a clock-like order to existence that served the particular needs of Addie-Mae Chesterfield from the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama—Lizzie's faith bubbled mightily, an effervescent tonic that caused her mind to brim with sure thoughts that the ill-gotten reign of Lady Swinburne, a cruel and undeserving mistress, would never endure. Any day, and by the swift act of a just God, servant would become master. Order restored by divine intervention.

In a show of ladylike kindness, Lizzie would then reserve a place for the fallen and humiliated mistress. After all, with so many other fertile lasses vacating their posts in shame, a reliable maid, one in no danger of becoming pregnant and receding into the shadows during the blackest hours of the night, took priority status.

Though the maid role wasn't pivotal, the underhanded motives did provide a necessary subplot—larding to help stretch out
The Battle for Djoun
to the contractual
88
minutes. In scenes set days before the alien's crash landing, Lizzie conveyed a fondness for machination primarily through facial expressions and inflections of voice since the speaking parts appeared sparsely: “Yes, Ma'am,” “Right away, Madam,” and “Milady, the Doctor requests your company.”

Marta imagined that Lizzy would look the part; a combination of subtle qualities—facial shape, makeup, hair, manner of dress, body posture—could transmit her uppity villainous qualities at a glance. Later scenes, soliloquies really, took place in the kitchen and in Lady Swinburne's bedchamber, and swept away any lingering doubt.

Lizzie's penultimate appearance also contained the longest speech. In it, the solitary maid withdrew one of Lady Swinburne's formal gowns from a steamer trunk and clasped it closely while directing a gaze to the polished sterling silver back of a hairbrush, held up with a free hand. Marta had tentative faith that an actor of the right calibre could squeeze pathos from the thudding words:

INT. LADY SWINBURNE'S BEDCHAMBER - DAY.

LIZZIE

My dear Sultan, you are too kind indeed.

(curtsying at the brush)

Verily, I cannot accept so extravagant a gift.

That you hold me in such high esteem is surely enough! You insist?

Such a wealth of gems could only attract the covetous eyes of my impudent servants.

True, I am indeed perhaps too kind to them, too kind altogether. And yet to cut off the hand of a thief, as is the custom in the land over which you reign, that extremity, if I dare say so, is contrary to the lawful civility of my fair island home.

She pauses, as though listening to the Sultan speak. A beat.

Oh, if it pleases you I shall place the necklace of rubies upon my neck.

My, they're so lustrous.

A complement to my own fair beauty you say? You flatter me so, Sir!

(giggles)

'Tis so, kind gentleman, I must inform you.

After sunset, Lizzie's ungoverned ambition propelled her to strike a diabolical bargain. Once Lady Swinburne had retired to the bedchamber, Lizzie harnessed a horse and rode toward the crash site. The consequence: predictably dismal. The maid's blithe negligence of folklore—no one signs a contract with a demon and wins—foretold a severed head planted in the sand minutes later. Though in a roundabout way, Marta conceded, Lizzie did receive poetic justice in the form of a bloody ruby necklace.
Very Angela Carter
, Marta thought, touched by the screenwriter's unexpected flourish.

Marta could see that Lizzie's revelation scene would appeal to any young actress on a quest for clips of CV-worthy material. Even with the dimwit echo of Lady Macbeth the hairbrush scene contained meat to chew through. Well, gristle anyway.

Lizzie's rationale for forming an alliance with the alien stayed opaque to Marta. The servant lived to better a lowly social status and drape her body with the aristocratic finery that she saw as a birthright. But the alliance with the alien could not result in a marriage of any kind; even for loopy logic of
The Battle of Djoun
a cross-species liaison was no possibility.
Perhaps Lizzie lacked the backbone to murder Lady Swinburne and consequently needed to enlist the alien. The reptilian predator certainly had no qualms. If so, what could Lizzie hope to offer in exchange? Nobody debated the alien's self-sufficiency. No matter, Marta had decided. Plumbing character psychology hardly defined the story's central principle. A functionary, a necessary sacrifice to a bloodthirsty plot, Lizzie read as a villain, and the eventual headless corpse toppled in the sand provided reason enough for the scenes devoted to her. Gory punishment—the reassuring Romans
6
:
23
message T-shirt worn by the pro-wrestling fan who'd swear on his mother's grave that bad things happen to bad people—reared up as the pay off. Revealing the drives of an embittered illiterate maid with delusions of silver-spoon refinement? Not a chance. The screenwriters must have skipped classes on kitchen sink realism to chase Tyrants in
Resident Evil
instead.

3
.

“W
ell, speak of the devil,” Lora said, breaking off a conspiratorial huddle with Chaz. “Question: Are you ready, lady? We think we've come up with a special job, just for you.” Although Lora smiled gamely, Marta heard undertones of mischief in the bubbly voice, notes of a dark promise.
The task, Marta suspected, would be belittling and unrewarding, in line with the miller's daughter's literally do-or-die assignment in
Rumpelstilzchen
.

Marta believed her mother had thrilled at intoning “Once there was a miller who was poor” with a strange, richly portentous relish, the eventual emphasis in the telling underscoring the miller's empty boast rather than the troll's comeuppance. As Marta grew older Dianne served the tale alongside a real-life snippet from high school that involved pushing an uncooked bratwurst down a hallway with her nose, a sorority initiation rite that doubled as a queer public humiliation in a Prairie town of Teutonic immigrants. Eventually she dropped the fairy tale; the sausage parable, however, had staying power.

Both stories, to the speaker at least, existed only to teach the same lesson: the trusting person is wise to grow a hard shell; wariness prevents injury. Thanks to Dianne, Marta's childhood imaginings had been populated with normal-looking people with secret elaborate schemes and fairy tales with sinister parallels to daily occurrences—beware millers and false promises, beware popular girls carrying deli meats.

“Chaz tells me you're up to speed on the Dol'rez incident.”

“Not exactly. I heard there was some problem with her.”

Lora had already unraveled the detailed version of the incident several times. She reduced it to essence for Marta: “There was an accident on set and now we really need to replace that actress.”