We Eat Our Own (11 page)

But up ahead, the director is a dozen yards in front of you already, looking over his shoulder impatiently with a tendril of cigarette smoke snaking behind him. He's halfway across the beach by now, nearing an enormous tree at the outer limit of the jungle where shooting must have already started.

You run to catch up with him, the camera in your fist. I'm sorry, you say. I'm tired, I didn't realize it was a prop. Could you—

Non importa. It doesn't matter.

You're still far enough away that you can't see what's going on. It takes you a moment before you realize that your destination is a tree: a tree that you do not know is called kapok, huge with reaching limbs, the bark etched with a labyrinth of deep ridges, all the ridges edged with fluorescent moss. There are three men clustered around the base of the trunk, pointing cameras at something you can't see yet. Beyond them you can hear a whimper and a bark and a scream, all in one voice, hoarse and loudening. Then you step beyond the cameras, into the dark and leafy air of the jungle, into the scene.

Remember it: the sensation of every drop of acid in your gut suddenly roiling, the rest of your body instantly numb.

Fabi is lying on the ground, fainting into the arms of a crouching man who leans into the trunk of the towering tree. A dozen enormous and angry sores are open and weeping pus on Fabi's foot and his foot is thrust out straight in front of him. Black trails of gangrene spread up his leg and split into tributaries. His pant cuff is rolled to the knee, and the rot spreads up beyond it.

The man who's crouching behind Fabi's body has him in a steady headlock, ostensibly to help keep him still. He has an Italian profile and dark hair that skims his eyebrows. He looks directly up at you and speaks clearly, in American English.

Are you filming? Are you getting all this, Richard?

He swallows once, smiles frantically. What does he want from you?

Richard, what are you doing? Film this! We're gonna win an Oscar for this!

You think,
But my name is not Richard
. You don't know how to use the camera; you can't do what he says. You try to lift it up from where it hangs at your side, but the weight of it is suddenly too much for the thin muscles in your forearm, for the thin nerves that control the muscles and the thin electricity that lights the nerves.

A third man, now, staggers in from somewhere in your periphery, a blond man with a heavy moustache and a bandanna at his neck, and he is kneeling, too.

There is a machete in his fist.

He holds it over over that inch of skin just south of the knee joint aiming and God, God, and he is lifting it up, and then bringing it down, and down, and down—

You can't look, but you do.

Seven hacks, straight through the bone. A wet sound, then a hard sound, then the same wet sound again. The blood curls through the mud. The mud steams in the new heat.

The camera makes no sound when you drop it. Your vomit puddles in the spreading tangle of the kapok roots, and the camera man steps closer, says, Bene, bene, bene!

Here is something else you don't know:

What a frame narrative is.

You've memorized Hamlet's monologues, sure, but you've
never bothered to learn the term. You tuned out during most of the Play Structure and Analysis courses you took in acting school. It was irrelevant to you. You already knew that the best characters in
Midsummer
were the Athenians. The mini-play with the cross-dressers and the talking wall—as far as you were concerned, you could take it or leave it. Besides, you know your type: you'd be cast as a Lysander, not a Bottom or Quince. There was no reason to study the rest.

So you weren't paying attention while your acting teacher delivered her lecture on narrative interiority. She made wide gestures as her voice boomed into the auditorium, the fluted sleeves of her batik dress swinging in the air, and this—this—is what you studied. The way she moved her hands and commanded the space, gestures that would work perfectly for a Prospero or some beefy tyrant in a Racine tragedy. You know what the phrase “fourth wall” means, but missed her definition of the “fifth.” Beatnik shit. Who cares? You leaned your head against the back of your auditorium seat and closed your eyes, letting her voice rush over you like a symphony.

• • •

In the final cut of
Jungle Bloodbath,
Richard's footage of the search for Veronica isn't found until the eleven-minute mark. There's a long intro first: a team of American officials journey to find whatever is left of him. They find the film canister, hacking it out from where it's nested, inside a cocoon of human bones and leaves and mud, suspended from the crooked limb of a mahogany tree in the center of the natives' village. The cannibals are bribed. The officials are rattled but triumphant. The footage is brought back to New York, wrapped in blue plastic and stuffed in the darkness of the hull.

The officials watch it: in a private screening in a darkened, red-chaired room, with mounting nausea.

On the screen, live turtles are beheaded by divers' knives. Richard stomps through bush in fatigue-print pants and a green shirt with the sleeves cut off. He orders his men to film the fascia stretching between the pried shells and the blood-dampened meat. Women from enemy tribes are raped brutally with stone obelisks and Richard films that, too. Lit torches angle toward the peaked roofs of grass huts. Brown bodies cower in the windows between the sparking flames.

For these shots, however, Richard is out of frame.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
At the very least, Signor Velluto, you must have known about the extreme conditions your cast and crew would be asked to endure during filming?

VELLUTO:
Define extreme conditions.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
This was an undeveloped part of the Amazon rain forest, no? Complete wilderness?

VELLUTO:
There was a hotel. There was running water.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Untreated water.

VELLUTO:
We supplied iodine.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Mosquitoes?

VELLUTO:
Well, yes.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Disease?

VELLUTO:
Some.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
We've heard testimony about four cases of malaria, three cases of tegumentary leishmaniasis, one man who had them
both—

VELLUTO:
He failed to take his antimalarials. The fungus rot, I don't know how he got that.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Parasites?

VELLUTO:
Am I responsible for every goddamned insect in the rain forest?

PROCURATORE CAPO:
If you choose to bring actors there, yes. You are.

VELLUTO:
It had to be shot there. Authenticity was important to my process. On this film, it was crucial.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Predatory animals?

VELLUTO:
It is the jungle. What would you have me do?

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Provide safe conditions, Signor Velluto, for one. Consider the safety of your actors.

VELLUTO:
They were all adults. They knew where they were going.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Numerous testimonies state that some of them did not. Some have said your male lead flew all the way from America without reading the script.

VELLUTO:
That was different.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
How—

VELLUTO:
That was different. He needed to be kept in the dark.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
And why is that?

VELLUTO:
It was important to my method. He needed to be kept in the dark.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
All this talk of process, method—

VELLUTO:
You asked the question.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
And you didn't give me an answer, signore.

VELLUTO:
It is an answer. He needed to be kept in the dark. It's the answer you're getting. Next question, please.

PAOLO and AGATA

Ovidio

I
n Italy, it would have been simple.

In a studio, Paolo and Agata would have fabricated a mold and filled it with Spam or gelatin, seeded the whole thing through with blood capsules to make it spurt when the cannibals dug their teeth in. Under other circumstances, it could be done in three days, easy, with spares ready. What the director wanted wasn't impossible: three prosthetic bodies, fully edible, with realistic bones that would show when the knives went in deep. They had six weeks to make them, the death scenes slated comfortably late on the production schedule. They'd packed their kits. They'd had a plan. They'd had more than enough time.

But then the director had changed his mind, to four bodies, then two, and then he said: just make parts. But this morning, apparently, the new American had lost his lunch on set and Ugo was thinking of killing his character off early, so have the body ready by sunset tomorrow.

But it is different, to make a body in the jungle.

When they left the polyfoam out to harden overnight, mosquitoes swarmed the molds and died, thousands of them, speckling the form like sores. And fuck running anything in
silicone in this humidity; they'd never get it to cure. After three days of frustration, three nights in a hotel too hot to sleep in and Paolo getting angrier and angrier, Agata had surrendered. They'd just have to magic it with camerawork, plastic prosthetics, quick cutaways. The solution to this wouldn't be in materials: there were more than one thousand kilometers of rain forest between them and the nearest city, no way to ship something better in. Camera effects. Performance. If they could be flexible, they could do it.

They had tried. But the test shots looked like shit.

They filled the washtub in the river, tried to get the prosthetics clean.

We could try making them out of bread dough, Agata said.

He grunted. If we could get any flour.

Will the budget pay for transport?

Not likely. No, it's too far.

Agata chewed her lip, exhausted. She looked up through the ceiling of trees, said: Paper.

What?

Newsprint. She brightened. Or the script sides. They don't even use them anyway. Soak everything in river water, throw in some dirt. Think about it, we could fake a mâché.

But what would we form it around?

I have latex, she said.

But not enough for three goddamned bodies, he snapped. An insect shirred in his ear and he swatted at it.

Agata scrubbed. What about wood?

They couldn't eat it.

They couldn't eat it. Shit.

Around them, the jungle twinkled. Over the river, something cawed. A long silence extended between them.

We could use meat, he said.

Agata smiled.

That's an idea. We could use meat.

The foam in the water seethed at her wrists. The limbs in the washtub bobbed, and Paolo pulled one out to study it: a plastic Halloween leg, hacked off at the knee, rubber sinews trailing.

But even the meat was a hard get.

They were over budget as is. The producer wouldn't okay a flight to the capital, not for a prop. Definitely not for forty tins of shoulder meat.

Agata barely realized she was saying these things out loud, until she heard Paolo curse and turn and hurl the leg into the trees. The sound jolted her: a snap of plastic on bark. She couldn't believe how quickly his mood had shifted from focus to anger.

I'm sorry, she said. I was just thinking—

If you're still thinking it out, Agata, don't waste my time, he said. We need to have come up with a solution weeks—

Calm down.

We're supposed to be professionals.

Paolo. Breathe.

Don't tell me to breathe.

Then go get the leg.

When he didn't, she hauled the tub up with both hands, pursed her lips as she dragged it across the beach. When he stormed off, cursing her, cursing everything, she thought to herself, he'll be fine in a minute. His temper had been getting worse lately, but he always came around. She dumped the river water out on the bank and watched the mud thicken.

He would be fine if she could just figure this out.

A deep gouge appeared in the earth, and Agata watched the river sluice into it, diluting the prop blood and the soap, filling instantly with tiny silverfish.

There has to be meat somewhere, Agata thought. She studied the fish: the brightness of their bodies, the skinny tails flipping in the silt. Not near enough flesh, and it would be the wrong color.

Agata! Paolo called.

She tried to manifest it with her imagination: 200 kilos of pink meat in buckets. Cattle or hog. She thought of her father back in Italy, slicing prosciutto off a pig leg strung over a rafter, and homesickness bloomed in the center of her chest.

Agata, Paolo said, closer now, Hurry up. The canoes are leaving.

She stared into the pink water, sick: the fish were gnawing at a dead thing they'd found buried in the mud.

• • •

When the props were put away, they cut down the path through the jungle, past the permanent sets. The “path” was mostly symbolic: a stripe of wood chips sprinkled over a skinny kilo­meter of mud, every centimeter of it invaded by bush. They could have followed the beach, but that wasn't much better—the way would be clear, but they'd have had to walk the whole perimeter of the peninsula and it would take three times as long. Paolo had wrapped the prosthetics in the beach towel and knotted it so he could wear it like a messenger bag, one strap of terry-cloth hibiscus flowers running across his chest. He needed both hands free to use the machete, to hack down the leaves in their way. Whenever he crouched under a stalk or beat back a rush of grasses, Agata could hear it: the clatter of plastic hands and feet at his back, clambering after him like a ghost.

They didn't talk. They passed the site of the fertility ritual, the rival village, the tree of hives.

All the sets were still being assembled, the ones that wouldn't be sturdy enough to survive the rain still packed in pieces under tarps. Even the ones that were mostly done were almost invisible: it was like a Magic Eye puzzle, finding evidence of their work inside the complex tangle of the bush. A hammer hung out of the crotch of two tree limbs. A boom mike slumped in a bush full of wilted flowers. Needles of light stabbed through the gaps in the foliage. There were piles of hacked strangler vines heaped near the road, to clear the upper third of the shot, and Paolo gestured toward them, said, The park service probably isn't happy about that.

Agata mumbled. There's a park service? She focused on her feet, on not losing her footing in the mud. The first day they'd arrived, she'd thought the mud was particular to the bank, but it was everywhere. It followed them into the jungle. It clotted, black, in the eyelets of her boots. She stopped walking and leaned against a tree, rolled her ankle around to try to shake it off.

Aren't there supposed to be animals in the rain forest? she said. She raked her fingernails through the rubber maze at the bottom of each shoe, but the mud clung.

This isn't the zoo, Agata.

But I haven't seen a single one, she said. Her fingers were coated and she tried to scrape them on the bark. Just this mud. All this fucking mud.

There was an edge of annoyance in Paolo's voice, in the sound his machete made through the leaves. The animals are there.
You
just can't see them. It's a skill.

It's because everything's brown. She squinted—maybe if she took off the boot? She grunted, working the shaft of it down over the knobby anklebone.

Of course everything's brown, Paolo said.

Well, it wasn't brown on the posters in the airport. They
don't tell you how everything blends together. When you think rain forest, you don't think—

Paolo ignored her, sucked his teeth in thought. We can stay on the path if we get this branch hauled out, he said. Put your shoe back on and help me.

Do you think you can learn how to see out here? she said, stomping the boot back on. She scanned the ground for moving scales, bulges of fur, looked up at the leaves and searched for the flick of patterned birds.

The downswing of his arm made a sound unto itself. Then she heard the machete thud.

Who fucking cares, Agata? We're going to be late.

She helped him haul the pieces of branch away. They were si­lent for twelve minutes, and then they were on the beach again.

• • •

They split up at the canoes; the props they'd brought that day wouldn't all fit in one. Agata rowed as the camera guys murmured in the bow. They were starting to get anxious about the heat.

It could get inside the cameras, one said.

Through the plastic?

There are seams, said another. Little splits. It could expose everything we've shot.

When I woke up this morning all my vitamins had turned to powder.

Powder?

The script supervisor leaned from another boat and whispered: The pills had sucked up the moisture out of the air. Can you believe this goddamned place?

They had been told that the director had worked with a loca
tion scout. He'd shown them pictures that the man had taken: yolky sunsets and a sparkling canopy of vines, the silhouettes of naked children playing in dusky water. They'd all signed on, but for what? The pictures hadn't told them shit about this humidity, these insects, this mud. The director hadn't, either.

The camera crew was supposed to be rowing, but no one was paying attention. Their oars cut vague angles in the water. They whispered over their shoulders. If we could just store the celluloid someplace airtight—but where? How can we minimize the muffle on the tape? I played it back on the
DAT
, the fucking flies are all you can hear—

They lost course. The nose of the boat slammed into the bank, and Agata felt the impact shudder in the center of her bones. She had an oar, too, but it was hard to steer when she was the only one trying. I can't do this by myself, scemos, she said, but her voice came out meek, and she felt like she was about to cry.

In the other boats, the actors couldn't stop laughing. Everything was funny to them: the way their canoes bucked when a fish or a crocodile nosed up under them, the way the crew looked, worrying over the equipment, yelping every time they started to tip. Paolo adjusted the grip on his oar, thought, Fucking kids. There were five of them now, two Italians and three nameless bilingual Colombians, two principals and three featured extras, one girl and a clutch of skinny boys. And now this sixth one, the American, supposedly just arrived from some inland stopover. Acting-school dropouts. Christ. They couldn't even get professionals.

One of them was in the front of Paolo's own boat. The actress; the one Ugo's casting director had sent from some random acting school in southern Switzerland, the one none of them knew anything about. She stood in her seat and threw her arms wide, heckled something in loud English, probably a line from
the script. Paolo gripped the gunwales to keep them steady as she drunk-stumbled back into her seat. There was something about the girl that made Paolo furious: her skinny legs studded with mosquito bites, the messy hair that she must have thought looked sexy when it fell over her eyes. He watched her nuzzle in too close to the guy next to her, her long brown neck swiveling so she could whisper something in his ear. He watched her arm snake behind his back and land on the seat next to his hip, her smile sending a white flash through the darkness.

Pick up your oar,
Paolo thought. Then he said it out loud: Pick up your fucking oar!

The actress gave him a dirty look and kept whispering, her tongue moving close to the man's ear. He smiled, falling for it completely.

Paolo swatted a wasp out of his eyelashes. A musk rose from the water, fogging the outer edges of his glasses, coating the inside of his mouth. He could hear the prosthetics clattering in the sack behind him, still wet from the river, probably scuffing. He wanted to shove the actress into the current, to tip the whole boat over. He wanted to punish her.

Instead, Paolo shut his mouth and focused on the swirl of foam in the current ahead of him. He thought of the bodies they still had to make, of fat marbled into flesh.

• • •

In bed that night, Agata said: I want you to know, I understand how you feel.

Paolo ran his hand over his sunburn and winced.

I hate working like this, she said. I'm afraid to ask him, too.

She meant the director, but didn't she mean Paolo, too, a little? Agata peered at the line of his profile and tried to decide.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed in his black shorts. The television was on, and it turned him white and blue.

The hotel was on the outer edge of a town built just ten years ago, a thousand square meters of jungle cleared by hand with machetes, by men who had hiked for days to get there. None of it should have been there, but there they were inside it: behind plaster walls and die-cut plastic windows, the whole building shipped down the river in flat-packed boxes and buckets and then assembled piece by piece like a dollhouse. Somehow, the hotel was at once too filthy and too clean. The walls were whitewashed, sprayed down with bleach, but the bugs and snakes and creeping plants still leaked inside. Agata listened to the diesel generator humming in the yard.

Paolo aimed the remote. You're scared of Ugo now?

I'm not, just—I'm afraid to
ask
him—

Ask him for what? The meat?

For anything.

Agata, we've done a dozen films with him.

Not like this.

What do you want me to say?

But he's
acting
differently.
Angrier
. You see it, too.

He's just focused.

He's never been—

We're in a foreign country. Of course he—

Something's different, okay? Agata said it more forcefully than she meant to; she could see it in the sharp tic in Paolo's temple. She sunk lower on the headboard, made her voice soften.