We Eat Our Own (21 page)

He's happy.

You'd never talked to Teo before, except in passing. You didn't know what the flatness of his voice signaled, and so you didn't know that he was annoyed with you, that you should probably stop talking.

You said: What is he so happy about? He almost killed that man. He almost killed
all
those people. He set a fucking forest fire. If that rain hadn't come—

Teo pulled hard on the stuck strap and grunted. Then it wouldn't have come.

You stared at him. There had to have been a plan, though. It was a stunt.

He can kill anyone he wants, Teo said. It's his movie.

He hoisted the bag across his back and left you blinking in the dark.

This is why you refused the bus from the river mouth to the hotel, why you've spent the last four hours wandering alone like an idiot, losing the trail every ten minutes:

Because you can't stop thinking of the man on fire.

You can't stop thinking of him when he hit the river, the sound of steam and howling. You think of how filthy the water must have been, rushing up against his wounds, and of the sharks Fabi mentioned—the ones that swim up from the Atlantic Ocean, that feed on piranhas and other sharp-toothed fish. You think of parasites that can swim through a pore and lodge in the lung, that can flit into the mouth and live under the tongue for years.

If you could talk to anyone about it, it would be Irena. You'd looked for her on the beach, but it'd been too dark to find her. On the boats, you'd looked again, and then you'd realized: she was sitting right next to Ugo.

You follow the darkening road for hours, and count the things you don't know.

Why won't they show you the rest of the script?

How many miles would you have to walk through the jungle until you reach the airport?

Why did they take your passport?

What happens at the end of the movie?

And because you don't have answers, because the jungle is full of chaotic sounds of a million animals and you can tell
none of them apart, because you are scared and you wish that you had anyone with you, here is the sudden memory that your brain spits out:

A year after you arrived in New York, eleven months before you boarded the plane to Colombia. It was winter; the lighthouse shuttered; she didn't understand why you'd taken her all the way out here.

Why do you think of it: in this, this moment of real panic? In this jungle, in this dark that reeks of soil and decay, why do you think of Kay?

You told her you were sorry, and you started to cry—or at least, the muscles in your face that participate in crying seized up, the way you'd trained them to do in acting school. You weren't trying to pretend, but the frozen wind pushed into your eye sockets and rifled your hair, and the drama of the moment must have gotten to you. You had another tour, yes, down to Delaware and back up the coast for three weeks, but that wasn't why you were doing this. You took Kay's hand, spoke in slow syllables. You took her here because you had something beautiful together, and beautiful things should end near the water.

That was actually the line you used on her.

Kay said nothing. Her face revealed nothing, her skin blue-white in the cold, her eyes blue-white like always. The sand was full of black shells and plastic bottles. You were both wearing goosedown vests in sun-bleached colors, wool sleeves, thick socks. Everything looked exactly how you'd pictured it. You closed your eyes for dramatic effect.

I love you, you said. I always will. But I
need
to act.

When you opened your eyes, she was halfway across the beach.

You had only closed them for an instant. An
instant
—how
had she moved so fast? But in your memory, it was not
even
an instant, just a slim black split between frames, a tiny gap that undoes your understanding of time, renders the moment discontinuous. Kay was there, and then Kay was gone. You barely shut your eyes, but in that lost time, the reel spun, and she was at the shoreline.

You sprinted after her. This you remember. You behave differently around water than you do around fire; you were brave. The sun was dull and your footsteps thudded on the frozen gray sand. The water was silver and full of knife edges, and she was walking as fast as she could alongside it, away from you.

This is how your memory has always repainted it, anyway: you didn't hesitate. She only got a few feet away before you caught up to her and reached out for her shoulder.

Then why was Kay so out of breath, her skin flushed with cold and wind and crying? Why were her eyes so wild when she turned to you, fifty times bluer than usual, the whites bright pink? You had never, never seen Kay angry before, and you'd certainly never seen her cry. It stunned you. Every time you'd broken her heart, she had just taken it in, had waited patiently until you came to her senses, had held you when you came back through the door.

But you'd never said it to her face before. You'd always just left a note.

Kay, you remember yourself saying, Kay, calm—

Why the fuck are you doing this again? Her voice was high with disbelief.

Your brain raced, your mouth moving. I don't—I'm sorry, okay? I'm not like you. I'm not so
sure
about everything. You're superhuman. It's just not that easy for me to—look, maybe someday I'll be ready.

You reached out to touch her face.

When she shoved you away, you remember, you were astonished at her strength. More than the impossible winter cold of the water, more than the punch of the sand as you lost your footing and landed on your ass and the heels of your hands, more than the way the air in your chest instantly clung to your organs and seized.

You were astonished by what Kay said, standing over you ankle deep in the water, in a quiet voice that should have been a yell: That she wasn't
sure.
That she wasn't
ready.
That she wasn't
superhuman.
Jesus.

I am
decent
to you. You remember it now: that's exactly what she said, spitting out your name like a seed. Decent. That is all I've ever been.

Kay didn't help you up out of the water. She turned and stormed back to the parking lot, toward the road that led to the station, and you walked back with her, ten paces behind and watching the white flag of her hair whip in the wind. You sat in the next seat over on the train, the two of you melting all over the orange plastic seats. Then you switched trains, and you took the seat next to hers, and after a while she was exhausted and let you hold her hand.

You didn't go on the tour. You never talked about it again. The radiator was busted so you took hot showers and ate soup for breakfast in the morning. You watched her pull a white towel over her hair and told her she was pretty. You kept a fragile thing suspended in the air between the two of you, and you tried not to break it. You didn't break it. You weren't the one. You didn't.

• • •

In the jungle, you stop and breathe again, overwhelmed. You look at your hands and the fine details of them are gone: cuti
cles, tiny hairs, wrinkled skin over knuckles. This is all you can see: the texture of loose gravel scattered over mud. The narrow clearing of the road stretching before you and behind you. Nothing is on either end. No one is coming for you. The road is straight in both directions.

• • •

In the final cut of the film, Richard will look at his hands in just the same way, in dark outside of the village. They'll light you through a blue
CTB
gel to simulate the moon, wave a palm frond in front of the bulb to make it spookier. They'll increase the f-stop for a brighter close shot on your hands: dirty fingernails clutched around two scorched white stones.

Like everything else, it's filmed on handheld, this time by Gayle. She'll approach from a distance, before Richard notices her. When he does, he'll stand up quick off the rock he's been sitting on and shout for her to put the camera away.

I was just getting some establishing shots, she'll say. I tried to get Joe to do it, but he wanted to sleep. The moon over the river is insane.

Well, turn it off.

She'll drop the camera to her side, but the reel won't stop. There's a shot of the ground, black and leaf-littered.

The audio is clear, though. The insects hum. Richard whispers.

I have to tell you something.

What happened? Gayle whispers back.

When we made contact tonight, after we smoked out the villagers at the tree of nests—

You shouldn't have done that. Her voice is thin and alarmed. Richard, I
told
you you shouldn't have done that—

One of them surrendered.

Gayle pauses. What do you mean?

I mean they took me to their graves.

Another pause. A snake as wide as a wristwatch winds its way through the bottom inch of the frame.

I don't understand, Gayle pronounces slowly.

Esteban and Amanda Perez. The researchers.

What about them?

They weren't—shit. Richard laughs, exasperated. They died of some fucking disease. The villagers were saying something that sounded like
malaria
over and over: Mal-a-
ri
-a, Mal-a-
ri
-a, they were, like,
chanting
it—

Slow down, slow down.

They didn't know what to do. They tried to shaman them back to health but it didn't work. Fucking animals didn't even try to row them to a hospital.

Shamanism isn't—

They're savages, Gayle. They killed those people. Their negligence.

Gayle sighs, crosses her arms over her chest. The camera swings wide and scans a new patch of ground behind her, settles and stares down the rotted-out core of a tree stump.

How do you know for sure? she asks.

Know what?

That they're dead.

Of course they're dead.

Richard, how do you know they were even buried where the Indians said?

Richard pauses. Gayle breathes hard, and then she realizes.

Oh my God, Richard.

I
had
to.

You didn't.

I needed to know for sure.

You dug them up?

I'm a journalist, Gayle. I had to check my facts.

Jesus!

You should understand that.

What are those stones you're holding?

Richard says nothing.

What did you do, Richard?

What the fuck are those stones?

Why would you even need a grave marker out here? Richard is speaking quietly, a laugh in his voice. It doesn't make any sense.

Those are their grave markers?

Fucking everything that dies in this jungle gets eaten up within an hour.

You can't just
take
a grave marker.

Richard laughs openly now. Even if the bodies don't get eaten—one rainstorm, the river could just wash them away. Why would you even bother with a grave?

Gayle pauses, then speaks slowly. We need to be able to find the bodies again. To give them back to the families.

Richard laughs.

This isn't funny, Richard. How are the families going to reclaim the bodies if we don't—

They're not.

Gayle is speechless. The camera shakes.

We're not going to tell anyone about this.

Richard—

This isn't the right narrative.

What do you mean?

I mean I didn't come down here to report on a couple of fucking malaria cases.

But that's what happened.

Richard pauses. His voice is strange, echoing hers:
Happened.
Yes, I guess you're right. That's what
happened.

In the silence that follows, you can hear a sound like stones clinking together, like Richard is turning them in his hands.

Then Gayle speaks: Richard, why are there only two grave markers?

Richard says nothing.

Richard, who was buried there?

Esteban and Amanda are gone, Gayle. That's all you need to know.

What about Veronica?

Veronica. Veronica.

Richard says it like an incantation, a spell to summon something.

Richard, is she alive?

Don't worry about it, Gayle.

Then they are both walking; the camera roams the ground.

Richard, what are you planning to do?

This is when the reel runs out.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Signor Velluto, I have to ask: What was your real intention, when you made this film?

VELLUTO:
I don't understand that question.

AVVOCATO:
Objection. My client is not required to testify against his best interests.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
I'm not asking your client to implicate himself, Signor Avvocato. I'm inquiring simply from an artistic perspective. What was your vision? And more specifically, how did the . . . conditions of filming contribute to that vision? Why were they necessary?

VELLUTO:
You're asking why I didn't shoot it on a soundstage in Italy. Plastic trees and stock footage of monkeys, stuff like that? You're asking why I'm not like other directors?

PROCURATORE CAPO:
But you
yourself
shot that way. Fourteen films before this one, all at Safa Palatino here in Rome. I can present the contracts.

VELLUTO:
Don't.

AVVOCATO:
Objection, relevance.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
I'm trying to establish why Signor Velluto changed his vision so drastically for this production. It goes to his state of mind at the time of the alleged crimes.

[Whereupon the giudici popolari nod.]

PROCURATORE CAPO:
So, signore, why did you leave the soundstages? Why knowingly put your actors and crew in danger?

AVVOCATO:
Objection!

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Withdrawn.

VELLUTO:
You would rather I build animal puppets and pay some marionettist to flounce them around? Put Italian
actors in brown face and Tarzan costumes, tell them to pretend?

PROCURATORE CAPO:
You would have avoided allegations of animal abuse that way. Abuse of
humans.
Not to mention the charges you face today.

VELLUTO:
It was the
state
that leveled these charges, friend, not—

GIUDICE A LATERE:
Signor Velluto, sit down.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
And to your point about brown face—the Indians you used were acting, too, weren't they? We've heard expert testimony from an anthropologist that they were likely from the Ticuna and Yagua tribes, that Ovido is many thousands of kilometers from documented Yanomamö territory where you claimed the film was set—

VELLUTO:
Have you seen the goddamned horror movies that are being made today in Italy, Procuratore?

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Not many, I'll admit. But I've read Napoleon Chagnon's account of the Yanomamö tribal life, and your film is not exactly a documentary in that regard.

VELLUTO:
It's my understanding that Signor Chagnon's treatise isn't considered exactly unimpeachable either.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
I haven't heard of this controversy.

VELLUTO:
Well, then I'll tell you. American anthropologist goes down to Venezuela in his battle khakis and a bucket hat. American anthropologist takes a goddamned crate of weapons into the bush and passes them out to whatever Indian he can find. Then American anthropologist writes a goddamned book about how the awful, warlike Yanomamö savages won't stop killing each other. Now you're all caught up.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
But there have also been claims that
Christian missionaries were the ones who supplied the Indians with hunting weapons that were so tragically misused.

VELLUTO:
Well, if the
Christians
did it!

PROCURATORE CAPO:
And more to the point, what about you, Signor Velluto? You manipulated the Ticuna and Yagua into performing unspeakable—

VELLUTO:
Did the film scare you?

PROCURATORE CAPO:
—acts, and then you call
them
Yanomamö, call your film a documentary for marketing purposes, sullying the name of that largely peaceful tribe—

AVVOCATO:
Objection—

PROCURATORE CAPO:
If Chagnon's work is problematic, you must admit, signore, that you're at least a part of that problem.

VELLUTO:
Did it scare you?

[Whereupon the procuratore pauses for a long while.]

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Yes, very much. When I thought of what sort of man must have made it.

AVVOCATO:
Objection!

VELLUTO:
Never mind why. You were frightened.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
I can never mind why. This is a court of law. I've already stated—

VELLUTO:
Then I'll restate it for you. You were scared. That is why I made the film. Why I did what I did so that the film could be made.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Is that a confession, Signor Velluto?

AVVOCATO:
Signor Giudice, this is a flagrant—

VELLUTO:
Let me off the stand. I've answered your question.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
I have more questions.

VELLUTO:
Let me off—

GIUDICE A LATERE:
Signor Avvocato, give the witness some room.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
Signore, it's becoming increasingly clear that we need to pursue a line of questioning about Signor Velluto's mental state at the time of filming.

VELLUTO:
I can't breathe.

PROCURATORE CAPO:
This is a tactic.

VELLUTO:
I can't breathe when this bastard is in my face, breathing my
air
—

GIUDICE A LATERE:
Do we need a medic? He's turning purple here—

VELLUTO:
You were scared by my film. Watch my film. You people. Let my work speak for itself.