We Eat Our Own (22 page)

UGO

Ovidio

H
e could do it on his hands and knees in the mud.

Ugo rips out a hunk of elephant grass so he has a better sight line. He aims his viewfinder and imagines in the scene postediting: backlit, close shot, the camera laid down sideways with half the lens steamed opaque by the heat of the earth.

Or he could move the camera along the ground slowly, snake's-eye view. Blades of grass edged in blood, then more, then everything drenched flat to the earth red and red and red until finally, the body: staring milky-eyed into the lens.

Ugo stands, crosses his arms, chews the inside of his cheek.

Behind him, it is dusk, and a dozen people are packing up the canoes or vainly trying to tear down the remains of the burned nests. They glance over their shoulders, anxious. They are waiting for him to tell them they can go. They don't know what he's doing, with his viewfinder on his knees.

But Ugo can't leave until he decides how he wants the American to die.

• • •

But to make a decision like that, Ugo would need to watch every horror film since 1896 in sequence and map the shot order to the instant. Then he needs an impulsive concussion, a jerk to his system that slaps his brain flat against the wall of his skull and makes the history of cinema drain out. He needs a crane and a thousand-dollar rig and then he needs his camera to liquefy in his hands, to stand in the humid void of the set with nothing between him and the actor. The paradox has been keeping him awake for days: he needs to systematically eliminate all alternatives, to know no one has ever died like this on camera before, and then he needs to feel the idea come howling out from within him with no referent.

Sweat has gathered in the creases behind Ugo's knees, and he feels it suck as he stands. Today was the best day they'd shot so far, but it's not enough. The whole film is worth nothing if this one death is all wrong. He exhales, runs the back of his wrist over his brow ridge and tells production they can all go back to the hotel.

He stays on the set until darkness comes, listening to the insects purr and yammer. A native boy hangs around to row the boat back for him later, crouching in the weeds near the bow to make sure it doesn't float away. When Ugo can't stand still anymore, he climbs the low branch of a tree and tries to imagine the American's spine draped over it, or no: an aerial shot of the American's torso hacked into three ragged steaks on the muddy jungle floor.

In the weeds, the boy pulls his T-shirt over his knees and rocks, making small sounds to himself.

Ugo aims his viewfinder away from the boy, brushes a dead fly off the lens. What if the American dies bloodlessly—a hot poison boiling, pushing against the inner shell of his body until the veins pop and drown him from within? Or what if he is drained, every cell of his blood in an empty canoe, and they film just that: a boat drifting south?

• • •

Even after he lets the boy row him home, Ugo still can't sleep. He's going to order the blood from props in the morning and shoot it by sunset, and he plots the thing all night: a follow shot from the shore, smooth as a dolly, an Indian carrying the camera at waist level and walking slowly. By dawn, he's decided: at the last minute, the Indian will turn the camera around and aim the lens up at his own face and leer.

But when Ugo gets to the breakfast tent, the American is not there.

He sets his tray down next to Fabi and Baldo, aims his gaze at the empty seat the American usually takes. He can see straight across the lot to the hotel, a spasm of sunlight reflecting unevenly off a plastic window. He can smell whatever's on Fabi's plate, something ricey and sweetened.

He tries to sound detached: Where's our Richard this morning?

I think he's cracking, Fabi says around a mouthful. Prima donna shit. There's always one, eh?

Baldo glares. We should all be cracking, after what happened to Paolo yesterday. Ugo, we need to talk.

Ugo ignores him. What do you mean he's cracking?

Because we asked him to film for once? Fabi laughs. Because he's an amateur who can't improv? Who knows.

Baldo leans forward, his fork hovering over his meat. We should all be as disturbed as the American. We need to talk seriously about halting production until we can assess the safety of the next—

Fabi interrupts him, big-voiced and big-gestured. He's tired! The guy's tired! He just can't hang, that's all. Give him an extra hour of sleep, he'll be fine.

Ugo brushes a strand of hair off the rim of his plate and feels a muscle along the roof of his mouth tighten.

Well, Paolo is not fine, Baldo says. The medic in town says it's mostly second-degree burns, but he's not going to be back. Agata either. They're trying to get him healed enough to transport to Bogotá tomorrow, where they have a real burn unit.

Who cares? Fabi says. The set dressers can cover the effects! We're pros!

We care because a lawsuit could shut this whole production down in a minute.

Fabi snorts. They signed a nonindemnification clause. We all did.

Indemnification without coverage is worthless. The insurance won't—

Ugo stares into the wet, pink core of a guava, thinking.

Fuck the insurance! Fabi cheers, swinging a speared sausage around. We're making art here!

We aren't making anything until we take a step back and think about this, Baldo says. And, Ugo, I should remind you the insurance wouldn't cover us for starting a wildfire in a fucking national park. You told me you would simulate it.

Fabi waves a hand dismissively over his plate. Come on, it was a controlled burn. The nests were the only thing dry enough to catch fire.

Jesus, what pyrotechnic specialist told you that?

Ugo sets down his fork, doesn't look at either of the men. We leave early today, he says. We leave now.

Fabi stops chewing. What,
now
now?

Baldo huffs over his plate and waits for Ugo to change his mind.

Now, Ugo says, swinging his legs over the bench. Get them ready.

Baldo rubs his eyes. I guess I'll go wake up our Ameri­can.

Don't.

What do you mean, don't?

Ugo walks, shoves his plate into one of the maid's hands without looking at her. I mean that if he doesn't show up, he doesn't show up.

How?

We shoot with who we have, Ugo says, sparking a cigarette. If we don't have who we need, we block.

What do you mean, we—

I mean I'm going to the bus.

It's that feeling: everyone scrambling behind him, the hotel doors all flung open, the shouts of
where is the—
and
hurry
,
get—.
It's the vibration down the bones of Ugo's forearm as he pounds the door to the bus open with the side of his fist, and how it feels to walk down the long empty aisle between the seats. He needs this: to find his place at the very back and settle in to watch them all come running. The floor is coated with sawdust and smells like livestock, which is probably what the bus is used for in the off-season when they don't need river shuttles. The crew runs like livestock, and that's what Ugo's been looking for: the feeling of being in front of a stampede, the hoofbeats of the herd coming up through the ground.

He needs to decide how to kill the American.

And he will, when they get here. It will be like raising a shepherd's crook and pointing in one direction, the answer coming to him when it has to, when they are close enough to trample him, when he sees the shine of their eyes.

• • •

Ugo thinks: strangler vine, piranha swarm, a single falling stone.

He tries them all out.

An Indian holds another Indian by the nape of her neck and shoves her facedown into the river, but an underwater camera would violate the whole premise and from land it doesn't look like anything. An Indian fakes a tumble backward onto the blunt end of a spear and his body opens like a book. An Indian strikes another Indian with an ax at each wrist, each knee, each elbow.

He hates all of them. He calls for a new set up, new props.

They've been doing test shots for the American's death for the better part of six hours when the light starts to wane. He's thinking of calling it a day, but Irena announces that she wants to help, so Ugo lets her climb the tall tree by the river and model a stunt. She mimes trying to force her ankle out of the place where it's wedged in the cleavage between two branches, but then she twists too far. She falls. She does the stunt just like they've choreographed: the acrobatic tumble that breaks the ankle and leaves her hanging and screaming upside down from the branch, the painful twist in her neck as she looks over her shoulder and sees the Indians circling the roots of the tree.

The whole crew gasps. Irena is three meters off the ground and thrashing, her hair waving like a flag. The prosthetic leg in the tree gushes, and the rig that's holding Irena's real leg in place is invisible no matter what angle they shoot from. Ugo doesn't know exactly how the effects crew managed it, but he knows about the squib they strapped just inside the neck of Irena's shirt, just beneath the hollow of her throat. He is the only one who doesn't shout Oh! when the Indian shimmies up the tree and reaches out with the machete and bleeds her like a sheep.

The crew applauds. The cameras stop. Irena does a little
upside-down bow and then someone climbs the tree and helps her back onto the branch and back down to the ground.

That's our fucking poster image right there! Baldo shouts, slapping his hands together once. Start putting together the press kit! That right there is our moneymaker!

What did he think? Irena says, pushing her bloody hair back from her face. Will it work for Richard's death scene?

What do you think, boss! Fabi yells, but Ugo isn't there.

The set dresser is the one who sees him, from the tree branch, when he looks up from dismantling the climbing rig: Ugo in the distance, stumbling over mud ruts with the oar in his hands. Ugo in the boat alone, pushing off into the darkening water.

• • •

He will make the bus come back for them. They have enough canoes without the one he took.

He will shoot it tomorrow. He will kill the American tomorrow. He will think of a new way.

He just couldn't stand to watch it again: all the death cues played out in the same order, the hitch in the breath, the eyelid shiver, the corn syrup blood dripping off the ends of her hair. Ugo has seen actors die this way so many times, it's become abstracted, like someone shouting the same word into your ear again and again for hours. It makes him feel furious and insane and restless. It makes him walk.

But when did night come, and has he ever been this far down the road? The village is small but Ugo has barely seen any of it yet. When he can't sleep, he wanders, but he stays close to the hotel. He walks circuits around the parking lot, or once, he sat all night on the floor of the shower stall and
listened to a single drop of water thunk again and again against the clay floor. Sometimes he goes to the abandoned breakfast tent and stands on the picnic table like it's the deck of a ship, closes his eyes, and waits for an epiphany to reach him. He hears the same sound now, walking through the bush. Biology tells him that nearly every insect in the air right now will die by morning, and Ugo knows that for the rest of his life this will be the sound of death for him: the backdrop of a hundred thousand minuscule wingbeats under the bark of tropical bats, and somewhere in the center of that sound, the crackle of a hundred thousand new eggs hatching.

When he thinks about it, has he slept more than an hour a night in the last six days?

When he comes up on the house, it takes Ugo a moment to realize he's arrived. The trail stops. His flashlight beam roves, encircling a glass window, a thatch of roof shingles, the beveled lip of a porch stair. He steps back. He can't put these things together. He can't believe these things are in the jungle, and he swings the flashlight wide to check.

The American proprietor hadn't told them he had managed to build two stories and an attic all the way out here, or that the house was propped on stilts to keep it out of the floodplain, or that it was painted this shade of power-washed pale purple. He had told the whole crew only to follow the road past the main square about three kilometers, to stay left at all the forks and look for a clearing. He'd told them he had a movie to show them, that it was tradition for every guest who came through town to see it, to come anytime, day or night.

Hank doesn't turn on the light when he opens the door. He yells for Ugo to stop shining that fucking thing everywhere, and what is he doing here in the middle of his kids' goddamned bedtime, and he might as well come on inside.

• • •

Ugo and Hank sit together in silence in the dark in front of a screen, watching a woman lean toward the peephole in a hotel room door. The ax blade comes through the wood with an atonal jolt of synthesizer, nicking her forehead, her body tumbling back onto the Persian rug. She presses both hands to her face. A gush of orange blood surges between her fingers, and her tongue is the same orange when she screams; the color calibration is all wrong.

The murderer pounds the door open, and this is when the projector hitches. The woman flips onto her belly and crawls, but the picture flickers: Ugo keeps missing the fine details, the pattern of the rug, the color of her fingernails.

Ugo's mouth twitches. The American proprietor stands up and slaps the machine.

This goddamned thing. It would cost me about a million dollars to ship it back and get it serviced, but one of these days—

Wind it back, Ugo says.

I can make it work if you just give me a—

Ugo leans forward and finds the switch on the side of the machine himself.

The woman flips onto her back, stands. The blood siphons back into her skin.

Ugo can feel Hank looking at him, but he keeps his eyes on the screen. The woman walks slowly backward, away from the door, to the white hotel bed and the book laid open across it. She lies down and reads. Then the scene cuts: ballerinas sprint backward in ragged toe shoes toward a retreating shadow.