We Eat Our Own (23 page)

Ugo thumbs the switch back to play again.

The American huffs, sits back down on the couch and kicks
up his feet on the coffee table, swipes a beer from the space between his boots. So you had a rough day on set? Hank says. Need to unwind? To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?

Ugo doesn't answer.

I mean, I'd love to hear more about this movie, Hank says. God, it takes me months to get new reels shipped down here. Is yours—

Ugo hushes him.

Ugo decreases the frame speed as low as it goes, and suddenly he can see everything. The pores on the bridge of the woman's nose as she leans toward the peephole. The minute curvature of the peephole itself, the glass as blue as her eye. He studies the velocity of the splinters that race past the frame as the ax comes through the wood, and this is when Ugo presses pause. Focuses.
There.

Come on! Hank yells.

Ugo tents his hands in front of his face. In the center of the woman's eye, there is an odd dark shape.

He winds it back again.

Hank laughs a little, coughs. You know, Hugh, when I invite guests up here, it's usually to
watch
a movie.

Splinters, eye shine, the same synthesizer lick. He can't make out the shape, even on the second pass.

I mean, really, what I wanted was to show you the movie from my snake-wrestling days, but when you told me you were making a
horror
film, I thought, hey, let's show off the collection.

Fast-forward: the woman scurries. The door opens and the murderer's knees appear. They bend to lunge.

But if you're just going to skip around all night—

Freeze frame on the cross-fade: the edge of an ax blade blurring into a wide shot of a stone fountain, the water sparkling like fairy lights.

Ugo unthreads the film fast, yanks the reel off the projector and puts it back into the canister. The room is flooded with white light. He rifles through the box on the table, holds a few films up to read the labels:
Who Can Kill a Child, The House with Laughing Windows
. He opens the case.

Well—Hank laughs—I'm learning a lot about you tonight, Hugh. You're certainly not an Argento fan.

Ugo threads the film through the sprocket, says, We saw the only part worth seeing.

What's wrong with the rest?

The rest is all predictable.

Hank's voice is surly and full of laughter, only halfway through with swallowing his beer. I tell you what, buddy, I hate to say it, but your movies must be goddamned terrible. You don't get horror at all.

He turns to look behind him, finds Hank's face in the dark. He is glassy-eyed and slouching, paunchy and overtanned. Ugo's never really looked hard at the man, certainly never had a conversation with him, but he's heard him plenty, speechifying in the lunch tent, in the bus he insists on driving to the trailhead most days so he can go on bragging about how the bus itself was sent down on the ferry in pieces. How the president of Colombia himself had ordered a telephone line installed there, Julio César Turbay Alaya himself, look it up, a thousand kilometers of wire strung on foot just so the capital can bend the ear of Hank Vance. How they were witnessing the birth of civilization, here and now.

Hank runs a toothpick through the space between his two front teeth and smiles.

Tell me what I don't get, Ugo says.

What?

About horror movies. What do you know that I don't?

Hank collapses back onto the couch, sighing. I'm drunk, guy. Come on. Don't make me explain it. He studies the darkness inside his bottleneck, reconsidering. Tell you what—play this next one from the beginning, and we'll talk.

Ugo thumbs the switch.

A car roves between green hillsides. The camera takes in the height of the mountain, the flowers brimming over the edges of the road, the gray castle towering over the peak. They're
supposed
to be all the same, Hank says, these movies. That's the point. You're supposed to be able to predict them. Watch this.

On-screen, the man drums his fingers on the wheel, the camera registering the fine wrinkles in his knuckles. The music is sunny, full of synthesizers. The sun discolors everything, three shades too brilliant and full of lens flares.

It's a classic setup, Hank says. A guy drives up to a cabin in the woods, right? Ghost stories and marshmallows, everything's great, until—boo!

On the screen, nothing happens. The car slows onto a dirt road and the man opens the door, inhales the mountain air.

Well, not now, I guess, Hank says, But that's the fun of it, you know? You're waiting for the jump scare. You know it's coming, and it comes. You want to get what you paid for, and you get it.

Ugo says nothing. The man walks to the house.

It's about catharsis
.
Hank pauses. Didn't you say you'd directed a dozen of these things? You've gotta know this.

What is catharsis? Ugo says. I don't know this word.

Hank takes another drink and ignores the question. This guy, he says, pointing to the screen, he's going to die. All these damn movies are exactly the same, so we know it, no doubt: by the end of this thing, we will see him bleed. Then let me ask you something: Why do we watch? Huh?

Ugo grits his teeth in annoyance.

Why do we watch a movie if we know exactly what's going to happen?

I asked you.

Hank smiles. Because we don't know
how
it's going to happen. It makes us feel powerful, to be able to find out.

The man on the screen walks into the castle. The camera slow-pans to a stained glass window, a human shape inside.

Hank grins, his teeth silvery in the dark. See?

Ugo looks him in the eye. He jams the switch and the reel fast-forwards, double-speed.

Pause: A nun strings a woman up by her wrists, laughs as she cranks at the mechanism. Toes rise and hover over a dirty floor.

Hank says, See! What did I tell you!

Ugo mutters to himself. No, not this scene.

Smash cut to a close shot of an old book. Pages flip in a startling wind. Bible or grimoire. Ugo prods the switch, getting angry.

This scene is great, Hank says, Hold on—

A long fast-forward, and then the man from the beginning of the movie is dying: a serrated knife, a priest in bloody vestments.

Hank erupts. That's not fucking fair, he yells. Is this the end of the reel? Man! That's not fucking
fair
!

Ugo studies the angle of the camera: high right, fish-eye, a dolly shot. You can see the back of the priest's skull partially eclipsing the victim's face, a sliver of the victim's forehead and his eyebrows raised in terror. An arch of a stained glass window yawns over them, turns both men shades of orange and blue. You can see their bodies struggling against one another, the blood racing across the floor, but that's not where your eye
goes: the camera is more interested in the sunset, the violence that the window does to the light.

This isn't funny anymore, guy, Hank mumbles. All this film studies bullshit isn't cute.

Don't watch, then, Ugo says.

What are you doing, are you just looking for shit to plagiarize? Scanning through for the greatest hits?

Ugo controls his voice. My movie will be nothing like this.

Don't bullshit me, Hugh.
Every
horror movie is like this.

Not mine.

See, but it
is
. Hank is up now—pacing, Ugo thinks, but then Hank crosses to a closet on the other side of the room. You know, I've been watching your production. Hank laughs. You know I've got eyes in the field.

Ugo thinks of the boy who rowed his canoe yesterday, seventy pounds in an oversize
Columbo
T-shirt the American must have given him, his tiny shoulder blades straining to move the oar.

Hank rifles around on a high shelf, shouts his words into the dark of the closet. I mean, I appreciate the thought, doing a horror movie cinéma verité style, but you don't really think that'll
work,
do you?

The movie is still running. The priest stabs and stabs and grimaces.

Killing is killing, Hank says. Even if you shoot it handheld, smear a little pig's blood on things to make the props look more real.

I'm not just going to smear pig's blood, Ugo murmurs.

I know, I know, but even if you have the best effects crew in the world? Whatever brilliant strategy you come up with? You get this movie in front of an audience, they're not going to be any more scared by it than they are—ah, heeeere we go.

Hank hoists something down. He crosses the room.

All I'm saying is, do you think whatever you shoot out here is going to be any different than these?

He plunks a heavy box down on the coffee table. Ugo tries to keep his eyes on the screen, but then Hank thumbs the projector switch to pause.

He glances.

A dozen more film canisters, labeled in masking tape:

Savage Rites,
Dir. Ugo Velluto.

The Swarming Hour,
Dir. Ugo Velluto.

Cannibal Purge,
Dir. Ugo Velluto.

Half of them never saw theatrical release. Half of them
he
doesn't even have proofs for anymore.

Hank grins. The projector whirs. I've enjoyed your work, sir, he says.

This is when they hear the knock at the door. Or at least Ugo hears it, flinches at it, tries to look away. But Hank keeps staring into the side of Ugo's face, straight through his skull, smiling. The knock comes again, soft and slow and six times, like a code, but this time, Ugo is sure, it's not coming from the door knocker outside. It's coming from the hallway, just beyond the room they're in.

Ugo turns the projector back on, winds it back a scene, tries to focus on the screen. Ugo tries to think about his film, about the American actor covered in boils or poison darts or bound up in ropes tight enough to make the skin bleed.

He tries not to listen to what Hank is saying in the hallway, in Spanish that is too easy for him to parse.

You can't be here.

I know.

Fuck, you smell drunk.

I needed to talk to you.

How did you get here?

I took a boat. I hiked.

Jesus. All that way?

The man he is talking to is filthy; Ugo can tell without looking. It is not just in his smell but in his voice and the sounds of his soaked shoes on the floor, jackboot-heavy, squealing when he pivots. A chilled sort of fury extends like a membrane between Hank and this man, and Ugo can sense that without looking, too. He feels the membrane vibrate, like it's been flicked. He pauses the reel and studies the face in the corner of the frame: it is blank, genderless, and totally impassive, but there are small muscles at work beneath the skin, an expression starting to form.

He starts the film back up. But still, Ugo can hear the men behind the doorframe, whispering in quick Spanish.

I had to talk to you.

The fuck you did, not this late at night.

Listen.

You know better than this, man.

Listen—they killed Marina.

Ugo fast-forwards the film, jams the play switch again.

The man on the screen tries to run, leather shoes squealing against a polished floor.

A deep sniff; a jostling, as Hank pushes the man farther down the hallway. Don't use names. You know the rules.

She's dead.

Well, what did she do?

I don't know. They never even met her.
I
must have done something that night when I was at—

But Hank hushes him.

Ugo pauses, lets the reel slip forward for a microsecond, freezes it. The face does not change. It does not even blink.

Hank sighs. When?

Last night.

Listen: How do you know it was them?

Because they're fucking animals.

This town is full of animals. Think. How do you know?

She left the tent in the middle of the night to go to the chuntos. Our bathrooms. She was . . . very sick. She couldn't see. It was a bullet. It came—

Lots of people here have guns. Think harder.

It must have been them.

Or—

You were the one who connected us with them. The man sobs. You know it!

The skin along the side of Ugo's face tingles. He locks his jaw. The man speaks again, more whimper than word, but Hank interrupts him.

Juan Carlos, breathe in. There. Good. Explain it to me: How do you know they did it?

I can't—

Give me the evidence. Spell it all out. Did you see one of them, with your own eyes?

The man on-screen raises his hand to shield his eyes. The priest slashes at it and the blood fans.

The man in the hall sobs once. It was them. It was them. I know it.

Hank's words are careful and somehow strangely pleased, every consonant landing like a pebble dropped carefully in a lake. You didn't see. You couldn't have. He laughs. We both know they're not that stupid.

Ugo doesn't know why he turns from the screen, now, toward the darkened hallway past the doorframe.

You're responsible for this. The man's voice is desperate and
exhausted. There is the sound of his shoes again, turning away, but he does not take a step.

Hey, buddy, come on, don't do that. I was up here in my house. I was just watching a goddamned movie.

I love her.

Call it a war casualty. You're a foot soldier. Casualties aren't your concern.

This isn't supposed to be a war, the boy says. That's the point. The war is later. We're preparing for the war.

Friendly fire. It happens sometimes.

They're supposed to be our allies. You said they were our allies.

Well, then it's more complicated, isn't it? What can you do?

She wasn't a war casualty.

Then what was she?

She was murdered. Goddamn you. She was murdered.

Asesinada; assassinata.

Ugo doesn't need to translate. The membrane between himself and these men is that thin. In the pause that comes, Ugo turns back to the screen. He switches the projector on again. Hank starts laughing—slow at first. Then he loudens. He riots and wheezes. He laughs in a way that is so huge it must be exaggerated, so Ugo can hear the spit in it, the bucking muscles that line his throat. Ugo hears Hank's shoes stomp back quick toward the living room, leaving the man in the hallway alone.