We Eat Our Own (27 page)

He gets down on his knees. He uses both his hands. He hauls the mud out.

The director says the actor's name, a question.

The actor coughs. What?

The actress says the actor's name, a statement.

We have to try, he says. We can't just leave him here.

The director steps forward. But we can't just bury him, he says.

Why?

The director swallows. Because he's a human being. He's someone to somebody, he must be.

The actor's tongue works without him telling it to: But is he someone anyone will
miss
?

• • •

In the film, Richard leaves after midnight and brings a machete.

He goes alone. He walks off the trail, and leaves the electric lamp switched off.

He doesn't know that Gayle is following him with a directional mic, the cameraman Joe tentative and stumbling ten paces behind her. Their lamps are switched off, too. She walks fast. The darkness is like mud and the mud is like darkness. You can just see the gray shape of her shirt ducking under a branch, her boots laced tightly to her ankles and struggling over stumps.

Joe, she whispers, get closer, there's no light back there, but he yells back, Jesus, Gayle, there's no light anywhere. Why are we even—

She stops. Hushes. She points straight ahead.

A thumbprint of firelight is bright in the distance, and Richard's silhouette is haloed by it, standing so still.

Gayle breathes: Look, Richard thinks the girl is still alive. Okay? Veronica. He thinks she's in that hut.

Joe whispers: Then why the fuck is he going there alone? We could
all
help—

The side of her hand scissors through the air behind her and swats him on the shoulder.

Jesus,
Gayle,
he says, but then Gayle hisses back, desperate: It's not a rescue mission anymore, Joe. Not for Richard.

He tries to ask more, but then Gayle is walking fast, and so Joe has to move, too.

The camera bucks as he jogs. The trees convulse. As they get closer to Richard, the fire grows and reddens.

Joe calls after her in a breathless stage whisper: If it's not a rescue mission anymore, then what the fuck are we doing?

Gayle swats a strangler vine out of her way, and it strikes at the camera like a snake.

Gayle, you have to stop right now and tell me what—

But then Gayle stops, claps a hand over her mouth. The camera aims to the place she is staring, through the vertex of two trees: a sagging hut to the left of the flames, mud and leaves and rain forest wood, and Richard standing eerily still, right outside the doorway.

Gayle changes her course and jogs right, stays low, keeps moving.

The camera ducks, too. They circle behind, slowing. They are forty paces behind Richard now, staring straight through the fire and into his back.

Richard is staring straight into the doorway, at a man who has just appeared in it.

Gayle stops, throws an arm like a bar across Joe's chest, and breathes.

Richard still hasn't heard them. They're close enough to see the color of his shirt, a faded plaid red, long-sleeved and too hot for this country. They can only see the tops of his shoulders over the flames, the uneven cut of his hair over his neck. Gayle did it herself just this morning with a pocketknife and canteen
water. There was a quick take of it, one scene before this: she nicked him behind the ear and he spat into his palm, slapped the wound and smiled up at her. This is how you know I trust you, babe.

Is he smiling now? She cannot see his face.

But she can see the Indian who appears in the doorway, now; she can see his
face, and she uses it as a mirror. He is stony-eyed and on alert. He reaches both hands to his temples and shrugs his headdress off, supplicant. He keeps eye contact with Richard until the headdress is resting on his belly, and then he lowers his brow in what looks like prayer.

The machete strike comes fast and clean and sudden, Richard's elbow swinging through the firelight.

It is not the same: to strike hard through the neckbone and hear the prop head thump, to strike hard through the knee tendon and know that the snap and the crumple and the blood are all real.

It is not the same: to kill and to kill, to perform and to act.

But it gets down in the cells, still. The things you do. Even when you are pretending. No matter who you do it for. There was never any Richard, or if there was, he has no hands and no mouth. He is the place you put the things you wish you hadn't done. He is a weight that settles as you stand up out of the mud, your knees creaking, the rebel's blood thick under your nails.

You are not Richard, but admit it: you will be the one who does the things in this film. You will step over the body of the Indian you just killed and into the hut. You will see the missing daughter, Veronica, on her sickbed, malarial, the sweat over her breastbone gleaming in the dark.

You are the one who sees the rebel at the edge of the pit you've just dug, the yellows of his eyes and the bleed where his voice once came.

You will grab both of them by the ankles and drag.

The camera doesn't see you do it, either time.

You push the rebel's body down into the hole.

You will haul the girl's body out of the dark and into the firelight.

The rebel keeps his eyes open as the earth comes over them.

The girl twists onto her stomach and finds the strength somehow to stand, to run.

VELLUTO:
Signor Procuratore, I'd like to present to you my cast. Alive and well.

PROCURATORE:
Thank you, Signor Velluto. Thank you for ending this charade.

VELLUTO:
This is Irena Brizzolari, our principal actress. Irena, please wave.

[Whereupon Velluto indicates witness.]

VELLUTO:
Teo Avati, actor. Teo?

[Whereupon witness steps forward.]

VELLUTO:
And our American, Mr. Adrian White.

RICHARD

Ovidio

I
n the last week of filming, the village of Ovidio has its first telephone installed.

For reasons you can't fathom, the president of Colombia himself will fly in for the occasion. Trees throughout the jungle have been repurposed as telephone poles, acres of wire arching between the leaves. The men who erected it sleep in the same hotel as you, come out to the meal tent at night to drink and tell stories.

You don't join them. You hear it secondhand: how they camped on felt pallets for months and took turns looking out for prey cats through the night, how they hauled out the elephant gun to show to whole the crew. It's unclear, from the gossip, why the president even wanted a phone all the way down here—whether he thought Ovidio was important somehow, or if someone in his office simply saw a
PR
opportunity in building it, a distraction from the violence of the cartels. Our noble Colombian countrymen, fearless and bold, venturing into the jungle to connect our nation's wildest reaches with our fair capital! Our grand president, architect of our country's future! An above-the-fold image, the president in a white bow tie, one elbow looped around an Indian's shoulders.

You think of something Ugo said: That's an image they'll print.

You think of Ugo's voice, buckling with the effort of swinging his machete through the bush: It's hard to photograph so many dead.

The telephone will be installed in the hotel's main office. There's really nowhere else it could go. There will be a ceremony, and the president himself will make the first call to say good afternoon to his wife over her lunch in Bogotá. Production has halted for the morning while all the residents of Ovidio pitch in to help clean up for his arrival.

In your hotel room, you lie on your bed with the lights out and watch as a maid in a blue dress squints at a smear on your window. She pokes her thumb against a soaking rag, rubs hard to erase the mark. She doesn't bother to look through the plastic. She doesn't see you there, one arm slung halfway over your eyes, staring at her like a television with the volume turned down lower than you can hear.

When she walks away, a muggy wind pushes the back of her skirt against her body, articulating her shape.

You close your eyes and repeat your own phone number in New York to yourself, over and over again, like a code you can't decipher.

• • •

In the afternoon, the work is done, and the river guides are ready to row you out to set again. You study the guide's back as he paddles, his shoulder blades shifting like landmasses under the ocean of his blue shirt.

It has been five weeks. You know there can't be much of the film left yet to shoot. You've already shot the arrival of
the crew in the jungle, and the scene where they glimpse the Yanomomö for the first time, splitting open the brains of live monkeys with stone knives, sucking the warm gray matter straight from the skullcap. You've filmed the scene where you, Richard, ordered the cameraman to shoot arrows at the villagers from behind a fence of pikes speared through shrunken heads to simulate a tribal war. You've filmed the scene where you, Richard, ordered the ritual execution of a pregnant woman.

Last week, they took the three of you out at night and shot a confusing scene in total darkness, a hut by a campfire, an Indian dressed up as a kind of shaman that you feel certain his tribe doesn't really have. You killed this man and stomped into his hut, dragged a naked extra out by her ankles into the firelight, and faked being startled when she stood up and ran away. Teo and Irena sprinted in from nowhere, holding cameras and microphones, screaming Richard, what did you do? You stood still, the heat of the fire warming exactly half of you. You didn't answer; no one had told you how to answer. One of the producers mentioned that the extra playing Veronica was only a stand-in; they'd probably recast by the climax.

You were fairly sure you hadn't filmed the climax.

The next day, the props crew built two bodies out of animal bones wrapped in thick cuts of bacon to simulate human muscle. They threw them in a little gully where the rain had washed out the earth under a tree, in front of the exposed root system and whatever animal had made its stinking nest inside it. The extras crouched and ate, jawing at the fat, plunging their wrists deep into body cavities, a cameraman barking at them to do it bigger, exaggerate the movements.

Who are they? you asked Teo, meaning the Indians.

Gayle and Joe, he said, meaning the bodies.

You looked at him.

Retaliation, he said. For what the three of you did to Veronica after you found her in the hut.

What did we do to Veronica?

You'll see.

Did Ugo give you a script? Show it to me.

I can't.

But I don't understand.

What's there to understand, Richard? You die later.

At the end of the final take, the Indians stood up, bloated and dragging their feet. The props crew kicked the bodies into the river. They washed up the next day, the bones sucked clean by nocturnal scavengers.

• • •

You do not allow yourself to think:
That was what happened to the rebel, after we put him in the ground.

You do not touch the tendon at the back of your knee at night, as you try to will yourself to sleep.

They have not filmed the scene where Richard Trent is killed.

They shot the deaths out of order; first the bodies were eaten, then the bodies were murdered, and you still haven't shot the scene that instigated the revenge. Joe was beheaded and castrated in a long handheld shot, with a few short lengths of thin rubber hose to fake the sinews in his genitals. Gayle was gang-raped and bludgeoned with rocks.

It was Irena's best work; you watched it from the beach. You were far off, but you could see her lips part and wince as the natives hoisted her up by her elbows. You could see her chin fall to her chest under the force of the rock, and the thick bone
at the top of her spine that appeared when her hair parted and fell over her shoulders.

She went back home to Italy the day after her death scene. They'd rushed it forward in production to send her home as fast as they could. No one on the crew asked why. No one on the crew told you. There is no one next to you on the boat now; there was no one in her hotel room, the last time you looked, the window polished free of her fingerprints, sheets pulled taut over a long shoal of heaped pillows.

Here is something you don't know:

How much silence there will be in this movie. They won't be able to find convincing voice doubles for all of you, and without the ability to reshoot for continuity, they'll go abstract. There will be scenes of Irena, pointing her sound recorder at nothing. There will be scenes of Irena, smiling at you across a campfire, but you won't film these with her.

• • •

Here is something else that you don't know:

How to die convincingly on camera.

Your death will not be filmed today, but when it is, you decide to try the Stanislavski method. You will try to locate some part of you that has died, in some small way, before, to summon up some remembered sensation of passing from this world. But you can't think of anything like that. Or, at least, you can't call up a memory you can face. The woman from the props crew will flick pig's blood over you, standing above and out of frame. You will lie staring on your side as the villagers bring their clubs down over your body over and over. The stones are Styrofoam and they will not hurt, but you'll thrash and flinch as if they are crushing the breath out of you. You will keep your eyes open
and trained straight on the camera, lying where you dropped it in the mud after your arm was lopped off by a villager's machete.

You will try to show that last flash of consciousness. After considering all the ways to do it, pacing the beach before the take, you settle on a tremble: localized in the eyelids and along the upper lip. No final breath in the ribs. No gasp. You will die with your eyes open.

Here is something you don't know:

Ugo will decide to cut your last moments in postproduction. In the last scene of the movie, the camera runs out of film just as the shadow of a raised weapon begins to spread along your cheekbone. Your mouth opens, and your scream starts, and then there are a dozen frames of quick black scribbles racing over a cell of solid white.

A voice-over:
I wonder who the real cannibals are.

Credits.

• • •

But that will be filmed later this afternoon. Ugo has one more take he wants first.

Since what happened when you shot the love scene, he's decided that there isn't enough sex in the film. The audience will already hate the film crew for what they've done, but a rape—a rape will make them want to cheer when they die. A rape will make the film infamous. Or at least that is the reason Ugo gave Fabi after the third time he got sick on set while they filmed a kill shot, the third time he yelled cut suddenly and stormed off into the trees without explanation. You never followed Ugo, but you saw it in his face the next time you shot: the quick wince when the prop gun fired, the terror in his eyes when the prop blood gushed. Everyone thought he was being
overdramatic, the usual Ugo, but you watched the trees for his return. He was pale and shaken and walking slowly. He wiped vomit off his lower lip, and then he got himself together, and stepped out amongst the crew.

He made an announcement: I've made some decisions about the climactic scene.

Richard will do it. He will chase Veronica away from the fire when she runs. She will run all the way to the black river and Joe and Gayle will film it. Richard won't let her get away, and when he catches her it will be too dark to see what he does. The audience will hear it: a quick Gotcha, a splashing thunk, a scream, a zipper. Stay down. A mud squelch. Hey—

Then a quick cut: daylight, the next morning. In the background, the same river, licking at the muddy shoreline. A girl impaled on a pike, stuck ten feet off the ground, the pike run straight from the space between her shoulder blades to the space between her breasts.

Eyes wide with faked terror, Richard will pretend that he is not the one who did this. He will tell the better story: he will stand next to the pike as the camera travels in a wide circle—no wires, no tricks—taking in the perverse arch of her back, the blood dripping off the ends of her hair. Richard will wonder: This must be some kind of hideous Yanomamö sexual rite. How could these savages do such a thing to an American citizen?

Then a close shot of the blood on your shoes.

Ugo won't be the one who films the bloody parts. No one will ask why. He'll get Fabi to supervise these shots while he goes out to get long stills of the river, while he climbs trees and films the flying birds.

It will be Fabi who stands with the naked teenage girl, while the props crew slathers her body with fake blood, Fabi who tells the girl jokes in Italian while the costumers rat up her hair.

The girl is one of the maids, but you don't know this. Her name is Anahi, and Teo has been harassing her every night since he got here, and so she understands Fabi's Italian at least a little when he talks to her, at least laughs into the back of her right hand while the other arm covers her chest. The pike is a actually a log staked to the ground with a back support nailed on top and painted the color of her skin, the tip of the pike puttied onto her chest with some kind of effects magic so it looks like the whole thing's gone straight through her. The stunt is actually agonizing for the girl, her neck and the small of her back craned for half an hour, but she never complains.

She'll use the money Ugo pays her for this scene to bribe the last of the M-19 to take her along when they flee the area, in response to the murder of two compañeros by the cartel. Her father is in this cartel, and he will not look for her, but of course you don't know that.

You will stand in your position, waiting for Fabi to call Action. You'll stare at what you've done: a girl on a pike with her eyes wide open. You'll feel vomit well up in your throat, the planet tipping forward to release it. But you'll make yourself hold it in. You'll make your face contort into an expression that is the opposite of what you feel. You'll tell yourself: I did this.

• • •

But still: that is later. That is how the scene will end. The rape scene comes first.

You can't rush past this part, however much you want to. The part where Anahi takes off her clothes. The part, now, when Fabi yells, Va'! and she sprints naked through the reeds, quick enough that before you catch up, you can see only her calves flashing through the slatted green and the dark. You know that
the only way to get this scene right is to feel it—the aggression, the brutality, whatever it is that consumes a man as he violates another person like this. You have to admit that all this is in you, somewhere, that there are many monsters secreted deep inside, and acting is simply about giving them an aperture to slip through and show themselves. You have to be devoured by it: to let Richard Trent swallow and digest you, to become a part of
his
skin.

The grass flickers. She runs. Your breath clatters in your ears.

That's it; that's been the problem all along. There has been a thin shell between you and your character until this moment, and you need to crack it apart. One machete swing straight to it. You will let Richard dissolve you from the inside like an acid. You know that acting is a kind of cannibalism, and you indulge in it: you will be eaten, and you will eat your own. You need to find it in you, somehow, to cackle as you lunge at the girl, yanking open your belt buckle already. You need to hold her down at the elbows. You need to push her body deep into the mud as she struggles, until the mud coats you both so thickly that it will harden into a thin shell, later, in the light.

You need to deny yourself any reminders. This has to be real.