We Eat Our Own (3 page)

That's why I don't know what happens in the movie. There's no script.

She takes out the hammer, holds it as close to the claw as she can so it won't make much noise.

He doesn't usually work this way, he says. Ugo. Usually we shoot on soundstages. They have every frame of the thing on a schedule and we just knock it out, bam, bam, bam. We shoot the whole film in a weekend. Can you believe that?

Anahi rises onto her toes. He stares at the muscles above her knees, bracing.

That's how we shot
Vacation in Hell,
he says.
Psycho Venom, Four Hundred Teeth,
all of them. They rent out a trained monkey and spritz all the actors down with water so they look malarial and add some jungle sounds in post. That's how we always worked. Hell, that's how all of these jungle exploitation movies are made. It's a genre.

She taps. Teo can't see her face from where he's sitting, but he can see it in the rest of her body: she is trying so hard not to look at him.

But something happened, he says.

She doesn't respond.

Something happened to Ugo, and now he's got this whole vision, wants to make this
new
kind of film.

He wants her to ask—what kind of film? He wants her to say anything, but then the hammer stops sounding, and Anahi starts to climb down, careful, like she's stepping down onto ice.

She does it so quietly. Teo can't help himself.

He leans over and rattles the legs of the chair.

She stumbles, yips. He laughs and shouts, Boogeyman! but she doesn't laugh back. The chair clatters and settles, and she finds her footing on the ground, takes a step back into the parking lot, covers her face with her hands. She catches her breath while Teo laughs himself breathless.

Why did you do that? she says, meek.

I was just kidding! Come on.

I could have broken a leg.

You're fine, he says, the first time joking, easy, pushing himself to a stand and tossing the bottle on the ground, ambling into the lot. But when he says it again, he is right next to her. His hand is on her waist and his words are a command.

You're fine.

Anahi stares at the ground. The lot is so dark, but Teo's close enough to see the fine creases at the inner corners of her eyes, her short eyelashes, and the little blood vessels in the white.

Now tell me about the snake, he says. You promised.

She looks up at him once, long enough to take in the curl of a smile at the corner of his mouth. Then she strides out into the lot, finds a branch, drags it through the wood chips they've put down over the mud. He listens to them clatter. The line she makes must be six meters and curves like a tilde. He cocks his head as he watches her do it, her body moving in the orange light of the mosquito coils that are burning all along the perimeter of the lot.

It's this long, she says, when it's stretched out.

She stares at the line. She stays on the other side of it, away from him.

In the dark, Teo looks straight over the line at Anahi and thinks of the mata toro, the way he looked at the animal in the mata toro's grasp and thought instantly of her. He's not sure why they evoke each other, except that there is a thrill to this kind of looking that he hasn't found elsewhere. Even when she walks away from him, she can't stop him from looking: he can still see the tiny globe of her jaw joint shifting as she grinds her teeth just a bit, the way the skin darkens over the bone when she does it. He knows how her skin works. He saw how the snake's skin worked: the way its lower jaw unhinged when
it had corkscrewed all the air out of its prey and was ready to swallow, how the scales drifted apart as the skin stretched around the body of the animal. When he looks at Anahi, he thinks of that new flesh between scales: that shocking pink, petal-delicate. The whole continent of the jaw joint moved and then separated, unhinging into its composite bones, drifting farther apart until the skin at the corners of its mouth stretched white. The snake put its lips around the head of the animal and pulled itself over, over, slow, a sleeve.

He had the shotgun in his lap, the barrel hot from the sun, a bar of pure heat. It was the exact thickness of a light pole shaft, and something about this made Teo feel powerful, like he was capable, like he knew exactly how to use this thing, though he'd never held a gun before in his life. He liked the feeling of holding it, of knowing what he could do and not yet be doing it. He liked how it felt to wait up above on the bank.

Teo looks at Anahi and thinks of how easy it is: he is looking at her, so she can't move at all.

She says, now: Who is your character in the movie?

Her feet are rooted, her posture rigid. Teo leans against the wall again, tries to sharpen his gaze so he can see her in the dark.

I don't know anymore, he says.

How can you not know?

Like I said, we don't have scripts. The director feeds us our lines, a shot at a time. He changes things around.

But your character has a name.

Well yeah, it
used
to be Mike, Teo says. Now it's Joe, I think. But then an actor quit, so everything might change again.

Who was it that quit?

You didn't meet him, Teo says. The American. He didn't even get on the plane.

The American?

We need at least one American in the cast. It makes international distribution cheaper. We've got a new one coming to replace him in a few days.

What part will he play, the American? When he gets here?

Probably Richard, but who knows? He could be anyone. Teo laughs. Who knows what part I'll play, hell.

But how can you shoot a movie like that?

Fuck if I know.

Why do you
want
to shoot a movie like that?

He hesitates. Directors recast all the time, it's not—

That's not what I mean, she says.

When did her voice get so bold? It's too dark for Teo to see her face. Her little hammer is clutched in both hands in front her, dangling like a golf club. He takes a step into the lot, grinning.

What do you mean, then?

I mean the violence, she says, bracing. I mean the blood and the killing and the guns. Hurting that Indian.

What about it?

She bites her lip. Never mind.

No, tell me. He walks a little closer.

Anahi looks off to the side. What I meant was . . . Doesn't it bother you? To even pretend to do things like that?

Teo is close enough, now, that he can hear the simmer of the mosquito coils. There is less than an arm's length between him and her and he can see the glint of her silly little hammer, the way her hands are trembling.

Look at you. He smiles. So worried about me.

The first time Teo called for maintenance, Anahi told him that she couldn't go inside his room when he was in it. The
owner would get angry if she did, she said; Teo would have to rehang the rest of the netting over his mattress himself. She offered to call one of the male employees, but Teo said no: he wanted her. Even if she could only hang the netting over the door, he wanted her.

He had said he wanted her the next night: a smashed lightbulb. And the next: he torqued his room faucet until water leaked out of the base. As far as he could tell, she wasn't allowed to say no.

Teo smiles once at her, then turns around, ambles through the curtain of netting and back into his room. He kneels and rifles under the bed for another warm beer, cursing as his elbow strains. His vision is blurred from the alcohol, but he can see the shape of an empty T-shirt under there, an untied shoe.

He hears her voice, hesitant behind him and far away.

You should be careful. Sometimes there are animals underneath.

• • •

Here is something else Teo does not tell Anahi:

It took him an hour to get back to set after he left the snake in the river, a half-kilometer walk with elephant grass thrashing at his ankles. He beamed himself in the forehead on low branches. The heat dropped and the humidity rose, every trunk he steadied himself against slick with mist like the trees were sweating, too. For the last half kilometer, Teo lost the trail he'd made going in and had to follow the sound of voices through the black. He could hear the cameramen best, loading in the equipment, planning a joke they wanted to play on the lead actress, a twenty-year-old girl from southern Switzerland
who they all thought was sexy and took every opportunity to tease. They'd stolen a fake skull from props, and they were going to bury it in the mud near the makeup tent, ask her to come take a look. They mimicked it: Irena, Irena, what's that over there? They said it in exaggerated accents, mocking her inflected Italian.
Teo couldn't see them, but he could imagine them pantomiming the face they thought she'd make when she saw it, laughing in whispers. They'd unhinge the jaw of the skull and make it laugh, too.

Teo focused on the laughter as he lunged over something wet and soft and wide on the ground, maybe a soaked sheet of bark or a body. The voices were so close, but he had to keep his eyes on his feet. It was so dark he couldn't have seen the silhouettes of the cameramen, even if he'd searched.

So then how did the director see
him,
pushing through an unexpected gap in the tree line and onto the black mud of the beach? Ugo didn't have a flashlight. His cigarette was lit and that's what Teo saw: a fleck of orange, moving from his mouth down to his side.

He winced when he heard Ugo say his name. He braced for the director's curt, quiet anger: Where the fuck were you, where have you been all this time?

Instead, Ugo issued one emotionless laugh into the dark. You smell like shit.

Teo murmured, I went for a walk.

It was like the director's gaze had its own magnetic resonance, the kind of look that could vibrate a cell at fifty meters. Ugo had always been intense but this was different: that look felt different here, in this country that smelled like mud and sweat and iodine, the river plashing out there somewhere in the dark.

I upset you today, Ugo said, a statement of fact.

We're fine.

You don't like this new process I'm trying.

He didn't ask Teo whether he liked acting, period.

Teo said nothing. He heard Ugo swallow, saw the vague shape of him folding his arms in front of his chest as he spoke.

What happened today—maybe it's a sign.

Teo flattened it from a question into a statement: A sign of what.

That maybe you're not right for the part of Richard, Ugo says. I was considering you for it, you know. For the lead.

I—

When the American quit, I thought, why not, let's try Teo in the lead? But I think now, I need someone more—what's the word.

Teo could feel sweat creeping through his scalp like insects, nosing under individual strands of his hair.

Someone more raw, Ugo said. More naïve.

Teo laughed. I've never acted a day in my life. I'm not sure how much more raw you can get.

That's not what I mean.

Then what do you mean?

I mean I want to take the script in a different direction.

What script?

Ugo coughed. The story, then.

Teo wanted to ask: Why no script? Teo wanted to ask what happened, why he was in this fucking country at all?

But something about the rough edge to Ugo's voice told him not to. Instead he clenched his back teeth, tried to find Ugo's face in the dark.

I can try to play innocent if you want me to. If that's the question. I'm new at this, but I can try.

Come on, Ugo said. We've done, what, eleven films together?

Teo paused, surprised Ugo remembered. Twelve.

And that last one in Milan, with the teenage girl, what was her name, the one who worked craft services?

All the muscles in Teo's face went slack.

And all that bullshit you put us through? All that hush-hush business, paying off the parents so we wouldn't have to stop production? You didn't think my production manager wouldn't tell me all about that, did you?

I—

You cost me money on that, Teo, Ugo smiled. Come on, don't tell me you don't remember.

Teo looked at a point on Ugo's cheek, above his mouth and below his left eye, and said nothing.

You can play innocent. The director laughed. Huh. Come on, Teo. We may not know each other well, but trust me, I know
you
better than that. And besides—

Teo will not tell Anahi what the director said next:

The way we're going to shoot this film—I need someone who's not just playing.

• • •

Teo doesn't flinch when Anahi mentions the animals under the bed. He pushes himself off the hotel room floor and stands, the beer warm in his fist. He puts a laugh in his voice, looks straight through the mosquito netting when he speaks: And what big scary things are under my bed?

Anahi is so still. He can't make out the particularities of her features through the netting, her nostrils or her eyes. Her eyebrows are thick and perfect. Her shirt is white and he thinks
it says
HOTEL OVIDIO
on it in black block capitals, but he can't be sure. She is crossing her arms over her chest.

Insects, she says. Rodents. They get under the beds.

Not snakes?

Not this far from the trees, no.

Teo puts his beer on the corner of the bedpost and slams the bottle cap off with the heel of his hand. Are you sure?

Anahi doesn't say anything.

He smiles. I don't know. I think I hear something in here. I think it's hissing.

Her arms fall to her sides.

I'm scared, Teo teases. I think you better get in here.

She says, I don't get paid more if I work late.

Save me, Anahi.

I need to go.

But I need your help.

I can't—

He shhs her. He hisses. Ssssss. Listen. Did you hear that?

Teo cups a hand around his ear.

Hey, hey. I think it's coming for me.