When she came out of the scene the director got her eyeball to eyeball. Loudly he announced that, next, they were doing a full dragonslaying. A Scylla-slaying, and as for the romantic lead, he should dial down.
What?, asked the boy. You want me to play sidekick?
His pout soured. Alya wanted to tell the kid the bile did him good, it was his ticket out of the Mouseketeers, but she didn’t feel like getting her head bit off.
Besides, it wasn’t any second-line player she needed to speak with now. After the Scylla was slain, after she was back at the makeup station getting the gore scrubbed away, she had her assistant call over to the Geek Ghetto. This time the nerd would get the go-cart, and wouldn’t you know it, just talking with Zachary left Alya’s girl with supernatural powers. Suddenly the assistant could read minds. After the call the girl handed over a folder in which, stashed among the documents, there lay a fat spliff fresh from the dispensary.
As his cart pulled up, her bad-hair boy was on the phone, the conversation intense. He had to use Alya’s name twice before he could ring off.
Awe, awesome, he declared. They’re into a whole 3-D redo.
He kept hold of the phone, perhaps to keep from grabbing her.
They’re back to the storyboards, he declared. Xena-rific, they’re saying.
The guy wasn’t a director, and this made his sweet talk that much more tasty. The folks from makeup were still in earshot, too.
Warrior Princess Queen of the Underworld. Franchise-ready.
Also Alya knew what the computer jockey got out of being seen with her, and why not indulge him? Why not soften him up?
Finally: Zachary, I ask you—where do you get your ideas?
Overhead, the floodlights had come on, and against the tarmac, the trailer siding, his shadow lengthened and hooked.
See but, Al, Alya, what? I told you I haven’t read the book.
The book, well, a smart guy like you doesn’t need to read it. Smart guy like you, you can imagine what it’s like, for this woman. A gifted young woman.
You, you can tell where it’s going.
A gifted woman in a gilded cage, what’s she got except big, heroic ideas? No MacGuffin there.
The way he gripped his phone, you noticed his wedding band.
And the man who wrote the book, Alya went on, he’s pretty transparent too, a geek who never got out of the library. One of those old Brit polymaths. But then there’s you.
Behind him, his crooked shadow might’ve come out of a horror show.
Where do you get your ideas? Do you just close your eyes and, where are we, another world? Every day you face that blank wall.
Uhh, a blank screen…
She went on staring, narrowly, avid, while with his free hand the nerd fingered his ring, and though he’d switched the Droid to mute it kept blowing up, its message lights blooming across his narrow chest. When at last he spoke, what came out was distracted and clueless: cultural inheritance?
Nonetheless, the actress let it go. What further clarity did she need, when she had the guy’s own breastbone, aglow with its Bat Signal? He didn’t want to talk about it, her Zak-Man, he couldn’t chase down that pill, because it led back behind the bones, into that breathless, bloody darkness with its throbbing omnivorous hulks, and after Alya had once more made her goodbyes, after she’d negotiated the traffic and the alarm and she was once more alone in the house, she knew just how to bring her night caller around. She knew how to get her papers scratched and gnawed on, her interiors tagged with rowdy graffiti. She might’ve started growing a claw herself, she had such a grip on her spliff while she dug for the sex tape. She didn’t want the tape she was using to threaten the ex, no, but the one he’d never been able to find, the tape with her previous ex, plus a dose of X, not to mention an extra, a girl from On the Rox. That ought to interest the little troglodyte more than her financials, and she had better paperwork for it too, like the receipts for her abortions. She had the mug shot from when they’d busted the escort service. Alya had taken care of herself a long time before she had to take care of a child, indeed before anyone had called her Alya, and in the photo from the bust, the stare she was giving the officer in charge, she was making sure he got the message—if he gave her the mug shot, she’d be his freak—and she had the shot now, didn’t she? She had rags and offal enough to occupy her nights for a lifetime, and with it, no end of outrageous promise.
CLOSING CREDITS FUN & COUNTERFORCE
So you’ve seen what there is to see, start to finish, but you’re still in your seat. Wasn’t a great flick, no, that’s not what brought you out—and anyway, didn’t some smart guy sometime say that the movies were an art form based on how long a person could go without having to pee? Smart guy, and you can vouch for him after, what’s it been here? Ninety minutes, a hundred? The movie had its limits and so does the old flesh and bones. Still, now that they’re rolling the credits, you’ll take a minute more. There was that recurring snatch of music, theme and descant, playful. Could’ve been Zappa, and let’s nail that down, composer and title. Also, let’s watch the fantasy die. Come the credits, everyone dies, even the assassin with half a dozen passports and a dusting of anthrax in each. Everyone collapses into a set of phonemes, white on black. The trickbag turns inside out: physical trainers and personal assistants and the crew in Wardrobe and Makeup. As for the zombies, these days there’s a boutique operation out in the Valley. The fantasy falls into cemetery rows, names and brand names. Except, not this time.
This time you see the credits turn cannibal. They turn on each other, pieces tearing out pieces.
Is this a trick cooked up by the tech people? A joke? A joke would mean you’ve been watching a comedy. The comedies throw in a last gag as the screen goes black. They show the outtakes, interrupting the credits with the failures, like when the cameras caught some pretty boy in his Dodgers cap, though the scene was set in gladiatorial Rome. The outtakes, that trick, that’s a risk, come to think. It can look as if the better laughs took place over in the real world.