Long enough to live. I wondered those seconds before death — does she feel my desire? Does she know I stare at the way fire meanders across her wrist, the way the oily crevasses reflect in her mastoids and the sharp accents of her clavicles? She reminds me of a charcoal painting with her chaff knuckles and her veins resembling broken pipeworks mired in corpuscles — a symbiotic car crash of mitochondria and guts.
She talks like an airport intercom messenger. “Paging Milton. Go drown yourself.”
Iris locks the glass cage. A makeshift audience has gathered. I’m vying for their attention, competing against their cell phones. Water mixed with green tea leaves explodes out like a fusillade. I drown and die; the cage releases the water.
Resurrected by CPR, I drink 60 % proof er gou tou and stumble around camp. I enter Iris’s tent and ask, “When was the last time you made love?”
She replies, “I need fire to get aroused.”
“Burn us,” I tell her.
Her eyes gleam. “A lot of people think they can handle the heat.”
“Burn us,” I say.
She sets her arms on fire, her lips curling. Sweat beads on her forehead and it crinkles in delight. She puts a match to my pants. I smell embers like they’re dead hope and I can see the blurry mistakes of my past.
“You want me to stop?” she asks.
I shake my head and the fire consumes us, greedy rivets stumbling over one another to get higher. I press my fingers against her bony back, her spine feels like bolts. She shivers and she’s crying from pain. Her tears whet the fire. “You’re insane,” she says.
The pain is becoming unbearable, the heat a scorching machete ripping my calves open. “Best way to quench passion is to kill it.”
“Who killed yours?” she asks.
“My bosses, friends, my ex… you?”
She sucks in the smoke. “Me.”
“Let’s kill you then.”
“How?”
I grab her hand and run towards the water tank.
“I’m not like you, I might not come back,” she says.
“It’s easy. Just swim towards the light.”
“What light?”
“The one you see when you blink and your breath stops. Ignore all the voices calling out to you pretending they’re the people you loved.”
“Who are they?”
“Death herself,” I answer. We jump in and lock the cage. Water bursts out, quelling the fire. I kiss her and swallow her burnt breast. There’s desperation in our fingers; every sense is acute in our race against the end. She closes her eyes, exhales, bubbles run up her face; I draw the last air from deep in my stomach. The water is cold, but it’s a fiery death.
58 Random Deaths and Unrequited Love
I.
Larry Chao was a failure. He’d made fifty-four films and not a single one had been distributed or accepted at the various film festivals. He’d had famous actors star in his movies; his stories were compelling and dramatic. The lighting was impeccable; the sound, epic. There was absolutely nothing wrong with his films except that none of them had been displayed in a public venue. There were a multitude of reasons, all ill fortune rather than any lack of talent on his part. In the two decades that he’d been making films, he’d collected over ten thousand rejections. Which wasn’t too surprising considering that his films tended to alienate rather than invite the audiences, the subjects varying across the board, including but not limited to: the epileptic janitor who fell in love with the spurned lover whose head was shot off by her ex-boyfriend; the dormitory of men that woke up one day and discovered they’d all become women; the millionaire who thought he was going to die and spent all his wealth in a day only to find that he’d been misdiagnosed.
His last film was about a failed suicide artist who fell in love with a failed food artist. Their disappointment connected them together, binding them in a crucifix of contempt and contemplation. His friends had assured him that this was the film that would gain him recognition. Surely the judges couldn’t ignore the brilliance of the piece. But eight months later, the rejections pouring in, he lost hope and instead sang the paean of the middle-aged depression artist who had never savored the dulcet nausea of adulation and acceptance. This time around, his cinematographer refused to return his calls. His actress slapped him in public after he complimented her on her dress. The girl he was dating told him, “I need to date someone with a real job.”
By some quaint disposition formulated through the combination of erratic genes and environmental anomalies inexplicable in any other setting, it never occurred to him that he might not be that great of a filmmaker. Instead, he felt convinced that his next film would be his magnum opus. His subjects would be 1) 58 random deaths that had no meaning, and 2) unrequited love. The film would be vehement, cruel, and horrifying, while blending in elements of comedy and vaudeville.
His executive producer asked, “Can’t we just make a normal film for once?”
“Like what?”
“Like someone cheating on their husband or someone addicted to drugs or a superhero-type figure who kills thousands of bad guys… or even better yet, a mid-life crisis kind of story where a guy goes on a road trip and finds happiness in banging some younger girl. People are tired of watching movies about losers. They want to see winners, not people like themselves. If you’ll recall, that’s why they go to the movies. To escape.”
“My movies are about real people. They don’t get the happy ending because I’ve never gotten a happy ending.”
“But even your romances end in disaster.”
“In real life, the guy doesn’t get the girl.”
“You mean in your life,” he corrected Larry. And it was a fact of some irritation to the producer because Larry wasn’t a very attractive man — short, balding, and chubby. As a result, he hired similarly proportioned actors for his protagonists: never compelling, never dynamic; instead, plain, dull, and normal, making his movies even harder to sell.
Still, production commenced. There were questions like what type of camera to use, which locations to secure permits and which locations to guerilla-style it. These were the unique travails of indie film productions rife with the exhilaration of dealing with unpredictable caprice that tore apart even the best of planning. It was a twenty-day shoot through rain and sunshine and early mornings and sleepless nights and groggy food marches. The range of deaths was diverse: severed heads, sundered intestines, rent rectums, and spliced spinal cords, the corsage of a conundrum with the punch line of emptiness. It was the dismal conviction of a life that had been unkind to a dreamer.
On the day of the wrap party, Larry got stuck in traffic. At the exact same time, a fourteen-year-old teenager was assigned the task of shooting a random person as initiation for the gang he wanted to join. He shot Larry five times in the head while humming a catchy pop song. Larry, who’d been humming Billy Joel, didn’t see what was coming and died on the spot.
The news spread like a wildfire, the conflagration of curiosity razing the public. Larry Chao had shown in his own film the method by which he would die days before he actually did, a ghastly prognostication on the stem of his being. Many viewed it as a condemnation of a society that beautified whimsical violence and sought purpose in perdition. All of a sudden, everyone wanted to see his movie. Motivated by the ardorous obsession of the zealot and the grisly curiosity of the scientist dissecting a live human and noting his death throes as observational bullet points, they waited in interminable lines and slept in front of theaters overnight to catch the matinee. The notoriety of a dog death had garnered him something that had eluded him throughout his breathing life. Interest. 58 Random Deaths and Unrequited Love was deemed a masterpiece by the critics. It won most of the major awards at the important film festivals and he was heralded as an auteur unparalleled in scope and vision. When it was revealed that he had archives of unseen films, they were immediately sought out and distributed. All of a sudden, the only name that seemed relevant in film was Larry Chao. Which seemed especially poignant when one considered that the title of the movie that seemed to connote every emotion Chao must have felt being six feet underground as a rotting corpse was his first: Posthumous Fame: What’s the Point of Being Recognized after Death?