The Little Sleep (25 page)

She sits on the bed wearing her white T-shirt and short denim skirt, but also wearing big purple bruises and rusty scrapes. In color, she looks even more like Jennifer, but an anorexic version. Her arms
are thinner than the film running past the projector’s lens, skin washed with bleach. Her eyes are half open, or half closed. I want her to have a name because she doesn’t have one yet. She sways on her knees and pitches in her own two cents of laughter. It’s slurred and messy, a spilled drink, a broken cigarette. She’s not Jennifer.

Off camera, the boys speak. Their voices are boxed in, tinny, trapped in the projector’s speaker.

“Let me take a couple of quick shots.”

“What the fuck for?”

“So he can beat off to ’em later.”

“Fuck off. For cover shots, or promos. It’ll help sell the movie, find buyers. What, am I the only one here with any business sense?”

“You ain’t got no fuckin’ sense.”

“And you ain’t got no fuckin’ dick.”

More of that boy laughter, plus the clinking of bottles, then Tim appears on-screen, backside first. He turns around, sticks his mug into the camera and travels through decades. He fills the frame, fills the screen in my apartment. He’s a kid. Fifteen tops. Dark hair, pinched eyes, a crooked smile.

Ellen was right. He does look like me, like I used to look. No, that isn’t it. He looks like how I imagined my own appearance, my old appearance in all the daydreams I’ve had of the pre-accident me. He is the idealized Mark Genevich, the one lost forever, if he ever existed in the first place. He’s young, whole, not broken. He’s not the monster me on that screen. He’s there just for a second, but he’s there. I could spend the next month wearing this scene out, rewinding and watching and rewinding, staring into that broken mirror.

Then Tim winks and says, “Sorry. I’ll be quick, just like the boys will.”

Off camera: a round of
fuck you
s and
you pussy
s mixes in with laughter. Tim turns away from the camera and snaps a picture. He says, “One more. How ’bout a money shot. Take the shirt and skirt off.” The chorus shouts their approval this time. The camera only sees Tim’s back. He completely obscures her. She mumbles something and then the sound of clothes being removed, cloth rubbing against itself and against skin. T-shirt flutters off the bed, a flag falling to the ground. Tim snaps a second picture, then hides behind the movie camera.

No one says anything and the camera just stares. She’s shirtless and skirtless. She opens her eyes, or at least tries to, and says, “Someone gimme a drink.”

Off camera. “When are we gonna start this shit?”

Tim says, “Whenever you’re ready. Start now. I’ll edit out your fuckups later.”

Two bare-chested teens enter the scene, both wearing jeans. Their skin is painfully white and spotted with freckles and pimples. These guys are only a couple of years removed from Ellen’s keepsake picture on the stairs, boys in men’s bodies. Sullivan is on the right and Times on the left; both have wide eyes and cocksure sneers. Unlike in the stair picture from Ellen’s house, Sullivan is now the bigger of the two, thick arms and broad shoulders. He’s the muscle, the heavy lifter, the mover, the shaker. Times has a wiry build, looks leaner, quicker, and meaner. Here’s your leader. He’s holding a bottle of clear liquid, takes a swig.

Times kneels on the bed beside the woman and says, “You ready for a good time?” No one responds to or laughs at the porn cliché, which probably isn’t a cliché to them yet. It’s painfully earnest in this flick.

The new silence in the room is another character. Times looks around to his boys, and it’s a moment when the whole thing could get called off, shut down. Sullivan and Tim would be all right with a last-second cancellation of this pilot. I can’t know this but I do. The moment passes, like all moments must pass, and it makes everything worse, implicates them further, because they had a chance to stop and they didn’t.

Times says, “Here.” He gives her the bottle and she drinks deep, so deep I’m not sure she’ll be able to come back up for a breath. But she does, and hands back the bottle and melts out of her sitting position and onto her back. Sullivan grabs a handful of her left breast and frantically works at the button and fly of his pants with his free hand.

Her right hand and arm float up in front her face slowly, like an old cobra going through the motions for some two-bit snake charmer, and her hand eventually lands on Times’s thigh. She’s like them, only a kid. And she’s a junkie. I wonder if those three amigos could see that and were banking on it, or if they were too busy with their collective tough-guy routine to see anything.

Times says, “Lights, camera, action.”

The sex is fast, rough, and clumsy. With its grim and bleak bedroom setting, drunk, high, and uninterested female star, and two boys who are awkward but feral and relentless, it’s a scene that is both pathetic and frightening at the same time. The vibe has flipped
180 degrees, from should-we-do-this to where the potential for violence is an ogre in the room. Like someone watching a scary movie through his fingers, I cringe because I know the violence is coming.

The camera stays in one spot and only pans and scans. There’s never a good clear shot of the woman’s face. We see her collection of body parts in assorted states of motion but never her face. She’s not supposed to matter, and even if nothing else were to happen, this is enough to make me hate the boy behind the camera and the man he became. Tim says nothing throughout the carnal gymnastics. He’s the silent but complicit eye.

Sullivan finishes first and stumbles out of the scene. He gives Tim—not the camera—a look, one that might haunt me for the rest of my little sleeps and short days. When that kid’s middle-aged version killed himself in the basement of his Cape house, I imagine he had the same look on his face when he pulled the trigger. A look one might have when the truth, the hidden and ugly truth of the world, that we’re all complicit, has been revealed.

Times is still going at her. He’s on top and he speeds up his thrusts for the big finish. Then there’s a horrible choking cough. It’s wet and desperate and loud, practically tears through the projector’s speaker, and makes Brill’s lung-ejecting hacks sound like a prim and proper clearing of the throat.

“Jesus, fuck!” Times jumps off the bed like it’s electrified.

It’s her. She’s choking. I still can’t see enough of her face; she’s lying down and the camera isn’t up high enough. She coughs but isn’t breathing in. Out with the bad but no in with the good. Yellow vomit leaks out of her nose and mouth and into her hair. Her hands try to cover her face but fall back onto the bed. She shakes all over,
the convulsions increasing in speed and violence. I think maybe I accidentally sped up the film but I didn’t; it’s all her. Maybe the bed is electrified.

From behind the camera, and it sounds like he’s behind me, talking over my shoulder, Tim says, “What’s fuckin’ happening?” He doesn’t lose the shot, though, that son of a bitch. The camera stays focused on her.

“Oh, fuck, her fucking eyes, they’re all white. Fuck! Fuck!”

Sullivan says, “She’s freaking out. What do we do?”

The camera gets knocked to the floor, but it still runs, records its images. A skewed, tilted shot of under the bed fills the screen. There’s nothing there but dust and cobwebs and darkness.

The bed shakes and the springs complain. The choking noises are gone. The boys are all shouting at the same time. I can only make out snippets, swears, phrases. It’s a mess. I lean closer to the screen, trying to hide under that bed, trying to hear what they’re saying. Their voices are one voice, high-pitched and scared.

Then the three voices become only two. One is screaming. I think it’s Times. He’s says, “Shut the fucking camera off!” He shouts it repeatedly, his increased mania exploding in the room.

And I hear Tim—I think it’s Tim. He’s whispering and getting closer to the camera. He’s going to shut it off, taking orders like a good little boy. He’s repeating himself too, has his own mantra. Tim is saying, “Is she dead? Is she dead?”

The screen goes white. The End.
Fin.

The take-up reel rattles with a lose piece of film slapping against the projector. My hands are sweating and I’m breathing heavy. I shut
off the projector, the screen goes black, the take-up reel slows, and I stop it with my hand. The used engine gives a whiff of ozone and waves of dying heat. Everything should be quiet, but it isn’t.

“Who is she?” A voice from my left, from the front door.

I say, “Don’t you mean, who was she?”

Jennifer Times stands in the front doorway. She looks like she did at the mall autograph session. Sweatpants, jean jacket over a Red Sox T, hair tied up into a tight ponytail. It might be the weak candlelight, shadows dampening her cheekbones and eyes, but she looks a generation older than when we were at the restaurant. We’re both older now.

I say, “I don’t remember calling and inviting you over. I would’ve cleaned up a bit first. Maybe even baked a cake.”

She walks in, shuts the door behind her. Someone raised her right. She says, “Who was she? Do you know?”

I say, “No idea. No clue, as it was. How much did you see?”

“Enough.”

I nod. It was enough.

She says, “What are you going to do now?”

“Me? I’m done. I’m taking myself out of the game, making my own call to the bullpen. I’m wrapping this all up in a pretty red bow and dumping into the state police’s lap. Or the FBI. No local cops, no one who knows your dad, no offense. I was hired to find it. I found it.”

Jennifer carefully steps over the rubble and crouches next to me, next to the projector. She stares at it like she might lay hands on it, wanting to heal or be healed, I don’t know. “What do you think happened to her after?”

I say, “How did you get in here?”

“I checked the welcome mat and there were keys duct-taped underneath.”

Keys? I never left any keys. I don’t even have spares. Ellen wouldn’t do that either. Yeah, she’s the de facto mayor of Southie, friends with everyone, but she’s also a pragmatist. She knows better than to leave keys under a welcome mat on one of the busiest corners of South Boston. All of which means Jennifer is lying and also means I’m screwed, as I’m sure other unexpected guests are likely to arrive shortly.

Jennifer holds up a ring of two keys on a Lithuanian-flag key chain.

Shit. Those are Ellen’s keys. I say, “How did you know I was here?”

“Why are you interrogating me?”

“I’m only asking simple questions, and here you go trying to rush everything to the interrogation level.”

She says, “I was parked outside of your apartment and saw you. I waited a few minutes and let myself in, then I sat outside your door listening. I came in when I heard them yelling.”

I fold up and break down the projector as she talks. I don’t rewind the film but, instead, slip the take-up reel into my coat pocket, next to the other film. I wrap up the cord and slide the projector into its case, latch the latches twice for luck. I say, “Why are you here?” and walk past her to the screen.

“I needed to see if you were telling me the truth on the phone. I had to know.”

The screen recoils quickly and slides into its box nice and easy. I say, “And now that you know, what are you going to do?”

Jennifer walks past the table and sits on the couch. “How about answering my question?”

“What question was that? I tend to lose track of things, you know?”

“What do you think happened after? After the movie? What did they do?”

My turn to play the strong silent type. I lean on the screen, thinking about giving an answer, my theory on everything, life, death, the ever-expanding doomed universe. Then there’s a short bang downstairs. Not loud enough to wake up neighbors, a newspaper hitting the door.

Jennifer whispers, “What was that?”

“It ain’t no newspaper,” I say. “Expecting company, Jennifer? It’s awful rude to invite your friends over without asking me.”

“I didn’t tell anyone where I was going or what I was doing.” She gets up off the couch, calm as a kiddie pool, and tiptoes into my bedroom. She gestures and I lean in close to hear. She whispers, “See if
you can find out who that woman was and what they did with her after. You know, do your job. And if things get hairy, I’ll come out and save you.” Jennifer shuts the door.

No way. I’m going to pull her out of the room and use her as a human shield should the need arise. I turn the knob but it’s locked. Didn’t know it had a lock.

If things get hairy.
I’m already hairy and so are the things. Yeah, another goddamn setup, but a bizarre one that makes no sense. Doesn’t matter. Prioritize. I need to hide the equipment, or at least bury it in junk so it doesn’t look like I’d just watched the film for the first time. I lay the screen behind the couch, unzip a cushion and stuff the film inside, then go to work with the projector and case, putting it under the kitchen table, incorporating it into one of the makeshift legs. I move the candles to the center of the table.

Maybe my priorities are all out of whack. I give thought to the back exit and the fire escape off the kitchen, but the front door to my apartment is currently under assault. I’m not much of a runner or climber, and I’d need one hell of a head start. I could call the police, but they’d be the DA’s police, and even if they weren’t, they wouldn’t get here in time. No sense in prolonging this. I walk over to the front windows and pull down the blankets. I lean against the wall between the windows, light a cigarette, shine the tops of my Doc Martens on the backs of my calves, adjust my hat, pretend I have style.