Authors: Owen King
“A complete and total
de
-sgrace,” echoed one of the ballerinas, and her peers giggled.
Whatever the maintenance man said in reply, Sam didn’t hear, because he was running up the steps, pushing through the oak doors and inside, jumping down two stairs at a time to reach the basement.
Set against the back wall of the editing suite was a long gray worktable. On the worktable was a series of pale shapes: squares, rectangles, machine-cut ovals. These shapes marked the places where, the previous day, the film department’s various monitors and CPUs and keyboards and other pieces of equipment had been. One unremarkable pale oblong on the desk, bookended by two larger squares, had been left by an external hard drive containing Sam’s work in progress, his film.
■ ■ ■
The panic lasted under a minute. Sam paced a few circles in the room, hyperventilating the damp air, trying to understand what it meant, how what had happened related to him.
The obvious answer clicked into place: it didn’t mean anything, and it had nothing to do with him.
Someone had an ax to grind with the film department. Someone had received a C on a final project and had stewed about it all summer long and had decided to take revenge by flambéing the editing gear. It was a baroque and stupid scenario, exactly the sort of thing that some overdramatic, overmedicated little shit would come up with.
Jesus, Sam thought, what a waste.
Under the gray worktable stood a row of filing cabinets. He slid open a drawer in the middle. The drawer contained over a hundred DVD cases, lined up in neat rows of black plastic. Among these cases were two copies of the assembly of
Who We Are
—even before screening it for himself, he had made these—as well as the video transfers from the film lab. There were, as well, copies of several extended sequences that he had stitched together in the process of assembling the assembly. Everything was backed up.
He pulled the two DVD cases at the front of the drawer, the complete cuts that he had burned onto blank discs the previous morning. Sam popped open the first case. It was empty. He looked in the next case—also
empty. Slowly at first, he began to go through the rest of the cases in the drawer—empty, empty, empty—until finally, in his fever to open them, he ripped the covers off of some of the cases, snapping them at their plastic hinges and tossing them aside.
They were all empty. There was not a single disc on a single spindle.
■ ■ ■
Sam climbed the basement stairs and went back outside. He strode to the thigh-high pile of burnt, foamy computer pieces. The maintenance man hadn’t moved.
“It almost looks like some kind of art, doesn’t it?” The maintenance man stroked his jolly bush of a snow-white beard.
Sam put the heel of his sneaker against the torched, hollowed husk of the computer monitor and pushed. The monitor toppled with a dull crunch. On the blackened grass beneath it was a large puddle of silver plastic, embedded with the finlike protuberances of a few DVDs that hadn’t melted completely.
“Oh,” said a ballerina. “Cool.”
The maintenance man agreed. “Yes. Kind of neat.”
■ ■ ■
The full horror of the situation was evident: all of the digital material was gone; Sam would have to order new transfers and re-edit the entire movie from scratch. He would need to placate Wassel and Patch for at least a week while he built a new assembly. Even doing that—because fall classes were about to open—was predicated on his finding a new editing suite, which would likely require tapping Brooks for more money. As distasteful as that might be, it was the least of his concerns at that moment.
Sam returned to the basement. He took out his cell phone and dialed the film lab in Astoria.
“Fuck,” said Sam. “Motherfucker.”
“Pardon?” The receptionist at the film lab, Celluloid Services, had picked up.
“Sorry,” said Sam. “I’m having a bad morning. Someone just tried to destroy me.” He asked how quickly they could make new transfers, how much it would cost, whether it would help if he drove in to pick them up himself.
While the receptionist left him on hold, Sam permitted himself to
fantasize about capturing the vandal who had committed this atrocity. Optimally, he’d get the bastard on-camera and film his confession. He wondered if Brooks would consent to hiring a private detective, preferably an unscrupulous one who wasn’t averse to beating a few people to get to the truth.
Sam could feel his mind gleefully skipping away, like some demented man-child escaped from a remote sanitarium. His outrage was scrabbling through the dense hedges walling the facility off from society, and now it was heading for the picturesque village in the valley below, where there were people to gnaw.
It was so stupid and pointless. He felt ambushed, picked on, and very, very angry.
To alleviate some tension, he went to the poster of
New Roman Empire
and ripped the blindfold of electrical tape off Booth’s face, tearing away a strip of poster.
The receptionist was on the line again. “Your partner checked everything out.”
“Uh-uh. I don’t have a partner.” This display of ineptitude momentarily buoyed Sam. There was not a single other competent person in the entire world; for the benefit of society, he had to persevere. “You looked up the wrong account.”
The receptionist asked if an individual named Brooks Hartwig, Jr., had signed for the account with a Visa ending in the digits 1512. Sam acknowledged that this was so; Brooks was his assistant. “Call him whatever you want,” said the receptionist, “but he cosigned, and he paid, and he already checked it all out.”
“Checked out what already? I’m not following you.”
“The negative. The film. Everything.”
Sam told her she wasn’t making sense.
The receptionist spoke with exaggerated slowness. “The man. Who paid. For this account. Closed it out. He took the negatives. Of the film.
The
film. He carried it away. He carried it out the door. Beyond the walls of this place. He could do that. Because he paid. Does. That. Make. Sense?”
■ ■ ■
The white-bearded maintenance man was still pondering the foamy wreckage of the editing suite. The ballerinas were gone. The sun, appropriately,
had slid behind a bank of metallic clouds, and the bright morning was now a dim afternoon.
“You are really upset?” The maintenance man was quizzical.
Sam didn’t stop or respond, only threw a brief, irritated glance over his shoulder at the man as he walked away. The connection between them from that night in the parking lot of the Hoe Bowl when they had exchanged salutes—the man in the driver’s seat of Brooks’s Porsche—had not yet resolved itself in Sam’s mind. It wasn’t until later, in the dark of the basement theater, when the maintenance man was projected across the screen in all his glory, that Sam finally knew him.
■ ■ ■
The ramifications of something having happened to the film, the actual celluloid, were too vast to contemplate unless there was absolutely no other choice. He focused on finding Brooks.
First he tried the AD’s dorm room. The door was, as was customary for Brooks, unlocked. Sam threw it open without knocking: no one.
The squalor inside—unmade bed, scattered clothes, massive punch bowl on the desk filled with black water and the stubs of several hundred dead kitchen matches—did suggest that the AD had been present recently.
Sam checked the computer lab, the student parking lot, the cafeteria, the health center, and the auditorium. He peered through the windows of the gymnasium—a place he could not conceive of Brooks visiting voluntarily—and observed nothing but dust phantoms hovering above the basketball court. There was no sign of Brooks around any of these places.
While he hurried from location to location, he repeatedly called the AD’s cell phone. It went to voice mail without a ring. He kept leaving messages: “I’m trying to find you, Brooks,” “I’m still trying to find you, Brooks,” “You’re not here, either, Brooks,” and so on.
At the science library, Sam descended all the way to the bathroom in the deep stacks where they had filmed Rick Savini’s scenes in the toilet stall.
Here, he rested on the toilet lid to catch his breath. Sweat made his shirt tight on his chest, and his calves tingled with pinpricks. The walls of the stall were covered in the signatures of the cast and crew. The basement air had a thick submarine texture. Sam held his head.
An exchange from Brooks’s short film about the haunted animal heads occurred to him:
The elk, on its plaque above the fireplace, watches as the taxidermist (Brooks) stuffs a squirrel at a rough wooden table. Its jet eyeballs slide back and forth. “You know that there are—things,” it says. “Around you in the air. Floating. All kinds of things, little man. But you can’t see them.”
“What are they doing?” asks the taxidermist. He sets aside the squirrel with trembling hands.
“Passing judgment,” says the elk. It chuckles dryly. “You never even knew you were on trial, did you?”
Brooks had mentioned to Sam that he received a C on the film. It was one of those winter nights in the AD’s dorm room. Brooks was watching the backward movie on his laptop. Sam was in the bed. The actress on the computer screen jerked and staggered as she traveled in reverse along a sidewalk, a movement that suggested, troublingly, the pull of giant invisible wires, of a giant invisible fishing rod, reeling in a catch.
“They said it was ‘grotesque’ and ‘tacky.’ But, like, if they can’t accept the world that’s right there in front of them . . .” Brooks twisted around and extended himself across the rug on his stomach, to reach under the bed where Sam lay.
Brooks emerged after a moment with a box of kitchen matches. He fished out a match and attempted to strike it off his belt buckle—nothing. “Anyhow,” he said, “ ‘yay’ for passing, right?” On his second attempt, the match ignited.
■ ■ ■
A message buzzed Sam’s cell when he emerged from the library. It was Wassel. “Hey, man, your assistant delivered the DVD this morning. He seemed super crazy, by the way. Extremely impressed that you have your own personal Renfield. Anyway, should we watch this without you or what? I thought you were going to give us the live and in-concert director’s commentary.”
The sweat on Sam’s body turned cool as he listened, and his legs went wobbly. The relief knocked the wind out of him. He dropped onto a bench. Hard pellets of rain started to fall, and it took him two tries to dial the producer’s number with slippery fingers.
“I’m on my way,” Sam told him. “And for God’s sake, keep that DVD safe.”
■ ■ ■
In Ossining, Sam stopped for coffee and a fill-up. While he was inside the gas station, his phone buzzed again. The cell’s display read
BROOKS
.
Sam stepped outside and huddled under a rusted overhang to keep from getting wet. The dirt parking lot was a brown pool shivering with raindrops.
“Brooks,” he answered. What he ought to say next—the right question—eluded him. He didn’t understand what had happened, what was happening, how exactly his AD was involved. All he dared say was, again, “Brooks.”
From the other end of the phone, there was quick, shallow breathing, and behind that, the hollow thud of wood battering against wood. “Brooks! Brooks!” someone cried.
“I can’t talk long.” The AD was breathless.
“Why can’t you talk long? What’s going on, Brooks?”
“Everyone’s upset with me here. I burned down Mom’s cupola. Are you upset with me, Sam?”
“I’m not upset with you,” said Sam. “I’m confused. I’m really, really—confused. Brooks, what did you do with the film?”
The AD sobbed, laughed, hiccupped. The thudding noises continued. “Are you getting this? I bet you love this. Great material, huh?”
“What?” asked Sam. “Getting what?”
“Not you,” said Brooks. “Someone else.”
Sam thought of the countless times he had seen Brooks push at the air, how often the AD had chuckled about the ghostly documentary crew he claimed to see.
“We called the fire department!” cried the distant voice.
“Uh-huh! I’m sure!” Brooks yelled back.
“Brooks,” said Sam. “You went to the lab, and you took out the film—”
“I didn’t realize it was already so flammable, right? Like, I knew it was flammable, but I didn’t know it was, like, nuclear. So the lighter fluid was superfluous and . . . And Mom is not happy.”
Words came out of Sam’s mouth: “You didn’t realize what was so flammable?”
“The short ends,” said Brooks. “Our film’s short ends.”
“My film didn’t have any short ends.”
Heavy objects were shaking loose, falling to the ground in an
avalanche of bangs and crashes. “I’m not sure how long my fortifications are going to hold, Sam.”
Across the boiling lot, at the gas pumps, a fluttering plastic banner advertising a two-for-one wiper-fluid deal broke one of its plastic ties. The banner unfurled from its remaining tie and crackled loudly in the wind.
Sam pictured the flatbed in the closet of the editing suite and listened in his head to the rustling, whirring sounds that came from under the door—the slicing sounds. He saw a razor squeaking back and forth, and the excess celluloid wafting to the ground.
There was more knocking and cracking and bumping.
“Go away!” Brooks screamed. “You’re invading my privacy! This is my room!”
“Brooks.” Sam pressed against the cold cement wall and sank to a crouch. “What were you cutting at the flatbed?”
“I told you. I was trimming off the short ends from our movie.” Sam could hear him dragging something to brace the door that was under assault. “Whatever, right?”
“No—no. Whatever, wrong. What did you do to my movie?”
“But listen, I called because I don’t want you to worry. Because, yay! Yay, they’re going to love it! Everyone is going to love it!”
In front of Sam, the parking lot was a lake. “You burned my film? The actual film?”
“Yes, but we don’t need it now. The movie’s all done. It’s all short ends once you’ve locked down the final cut, right? And I’m telling you, they’re going to love it.” Wood splintered on Brooks’s end of the phone. “Oh. Wow . . . I think they actually did call the fire department.”