Authors: Reed Farrel Coleman
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Hard-Boiled
That was it. Fifteen minutes of that one wide shot of the Hollow Girl, bound, gagged, bleeding, a photo at her feet. But it wasn’t real. I wasn’t much of an artist, my only attempt at art consisting of one high school poem of unrequited love. My previous experience in the art world had taught me little. I admired artists, yet I couldn’t begin to understand what made them do the things they did. When I was working to find Sashi Bluntstone, I felt like I was swimming through a sewer pipe. The charisma of the artist and how much patrons and collectors were willing to pay mattered more than the art. The art seemed almost secondary. And now with Siobhan, it was impossible not to wonder what she was trying to say.
My cell phone, Nancy’s cell, Nancy’s house phone were vibrating and ringing not a minute into the post. Listening to Nancy’s “Time of the Season” ring tone made me think she’d picked the wrong Zombies song. “She’s Not There” now seemed the more appropriate choice. I kept that thought to myself, as the phones didn’t stop ringing until we shut our cells off and took the house phone off the hook.
“Look at the fear in her eyes, Moe?” Nancy repeated over and over again as we stared, transfixed by the image on the screen. “Look at the fear in her eyes.”
“Everybody says she’s such a good actress: you, her agent, everybody,” I said, holding Nancy close to me, stroking her hair.
“I know. I know, but look at her eyes.”
She was right and she was wrong. The fear in the Hollow Girl’s eyes seemed real enough to me. I had seen real fear in people’s eyes up close as a cop and PI, and Siobhan’s eyes had the same look, but so too did the eyes of the victims in the B-movies I watched on Netflix when I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t tell them apart. I wasn’t going to argue the point too hard.
“That lally column she was tied to, did you have one of those in your—”
“Yes, a few. It was an older house,” Nancy said, glad I wasn’t trying to talk her out of her fears. “I always thought they were ugly.”
“Ugly but necessary. Did you recognize the woman in the photograph at Siobhan’s feet?”
“It wasn’t Sloane. I could tell that. A mother knows that.”
“But did you recognize who she is?”
“No. Why, do you think it means something?” Nancy asked, grasping at straws.
“It means something, but I’m not sure what. It might be symbolic, some artistic statement Siobhan’s making about appearances or your surgeries. It’s hard to know. Or it might mean something very different.”
“Different how?”
“If she really is in danger—”
Nancy blurted, “What do you mean, if? Didn’t you just see that? Didn’t you just see her tied up and bleeding, for chrissakes?”
“The disclaimers, Nancy. You’re forgetting the disclaimers and her history and her talent. She knew people would react the way you’re reacting … well, maybe not quite the way you are, but close to it. Look, I’m going to find her whether she’s really in danger or if this is just bullshit. I promise. So don’t worry about that.”
She kissed me on the cheek. “I don’t think you can understand how much better that makes me feel. After we first met, even thinking about you used to make me feel safe. Just knowing you were out in the world somewhere … I don’t know how to explain it.”
I put my finger across her lips. “Then don’t try.”
“I’m sorry, you were talking about the photograph.”
“Right. Like I was saying, if she is in danger, the photo wasn’t put there by her. And if it wasn’t put there by her, it has meaning to whoever has her.”
“Has her! Oh my God, Moe. I—”
“Calm down, calm down. It’s my job to think this way, not yours. I’m just thinking out loud. One thing is pretty clear, though. Your daughter isn’t alone. The gag she could have put in her mouth herself, but she couldn’t have done the rest of it alone. She couldn’t have tied herself up like that, certainly not so tightly. She couldn’t have placed the photo by her feet after she was tied up. Someone else had to do that. What I have to find out is whether this other person did it for her, or to her.”
Nancy reached into the pocket of her jeans, pulled out her phone, and switched it back on.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling the cops,” she said.
I stopped her. “Not yet, Nancy. Not yet. Trust me, in spite of the disclaimers, the cops’ll be getting plenty of calls tonight. It’s just the way people are. They don’t read instructions and they ignore warnings. You don’t want your voice lost in all of it. You also don’t wanna be accused of crying wolf. When we call the cops, we want them to listen.”
She put the phone down. I could tell she wasn’t happy to do it. If I’d thought Sarah or Ruben were in danger, I wouldn’t’ve been happy to do it either, no matter what was said or who said it. But Nancy had yet to be so overwhelmed by fear that she’d lost touch with her rational self. Then there was hope. Hope was often a person’s worst enemy. The persistence of hope, only second to love, caused people to make terrible decisions, or worse, it stopped them from making decisions at all. This time, hope worked in my favor. As long as Nancy clung to even the slightest hope that this really was just some elaborate charade, it stopped her from doing something counterproductive. I laughed at myself because I found I was hoping I was right to stop Nancy from calling the cops. If I was wrong and things turned out badly, I wasn’t sure I could withstand another prolonged bout of guilt.
“Pack a bag,” I said. “You’re coming to stay with me.”
“What? No. What if—”
“This place is going to be inundated by the press. The phones won’t stop ringing. The paparazzi will be climbing the walls. Satellite news vans will be lined up across 107 and news helicopters will be flying overhead. Believe me, I know how it works. I’ve seen it destroy people. Do you really want to deal with all that now? You’ll be harder to find at my place.”
“I’ll follow you in my car. I need to be mobile. I don’t want to be trapped in Sheepshead Bay if Sloane needs me.”
“Okay, as long as we get out of here soon.”
A half-hour later I was heading south on Glen Cove Road toward the Long Island Expressway, a red Porsche Cayman trailing close behind.
Newsday
Monday, October 7, 2013
DANGEROUS STUNT REDUX
Media Columnist Linda Brown
Last evening marked another bizarre twist in the tale of the Internet phenomenon known as the Hollow Girl. The fifteen-minute single shot of the semi-naked Hollow Girl bound to a pole with rope, an orange ball gag in her mouth, and covered in fake blood is testament to the extent people desperate to breathe life into flagging careers are willing to go. Given her history of this sort of outrageous stunt, one would have hoped that this now-grown woman would have learned her lesson. But the obviously phony panic in her cynical blue eyes showed only a continuing pattern of condescension and contempt for the viewers who, since her return, have been flocking to watch her posts.
In the waning years of the last century, a lonely, nondescript girl became one of the first Internet stars by posting a video diary that purported to describe her daily adventures as a college freshman. She would remain anonymous and would be known to viewers only as the Lost Girl. The Lost Girl’s posts attracted a wide viewership over the span of several months during 1998 and 1999. The postings ranged from the mundane to the salacious. The Lost Girl was just as apt to describe poetry class with a boring professor as she was to detail her abusive relationship with her boyfriend Lionel or her intense sexual attraction to her roommate Victoria.
Only after posting a particularly graphic entry on Valentine’s Day 1999 in which the eponymous Lost Girl detailed witnessing a traumatic sexual encounter between the two objects of her desire did the lie begin to unravel. During the now-infamous Valentine’s Day post, the Lost Girl, calling herself the Hollow Girl, feigned suicide by overdosing on red wine and pills. The post caused quite an uproar as the “dying” Hollow Girl pleaded for help. 911 call centers, suicide hotlines, and hospitals were inundated by pleas from desperate fans in a panic to save the Hollow Girl’s life. Squad cars, ambulances, and emergency personnel were dispatched throughout the country, throughout the world, and several innocent people were injured as a result of traffic mishaps.
The Lost, or, as she would thereafter be known, Hollow Girl, was subsequently revealed to be a precocious high school senior and aspiring actress named Sloane Cantor. She has since legally changed her identity. She had perpetrated the entire hoax—which she claimed was simply performance art—from the basement and bedroom of her parents’ lavish home in a very well-to-do Long Island suburb. Although her viewership expanded after the Valentine’s Day post and the revelations about her true identity, the Hollow Girl could not survive the threats of criminal action and civil suits that followed in the wake of the “Suicide” posting. She somehow managed to come out the other end of it relatively unscathed, though she left much collateral damage behind her. Not only were people physically injured, but lives and reputations were ruined.
In spite of her past history, the Hollow Girl recently resurrected herself in a somewhat new form. Until last evening’s post, I’d found the latest incarnation of the Hollow Girl rather snarky and claustrophobic. Now, regardless of the myriad disclaimers and false sanctimony about performance art, she has done it again. The Suffolk County Police reported a twenty-three percent increase in 911 calls in the aftermath of last night’s “S&M” post. Nassau County Police reported a similar increase. This time, at least, no cars were dispatched and no one was injured. Maybe Warhol was correct, and we shall all have fifteen minutes of fame. I hope that if it comes to me it does not come at the cost of fifteen minutes of shame, as displayed by the Hollow Girl last evening. But this must stop. I urge you not to watch, because to watch is to reinforce this kind of behavior, and this kind of behavior will breed copycats. Only your refusal to be part of the performance will close the show. Please, close the show.
Monday, October 7, 2013
by Cilla
Last night we bore witness to an ascendancy the likes of which we are not apt to see again in many years. The Hollow Girl officially said Get the fuck outta here to poseurs like PSY, a chubby no-talent who wasted our time and whose only wisdom was Whop. Whop Whop. Whop Whop. I was totally gobsmacked by the Hollow Girl, who changed course from her intensely personal, parent-inflicted self-hating rants to a kind of still life, masochistic Kabuki. Her brilliant fucking use of clichéd symbolism was outstanding. The metal pole as phallus. The rope and tape as the restraints of a male-dominated society still bent on the subjugation of women. The ball gag to shut up those who would fight the power and as a reference to the male preference for women as exclusively sexual objects: silent, pliant, obedient. The fiercely tight rope a sign of male desperation at the sense of loss of control. The blood as the blood of a martyr, as menstrual blood, as blood of the whipped slave. But by far the most intriguing and poignant bit of theater was the detail of the photo at her bound feet. The woman in the photo, her identity, her true nature obscured by strips of black tape. The tape cannot be removed, her nature cannot be revealed until the Hollow Girl herself is freed from the restraints of male dominance. Is the identity of the woman in the photograph of any importance? Maybe not, but I confess to a desperate need to know who she is and to see her face. Some day I hope to kneel before the Hollow Girl and kiss her rope-burned thighs. I am hers.
The sun hung low in the sky over the eastern jaws of Long Island, a veil of haze cooling its bright orange to a sickly, pale yellow. Here at the western tip of the island, in the other world that was Brooklyn, my breath made white smoke in the crisp morning air. A sad chorus line of freshly fallen leaves cartwheeled past my shoes as I stepped to my car. In the hum of the cars along the Belt Parkway and in the pier-slapping waters of the bay I thought I could hear the faint, unpleasant snarling of winter. But I think I woke up looking for omens.
I’d gotten out of the condo before Nancy got out of bed so I could go down to my car and check the messages on my phone. I’d made a promise to Nancy to find her daughter no matter what. I was apparently untrainable. I should have known not to make promises, that promises were quicksand and swampland. I figured I might find some sign in my messages that would give me a sense of how deep the swamp was into which I was about to wade. I prayed it wasn’t much more than shin deep. At my age, with my knees, I didn’t even do that well on dry land.
There were a series of increasingly angry and desperate calls from Julian Cantor. The three calls from Vincent Brock were just desperate. Man, the guy really had it bad for Siobhan. I didn’t know Siobhan except as the Hollow Girl. I didn’t much like her. I was willing to bet she had slept with Vincent to prove a point to her father. Sex as an oblique weapon often seems like such a good idea, though it rarely is. The person you’re trying to injure usually walks away untouched and, in the end, it’s always the innocents who bear the scars. That was certainly the case here. Cantor had admitted to me that he knew all about Vincent and his daughter. Once Siobhan found out that her father was okay with her bedding his whipping boy, Vincent would be shit out of luck. I almost felt sorry for the poor schmo. I didn’t call either Vincent or his boss back. Allaying their fears was low on my list of priorities.
There were other calls, too. One from my daughter Sarah. She had seen the post. Suddenly she didn’t sound quite as happy about her dad playing PI again as she had been last Monday when we’d said our so longs. I wasn’t happy about having made a promise to Nancy, but I couldn’t say that about the rest of it. The soul-numbing, suffocating routine of the wine business had always heightened the pleasure of working a case. That was the corollary to the knot in my gut: the excitement, the stumbling around in the darkness. Not all the money I’d made nor the success I’d achieved as a shopkeeper could touch that. None of it could even touch the shifts I’d spent walking a beat on the boardwalk in the heart of winter, pellets of wind-whipped sleet gnawing at my face, the smell of Nathan’s hot dogs beckoning. I remembered that during the worst of the chemo and radiation, when I could barely raise my head to vomit, that I would have given anything to be back there, back on the boardwalk, alone in the sleet.