Past Indiscretions Read online

  It took a few minutes to yank the bicycle free, but he got it, forced it into his back seat. He didn’t hit the gas too hard, didn’t want to peel out and alert anyone, but he left the scene as quickly and quietly as possible.

  He’s already dead. I didn’t mean to kill him. He shouldn’t have been messing around out here at night like that! No reason to throw my life away. Not now. Not when everything is finally going my way. Melissa and the baby…they need me.

  And I’d do anything for them.

  ***

  “You okay, sir?”

  “I’m fine. Just had a…a little accident. No big deal.” Morris had forgotten about his own injuries, and he forced a smile as the teenage girl glared at him from behind the checkout counter. He reached up, slid his palm over his forehead, chuckled and wiped the blood on his pant leg.

  “That’ll be $11.39, sir.” She took the money, then frowned again. “You sure you’re okay? That looks pretty deep.”

  “It’s nothing. Really.”

  Morris took the shovel from the counter and tried not to look too suspicious as he walked out of the store.

  ***

  Babycakes: Okay…I’ve gone from pissed off to scared. Are you okay? Tell me what’s going on, please! If you don’t, I’m calling the police. I’m not kidding, Morris.

  I’m fine, baby. Don’t worry. I didn’t mean to worry you, just wanted to surprise you. I’ll be home soon. I love you, Melissa. I love you so much. I don’t know what I’d do without you.

  Morris turned off the phone and shoved it into his pocket. Before that message, there had been ten others, unanswered. He knew Melissa was probably losing her damn mind by now, and he’d have to think up one hell of a story to get out of this mess.

  The hole took much longer to dig than he had anticipated. It was a dry summer, and they were in the middle of a record-breaking drought. The dirt was as hard as concrete, and by the time he had the hole as deep and wide as he wanted, his arms and shoulders felt like they had been ripped free from his torso.

  He tossed the shovel away, wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his forearm. Each breath wheezed out of his barren throat, and he shuffled toward the car, dragging his feet, and popped the trunk.

  Just a boy. Tears filled Morris’s eyes, rained down on the body as he imagined this as his own son. What would he do if someone did this to his child? Killing them and then taking them away like this. The parents would never get closure. They would assume their boy was kidnapped. Would probably be on the news, begging whoever took their son to please bring him back, that they love him so much and would do anything to have him back in their loving arms.

  “I’m…I’m so sorry. I’m s-so fucking sorry…”

  He scooped up the crooked body into his arms, slowly made his way toward the hole. He had made sure to dig it large enough to fit both the boy and bicycle, but once the boy was inside of it, Morris collapsed to the dirt beside the hole, glaring down at the boy whose face was pointed toward the night sky.

  “If you would have been alive, I would have gotten you help. I swear to God I would have. But you understand, don’t you? I have a family to take care of. My own son coming into the world any day now. They need me.” Morris wiped the tears away, then climbed down into the hole with the boy, gripped his small hand, ran his thumbs over the knuckles. “I wish I knew your name. If I knew your name, I’d give it to my son. I would. To honor you. I—”

  The boy coughed once. It was weak and barely noticeable, but it was a cough. His eyes fluttered open, and within the next few seconds, his bloody face twisted into a grimace and he began to cry. Asking for his mother. The cries became screams as his squinted eyes locked onto Morris.

  Morris pulled himself out of the hole, kicked his feet and scooted away from it. His head shook from side to side as chaotic thoughts screamed through his mind.

  Alive…he’s alive…oh Jesus Christ he’s alive!

  Morris covered his ears and bared his teeth as the boy continued to bawl, begging for help, going on and on about how much it hurt.

  I’m going to help him now, just like I said I was. He’s alive, he can live through this. He needs an ambulance.

  But instead of reaching into his pocket for his phone, Morris walked the few feet toward the shovel, picked it up, twisted his hands over the wooden handle, ignoring the splinters stabbing deep into his palms.

  He hopped back into the hole, raised the shovel over his head.

  Even as the boy screamed and pleaded, it was Melissa’s laugh Morris heard in his mind. Her moans of pleasure when they made love. The way she said eeeeeee when she was excited.

  It was the cry of his newborn baby boy.

  “I’m sorry,” Morris said, then swung the shovel down. Then again. And again and again and again. “My family needs me.”

  And I’d do anything for them.

  Reprising Her Role

  by

  Bracken MacLeod

  Ignacio thought the girl on the bed looked familiar, but then the glassy-eyed heroin slackness made them all look alike. Not that it mattered. She was a prop, not a performer.

  He checked the setup again through the LCD monitor. The key light was too close; it washed out the scene and made the set look too clean. Not clean, exactly. The hardest part of Ignacio’s job was making something dirty look even dirtier. Without looking directly at the girl, he stepped around the camera and pulled the light back to soften its glare and create deeper shadows that would add needed contrast to the scene. Otherwise, when he inserted the grain effect in post to simulate film instead of digital video the actress’ facial expressions would be lost in the noise. While the audience for this masterpiece would likely be looking elsewhere in the frame for most of the scene, he knew that her face was important. Her expressions sold what was happening, made it look real to a skeptical viewer. And “reality” was what people wanted. In the sense of a “real life” Alaskan trucker series or a pawn shop show. What they were filming couldn’t look like a reenactment, but it had to have just enough doubt to let the viewer feel like they’d come within a safe distance of something terrifying. The people who bought Byron Blank’s movies at conventions wanted them to look as real as possible, but not actually be real. They wanted the production to do the work of suspending disbelief for them so they could watch a couple of dudes tearing up a girl and at the end still feel like they hadn’t been complicit in an actual atrocity. And that meant that it had to look just fake enough.

  That was the problem.

  “Vérité is context, not content,” Byron liked to say. “What passes for authentic is what people expect reality to look like, not what it actually does.” Ignacio’s job was made easier and more difficult by the fact that people had their own opinions about what looked real, and those were almost always informed by entertainment instead of experience. Making something authentic look fake enough to convince people it was only almost real took work.

  The men who’d dropped the girl on the bed a few minutes ago returned in wardrobe, wearing featureless white masks. A violent shiver rippled up Ignacio’s spine. He worried that they noticed his discomfort. Detached aloofness to what happened on set was the only appropriate response from behind the production line.

  Through the viewfinder, Ignacio studied the girl. He still couldn’t place where he’d seen her before. She was pale as a corpse and as almost as still.

  While the set depicted a nice, teen girl’s bedroom, this girl didn’t fit in it at all. Maybe once she might’ve, but not now. Not with the scar and the heroin dimness in her eyes. She looked like the person the girl who inhabited this room would become in the aftermath of what they were about to shoot.

  “The fuck is wrong with her?” Byron shouted as he walked onto the set.

  “She’s so pumped full of slag she won’t notice a thing. We’re going to have to do ADR in post,” Ignacio said.

  “No dubbing!” Byron shifted his focus to the masked performers. “You two make sure sh
e hits her lines, okay?” One thug gave a thumbs up; his other hand was occupied with the front of his trousers.

  “And you. No fancy camera shit. Just what they pay for.” Ignacio could have easily set up a three camera shoot and cut together the scene using the best footage from each angle. Really made something to be proud of. One camera, one take, one static shot. No artifice. “Vérité is context—”

  “Not content,” Ignacio finished.“Gotcha, Jefé. Hands off.” Whatever gets you through it, he thought. Detachment is self-deception, not distance. The viewers wanted their brand of role-play porn looking a certain way. Most of the time Ignacio shot brother/sister or mother and step-son role play, and left the “forced” stuff to the Russians. But every once in a while, Byron wanted to wander outside of his demesne and go slumming.

  Byron took his seat next to the camera and motioned for the men to stand ready. He looked at Ignacio who gave a weak nod. “Action!

  Ignacio leaned over the camera cupping his hands on either side of his eyes to better see the monitor, and wishing he still had The Mic Drop reality show gig. On the tiny screen he watched the men move toward the bed. The bigger of the two grasped the girl’s ashy blonde hair, yanking her up from where she lay on the mattress. Her face remained slack except for lips peeled back in a grimace. The sound of the man’s hand slapping her cracked in Ignacio’s headphones. He flinched and feared bumping the camera. Resetting the shot was unacceptable. He could put in a false video defect so viewers could process the jump without being taken out of the narrative. Thank you David Fincher! Too much of that, and it started to look intentional. That kind of contrivance was the kind of thing that could cost him future gigs, and he had a food and rent habit he was unwilling to give up.

  No edits. Stay cool. Stay pro.

  The next hit was followed by a deep woof of air as a fist slammed into her stomach. But that was still it. No screams. Byron wanted screams.

  A sound like tearing canvas crackled through the headphones; Ignacio leaned closer to get a look. Blood painted the woman’s pale legs followed by a pile of intestine. He finally remembered the girl.

  That can’t be her. We killed her.

  The smaller man took a step back. A smell of shit and bile rolled off the set like a fog over the bay. Ignacio stood confused and blinking. He hadn’t worked an SFX film since he was a P.A. on the second unit crew for Wicked Season, and he’d gotten his fill of pig intestine on that shoot. Never again. But there wasn’t a make-up creator on this shoot, and he sure as hell hadn’t set up an effect. This wasn’t even a real film. Just a porno scene. Something to sell to desperate men who thought that if it looked amateur enough, they were getting something unfiltered and forbidden.

  The girl stood up, dropping the guts to the floor. She craned her neck around, leering at the camera like she expected Ignacio to zoom in for a close up glamour shot. Her teeth clacked in his headphones.

  None of it was right. None of it was in the script.

  Finally, a full-throated shriek broke the silence, crackling in Ignacio’s headset. One of the performers stripped off his mask and clawed at the girl, trying to get her back on the bed. She wouldn’t move. His partner screamed and fell to his knees, trying to gather up his intestines and shove them back in his stomach. The slick viscera kept spilling out over his hands; he fumbled at them, clumsily juggling himself as his tears dripped from beneath his mask, splashing in the spreading gore below. Ignacio heard the thug sobbing and ask for his mother.

  Byron ran into frame and tried to grab the woman. Before he could think about what he was saying, Ignacio shouted at him to stop, that he was “ruining the shot.” But everything was already ruined. Byron started to shout but his words were cut off before he got more than a word out. Ignacio stepped back and looked up from the monitor at the set to see the woman holding the director by his neck with a bony red hand. Ignacio tried to process what he was seeing; none of it made sense. The expression on her face and the light in her eyes was brighter and more focused than ever.

  The full, unfiltered experience of the room settled down over him, the sights, the sounds, the smells. Everything he distanced himself from with the camera as mediator was right in front of him, exposed. The reality of the scene revealed itself like an opaque vinyl strip curtain being pulled back to reveal the cruelty of a charnel house. Byron pulled a pistol from inside his sport coat and aimed it at the woman’s face. Instead of a shot, Bryon heard a sound like he’d never heard before. It certainly wasn’t like the stock sound effects he heard in the movies when an action hero broke the bad guy’s neck. This sound was wetter. It popped and ground and a low aborted groan escaped Byron’s throat. It sounded just like she had when he first saw her through his camera. It sounded like a person dying.

  Ignacio ran tripping over cords and cables, getting caught up in them like a moth in a web. The camera and tripod clattered at his heels before getting caught in the doorway and tearing free from the headphone cable dangling from the clamshells still around his neck. He sprinted home, not caring about his equipment, car, or how people stopped and stared at the screaming man tearing up the street in the bright day light.

  ***

  Ignacio slammed his apartment door, locked it, and doubting what he’d just done, unlocked it and threw the bolt again, just to make sure. He couldn’t get a breath and his lungs burned, still, he raced to his bedroom and clawed out the false wall panel in the back of his closet. Dragging out a lockbox, he fumbled at the key pad until getting the code right on the third try and the lock clicked open. Inside, He found the fake Mexican passport his friend in the Art Department at TurnaЯound Films had made for him. It wasn’t perfect, but he figured it’d be convincing enough with a couple of hundreds stuffed inside. And he never intended to use it—not unless what was on the flash drive underneath it got out.

  Got out.

  She can’t get out.

  He picked the memory stick out of the lockbox with trembling fingers and crept back to the living room. He stuck the thing into the port in the side of his sixty-inch television, and stepping back, pointed the remote at the TV. He hesitated, working up the will to click on the only file on the drive: CHKR.M4P.

  The screen went black, replaced a second later with a view of the interior of a foreclosed house. A man in a black leather mask walked into the room and shoved a slender woman with ashy blonde hair onto the bed. After a few minutes of reluctant role-play bordering on the real thing, the actors seemed to pause as if unsure what to do next. Though the viewers didn’t want that kind of intimacy, Ignacio had zoomed in on the woman’s face. The man’s thick white knuckles were visible below her jaw. His fingers white and her face purpling. The key light reflected in the tears that trembled at the edges of her eyelids. The image was real and terrifying and Ignacio was frozen, staring into them on his monitor. Something told him to look closer. Get her eyes on camera. Nothing said to him, nudge Byron. Get him to yell cut. Go over and stop it. Instead, he stared.

  Standing in his living room, he remembered her now.

  He stood, TV remote in hand and watched her lights go out. Again.

  ***

  The image zoomed back and the scene blurred and swirled around as the lens pointed at the ceiling. Byron screamed in the background at the actor. The actor was hyperventilating, and crying, and then he threw up inside his mask. Ignacio recalled the competing smells of vomit and the woman’s piss on the bed, and felt his own stomach churn. A minute later, the file ended and the TV screen returned to the menu.

  The shoot wasn’t supposed to go that way, but the girl was wasted and so was the other actor and she fought back a little too hard and that pissed him off and before anyone intervened she’d been… wasted.

  They’d made an accidental snuff film.

  They dressed the girl and dumped her body off a cliff into the ocean and went back to making low budget porn like nothing had happened. No one came looking for her because she was no one and only the three of them knew she�
��d ever been hired in the first place—and only Byron ever knew her name. Ignacio watched the local news for a solid year with his breath held for the first ten minutes of every broadcast. And then it really was like she never existed. Because she didn’t anymore. The TV went dark and the scene began to replay. Ignacio pushed STOP on the remote and nothing happened. He did it again, and again, each time the scene continued to play out until her face filled the sixty-inch screen, and the scene paused. He threw the remote at his TV, and it bounced off, clattering in pieces to the floor, batteries rolling away under his futon. Despite the spider web cracks in the screen he could still see her face and on top of that, his reflection– watching himself watch her die… again.

  “You can’t come back,” he said to the image on the screen. Not after what we did to you.

  He unplugged the television and the broken screen went dark. He stumbled into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of scotch down from the top of the refrigerator. He poured the amber liquid into a juice glass from beside the sink and quickly gulped it down. The whisky burned his throat and his stomach threatened rebellion. He answered the threat with another stinging blast of whisky straight from the bottle.

  It’s a gag. They are messing with me, doing some elaborate set up. Fake scar, fake guts, fake bitch. Fake!

  A loud thump at the front door echoed through his apartment. Ignacio dropped his glass. It shattered and whiskey spread under his feet. He stood still, waiting for another knock.

  None came.

  He crept to the door, and peered through the fisheye peephole into the hallway on the other side of the door. It was empty but for a DV camera on a tripod.

  My camera.

  The red light lit up, recording.

  His guts seized. He put his hands on the door to reassure himself the barrier between him and the camera eye was solid not an illusion. He checked the deadbolt again. Still locked. He let out a small breath of relief. It wasn’t opening unless he opened it, and there was no way he was unlocking this door, not even to try to reclaim his camera.