She's Lost Control

  “This family cradle kept your grandmother safe,” Jeremy said. “What was good for big Rebecca will be good for little Rebecca.” She hasn’t burned it. She can always burn it. There has never, she wants to tell Jeremy, been a single verified case of sudden infant death syndrome when the baby was sleeping in the parents’ bed. Of course, fat, senseless felonious drunks rolled on their infants and crushed the life from them. She knew they did. They did it on purpose, because she didn’t believe they could not notice, for how could they not notice? In the hospital, newborn Rebecca thrashed like a weasel when she slept spent and chanced to lean on her unaccustomed bundle, just five hours outside her own body. In their big bed, Jeremy liked to lounge. Jeremy basked. He was a scholar of sleep, a sultan of snore. He didn’t want to wake little Rebecca. She pictures poor Jeremy’s trustful face, slackened in sleep, pressed to the biggest cherry bright plate on the electric stove.

  Next month, she thinks, as her face shoulders neck chest heart relax, she will take the plunge she’s been meaning to take all along. She’ll pack a tiny bag and rent one of those pods at the airport, those brutally clean pinned sheet napkin wrapped pods. They were made for her kind, for sleeping in public places. She sometimes casts yearning looks at the troll houses of bank kiosks—how warm and public they would be. But dirty. Dangerously dirty. When the weather is warm, she’ll park up in the lot of the ski lodge. Ah wilderness. She can imagine waking to the sun basting the ridge, another night burned.

  At Jeremy’s Christmas party, she overheard a woman sleekly say, “They were acre couches. They were Rhode Island sized couches. They were deep as the Mariana trench. And I just stuck my purse under my butt and kicked off my shoes and snuggled up on top of my ratty old fur coat and I was out! Out!”

  The woman turned, flinching from her eyes, more startled than the owl.

  Even in memory, the devouring maw of her attention abashes her. It must have risen up like a stink. She had studied the woman. Her bob, her sneer, her fishnets and coral pout. Was she another like her?

  No, she thinks. She’s fine now. Here now. The night is colder. Cold might rouse her early but she will get some good hours. Down she slides into surrender. There is no other. Of her, she is the only one.

  FOLEY

  Katy McCarthy

  MONA PRESSES THE loose floorboard with a socked toe, just to hear it talk. It speaks: the sound of a miniature diving board. She is grateful for 7:30 a.m., an hour appropriate for drinking coffee, grateful that it is no longer 4:30 a.m., the hour at which she unwillingly rose.

  Her three roommates are still nooked up in their bedrooms. If Mona listens closely, she can hear the fleecy sounds of their elbows moving through blankets and the little taptap of their finger pads on glassy screen faces.

  Like most things, Mona prefers hearing her roommates to seeing them.

  Sound is fact. She can handle it objectively, break it down and hold its many parts in her ears. When she was a kid and her parents used to rage at each other she would rhythmically press the hollowed part of her palm to her ear, remixing their fights into something more abstract. Something tolerable.

  One of her routine morning thoughts (the kind you cannot control, that float up triggered by the environment) is that a person can gauge their fit within a communal household by how they feel in their home in the morning.

  Most mornings in this house, Mona skulks around drinking a cup of coffee, the better to speak as rapidly as the fast-mouthed cohort she lives with. Often, she ends up drinking another cup and overshooting the mark. Her shaky hands break mugs and she starts her day by scuttling shards of ceramic into paper bags and apologizing.

  They are not bad people, just not her people.

  Mona makes coffee. She stirs in cream with a butter knife. The sound warps and curls, a bell to action.

  The freeway is thick with other Angelinos at 8 a.m. Traffic is now the center point of a constellation of other things she finds unfavorable about L.A: the dirt air, the layer of jelly fat on her lower back from no longer walking everywhere, the performance art. It feels that all the components of her life are light years from each other. A forty-five-minute commute to a party, an hour to the museum on the hill, a year until her next career move.

  ***

  At work, Mona and the senior foley artist Louis—a surfer-turned-yogi-turned-sound guru—stretch out on yoga mats in the recording room. The walls are upholstered in spiky foam, localizing and dampening all sounds. The familiar weight of silence soothes Mona’s tympanum.

  Mona squats to stretch her hips out, then eases down onto the floor and extends her legs, touches her toes. She is agile and has a penchant for picking up complex choreography. In New York, she danced with a downtown company. The director told her once she had great powers of mimesis but no style. So now, she is here, where perfect mimicry is the name of the game. Doing foley is like playing Dance Dance Revolution while performing a John Cage piece.

  Mona extends her arms behind her and interlaces her fingers. Her left shoulder pops satisfyingly. On tables around her Louis has already gathered wheels, pieces of wood, Play-Doh, little trays of gravel, carpet samples. “Finishing the last episode of Clambake Motel today?” she inquires.

  “Yap,” Louis hands her a cue sheet: lots of keys, some flesh stuff, doors slamming. Mona turns around to peek into the audio booth, the engineer has arrived and is looking down at her phone. Louis walks up to the glass between them and taps it with the back of his knuckles. “Let’s make some noise!” he sings.

  The first scene is a bath. As the character steps into the tub, Mona follows suit with her own legs into a tub of water, splashing lightly in acclimation to the heat. Louis voices the heater, plucking a wire to simulate the popping of hot oil. When the character, the overworked female proprietor of the titular Clambake Motel, allows her head to be subsumed by the water, Mona sticks a straw in the tub and blows bubbles to give sound to her underwater exhale.

  ***

  At the end of the day, Mona is damp but feels accomplished. “Great work today,” Louis compliments her, “can’t wait to see you take on the flick we’re doing in the morning.”

  “Gimme the lowdown,” she says, tucking a bucket of keys back onto a shelf.

  “Kind of an indie movie, suspense . . . horror,” he says, “sort of experimental. The whole movie is basically a bunch of YouTube videos edited together.”

  Mona has a soft spot for horror although she has done very little foley for the genre.

  “There’s a lot of barefoot carpet tiptoeing and slamming door stuff, but some pretty chilly shit at the end.”

  “I might stay late and watch it, is that cool?”

  “Sure, just lock up when you leave and don’t like, wig out here alone.”

  ***

  In the engineering room, Mona clicks around on a mouse to wake the projector up and presses play. The picture blooms to life, introducing FionaFakesIt, a YouTuber who has forsaken Hollywood dreams for smaller screen fame. Dirty blonde and slightly sticky in the heat of the San Fernando Valley, Fiona is creating her latest DIY filmmaker tutorial. A mélange of shears and loose hardware and leftover rings of PVC make cameos on screen as Fiona demonstrates how to make a camera glide rail with rollerblade wheels and pipe. When she cuts to the footage it is choppy, fast then slow, and bumpy. She is willfully oblivious. “So, there you have it, your own good-as-professional camera slider for less than twenty dollars!” As she is swiveling the camera towards her pillaged, useless rollerblades, a shadow moves across her window. Busy making a joke about already missing blading on the boardwalk, she doesn’t seem to notice.

  But—later—as Fiona is reading the five comments she has received, two of which are from bots, she frowns at one. “Something in ur window at 7:13? Whattttt is that?”

  ***

  FionaFakesIt’s audience starts to grow, and she gets a haircut and paint her nails. She posts a video called Three DIY Techniques for Injections and Needles! In the first demonstration, she
barely touches the needle to her skin and films herself pulling away quickly. “This is how they did it in Pulp Fiction,” she explains, reversing the video to make it look like she is stabbing herself.

  “It’s obviously most effective if, just as the needle makes contact, you cut to a scene of like . . . the person’s face in pain,” she says guilelessly. For method number two, she pulls out a hunk of prosthetic skin and loads a real hypodermic needle with a milky concoction. “Couldn’t afford a full limb and I doubt you could either, but I have a friend who works in sex doll fabrication who will give me swatches of test skin.”

  Fiona flicks the needle and jabs it into the yielding fake. She sucks it back and the chamber of the needle swirls with a few red ribbons from the blood packet glued to the underside of the prosthetic. She depresses the plunger and empties it. “So that works pretty well.”

  “The last method is to just use a stage needle,” Fiona explains. “You can get em’ online. It’s basically just blunt metal, spring loaded, so when you push it against something, it looks like it’s going in, but the needle actually just retracts into the body of the syringe, see.” She swiftly stabs herself. “W-what the fuck!?” she yells. The needle is buried deep in her arm. She pulls it out and shakily makes a joke about being a “real noodle for accidentally using a real needle.”

  Fiona chuckles, but her pupils are huge. Mona thinks that if the movie was 4D, Fiona would be fragrant with fear-sweat.

  Fiona is wrapping up her video and reminding folks to leave comments and be sure to Like the video if it was helpful. As she’s waving goodbye, there is a slam! from somewhere in her house. Fiona jolts back and snaps her attention in the direction of her bedroom door. “The fuck . . . ”

  “Um, hello?” she calls out in her valley voice.

  She gets no reply. “Must be the Santa Anas,” she says to her camera.

  Seconds go by and Fiona doesn’t move, just stares in the direction of her bedroom door. Mona imagines the little red worm on the video progress bar getting longer and longer and how it looks just like a syringe of blood, getting fuller and fuller.

  Finally, Fiona looks deeply into her webcam. “Maybe you guys can come with me and I’ll just check it out.” The picture swims as Fiona scoops up her MacBook. Holding it close to her head, angled slightly to the front, she and her viewers move into the hallway and then slowly towards the living room.

  Her front door is open wide to the windy night.

  She approaches the door and Mona gets a view of Fiona’s dark front yard, overgrown with bougainvillea and manzanilla and white sage and also two glowing eyes.

  Mona gasps as Fiona yips and slams the door. The computer is briefly left unattended and Mona can hear Fiona locking the door and tip toeing to a window, the sound of curtains being pulled shut and then slowly pulled back. Fiona comes back to the computer. “It’s just a deer guys, sorry I’m so jumpy.”

  She turns the screen towards the outside again. Through the window the deer stands still, ears alert.

  “Pretty wild in these hills,” Fiona speaks softly. “Maybe I should start a nature channel instead, whatdya guys think?” Then a crack sounds, and the deer falls hard.

  Fiona and the computer run back down the hallway, into the bedroom, behind a locked door. Fiona dials 911 on her cell phone and is frantic with the operator.

  “My front door was open, and then just now someone shot a deer in my front yard [a pause]. No, I haven’t used any drugs tonight! Can you just send someone out fast, I’m worried there is someone in my yard with a fucking gun! My neighbors? I don’t know, a half mile?” She gives them her address. The webcam records all, then she hangs up and moves off screen. Clicking sounds lead Mona to assume that Fiona is locking her windows. Fiona comes back to the broadcast, wild with fear, biting her lips and rocking. “I don’t know what to do you guys, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what is going on or who is out there or why—why they killed that deer or . . . ”

  She leans over her keyboard, biting her right thumbnail and periodically jerking at the small noises of her home.

  This goes on for fifteen miserable minutes. It’s a strange editing choice, Mona thinks, but effective. Real time, waiting for the police to wind their way up and over the canyon.

  Finally, the police rap on the door and yell. Fiona skitters out, leaving the computer unattended. Muffled voices sound from the living room. The screen is a still life of her empty room. It’s banal but riveting, the way real things are. The cinema vérité editing choices snub the four-second attention span of millennials and ease Mona into a state of suspended disbelief.

  There is a noise at the window. The window. The window is opening, just a crack.

  Fiona leads the cops back to her bedroom. They immediately glom on to the small pile of needles on her desk.

  “Oh, no! Um, I make YouTube videos,” she explains.

  “About doing drugs?” an officer asks, icily.

  “Ha, no, like about how to do your own special effects and editing tricks and stuff.” Fiona’s wrinkled brow and flushed cheeks loom into the image. “Actually, something else weird happened tonight with one of my props . . . Look, I’ll show you.” She stops the recording.

  Mona realizes her shoulders are crunched and her palms sweaty. Adrenaline hums pleasurably through her. She adores the feeling now but knows the movie will keep her up later. Her penchant for horror often means late nights spent rigid with wakefulness, only eventually falling asleep with her bedside lamp aglow. She is a feminist who loves slasher films and she sort of sees no problem with that. The contemporary woman is allowed to be contradictory, permitted to watch men hurt women on screen and then bring a man home with her.

  Different men cater to different qualities of her fear. Some men Mona sees as comrades of death: If a murderous spirit comes to life under the house and floats up to violently kill her, her friend will die too, and she won’t be alone in her final moments. Other men seem capable of protecting her. These men she puts on the side of the bed facing the door, cupping their cross-fitted shoulders and riding smoothly into the deep black of unconsciousness. It’s complex, womanhood, but Mona doesn’t lose sleep over it with a warm male sharing the bed.

  ***

  Since the video of the deer, which went viral, it seems that Fiona has accrued quite a fanbase. Not just DIYers but people looking for entertainment outside the purview of HBO and Netflix. Fiona stirs almond milk into her coffee that lingers, undispersed, so unlike cream, and runs her mouth about morning light on camera.

  “Let’s see if the Times is here,” she says and pads to the door. The vertical format of the video tells Mona that Fiona is recording from her iPhone this morning. The video walks with Fiona to the door, who opens it. She leans down to pick up the plastic sleeve of newspaper.

  Underneath it, written in coppery, dried blood: Hollywood prefers real horror. The prop needle lays next to it.

  Fiona drops the phone.

  The next day she will pick up a million new viewers.

  ***

  Mona does not want to be like poor Fiona with her stalker and her dangerous fame. The internet is a nation of creepy stalkers and prurient fans, diligently tuning into Fiona’s every episode. Shamelessly Liking as she gets scared witless. Does she want the attention? Not like this.

  When she finds the needle, Fiona runs straight to her car and speeds to a friend’s place downtown, stopping only to buy an e-cigarette at a gas station. She blows vapor over her anxiety and tries to keep her audience intrigued by wearing less clothing and recruiting friends to prank call her and breathe deeply on the other line. But it’s never enough, her capricious fans can smell the fakery and viewership drops off. No one actually wants to watch her parent layers in After Effects to create a Cool Text Message Conversation on Screen while receiving fake calls. The comments are demanding: Return to the Blair Witch broadcast or else. The audience is fickle; they want what they want.

  They don’t have to pine for long
.

  In the next scene, on a Tuesday morning when she live-broadcasts herself reading and responding to comments, Fiona notices a new video on her channel that appears to have been posted the night before, but not by her. It is a dark, pixelated shot of the front of the friend’s house she has been camped out in. Light blinks from an upstairs window and the camera zooms towards it. It’s slightly blown out, but it’s certainly her, Fiona, demonstrating how to set up a green screen. She gestures towards the corners. She pulls wrinkles out, stapling the Kelley Green Sheet to the wall like an alien hide.

  “Someone hacked my account . . . ” she says quietly. Her eyes are red and searching. Her chin wobbles as she speaks, looking directly at the camera “Who the FUCKING FUCK are you, this is SICK, OKAY? and WHY . . . Why are you doing this? I want it to STOP I want you to stop please stop,” she pleads, wrapping her arms around her shoulders. “Maybe it was a joke, or maybe you liked me and didn’t know how to, like, show it or something, but, it’s gone too far, and the Police are looking for you and, now I’m sure they will track your IP address and find you, so you better just stop. Okay? Just . . . ” She breathes out. “Please, just, please leave me alone, go away.”

  She turns the camera off.

  An hour and fifteen minutes into the movie, on a Thursday night, Fiona kills herself on camera.

  Mona half-watches, but she listens, deeply, to Fiona’s death. The incision will need to be juicy, Mona thinks. The steady push push of blood from the pulsing slits should make a glug, glug noise. How will she foley this scene? Slicing into a chocolate lava cake? Pushing viscous liquid from a slice in a balloon?