I'm just trying not to cry again while standing behind Bobby. On the computer screen: designs for a device, a breakdown of the components that make up the plastic explosive Remform, prospective targets. Jamie's in the kitchen, carefully reading Tammy's prescription while pulling a bottle of Evian out of the refrigerator.
"How's she doing?" Jamie asks Bobbv.
"If it's any consolation?" he asks back. "Better."
Jamie walks past me blindly and moves slowly up the spiral staircase, maneuvering around crew members, thinking maybe she should feel more for me than she really does but my fear doesn't move her, it's isolated, it's not hip, it doesn't sing.
I'm touching Bobby's shoulders because I need to.
He stretches away from me, mutters "Don't" and then, "That's not a possibility anymore."
A long silence, during which I try to learn something.
"You look thin," Bobby says. "When's the last time you worked out? You're looking too skinny. Slightly whitish too."
"I just need some sleep, man."
"That's not an explanation," Bobby says. "You need a motivational workshop."
"I don't think so," I say, my voice cracking.
But Bobby might as well be submerged in a pool. We might as well be having a conversation underneath a waterfall. He doesn't even need to be in this room. He's just a voice. I might as well be talking on the phone with someone. I could be viewing this through a telescope. I might as well be dreaming this. Something hits me: but isn't that the point?
Bobby walks silently into the kitchen.
"Things are, um, falling apart," I'm saying. "And no one's acting like they are."
"What's falling apart?" Bobby says, walking back up to me. "I think things are right on schedule."
Pause.
"What... schedule?" I'm asking. "What... things?" Pause. "Bobby?"
"What things?"
"Yeah... what things?"
"Just things." Bobby shrugs. "Just things. Things about to happen."
Pause.
"And... then?"
"And then?"
"Yeah... and then?"
"And then?"
I'm nodding, tears spilling down my face.
"And then? Boom," he says serenely, lightly slapping my face, his hand the temperature of an icicle.
On cue from upstairs: Jamie starts screaming.
Even within the artfully lit shadows of the bathroom Tammy Devol and Bruce Rhinebeck shared, you can easily make out the bathtub overflowing with dark-red water, Tammy's floating face, its shade a light blue, her eyes open and yellowish. Our attention is also supposed to be drawn to the broken Amstel Light bottle that sits on the tub's edge and the groovy patterns her blood made on the tiled walls as it shot out of her veins. Tammy's slashed wrists have been cut to the bone-but even that wasn't "enough," because somehow she managed to slice her throat open very deeply
(but you know it's too deep, you know she couldn't have done this, though you can't say anything because you know that scenes are filmed without you and you know that a different script exists in which you are not a character and you know it's too deep) and because it smells so much like what I imagined a room covered in blood would smell like and Jamie's screaming so loudly, it's hard to start piecing things together, make the appropriate connections, hit that mark, and I can't stop gasping.
Chapter Seventeen
It's the things you don't know that matter most.
Two propmen, both wearing dust masks, swiftly force themselves past us and lift Tammy nude from the tub, her wrists and neck looking like they burst open outward, and a large purple dildo slides out of her cunt, splashing back into the bloody bathwater. My eyes are homing in on her navel ring.
Jamie has backed out of the bathroom and into Bentley's arms. She struggles, hugs him, pulls away again. She holds a hand to her mouth. Her face is red, like it's burning.
In a corner of the bedroom Bobby is talking to the director, both of them motionless except for an occasional nod.
Jamie tries to get away from Bentley and shambles madly toward Tammy's bedroom but she's blocked because another propman, also wearing a dust mask, is hauling a mattress soaked with blood down the hallway, to be burned in the courtyard.
Jamie stares at the stained mattress in horror-at its truth-and Bentley holds on to her as she flings herself at Tammy's bed, Bentley falling with her, and screaming, she lunges for the script on Tammy's nightstand and hurls it at Bobby and the director. She struggles with a pillow, absurdly. Her screaming intensifies, is a variation on the earlier screaming.