Mitzi shrugged. On her phone she cued up the audio file she was shopping around. Her latest scream, it was the future of motion pictures. Acting beyond acting.
It was a shitty double standard. Visually, pictures were better every year. With computer graphics. With digitally animated everything. But sound-wise, it was still two coconut shells for every shot showing a horse. It was somebody mashing a bag of cornmeal for every step an actor took in the snow. The delivery was better, with Dolby and Surround and layered tracks, but the raw craft was still the fucking Middle Ages.
Thunder was a sheet of metal. Bat wings were an umbrella opened and closed at the appropriate speed.
“What’s your scene?” Mitzi asked. She’d find out soon enough from the clip, but there were basic questions she needed answered up front.
Schlo looked away. Looked out the big windows at a Porsche parked in the lot. He said, “Nothing special. A young lady gets herself stabbed.”
Mitzi plucked a little spiral notebook from her handbag. She clicked a ballpoint. “The make of the knife?”
Schlo frowned. “You need that?”
Mitzi started to slide the envelope of money across the table to where it came from.
Schlo slid it back. He held up a finger for patience while he fished out his phone and scrolled through something on the screen. Reading, he said, “A German Lauffer Carvingware. Stainless steel with an ebony handle. A seventeen-inch slicing knife, manufactured in 1954.” He looked up. “You need a serial number?”
The waitress reentered the scene. She’d pinned her hair back, off her face. Her lipstick looked fresh and glossy. Her lashes sagged, long and fat with added mascara. Smiling as if this were a second callback, she held a couple cups in one hand. A pot of coffee in the other. In a single take she placed the cups on the table and poured them full. She exited.
Mitzi jotted notes. “The knife stay in, or is this a multiple?”
Schlo looked up from his phone. “What’s it matter?”
Mitzi shoved the fat packet of money back across the table. She clicked her pen and feigned putting away her notebook.
She didn’t say as much, but with a multiple there would be the sound of the knife coming out. A suction noise. A sucking followed by the rush of blood or air from inside the wound. It was complicated.
As Schlo pushed the money back, he said, “Three stabs. One, two, three, and the knife gets left inside.”
Without looking up from her note-taking, Mitzi asked, “Where’s she stabbed?”
The producer eyed the pen, the notebook. He picked up his cup and slurped. “In a big brass bed.”
Exasperated, Mitzi sighed heavily. “Where on…her…body?”
Schlo looked around. His color rose, and his eyes narrowed as he leaned across the table. He whispered something to her from behind his raised hand.
Mitzi shut her eyes and shook her head. She opened them.
His eyes narrowed to slits, the producer glowered. “Don’t get all high-and-mighty with me.” He smirked. A sneer showed bottom teeth capped and bleached but no less ugly. “You did that scene where the demon dogs ripped the skin off that faggot priest.” He was sputtering, juiced with equal parts shame and outrage. The few other diners looked up and glanced their way.
She didn’t invent any of these scenarios, but Mitzi didn’t say as much. She was just a woman, an independent contractor, making some writer’s twisted dream come true.
Across the way a man seated at a table began to weep. Cupped both hands over his face, he did, and let loose loud, stagy sobs. A second man seated across from the first glanced around, his face going brick red with shame. This second man, just some dad-shaped nobody, he was, but his face Mitzi knew.
Back at his office, small girls continued to haunt Foster. Third graders ran photocopies. Middle schoolers pushed the mail cart, but he kept his monitor angled so they couldn’t see. Their whispers and giggles drifted to him from the hallway and the offices beyond, but he stayed on task. In his leather swivel chair, he pretended to sip a cup of coffee. Sales reports lay open across his desk. One hand he kept always ready, one fingertip always resting on the key that would toggle him to a screen filled with part numbers and delivery dates.
The workaday world eddied around him as he snaked his way through secret online portals. Typing passwords. Directed to links embedded in emails sent to him in exchange for a credit card number or crypto currency. Using a list of usernames, he hit sites that redirected him to sites that redirected him to JPEG bins where no one’s IP address could be traced. There, Foster clicked through images people refuse to believe exist.
A coworker from the Contracts department stuck her head in the doorway. “Gates, you have a second?” she asked. “I’d like you to meet my daughter, Gena.” A younger version of the woman, a girl standing elbow-high to her, stepped into view.
His red-rimmed eyes looked her way, he smiled. The very picture of a harried district rep, he said, “Hello, Gena.”
The girl carried a manila folder. Pages and slips of paper dangled and fluttered from the edges of the folder. She looked at him with solemn eyes, her gaze taking in his office. “Where’s your little girl?”
Her mother petted the child’s hair. “Sorry, she thinks everyone should have a daughter she can play with.”
A few degrees beyond the woman’s field of vision, atrocities were worming across Foster’s monitor. Playing in lurid color, the sound muted, here were crimes against children just the witnessing of which would send him to prison until he was an old, old man. With just one more step, she’d see things that would trouble her sleep for the rest of her life. Men wearing masks and waiting in line. Sex where the child was clearly dead.
Foster tapped a key, and the horrors were replaced by columns of serial numbers. He said, “Gena?”
The girl looked back, her eyes confused.
He continued, “You have a good ‘Take Your Daughter to Work Day,’ okay?”
Gena stepped closer. Her head tilting to a slight angle as she asked, “Why are you crying?”
He touched the side of his face and found a tear he wiped with his knuckles. “Allergies,” he told her.
Her mother mouthed the words, “It’s Tuesday.” Stretching them out. She put a hand on her child’s shoulder and steered her away.
Right. Taco Tuesday. Only in prisons and aboard submarines were people more excited about food than they were in office jobs. It was lunchtime, and the floor was going quiet. Foster toggled back to hell.
To find these sites had been spooky-easy. One anonymous phishing email had led him down the rabbit hole. Each cache yielded links to others.
So what if someone caught him? Who really cared if somebody from IT found anything he’d failed to scrub from his browser history? Foster risked nothing. He’d become a man who’d already suffered the worst. This searching gave him a reason to live.
Robb had told him, once, in the group, that the laboratories that did medical experiments and product testing on animals sought out dogs and cats that had once been household pets. Wild animals or strays living on the street knew how dangerous the world actually was. Such animals had a survival instinct, and they fought back. But animals raised with love would tolerate torture and regular abuse and never strike out in self-defense. On the contrary, animals raised in loving homes would suffer the laboratory abuse and always strive to please their tormenter. The more torture an animal could endure, the longer it was useful. And the longer it would live.