Mitzi Ives, schoolgirl Mitzi, she’d suffered the pins as both the board and the bug to be stared at.
Her hairstyle she winced to recall, the way it showcased her neck. The way her neck skin had glowed red when the producer eyeballed her chest and rubbed a hand over the blue stubble of his cheeks and chin.
The way her shoulders curved inward. How Mitzi hunched forward and crossed her arms. Her entire body was a recording of that first sales pitch.
“Miss Ives,” said the producer, not Schlo. He looked at something written on his blotter. “Mitzi.”
He wasn’t Schlo. She’d worried Schlo would recognize the scream. Her career would begin and end with that sit-down. A rival of Schlo’s this had been. He’d nodded for her to take a seat opposite his desk, then he’d sat. Perched he had, on the front edge of his desk, perching himself in her face, so close she could smell the starch in his shirt.
She’d skipped school half a day. Ditched a quiz in Popular American Politics, and missed a session in the language lab and a lecture on Intro to Fractals.
She’d worn her school uniform on the bus, her pleated, plaid tweed skirt. The blouse with capped sleeves and a Peter Pan collar with the top two buttons undone. Her feet remembered the shoes, too-big high heels left behind after her mother had taken a powder.
The chair she sat in was stylishly low, its seat wasn’t a fart off the floor. Low, precisely so her skirt would slip toward her waist. Low so that she’d be forced to lean forward to tug the hem of the skirt and clamp it between her knees. At the same time, bending forward, her collar dipped to where not-Schlo could peer down the front of her blouse. Ordinary clothes. In her bedroom such clothes had been a uniform. Professional Frumpy. Here they felt like a music video striptease. Around her, the usual Berber rugs and chrome lamps. A wall of windows framed a view of Netflix.
At her eye level had been his crotch. Handshake distance.
Here was a tricky moment. In this game she’d never played, Mitzi had brought a tape player loaded with the DAT and cued up. She’d sweetened and fattened the scream, listened and relistened until she’d no idea whether it was any good or not. The player she’d set on the floor at her feet. Her feet still felt the wadded toilet paper she’d crammed into the toes of her too-big high heels.
Not-Schlo, his necktie a pointer, a striped silk arrow, red silk, it pointed down from his face to his crotch. This her eyes couldn’t forget: How he could perch there and look at any point on her face and body. Stare up her skirt. Down her blouse. While she couldn’t look at the one stuffed, crammed-full bulge, the swelling that eclipsed his belt buckle. Like a miniature belly it looked, stuffed like her shoes were stuffed. Between the belly-belly hanging down and that bulge rising up, his belt buckle was almost lost. None of this could she look at.
That was his power.
She brought the tape player to her lap. Like armor she wore it. Like a blocky, heavy, high-tech fig leaf, its speaker was positioned as if the sound would come wailing out of her.
Not-Schlo, he grunted. “What have you brought to interest me, young lady?” His hand went to his mouth and wiped his lips. His throat shifted up and down as he swallowed, hard, making the knot of his tie bob. A shining red-silk Adam’s apple.
Mitzi fumbled the buttons on the player. Tape squealed at high speed past the head. She clicked Rewind and brought the numbers on the counter back. The next appointment waited beyond the door. Voices were already trespassing to pull the focus off of her moment.
Mitzi felt weak. She’d failed. She would always fail.
Her body continued to be the black box of a jetliner that had crashed with no survivors.
She pressed Play.
A hiss of room tone followed. Then, her art.
Not just her hands or her neck but her entire body felt the rush. She was more than her body and mind. When the scream played, she felt plugged into the eternal, as if she were channeling something from the next world. She’d created something immortal, worth more than money, a thing no bean counter could create.
This was her power.
The scream rang out, and the shift occurred. The reversal. Now the producer was reduced to being merely a body. His mouth gaped to mimic the sound. That was the hallmark of the best gesture or catchphrase. Like a fishhook, it sank barbs into the audience and became part of them. A parasite, this scream was. The not-Schlo’s eyes bugged even as his belly and crotch shrank away. They bugged and clamped shut as if suffering the same pain her actor had felt. The producer’s mouth yawned, dropping his chin into his neck, and the all of him reared back as if Mitzi had shot or stabbed him. As if she a prizefighter was, and she’d pasted him a roundhouse punch to his glass jaw.
After the tape returned to its dull hiss, the room continued to vibrate. The voices from the waiting room had fallen to silence. Silence until the small words of one distant stranger asked, “What the fuck was that?”
In the office, the producer looked around. The bookshelves weren’t the shelves they’d been. The framed photographs had become something strange. Every pen and book had shifted to become an animal menace in this confusing jungle, and a new host of chemicals appeared to surge through his body, the tears welling in his eyes, the flushed, forked veins that rose out of his buttoned-down collar.
Such a rush Mitzi had felt recording that first scream.
Everyone wanted to have an effect. People spent their lives trying to get a laugh. Or to seduce an audience of strangers. The goal was to commodify something, repeat it, sell them, these the most intimate of human drives. It meant turning people’s basic humanity into something that could be bought and sold. From fast food to porn, this was power.
The producer shook his head until his cheeks flapped. He lurched to his feet and staggered behind his desk to slump into his chair. Even the swivel chair, black leather and button tufted, made a squeak like a beast, like a throat cut, and not-Schlo lifted his hands from the arms of the chair and recoiled into a small ball balanced there.
Mitzi’s body never forgot that feeling. To vault from being a nobody to being the most important person in the room. Prey to predator.
She moved her hand as if to press Play once more, and the producer waved to stop her.
“Don’t,” he begged her. “My heart.”
That, the shift from frightened to frightening.
Before that day, any rude bus driver could make Mitzi cry. Henceforth, her career would be to make everyone else cry. She’d jumped rank to become a professional bully, but better. This was tantric, the way she’d create universal tension, then trigger a united blast of relief. It was sexual, a smidgen more than almost.
Still two years shy of graduation, and she’d never gone back to class. After that day, the high school had sent truancy letters to her father. But from that point she’d been the only Ives in Ives Foley Arts.
Fractals would be for other fifteen-year-old girls to conquer. College-track girls. Mitzi knew all there was to know about life and violent death and cutting deals with back-end points allotted against the international net box office. Mitzi knew what tortures would spoil a scream.
The voices in the outer office remained silent. Now they were listening to her. The producer, not-Schlo, he reached a spotted hand inside his suit coat and brought out a rattling bottle of pills. One of these he tipped into his palm and tossed onto his tongue.