For a while Mitzi had called her work “politics.” To her mind, women had never been allowed to kill. Not unless they were threatened. Women could never kill for the sheer pleasure, and they could never kill another woman. Despite all the fuss about universal child care and income inequality, killing was the real measure of a woman’s progress. As the thrill of that first recording session had ebbed, Mitzi told herself that collecting screams amounted to a political act. It constituted the ultimate power.
To her mind, it amounted to Last Wave Feminism.
Eventually, her motives would evolve. As she continued to chase that first high, Mitzi would come to think of the work as a gift. In classic displacement, she tried to find her joy in others. She was redeeming the anonymous lives of anonymous people, giving them an immortality they’d never dared imagine. Mitzi Ives: Star Maker.
But each new motive was just a step further from the truth. It wasn’t political or benevolent, what Mitzi did she did for power. The ever-diminishing marginal rewards of that first brush with power.
She’d never taken a drink or a pill. Those would come soon, when the stories she told herself had begun to wear thin.
The producer, not-Schlo, he’d gathered his wits. His eyes counted numbers Mitzi couldn’t see, and he said, “I’ll give you twenty thousand for exclusive world rights.”
Mitzi set the DAT player at her feet and crossed her legs. She let her skirt ride up. To see if he’d look, to see if the power had truly shifted to her.
He didn’t look. “Okay, twenty-five,” he’d said.
“Thirty,” Mitzi countered. She leaned forward and allowed her neckline to dip low. To display the almost-legal shape of her breasts.
He continued to not look. She’d proved herself to be someone that dangerous.
A sneer, not a real sneer, more a reflex he’d used on too many pitches in the past, it pulled his mouth to one side. “Nobody’s paid that much for a scream.” He said, “Crazy to think—”
Mitzi stood and smoothed her skirt. “You want to try for forty thousand?” She made as if to take her things and leave.
He snapped. Fear would sell him, the dread that a rival would spend the forty grand and leverage the scream to make a fortune. Such a scream, it could be licensed and sub-licensed to films and television, to video games. Telephone ring tones. Greeting cards! Screams needed no translation to reach foreign markets. The trickle down would never end. It would be a profit engine forever.
“Sit, sit, sit!” he’d said and patted the air as if he could shove her back into that low-low chair. He rummaged through a desk drawer and dug out a checkbook. If he balked, she’d take the recording wide. By next week not-Schlo would be bidding against an army of sound engineers and special effects gurus. Testing a pen, he asked, “What do you call this…masterpiece of yours?”
The question gave Mitzi pause. It was like naming a first child, something so important she’d neglected to give it any thought. According to her watch, the meeting had gone beyond its allotted time. Other pitches would be piling up in the outer office, all those strangers listening. They’d hate her for hogging so much time.
She found she enjoyed being hated.
Here was her brilliant new career: to attract the listening of a billion strangers.
“I call it…,” she said and waited. Timing was everything. “Serial Killer Flayed to Death by Child.” She added, “And let’s round the price up to a hundred thousand dollars, shall we?”
The producer didn’t respond.
The faint sound of his scratching, his pen scratching her name and the number one hundred thousand on a check, that sound would echo forever, recorded in her ears.
No one spoke at first. The group of them sat around the basement, casting looks at each other. A former mother looked at a former father who looked at the group leader. No one looked at Foster. Then they were all looking at the group leader, Robb. Robb looked at Foster and asked, “So, how’s Bali?”
Foster looked down at his hands, at his hands in his lap.
A doctor whose son had gone bicycle riding and forgotten to wear his helmet, just once, just that one time, just a quiet ride around the neighborhood is all it was, a story Foster had heard him recount until Foster could tell it himself, this man took a phone from his coat pocket. The doctor brought up a web page and held it for the group to see. He said, “I understood your daughter was dead?”
People craned their necks to look. Others brought up the same page on their own phones. One member said, “So she’s not dead, your Lucinda?”
His brow wrinkled with confusion, another member studied his phone. “A dead girl this most certainly is not.”
The group leader, Robb, held up his hand for silence. To Foster, he said, “I was afraid of something like this.” The picture of empathy, he urged, “Tell us, again, how Lucinda died.” After a beat, he added, “Please.”
There was nothing Foster hadn’t already told. She’d stepped into an elevator.
The group, this group amounted to a kind of addiction treatment. To Foster, they were all recovering from their love for a dead child, and they wanted him to follow the same path, but he couldn’t. He wouldn’t abandon his addiction. And maybe they envied him his denial. Each of them had seen his or her son or daughter removed from life. They’d identified the remains. Held a funeral. Only he had the option to pretend his child still existed, somewhere.
The woman in the photos they perused, she had Lucinda’s fall of wavy auburn hair. College age or thereabouts. The woman smiling beside him at the rail of a cruise ship, her eyes and mouth were the adult version of the eyes and mouth of the second grader smiling beside a much younger Foster in other photos.
Yes, his child, yes, Lucinda, yes, she was dead. This other Lucinda, so beautiful and still alive on her social media page, she was a coping mechanism. Why bother explaining? His reasons would never sink in.
Another member of the group held up a video clip of this full-grown Lucinda and Foster, her father, in the basket of a hot-air balloon. Far below them acres of grapevines flowed in parallel straight lines across a landscape of low hills. This member asked, “Gaslighting us, maybe?”
Another corrected. “‘Trolling’ the young people call it nowadays.”
The group leader continued to press. “If… If she’s really been missing over seven years, you need to finally file with the medical examiner for a Presumption of Death Order.”
How could Foster make them see? It wasn’t how it looked. He flexed his hand, balling his fingers into a fist and then spreading them wide. Letting the pain from the airport bite mark distract him.
Robb shushed the group. “Friend,” he asked. “Is your child dead or alive?”
Foster began the story he always told. “We’d gone to my office. Lucinda stepped into an elevator—”
Robb interrupted. “Then you need to hold a funeral.” He meant an empty-casket ceremony, a memorial service where all her false friends and distant social media followers could pay their last respects to a coffin filled with her old dolls and stuffed animals and clothes. Pallbearers would carry this to an open grave. In short: a hollow ritual.
As the harangue continued, his phone buzzed. A text appeared on the screen. From Lucinda.