This Lucinda, alive and beautiful and so addictive, she asked: Up for next week?
The girl on the bed stirred. She blinked slowly, and her lips curved into a loopy, dopey smile. Her bare arms and legs twisted, stretching against the rope that held her wrists and ankles tied to the posts of the rented brass bed. Her movements crinkled the clear-plastic sheeting that protected the mattress. It had taken Mitzi longer than she’d expected to assemble the bed, an antique delivered from a properties warehouse. She’d hardly had time to position the monitor and move the mic booms into roughly the right locations before the Rohypnol had started to wear off.
She lowered a Shure Vocal SM57 until it almost touched the girl’s lips. Next to it, an old-school ribbon mic waited, like something left over from Orson Welles’s radio days. Reaching in from other directions were can mics. A shotgun mic dangled down. Each connected to its own preamp. She waited for the girl to speak, watching for the needles to jump on each of the VU meters in this, her palace of analog.
The needles twitched as the girl spoke. “Oh, it’s you.” She gave Mitzi a slow-motion, underwater wink. Lifting her chin, she looked down at her exposed breasts, her complete nakedness.
Mitzi nudged a mic closer. “You fell asleep during our talk.”
The girl sighed with relief. “I was afraid this was a rape.”
In response to a monitor, Mitzi withdrew a mic a smidgen. She said, “I need to check my levels. Can you tell me what you had for breakfast?”
Still woozy from the sedative, the girl lifted her face toward the Shure. So close she looked at it cross-eyed, she began, “Pancakes. Potatoes. French toast.” Clearly playing along, inventing things, she continued, “Scrambled eggs, oatmeal, bacon…”
A waitress reeling off breakfast specials.
The popping p’s and b’s pegged the analog needles into the red. Oversaturating the recording, making it warm. But clipping the digital, turning it into useless static. Mitzi pulled the Shure back a little more. She brushed a strand of pale hair off the girl’s forehead, and doing so gently pressed the girl’s head back down into the plastic-covered pillow.
Without resisting, the girl continued, “Orange juice, grapefruit juice, oatmeal…” Her eyes drifted shut as if she might once more fall asleep. Her restaurant uniform lay draped across the chair near the wall. Her stomach growled, making the needles jump. “Sorry,” the girl mumbled. “All this food talk makes me hungry.”
Mitzi wondered if she needed to readjust for room tone. She said, “Not to worry. You won’t be hungry much longer.”
She went to the chair where the girl’s things sat and opened the purse. Removed a billfold. Sought out a driver’s license and studied it. “Shania?” She stepped back to the bedside, repeating louder, “Shania, honey?” She spied, in the billfold, the three one-hundred-dollar bills she’d offered as bait. Mitzi retrieved the bills, folded them, and slipped them into a pocket of her jeans.
The girl’s eyes opened. Her brow furrowed as her focus darted from one mic to the next as if she’d forgotten them.
Mitzi pressed on. “Do you know what the Wilhelm scream is, dear?” The girl’s eyes found her own.
The girl shook her head. The driver’s license had been issued in Utah. Jack Mormon because there’d been no special underwear to find when Mitzi had cut away the waitress uniform.
“You’ve heard it,” Mitzi prompted, “the Wilhelm scream.” It was a man’s scream first recorded in 1951 for a film titled Distant Drums. In one scene, soldiers wade through an alligator-infested swamp, hence the scream’s formal title, Man, Getting Bit by Alligator, and He Screamed. Since it was created, the Wilhelm scream has been used in more than four hundred features, as well as countless television projects and video games.
“The classic screams have such elegant names,” Mitzi continued. “Like paintings.” The second most famous scream, for example, is titled Man, Gut-Wrenching Scream and Fall into Distance. “Like a masterpiece of art.” This scream’s more common name is “the Howie scream” because it was used to dub Howie Long’s 1996 performance in Broken Arrow, but the scream itself was recorded for a 1980 film called The Ninth Configuration.
The third most famous industry scream was The Goofy Holler, but the less said about that the better.
A chime sounded. Her phone, sitting on the mixing console, it chimed again.
From the bed, the girl said, “You have a call.”
Mitzi lifted the phone and held it to show the photo of a man. “My boyfriend. Jimmy.”
“He’s cute,” said the girl, squinting.
Mitzi considered the photograph of a shaggy-haired greaser wearing an oil-stained bandanna knotted around his head. “You’re still delirious.” She waited for the call to go to voicemail. “He wants to hook up.” She lifted her chin and turned her head to display some fading purple bruises around her neck. Doing so, she watched the monitor. Watching and rewatching the short clip the production company had asked her to loop. The monitor positioned so the girl on the bed couldn’t see it. Mitzi knew she was droning on, but she needed the girl to be fully awake. There’d be no chance for a second take.
She lifted a FedEx mailer and felt the surprising weight inside it. Something so long and thin yet so heavy, it had to be metal. The shape of it obscured by layers of Bubble Wrap.
Healthy as the girl looked, hers wasn’t the body type casting agents kept on file. Her lips parted. As if praying, she continued to whisper, “English muffins…biscuits and gravy…”
Mitzi stretched a latex glove over one hand. Watching the meters pulse softly, she stretched on the second glove then began to bundle her hair under a cloth surgical cap.
Clear as the girl’s skin was, it hid nothing. Her face and neck flushed red while her hands and feet faded to a blue-white. Her breathing grew shallow. Beads of sweat pebbled her chest and belly.
On the mixing console a bottle of pinot gris sweated in a chrome bucket of ice. A cloisonné saucer held a few pills. Always the same saucer enameled with pink poppies, those flowers of forgetfulness. Always Ambien in the strongest dose available. Mitzi poured a glass of wine and took a few sips with a pill.
She wondered if Jack Mormons prayed. If they had prayers to recite when they found themselves naked and tied spread eagle in an acoustically perfect recording studio.
The Ambien seemed to push the blood through her veins a bit faster. The typical side effect had started, the mania. Before conking out, people on Ambien reportedly binged on ice cream. They went on internet or cable-television shopping sprees. Engaged in marathon sex with strangers. Even committed murder. Murders for which they’d later be acquitted because they had no memory of the event.
That was crucial, to have no memory of the event.
She poured her glass full again. With latex fingers she lifted a second pill from the saucer and drank it down.
On the video monitor the actors dressed as Confederate soldiers attacked the actress in the bed, the scene looping over and over again.
Mitzi reached up and pulled the shotgun mic a skosh closer to the girl’s mouth. At a keyboard she typed in the name of this new file. Using a felt-tipped pen, she wrote the same on an old-style DAT cartridge. She wrote: Praying Girl, Stabbed Brutally, Rapid Exsanguination. She asked, “Now, Shania, tell me what else you ate for breakfast, please.”