The opportunity costs of identity.
We’ve rejected the slack self, the fat self, the gray-haired or skinny self, those constant other selves we see modeled by people around us.
We are each our own best effort. And we’re satisfied until we see a photograph or hear a recording of our voice. All the worse is the torture of video, to witness the squawking, gawky monster we’ve created. The you that you’ve chosen from all possible yous to create. The one life you’ve been given, and you’ve dedicated it to perfecting this staggering yammering artificial Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from the traits of other people. Anything original, anything innately you, it’s long ago been discarded.
Knowing all of that, Mitzi still pressed Play.
How the session had gone, Mitzi had no idea. As always she’d blinked awake to find the actress gone. No blood. No body. Only the faint perpetual whiff of bleach. A length of tape had spooled from one reel to the other, but she’d not had the heart to review the result.
Now the reel turned, and a girl’s voice said, “He named his horse Yahoo.”
Through her headphones Mitzi recognized the snap of a latex glove. She heard wine poured into a glass. Her recorded voice sounded slurred. In slow-motion words, she said, “The name of your character is Lucinda…”
The meters registered something. A jump or the creak of the ropes.
Shushing her, telling her to relax, Mitzi said, “Your line…the line I want you to say is ‘Help me! Daddy, please, no! Help me!’”
Almost inaudible on the tape, the girl asked, “What’s my cue?”
At the console, Mitzi lowered the volume just as a scream rang out. The shrieks built in stages and broke with a ragged gasp followed by a hoarse coughing fit. After that came the silence of death.
Rising in the background were sobs. Sobbing, a woman crying softly, the bright ding of a knife dropped on the concrete floor. A self Mitzi didn’t remember.
Another woman, the girl’s voice asked, “Can you untie me, please?”
The sobs ebbed to sniffing, shuddering sighs. Halting exhales.
“I’m going now,” the young woman said. “Here,” she added, “take these. They’re real pearls.” A click followed, too faint for anything but the most sensitive mic to catch. Then footsteps hurried away. A door opened, closed.
Listening to the tape now, those echoed voices seemed more real than the man working next to her. More real than the stranger curled up inside of her. Mitzi sat motionless, the headphones cupped over her ears, and listened to her real self weeping before the artificial her reached forward to hit Erase.
From Oscarpocalypse Now by Blush Gentry (p. 205)
Why did I go with Gates? He rescued me from the real kidnappers. Millions of people don’t know what goes into ranch dressing, billions of people, but they still love eating it. I don’t recall any detail of my kidnapping, but I know that Gates Foster rescued me and I married him and now he’s among the industry’s leading Foley artists. They headhunted him, the government did, as part of their effort to rebuild the domestic film industry. And I know I love him—even though half the time he smells like bleach—and I love our son, Lawton. Almost as much as I love chromium diopside. I mean, you just put on any of my high-fashion rings or necklaces and it’s like you’re in a classic Hollywood movie. You know?
You could say I’m married to chromium diopside. I was born to be married to chromium diopside.
Foster wiped another tape. How many screams he couldn’t say. He’d quit counting.
Lucinda had never seemed more lost to him. He’d tracked her this far, to this concrete pit in the basement of a soundproof, world-proof bunker, and now he was forced to search for her among the screams of so many. The hell was inside his head where he met the ghosts and sorted between them. As if he were groping through the underworld seeking just one soul from amongst the billions of dead.
He mounted another reel on the spindle and threaded the tape. The headphones hissed. His fingers lowered the volume by twisting a knob the moment before a scream ripped through his head. A long one, someone with huge lungs, the scream ran for longer than most. It ran for too long. Until it was no longer a scream.
He turned to meet the Mitzi person’s round, shocked eyes. She’d lowered her headset, and as he did the same the scream continued. It filled the studio.
“My alarm,” she shouted against the noise that burst from speakers in every corner. Tuesday had arrived.
“They’ve come for their invention.” She threw him a smug look and reached across the console to flip a switch. Just that one unmarked, unremarkable switch, just the click of it and the studio began to fill with the smell of smoke. The bitter stink after a million birthday candles are blown out.
Whether the street camera had been blacked out with paint or busted off, the monitor showed nothing. Something slammed against the outside of the street door, that metal door that looked stronger than the concrete walls surrounding it.
Mitzi’s plan wasn’t a plan. Not really. Not until she stood up and walked to the door of the prop room. There among the machetes and sabers she found a length of steel chain and a padlock. There she found the Carvingware knife.
The screams of everyone layered and overlapping, they blared. Smoke, acrid, stink-smelling, black and poisonous, it seeped from the boxes and the file drawers. Behind the smoke the first orange suggestions of flame. The pounding at the door almost lost in the din.
Mitzi carried the chain and her glass of wine to the table in the center of the room and lay down across it. The stranger inside of her
