CHAPTER 115 - Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) (2)

Josie stole Chekhov’s gun.

Olivier Brassac felt total fulfilment when it finally happened. With all that overemphasis, he would have been scandalised if it hadn’t. She stole it right off Marcel’s lap while he slept, an ultimate betrayal of trust, like a cat taking a fish from the table.

The next set piece for action was the DEA lobby bathroom. The lobby was an official building somewhere in New York City. Josie used her big blue eyes to charm security, then followed Hollis into the men’s. The bathroom must have been a separate set, either on a soundstage or maybe in an abandoned building somewhere; both suggested the budget had clearly been stretched. Compared to the lobby, the bathroom made the SFX muddy, because the tiles reflected everything too loudly.

Hollis went to a stall, closed the door with a bang, and did his business.

If he were Josie, he would have just fired into the door until the bullets ran out.

But Josie was clearly not a film buff—her father and sister had denied her the television—and what TV time remained had gone to cartoon dinosaurs.

And so, filled to the brim with naivety and the milk of human kindness, Josie walked to the last stall and shut the door and sat on the cistern with her feet on the seat. She took out the gun; she checked the chamber—just like she had watched Marcel do dozens of times.

There came the SFX of Hollis relieving himself.

Then the flush, then a sigh.

Then the sound of clothes ruffling.

Then Hollis washing his hands.

Then the magazine slid home.

CLICK

Against the tiles, the sound was enormous. Outside, the water stopped running.

Brassac almost laughed. Not because it was funny, but because it was narratively so CLEAN. That same SFX, that same noise, had played a dozen times by now at the start of the film and during the cosy montage. It was not a sound that had been chosen lightly; it was a whole damn recursive structure!

“Chapeau,” he murmured. Bravo!

When she opened the door, Hollis was ready for her.

With the lens still focused on her eyes and the muzzle blurred by bokeh, Josie came out with both hands on the pistol, her hands small and the gun enormous, pointed at Hollis’s head.

The whole wall above the basins was mirror, and the Josie who emerged from the stall was no longer herself. Madness and vengeance. Vengeance and madness. Hollis wore his camel coat, and she wore her teal and purple windbreaker.

“Who the hell are you?” Hollis looked amused. Dr Cooper was once more bringing theatre to the silver screen. “Do you know where you are, little lady?”

“He was only five years old!” Josie’s retort came out almost as a howl, and the hard tiles made her voice echo like a spectre’s. “He loved dinosaurs!”

Cooper’s character did not protest; he began, instead, to speak. He asked if she knew what her father did for money. He asked if she knew about the families who had been broken apart by the “goods” her father was selling. He asked if she knew about the boys in the Bronx, who were told to sell his products, and what happened to them, their families, their lives. He asked her if they too deserved to live a normal life with toy dinosaurs.

Brassac suddenly understood what genius it was to make Hollis African-American.

“I must be cruel only to be kind,” Hollis quoted from his mental folio. “Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.”

Hollis sounded like a theatre teacher. He channelled, somehow, a possibility in which, in a different life, he would be teaching her drama instead of murder. And he would have been extremely convincing had it not been for the film of psychosis clouding his eyes.

Josie fired.

The sound was mixed far too loud.

The mirror exploded.

On the screen, Brassac saw an award-winning frame.

Josie couldn’t aim and so did not hit Hollis. Instead, she struck the reflection of herself, a foot to the left of his head, so that her own face exploded in a spray of silver while the recoil took her back. There was no second take involved; what was shot was what actually happened. The girl had mimed the recoil, and she was falling.

The mirror shot. Du vrai cinéma.

Hollis crossed the eight feet of space in a second. The gun was gone from her hand, and he beat her, just once, low in the gut, and the whole theatre flinched. She went down, and she retched over the tiles, a tiny body doing what it does, and Brassac hoped someone had signed a waiver, because that was no stunt. Des couilles, Brassac thought, it took balls not to call the cut.

Oh—and the whole sequence was sharp as a tack, not a hair out of focus.

With dramatic flair, Hollis drew his gun from under his arm and put the muzzle against Josie’s head.

Who would be Ferroni’s Deus Ex Machina? Brassac wondered.

The door banged open, as expected.

The face on screen surprised the Gaumont agent. It wasn’t Marcel. It was Tull, played by Kelvin Grant. He looked from the broken mirror to the vomit to the girl on her knees and the boss with a pistol to the side of her skull—and he was mortified.

Not again, his face said. The boy’s acting had gotten better.

Brassac watched the master thespian look over at his protégé with a long, unhappy sigh, then grow suddenly cheerful as he pulled the gun from the girl’s head. Brassac drew in a cold, lingering breath of air-conditioned air—the layered foreshadowing was almost too much for the discerning audience member.

“Clean her up,” Hollis said, holstering his gun. “Take her upstairs. I have questions.”

Then, as a master does, he looked straight past the camera and smiled.

“And get me a coffee.”

Someone in the audience laughed. The tension had been too much, too uncomfortable.

Brassac shook his head.

The average American did not know their Shakespeare…

If they did…

He wondered, as the film switched to Marcel’s discovery of his missing daughter, if Dr David Cooper could take interviews in French.

This reproduction was taken without the author's permission. The official page used to publish the story carries the chapter.

Patty Smith, twenty-four, brunette, and residing in Heber, about a stone’s throw away, had a theory about Kel G’s character.

She considered herself a local film buff, having attended nine festivals thus far. For this one, just to see her favourite singer, she had stood in the queue in the snow for three hours in three layers and hiking boots, and even so, she had to sit near the back.

Patty sincerely felt that Kel would have a very significant role in the fifth act. She felt this because Kelvin was very famous, the most famous person in the film. He had multiple top-ranking records; he sang Doves Cry with Kellie at number one, and he had personally attended the premiere. In fact, she could see him from where she sat.

It was all very predictable.

Kel’s Tull was perfect. Kel, clean-cut, in smart casual as a DEA agent, was her ideal. Ergo, they must be saving him for the big twist. Patty thought she had it figured out by the time the apartment execution ended. Kelvin wasn’t a bad guy. He had been outside when it all happened, and when he came in, he looked disapproving, and Hollis had looked disappointed in himself. This meant Kel was the main man.

She was confident that by the end of the film, Kel would be the one looking down that same corridor at the tragedy that was Marcel and Josie. This was because he would become the avenger of his teacher, Hollis, who had to die for being so evil.

It was perfect.

She had been so excited about this that she started whispering to the lady next to her. The lady told her to shush and never speak to her again.

When Kel took Josie upstairs, she knew she was right.

The office was boring, but not so Kel. He sat her in a chair that was too big for her, and she looked a wreck. Her hair was around her shoulders, wet and messy, and her make-up was ruined. The actress’ eyes were enormous, and they made Patty feel genuinely sorry for rooting for Tull.

Patty also felt a little envious.

If Kel did this for her, she would die happy.

She watched as Kel, the good man that he was, put a blanket around Josie. He then got in front of her, kneeling, took out a cloth, and wiped her cheeks clean.

SO TENDER!

BRAVO, Director!

She had to stop herself from squealing.

Tull made cocoa from a packet, and Patty’s heart melted with the marshmallow he put inside. He offered her the mug, and she refused, so he put it in Josie’s hands. This is going to be amazing, Patty thought. When Hollis is murdered, and Kel’s hunting Josie, would he remember this moment?

Ooo!

What if they both survived?

WHAT A SEQUEL!

On the screen, the girl looked up at Tull, her mug steaming.

“You killed my brother…” she said, laying wrongful blame on Kel.

Kel’s reaction broke Patty’s heart.

“He was only five years old,” the tiny voice said. “He loved dinosaurs…”

Patty felt her throat grow sore. She had a little brother too, although he was eleven and an absolute little shit. The next shot focused on the close-up of Kel’s face, from Josie’s perspective, shot at eye-level, because Kel looked incredibly handsome.

Tull’s face had gone numb, and his eyes grew warm, and something in it pulled, an expression which Patty lacked the vocabulary to express. His hands came out of the fold of his arms, and he reached out towards Josie.

OMG?!

Are they going to hug? But that’s wrong. She’s so young! And his friend killed her brother! But maybe that’s the toxic romance?!

Or was it the guilt?!

The guilt was making him do it!

“I am real sorry about—”

The camera cut to Josie. The crack that rang across the room was that of a thumping silencer, the same SFX used in every single blockbuster.

Patty stared.

Just as Josie stared.

Their horror was mutual. Simultaneous.

The violence was entirely off-screen, and now it was painted over Josie’s face. She was splattered from forehead to chin and over her shirt. What was inside Tull’s skull dribbled over her bloodless lips, into her enormous, open eyes, and ran down her chin. Even her teeth were bloody.

A calloused hand took her wrist.

And a face, without expression, without remorse, said the most ordinary thing in the world.

“Let’s go home.”

And that was the end of Kel’s character. Patty sat with both hands over her mouth, acting out Josie as the scene moved from the office to the back street, where Josie’s face was wiped clean.

Patty felt… empty. She wanted to get up and shout, or perhaps to grab someone and shake them. She wanted to stand up and walk down the aisle and protest. She wanted Tull to finish saying what he was saying.

She wanted to know whether, if Marcel had known the truth, he would have spared Kel’s character.

But the film had moved on.

The film returned to the empty office; the bodies were there, sprawled here and there, arriving finally with Hollis.

Like a vengeful spirit, Hollis walked through the halls, gun drawn, calling Tull’s name, a father looking for his son. He finally came into the office and saw the splattered gore, the pool of blood, and one foot, the shoe still attached, on the floor.

Patty knew the black actor was very, very good.

She knew he was good because she felt in that moment what he felt, and she was willing to do anything to avenge Kel, even though this man was a child killer.

Hollis looked at the boy he had thought of as his protégé, the boy who would one day sit in his seat, now in a crumpled heap, and he began to transform. The rage came up upon him with a force that was almost palpable. His expression, terrifying as it was before, was now demonic.

“O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth—that I am meek and gentle with these butchers!”

The words were a growl, the guttural wounded growl of some primal predator barely visible in the undergrowth.

When finally Hollis stood up from the body, something horrifying inhabited him.

His eyes, which had been between madness and lucidity, were now lunacy.

She had never studied Shakespeare in school.

A few Greek plays were all Patty had done.

Yet, in that moment, she understood the meaning of self-fulfilling tragedy.

A dozen gasps rose from the back; Kelvin Grant heard them as his on-screen character died.

When he first read the script, he’d imagined this incredible scene where his face split open, and a bullet came out, and his blood and gore went everywhere.

As it turned out, the only budget they had was him standing on the side watching a syringe splatter fake blood onto Eppie’s face. They had even added little jelly chunks so that it looked more realistic.

Nonetheless, he was happy beyond happy that people reacted to his death.

This meant that he had done a good job: people saw him die and felt something.

He sank into his Hugo Boss puffer, feeling warmer and snugger. It was a very different feeling to have teenage girls screaming your name under a concert stage. It was very different to having people exchange handshakes and say, “my n——.”

He watched Doctor Cooper’s grief on screen, now framed in a medium close-up shot, colour-corrected and enhanced with symphonic background music.

Something inside him went tick.

Kelvin Grant considered his life, because his life on the screen had just been extinguished.

He had been plucked out of a line at fourteen and given a puffer jacket. A team of handlers, teachers, songwriters, dance instructors, stylists, and marketers made Kelvin Grant into Kel G. He became Trent Davis’s premier product, a boy in a man’s suit, not so different from a clown in makeup, who rapped and rapped well, and rapped on command. He could see himself rapping in the future with someone who was younger and more fit and more popular at a reunion tour when he was forty. In fact, he had one of those coming up, celebrating some rapper he had never listened to in his life, while telling a lie: “This is the G who influenced me.”

On the screen, he saw something else.

A body with infinite potential.

He felt ardently the desire to stand in a room with a man like Cooper, and be different people. He wanted to see his audience cry. He wanted to see them laugh. He wanted to see them look contemplative, like they did now. He wanted more than just screaming fan girls, champagne in exclusive clubs, and boys who stuck around because he gave them access.

He wanted to talk to someone. Maybe the redhead next to him.

But the movie was still playing, and it would be rude to talk.

He thought, therefore, of his mother.

He thought about what she said when she had come back from church and made breakfast in the enormous house he had bought for her. She told him that he should keep company with folk who made him a better person, rather than company that just made him money. They had enough money, and if he lived within his means, it could scarcely run out.

On the screen, Hollis made phone call after phone call with a trembling hand.

In a cross-cut, Josie sat on the bed, still bloody, hugging her knees, while Marcel cleaned the gun.

A final lull—before the tragedy fulfilled itself.