Scar Flowers (10 page)

Outside,
the sky darkened. Every twilight had such a moment, when day snuffed out and night took over. Not a gradual transfer of perfect balance, but a sudden defeat.

“
It’s not like my films where I wrote the script. There’s something missing between the two main characters.” Simon returned all four legs of his chair to the floor. “Half of it’s because the executive producer thinks she’s a screenwriter.”

The trailer
creaked and tilted toward the side Tom had entered from. The sound reminded Simon of an ancient terrier of his mother’s, how it groaned in its sleep on the braided rag rug in the living room.

“
If I do everything the studio wants, I’ll have a bomb on my hands,” he said. “The only way to not go crazy is to concen-trate on telling the story. But I’ve lost it. And . . .”

“And?”

Simon shook his head.

“You’ve never had a problem bein’ two people at once,” said Tom. “Maybe you should let ’em meet each other sometime. One might have your answer.”

“What’d you mean, about the people I spy on having power?” Simon lobbed his empty into the trash.

“Shit, Cob
b. Indians’ll say anything for a beer.” Tom stood. “I’m on my way to San Fran tomorrow. We’ve still got time for some serious drinking tonight. You can lemme talk some sense into you about this Hollywood lifestyle of yours.”

Simon shook his head. “I can’t. You got a place to stay?”

“Big movie man with a mansion around here is a friend of mine. That action star with the sunglasses. Hot and cold running champagne, babes in the hot tub. Said I could stay with him.”

Action star? Sounded like
one of Kazaan’s tall tales.
“Don’t look at the truth with a magnifying glass,” Eva used to say. “It’ll look different every time.”

“I might need you to introduce us if things don’t go well here. I even heard a rumor the other day that StarBorn was in trouble.”

“I’ll tell your Ma you asked after her.”

“I’m an asshole, I know,” said Simon. “Say hi to everyone else, too.”

“Call ‘em. It’s not me they wanna see.”

Simon
had split every other studio paycheck and send it to his parents, despite their protests, but thinking of them now inter-fered with his work—all those responsibilities of representing history when he was trying to navigate Hollywood.

History told him that if he
and his brother Sean had been born on a reservation, he most likely wouldn’t be a director. As children, they would have been shipped off to boarding school by the government. Punished for speaking their native language—if they had had one. Some of Eva’s relatives spoke Cree, but she had never learned. And then to return to the reservation, to suffer frostbite in shacks heated with oil-barrel stoves, maybe die from huffing gas to get high.

His mother never talked about her childhood, never acknowledged
that her son’s best friend lived on and off at the Klukwan reservation. One night in high school when Simon and Tom shared a stolen bottle of Old Crow behind a gravestone at the Slide Cemetery outside the Dyea ghost town, Tom had referred to Simon’s mother as “high yellow. Uppity.” That started their only fistfight, which Simon had lost.

His mother said of his broken nose, “Your face has a new story. You won’t be able to pretend anymore that it’s something separate from your blood.”
In dreary winter months, white school-mates taunted him for having “done a rain dance” and made the sky gray. He had not told his mother about the Indian kids who had beaten him up: “Paleface half-shit thinks he’s white!” Singing, Eva gave him a venison steak to put on his black eye, and he accused her of being happy about his condition. “You and your brother can’t wait to forget, can you?”

He had not said, “Neither side of my blood is knocking any doors down to claim me,” or “Métis isn’t a tribe.” It would not have been worth the fight. But from then on Tom’s presence in his life shielded him. No one beat up Kazaan—or his friends.

“Hey,” said Simon as Tom went down the stairs. “Good luck in Frisco.”

Simon stared for a moment at the
video, paused on a closeup of Nadia.

Nothing was going to interfere with his film. He rummaged through boxes, tossed anything unnecessary into a garbage bag. Random and futile, but at least he could work up a sweat. Maybe inactivity was his problem. It took months to get back into top shape after shooting. It was the weekend tomorrow; maybe
he could get in a run or two before Monday.

He
pulled out his wallet and extracted the dog-eared photograph. Kim’s face and his own smiled up at him as he tore the photo and let the pieces flutter into the trash. Simon printed a screenshot of Nadia, then dialed her hotel. As he waited for her to pick up, he typed “Detective Agencies” into a search engine.

Friday, June 2,
10:00 p.m. Day 10 of shooting.

At the knock on his trailer door, Simon levered the blinds apart. Nadia.

“Good evening,” she said when he emerged on the threshold.

Backlit by a parking
lot streetlamp that buzzed and hummed, she held a green velvet bag in the crook of one arm. A breeze lifted strands of her hair over the crown of her head, where they glowed orange. She wore dark velvet too, a dress that flared at the knee and brushed the ground. The light from his open door did not reach her face, but he caught a glint of famine in her eyes, like a moth at a candle. It took him aback, made him doubt his eyes.

“Thanks for coming. I wanted to talk to you about yesterday.” He stepped aside
and held the door open, but she did not move.

“May I?” she asked. A car turned in to the lot, sent a band of illumination from its headlights skating across her mouth. Gravel popped and skittered.
Her mouth was made up with crimson lipstick.

“Yes, come in,” he said, too gruffly. If she wanted to split hairs over etiquette, that did not bode well for the rest of their meeting.

Simon folded his laptop shut on the kitchen table and transferred the pile of papers and books from one seat to the other to clear a chair. He sat on his bed amid the laundry and notebooks. The overhead cupboards, crammed with costume samples and props, cast shadows that soaked up the yellow glow from the over-head light fixtures. Starting in preproduction, he did not allow the cleaning service in, so no one would throw away something im-portant, but tonight as he shoved a pile of clothes out of his way, he noticed the hamperish smell of his clutter mixed with undercur-rents of new linoleum and carpeting. Nadia’s expression was politely opaque as she took in the surroundings.

“Your work is fine,” he said. “We’re not here to talk about that. But I want you to understand about Karen. The whole film rides on her state of mind
—hers and Victor’s.”

He realized as he spoke that he did not want to talk about Karen.

“Of course.” Nadia sat down on the folding chair that had his red-and-white leather racing jacket slung across the back, stiff with padding. “Do you have any water?”

She slid the velvet bag
down to expose the liqueur bottle inside and pulled out two short Pilsner glasses, a box of sugar cubes, and a silver filigree spoon. The bottle had an old-fashioned label with fancy lettering on a draped banner.

Dishes shifted in the sink as he opened the refrigerator under the counter, with its sucking resistance, its plastic-scented air escaping. He handed her a can of soda water.

“I don’t want you putting her in a trance again, or anyone on the set, for that matter. We’ve got a film to make.” He sounded like his high-school gym teacher, talking about a big game.

“You’re right. I let my enthusiasm run away with me.” Nadia
handed him the bottle to open. He cracked the seal, and she poured two measures of jewel-green liqueur into the Pilsner glasses. A cough-syrup smell of anise and herbs drifted past. “This will take a moment.”

“What is it?” Amid the scent of the liqueur he caught a hint of her perfume: spice and sandalwood. If she were embarrassed or angered by his
earlier rebuke, she did not show it. Her unexpected agreement unbalanced him, like a stuck door suddenly giving way.

“It’s from a friend of mine who brings some home every time he goes to
Spain. It’s supposed to be hallucinogenic, even mystical. If you believe in that sort of thing. If you believe in trances and mind control and zombies.”

She smiled with the same flash of charm from the film festival when she asked for the fight choreographer job: a subtext of
I know you, we are equals
. Nadia tipped a few drops of soda water over a sugar cube that was poised on the spoon, where they melted into the glass in opaque yellow bursts. Tiny underwater explosions, streamers of amber cloud.

Simon leaned against the wall and stretched his legs out. This meeting was the last task of his day. Soothing, the way her hair slid across her back as she turned her head. The times he had seen her on the set, she had her hair pulled back and her arms crossed. Perfect posture and long legs for her height. Like those Russian ballerinas with the dangerous accents and chiseled cheek
-bones.

“When
’d you learn hypnosis?”

“Years ago.
I’ve always been interested in trances and mind control and zombies.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “This film fit so perfectly with my background that I had to get this job. Julia lives in other people’s minds as much as she lives in her own. Knowing hypnosis helps me understand her. She’s breaking the ethics of her profession. If she’s used to bypassing the usual barriers with people, it would affect her approach to violence.”

“And is that what you use it for? To bypass barriers?” He glanced at one of his alarm clocks. He had something else to do tonight but could not remember what.

Nadia
set down the slotted spoon. “The barriers I’m talking about are paper-thin. Most people who’ve been hypnotized can’t even tell when it begins. It doesn’t feel much different from having a vivid daydream or being lost in a good book—both of which are mild hypnotic states. ”

Her hands busied themselves, to reposition the bottle and glasses by a fraction, to wipe the spoon with a paper napkin. Though her face remained serene, her gestures
seemed an attempt to restore order. Until now, he had never been able to imagine her as a child or as ever having been in love.
Keep it professional, Mercer.

“You never did ask
me what happened with Karen when I hypnotized her,” said Nadia. “I’d asked her how she wanted to express herself to you. But I suggested that she stop when I saw what she had in mind. Lovely girl, but impulsive.”

Karen
. Damn. She had made him promise to call her tonight. He would find time later. Right now he wanted to back up the conversation to the point where Nadia had started to hide again. Her eyes were on him, and she seemed to have sat up straighter.

“What is it good for, then?” he asked. “How do you use it, and why?”

“For self-discovery. I hope. Not just mine, but also the people who trust me enough to go into trance.”

“You hope.”

“It depends on the individual. Whether he wants to learn about himself or not. Isn’t that true in film?”

The prudent thing would be to keep his guard up, draw her out, but he said,
“Most people working on a film in this town want the job of the person above them. It has shit to do with art and self-discovery.”

“Is it that stressful?” She replaced the cap on the liqueur bottle. The light stained her face and hands and the kitchen table
amber, and shadows lined the folds of her dress.

“No. Just complicated.” He closed the cover of his notebook.

Where had his sudden confessional streak come from? Maybe because she was the first person he had spoken to in days who did not want something related to
Babylon
.

“You mean I wouldn’t understand,
” said Nadia.

“Not that either. I’d just rather hear more about hypnosis.”

She gave him a look as if to question his sincerity, invite further confessions, but he did not take the bait.

“All right,” she said. “The trick is
not violating boundaries. If I don’t trigger resistance, the subject stays in trance. He brings all the desires to the table and must agree internally to be hypno-tized. I can’t make anyone do anything he doesn’t want to do.”

His own research confirmed what she said: hypnosis did not equal brainwashing
or mind control. So what was it about her that he was not sure of? Under the weak glare of the light, her lashes gleamed like splinters of cedar, and her lips and lacquered nails shone wetly. She used a knife to puncture the top of the box of sugar cubes and open the flap. Her hands tipped and measured, clouding the drinks.

Letting his imagination run away with him. Zombies and mind control. Sending her photograph to a detective—had he been justified or paranoid?

“I remember the first time I saw
Poppies Are Red
in an art gallery back in Seattle,” said Nadia.

“I did that one a long time ago. Just out of film school.”

That documentary won a larger audience than he had hoped. Most were body modification enthusiasts, hipsters, or unhappy people who were cutters themselves. The rest were aesthete types, a breed of liberal culturista. She could be one of those. No visible tattoos or piercings, and no jewelry except for a carved jade ring. Fingernails filed short on the left hand, almost to the quick, but long on the right hand.

Should he ask about Paul? No. Personal questions would give the wrong impression.

Nadia handed him his glass, and he took a taste. Bitter herbs, with a sweet, gritty wash of sugar swirled in. He blinked away a flash of the paisley silk scarf one of his girlfriends had pinned over the light fixture in her apartment. Vivid things fired his nerves like that sometimes. To this day he associated hot peppers with loud music, an ear-numbing assault stronger than the fire on his tongue.

As he drank
, the glass brushed his cheek and the itchy soreness of his new beard.

“That documentary impressed me. It took something painful and hidden and gave it a voice. Some directors would’ve used that to drive their point home, but you didn’t.”

Nadia’s eyes were on him, as if that were the whole reason she was here: to look into his eyes. Was she here to seduce him? Just because he got so much attention at film festivals did not mean every female in sight was after him. She probably
just thought of him as a co-worker.

They talked about
Babylon
. Work, nothing personal. Her ideas were good; she cared about the story. A weight lifted off him. He must have imagined the conflict he had felt this afternoon, his suspicion of her. Every time he looked up, her eyes were on him. Were they blue? Green? He wasn’t close enough to tell.

With the amount of sleep he had been getting, it was possible
that he’d been daydreaming this afternoon, not hypnotized. The hum of the light fixtures, outlined with silhouettes of insect bodies; the bursting cupboards; the wigs and masks and sketches—all hung mute and weary, witness and proof of his everyday life, real and uninterruptible.

They got on to the subject of insomnia, how Nadia had watched
The Conversation
for the first time late one night and skipped sleep entirely.

“It was about a man who was completely alone,” she said. “He had his work—it was his whole life—and when that was taken away, he had nothing left.”

Simon shook his head as though fighting off sleep. “It was all about what group Harry Caul belonged to and the different factions that wanted to claim him. He didn’t lose his work. It just couldn’t save him.”

He knew that a film meant something different to each viewer, but he had expected her to share his opinion. Of course she would see things through the lens of white privilege. She could afford to interpret the film as personal, not political. Simon wanted to shout that Harry Caul was not alone, that it was the rest of the world that wasn’t right, that the hero could not lose his work, his identity. Caul: a veil of skin over a newborn’s face that, according to old wives’ tales, was a sign of psychic ability. Like the clear plastic overcoat Harry wore in the film, a placental membrane that looked too small for him. A caul must be cut off so that the child could breathe. At no other time could skin be removed so easily, nor do so much to hide identity.

Harry kept a mistress, too, a woman he told nothing about himself and tried to keep secret from everyone. As Nadia spoke, the idea grew:
secret, she keeps a secret, she’s trying to see into something
,
to spy
.

“—a conduit. Like you are,” she said.

“That’s not some New Age bull, is it? Vision quests and shamans and all that?”

“I wonder if you misunderstood,” she said. Her voice wavered
from its soothing tone for a moment. “It could be that you’re dreaming. We were talking about the nature of the artist.”

He searched his memory of the last few minutes for gaps.
Dreaming?
Something did strike him as odd, as if the corners of reality fluttered and stretched, the weight of sleep behind his eyes.

It feels
like the last time she hypnotized you
, a voice whispered. He did not want to acknowledge it, or the conclusions it led to. This meeting was going just as he wanted. Could the drink be drugged? No; both the absinthe and the sugar cubes had been sealed.

She refilled his glass, her hands infusing the water, clouding bursts of water drops in the emerald liquid. Left-handed. Interesting. She did not ask if he wanted more, just refilled his glass. Long dress with a flared
green skirt and a velvet hood that hung down her back, its fabric fading into shadow, to blend and blur in swirling grades of smoke. His stomach burned with pleas-ant warmth, and his head felt light, as if there were more room behind his eyes than usual. Had he eaten anything since lunch? Slept since yesterday?