The Last Days of Video (24 page)

But she hadn't checked his IMDB page in months. She'd had no idea what he was up to.

That he was making
their
movie.

“I don't believe it,” she said breathlessly. “Waring, I might know someone who can help us.”

She scrambled for her iPhone—the details of Star Video's new hope were possibly a frantic Google search away.

“What are you talking about?” Waring asked.

The director of
The Buried Mirror
could only be one person—Match Anderson, the local boy from her hometown who'd gone on to Hollywood acclaim. Her high school sweetheart.

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After using her iPhone
to confirm on IMDB that Match Anderson was indeed the auteur behind
Not Tonight, Joséphine!
, which was categorized on the website as “filming” and which was too ridiculous a title
not
to be fake, and after a round of calls confirming her suspicion that the cast and crew of the movie would be staying in Appleton's nicest hotel, the Siena, and after calling the Siena and extracting from the front desk drone that the production had recently arrived, Alaura grabbed Waring's keys, jumped in his Dodge, and sped (as fast as the Dodge would allow) across town.

But Match couldn't be in Appleton. This just wasn't possible.

The only thing that explained it, that made this all not completely absurd, was
The Buried Mirror.
Match had written the first draft of the screenplay when he and Alaura were in high school together, in Sprinks, over a decade ago. She had helped inspire
The Buried Mirror.
They had worked on it together. Developed it together. And the story was set, she knew, in Appleton, the town to which they'd made more than a few teenage expeditions over the years, after meeting as high school freshmen. The movie's lead characters, a wife and husband, were both Appleton University professors, and the Historic District was intended as the picturesque,
Stepford Wives-y
backdrop to the intense, hypersexual storyline.

Now Match was here, filming the movie! Alaura had to remind herself that she didn't believe in Fate. There was no Reality Center magic about any of this. She had done nothing to bring about this result.

Because if she really got down to the truth of the matter—and I better get shit straight quick, she thought—if she was totally completely honest, Match had not been her “high school sweetheart,” as she often thought of him. She'd only conferred that passé label on their relationship in retrospect, years later,
after
he'd become famous. In fact, they had only “been together” during the summer following their high school graduation. Before that, they had been best friends . . . she had been a tomboy, and he had been the sort of
geeky, artsy rich kid who would hang out with a tomboy. They had watched movies together, constantly, for years—in fact, watching movies was all they did. Movies were Match's entire life. And she hadn't minded at all. As freshmen, they'd become quickly inseparable. But it was not until their final summer together that they began kissing, holding hands, sleeping together, calling themselves boyfriend and girlfriend—actually, though she didn't think about it often, the intimate side of their relationship had only lasted a few weeks. He was handsome, but for some reason, she'd never been that attracted to him, he smelled a bit funny, and he was maybe a bit
too
fascinated with movies . . . so she'd always thought of him as more of a brother, and their ultimate summer coupling had been less romantic and more like a submission to what seemed proper teenage protocol. They were about to go their separate ways—she thirty minutes to Ape U and he light-years to Los Angeles for film school. So they got together, and in a flash, the summer had ended.

Then, for some reason, she never contacted him. She never e-mailed or called or wrote, waiting for him to make the first move. But he made no attempt to contact her either. His parents moved away from Sprinks, so he'd never returned to the town for holidays. Within a few months, she was deep into partying at Ape U, drinking and smoking weed and getting piercings and tattoos and sleeping with guys like it was going out of style, and soon it was too late to be the one to break the silence.

She had always known he was special. His name was special—“Match,” a cool Anglicization of the Scandinavian “Mats.” His grandparents lived in Europe, which was the coolest thing she had ever heard. He'd been born in Massachusetts, had lived for years in Boston, and he was the only kid in Sprinks—where his mother had moved to work at nearby Research Triangle Park—who didn't speak Redneck. He was ideologically opposed to hunting and manual labor. He wore black band tee shirts and baggy jeans, and he loved to read fat books and to watch movies, always movies.
These traits, as well as his waifish frame (he'd weighed no more than 125 pounds at the time) so differentiated him from her other classmates that he was the logical choice as her companion, because by that point, she was already “too smart” and “too weird” for Sprinks. And Match hadn't minded that she was poor, that she lived in a rusty trailer. He introduced her to a new world: a world beyond Sprinks, a world of culture and insight. They developed their own shared history, their own inside jokes, their own lexicon derived from film that only slightly resembled Piedmont English. They rented movies from the nearby grocery store and watched them on his family's VHS player and huge television. They cackled at their own obscure movie references, while other kids thought their antics were offensively nerdy. As far back as freshman year, Alaura had felt that their souls were platonically linked.

The Buried Mirror
, she remembered, had started as a joke between the two of them during that final summer. On a Saturday road trip to Appleton to see an old film (The
400 Blows
, she recalled), they had wandered downtown (which to them was Greenwich Village compared to the ratty stoplight of Sprinks) and into an independent bookstore. There they had chanced across a used Spanish history book called
The Buried Mirror
, and into her head popped the idea that it would be a good title for a movie. She told him this. He agreed and said that it sounded like a Hitchcock thriller. The idea stuck. On the drive home that day, they worked out some of the story details. She proposed Appleton as the film's setting and suggested that the main character be a stifled housewife with dangerous sexual longings. He suggested that her husband could be carrying on an affair with an underage girl living on their immaculate Historic District street, and that when the stifled housewife discovers the affair, she engages in her own self-destructive escapades, including some backwoods rednecky drug-den scenes, ending in disaster. Alaura insisted that the actors must be real-looking people, not Hollywood types, and he agreed
enthusiastically, registering all of it, a creative blaze roaring behind his thousand-yard stare.

Over the next few days, he outlined a story, and a week later, he acted it out for her on his back porch. They critiqued the outline together, then made love for one of the very last times, and then he sat down to write the entire thing.

If he was making the film now, in 2007, that meant that
The Buried Mirror
—a Lynchian/Cronenbergian thriller she had helped inspire—had been growing inside Match Anderson for over eleven years. And now he was home, in North Carolina, in Appleton, to film it.

She didn't believe in Fate. But at the moment, it was hard not to.

With just a little more luck, Star Video had a chance.

It was seven p.m.,
just after sunset, when Alaura arrived at the Siena Hotel, which was a four-story Italian-style building that rested in a verdant corridor of oaks and maples at the bottom of the eastward slope of Appleton, two miles from campus.

A large crowd had gathered at the hotel's ornate front gate.

Alaura parked the Dodge, walked across College Street, and found herself amidst a throng, a bizarre collection of middle-age and teenage females—autograph hounds, she realized. She pushed through the heavily perfumed crowd, her head down, gaze locked on the sidewalk, and she realized again that she was still wearing this stupid blue business suit.

Keep going, she told herself.

She reached the head of the buzzing mass, where activity seemed loudest, most violent, and to her surprise, she was admitted without comment past the literal velvet rope, ushered in by an armed security guard wearing a lemon-yellow polo, his massive hand gently touching her back.

Why had she been admitted? Did Match know she was coming?

It was probably the tattoos on her neck and her pomaded hair combined with the business suit—that she looked so unlike the bubble-gum swarm of Southern women—that the security guard had assumed she was part of the crew.

She walked quickly toward the hotel.

The front doors of the Siena opened and closed with a pleasing sci-fi whoosh, and once inside, she found herself amidst another maelstrom. She had been in this lobby once or twice, for a wedding maybe, or on a night out drinking (there was a restaurant/bar in the back), but she did not recognize the space now. Piles of crumpled cardboard boxes and various bits of alien film equipment filled the room, and packs of people churned in seemingly random directions, chattering, laughing, cursing. Several loud debates went on at once, fingers pointing at computer printouts, men and women rubbing forefingers and thumbs against temples. A man with wild white hair sat in a suede easy chair, his legs crossed, and berated several young crewmembers. Another man stood next to a potted holly tree and looked over the room with a scowl that seemed to betray sinister intentions.

Then Tabitha Gray, Academy Award winner and international tabloid star, entered the lobby—she was flanked by three bodyguards, firearms holstered.

Alaura had never been so near a celebrity. Fifteen feet. Ten feet. Five. Tabitha Gray, known affectionately as “Tabby” (though she was reputedly a sadistic anorexic) was even more striking in person than on screen. Her brunette hair seemed to sparkle. Her face was flawless and Photoshopped. Her neck was as long as the neck of that alien from
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, and her figure was the work of some sadistic deity bent on torturing all of malekind.

As she passed, Tabby smiled at Alaura, and a blue firework exploded inside Alaura's chest.

But the blissful moment evaporated as Tabby floated by and as Alaura discerned that the room had quieted in deference to her raw power, to her beauty and fame and familiarity to audiences. Tabby
knew her own power, and the crew knew it, and she hated them for it, and they hated her. Alaura felt the vehemence at once—there was nothing but sexually charged hatred in the air, until Tabby finally exited in the direction, Alaura now remembered, of the hotel's indoor swimming pool.

“May I help you, miss?” a voice asked.

A huge guy in a yellow security shirt stood to Alaura's right. His hair was up in a high, clean, perfect Kid 'n' Play box cut.

“No,” she said, confidently looking toward the center of the room.

“Are you a part of the crew, miss?”

“Absolutely.”

“The hotel is off-limits to non-crewmembers, miss. We've rented the entire building.”

She knew it was unwise, but hoping to scare off this square-headed titan, she decided to channel Waring:

“Quit waving your beef burrito in my face, dude, and don't call me
miss
.”

“Miss, I know everyone on the crew, miss.”

“I'm a friend of the director,” she said.

“Do you have a security pass, miss?”

“I just arrived, didn't I?”

“Miss, I'm going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Call me miss again,” she said, preparing herself to be arrested and placed into handcuffs. “I triple-dog dare you.”

One hour later, Alaura
was sitting in a small, sterile conference room in the depths of the Siena Hotel, a room that she imagined was used primarily for the hiring and firing of employees. Another uniformed security guard—this one slickly handsome and donning the Eurotrash fauxhawk that was all the rage that year—stood in the corner of the room, hands cupped in front of him as if protecting his genitalia. The guard had not spoken to Alaura, nor moved a muscle,
since the other guard with the box cut had left to check her insane story. She had removed her suit coat and was leaning forward, her elbows propped on the ovular conference room table.

Endowed with a confidence born wholly from the absurdity of this situation, Alaura said to the guard, “You know, I work at a video store. If you bring Match Anderson to me, I'll give you free rentals for life.”

No response.

“I bet you get one or two crazies like me a week.”

Nothing.

“This time it's actually true, though. I really
do
know Match Anderson.”

“Get me a screen test?” Fauxhawk said in a bored voice.

The door opened, and a potbellied man with a scraggly salt-and-pepper beard entered.

“Match?” she said.

He wore a rumpled brown blazer, and his eyes seemed twice the size that she remembered. Altogether, Match looked like a different person. His face sagged under his beard, even more than in the most recent photos of him she had seen, like he'd attempted to pull back his skin for a facelift only to terminate the operation unfinished, leaving the stretched-out material to flop downward. His formerly waifish frame had remained spindly at the chest and shoulders, but it had bloated dangerously in his midsection. And his hands twitched nervously, like he was tickling an invisible monkey wrapped around his waist.