Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (read e book TXT) 📗

To keep excited, they set up a television just outside the shot and ran adult movies they could watch while being taped. These became their cue cards or TelePrompTer they could mimic. The same as the Clarks, the people in each movie seemed to be looking off camera at a movie of their own. This chain of voyeurism, the Clarks watching someone watch someone watch someone, it felt good. The video that Tess and Nelson watched, it was at least five years old. The men had long sideburns and the women wore dangle earrings and blue-sparkle eye shadow. How old the movie those people were watching, it was anybody's guess, but it felt better, knowing that all of them were daisy-chained throughout history.

Those video people, they looked the Clarks' age in front of their camera, but now they'd be sliding into middle age. They looked young, with muscles in their legs and arms, long and standing out, but they moved fast, as if what they watched off camera was a clock.

To help each other smile, Tess and Nelson took turns saying what they'd do with their money.

They'd buy a house.

They'd travel to Mexico.

They'd make real movies. Feature films. They'd start their own independent production company, and never work for other people, ever again.

They'd name their child Cassie, if it was a girl.

Baxter, if it was a boy. Instead of some old birthing video, someday they'd show their child his conception. Baxter would see just how hot and with-it his old folks had been. It seemed so progressive.

And after that, they'd never, ever have to have sex, ever again.

The worse the job got, the more they expected to earn. The more it hurt to touch their chapped skin, or to lie back against the cold, sweat-soaked mattress, the brighter they had to make their future. Their faces ached from smiling. Their skin burned red from being caressed. As the marathon went on, their reward had to grow more and more impossible.

Then, quick as a doctor saying your disease is fatal, quick as a judge handing down a death sentence, they were done.

The Clarks had done everything they could imagine to each other. All they had left to do was edit the tape.

That was supposed to be the fun part.

The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people.

And maybe the reason vampires don't die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.

“No amount of editing,” Mrs. Clark says, “was going to save us.”

No amount of aerobic exercise or plastic surgery would ever make them look the way they'd imagined they looked before they watched that tape. All they saw were two almost hairless animals, hairless and dark pink and proportioned all wrong, the way mongrel crossbreed dogs look, with short legs and long necks and thick torsos with no definite waist. They were grinning big bear-trap smiles at each other while their eyes darted at the camera to make sure someone was still paying attention. They sucked their stomachs flat.

Worse than their everyday ugliness was the proof they were getting old. Their lips suction-cupped each other, and their loose skin looked baggy and wadded around every orifice. Their bodies rocked together as if they were some terrible old machine forced to work at top speed until it would break apart.

Nelson's erection looked twisted and dirt-dark, something from a bin in the back of a Chinese grocery. Tess's lips and her chest looked sideshow-too-big, the scars still burning-red.

So what.

Tess Clark cried as they watched themselves from every angle, in every position. Every part of them, from the soles of their feet to their scalps, the secrets they kept between their legs, the hair they hid under their arms, they watched it all, until the tape ran out and left them sitting in the dark.

That was all they were.

After that, even crying seemed like another doomed way to get through the moment. Any emotion seemed a silly and useless way to deny what they'd both seen. Any action meant starting over with another doomed, stupid dream.

They could make another movie. Start their production company. Only now, whatever they did, they would know it wasn't real. They'd never be the way they imagined they were.

And no matter how hard they tried, no matter how much money they made, they were both going to die.

In two days with a rented camera, they'd used up their lifetime allowance of interest in each other. Neither of them held any mystery.

The lights and camera, ABC Rentals kept calling to get them back. The rental company kept charging their credit card until the Clarks owed more money than they'd ever put in savings.

The day Nelson Clark rolled out of bed, to pack the camera and lights, to take them back, that day he didn't come home.

That next week, Mrs. Clark's period didn't come, either.

“These two huge breasts,” Mrs. Clark says, “they were supposed to be a tax deduction.” Just the appearance of something big and mothery. And now a baby was on the way.

Nelson Clark never did come home. In a city this size, every year, hundreds of husbands walk away. Kids leave home. Wives escape. People disappear.

So what.

Tess Clark burned the videotape, but it plays every time her eyes close. Even now, almost sixteen years later. Even now that her child is born and grown and dead.

That baby, she named: Cassandra.

9

It's in the Italian Renaissance lounge that Mrs. Clark finds Director Denial slumped over a heavy, dark wood table. The table dripping with blood from every edge. The sticky blood already flocked with a layer of cat hair. Director Denial with a rope of twisted nylon stocking tied around her wrist. A meat cleaver is sunk in the table. Above the nylon stocking, the Director's hand lies pale in a puddle of dark red.

On the floor under the table, Cora Reynolds chews on a severed index finger.

“My dear,” Mrs. Clark says, looking at the crusted, bloody