The picture was the kind she liked, more talk than violence. There was either a cigarette or hard beverage in every scene. The drink was never flasked, always poured in glass with ice. Neat, like her, and maybe that was bad for them, but it helped the characters flow smooth from one scene to another.
The theater was dark. She likes that theater. There's another on the other side of downtown, but they gave into the urge to keep dim lights on. It's so people can see each other's faces as they discuss the film. That's fine for other people but never what she wants.
The chairs were the good stuff, feathered velvet.
Now she's standing outside. Streetlights are closer together here than they are in the suburbs. The film started late and ran late and now she's the only one on the street. She turns left, looking east across downtown. It's a mess of over lit signs and golem buildings. They all haze together into meaninglessness. The skyline she sees, the sun trying to make it past the building tops to the ocean, reads like nothing.
But she turns to her right and sees the shadow under the streetlight like she is expecting to.
She waits there, feeling the heat of his hat hooded eyes, and stares back, though all she sees is the shadow of the brim.
After long moments he starts to drift toward her. He hunches low and the shadow from his hat dissolves his neck in full darkness. His feet scrape over the pavement. He doesn't avoid the cracks and they catch harder there, the sound hurting her more as he draws closer. She covers her ears but she still hears it, a scritching, like spiders are crawling in her lobes, mandibles bristling against the ridges.
Her hands fall to her sides, useless.
Her jacket isn't warm enough. She feels the wind break against her throat, cold slivers like sharp teeth. There are no leaves downtown, not even dead leaves, because there are no trees. Instead there are cigarette ends nestled in the pavement cracks, scuff marks by her feet, "closed" signs in windows.
The man's frame now blots out the streetlight glow behind him. Strides away, soon footsteps. When he stops before her she still can't see his eyes, but she can see her teeth, like animal fangs. His fingers peek from under the cuff of his coat sleeve, slender with long nails.
"Do it," she says. "I want you to."
His arms raise. His hands claw and light from the marquee behind her bleeds through his fingers, breaking his shadowed face into fragments, black diamonds.
They find her throat, sink in, start to mold her like clay.
If this was a picture, she thinks, this would be the first take. The screenwriter would want the film to play dark, unsettle people. The pale heroine would see her life as meaningless, invite her own death, see it as a gift. In turn, the lives of everyone who paid a quarter to see the film would be meaningless. They would feel this as something different. It would reach them, stir them, move them to different places.
But most people aren't like her. Most people want back lit theatres, so they can look away, talk to the people they see every day. They want the familiar. To them the new feels too much like the death of the old.
She is floating above the air in her lungs that can't reach her.
So they would record a second take, she decides. An espirit d'escalier. In this version the pale lady would run from the stranger. Weave through the night streets. She wouldn't find anyone to help her. Loneliness at its most primal. She would slip through streets and find where her ex-lover lived, probably a modest but smart apartment somewhere in the west end. Together they would overcome the stranger using their wits. Or the coffee in the screenwriter's blood would fight a losing battle against his eyelids, and his deadline would loom like hangman's noose, and he would write that the ex-lover had a gun, probably a Colt from his police days.
Gail never held a gun in his life.
What would it be like for that version of her? The life or death moment would relight fiery hearts. The film would close on them happy, and then they'd have to be happy together, for the rest of their lives now. Move into their suburban house, like the one she's left behind, empty, the yard filled with dead leaves she never swept.
What would it be like for her, knowing the primacy is past her, and everything left is monotone?
I am the first take, she thinks, as her sight becomes water and starts to drain away. Never the second. I was never afterthought.
I watched the stars. I saw their eyes in black and white.
