TWENTY-TWO
Setti woke the next morning smiling and cheerful. She cooked me eggs and rice. The coffee was perfect, as was her goodbye kiss at the door before I left for work. Had I not experienced it myself, I never would have subscribed to the creepiness of the night before.
The rest of that week proved hectic, denying us both the opportunity to watch the accident video. I invited Setti to watch it herself while I was away, but in one of her slides toward a more dominant role, she refused, insisting that we be together when the time came.
On Thursday—Thanksgiving Day overseas—I fired the caterer. It was a duty best performed over the phone, as downtown Edsa traffic remained hideous whilst I, in a state best defined as overtactful, cultivated no desire to take part in a venomous physical confrontation.
“Martha?” I said, once I had her on the line. “Your food is delicious.”
“Why thank you!”
“You’re fired. Allow me to explain...”
I can be said with a fair amount of certainty that I conducted a poor show of explaining. Martha hung up the phone on me, cutting off some chambered compliment about her menudo, which was in fact brackish to the point where several of our crew had begun to worry about kidney stones. Following this unpleasantness, I made a quick call to another caterer, Eat, Sleep, Burger. My questions were brief, the answers briefer still.
“Ano ang pinaglilingkuran mo?” I asked.
“Burgers,” a clipped, male voice replied.
“Maaari kang maglingkod sa isang malaking tauhan?”
“Burgers.”
“Naghahatid ka ba?”
“Burgers.”
“Salamat. Tinanggap ka.”
And just like that we had ourselves a new food source.
Other issues that week included several last moment changes to the script, which required some fast typing, as our secretary was out sick. My fingers raced over the keys the way that late, bearded director had once raced his in effort to keep fresh polish on a faded idea. Also, the crew was getting low on cigarettes. I ordered several cartons from a village store near Friday’s shoot location. Then came the weather. The tropical depression PTN’s meteorologist reported earlier in the week was now a super typhoon, and headed in our direction. He predicted it would make landfall late the following week. I contacted my crew and told them to anticipate shooting delays.
Also before I got a chance to watch the video with Setti, I contacted my parents. It must have happened on Friday evening. Setti was to blame. Instead of watching the video that night, as I wished us to do, she bade me a chat with the past. We were sitting on the couch. The artifact I’d borrowed from PTN lay before us, awaiting examination. Yet Setti, for reasons that seemed to flee all logic, as silver flees the repelling countenance of a magnet, insisted that I call home. More to appease her than out of any willingness to speak with Mom and Dad, I dialed out.
The line was bad. It began with a crackling hiss like that of a half-broken pocket radio. Then it went silent, leading me to believe that I’d not gotten through to Cleveland at all. I was about to press CANCEL and try again when my mom’s voice, faint, came through the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Mom? It’s me. Fredo.”
“Fredo?”
“That’s right.”
The annoying hiss returned, followed immediately by a garbled, rushing sound, as if waves from the Pacific Ocean had somehow risen up in attempt to drown our connection. Then it all stopped, and I could hear Mom again, reasonably clear.
“You shouldn’t be calling,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“Please don’t address me that way.”
“What? As Mom? Why not?”
Her answer took several seconds to arrive. Then, as if on the verge of tears: “I can’t believe you would ask.”
“But you’re my mom.”
“Stop it!” she shouted. “This isn’t right!”
I looked at Setti for a moment, who shrugged. She wasn’t part of the chat. I pointed to the phone. “Want to talk to Mom?” I asked softly. Setti made no reply, which I took as an acceptance. “Mom?” I spoke into the line. “Setti’s here. Would you like to speak to her?”
My mom screamed. Then she began to wail in the most wretched, heart-torn way I had ever heard. The receiver vibrated with agony. Stung, I moved it away from my ear. This only made things worse. Now Setti could hear it too. The shrieking, splintered cries of fathomless despair.
“Mom!” I yelled, putting the phone back to my ear. “What’s going on?”
“How could you?” she bawled. “How could you?”
“Mom!”
“GO AWAY!”
The line gave a harsh CRACK as she broke the connection.
“Oh, Christ,” I said, staring at my phone.
“What happened?” Setti asked.
“My mom. She’s insane.”
This made her smile and, with one of her small hands, gently take the phone from grasp. “No, honey. She just misses her child.”
I was skeptical. “It never sounds like she misses me much at all.”
“She misses her child,” Setti repeated.
Now I looked at her more closely. A lilt existed in her tone of the correcting teacher. Her smile, too, had taken on a knowing list. I asked what she was saying. I told her I didn’t understand.
“Let’s watch the video,” she said, swatting all other pretenses to the side. “I’m getting more morbid about it every day. Aren’t you?”
I had agree that I was. I reached for the VCD case, opened it up. A shiny, unlabeled disk flashed. Popping the disk out of its shell, I knelt to feed it into the console. The TV flickered to life. Setti had turned it on with the remote. Now came the console onscreen menu. And there shone the VCD title: G. Chavez/Accident.
“Come sit,” Setti commanded. “It’s showtime.”
The scene took place at a grotto atop a grassy hill. I thought I recognized a number of trees in the background, swaying in some lost, bright afternoon breeze. Through the verdant boughs the sun flickered like a lady’s smile. Several crew members passed in front of the lens. There was joking and laughter. I could see blades of grass stamped flat. They led to the edge of a round, blue body of water. Here a rusty boom crane had been set up. Attached to it was a maroon-colored 4 door sedan. This was Giselle’s stunt vehicle. The car in which she would die.
More talking and laughter came from off-camera. Then I heard someone ask about positioning of the HMI. Somebody else bumped the tripod. The grass, water, and trees all shook. Then they got still again...and Giselle Chavez appeared.
At the sight of her I became as one from that dark land beyond the forest, met with the misfortune of horizons unbound. A creature of a symphony of horror, caught out by the looking glass. Called forth, confused and embarrassed, toward an intangible truth. There my lover stood in the glass, with myself nowhere to be found. There she sat beside me. I gaped, looking from one girl to the next. Though dressed differently, they were the same. Almost precisely the same.
Setti wouldn’t look at me. Wearing a smile faint as a distant star, she watched the screen, where a small, haughty woman, bursting with confidence, was describing that day’s stunt.
“We’re going to sink the car to a depth of ten feet,” she said, grinning as if this were the most wondrous thing in the world, “with me, your favorite femme fatale, handcuffed to the steering wheel.”
Giselle looked more ready for a rock concert than a cold swim. Her hair, thick and black, flew in the breeze like a victory pennant. She wore a crisp, low-cut purple vest that stopped above a concave belly. When she took a breath, I could see the thin bones of her ribs rise tight against smooth, soft skin the color of melted caramel. Beneath this was the clip of a studded belt, followed by a purple skirt cut high over a pair of black boots.
“Don’t worry,” she cooed at the lens. “I know how to hold my breath. My personal best is four minutes! We’re not going to need that much today.”
From here about ten minutes went by, during which the crew chatted about how the scene would be shot. Giselle—Selli—stayed close to the boom crane. At around the seven minute mark a man I didn’t recognize stopped to talk to her. Giselle pointed to the car. They both laughed about something. Then I saw her take a deep breath, pinch her nose, and pretend like she was sinking.
I turned to look at Setti. Her eyes would not leave the screen. This despite my suspicion that she knew my regard had shifted, and requested acknowledgment. On Setti’s face hovered the expression of a woman seeing an old, old photograph, taken when she was young, with ideals cut of a different, more radiant cloth. A wave of acute compunction swept over me, as if somehow the death of these ideals had come by my own blade. I was a guilty party. A wolf come into the garden. That of course seemed absurd. I was still living in Cleveland when Giselle died. My parents had separated. Come apart along some unseen fault line of their love. It had happened fast, like a car crash over a bridge. Then came the water, cold and ineluctable, drowning all their dreams.
On the screen it was happening for real. The drowning, I mean. Over the past few minutes Giselle had entered the sedan. Now her hands were cuffed to the steering wheel. An interior camera, mounted near the driver’s side ceiling, showed it all. There came a lurch as the car executed a nose-forward sink. Giselle began to take a number of deep breaths. Her gasps were light and quick. She was, I knew, oxygenating her bloodstream. Stocking up on life.
Seconds later, a Niagaral deluge of water gushed into the cabin with the sound of a hundred thousand crazed football fans applauding a game-winning touchdown. It rose from under the dash, engulfed the steering wheel, then took Giselle. Before she went under she breathed her last: “HUUUUHHH!”
I glanced at Setti again. Had she also taken a breath? A moment was all I needed to see that no, this did not seem to be the case. If anything, the rise and fall of her breasts had become more pronounced, while on the screen, Giselle gave the camera some time to record her illusory predicament. Lips tightly pursed in a held breath, she made a show of looking around the cabin. Bubbles large and small rose from what must have been a thousand tiny pockets of trapped air. Giselle’s hair fanned in front of the camera, fell back, and fanned again.
After one full minute of dramatic presentation, she started in on the cuffs. Her slender wrists twisted to the right, then left. The cuffs bumped along the rippled grip of the wheel but gave no sign of relenting their hold. Fascinated, I watched Giselle work her little movie prop some more. A lacquered red thumb-nail slipped beneath it to activate what I surmised was some kind of release component. Then the stunt-woman gave a pull on the chain. The chain went taut. When it didn’t let go, Giselle tried the component again. And again, did not achieve the desired result.
I could see Giselle’s neck, along with part of her clavicle, turning red. Her thin chest had been without a breath for two full minutes now. It was quite obviously beginning to hurt. To feel tight and tired.
“UH!” the girl moaned. “MMN!”
A sudden plume of pretty silver bubbles burst from her lips. She was hurting all right. Running low on air. After five tries on the hidden component—and three minutes underwater—little Giselle Chavez lost her composure.
A bubbly explosion of precious air screamed from her lips. Hard as she could, I saw her yank on the chain. But the mechanism had jammed from somewhere inside. It simply would not let its prisoner go.
“HELLLP!” that prisoner screamed—or tried to scream.
She bent her knees in a frantic attempt to kick backward from the dashboard. The effort lifted her skirt up well over the waist, revealing a lacy black pair of panties. The panties had come down partway over her buttocks to expose the cleft. Locked in a breathless battle for life, Giselle was far from caring. Using all of her strength, she strained against the dash. One of her boots slipped, regained purchase, slipped again.
At precisely three minutes and twenty-five seconds into the stunt—yes, I counted—Giselle Chavez drowned.
It happened fast, with a twitch, a jerk, a pair of crossed eyes, and a final, discordant burst of disengaged breath. Then the stunt-woman was still. Her bubbles trickled to a stop. The scene went quiet. It was over.
The same might have been said for our living room. Setti and I watched the dead girl float in front of us for I don’t know how long. It must have been near the five minute mark when a frogman finally swept into the scene to cut Giselle free. Before that, however, Setti broke the spell on her own, with the muttered words:
“That’ll teach her.”
My appalled gaze snapped sideways to look at her. Setti looked back for moment before flashing a brief, devious smile. The smile of one only vaguely embarrassed by behavior perceived to be inappropriate. Then she stood and, without a word, disappeared into the bedroom.
Later that night I told her that what we had seen appeared to be an accident. This after recalling Setti’s opinion from months ago. She’d told me the whole scene had been staged. That Giselle committed suicide.
“It really didn’t look like suicide,” I whispered in the dark of the bedroom.
I didn’t expect the other’s reaction, which was harsh and quite immediate. “Of course it was suicide!” she snapped. “How dare you imply that Giselle is incompetent!”
“No. I didn’t mean—”
“She was a stunt-woman and an actress! An actress! All that struggle and panic was a sham!”
“Setti—”
“Idiot! Weren’t you paying attention?”
I could think of nothing to do but blink in astonishment. For the rest of that night we exchanged not a word, though I slept little. I could feel Setti lying next to me. A cold presence. A shape under the cover. Over and over, my mind played out the drowning death of Giselle Chavez. I tried to pick out places, frame segments, that looked scripted. Hairline cracks in the foundation of whatever madness could have driven her to suicide. None were present. Despite the nature of Giselle’s stunt, it all seemed water tight. Her death was an accident. A failed spring, perhaps, in the cuffs. A jammed latch. A rusted button.
An accident.
It was dawn when at last I drifted off. The window had come faintly aglow with another hot day. I rolled over to check on Setti, only to find her side of the bed empty.
Come back, I thought. Please come back.
And then I slept the sleep of the dead.