My acting years grew new things in me. They gave me unfamiliar words to work my mouth around with each incoming script. They lent me names through which I could expose the more fleeting instances of myself. That I was often anonymous-seeming and lacking in talent only boded well for me. If most people are doors, with an inside and outside, I tried to be the shattered window. The films I performed in ranged from sickly yellow comedies to fever-lurid love tragedies to dense-dark experiments with sound and moth wings. In them I roamed from meadow to train station to mutilated village. I searched for dead kin only referred to by grimaces. Or I walked among stones, leaving blood-prints behind me. Or I pretended to be the dead moth made live by light-work and antic editing. Or I was already a that, churning into a this. Acting, I realized, is a form of expansive emptying, a farce of disembowelment. A method of heretical prayer. A perverted subtraction where the flesh you lose is regained as shadow.
#
This started in my youth, when my teachers saw how vacant my eyes were when they tried to fill me with facts, narratives, practicalities, and the general shape of what was then considered history. Most days it rained, and I walked around the stone garden, letting them watch me in that rain. They eyed me from the windows. I was both cipher and specimen. And when my teachers were gone, taken by age or illness, the windows would continue to study me, rain trickling down their gray, unblinking eyes. Were there others? Most likely. At the edges. Forms of people crawling forth, bloodied and mewing, from other persons. Faces emerging through other faces like one firework blasts blossoming from the thighs of another. The names they gave themselves never lasted long.
As I grew older, I realized distance did not separate persons as much as time. Everyone living in their own hour. Every hour warmed by its own alien light.
I was the proverbial well in the fairytale that hears the garden sounds around it and echoes them back with a leaden, infernal cadence, as if bird chirps and leaf rustle were the ashen choirs of the under-earth. The past unfurled in the relentless future tense. My parents left me in crooked corners, in the pews of desecrated churches. My pets turned feral, glittering with teeth. My friends wove flowers into my hair and planted me in parks, among bird-shat statues. Somewhere, someone even now is dressing me in faded gray and rose-petal pink, and sending me forth into the storm. With my long empty face. My long empty hands.
That was me, always.
#
How the directors found me, I don’t recall.
Maybe blank as I was, I stood out. Like those Victorian pictures of living relatives gathered around the dead dear one.
Mostly, I was an extra mistaken for the lead.
I was called forth from the garden, the temple, the fencing lesson, the ivy-birthed barn. New scripts were pressed into my hands. My hair was cut, my face painted. Bright lights were aimed at my body. Rooms and spaces opened in my direction, and I was told to walk into them and repeat words I’d memorized.
The more neurotic directors believed their lowbrow Freudianism should be expressed with highbrow manners, their visions a cold-cellar mix of Petronius and Tinto Brass. When they discussed emotions, they actually talked of different types of sky. When they spoke of sky, they dreamt of unnamable emotions.
Feeling into frequencies. Weather into an array of tints and speeds.
Whole worlds were built with fragments of film. Voices were played with, from the depths outward. Temporal lobes glowing with light the cameras let in. New types of shadow moved in the wintery past, promising brazen, sun-faded futures.
As a cipher, I was a dilemma waiting to hear the riddle, an epilogue torn from its prologue. The crew wore surgical gloves and little else in the heat of the movie’s enduring desert light. I aged and grew younger. They had plans for my face. My hair. My living leather, my ever-growing wig. They had me walk with the gait of strangers towards the horizon where I watched myself shrink. A dot on stretching sands.
#
In Kansas, I acted as the drowned one risen from the ocean. At a beach in New Jersey, I spoke with a midwestern accent, my past a series of smudged towns haunted by skinny killers. When the camera turned towards me, I turned away, showing my back which had become my truest face. Art took place at the top of my skull, a target that itched long after others went home. I would’ve done anything to myself to be able to nuzzle the back of my head, cry into the hairs, bite into the skin of my scalp.
In certain visions of paradise, mouths eat the backs of heads. Dante’s Ugolino and Ruggieri in circle-jerk formation.
That was as close as I ever got to myself.
Most my films were silent. My howls in them remained unheard. Only from the shape of my mouth can you imagine how they might have reached you.
I wore clothes that belonged to everyone, as did everyone else. Even my skin amazed me with its lack of convincing backstory.
That my cheeks are rouged implies even now I’m alive. That I dance on this screen in this skeleton costume tells me I’m here even before I got there.
And even now I see myself, from this distance. In the back row. In this radiant dimness. Each other seat dense with shadowed shoulders. My throat crammed with popcorn. Eyes alive in reflecting light. Waiting to see from what door I’ll exit next.
James Pate writes experimental horror fiction and poetry. He has had work published in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Black Warrior Review, Tarpaulin Sky, Ligeia, Coffin Bell, Oculus Sinister: An Anthology of Ocular Horror, Aphotic Realm, Dark Lane Anthology #12, Deracine: A Gothic Magazine, Occulum, and (forthcoming) Come October: An Anthology of Autumnal Horror, among other places. He runs the Strange Fiction Series at Action Books. His books include the poetry collections The Fassbinder Diaries (CCM) and Mineral Planet (Schism), and the essay collection Flowers Among the Carrion (Action Books Salvo Series).
Image: atlasobscura.com
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Heavy Feather Review 