The First One You Expect Read online

  It still looks real, but it no longer looks criminally real.

  The idea I’m working from is: when people watch something on a computer screen, they’re looking for seams. I’ve never seen a single viral video that I don’t first think was staged.

  I delete those few frames, and then once I’m sure that the edited video has been saved in triplicate: I destroy the MiniDV by unspooling it and burning the tape in the sink. I’ve never done this before, I’ve never even taped over footage, so I’m surprised by how much black smoke there is, have to fan the fire detector for a good five minutes.

  There’s now no version of the video that doesn’t include that break in reality. It amounts to roughly a quarter of a second, but I think it’s enough.

  Anything can happen in a quarter of a second, you can cut the camera and replace Burt’s neck with a prosthetic, replace Burt’s whole body with a meticulously detailed dummy, one that coughs and struggles and drools all over itself as it has its throat cut.

  To the community, all Youtube videos are guilty of forgery until proven innocent, and even if they’re authentic there’s always a vocal contingent that will yell “Fake!” in the comments.

  I color balance the scene too, not for cinematic aesthetics, just to make the image a little more processed, throw up more of those “it’s gotta be fake” red flags in my audience’s mind.

  And if the audience is the FBI? Mulder and Scully? Well, by then we’re probably fucked anyway, if they’re looking. As I see it, that’s the weak link in Anna’s plan. By the time someone reports him missing, there’s a video of where Burt went. She seems most concerned with me cracking up, confessing, but I don’t think I will.

  What’s done is done. And what’s done is going to ruin me one way or the other.

  When the video’s finished I play it through again. It’s your normal five minute pledge video until you get to the last minute, and then it’s a snuff film.

  I’m not going to upload it tonight, I’m going to wait until the morning, watch it again and see how I feel. This is not something to be rushed into.

  In the immediate aftermath of the crime, I vomit twice, using Burt’s kitchen sink, for obvious reasons. The bathroom is occupied, Burt’s lanky frame taking up more space than he ever has, now that he’s all over the tile, droplets of him even made it the three feet into the tub.

  “We’ll come back tonight for the car. And for him,” Anna says, motioning to Burt. She’s wrapping tape around his body, triple sealing the black plastic garbage bags around his upper torso.

  While she does that, I clean the toilet.

  I find a cache of cleaning products under the bathroom sink. The stuff hasn’t been touched since Burt’s mother was alive, but there’s a lot of it. The Scrubbing Bubbles smells as chemically strong as ever, maybe even stronger, like it has fermented into ammonia-moonshine.

  I get the outside of the bowl too, but I don’t do a great job on the first pass and the grout around the base of the toilet turns penny-brown. The stain is a much darker shade than the kind that Caro syrup with red food dye leaves and it serves as one of a million sensory reminders that this has happened.

  It’s well after eight when we finish cleaning up and is dark by the time we leave. Anna drops me off at my place and then tells me that she’ll text me tonight when she’s outside.

  “Don’t fall asleep. I won’t call, I’ll just text.”

  There’s no indication of how long I’m going to be waiting. I’m not used to this lack of control. Well, maybe I am when you look at my life as a whole, but not in regards to a film.

  On set I call the shots, but it’s a different business now.

  I manage to get the whole video edited together by the time my phone buzzes. It took four hours and it’s not an assembly, it’s the finished video, color balanced and ready to compress.

  I put my hand on top of the PC tower. It’s running hot. The external hard drive stays cool enough, though, that’s why I bought it. Even though I’m usually a paranoiac that would burn the file to a DVD to be sure, I judge that the backup is safe and hit the button to finalize. A progress bar appears and tells me it’ll take about five hours, but it’s still estimating, the real time could be less.

  I’m just making an uploadable file, not uploading anything. That decision can wait.

  Patting my pockets, I make sure that I have my keys and my phone, and then climb the stairs to the first floor.

  The upstairs is quiet, my parents are sleeping.

  Down the hall in their bedroom, I can hear my father struggle against his uvula. His sleep apnea is louder than I could ever be. Even so, I use my phone as a flashlight, making sure that I don’t knock into any furniture on my way out.

  The house is carpeted everywhere except for the kitchen, where it’s tiled. My tread is near silent, but still I imagine my mother lying awake in bed, sneaking up behind me to ask me where I’m going when it’s almost two in the morning.

  She’d turn me in. We’re nowhere near that point yet, only Anna and I know that any kind of crime has been committed, but that’s the thought I have anyway. She would turn her own son in.

  Nothing happens, though. I can see her taillights at the end of the block. I’m out of the house and into the car without incident.

  “You don’t have a car, but you do have a license, right? I didn’t think to ask before.” It’s the first thing she’s said to me in five hours. She’s not mechanical or cold, exactly, she’s just barely holding it together and putting what’s important first. At least, that’s how I’m reading her.

  Like I said, I’m no good with women.

  “I have a license. I can drive.” I say, she doesn’t look like she buys it though, and can likely tell that I’m trying to convince myself as I say it.

  “You’ll take my car then,” she says.

  “Where are we bringing him?”

  “I changed my mind, we shouldn’t bring him anywhere. It’s best if we keep him inside. We’re still going to move his car, though. I went to Home Depot after I dropped you off, barely made it before they closed. Then I raided my mother’s tool shed. Didn’t want to buy too many things at once.”

  “You live with your parents?”

  “Just my mother.” She says, and it’s like we’re on a date, this question no longer restricted to need-to-know information, and I get an answer that tells me more about Anna Friedman, a girl I clearly know nothing about.

  I don’t ask what she bought at the store, if she used a card or cash. I can guess though, I’ve seen enough movies and I’m betting that she has too.

  She’s been delegating the work, giving me the easier stuff. It’s not maternal protection and she’s not “serving” me, she’s being practical, is trying to judge how much I can handle.

  That means that I’m the one digging. It’s dry work, aside from the sweat, and if I fuck it up it won’t land us in prison.

  I’ve always been a pretty skinny guy, never needed to exercise when I was younger and still don’t, but now the skin around my midsection has gone soft, curdled up into bumps. I’m not fat, just slack.

  I puff as I work through the packed dirt of the basement, clearing out some cardboard boxes and starting to dig in the corner, a few inches away from the foundation. I dig as deep as I can, then move inward towards the middle of the house.

  It’s easier the deeper I go, until I hit what feels like rock and can’t go any further. I scrap this hardened layer as clean as I can, forming a kind of funeral slab.

  It’s about three and a half feet deep. It may not be the industry-standard six feet, but there’s enough room as we heft Burt inside. I carry his legs while Anna takes his arms and plastic-wrapped torso. I check for leaks when we’re done and Anna retraces our steps, checking a suspicious spot in the dirt, but it’s just a drop of sweat, not blood.

  At Home Depot, Anna has purchased a thick blue tarp and three bottles of a drain cleaner called Instant Power Commercial Drain Cleaner. You know
it’s industrial strength not only by the picture of stainless-steel restaurant equipment on the package, but also because they didn’t even bother coming up with a snazzy name for it.

  Anna steps into the small hole, swaddling Burt in the tarp as she douses him with drain cleaner. It reeks and I begin to see the smell as a wrinkle in the plan. What if you can smell it from outside? There’s only one small basement window, but it’s facing the neighbor’s house.

  “Won’t it eat through the tarp, too?” I ask.

  “Hopefully not until well after it liquefies him. Even then,” she says and taps the end of the shovel against the rock, the metal singing like a tuning fork. I think she’s implying that even if it eats through the tarp, he’ll still be lying in a kind of concrete trough.

  We cover him back up and pat down the dirt. It’s not perfect, but you’d only catch it if you were looking for it. I rearrange the cardboard boxes so that the dark, upturned dirt isn’t as prominent.

  I peel off my thick gardening gloves, but Anna keeps her yellow plastic dish gloves on. I go to set them down and she stops me.

  “Give those to me. They’re covered in your DNA.”

  She puts them in the plastic Home Depot bag and ties the handles in a quick knot. I don’t ask where those are going, but I probably should, I should probably know everything. Again, I think Anna thinks of me as the largest liability here, so I get nothing, her lips knit so tight that I don’t even ask.

  “Burt has officially left for vacation,” she unknits to deliver a bit more of her script, words she’s contrived and now controls.

  “Where?” I ask.

  “He was a weird guy, he didn’t even tell his best friend, didn’t give his boss notice.”

  I make a sound in my closed mouth, kind of an mhmmm in the affirmative, it’s so casual that it makes me want to sob.

  “Let’s move his car.”

  TWELVE

  My eyes should be on the road, but at the first stop light I snoop through as much of Anna’s car as I can.

  There’s a half-eaten cinnamon bagel in the first cup holder, a pack of Kools in the second. I didn’t notice the cigarettes this afternoon and haven’t seen Anna smoke. I wonder if this is even her car, or whether it’s her mother’s too. I suddenly want to know more about Anna.

  Before today I wanted to know everything, but the list of everything I wanted then was topped by what color panties she was wearing, whether she’d ever date an older guy, one with a gentle dusting of pockmarks on his ass. Now I want to know everything that has the power to help keep me out of trouble, away from the principal’s office.

  I checked my license back at the house when Anna was out of sight. It expired last January.

  Luckily there’s no body, no evidence that we’re doing anything wrong at all as I crawl behind Burt’s car. My foot applies uneven pressure to the gas and every jolt forward gives me a nervous twinge.

  It won’t be dawn for another two hours, but it still feels more like morning than it does night. I see four a.m. frequently, but I’m never outside for it. Not behind the wheel of a stranger’s car.

  She signals with Burt’s blinkers long before she turns, I don’t know where we’re heading but it seems like she does.

  Like most of the evening up to this point, Anna has more planned out than she’s telling me.

  I think of the massive, submerged part of an iceberg, then I think of me crashing Anna’s early-‘90s Lincoln, ripping a chunk out of its side and leaving the engine visible beyond mangled fiberglass and metal.

  I clear my mind and focus on my driving.

  We pull into the Central Islip train station, a fifteen minute drive from Burt’s house. I don’t know if Burt’s been on the LIRR in his life, but there aren’t many people that know much about Burt at all, so I guess it doesn’t matter.

  There aren’t many kids in his neighborhood, more retirees than young families, but if there were kids, Burt would probably be their Boo Radley. A lanky Robert Duvall, too drunk to leave them any presents, so he’d just get all the bad stuff, be that weird guy who lives alone.

  Anna parks and I pull in as close as I dare, she only has to walk a few feet to hop in the passenger’s side.

  “Why here?” I ask and Anna points up to the large fluorescent lamps overlooking the lot. There are holes in some of the posts, wire’s hanging out the sides, one has a security camera still attached and the sight of it makes me jump.

  “The glass on the front of it is completely busted. I take the train from here. It’s a complete ghetto. The local punks sell dimebags and bust out these cameras to keep their weak ass gangs safe.”

  Holy shit she’s thought this out well.

  “Gangs?”

  “High school kids.”

  She’s right, I don’t much consider Long Island to be a hotbed of criminal activity, but thinking about it now I did know a girl from high school who wound up dead in C.I. The bullet caught her in the neck, was meant for her guy, naturally.

  I want to pull over, ask her to switch seats with me, but I’m too ashamed. I can see that she’s getting ready to talk about what we do next, but I’ve got too much of my attention on driving to engage her in conversation. It’s harder now that I’m not ghosting the movements of a car ahead of me.

  We’re rolling to stop at a light, there’s a 7-11 on the corner and as I look out the driver’s window I can see the clerk inside. The guy’s got his elbow against the counter. He’s either just come in to work or is just about to go off shift. Whatever it is, he looks tired.

  “It’s green.” Anna says.

  I hit the gas and she starts talking, there’s a feeling so beyond direness in her voice that she’s looped back around to a conversational tone.

  “I didn’t plan it, you know that, right?” she asks.

  “I know.” I don’t really, I just know that she’s telling me. Seemed pretty rehearsed to me.

  “I’m sorry if this is too much. He was holding you back, he was a sad guy.”

  It takes me a minute to filter through everything she says and even then I’m not sure I get it all as I’m only half-listening. The feelings I’ve got going are all over the place.

  “You wanted more, you told me that, you told me how tired you were of the same old shit. Me too, it turns out. When I saw him there, it all just came out.”

  I didn’t say anything quite like that. She makes it seem like I was pouring my heart out, crying in my beer over my missed opportunities. It’s something I’ve done, just not something I’ve done in front of her. I haven’t given her anything like this, but still she’s smelled it all over me, knows me better than I want her to.

  It makes me angry, how much she’s guessed, how much she’s acted on those guesses, never knowing for sure.

  It makes me even angrier that I’ve gone along with it all, just as she’s predicted.

  We’re done with the feelings portion of the conversation, I don’t want to respond to her, probably wouldn’t want much to do with her even if she was naked and pouring a glass of Johnny Black.

  I stop at the end of my block, ready to walk up to the house rather than risk being seen in this car.

  “How does the video look?” she asks.

  That’s true. She’s reminded me that there’s still a decision to be made.

  THIRTEEN

  I had guessed that it would be an involved process, but nothing like this.

  Filling out the Kickstarter page is a nightmare. It could have been worse, though. A few weeks ago, on a whim, drunk, I had used my account to submit a proposal for the new Debaser film. A couple days later I’d gotten an email that the project had been approved, so that’s the draft that I’m working from now as I create pledge levels.

  I want the rewards to be diverse and enough of a value that people donate, but also want to make sure I can get some money out of the deal.

  I’m three quarters of the way done when I get to this section:

  What are the risks and chall
enges your project may face?

  Oh, if only you knew, Kickstarter.

  I type in “Incarceration” and then backspace over it. What I really write is this:

  “As with any film project, there are a million things that can go wrong on set, never mind post-production. What counts in this field, though, is one’s ability to deal with challenges when they arise. As an experienced team with eight independently produced feature films released (The Debaser, The Debased and the Used, Blood Bubble), I believe we have the know-how necessary to overcome any challenges. I’m a director that works fast and knows how to properly blend practical and computer effects to get the most out of a scene (as evidenced by our pitch video). I will do my utmost to make sure that pledge rewards are shipped out in a timely matter.”

  I would no more know how to use a computer to remove Burt’s head than I would be able to land the space shuttle, but this answer lets me subtly drop in that yeah: that video is totally fake.

  Before hitting the “submit” button, I read everything over one more time, check the spelling and make sure I’ve got the correct forms on there.

  The video is up at the top of the draft, I could watch it again to make sure that it plays correctly on their site, that I’ve uploaded the correct file, but I know I have so I don’t click play, I just send the thing for final approval.

  I get a tiny rush as I hit the button, but not much. I don’t feel any strong desire to jump into cyberspace after the submission, wrestle it down so nobody can see what we’ve done. I kinda want them to see, because part of me feels like I’m going down anyway, so that it would be some kind of waste, a slight against Burt’s memory even, to not have sent it.

  It could go up a few hours from now, a few days, or never. And I could go to prison.

  I guess we’ll see.

  FOURTEEN

  The next day, left without a ride, I’m walking to Stop & Shop. I end up being fifteen minutes late, but I tell myself that’s a good thing, that it will help me sell my story a little better.