10. Then The Cigarette

Most of my cuts and bruises were real. Makeup Melanie told me I must bruise easily, and she jabbed a finger into my shoulder to test her thesis. She said, "No bruise."

I said, "Yeah, but my arm will fall off tomorrow."

Mel and Karson added a few fake cuts and marks to my body. They applied the mask and neck makeup next. Then, when I was ready, it was discovered that no one had brought a carton of cigarettes to set. Oops. Everyone pointed at everyone else, like we were suddenly in a locked-room mystery farce. In a moment of quiet, I attempted to break the tension and said, "Smoke 'em if you've got 'em," the delivery muffled by the mask. I got more laughs than scowls. This is my memory being generous, I think.

Valentina pushed her beanie higher up her forehead and gave me the look of death. My mask returned the look, but I withered on the inside. Bad joke or not, she was upset I was speaking at all, that the Thin Kid was talking. I broke the rule about always being in character when wearing the mask. Valentina was angry at everything, and for the first and maybe only time on-set, visibly flustered. She ripped off her hat and frisbeed it against the windows, then paced in small circles.

Dan, our voice of reason, said there was a 7-Eleven about fifteen minutes away, he'd send one of his grips. We had only one official grip even though he used the plural. Dan tossed the van keys to Mark as he walked toward the classroom exit. If I am to make this more dramatic, imagine a young and bored Jacob Marley shuffling down the lonely school hallway, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, the links in his chain wallet jangling for our future sins. Mark was a good guy, a lurching metalhead and engineering graduate school dropout, one of the few on-set who would talk to me when I had the mask on, usually to offer $5 bootlegged live cassettes from any band I could name.

Dan also said, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, that if this was the worst mishap we'd have on-set, we should consider ourselves divinely lucky.

Cleo mumbled about someone needing to knock on wood. We were wary of real curses. I obliged by miming knocks on my head. So fine, I'm not a comedic talent.

Dan pulled out a crumpled, nearly finished cigarette pack of his own and said, "I guess I get to smoke on-set today. A first."

I wanted to tell Dan and everyone about how my mother used to smoke all day long and that she would send me on the short walk down our road and dashing across the busy and treacherous Elliot Street to the White Hen Pantry to buy her cigarettes. She'd send me with enough money leftover so I could buy myself a pack of baseball cards. I wanted to tell Dan and everyone I wasn't a smoker because Mom let me try one when I was ten, knowing that I'd cough, get sick, almost puke up the radioactive-green Hi-C I'd been drinking, and I'd never want to try it again. But when I was masked, no one wanted or needed to know anything about the real me.

Valentina asked Dan to hold off on lighting up as we'd need that smoke in maybe twenty minutes. Having regained control, she announced we'd flip the day's order and first shoot the Thin Kid alone with his burns and his retreat to the supply closet.

It was back into the makeup chair for me, which was in the rear of the classroom. Karson questioned the new plan, complaining that after this scene they'd have to remove the burns only to have to put most of them back on again later. Valentina asked, "Is that a problem?" dropping the temperature in the room by a gazillion degrees. Karson shook his head and shrugged. Of our group, he was the least enthusiastic about what we were doing, what we were making. I wish I could go back in time and ask him why, ask him what he knew.

Cleo had previously given Melanie and Karson a map of my body, detailing where the burns would be placed. They set to adding small red circles to my skin, and they went about the task somberly, not speaking to me other than to describe what they were doing, what I might feel.

Valentina wandered over to the makeup area and looked me up and down. At the time, I assumed something was wrong. Now I know she was sizing me up, readying to put me to further use.

She called Dan and Cleo over and said she wanted to talk about tomorrow morning's schedule at the high school. Dan had finally convinced Valentina it didn't make practical or financial sense, or even sense sense, to film everything in exact order. They were to crank out all the high school set scenes tomorrow, so they'd need the school and the student extras for just the one day.

Valentina wiped her face, but the pooled undereye shadows betraying lack of sleep remained. She said, "Something occurred to me last night, and I want to run it by you." She briefly described the multiple-day montage as written in the screenplay, which were scenes I had yet to read and would not read until 2008, after she posted the screenplay online. "I guess it makes story sense that our teens have a little emotional arc," she said, "and they enjoy the sympathy and attention they get from their classmates because their friend is missing. But I don't know. Now I'm thinking that feels too something. Too armchair psychology, maybe. Too ‘movie,' for sure."

Valentina, Dan, and Cleo were framed within the eyeholes of my mask, which made everything seem less real, or more real. I can't decide which. I wasn't a player. I was the watcher, the audience, which had been the entirety of my role thus far. Their movie, the one they imagined in their heads and the one they saw playing out before them, was different from the movie I saw, that I lived in. I don't know if they understood that.

Dan asked what Valentina meant by "too movie."

Valentina said, "The audience expects the classmates to react to the Thin Kid's disappearance, and having the teens feed off it plays into the trope of the loser teens who just want attention. Attention is not what they really want, right? More importantly, do we want to communicate that? Attention or social status is not why they're doing what they're doing to the Thin Kid. Maybe the montage as written works as a red herring as far as their motivation goes, or maybe it'll just confuse things later because none of this is about motivation. Not really. I mean, some people are going to think what they do to the Thin Kid is because of their classmates, and that's fine. But I don't really care about motivation. Neither do you, Cleo. We talked about how the teens do it because they can and because they're inexplicably driven to do it and the viewers will be driven to ask why why why and not have a clear, easy answer. That's what's scary, that's why I want to make this movie. So, I think we need to go stark. I want to go weirder." Valentina looked at me, and I didn't know if I was being tested because the masked me wasn't supposed to have opinions, was supposed to accept his treatment, at least until further notice, but her stare elicited a shrug from me.

Mel, who worked in and around my chest and reeked of patchouli, poked my arm and said, "Don't move, please. Hey, can we put a burn on his nipple? I want to put one on his nipple."

Valentina and Cleo said "No" at the same time.

Cleo said to Valentina, "Okay, what would be weirder? I'm all for weirder."

Mel whispered, "A burn on his nipple."

Karson, applying burns somewhere down below my knees, laughed. I wanted to laugh too.

"What if, in the montage," Valentina continued, "their school days never change, always stay the same? Their classmates still avoid and ignore them. We see the same exact shots and actor staging. Then it would be like they really are stuck in a loop—stuck in hell, like you wrote, Cleo—and the only thing that is different is what they do to the Thin Kid." Valentina stepped between Dan and Cleo, which is an important staging detail of my recounting. No one said anything, but it wasn't an awkward silence. Valentina continued. "Having no bullshit character mini arcs, having zero change in anyone's reaction and behavior during the montage, them going through the motions, that's more unexpected, more horrifying, more hopeless for everyone."

Cleo flipped through the script. Lost somewhere between the pages, she was her usual inscrutable self. I keep saying that I couldn't read her, which implies that no one could. I know that's wrong. Given what was to happen, saying that she was inscrutable is, perhaps, a mealymouthed defense on my part.

Valentina stared at me.

I swallowed and my mask-and-makeup hybrid throat palpitated with almost-speech. I'm not overstating this. I was afraid, but also, I thought she wanted my opinion, and I had one. I said, "And then everyone would be the monsters."

Valentina pointed at me and said, "Exactly. Fucking right." She left her center-stage spot between Dan and Cleo, and walked toward me, washing up at my side. Dan and Cleo closed together, like a curtain, heads ping-ponging between me and the screenplay.

Valentina was worried that the other two had become a team. While I wasn't privy to earlier discussions about the scenes not involving me, it was clear that Cleo sided with Dan over the scheduling changes. Valentina felt outnumbered and needed to balance the power dynamic on-set, even if it was only symbolic. I had zero issue with Dan or Cleo, but in that moment I wanted nothing more from life than to say something brilliant to bolster Valentina's argument. But Dan jumped in.

Dan said he liked what was in the script because it was a grounding flash of realism and empathy or connection, and it would be fun for the viewer to break the visual pattern. He said the viewers always needed some fun.

"Fuck fun," Valentina said. "Fuck it to hell." She laughed, and we did too.

Dan said, "Well, you say ‘fuck fun,' moviegoers say ‘fuck your movie.'"

"Eh, fuck them too," Valentina said. "We're not making this for them."

"You better be making this for them," Dan said.

Valentina and Dan continued to joke/not-joke, trading volleys, trading personal mission statements regarding expression and commercial reality hidden inside Trojan horses of humor and sarcasm.

Cleo, the perpetual peacekeeper, crowbarred herself into the exchange and said she saw merit in both approaches to the montage.

Valentina, satisfied, suggested they reconvene after the shoot, or sleep on it and make a final decision in the morning. The morning bit meant that Valentina planned to get Cleo on her own later that night to make and manipulate her case.

Melanie suddenly popped into my mask's eyehole frame. She wore a sunflower-bespeckled purple T-shirt big enough that the short sleeves were half sleeves. She said, "My masterpiece," and made a swashbuckling rapier flourish with an applicator.

Rough burn makeup covered my left nipple.

We shot the cigarette aftermath scene in one take, on Valentina's insistence. Mainly because Dan had only three cigarettes with which to smog our corner of the classroom. After, to appease the makeup-team duo, we did a few close-up shots of my hand covering a spot on my chest and then the hand lifting away to reveal the injury, which would later be intercut within the cigarette attack scene. We were finished not too long after Mark returned with the carton of cigarettes and a couple of fresh bootlegs to show me.

We shot the teens entering the classroom, again one take. Then we spent a considerable amount of time choreographing the attack scene. The plan was for quick shots/cuts of the actors lunging at me with lit cigarettes. They were to get as close to my skin as possible without making contact, close enough that by proximity and camera angle it would appear the cigarettes contacted skin. I was to slap my hand over the spots that they appeared to burn, blocking camera view of my unblemished skin. The rehearsal was shaky at best. Our timing was off. When I slapped my hand over an imaginary wound, I was too quick, or the other actor was too slow retracting their unlit cigarette and I ended up slapping hands and crushing a few cigs. Valentina made us stop, as the rehearsal was seconds away from regressing into a silly slap fight.

Go time. We were just going to shoot it and see what happened. Dan coined the term "fuck-it filmmaking."

Later, much later, on our last day on-set, Dan would present Valentina and Cleo with black T-shirts proudly sporting the phrase FUCK-IT FILMMAKING, and Valentina shouted, "This is the best!," ducked into the makeshift wardrobe area, and changed into the new shirt.

I sat on the symbolled mark on the classroom floor. The teens sat around me. Valentina lit a cigarette, puffed it, the smoke framing her face along with her curls, then she jabbed the glowing end at my shoulder, got close enough that I felt the hungry heat of it. I squealed and scrambled to the corner of the room. Cut.

Dan adjusted the lights for the next shot. While we waited, Valentina casually mentioned that for the past week she had experimented with stubbing out cigarettes on pig skin, hoping they could use that for an on-camera close-up of a burn.

"Do you have that shot in the storyboards?" Dan asked.

Valentina said, "No. I didn't include it because I wasn't sure if it would look right."

"If you'd given me a heads-up I could've tried to pull something together," Karson said, ever the aggrieved makeup and effects artist. "Also, where'd you get fucking pig skin? The deli?"

Valentina waved a hand, as if to say No big deal. "I have a tattoo artist friend. Newbies and apprentices practice tattooing on pig skin. She gave me some."

Melanie, sitting in a chair and holding a cardboard platter of cigarette burns, said, "Ooh, bacon."

Cleo asked, "How'd it look?"

"Pretty gnarly. But there's no way we can make the pig skin look as pale as his skin." She flashed an accusatory hand in my direction.

I flinched, and I imagined her inside her hotel room, late at night, the kind of late that became early, unable to sleep, to even think of sleep, as she smoked and stubbed out cigarette after cigarette into the pig skin, into the Thin Kid's skin, my skin, and this wasn't about a special-effects test, not really, it was how she prepared for her dual role as the director and character Valentina, blurring and stubbing out the lines of separation.

Dan said he could try to work magic with lighting, but Valentina was dubious. She continued lamenting not being able to get that kind of simple but effective shot. Recalling what Dan had said earlier, she said that would've been the cool moment of grounded realism Dan wanted, the violence being what grounded this movie. She kept on talking in circles about the shot, and she never asked me to become a half-assed stunt man, didn't ask me to volunteer to let a cigarette actually burn my skin, but I knew that was what she wanted.

I can't explain why I would let a cigarette burn me other than to say if you were there in a mask, that mask, and if you felt the way I felt about myself both in and out of that mask, you would've said what I said and the way I said it.

"Hey, we can do it once. Stub one cigarette out on me," I said.

The funny part is everyone knew I wasn't joking, despite my previous jokes. Everyone said no, told me to stop it, to shut up. But I didn't. I said it wouldn't be a big deal if they stubbed it out quick, if they didn't leave the burning part against my skin too long. There were more noes and no ways, but fewer people were saying them. I asked, "Who hasn't stubbed out a cigarette on themselves before?" and no one answered. The implication was I had done so before. Therefore, the question was a kind of lie, as I hadn't burned myself like that. But it wasn't a full lie, either, because the Thin Kid in my head had had it happen to him, many times. Because he and I had already read the scene we were about to shoot, it meant the scene had happened to him, to us. I kept saying, just do it quick, and like I was a burn expert, I said it would only be a first- or second-degree burn if you were quick, and those burns healed, didn't leave scars. The noes and no ways stopped.

With everyone gone quiet, watching their movies inside their heads, Valentina said, "You don't have to do this."

Now, here's what I think. Everything that had happened that morning was purposeful: forgetting the cigarette carton, the discussion about the montage scenes, Valentina pulling out my opinion in support of her rewrite position, and her pig-skin story all were to get me to a place where I would volunteer to have a cigarette stubbed out against my skin on film. I wasn't mad then and I'm not mad now. This wasn't manipulation, it was direction. The Thin Kid needed direction.

Mel said, "I'll do it!"

I said, "Hell no. It's gotta be Cleo. Her character would be the quickest, I think, wouldn't press as hard, would leave the cigarette on me the least amount of time."

Valentina rolled her eyes and slumped her shoulders like she was jealous of a sibling getting to do something she wasn't allowed to do.

Cleo blinked at me, processing. I thought she would protest, and I'd have to keep asking until I wore her down, but all she said was, "You sure?" Maybe she was pissed that I'd sided with Valentina on the suggested script change. Maybe motivations were simple sometimes.

I said, "I'm sure."

Dan and his camera cornered me. Valentina perched over his shoulder. Mark hovered the boom mic over my head. Cleo pinched the cigarette, her eyes wide, fixed on the spot we agreed to use, left chest, over my heart.

After this shot, the unspoken rules for my speaking with the mask on would go back into place for the rest of the day, and really the rest of the shoot but for the times I was hurt or could answer a question with one word or a grunt. One of the last full sentences I ever said with the mask on was "Don't worry, I won't feel it."

Cleo puffed the cigarette until the embers glowed redder than her hair. Valentina told Cleo to be slow on the approach, to pretend she was trying to pin a tail on a butterfly. She came in slower, slowest, and hesitated, and I don't know if anyone else saw the hesitation but I lived there and I've lived there ever since, and I looked down into her face, not for the first time and not yet for the last, and she wasn't looking at the spot on my chest, but at my eyes, the mask's eyes, and yes, I know how boring and impossible it is to describe a look on someone's face so I won't, but I'm being a coward because I'm choosing not to describe that look, not yet, not now. Maybe the hesitation meant she didn't want to do it, or it meant she really wanted to do it and was dragging it out. Either way, I stepped in, or I leaned into the cigarette. And I felt it. I still feel it. The bright, searing pain electrified my nerves into a ball that expanded from my chest, filled my body, and I gasped to let it free and into the world. I flinched and fell back into the corner.

Cleo dropped the cigarette, covered her mouth with her hands, and stumbled backward, bumping Dan. Valentina helped steady him and the camera.

Dan said, "Don't worry, I got the shot," even though no one asked.

A few minutes later, or maybe it was more like a half hour later, I don't remember, it was the full cigarette-frenzy-scene time. Cast and crew gathered in the front of the classroom and lit up to fill the room with smoke.

The burn on my chest throbbed with my heartbeat. I suppressed the urge to touch the blistering, dead skin with a finger, to press that button. This burn marked where the rest of the movie began, where it spooled out on its own and into forever. The cigarette attack is one of three scenes that Valentina eventually uploaded to YouTube. One minute and twenty-five seconds in duration, it appears well choreographed, like we'd spent hours carefully mapping out each movement, and almost in one take, due to the clever, cold, calculating, unobtrusive editing, which includes a stinger of a shot on Cleo's cigarette burning my skin. When I watch and rewatch it, I don't see me leaning my chest into the cigarette, and it's almost enough to change my memory of what happened. Almost. But I know what I did. There's no changing or editing that. When Valentina had edited this scene along with the other two is subject to much online debate and speculation, as though pinpointing the time and level of technology at her disposal would bring meaning, order to the world. The scene is difficult to watch, I'm told, although it has over 20 million views online.

Cast and crew's smoke clouded the front of the classroom, and I remained in the corner. I shallowed my breath because I could.

Melanie extended her cigarette toward me, filter first, and said, "You can put it in your mask hole if you want to help out with a puff."

I stood tall, taller, and tilted my head, just slightly. The tilt was subtle, so subtle that if we'd been filming, the camera might not have registered the movement.

Melanie retracted her offer, her arm, and the smile on her face withered, died, and was then reborn inside my mask.