18. Then Valentina’s House Part 2

The trunk closed like a movie slate's black-and-white-striped arm.

Action.

This wasn't the same suburban neighborhood in which we originally filmed, but it looked the same through the mask's eyeholes. I walked, squishing across the mud, to the front door. My body vibrated with the fear that I was not up to this, the fear that this was above and beyond my capability, which was not the same as the fear of failure. Failure meant you should've succeeded but you didn't. I didn't let myself inside until my hands stopped shaking.

Have you ever worn a mask, really worn one for a significant length of time? The best way, the only way, to acclimate to the discomfort of having your head enveloped and the disorientation that accompanies your winnowed field of vision is to learn another way of being. I don't mean that in a multilevel-marketing self-help scam way, though by all means, make your friends and coworkers buy my audiobook to facilitate your ascension to the next plane of self-actualized mindfulness. With the mask layered over your face, allow yourself, what you think of as your self, to sink, to recede. Then the mask will step forward and show you a new way to breathe.

I opened the front door and walked through the house, leaving footprints behind that someone would have to wipe away. Valentina's house was not a maze. I already knew my way around. I walked, neither confidently nor sheepishly, into the living room turned hospice. Because Valentina didn't say anything when she saw me, I flowed with the current to the wooden chair, and I sat down across from her.

Her expression was blank, slack, another mask, but her eyes found mine even though they were hidden. One corner of her chapped upper lip was snagged on a tooth. I chose to believe she had been smiling while I was gone, and the lip had stuck.

I wanted to tell her that it was okay, that it was me, not the Thin Kid. But the mask was on, which meant the no-talking rules were in place. The longer we sat in silence, the more I knew this was a mistake, yet another in a series of terrible mistakes. But maybe it wasn't too late. If I took off my mask, I could stop everything else from happening. Choice being real and an illusion at the same time is a horror. It's all a wonderful, sublime horror.

Moments before peeling my mask away—I swear I was going to—Valentina stood up and looked down at me. Her tongue freed her snagged lip, and she said, "Come on. Let's do this."

I stood. She looped a dried twig of an arm around mine. This was not an act of affection or her being desperate for physical contact. Our linked arms were a follow-me command. She pulled and led, and we shuffled to her office. I was afraid again, and I would've pulled away from her if I were stronger. I'm sorry that I wasn't.

Valentina flicked on the ceiling light. The office walls were painted red. I hadn't noticed that before. I don't know if that is an important detail or not. Maybe the walls had been a different color when my mask was off. I followed her to the rolling chair by her desk. She released my arm and sat down. A puff of air escaped, as though she'd been holding her breath.

She said, "Stand behind my chair. Right behind it. Put your hands on the headrest."

I did as she asked. I imagined becoming a statue, a memento, a memory from her brief film life turned artifact, like a projector on a shelf, not exactly forgotten but not exactly remembered, and I would remain in her office for days and nights until the end, her end.

Valentina moved the computer mouse. The dual screens exploded with light and sound. I flinched. She opened her web browser, logged on to her YouTube account, and uploaded a file named "CigaretteCigarette." A swirling colored circle spun while the file uploaded. From somewhere behind the mask, I smiled at her using the same word twice in the file name. It had to be a reference to a Smithereens song. She and I had discussed the band when we were in college during one of those nights at Hugo's. How many nights were there? The number both increases and decreases in my memory. I had liked the band more than she had, because they were too poppy for her, but she had admitted that she liked the one song and the line about a cigarette burning up time. And maybe for the last time, I ached to stop being the Thin Kid, to be who I used to be, as much as I never liked him, so, if nothing else, she and I could talk about the song and everything else and anything else from the burnt-up time of our previous lives.

I stood there silently as she uploaded two more videos. We did not watch them. I would watch the scenes later by myself. The uploads of the screenplay as plain text and as a downloadable PDF and still photos to her blog and website went much quicker. Then she sprinkled links to everything in a slew of horror message boards and fledgling social media accounts. And that was it. The spores were released.

Valentina clambered out of her chair, not without struggle. She again entwined her arm with mine. She said, "We're going upstairs."

We walked out of the office. The staircase to the second floor was adjacent to the front door. The treads weren't wide enough for us to walk side by side. She wouldn't let go of my arm and she turned and slowly side-stepped up the staircase. I had to duck to avoid the first floor's ceiling at the edge of the first of two landings. We rested at the top of the staircase once we reached the second floor so she could catch her breath. Across a narrow hallway was Valentina's bedroom, or what she had used as a bedroom prior to relocating downstairs. The floorboards creaked under my weight as we stepped across the hall and into the room.

The unlit bedroom was compact, low-ceilinged, and Spartanly furnished with a twin-sized bed huddled in the corner to our right. Along the wall across from the entrance and under the eave-slanted plaster ceiling were a dresser and hope chest, their tops frosted with dust.

Valentina pointed at the bed, or the narrow space below the bed, and released my arm. I started bending toward the floor and made it onto my knees when Valentina stopped me, grabbed my arm again. She said, "No, you can't fit under there. Lie on top of the bed. It'll have to do."

I lay face-up atop the covers. Valentina pulled down the window shades. She said, "Pretend you're under the bed," then left the room, and shut the door behind her.

With the door latched closed, the darkness was initially near total but my eyes soon adjusted and I could make out the shapes of things. I chose to stare at the ceiling. Through the wood and plaster I heard Valentina breathing heavily from the hallway.

Valentina knocked twice on the door to ensure I was still paying attention to her. She told me how she was going to help me build more legend and lore into the making of the movie. She told me what we were going to do next. A swell of nausea jellied my legs, and a weak groan bubbled up with my rising bile. To keep from puking, I focused on memorizing her plan's details as though they were the lines I never got to speak on-camera. Then she opened the door.

Valentina didn't have to lead me by the arm anymore. I followed her downstairs and back to the living room. She retrieved one of her prescription bottles from the end table and then we walked to the small kitchen that, with its oak cabinets and white tile countertops, seemed to be stuck in the '90s, décor-wise. Pushed up against the wall to our right was a round table with four chairs, one of the chairs pinned between the table and wall. A dark blue tablecloth covered the table's top. Valentina pulled out a chair, the one with its back to the rest of the house, and she told me to sit. I sat.

At the sink, she filled a tall glass with cold water and a squat teacup with hot water and set both on the table with the prescription bottle. Viewed through the distorting lens of the orange plastic, the white pills were as fat as cotton balls. Next, Valentina rummaged through drawers until she found a plastic straw. She brought that to the table, along with three kitchen hand towels that had been hanging on the oven's door handle. The towels were red, white, and blue. Then she gathered a cutting board, thick and gray and scarred with slashes, along with a butcher's knife.

When we were upstairs, she'd explained that one of her prescriptions was for twelve-hour time-release OxyContin pills. Her prescription was for a whopping 160 mg per dose. She opened the bottle, shook one pill into her hand. "One for good luck," she said, and popped the pill into her mouth. She took a long sip of water from the tall glass, enough water that her deflated cheeks distended, and she threw her head back twice. After finally swallowing, she exhaled and rested her hands on the table, and said, "Those suckers are hard to get down."

She coaxed a second pill onto her palm, closed the bottle with a practiced twist, and placed the pill on the cutting board. The butcher knife's handle was large and ended in a rounded bulge. She ground and pestled the pill under the handle end until the pill gave up its shape and disintegrated into a sandy pile of white dust and jagged crumbles.

Slightly out of breath, she lifted the cutting board with a trembling hand and dumped the powder into the teacup. She stirred the water with the straw, clockwise then counterclockwise.

"Twelve-hour time release, deactivated," she said.

I picked up the teacup, careful to not spill the cloudy water. I didn't need help needling the straw through the mask's mouth slit. I drank, sucking until the cup was empty, until the straw made those silly slurping noises that were always funny when we were kids. My mouth tasted gritty, filmed, and there was a dusty tang that wasn't wholly unpleasant, and I continued to suck at the insides of my mouth after I removed the straw.

Valentina said, "Let me know as soon as you start feeling it. It shouldn't be long. But also, I don't know how much time we have."

Here I pause the retelling to state the obvious, that I dwell on my last visit with Valentina, and sometimes I try to change my memory of what happened. For example, I'll imagine Valentina and I were making another film, a different one, a short one, an obnoxiously arty, pretentious one, where it's just Valentina and me sitting in her kitchen, and sometimes I'm wearing the mask and sometimes I'm not, and when I'm not wearing the mask you still can't see my face because I don't want you to, and Valentina says, "I don't know how much time we have," and she says it repeatedly, theatrically, changing inflection, changing which word is stressed, until we understand.

She drank her glass of water. I watched. My nausea faded and was replaced by a general sense of calm and wellness. Though to say that the feeling built would be wrong. It was more of an anti-building. My fears and anxieties were dismantled, torn down into harmless components and left to drift and then sink into the ocean of me. I was there too, floating, and the distance between me and what was outside, what was beyond the mask's eyeholes, grew.

I don't remember communicating with Valentina that I had started feeling the effects of the drug, but at some point, Valentina left her chair and stood next to me. She lifted my right hand off the table. Her hand was cold and all joints and bones. She folded my fingers into a fist but left my pinky out, extended. The blue kitchen towel was spread over my lap. The cutting board's end lined up with the table's end in front of me. She staged my hand so that my pinky was pressed flat against the cutting board and the rest of my hand was below it, the backs of my fisted fingers pressed against the table's arced outer lip.

Valentina picked up the butcher knife, the blade as long as her forearm, and said, "Don't move. Please."

I was floating but moored.

She pressed her thighs against the table, the table quaked, my inner waters rippled, but my hand remained where it was. I would not move it. It was a stone jetty, able to withstand storms for generations. She leaned over the table with the knife, one hand gripping the chunky handle, the other hand's palm on the back of the blade. She hovered the knife between the two upper knuckles. She expelled three orderly breaths, and as she carefully lowered the knife, she curled her torso over it, behind it, to give it the gift of her weight. Her lips split and showed off her gritted teeth, a stone wall behind which she screamed, and then she pressed down. There was momentary resistance to the gathered forces, and blood blossomed at the blade and skin line. The pain was initially a pressure, one reporting from a distant but approaching front. A single heroic moment was all the pinky could muster, however, as it was weak—others have famously observed the flesh was weak—and I was somewhere else and I couldn't protect that part of me, any part of me. The pinky acquiesced. The blade passed through with an audible chunk into the cutting board. The pressure pain quickly became a fire, a conflagration at the end of my finger, a gout of flames and blood. High-pitched squeals came out of the mask. I could pretend it wasn't me making those sounds. Valentina dropped the knife onto the table, gasped, as though surprised. She draped the white kitchen towel over my hand and pressed against the bleeding pinky stump, but she didn't press hard, having already spent her strength. The fire at the end of my finger quickly used most of the oxygen and settled into smoldering coals, hot enough to melt iron. She lifted the towel away to look, to see, which was a mistake, because there was more blood, and the severed bit remained stubbornly attached by a web-thin piece of skin. Valentina convulsed with dry heaves, but to her credit, she finished the job with a quick flick of the knife before pivoting to the sink and retching into its basin. I sloppily wrapped my hand in the wet towel. The blood on the cutting board beaded and shimmied like freed mercury. The blood spreading on the tablecloth was an oil spill, an environmental disaster. I gathered the severed bit of pinky with my left hand, protecting it in a closed fist. It was warm in my palm. My brain tried to make it wiggle. I don't think it did.

Valentina returned from the sink composed, or maybe she had shut herself off. She tightly wrapped my hand in the red kitchen towel and kept it in place with two strips of duct tape. I didn't see where the duct tape had come from. I stood up from the chair, a little unsteady, but confident that I wouldn't fall. I was done falling for now. The safe feeling returned because the pain dimmed, was being held behind a fortified barrier. The worst was over. There would be a worst thing to happen again, but that would be so much later, and I would deal with it then.

Valentina rinsed the knife in the sink. She balled up the cutting board and two other kitchen towels within the tablecloth and threw the blob into the trash. She sprayed and wiped down the kitchen table and just like that, everything was clean. Everything was done.

Valentina placed a hand on my lower back and gave me a gentle push out of the kitchen. I thought she was going to bring me back to the office and store me in a corner so I could be the artifact again, but she went back to the living room, and I didn't follow her because I wasn't supposed to. I assumed she climbed into the pull-out couch bed because the frame's springs creaked and groaned.

If I was telling a story, if I was making this up, I would tell you she said, "Goodbye," or more befitting her humor and personality, "Break a leg." Valentina didn't have any last words for me, and she left me alone.

I floated out of the house and to my car on autopilot, the same autopilot that would bring me to a hospital. I luxuriated in the driver's seat as though I had achieved transcendence by the simple act of sitting. Then I remembered the job wasn't done. It wasn't an anxiety-inducing thought. It was just another task, a harmless item to check off the to-do list, and once completed it would ensure continued inner peace.

My mask was still on, and the severed pinky bit was clutched in my fist. I opened the hand, showing off its ostentatious number of fingers. The pinky bit looked so small but also flawlessly designed, beautiful. Beautiful because it had come from me. I had grown it, like a piece of fruit. The flesh wasn't weak. It was divine.

I lovingly placed the half pinky on a thigh, and I tugged and folded up the base of my mask until my mouth was exposed. The rush of cool air was not a pleasure, but something to be tolerated. I already missed the safety and warmth of the mask. I put the finger piece into my mouth, careful to keep it away from my teeth. My teeth could not be trusted. They were always stupid with want, with the desire to render and chew. With the half pinky on the bed of my tongue, I pressed it up, fitting it into my palate, and it fit like it belonged there instead of at the end of my finger. I tasted copper and salt, and I didn't like it. As a final curiosity, my brain asked the removed half pinky to move again. I don't know if it would've changed anything if it had moved.

I swallowed because it was in the script. My throat was dry, too dry, and rebelling against my wishes, it gripped the half pinky. The mass was stuck, lodged, and I couldn't breathe but there was no panic. I had a solution.

I rolled the mask back down. My mouth fitted into and became the Thin Kid's mouth. My throat instantly expanded and distended not only to accommodate the pinky but wide enough so I could swallow the world.