20. Now The End

I probably should end the audiobook here, at Cleo's death. The rest of this will likely feel anticlimactic. Or will it? Muahahahaha!

Eh, we'll see. But if we call this the denouement, then artistically speaking, we'll have an excuse.

I wish I had another revelation for you, something like the origin of the mask. I could make something up, like I had somehow gotten wind of Valentina's plan to make a horror movie, I made the mask using goat's blood and an occult-informed mask-making-for-dummies book, and I sent it to her, but that would be a lie. I'm not here to lie to you. Yes, I'm aware that's something a liar would say.

So, you don't get any more info on the mask. You know as much as I know, which is how it should be, frankly. What I have for you here, at the end, is the reboot.

Filming is almost finished. Almost. Shooting the reboot has been a big letdown. Not at all what I imagined it would be. Part of the problem is that I built up in my mind how the filming would go and what the reboot would be and mean, and it was impossible to meet those expectations. To tell the truth, I'm more than a little depressed about the whole thing.

Don't get me wrong, it's going to be a great movie. You're all going to see it. Most of you are really going to like it. You'll thrill to the transgression and spectacle and then you'll participate in the buzz and the Letterboxd and social-media conversation. (I use the word "conversation" as snarkily as possible.) Will the movie be something you take with you, that stays with you, burrows into and lives in a corner inside you? That, I don't know.

The production has been beyond professional and everyone involved is immensely talented and is giving their all. The DP is cool and hardworking but aloof. There's no Mark equivalent here. The actors playing Cleo, Karson, and Valentina are nice. I mean "nice" in the way someone is friendly to you and smiles and manages eye contact for the full two-minute breezy chat about nothing, and then you declare them as being nice, as though you really know who they are. So, yeah, they're nice people, but they're not Cleo, Karson, and Valentina. What a dumb, obvious thing to point out. I thought (and maybe hoped) being in the company of the young actors, especially during our scenes, would be like interacting with ghosts and I would be awkward around the new Cleo and new Valentina and at the wrap party I'd get drunk and say to them all the things I didn't and couldn't say to the real Cleo and real Valentina. The new actors are not ghosts—they're barely avatars. They are reminders that this is not the same movie. And Jesus, these actors are so damned young. My heart weeps at the thought that we were ever that young. Instead of sharing in their holy-shit-we're-making-a-big-movie, it-doesn't-get-better-than-this excitement and enthusiasm, I want to tell them that it in fact won't get better than this, that this too will end and maybe even before it's finished. I didn't think I would be such an Eeyore on-set. I miss everyone from the original, and I miss them hard.

At least the new Thin Kid looks the part of a scared rabbit, and he is replicating my acting method. I haven't asked Marlee if she required that he approach my character that way or if he's doing it on his own. The new Thin Kid doesn't speak much or at all when on-set and when we're on location, he spends his downtime in his trailer. Oh, I've made note of when he arrives and leaves his trailer.

I don't know what I was expecting from the reboot. Well, that's not entirely true. I was expecting a sense of fulfillment from having helped shepherd Valentina's and Cleo's vision to completion, finally, after thirty years of disaster, tragedies, sacrifice, disappointments, pain, and some dumb, stubborn hope, perhaps the poisonous kind, growing in the cracks of my heart like grass tendrils sprouting through the pavement. Hell, after thirty fucking years, man, I was expecting an emotional catharsis, an apotheosis. I was expecting meaning-of-life-level kind of stuff, you know? I wasn't expecting boredom and cynicism and vanity (my own, most disappointingly) and hours alone in the commissary or wandering the sets like a B-grade Phantom of the Opera. Maybe there's a chance for apotheosis still.

So, here's the deal. I am not being used very much in the reboot. You'll see. Eventually.

Talk about a resource being wasted!

I have had much less screen time than what Marlee had proposed to me. I don't think she's solely to blame. I don't think she was lying to me about how much she would use me. Would the joke Don't worry, you'll always be used in Hollywood be too cheap, too easy a shot?

Maybe when the high ideas and ideals and the screenplay met with the realities of filming and budget and market and studio involvement, adjustments had to be made. I am an adjustment that had to be made.

Maybe I am too differently shaped in comparison to their Thin Kid. He's at least two inches shorter than me. Plus, I'm the Thin Old Kid now and despite my ill-advised crash diet, I still probably outweigh him by twenty or thirty pounds, though it doesn't seem possible I have any more weight to sacrifice for the film. Maybe if I lopped off an arm. With all that in mind, it doesn't make continuity sense for me to swap in and out with him as much as was originally planned.

Maybe Marlee and the producers are turned off by my insistence upon wearing the original mask and not their expensive redesign. I promised them I was not a difficult actor to work with, but maybe I am a little difficult. I can admit that. But it's not like I'm throwing fits over my trailer size (I don't have nor do I want a trailer) or the font on the back of my character chair. I calmly explained my position regarding the original mask and how it would help me help the movie. It isn't that the new mask doesn't look good or isn't designed well. Not at all. The new mask is gorgeous and malleable, able to walk the line between being a mask and looking like a living creature, and you're going to love it when you see it onscreen. But when I wear it, it doesn't work. The new mask doesn't have the soul of the original. I can't be me in the new mask.

Maybe after the FX crew discovered my torso scales and the rough plate at the end of my finger nub, the word of my body modifications (for lack of a better term) leaked and spooked the movie's decision-makers, motivated them "to lessen the burden of his onscreen responsibilities," to quote one producer I overheard. I can't help what I've become. I am what I am, I gotta be me, blah blah blah.

The only scene in which I have appeared, so far, is Karson's death scene. It's an important scene, I grant you.

The set for Karson's house, the first floor, anyway, was built on a soundstage on the studio lot. After staging and chatting with the DP about the shot and giving me direction, Marlee ducked into an adjoining room that had a portable monitor. She preferred to watch the action as it unfolded on a screen to better experience how it will look for the viewers. A bell trilled for quiet on the set, then Marlee shouted, "Action." I waited a few extra beats to replicate in miniature the suspense and long build of the screenplay. I stepped into the doorway, to be viewed in silhouette and from across the filmic desert. I menace-walked across the dining room to Karson. At the end of the take, Karson, from behind the camera, was all smiles and told me I was great, so scary. Didn't he know I was going to kill him? Marlee shot the scene again four more times. Five takes. I spent the full morning in the makeup chair for five lousy takes. I mean, Christ, I was just warming up, crawling back into the Thin Kid's headspace. Five takes is a perfect metaphor for the reboot experience thus far. In the last take I walked backward from Karson to the opposite archway, which is an oft-used technique in horror movies: have the actor go backward and then play that bit of film in reverse to make for a creepy, unnatural walk. Like the professional I am, I did the take, but my heart wasn't in it, because the Thin Kid wasn't a specter, he was real, so why would he move like that? The Thin Kid wasn't ethereal and dreamlike, he was unblinking, remorseless inevitability. Eh, what do I know? Anyway, at some point during one of my ambles, they'll cut away and replace me with the other Thin Kid for the kill. They did film the kill as the Thin Kid taking a large bite out of Karson. Kudos to them for the effort. Watching the practical effect in real time was a bit too behind-the-curtain for me. I have a hard time believing the big chomp will look real on film, but everyone on-set seemed pleased with what they shot.

For my part in the scene, Marlee acquiesced to my request, and I wore my original mask, not the new design. You won't be able to see a difference when you watch the movie because of the lighting, but I know you'll be able to tell it's there. You'll be able to feel it.

I'm going to volunteer myself to be in one other scene, the one they're shooting later today. Today, they're filming Cleo's death scene.

I arrived at our main on-location set early. There have been other on-location shoots, but most of them have been handled by the second unit. Today I'm at an elementary school destined for the wrecking ball, north of L.A., up near Bakersfield. Thanks to a controversial budget-override vote, a shiny new academic building has been built in the lot adjacent to the venerable fifty-year-old building. The town will knock down the old school as soon as filming ends and use its footprint for the new school's green space and playground area. Kudos to the location scouts, as the production won't have to worry about cleanup and Humpty-Dumptying things back to the way they were.

When I say I arrived at the location early, what I mean is I didn't leave, or I didn't leave when everyone else did. I was here yesterday, and after the shoot I stayed overnight in the new Thin Kid's trailer. The locked door wasn't locked for me.

The trailer, from what I understand, is a big one. One enters into a small kitchen and sitting area with a wall-mounted flat-screen television and video game console on the dining table. Between the front and the back, the trailer narrows into a hallway with cabinets/storage on one side and a bathroom on the other. The bedroom is in the rear. The bed is a trundle, fold-down type, with a twin-sized mattress.

The bed was just right. Not that I slept much. Don't worry, I didn't mess up his sheets and blankets, I lay on top of them wearing my mask, underwear, and sundry body scales. I wasn't cold and I wasn't warm. My skin itched, but not unpleasantly, so I didn't scratch. Besides, my fingernails were too long, too sharp.

Morning came and went and now it's midafternoon and there are the unmistakable sounds of people stirring outside. The machine of the movie winding up one more time. I crawl and shimmy under the bed. Despite my age and cranky joints and tendons, I can still make myself small enough to fit into the dark spaces.

Right on schedule, the new Thin Kid enters the trailer. He carries sides and a canteen of water. He settles in the front sitting area, and from my vantage, I see parts of one shoulder and the back of his head. He doesn't hum or whistle or read aloud, not that he has any lines, and he doesn't play music on his phone even though he's by himself. The only sounds are the cushion creak when he adjusts his sitting position and the script pages turning. I admire that he doesn't need to fill the empty space with his noise, and it gives me pause. Maybe I could show him. Maybe he could learn.

Eventually he walks into the bedroom, toward me. Christ, he looks like he's thirteen years old, looks like he hasn't ever shaved yet, but in a certain light, his head turned a certain way, he does bear an uncanny resemblance to the young me. Spaghetti legs dangle out from orange shorts, and a baggy plain white T-shirt billows over his narrow chest. Has he been wearing white T-shirts, my white T-shirts to set all along and I haven't noticed? Is this shirt a special choice for today? Does he know all I wear are white T-shirts, that it's part of my post–Horror Movie uniform? I don't want to sound like an egomaniac, but given his attention to the character details, attention to my original approach to the character, he must know. It doesn't take very long to find online discussion threads about how I wear nothing but white tees to conventions and what it means. Is he wearing it in honor of me, or is this him usurping, engaging in a metaphorical coup of my character? Or is it a total coincidence? The problem when you foolishly think one thing has meaning: you then think everything has meaning. I've yet to say the following in the slew of recent interviews when asked what makes Horror Movie so scary: in a movie chock-full of symbol and portent, it all amounts to nothing, to the horror of void. Most of you can't handle that. I don't blame you.

Anyway, I decide to be flattered by the white T-shirt, but ultimately the why of his wearing it doesn't matter. It won't change what is going to happen.

He clambers onto the bed and sits with his legs folded. I can tell he's sitting by how the weight is distributed through the mattress above me. He does deep-breathing exercises and I pattern my own breaths to match his. I match them perfectly.

There's a knock on the trailer door and a call of his name. I won't remember his name and that is how I will choose to honor him.

He leaves, heading for the makeup chair. He'll be back in roughly two and a half hours. Plenty of time for me to get to work.

I crawl out from under the bed and walk to the cramped mini hallway, that thin space between the two larger spaces of the trailer. I place small cameras in odd, unexpected places—in a ceiling panel, a corner of the room, perched below the windowsill—so they can record jarring POV shots, ones that walk the line between pulling you out of the movie, of letting your lizard brain know that you are watching a movie, and making you frightened of what you'll see next and how you'll see it.

I dowse a patch of unmarked, unscaled skin stretched over one of my ribs. At the end of my pinky, the one that had a missing piece and a scale plate, the one that grew back overnight, is a sharpened nail. All my fingers are tipped with these razors, but the one at the end of the pinky is the sharpest. I flick and slash the skin on my left side and invite the blood. I set to painting the movie's unaccountable symbol, the one that means everything and means nothing, on the floor in my blood. I'm no artist, but I have been practicing. Once it's completed, I stand with the symbol between my feet and I wait. I wait for the end that I am rewriting.

As a part of his routine, the new Thin Kid returns to the trailer in full costume. Someone holds the door open for him. He struggles inside and whoever holds the door says, "Ten minutes." The new Thin Kid does not acknowledge the time delineation, displaying wisdom beyond his years. He's already in character.

The trailer door shuts and he doesn't see me in the little hallway because I don't want him to yet. He won't see the symbol, either, unless I decide to show it to him. I briefly imagine pressing his severed head against it as his eyelids flutter their last.

I wonder if he'll attempt to return to the bed and continue his breathing exercises or remain in the trailer's front and look at the sides or stand quiet and still like that totem he wants to become.

He reaches for something on the table, and it's the TV remote. He awkwardly paws at the buttons and turns on the screen. It streams some obnoxious gamer's Twitch channel.

An unexpected cue, but a cue nonetheless.

I emerge from the hallway, fully formed. My skin is entirely scaled and plated. There is no mask. The mask is me.

I spin him around so he can see me, and I grab him by the neck, squeeze, and lift him off the floor. His legs kick and his feet flipper briefly, until he passes out or dies. I'm not sure which. The latter would be a mercy. I drop him onto the sitting-area table. He's nothing but a young man, a child, in a rubber-and-latex suit. How could he possibly scare anyone?

I try out my new razor claws and cut and gouge trenches, digging into the dirt, digging through the layers until I find his blood. He stirs, moans, and I wrap a hand around his throat again to silence him. Aware of the ticking clock (fucking hell, I can't tell you how much I hate film people when they use the phrase "ticking clock" as a general, default guideline to plot, but when in Caligula's Rome...), I have to rush things a bit. I squeeze hard enough to crush the little cardboard box of his larynx. He can't call out to anyone now. There are choking sounds but they're not significantly louder than the yammering Twitch streamer on the TV.

I grab a shoulder and fold him into a sitting position. His head lolls loose, untracked. He swipes at me with weakening arms, and his rubber claws are no match for my real armor.

My mouth twitches. It wants to open. I strike, burying myself into his throat. The first bites are small ones, teeth-clicking and ratlike. I gnaw through latex. The taste is chemical and powdery until I reach skin and blood, and I bite so quickly I nip my own tongue, but I don't stop. I bite and I root into a different kind of rubber, vein and ligament, and the tough, apple-bite of cartilage. The new Thin Kid's last breath whistles through the new hole I made and into my own throat because I'm swallowing everything. That deliciously warm breath triggers a waterfall of saliva that lubricates my new machinery; elongating teeth, gumline receding to expose even more teeth, my jaw bones popping and releasing from their tracks, and if there's pain it's a different kind of pain that sharpens my focus and resolve, and my mouth drips with want and it unhinges, expands, engulfing his neck and collarbone and upper back, and I fill my mouth and I bite and my teeth click when they meet again.

I want nothing more than to linger and to finish consuming him, but I have to finish something else first. I carry what's left of his body to the bedroom and stuff it under the bed.

My blood-slicked skin is clay under my hands and tongue. I shape and re-form myself to look like the new Thin Kid, or enough like him that no one will see or know the difference. Well, they'll know in an animal-sense kind of way. They'll keep their distance and side-eye me. They'll be afraid of me, afraid of what I've done and who I am without knowing who I am, but they won't say anything. You can always count on people to not have the courage to say anything.

Even if someone recognizes me as not being the new Thin Kid, I don't think it'll matter. I'll convince them that we need to finish the movie. Monsters can be very persuasive.

I finish my pre-scene preparations by licking myself and the table clean of blood. They haven't called for me to come to set yet. I've finished with time to spare. I think it's rather considerate of me to not hold up production.

We'll film the chainsaw scene, which is really where the original movie ended, in my mind. Something has always felt off about Valentina leading the Thin Kid home to her bedroom and hiding him under the bed. I don't think she or Cleo would be upset if I changed the end in keeping with the spirit of the original movie, in the spirit of self-destruction.

After the chainsaw scene, I will go back to the trailer and you will watch me finish consuming the new Thin Kid. I think folks would have loads of fun picking through that carcass for metaphorical and psychological meaning.

Or after the chainsaw scene, I will go on an old-fashioned monster rampage, the kind where no one and nothing is spared. A rampage that will come to your town.

Or after the chainsaw scene, I'll go for a more subtle ending and more postmodern. Something like this: Marlee yells, "That's a wrap," and there's applause on-set, and the applause is for me, and as the crew share hugs and high fives, I slink away, but a camera follows me, and another camera follows the camera following me as I walk out of the school and I walk until I disappear into the woods or submerge myself into the Kern River.

Or, no, I'll walk the streets, and the streets will become more streets, and I'll walk and walk and the cameras will go with me as I walk the earth. The movie won't end. Either sitting at home or in the theater you'll be given a QR code or a link so you can go online and continue to watch me walking the earth, and maybe you'll watch for another ten minutes, or even an hour, and you'll get bored or tired of the gimmick (but it's not a gimmick) and shut it off. Some of you will come back to watch, and watch obsessively, and I'll be there on the screen, walking away, walking toward, walking in the movie that won't end until the end of everything.

Here's the knock on the trailer door and the call for me to come to set.

I haven't decided on the new ending.

I guess you'll have to watch the movie to find out.