Epiphany Jones (28 page)

‘I was an extra – a nobody,’ and she looks at me conspiratorially, ‘and you, well, you
were
a virgin.’

I’m sorry, what?

‘We were at that wrap party – do you remember?’

No, I don’t.

‘That horrible movie?’

Nope.

‘That utterly forgettable piece of celluloid? It was that first movie I
was an extra in. And, God!’ she laughs as she gazes over the balcony. ‘Do you remember? The whole damn movie took place on one set! It was supposed to be some kind of–’

And my heart stops when she says, ‘– silverware factory.’

Jordan, she turns and places her palm on my cheek. She caresses it. ‘And your dad, your sweet dad. He came to me and said that if I took care of
you
, he’d make sure I’d have a role in Matthew’s next production.’ She presses her body into mine. ‘You were so nervous when you found out I was going to fuck you,’ she says, twirling a bit of my hair around her finger. ‘You looked like you were going to cry.’ She strokes my cheek, then laughs. ‘And then you came so quickly! A two-minute fuck for twelve years of fame! I was going to fuck you again even, in case the first time was too short for it to count as part of the deal.’ She puts her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh! My! God! But do you remember that horribly skinny girl who burst into the room? She looked terrified when she saw us! She ran out as fast as she came in and you – you ran out after her! And I was going to fuck you again! Just imagine!’ she laughs. ‘You know how many men would kill for a fuck from me now? And I was going to give you two!’

And as I feel like I’m about to have a heart attack, Jordan takes a long sip of her Bellini and looks back over the Mediterranean.

‘Oh dear,’ Jordan says as she casts her gaze from the sea back to me, ‘that was the night your dad got into his accident, wasn’t it? It was so horrible! I was so afraid I wouldn’t get my end of the deal. But Phineas, kind, kind Phineas honoured it when he took over for your dad.’

Memory. It’s a funny thing. Just because we can’t recall things, we believe they’ve never happened. We think we’ve blocked out the pain of a sister’s death, but if by chance we come across her old photo on our mother’s mantelpiece, we want to burst into tears. When we see children playing soccer in the streets, the regrets of long-ignored mistakes rise and beg forgiveness in the present. And when we meet our father’s old colleague we suddenly realise how important it is to hear that Dad was proud of us.

They’re such imprecise instruments, memories. Some are just
habitual, like storing enough about Photoshop in your brain to get through your shitty museum job. But others … other memories are spontaneous. They’re the kind that suck up your imperfect perceptions and impressions of the world. They’re the kind that are brought to the front of your mind when it benefits you and shuffled to the back when their recall would do you harm. But even these can be summoned in sudden, painful flashes. Sometimes it’s a father’s gold watch or the long-forgotten theme song to an old TV show that summons those flashes. But sometimes, just sometimes that flash requires an unbelievable story from an international sex symbol.

But I was a virgin until … until Bela,
you believe.

No, Jerry,
your spontaneous memory answers,
you weren’t.

Memories. Your head doesn’t have enough room for all of them at once. When some come up, others need to get pushed to the back. Your thoughts become clouded.

I feel sick. I’m going to fall over. These people around, the ones inside drinking, they’re making so much noise. This blonde … why is she looking at me like that? Who’s that bearded man smiling at us from inside? Why is this balcony moving?

I’m spinning and put my hand on the blonde woman’s waist to steady myself.

‘Oh, J,’ she says drunkenly. ‘You want me again, don’t you? You want that second fuck? For old time’s sake?’ She moves my hand from her waist to her ass. She kisses my mouth and it’s a taste I remember always having desired
and
always having had. She kisses my mouth and puts her hand on mine, forcing it to squeeze her ass.
‘Oh, J,’
she bites my lip and in that bite, her tooth punctures my flesh and a single drop of blood stirs inside my mouth. In that single drop is my entire life. Bela. Epiphany. My mother and father. Emma. They all come back to me.

I break from her lips. ‘What was the name of the film?’ I tremble.

‘What?’ she says, piqued that someone’s stopped kissing
her
.

‘The film … The silverware factory set…’

‘Oh,’ she says and returns to kissing my neck. ‘Who cares, Little J?’
Her hand slides down my front until it finds my crotch. ‘Just don’t tell my boyfriend…’

I take her shoulders. ‘What was the name of the film?’ I shout and shake her as if doing so will rattle this memory of hers to the ground, where I can scoop it up and push it though my ear into my mind.
‘What was the name of the film, you stupid whore?’

And Jordan, she begins to cry.

‘What was its name!’

‘Four Men,’
she sobs. ‘It was
Four Men
.’

‘W
hat if we’re all the bad guys?’

‘Who is truly good? You?’

‘Momentous events are sparked by free will and petty motivations.’

Four Men
is a dialogue-driven movie about four people who wake up trapped in the same room together. Two of them are handcuffed and there are two extra sets of cuffs on the ground. There’s a pad of paper on the floor with directions written on it. In a shallow box on a rollered conveyor belt they find a set of keys and a cell phone with a dead battery. The kicker for these four men is that no one can remember who they are or how they got there. But they all smell gas and one of the handcuffed men has a gun.

And a line of dialogue says, ‘You had it all wrong.’

A line of dialogue says, ‘Fear makes us do all sorts of bad things.’

A line of dialogue says, ‘Sometimes the crazy ones are the right ones.’

After I released my grip on Jordan, after I ran past Phineas and out onto the Promenade de la Croisette, I went from DVD stall to DVD stall. By the fourth one I started to fear I wouldn’t find it. Then I saw one last stall on the opposite side of the Croisette. Its location was relatively poor as most of the foot traffic stuck to the right side of the street. The DVDs were arranged by actor. This vendor, he had all her movies:

The Best Girl.

Before Dying.

The Mechana Effect.

Caribbean Dawn.

All but the one I needed.

‘Four Men?’
I said.

‘Ah, I keep that under “Donald Diamon” since he was the main star,’ the vendor said. ‘Let me see if I still have a copy.’ He flipped through the Diamon section. ‘Most people don’t know that was Seabring’s first role. She played an extra in the background during one of the flashback sequences in the second act. You must be a big fan if you know she’s in it.’ He pulled out the DVD then took my money and nodded towards the photos of her he was selling. ‘Man, what a looker, huh? How’d you like to hit that?’

In my hotel room I sit on my bed, barely breathing as I watch the movie play out. The film consists primarily of close-ups of the characters and the items they find. In the first act the only medium and long shots you get are when you see the characters’ flashbacks – when they suddenly remember something based on an item they find in their wallet or on a shelf or wherever. And then we get to it: the flashback scene of the middle-aged father. The one where you see his fifteen-year-old daughter in the background. Jordan Seabring’s first foray onto celluloid. It lasts all of eight seconds.

After each flashback, when the camera returns to the present you get to see more and more of the room where the men are being held. And even though I’ve never seen this movie before, I’ve seen this room dozens of times. They’re in a silverware factory. The factory is abandoned. Teaspoon after teaspoon rusts in boxes on roller conveyors. Forks dangle from strings overhead. Three furnaces fill the room in the far corner. Their mouths gape, revealing long extinguished insides. Behind them, scorch marks make permanent shadows on the brick walls. The floor planks are stained dark.

A line of dialogue says, ‘Memory is tricky.’

It says, ‘The mind finds ways to protect us.’

It says, ‘Are you sure what you believe is true?’

I pause the screen and such a strain comes over my chest. Bits and scraps of thoughts swim around in my head. They stir in my mind as if shaken in a snow globe. And, as if they’ve only been playing with the
idea of coming up for air, now the tiniest little scraps decide to break the surface.

Rewind.

I’m seventeen. My father and I are at the wrap party for
Four Men.
The party is being held on one of the lots at the old Imagination Studios. People are laughing and smiling all around. The extras are all huddled together in one corner, nervous excitement on their faces, hoping for the chance to talk to someone who might further their career. Phineas is there. So is Roland, only at this time he’s going by the name Rolin. And, unlike the other people at the party, he looks a little worried.

Standing by a lighting rig Matthew and my father whisper to each other, grinning masters of the universe. On the other side of the room there’s a girl around my age. She’s an extra named Jordan. And my father approaches her and speaks briefly. Then he points at me. And Jordan, she walks over, smiling. She asks me to come with her to get something from the dressing room.

In the dressing room we sit on a couch. She looks nervous as we chat about nothing for twenty minutes. I’m nervous too. She’s beautiful. She’s got Hollywood written all over her.

On our way to the party tonight, my dad told me he had a special gift for me. ‘A gift that will make you a man,’ he said. And it doesn’t take me long to realise that Jordan
is
that gift.

‘OK, let’s do this,’ she says abruptly. ‘My parents are picking me up in thirty.’

She takes off her top. And her breasts are magnificent – as the first breasts you touch always are.

‘Take your clothes off,’ she orders.

I do.

‘Lie down.’

I do.

We don’t even kiss. She pulls on my dick until it gets hard and she climbs on top of me. And
this
is where I lose my virginity. From underneath her skirt, she slides her panties to the side and puts me inside her. And she rides me like a toy pony. And ninety seconds later, I cum
and Jordan climbs off me and plops back on the couch, annoyed and a little disappointed.

‘I’m not sure if that counts,’ she says. ‘It was so quick.’

And for some reason, I want to cry. For some reason, this doesn’t feel right.

‘Well, let’s go again,’ she says. ‘I want to make sure I get the part.’ And she looks at my penis. ‘Go on, get hard.’

I say, ‘I can’t.’

‘Fine, I’ll do it,’ she says and takes my penis in her mouth.

Suddenly there’s a commotion on the other side of the dressing-room door. Someone’s screaming. Then the door bursts open and a black-haired girl in a light-blue dress runs in. She’s crying and scared and shaking like a whipped animal. ‘Oh! My! God! Get out!’ Jordan screams, and the girl with black hair darts through a side door.

From the hallway, Rolin’s voice shouts, ‘She’s in the dressing room!’

I’m so petrified that someone I know will see me naked, I take off out the side door, too. It leads through a prop room and out to the studio back lot. And I run in the night, exposed, across the back lot. I run and run until I come to a small building. Inside it’s a set. And I stand in the middle of this set, naked. Shaking. Crying. I’m not who I was before this night. I feel wrong.

The set is made to look like a silverware factory. The oil that stains the floorboards is paint. The silver forks that dangle from the strings are really made of plastic. And from the left set wall – the one that’s constructed to look like the tin siding of a shack with cracked, yellowed windows – the silhouette of a girl runs past. And I hide. Naked and shaking I crawl into one of the big furnaces that look like it’s cast from iron, but really it’s just moulded polystyrene, and I curl up inside. I cry.

And then I see her. The girl from the dressing room. She’s fourteen, maybe fifteen years old. Her frame is petite and doesn’t fully fill the dress she’s wearing. Her face is small and round. Her hair, pulled back tight around her head, is black like a raven’s folded wing. Her skin, white as cream. And her left ear – now it looks like a piece of her lobe was torn right off.

I want to shout, ‘Over here! Hide over here!’ But I don’t. I’m too scared. So I just watch. I watch as this girl looks around frantically. I watch as the black soles of her pale feet give up. They won’t carry her anymore. And I see more silhouettes run past the cracked, yellowed windows, the ones that are made from glazed sugar stained with coffee so they look older. And from my hiding place in the polystyrene furnace, I see Rolin enter. And then Phineas.

They claw at this poor girl like hawks attacking a prairie rabbit until she collapses to the ground. And she struggles on the paint-marked floor; she screams as she’s beaten into restraint. And, as this poor girl is held to the floor, another man enters the set. Rolin and Phineas spread the girl’s legs as this new man forces his hand into her privates. His movements are so rough, so powerful, that each gyration of his arm rocks the girl’s entire body on the floor. And as the girl howls, this man takes his hand from between her legs and beats her on the face. As she bleeds from between her legs, the man orders Phineas and Rolin to drag her away. Then the man stands up and wipes his hand clean.

The man, he’s my father.

T
here’s a shark in my bed. He’s got a bullet hole in his head. Then he’s gone, and Emma is in the bed. She’s pale and sick and has cancer. Rachel stands in the corner, her red anime hair glowing. ‘Come to me,’ she says. Then she’s my father. ‘This will make you a man, Jerry.’ And my father becomes LaRouche, who becomes the shark, who becomes Emma.

All of them are popping in and out around the room. I sink next to the nightstand and press my eyes shut. ‘Please leave me alone,’ I cry. ‘Please…’

But they keep coming. Even with my eyes closed and my hands over my ears, I hear them. ‘Stop this! Stop! I didn’t ask for any of this.’ I open my eyes and throw the bedside lamp at my father. And the figments popping in and out, they’re more rapid now. Sometimes three are in the room at once. Now Epiphany is among them too. Emma is standing beside her.

‘Please, Emma, please. Make them go away.’ But it’s Epiphany who walks over and places her hand on my shoulder. And when she does, all the other figments vanish – like they did with Bela. ‘Shh. It’s just you and I, Jerry. No one else is here.’ And that’s when I realise that this is the real Epiphany; the flesh-and-blood little girl my dad dragged off the silverware factory set. She’s got a butter knife in her hand and the hotel room door behind her is ajar.

Epiphany sees the image of the silverware factory frozen on the TV screen. She sees the gun I tried to murder her with sitting on the nightstand. She reaches towards it, but instead of taking the gun she sets the butter knife next to it.

‘Why are you here?’ I shake. My whole body feels as if it’s broken.

It’s several moments before she answers. Then she looks at me with her green eyes and says, ‘Because, for once, I listened to my own voice.’ She takes another moment before cautiously adding, ‘I didn’t kill your friend. You need to know that. You deserve to know the truth.’

No. I won’t believe it. She had to. She had to. There was no one else. ‘You’re trying to mess with my head. You’re trying to trick me,’ I shake.

‘No, Jerry,’ she says softly. ‘No more lies, no more tricks.’

‘Why’d you run, then? On the street, why’d you run?’

‘When I discovered you in the bar, I was going to tell you everything, but then my–’ She stops herself. ‘I suddenly
knew
you had a gun. So I ran.’ I’m looking at her, unable to utter a word. ‘Jerry, when you held that gun to my face … I had not seen that much pain in someone’s eyes since they took my daughter from me. That is when I realised that you and your friend – you and she are as much victims of trafficking as my daughter and I, and all the others are.’

And before I can ask what she means, she says, ‘You didn’t kill Nico on that pier in Veracruz.’

‘I did.’ It’s like I’ve just been kicked in the gut. ‘I saw him lying, bleeding.’

‘But not dead,’ she says.

A cancer of remorse invades my stomach. I know what she’s going to say. And now something I wished I could have taken back for the longest time, I cry that I didn’t actually do.

Epiphany tells me what happened after I jumped ship in Porto. How she woke the next day. How she figured I’d need to hide in Porto until I knew what I was going to do now that the videotape showed nothing. She had Abdul phone different places to see if I’d rented a room. After a few days of being unable to find me, she knew she had to go on to the house outside of Seville without me. But she arrived too late. The girls had been moved. The only one left in the house was the madam. She was Russian, just like LaRouche. And this madam, after some ‘very firm discussions’, she revealed that there were twelve girls – all special order – all moved to Cannes the day before. The madam told Epiphany that
one of the girls had even been kept there, unspoilt, for almost twelve years, aging like a fine wine for just the right occasion. This year was that right occasion. At Cannes, Matthew would be hosting an exclusive party that required only the purest treats.

So Epiphany, she dragged this madam from the house and tied her to a wretched tree that had died this spring in the unusually extreme Spanish heat wave. Then Epiphany went back into the house. It was minutes before she returned carrying a burning cloth wrapped around a stick. Fear came to the madam’s eyes and she pleaded with Epiphany. She told her she had taught her daughter the mother tongue. That she had cared for her like her own.

Overhead, the sun was so relentless that, as Epiphany burnt the house to the ground, the flames hardly added anything to the searing heat of the Andalusian air. And Epiphany, she stubbed out the torch and told the woman that she knew it wasn’t entirely her fault – this life of hers. ‘But let’s see if God sets you free before His sky consumes you.’

Now knowing exactly
why
her voices had said she needed me, Epiphany returned to Porto. But when she found me that day on my way to the farmers’ market, Nico had found her. By that time he had tracked us to Portugal. As she stood behind a watermelon stand watching me, she and Nico saw each other at the same moment. She fled and Nico pursued. Her flight eventually led her to an alley where she hid. This alley, it was full of cats that seemed to crawl all over her body, making her invisible in the dark as Nico ran past. Then, as Epiphany remained hiding in the alley – desperate and scared that Nico had already gotten to me – ‘as fate would have it’, I walked by with a pumpkin in each hand.

And after our confrontation in that alley – after I left with my remaining pumpkin, after I told Epiphany everything she believed is wrong – she realised how mad she had sounded, because she had been so shaken by coming so close to finding her daughter in Spain and then by seeing Nico alive in Portugal. And Epiphany remembered the night in Mexico when she and LaRouche spoke at the kitchen table while I was lying in bed with a freshly stabbed back. LaRouche had tried
to explain to Epiphany then that, though she understands so readily what she must do because the voice of God speaks to her, other, more secular, individuals would easily mistake her passion for madness.

So Epiphany tracked me to my apartment. She knew she needed to explain everything then, rationally and in full, if she had any hope of getting me to help her. That was when Paulo saw her outside at four in the morning. Epiphany feared that any man by my apartment at four in the morning might be working with Nico, so she fled. But she returned a few hours later and crept past the sleeping Paulo, up the stairs past the candlelit vegetables. But instead of finding me, she found Nico sitting in the kitchen – and Bela already dead in the bedroom. Instantly she knew Nico didn’t travel to Portugal just for her. And Nico then understood that Epiphany wasn’t with me anymore; that in fact she was looking for me herself. Nico leapt at her. Epiphany shows me where his ring cut her cheek. But she fought back and fled out the back window onto the roof.

‘He followed me. I managed to lose him. But by that time I couldn’t wait any longer for you. I hadn’t heard my voices in days. I needed to get to Cannes,’ she says. ‘When I arrived here, I disguised myself in case Nico followed. And he did, Jerry. He’s here. Every night I’ve been going to the bars to find someone who could help me get into Matthew’s party. I’ve seen him at the Majestic.’

For moments I say nothing. It’s almost too much. Nico. Alive. Here. I swallow, ‘He put the cover over her in bed. Moved her to make it look like she was sleeping – waiting for me.’

Epiphany presses her lips together. ‘Nico is a cruel man. Cruelty comes in many forms.’

I think I’ve reached that point now – the point where even though you want to, you just can’t cry anymore. Minutes pass as we sit in silence. Then Epiphany, always one to ruin a good thing, looks at the frozen image of the silverware factory on the TV again. She says, ‘There’s more you need to know.’

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I don’t have the strength to tell her I don’t want to know about my father.

Epiphany waits until my eyes catch hers. ‘When I was held by,’ and she mercifully says
Matthew’s people
, ‘you can not imagine what it was like. We were moved from apartment to apartment in the city at regular intervals so as not to attract attention. We were never allowed outside. Our flesh became white. They required us to exercise on a stationary bike so our bodies kept nice. If they thought we had put on weight we were made to stand naked on a scale. If the scale showed more than a kilogram gained since our last weighing, our diets were limited; our rapes increased “for exercise”. We were nothing more than prized thoroughbreds they wanted to keep looking good for their enjoyment.’

And here Epiphany’s mercy at sparing the details disappears. Here she speaks between her teeth.

‘For three years we were forced to service them and for three years, since your father took me in Mexico, I hadn’t heard my voices. I prayed every day but they remained silent. But at fourteen … I became pregnant and everything changed. My voices came back to me,’ Epiphany smiles crookedly. ‘The three-year abyss was only a test to see if I remained faithful to them. When Matthew and your father found out I was pregnant it was decided that I would have the child.’ Epiphany, she shakes her head. ‘With all the horrible things they did, they still had a twisted view that they were moral, upstanding Christians and that abortions were out of the question. It was the only thing they ever did that I was thankful for.’

Epiphany tells me that she was separated from the other girls during her pregnancy. She was moved to a nicer private apartment in the city where the girls were taken when Matthew or one of his people wanted a night alone with them. A back-door doctor with crooked hands delivered the baby. But Epiphany didn’t even get to hold it. She screamed as it was taken from the room. The doctor came back with a bucket of water and a cloth. ‘Clean yourself up,’ he said.

Epiphany was locked back with the other girls after her pregnancy. Some of the girls were new. The new ones, they would clutch and hold on to the others as Matthew’s men came to drag them out. ‘We would huddle in our small apartment, only a bathroom and an exercise bike
and mats on the floor. Sometimes a man would come around to do our makeup. He was allowed to rape the others as payment. The girls who had their makeup done knew they were in for a hard night.’ Epiphany’s eyes burn. ‘One of the men was limp. He couldn’t take us, so instead he photographed us as we were violated. He got off on capturing rape in black and white, salivating like a dog with each photograph.’

I think I’m going to be sick. I worked with him for so long. He dated my mother. And it hits me. That’s why my mom had El Captain. Roland couldn’t get it up.

Epiphany tells me that, out of all the girls, she was never allowed to be photographed.

I say, ‘Why?’

‘I was the prized one,’ she says. ‘Men are territorial over their property.’

But Epiphany knew the power a young body could have over a man and she promised she would never tell anyone he photographed her if he would only tell her what happened with her baby. So Rolin, he told her that her child would be kept until it could be ‘of use’. It was only then that Epiphany understood she had had a daughter. And Rolin, he took his photos.

Epiphany was determined not to let the same hell happen to her daughter. She began causing trouble. She would try to get the other girls to revolt – but this only got the girls beaten. So she tried something else. Even though they were treated no better than livestock, sometimes the men would become attached to them. They’d talk to them and tell them their worries and fears like they would to a normal girlfriend. There was one man in particular who was obsessed with Epiphany and she, well she used the oldest torture in the book: she became aloof. She hoped mentally mind-fucking this man would get him to have her shipped back to Nico for a new girl. It would be easier to escape in transport than in LA. But her plan backfired. The man started blaming her for his increasing unhappiness and only raped her more to ‘teach her to love’ him.

But then, on a quiet night in June, three of the girls and Epiphany
were brought to the studio lot. There was an orgy with Matthew, Phineas, Donald Diamon and my father. And on this night, her voices spoke to her. They said ‘pay attention’. And as the orgy progressed, Epiphany noticed a blinking light tucked away on a shelf. And at that moment what Epiphany understood more than anyone was that kinks never stay the same. They only grow. They only mutate.

When the orgy finished, while the men were discussing whether to move the girls that night or leave them until the next night, Epiphany crept over to the blinking light. It was just a small digicam – the kind that records video to SD cards the size of a postage stamp. Where a photo used to suffice, Rolin now needed moving pictures.

She knew instantly what she had. That tiny little card she took from the camera showed the most powerful man in Hollywood having sex with little girls. It was the best bargaining chip she could hope for. Not only for her freedom, but her daughter’s as well. But first, she would need to escape.

The next night was the
Four Men
wrap party and, as I was being introduced to Jordan in the dressing room, Rolin was coming clean to Matthew and my dad about the missing SD card. Matthew was furious. Epiphany could hear the shouting from the room the girls had been locked in since the night before.

Matthew, Phineas, Rolin and my father each took one of the girls separately to demand they give back anything they took. The other girls were confused, but Epiphany knew what the men were looking for. It had been hidden in her vagina for the last twenty hours. When my father demanded Epiphany submit to a full cavity search, she ran. She ran into the dressing room where Jordan had my dick in her mouth. And as Rolin shouted from the hall, she fled out the back door, through the prop room and out across the dark studio back lot.

But, like all studio back lots, the walls were high to keep people out. So Epiphany, she ran across the lot until she came to Matthew’s office. The office was lined with paintings and one of those paintings was a Van Gogh. She didn’t have much time. She heard someone outside and, fearing she was about to be caught, quickly slid the SD card into
the top of the Van Gogh, between the canvas and the support frame. She picked up the phone as my dad burst in so he would think she was trying to call the police. He lunged at her, grabbing her earring along with the phone. Her cartilage stretched until it tore. Blood flowed down her neck. That’s when she ran again. She ran until she came to the silverware factory set where I had hidden.