We Eat Our Own (28 page)

You need to convince yourself: that no one will yell Cut. No one will put you back on a plane at the end of this, and that plane will not land in a thunderstorm, the armrests bucking in your grip and lightning creasing the square foot of sky outside your window. You will not haul that same little suitcase through the terminal and then the rain.

If your goal is to become Richard, then you can't make it home alive. If you become Richard, then you can't be Adrian White anymore: a shitty actor in size ten and a half shoes, soaked and slouching toward the taxi line in some other universe.

Adrian White is the one who will sign the contract that says that he will disappear for a full year after the film opens. That he will go by a different name and avoid crowded places where anyone who's seen the movie might recognize him and raise a pointed finger and remark. That in the eyes of the world, he will be the disappeared journalist Richard Trent, whose fateful last assignment is screening now in theaters near you under the title
Jungle Bloodbath
. That in the eyes of the world, he will be dead—until Ugo gives up and announces eleven months later that it was all a hoax.

You will not be the one who opens the door to your old apartment and find Kay gone, and all her things gone, and a note under a paperweight on the kitchen table that says she's paid the rent through the end of the month, this time it was just too much for her, and please don't try to find her again.

You will never see Irena again. The Italian courts will not demand your presence at trial eleven months later, where Ugo Velluto will stand accused of murdering his actors on film in the name of some perverse verisimilitude. You will not glimpse her slouching posture in the witness booth: Irena, her hair washed clean of river mud and gathered tightly at the neck. You will not file into the booth next to her and sit, straight-backed and still, as if the bench were a canoe whose balance you could upset. After an hour of testimony, she will not lean over and whisper, Richard, fucking relax; it was all pretend.

You are Richard.

You will not look at the scar on her forearm, whiter than the rest of her skin and shiny as a beetle.

You are Richard.

You are Richard.

You are Richard.

You will never think of the guerilla you killed again.

You will not dream of black mud falling into a man's open eyes.

Maybe Adrian will try, but you certainly will not search the international news for mentions of a mysterious disappearance of a young Colombian man in the Amazon, and find nothing. Maybe Adrian will wonder, but you will not try to imagine what he was fighting for, or why he was there. This might be Adrian's burden: whoever the hell Adrian becomes after this. But it will not be Richard's. Not yours. You will not scan the news for years for mentions of Colombia, or Brazil, or Peru, wondering which army he belonged to. You will not find more violence than you can process: so many photographs of people disappeared, of guerillas dead on the red marble floors of the Senate, of paramilitaries setting fires to coffee farms, of black American planes stuck like pushpins in white skies.

You will not read about the town of Ovidio, raided by the
DEA
and Colombian special forces, Hank Vance absconded to parts unknown, but the town still doing a brisk tourism business, especially among American vacationers.

What you did here will not stay with you for the rest of your life.

In an Italian courtroom, eleven months from now, you will not stand next to Irena and Teo on the witness stand and declare, in turn, that it was all fake, that each of you is who you are and you are, in fact, alive.

And you will not buy the tape that proves it otherwise: the tape that you have to give a stranger in a basement apartment in Queens sixty dollars for, and even then, it will be unlabeled, wrapped in brown paper, handed over with a warning: don't tell
INTERPOL
where you got this.

You will not watch it, because how can you watch a tape of your own death? It is a logical paradox. Your body cannot sit in an armchair in Woodside when it is also curled on its side on the ground in the jungle three thousand miles away. It's impossible to see when your eyes are so full of blood. The scene is silent beneath the soundtrack, but how could it be? The stones must be so loud, striking at your ribs. The stones must be so loud, striking through the skull, scattering your brain. Your brain can't process what you're watching: the weak tremor across your eyelids, and the hand, someone's hand, a stranger's hand gripped around a rock that is attached to an arm that is joined to a body out of frame with a face you can't remember, no matter how hard you stare into the eye of the
TV
, some native you did not bother to meet, some Colombian or Brazilian or Huberto or Benyamin or Laura whose name you did not learn, whose face you did not memorize and whose voice you could not understand, whose hand is rising over you, whose mouth is lowering over you, whose teeth are in your brain now—

A cameraman is in the sky somewhere, yelling Roll film, come on, andiamo! He's fine!

Mud is in your mouth. Blood is in your mouth.

Who are you? Your voice says, battling the music. Why are you doing this?

Your voice screams, and you listen.

The VCR whirs, and you listen.

Your skull opens wider.

The cannibal takes a part of you up in his mouth, and then he opens his teeth wide, to show that it is gone.

Author's Note

T
his is a work of fiction, and its characters and events are the product of my imagination. In its creation, I have drawn inspiration from many histories, memoirs, oral histories and works of fiction about Colombia's drug trade and armed conflicts,
US
–South American relations and the complexities of filmmaking in this area. I owe a special debt to Ruggero ­Deodato's amazing film,
Cannibal Holocaust
,
and the aftermath of its release, which provided a starting point for my imaginings.

Acknowledgments

I
owe my highest gratitude to three women: my extraordinary editor, Kathryn Belden; my tireless and inspiring agent, Jin Auh; and my mentor and teacher, Kathryn Davis, who has read
We Eat Our Own
more times and encouraged me in more ways than anyone else—without all you have given me, this book would not exist.

Thank you to the entire
MFA
program at Washington University in St. Louis and especially my teachers there: Marshall Klimasewiski, who was the first person to tell me this project could be my first book, and Danielle Dutton, for crucial guidance.

Thank you to Kris Kleindienst, Jarek Steele, and the entire staff of Left Bank Books for friendship, home, support of so many kinds, and creating an irreplaceable space for readers and writers.

Thank you to the many writers in the
MFA
program who read and offered essential feedback on versions of this book, in addition to their friendship: Ross Rader, Dolly Laninga, Maria Xia and Gwyneth Merner; Catherine Chiodo, Avery Gallinat, Rav Grewal-Kök, Jordan Jacks, Rickey Laurentiis, Ariel Lewis, Katie McGinnis, Caitlyn Tyler, and Phillip B. Williams.

Thank you to J. Robert Lennon and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, who read and offered essential critique on the chapters “Andres/El Puño” and “Irena,” respectively.

Thank you to Brody Klotzman, for her best guess on how a special effects team would have built an edible prop body in the jungle in the late '70s.

Thank you to the entire team at Scribner, especially David Lamb, for helping me find my title and for essential insight in the book's final stages.

Thank you to the entire team at the Wylie Agency, ­especially Jessica Friedman.

Thank you to my friends and family, for their love and support.

Thank you to my partner, Chris Bowman, for everything.

About the Author

© CHRIS BOWMAN

K
ea Wilson received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she lives and works as a bookseller.
We Eat Our Own
is her first novel.

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 by Kea Wilson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-2831-8
ISBN 978-1-5011-2833-2 (ebook)