Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

A handful of women break out of the assembly and run forward to the steps of the Skin Palace. They’re carrying what look like brightly colored plastic rifles. They form a fairly precise line, bring the rifles up and buttress them against their shoulders and fire. Fat streams of water shoot fifty feet into the air and Sylvia realizes they’re firing those super squirt guns, the kid’s toys that are so popular lately. But when the wind comes and she gets the heavy chemical odor of gasoline or lighter fluid, she knows they’re not squirting water. Their liquid barrage is arcing, making it above Paige’s head and soaking the screening sheet.

“They’ll burn down the goddamn building,” Sylvia says to Propp and jumps down from the mailbox.

When the gunners exhaust their spray tanks, Paige turns her back to the crowd, clasps her hands together around her candle, and throws it into the air. It sails, starts to dive and bounces off the middle of the sheet, the central image of the crucified woman. The fabric catches immediately, starts to burn, flames licking upward to begin a run of consumption. And the mob goes crazy with screams and whistles and horn-blowing. The fire increases its strength, gaining on the sheet, feeding faster on the accelerant with every passing second. The images of beating and torture and humiliation start to dissolve upward and outward into a charred black that wastes into smoke. The drizzle is having no effect on the blaze.

Sylvia watches, drunk on the spectacle, shivering. She watches the crucified Madonna begin to blacken and instantly fade. She watches the woman in agony begin to crumble upward and vanish like a magic trick that’s performed too fast for understanding, her misery dissolving instantly with each lick of flame. And as Sylvia stares, she goes into one of those helpless moments when sound seems to ebb away, when all that’s left is a very narrow field of vision, as if her eyes can no longer pivot in their sockets, as if her pupils were frozen into a singular position that assured her brain she’d take this one image in.

Only this image.

And in that instant of locked-up, intensified vision, she sees the explosion.

TIGHT SHOT — THE EYE OF HUGO SCHICK

as seen framed in the round, black circle that is the perimeter of the lens. He is looking through the Panaflex. He is a maniacal cyclops, insatiable and feeding on just this latest meal of manipulated imagery. But it is to be the last meal for the Doomed Artist, as we pull back to

WIDE SHOT — INT HENRICK GALEEN MEMORIAL STUDIO

where the entire cast of Don Juan Triumphant are engaged in an immensely complicated orgy, well on its way to a synchronized and unanimous crescendo as orchestrated by Hugo Schick from his position behind the camera.

TRACKING SHOT — THE MOUNTAINOUS DAISY CHAIN OF WRITHING FLESH

as the camera passes face after glimmering face contorted into masks of imminent, passionate explosion.

MED SHOT — HUGO SCHICK, THE DOOMED ARTIST

as he pulls back from the camera and drops his face into his hands and weeps with the realization of his achievement. CAMERA takes the place of Hugo’s eye and looks through his lens to see

WIDE SHOT — INT HENRICK GALEEN MEMORIAL STUDIO

as the walls dissolve, implode, cave inward and are replaced by new and moving walls of fire, waves of rolling blue flame that stretch from collapsing floor to collapsing ceiling, a new world of inferno replacing instantly the prior, physical world. Sound track fills with a chorus of screams, ultimate pleasure succumbing to ultimate pain. The mountain of coupled flesh is consumed by a Technicolor holocaust in special effects display that could only be engineered in hell itself.

FINAL SHOT — THE FACE OF HUGO SCHICK

as the Doomed Artist’s eyes sear and melt and fade.

Possibly, Sylvia sees it with a clarity that no one else in this mob can achieve. She sees the first-floor windows blown outward to the street, the shards of glass raining down on the instantly scrambling and screaming crowd, the way the gust of flames roll outward to the street, like the fire was liquid, like it was some transplanted ocean wave of orange and blue, coasting, ball-like, jetting through the portals of the Skin Palace windows. And then the second-floor windows follow suit, shattering in unison as if detonated, tremendously hot air pushing outward over the street, over the bodies colliding with one another, the heat singeing the hair of the closest protesters. The building seems to be belching flames, spitting tongues of fire from every orifice.

And, like a perverse reflex she can no longer control, Sylvia flashes on Tara being burned to the ground in Gone With the Wind. On the disastrous skyscraper in The Towering Inferno. On John Wayne in Hellfighters. Kurt Russell in Backdraft. On Spontaneous Combustion and Inferno in Paradise and The Flaming Urge …

She sees Paige Beatty down on her knees, bleeding from the side of her head, her back to the Skin Palace, shocked, not comprehending what’s happened, looking as if a hand had reached down from the sky and picked her up and pitched her back down to the pavement. Looking as if the Skin Palace itself has struck out at her, responded to her theatrical dissent with retaliation.

She sees people running everywhere, trying to cover their heads with their arms, packs of runners slamming into other packs. People scrambling, falling, trying to get anyplace else. Horrible slapstick.

And then the sound fades back in and Sylvia hears the noise of fireworks, that booming, thunderous, slightly muffled roar of explosion. And she’s in Propp’s arms and he’s trying to steer her away from the noise and light.

She lets her head turn in to his chest, but she keeps her eyes open. Someone checks into their backs and they go down onto the pavement, Propp on top, and Sylvia tears open the knee of her jeans and the skin underneath, Propp pulls her up by her right hand and they run through a gauntlet of fleeing, screaming individuals, people reduced to fleshy, charging panic by terror and confusion.

And then they’re down a side street, still moving, staying close to the storefronts and running away from the Skin Palace until Propp pulls her to a stop and says, “Your leg.”

They sit on the curbstone and Sylvia looks down and sees blood has soaked through her jeans. But she doesn’t feel any pain yet. Propp gets up on one knee as people run past. He takes out a white handkerchief, slowly pulls back the torn denim, and dabs gingerly at the wound.

He looks up at her and they stare at each other. Sylvia starts to hear sirens in the distance.

“In the cellar,” she says, “where we saw Fernando …”

Propp nods, holds the cloth flat against her knee.

“He must have been opening the gas lines. Boetell will blame the whole thing on Beatty and her people.”

Sylvia jumps back up to standing and the first blast of pain shoots from her knee up to her heart and she screams and starts to fall and Propp catches her in his arms.

“Schick is still inside,” she yells and Propp just stares at her.

“And all his people. They’re up in the studio. They’re up there filming.”

She struggles for a minute in his arms and then collapses against him.

He hugs her into himself. He says, “They might have gotten out,” into her ear.

Then he says something else, but Sylvia can’t hear what it is above her own sobbing and choked breathing. She feels like she’s going to pass out and she hangs onto Propp’s neck and the water pours through her eyes until everything she sees is obscured, refracted, almost glittering.

And she looks over Propp’s shoulder as he pats her back, rubs his hand against her back in circles, the way you’d attempt to calm an infant who’s trying to wake from a nightmare. The way you would try to comfort your child. Your baby. This small creature convulsing with fear and confusion and the absolute horror of the unknown.