Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

Propp nods as they reach the top of the stairs and start to walk across the open lot toward the freight yard.

“Still,” he says, “it’ll make a great film.”

They walk the rest of the way in silence until they come to the tracks where a string of freight cars, all the color of deep rust, sits for the engine to pull out. Every other car bears the faded words Elias Freight on its loading doors. The last car has its doors rolled up, but Sylvia can’t see anything inside.

“What are they hauling?” she asks.

He gives a small laugh and just stares at her.

“Where are they headed?” she tries.

“South, I think. Or maybe west.”

They stand and listen to the diesel powering up until Sylvia makes herself say, “Why after all these years? You were just a dead milkman to me. I didn’t even have a face for you.”

He looks at her as if she’s talking another language, but he doesn’t say a word.

“Didn’t you love her?” is all she can manage.

He shifts his stance, stares at the freight car, finally says, “If you mean the woman in the pictures—”

“You know who I mean.”

“Yes, I love her.”

“Then why?”

His eyes start to blink. Sylvia can see him pulling in on his lips. And she still can’t make it easy on him.

“My whole life came apart this week,” she says. “You’re leaving now. Can’t you just tell me why you did this to me?”

“I didn’t do it,” he says. “I swear to you Sylvia—”

“Just confirm it or deny it,” she says. “Are you my father”

When Propp hugs her, crushes her against himself, kisses her forehead for a long minute, she can feel the shake of his crying. She can feel his tears against her forehead.

He breaks off and moves for the car as the train starts to roll. He jogs along the next to the tracks for a second as he heaves his bag up and into the boxcar. Then he picks up speed, chooses his moment, and throws his body inside, the last leap that will take him out of Quinsigamond forever. Sylvia watches the train roll out for a few minutes, slip down the rails like film rolling into a projector. Twenty-four frames a second.

She turns away and looks at the small stack of photos in her hand. They’re shots of her from the other night. The shots of her as the Madonna. Sylvia in the remnants of the Berkshires nightgown. Perched on the marble base, looking up into the balcony. Half a dozen shots of Sylvia as an icon. Sylvia as a myth-figure.

Except for the last picture. It’s clearly not part of the set. It’s an old, faded image. A portrait shot. Full-face this time. No shadows. Nothing obscured. It’s a photo of her mother as a young woman. Looking out at the photographer with a shy smile, leaning over a wooden crib, wearing a housecoat. And lifting an infant, delicately, perfectly, into the air.

After leaving her duffel at St. Benedict’s Diner, she comes back up onto the street and starts to walk. She avoids the Canal Zone, makes a loop around its perimeter and enters Bangkok Park from the other direction.

She walks down Goulden Ave until she comes to the intersection of Granada, picks a corner and takes a position sitting on the curb. She waits an hour. Then another. No one bothers with her. Now and then she pulls the camera from the cover of her jacket and takes aim at something easy. A neon sign that flickers the words Brasilia Beef. A young Hispanic kid stumbling out of the Granada Cantina, steadying himself against a light post. A bicycle that glides past under the direction of an individual whose face is totally hidden by a hooded sweatshirt.

When a pack of bodies turns the corner onto Granada, she expects to be overtaken by one of the Park gangs, until she notices that the individual in the center of the group is carrying a movie camera up on his shoulder. It’s that young kid — Jakob Cain — the boy she met at Der Garten and the coffee shop. He’s surrounded by a circle of thugish-looking bodyguards, all of them dressed in Schickian khaki safari jackets with epaulets and waist belts. As they pass, silent, all the eyes wide, the boy nods to Sylvia and aims his movie camera in her direction. Then they continue down the street. Sylvia lifts her Aquinas and focuses in at the stitching on the back of one of the jackets—

Amerikan Pictures Presents

Little Girl Lost

coming soon to a theatre near you

She aims and she focuses, but she doesn’t shoot any pictures.

Sometime just before dawn, when the street is momentarily deserted and the last breeze of the night blows the lighter trash down the length of Goulden like filthy ragweed, she spots a beat-up old pickup rounding the corner and rolling toward her. It’s an old Ford covered with huge blotches of paint primer and bearing an out-of-state license plate. Sylvia stands up and the driver’s window comes down a crack. She sees a woman behind the wheel who has gone too long substituting coffee for sleep. The driver’s eyes are blinking and her head gives a sharp twitch just before she speaks.

She says, “Is there a motor lodge around here?”

Sylvia stares at her. The woman is wearing a pink nylon smock and a white plastic nametag, about the size of a stick of gum, that reads Gretta. Sylvia looks at the foot well on the passenger side. It’s loaded with empty brownstained paper cups and a half-folded road map.

“You’re on the wrong side of the city.”

Gretta looks out at the street and says, “Is there a gas station near here?”

“Take your next left,” Sylvia says. “In a couple of miles you’ll hit an all-night place.”

Gretta nods and Sylvia waits for a thank you, but the truck just rolls away slowly and swings onto Goulden. Sylvia brings the camera up and follows her movement. In the rear bed of the pickup, wedged between piles of ragged luggage, her face hanging over the tailgate and looking out on everything she’s passing, is a young girl. Maybe ten or twelve years old. Her hair is pulled back into some kind of loose braid and her bottom lip has a tired pout to it. She’s holding something in her hands. Her eyes are wide and there’s a good chance she’s staring at the photographer.

Sylvia twists the lens a bit, barely nudging the girl’s face into sharper focus, gingerly pushing for just that much more clarity.

And then she opens the shutter.

The title of the movie is The Rosy Hours of Mazenderan. It’s a foreign film, dubbed carelessly into a hilarious English. The actors and actresses move their mouths for long moments after the noise of their dialogue has finished. The images on the screen are unusually faint, as if a bulb had burned out and no one had bothered to replace it.

The woman, at one time an actress of some renown in certain circles, sits behind the wheel of her Citroen and tries not to make judgments about the performances she’s viewing. She tells herself it would be unfair given the quality of the print she’s seeing and the fact that she’s viewing the movie outdoors, on a shabby drive-in screen .

Instead of forming a critical opinion, she lets the images roll out before her, get processed by her optic nerves without any accompanying valuation or assessment. She knows there are people who would tell her she’s deceiving herself, that this is an impossible feat. She has nothing but contempt for these people.

The former actress is being fed popcorn by her companion, a classic drifter possessed of a nervous demeanor. The drifter is reclining with his head in the woman’s lap, a bucket of popcorn propped on his stomach and his long legs hanging over the car door.

The drifter was hitchhiking when he met the woman. He was leaving the city with no specific destination in mind. He looked disheveled and distracted, the kind of man you might cast as a serial killer in a horror movie. He was tall and round-shouldered with a crown of clown-like red hairand doughy skin. He looked as if he’d only recently ended a hunger strike.