Chapter 15
“DEZ?” HER MOTHER WHISPERS THROUGH the phone the next morning. “Is it really you?”
“Mom,” she exhales in bed, closing her eyes in bodily relief. “How’s Mo?”
“Don’t tell me where you are.”
Dez’s eyes open now. “You know where I am.”
She hears her mother’s quiet sob. “I tried calling, but your phone goes straight to voicemail.”
“I know. I’m sorry. This school, it’s—”
“It’s not real, is it?”
“What?” Dez flinches, sitting up in bed. Goose bumps rise on her arms. “Why would you say that?”
“No one’s heard of it, Dez. It’s not online, not on any map. That letter you showed me … it’s okay if you faked it.”
Dez feels her chest constricting. “Mom! Why would I … I would never. I’m here. I’m at—”
“It’s better if I don’t know. If this conversation never happened. You were scared. I understand. When you’re the only suspect—”
“No.” A sea of red swarms before Dez’s vision as she tries to get out the words. “They still haven’t found him? A man tried to rob us, tried to kill me. He stole my car and kidnapped Mo.”
“I know that’s what you said.”
“Because it’s true.”
“There’s just no evidence, Dez.”
But there is evidence. The eye she pulled out of his head.
Dez’s voice sounds far away when she says, “I’ll come home. I’ll tell them everything. I’ll fix this.”
“Don’t you dare.” Her mom’s voice is suddenly sharp. “Your brother’s still in the ICU. I need to be with him, undisturbed, not running around trying to bail you out of jail.”
“Mom!”
“Please don’t call again. If you care about this family, Desdemona, stay away.”
Her mother hangs up.
Dez drops the phone in a stupor. She doesn’t know what’s more disturbing. That her mother thinks she made up Acheron. That she doesn’t want Dez coming home. That she hadn’t even told her Mo’s prognosis.
Or that the police still have no evidence of the gunman who set fire to Dez and Mo’s entire world.
Dez didn’t make up her acceptance letter to Acheron.
And she didn’t make up the gunman. She looks at Rafe’s phone on the bed, thinking how yesterday she’d been desperate to get her own phone back in service.
She thinks of the voicemail Asher left as she was leaving town.
She has no access to it, doesn’t have his number to call him back.
And what would she tell him anyway at this point?
The conversation she’d wanted to have with him belongs to another version of Dez. She isn’t that person anymore.
She misses Silas. She wishes she had his number memorized so she could call him while she has access to a phone.
He’s probably texted her ten times since her phone died and is surely worried about her.
He’s starting nursing school next week, and she never got to tell him good luck, never got to tell him about Acheron. She never even got to say goodbye.
Has Silas heard about what happened to her brother? What would he think if he knew Dez was to blame for Mo’s burns?
She reaches for the pill bottle in the pants she dropped by her bedside last night. She pours the melted snow out in her sink and takes out the eye. She sets it on her nightstand and stares into its inky black iris.
She thought it would have shrunk by now, decomposed or changed, but the ice must have preserved it.
The viscous optic nerve looks fresh. And the expression in the iris is every bit as alive as it was that night.
Vengeful, malicious, dark as hell. She would never have hurt her brother if the owner of this eye had given her a choice.
She will not let this one-eyed thug keep her from the people she loves.
Not for long.
“Last night, we experienced a tragedy,” Dr. Moriah says to the first-years gathered in the Kohenet Lecture Hall hours later.
When Dez and Simon slink in, late again, fresh from their breakfast shift, Moriah stands on the dais, her white cobra a slithering snakeskin belt around her waist.
Dez thinks of the snakeskin she found in her bed the night before, after Rafe left. What did it mean? How would a snake have gotten into Dez’s room? Was the director somehow watching them? Sending Dez a signal? Meaning what?
Dez doesn’t know who she can ask about this. She has no one to confide in yet at Acheron. Not about something so strange.
Next to Moriah, Zarlengo hasn’t varied his Old West undertaker style. There’s a third faculty member with them today, a man Dez hasn’t yet met. He’s in his seventies, wiry, with a three-piece houndstooth suit, a white handlebar mustache, and inquisitive eyes behind round spectacles.
He’s watching her as she and Simon take their seats.
Dez feels oddly formal in her Acheron-issued black slacks, whose label reads 100% vicuna wool, and the crisp white button-down shirt that seems like it was tailored for her.
She may look the part of a film student at a fancy school, but she still doesn’t feel like one. At least there’s a desk for her today.
When she sits, she notices there’s an envelope on the desktop. It has her name on it, like someone knew she would find herself here. She flashes it at Simon. He shows her a corresponding envelope from his desk with his name written on it.
Dez stares at her envelope, tuning Moriah out as she rehashes the story Yael told them last night.
Something about it still doesn’t ring true, but Dez feels powerless to challenge it, especially coming from Acheron’s director.
Dez is still raw from the conversation with her mother, still wound tight from last night in her bedroom with Rafe.
Which she dreamt about, of course. Which she cannot stop replaying in graphic detail in her mind.
It’s embarrassing to admit, even to herself, that Rafe’s kiss was the best sex Dez has ever had. That his mouth on hers alone had brought her deeper pleasure than any man’s whole body has before.
Imagine what more Rafe could make her feel.
What had happened to change his mind so suddenly? Dez can’t find any explanation when she recalls the scene.
At some point, she’s going to have to face him. And it’s going to suck. Because she needs more of what they did in her bedroom. Whereas he couldn’t run away from her fast enough.
“Our sadness aside,” Moriah says, visibly lifting her shoulders as the cobra flicks its tongue, “today is an exciting day. We’ve rescheduled your introduction to the Vault for this morning.
You’ll soon begin your first assignment.
But first each of you will receive your genre designations from Dr. Zarlengo, as well as your security clearances—”
“Mind’s-eye access,” the stranger on the stage corrects Moriah, and Dez leans forward, intrigued by the sound of this.
“Excuse me, your mind’s-eye access,” Moriah says, “courtesy of our Dr. Ezekiel.” Her gaze travels around the room.
“Your mentors will be waiting to escort you through today’s events, to see that you are all well settled in your Lenses in the Vault.
I look forward to reviewing the work each of you will soon begin. ”
With that, Moriah, her snake, and Dr. Ezekiel exit the lecture hall, leaving Zarlengo to bellow:
“Genre! Inside your envelopes, each of you will find the genre for your first assignment. Knowing which genre you’ll be working in will help you determine how to structure your film.
Genre sets our expectations: What kind of experience are we going to have when we engage with a film, as filmmakers, and as the audience? ” he says. “Open your envelopes.”
Dez opens hers, pulling out the white card where she finds the word DRAMA in large calligraphed letters.
She flashes her card at Simon, who shows her his: COMEDY.
In the row in front of her, Dez glances at the card Alice Quinn, Yael’s protégé, pulls out: HORROR.
Alice gasps and pushes the card back inside, tucking the envelope between the pages of her bullet journal. Dez watches Alice, who seems to fit in here even less than Dez. She wonders how Alice feels about being paired with Yael.
“Every genre has its trappings!” Zarlengo shouts, launching into a lecture.
“Your task is to fine-tune the viewer’s experience according to your designated genre.
Those working in Tragedy: tear the viewer’s heart out.
Horror, keep them up at night in abject fear.
Comedy, lie to them that the world can be made whole and right.
And Drama, you must show your viewer just enough nuance to make them think their lives have meaning.
Better yet, that they’re in charge of their destinies. ”
Dez and Simon share a look.
“But they are not in charge,” Zarlengo says in a bone-chillingly low voice. “No, they never are. We are in charge of how the story’s remembered. What a magnificent responsibility.”
“Is he actually bananas?” Simon asks out of the corner of his mouth.
But in a way, Dez is feeling Zarlengo’s lecture.
They are at the dawn of their careers, at a crossroads with their artistic souls on the line.
And some of them—or maybe just Dez—are also at a crossroads with their literal souls on the line.
She’s fucked up the rest of her life. She cannot fuck up here.
“Later today in the Vault,” Zarlengo says, “you’ll receive your first film subject.
For every subject, there will be one Scribe and one Visionary assigned.
Scribes, you’ll begin by researching your subjects, listening to their voices using the archives in the Vault, until you can hear them more clearly than you can hear your own thoughts.
You’ll write a script to pass along to your corresponding Visionary, but it won’t be like any script you’re familiar with.
These are thought-scripts, the inner world of your subject put into the clearest words you can find. ”
Simon and Dez trade glances, and she senses that he’s as lost as she is.
“Visionaries!” Zarlengo shouts. “Using the scripts that arrive from your scribes, you will marry the inner world of your subject with the visual outer world of scene. And before any of you start vision boarding your precious opening images or your tonal comps, you must locate the wound.”
“Did you say, the wound?” Paul Rowan asks from the front row, furiously scribbling notes. “Or the womb?”
“For an artist, there is no difference,” Zarlengo says. “The wound is where art is born. Seek the rawest, most vulnerable place within your subject. Press on the bruise. Then begin.”
Dez thinks about this. She once read that every child carries the wound of its parents’ unlived lives. It’s an idea Dez doesn’t like to think about, which tells her it’s a good one.
Her own parents, married too young and only because Dez was on the way, never really stood a chance.
In Dez’s earliest memories, her dad was mean and angry, and her mom was a shell.
An unlived life. Dez thinks of the scar on her wrist, the one she got trying to protect her mom from the deep fryer at the Dairy Barn when she was four years old.
It’s the first real pain she remembers, and the first time she learned that her instinct to help those she loved could backfire catastrophically.
That maybe everyone was better off if Dez didn’t try. She learned this again with Mo.
Maybe that’s why Dez has always dreamed of ways to escape her home. Because on some level, she fears they’re better off without her. Because maybe if she’s far away, she can start a new story, a new life. The one her mother never got to live out when she got pregnant with Dez.
She’s done it now, gone far away, but it doesn’t feel the way she thought it would. She’s lonely and she misses them.
She thinks about Moses, his wound. Aside from the very obvious one Dez gave him, he carries one inside himself just like she does.
He grew up in the same house, with the same parents, same conditions as Dez, but where she projected her pain out into the world, into her art, Mo turned all his pain inward. Then he turned to drugs.
She’s thinking of all this—the heaviness all families bear; her own wrenching, present circumstances; the drama of it all and what she might be able to do about it—when Zarlengo dismisses the class.
“Go and think and feel and be inspired,” Zarlengo says. “Soon you’ll become one with your subject.”
The other students stream out of the classroom, but Dez hangs back, telling Simon she’ll meet him later. She finds Zarlengo alone.
“Dr. Zarlengo?”
“Ms. Rae.”
“I wanted to ask about our film assignments.”
“You’ll receive them in the Vault. Your mentor will answer any questions.”
“But I have an idea for the film I want to make.”
Zarlengo squares himself to face her and gives her a withering look. “Exactly where do you think you are, Ms. Rae?”
“I know where I am, and I know what I want to do.”
He forces a smile that looks like a knife. Rustling through his briefcase, he pulls out a library book and hands it to Dez.
She looks at the title: The Genius of the System.
“Read that,” Zarlengo says. “It explains how when you work in film, it’s never up to you.”
“Dr. Zarlengo, my brother—”
“Your brother?” Zarlengo laughs. “What makes you think I give a damn about your brother? I don’t ever want to hear about your brother again. Or your mother. Or your fucking uncle for that matter.”
“But—”
“Look, Ms. Rae, there’s nothing to debate. You’ll make the films we tell you to. Understand?”
Dez shakes her head. “No, I don’t understand.”
“That sounds like a personal problem,” Zarlengo says, packing up his papers and heading for the door. “See that it’s solved before you enter the Vault.”