Oscar was hunched over his desk while Heidi stood waiting. He was focused on the contract the film producers emailed him a few days earlier. He looked up. A nervous chuckle replaced the nothing expression of his mind at work, “This is more money than I’ve ever made! Combined!”
His manager’s job was to reassure him, to keep him on-track. “Those psychopaths you conjure up have been an ATM for the studio for years.” She nodded at the contract, “This is where you cash-in.”
He returned to the enormous number on the contract and felt a panic rise from depths he didn’t even know existed, “What if I can’t live up to this? What if I can’t bring him to life?”
“You’ve got this, O. But, hey, only one schizo at a time, right? That Jekyll and Hyde creep you’re working on can wait until this one fills our bank accounts.” He nodded, understood. “Good,” she said. “I arranged for a car. It’ll be here at eight sharp. Be ready! You’ve got the itinerary?”
“The Algonquin, Paris Vendome, Holiday Inn Berlin, yada, yada, yada.” He tapped his noggin, “A steel trap. Nothing gets out.”
“That’s where the demons are born,” she said proudly.
“Damned skippy!”
Mandy, Oscar’s wife, entered his office from the hall. She stepped around Bruno the golden retriever, squeezed past her husband’s collection of Houston Astros memorabilia, including the prized José Altuve’s game-winning bat from the 2017 ALCS Game 6 trouncing of the Yankees, and handed Oscar his mail, “It’s a light day. Funny postcard, though. Even looks like your handwriting — hey! a fan! — but with anything but your opinion.” She laughed darkly, “I’m leaving before you vent your rage on the innocent.” She stepped from the room, and he found his way to the solid black postcard at the back of the stack. He turned it over, read its message, and laughed; his wife had been right.
“What’s so funny?” Heidi asked. He handed her the postcard. “What’s Event Horizon?”
Oscar was appalled, “You haven’t seen Event Horizon?” She stared at him with her I-don’t-give-a-fuck expression. “Where a mysterious force from a black hole causes everybody on a spaceship to start hallucinating?” He waited. “Murder? Mayhem?”
“Sorry. No go.”
His tone turned grave, “You’re fired!”
“Nice try.”
“Rent it tonight. I’m not kidding! The best two hours you’ll ever spend.”
“Yeah, that’s happening.” She nodded at the contract, “Sign on the dotted line, fanboy, then go pack your bags. We’ve got places to be.”
“Like the Stockholm Hilton and Piazza Navona Roma,” he said proudly as he signed the contract.
She pulled the paper from his desk and turned for the door, “Eight A.M. Try not to be late. L.A. awaits.”
Heidi exited the room and Oscar flipped the postcard in his hand and checked the top for a return address. It read simply “Austin, Texas,” and carried the local postmark. He again glanced at the message, “Event Horizon sucks!” He considered its likely source: this idiot on Twitter with whom he engaged in a tweet war over the old film. The effort was flattering, until the unease set in; how did some random guy on Twitter get his home address? Oscar entered his name and “address” into Google and clicked. His info was everywhere, like everyone’s, and included every address at which he had lived, from childhood through his and Mandy’s last house. But none of the websites listed the home they moved into just three months earlier. He sent Mandy a text: “Have you given our home address to anybody other than the usual?” A few beats. “No worries. Just curious.”
Mandy replied: “No one.”
Oscar: “Thx.”
Twenty-four hours later. Oscar stepped into a luxurious single at the Beverly Hotel in Los Angeles. A California king filled the center of the space. Two comfortable chairs, a table, and a sleek desk sat under a bank of windows. A bottle of champagne rested in a bucket of ice on the table. Next to it sat a postcard. On the card was written “Event Horizon sucks!” He laughed, Heidi was the best. “Nicely played.”
That night. Oscar and Heidi were returning from the studio in a large black car. Their plush ride was parked in rush hour traffic. “It’s only two blocks up. You wanna get out and walk?” Oscar asked.
“Nope!”
“Fair enough.” He took a sip of wine, “I got the postcard. You watch it yet?”
“What postcard? Watch what?”
“Event Horizon. The card you sent with the champagne.” She flashed him a scoffing side-eye. “That wasn’t you?”
“Do I look like I give a shit about some old sci-fi flick? We’ve had that talk.”
“Horror not Sci-Fi,” he mumbled. Traffic started to move.
Oscar parted with Heidi in the hotel lobby and was soon stepping fresh from his shower. He walked to the windows of his fifth floor room and looked down on a crowd of partygoers walking drunkenly from the hotel. Oscar loved fourth and fifth floor rooms. They were high enough to catch a glimpse over the horizon and yet low enough for his middle-aged eyes to capture details on the ground. It was the perfect analogy for that place where writers were required to play. He tossed his towel on the bed, grabbed a pair of worn red briefs from his suitcase, and slipped them over his short chubby legs.
Oscar stared mindlessly out the window. He missed his home. He missed Mandy. He had been traveling so much the past few years that both had come to feel less real than his stories. Success had a price. He picked up the postcard, studied the solid black front that was identical to the last one, reread its simple message, and again took note of the “Austin, Texas” postmark. He pushed the discomfort from his mind. Yes, this was 4×6 inches of weird, uncomfortable weird — the best kind of weird, he mused — but its only threat was a paper cut, and it was time for sleep; they had an early flight out. He dropped the card on the dresser and fell into bed.
Oscar and Heidi were trudging through San Francisco International Airport with their bags in tow. She sped up her pace, “Pick it up, stumpy, we’ve only got an hour!”
Jean Bernard (French, film critic) was Oscar’s sixth interviewer in two hours and the final of the presser. The Frenchman spoke a mile a minute with no effort to break the accent barrier. And if this pretentious French fuck wasn’t going to make the effort, then neither was Oscar, who answered “Yes” to every question the Frenchman posed. (Like anyone this side of the Atlantic was going to pay attention to this Parisian Bozo!)
Oscar and Heidi were again in the back seat of a large black car. And, again, they were drinking. “I hate the French,” he said.
“I’ve got no opinion of the country, but Bernard can make or break us there, and that’ll set the tone for the rest of Europe. So you better have kissed him after you blew him.”
“Kiss him, too? I’m not a whore!”
“You are, actually.” Seriously, “You treated him right, right?”
“He’s French.”
“What’s that mean?”
He shrugged and stared out the window.
Oscar stepped into his dark tiny hotel room, kicked off his shoes, and flopped onto the bed. He was already tired of their junket and they had two more weeks before they were done. One of those weeks would be spent in Europe. (He wondered if he had time to learn French but immediately dismissed the prospect. He’d blown up — if not blown — France; la République was toast.) “Fuck!”
Maybe it was the potential loss of Europe, or maybe it was the stress of knowing that he had become a big fucking deal who singlehandedly shouldered the massive expectations of a script that wasn’t even finished, but Oscar was feeling his success, and in the worst possible way. (How did a writer improve on Robert Louis Stevenson? What the hell he was thinking? And what was Heidi thinking?! She had cranked the P.R. to eleven on that project, and now the entire industry was buzzing about his ‘fresh take on a hundred-year-old classic.’) “I am so screwed,” he whined. And he missed Mandy.
He had to pee.
Oscar turned for the bathroom, glanced at the dresser, noticed a white rectangular reflection beneath the night’s gray light. “Where did this…?” He spun a nearly imperceptible turn as he searched for the familiar card’s courier. But no one was there. And yet he was certain that they were. Somehow. Somewhere. He picked up the card although he knew what it would say. He began at the top with the postmark and the return address — “Austin, Texas” — and then forced his eyes down through a current thick with fear. “Event Horizon sucks!” He placed the card back on the dresser and stepped to the door, where he slipped the chain in the slot, turned the knob, checked the deadbolt. “What are you afraid of?” he whispered to himself as he held tightly to the knob. He had no answer. But he knew that he was standing within that void where gods and insanity were born. It was a world in which he should have found the most comfort — the place he had exploited for years that had rewarded him with fame and, soon, fortune — but tonight he was no longer its master. He glanced back across the room at the postcard. How had it gotten there?
Oscar stormed into the bathroom and ripped the shower curtain aside. Nothing! He yanked the bathroom door quickly from the wall. Nothing! He walked angrily back into the room. “Who’s here?!” he screamed at nobody.
No body.
Oscar crawled into bed, pulled the covers tight to his chin, stared coldly at the ceiling, began humming the Full House theme at concert level volume. He squeezed his eyes shut and sang-screamed, “What ever happened to predictability?!”
Heidi was signing them in at New York’s Algonquin Hotel. Oscar was glaring at the hotel cat. The cat was glaring back. “What’s the feline equivalent of bastard?” Oscar asked.
His manager wasn’t in the mood, “What?”
“Nothing.”
The clerk gave Heidi the keys and she gave one to Oscar. “Hold up!” the young man said. “I forgot.” He handed her a postcard.
She presented the black card to Oscar. He stared at it in her hand and inhaled a deep calming breath (that wasn’t calming at all). She jabbed it at him, “Well?” He took the card, flipped it over, checked the Austin return. And then he laughed. That was all he could do. “What’s so funny?” Heidi asked.
“You need to rent Event Horizon,” he said giddily. She marched across the lobby into the elevator. “I’m not kidding!” he called from within eyeshot of the cat. “It’s terrific!” The lift’s doors closed between them.
Oscar sat at the window end of a Midtown hotel room across from a reporter from The New Yorker magazine. “I read in an interview that you gave to the French magazine Oi that the musical group Yes had been one of your biggest early influences,” she said. “That’s an unusual muse for a young writer. Can you elaborate?“
“There might have been a language barrier,” Oscar mumbled.
“Then I’ll ask the same question in fluent English. What artist or artistic creation most influenced you?” Questions like this were bullshit, of course. Writers weren’t influenced by any one particular thing. They were influenced by the exquisite matter the universe hurled at them like particles in an accelerator: colors, words, shapes, smells, and sounds that were consumed by their demented imaginations and shit out as “art.” A writer’s imagination was different today than it was yesterday and would be different tomorrow than it was today because their influences were everything; but they were most of all unknowable. And yet during these interviews, the products of which would be sandwiched between advertisements for foot cream and mascara, writers played along.
“Event Horizon,” he said. “That was my primary influence.”
“The old sci-fi film?”
“Horror. It’s horror! Yes.”
“I’ve never seen it. Why Event Horizon?”
The world’s ignorance toward one of the greatest movies of all time was beginning to irritate Oscar. First Twitter, then Heidi, and now this bitch. “Because it’s fantastic!” he screamed.
Miami, London, Stockholm, Berlin, Paris. Fuck, Paris. The skylines changed but the questions did not. Neither did the postcards, which arrived for Oscar at every stop through the end of the tour.
It was approaching midnight when Oscar stepped quietly into his office and slipped down the wall to the floor beneath his Astros collection. It felt good to be home. Yet this place had come to feel as foreign as it did familiar. Bruno rested his head on his master’s lap. Familiar. Oscar petted the dog and Bruno wagged. Oscar opened his new screenplay.
As Oscar flipped through his new story for the first time in two weeks, he was excited by the prospect of fresh eyes; time away helped you recognize the glitches in a creation that you often knew too well. But nothing registered as he scanned the white pages before him. His fuel was spent. He looked up from his script, “Come on, boy.”
Oscar rose to his feet and stepped to his desk, where he dropped into his chair and rifled through the mail Mandy had piled neatly by his lamp. At the bottom of the stack was another black card. He laughed, accepted the weirdness, wondered if it would ever end. He flipped the card over — “Event Horizon sucks!” — and shifted his eyes to the return. That was when he saw it. It was a small change, just two words in the reply-to line, but it robbed him of his breath. “Austin, Texas” had been changed to “Oscar’s Den.” He looked into the darkness of the unlit hall and his stomach tightened. This was a gag, right? Or was somebody in his house? And where was Mandy? He dropped the card to the desk and rose to his feet and retrieved José Altuve’s bat from the wall. “Follow me,” he said quietly to Bruno. Oscar stepped gently into the hall.
At the far end of the hall, last door on the right, was a bedroom that Oscar and Mandy had converted into a home theater with six comfortable recliners, a big screen TV, and a kick ass sound system. Flashes of blue light — flickers from the TV — exploded from beneath its door. Oscar raised the bat like he was preparing for a Verlander fastball and edged toward the opening.
Oscar’s light steps became tip-toes — short, silent, tentative — as he arrived at the door. He took a breath and gently grasped the doorknob.
Then, with an unrepentant and singular motion that both empowered and terrified him, he turned the knob, kicked the door open, and prepared to swing. A woman was sitting in one of the recliners. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she said cooly. The stranger’s face screamed “Sane when she has to be, crazy in her off-time” as she rose fearlessly to her feet. She stepped toward him.
“Stop!” he yelled.
“What?” she laughed, and she kept walking — twelve feet, ten feet, eight feet, six, five, four…
That’s when Oscar made his move, swung José’s bat like the Series depended on it. The first hit took out the woman’s left knee, the second her right, and she dropped to the floor. She looked up at him and begged him to stop. But Oscar kept swinging — at her legs, at her body, at her head. His impacts were brutal. The cops would call the pummeling “psychopathic” when they discovered her dead body at the first light of dawn. But, tonight, it — the feel of the bat reverberating up Oscar’s arms as it connected with her fracturing bones, the hypnotic yet monstrous sound of her organs vaporizing — was primeval in its allure, as beautiful as it was real, as the stranger cried out his name, “What are you doing, Oscar? Stop!!! My God, Oscar, stop!!!”
But Oscar did not stop. “Event Horizon is a great fucking movie!!!” he screamed as Mandy curled into a ball and begged her husband to stop killing her… until she begged no more.