—
Mel suggests a chronological format for the List movie, checking off items from first to last. “You are at the center,” Mel tells me. “Just start from square one—the Faulkner stuff, growing up, Teddy—and then sprint out to one thirty-eight. Don’t think about the guy, but think about what was going on in your life when you encountered the guy. We sort of chart your life through them. They’re the buildup to the stroke.”
“And then what’s the resolution supposed to be here?”
“You’ll tell me,” she says. “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”
But when we start work on the guys, we quickly discover how boring it is. Instead, I find myself drawing the Phillips-Stamper Cemetery as I’d imagined it during our night ride—twilight, the sky in streaks of deep purple and vermilion, casting a shadow over Faulkner as it twinkles, light and wavering. “Whoa,” Mel says. “What’s that?”
We do Faulkner, we do Shauna’s face. My father’s face. The layout of my high school. The old Magnavox set I watched television on. Teddy as a boy. Teddy’s dad’s room. The red plastic ashtray on his bedside table. What a Hustler centerfold would have looked like in 1994. “The only difference between then and now,” Mel says thoughtfully, “is bush. And implants. By 1994, all those adorable little tea-spout boobies would have been long gone.”
“Do we have to start there? At the stuff in the trunk? I mean, I don’t want that to be the launchpad,” I say.
“We don’t have to do anything,” she says. “We can put the story about your mom throwing that ottoman through the window and spirits coming at you through the TV first, so long as it does what we want it to in terms of starting the story. First the fight, then the pictures. One discovery, then the other.” Her eyes go wide and she starts rubbing her temples. “God, I sound like you, talking all this story technique shit. That’s scary.”
I think fleetingly of Teddy. I feel a final slice of guilt, oozing red, in my middle. “Sometimes I wonder if we maybe shouldn’t take out the photo scene,” I say. “Maybe it’s too much. You know?”
Mel pauses for a moment, searching my face. She takes off her glasses and rubs at her eyes before looking back up. Without glasses, her face looks smaller somehow, her eyes lighter, vulnerable. “Do you ever think about the kind of person you would have become if you hadn’t seen those pictures?”
“Let’s not go down this road.”
She puts her glasses on the drafting table. “Look. That story you told me is brutal. You saw pictures—real pictures—of little girls knocked out and tied up before you even knew what you were seeing. You were what, ten? You knew nothing then. You wouldn’t even have had your first period yet. Once you see something like that, you can’t unsee it. You were unwittingly exposed to the possibility of pain. Of violation. And I think a big part of you spent a lot of your life trying to feel something else.” She leans in. Her eyes are wider. She’s angry, I realize. She’s furious. This has been curdling inside her. “Anything that makes you in that way, anything that makes you hurt and hungry in that way, is worth investigating. No matter how disgusting the source.”
And there it is, in the middle of the room: a crystalline Mel Vaught reading of a life, fearfully, morbidly accurate. We both know she’s right. She’s right about the story, she’s right about the shape. She’s right about me. It’s only two steps from drawing the Phillips-Stamper Cemetery to drawing Honus Caudill. My fingers are thinking on their own now. I bury my head in my arms and smell the wool on my sweater, seeing blackness running through it all.
I raise up. “Okay. Let’s see what kind of story it makes,” I say. “Try it out.”