3000 Beats Per Second
A Short Story
Andrew Berg
3000 Beats Per Second
Copyright 2009 by Andrew Berg
All Rights Reserved
Smashwords Edition 2009
Cover Design: Andrew Berg
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Here: Tonto signals a passage of time. Sings-Like-a-Bird holds a piece of aluminum foil at an angle to the moon, reflecting the light towards the make-up artist’s closed eyes. Nothing. Tonto signals another passage of time. Kills-Big-Bear opens his mouth and sings in all the light he can. The make-up artist doesn’t move. Jesus, Tonto says as he begins recording, this could take forever.
The body of the greatest make-up artist ever was found naked and bald in the East River last week. The body floated for three days. One passenger commented that the Staten Island ferry came along and “knocked him in the head.” That’s how it happened though, the hull of the big boat connected with the make-up artist’s skull. It made a sound just loud enough that a girl from Staten Island heard it as she stood shivering on the lower deck. When she looked over the rail, she saw something white in the dark waters below. The shape of a dead man floated face down. He spun slowly like a spiral galaxy into the boat's wake.
When the make-up artist was 30 and just making his mark on the industry, he did a fairly convincing drowned man for an early 60s horror film. It was a shame he couldn't be there to inspect his own death's soft hues and shades. He’d have found it to be excellent research for work on gangster films. As much as he would have loved it however, the girl from Staten Island could not look. Instead she went and ordered herself a coffee and sat in the empty heaviness near a porthole at the bottom of the boat. The passengers of the boat floated silently in the middle of the night. All of them plus one dead man waited for the Coast Guard. The girl from Staten Island had no idea that the man whose head she heard crack against the hull of the ferry was a make-up artist. No one on board knew that. The make-up artist was just another “floater.”
Formal poetry is sometimes found on bathroom walls. For instance the girl from Staten Island had to use the restroom after a half-hour delay and nearly a full cup of coffee,. She went to the bathroom and sat down to pee and felt very cold just as the boat began to move again. She read the graffiti on the wall of the stall. She read, RAGE RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT! and beneath that, I FUCKED MY BOSS!
Coincidentally the make-up artist's assistant wrote the more vulgar of those two stall entries on her way home from work only a week earlier. She wrote 'I FUCKED MY BOSS!' in eyeliner with trembling hands. After flushing she threw the eyeliner in the toilet, then took off her heels and stood that way like a rag doll woman. She stood that way and cried.
Upon reading the writing on the wall, the girl from Staten Island felt like laughing. Rage, Rage..., it sounded funny as she sat peeing. But she felt guilty for laughing, ...considering, she told herself, ...considering. She recalled the sound his skull had made muffled by the rush of water and that put an end to the laughing. With pursed lips she finished peeing, wiped, flushed, got up and kicked the stall door hard. Then she bent into that stall door. The girl from Staten Island felt the cold metal against her face. She felt as if standing there like that maintained a rigid tension essential to keeping the boat moving and the planet spinning.
The make-up artist had always been fascinated by the evolution of theatrical blood as the studios changed from black-and-white to color film. When he was 41, he did a Western in Hollywood: bullet holes, chapped lips, dirt, the rotten-mango tinge of ‘the fever.’ The make-up artist had become particularly engrossed with creating the fatal bullet wound for a villain named Victor Black.
"Right between the eyes!” the director said accenting each word with a tap of his pointer-finger on the make-up artist’s own forehead.
“This,” the director shouted, “was the result of death at the hands of an artist. Get it right! It’s a close-up!”
The make-up artist spent two hours on that one little hole between the eyes of the fidgety prima donna who played the notorious Victor Black. In the end they hung Victor Black, and the bullet hole was washed off like so much infantry blood spilled on the endless battlefields of film and television.
When the Coast Guard called, the make-up artist's assistant couldn't bring herself to identify the body. She’d been his assistant for two years. It was the best job she’d ever had but then she went and fucked him. Then he went and got naked and dead in the river and she lost it. Instead of dealing she simply packed her apartment in a truck and drove all of her things and herself back to California.
Five years later the make-up artist's assistant will forget crying in the Staten Island Ferry bathroom. Six years later she will forget writing I FUCKED MY BOSS! on the stall door. When she is 63 and staying in a cheap hotel in San Jose, she will lie in a bed that smells too clean, watching Apocalypse Now (edited for television), and say “I fucked a bald man once.” But her sleeping husband won't notice, and she’ll turn off the TV and fall asleep to the sound of the ice machine above her. She will never speak of the make-up artist again.
The girl from Staten Island waits with the throng of agitated passengers to de-board. All around her it smells like the daily shit of being human in Winter: damp wool, wet dogs, stale, dry skin and the frozen perfume of the dump. The man ahead of her lights a cigarette and she’s almost relieved. All the people's faces are lit by the intermittent red flashing lights of a docked Coast Guard boat. She hears words around her like ‘bloated,’ and ‘blue,’ and ‘dead.’
The make-up artist slept restlessly the night before he died. He’d never touched the waters where his body would be found. He never really considered it water, only what's beneath the bridge when you drive over it. Even as he lie awake that last night staring at the ceiling above his bed, there was no thought of water. Instead he closed his eyes and saw the usual succession of plain, washed, immovable faces that always haunted him during bouts of insomnia. None of them appeared more beautiful than another. They just appeared one after another like the 124 Navajo extras he’d touched up to lie down and be dead for 10 minutes in one of MGM’s big pictures. The vision gave him the feeling of being eternally needed. He thought of himself as the gatekeeper to a world of illusion. Without make-up on film an actor is as pale, and affectless as a ghost. Even the Hollywood dead will appear more alive than the hero with no make-up. He often joked that he had the most secure profession in the business.
“Even the dead need a make-up man!” he’d say.
When the ferry groaned to a stop, the balance onboard shifted; the dull but unexpected heave of a craft slowing suddenly in water. A tourist from Viet Nam was taking a picture of her sister at the rear of the boat. There didn’t seem to be enough light but she tried anyway. She wanted to get the statue of liberty glowing in the background. This shift of balance, the slow swell of dark water, made the woman taking the picture drop her camera. The camera bounced. The cover came open, and the film unspooled to the exposure of night. The girl and her sister both knelt to the camera as though it might break more if they touched it. They could not hear the girl from Staten Island yelling “It’s a body! It’s a body! Oh my God, it’s a fucking body!” They were bent over the camera whispering in Vietnamese accents to one another, “Rockefeller, Trump, and Battery Park,”
At 11 years old one of the greatest make-up artists of all time constructed a teepee in his parent’s backyard. The structure was made of cheap tarp and plastic pipes, and he had no help building it from anyone. Even back then he did his own war-paint; the ceremonial markings of an exclusive tribe of one. He saw a western once where the Indians talked and prayed a lot in their teepee. Because he had no tribe he spoke to an ancestral tribunal of spirits whom he named Sings-Like-A-Bird, Kills-Big-Bear, and Tonto. Using a sawed-off broom handle was the best he could do for a peace pipe. His prayers were mainly about the warding off of bullies and safe passage for dead pets.
There was a telescope placed at the entrance of the teepee which he said he’d received from the “White Ghost,” as a way of explaining it to Tonto. With the telescope he could watch his mom through the kitchen window at the back of the house. Tonto always hated the telescope. “Why do you want to look at things so big like that?” Tonto is always asking. The make-up artist has no answer.
It’been a very long time now that Sings-Like-A-Bird, Kills-Big-Bear and Tonto have been singing for the make-up artist. Tonto is sure that they have the songs all wrong. They harmonize using the sounds of M-16s, Cowboy theme songs, and running water. They beat Tupperware drums with wooden spoons in the hopes that the make-up artist will wake up and come back to life. The make-up artist has been dreaming a long time now; “Ever since the White Ghost brought that damned devil’s eye!” Tonto often says as he paces the teepee. Regardless of his hatred for it, Tonto checks the telescope between songs.
“Just the moon,” Tonto tells Kills-Big-Bear.
“Nothing!” relays Kills-Big-Bear into Sings-Like-A-Bird’s nearly deaf right ear.
Sings-Like-A-Bird doesn’t flinch. He begins a song of his own in the key of absolute silence. Tonto and Kills-Big-Bear take to the Tupperware at 3000 beats per second. It is the most powerful song they know. It is a song with a gravity so strong nothing can escape it.