Night Film(148)

Brad’s briefcase dominates the film so entirely—Emily becomes obsessed with it, desperate to steal it, break the locks, see what her husband was stowing inside—it was actually a main character, featured in more shots than Brad himself. Neither Emily nor the audience is ever allowed to see the inside, a narrative device Tarantino used in Pulp Fiction fifteen years later.

In the film’s third act, during the confrontation between Emily and Brad, when they fight each other—Emily convinced she must fend off a psychopath; Brad convinced his wife has gone crazy—the briefcase inadvertently slips down onto the floor between the bed and the wall. It remains there, unnoticed, tucked inside this tiny Vermont cottage, which, with Emily—an orphan—taken away to a mental hospital and Brad dead, will remain deserted for an unknown period of time.

The final shot of Thumbscrew is the briefcase, a slow tracking shot pulling out from under the bed, winding down the hall, out the front door past the police, into the woods, fading to black.

I rolled off the couch—some feeling had returned to my legs—and stepped across the room to the fireplace.

I walked over to the bookshelves. Thumbscrew, I remembered, had been made in 1978, and the worn-out paperbacks were from that time: Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Salem’s Lot, The Gemini Contenders. So was the geometric brown-and-mustard-yellow wallpaper, the lacquered furniture, the orange swag lamp hanging by the front door, the orange-tiled kitchenette, an old GE waffle maker on the counter.

The place had a frozen-in-time feel, as if life had stopped here mid-conversation. No one seemed to have set foot here in decades.

I stepped through the doorway, heading down the narrow corridor. It was dim. I fumbled my way, opening two false doors—they opened back into the warehouse—though the one at the end led into another room.

It was the Jacksons’ master bedroom. I moved to the closet and slid aside the door. Emily’s clothing hung along the racks, housedresses, a pair of bell-bottom jeans, pairs of platform sandals and go-go boots. I stepped to the other end, which had Brad’s clothes, wool slacks, tweed jackets.

I grabbed a pair of the brown corduroy trousers from the top shelf, and a yellow polyester button-down. And I put them on rapidly, because I didn’t want to even attempt to get my mind around the fact that I was donning Brad Jackson’s seventies-era clothes, that I was literally rummaging through Thumbscrew.

The slacks were a few inches short in the leg, but they fit well enough. So Ray Quinn Jr., who played Brad Jackson, unlike most Hollywood leading men, wasn’t a homunculus. I pulled on a red sweater far too tight in the sleeves, found a pair of argyle socks in the chest of drawers, an orange portable Philips record player on top, James Brown’s The Payback on the turntable. After putting them on, I was about to head back to the living room to regroup, when I stopped in the doorway.

I had a sudden vision of Wolfgang Beckman—how he’d shout at me, eyes bulging: “You stumbled, by accident, into Brad and Emily Jackson’s Vermont ranch house and it didn’t occur to you to look under the bed for the briefcase? You’re dead to me now.”

Indulging this hallucination, I crouched down, squinting under the bed.

It was too dark to see anything, so I stood back up, stepped to the bedside table, switched on the lamp, and yanked the bed away from the wall to get a better view.

Immediately, there was a clattering thump. It was there.

I stared at it in disbelief.

The infamous Samsonite fawn-colored briefcase.

It had been wedged against the wall and the other bedside table in the corner. I was shocked, and yet—what did Emily say in the film? Wherever the briefcase goes, Brad follows. I found myself looking over my shoulder to the empty doorway, half wondering if I was going to see Brad’s warped shadow projected on the hallway wall.

I grabbed the case by the handle—it was surprisingly heavy—and set it down on the bed.

I tried the latches. Locked. I realized then I knew the combination. Emily goes to great lengths to figure it out. It was the date that marked the sacking of Rome, the final blow in the decline of the Roman Empire, marking the onset of the Dark Ages.

410.

I spun the numbers into place. The locks popped open.

I lifted the lid.

It was piled with papers. I went through them, pulling out an issue of Time dated July 31, 1978, “The Test-Tube Baby” on the cover. Under that was a stack of student term papers, graded with handwritten comments. Marcie, you make a very nice argument that the Dark Ages were a natural rotation of history, but you need to go deeper.

When I saw what was underneath that, I froze.

Neatly folded in the corner was a boy’s plaid button-down shirt.

I picked it up, feeling a wave of revulsion as the shriveled rigid sleeves unfolded in front of me, as if they had a fragile will of their own.

The front of the shirt was stiff, covered in deep brown stains.

It looked harrowingly real, a real souvenir from a real murder. The fabric itself seemed beaten, as if residue of unimaginable violence had soaked and dried into the fabric.

It was a hell of a lot of effort to go through for a prop that never appears in the film. I recalled the ravaged white suits I’d found in Marlowe’s closet. I accessed the deepest, most tormented parts of myself, she’d said. Parts I was petrified of opening because I doubted I’d ever get them closed again.

Maybe Cordova’s films were real. The terrors on-screen, real terrors, the murders, real murders. Was it possible?