The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts(65)

He places Pips and me on a crate, back to back, our arms crossed behind our backs and touching one another, then takes a long chain-link metal rope, wraps our wrists individually and then together. He’s crouched low between us, giggling as he goes.

“It’s the strangest thing,” he says. “Right after my mom died, I made this animated short of a monster eating a girl and put it on YouTube. Just for fun, you know? It got a hundred thousand hits. Blew me away. Too tight?” he asks.

We wriggle our wrists.

“Not tight enough,” Pips says, then lets out a long, low evil-villain laugh. Her eyes don’t have that sleepy tilt Sunshine and I both have, and it’s true she’s younger than me by a few years, but there’s something else. Being here seems to have sparked some fuses that cause her to light up. Plus, she only has a few days left performing with the sideshow, and then she’ll make her way back down to her home in Florida, though nobody is really talking about that.

“I’m not gonna tie the ends of this chain-link,” Raymond says. “I’m just gonna tuck it behind your hands so when I tell you that you’ve struggled enough and can escape, you can just shake this off. That’ll be a funny joke. Right? Don’t you think that’ll be a funny joke?”

Pipscy starts thrashing around in rehearsed panic. By virtue of our attachment, I do, too.

“Can we be funny in this?” I ask.

“Oh sure,” he says. “As long as you also fight the chains and monster. But just know I might cut out some of your dialogue.”

“I make a very good angry hero,” Pips says.

“I can’t wait to feed these girls to the monster,” Sunshine says, eyes not leaving her phone’s screen. But she smiles, a lovely, genuine, private smile that breaks my heart a little with its tenderness, with its purported disinterest in what we’re doing but clear love for being down here together, for performing. Maybe even some love for us.

*

We begin filming, Pips and I tied up and bantering about escape plans. When we say something that Raymond thinks is particularly clever or actually seems to advance the improvised plot in some way, which is nearly never, he yells, “Pause!” and moves the camera to a different angle, and has us repeat the same line again. I suppose this is a trick of the cinema, to emphasize a line of dialogue by changing camera angles just before the line, jarring the viewer almost imperceptibly.

We finally break free from the chains by using our wits and are bickering about how to next escape from the room when suddenly Raymond yells “Freeze!”

He uncoils a long pink cloth that he hooks inside Vore’s mouth, unstretching it all the way to Pipscy’s waist. “Hold this,” he says, placing her hands against her hips as she holds the tongue in place, “and hold still.” He runs back to the camera, takes a few seconds of film, and returns to Pipscy, wrapping the tongue a little farther around her. He tells her to hold still, runs back to the camera, and repeats this series of actions until Vore has her coiled inside his tongue and pulls her into his mouth.

“I’ll fix all this in editing,” he says, “but for now, Pipscy, I need you to yell and kick and fight, flail your legs out of Vore’s mouth as much as you can without actually breaking the monster in half, and when I give you the okay, slide down his throat.” She obliges.

“Finally, she’s dead!” I yell toward Vore’s empty mouth when we begin rolling again. Sunshine’s turn. You can hear her five-inch heels tapping and thumping as she enters the frame. She’s in a leather corset and tiny black booty shorts and, in all ways, looks like she knows what she’s doing. I keep hoping my years of school plays will become useful any moment here, but so far I’m relying on overacting and a poor imitation of whatever the other girls are doing. Luckily, my time is nearly up.

Sunshine backs me up with accusations until I’m just outside Vore’s green, flaky lips. She pushes me in. Here we pause again so Raymond can best adjust the angles of my body for consumption. I am ready to be eaten by the monster. I’m ready to give myself an out, to take myself offstage, to enter a pool of monster stomach acid and let myself break down. When I slide down his mouth and arrive at the bottom, I am warned against hitting my head on the washing machine. I’m told to look out for rug rash on the belly from all that sliding. I’m told to go sit quietly in the back of the basement until it’s time for my final shot, the one where all three of us tangle our bodies on top of a blue cloth and are digested together within the frame of the camera because it is not enough to be consumed, all evidence of life must also disintegrate.

*

At 5:15 a.m., Raymond drops us off back at the fairgrounds. He hands each of us one hundred bucks. He’ll spend the next month or two editing our video before he releases it.

“I have high hopes for this one,” he says as we get out of the car. “I think I’ll make my money back in the first week. They’re gonna love it.”

I crawl into my bunk to sleep for two hours before we open again.

*

This is who I am now:

A headless woman.

A four-legged woman.

An inside talker for the bed of nails act, sitting on the strong man as he lies on the nails.

An inside talker for the contortionist act. This is my most important role. I am now a moneymaker.

My new world is full of boxes. The boxes I put my head inside, the semi’s container we live inside. I run between acts as the show cycles through from first act to last every thirty minutes, the same pattern of movement between my four acts, so that already by noon on opening day of being an inside performer, I could have shown up where and when I was needed almost automatically, my feet moving by themselves.