Looking out for Mister Stitches

"Looking out for Mister Stitches"

Four, five, six.

He doesn't need to count the paces from sink to kettle anymore, but he
still does it, finds it reassuring. He reaches out for the power point
and snaps it on, listening for the slight hum and hiss that tells him
the water is beginning to heat up.

He reaches up and opens the cupboard slightly to the left of him. His
cupboards are sparse, he can't afford to have too much in them, he
needs to know exactly where things are, precisely which jar or can has
the substance he needs. Coffee, tall jar, label pricked with the symbol
for 'C' in braille, an action he performed himself once he got the
coffee home, with a pin. He still hates it when the supermarket
rearranges the shelves and he has to ask other shoppers for
guidance.

The jar down safely, he unscrews the lid, with soft, sure movements and
spoons a teaspoon of coffee into his cute frog mug.

A pained grin shoots across his mouth as he thinks about the cute frog
mug, brought for him by his colleagues at the dull office job, on his
last day. He remembers unwrapping it, sensitive fingers tracing its
shape - he had known from the weight that it was a mug, but the shape
had been odd.

"It's a frog, " he had said, in fake delight. He found it easy to fake
things. Nobody could ever look into his eyes, where the truth is hard
to hide, obscured as they were by his opaque black glasses.

That day, Kimberley remarked that she was going to miss him, he was
such a good listener. Marshall said that despite his, you know,
condition, he was a real hard worker. Elaine said, to a friend, that if
it hadn't been for his blindness, she might have, well, she probably
would have...

Nobody said, You know, I think that guy could turn out to be very
dangerous indeed.

* * *

Another failed audition, the guy casting had been a good seven years
younger than him. Owen couldn't bear that, begging for scraps from
someone who had still been a virgin while top starlets had been
crawling from Owen Darby's bed.

The last piece of work Owen had done was the voiceover commentary for
the DVD release of an old movie of his, "Silent Knife", a story of a
family whose life is thrown into upheaval by Owen's marital
misdemeanours with a temptress member of his choir. It was a pretty
sucky movie, but with just enough about it to have been popular in a
poor year for movies. The other actors in the movie had gone onto
bigger and better things and it was beneath them to turn up for the
commentary with the director.

It hadn't been beneath Owen Darby.

A commercial for motor-oil wasn't beneath Owen Darby any more. Coke and
alimony had wiped out all he had ever earned. He had made some
catastrophic career choices, reading straight from the Burt Reynolds
textbook. Don't do Terms of Endearment, do another Smoky and the
Bandit.

In Owen's case, it had been, don't take the role in Seven that Brad
Pitt had finally played, don't be in Pulp Fiction ("Quentin who?") , go
for the sure thing, do the sequel to "Grizzly Murders" - the film where
Owen had played a cop partnered with a police bear.

A police bear ? A bear ? What had he been thinking ? He should have
walked away on that first day, when he found out the bear and handler
had a better trailer. The bear got all the laughs in the sequel. There
hadn't been many laughs, as Owen recalled bitterly, but all of the
meagre laughs there were went to the bear.

It hadn't all been that bad. For a time, he had done well, playing the
lead in comedies and romantic comedies. He was there with Steve
Guttenberg and early-career Tom Hanks. His problem had been that his
finest hour came in 'Agent Orange', a gritty, realistic Vietnam film,
that came in way over-budget and came out two weeks after
'Platoon'.

He had really acted in that one, proper stuff. It had been harrowing.
The film had got decent critical reviews, and he had been nominated for
an Oscar, but hadn't won it. Close is still far away in Hollywood. He
hadn't known which path to take and he took the wrong one, signing on
for any project he could find, too coked-up to read scripts or listen
to advice before signing the deal.

Owen still turned up to the auditions, still called old friends who no
longer cared, who didn't return his calls and were always 'just going
out' when he actually got through to them, old friends who never
delivered when he asked if there might be a small part going in their
new picture.

He had no idea he was about to make a comeback...

* * *

Owen wakes, lashed to chair. His head feels muggy, as though his mind
is a cat curled up by a fire. There are lights shining into his face,
bright and white. And cameras too. He can see the cameras.

Despite everything, despite the drugs coursing through him and the
disorientation and not having any idea where he is, Owen's instincts
kick in and he gives a wry grin and turns his head slightly to the
left, showing the camera his good side.

"Oh good, you're awake, " says Mister Stitches, "I was getting rather
bored. "

Owen squints at him, whoever him is. A man aged about thirty, obviously
fit, moving very lightly over the floor, so as not to disturb it. He is
wearing dark glasses, thick - not sunglasses. Owen used to be a
celebrity, he knows all about sunglasses. These are different. He has a
thin white stick which floats lightly in his grip, just about a foot
above the floor.

"You're blind? How did you know I was awake ? "

"I could hear you smile for the camera, " says Mister Stitches, "I
could hear the juicy sound of your lips pull back over your teeth.
"

Owen strains against the knots that held him, but these weren't movie
knots. Whoever tied these wasn't intending for the good guy to burst
out of them after a minute's struggling.

"What's going on ? "

"Well, briefly, " says Mister Stitches, "I have had you drugged, put in
the trunk of a car and driven to somewhere quite far from anywhere. I'm
intending to have some fun with you. By the end of the evening, you
will either be famous, or dead, or perhaps both. Who can say ? "

* * *

Mister Stitches shows Owen the arrangements. Owen has stopped crying
now, but he is still freaked. All he can think about is the coke that
is back at his house. He could do with that now.

The 'arrangements' include cameras, good sound recording system, some
computers and some technical stuff that Owen didn't understand at
all.

"In about half an hour, " says Mister Stitches, "We'll be going live to
the nation. Well, those parts of the nation that are watching
Gladiators. I felt they'd be the most indolent and bloodthirsty. It
appealed to me. "

"Why me? " says Owen.

"Why not ? "

"I've never done anything bad, " claims Owen.

"Those movies with the bear were pretty bad, " says Mister Stitches, "I
could tell that the concept was stolen from all the cops-with-dogs
films, but really. You see, cops do actually work with dogs. The set up
works. Cops don't tend to work with grizzly bears. They don't obey
orders, they don't chase suspects and hold them down on the floor. They
clout them with a paw carrying two hundred and forty pounds of solid
bear-power and then they eat them. Why not a cop and horse movie ? That
would have been potentially plausible. "

"You're going to kill me because I made a bad movie ? That's
ridiculous. "

"Not because you made a bad movie, " explains Mister Stitches, very
patiently, "Because you made bad choices. "

* * *

"Good evening middle America, " says Mister Stitches, and on a monitor
nearby, Owen sees the picture which has replaced American Gladiators,
"Sorry to interrupt your viewing, but I have something much more
diverting. Now, this broadcast is Parental Advisory. There may be
bloodshed. If you have sensitive children, send them upstairs to bed.
My name, is Mister Stitches. I will be your host this evening. "

"I have here, " says Mister Stitches, and the picture on the monitor
cuts to Owen's scared face, eyes puffy from crying, "A has-been movie
star. Some of you may no longer recognise Owen Darby. He was in Agent
Orange - not bad in that. He was in "Urban Turban" - he played the New
York cop who went undercover in Pakistan. That was rather unsavoury. He
was in "Dead Legal" in which he played the lawyer with a ghost for a
partner, ending up representing ghosts in court. The tagline for that
on the posters was, 'Being dead, is no defence !'. If it was
re-released, it would be modelled after the Sixth Sense 'I sue dead
people' "

Even in these extreme circumstances, the memory of this made Owen smile
faintly.

"This makes me sad, " says Mister Stitches, "This man has mildly
entertained middle America in the mid to late eighties and yet here he
is on the scrapheap. He was slightly diverting, even if all you know of
his work is picking up a tape in the video-store and then rejecting it.
"

"Here's the deal, " says Mister Stitches, "I intend to kill this man in
twenty minutes time, on live television. The number scrolling across
your TV screen now, is a bank account. If you transfer just two dollars
from your bank account into that account, you may contribute to saving
his life. If I get just twelve thousand dollars, he has a chance to
live. "

Owen gasps. His life entirely hinges on whether six thousand Americans
think enough of him to pick up the telephone and pledge money.

"Perhaps Owen Darby would like to say a few words, to aid the appeal, "
says Mister Stitches, taking five, six, seven paces towards Owen and
proffering a microphone to Owen's lips.

"Please, you've got to help me ! He's a lunatic. He's going to kill me,
I swear it. Please, just give him what he wants. It's only a little bit
of money... "

"That's very true, " says Mister Stitches, taking the microphone back
from Owen, a slight look of distaste on his face, "Why, every time you
go to see a film, you spend more than that on popcorn. Eight million of
you idiots went to see Grizzly Murders, starring this wretch and a
trained bear. Surely some of you think well enough of Mister Darby to
pay him back a little. "

"Oh, and any of you law-enforcement types. Precautions have been taken.
You won't trace this transmission. You won't arrive in time to save
Mister Darby. All that will happen is that you'll chase round, get
sweaty and miss the best bit of television since nineteen sixty-three.
"

* * *

Five minutes elapse. They are a very long five minutes for Owen.

"Do you want to do a reading, while you're here ? " asks Mister
Stitches, "While you've got an audience, you may as well show them your
dramatic range. What about the speech from On the Waterfront. I
could've been a contender... "

"Fuck you, " says Owen, and if his mouth wasn't completely dry, he
would spit at Mister Stitches.

Mister Stitches paces out the steps to his laptop computer, which is
keeping track of the money coming into his account and filtering it
from one dummy account to another, so fast nobody could trace it. He
presses a key and the computer speaks to him in a low synthesised
voice.

"Viewers, we have two thousand dollars. Some of you must have really
hated Owen's movies. Or maybe you think this is all a publicity stunt,
that I'm not really going to kill him. Maybe you think... that he's
acting. "

Mister Stitches grins for the camera, "Viewers, do you not remember
this man's acting ? He couldn't convince anyone. Believe me, this is
real. "

He measures out the distance to Owen, everything was carefully counted
and prepared before Owen was drugged and brought here. He puts a hand
out to Owen's face, strokes it lightly with his hand. With the other
hand, he takes a wrench from his jacket pocket and hits Owen hard
across the face with it.

"That's not acting ! " he shouts triumphantly, "That's the real deal.
We don't have the budget for effects. Pick up the phone and pledge some
money to save the life of a mediocre actor. "

* * *

"Nine and a half thousand, " says Mister Stitches, "And just four
minutes to go. I do hope the rest comes in, I'm starting to get a
little bit fond of Owen now. We've really bonded, haven't we Owen
?"

"You're absolutely insane, " says Owen, his nose feels like it is
broken and one of his eyes is beginning to close from the beating he
took with the wrench.

"True, to an extent, " says Mister Stitches, "Do you think the audience
will dig a bit deeper if I cough up my motivation ? Do the movie
bad-guy thing and tell my story ? "

"I don't think anyone will care, " says Owen, despairingly, "I don't
think anyone is watching anymore, except the police and the feds.
"

"How sad, " says Mister Stitches, "All those people went to see your
second-rate movies, and you don't think they'll be able to keep their
twitchy fingers off the remote long enough to see whether you'll live
or die ? This is reality tv to its logical conclusion. Never mind who
gets in the band or who gets kicked off some tropical island- your
telephone call makes a difference of life or death. Ring in folks, play
the game. Be part of television history. Do you want to be partly
responsible for the death of this man, for the sake of two dollars ? Or
do you want to feel good about saving someone's life ? "

"Let's play them a clip, " says Mister Stitches, "Remind them what you
were like, before you got washed up. One of your old movies. "

Mister Stitches paces over to his computer and presses the buttons to
run a clip of "Dead Legal" for the viewers. The computer said something
in its synthesised voice which Owen couldn't catch.

"You're the talk of the net chat-rooms, " says Mister Stitches,
delighted, "All over America, people are emailing and posting to say,
'you gotta see this'. There are polls as to your best movies, your
cheesiest lines, as to whether you should live or die. You're more
famous now than when you were famous. How's it feel ?"

"What's wrong with you ?" asks Owen, who needs a drink more badly than
he has done for seven years, since the car wreck where a model got
killed and the rest of his savings got wiped out covering the thing
up.

Mister Stitches taps his dark glasses, "That's a bit insensitive, " he
says, "I'm BLIND. "

"Plenty of blind people, " says Owen, with a thick tongue, "They don't
all kidnap celebrities and have them killed for entertainment. "

"So, you want the story after all ? I haven't always been blind. But
I've been frightened of being blind my whole life. When I was a child,
my teacher read me the story of Louis Braille, how he went blind in one
eye, and then rubbed the other eye after rubbing the first, and went
blind in both eyes. Rubbish of course, I know that now. But for eight
years, I would religiously only touch my left eye with my left hand and
vice versa. I was petrified of going blind. "

"When I was nine years old, I learned how to read and write in braille.
I taught myself how to find things in the dark. How to do things in the
dark. How to walk, how to brush my teeth, to use the telephone. Then I
went on to a blindfold, spending a whole day blindfolded and developing
my other senses, all in readiness for going blind. "

"My preparations became more and more thorough. I got to the stage
where I knew that I could cope with blindness. Yet I still feared it.
The only thing I was ever afraid of. Do you know what the last thing I
actually saw was ? That I saw with my eyes ? I went to a cinema, I was
bored, I paid money and wandered into the next film that was on.
"

"One of mine ? "

Mister Stitches grinned and this time, Owen could hear that juicy,
sticky noise of lips pulling back over teeth, as well, "Grizzly Murders
Two. Can you believe I wasted the last two hours of my vision on such
garbage ? And you wonder why I'm a little, misbalanced ? "

The clip stopped and Mister Stitches addressed the camera again, "This
is really very exciting now viewers. I think that the time is nearly
up. Shall we see whether Owen Darby lives or dies ? "

Owen bites his lip while Mister Stitches crosses over to the computer.
Mister Stitches bends down close, to hear the result.

"Viewers, thank you ! You did it. Fifteen thousand dollars. More than
we deserve. Thank you so much. But wait. "

Owen's head is buzzing. What next ?

"You've done so much, you've contributed so much. It's only fair that
Owen Darby should put a little effort in as well. What do you think
Owen ? "

"Do I have a choice ? "

"That's EXACTLY what you have, " says Mister Stitches, "You can choose,
whether to make a noble sacrifice and die a hero, or you can save
yourself, and I kill one person for every thousand dollars we collected
tonight. "

Owen closes his eyes, this isn't happening, this isn't happening.

But it is.

"What's it to be Owen? You're a celebrity, you bring joy - or at least
a slight relief in tedium - to millions. Isn't your life worth more
than that of ordinary people ? Balance it up - you and your rejuvenated
career, against the lives of fifteen people with dull office jobs and
debts they can never repay. "

"What do you think he should do folks ? What do the people in the
internet chat-rooms think he should do ? Should he be noble and take
his punishment, or should he do what every single one of you would do,
and let some strangers take his place ? Do it to Julia, that's what I'd
say. "

Owen looks up, with a haunted look on his face, he can hardly bear to
speak.

"Let me go, " he says.

Mister Stitches tucks his white stick under his arm and gives a
sardonic round of applause to Owen, "Isn't he brave folks ? I know we
all would have done the same thing, but how many would have the guts to
come out and say it on TV ? "

"I'll be there when they fry you, " says Owen, "And I pray to God
that's soon. "

"Good point, " says Mister Stitches, "See, don't judge him too harshly
folks. He may have traded fifteen of your lives for his own, but I may
not get to kill all fifteen. I may get caught or killed before then.
It's a risk worth taking. "

* * *

"Hop into the trunk, " says Mister Stitches to Owen, as the warehouse
burns down behind them. Owen squints, but he can't see the licence
plate, which is smeared with mud.

"It's stolen anyway, " says Mister Stitches, "And I'll be ditching it
in a while. "

"How did you get me here? " asks Owen, "You must have had help. "

"Maybe I did, " says Mister Stitches, "And maybe when I was learning
how to do everything else blind, I learned to drive too. "

Owen clambers into the trunk of the car, arms still tied behind his
back. Before Mister Stitches closes the trunk he comes to speak to
Owen.

"Don't think you can just assume that every murder in the paper is
someone else's, not your fault. I'll be in touch after each and every
one. Just so you know exactly whose life has been given in
part-exchange for your own. "

"You're a sick, sick man, " says Owen.

Mister Stitches says nothing at all, but just before he leaves, he
raises his dark glasses and Owen can see that the lid of each eye has
been stitched shut, ragged uneven stitches a quarter inch thick. Then,
mercifully, the trunk closes, leaving Owen alone in the dark.