Nancy's Method

“They want to see more of you!” Elaine Lane was as shrewd an agent as a Hollywood hopeful could hope for, Fiona knew. “Fiona, honey, listen: you’re 31 and still cute enough to pass for 25-you’re in the sweet spot. If you don’t break through some of that discomfort and take these auditions, you’ll miss the window entirely. And this is an audition you cannot miss. I can’t understand your hesitancy on this, honey!” But Fiona knew what this audition was for, and she knew things about her body that no one else knew-especially not Elaine. “I’m taking it, okay? I’m going to go for it, I know this was a tough one for you to land, Elaine. But you know how I feel about these sorts of roles.”

The agent slightly cocked her head, narrowing her mascara-laden eyes. “Oh Fi; honey-what men in your life were absent to the point that you don’t know how beautiful you are? Do you realize how much leverage you have? You’ve got to use it, before you get old and unnoticed like me! None of us wants to have to use our leverage; but it’s how the world works, hon. The world that men drive. Trust me!” Fiona shook her head. “I know-and I don’t care about the immodesty. But you don’t understand,” Fiona replied. She sighed in a sort of defeat as she slipped her blouse down over her right shoulder. Elaine’s brows slightly creased. Fiona stared at her, urging her. Look!

The acting agent stepped forward and saw there, on the woman’s bare shoulder, two off-colored blotches. After a second she realized what she was looking at, and barely stifled the reaction to gasp. “Honey,” she began.

“And here!” Fiona commanded softly. She threw some of her strawberry blond hair back and revealed another such liver spot on the crook of her neck. Tears welled up in the aspiring actress’s eyes, as she walked to a box of tissues on a table in her agent’s office. She began rapidly wiping the black eyeliner-her signature cat eye style- in broad, smudging streaks down her cheeks. “This one showed up about a month ago,” she choked out. Elaine, approaching her, could see a pinkish little spot, no bigger than a grain of corn, between Fiona’s temple and the edge of her right eye.

“Is this what you’re scared of, sweetie?” She placed a comforting hand on Fiona’s arm, pulling her shirt back up over her shoulder. Fiona blotted the wetness from around her eyes with the tissue. “Growing up in Miami-nothing good comes out of there! We practically lived outside.” “Who all have you talked to, about…it?” Elaine quietly asked. Fiona lightly scoffed. “My dermatologist?” Elaine nodded, understanding carved into her features as she looked Fiona up and down. Then, Elaine Lane walked abruptly to her desk, and began clacking away on her keyboard behind her monitor. “I know someone,” she began. “And those spots, sweetie? They only increase with age, trust me. But I have a-”

“I’ve tried them! I’ve seen every specialist in L.A., trust me.” Fiona’s tone was deadpan, as she folded her arms. A triumphant tap on her keyboard brought Elaine scooting back on her rolling chair, in victory. She motioned for the younger woman to come. “Trust me, you haven’t, honey.”

Fiona had promised herself that very morning, in front of this same bathroom mirror, applying her eyeliner, that she’d treat herself to an early night. She’d pamper herself with a bath and chardonnay, maybe watch the latest episode of The Wonderful Armenian Baklava Race; but have lights out by no later than nine. Yet here she stood in her nightgown, at 10:32 p.m., phone in hand. “Burton,” that was the contact Elaine had shared to her phone’s contacts. It was a 503 area code; somewhere in the northern part of the state. She’d been raised to ask more questions than to simply do something as dodgy as this. What would mom and dad say? But the pepperoni-colored dot on her face was silently taunting her. She called.

The line hardly rang for a second before a quiet male voice answered.

“Hello.” The voice was subdued sounding, and the answer not was intoned in a question. Fiona felt her breath catch in the back of her throat before she could think of how to respond. She realized she didn’t know what she’d expected: a call center? An apt secretary’s voice, announcing the name of a business? A switchboard?

“...Is this Burton?”

“Hold a second,” came the voice, followed by a brisk sound like a steel cable being spooled. The noise was jarring, almost painful, and Fiona felt herself holding the phone at a distance from her ear. She was ready to hang up when she heard another voice, louder.

“Z-Effects Prosthetics,” it said. What?! Fiona mouthed the word, unable to utter it for her surprise. In her rattled mind she thumbed through everything she knew of her agent of the past 10 months. Was Elaine playing a cruel joke? Is she capable of this sort of humor? The more sensible notion, that perhaps the number was bad, wouldn’t occur to her rattled sensibilities. “Um…never mind, I think I have the wrong number-”

“Wait!” said the voice. “Burton’s number is not widely known. Which agent referred you?”

“Elaine…Lane?”

“Yep,” the voice replied. “We don’t just do effects. You need help with age spots, yeah?”

“Yes,” Fiona was genuinely perplexed now. “Let me get you to the right number. Take just a sec, okay?”

“Okay.” The same weird clunking took over the line, but Fiona was insatiably curious.

After a considerably longer waiting period, the line clicked over. There was a heavy background drone. Fiona could hear fumbling with a device, until a woman’s voice answered. “Yeah,” she stated; again, not a question. “Umm…I’m calling about age spots.”

“You’re calling from a West Coast number; is that where you are?”

“Yes. Los Angeles.” The woman on the other end of the line sighed. “I’m in Chicago. No problem, though. How many spots do you have?” Fiona told her exactly how large, and at exactly what places on her body, all three of the blotches were. There was an unsettling length of nothing but air for sometime. Then the voice said, “My name is Nancy. I charge $5,000 a spot.” Fiona couldn’t stop herself from snorting in incredulity. “It’s permanent,” Nancy said. “I charge in full after services are rendered. I’ll assess the final amount when we can meet in person. I have availability for the next two days, so I could be in L.A. tomorrow. You’ll have to cover my flight from Chicago, and I don’t fly coach. You won’t owe anything until after I remove the spots. Are you still interested or is this call finished?”

Fiona didn’t have a spare $15,000 on hand-she’d barely be able to cover a first class flight from Chicago! Elaine would have to help her on this-she’d probably need to take out another loan. “I’m interested.”

“After you hang up, a routing and bank number will be texted to this line. A public address will be texted to this line next, along with the cell number to a burner phone. The public place will be where we meet for consultation. The burner phone will be my line of contact with you in case extenuating circumstances should alter the plan. If I do not receive the full amount of money to cover a first class ticket from O’Hare International to LAX by 9:30 A.M., Pacific time, tomorrow, I will assume you changed your mind about this and cancelled. If I have to pay any difference for the ticket, you will be billed with it along with the service. Is this understood?” It seemed as soon as Fiona could utter the word “yes” that the call had ended.

She wasn’t able to fall asleep that night not until nigh on four in the morning. After frantically searching for tickets from O’Hare to LAX, her entire body jittered more than any excessive days of caffeine. Elaine had seemed thrilled over the phone, and assured her that for the price, this was a steal of a lifetime. “All I can say, Fi, hon, is I’ve worked with two girls-one is an actress you might’ve heard of-Madison Nix?” Of course Fiona knew her name, she’d starred in the most recent David Cronenberg film. “She had psoriasis like you wouldn’t believe, sweetie. After Nancy? Nada!” Fiona was even more jittery, elated, but flighty, when she walked into her bank at nine sharp. The first and only customer, she had the ticket amount transferred, plus $100 to be sure. The flight was scheduled to land in LAX at 4:08 P.M., departing Chicago at 11:15 in the morning.

Fiona had never done anything so brash, so off-trail, but Elaine had assured her; all the details were the tools of the trade. In fact, Elaine seemed to know everything about Nancy’s miraculous skin-working except precisely what Nancy did. But the anticipation clouded out anything else in her mind that day. The drive to the airport took over an hour, and the crowd once inside began building doubt: what if she simply couldn’t find her? Per Elaine’s advice, Fiona texted the cell number, now that she was in the airport. It was 10:57, and likely-hopefully-this Nancy character was boarded and comfy in her first class seat, waiting for take-off. She felt her beating heart in her temples as she felt her phone vibrate with a response: “Meet in Bean St. Cafe, Terminal 7, by time flight lands-4:08PM.”

The time waiting in the cafe would blur in the coming months, as Fiona entered into a new aberrant reality. Nancy wasn’t anything like what she pictured her to be; imagined faces never matched to seeing them in the flesh. Nancy was odd in that she felt quite old; her movements, mannerisms, and strange sce2nt of lavender. She looked ambiguously younger; hair naturally acorn-colored, and not a strand of gray to be seen. Her hands had veins and her exposed skin of her forearms, her throat and face, all seemed to be in some mellifluous pudding-like foam. The skin wasn’t thin and flabby; nor was it tight and healthy-looking.

Nancy didn’t smile. And though off-putting, something about her directness put Fiona’s nerves at ease. She leaned across the small round table in Bean St. Cafe, inspecting each of Fiona’s liver spots. The spots on her shoulder were technically two; but Nancy said she’d charge just $8,000 for their removal because of their proximity. And when Fiona asked about hotel arrangements, Nancy simply replied in her deadpan way “I will depart for Chicago sometime tonight, as soon as we finish.” Fiona learned in breakneck time, that Nancy’s method relied hardly on medical science and a lot on pseudoscience.

“I’m the majority shareholder of Memorium,” said Nancy as the two got into the taxi. Nancy had told their driver to take them to the Riverveiw Plaza Center, a corporate business park in the eastern L.A. suburbs.

Fiona had to be told what Memorium Incorporated was; but she half-registered Nancy’s response; a funeral services conglomerate, as Elaine’s call altered her better judgment. “He wants to talk with you now! I’m going to send you his number; he wants you, Fi! He told me to have you call him!”

This is it! I’ll always have this memory-being in a cab with this strange woman who may or may not be a snake oil seller! All that presently mattered was the number, which her agent had just texted her: Ashton Sexton. The Oscar-nominated director’s number was a contact in her phone!

The talk with the filmmaker was an ebullient swirl, even as Fiona apathetically noticed they’d made their way into an industrialized part of the cityscape she’d never known existed.

As they exited the cab-and as Fiona absentmindedly paid the fare-it dawned on her, fleetingly, to ask about what essential oils or deep tissue massaging was involved with this strange woman’s methods. But Nancy’s gaze at her, before the great locked glass doors-bereft of any signage or posting, brought Fiona into intense focus. Nancy’s arm had been raised; she was hailing the cabbie to stay parked. “What I’m going to perform on your liver spots is a rite of transference. I’m a witch. You’re about to take part in a ritual utilizing black magic. I just wanted you to be aware. If you don’t want to go through with this, now is your final chance.” In her giddiness Fiona stifled a laugh. She’d not been raised religious, and being unfamiliar with such fringe ideas, her instincts tilted towards the dimension of silly absurdity. Nancy’s grave deadpan demeanor snapped her back to the present. She shook her head, then nodded; not knowing which affirmed her better. “I’m in,” she said. Nancy gestured to the cabbie he could leave.

Entering in a code on a keypad, the glass doors slid open quietly. Inside the sterile building was a titled corridor, with shut doors tunneling down a white hallway. The room was so nondescript it was disquieting to Fiona. She followed Nancy down the hallway, until she stopped at a closed metal door, and ran a combination on a padlock over the metal handle. A hand-written sign on the door read "NO N.O.K." When the door was pushed open, a rush of uncomfortably cool air met them; sterilized cool air. This room was a body cooler. Even the off-white fluorescents in the gray ceiling were off-putting. But what Fiona saw were unmistakable body-sized doors, before her, on either side. Seemingly at random, Nancy opened a door and pulled out the gurney on which lied a partially-gowned human corpse; that of an old woman. Nancy moved some of the white bedsheets partially shrouding the body, and revealed a shriveled foot. She motioned for Fiona to step closer.

In a language Fiona couldn’t quite place, Nancy began droning. Is this too late to back out?! Would Ashton really not cast me as is?! Nancy spit on her fingers, and, continuing to drone, placed her fingers on each of Fiona’s liver spots. As if she held something in her clenched fists of awkward weightiness, Nancy slowly, through strained chanting, flung her hands onto the foot of the corpse. The woman then became silent, huffing as if winded. In amazement Fiona watched her liver spots appear on the feet of this corpse. Nancy held up a make-up mirror, and in glee Fiona saw her spots gone; in fascination she studied the spots-just as they’d been on her face, shoulder; her neck-appear on the gnarled old foot of this corpse. “Thanks, Greta,” said Nancy, reading the toe tag.

So Fiona Price broke into her dreamworld, seemingly rising overnight from obscurity with her lead role in a medium-budget film. It wasn’t long before a new agent; far more prestigious than Elaine, replaced her. And Nancy’s invoice, of $18,000, was stored away in a cluttered ‘to-do’ list on Fiona’s ever-exciting schedule. She’d never not meant to pay for Nancy’s magical…work-she just had so many exuberant new details emerging daily in her life that remittance of a bizarre service; one which technically couldn’t be proved to have actually taken place-it didn’t take the place of new casting calls and all number of interviews and photoshoots. She was now: Fiona Price! And besides, she’d been given a new phone. Although she remembered Elaine forwarding an email to her, a sternly-worded email, admonishing Fiona for late payment and to make remittance immediately.

A year passed, then two. It was on the night of her premiere, as she sat in front of her mirror, that she screamed. She covered her face, and told the two make-up artists that were in the room with her to get out-but Fiona felt something wrong. Looking at her hands-they were aged, old hands. She looked at her reflection. It wasn’t that she was aging, but her skin was thinning with each split-second. Purple blooms beneath the surface of her skin clouded about each of her eyes, even as her recently-plucked eyebrows discolored into a black-gray, and became wiry and uneven. Her tongue felt a strange sensation, against her teeth, and as she moved around the muscle in her mouth, she felt her teeth simply springing from her gums like barnacles. Ochre and bloody chunks dislodged all about her mouth as she spat them onto a shaking, venous hand. Her mouth gaped open but no air could come out. Suddenly the sole door to the make-up room burst open, light exploding through from the outside. It was Elaine’s ever-faithful replacement agent. “They want to see more of you!”