CHAPTER EIGHTEEN –
MILES POINT OF VIEW
I pulled the sedan door shut behind me with a weary sigh, miles of turmoil still roiling in my mind’s wake.
The crisp night air did little to settle my temperament – if anything, it only sharpened the disquieting thoughts needling me.
Hailey was… an anomaly.
I CAN say she’s better than Lindsey!!
No … Noo… don’t think of that BITCH!
An enigma that shouldn’t have existed to upend all my carefully cultivated expectations.
With each subsequent “audition” I’d subjected her to, the impudent waif only deepened the offenses against my jaded sensibilities.
Scorning every opportunity to wither and crumple under the harsh brilliance of my discerning cruelties.
Instead, she hemorrhaged transcendent talent from every pore.
Mastering the most abstruse avant-garde abstractions and caustic modern atrocities with ease. Yet still retaining that gossamer comedic touch and gift for evoking rapturous, silvery frivolity.
A true… chamelonic virtuoso whose very presence represented an existential threat to my chosen path.
I should despise her; I reasoned as Igor opened the door and I slumped onto the worn leather backseat.
Should loathe this uncultured upstart whose very existence stood as a rebuke to my sadistically honed craft.
An overmounted maverick blazing her own trail, disrupting the hard-fought balances I’d mastered between pleasure and cruelty, amusement and soul-flaying anguish.
And yet… I couldn’t quite stoke those enveloping flames of contempt and animosity.
Some infinitesimal yet persistent spark within me refused to be extinguished, crackling with a foreign allure every time I witnessed Hailey’s staggering capabilities anew.
A hungry, almost puerile sense of enchantment at the possibilities her talents embodied.
“Everything… go well, today?” Igor grunted in that phlegm-curdling rasp of his.
“Well, enough, I suppose,” I replied with a cagey shrug. “Our girl proved more… indomitable than one might’ve supposed.”
A snort escaped the mouth breather’s flaring nostrils. “She schnook like many demons. Like Viktor’s first wife, may flock have mercy.”
“Yes, very… evocative, I’ll grant you that much,” I mused with a faraway tone.
Images from her auditions flickered through my consciousness like an opulent zoetrope – Hailey thrashing and snarling through the profane, id-born catharsis of the anti-narrative piece.
Mouth gaping open in rapturous ecstasy and surrender, raw and overflowing with forbidden revelations.
Banishing such reveries with a sharp clearing of my throat, I directed a sidelong glance at Igor’s hulking silhouette. “You were supposed to keep watch over her, ensure she made no ill-advised attempts at defiance or wish to quit. So why did you allow this transparently gifted ingenue to run absolute circles around my carefully curated regimen?”
A twitchy squirm rippled through those massively sprung shoulders – the closest my enforcer came to flinching under a blistering disapproval. “She… not seem so bad, at first. Thought would be breaking her spirits like others, yes?”
One beefy hand rubbed across the back of his corded neck as if massaging away phantom agonies. “But then… had feeling. Like little pretty doll was PLAY at being broken, all time. Tormenting tormentor with own expectations, until-” He trailed off with a shudder.
Despite my rising irritation, I couldn’t deny a kernel of truth underlying Igor’s crude perceptions.
Hailey’s performances had proven nothing short of masterful deceptions, hollowing out my inmost beliefs about her vapid limitations and frailties before crushing them asunder.
A subtler, more artful vengeance than any mewling threats of defiance could’ve mustered.
“Be that as it may…” I growled in clipped tones. “You would do well to resume a more… vigilant tenure come the morrow. I’ve exhausted my repertoire of warmup theatrics with this one. When we reconvene, you can expect my methods to become… acutely more persuasive in illuminating whatever remains of her mediocrity.”
My phone chimed from an inside jacket pocket, sparing Igor any further squirming under my displeasure. Retrieving it, I saw it was none other than my ever-shrill agent summoning me.
“Yes, Celia?”
“Miles, you’ve been absolutely rotten about checking in today,” her curt tones sliced across the line. “I’ve had the studio vulgarians circling me like sharks this whole time. How did the latest round of auditions with this Hailey girl go? Any progress toward locking her in so we can move into pre-production?”
I paused, fingers toying idly with the smartphone’s tempered glass screen as my mind churned over how to best couch my observations without telegraphing disquiet.
Best to play it smooth and dismissive, I reasoned.
Why stroke Celia’s panic further by revealing any seeds of doubt, tenuous though they remained?
“Well enough to secure my commitment, I’d wager,” I replied at length with a cavalier stroke of confidence. “Hailey continues exhibiting… intriguing raw materials, despite the glaring gaps in her formal training, of course. But we’ve another session on the books for tomorrow where I plan to truly put her unrefined wares to their paces.”
A pregnant silence stretched for a beat before Celia’s sigh of relief gusted over the line. “Well, thank Christ for that. The last thing we need is you spinning into another of your self-indulgent funks again and stalling the whole production over some idiosyncratic creative vision.”
The acid laced within her words only further stoked those persistent embers of intrigue within me.
Celia didn’t understand – and could never understand the unassailable brilliance that this Hailey Templeton radiated in her unvarnished state.
No mere “creative funk”, but the awestruck reverence of a true artiste who had stumbled upon visions of the sublime incarnate.
Not that I would dream of voicing such treasonous blasphemies, of course. Not when I fully intended to crush and subsume those visions under my indomitable will by dawn’s first light.
“Well, you needn’t fret about any delays on this project, my dear,” I assured Celia with oily reassurance. “If anything, our little ingenue has only redoubled my commitment to this venture’s uncompromising fruition. So do try to placate the studio filth’s understandable impatience for my next masterwork just a while longer.”
“Ha! That’s rich, coming from you. But fine… I’ll do what damage control I can until you pull your head out of your ass and give me something definitive to work with.”
Without further preamble, the line clicked silent again. Typical Celia – never happier than when she could slink off and carp in solitude.
Not that I blamed her for chafing against my absolute authority. How could a mere bean counter hope to comprehend the loftier stratospheres which my artistic revolution continually soared?
“You hear all that, Igor?” I called up toward the burly man’s impassive visage. “I expect you’ll be on your overcompensated best behavior come sunrise. Because tomorrow… I WILL wring every drop of thespian cesputizum from Miss Hailey’s resistances, see if I don’t.”
A low, terse grunt was the only reply. But it mattered little whether my loutish underling grasped the full magnitude of what Hailey represented – a potential flashpoint for the stratospheres of my masterwork or an existential threat to cast down into the gutter with extreme animus.
Either way, I vowed to burrow into the sordid marrow of her tantric talents with each fresh barb of cruelty or depravity my sadistic ingenuity could conjure.
No longer would I be merciful or ingratiating in hopes of disarming her gifts. Tomorrow would mark the start of my magnum opus for Hailey’s total subjugation.
And if by some infinitesimal chance she proved able to defy and transmogrify even my most demented, soul-scorching trials? Well…
With ice curdling in my veins, I glimpsed perhaps the most subversive possibility of all.
Not that I would simply fail in exerting my will over Hailey’s. But rather… that her ineffable lights might instead ignite the final fuses of my long-forestalled metamorphosis.
A becoming in which the dying embers of my artistry at last broke free from its fettered, earthly animus.
Shedding every last cloying shell of convention and puerile conceits, to be rendered anew into something sleeker and more rapacious.
Something… transcendent.