Absolute Zero

Episode 2 finds both of our heroines at a personal crossroads, as Emily faces a decision that could change her life forever and Kayleen finds herself growing closer to Tanya after witnessing something truly shocking. As for the Monster…well, he thinks he’s found the cure for his endless, yearning loneliness. The only question is what he’ll do to get it.

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Transcript

NARRATOR

This is…Bear Lake

[music]

Episode 2: Absolute Zero

THE MONSTER

I want to take you back
if I may
to your Teenage Years
when you are without question the MOST IMPORTANT being in the world
obsessed with that eternal question:
Who can I beguile into fucking me??????????????

(being consumed by this feeling of needing another something next to your something to do something)

Okay so imagine that but you are like I said
The Last Of Your Kind
and you find your own parts repulsive and you find your own immense brain overcrowded and you find your self-worth shrinking into a dense sad little dwarf star of depression.

There was the time I tried dry-humping a bunch of native coral
and I got all these sores but also like sores on my soul?
And I couldn’t tell you why
But my body was gross?

And oh, the loneliness!!!!!
The need to touch with nothing to touch!
My body was an isolated star in my lake
with nary a black hole to snag me in its galactic vaginal orbit.

I wanted, already, to love and be loved
to penetrate and be penetrated
to give myself fully to the Great Someone
whose Great Purpose in life was to want me.
I was born from the cells of a heart in a box.
Bound up in my very DNA was something aching, lustful, stricken.
I was bursting through my own skin.


KAYLEEN


Dad’s “nap” lasts through our 10pm closing, so I kick out the last of the thrill-seekers and power down the rides myself.
This is probably the school guidance counselor’s nightmare, but I enjoy it: for forty minutes, the park is all mine.
I do one last inspection of the track on Ride the Monster, and clear away any stuff that’s fallen beneath the ride. We’ll stop and do a retrieval if anyone drops any valuables, but for hats and water bottles and stuff we just round them up at the end of the day and hope people come back.
I make sure the food stands are clean-ish and do a final walk-through of the bathrooms.
Then I leave my coveralls in the Hub and turn off the security cameras for the night.

It’s so quiet, with the lights off. I can hear the lake below, the wind. From up here the lake looks big as an ocean.

It’s when I’m locking the front gate that I hear something else:
Voices, on the beach.

I look down and see two people, barely hidden under the pier, who are fully making out.
My heart stops when I realize it’s Tanya and Bronson Reed.

The world freezes and I’m moving down the ladder from the pier to the beach. Every nerve in my body is screaming at me to turn back.
Bronson puts his hand around the back of Tanya’s head and pushes it down.
Stop, Tanya says. I told you I’m not doing that.
I’m thirty feet away and I can see Bronson smirking.
It’s fine, he says. It’s not even sex.  Just c’mere -
His hand snakes around the back of Tanya’s neck.
Twenty feet away.
Don’t be gross, she says. She slaps his arm away, and he tenses.
I won’t tell anyone.
Ten feet away.
I need you to not, Tanya says, and she’s trying to stand up but he has his hand on her arm.
Bronson, she says, stop.

He pulls her in, hard now, and I yell -
She said back off.

They turn and see me and I’m like, oh cool cool cool this was the biggest mistake of my life.
And then Tanya laughs, Bronson still holding her wrist.
She shakes him off and says:
Let’s get out of here.
There’s a slight tremor in her voice, but she marches over to me with her head high in the air, like this is all just a minor inconvenience.

Okay, says Bronson, go off with your girlfriend.
Tanya ignores him, but I stop her.
What did you say? I ask.

Bronson laughs.
C’mon, even Tanya knows you look at her like she’s a piece of steak.

No, I say. My stomach hurts. I don’t.

Shut up, Tanya says. Kayleen, ignore him.

If you tell on me, Bronson says, I’ll tell on you.

Tanya grabs my arm and starts dragging me away, but then Bronson comes up behind us and now he’s grabbing her arm, saying he’s sorry, but she’s making a big deal, pulling her away from me -
You won’t tell anyone, he says, right, promise me you won’t tell -

Tanya wheels back to kick him, and something in his face changes and before anyone has time to stop he slaps her. 
So I run up behind him and I push him as hard as I can.
Bronson’s eyes are wild as he grabs me by the shoulders and sort of heaves me to the ground -

Tanya yells, Bronson, stop -

And Bronson laughs.
Jeez, he says. It’s no wonder her mom left.

For a second, everything is frozen.

Then something grabs Bronson around the ankle.
He goes down chin-first. Tanya runs over to me, and I keep saying I’m fine I’m fine it’s fine.
Something is dragging Bronson backwards, into the water, his fingers scrabbling against the rocks -
Tanya screams and dives for him, but he’s already under the water.
A geyser of blood bursts out from the shallows and spills over the rocks, plus this horrible gurgling, and I wish I could scream but I can’t
Then it’s over.
The water is still. Bronson is gone.
Tanya vomits into the sand.


EMILY


June was ending when Sam announced that it was two weeks
until his party left town.
I hadn’t even realized that he had a “party”.
I’d always pictured Sam as a solitary ghost in my door.
I could feel a tugging, at that two weeks,
between his stomach and mine.
There are opportunities in Salt Lake,
he added,
Out west.
For women too.
He moved as if to smile at me
but instead his fingers fluttered over the surface of the table.

I knew my parents wouldn’t go with me.
Mother had bad hips, Father a bad back.
Mother still kissed my forehead at night before bed.
Could I survive alone?
But would you be alone? The thought came to me, unbidden, between bed and sleep.
Emily, he said
Sam came for dinner the night before he was due to leave and I found myself scrubbing the same dish over and over until I couldn’t anymore.
So I went outside to watch the moon rise.
He stood next to me.
His shirt was open at the collar and I could see the hint of hair below his collarbone.

I said: I don’t know if I believe in your God.
He smiled at that, a quirk of his flat mouth, and asked: What do you think my God is?

I remember, I said, when our old priest passed away.
And they put him in a box but by the time we came to bury him the body already smelled.
Like a sheep, or a cow.
He was no different.
I couldn’t believe that he’d ever been anything but frozen skin in an old pine box.

I didn’t know why I was telling him this.
I was too busy trying not to shake.
When things die, I said finally, they are dead. Death is the only God that matters.

And he thought about that.

After my family died, Sam said, I was alone.
I did what I had to do to stay alive.
A shadow passed over his face, but he continued in the same steady way:

When I found the Church I chose to forgive myself..
And I chose to believe in eternity, even beyond death.
His eyes met mine.
It was the choosing, he said, that mattered.

In the morning Sam baptized me in the old millpond.

He was standing in the grimy water and I waded in after him
my parents standing on the bank
until I was deep in water up to my waist.

He reached his hand onto my back and suddenly he was leaning right over next to me and I could feel the hint of his breath on my neck and he took my small fingers into his long, callused ones and he said

Close your eyes

I was mid-nod when he plunged me into the water
my feet scrabbling for purchase on the muddy floor.
For seconds that felt like hours everything was water
and then I felt Sam’s hand on my back pushing me back up towards the light.
I gripped his shoulders
and I could feel the warmth of his skin under his wet shirt
And I held on to him for a few more seconds that felt like hours.


THE MONSTER


She came into my life in a way no one had before: she came into my life alive.
I saw her the way the sun sees the moon: from an impossible distance, celestial and
implacable.
She was sitting on the abandoned pier, a relic of an imagined boating boom in the sixties, staring down at the vastness below.

Her feet, hanging there.
I could have reached out a tentacle right then and there, I could have taken her and nobody would have known a thing.
But I didn’t.
I watched her.
She was wearing this loose linen dress and her legs were bare, toes unpainted.
Her hair was long and black and it hung down her back.

She didn’t seem to be in any hurry.
So neither was I.

I watched her for a long time. I watched the slight hook in her nose, her lodestone eyes, her angular chin. I watched this woman until a small girl with long black hair like hers came running up and flung her arms around her waist.
The way that little girl looked up at her.
If my love was the moon, then this girl was her very own planet, bound gravitationally to the object of her adoration.
I remembered Champlain’s warning: a monster is not a person.
Then why did I yearn like a person, why did every slimy scummy inch of me want to wrap around her and squeeze?
The two joined hands and walked back down the pier, where a man stood, slightly older, with a wiry frame and two elbows like pigeon wings.
And that too was agony, but a sweet agony, something new, the feeling of an echo I’d been meant to hear.

I knew in that moment that I loved her.
I knew, as the lake froze over for the winter and thawed in the spring and I watched her with my watery eyes, that to take her life away from her would be the direst form of cruelty.
And I knew that, someday, I would do it.


KAYLEEN


I don’t throw up.
My stomach shakes and my brain shakes but I don’t throw up.
My brain is taking woozy polaroids of the blood, fading into the sand.
Bronson Reed’s blood.
He prayed for his arm to heal.
And for a Gameboy.
I say, we should get help.
Tanya straightens up and wipes the vomit from her mouth.
Tanya?
She shakes her head.
No.
There’s a phone in the Hub, we could get the police -
No.
She buries her eyes in the heels of her hands, eyeliner bleeding into her palms.
We need to get outta here.
And without warning, she takes off across the sand, Doc Martens slipping and sliding as she goes.

I run after her, but she’s moving like a shark, sharp and fast.
Tanya, we need to get off the beach.
Tanya -
She doesn’t respond but we change direction, heading back  towards the hill, towards my house half a mile up.
When the sand becomes dirt under our feet, she speaks:
Do you think he’s dead?

I look over to see if she’s joking.
Um. Definitely?
Don’t be so fucking superior, Tanya says.
We stop together halfway up the hill.
The lake spreads out before us, black and calm.
I can hear her breathing, hard and fast.

Kayleen, she says, you’ve got blood on you.

Was he your boyfriend?
I say it before I know why.

Tanya bites her lip like she’s not sure whether to laugh or I don’t know throw up again. Instead she says:
Have you ever met the cops in this town?
Inbred football jocks with tasers.

Right, I answer, still nodding like an idiot. Right.
The plume of blood. Gurgling. The way he hit hit the sand -

Last time I checked, she continues, your Dad’s the town weirdo and my Mom’s the town drunk. No fucking way we can show up and tell them that Bronson Reed was tragically murdered by, what, by the fucking Bear Lake Monster?

But it was the Bear Lake Monster, I say. Like I really think it was.

Not the point, Max Headroom.

She pulls a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her pocket, hands shaking so bad she can’t get a spark.
They’ll think we snapped and like, did it ourselves. Like those two chicks in New Zealand.

I take the lighter, my hands perfectly still.
New Zealand?

It doesn’t matter, she says. The point is, we’d be super easy to blame. Plus no-one at school likes us.
People like you, I say.
Tanya takes the lighter back and manages, finally, to spark her cigarette.
People put up with me, she says, because I don’t kiss and tell. 
She exhales deeply.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to spend the rest of my life in a mental institution.

I nod. Yeah.

Tanya eyes me sideways.
I don’t get it, she says. I’m over here fucking babbling and you’re just -
She flattens her hands on her knees. Absolute zero.

I’m thinking, I say.

The school guidance lady says that blanking out is a trauma thing, says Tanya.
She takes another long drag. I know you see her too. I think she’s bad at her job.

I nod.
Can I have one? I ask.
She snorts. I mean, if you want.
The cigarette seems to have restored Tanya’s equilibrium, and her hands are steadier as she passes me the box of Pall Malls.
I’m not traumatized, I say. By the way.
Yeah, she says, me neither. Here, lean over -
Suddenly her face is close to mine. I can see the flecks of mascara on her cheeks, her still-swollen mouth.
She says, breathe in.
The tip of her cigarette touches mine and I breathe in hard, choking as the smoke fills my throat and lungs.
You’re gonna cough, she says.
I do, but the cigarette tastes the way Tanya smells. It’s New and it’s Bad and I take another deep, long drag.
Congratulations, she says.You’re officially a badass.
She snorts again.
The counselor lady says my Trauma Thing is treating everything like a joke.
I don’t think you’re traumatized either, I tell her. You’re just…normal.
Christ, she says. I hope not.
I remember Tanya winking at me in the Hub. Our little secret.

I say: Yeah, okay.
She bites her lip again.
Okay, what?

Okay, we don’t tell anyone.
She surveys me, all eyebrows and eyeliner.
Then she fishes in her pocket and pulls out a nail-clipper.
We were never here. Repeat after me.
And she pushes the edge of the clipper into her finger hard enough to draw blood.
She says it one more time now, like a spell:
We were never fuckin’ here.
I take the nail clipper and do the same, trying hard not to flinch.
She presses her finger against mine, skin-to-skin, blood-to-blood.
She says, say it.
And I repeat, with all the pizzazz that I can muster:
We were never fuckin’ here. 

VOICEOVER

Bear Lake was created and written by Zoe Maltby, and directed by Liz Power. 
With performances by Gabrielle Laurendine, Suzy Weller, and Joseph Huffman.
Produced and sound designed by Gabe Lozada, with original music by Ronan Delisle and additional music by Gabe Lozada.
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