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YOKNAPATAWPHA COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT
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Investigating Officer(s): Det. S. Murphy, Det. T. Armstrong
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Incident No.: 002221-15H-2004
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Case Description: Corwin Fitz Homicide
The victim's film journal was found in a box of script pages in the
editing room/office (Evidence # 002221-13).
The following excerpt is from the latter portion of that journal.
View the first journal excerpt. Note: Around mid-July, Fitz's journal entries ceased to be dated. His
explanation was that he wanted to witness his life's
narrative evolve like an un-chaptered novel. He wanted to
study "the natural rhythm of the mind."
Caution: Rough language and situations.
I've got a song in my head that won't come out. I felt
like beating it out, just pummeling my head against the wall
or blowing the meat of my head away with any number of fully
automatic weapons lying around here. But then I started
listening to it.
If I could turn back the hands of time. If I could turn
back the hands of time.
What difference would it make? Something would just come
along and fumble it up again. I get so goddamned sick and
tired of waiting on the tripwire to be reversed, for this to
all start making sense. In the morning, I will be amazed at
myself for just sitting here waiting for an answer to this
movie to appear. Some sort of solution that will break me
out of this terror of knowing that it's all just a piece of
s***. A dead peace of unanswered, unutterable nonsense,
filled with nonsensical words and rhythms and no life, no
truth. You get something like that staring you in the face
every night and you feel like flying out of a window or
putting a pillow over your head, if you could only suffocate
yourself.
What's the most plush way to die, I wonder? Choking on a
rainbow. The blood in your veins turning instantly to ice.
Drowning in velvet and flesh.
If I could turn back the hands of time.
Meatsa, meatsa, meatsa! Now I can't help picturing
television jingles. Christ, now I am going mad!
What if I had a character stick his head in boiling
water? What a suicide!
Is there any sort of gas a guy could suck on, and it would blow him
up like a balloon? I need to get Alsace
making a lifelike dummy that will blow up and burst like a
human balloon.
I've rewritten the ending to this damn movie so many
times that I can't even remember the beginning in the
middle. Maneuvering through this script is like being
trapped in a mansion of dead-end corridors. I walk around
the lodge sometimes just to feel what it's like to walk into
a room and interact in a scene that has a definite
beginning, middle and end, and not a scene that spins in
monotonous circles. For example:
CORWIN walks down the hall and into the dorm
room. DAVE is the only person there, he's sitting on his
bunk bed staring at the floor.
CORWIN
Dave, what are you doing?
DAVE
Dude, sit down and look at this.
CORWIN
What is it, Dave? I want to look at this with
you.
DAVE
Dude...
(points to the floor)
CORWIN
What? I don't see anything.
DAVE
Dude, you don't see molecules?
CORWIN
No, Dave.
DAVE
They're getting bigger, man. The molecules are
getting bigger and bigger every hour. I've been
monitoring the results right here.
(shows Corwin a yellow sketch pad)
CORWIN
These are just meaningless markings and
scribbles.
DAVE
Dude, you're riding this scene with the parking
brake on.
CUT
If I could have turned my mind on like a video camera and
walked through those scenes back at the Gulf. Those times, my
life was as fractured and irrevocable as any thumbs-up movie
I'd care to watch. It was the best because it was free and
in living color, numbingly bright colors. Drawing life out
of thin air like a fruit picker. We made many a cotton-picker
mess his or her drawers with our antics, and we nearly
scared each other half to death in the process. Even in
those days, I was never strong enough to put both legs up on
the seat and ride it out. I was grinding gears the whole way
down. And the only way to end this kind of ride as abruptly
as I felt the need to is a wreck, a fiery jumble of knotted
steel and flaming cushions that had performed
insufficiently.
So this is what it was.
I picture the two scenes -- the story of my life, the
story of my film -- and I see that it is necessary they
converge. Because this is the end of my life. I know it as
sure as if I had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The
final days are winning, and I have to see it this way to
know what to do, to know what Radler should do. Brett and all
the others are only actors -- they don't know what will
really happen, and they don't care. I was foolish to allow
them to think that they would care and that would determine
what happened. This is what happened:
Helen and I had become one, moving, speeding toward a
sharp, distant horizon, an oasis where we could hide from
the fun and tricks that were becoming increasingly
dangerous. Yet I could tell before even applying the brakes
that she wasn't going to stop, that she'd run naked right
out into that surf and swim until her arms fell off, and I
was only willing to scamper into the surf, and laugh, and
let my life trickle out of me like stale beer piss on the
tide. I danced in the sand to all the lies we'd told and
tricks we'd played. Two grifters can't fall in love because
they'll rob each other blind.
So I employed the arts of my profession and staged a
gruesome death for myself. Rob painted me up in the bathtub
to look like a rich, red suicide. I pretended to be bathing
when she came in, and I made sure she heard the gunshots.
She exploded into the bathroom to check on me, but by then I
appeared to have blown my last life away. She knelt at the
tub laughing hysterically, as if she were in on the joke.
But my resolve was stronger. Sure, I was sedated, but I
didn't let my face crease or my mouth quiver. I was at that
moment more perfect a corpse than I will be the day they
close the coffin lid on me. And then she found the note, and
if that wasn't overkill....
Of course I blamed it all on her. It was her psychology,
the things she did and felt the worst about, that drove me
to my own death -- that self she feared had killed the man
she had pretended to love. It wasn't me she was crying for,
it was herself. Herself and that other self, and probably
even more selves. It was a hall or mirrored murderers. Pick
one, any one. Boom....
It's this dynamism that Cheyn is missing. I guess I
always underestimated her.
Katrina is a puppet, trained by some nervous puppeteer. I
put her in my show, and she wants me to lead her. I can't do
that. I can't do it! I only create the recipe, but the
ingredients stir themselves. It was supposed to be like this
from the start! It's what God must have felt like when he
wound up man and woman and let them go in the woods. They
knocked everything down, up and out. And they keep going,
and going, and going....
I have failed once again at this art because I cannot
work as a team.
I tried to paint pictures, but the physical limitations
were too great to satisfy my spirit of compromise between
what my eyes saw and what my hand could allow.
I tried to build, but the raw materials were too crude to
withstand my designs.
I tried to mold, but the impression was only that -- an
impression -- and not a new, amazing thing.
Call it lack of talent, or dissatisfaction with reality.
Either way, it's a scenario that must be dealt with. I'd as
soon rock back into the pool of unliving, that effortless
tomorrow, and swim in something I don't already know about.
This other business -- this earthbound attention -- is not
for me.
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