“Is there someplace I could stow my coat?” I asked.
The thing was to behave as normally as possible, more normally than was possible, in order to balance out the blood. All the attention in the room was pooling at my feet, and I needed something big and alarming to draw it away from me, or conversely, something very ordinary to mask it. I went over to the table to find something to hold in my hands. Empty plastic cups measured out the emptiness in neat rows, waiting to be filled or moved or restacked. These objects were pieces, building up toward a whole I could not at all recognize.
“A little bit of detergent and ammonia, that’s what I would use,” said a woman’s voice from behind me, whispered harshly. It appeared some people were having trouble telling the fake blood from real, and this might account for the coagulation of fear in the space surrounding me. I mixed alcohol, juice, and ice until it approximated the right color, and then I tried to figure out a way to stand. The light was strange in there, and it seemed conceivable that I could find a place and position that would render the bloodstains invisible, camouflaged, like a dappled shadow falling on the surface of grass.
But my movements in and out of the shadowy areas of the room, covered in blood as I was, made the other partygoers nervous. My dress gave off a loud and plasticky sound when I shifted even slightly, and there was the tendency of my costume toward drippage. The other guests hunched in toward one another as I wriggled in the corners, trying to cancel out the stains. “You just can’t hide something like that,” a man’s voice said with audible disgust, coming from someplace I was unable to see.
The way things were, all I could do was make the situation worse.
There are times when any amount of being within the world is like rubbing bare skin against sandpaper, when any form of motion is a kind of abrasion, leaving you raw and pink and vulnerable to the next thing. At these times, I prefer to close my eyes and be still, still like the cups or candles or crackers on the table, nerveless and open. I closed my eyes and tried to think of the thing furthest from my situation. I imagined a meadow and I populated it with sunlight, a small and rustic fence trailing toward the horizon, a little family of ducks and a couple of grazing sheep, a green and verdant field studded with small white flowers, possibly clover blossoms. But before I knew it, blood was everywhere, though the sheep continued to munch along idyllically, tearing at the reddened tufts with small, calm movements and very white teeth.
When I opened my eyes, a man was standing next to me, watching me with curiosity, mostly. There was a shyness to his staring that I found bearable, if only in contrast to the other forms of staring that were going on around and at me. “Hello,” he said. “Hi,” I responded. “My name’s Andrew,” he said.
I nodded. Where was all this going?
“Well, I wanted to tell you first off that your fake blood looks great. Really realistic. Really scary, you know? But without being actually too scary. Really great.”
I was flattered by his eye for detaiclass="underline" in fact I had spent a good amount of time getting the blood right, perfecting the proportions and cooking times as I made it from scratch. My recipe was a variant on the classic Karo syrup and red food coloring used in horror movies from the 1980s. Six pints of Karo syrup at room temperature, three ounces of red food coloring, nondairy creamer for opacity, arrowroot powder for texture, blue food coloring for depth, a bit of honey for the complexion, and vanilla extract to improve the scent. As with real blood, every element of the fake served a vital purpose.
It looked like Andrew had something else he wanted to say.
“Well, I don’t mean to bother you. I guess I just noticed you standing by yourself and I just was wondering. I mean, you don’t have to answer. But I was wondering. Are you part of the murder mystery, too?”
“Murder mystery?” I asked.
“Yeah, the one in the other room. In the kitchen or whatever. The guy with the ax in him.”
“I’m not part of any murder mystery,” I explained. “I just made a mistake.”
A woman’s voice came from my right. “Murder mystery?” it said. “Oh, how fun!”
I turned and looked at her.
“Well,” she said, directing herself toward Andrew and avoiding my glare, “let’s have a look! It’s about time something interesting happened here.”
The other room was a dining room, smaller and more intimate than the large hall we had been in before, but similarly windowless and dim. Objects were overturned on the table and floor in a way that suggested a struggle, but one that had been carefully choreographed. The candelabras and vases lay on their sides, gently, and long-stemmed roses were strewn evenly across the room with an executioner’s precision. On the ground under some of the roses was a man sprawled flat on his front, his face buried in the carpet and a large ax sticking up from the middle — the exact middle — of his back. A dark red substance pooled beneath his body.
Impressed sounds came from all around me.
“It’s very realistic, don’t you think?” “Looks very much like a murder.” “John really went all out this year, that’s for sure!” Who was John, and why was he letting this happen? And then: Who was this man, and was he in on the joke or was he, like me, waiting it out, hoping that everyone would find something else to stare at?
In the lower center of my body, two feelings were swirling together. On the one hand, the scene was too grisly to be real, and I sensed my fists relaxing, going loose. On the other, I had never seen this much blood before, real or fake, and what did I know? It might be exactly grisly enough to be real.
“Are we very sure he’s not really dead?” I asked.
A tall man in a gray suit strode over and stuck a finger in the red puddle. He rubbed the substance between his finger and thumb, sniffed it briefly, and declared, “Corn syrup. Definitely corn syrup, you can tell from the texture: slippery, thick, and sticky as hell. Smells sweet, too. I think our hosts are probably having a good laugh at our expense! The looks on our faces!”
I was still uneasy, but the unease was lifting slowly. The man looked competent, like a doctor. Or like someone who could have gotten into medical school. And then I wanted so badly to let it all be normaclass="underline" for the first time that night, nobody seemed bothered by me. They hardly seemed to notice, they were so busy marveling at the accuracy of the carnage, dipping their fingers in the spreading liquid and playfully terrorizing their dates. I looked over at Andrew, and when he smiled at me I smiled back.
Just then there was a scream, followed by another scream, followed by nervous laughter.
The man who had identified the blood as corn syrup was facedown on the floor, surrounded by women who alternated between laughing tightly and murmuring quietly to each other. In the middle of his back was an ax much like the ax stuck in the first man, though with a different manufacturer’s name on its handle.
“Um,” I said. “What just happened?”
Nobody knew. One moment he had been upright; the next he was prostrate, and axed. Everyone agreed it was great showmanship. Some began to talk about how difficult it would be to remove the stains from the plush beige carpet, how much it would cost.
“So, um,” Andrew said, turning back toward me. “What sort of work do you do?”
I was a secretary, but also there on the rug the same dark substance was blossoming out from under the second axed man, and something about this bothered me immensely. I would never have considered myself an expert on real blood or murder mysteries or staged deaths or party etiquette, but I had a good deal of experience with fake blood; and this just did not look like genuine fake blood. There was a liveness to its flow, and it filled the room with a dark and indefinable scent.