It is always rewarding to publish a new story from a long time contributor. In NDQ 90.1/2, we were fortunate enough to feature a new story from Jim Sallis, “Lying Down.” If you’re familiar with Jim’s work, this story will be another gem-like contribution to his oeuvre. If you haven’t read some of his classic fiction, then this story is a nice introduction to his ability to create narrative tension laced with humor. This story will also appear in Jim’s complete collected short stories, Bright Segments which will be published by Soho Press in early 2025. 

(As an aside, I re-read his novel, The Long-Legged Fly this summer and thoroughly enjoyed it.)

If you feel like you want to explore NDQ more, check out some other content from issue 90.1/2, our digital archive  and the digital anthology of the first 90 volumes of the journal: NDQ@90 .

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Lying Down

You ever see Always a Dead Body Somewhere, that opening scene panning so slowly along the beach to the poor sucker laying there stone cold gone and done with, with the heron perched on his chest? That’s me. That was my breakthrough, the beginning of a long career. I owe a lot to that minute and a half by the water in San Diego.

My name’s Jeremy Blunt. The studio wants a dead body onscreen, I’m who they call. Before Always, I’d spent twelve years out here trying to make it as an actor. After Always, word got around fast, the way it does, and I didn’t have to go knocking anymore. Best in the business, everyone said. Has the experience you need, my agent said. No one does better DBs than me. End of discussion.

You better believe, after a quarter of a century out here on sets and streets I have more stories to tell you than I could get through in a solid month. Like the time they set up close to an anthill no one noticed. I got down, doing my thing, dead to the world you might say, and right after cameras started rolling, so did the ants, up and out to find this fine big meal they’d been provided. And it was a long scene. Shows what a pro I was, even then. Or there was that time the director and cameraman, both hungover from last night’s party, got into it and wound up pulling prop guns and swords on each other. Or the director who had to show everyone, every scene, how it was to be played, so that his shootings went two or three times as long as others. When it came down to his prepping me, my part being exactly to do nothing, the whole crew applauded as he lay there. He just looked confused.

 But maybe we can get into that later.

The big moments in our lives never come when we expect them. I owe a lot to that San Diego shoot. I owe everything to what I’m telling you about here.

We were shooting on the fly and cheap as junk shoes, one of those projects where the director and writer are the same and it looks to be financed off credit cards and deception. We were in a state no one would ever have much reason to come and in a part of the state where even the roads were downright sullen about being there. The whole thing was a mess. Everyone knew it, and no one would say it. The script was still getting cooked. We’d come in mornings and everything from dialog to the roles themselves would have been changed. The one thing we did not do was reshoot, anything. No money for that, so whatever got onto film stayed there. Made for some interesting continuity, not to mention transitions. Guys would be talking in a room, full daylight, then they’d go outdoors and it was dark. Or the director, editing, would lard in filler, patch-over shots of the set through a bottle of seltzer or a windowpane with rain running down it as characters spoke voiceover. That sort of thing.

The female lead was one of those with a nose that could hide behind a demitasse spoon and eyebrows plucked away to make ample room for expertly drawn new ones. She pronounced every single syllable of every single word like she rolled them on her tongue before pushing them out. If we’d done run-throughs before shoots she would have showed up in tights and shapeless cloth dresses, which is what she wore, all she wore, any time she was off camera.

Then one morning this guy popped up, fifties maybe, good shoes and haircut. The suit fit, but it looked out of place as hell here in rural bumfuck on a halfass movie set. Struck me as a man accustomed to moving through the world expecting no resistance. No one I asked knew for sure who he was. Like me, he hung around the edge of the action, bellying up at least once to a goodies table that was mainly coffee, bottled water, cookies, crackers, and cheese cubes. Then after my stint, which came up a few hours into the day’s shoot, with another, brief appearance as a second DB, set for later, he came over.

The scene had me propped up against a flat rock, pale as surrounding sand, upper-body clothing mostly ripped away. Makeup had spent an industrious hour-plus creating wounds on my arms, chest, and face. On edit, Effects would drop in gulls pecking at me, a strip of flesh or two.

Our spectator walked over as I was heading for the trailer to change. When he held out a hand, I couldn’t help but notice that the shoulders of his suit stayed put. Tailored. “Good work,” he said. “That scene was yours.”

“Until they put the gulls in, anyway.” I told him about the effects still to come.

“Yeah. Animals, cute kids…”

“Scene stealers every one.”

“Still, a good death scene, a believable one…Not something just anyone can pull off.”

I considered responding with a Brando impression of method acting, What you gotta do is get right down in duh death, but thought better of it and simply smiled.

“B. Grant,” he said.

“As in winged, with a stinger?”

“Just the initial, the letter. Unimaginative, nonconformist parents.”

“Two adjectives you don’t often find traveling together.”

“Oh?”

“The exclamation, or just the letter?”

He held up his hands in mock surrender, then handed me a card. Embossed, high end paper, quietly stylish. Like the shoes and suit. “Any chance you’re done here?”

“One more call, tomorrow, early.”

“I see…I’m wondering, might you then be interested in new employment?”

  “Doing?”

 “Only what you do so well, I assure you.”

This, I thought, is the part of the movie where the character knows better than to go out on the porch to see what’s out there but does it anyway.

Thank the Lord, chance, the relative position of heavenly bodies, prevailing winds, pick one or all the above, that I did.

~

You know how you walk into places or see them onscreen and think, No way an actual person lives here? That’s what stepping through the front door with B. Grant was like. There was so damned much glass, on summer days you’d have to wear sunglasses. Low-slung furniture, apparently built for people severely short-changed as to leg length. And most everything white except for blobs of color on the wall that were probably supposed to be paintings.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” B. Grant said. “Not my style either. Also not my condo.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

“Checking in.”

Voices outside, then a man and woman entered, both in clothes that came off no rack like any I’d ever been close to. I could have lived a year off what they paid for their four shoes.

“Emil, Lucinda. Thank you for coming.”

“So this is the one,” the man said, looking me over.

“He is.”

I turned back to B. Grant. “Sorry, I thought –”

“No, no. Merely acting as agent here. Seeking the best man for the part.” Then to Emil: “And I’ve found him for you.”

“We’ll see.”

At that, B. Grant looked a bit uneasy. For a moment I worried that he might start shouting out commands. You know: sit, roll over. Play dead. Not that I ever minded auditions.

“I’ll be going, then,” he said and, with nothing further forthcoming, did. I introduced myself, they reciprocated with handshakes. Emil went off to get drinks, fetch being the word he used, as Lucinda and I sat on the lowboy chairs, knees poked up like kangaroos.

“You’re an actor?”

“Well, ma’am, it was either that or find honest work.” Seeing her jumpstart a smile for my lame joke, I backpedaled. “Not much of one, when it comes right down to it. I just do one thing really well. But you keep doing that thing, if they go on letting you do it, before you know it you’ve got yourself a career.”

“So that’s not what you always wanted to be? When you were a child?”

“When I was a child…Truthfully, I can’t remember that I wanted much of anything in particular. Or maybe I wanted everything.”

“Whatever we want or don’t, nothing much ever turns out the way we think it will.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Emil was back with the drinks, a pinkish wine for her, whiskey of some sort for him, the beer I’d asked for. Imported. Vaguely gothic lettering. Dark.

“I overheard a little of what you were talking about out here,” Emil said. “Have to ask what that one thing you’re good at might be.”

“If I had to put it in a word – pretending, I guess.”

“Pretending.” Emil.

“As children do.” Lucinda.

I nodded to both.

“Interesting.” Emil again, with a sip of whiskey as he considered. “Grant told you what the job pays?”

“He didn’t even tell me what the job was.”

“And yet you agreed.”

“I came along. As they say in the film world: Great set up. Get ’em watching, we can run credits after.”

~

If there were credits, the first thing onscreen would have been A Lyle Kron Film. Cause that’s what it was about, that’s who the director was, and the star. Also why I was there. It wasn’t a film, though, never would be.  

Turns out the Emil-Lucinda couple had a friend of the starving artist persuasion. God only knows how they might have met, living in separate worlds, but they did. And this friend, about the couple’s age, I’d guess, was a painter and sculptor. “Best to let the man himself explain it,” Emil said as we sat in that bright room with our whisky, tea, and beer. Shortly thereafter we disembarked for the starving artist’s studio.

At that first meeting Lyle, who physically reminded me of overfull, overburdened, unsorted dormitory rooms, told me he’d spent five years now on a single project. That he wanted to capture, in a painting, drawing, or sculpture, “the true, forever secret, horrid, beauteous image of death itself, death felt, death lived.” To this end, over those years, he’d employed the services of better than twenty models, all of whom eventually were dismissed as inadequate to the mission, “though perhaps,” he admitted, “it is my own inadequacy. And that Death doesn’t wish us to know her so intimately.”

In time Lyle had spoken of his despair to Emil and Lucinda, and they, sensitive to the pain in his voice, offered first to assist him in finding the ideal model for his project, then to provide formidable payments for same.

So it was that an artist’s studio above a furniture warehouse by long-abandoned train tracks at city’s edge became my new occupation, my daily haunt, and my rightful duty for close on ten months. As with all life, much of what went on there was routine, some quite challenging, most of the rest humdrum. There were bright segments, of course. And something about Lyle’s dedication and drive that proved infectious.

Vividly I remember the day he moved from a painting at which for weeks he’d been disheartedly poking and prodding, to a mass of hard clay on a stand nearby and, requesting a small change in my pose, his hand lightly at rest on the clay before setting to work in earnest, said, “The medium knows, this damned clay, canvas, paper, stone – it knows, with every move, every shape or volume or line I leave behind, every blankness, it knows this is all untrue, dishonest, all but small parts of a greater lie.”

Every second day or so, fully aware of his predilection for diving in and staying down, Emil and Lucinda brought around bagels and fixings, sandwiches, or pho. Save for that, bodily exigencies, or occasional collapses into a few hours of sleep, Lyle scarcely stepped out from behind that trestle table and its burden of clay for close to a month. My own agenda, first as a matter of course, then diligently, echoed his.

What finally came off that table and from that hard clay, the statue cast in bronze and entitled The Dead Don’t Lie, you can see at the city’s museum, in art books, online at specialty and educational websites. Critics describe the work as filled with foreboding yet strangely restful, as darkness and light intermingling, as an object one cannot look away from, as a marvel and a wonder. I’ll leave descriptions, reactions, and praise to critics and viewers. I myself have never seen the completed piece. I never will. I have no need to.

The big moments in one’s life, the truly momentuous ones, never come when we expect them. I walked away from that studio with ever so much more than I had ever owned upon entering, with a new and abiding realization of what it is I do. I know now. I know what I do, and why.

Silence, longing, loss, darkness, all those empty spaces within and without us, everything we fear deeply and forever – I can give all these a shape and form. I can bring them into light. A rare talent? A gift. A calling. I lie down.

~

Jim Sallis has published 18 novels, multiple collections of stories and essays, three books of musicology, five poetry collections, a biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin. Upcoming are a new story collection and a collection of five novellas set in the same near future.

 

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