BOY
CLIP FROM NOT ANOTHER GIRL OF ICE (1978)
Mireille Foix, age sixteen, winner of the Best Actress Award at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival
[Film rolls]
The scene opens in a midnight wood, dense and tangled, its rotting breath palpable. The locals call it Delirium Forest, and it’s famous for devouring people whole, for reshaping the most solid of realities. A figure is visible inside, the moss-choked air around it glowing like an aura. The figure seems to float above the forest’s gnarled roots, impervious to its thorns, its nettles, its spines and raking branches. As the figure moves deeper inside, its luminescence fades, and a deep, guttural buzzing builds.
At the fringe of the forest, a scummy parking lot, tongued by sagging bags of trash. And there, beside them: a broken form, lying in a growing pool of his own blood, thick as ink. A black cat edges around the mess, sniffing.
“Leave it,” a woman’s voice hisses, a static burst, and the cat skitters away.
The woman’s wearing a ripped white camisole and fuchsia hotpants; she’s gripping a tire iron, white-knuckled and red-eyed. Platinum hair. Chapped, bitten lips. Without even seeing her whole face, we know she is beautiful and that her beauty is like a fishhook: delicate, sharp, designed with ancient wisdom to hurt, to trap. She rests the tire iron on her shoulder, and its rusted edge drips fresh crimson freckles on her and the torn camisole strap.
The woman: She’s no more than sixteen, all bruised skin and bird bones, the icy-blond wig on her head askew. Shivering in muddy boots.
She doesn’t notice us.
She’s staring into the woods. Faintly luminous, still. The humming grows louder, more ominous, and the woman leaves the safety of the bloodied asphalt to meet it. Her eyes never stray from the wild deep as she is guided away from us. Away from us, and into the carnivorous dark beyond. The droning intensifies, into its cracking and fizzing crescendo, until the woman finally—disappears.
[Film stops]
Mireille Foix possesses Grace Kelly’s elegance crossed with Audrey Hepburn’s mischievousness, Katharine Hepburn’s wit, and Marilyn Monroe’s pure, languid sex. She was born and raised on the mysterious Mediterranean island of Viloxin, and her idyllic childhood—spent free-diving for scallops with her fisherman father (now deceased) in a whitewashed cottage on the forested fringes of a minuscule seaside town—is nothing short of mythical. Today, she is her country’s greatest cultural export and patron, thanks to her Foix Institute. She is also the last Star with a capital S, deemed the most beautiful, charismatic, and intuitive woman living today by a swath of Tinseltown A-listers. Mireille Foix is a goddess, come to Hollywood on her golden Viloki scallop shell.
—Vogue magazine, 1996
To most, the name Henry Hammick still conjures an image of a shadow in a lab coat: mysterious, bizarre, impenetrable. What were we to make of this monolith of a man who left behind his family, his career, and his home country to start over on an isolated, volcanic Mediterranean island half a world away? He moved to Viloxin in the 1970s at the age of thirty and never looked back. Since launching his groundbreaking pharmaceutical company, Hero Pharmaceuticals, Hammick’s team has single-handedly introduced several history-changing medications and medical devices, most notably Ladyx, a treatment that slows the growth of many cancers.
Hammick has immersed himself in everything Viloki, from studying the largely unknown island history and social practices to Viloxin’s poignant poetry and burial customs. His command of the local language, Vilosh, has awed scholars. And now, after earning Viloki citizenship for himself, Henry Hammick has taken a traditional Viloki name for legal reasons: Hëró. Yes, it’s pronounced Hero, just like the name of his company. But don’t hold it against him: Hëró Hammick, founder of Hero Pharmaceuticals—now worth billions of newly minted euros—is this decade’s God among men.
—Time magazine, 1997
The Foix-Hammicks believe Viloxin is their Camelot. Their Eden. Do I find this realistic? No. I certainly do not. They know nothing of this island, nor even of themselves. My family has been here hundreds of years, documenting its darkest nooks and its myriad depths, and I can assure you: The Foix-Hammick family does not venture below the surface in any of its endeavors—especially Mireille Foix Hammick’s so-called White Fox film script. It is no Holy Grail. And no script—no family—concerns me. Despite their best efforts, they too shall disappear from our city, from our volcanic hills, from our lavender-scented meadows—in due time.
—Antella Arnoix, March 2009
RUNAWAY FOIX ON VILOXIN!POLICE COMMISSIONER CONCLUDESTHAT MIREILLE ABANDONED HER CUBS.
—The Viloki Sun, July 2009
One year ago today, beloved film star Mireille Foix disappeared from her grand country home, Stökéwood, taking with her a crocodile purse, an Hermès scarf, one pair of calfskin gloves—and the only known copy of her secret film script, White Fox. The Viloki Sun gained exclusive access to a segment of this script, photographed by Foix’s former manager, Daria Grendl, in the months preceding Foix’s disappearance. It is speculated by some that White Fox possesses clues to Mireille Foix’s current whereabouts—or to a shocking discovery she made before she vanished—as it eerily references the very items that went missing with her. Some call it the Viloki Holy Grail, claiming that Mireille Foix hid the secrets to building the ideal society inside.
Read on to discover for yourself a chilling excerpt, transcribed here from Grendl’s photo. The world may never have the chance to see what might be this legend’s greatest work.
Captor opens White Fox’s red purse and looks through the contents.
CAPTOR (V.O.)
You say you are strong, but I know you cannot stomach the polluted mess in the mirror. Cannot reconcile it with the beautiful fantasy world you created around yourself.
Captor examines a pair of calfskin gloves, a wallet. Captor finds photographs.
CAPTOR (V.O.) (CONT’D)
A world of unbridled hope, of answered prayers, of selfless goodness, of smiling children—
Captor flips through photographs, finding one of smiling children. Two girls, beautiful girls, their identities unknown.
CAPTOR (V.O.)
How sweet the photograph was, inside your ruined red purse.
Captor reenters chamber with clients inside and watches White Fox, now stone-faced.
CAPTOR (V.O.)
Evolve or die, White Fox, dear. Evolve or die.
Who is this captor? Grendl is staying mum.
“I simply thought it would be edifying for investigators and those who loved Mireille alike to understand her mindset prior to her departure,” Grendl explains. “It should be plain to readers that a troubled Mireille felt trapped and ran off.”
Read on for Grendl’s exclusive list of Mireille’s Viloxin haunts—ideal for those seeking a warm weather escape!
—The Viloki Sun, May 24, 2010
HERO TO HERMIT! “HE’S SICK, PARANOID, IRRESPONSIBLE—AND HE REFUSES TO LEAVE HIS STÖKÉWOOD HOME,” SAYS HERO PHARM BOARD MEMBER.
—The Viloki Sun, January 2014
NONI
NEW YORK, 2014
Two blocks from our home, an underground psychic was waiting for us with a secret message. Her basement shop blends into the row of dirt-encrusted town houses on West Tenth Street during the day, but at night the shop’s magical features come alive: carefully painted wood paneling; a neat row of budding, overgrown plants; and a buzzing neon sign of a purple crystal ball.
“You have the money, right?” Tai whispers to me, between blowing on her hands, that shock of cherry hair in her face.
It’s been five years since Mama disappeared, but strangers still notice us on the street sometimes, whispering “Is that…?” to their friends with that sideways-sneak look, so we had decided to wear plain brown wigs tonight to stay incognito. But then Tai wanted to use the red one from her devil costume, and Tai gets what she wants. You’re only thirteen, Aunt Marion cried, when she saw the crop top and leather miniskirt my sister was wearing. Mama wore a thong swimsuit in a movie when she was thirteen, Tai snapped back.
I hike up my loose jeans and pull the envelope out of my fleece sweatshirt’s kangaroo pocket. “Two hundred big ones,” I whisper back. We had been saving for months.
Tai grabs my shoulders and squeals, this infectious grin spreading from one bubble gum–pink cheek to the other. There’s so much innocent hope in her lined-and-mascaraed blue eyes, so much it makes me quiver, but of course I’m smiling back before I know it. Tonight could give us clues, if not answers. My stomach hasn’t felt settled in days.
Tai follows me down the steps, and we push inside the storefront—a bell jingles. The entry room is dark: patchy red velvet seating and finger-thick vines crawling everywhere. The smell of patchouli mixed with something heady and sweet, like cloves in hot wine. A stained, paisley curtain fringed in golden thread blocks our view into the back. A lone television on the wall plays a grainy video of spooky nature scenes on silent loop: a duck moving across a shadowy pond, wet red leaves falling from a tree, a lush forest that looks familiar.
“Hello?” Tai calls, scratching at her wig’s netting.
Wind chimes tinkle in the back. I pull Tai onto the lumpy love seat up front just as a black cat pushes through the curtain—a furry lump in its mouth—and bounds up onto its window seat in between two ferns. It drops its catch and paws at it.
“Ew,” Tai whispers, before rubbing at her bare legs. “What time is it?”
“It’s eight-oh-one,” I whisper back, just as she walks through the curtain, short and squat and dressed in black silk from head to toe: the imposing Madame Morency.
“Carmela!” She claps at the cat. “You promised your days hunting young and delicate creatures were over.”
The cat yowls, and Madame Morency notices the two of us, clutching hands on the love seat, our hearts beating too fast in the small room.
“You’re my eight o’clock, ladies?” she says in her deep rasp, head tipping to the side. “Sisters. You’re very young. What loss could you have possibly suffered?”
Tai’s purple nails dig into my skin.
“How old are you, exactly?”
“Aren’t you a psychic?” Tai says, before I even open my mouth. “We’re eighteen,” she adds, with that confidence of hers that springs up from nowhere.
Madame Morency’s lip quirks. “I will not begin any session without honesty and an open mind. It’s best you see yourselves out.”
“There’s no legal age requirement to visit a fortune-teller in New York State,” I reply, sweating hands squirrelling into my sweatshirt pocket. My lips snag on my braces. “Telling fortunes in general is a class B misdemeanor, anyway, though, and—”
“Fine,” Tai interrupts, just as Madame Morency crosses her arms at me. “We’re just kids. But we did lose someone important when we were really young. And we made this appointment because we need your help to reach her.” She holds out the envelope of money. “Won’t you help us?”
Copyright © 2020 by Sara Dorothy Rosenberg
