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Marion collected the numbers of every restaurant in the area that would deliver to the room, so by the time he rang the desk bell his support system h1ad consisted of four pizzerias, two reasonably sanitary-looking Chinese places, a Jamaican jerk joint, a very decent hot wing shack, and, what seemed like a great stroke of luck to Marion, the Crestview Diner, which was open to Marion’s proposition for a special arrangement; normally, no delivery, but the proprietor, a man called Jabir, informed Marion that he had in his employ a legally licensed-to-drive busboy who was happy to set off on deliveries if Marion promised to tip well. Marion promised. Then he took a room on the second floor of the Motel Americana. 201.

At time of check-in he also had in his possession an ad he’d cut out of the local paper. It declared simply:

Bonafide Healer

Guaranteed or Your Money Back

So after two and half weeks of binge-eating, he finally screwed up the courage, spun the motel phone rotary around the requisite number of times, and four hours later found himself watching the movements of the ugliest mouth he had ever seen as it said to him:

I studied under a king. I’m heir to the throne.

Technically, you can’t study to be a king, Marion corrected.

The mouth formed a sneer but continued unimpeded: You take the picture, you take the soul, it said. This was the first thing Barrallari ever taught me. You know this name? The famous Barrallari? We were sitting in a bar in Capri overlooking a sea so blue it hurt you to your childhood to look at it. Reno was laying low after Brando accosted him in the streets of Rome. Threatened his life.

The mouth continued to weave words around and through its yellow-brown teeth, its open sores, the whitened saliva coagulations lodged in the creases of the lips.

Reno Barrallari, it said. Even his name is immortal. I love saying it. I’ll say it again. Reeennooo Barrallari. Rolls off the tongue like a wet kiss, don’t it? Go ahead. Say it.

Marion declined, but as the mouth charged headlong into what Marion presumed was a sales pitch of some sort, he did venture to mouth the words as if they were a Rumplistiltskin. The name formed in his breath, a whisper, floated like a feather: Reno Barrallari.

Barrallari has had seventy six cameras smashed, the Healer’s mouth declared. Broken eleven ribs. He has been to the emergency room one hundred sixty two times. One hundred and sixty two!

Celebrities, they’re animals. Brutal. One time, one time Sophia Loren put a cigarette out in his eye. Barrallari had to wear a patch four months straight. Couldn’t shoot straight two after that.

But War is War.

That’s another thing Reno said. Famously said. To the world at large, yes, but also to me directly, personally, as we sipped Campari from each other’s glasses on that portico that day.

Nothing like that, no, the Healer said. It’s just Reno has very specific litmus tests for things like trust. That was one of them. We drank of each other’s backwash. So what? We became blood brothers. Spit brothers, okay. He was ahead of his time, Reno– this blood scourge that’s taken over today, no one can screw without full body armor anymore. It’s killing the business truth be told.

Anyway, You take the soul with the picture. A cliché, but one that bears further inquiry… for what Barrallari liked to call sociological implications. He said, You infer from this photographic soul stealing a kind of… spiritual cannibalism.

The Healer paused here for effect. Marion took the opportunity to say, I’m not sure what any of this has to do with me.

The Healer looked around the room, then at Marion accusingly and said, Most of us, most of us feed on images of beauty. We invent beauty. Re-invent it. We obsess over beauty like a Geppetto with a puppet. Then we consume it like a Kronos. You understand consuming, yes? At least this? Most of us, beauty is our daily bread. We masticate beauty.

Then, we shit beauty out.

The Healer rose and leaned over Marion, who was lying flat on his back on the bed. With the exception of the daily crutch-aided glacial journey to the bathroom, it was a position from which he hadn’t moved in a week. The Healer clicked on a pen light and shined it into Marion’s eyes one after another and made clucking sounds with his tongue saying:

You ever know anyone, Reno asked me and now I’m asking you, Think about it, anyone who didn’t care to look at their own stinking expulsion floating in the bowl after a movement?

Marion could see no good coming from a response. He declined to offer one.

The mouth said, Why would anyone do such a thing? Stare at their own floating feces? It makes no sense. To what end? What’s there to see? I’ll tell you just as Barrallari told it to me: What’s there are equal parts pride and disdain for what we’ve done, that’s what. If we accomplish nothing all day, we’ve accomplished this. Barrallari had a theory that we derive a small sense of pride looking at the ruins of what we’ve done to the very thing that keeps us alive. A sense of purpose in life.

The Healer said, This place is disgusting.

And it was. The carpet was littered with food packaging of all forms. Paper bags and plastic bags. Plastic forks, plastic spoons and plastic knives. Styrofoam cups, straws. Dented tin rounds. Ho-ho wrappers. Egg shells and Chinese cartons. Used napkins and half-emptied sauce cups of varying colors and states of decay. The waft of used grease and wet meat hung over everything. The smell of warm ketchup. The Healer swatted at a fly and shook his head at the filth, then began pacing the room, stepping through the minefield as he crossed it.

He said, We were watching Jayne Mansfield bathing in the Fountain of Trevi. Remember her? She was what angels see when they imagine what angels look like. She was pretending to be Anita Ekberg, who I believe was pretending to be her in the Fellini. Anyway, Barrallari said to me, his exact words were, If we accept that Beauty is a Godhead, then we can easily agree to say that we build our Gods. We devour our gods. We shit our gods out.

We were also at that moment watching a man who was watching Mansfield taking her bath. Let’s say this man’s last name rhymed with Lennedy. Just as this Lennedy stepped from the shadows and approached the angel’s angel and embraced her in a kiss, Reno stepped from his own shadow and took the picture to end all pictures.

I’ve never seen a man happier in my life, more triumphant.

Or another man more furious.

We fled, giddy as schoolboys running from the yelp of a teacher who just sat on a thumbtacked chair. But as we were fleeing, four men in dark suits popped out of a black car and shoved Reno to the cobble stone. They smashed his camera and turned the film inside it into linguine. Then they used Barrallari’s head as a soccer ball for a while.

A football, excuse me.

But later in his apartment, holding a cold braciole to his swollen jaw, Reno told me, This is the price we pay to provide our service to humanity. This is the cost the minister priest pays to perform the ritual sacrifice of the blood-letting.

Having to pay for a service you provide is an irony that doesn’t escape me, I told him.

Reno shook this off. He stepped out onto the deck and looked out over his city. The city. You could see the Coliseum standing on the horizon.  The smashed cameras, he said, The broken bones– chump change. Even the missing teeth. What gets me is the hypocrisy.

The fattening process, Barrallari called it.

Bigger than the coliseum was a billboard of Monica Vitti on a building just across the street. Thirty feet wide if an inch. Bigger and more beautiful than life itself.

Look at her, Barrallari demanded. I built that billboard for her, literally painted her face there for all of us to worship. More magnificent on the red carpet than any of God’s children has a right to be. I snap her at just the right moment, just the right angle and voila: immortality.

I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes, the Healer said to Marion. I’ve seen them shake his hand as if seeing an old friend. Once, Marcello paid for our entire week’s stay at the Hotel Martinez. Barrallari told me, Comes to the point you can’t tell who the hunter and who the prey are.

Reno loved Giorgio Caproni. The poet? Così si forma un cerchio, dove l’inseguito insegue il suo inseguitore.

The Healer stared down at Marion.

No parlare, eh? A swine before the pearl, eh? I’ll translate: Thus a circle forms in which the one chased chases the one chasing.

99% of the published celebrity photos, supposedly candid, they’re actually staged. We do our duty. We fatten the pigs for the slaughter.

The Healer continued: Barrallari pointed at the glorious face on the billboard with the braciole and said, But when it comes time to cut out her heart, she’ll act surprised. Indignant. As if she didn’t know it was coming, the blood-letting.

A darkness overtook The Healer. Christ didn’t dictate the terms of the crucifixion, he said. What gives them the right?

It’s not right, he muttered. Now you look at him, he’s a wreck of a man. Crushed bones. Scars. Head trauma. He’s got a plate in his skull. He pointed to his own head as a stand-in for Barrallari’s. He’s not all there. But to this day Reno bears no grudge. Reno believes in suffering for his art. Not me. I came to hate the pigs. I couldn’t wait for their slaughter. Before I even snapped my first picture, I wanted to taste their blood.

The ugly mouth stopped talking. The man moved to the window. He parted the curtain a few inches. Marion watched and wondered what he saw out there in that silence. The parking lot below. The turnpike beyond that. What else? The Healer let the curtains close with an air of finality.

A month after, he said, Elizabeth Taylor’s muscle put Barrallari in traction. An incident in Venice. From his hospital bed, Barrallari told me, You’re ready.

I wasn’t. Not by a long shot.

I was given a time. A place on the Rue Royale. The target was a young starlet who stole a scene out from under Leslie Caron so completely that Caron demanded the scene cut from the film. It had little effect. The young starlet’s star was rising. Word got around.  She was in demand and already being offered leading roles opposite the Clifts and Hudsons of the world. This without a single celluloid frame of her face to have graced the screen.

My assignment was to take a quote unquote candid picture of the young starlet walking into Maxim’s barefoot. A quote unquote scandal to end all scandals would ensue and that scandal would incidentally catapult the young starlet into the imaginations of everyone on the planet born with eyes to see. A fattening assignment. Not a slaughter.

Okay, we all start somewhere.

I greased the palm at the door and ordered a plate of beef tongue. I readied my camera just as Barrallari taught me. It was a Tuesday afternoon and there was only one other man in the room. I recognized him as the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Socrates Onassis. More money than Zeus himself. Richer than the Garden of Eden.

And when she walked in… my  God, when she walked in…

The ugly mouth closed. The jaw muscles tightened.

I was paralyzed, it said. I couldn’t breathe. I ceased to exist.

And I failed to fulfill my duty. I failed Reno. Failed at fulfilling my only purpose for being in Paris, my only purpose for being anywhere. I took no picture of the young, barefooted goddess.

I took no soul.

The maître de was evidently a blind man. He turned the young goddess away for improper attire as was devised by the young goddess’ publicity apparatus, and just like that, she was gone. The woman, the vision; poof.

Aristotle jumped up and followed after her immediately and I, finally released from the young goddess’ spell, followed after him.

The Healer began cleaning the room, depositing Marion’s food remnants and used wrappings into the garbage can.

Reno had warned me, Never get involved with them. He told me, Subject and Object are not interchangeable, despite what these blasted postmodernists might tell you. The observer who becomes the observed creates existential crises for both parties. Over and over, Reno warned me of this. And I failed to heed this cardinal rule, and on my very first assignment.

Out on the street Aristotle had overtaken the Goddess. When she failed to respond to his questions, when she ignored him utterly, when she refused to stop walking to indulge his propositions, he grabbed her by the shoulders forcefully and with madness in his eyes made demands, shouting them into her perfect face. He demanded to know her name, demanded she acknowledge him, demanded that she take a joy ride on his giant yacht. The biggest goddamn yacht on the Riviera! he screamed insanely.

Taken out of context, the altercation would have appeared to anyone to be a lover’s spat. Teeth-sinking delicacies that would accomplish our objective better than any manufactured transgression of social etiquette by a long shot. But I saw fear in the young goddess’ eyes and again I failed to be what I claimed to be. Instead of taking the photo, I smashed Aristotle in the face with my camera.

Reno’s camera.

As Aristotle lay out our feet, I asked the barefooted goddess if she was all right. She folded into my arms, confused and sobbing from the chaos that had swept her up.

We should leave before the police get here, I told her. She agreed. I took her to the room I had at the Hotel de Suede and consoled her. We drank Campari. Of course, we drank Campari.

And we were married twelve days later.

Marion’s room was nearly clean.

It was a mistake, the Healer said. My jealousy ate me from the inside out. We drank. We fought. Epic fights that rivaled that of the Greeks. I hid her from the eyes of men. I forbade her to continue pursuing a career on the silver screen. I forbade her from magazine shoots. I forbade her from sunbathing. I forbade her, ultimately, to leave the house.

The Healer was at the window again, looking out through finger-parted curtains.

Well, the woman had her revenge on me. She gave me ulcers. She gave me chronic back pain. Neck pain. Tooth aches. Poison ivy. Insomnia. Irritable bowel. Panic attacks. High blood pressure. You name it. Cancer itself. I was dying. Nearly dead. But in the end, I refused to go without a whimper and, like Aristotle before me, I was blinded by my rage and the various diseases she cast upon me. I locked her into a closet once and for all.

She escaped and smashed me in the face with a mirror.

I remember little of what happened next. I cornered her. I bit her. I bit her so hard and so savagely, she was stuck in my teeth. I tasted her blood in my mouth.

The ugly mouth breathed deeply.

I swallowed her flesh, it said.

He leaned over the giant man on the bed.

Look in my eyes, Marion. They’re clear. I’m cured.

Marion said, You’re insane.

I can heal you.

Jesus. I should have known. You’re nothing but a two bit charlatan.

Careful.

You’re no Barrallari. You’re just a Bakker.

The Healer grinned at him. Wait here, he said.

The Healer left the room. For good, Marion hoped, but he returned a moment later with a woman in his arms. Marion knew it was the woman. The goddess. Or what was left of her. She was an amputee now, her limbs severed at varying lengths. Four fingers from the left hand. From the elbow down on her right. The entire left foot. Everything below the right knee.

Her skin was enflamed. Nearly every inch of her was eaten away, rotten, scorched with infection. But her her face, yes, perfect, angelic, beautiful. The mouth had spared her her beauty. Or failed to take it.

Marion gasped, stricken.

The Healer stood over him, the woman in his arms.

You should feel blessed, Marion. Aside from me, you will be the first beneficiary of my miracle. Whatever it is you’re dying from, it will be healed. What? Diabetes? Gout? Blood disease? She can cure you of hunger itself.

The woman did not speak but he looked at Marion as tears streamed from his eyes.

The mouth said, All you have to do… is do what you do.

With the movement of an ocean liner, Marion brought himself to a sitting position.

It took a moment for him to catch his breath.

The Healer lowered the woman down to Marion. Inches from his face.

Marion said, I’m not interested.

You want to be healed.

No. Not like that.

Then how?

You wouldn’t understand.

Why the fuck did you call me then?

I came here to die.

You what? Where the fuck is my money?

I called the wrong man.

Panic overtook the Healer. Where’s my money!? he screamed.

The Healer dropped the woman onto the floor and began searching the room, flinging drawers open. Rifling through Marion’s bags.

As he did this Marion lifted the receiver from its cradle. He dialed emergency and said into the phone. I’d like to report a crime. A murder.

Staring at the Goddess, he told the man on the line the name of the motel. The room number.

Marion stood. He moved in the corridor connecting the main room from the doorway.

The Healer had found the money- a short stack under Gideon. He tried to flee but Marion would not budge. You bastard, the Healer screamed. She’s infected you! Can’t you see she’s infected you?

Sirens sang in the distance as the Healer slammed futiley against the mass of Marion.

The Healer turned to the woman. You! This is your doing, isn’t it? You planned this!?

The sirens drew closer.

The Healer shoved the bills into his pockets, ripped the television from the stand and flung it through the window.

Without hesitation, he went out after it, a wingless albatross.

Marion heard screams coming from the mouth below. The Healer was crawling across the lot when the police arrived. When the police came through the door, they found Marion hovering in the air, light as a feather four feet off the floor, the mangled Goddess in his arms.