Return on Investment

It was week thirteen of shooting the fourth season of MonsterMan: The Challenge, and I was on the balcony of my room in the Burj Khalifa, breathing in the purple Dubai sunset wind, looking out at the chrome and concrete oasis. I liked Dubai. Ronny, MonsterMan himself, liked Dubai. It was clean. Orderly. It was rich, and it was perfect. It matched his brand.

My iPhone 17 Pro Max dinged from my pocket. I always kept my old phone on silent, embarrassed that it was an Android, but ever since Ronny had gifted me this one when I became his personal assistant, I kept it at full volume, just to remember how far I’d come.

Got every shot we needed, read the text. It was for the MonsterMan Challenge Crew. Group Chat. It was from the cinematographer, Jerry.

How much did today cost us? I wondered. Probably more than the budget allowed. That was how it was every day. Ronnie always wanted more than what other people wanted to give him. Some of the crew who didn’t understand that and criticized him for it - said he was greedy and wasteful, greedy, and manipulative. But not me. I knew Ronny better than them. There was something special about me, and Ronny knew that. I knew that in me, Ronny saw the same peach-fuzz-faced twenty-year-old that he was when he started his YouTube channel and began his path to owning a media empire - the beginner kid who started with videos like I counted to a million, and Fun stuff you can do with orbeez, and would eventually go on to make TRAPPING 1500 YOUTUBERS ON A DESERT ISLAND and I HUNTED DOWN EVERY LAST BLUE WHALE. Ronny saw that same hunger and ambition in me. He had to. Yes, Ronny knew that I was special.

It was nearly eight o’clock. Whenever the crew stayed in a hotel, Rony liked me to bring him snacks around eight. I left the balcony, crossed my perfectly shiny beige and white room, and walked to the elevator in the hallway. When the elevator door opened, the first thing I noticed was a single fingerprint in the middle of the floor to ceiling. That shouldn’t be there, I thought. There shouldn’t be fingerprints in Dubai. I tried to rub it off with my sleeve, but it wouldn’t come off. I  eventually turned away from it and decided that was as good as never having seen it.

I reached the ground floor and entered the snack bar, which might as well have been an entire grocery store snack aisle. I picked out a bar of that Dubai Chocolate stuff everybody was obsessed with a couple of years ago. Ronny’s social media team got a couple of tens of thousands of dollars out of it.

I checked out the chocolate, along with a bottle of water and a bag of chips, and headed back up to Ronny’s floor, which was at the very top. The elevator stopped along the way, and one of the Cameramen, Tom, got in.

“Just checked in with Marcus,” he said, “all good for tomorrow.”

        “Okay, good,” I said, “Hey, by the way, the fingerprint isn’t mine. It was there when I stepped in.” Tom looked at the fingerprint in the mirror, then back at me.

“Okay,” he said.

“No, seriously, it wasn’t me. Swear to god.”

“Okay,”

“Like, I’m just letting you know right now. That’s not my finger-”

“Dude, I got it. Fingerprint isn’t yours. Don’t worry. I believe you. It was someone else. I heard you the first time.”
        There was a long, painful silence before the elevator opened. Just as Tom was stepping out, he put his hand out to keep the door open and asked, “Oh, have you seen Jerry? I can’t find him anywhere.” I shook my head. Tom left, and the door closed. I put my head in my hands. He definitely thought that it was my fingerprint. 

I pulled out my phone and texted Ronny that I was on my way with his snacks. Thanks, man, he texted back, u always know what I need.

God, I thought, and I smiled, I’m so lucky to have this job.

I walked down the hall and knocked on his door. That moment right there, standing in front of his door and hearing a wet shuffling hurry towards the door and suddenly stop, was the first sign that something might be wrong.

I waited, trying to figure out what the sound had been, for almost fifteen seconds before the door opened. It was completely dark inside. I couldn’t even see any of the light from the window.

“Uh, Ronny?” I called, “Are you in here?” There was another uncomfortable round of silence, in which heavy breathing started to grow. Finally, Ronny spoke. His voice came from the far corner of the room.

“Shut the door.”

“Ronny? Are you okay?” I asked.

“Just shut the door,” said Ronny. He sounded frantic and stuffy, like he had a cold, “I can’t- how do I explain- just- the light is bad. Shut the damn door.”

I obliged. The room plunged into total darkness.

“That’s a lot better.” He said. He sounded less stuffy now that I was alone with him. There was just silence for an unbearable few moments. When Ronny spoke again, it was in a low voice that barely sounded like himself. It sounded more like the flat, not-yet-media-trained voice he used in his earliest videos. “You know, you’re a good assistant.”

“...Thank you.”

“You do your job well, and you like it.”

“What can I say?” I laughed nervously, “It’s a great group of people.” Ronny let out a short, forceful, well-projected laugh, the kind he only ever does in his videos because it picks up well on the mics.

“Look. You’ve been a good assistant, and you can still save yourself. I need you to leave Burk Kahlifah. Leave Dubai. You can get out of this okay if you leave Dubai right now.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

        “Don’t worry about it. Get out. You can still live a good, happy life if you get out. Get out, and don’t do what I did. Don’t want so much.”

“I’m not leaving, man. I like this job. I’m dedicated to this brand. I think it’s really taking me somewhere-”

“You wanna know why you’ve got this job? Really? It’s because you're the first one who didn’t walk away when you found out we weren’t going to pay you minimum wage. You have this job because you’re either stupid or silent enough to be cheap.”

“What?”

“Yes, yes, you’re just our wage slave and all that. Is that enough to get you out of here?”

“Ronny, tell me what’s happening.”

“There’s no time.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“Alright, fine.” Ronny sighed. “Eleven years ago, when I was just starting my channel, I - how do I put this - signed a contract.” He paused, and when he resumed, his tone was different. He was almost whispering now, like I needed to hear every word he spoke as both a warning and a lesson, “I signed a contract with a man. Now, you know this man; everyone does. You know his name, and even though you don’t think you do, you’ve lived with him your whole life. Do you know who I’m talking about?”

I was silent. I wasn’t listening to Ronny talk. I had noticed something wrong - something worse than whatever he could be telling me. Behind his words, there was a slight, shallow, whimpering inhaling and exhaling. I had assumed it to be Ronny’s, originally, but he couldn’t have been breathing while he was talking…

“Now, this man, he told me that I could have all of this, this crew, these videos, all of this wealth, as long as I let him come take it away from me eventually. That moment has-”

        I hit the light switch. Ronny screamed in pain. I saw everything. Walls covered in blood. Black trash bags covering the door to the balcony. Jerry, mangled on the floor, what limbs were still in tact covered in bite marks. Ronny rushed over to me. He slammed the lights off and grabbed me by the shoulders. I could see the whites of his eyes burning yellow in the dark.

“Listen to me,” he said hushedly. “There is going to be so much more just like that, and it’s all going to come tonight. The contract said I could save one. You’re one. Go. Get out of Dubai. Run.”

So I ran. I ran down the hall, and I didn’t look back. I got in the elevator. Weren’t the elevator walls mirrors? I could swear to god they were mirrors. But they weren’t anymore: they were smudged, caked with dirt and grime and oil, rancid and covered floor to ceiling with imprints of entire bodies: faces, hands, chests, shoulders, intestinnes, brains.

I don’t remember how I got out of Burj Khalifa. I only remember seeing the TV news reports showing showers of blood dripping down the tower walls the next morning. I remember sprinting through Dubai’s rancid, packed worker-slums as I sprinted away from whatever it was I’d just seen.

I never looked back. I received one final nine-dollar paycheck for my work for MonsterMan Entertainment. After that, my contract was fulfilled.