He sat in the cinema with his girlfriend and made a quiet apology to his brain. He was sorry, he thought/said, not only for subjecting it to this film but for his past abuse, for the antidepressants—drugs—he’d taken in the attempt to feel happier. No, it wasn’t only to feel happier but to change some elemental part of himself, his core. He wanted to be someone else, and he thought perhaps these small, harmless pills that came in the colors of Sweet Tarts would change him. It would be that simple.
But it wasn’t. There was never a dramatic effect—none that he could notice—except on the negative side. He lost a certain excitement for life, the sexual excitement, which was one of the few things that had propelled him along before the pills came. He had always fallen back on sex and thoughts of sex, fantasies, when nothing else was going well. It was like being hungry; it gave him purpose and direction. The pills took that away. They also made other systems in his body malfunction. There was no other way to put it: he felt like he was retaining waste. He was no longer what his mother used to call, a long time ago, “regular.” Something had sewn him up.
This was symbolic, he was sure.
“Did you see that?” his girlfriend, Claire, whispered to him. “I think I saw the boom.”
She was a movie person, much to his disdain. He had grown up obsessed with classic films like It Happened One Night and I Cover the Waterfront, but since moving from the Midwest to Los Angeles 10 years ago, he had lost these feelings. And many others. The film culture was pervasive. Everyone was either a part of it or wanted to be a part of it. Even the most unlikely people could be overheard talking about A-list premiere parties. Janitors argued about character arcs and plot points.
But there was something about Claire, he had thought when he met her in art class, something melancholy and real. She was attracted to the film business, yes, but she was also repulsed by it.
“Can you believe how sloppy people can be? Look at that microphone hanging over his head.” She turned away from the screen to face the faux art deco, low-glow lamps on the walls. The film had obviously lost Claire; they might as well leave early. But they wouldn’t. It was easier to stay seated, remain paralyzed under buckets of popcorn.
They watched clichés struggle to rise from the dead. People clapped. The story survived on snappy one-liners, breasts that shone like armor, and glib facial expressions. They all just sat there. Claire always had to read the credits, all the way down to the copyright symbol.
“Ugh. Seamsters Post-Production House. They are crooks.”
People staggered up the aisles, rubbing their eyes, stepping on popcorn and candy that had escaped from packages and jumped to the floor. People got stuck and clotted the aisle, right next to him. There was no room to move. Something was wrong.
He began to panic, thinking that this might be the entryway to the life he always knew existed, the one underneath the life he experienced each day. All the time, driving around, listening to the radio, drawing, painting—all the time, he could feel this other life underneath, waiting to be occupied. And he was afraid of it. He didn’t know where the entrance was, but he knew once it found him, he would never get back out. And as dissatisfying as this life was, right here, it was utopia compared with the Other Life.
Who knew, maybe there were layers of Other Lives, each one more terrifying than the previous. He could spend the rest of his years trying not to make a misstep and fall. Maybe he already had fallen.
Shuffling occurred a couple rows ahead of him. And shouting. Two men in polyester red vests that said “MovieHouse” on the backs ran down to an elderly woman in one of the seats. He saw now that the woman was slumped over, as if she were looking for something she had dropped.
But she was looking for nothing. The MovieHouse men unfolded her body on the aisle floor, a few feet away from Claire and him, and listened for breath at her mouth.
“Nope,” one said. “Where’s the damn ambulance?”
The man placed hands in the middle of her chest and pushed rhythmically. It was clear now that sometime during the film, this mediocre and formulaic film, this woman had died. He wondered which scene it was, exactly, that was her last. The sex scene with the big-breasted warrior and the robot? The one where the mother ship blew up and scorched all the monsters? One of the slow scenes, where people marched down stainless steel hallways to board meetings, with many shots of leather Florsheims?
Claire had grabbed his arm so hard that it was beginning the prickly descent into sleep. He eased it away from her.
Scores of people stood around them, in back of them, staring down at the woman.
She looked about 75, in good health, one of those older ladies who were quite self-sufficient. She probably had a nice apartment somewhere nearby with champagne-colored shag carpet and large windows. She walked here for the late afternoon show. She had outlived her husband and was surprisingly happy with her group of close friends and her menu of television sit-coms. Perhaps she even read books and exercised. Ate Marie Callendar’s frozen meals for dinner. The chicken pot pie is delicious!
Paramedics covered her with a projection-screen-white sheet and carried her out. People watched her as if she were a continuation of the movie, a 3-D element that had floated out at the end. Was she real?
So that’s it, he thought. She lives her life, probably a decent and semi-interesting one, and dies during a bad movie one evening. Strangers all around.
“It’s sad,” he said, wincing at the inadequacy of this statement and thinking, even then, that he had recited a bad line.
“Let’s go to Formosa,” Claire whispered. “Get a drink.” They would sit in the dark vinyl booths, underneath signed headshots of movie stars who’d been dead for decades. Drinking martinis, telling people the big story of today—narrating the last moments of this woman’s life for entertainment purposes—and the very meaning of a human soul leaving the earth would be lost in a flurry of drunken verbs and adjectives.
He felt the popcorn moving through his intestines, where it would stay for weeks, probably, since this medicine made him so constipated. A reminder of this incident, as if he needed one.
And here were the police, with clipboards and pencils, asking questions of audience members. Did you know her? Did you see anything?
They all shook their heads. He wished he could have said something helpful; he wished he could explain how and when this woman died, and why here. But he couldn’t, and as they walked out the door he could see the light from the projectionist’s booth above them, still oddly running, casting a dusty gold ray down into the theatre. It may as well have been the sun, illuminating its own dark Earth and the people on it.
“You know, I could feel a weird energy in the theatre during act two,” said Claire, already crafting her tale. “I wonder if that was the exact moment she died.”
In the lobby, people were beginning their stories. Claire waved to two co-workers—fellow splicers, she called them—and cleared her throat. I just knew something was going to happen! The three of them clasped hands and shouted out their stories at the same time. I almost sat next to her!
He considered stopping but kept walking. Through the glass doors, out onto the sidewalk, past people having dinner at small bistro tables, past a drag queen sitting in the window of a bookstore, advertising his memoirs. He found Claire’s Saab—she had the keys—and tucked a note under her windshield wiper, written on the back of a receipt: “Sorry. K.”
But he wasn’t sorry.
The city’s white eyes opened across the sky: floodlights announcing more movie premieres. He turned down the alley and headed home.
BB
