B008J4PNHE EBOK (18 page)

 ■ ■ ■ 

Besides Sam, Greta was the only one to make it all the way through.

In the middle of the film, during a series of quick cuts between the satyr—boner-laden—stalking a woodchuck along the banks of a stream and Hugh fecklessly searching the stacks of the science library for Merlin’s bathroom, Patch became convinced the cocaine was poisoned. The producer had dropped to the floor, crawled out of the room on his forearms, and locked himself in a closet. Wassel had called Sam a son of a bitch and rushed out to obtain quaaludes.

Greta ejected the DVD from the player, returned it to the blank case, and handed it to Sam. He shrugged out of the garbage bag and gave it back to her. They went upstairs.

“I liked it,” said Greta. Her eyes were bloodshot, one slightly wider than the other. Several times he had heard her gasping, on the verge of hyperventilating. “I really liked it. Did he really have sex with the tree, or was that a special effect?”

It had certainly appeared unsimulated to Sam. “Yes,” he said. “I think he really had sex with a tree.”

He felt like he was standing next to himself, like his spirit—soul, whatever—had been knocked loose from his being in some kind of amazing collision. If he stayed calm, perhaps that other phantasmal piece of him fluttering nearby might regain its bearings and decide to slip back inside his body.

Sam opened the front door. Wet, humid air washed in. The rain was
as heavy as before. A parking ticket was plastered to his windshield. “Goodbye. Please tell everyone that I’m sorry.”

“But what does it mean? The movie?”

“What do you think it means?”

“I asked you first.” Greta waved a finger at him.

Sam wondered if this was what it felt like to have a concussion. “It means that everything’s a joke,” he said.

“Everything?” she asked.

“Everything.”

She put a hand on her hip. Her expression said she thought he was being facetious. “But it was so sad.”

Sam drove four hours north with the DVD case on the passenger seat beside him, and when he parked outside his unit of the development, he left the case sitting there. Though the disc contained all that remained of his work, the fragments meant nothing. Sam had, as he piloted the car along the rain-swept straights of I-87, halfheartedly considered the idea of extracting what was left from Brooks’s satyr stuff and, after a bit of calculation, came to the conclusion that it would be pointless. The movie had been gutted of at least forty minutes of irreplaceable material, then refilled with insanity. The film Sam had made was gone. The DVD was merely an artifact. He supposed he’d throw it out.

Inside, Sam sat at the desk, watching the raindrops pepper the parking lot and the pothole bubble. He pressed his forehead to the glass and let the cool of it spread from temple to temple. Thoughts of Brooks, of Brooks’s superendowed maintenance man, of whatever it was the two had intended, of how badly he had let everyone down—Tom and Wesley and Polly and his mother and Mina and Rick Savini and Julian and the crew—entered and exited his mind as swiftly and meaninglessly as a solid block of technical credits scrolling off the edge of a screen.

An impulse that he could not justify made his hand reach for the telephone. As illogical as it was for him to want to contact Booth at such a baneful moment—to seek consideration from the least considerate person—the compulsion was powerful, nearly reflexive. It was like in those
diners that still had tableside jukeboxes, whose pages of hit songs generally dated from the mid-nineties. Sam couldn’t recall the last time he’d encountered one that worked (not since childhood), yet he could never resist plugging in a quarter and pressing the buttons.

Sam picked up the phone and dialed. It rang three times before his father answered. “Yes? Who is this?”

He cleared his throat. “It’s me, Dad. Sam.”

“Samuel! How lovely to hear from you! Let me ring you right back, all right? A Gypsy caravan rolled up a few moments ago, and I just need to send them on their way.” A woman laughed in the background; music was playing, other voices. “Five minutes, ten at the most.”

“Oh, sure,” said Sam, realizing that he had no idea where in the world his father was at that moment. Booth had already hung up.

He climbed into bed, waited for a half hour or so before accepting that this jukebox was as broken as all the others, and gave himself over to sleep.

 ■ ■ ■ 

In the morning, before thoughts of anything else—before the movie, even—Sam awakened to remember what Mina had told him about how their father had promised to take her to Paris. Booth, compulsive prevaricator that he was, was at it again, showering disenchantment on someone else’s childhood. Sam wasn’t going to let him get away with it. The time had come to inform his father that if he made Mina any more promises he couldn’t keep, Sam was going to punch him in the face.

Aside from that, there was the matter of a certain prosthetic nose—puffy, with a very realistic mole—that Sam had only just recalled. While he was at it, he planned to insist that the money his father owed be handed over immediately. The damned nose had cost him $587.34.

He thumbed in his father’s number. There was a single ring, followed by a recording explaining that the customer he had dialed was currently unavailable. In other words, Booth’s payment was, as of the morning, officially overdue again.

Sam packed his few things. He was decamping for Brooklyn; he could stay in Red Hook with Wesley until he figured out what came next.

Outside, after the deluge, it was sunny and chilly, and everything at ground level had an icing of mud.

Sam got in the car. He started to reverse, checked in the rearview
mirror, and stamped on the brake. He put the car back in drive and went forward into his space. Sam got out.

Perhaps ten feet behind his vehicle’s rear bumper was a yawning black pit.

The night’s torrent had caused the parking lot’s big pothole to expand into a sinkhole. The pavement had fractured in a webbed pattern, and huge chunks of macadam had spilled into the hole. The resulting cavity was about the shape and size of a luxury hot tub.

Sam carefully approached an edge and peered into the well. The sides gave way in a jagged slide of ocher-colored mud. At the deepest visible point was a slick of pearly water streaked with oil, but where the absolute bottom lay was impossible to tell.

He returned to his car.

Instead of reversing, he drove forward, bounced over the curb, and crushed a low hedge. Sam executed a wide, spraying arc across the muddy lawn of the apartment complex before thumping down over another section of curb and back onto the drive that led out and away.

At the bottom of the housing development’s driveway stood a large corrugated trash can. Sam braked, buttoned down the passenger-side window. He plucked the DVD case from the passenger seat and flicked it in the direction of the trash can. The case struck the lip and clattered onto the pavement of the entryway median. Close enough, Sam thought, if he thought anything.

To the unenlightened, the derelict Western New York Limited switching yard was an all-purpose dump, a place for the local populace to deposit junked cars and other pieces of large-scale detritus free of charge. It wasn’t a proper scrap yard, per se, but no one seemed to mind; it was convenient, and the railroad sure as hell wasn’t coming back.

To the disaffected sorts who squatted there—dropouts, dodgers, runaways, the homeless—it was known as Tomorrowland. Allie could see two opposing ways to interpret the title: either the designation was intended as predictive of an apocalyptic future, littered with stinking and rusting garbage, where there were scant reserves of clean water; or, less bleakly, it was meant as a comment on the residents’ cooperative use of very limited resources—makeshift shelter, scarce food and water, a dearth of hygiene products—the label for a rough model of the way forward, a stepping stone in the direction of a more sensible world.

That morning Allie, who was depressed for a number of reasons but most of all because she had not taken a shower, had a cup of coffee, or slept in a bed for three days, leaned toward the former.

From behind the wheel of the lifeless Pontiac Parisienne where she currently dwelled, Allie watched a tall, heavyset man hop from the tracks and surf down the gravel embankment to the flat ground of the yard. His enormous grin was visible at fifty yards. If the car still worked, she would have seriously considered running him over.

The heavyset man stopped at a spot in the center of the yard. He picked up a hubcap, swished it around, nodded to himself, and then whacked it viciously three times against the bent front fender of a sepulchral DeSoto. The clangs resonated around the embankments, redirecting off the ten thousand metal surfaces, thrumming on the air and
through the ground. Allie felt the reports through the driver’s seat of the Parisienne and instinctively clenched the wheel.

“Good morning, men and women of the future!” the stranger cried. “My name is Booth Dolan, and I am a filmmaker. I am most keen to begin photographing my maiden production, entitled
New Roman Empire,
but I lack one vital element: a cast.

“That is where I hope you good people will come in.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

In the wake of this racket, the residents of Tomorrowland emerged, somewhat shakily, from their various berths: Mayor Paul parted the moldy red curtains at the rear of the front end–less hearse that was his residence. Marty and Anissa crawled from their bed in the doorless green boxcar. Adam and Brittany shuffled onto the porch of the depot to blink out from beneath the lichen-crusted eave. Allie shouldered open the door of the Parisienne and climbed out.

The only one who didn’t show a face was Randall, the paranoiac inhabiting the engine-less hollow beneath the hood of the DeSoto that Booth Dolan had gonged. “Fuck you, man!” Randall’s voice came through the airholes punctured in the rusted metal. Allie had never seen the man, but it was said that at night he sometimes felt safe enough to leave his nest to forage.

“Oops! My friend, I did not realize you were in there. I am very sorry.” Booth flipped aside the hubcap and gave the hood of the car a gentle pat.

The stranger wore a black suit. His jacket was wrinkled and dusty-looking, and his thick, hairy wrists protruded from the cuffs of his white shirt. The hair at his temples was buzzed military-short. The morning sun threw his shadow hugely against a segment of discarded train siding propped against a heap of tires. It was easy to imagine him playing football, a position on one of the lines, or manning first base. Whoever this Booth person was, he clearly wasn’t one of them.

“You drunk?” asked Marty.

“No. I’m inspired,” said Booth.

Marty yawned. “Oh. That’s okay, then.”

“Hold on, mister. This is private property.” Allie had come up beside the DeSoto.

Booth tipped his head to her. “Pardon my intrusion. And you are?”

“Allie. What’s it matter?”

“It could not matter more.” His mouth pulled into a solemn frown.

“Oh, please.” Three days earlier Allie had been a shy, whispery freshman on a music scholarship in good standing at SUNY-Hasbrouck. Today she was petulant, distrustful, and near to washing out. Her transformation had occurred as the result of an introductory meeting with her adviser, Professor Murton. They had been alone in the second-floor studio, and at his request, she had sat down to play a piece by Bach.

A few measures in, the professor clapped his hands to stop her. “No, no. That won’t do, my dear.” Professor Murton rose from his seat and paced around on the hardwood floor, tapping an index finger against his philtrum. A bald man in gray suspenders, he had a quick, purposeful walk that conveyed an intense, searching intellect.

Allie had to concentrate to keep from squirming on the bench. She wasn’t used to being critiqued, let alone by someone so experienced and important.

“You have talent, but . . . there is a tightness. A snarl in you, in your playing,” he announced after a few seconds. He made a scissoring gesture with his fingers. “It needs cutting loose.”

“Oh.” Come to think of it, Allie thought, her stomach did feel a little tight. “Okay.”

“Good. Good, good. Then what I’d like you to do,” he said, approaching to lay a hand on the chest of the piano, “unless you have any objections, of course, is this: play the ‘Etude’ again and— Actually, no, not that, something much simpler. ‘Für Elise’? Yes, that’s it. You play ‘Für Elise,’ but
standing up
. No bench.
Standing up
. Are you with me?”

“Yes, I understand.” She smiled to show how eager she was to please him and to liberate her technique.

“Right, then,” said Professor Murton. “So you stand up to play. And then, as you begin, I shall come around behind you, raise your skirt, slip down your panties, and with the most exquisite gentleness, gain you from the rear.”

“Uh,” said Allie.

“I think you’ll find the experience tremendously freeing.” Professor Murton closed his eyes and nodded as if savoring something delectable. Light lay on his naked scalp like grease.

“I should go,” she might have said, although in her hurry to put space between herself and the professor, Allie wasn’t sure if the words came
out. She bolted from the studio, the heavy door slamming shut on Professor Murton’s calls for her to wait. She hadn’t been back to campus since, staying instead at Tomorrowland, trying to figure out what to do.

“I want to give all of you eternal life,” Booth said. “I want to put you in my movie.”

Allie scoffed. She couldn’t remember ever being in a nastier temper. But the others were listening intently.

“What kind of a movie?” Lanky and beaky, Mayor Paul had walked over from the hearse. He was in long johns, and his feet were bare. Mayor Paul’s sweet, stoned character made him well liked by everyone. Although he wasn’t an actual elected official, he had naturally assumed a leadership role: divvying up supplies, defusing arguments, negotiating with the police when they made one of their occasional raids on the camp; also, his hearse was the most impressive wreck.