Three Moments of an Explosion (29 page)

The man leans over a crumbling cliff. He shouts, “Take hold!” He leans, dangling the hook over his head toward an old man hanging to an outcrop.

1:07–1:10

Close-up of the young girl’s face.

She whispers: “You never got off the production line. You never will.”

1:11–1:12

The hook snags the spray-painting robot and sends it flying.

1:13–1:16

The man staggers away from a river. A rope is tied to the hook above his head, stretching back into the dark water. He is hauling up something big and unclear.

1:17

Close-up of the man, gritting his teeth.

1:18

Close-up of his back. Where the pole emerges between his shoulders, the flesh is oozing blood, the metal shaking.

1:19–1:20

The cable in the factory angles steeply. We hear something sliding along it.

1:21–1:23

Darkness.

Voice-over, old man: “What did you escape?”

1:24–1:27

The grimacing man is high above the factory floor. Above his head, his hook is on the rope again. In his hands he clings to a big chain, bolted to the floor below.

He pulls on the chain, drags himself down, stretching the cord from which he dangles.

There are other men and women strung along the line by hooks like his. They are limp, their eyes closed. They slide toward him, their bodies thumping into him, their hooks gathering at the point of the stretched line.

He cries out.

1:28–1:29

Darkness.

There is a loud snap.

Voice-over, man: “Everything.”

1:30

Title card: “Escapee”

THE BASTARD PROMPT

We’re here to talk to a doctor, Jonas and I. We’re both on the same mission. And, or but, or and
and
but, we’re on different missions too.

We need a new conjunction, a word that means “and” and “but” at the same time. I’m not saying anything I haven’t said before: this is one of my things, particularly with Tor, which is short for Tori, which she never uses.

This “and-but” word thing of mine isn’t even a joke between us any more. It used to be when I’d say, “I mean both of them at once!,” she’d say, “Band? Aut?” In the end we settled on
bund,
which is how we spell it although she says with a little “t” at the end, like
bundt
. Now when either of us says that we don’t even notice, we don’t even grin. It almost just means what it means now.

So Jonas and I are here in Sacramento, on missions that are the same
bund
different. Although honestly I don’t know that either of us thinks we’re going to figure much out now.

It was a seven-hour drive to get here from Treemont. An unlikely road trip through big fields and flat ugly towns, neither of us saying very much.

There’s a guy on our little committee, back home, Thoren. He wanted to come. To pass on a warning, he said. If I knew him better I’d tease him about it because his voice gets this hollowness at the back of his throat when he uses that word “
warning
.” He’s a pharmacist in the hospital and up until recently if you’d tried to tell him what seemed to be going on, he just wouldn’t have heard you. The moment you got beyond “something weird” he’d have tuned you politely out until his underbrain verified that you were talking sense like a person again.

Now he’s got more theories than any of us. And unlike most of us he’s not shy of expounding them, no matter how out there. Which some of them are. He says them in that same voice, the
warning
voice.

“Who does he think he is?” I said to Diane once.

“St. John the Divine,” she said. “Harkening the world, starting with Sacramento.”

Diane would have come too, if we’d invited her. She does something in the city government, so she’s been able to get hold of quote confidential unquote files and whatnot for a while now. It was she who found out about this conference we’re going to. I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of people presenting here have had letters from her, careful communications, sounding them out.

Jonas and I are sitting in a foyer coffee spot in the conference hotel. We’re reading the schedule. We have conference packs and our names on lanyards.

“What did you tell them?” I ask Jonas. “About why we’re here?”

“They don’t give a shit,” he says. “We paid our registration fee.”

Underneath my name my badge says
INDEPENDENT RESEARCHER
.

Jonas is here in a last-ditch attempt to figure out what’s happening. I’m here for that too. He’s also here because he’s totally into what’s going on, he sort of loves it.

I’m here for Tor.

My theory is that Diane persuaded the rest of the group, at some meeting I wasn’t at, that when I start talking about Tor, I make a particularly strong case. That I get persuasive because I get agitated, and she wants me, us, to persuade someone that whatever’s happening is important.

I’m an engineer. I’ve been working for the city on a big new mall for months, until I took time off for compassionate leave and then Diane did something with paperwork and that leave got extended so no one’s bothering me about it.

Tor’s an actor. When I first met her and she told me what she did I called her an actress until she told me not to, and why it mattered.

I wasn’t born in Treemont but I’ve lived there most of my life. I was away for college and I’ve been to NYC and San Francisco and a bunch of places a bunch of times and I thought I might live in one of them for a while but it hasn’t happened and honestly it turns out that’s OK with me.

Treemont’s not tiny. I’m a walker. That’s how I like to get around. And even after all this time I still keep finding new parts of the city I didn’t know existed. As long as that can happen, I don’t think I’ll be unhappy there.

I met Tor at a party four years ago. We had a couple of friends in common. Tor told me we’d been at high school together, although I don’t remember that. She’s a little bit younger: we didn’t overlap socially.

At the time I was working on a big bridge upstate. She asked to see a photo. I said no because no one’s really interested, but she insisted, so I flicked through one or two, explaining what she was looking at and telling her she didn’t have to pretend to care, but she kept looking. Then she showed me pictures of herself as Feste in an all-woman production of
Twelfth Night,
and it turned out I knew Malvolio so we got talking about that.

My parents are both gone and I live in their old house, which some people find weird, but honestly just makes financial sense. Tor moved in a few months after we started seeing each other. A year after that we had a big celebration because she got a part on a TV sitcom about a meathead high-school wrestler who’s secretly a genius. She played this kooky bookshop owner who runs a poetry night where the wrestler performs in disguise but she recognizes him.

She was in a couple of public information films after that, and nearly got an ad. She has an agent, she got calls and did a ton of auditions. She did a bunch of theater, which she loved, and even though the money wasn’t great we were OK because I’m well paid and we’re neither of us what you’d call extravagant. Sometimes you look up and realize how many months have gone by.

Tor said that when she turned thirty if she wasn’t making a living at it, she’d give up. She didn’t want to.

I’d been poking around for this mall job I’d heard rumors about. I came home one night and Tor had spread a bunch of papers across the kitchen table.

“You remember Joanie,” she said.

“From
The Mousetrap
? Sure.”

“I saw her today. You know what she’s doing?” She waved a sheaf of documents. “She’s a standardized patient.”

People pass our little coffee place in the hallway, some in suits, some in casual clothes. There are several conferences going on at the same time and I can’t read who’s here for what.

I read the titles of the sessions and the biographies of the participants in the one we’re here for. “SP Training and Methodology.” “Debriefing End-of-Life Conversations.” “MUTAs and the Problem Simulation.”

I mutter something and Jonas looks up and says, “Huh?”

“I said, ‘Once More on Epoxy-Fixed Overhangs,’ ” I say.

“Of course you did,” he says, and looks down again.

I was never super-close to my mom but we did totally bond over specialist magazines. There are a couple of big bookshops in town which stock a bunch of them, or used to—maybe everyone subscribes online now, I don’t know. Me and mom would stand together in Malley’s and pick up some publication, the only rule being that it had to be about something neither of us had any interest in or knowledge of.

We weren’t just sniggering. Sure we were laughing but it was actually oddly respectful. It was more awe than scorn.

It’s incredible how fast you can pick stuff up. Within seconds of browsing we were learning the jargon and terminology, we had a sense of the big controversies, the pressing issues, even the micropolitics of a hobby. You could figure out which publications were in some company’s pocket, which were run by Young Turks. I’d snaffle favorite terms from whatever field I was reading about for my idiolect: refugium (fishkeeping); dado (carpentry); fiddle yard (model trains). I’d become a firm supporter of one side or other in a debate the existence of which I’d had no clue seconds before. I bet anyone looking at an engineering journal would experience the same phenomenon.

Whenever my mom or I was obsessing a little too much about anything, or we had too strong an opinion about something that objectively was really beyond our bailiwick, the other would say, “Once More on Epoxy-Fixed Overhangs.” It was the title of an article we’d found in
Tropical Fishkeeper
. Should you or should you not rely solely on gravity when arranging coral in your heated tank?

I was with the epoxy-advocates. It’s not like any of it was natural.

Treemont has a university, and one of the hospitals, St. Mary’s, is a teaching hospital. I think I had some vague idea what standardized patients are, but of course it was too simplistic.

“A lot of actors do it,” Tor said.

When she did the training, her class was fourteen people. Not all of them had acting experience, but more than half did. At the end of the training period, everyone had to pass an audition.

“So the medical students come in and you’re sitting there in a gown and you tell them your symptoms?” I said.

“Well yeah,” she said, “only we’re supposed to be like real patients, so sometimes the trick is to
not
tell them our symptoms.” She showed me the notes she’d been issued. Ms. Johnson is twenty-six years old and suffering from hypertension. She has a great fear of doctors. She is fearful about the health effects of her smoking and does not like to admit to herself how many cigarettes she smokes. Miss Melly is a thirty-year-old woman who is presenting with weakness of her left side from the early stages of undiagnosed MS. Mrs. Dowell is diabetic and pregnant.

Tor had notes for the male characters in her folder too. Mr. Smith is a truculent insurance salesman who has bowel cancer.

She told me it wasn’t just reading symptoms from a list, and it wasn’t just acting as these people, her job was helping to evaluate the med students afterwards.

“You have to be the same patient with exactly the same set of symptoms ten times in a row. Standardized,” she said, “not simulated. Although we are simulated too. Some of these characters are drug-seeking, some don’t know what’s wrong with them, some are in denial, some know but don’t want to admit it to themselves.”

“What’s the pay?” I said.

“Seventeen dollars an hour.”

“Seventeen dollars an hour to get felt up?”

“Nice. There’s no touchy-touchy. Although I tell you what, if I do the GTA training—”

“Genital?”

“Mm-hm. If I do that, which means they do exactly what you think, then I get paid a
lot
more. I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

The night before her first performance—she called it that—she asked me to test her. She gave me character spec and a list of symptoms.

“I’m not a doctor,” I said. “I’m not going to ask in the right way.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “We can make sure I’ve got the symptoms down. Go go go.”

She stood formally in the doorway.

“Action,” I said. She rolled her eyes. “Good afternoon, Miss Baker,” I said. “What seems to be the trouble?”

“Oh, thank you, Doctor,” she said. “I’m having the most awful aches and pains.”

I remember her clothes surprised me. I knew I’d seen all the items before, but she’d put them together in a new combination, with a different vibe than I was familiar with. She walked tentatively. She wore one of her pairs of clear-glass spectacles.

Of course I’d seen Tor act a ton of times. I liked her TV stuff but I don’t love her onstage, to be completely honest. Not that I’d ever tell her that: I think it’s the medium. So, not being a theater guy, it was startling to see her like that. In a way I’d never been so impressed with her acting as I was in that moment: it was so intimate and subtle. She shifted her whole self with tiny little mannerisms, tiny tweaks.

“You killed it,” I said afterward.

When she walked to the car she did it in her new guise.

There are thirteen of us on our committee, back in Treemont. As you’d expect, almost half work in the hospital. Jonas and two other doctors—Jonas I knew socially, had met through Tor’s work—a couple of nurses, a tech, and Thoren the pharmacist. The rest of us are friends of theirs, or friends of Tor’s, or, or and, of the other affected SPs.

You might wonder why the committee isn’t bigger, given everything. Thoren will tell you it’s because of conspiracies and secrets, and that is not crazy. Another, Janet, a radiologist, has a different explanation.