You Don't Know About Me (30 page)

When I got back to the canyon the horizon was graying up. Cave Sweet Cave was still black as night. I snuck back inside without knocking anything over and crawled into the couch bed. I fell asleep to Nico and Momi snoring away in the mine-shaft bedroom like a couple of hibernating bears.

Waking came too soon. I squinted against the harsh light and stumbled to the closet of a bathroom. I wished I could climb back into the z-bag. The flushing toilet sucked away my wish and the tattered memory of a dream. I zipped up and told myself to do whatever the Potlatchers wanted for their weird movie, then get out of there.

On the kitchen table, there was a plate of banana muffins and a tall glass of milk. My backpack sat in a chair. I checked it. Everything was there. I wolfed down three muffins and chugged the milk.

I grabbed my pack and went outside. I saw the entire canyon for the first time. The walls were high and sheer, but that wasn't the big surprise. The railroad tracks I'd seen the night before, running along the canyon floor, didn't stop there. They crept up broken trestles along the walls. Some of them even spiderwebbed toward the middle of the canyon on spindly rusty towers.

“And, antiaction!” I heard Nico yell.

I followed his voice to the top of a tower. He and Momi were on a wooden platform. They stood behind a camera on a tripod. The camera pointed down at me.

Momi waved. “Good afternoon, William.”

“It can't be that late,” I blurted.

“Yes it can,” she called down. “We wanted you to get your beauty sleep for the big scene.”

“Are you filming now?”

Nico's head poked from behind the camera. “Nah, just a rehearsal. You're not in costume yet.”

“I have to wear a costume?”

They started coming down the ladder in the middle of the tower. As they climbed down I looked around some more. Some of the elevated tracks disappeared into the black mouths of mine shafts in the canyon walls. The strange shapes I'd seen the night before were old bucket cars and miniature engines rusting on tracks or sunken in the dust. The canyon looked like it had been home to a rickety roller coaster that hadn't heard a scream for a hundred years.

The Potlatchers jumped off the ladder and came over.

“What is this place?” I asked.

Nico spread his arms. “Earth Wars Productions.”

“I mean before that.”

“An old copper mine,” he said. “And it's filled with the ghosts of miners.”

“That's the cast of our un-movie,” Momi added.

I blinked in confusion. “A bunch of ghosts?”

“Absolutely,” Nico said. “There's no better anti action hero than a dead one.” He held some kind of meter up to the sun.

I didn't like the sound of a movie about dead people. It reminded me of movies Mom used to tell me about. People kidnapped kids and murdered them on film; “snuff movies”
she called them. Maybe I'd have to make my escape sooner than later. I looked to see if the bike was still on the porch where I'd left it. It was gone. Fear knifed through me. Maybe they knew I'd snuck back to Homedale. I tried to stay cool. “So, in the movie, I'm supposed to be dead?”

“That's right,” Momi said. “You're the ghost of a miner.”

“What does a ghost miner do?”

Nico jumped in. “An antiaction sequence!”

“What's that?”

“The
heart
of an un-movie!”

“I still don't get it.”

“It's very simple,” he explained. “An un-movie is the opposite of a blockbuster. Instead of a shoot-'em-up action sequence every ten minutes jam-packed with special effects, an un-movie has an antiaction sequence every ten minutes jam-packed with special
defects
.”

I couldn't tell if I was just confused, or if they'd put something in the banana muffins. “What are special defects?”

Momi turned to Nico. “I told you he'd need a quickie in un-moviemaking one-oh-one.”

“Fine,” he told her. “You go get started on his costume and makeup while I wipe the blank expression off his face.”

She started toward the main building as Nico turned to me with gleaming eyes. “Herr Director will show you exactly what he means.” He held up his hands, making a rectangle with his thumbs and forefingers. “Don't move or speak.”

I didn't.

“A close-up of your face, held for several minutes. That's an antiaction sequence.”

“So it's like a photograph.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Ah-ah, you just broke the first rule of antiaction sequences: you opened your mouth. And no, a held shot of a face is never still. There's always something going on, something moving in the great landscape of the human facade. That's what moment-making is all about.” My face must've scrunched, because he said, “See! That was a moment: confusion!” He dropped his hands. “Okay, here's a better example. At Burning Man, when you looked into Spring's eyes and kissed her—”

“You saw that?”

He two-fingered his eyes. “Wachpanne Papa sees everything. Just before you kissed her, when you faced off, did you see all sorts of fascinating stuff in her face and eyes?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Bingo!” He snapped his fingers. “That's an antiaction sequence.”

“Even when we kissed?”

“No, that's different. That's action. There's never any action in an antiaction sequence.”

“So what is there, just a face?”

“Yep.”

“Isn't that boring?”

“Not when a face is firing off tiny moments right and left. It's jam-packed with special defects.”

“But if it's a happy moment, like when I kissed Spring, why call it a special
defect
?”

“Because, Billy, every moment in life, good or bad, every
feeling that tweaks the human visage, good or bad, takes us one step closer to the ultimate special defect: death.”

I tried not to let my face give away how he was creeping me out with his talk about death and dead miners.

Nico threw an arm around my shoulder. I tensed. He led me toward the big building Momi had gone into. “Look, I don't expect you to understand. Besides, actors do their best work when they're underinformed. If their brains are stuffed with ideas it clogs the emotional plumbing from the heart to the face. So, go inside, get into costume and makeup, and I'll set up the camera for your antiaction sequence.”

I pointed up to the platform. “What's that camera for?”

“For a long shot later. But first we do your close-up.”

I went into the building. It was a big room with worktables, rusty machines, and old mining equipment. Huge wrenches, drill bits, and saws made the place look like a torture chamber for giants.

Momi handed me a pair of ratty overalls, a grimy under-shirt, and some holey boots. I took my backpack behind a screen of hanging ropes and pulleys and changed clothes. Before I stuffed my cargo shorts in my backpack, I took my Leatherman and put it in the overalls' chest pocket. If the antiaction sequence got too weird I'd be ready for some
anti
-antiaction. I also pulled out the
Huck
chapter with my father's card on it and stuffed it in the overalls. No way could I lose that.

Momi put me in a swivel chair in front of a mirror. There was a bunch of makeup on the table, and she started wiping some pale stuff on my face. “I don't get what's so awesome about a movie version of a photo album,” I said.

She took a brush, dipped it in gray stuff, and painted shadows on my face. “Everyone on the set of
Pirates of the Caribbean
thought it was a piece of crap when they were making it, but it turned out to be a huge hit.”

I wanted to say how it was probably filled with fighting-pirate sequences, but getting into an argument would only slow her down and raise the chance of Ruah finding Dogleg Canyon before I got back to town.

She picked a nickel-sized piece of rubber up off the makeup table. It was shaped like a crater. “What's that?” I asked.

“A bullet hole. It goes on your forehead.”

“Do I have to wear it?”

“Yes, you do.” She wiped glue on the back of it. “You're a ghost and we need to know what killed you.” She stuck the bullet hole on my forehead. “If it's going to creep you out seeing it in the mirror I'll turn you around.” She dipped a brush in red makeup.

I didn't want to watch what would probably look like Momi doing brain surgery on me. “Yeah, turn me around.” She did and began working on the bullet hole. I tried to keep my mouth shut, but when there's a bullet hole in the
middle of your forehead you want to know how it got there. “Who killed me?”

“We don't know yet.”

“How can you not know?”

“That's the fun of an un-movie. We shoot your long close-up first, then we'll fill in the story of who you were later.”

“How are you gonna do that if I never open my mouth?”

“It'll all be done in voice-over. Every little moment your face gives us on film will be our guide to who you were, how you got killed, and how you ended up at the mine.”

“You mean I got killed
before
I got to the mine?”

“All the miners did.”

“That makes no sense. What good are a bunch of dead miners?”

“That's the mystery each miner's antiaction sequence will reveal to the audience.”

This movie was sounding like weird squared. “So what's the big mystery?”

“I don't want to ruin the ending.”

“If I'm in the movie shouldn't I know it?”

“Okay, but don't you dare tell Nico I told you.”

“I promise.”

She kept working on my bullet hole. “The couple who runs the mine—”

“Are they dead too?”

“No, they're the only ones alive. Nico and I play them.”

“Why do you get to be alive and everyone else has to be dead?”

“Would you let me tell the story?”

“Okay.”

“The couple—Nico and me—are powerful psychics. We're really good at séances and communicating with the dead. And from the dead we learn a secret, a secret about gravity. Now, everyone knows that gravity is the invisible glue that holds the universe together. But what Nico and I learn from the dead is where gravity comes from.”

“Where does it come from?”

“From dark matter. Just as the sun makes heat and light, the dark matter woven all through the universe makes gravity. Without dark matter the world would fly off in all directions. But dark matter is invisible to the living. All we can sense is what it makes: gravity.”

As wacky as it sounded, and as much as I wanted to get out of there, I was into what she was saying. I mean, that's what mountain biking is all about: working out your own personal relationship with gravity. “Okay,” I said, “the dead know about the thing that makes gravity, dark matter. Got it.”

“Right, they can see it, touch it, and even collect it. So the psychic couple starts recruiting ghosts of the dead, and bringing them to this canyon to mine dark matter. They call it Dark Matter Mine.”

“But why do they want to collect dark matter?”

“Because if you can gather dark matter, you can experiment with the thing it makes: gravity. And if you can control gravity, you can make a major weapon.”

“What weapon?”

“A gravity bomb.”

“What would you do with that?”

She studied my forehead, then dipped her brush in another makeup tin. “You could do wonderful things. If two countries went to war, you could drop gravity bombs on both sides. Everything would get super heavy and, under the force of greater gravity, everyone would go into slow motion. It would be the ultimate peacekeeping
force
. Or if a tsunami was about to slam into India, you could hit the tidal wave with a gravity bomb, slow it down to nothing, and sink it in the ocean before it killed millions.”

I had to admit, I was getting into their movie. I mean, if you could throw gravity grenades during a bike run, you could throw everything into slow motion. It would be as good as mountain biking on the moon. “Is that how the movie ends? They turn their gravity bombs into weapons for peace and good?”

“Of course not,” she said with a frown. “An un-movie has to have an antiaction ending.”

“What's that?”

She gave me a hard look. Her eyes narrowed. “You absolutely swear you won't tell Nico I told you?”

I raised my right hand. “On the Bible.”

She went back to my bullet hole. “In their effort to create a weapon that will do only good, the psychics realize that all they've done is create another weapon of mass disruption that tinkers with the way the universe works. They realize they're playing God. So, in the last long close-up, they drop a gravity bomb on
themselves
. They go into slow-motion antiaction. The audience can't tell if they're alive or in suspended animation.”

“Are they? Alive, I mean?”

“That's for the audience to guess”—she gave me a sly smile—“and then find out in the sequel,
Dark Matter Mine Two
.”

She swiveled my chair to face the mirror. I stared at the hole in my head. The edges were puffed up with blood and torn skin. In the middle, there were bits of broken white bone and purplish gray brain sticking out. If I hadn't known what she was doing to me, and she whipped me around without telling me I had a bullet hole in my head, I would've dropped dead from shock.

We went back outside. Nico made a big deal about the fantastic job Momi had done, making me look like a corpse. As long as no one tried to make me into a real one, I was cool. He led me over to a big camera on a tripod. He put me in front of it, moved me around, and adjusted the camera until the light hit me just right. He asked if I was ready for my antiaction sequence.