Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “A vanload of luxury water every day,” he says, almost to himself. “What are you going to do with all this?”

  “Fill my swimming pool,” she says flatly, her voice lonely and distant. He puts on the turn signal and exits, veers from the highway into Cassidy’s gated community, the wide streets sleepy and dark, vacant and unburnt.

  * * *

  —

  Back at the Hacienda Lodge, he parks the van beneath a cottonwood tree in the back of the lot. He checks each door manually—there are no power locks on this basic, throwaway model. When he slides the side door shut, the whole vehicle quakes. As he walks to the motel entrance, he sees a strange shape on the lawn, rounded like a stone but soft. It seems to tremble in the breeze. Patrick sinks to a crouch. The velvety mound takes on the shape of a rabbit, eerily long-limbed, with ears like a mule and legs like a gazelle. Stretched on its side in the green, thick grass like it’s been paused mid-leap, its eyes are a glossy, taxidermied black.

  Inside his room, he sits at the edge of the bed and calls Oswego again and again, though he knows it’s close to midnight there and most likely no one will pick up. The last couple days, he’s succeeded only in reaching a sampling of strange hippies, space cadets who can’t seem to figure out why he’s calling, or tough matrons who tell him to call back at a different time—earlier, later, on a Wednesday. Patrick pops open a bag of potato chips and twists the top off a brand-new bottle of WAT-R. Cassidy Carter doesn’t know what she’s talking about, thinks Patrick to himself. It’s more of that New Age, crystal-healing celebrity bullshit. Money creates problems for money to solve. The crack of the cap as he breaks the seal comforts him, reminds him that the product is clean and unopened and meant for his mouth only.

  Alone on a motel bedspread, meaning nothing in particular to anyone around him, Patrick looks down at his body, supine and exhausted, rising up before his gaze like a deserted island. Nobody to call, nobody to care, nobody to gaze upon his physical form with kindness, nobody to recognize the mole on his left shoulder blade and assess its size or regularity relative to prior versions. He’s in the antechamber of an adventure unlike any he’s experienced before, nobody he knows has ever worked a day in Hollywood, but the pride feels flimsy when it goes unwitnessed, unshared. He wonders if it wouldn’t perhaps have been better if he had never had a family at all. Having known the tender pressure, the gentle crush of being loved on all sides at once, constant recipient of text messages and data points, location known, ETA known, never left to his own thoughts for more than an hour or two in the basement office, door closed, always susceptible to a call for help in the kitchen or to come see the newly completed drawing or to answer questions about the sky colored blue, the flow of small creeks, the training process involved in becoming a lawyer or a firefighter—he feels the absence of their need as rejection.

  Patrick opens his laptop, stares down at the screen as it purrs atop his thighs. It’s possible to stream all five seasons of Kassi Keene: Kid Detective, so he clicks on the first episode, “Who Killed the Cottonwood Cougar?”

  The screen is racked with bright colors and the jangly sounds of the Kassi Keene theme song sung by a pop-punk female voice wailing over and over again: “Where’s the real crime? Where’s the real mystery?” In the intro, slices of Cassidy Carter in a whole season’s worth of escapades are spliced together but oddly homogenous. Cassidy smiles in a yellow plaid sundress. Cassidy halts the crowning of homecoming king and queen, grabbing the microphone off its stand. Cassidy bursts through the calm surface of a lake, holding a soggy boot up in triumph. A large, furry woodchuck mascot removes its head and underneath is Cassidy’s face, furrowed in concentration as she holds a magnifying glass up to her eye. There’s something worrisome, from a fatherly perspective, about all these Cassidys mugging for the camera, unflaggingly perky, always giving it their energetic all. Where are the secondary characters? A best friend? Where’s her TV family, her cookie-cutter TV home? A teenage love interest who plays the electric guitar, or drums, or keytar, or trombone? At the end of the intro sequence, the camera lingers on Kassi Keene’s smiling face for a few long, awkward seconds, and he sits forward. Is it the loneliness that makes him think they have something in common? In the distance between her winning smile and the stiff, disappointed look in her eyes, Patrick sees a feeling he recognizes, like a tundra unmapped and uninvestigated, waiting with little optimism for the touch of the sun.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  “Give yourself a promotion,” reads the headline. “How to manifest a higher status by choosing who you report to!” Patrick scrolls to the bottom of the article, then back up to the top. He can’t tell if the advice it offers applies to his current situation. “How to make $2,000 a week off your own cached data! How to make $500 a day using the body debris you’d usually throw in the trash can!” On the edge of the soundstage parking lot, a portable canopy shelters plastic-plattered cheese cubes and sliced fruit, a tray of skinny sandwiches on pale white bread, plastic dispensers of hot coffee and tea, and a frenzy of M&M’s. The production assistants haunt the catering station, returning to it faithfully in between takes to graze on the cheese, to fold thin sandwiches into their mouths, their fingers digging into the soft colorless squares. They plunge their hands into the M&M bowl, the sound like heavy rain sifting across a metal roof. They scoop the sugary pellets straight into the mouth, or slip a handful into a pocket for later. At the far end of the folding table, bottles of WAT-R Energy Surge, a calorieless sweetened product with a flavor like artificial melon, wait in irregular rows to be taken.

  Patrick stands off to the side of the entrance, watching the PAs come and go, their spirits animated by the fragile blessing of free food. There’s something undignified, he thinks, about feeding from a trough like this, as though employee and employer alike are admitting that the most important part of a person can be satisfied like an animal. He notices that a few of the sound engineers stop by the snack table, the electricians, the tall, triangle-backed guy who holds the microphone, but they don’t make a big deal of it the way the assistants do, hovering anxiously near the ravaged sandwich tray to watch for someone to come and fill it back up. In the chilly shadow of the windowless building, he decides that he won’t become like them, he’ll distinguish himself through behavior if not through title. He won’t join them at the watering hole in between the ceaseless rushing to and from vehicles, between driving to the hardware store for staples for the staple gun or back to the office for Brenda or Jay’s laptop, Zippo lighter, phone charger for the matching second cellphones they carry, which they use exclusively to communicate with each other. “Producer pagers,” they call them, though in their cheap glossy plastic they look more like burners.

  This morning, he’s been asked to go fetch Brenda’s velvet loafers with the embroidered zebras from the bottom-right drawer of her walk-in closet at home, but he swiftly delegated that to the Arm, who got stuck in traffic on the 101 and hasn’t been seen since. Patrick decided in the first week that he doesn’t fetch, or he only fetches important items, items with an integral part to play in the story—scripts, for example, or objects that belong in the film itself, in front of the camera. He’s scanning the trickle of emerging crew for the leather jacket and trim beard of Sam Sackler: if he takes his tasks directly from the man in charge, doesn’t that place him a few tiers above the other assistants, in their anonymous glom of jeans, tees, and fashion sneakers?

  He drifts back and forth between the parking lot, where the crew emerges one or two at a time, to smoke cigarettes and blink into the warm sunlight, and the margins of the set, where the bodies of cast and crew turn toward the action like sunflowers toward the sun. At the center of the vast industrial space, a brilliant rectangle of color slices his gaze: the green of cartoon frogs, of a baseball field plugged into a power grid, a green like the dream of the word itself, an electric color that has never arisen without the labor of a
human hand. Against the uncanny bright, the bodies of the actors are illuminated in unbelievable detail, every freckle and spot urgent under the scrutiny of the lights. He sees Dillon Davies, the alter ego of his fictional alter ego, standing in place in the bright-green field as the crew readjusts equipment. To his left, an ordinary painter’s ladder is propped inexplicably in full view. The short, light-colored beard from the table read has been razored off, and now Patrick can see the young star’s entire face, shockingly smooth, a brand-new face that has never been seen by his fans. In the exact center of that fresh softness is a chiseled lower lip, as plump as a cherry. Dillon stares dully at the poured-concrete floor, chewing on a fingernail, dreamier than ever, somehow. Is this what charisma is, Patrick wonders—the skill of exuding appeal even when you appear to be exuding nothing, appear to be doing nothing at all?

  Sackler isn’t there among the silhouetted throng watching Dillon dismantle his hangnails; he’s not bent over the electrical wires or lighting equipment or camera. Patrick looks for a director’s chair, the foldable kind, iconic, clichéd—but is that too obvious? The mid-forties paunch, the thick-rimmed glasses with the thin, possibly false, lenses. He asks the pair of makeup girls by the touch-up station, but they have no idea who Sackler is. Neither does the kid with a coil of insulated cable slung over each arm, whose pockets rattle with pilfered candy as he walks away. “Can you direct me toward whoever’s in charge?” Patrick asks the clustered backs, but not loudly enough for anyone to hear him. The soundstage is half lit and haphazardly peopled, like a high-school gymnasium transformed into a tornado shelter. When he sees the Arm wandering in from the sunlit outdoors, what he feels is a mixture of annoyance and relief.

  “Where have you been all afternoon?” Patrick says, sighing loudly. “Wandering the desert in search of enlightenment?”

  “I just had a terrible experience,” says the Arm in a hushed voice.

  “Do you have the pickup from the address I gave you?” Patrick asks. “Brenda will be asking about it.”

  “I was on the highway, driving,” the Arm continues, as if Patrick hasn’t even said anything. “Everything was normal. Traffic was almost at a complete standstill, I was just idling forward, braking when I needed to, watching the smoke from the fire rolling off the Malibu hills. It was beautiful. Relaxing, even. I know it doesn’t sound like smoke should be that way, but if you just pretend they’re clouds, dirty clouds, you can see all kinds of things. Big, puffy shapes crawling across the sky. Hippopotamus. Pirate ship. Half a dragon. Stuff like that.”

  “I asked you about loafers, and you’re telling me about dragons.”

  “Dragons are what I saw,” the Arm replies, “but you might see something completely different. It’s subjective.”

  “I know what subjective is,” Patrick responds.

  “Well, I’m just sitting in the car, I have my music on, I’m gazing out at the natural world and at all its, you know, splendor. And then I see this gorgeous girl. She’s petite, cute chin and tiny waist and all of that, and she’s wearing a yellow bathing suit, it’s a tankini but it’s skimpy in the right ways. She’s carrying a beach towel under her arm, and her hair is kind of long and kind of short. She looks like the sort of girl you’d see on the college quad, someone new to school but fitting right in. Then I see that she’s not wearing any shoes and her feet are all gray, up over the ankle. Oh, and she’s smiling this fantastic smile, like a face-soap billboard. She’s walking on the highway, down the stripe between the lanes of traffic, which is moving slowly for the most part, but sometimes a lane starts moving a little faster and someone wings her with the edge of their rearview mirror. And then she unrolls her towel and spreads it out on the asphalt up ahead of me. She lies down right between the fast lane and the middle lane, with the cars barreling past her on both sides.”

  “And what did you do?” Patrick asks, uneasily interested.

  “Well, I did what any good person would do,” the Arm says, troubled. “I put my hazards on and went to see if she needed help. When I got out of the car, the traffic had begun to clear up, so I had to try to wave the cars away from her, and I asked her if she was okay.”

  “And was she okay?”

  “No,” he says, “she was not.”

  Belly-up beneath the ceaseless sunshine, she lay with her eyes closed and her midriff bared to the ultraviolet eye overhead, an expression of stark serenity carved into her pale, bronzed face. As he leaned over her, he saw her features in such incredible detail that she didn’t seem real, didn’t seem human: she had the incomprehensible exactness of a map. He read the contours of her unlined cheeks, the crinkles at the outer corner of her eye. Slathered with gloss, her heart-shaped mouth glinted slow as breath snaked its way up from sluggish lungs. Pulse thrumming silently in the shadow of a long, slender bone, cheekbone gleaming with man-made dew. Under the bright, prickling heat, the only thing quick in her was her eyelids, the trembling so small and so fast that it reminded him of the scutter of insects, the faint penciling of sound you hear when a housefly passes close to your ear.

  But maybe that was just the vibration of the road, the humming around and beneath him as the cars picked up speed, honking to underscore their objections, and as, far ahead and out of eyesight, thousands of vehicles began their acceleration to normal speeds, tiny explosions within their engines erupting so many times a second that no human eye or ear could parse it. He slid his fingers under her neck and lifted slightly, her mouth falling open a half-inch and exposing a sliver of tongue. He was saying the words: “Miss, are you all right? Miss, are you in danger? Are you ill? Should I call the cops? An ambulance, a parent, a friend?” Someone to match face to name. But, from the untroubled limpness of her expression, he doubted that she heard him at all.

  “Don’t you have something for me, Hamlin?” comes a voice from his periphery.

  Patrick turns toward Brenda. Every time he sees her, he’s taken aback: her beauty is vaguely inhuman, the features unnaturally even and obviously expensive. Her skin smooth and poreless, like the sexy, futuristic plastic of the modernized electric toothbrushes advertised to him in the margins of his browser window. Brenda seems irritated: the smooth skin knits at the apex of her brow, creating a visible indentation.

  “I delegated that task to my associate here,” Patrick replies, patting the Arm’s knobby shoulder.

  “I was unable to complete the task,” the Arm says sadly, “because I became embroiled in a police emergency involving a beautiful woman.”

  “Forget the shoes,” says Brenda breezily. “I have a pickup scheduled that Patrick can do right now. If he hurries he’ll be back in time to drive Cassidy home.” She hands him an invoice made out to a clinic in Oxnard, about an hour past her Malibu home. Then something catches her attention. “Oh, good,” she says, her voice growing bright, “she’s actually here.”

  From the periphery of the room, a small, alarmingly slender figure drifts toward the set in a gown of pale, stiff organza, a sort of sexed-up crinoline topped with ruffled sleeves that slump alluringly off the shoulders. The gown is too big for the body inside it; it drags after her. From this blunt angle, in the odd and spooky artificial dusk, Cassidy Carter looks like a child of eight or nine playing pretend in a grown-up’s dress, her long light-colored hair wild and unbrushed. Against the half-light, her limbs are bluntly visible, stick-straight and narrow, like bones through an X-ray. Cassidy reaches the luminous green square and stops, turns around. She points at the ladder. “Is this supposed to be the ‘tree’?” she asks loudly, speaking to anybody and nobody in particular. “The ‘tree’ I’m supposed to be climbing in this scene?” Nobody answers her. “Hellooooo,” she calls, the sound echoing through the vast rectangle of trapped air, captured by this building and kept from the sky. “Who’s in charge of this clown car?”

  Patrick looks around. Brenda is suddenly nowhere to be seen. But Horseshoe is walking tow
ard them, chugging a half-empty bottle of WAT-R. The lump of his throat bobs up and down rhythmically. His grin looks like a grimace as he swallows deep. From his chinos comes the rattling sound of pilfered candy.

  “Hi, friends,” Horseshoe says, gesturing toward the green screen with the narrowed end of the plastic bottle. “What’s happening up there?”

  “She’s looking for the director, I think,” replies the Arm. “Or someone else who has authority.”

  Cassidy walks over to Dillon, who looks nervous. She’s standing with her arms crossed before him, the ruffles exuberantly framing her aggrieved little face, asking him questions that they can’t quite hear.

  “Sam was fired,” says Horseshoe thoughtfully. “I heard they hired his replacement already.”

  “What do you mean, Sam was fired?” Patrick says, too loudly, too sharply. “By Jay? For what?”

  “I’m sorry, guys, I just can’t get that girl out of my head.” The Arm speaks sorrowfully, and it’s true, anyone can see it, he is rickety with feelings. His mouth tilts and twists; he blinks over and over and seems to have no control over it. “I remember, like, everything about her. The confusion on her face when they hauled her away. After a while, the cops showed up and blocked off a couple of the freeway lanes. They were able to get her awake somehow; they sat her up and checked her heart rate. Pointed a little green light into her eyes, gave her some WAT-R to drink. They did this thing to her that we used to do when I was a kid when we wanted the cat to swallow its medicine—they would pour a little WAT-R into her mouth and rub her throat in long downward strokes. Eventually, she started blinking, not just staring. And then she talked.”