Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  It’s harder for her to be angry with Patrick when he’s here in front of her, silent and morose. Over the phone, she feels an exhilarated rise, like when you mix coke and tequila: the head floating high above the fray like a balloon, the body ready to fucking rage. But look into the sad man’s eyes a second too long and that feeling leaks out of you. Patrick is driving like a person only half awake; he puts on the turn signal too late, drives eight miles under the speed limit. Cassidy tells him about the fight she got into today with Jay and the film’s director of photography over the green screen. People always assume that she knows nothing except how to be on camera, but in fact there are many things about the production that can be seen from her position. She can read the lens and tell whether the director is mining her face or her entire body for the image; she knows whether the mic is being dropped into frame or held too far away. And from Five Moons of Triton and countless studio photo shoots, she knows that any background designated for erasure should be smooth and perfect—the roll of unmarred white background paper sleeking gently down to the ground, its bend nearly undetectable, like a slice of winter in the dead of July.

  She pointed these things out to the DP: the sloppily painted wall, patches of glossy and matte, with a sharp, dark crease where green wall met green floor. The uneven lighting that cast the leftward reach in algae-green shadow, dark and sickly. Cassidy knew she had only an imperfect sense of how money worked in the world—the prices for nice things always seemed hilariously random, imaginary, like the shops she and her sister, June, used to conjure from an overturned cardboard box and the contents of their shared closet. But cheapness was a thing she could sense instantly and from a distance—intimate, like the taste of vomit in the back of her throat. Cheapness was a substitute for the real thing. It was a sign that someone else, somewhere, was pocketing the difference. It offended her as an individual who had clawed her way out of the realm of the temporary and into the sunshine of the real and lasting.

  Then Jay came up and started running interference, talking up the veritable army of animators and digital-effects wizards who were waiting in the wings for the raw footage. Digital production had evolved since Five Moons of Triton, he explained, as he placed a helpful hand on the middle of her back. Backgrounds no longer needed to be perfect to be seamlessly replaced—in fact, perfect was primitive. Reality was easier to override than ever, and the substitute was much more potent, much harder to forget. In any case, he continued, there was an important opportunity he wanted to discuss. Would Cassidy be interested in coming to a little capital-raising party they were throwing on Saturday at Brenda’s Malibu place?

  Suddenly Patrick pulls the van over to the shoulder of the highway and buries his face in his hands. He’s breathing fast and making a sound like an animal in distress, a muffled, jagged bark.

  “Oh no,” says Cassidy, “are you choking?”

  He curls away from her, crumples, presses his head against the driver’s-side window. He’s still making that hacking sound; with each heave his skull strikes softly against the glass. He’s coughing, Cassidy realizes, instead of crying.

  “Whoa, okay. Don’t worry. Take a deep breath.” Cassidy exhales loudly, inhales deeply, for reference. “You messed up, but I’m not going to make a big deal about it to Jay and Brenda. People in this business say a lot of shit that doesn’t mean anything in reality—I bet it’s different from your book world. Just try to, you know, pick up your phone.”

  “You don’t understand,” Patrick growls, a burning pressure lodged in the space between his eyes.

  “Understand what?” she asks.

  “Having a family,” he mutters into automotive glass, “having a family in this fucked-up world. Nothing making sense. Being responsible for all of it. Nobody listening. Being treated like a disposable, like I’m just one of those kids standing around the snack table.” He feels the clench of self-consciousness: he sounds like a teenager, the self-pitying version he teases Nora about becoming, triggering her sighs. “Trying to care for the most important people in your life from the other side of the country, and not knowing where they’re sleeping or whether they’re warm and safe. Seeing all those comatose people in the tiled room looking so lost. And now it could be my last chance to talk to my wife and daughter and I can’t do it, because I have to drive you home.” Something like a sob bursts from his throat, transforms into another string of coughs.

  Cassidy stares. A game she and her sister used to play when they were all living in the apartments, sharing a bunk bed in a room papered with wild-animal photos cut out of magazines, was called Switch On/Switch Off! It was a game of emotional agility, an acting exercise that never ended. You played in your real life, using your real feelings, in places both public and private. As they shopped for new audition outfits at the plastic-hanger store at the mall, Cassidy’s mom might take the stretchy magenta dress right out of her hands and hang it back on the rack, telling her, “You need to get that belly under control first,” and Cass would tear up, her vision overlaid by a layer of wobbling saltwater that made the mall store a wilderness of melting shapes. She’d wrangle with the feelings, losing small, steady ground, until June leaned over and whispered “Switch off!” in her ear. Then Cass would let her face go slack, neutral, like a pretty doll, until June whispered again, “Switch on!” And she would will her face to come back to life with a new emotion, a quiet, self-contained smile like that of a brave female pilot about to climb into her plane.

  The challenge wasn’t in shutting down the link between the feeling and the face, it was in finding something brand-new to fill the face with, a feeling distant from the one you were actually experiencing. June would play too, but Cass was the undisputed queen. When it was just the two of them, they might string the switches together for so long—ten or twelve or fifteen in a row—that they both lost track of how they had felt at the beginning, so that switching feelings and switching expressions became a feeling of its own, like floating high above yourself and seeing all the detail of your life in its precise and indifferent reality, like waves shifting on the surface of the sea.

  Even now, almost twenty years later, she sometimes feels that she lives life in a vague echo of that game, searching the behavior of friends and producers and actors and staff for signs of falsity, for clues to whether they were really smiling, really shouting, without the relief of ever finding out what the underlying emotion actually was. Her ex-manager tells her with a melancholy tone that it’s pathetic what’s happened to her, an actress who had for many years commanded some of the highest fees in the industry for an individual under the age of twenty-five—but then he begins talking about a product-placement deal he can hook up with the tampon company, only one post a month, whenever she’s bleeding, and they’ll pay her a steady seven K a pop. Her ex–personal assistant waves a bright goodbye and goes off to pick up a week’s supply of juice cleanse, but never returns, never sends back the money, quits her job over DM. But this display from Patrick seems genuine: it’s too uncomfortable, too unnatural, too weird to be an effort at manipulation. He grinds his reddening face into the driver’s-side window, leaving nose smudges on the curved glass. He rubs his eye sockets like he’s wiping away tears, but there are no tears. Whenever a car flies past them on the highway, the stopped van shudders around their bodies, trembles beneath their feet.

  Cassidy opens her door and walks around to Patrick’s side. She pulls his door open and tells him to climb over into the passenger seat.

  “Fine,” she says, “I’ll drive, so you can make your phone call. Just this one time.”

  As the van lurches into motion, Patrick dials the commune pay phone. It rings once, twice, five times. Then, just as he’s about to despair, Alison picks up.

  “Patrick, is that you?” comes the sweet, familiar voice, as clear and constant as water from a tap.

  “Alison. Jesus. I can’t fucking believe it. You had me so
worried.”

  “Patrick, are you okay? What’s the emergency?” Patrick can hear the nibble of fear in her voice.

  “Are you kidding? You are the emergency, you and Nora. Do you realize we haven’t spoken in eight days? I don’t know if you’re safe, I don’t know if you’re healthy. Everything can change in eight days—just look at Jonestown. And Klaus is no help. Apparently, you don’t share much information with him.”

  “I barely know him,” Alison replies.

  “Listen to me,” Patrick says, his voice straining. “Do you remember what it was like last spring? How worried I was? This might be worse. I’m close to tears. What are you two doing over there every day? Who’s running this camp? What do you know about them, about this place you’ve decided has all the Big Answers?”

  There’s a long pause on the other end of the line, an inky silence.

  “Hello?” Patrick asks. “Did we lose the call?” He holds the phone away from his head to look at the crisp display, where the screen tallies up, second by second, the duration of their connection.

  “No, I’m still here,” Alison answers. “I just…” Patrick waits. “I want to do a good job here. I want to try to put you at ease. I don’t know if you’ll understand. I don’t think you’ve understood in the past.”

  Patrick sits silently, suddenly aware of Cassidy’s presence in the seat to his left. With her large black sunglasses on, he can’t tell whether she’s listening in. Her pert little face is fixed on the road, as she drives into the darkening east, her back to the colors of the sunset.

  “It’s not a cult, it’s a commune,” Alison explains with a steady tone. “It’s called Earthbridge; it’s been around for almost eight years. This place is normal—these people were doctors, teachers, graduate students. I promise you. There’s no drugs, or at least no unusual ones. There’s yoga in the morning and the evening, but the evening one is a little better, less crowded. Nora and I have two beds in a cabin with a few other women, a couple kids. It’s cold at night, but there’s a closet-full of blankets in the lodge, big scratchy woolen ones. Probably remnants from the seventies and eighties, when this camp was booming.” She pauses to listen for his response, then continues. “Nora sleeps all the way through the night; she wakes up with me, when the light breaks. She’s making friends. I don’t know what she’s said to you, but she tells me she likes the ‘idealism on display.’ Though she says it’s also a bit ‘escapist’ here.”

  “And the leader?” Patrick pressed.

  “You mean the owners? Oh god, I don’t know. This woman named Diane and her husband, Jeff? They used to work at HBO. They bought this old summer camp a few years ago, when Jeff tried to kill himself. He had just watched that viral video of the polar bear that got shot when it tried to scavenge in a grocery store. But I wouldn’t say they run this place.”

  “What do they make you do?” He’s pushing now; he feels the swaddle of Alison’s carefully chosen words.

  “Patrick, what are you trying to uncover?”

  “Just humor me, then, if it’s all so wholesome.”

  She sighs, and when she speaks, all the softness of her voice has been compressed into one thin line, as sharp as a blade.

  “Look. We get up at seven, have hot cereal and berries in the dining hall. Then we gather at the lodge, sit on the ground pretzel-style—like children, I know, you don’t have to say it. Then someone comes up to the stage, usually Talya or Linden, and they give the update. It’s a list of losses we’ve suffered over the last twenty-four hours. A tiny silver moth indigenous to Hawaii went extinct. They started drilling off the coast of Maine, near one particular island, and if a particular bill passes the State Legislature they’ll do more. We get updates on the larger things, though it’s harder to put an exact date and time to their passing. This morning, they finally declared the Thwaites Glacier dead. There are pieces floating around still, but it’s like looking for teeth in the ashes of a fire. The thing that had a name has been wiped off the face of the earth.” She pauses. “And then we mourn.”

  “What does that mean, mourning? For a glacier?” Patrick can’t tell whether what he said sounds serious or mocking.

  “It means what you think it means,” Alison replies. “We might share our thoughts, our feelings. We might cry. We might lie down and feel like dying, feel scared, we might lean or huddle or hug each other. And then someone does the eulogy. They say something like: ‘Imagine how this little moth, Philodoria auromagnifica, lived its brief and precious life. Born into the flesh of a single kolea leaf, the plant upon which the destiny of its entire species depends. A tiny caterpillar growing each day, eating a minuscule trail through the structure on which it was born, spinning a minuscule cocoon for itself inside tunnels carved in leaf flesh. Imagine that it casts itself into the night sky for the first time, its tiny body the size of an eyelash, searching the sunless dark for a mate of its own kind. Imagine that it finds another one of its kind in the vast and unbounded air, in the undestroyable, uncontestable largeness of the world, and discovers the joy of life continuing on. How impossible it was that a creature like that should ever exist, how impossible it is that it will never come into existence again. How beautiful its life must have been to witness while it was allowed to live.’ ”

  Alison doesn’t say anything for a long time, and Patrick doesn’t prod her.

  “I know you don’t see the point of moths, or sitting around weeping,” she says crisply. “I’m just trying to give you a sense of what goes on.”

  “I think,” says Patrick, struggling, “that we’re coming up against the limits of the telephone as a medium. How can I understand where you are, whether it’s as safe as you say, when all we have to communicate with are words? No matter what we say, what we do, it’s only a story told over the phone. I just wish I could see the place, you know.”

  “Well, you’d be welcome here. You can come here any time you want.”

  A loud silence. Patrick looks up. The van is stopped in the middle of an empty strip-mall parking lot, engine running and headlights on. The sky is a deep, dark blue, and the stores are closed, the shadowy interior of a bead store full of strange bins and droopy materials on the walls, foreboding in the middling light. The only sound is the sound of traffic, an aimless rumbling. Cassidy is nowhere to be seen.

  “I have weeks more here, weeks of work. It’s crazy, unpredictable,” he says. The truth is, he doesn’t want to give up a nothing that could become something glamorous for a nothing that’s certain to remain so. “I have so many things to tell you. But in the meantime, though, maybe you could take a few pictures with your phone and send them? Send some of where you and Nora are sleeping, the lodge and the dining hall, your beloved leaders. Then I’ll have something to assess, you know?”

  “I don’t want to do that, Patrick,” Alison responds, exasperated. “For one thing, I don’t charge my phone anymore. I basically turn it on if I’m sending a letter, if I need to look up an address. For another, there’s no Wi-Fi, no cell service. To send you a single photo, I would have to hike forty-five minutes to the top of See Clearly Peak, then down again. And it’s the middle of the night.”

  Patrick makes a dismissive sound. “And you wonder why I feel like you’re hiding something from me?”

  “Come see for yourself,” she replies.

  Through the sliver of open window, the cargo van is infiltrated by the sound of cicadas. The dusky air smells of life, green and lush in the hiss of sprinklers. Where the glare of the headlights begins to soften, he sees countless insects flitting through the beams, dime-sized flutterers and long-limbed night flies bleached pale in the bright light. More life was supposed to be a beautiful thing, Patrick thinks to himself, more insects, more birds, more incomprehensible germlike animals too small to see, the planet “teeming with ineffable variety,” as Nora might say in her eerily mature way. But he can’t help feeling li
ke there’s something awful about all that activity, the endless increase of creatures that live somehow, grow somehow, consuming even smaller, unseen creatures to fuel their strange fragile bodies. The reality of that world unsettles his own. Now that he’s heard the drone of the insects, the rhythmic in-out pulse of their alien song, it seems impossible to ignore it, to go back to the way it was before.

  “Actually, no,” Alison says sharply. “Don’t come.”

  Through the dim tint of the windshield, Patrick sees a slim blond figure weaving through the empty parking lot. He feels the flow of the van’s air conditioner on his face, its coolness scented dimly of plastic.

  “I don’t know why I keep telling you that you’re welcome at Earthbridge when I know it would only make both of us miserable. Every day here, we acknowledge that the planet is dying, that the life to come, the life our children will lead, is only a shadow of the life we enjoyed ourselves. Every day, I admit to myself that the way I’ve lived has taken from my daughter the things we taught her to love. But I never feel as bad as I do when I remember living in that house with you and Nora, watching these same things unfold, and getting ordered by you to take my handful of pills and look away.”

  “You know I did every single thing I could think of to help you,” Patrick says, the sense of betrayal in his voice matching the hurt in hers. “And I’m still trying.”

  On the other end of the line, there’s a sound like a gasp and a scuffling of cloth against pay-phone receiver. He imagines tears cutting a path down the side of her nose as she pulls the phone hard to her chest, pressing bone through her scratchy fisherman’s sweater. He’s a little surprised that he’s not crying himself—if it was going to happen at any time, this should be it. He kneads the meat of his dry eyeball through its lid, hears the shift of flesh pushing against flesh. The silence on the phone line has a hot, raspy quality.