“You like?” Dr. Gene asks.
“It’s…” Patrick pauses. He sees worry in Cassidy’s black-rimmed eyes. “Different. It has a—I don’t know—mouthfeel.” He swirls his tongue around but can’t rid himself of the filmy sensation, like unrinsed soap on the skin. “I feel like it’s stuck at the back of my tongue, I can’t get it off.”
“You’re exactly right,” Gene says, pleased. “We’re developing this for elite athletes, mountain climbers, people who work long days in the sun, and children with bladder-control issues. It’s a high-stick, low-evap product that keeps you hydrated longer by bonding deeply with your body at the cellular level. The coating in your mouth is a side effect, but it also lessens the amount of water you lose through breathing.”
“It doesn’t feel right,” Patrick says. “It makes me want to rinse my mouth out.”
Dr. Gene looks disappointed but patient. “Of course, our competitor has the advantage of prior market saturation,” he says. “But we’re confident that customers will adjust to these new textures and, in the long run, come to prefer them.” As they board the cart once more, Patrick comments on how large the plant is, so large that seagulls can wander in and fly around the huge space, mistaking it for the outdoors. Cassidy turns and stares at him with some urgent, fervent message in her eyes. He has the uncomfortable feeling that she’s checking his pupils. Dr. Gene just laughs.
“You must be mistaken,” he says. “An animal in the facility would be a major violation of our manufacturing code, unsanitary and dangerous. We have a security system that zaps them if they enter the containment zone. We’ve never had a single one make it inside.”
Together, they dismount from the cart and walk through a glass-walled skybridge that looks down upon a vast floor dotted with tanks three stories tall. From their vantage point, they can see the tiny bodies of workers in their sky-blue suits. The blue suits check panels on the sides of the units, motion to others across the floor to turn valves on or shut valves off. A constant, percussive oscillation can be heard through the thick bluish glass, a high, anxious sound, like the dripping of a faucet that can’t be shut off. For the workers on the floor, the sound is a physical force pounding on the rib cage, tremoring the heart.
“This is chemistry in action,” Dr. Gene says proudly, gesturing at everything below. Behind their backs, the manufacturing tanks extend equally far, as far as can be seen, in the opposite direction. “Here, we mix the raw ingredients of water, hydrogen and oxygen, in proper proportion, and apply the necessary energy to bring them together. It’s a simple recipe, but a good one.”
“So,” says Cassidy, throwing her hair over her shoulder and giving Dr. Gene a gamine look, “if I get some hydrogen and some oxygen together at home, I could make WAT-R?”
“Not unless you want to lose your home in a fireball explosion!” he responds, heartily. “When the hydrogen-oxygen reaction occurs, it is explosive. Propulsive. Nobody has ever been able to control it before WAT-R Corp. Do you remember the Hindenburg, a blimp filled with hydrogen gas? When it exploded, it made the headlines. What didn’t make the headlines was that an amount of pure, new water was also produced in the process, unnoticed amidst the human drama. Nobody else has had the courage to harness a thousand Hindenburgs per minute, as we have done, to build the tanks needed to contain it, to discover the substances crucial to containing the reaction and holding it within the realm of human might. Once mastered by inventors of the combustion engine, the explosion drove our vehicles forward. Now it quenches our thirst.”
“And what substance is it that you add?” Cassidy inquires innocently.
“Oh, it’s a common flame-retardant,” says Dr. Gene. “We filter it out in the postproduction. I’ll show you.”
They follow him out through the double doors and onto the walkway, a narrow path made of perforated metal, hovering above the open vats of cool, swirling WAT-R. As they move forward, Patrick can see the world down below passing through small apertures in the punched steel, each hole reading dark and then light in dazzling sequence, changing as fast as he is moving, which now seems unbearably fast. He’s so far from the ground, he realizes, and he loves the ground so much. He grabs hold of the railing and clutches for dear life, but some shivering, buzzing sensation is traveling the metal, and he lets go so the shaking won’t cast him into the strange, dark basins below. Cassidy and Dr. Gene are forty feet ahead now, as he lowers his body to the metal surface and lies down flat for maximum stability. He extends his arms out from his sides until he reaches the edges of the metal path. Then he curls his fingertips around the metal rim to remain fixed tight to the surface, to ensure that he won’t slide off.
Far ahead of him, he can hear Cassidy and Dr. Gene talking. She nods with a serious, intent expression as he describes a five-year plan, monopolizing the local markets and then slowly raising prices once WAT-R’s become a natural, inseparable part of everyday life. Like the frog in the simmering pot, he explains. It feels as though they’re talking in another world, another time, a place where Patrick used to live but can now only watch as if through glass, as if it lay in impossible exactitude on the other side of a mirror. With each step they take, his body shakes and the teeth rattle in his skull.
“You know, the producers I work with are in the WAT-R business. They have a connection to this factory; that’s why we thought it would be a good place to do my research. Do you know a Brenda Billington or a Jay Arvid? They’re fantastic people. I think they have some scheduled in-person pickups? I forget for what.”
“I can’t say I recognize those names,” Dr. Gene says after a moment’s thought, “but we have a number of investors who see that WAT-R is not only the future of this region, but also its inalienable present. An in-person pickup would be unusual, but not impossible.”
“Do your investors drink WAT-R?” Cassidy asks innocently.
“Of course they do! I really think you should reconsider your ‘no WAT-R’ attitude,” he says. “I see many people afraid of what’s new in the world, and they never think about how intolerable they would find the way we as a species used to live. Every single thing you enjoy today is a new thing in the big picture of human history, a violation of the way we once lived: in caves, eating raw mammal in the dark. The WAT-R we make here is cleaner, more perfect at a chemical level, better-tasting. It’s better at cleaning, better at plumping our cells, better at putting out fires like that catastrophe up near Malibu. It’s even bluer than old water, and looks better in a pool, a fountain, a glass. Aren’t we lucky to drive cars now, rather than ride on horse-drawn carriages? I’m sure that the brilliant Kassi Keene, if she were a real person, would see the reason in this.”
“I don’t have sophisticated reasons,” Cassidy says, and though Patrick can’t see her face, he thinks he hears sadness. “I can’t, you know, argue with you about the things you’ve been saying. I just feel like we owe something to water. Didn’t life begin in water? Didn’t we need it so much we grew a skin around us to trap it inside when we crawled out?”
“Is it useful to be so sentimental about a substance? I’m sure it’s costly, and not just in monetary terms,” he says.
Cassidy laughs quietly. “My mom used to tell me all the time that I had to learn to be less demanding, to be flexible. She wanted me to do more ads, more branding, do more kid roles. I swear, I’d be doing kid roles now if I were still with her—she’ll always find a way to get me in pigtails. She never thought I’d be believable as an adult. ‘You’ve got a cute mug, Cass,’ she’d say, ‘not a beautiful one.’ And she hated that I complained, that I wanted to hang out in basements, that I drank, that I’d made my face all bloated the day after partying. She chose every role I did until I was twenty-one, and I had to jump into whatever shape they asked for—happy, sad, sparkly, innocent—the exact moment they asked for it, for years. When I got photographed barfing on someone’s car, I had to apologize for i
t and convince everyone I really, really meant it; when I was messed up and sad because my mom was being a cunt, I had to pretend I felt so bad I let her down; at every single moment, I’ve had to pretend I want something I don’t want or don’t want what I really do want: to get enough money and drugs and water to just live on my own fucking terms. I’ve been flexible all my life,” she says, now so quiet that Patrick can barely hear her, “I’ve been a plastic girl. I don’t know anything about how to live. I just don’t want to give up and drink the stuff. I don’t know.”
“Well, don’t worry,” Dr. Gene says in a friendly way, “let’s talk instead about something about which you have expertise. I’ve prepared some questions about the last season of Kassi Keene and ranked them in order of importance, in case you don’t have time to cover them all during your visit. This way, at least the most pressing questions do get an answer. Shall we start?” He lifts his hand to the forehead of his grinning face and gives the two-finger salute.
* * *
—
After the tour, Dr. Gene drives them back to the front of the building. Cassidy promises to try to answer his remaining questions when she has time after filming, and Dr. Gene offers to send her a bottle of One Hundred on the house, MSRP $475 for a twenty-ounce flagon. The sun has begun to set over Alamitos Beach as they exit the vast building. Smoke from the fires has made the air thick with particulate, and the sky looks fantastical, like a thing cooked up in CGI. Broad, soft-edged stratus formations hang low over the water, glowing in pastel tangerine shades that mirror the sky behind them. Higher in the sky, sheer puffs of thin vapor blaze in vivid violet and red. And in the foreground, a few odd, dense puffs of cloud linger in the air, unmoving and unchanging, their color a pale grayish-blue. As they take off their shoes and walk toward the water’s edge, Cassidy looks troubled.
“When I turned back and saw you lying down on the bridge, I thought you were dead or something,” she says in a serious tone. “I told Dr. Gene that you’re an amateur photographer and like to examine spaces from unusual angles. But, seriously, what were you doing?”
“I wasn’t lying down, I was just sitting.”
“You were lying belly-down, eyes closed, whimpering. You were clinging to the walkway. Your knuckles were bone-white.”
“I was tired,” he says, and shrugs hard.
They walk along in silence. They pass one tent, and then another. The tents are set up along the shore, in the soft and mounded sand out of the tide’s way. There are duffels and bundles of cloth placed in front of tents, old roller suitcases on their side, and piles of plastic bags tied tight around their unseen contents. There are feet sticking out of some of the shelters as bodies drowse, their heads hidden from the worst of the summer heat. And there are roughshod, handmade stills set up on crates: two bottles set lip to lip with a small can-fire burning beneath, a sheet of glass suspended over a shallow tub of seawater, draining out to an old plastic bucket with sand swirling inside. All of it to separate the sweet water from the brackish, the liquid from the salt. To squeeze a few handfuls of sea for its lifegiving slake.
Suddenly Cassidy stops. She turns toward him about to speak, her hair ablaze in the liquid-gold dying light. To Patrick, it’s as though the sun is melting into a puddle in her face. Her skin is a golden liquid staring at him with an expression on its face, but because the liquid keeps moving very slightly, he has trouble telling what that expression is. Is she smiling? He has trouble remembering what that looks like, and what the word even means. She steps toward him, looking into his eyes, searching. Inside his body, his upper skull feels light and squeaky clean. He doesn’t feel bothered by anything that has happened to him in the past or that is happening or not happening someplace else. The dissolution of bad feelings, even as the basic goodness of sunshine, blond girl, warm shoulders, bright colors remains intact, feels, to him, a little like falling in love.
As her body begins its lean toward his own, he slides his arm around her waist, the circumference smaller than he imagined, and thinks that he was wrong to believe for so long that the imagination was the solution to reality’s disappointments. In actuality, our imaginations cannot, can never, mimic the bliss of the real, the material, the warm, lithe body in your arms at last. Simple things inspire him now, like the smoothness of a cheek or the wetness of an eyeball. The elastic cheer of the Kassi Keene theme song. The sky like an upside-down hole you could fall toward forever without ever hitting the bottom. His eyes hurt a little. His mouth is so dry it creaks, and his brain pounds softly against its skull, in rhythm with his heartbeat. With supreme confidence, he bends to her, slides his thumb across her porcelain jaw, brings his lips gently to her face. And then he stumbles backward into a half-submerged rock, pushed off and probably kneed too, if the feeling in his groin is anything to go by.
“Are you fucking crazy?” Cassidy gasps, and the last thing he sees is the surprise on her face, intermingling with purplish motes of fear.
* * *
—
The smoke-gray sectional sofa had been upholstered in smooth Belgian linen and is the lone item of furniture in the stark, grimly white room. Barely used, it still resembles the photo in the catalogue Cassidy bought it from, where the pictures made it look as though it would fit neatly around the infinity fireplace in the main-floor living room. Instead, it had to be installed in the sitting room, the only room she had never figured out a use for, a room whose title always felt like a riddle, another reminder that the house wasn’t meant for a person like her, but for someone with a life large enough to fill it up. She can’t remember the last time she sat on it herself, or had someone else into her home to sink into its pillowy, undented surface. But now she sips from a low glass of yellowish drink as she studies Patrick, limp and stretched out and still wearing his shoes, and tries to figure out whether he is sleeping or passed out, trying to remember whether there’s even a difference.
By the time Patrick comes to on the sweat-marked cushions, the light has entirely left the sky. Cicadas sing in the low bushes outside Cassidy’s home, and the room is dark, except for when a car comes around the turn, filling the room with a brief, dizzying flash of blinding white light. She crouches by his head, waves her pallid hand before his face.
“You’re alive, right?” she says.
He sits up, looks around him.
“Good. I thought you were drunk,” she says. “But you hadn’t been drinking. Still, you were swaying and mooning around like someone who had been.”
“The kiss?” he asks. He can’t keep a hopeful tone out of his voice.
“I’ll forget about it if you promise not to infringe on my bodily space ever again.” She looks in his direction, but won’t look him in the eye. “We’ll say you lost your balance.”
Cassidy drags a lamp in from some other room and plugs it into the socket. Suddenly he can see the room in its unfurnished melancholy, the white carpet still bearing the marks of a long-ago vacuuming. She turns the light up three notches and stands there, casting a long shadow.
“We need to make a move,” she says, and her voice shimmers with an intensity that Patrick recognizes from Kassi Keene, which makes him feel like he’s part of the storyline, a recurring character. “There’s something in all this that wobbles. So Brenda and Jay are collecting money from these clinics, WAT-R stores, and at least one major WAT-R factory. That’s steady income, and a lot of it. They’ve locked down the market in SoCal and they’re raising prices, which means they’re going to be making more for the same exact product. Why are they dipping into the film business with this half-assed production, collecting all this footage when they haven’t found anyone yet to cut it? I called the company that’s supposed to do our effects, and they only took one meeting with Jay last year, they have no contract. There’s no one on board as editor.”
Patrick feels a sudden twist of worry in his guts. He had doubted the project, questioned
its quality and their choices, but somehow he had never imagined that it wouldn’t produce a film. “Well, that would be fraud, if they claim to be making a movie and have no intention of following through,” he says, grasping at a sense of confidence. “We could go to the police.”
“How would we ever prove they didn’t intend to? I was held hostage once. On a small island in the Ionian Sea, for over a week, by a Russian aluminum man who told my manager they were filming a commercial for sunscreen. For ten days, I had no cellphone, no email, and they kept setting up these scenes with me getting lotion rubbed onto my body by a swarm of foreign models. All they fed me was watermelon and ouzo. After a few days, I said I wanted to go home, but they kept telling me the light was bad, the film got exposed, we needed a redo. Finally, I had to climb out a window and pay a fisherman to ferry me back to Corfu all by myself. There was never any commercial, but because they paid up and anyway there was no way to show the film hadn’t been destroyed in a capsized boat, there was nothing we could do.” The drink, pestered by her restless, gesture-heavy speech, disappears down her throat.
“I can’t believe this,” he says. “This was supposed to be a life changer. My name on a Hollywood movie. On a Hollywood franchise.”
“That’s right,” Cassidy says, some new awareness creeping into her voice. “They’ll never get a sequel made without some receipts for this one—box office, buzz, whatever. They don’t plan to make it. They’re taking money for it, but they’re going to bug out before they’re expected to show anything to their investors.”
She pulls out her phone and begins pressing a message into the small, bright screen. “I think we have about four weeks before the thing collapses, maybe a couple more if they draw it out a little by declaring some sort of problem with their postproduction vendors. They could hire some film students to poke around at the footage and buy a little time. But listen.” She puts the phone facedown on the floor. “If we don’t cut a deal now, there are no more deals to be cut, you understand?”
Something New Under the Sun Page 23