The shelves yielded miracle after miracle. Here was The Death of Superman, directed by Tim Burton, starring Nicolas Cage; in Pete's universe, Burton and Cage had both dropped the project early on. Here was Total Recall, but directed and written by David Cronenberg, not Paul Verhoeven. Here was The Terminator, but starring O.J. Simpson rather than Arnold Schwarzenegger—though Schwarzenegger was still in the film, as Kyle Reese. Here was Raiders of the Lost Ark, but starring Tom Selleck instead of Harrison Ford—and there was no sign of any later Indiana Jones films, which was sad. Pete's hands were already full of DVDs, and he juggled them awkwardly while pulling more movies from the shelves. Here was Casablanca starring George Raft instead of Bogart, and maybe it had one of the alternate endings, too! Here a John Wayne World War II movie he'd never heard of, but the box copy said it was about the ground invasion of the Japanese islands, and called it a “riveting historical drama.” A quick scan of the shelves revealed no sign of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, and those two things together suggested that in this world, the atomic bomb was never dropped on Japan. The implications of that were potentially vast ... but Pete dismissed broader speculations from his mind as another film caught his eye. In this world, Kubrick had lived long enough to complete Artificial Intelligence on his own, and Pete had to see that, without Steven Spielberg's sentimental touch turning the movie into Pinocchio.
“You only get them for three days,” the clerk said, amused, and Pete blinked at her, feeling like a man in a dream. “You going to have time to watch all those?"
“I'm having a little film festival,” Pete said, and he was—he planned to call in sick to work and watch all these movies, and copy them, if he could; who knew what kind of bizarre copy protection technology existed in this world?
“Well, my boss won't want to rent twenty movies to a brand new member, you know? Could you maybe cut it down to four or five, to save me the hassle of dealing with him? You live near here, right? So you can always bring them back and rent more when you're done."
“Sure,” Pete said. He didn't like it, but he was afraid she'd insist if he pushed her. He selected four movies—The Magnificent Ambersons, The Death of Superman, I, Robot, and Casablanca—and put the others away. Once he'd rented a few times, maybe she'd let him take ten or twenty movies at once. Pete would have to see how much sick time he had saved up. This was a good time to get a nasty flu and miss a couple of weeks of work.
The clerk scanned the boxes, tapped her keyboard, and told him the total, $12.72. He handed over two fives, two ones, two quarters, a dime, two nickels, and a couple of pennies—he'd brought lots of cash this time.
The clerk looked at the money on the counter, then up at him with an expression caught between amusement and wariness. She tapped the bills. “I know you aren't a counterfeiter, because then you'd at least try to make the fake money look real. What is this, from a game or something? It's not foreign, because I recognize our presidents, except the guy on, what's this, a dime?"
Pete suppressed a groan. The money was different, he'd never even thought of that. He began to contemplate the logistics of armed robbery.
“Wait, you've got a couple of nickels mixed in with the fake money,” she said, and pulled the two nickels aside. “So that's only $12.62 you still owe me."
“I feel really dumb,” Pete said. “Yeah, it's money from a game I was playing yesterday, I must have picked it up by mistake.” He swept up his bills and coins.
“You're a weird guy, Pete. I hope you don't mind me saying."
Nodding dolefully, he pulled a fistful of change from his pockets. “I guess I am.” He had a lot of nickels, which were real—or close enough—in this world, and he counted them out on the counter, $3.35 worth, enough for one movie. He'd go to the bank tomorrow and change his cash for sacks of nickels, as much as he could carry, and he would rent all these movies, five cents at a time. Sure, he could just snatch all four movies and run now, but then he'd never be able to come back, and there were shelves upon shelves of movies he wanted to see here. For tonight, he'd settle for just The Magnificent Ambersons. “This one,” he said, and she took his nickels, shaking her head in amusement. She passed him a translucent plastic case and pennies in change, odd little octagonal coins.
“I'll put these away, Mr. Nickels,” she said, taking the other movies he'd brought to the counter. “Enjoy, and let me know what you think of it."
Pete mumbled some pleasantry as he hurried out the door, disc clutched tight to his chest, and he alternated walking and running back to his apartment. Once inside, he turned on his humming stack of A/V components and opened the tray on the DVD player. He popped open the plastic case and removed the disc—simple, black with the title in silver letters—and put it in the tray. The disc was a little smaller than DVDs in this world, but it seemed to fit okay. The disc spun, hummed, and the display on the DVD flashed a few times before going blank. The television screen read “No disc.” Pete swore and tried loading the disc again, but it didn't work. He sat in his leather chair and held his head in his hands. Money wasn't the only thing that was different in that other world. DVD encryption was, too. Even his region-free player, which could play discs from all over the world, couldn't read this version of The Magnificent Ambersons. The videotapes would be similarly useless—he'd noticed they were different than the tapes he knew from this world, some format that didn't exist here, smaller than VHS, larger than Betamax.
But all was not lost. Pete went out the door, carrying The Magnificent Ambersons with him, since he couldn't bear to let it go. He raced back to Impossible Dreams. “Do you rent DVD players?” he gasped, out of breath. “Mine's broken."
“We do, Pete,” she said, “but there's a $300 deposit. You planning to pay that in nickels?"
“Of course not,” he said. “I got some real money from home. Can I see the player?” To hell with being reasonable. He'd snatch the player and run. She had his address, but this wasn't her world, and in a few more minutes the shop would disappear again. He could come back tomorrow night with a toy gun and steal all the DVDs he could carry, he would bring a suitcase to load them all in, he'd—
She set the DVD player on the counter with the cord curled on top. The electrical plug's two posts were oddly angled, one perpendicular to the other, and Pete remembered that electrical standards weren't even the same in Europe as they were in North America, so it was ridiculous to assume his own outlets would be compatible with devices from another universe. He rather doubted he'd be able to find an adapter at the local Radio Shack, and even if he could rig something, the amount of voltage carried in his wires at home could be all wrong, and he might destroy the DVD player, the way some American computers got fried if you plugged them into a European power outlet.
“Never mind,” he said, defeated. He made a desultory show of patting his pockets and said, “I forgot my wallet."
“You okay, Pete?” she asked.
“Sure, I was just really excited about seeing it.” He expected some contemptuous reply, something like “It's just a movie,” the sort of thing he'd been hearing from friends and relatives his entire life.
Instead she said, “Hey, I get that. Don't worry, we'll have it in stock when you get your player fixed. Old Orson isn't such a hot seller anymore."
“Sure,” Pete said. He pushed the DVD back across the counter at her.
“Want a refund? You only had it for twenty minutes."
“Keep it,” Pete said. He hung around outside and watched from across the street as the clerk locked up. About ten minutes past 10:00, he blinked, and the store disappeared in the moment his eyes were closed. He trudged away.
* * * *
That night, at home, he watched his own DVD of The Magnificent Ambersons, with its butchered continuity, its studio-mandated happy ending, tacked-on so as not to depress wartime audiences, and afterward he couldn't sleep for wondering what might have been.
* * * *
Pete didn't think Impossible Dreams was goi
ng to reappear, and it was 9:00 before it did. He wondered if the window was closing, if the store would appear later and later each night until it never reappeared at all, gone forever in a week or a day. Pete pushed open the door, a heavy plastic bag in his hand. The clerk leaned on the counter, eating crackers from little plastic packages, the kind that came with soup in a restaurant. “Hi."
“Mr. Nickels,” she said. “You're the only customer I get after 9:00 lately."
“You, ah, said you didn't have money for dinner lately, and I wanted to apologize for being so much trouble and everything ... anyway, I brought some food, if you want some.” He'd debated all day about what to bring. Fast food was out—what if her world didn't have McDonald's, what would she make of the packaging? He worried about other things, too—should he avoid beef, in case mad cow disease was rampant in her world? What if bird flu had made chicken into a rare delicacy? What if her culture was exclusively vegetarian? He'd finally settled on vegetarian egg rolls and rice noodles and hot and sour soup. He'd seen Hong Kong action movies in the store, so he knew Chinese culture still existed in her world, at least, and it was a safe bet that the food would be mostly the same.
“You are a god, Pete,” she said, opening a paper container of noodles and wielding her chopsticks like a pro. “You know what I had for lunch today? A pear, and I had to steal it off my neighbor's tree. I got the crackers off a tray in the dining hall. You saved my life."
“Don't mention it. I'm really sorry I was so annoying the last couple of nights."
She waved her hand dismissively, mouth crammed with egg roll, and in her presence, Pete realized his new plan was impossible. He'd hoped to endear himself to her, and convince her to let him hang around until after closing, so he could ... stow away, and travel to her world, where he could see all the movies, and maybe become the clerk's new roommate. It had all made sense at 3:00 in the morning the night before, and he'd spent most of the day thinking about nothing else, but now that he'd set his plan in motion he realized it was more theatrical than practical. It might work in a movie, but in life he didn't even know this woman's name, she wouldn't welcome him into her life, and even if she did, what would he do in her world? He spent all day processing applications, ordering transcripts, massaging a database, and filing things, but what would he do in her world? What if the computers there had totally different programming languages? What would he do for money, once his hypothetical giant sack of nickels ran out?
“I'm sorry, I never asked your name,” he said.
“I'm Ally,” she said. “Eat an egg roll, I feel like a pig."
Pete complied, and Ally came around the counter. “I've got something for you.” She went to the big screen TV and switched it on. “We don't have time to watch the whole thing, but there's just enough time to see the last fifty minutes, the restored footage, before I have to close up.” She turned on the DVD player, and The Magnificent Ambersons began.
“Oh, Ally, thanks,” he said.
“Hey, your DVD player's busted, and you really should see this."
For the next fifty minutes, Pete watched. The cast was similar, with only one different actor that he noticed, and from everything he'd read, this was substantially the same as the lost footage he'd heard about in his world. Welles's genius was apparent even in the butchered RKO release, but here it was undiluted, a clarity of vision that was almost overwhelming, and this version was sad, profoundly so, a tale of glory and inevitable decline.
When it ended, Pete felt physically drained, and sublimely happy.
“Closing time, Pete,” Ally said. “Thanks again for dinner. I'm a fiend for Chinese.” She gently herded him toward the door as he thanked her, again and again. “Glad you liked it,” she said. “We can talk about it tomorrow.” She closed and locked the door, and Pete watched from a doorway across the street until the shop disappeared, just a few minutes after ten. The window was closing, the shop appearing for less time each night.
He'd just have to enjoy it while it lasted. You couldn't ask more of a miracle than it was willing to give.
* * * *
The next night he brought kung pao chicken and asked what her favorite movies were. She led him to the Employee Picks shelf and showed him her selections. “It's mostly nostalgia, but I still love The Lunch Bunch—you know, the sequel to The Breakfast Club, set ten years later? Molly Ringwald's awesome in it. And Return of the Jedi, I know a lot of people hate it, but it's one of the best movies David Lynch ever directed, I thought Dune was a muddle, but he really got to the heart of the Star Wars universe, it's so much darker than The Empire Strikes Back. Jason and the Argonauts by Orson Welles, of course, that's on everybody's list...."
Pete found himself looking at her while she talked, instead of at the boxes of the movies she enthused over. He wanted to see them, of course, every one, but he wouldn't be able to, and really, he was talking to a woman from another universe, and that was as remarkable as anything he'd ever seen on a screen. She was smart, funny, and knew as much about movies as he did. He'd never dated much—he was more comfortable alone in the dark in front of a screen than he was sitting across from a woman at dinner, and his relationships seldom lasted more than a few dates when the women realized movies were his main mode of recreation. But with Ally—he could talk to her. Their obsessions were congruent and complementary.
Or maybe he was just trying to turn this miracle into some kind of theatrical romance.
“You look really beautiful when you talk about movies,” he said.
“You're sweet, Mr. Nickels."
* * * *
Pete came the next three nights, a few minutes later each time, as the door appeared for shorter periods of time. Ally talked to him about movies, incredulous at the bizarre gaps in his knowledge—"You've never heard of Sara Hansen? She's one of the greatest directors of all time!” (Pete wondered if she'd died young in his world, or never been born at all.) Ally had a fondness for bad science fiction movies, especially the many Ed Wood films starring Bela Lugosi, who had lived several years longer in Ally's world, instead of dying during the filming of Plan 9 from Outer Space. She liked good sci-fi movies, too, especially Ron Howard's Ender's Game. Pete regretted that he'd never see any of those films, beyond the snippets she showed him to illustrate her points, and he regretted even more that he'd soon be unable to see Ally at all, when the shop ceased to appear, as seemed inevitable. She understood character arcs, the use of color, the underappreciated skills of silent film actors, the bizarre audacity of pre-Hayes-Code-era films, the perils of voiceover, why an extended single-camera continuous scene was worth becoming rapturous about, why the animation of Ray Harryhausen was in some ways infinitely more satisfying than the slickest CGI. She was his people.
“Why do you like movies so much?” he asked on that third night, over a meal of Szechwan shrimp, she leaning on her side of the counter, he on his.
She chewed, thinking. “Somebody described the experience of reading great fiction as being caught up in a vivid continuous dream, and I think movies do that better than any other kind of story. Some people say the best movie isn't as good as the best book, and I say they're not watching the right movies, or else they're not watching them the right way. My life doesn't make a lot of sense sometimes, I'm hungry and lonely and cold, my parents are shit, I can't afford tuition for next semester, I don't know what I want to do when I graduate. But when I see a great film, I feel like I understand life a little better, and even not-so-great films help me forget the shitty parts of my life for a couple of hours. Movies taught me to be brave, to be romantic, to stand up for myself, to take care of my friends. I didn't have church or loving parents, but I had movies, cheap matinees when I cut school, videos after I saved up enough to buy a TV and player of my own. I didn't have a mentor, but I had Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. Sure, movies can be a way to hide from life, but shit, sometimes you need to hide from life, to see a better life on the screen, to know life can be bet
ter than it is, or to see a worse life and realize how good you have it. Movies taught me not to settle for less.” She took a swig from her water bottle. “That's why I love movies."
“Wow,” Pete said. “That's ... wow."
“So,” she said, looking at him oddly. “Why do you pretend to like movies?"
Pete frowned. “What? Pretend?"
“Hey, it's okay. You came in and said you were a big movie buff, but you don't even know who Sara Hansen is, you've never seen Jason and the Argonauts, you talk about actors starring in movies they didn't appear in ... I mean, I figured you liked me, you didn't know how else to flirt with me or something, but I like you, and if you want to ask me out, you can, you don't have to be a movie trivia expert to impress me."
“I do like you,” Pete said. “But I love movies. I really do."
“Pete ... you thought Clark Gable was in Gone with the Wind.” She shrugged. “Need I say more?"
Pete looked at the clock. He had fifteen minutes. “Wait here,” he said. “I want to show you something."
He ran home. The run was getting easier. Maybe exercise wasn't such a bad idea. He filled a backpack with books from his reference shelves—The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies, the AFI Film Guide, the previous year's Video and DVD Guide, others—then ran back. Panting, he set the heavy bag on the counter. “Books,” he gasped. “Read,” gasp, “See you,” gasp, “tomorrow."
Asimov's SF, July 2006 Page 12