This Location of Unknown Possibilities

by Brett Josef Grubisic

  From past truck ride episodes, Jake was fully aware that Nicos could—and would—say much more. “Hold on a sec. I need to get this sent.” Jake tapped the glass, scanning old online profile messages and photos, and waited for Lora’s reply. Being on location and away from city amenities always made his testosterone levels spike, he’d swear. Hormonal torment: maybe the herbal pill magic had begun kicking in, after all.

  “So, you were saying there’s nothing closer, eh?” Jake said, no longer able to ignore Nicos’ swiveling head and quests for eye contact.

  “You saw the pictures, right?” Nicos turned to Jake again, expression obscured by shuttered mountaineering sunglasses. “There’s some hills with a few scattered rocks, yeah, but nothing epic as per orders.” Nicos flipped through a binder, steering with one hand. “Here it is. See, right, the list of requirements actually put in ‘grandeur’ a couple of times, so that’s what I looked for. Grandeur, Christ! And found, kinda sorta, you’ll see.” He detached the copy of the email and thrust the sheet at Jake. “Anyway, the other option was way the hell over there in the sticks”—he thumbed southward—“and that would of pissed off everybody. All the talent pussy footing around and complaining would of been a sight, I gotta say. But the cost . . . killer. K-i-l-l-e-r. Not to mention the fact that we’d have to hire helicopters or a fleet of Humvees to access it. In no time we’d be hitting James Cameron territory with budget overruns. Hell to pay and all that, your head on a silver platter, the whole nine yards.”

  “Right,” Jake sent a follow-up message: “The tide is rising.” He’d let Nicos spew it all out. Like a baby, Nicos would tire eventually and maybe hit some kind of equilibrium after a painful few minutes of squalling. That strategy also worked when Hurricane Lora approached.

  Lora’s text opened with a smile emoticon: “With great power comes great responsibility. Reward him with a gold star and Good Luck!!! Rearranging YOUR schedule now so can’t talk. ttyl biatch!!” Jake smiled. Schadenfreude: he would have typed the same.

  Jake stared out the window while Nicos spoke, unconcerned about the failure to contribute. Nicos didn’t expect an exchange of sentence for sentence reciprocity; a second body created the necessary illusion of conversation.

  As the truck passed a barely there trailer park on a low sandy rise, Jake followed the abrupt change to greenery, a hand-planted oasis promising reassurance in an otherwise unwelcoming—though harshly striking—environment. In place of imposing barren rock outcrops and the invariable parched grass plains between them grew countless trees—vibrant, groomed, and healthy, a domesticated wilderness planted in fertile, easy-access grids. The layout appeared ingenious in its efficiency, but unlike the cold brutality of an auto plant, the orchards and their fluttering summer grace invited attention. Jake foresaw entranced drivers slowing and pulling over, eventually giving in to the desire to stroll around the luminous unthreatening forest, blithely setting aside the important lessons about the malevolence that awaits in stands of trees learned by Hansel and Gretel or those doomed kids in The Blair Witch Project. And that duo from the bible too.

  Jake made a mental note to wander through a few rows before the shoot wrapped, ideally during the weak light at sunrise or sunset. A roadside sign—“U-pik fruit”—offered a handy solution to the trespassing problem.

  “We’re just about there,” Nicos said. “Behold,” sweeping across the view with an open palm, “the Djoun compound. Well, in a minute. Hold on.”

  Without signaling, Nicos swung off the highway and on to a narrow dirt road, swerving at a jackass speed that prompted a RV’s angry horn blare and, for Jake, a short cinematic vignette of the lifted wheels that precede a tumbling crash, bloody wrecked bodies, a cloud of settling dust, spilling gas, and appalling final silence.

  Jake leaned gamely with the truck’s turn velocity—he’d heard Nicos’ boasts about Dakar Rally-worthy off-roading expertise, but trusted his skill anyway. Curious about the pilot’s shows of manly aggression over the past hour he figured he deserved an explanation. “You’re testy today, man. Need to get laid or something?”

  Nicos smiled widely. “Nah, it’s the great outdoors. Brings out the animal in me, so I guess I’m testes. Get it?”

  The homemade road mowed a line between two parcels of farmland.

  A uniform green span of fruit trees fluttered visibly from Nicos’ window, and on Jake’s side the orchard spelled decimation, a flat expanse of plowed dry dirt clods and leafless wood carcasses. Errant partial rows of upturned stumps implied a work-in-progress; in the middle of the former orchard plot whole spiny trees had been dragged into one high pile that, Jake guessed, would soon be torched or fed into a chipper. The trees looked too puny for lumber.

  “Disease?” Jake asked, thinking of the photograph of anthrax-infected livestock buried in shallow desert graves that Marilyn had suggested as a décor option for the fireplace wall. He’d felt better about the eerie industrial site photographed by the German couple, sterile metallic gloominess ultimately proving easier to come home to than decaying cattle with milky dead eyes.

  “You’d think so, but no. I asked a guy here about that. When the time comes, they rip up the whole thing and plant new ones. It improves profit in the long run. I think orchard plots are like thoroughbreds. I mean they’re super productive while they last, right, but they run out of juice quicker than a mongrel—or whatever they call non-thoroughbreds—so you put them out to pasture.”

  Nicos slowed to a rolling stop to examine the wasteland, then pushed the pedal for a demonstration of pebble-spitting acceleration. The Red Bull clattered and bounced in the back. “Or they chop them down and burn them, as the case may be. It’ll make for a wicked bonfire, like at Burning Man. And sometimes it’s a market demand thing, they’re not sentimental these guys: they get paid more for apples than for pears or something, so it’s out with one and in with the other. That’s why there’s so many grapes everywhere now: city yuppies pay through the nose for Chardonnay, not apple juice. They’re businessmen these farmers, so I guess optimal fruit production is key.”

  “It’s a long-term investment, I guess. You’d think trees would take years to grow to that size.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not up to speed on agribusiness, you know, so maybe there are new hybrids or something that grow really quickly like bamboo or those trees they’ve developed for toilet paper. Synthetic growth hormones maybe, chickens and cows are pumped full of ’em, so why not plants. Gene-splicing too. Mondo-sized trees in just six short months! Sleeper here we come.” Jake guessed that Nicos’ veins flowed with the blood of a conspiracy theorist.

  “I suppose so.” Jake hadn’t heard about toilet paper trees, and he didn’t ask. It would please Nicos to offer up another information session that began with “I read somewhere . . .”

  As the truck reached the back end of the orchard the road widened into a yard of ankle high grass. Obscured by trees, the farmhouse to the left hinted at a spiritual closeness to the stucco mid-century rancher of the suburbs and confounded Jake’s expectation of a gabled Walton family homestead in aged white. The old-time barn at the edge of the stump field butted a round-shouldered mound of mountainside; with a sagging profile, mullioned windows, and planking weathered a powdery grey, it stood ready for second unit crew exterior shots.

  “That’s great,” Jake said.

  “Got it video-documented already and filed away. It’s too country and western for us, right?”

  “Right. Unless we get another script change.”

  “Okay, here we are. Behold the Hebe family farm.”

  Nicos slowed to wave at a lanky ball cap teen—Hebe Jr.?—inside the glassy cab of a yellow tractor. After a gentle right, he drove toward the barn and made a sudden left, where a dusty clot of weeds huddled. Jake hadn’t noticed the gap between one hill and the next; the sun’s glare on the identically hued humps of tall dry grass produced an optical illusion sim
ilar, he guessed, to snow blindness.

  “How’d you find this place? More insider info from skateboarder hippies?”

  “Nope, just old-fashioned footwork. Some luck too. I was driving toward town and noticed the stumps. I figured the farmer might be cash-strapped and open to an offer to lease the field. We could set up shop there and it’d be cheap for us, so what the hell. It wouldn’t hurt to ask. Turns out there’s more to the property than meets the eye.”

  Nicos waved to the young woman who approached as the truck turned. The PA pointed Nicos toward a makeshift parking area—a shallow U of orange fluorescent tape—with expert traffic-cop gestures. Jake didn’t recognize her; the vested newbie must have been okay’d by Lora.

  “Who’s she?”

  “Loree, I think. Rory. Lottie, maybe. Something like that. She’s got more tattoos that you and me put together, that’s all I know. Showed up yesterday. Considering that she’s been parked on her ass guarding an empty lot, she’s doing alright.”

  “Nice.”

  “I heard that she’s not into dick,” Nicos said. “A carpet muncher, get it?”

  “Yeah, I figured that out when you said she’s not into dick.”

  The building crew was nowhere in sight. Jake scrutinized the rampart wall of the compound. From the distance it appeared fully prepped. The caramel colour of the plaster contrasted nicely with the faded beige field on either side. Jake nodded: so far, so good.

  “Not bad, eh?”

  “Yeah, looks that way. From here, anyway. Where’s the house?”

  “The gate’s on hinges. Open sesame and the rest will be revealed.”

  Adjusting to the radiance and desert wind, Jake walked to the far left of the wall. Though he’d worked on countless sets, the simple act of stepping behind the façade never failed to amuse. An illusionist’s clever trick, it stayed magical even after the secret had become public domain.

  He stepped up to the house façade and tested the rounded plank entrance. The doors gave the impression of heaviness, and the plywood’s paint job—big wood knots, rough edges, thickly drawn lines of grain—read as being hand-hewn from whatever trees that grew in Lebanon back in the day.

  The set designer, a pale over-caffeinated novice keen to make the right mark that would elevate her into A-list feature film Olympia, had agonized—right down to wringing hands—about the lack of material about Lady Stanhope’s home base: “But there’s a dearth of extant documentation” and the like in person, as well as by phone and email.

  “Don’t sweat it, Brainiac,” Jake had replied with minor variations—“Professor,” “Calculon,” “Einstein,” “Spock.”

  After the offhand comments designed to calm her, he’d grown bullying and blunt: “Relax, okay, it’s not like we’re making a documentary for the Lebanese Museum of Natural History or whatever. There’s no curator, okay, there’s no committee of experts with asses to kiss, just TV viewers wanting a good story. TV viewers. Got it?” And as the script changed: “It’s the idea of a generic desert compound in the 1820s. No one—and by that I mean no one: viewers or studio—will care that you filled in the blanks with an educated guess. The reference is to other movies, not some old painting or The History of Middle Eastern Architecture. The viewers will care more about the surface of the UFO’s hull and the alien’s face than the goddamned gate of Lady Swinburne’s compound. So how about you go watch The Mummy or The Jewel of the Nile. Okay?”

  Submitting, the woman had asked no further questions. If he caught sight of her again soon, he’d commend the effort.

  3.

  Inspection complete, Jake walked back to the truck. Nicos waited inside, music blaring inside the sealed cab. When Jake thumbed toward the highway, Nicos revved the engine while sliding down his window. “Next?”

  “Bingo.”

  “It’ll be about twenty minutes, boss, thirty max.”

  Nicos signaled left at the highway. Weaving impatiently around lumbering RVs, he flipped between radio stations and remained as quiet as predicted while Jake tapped an update to Lora and tormented himself with virtual contact with the city.

  In short minutes they climbed north from the serpentine highway of the valley flats to a sparsely inhabited area of rolling grassy fields whose rear borders disappeared into dark conifer islands.

  When Nicos announced only a few turns remained until they arrived, Jake looked around and frowned. There’d been no word of a prairie crash site from construction, and the process photographs he’d viewed focussed on close-ups of spacecraft details. Rounding yet another corner, the roadside fields irregularly parceled by barbed wire fencing were interrupted by an austere institution lifted directly from a script—the sort of sci-fi thriller that centres on covert extraterrestrial visitors, black-suited governmental operatives with opaque aviator sunglasses and black Suburbans, and a terrible conspiracy that corrupts all the way to the innermost circle of power.

  “Pretty cool, eh,” Nicos said, glancing at the dazzling white radio transmission dishes that grew like cybernetic mushrooms from alfalfa fields. “Too bad we can’t use them.”

  “Never say never.” Jake charted plot turns capitalizing on the primo location. Jumps through space-time weren’t an unheard of concept for the network, after all.

  “You think it’s available?”

  “I don’t even know if it’s operational. I can ask, so just say the word.”

  As they turned off White Lake Road, Nicos said, “You, know, I never found any White Lake. I looked too. Weird, maybe it dried up.”

  So far as Jake could tell the cracked mud access road only led them toward an eternity of low grassy slopes. With nothing to call mountainous he huffed with concern that his Location Manager’s instinct had failed. Jake hoped the crash site would be majestic but harsh, as though the craft had plummeted to the base of Everest; judging by the placid landscape outside the window, any UFO here would appear benevolent, as though it had touched down gently, prepared to disgorge philanthropic visitors possessing kind bulbous eyes, soothing curves, and valuable, softly-glowing technology their delicate amphibian hands gladly shared.

  The road forked and Nicos swerved left onto a narrower stretch, bumpy and overgrown. “It’s not exactly ideal conditions, right, I’ll grant you that,” Nicos said. “I figure we can set up base camp here and taxi crew and talent to set. It’s a hassle, but that’s less than nothing compared to the other option over yonder.”

  After stopping to open an improvised gate of barbed wire and scrap lumber, Nicos sped up, spewing rocks and creating a momentary fog of tinder-dry earth. With a final right, the truck descended; the path terminated at the bottom of a deep bowl.

  “Ta da! You’d never guess, eh? It’s the former property of a bankrupted gravel company, now administered by the town. They abandoned the pit a while back, but the local kids still come here to party and make out on weekends. I drove out here last Friday night. It was pre-gaming tailgate parties and steamy windows, like stepping back into my youth.”

  “Right on!” Jake said, smiling. He’d received his first blow job—though nowhere near the best; even with whispered course correction, “Um, can you watch it with the fangs?” Janica Detwenko had been slow on the uptake and accidentally taught a fumbling early lesson about the commingling of pain and pleasure—at a gravel pit during junior high school. “Stop here, okay?”

  Nicos skidded to a halt and popped the door locks; the men stepped out, stretched, and wandered toward their destination.

  The largest portion of the bowl broadcast its uselessness—rusted equipment, low sandy piles overgrown with determined clumps of weeds, and tall piles of loose rock that looked like nothing except gravel pit. Jake imagined that in a pinch the location could serve as a make-out spot in a teen comedy or a gangster’s forlorn execution site.

  The remaining quadrant, a pint-sized and unexpected striated granite
face—vertiginous, infertile, pitted, lunar—could be better only if it stood taller. Partially buried in front of the cliff, the crashed spacecraft possessed reassuring solidity: even before being framed by a camera the wreck would momentarily convince a passerby of its authenticity. The alien technology read as adversarial too: the sharp angles, jutting armored components, and crude oil-effect surface conveyed stealthy malevolence with ease.

  Nicos pointed to the extreme right of the cliff face. “No idea what the deal is with the tunnel, it’s not like there was a mine,” he said, “but maybe they found the gravel part first and when they expanded they found the harder granite or whatever, and got a bit of gold rush fever and made some preliminary digs to see what was there, I dunno.”

  “Why isn’t anyone here, a PA at least?”

  “No need right now. Right?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Jake knew an oversight of that type could bite him on the ass. “We need someone here as of today, though. It’s safe? The cave, I mean.”

  “I dunno. I stuck my head in it, but that means squat. It’ll be good for second unit, I bet.”