Tell the Machine Goodnight

by Katie Williams

  “I can see it,” Marilee said. “The spot where the lash used to be. See that little fleck? Right there.”

  “The follicle,” the pretend boyfriend provided helpfully.

  “What?” Marilee snapped.

  “That’s what it’s called.” He disappeared from Calla’s view. “The little hole where a hair grows out of your skin. Follicle.”

  “My eye is drying out,” Calla complained, and Marilee finally removed her hand, if begrudgingly.

  “I’ll see that woman ruined,” she said.

  “It’s just an eyelash. It’ll grow back.”

  Marilee frowned, unconvinced.

  “And if it doesn’t, I can get an implant, okay?”

  Calla’s pretend boyfriend snorted.

  But as usual, Marilee wasn’t in the mood for Calla’s jokes. “This is Flynn’s fault is what it is.”

  “Don’t blame Flynn,” Calla said. “He’s a child. A forty-six-year-old child.”

  “A child who breaks all his toys,” she decreed. “I should never have let him talk you into that damn VR job. You know who’s into VR and mythology? Weirdos, that’s who. A special little cross-section of obsessives and escapists.”

  “But that’s why we did it,” Calla reminded her. “Weirdos decide cult classics.”

  If you’re lucky enough to do a cult classic when you’re young, you can draw back upon it when you’re old, revive your career when you reach what would otherwise be the gulf between ingénue and ingénue’s mother. That was the plan, anyway. Marilee and Calla had discussed it. And that’s why Calla had signed on to play the oracle in the VR game Mount Mythos. That’s why she’d gone to the studio and let them dab her with paint that made her skin look like fissured stone, why she’d hiked up the heavy skirts they’d tied around her waist and climbed onto that plaster plinth. Why she’d recited her lines in stentorian tones:

  Travel on a crooked road, your flag held high, and there you shall meet it.

  Dip her head once in oil, her feet twice in the ocean, then hold her finger to the flame.

  Beware the one who walks footlessly behind you. Beware the tap on your shoulder.

  It had been two days reading lines, one day making facial expressions to be grafted onto the game’s avatar, and one more day assuming postures for the different story lines the player might activate—head bowed to bestow favor, arms lifted to invoke the gods, shift pulled away to bare one breast, and a graceless topple off the plinth. The part in the game where the Calla-oracle shattered into pebbles was, of course, something the animators added in later, a special effect. A player could take a pebble from the shattered oracle and store it in their inventory. The pebble had magical properties that increased the player’s accuracy, fortitude, and luck.

  As best as anyone could tell, this was where it had started, the rumor that a piece of Calla Pax would improve your lot in life. Maybe it’d begun as a joke or a prank in some fertile little corner of the Internet, but as of that morning, a strand of hair pulled from Calla’s head was for sale on the dark web for $3,000, a tampon soaked with her menstrual blood and stolen from her trash for $4,000, a scrap of fabric torn from a sweatshirt Calla was wearing (the event that had prompted the hiring of the pretend boyfriend/secret bodyguard) for $750. Everyone wanted a piece of her, literally.

  “Enough!” Marilee said, folding up her screen and whatever message had just surfaced on it. “I’m talking to that woman’s producer.” She marched from the greenroom, leaving Calla alone with her pretend boyfriend.

  They looked at each other. She shrugged. He shrugged back. He’d only been her pretend boyfriend for two weeks; they were practically strangers, even if his hands had been all over her. He picked up a dye wand someone had left, selected a strand of his hair, and began dyeing the tip of it. He hadn’t even checked the color cartridge first, Calla noticed. The wand turned out to be loaded with a milky yellow.

  “You could pull off blond, if you wanted,” Calla said. And he could. He was nothing if not pretty. She hoisted herself to sit on the back of the couch and scanned the room for food.

  “They took everything out to the soundstage,” her pretend boyfriend said. The blond had crept halfway to his scalp. He put down the wand and extracted a bundle out of his jacket pocket: a napkin wrapped around coins of cheese the same color as his strand of dyed hair. He came over to the couch and offered this bounty.

  “Thanks,” she said, picking one out. “Need to refuel, you know. Grow that eyelash back.”

  His smile curled one side of his mouth and a nostril. Pretty with a sneer. Marilee had let Calla pick him. They’d auditioned fifty actors, half guys, half girls, all with martial arts or fight training, all of whom thought they were trying out for a featured stunt role in Calla’s next movie. Forty-nine of them still thought that. Calla hadn’t chosen this one because of his elbow strikes or kiais, but because of his sneer. She knew a cultivated expression when she saw one, and she could tell that he had practiced the look in the mirror. And if you have to practice a sneer, she’d reasoned, you are not a natural sneerer.

  “So you stash cheese in your pocket?” Calla reached for another. “Kind of like a mouse.”

  She grinned and continued to chew openmouthed, working cheese and saliva into a gluey paste. Sometimes Calla liked to do gross things so that she could see the battle on people’s faces between their idea of her and the actual her of her. But Calla’s pretend boyfriend didn’t seem the least bit bothered by her mastication. He plucked up another piece of cheese and held it between his teeth.

  “It’s my policy,” he said around the cheese, “to always carry a little food on me.”

  “In case of the apocalypse, huh?”

  He opened his mouth; the cheese dropped in.

  “The apocalypse or low protein. Good for either.”

  “I was in a movie about the apocalypse and I was in an infomercial about low protein.”

  “So you know how it is.”

  “Actually, I’ve been in five movies about the apocalypse.”

  “Long apocalypse.”

  She made a face. “Five different apocalypses.”

  “Like that Robert Frost poem. Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice.”

  “Some say the world will end in sea monsters. Some say the world will end in ten-foot-tall vampire bats,” Calla ad-libbed.

  She had been sixteen and not yet famous when she’d made the vampire-bat movie. Back then she used to bribe PAs to tell her what the casting agents said about her after she left the room. Two hundred dollars for the unvarnished truth—that was the deal. For the bat movie, Calla had been up for a supporting role, the lead girl’s babbling friend who, at the midpoint, is vivisected in the catacombs.

  “They said you weren’t buxom enough,” the PA had told her when they met in their agreed-upon corner of the parking lot.

  “Buxom?” Calla asked. She didn’t know the word; she was only sixteen.

  “You know. Boobs.” The PA arched a brow and indicated her own breasts, battened down in their sports bra. “They said you don’t have them.”

  Calla looked down at her chest.

  “Big ones, I mean. They say you have to have big ones for a vivisection. They say that’s what the audience wants. To see the tits separate from the girl.” The PA chewed the inside of her cheek. “Strangling deaths, too, they said. Got to see them heave.” Her hand fidgeted at her side, ready to accept payment. “Hey. They liked your reading, though. ‘At least this one can act.’ That’s what they said.”

  “Thanks.” Calla passed her the bills. “That’s, um, helpful.”

  And it’d turned out to be helpful after all, not the information so much, but Calla’s modest décolletage, because instead of the vivisected friend, they’d ended up casting her as the lead. And by the time Calla’s breasts had come in two years later (an
d come in how), she was famous enough to be slaughtered in whatever manner she so wished.

  “I saw that vampire-bat movie,” Calla’s pretend boyfriend said. He lowered his voice and recited the tagline, “Evil echolocates.”

  “The director came up with that. He was a real doof. Instead of calling action, he’d shout, ‘Batter up!’ Get it? Bat-ter up!”

  “That’s not doofy. That’s awesome.” He retrieved the dye wand, saying over his shoulder, “You were good in it, by the way.”

  Calla knew the formula for compliments given to one’s face: downgrade by one. If someone said you were great in a movie, in truth they thought you were good. If someone said you were good, they thought you were just okay. Calla considered herself immune to criticism by now, but she found herself rankled by this bit of faint praise. Who was this little pretender, this little scrabbler, to deem her just okay?

  Which was why Calla said, “So you want to be an actor, huh?”

  The question was unkind because you could want to be an actor all you liked, but you weren’t an actor, not really, unless a casting agent and producer and director said you could be one.

  The pretend boyfriend, however, looked impressed rather than insulted at Calla’s comment, or, to put a finer point on it, he looked impressed at having been insulted. He opened his mouth and said—but whatever he was going to say was interrupted by the chime of Calla’s screen. It took her a minute to find it tucked away in Marilee’s bag. When she unfolded it, the face on the screen was a familiar one. Pearl!

  Calla moved to answer but then paused, her hand stilled with a thought: What if Pearl wanted to take a piece of her, too? To reach out, fingernails sharpened, scissors hidden in her hand, and—?

  No. Pearl was her friend. As if to underscore this, Calla jabbed fiercely at the center of Pearl’s forehead, answering the call.

  Pearl’s eyes focused as Calla’s face appeared on her screen—“Calla!”

  Her usually tidy short hair was tousled, and her collar was crooked, as if she had been tugging on it. She appeared windblown, windblown with worry.

  “Hey, don’t look like that!” Calla said. “I’m fine! See?” She swung the screen down, a scan of her intact body, and back up to Pearl’s now-startled face.

  “Calla. What—?”

  “You called about the thing, right? About how I’m like an elephant tusk or a monkey paw or whatever?”

  “A rabbit’s foot,” her pretend boyfriend said from somewhere behind her.

  “Like a rabbit’s foot,” Calla repeated. “You know, some good-luck charm?”

  “Well. Actually.” Pearl fussed at her collar. “In a way.”

  “As you can see, I’m totally and completely okay. You know Marilee. She hired muscle. Okay, sometimes the muscle is inattentively eating cheese.” Calla cut eyes at her pretend boyfriend. “But the other day this guy on the street was going for my hair and he totally clotheslined him.”

  “Your hair?” Pearl pinched the bridge of her nose. “Oh, Calla.”

  “Didn’t you hear me? Like flat out on the pavement!”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry? I know, I know, it’s a common expression of sympathy not necessarily an admission of responsi—”

  “I’m sorry because it’s our fault!” Pearl burst out.

  “No, it’s not,” Calla said immediately, ignoring the hollow in her chest, which was suddenly empty and echoing as the vampire-bat catacombs. Not Pearl. She could trust Pearl. “It’s some weird Internet thing.”

  But Pearl wasn’t listening; she was speaking to someone offscreen. “No. I don’t think— Fine. Stop. I said fine.” She turned back to Calla. “My colleague wants to talk to you. Would that be all right?”

  “Maybe I should get Marilee,” Calla’s pretend boyfriend said. Calla ignored him. She should’ve known he would have been given such instructions.

  “Sure,” she said loudly to Pearl. “I’ll talk to whoever.”

  Calla heard the door open and close behind her as her pretend boyfriend scampered off to tattle. On her screen, Pearl disappeared and a hunched man took her place, his chin jutting forward, his shoulders nearly level with his ears. But no, he wasn’t hunched after all; he was crouched, like he’d been cornered and was coiled to spring.

  “Miss Pax!” he said, coiling tighter. “What an honor.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The first time I saw Skin Scythe, you know what I did?”

  “Um. What?”

  “I pointed at the screen”—he pointed at this screen now—“and said, ‘Her. Her!’”

  Calla glanced over her shoulder, finding herself suddenly hoping that her pretend boyfriend would return with Marilee after all.

  “—director of special projects,” the crouched man was saying when she turned back. He touched a hand to his chest as if this title was his name. “But you can call me Carter. I work with your Pearl—our Pearl—here at Apricity.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “You too, Miss Pax. You too.”

  “Um, Pearl just said that—”

  “Miss Pax, Miss Pax, Miss Pax! If you, if you could just? If you could indulge me? I have something to tell you. To offer you, really. And if I could get—if you would be kind enough to let me get—through it?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Shoot.”

  Carter took the hand from his chest, made it into a gun, and pretend-fired at the screen. (Calla curbed the urge to pretend-die.)

  “What I have to offer you,” he said, and then paused, “is a job.”

  “What? At Apricity?”

  Carter smiled slowly. “As Apricity.”

  “As?”

  “As.”

  But before he could tell her any more, Marilee had marched into the room and lifted the screen from Calla’s hands, Carter and his baffling offer sailing high above her head and out of her reach.

  * * *

  —

  PEARL AND THIS CARTER would go through appropriate channels, Marilee told Calla after confiscating her screen. She was pissed that Pearl had contacted Calla sneakily, a word she kept using. Marilee had set up a meeting at Apricity the next day, for herself and Calla’s agent. Calla would not be in attendance, a punishment for Pearl’s presumption in calling Calla directly.

  “And no chatting with Pearl in the meantime,” Marilee warned.

  They were in the elevator at the Gray Hour parking garage. Calla’s pretend boyfriend stood at the buttons, acting like he wasn’t listening.

  “Don’t blame Pearl,” Calla told Marilee. Calla hadn’t told Marilee what Pearl had said, about being responsible for the people trying to steal bits of her.

  “Don’t blame Flynn. Don’t blame Pearl. Really, Calla, whom would you like me to blame for this predicament? You? Me? I suppose me.”

  Calla shook her head. “Not you. No one. Fate.”

  Marilee tsked. “You don’t believe in fate.”

  And it was true; Calla didn’t believe in fate. She knew celebrities who did, like some god had bent over their crib and made a chalky mark of future fame on their infant forehead. Calla had no such illusions. She believed in determination to the point of stupidity: lying in the pool of fake blood until it dried and stuck to your skin, practicing death faces in the mirror until you couldn’t look at your reflection for days, paying PAs for insults that no one would deliver to your face. Calla also believed in luck, but luck writ small. Not the cascade of a slot machine, but a wink, a tip of the hand, a faint glimmer in the air. Like the luck of your breasts developing late, which landed you the lead role instead of the vivisected best friend.

  The elevator dinged and the doors slid open.

  “Photographers,” the pretend boyfriend said, jerking his chin at the far end of the garage, where their car was parked.

 
Marilee swore, a filthy Shakespearean curse.

  “No, wait.” She consulted her screen. “I arranged these ones. You two”—she pointed between Calla and the pretend boyfriend—“get ready.”

  “How much?” the pretend boyfriend asked.

  “Well . . . It’s midafternoon.” Marilee hemmed. “Let’s say a four. Sweet, no groping.”

  “How’s your breath?” Calla asked him.

  “Cheese scented,” he replied.

  They exited the elevator, Calla’s pretend boyfriend sliding up next to her, his hand in hers. The photographers caught sight of them, with flashes of light like dry summer lightning and shouts of “Here! Here! Calla! Look here!” But Calla didn’t look at any of them, because her pretend boyfriend was already inches away, tipping up her chin and touching her cheek, and she hadn’t even had to tell him to wear his sneer when he was about to kiss her, that it would photograph as intensity; he was already sneering. And behind the sneer, his breath was, as he’d said, of cheese, damp and custardy. It wasn’t exactly pleasant and it certainly wasn’t sexy, but Calla liked it somehow anyway. They opened their mouths for just a moment, and his hand wandered into her hair. They parted. There. That was a four.

  As she walked past the photographers, Calla’s fear unfolded like a sheet shaken out and lifted so that it caught the air. She clapped on a smile and searched out of the corners of her eyes for the hand that would snake out and grab her, the gleam of a knife, the first foot-shuffling of a stampede. She could feel the muscles in her pretend boyfriend’s arm tense around her, ready for the counterstrike. As soon as they’d made it behind the car’s tinted windows, Calla’s pretend boyfriend retracted his arm from around her shoulders and scooted away. Calla slid down in her seat, hugging herself. Safe. It took her a moment to realize that, in her fear, she had forgotten to remove the smile from her face.

  * * *