The Last Projector

by David James Keaton

  Larry didn’t know whether that was directed towards him or the fake medic, but it worked either way. Then Rick shrugged as the automatic doors hissed open, and the girl was suddenly awake, leaning up on her elbows. Jack was so startled he almost ran the gurney into a wall. She looked at Jack, then at Rick. Then back to Larry and his handheld camera.

  Then Rick laughed, and Jack knew there was no way Rick didn’t understand the implications of this new development. He stared at her some more, scared to ask the questions:

  Did you hear what I said? Or do you know what I did?

  An old man came around the corner, sipping some hooch out of a jelly jar, and Larry recognized him immediately.

  “Jesus Christ. How old are you now? A hundred and a hundred?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” was the old man’s guttural reply. “I got chronic pain, boy.”

  “Yeah, a chronic pain in my ass.”

  “Who is this guy?” Rick asked.

  “One of our Frequent Flyers from back in the day. Look at him. See how he’s happy right now? See how you’re happy right now? In spite of anything I say to you, because you’re getting something for free. You remind me of those crackheads who have twenty surgeries a year just to get the pills. You want to figure out which ones are in the waiting rooms just to get their hands on another script? Look for the ones who are talking to the fish tank. The ones that are happy to be there. Like you…”

  “Damn, Larry, chill out. Old bastard ain’t hurting nobody.”

  Larry rubbed his face to erase the old man from memory. When Larry first decided to cut corners on his movie by having them wait for a real car wreck, he explained to the crew that everything that resulted would be a happy accident.

  Happy accident. Two words that went together like chocolate and peanut butter.

  He tried to remember everything that happened to him back then so they could keep making the movie. He told everybody to pretend it was tomorrow. Both were easy with the sun coming up.

  Hospital. Next day. Jacki Ramirez is being gently sucked into an MRI tube.

  “Just like a coffin into a crematorium,” she mutters.

  “Excuse me?” a technician covered in cartoon Tinkerbells asks her.

  “Never mind. How long will this take?”

  “Longer if you don’t lie still.”

  “Figures,” she scoffs.

  When she’s all the way inside, machines start humming and clicking around her like insects in a hollow tree trunk. Her tree seems to shrink as the time ticks by, almost closing to a point around her head and feet. She feels like she’s being stretched in a Chinese fingercuff, and she hallucinates a bit in her panic, seeing a flash of a dog’s mouth, rooting its way up into the darkness between her legs. She shakes it off. Immediately, a stern voice comes over the speaker.

  “Ma’am, we’re going to have to start again because you moved. Please, remain as still as possible.”

  “Sorry sorry.”

  The corner of her eyes water, and she grinds her teeth to keep her eyelids and the ends of the tube open until it’s over. Twenty minutes into the scan, she feels calm, even a little ornery.

  “Has anybody ever played a practical joke on you?” she asks the nurse. “Have you ever pulled out a dummy instead of a patient?”

  “Please, ma’am!”

  She’s quiet awhile longer, but fifteen minutes later, she can’t help but shout:

  “Hey, did you know there’s graffiti all over the walls in here?”

  There’s about a 30-second pause this time, then Tinkerbell’s voice over the speaker, frustrated.

  “Miss Ruiz, we have that machine cleaned regularly. That is simply impossible. What exactly are you-”

  “I was kidding. And that’s not my name, by the way.”

  The next half hour is real quiet.

  Later, when she’s finally out of the electric tree trunk, Jacki’s sitting up in her hospital bed watching something called Into the Mild on the wall-mounted television, trying to turn off the screen but not the sound.

  Jack Grinstead walks in. Awkward half-smiles are exchanged. She recognizes his medic uniform.

  “Are you… did I leave something in your truck?”

  Jack looks around nervously, cracks his knuckles, tries to work up some courage.

  “Not exactly.” He looks to the TV for help. “What’s this?”

  “You’ve never seen this show?” she says. “It’s on once a week. Buncha kids trekking out into the wilderness to try and jumpstart a tour bus. Sometimes bears almost get ‘em. Sometimes they eat the wrong shit and almost starve. They’re never more than ten yards from a major highway. It’s like a terrible game show where nobody wins anything. Good music though. I can’t believe I’ve never heard these songs before.”

  “Didn’t that happen in real life? Some little rich prick die for real?”

  “Really? It’s gotta happen one day with shows like this. It needs a better title though.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Educated Young Men Reject College and Everything It Taught Them.”

  “Nice,” Jack says, smiling.

  “Or Rich Assholes Burn Dads’ Money, Forget Which Seed is Which.”

  “Ha, yeah, I love it. Or how about just Magic Bus? More Like Roach Motel! Kills Fifth Hippie in as Many Years.”

  “It makes sense though,” she says. “The urge to play a game with no prize. Like philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote about the radio, ‘When you are on the air, you have no body.’”

  Jack ponders this, and the injury he erased, and the answers to everything are so close he can almost grab them from the space between them. But then a prime example of the guy they were describing walks through the door with a bundle of “Get Well!” balloons in his arms. Ratty little punk, looking like he’d be perfectly at home on any San Francisco band’s album cover, likely the one clown in the photo looking the wrong way, all dramatic.

  He stamps past Jack, ignoring him way too hard not to see him, and leans down to kiss her. Jack is amazed to see more irritation than concern for her on the punk’s face. He’s clearly waiting to have her alone, to accuse, to bully, to find out who she was with in that car. His lips are so tight they’re white as marble. Jack watches the blood fill them back up as the punk finally prepares to speak, and he jumps up to stop this from happening.

  “So!” Jack interrupts. “Once the first one dies, how many more will die making pilgrimages to the first kid’s grave?”

  “About 30?” she smiles. The punk finds a spot on the wall to study. Even this makes Jack angry.

  “Not enough!” Jack says. “Why doesn’t anyone realize that this is not a game?” he asks them both. “Just an awesome horror movie about a killer bus.”

  “Good question,” Jacki says.

  “They’re all horror movies,” the punk says, finally turning for the stare down. “Did you need something, buddy?”

  “I’ll come back,” Jack says.

  They both smile at each other longer than they have to, then Jack walks out.

  There’s no one in the hallway, so he can walk a long time with his eyes closed.

  It was later that night, and Larry was filming his latest Jack sitting at a desk in his apartment, staring at a dead television screen. Jack’s apartment was a spitting image of the apartment Larry had for all his worst adventures. Larry was telling Jack to pick at the wrappers in front of him and wrinkle his nose at the dog-food smell of fast-food tacos. This was easy. The sounds of partying just outside his door spiked for a moment, then his door opened and a naked girl framed by the yellow glow of the hall light was suddenly posing in the reflection of the TV screen.

  Initially, Larry was disappointed there would be nudity in his first real movie, but his elbows weren’t itching at the moment, so it didn’t really bother him.

  “Action!” Larry told them.

  “So, she was cheating,” Jack said, almost to himself. Luckily, Larry was close enough to get it on his hand-
held.

  “Who was cheating?” the girl in the TV asked him.

  “The naked boy in the tree. The scarecrow. She was cheating with him,” Jack mumbled to the shadow on his screen. Larry motioned with his thumb to talk louder.

  “No, you’re the one who’s cheating. Come out and join the party, Jack.”

  “And that punk in the hospital knew all about it.”

  “Knows all about what?”

  “What if he was the one who-”

  “Truth or dare?” asked Naked Girl suddenly, tits bouncing, ice cube popping in her teeth. Jack refused to turn around and face her, happy to keep her trapped on his monitor for now.

  “Tell those guys to keep it down,” he snapped. “I have a shift in four hours.”

  That’s true, Larry thought.

  “Truth. Or. Dare,” said Naked Girl, still bouncing, chewing louder.

  “I’m not playing.”

  “Wait, I’m doing it wrong,” said Naked Girl, momentarily confused. “You ask me, ‘truth or dare.’”

  “Just tell everyone to please-”

  “Turn around!” Naked Girl stomped a bare foot, but Jack just kept staring at her in the reflection like a pro. He was supposed to consider reaching out and trying to turn her off instead of the television, but, before they began, Larry had resigned to the fact he had no idea how to visualize this.

  “Ask me truth or dare!” she pouted.

  “Truth or dare.”

  “Dare,” Naked Girl said, smiling, expecting something sexual.

  You can take the actress out of the porn, Larry thought. But you can’t…

  “Piss in your hand until it’s full. Then drink it.”

  Naked Girl’s smile dropped. Larry’s, too. If he had a script, he would have rifled through it.

  “Do it for me?”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” she shouted, walking into the room between him and his screen. Jack deftly ducked his head to avoid her kiss. Something was barking in the hallway.

  “Who brought their fucking dog?” Jack asked.

  Naked Girl didn’t answer, instead crunched the last of her ice cube and swallowed.

  “What the hell? You said you had four hours.”

  She turned to leave, but stopped at the door. Jack reached up to finally turn on the TV. The screen heated up, her outline slowly swallowed by static. Larry moved in close to capture the blizzard of snow on the screen.

  “Hey, next time you kiss me, do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  “Keep the ice in your mouth.”

  “Why?”

  “So your tongue will be cold…”

  “Oh, no.”

  “…and I can pretend you’re dead.”

  Stunned, Naked Girl started to say something, then smiled and exaggerated the motion of biting her tongue instead.

  Jack jumped up and walked past her and out of his room, past the dogpiles of half-dressed partiers in the living room, past the low growl of someone’s dog, out of his front door and straight across the hallway.

  Larry ran after him, desperate to keep him in the frame.

  He opened the door of another apartment and entered.

  It was identical to the room he just exited, except for stark white walls and a lack of furniture, noise, or televisions sprouting naked, ice-cube munching females.

  Jack and Larry walked around a corner to where their bedroom used to be, then they sat down in the middle of the floor.

  Half in the shadows, a dog blinks slowly, love struck, almost intoxicated by the affectionate digging and scratching of a heavy hand into the fur at the base of its skull.

  Tom Waits’ “Raindogs” creaks its way around an old turntable like a calliope.

  “Her long hair black as a raven. Oh, how we danced and you whispered to me, ‘You’ll never be going back home...’”

  Then the master’s hand stops and taps the face of a wristwatch impatiently. The dog begins to whimper, convinced it did something wrong and is on the verge of being disciplined. Confused, it runs to a pile of fresh feces and frantically tries to bury it, nails catching on a pile of nearby postcards, which rocket through the shit, one after another. The master’s hand moves to his own ears, trying to stay angry, but it wasn’t the dog’s shit on his floor, and he’s also thinking of that popular painting now, realizing this is what would happen if dogs really played poker.

  It was getting dark, and when they got to the top of the next hill they both saw the glow of the drive-in through the trees. Bully’s drive-in. The Kid. Even with a bronze stripe of daylight still on the horizon, a movie was already playing, and the huge shapes were moving in the distance, giants that moved way too fast and turned a romantic comedy into a monster movie. Billy always wanted to take her there, in a car, like you were supposed to, but she’d never bother if she was getting it for free every night.

  On the radio, Saga’s “On the Loose” was winding down, and Bully reached out to find something else before he could stab the button on Billy Squier’s Emotions in Motion again.

  She was fast getting sick of both Billys, and if she had to hear that tape one more time... She jammed one of her tapes in, giving him a look that it was her music or nothing from now on.

  “What the hell is that?” she frowned, turning up the volume.

  She’d hit the A.M. band by mistake, and they could just barely make out a creepy children’s chorus.

  “Eight more days till Halloween… Halloween… Halloween...”

  “You hear that?”

  “Is it a commercial?”

  “Eight more days till Halloween… Silver Shamrock…”

  “No way that’s a commercial. I mean, I’ve heard that in a commercial somewhere, I think. Is this...”

  They both looked at each other, simultaneously understanding what they were really hearing.

  “It’s a song from a movie! The movie in the trees.”

  “What movie?”

  “Halloween III,” she said. “Tonight only.”

  “Let me guess, ‘Triple Feature,’” Billy sighed, squinting into the distance. “Wait, I thought this was a romantic comedy.”

  “No, the triple features are only on the weekend, when people can stay up all night. Question though. How can we be hearing voices from the movie coming through the radio? There’s no way it broadcasts that far.”

  There was a heavy thump through the frame of the car, then a muffled bark, and he rolled down his windows.

  “What the fuck,” she said.

  They could barely hear the sound of Officer Bigbeep shouting indistinctly in the woods. After a minute, they were able to decipher the word.

  “Is that really the dog’s name?” Billy wondered aloud.

  Billy looked at Bully eagerly, hoping for admiration or at least shock that he’d already grabbed the animal. But she didn’t give him the satisfaction of eye contact, not even a half-smile for actually going through with the dognapping. Just a change of subject.

  “You forgot one pizza, you know.”

  “Huh?”

  “Before, when you listed the ingredients, you forgot one. What if there was zero ingredients on the pizza. How freaky would that be?”

  “Well, yeah, but that’s just a white pizza. Or a Greek pizza. So, you understand there’s a dog in my trunk at this moment, right?”

  “Of course. You want to name it?”

  “Maybe we should feed it. It was sounding a little ragged.”

  “How about ‘Little Beep!’” she said. “Or ‘L.B.’ for short.”

  “That sounds like a disorder.”

  “Speaking of Big Greek, we’re not still following him today or...”

  “Shhh, I want to hear this.”

  Billy turned up the radio to decipher more voices.

  “He’s your emesis,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Look it up! Jesus Christ.”

  “I thought your ex-boyfriend was my nemesis.”

  “What e
x-boyfriend?”

  “You know how I’ll always remember your boyfriend? Waking up screaming with a dog collar on his neck.”

  “But if he screamed, that collar would squirt him in the face.”

  “Do you think he got loose? Those handcuffs weren’t that tight.”

  “Yeah, but his arms were stretched out tight. I can’t believe he let me click ‘em. Or swallow the key.”

  “He was always such a martyr.”

  “Question. What’s the only difference between Jesus and the Karate Kid?”

  “Hold on. What name is that cop yelling?”

  “I don’t know,” Billy said, nervous.

  “Do you think we should rename his dog?” she asked him.

  “We’d need to know its name to rename it.”

  “Why don’t you go find out?”

  “No. That’s never a good idea with a hostage.”

  She knew its name. She rarely slept, and she sure loved that solitary recon, so she’d heard Bigby shouting for his dog more than once. He lost his dog sometimes. They all did. And other times he got it mixed up with other dogs. These K-9’s were apparently as interchangeable as the assholes on the leash.

  Bully got wrist-deep in her bag again, organizing cassettes. She’d bought them instead of the batteries, but they didn’t need them anyway. She suspected it was just any old canine and not the K-9 in her trunk, just as much as she knew Billy didn’t have the guts to do anything to the cop or his dog. There was just no way Bigby named his dog “Hansel.”

  But she was having lots of fun seeing how far he would go.

  When Bigbeep got back to his car, they tailed him some more, but they hung back so far they almost got pulled over by another cop instead. It was a false alarm, but it scared them enough to eject Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, realizing for the first time that bass shaking your rear-view mirror with cop-hating tunes made it much easier for a cruiser to sneak up on you. He fumbled it at first, backing off of “Burn Hollywood Burn” and stopping on “Welcome to the Terrordome.” Heart pounding in panic, he went back to something a little more high-end instead, safer, shriller. Squier.

  “Do you work for them?”