The Last Projector

by David James Keaton

“What?”

  “Exactly.”

  “…and even stranger than Larry hiring Rick to play Jack is the fact that Joe Fuck, now playing Larry, will insist on calling himself ‘Joe Luck,’ his given name, perhaps the strangest revelation of them all...”

  “Wait, who the fuck am I now?”

  “…and during all the fighting, the Girl Who Loves Ice Cubes will have to bite through something to help someone, and the audience will realize that all that chomping gave her the strongest teeth on the planet. Joe Luck as Joe Fuck as Larry as Rick as Jack as you as me will probably watch her snap through police officers’ fingers like breadsticks, remembering the day they met in the hailstorm that cost $2,500 worth of damage to his car, and all five of them will fall in love all over again. The hailstones had shaken the car harder than the bass of her new DMX single, a song which declared, ‘This one time I’m-a let a dog be a dog,’ which will be good advice really…”

  “That day, she ate every hailstone she caught in her mouth. Still did.”

  “The crew shuffled around, staring at their feet.”

  “Damn right we did.”

  “And then later, all the cops, they’ll be out on patrol, and everywhere there’s a dog attack they keep hearing these kids saying, ‘Eck-nail-ub-muh!’ and pointing off down the road. But the cops they’re fuckin’ racists, so they just shrug and think it’s Spanish or ghetto slang. Not realizing these little witnesses are giving the audience the biggest goddamn clue of all time!”

  “If you have any extra clues, I could use one.”

  “You guys ready to shoot this? Come on, are you ‘lubri-can’ts’ or ‘lubri-cans?!’”

  “That has never made any sense.”

  “So, let’s do it. Clear?”

  “Clear.”

  “Larry, I hate to fuck up this movie, but I’m not going to do any of that.”

  Hours later. Sun coming up over the beach. Big Mike is being interviewed by a little cop. They make a great pair. Bystanders linger. Someone nearby listens for a minute or two, then comments how much the interrogation reminds him of listening to mental patients stuck in an elevator. Then someone else asks how he ever heard that before to make such a comparison.

  “I’m getting like ten different versions. Maybe you can clear some things up.”

  “…so, here’s how it went down, I’m holding my finger up under the light,” Big Mike says, holding a finger up under a light. “And it’s glowing green. I turn to Mike, and I’m like, ‘See, I told you something was wrong with that girl!’ and he’s like-”

  “I’m like, ‘Everything is glowing green, dumb ass,’” Big Mike says, interrupting himself from behind his own shoulder, with a black and burnt finger now playing the role of the recently roasted Little Mike. “Cause it’s one of those blacklights in the room, and he’s standing under this poster of a panther that’s glowing like Three Mile Island and he doesn’t even notice...”

  “Let’s get back on track,” Little Cop says, understandably confused by a black finger pretending to be a dead man pretending that the finger is green. “You knew this janitor?”

  “Oh, hell, yeah, we knew him,” Big Mike says.

  “Do you remember how tall he was?”

  “Huh?” Little Mike Black Finger answers for him.

  “His height,” Little Cop goes on. “We’ve got a measuring stick from an amusement park in evidence, and a witness who seems to remember a suspicious man who was… three feet tall?”

  “No, Derek’s a big dude.”

  “Don’t you want a description? Or a last name?”

  ‘What the fuck do you think this is? Literary fiction?”

  “Just the facts, boys,” Little Cop coughs. “And please, no amateur sleuthing necessary.”

  “You laugh,” Little Mike Black Finger says. “But stranger shit has happened. You know how they’re saying Derek was pissing and spitting on people’s food? Well, I used to live with this asshole who put a big black pubic hair on my pizza slice in the ‘fridge. After four days, the hair was twice as long. Explain that shit, Detective.”

  “Think about that,” Big Mike says. “Is it the ‘fridgeration? Is it the pizza? Boggles the mind...”

  “Naw,” Little Cop says. “That’s a myth. It’s like when they say fingernails keep growing after someone dies.”

  “They don’t?” Big Mike asks, looking at his fingernails. “I swear I’ve seen that.”

  “No, he’s right. It’s just the skin on the fingers shrinking back after you’re dead.”

  Little Cop slams his book shut.

  “Precisely! Okay, I think we’re about done here-”

  “Wait! Did you hear about how I got immunized for the ‘hunta’ virus?”

  “No.”

  “True story. I’m holding down the dog for the vet to give the shot and the needle goes through-”

  “Hold on. Same thing happened to me!” Little Cop says.

  “Bullshit”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “Me, too!” Little Mike Black Finger is going nuts to be part of things.

  “No. Shit.”

  “What did you do about it?”

  “I go back every year to get another shot. Just in case.”

  All three of them laugh.

  Hours later. The back of an ambulance with a strong, steady siren blaring.

  A paramedic with a baseball cap covering his face is working on Derek. Captain Beef Loaf’s “Electricity” is playing loud on a small portable cassette player. Then the song is interrupted by Derek’s giving a fake radio dispatch.

  “Please respond to dog attack on the corner of… fuck, that doesn’t sound right...”

  The paramedic laughs and pulls back his cap. It’s Rick. He fast-forwards the tape to get back to the song. Jack hovers over Derek on the gurney.

  “Hey, asshole!”

  The muscles that used to hold Derek’s eyes try to pinwheel.

  “Ever heard anything by the band, ‘Penis Flytrap?’ Me and Rick bet five bucks that’s where most of your ideas come from. Pretty sad.”

  “Why is it taking so long to get there?” Derek asks through a mouthful of sand and blood.

  Rick turns off the siren. Captain Beefheart is now the only thing howling.

  “Good question,” Jack laughs.

  “I’m just trying to remember my buddy Jack’s philosophy,” Rick says. “Or was it yours?”

  He rips off the tape covering Derek’s empty eye sockets.

  “What was it you said? ‘If you can’t see it, then it didn’t happen?’ Or was it, ‘If you can’t hear it?’”

  Derek’s empty eyes blink out of reflex.

  “Never said that,” he mutters.

  “Question for ya,” Ricks says. “Is it true? I mean, all that crazy shit about the dogs? Did you really do those things with the dogs? Or was Jack chasing shadows these last couple days?

  Or should I say, chasing his tail?”

  “I’m sorry,” Derek says, groggy, lost in thought. “I never did anything like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Smokey just follows me around, like any dog would. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Smokey?! We’re not firefighters, fuckface.”

  “He follows me, I swear.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Your partner put so much time into his theory. I don’t know. It seemed so important to him, to let him think he was right about everything.”

  Rick puts a hand over Derek’s mouth.

  “I knew it. That fucker was crazy. I fucking knew it.”

  “He’s only like twenty-five percent crazy,” Jack says. “Thirty tops. The rest really happened. And this motherfucker did the worst of it.”

  He stops laughing, considering the crimes.

  “He did the worst, and he deserves worse,” Rick says. “All of this really happened. Sorry I doubted you, man…”

  Jack stares into Derek’s sockets.

&n
bsp; “Yeah, it happened,” he says. “But it won’t as soon as I flip the switch on this Time Machine...”

  “Wait,” Derek pleads. “I was just trying to…”

  “Shhhhh,” Jack whispers. Rick turns to watch.

  “Hey, you ever see those three monkeys?” Jack asks him. “The ‘See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil’ little bastards?”

  “No. But for the record, Tommy sucked,” Rick says.

  “Well, there you go.”

  “Your attempt to blame all this on the butler is laughable, Jack,” Rick says. “Transparent. It sounds… fishy.”

  “Sounds?”

  “Smells fishy.”

  “That’s not what we are. We’re the janitors.”

  “Butler, janitor. Doctor, director. Same difference. Everyone knows more than doctors. For example, I didn’t make that joke about fish. Because one man’s forgotten colostomy bag learned me long ago that fish means you’re smelling piss, not pussy. Point is, you did this. You did it all.”

  “No, he did.”

  Jack flips a switch, and a climbing whine fills their ears. Derek pinches his sockets closed, and Rick looks around the back of the ambulance one last time, stopping to focus on Jack’s baseball cap, the Georgia Bulldog watching him close. It’s a weird feeling. He squints at the baseball cap drawn on that bulldog and wishes there was a dog on that one, too.

  Then Jack brings the two defibrillator paddles up to Derek’s ears. Derek doesn’t really struggle but seems to know what’s coming.

  “Relax,” Jack says, knee in his chest. “Hear no evil, right, brother?”

  “That’s right,” Rick says, eyes on the road. “Fucking do that shit.”

  Jack hesitates.

  “You know, I never realized what ‘Timber’ meant to a lumberjack until someone said it sarcastic and all quiet-like,” he tells Derek. “Just a ‘timber?’ you know? Telling everyone what’s coming. I think that’s the same with ‘Clear.’”

  The metal walls echo like a submarine as the charge reaches its peak.

  “Clear?” he asks, softly.

  Then there’s a hollow smack like someone swatting an insect too hard against their ear, and the waxy childhood magnets deep in Derek’s head are humming now, making his head shimmer around the edges like a tuning fork, causing the cassette to stop and the heads of the old player to begin eating the tape. The song “Plush” by Stone Temple Pilots plays next regardless. It’s about dogs. When the band gets big one day, Rick’s wife will call them “Stone Temple Toilets,” and the premonition causes him to click it off after just one lyric:

  “When the dogs begin to smell her, will she smell alone…”

  The electric whine starts to climb the metal walls again. Blood trickles from Derek’s cored out eye sockets and nose.

  “These are gonna make you a new man. No, seriously, someone else entirely.”

  Jack rubs the paddles again.

  “Clear?”

  They’re sitting at a red light. Rick looks both ways for traffic.

  “We’re all clear.”

  Jack looks at Derek one last time.

  “Three more minutes and you never happened.”

  The blast wave ripped a flyer off the teeth of the windshield that held Evil’s ribs tight. The hot breeze carried it at least half a mile, and it rode the heat until it finally stuck, slapping and flapping against a tree trunk, miraculously upright. The flyer read:

  “Lost Dog” and “Answers To ‘Skinny Elvis.’”

  Speaking of, back at the blast, someone was crooning.

  “…he wants to come back inside… too bad his head died… he wants to come back inside… too bad his head died… he wants to come back inside… too bad his head died…”

  Bully’s voice kept clickclickclicking the refrain of his love song out of the wrecked radio, even as response teams started sifting through the rubble for survivors. Billy had way too many lyrics for that song, but that was back when he was still Billy. And they’d all argued over the title, too. To compromise, Billy wanted “The Rap’s The Thing (To Catch the Conscience Of the King),” but Bully was really into the much simpler “Your Blood’s Gonna Scream.” Evil didn’t have an opinion.

  So she won. She always won. But even though she mocked him mercilessly when he was taping this song in the garage, she’d snuck back to add a few extra lines of her own. She wanted the song to be good. She guessed it was because she was still rooting for him. She couldn’t help it. A first kiss at the movies was still a first kiss at the movies.

  Nearby in the smoldering crater, faint but unmistakable, hard but tiny, Bully’s voice was still coming out of half of some fuzzy headphones, going on and on about something else, always something, but this something sounded a lot like a full disclosure at a deposition:

  “…a small blonde female was recorded on several police cruiser dashboard cameras, running along the concrete divider with a gym bag over her shoulder. She came upon the scene of the delivery man in the circle of dead police officers at 3:35 p.m., just minutes after detonation. Her whereabouts are currently unknown. Tragically, Officer Bigbee did not notice the extra weight in his bulletproof vest until it was too late. His head was launched from his torso, rebounding between the wheels of traffic for a good 15 minutes until it became pinned into a lowrider’s exhaust... wait, I’ve told this story before. How about this instead? On March 15th, at 3:27 p.m., surveillance cameras will record a pizza delivery man walking into a local bank. Around the man’s neck will be a basketball hoop, which is no way to make a reliable explosive device. These events will be transcribed onto a small audio tape, later to be discovered in a discarded bag of pepperoni because all pizza is Greek to me. The small blonde female was later identified as Amy Luck, a.k.a. ‘Any Luck?’ Birth name ‘Toni Ramirez,’ nickname ‘Bolita’ or ‘Boli,’ renamed ‘Tully,’ tragically mispronounced as ‘Bully.’ She was state-raised by the Luck family following the suicide of her mother. Or was it her sister. Either one…”

  There was some rustling in the recording, then Bully’s voice softened for the first time in her life.

  “…Billy, I’m sorry about the tape bomb. It wasn’t supposed to rat you out, I promise. It was supposed to be discovered after we leveled the drive-in. To take credit after we did our thing. But your confession became the perfect manifesto. I think we were following the wrong cop, too. Awkward!”

  And then her voice stopped for good.

  After eight hours of sonar and search teams and sifting bloody rocks and blocks of the void where The Spotlight Kid used to stand (now more like Beefheart’s Clear Spot instead), rescuers discovered that when the screen had come crashing down, the crushed playground was mercifully empty after all.

  Well, almost empty.

  After some struggling in the dust, one lone, raggedy chunk of concrete flipped over in the rising sun, and the men stepped back to reveal a smoldering covered children’s slide, now just a twisted lump on the ground, flattened except for the grotesque bulge in the center, like an anaconda that had just choked on a pig.

  Epilogues

  Rat Chases the Cat – The Last Project – Hard Ralph’s Café – (Spoiler Alert!) – The Worm Turns and Eats the Worm – Bugs Bunny Paradox (or See No, Hear No, Speak No Evel Knievel) – Suitably Dramatic Removal of the Chicken Skin – Signing the Cast (The Scene in Which Our Hero Finally Kisses the Girl after It Doesn’t Mean Jack Shit Anymore) – Turtle Cake Turns Turtle Tank – Warning Signs – The Best Scene of the Red-Faced Bastard’s Career – Snap Snap Snap

  “They find their own way in

  And they rip up everything that I believe in”

  -Pulp “Dogs Are Everywhere That I Go”

  Years later. Jack will be sitting in an apartment, a frayed baseball cap shading his eyes. The apartment will be empty except for a crappy black-and-white television on a cinderblock, a small potted plant drooping on the windowsill, and a black rotary telephone on the floor by his knee. On the screen, the credits will be rolli
ng on Eric Bogosian’s Sex Drugs Rock & Roll. Unprepared for such a sight, he will quickly rewind it to the middle.

  “I saw this tree, this beautiful tree. They dug a hole and put it in the sidewalk. Every day I come to say hello. And this guy was backing up his truck. The truck was making that beep sound, ‘Beep beep beep beep’ right over the tree, ‘cause, see, the tree can’t hear that…”

  The phone will ring, and he’ll fumble it a bit because of a broken thumb.

  “Hey,” he’ll say. “Hi.” Pause. “How did you get - nothing. I’m surprised you called.”

  Long pause.

  “Come on up.”

  He’ll walk in circles, flattening imaginary grass until the knock at the door. Opening it, he’ll see Jacki standing impatient like she always was, and he’ll finally lift his cap to let in the light. He heard somewhere that cowboys did that when they were finally ready to talk. His left eye will be covered with a scabby bandage. Jack’s new dog, Derek’s old Dobie, will trot up to the door behind him. It will stand obedient, peering out from behind his left leg. Jack will absently scratch its bobbed bat-like ears.

  “Say, ‘Hi,’ boy. He’s my new eye,” he’ll laugh. “I seem to have lost my peripheral vision.”

  “Or maybe you got it back,” Jacki will offer.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. So… I just wanted to say... I don’t know. Something,” Jacki will sigh. “I’m not really sure why I’m here.”

  “That’s fine. Makes perfect sense to us.”

  Jack will hold his door open wide to coax her inside, and Jacki will look past him to the TV screen. The credits will be back, and a valve in Jack’s heart will hiccup in fear. He still won’t be able to keep the credits at bay for long.

  “Wanna come in?”

  “No. What movie were you watching?”

  “No idea. There was a dog in it though. Or someone pretending to be a dog.”

  “Of course there was,” Jacki will say with a long blink.

  “It all evens out,” he’ll say, rubbing the Dobie’s ears flat. “When this dog here dreams, I think he dreams of being a cop. He loved our movie, too. Right up until the drive-in blew up.”