The Last Projector

by David James Keaton

  Evil thought about his poor smashed boombox, and he tried in vain to ask where they got their special radio. He’d heard of these new antennas, the ones that actually picked up songs from the past, too.

  “What year do you think this is? 1988?”

  “Try 1999.”

  “See?! Time travel.”

  “Dick, listen…”

  “That’s not my name.”

  “Close enough.”

  Then the paramedics talked about the other explosion, years ago, when the other drive-in went down. Evil knew it was Bully, and he would have loved to tell them all about it. But what Evil didn’t know was it happened the day The Butch Cassidy switched to over to porn, too, just like the Spotlight Kid. Then the paramedics talked about all the dogs. And all the songs about dogs. There were a lot of them. But they mostly talked about the injured police dog that the crowd at the Spotlight Kid had tried to get them to take in the back of their ambulance.

  “They get that behavior from the movies,” one of them said. “It’s ridiculous. Fuck people. You have to hurt a dog in a movie these days to get an audience emotional.”

  “Why do you think that is?” the other one asked.

  “You tell me why.”

  “I’ll tell you why. Dogs are so effective in movies because everyone has lost a pet and will tear up instantly. Even a goldfish. Not so many people have lost a dad. There is a cure for this though. Give more people real, live, dead loved ones to grieve over.”

  “I’m on the case.”

  Evil didn’t understand how they’d help remedy this, but he couldn’t ask.

  “Kind of like that little girl?” one of them said.

  “What little girl?”

  “The little girl who was choking.”

  “Exactly! All those people putting away their guns for a second, working it out, getting together to save her. It might have been one of those heartwarming moments if one of those dumb fucks actually knew the Heimlich Maneuver, of course.”

  “I’ll bet they can do it on a dog though.”

  “Even a smack on the back might have helped! Assholes.”

  “What happened back there anyway?”

  “What do you mean what happened? Didn’t you see the screen?”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen that movie a million times.”

  “What movie?”

  “Doppelbängers.”

  “Ha! Nice name. What is that? A porno where people fuck anyone that looks like their ex-wife?”

  “No, anyone who looks like themselves. Masturbation fantasies.”

  “Of course. Play that shit at a drive-in where they’re already jerking off and…”

  “Boom.”

  “No one will try that again.”

  One of them turned up the music.

  “Okay, think about it,” he went on. “If you’re hearing a B-side on the radio, it means you are important enough to exist in the imagination of some other creature. That or you should try to make yourself more important pretty damn quick before you’re written out. A B-side like this on the radio means that the author is up there spinning old records, looking for a hero…”

  “What the fuck is all over this kid’s body?”

  The voice was close, and Evil could smell the burger on his breath. He tried to sit up. Tried to ask who stole his girl, or who stole his bike.

  “Worst tattoos I’ve ever seen.”

  “More like an infection. Give me a needle.”

  They were making sense to Evil now, and he kept trying to sit up, all the way up until he slipped underwater. He didn’t hear them change tapes and put in more popular music for the long drive.

  After the worm slid down his throat, Larry tore his sleeves down to the elbows and scratched even harder. He scratched as hard as he used to scratch the rental stickers off the corners of his videotapes. And those suckers were on like cement. Harder than anyone dared to scratch living tissue, that’s for sure. Almost as hard as a young man’s cock, the young man he used to be anyway. His fingernails stripped the gray hair off his arms, along with the wrinkled husk of his pale exoskeleton, past what a paramedic might call the epiphyseal bone connected to the synovial bone, past the hyaline cartilage that sent the bump of bee stings all over the funny bones.

  And underneath, there was another layer.

  One that split easy, with barely any pressure at all, then finally slipped away like spoiled, wet chicken skin with just that sting he used to get as a kid when his new blisters hit the air. He felt about a foot taller, and the new skin underneath was glistening, smooth as a boiled frankfurter and just as angry. Larry didn’t see the patterns at first since he was so close to the experiment, but as he ran his fingers over the rapeseed crop formations of hives on his arms, shoulders, chest, stomach, he didn’t have to see it from the clouds. He’d seen them all so many times now, he could read them like Braille. Larry’s stains were always childlike, the same bullshit a little boy would doodle into his school books...

  Race cars, monkeys, and dragons covered his arms. Gators, hummingbirds, ivy, roses, unicorns, unicorns listening to boomboxes, unicorns having trouble with their headphones, the ol’ cat showing its ass where Larry’s bellybutton would be, lions and tigers and bears, all carrying an assortment of guns, guns, and more fucking guns like the little boys loved, barbed wire, telephone wire, an entire cemetery of headstones and dates, Jesus on the cross, an alien on the cross, Jesus playing basketball, loading a musket, riding a goddamn dinosaur, a spider web and an angel trapped inside, the hedge maze of tribal nonsense on his tricep, a Rosetta stone of indecipherable languages and fonts on his bicep, the dual snakes of caduceus on each wrist, a symbol of thievery, instead of the single snake on the Rod of Asclepias, just because those idiots in the U.S. Army Medical Corps sewed the wrong one into their uniforms back in 1902, the hoary ol’ ouroboros sucking itself off forever, the buckshot scatter of five-pointed stars on his shoulders, sharks and fire, sharks on fire, and, finally, the names of everyone he knew that had died. With every fucking name misspelled. Just like his given name, “John,” that everyone always got wrong before he changed it three times.

  You can’t be around them that long… his wife’s singsong voice in his head. …you’re gonna catch something...

  He remembered her first tattoo, a ladybug on her thigh. She said it gave her infinite wishes. Then she fucked it up with a ladybug as the President on a fifty-dollar bill.

  When they did tattooing in real tribes, they didn’t have an electric needle. Larry saw this on a show once, or maybe it was the movie Utu, something about the Maori tribes of New Zealand using this tiny hammer and chisel, and they would trace the lines of your chin, your brow, and bang channels into your face to soak up the stain of octopus ink, berries, or your own blood.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  In his hospital bed, Evil stared as his arm and leg suspended high over his head. Sleeping on his purple cast-covered toes was a stuffed green monkey with a bright red bow. No card.

  Sometimes, when he drifted in and out of consciousness, he would see the blur of someone in the room with him, someone with a patch over her eye when she leaned in close for a kiss. Maybe it was a him, not a her, but the kiss never came. Sometimes, he would see the crowd from the drive-in pile into his room, and he would scream in pain when they fought to sign his cast. They would push too hard with their names and doodles and their very own monsters, but his voice would still be underwater, or at least underground, buried in six feet of blood and bandages.

  “I haven’t seen a cast this big since Marlon Brando broke his leg line dancing…” Evil slurred, unheard.

  They would draw on him all through the night, not realizing they were pressing the red fire of broken bones against metal pins they’d used to rebuild him. They’d wrestle and scribble, covering him in Mothmen and the lyrics to The Monster Mash and maps to the stars. After a while, he stopped trying to scream. He stopped trying to communicate with sign language or a fluttering eyelash. He even
abandoned his half-remembered Little League baseball signals soon after that. It was no use.

  When you’re the star, the cast did the signing, not the other way around.

  At the funeral reception, Bolita Ramirez kicked and rocked her body around some lazy figure-eights on a child’s swing. She let her feet drag every fifth spin or so to keep her orbits just slow enough to seem distraught, while all around her swam a backyard of mourners, respectfully silent. But most of the children, particularly the ones that were the same age as the deceased and therefore much more likely to talk freely about his short life and lack of legacy, were gathered around the plastic playground with her. Boli felt a kinship with 9-year-olds, or at least that particular mentality, as she understood the difficulty of imitating rational adult behavior the minute she became one.

  The boy they’d buried that morning had been killed in a car accident, collateral damage from Boli’s latest crusade against wanton roadkill. Even though her newest scheme involved 100% fewer explosives, the boy had been thrown from a car that had made the mistake of swerving to hit one of Boli’s “turtlecakes,” a counterfeit Carolina Terrapene she’d crafted from cereal bowls, spray paint, a gutted Pound Puppy, and a bit of garden hose which, when compressed by a car tire, revealed a porcupine of carpenter nails almost guaranteed to result in a blowout and a ton of frustration. Fatal accidents afterward were a surprise, and a bonus.

  Boli had originally started out with a World War II helmet that her boyfriend had scavenged from an Army Surplus. She had this thing about vets again lately, and he swore he was heading for veterinarian school after he shook off all that National Guard bullshit. But she quickly discovered they just didn’t make things like they used to, or make cereal bowls like they used to make steel infantry helmets anyway, because even an 18-wheeler wouldn’t crush a soldier in her box-turtle infantry. Colanders and popcorn bowls were too big, too, even though the popcorn seemed especially appropriate while waiting in the bushes for the trap to spring. But there was something about any turtle bigger than breakfast size that made people start worrying for their tires, and they wouldn’t take the bait. And indeed, during her research, she’d read news reports of turtle shells piercing the white walls of some asshole’s Lincoln when the driver exercised his God-given right to flex his Great Santini Syndrome (people didn’t have to see that movie to understand that, yep, “It takes a mighty brave man to run over turtles!”). But a regular-size cereal bowl held the porridge that was just right, spot-on dimensions of the familiar box turtle, the perfect target that people steered towards on the roads the vast majority of the time.

  Her new boy, fresh home from Afghanistan, was no stranger to funerals, of course, but he wouldn’t come near this one, for good reason. He was feeling way too guilty about what they’d done, even though it was probably him that had given her the idea to begin with. Okay, him and seeing that creature lying burst open next to his mailbox where her letters had piled up unread, bloody string of intestine and Ping Pong balls trailing off into the gutter. Maybe she suspected he squashed it, who knows. Everyone blamed the mailman for everything. But her projects would always get complicated, intentions forever blurred in favor of effect. It was the cat that really set her off though. Her New Boy had this cat, a sluggish obese calico with the markings and fur pattern that was very similar to a turtle, but even more similar to a cake. In fact, Bolita’s boyfriend started calling her “Turtle Cake” rather than her real name, some idiotic movie reference that never stuck in Bolita’s brain for even the length of a heartbeat (although she did hear him call the little fatty feline a “turtle tank” once). For fun, when it was the New Boy’s birthday, Bolita even tried to balance some candles on Turtle Cake’s back. Turtle Cake wasn’t amused. And she also wasn’t burned too bad really, as the candles fell off before anyone had a chance to blow them out. But after that there was just no getting the image out of her head, a cat, turtle, pancake, porcupine or whatever the fuck combination, all those burning candles sticking up out of its shell. This image sort of morphed into a daydream, then smack dab back to fantasy. Until one day, maybe on her birthday, evolution would finally gift mankind a turtle that could safely flatten out under compression, rather than die squirting out a streamer of aborted omelets. Instead, drivers would get a bevy of secret spikes that would punish any motherfucker who swerved to run a poor critter over. All the fantasizing and fat cats led to the fabled ding! and a light bulb went off over her head. Well, maybe more like a boom! really. But definitely the blowout she was looking for.

  A girl half Bolita’s age, but twice her height, joined her on the swings, and it didn’t take long to get her to talk about the dead kid they’d buried in the box. How he lied, bent stuff, broke stuff, stole stuff, generally how he put his fingers where he wasn’t supposed to, and Bolita felt a lot better and stopped dragging her feet on the swing as much. She certainly would have been happier if the driver who’d swerved to crush her precious turtle bomb had been the one who flew through the windshield, neck snapping somewhere along the journey, ending up dead with bare feet swinging lazy figure-eights from that willow tree, but she was always destined to work within an imperfect science. Eggs would get broke and all that.

  She swung faster and faster in the plastic swing, black shiny shoes tapping the clouds. She didn’t feel bad at all anymore, not that she ever did really, but this would surely put her New Boy’s mind at ease. And now she was confident they could step things up very soon. A relationship had to move forward, right? This was the real reason behind every funeral reception. Attendance cleared consciences. Justified all the plaster casts and fatalities in her wake.

  She knew that soon she could ask her New Boy, probably pacing right now in his half-empty apartment, memorizing dog diseases and ear mites, finally back home in the States and finally forgetting about that leg he left in the teeth of an I.E.D. in Panjshir Province.

  There on a swing set that wouldn’t last three summers before it disintegrated, a poor substitute for the immortal swings at every dying drive-in the country, munching on funeral shrimp and thinking of her newest boyfriend, she realized only a psychotic hopes for a car wreck when someone does something as foolish as running over reptiles. Certainly there was room for improvement here. Wouldn’t a driver’s survival be favorable? Maybe. If the crash also left someone with a loss of limbs resulting in the most turtle-like appearance, of course. A turtle that was tucked down in fear inside its shell. This would be the preferred outcome. Something to shoot for.

  She’d start working on a more lethal birthday cake any day now, when she got back to the empty apartment she shared with her New Boy. Something more like the mechanical roadkill that ate his leg for dessert in a desert halfway across the planet. Now that would be a turtle tank to reckon with when it got pancaked. The rabbits could still win all the races, but they’d fucking pay for it.

  Next night. The driver searches the rear-view mirror as a line of streetlights pulse through the back windows of the ambulance. He’s alarmed to see his new partner, Jack, holding defibrillator paddles up to the sides of his head.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Locking shit down so it doesn’t slide,” Jack tells him.

  “Well, I’d keep those away from your dome. Unless you wanna forget the alphabet. Can’t you read the warning label?”

  “What if it’s actually a warning for us, if we use ‘em too much?”

  “Huh?”

  Jack ignores the question.

  “It’s like those babies through the windshields.”

  “Are you all right, man?”

  “Come on, you haven’t seen ‘em? The warning signs are everywhere.”

  “Everywhere, huh.”

  “Yep.”

  They’re on a dark stretch of road, and Jack is lost in the shadows again.

  “Not too many streetlights in your country, huh?” Jack says, looking out the back windows. Then a red hotel “Vacancy” glow reveals Jack rubbing the paddles together tho
ughtfully.

  “So, maybe these warning signs are just warning us not to put these next to our heads so that…”

  “They warn us not to put them on our patient’s head!” the driver almost shouts.

  “…so we don’t try it ourselves,” Jack finishes. “You know, out of curiosity. Just to see what would happen.”

  “Who would try that?”

  “Maybe it’s harmless,” Jack whispers, moving closer. “Maybe it just changes the color of your eyes. Clears your head. Are you clear?”

  “What? What are you doing?”

  “Maybe it makes us smarter. Are you clear?”

  “I guess not. Why don’t you give me a jolt?” the driver laughs nervously.

  “Clear.” Jack says again, sincerely. Then he leans over and pushes both buttons, marked “apex” and “sternum,” and electricity arcs from the paddles through the metal frame of the driver’s glasses. The whip crack of a thousand volts freezes his eyes in surprise, teeth bared like a dog. The driver sucks in one last breath as if through a straw, both feet suddenly concrete, stomping the gas and brake at the same time. The engine screams in protest while the ambulance slows, slows, then stops.

  A week later and another partner is adjusting the steering wheel to his height while Jack organizes the equipment in the dark.

  “Hey, man, you sure you want me to drive?”

  “Yeah,” Jack says. “But we should eat early before calls start coming in.”

  “Cool. I heard this is the most stressful time of the night.”

  “Some can’t take the stress. Coronaries ain’t uncommon.”

  “Don’t worry. I just had my physical.”

  “So, what do you wanna eat?”

  “Let’s hit the drive-thru. Hey, what are you doing back there anyway?”