Something New Under the Sun Read online

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  In the back of the Arm’s dinged-up four-door sedan, Patrick searches on his phone for the email his agent sent him, the one with the contract attached. The subject line is Re: Hello! and the only text is a phone number, his agent’s, so that he can call if he has any questions. He opens the contract searching for something to prove him right, but what it says is little different from what the Arm relayed at the poolside bar, where he had drunk so much gin-and-tonic that the generic techno piped in through hidden landscaping speakers lost its shape, turned to mush in his ears. As he reads, the terms of the agreement feel familiar to him, but far removed. “Approval-blind script consult,” he reads, and “standard etiquette budgetary maneuvers.” He remembers some of the phrases from that first read, but they don’t sound as hopeful this time around. He thinks back to that first day, opening the contract, reading that term, “production assistant,” and feeling such a shiver of pride that he had to put the document down and pace around the house to manage his excitement. He phoned his wife.

  “Isn’t that a job for a kid?” she asked, over the sound of trampoline springs squealing in the background.

  “They’re called PAs,” he replied.

  “I don’t know, Patrick. You tried to break a book contract once because you didn’t like the paper they were going to print it on. I think you like to be involved.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” said Patrick. “They want me involved. On set.”

  There was a long screech, accompanied by a loud and violent thumping.

  “What was that? It sounded terrible,” he said.

  “Nora just did a backflip on the trampoline. Everyone was clapping.”

  “If you think I should stay here at home, just say so. I don’t mind. I’m sure I can give them my guidance on some things over the phone,” he said, grouchily.

  But Alison hadn’t put up much of a fight after all. After that brief phone call in the middle of Nora’s gymnastics class, the question never really came up. Patrick had signed the contract, and Nora had learned how to do her backflip on the springy, ultramarine-blue tumbling floor. Almost a year had passed since that conversation, enough time for the studio to contract out the adaptation, put together a crew, and secure a soundstage to film in—but when he stopped to think, it seemed clear that whatever was eating Alison now, making her so inexplicably sad and distant, had been nibbling even then. Though she said normal Alison things, poking at him in her invasive, cottony tone, there was a lag to everything, a second meaning, a thing she wasn’t saying that only occasionally slipped out. That night, he heard a long pause on the line, followed, unexpectedly, by a burbling sound, like a small amount of water running over rocks. Patrick realized that Alison was crying. “She’s so happy, Patrick,” she said through a scrim of tears. “Why do I feel like she’s the happiest she’ll ever be?”

  The city viewed from the highway has little to do with the place he had seen on the ground. It resembles an old photograph, colors faded, with a swath of flat gray rooftops close to the highway, a sea of smaller homes and buildings with reddish, quirkily tiled roofs in the middle ground. Neighborhoods pool at the base of the brown hills in the distance; tiny modernist structures stud the slopes and peaks, swaddled by smog. It looks like a diorama, three different strips of cardboard painted and stood upright to form a realistic landscape, each successive piece rendered a little hazier than the one before, articulating how vast the distance is between where they had been and where they are going. The smooth, synthetic edge of the seatbelt digs gently against Patrick’s throat as he plugs Cassidy Carter’s name into the search field and discovers, to his surprise, that she’s starred in over twenty movies, many so famous that he recognizes their titles, though he has never actually seen any of them. He learns that she has a sister named Juneau and a father who used to sell farm equipment—the stationary kind, like silos—until he left them all behind to try for a music career in Nashville. He learns that she was paid $195,000 per episode of Kassi Keene: Kid Detective, which made her the world’s highest-paid child star until the end of the show’s five-season run. There’s a photo of her from a profile published to coincide with the show’s finale—she’s dressed as a sexy Sherlock Holmes, lounging on a gigantic red velvet question mark. “Who Killed Kassi Keene?” the headline reads. “It Was Miss Carter in the Studio Lot with the Hot New Film Career!”

  In the front seat of the sedan, the production kids make loose, sporadic conversation, like old friends. They do each other small kindnesses: the Arm fixes the A/C vents so the cool air blows with greater precision upon Horseshoe Shirt’s glistening forehead; he in turn unwraps a stick of gum the exact color and shade of a fresh tennis ball and pushes it into the Arm’s mouth as he drives, both hands on the wheel, maximally alert and responsive. When the flavor has left, Horseshoe feels around on the floor for an old receipt and holds it patiently before the still-chewing mouth, waiting for the Arm to deposit his cud before tossing the little packet out the passenger-side window. All around them, the cars crawl forward fitfully, incoherently, first one lane and then another, never in unison.

  “Wow,” says the Arm. “I would give anything to be able to just zoom up and over all this traffic right now.”

  “Everyone would be gazing at you,” says Horseshoe, “in wonderment.”

  “Remember that scene from Back to the Future Part II where Doc shows up in the DeLorean and then it lifts off from the ground like a spaceship and the wheels retract and it jets off into the future? Like a spaceship?”

  “They would be taking videos on their phones, selling them to TMZ. Buying Kawasaki motorcycles and vacation packages to Los Cabos. Statues of lions and horses for their backyards. Et cetera.”

  Horseshoe lights a cigarette and sticks his arm out an open window and into the sunshine. Talk radio filters through the air from a Honda Civic on the passenger-side flank of the car. Today’s program is about violent encounters with wildlife on the fringe of urban spaces. One of the guests is a mother of three who was attacked by a pack of raccoons while trying to return a pair of sneakers to a local Foot Locker just after closing. “They took the box from my hands and began pawing through it. They chewed at the brand detailing, the little swoosh. I think it was because of the leather scent they spray in these things, just too completely real. But if it can fool a wild animal, it must be a high-quality product.” The driver of the Civic is female, in her twenties, with a lime-green streak in her hair. When she looks over, Horseshoe smiles at her and waves with his cigarette hand. She looks away.

  “Do you know why we have traffic?” the Arm asks suddenly.

  “There are too many cars,” Horseshoe says, in a sad tone.

  The Arm shakes his head, gazing out the window at small plumes of smoke in the distance, on the occluded face of the yellowing foothills. “It’s because nobody can see the whole picture. There’s enough road for all the cars to move along smoothly at the same speed, but even if we understand this at a rational level, we can’t do anything with the knowledge. Our default is to behave as self-interested individuals. Sometimes we work against that principle and defer to another driver, but even that’s just a variant on individualistic behavior. When you slow down to let someone merge in, you contribute to the worsening of the whole.” He nudges the gas pedal. The car lurches forward three feet, and then rolls down to a near halt.

  “Altruism is no escape. Only an exhaustive revolution could hope to alter the scale of daily existence,” says Horseshoe, searching the glove compartment for more gum.

  “Sometimes there are crashes. Fender benders. People lose their lives,” says the Arm thoughtfully. “The victims long for a better world, a world in which the cars pass serenely in discrete space and all conflicts are indefinitely deferred. A car crash challenges scale directly. Self-driving cars were the industry’s answer to that challenge, but the consumer exper
ience wasn’t in demand. The average person would rather retain control and believe themselves lucky than take on a statistically smaller risk, governed by the probabilistic Other.” He puts on his signal and lurches suddenly, violently, into the right lane, the sound of horns swarming around them, muted by the chassis of the van, which shields them and holds them tight. “People don’t want to place their trust in their vehicle; they want the sensation of silky, effortless agency.”

  “You can’t repair an appetite, you can only feed it or ignore it.”

  “To go from one stage to another requires passage through an ungainly middle space. In this middle, human-driven cars crash into computer-driven cars, computer-driven cars crash into human-driven cars—either way, they kill the humans inside. When change happens, we want it to happen all at once. In transit, there’s catastrophe.”

  “Catastrophe is incomplete change,” says Horseshoe casually, fishing a cigarette out of the pack and tucking it behind his ear. “Change is violent for those who arrive to it late.” He swivels around and offers up the opened pack to Patrick, who doesn’t even notice the gesture. “The safest thing would be to remain perfectly still,” he says, shrugging as he untwists, “and let the future simply arrive.”

  Patrick is texting Alison: Almost at the hotel. California is paradise. These guys from the film company are genuine West Coast stoners. Call you when I’m finally alone. He looks up from his phone, eavesdrops on the conversation for a second, and looks back down. He searches Cassidy Carter net worth, then Cassidy Carter arrests. He feels oddly unable, for some reason, to interpret the results. Is $850K a lot of money? Is three a lot of arrests? Between the lurching movement of the vehicle and the impassivity of the hills in the distance, he feels a little like he’s out to sea, bobbing in a lifeboat as his body bakes beneath the heavy sun.

  “I wrote a script in college about an alien invasion,” the Arm says. “Small crablike creatures attach to the neural centers of cheerleaders. It begins as a slasher flick—people die in creative and ironic ways—but when the takeover is complete, it becomes a quiet, peaceful sort of thing. Then it’s a movie for the aliens, full of colors, lights, moving shapes, and warm, buzzing sounds. But as long as a single human being is alive, its genre is horror.”

  “Was your script any good?” Horseshoe asks.

  “It wasn’t.”

  “I could see it getting made. Elle Fanning as the Last Girl. Tessa Thompson as a brilliant, corrupt scientist. Tony Hopkins as a human possessed by the alien queen.”

  “Thanks, man. It means a lot to me to hear that,” says the Arm.

  “You gotta have faith. That’s why we make such heavy sacrifices, man, because we have faith in the art form. In the product. In the industry. In the ephemeral rendered luminously concrete. It’s the machinery of dreams.”

  “But do we have faith in the industry? Is it a blind faith, based on nothing more concrete than the faith of other blind people who assure us that there is something there to see, if we could only see it? Is it a false faith, the belief that we who make fifteen dollars an hour will someday employ others for fifteen dollars an hour?”

  Patrick looks up sharply from his phone, too sharply. Reading in a moving vehicle turns his stomach; there’s a tilting feeling somewhere inside his head.

  “Wait, what do we make an hour?” he asks, concerned.

  “About fifteen dollars,” says Horseshoe.

  “My parents buy vegetables for me when they come to town,” says the Arm.

  Patrick stifles a groan. “What is this job?” he asks. “Is it skilled labor? Do you manage others? Do you make decisions?”

  “At this stage in our careers,” says Horseshoe, “I think the most accurate thing would be to say that we are managed by others and make only the simplest decisions, the sort of decisions no one else cares about. But, obviously, nobody can know, ourselves least of all, what our futures may hold in store.”

  Patrick grimaces and rests his head against the curve of the window. Pressed against the cool, firm glass, he stares out at the vestiges of Hollywood, far away now and muffled in haze. The sky is blue but diluted by a grayish, brownish undertone that can be found everywhere and nowhere at once—like the halfhearted presence of his wife and daughter over text or phone, like the internet, like DDT, banned in the United States but increasingly prevalent in South America, Africa, Asia. Like the omnipresent Cassidy Carter: an ambient mechanical whine coming from somewhere deep within the house that, once heard, can never again be unheard. The production kids drone on in front, talking about the fundamental correlation of the internal-combustion engine to the film projector. In the surrounding lanes of traffic, the other cars seem to move backward and forward randomly, pointlessly, going nowhere. He can’t tell whether the van is moving or sitting still, but he knows that whatever is happening upends some organ deep in his torso. He is light and heavy, sunburny and chilled, dizzy and pulsing and empty like a balloon. High overhead, a hawk hangs in the air, frozen in place, as though the fact of atmosphere were only a theory, a lie. He realizes suddenly that he needs to get out of the car.

  “Pull over, it’s an emergency,” he says weakly.

  “It’s a catastrophe!” says the Arm cheerfully.

  “Pull over on the shoulder, or get off the highway?” Horseshoe asks, sounding concerned.

  “I don’t know,” mumbles Patrick, his eyes squeezed shut.

  The turn signal goes on, and the sedan begins its slow meander into the rightmost lane. At the side of the road, pink hibiscus in bloom. Patrick lies horizontally in the back seat, his arms crossed, trying to fit the curves of his body into seat troughs designed to cradle upright, individuated asses. He stares straight up at the van’s nubby beige ceiling, tries not to think about his mouth filling uncontrollably with moisture, trying not to notice the emergency feeling growing louder like an approaching siren. Has anyone ever drowned in their own saliva, choked on it, maybe while asleep? he wonders, as the car rounds lazily through the off-ramp and pulls into the first available outlet, a large and desolate Mexican-restaurant parking lot. They slow to a stop near the turn-in, and Horseshoe gets out. The scent of parched and sunstruck vegetation fills his nostrils, and he inhales deeply with a satisfied look on his face. Then he opens the back door for Patrick, who crawls out onto a patch of vividly, electrically green grass near the front entrance and dry-heaves behind the geraniums.

  “He should do child’s pose,” says Horseshoe, stubbing out his cigarette and lighting another.

  “He should try chewing on something tough and low-calorie,” says the Arm thoughtfully. “Maybe a twig.”

  As the kids loom above him, smoking, Patrick pulls himself into a fetal position on the ground. He wraps his arms tight around his middle-aged knees and tucks his head in, closes his eyes tight. It smells like mulch and quesadilla, and the clean, dry odor of the prickly lawn. He rocks gently back and forth. The sun has started to set, and the brownish tinge takes fire, igniting reds and oranges and pinks that defy summarization. Now when he closes his eyes, the fleshy red color has become even redder. The beauty of a sunset comes from the distance the light must travel in order to reach the eye of the one observing it: the greater the distance, the more encounters that light has with air particles, scattering and shifting the visible wavelength away from the familiar blue and toward exotic, desirable colors. When the breeze blows in just the right direction, Patrick can smell the scent of flowers—detergent from a laundromat across the street. Tapping their cigarette ash out onto the concrete below, the production kids stare into the sunset, squinting, shielding their eyes. They watch the indescribable colors burn over the sky, not even trying to describe them.

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  Off Highway 210, at the base of a hill blanketed in ivy and eucalyptus, the Hacienda Lodge offers beds and motel breakfasts to out-of-towners unfamiliar with the layout and
geography of Los Angeles County. In front of the door to Room 213, Patrick slides his key card in and out of the reader at varying speeds. The reader blinks red, and then red again. The night is surprisingly dark here, despite the nearness of the highway, and the parking lot is a sea of available spaces. When the door swings open at last, it reveals two queen-sized beds a foot apart, a chair upholstered in green performance plush, a TV with no remote. The room has a yellow cast: pale-dun paint on the walls, ochre carpeting, and on each bed a quilt patterned in floral butterscotch. Through an open window in the bathroom, the whine of cars passing by at high speed mingles with the dry, green, medicinal scent of silvery trees.

  Patrick lets his body fall backward onto one of the beds and lies there with his arms by his sides like a patient in a hospital bed. Of all the things that bother him about this day, the one that stings the most is the feeling of being nobody in particular, just a man middling through his forties with a body of middling fitness and three books that no one on this coast ever inquires about. Maybe this is why people have families, he thinks, so that every day, at least once, they can walk into a room and feel known by every person in it. He conjures a memory, or is it a fantasy, of home—he’s with the two of them on the couch, he’s tickling Nora and she’s laughing brightly in slow motion, and Alison joins in, and they laugh together for what feels like forever. It feels so real, but in actuality Nora hates to be tickled. His feet still sweaty in his leather shoes, he digs the phone out of his front pocket and calls Alison. His mood sinks a little more as he listens to the phone ring and ring and then go to voicemail. You’ve reached Alison, says the recording in a miniature version of her voice. Do I want to be reached?