Something New Under the Sun Read online

  She turns toward Patrick and gives him a thumbs-up sign.

  “Beginning today, of course,” she says. “He’ll help me transport it.” She pauses. “You’ll need to rent him something bigger to drive.”

  He watches incredulously as she laughs and laughs at some joke Brenda made.

  “Okay, right, well, see you so soon. Give my love to Jay. Oh, he’s right there? Isn’t that great. And, hey, don’t go too hard on this Patrick guy. I’m sure he wasn’t really trying to cause me any emotional duress, he’s just not from around here, doesn’t know how we get things done. Okay, can’t wait to see your face! Me too! Bye!” Her brilliant smile fades to one of quiet self-satisfaction as she puts the phone down on the kitchen counter.

  “Win-win,” she says brightly, leaning over the back of the couch.

  “How did I win?” he replies sarcastically.

  “Well,” says Cassidy, “I negotiated the payment plan I want, and you got one free favor from me. Gratis. What do you want? An autograph for your kid?” She inspects him. “Has your kid seen my work?”

  “I could call Jay up right now and tell him about the drug paraphernalia I saw all over your house,” Patrick says. “He’d be interested in his famously unpredictable star returning to her famously unpredictable hobbies.”

  “Yeah, maybe give him a call about that,” Cassidy says offhandedly, “but later. I don’t think we have time for any more phone calls now, we’re really late.”

  Cassidy grabs a wad of white from a kitchen stool overflowing with clothing and slips the mesh dress on over her swimsuit. She puts on a pair of socks from the pile and pulls a pair of sandals from a tote bag hanging on the back of a chair.

  “I’m ready, let’s go,” she declares.

  They walk out into the blinding sunlight, into the sprawl of Secret Sunset, the neighborhood a violation of scale, its homes stretched and enlarged so that the intimacy implied by the name dissolves into intimidated silence. The houses in Secret Sunset come in the styles of other houses he’s seen before—a Southwestern one, a Cape Cod, a mid-century ranch, or a Spanish-inspired casita—but at three times the length and twice the height, they inspire dread. They dwarf the middle-aged oaks and willows planted at their flanks and nurtured at significant expense, making cars look like toys and people look like figurines. The effect isn’t neighborly: instead of sensing the other house’s proximity, Patrick feels its distance.

  “Let’s take my car instead,” says Cassidy, rooting through her handbag. “You drive, though.”

  “I can’t leave the rental car,” Patrick complains, gesturing at the matcha-green economy compact sedan he rented from the less-trafficked airport near his hotel. “I have to return it tomorrow morning.”

  Cassidy regards it with a look of casual repulsion. She unlocks her own vintage convertible, cream-colored and pristine but for a few dents in the passenger-side door, and tosses him the keys.

  “Get one of the PAs to return it,” she suggests breezily.

  “I am a PA,” he replies. “It says so in my contract.”

  “You said you’re a writer, right? Well, if they call you an assistant and you do assistant things, you’re an assistant, not a writer. If you want to move up, you have to inhabit the job you want, not the job they give you. I have a book on tape I could lend you about it.” She stares at Patrick across the roof of the car—or at least he thinks she stares at him, the lenses on her sunglasses are so dark he sees nothing but his own murky shape. “Listen,” she says sharply, “don’t waste too much time thinking about it, we’re really late already.”

  Patrick slides himself into the driver’s seat, onto the tan leather. As he backs out, he notices for the first time that her lawn, unlike the others, is completely dead, a prickly, yellowed carpet with the dry texture of a scouring pad.

  Cassidy looks up from her phone. “There’s a fire in North Hollywood,” she says, “so we can’t take the road you came in on. We need to detour. Turn left up there.”

  Patrick sighs, and makes the turn. Now they’re clawing their way up a mountain road, into the heart of the hills and past it, where they’ll get on the 118. As the well-appointed homes and carefully watered lawns grow distant in the rearview, the terrain brambles and roughens. Twists of silvery-green scrub crawl up the hills, brownish brush and yellow grass grasping toward the cloudless sky like upward strokes of a paintbrush. Occasional trees reaching like fractures into the sky. There’s the crunch of the wheels on dirt road, a fine haze of dust turning the creamy car sepia-toned. Cassidy’s dangling her hand out the window like some music-video girl with no lines and no backstory, her elegant nostrils delicately flared as she sucks in the canyon air. He begins to suspect that this detour may not be wholly necessary, just another way for Cassidy Carter to get what she wants: a nice drive in the country. He looks into the sky above for signs of smoke tainting the air, but from this angle it’s impossible to tell. As he stares up into the blue, it seems to telescope out and retract, some strangeness that the nine-year-old natural philosopher Nora would know how to fact-check—to tell him whether it was really happening or whether it was all in his mind.

  “So,” says Cassidy, staring out her window as the landscape scrolls by, “if you’re a writer and you have some kind of family back in Boston or wherever, what are you doing running errands for me and Brenda? Don’t you miss your kids?”

  “Of course I do,” Patrick responds, the anger in his voice surprising him. “Every moment I’m out here I think of using the last of my frequent-flier miles to book a same-day flight back, to people who know me. To a place where they respect what a person has achieved in their life. You realize I’m an award-winning author? That I have a carefully, lovingly built life with a wife and daughter who are very important to me, and instead of spending time with them, I’m here driving you around?” Now that he’s begun venting, it’s hard to stop: a pulled thread that unravels the entire rug. “You realize I created this story? That without me this movie is just a bunch of people standing around with no premise, no plot? And now, just because Jay and Brenda said so, I’m playing intern to a famously psychotic twentysomething.”

  Cassidy gives him a small smile. “I hear what you’re saying. I’m a shit assignment. But maybe you should take a moment to think about what being given this assignment says about you. Maybe you’re not as amazing as you think you are.”

  Patrick says nothing for a long moment. “I could pull over right now,” he says, more quietly. “I could get out of this car and just walk away. And you might call Jay and get him to send someone else, some PA who finds your first few tantrums novel. But what about when that person quits? How many more do you think they’ll send?”

  For a long time nobody says anything. The noise of the engine leaks, diluted, into the vast, empty sky. He doesn’t pull the car over to the side of the road; she doesn’t argue, only sits there idly locking and unlocking the passenger-side door.

  “I’m sorry you’re missing your kid,” says Cassidy flatly.

  Patrick stares straight ahead.

  “I was a kid,” Cassidy says, facing away from him, staring out. “I came from the most Podunk town you’ve never heard of. We were famous for growing hay. People don’t even eat hay. And it’s not that my town was the best place to grow hay, we just made a lot of it. In the fall, hay rides and hay mazes. Scarecrows and pumpkins. The smell of living stuff drying out in the sun, geraniums in the front yard. Whatever.”

  She looks at Patrick and then back out at the canyon in motion.

  “This was inland, an hour from Fresno. Four or five hours from here. Nothing ever happened there, not even a hit-and-run. There just weren’t enough people. And then, one day, I’m walking back from where the school bus used to let me off and this amazing car pulls up. I didn’t even know what kind of car it was; probably it was some pretty humdrum bullshit, but it was shiny, an
d the roof was down. And inside that car was Rainer Westchapel. Do you remember him?”

  Patrick reluctantly shakes his head no.

  “He was in that Christmas movie, the one where Santa gives all the good children coal and all the bad children ponies by accident and one man, an ordinary IRS clerk, has to set it all straight. Even Santa Makes Mistakes, that movie. Well, Rainer Westchapel played the IRS guy’s best friend, the abstract painter with the wise advice. I know you’ve seen it. They show it every year.”

  “Maybe,” says Patrick. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “So Rainer Westchapel pulls up next to me, and he’s lost, he was trying to get to some hot spring where his buddy had a vacation house. He was house-sitting. He’s not so famous, you’d only know him from Even Santa Makes Mistakes. But he was the biggest celebrity ever to pass through Haywood, and I got to give him directions back to the highway. Personally. It was a catastrophe for me, like a tornado or a hurricane. It changed everything. I felt like I had been diagnosed with leukemia, like one of those kids on TV where there’s a number you’re supposed to call to donate. I literally couldn’t stay in a town where there was no chance that I’d ever see another celebrity ever again. It hurt, to think that my life would be Rainer Westchapel asking for directions, and then decade after decade of nothing, and then death. Death was right in front of me. I finally convinced my mom to move June and me closer to L.A. so that I could do auditions. It wasn’t that hard; my dad had already left us.”

  She stares far into the distance, at the shriveled little trees.

  “My sister hated it here, though,” she adds, quietly.

  The grass rolls by, the brush rolls by, the cripple oaks and stray, stunted chollas like visitors from another planet. The naked rock faces of small mountains roll by, and so does the road. When Cassidy Carter speaks again, her voice is curiously unemotional, like she’s speaking only to herself.

  “You know, after I gave him directions, Rainer Westchapel lingered there for a while with the engine running. I could hear the little pings of the machinery inside, like someone was skipping stones across the hood. He asked me how old I was and where I went to school. He asked me about my mom and my sister and what color my bedroom walls were. He had a handsome, leathery face, I guess, though I don’t know if I knew it at the time. Then, suddenly, he grinned and leaned toward me, almost hanging out of the car. He licked his lower lip and said, ‘Now, if you were just eight years older, I would take you with me. And I would do such things to you, little one, you wouldn’t even know the words for it.’ Then he sped off, toward the highway. The exhaust smelled like glue and paint thinner, mixing with the sunshine.”

  She’s silent, then her eyes narrow. “I wonder what his net worth is today.”

  Patrick’s still trying to think of some way to respond when he hears a shriek from the passenger seat next to him. He brakes hard, kicking up a curtain of dust. As the curtain parts he sees what Cassidy saw: a gigantic cat, dun-furred and large-pawed, the color of the hillside and the rock. He hears the sound of its exhale, like a gasket, stirring the tawny dust. Walking slowly, one paw after another, the heavy muscles like living knots, twisting beneath the skin. The mountain lion hangs its head low and takes them in from the corner of its golden eye, the tail tip twitching once to the left like a single, quickening thought.

  Patrick fantasizes for a moment that seeing him would mean something to this animal, that it would remember having looked in the eyes of the human driving the car that nearly caved in its contraption of sinew and bone, the only thing an animal owns. But an animal like this exists in another world than our own, thinks Patrick to himself. The actual world, maybe, where the exact nature of a threat is as real and tangible as the stump of a tree or the engine of a Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder. Patrick is about to tell this thought to Cassidy, finally something wise and confident he can say, when, suddenly, the cat breaks into a run. “Holy Jesus hell,” says Cassidy softly. They watch its heavy body turn light and elastic as it lopes smoothly, easily, up the hill and into a hidden part of the canyon, where their eyes can no longer track it.

  * * *

  —

  At the studio, the indoor temperature is sixty-three degrees and the office furniture is chilly to the touch. Patrick sits in a pale-green armchair with modern lines, its back built at an angle of half-recline, making it difficult for him to hold himself in an alert, professional posture. He looks up “Oswego farm family mourning” then “Oswego nature mourning retreat” on his phone and turns up a smattering of obituaries, locals who’ve perished separately, unsystematically, of unrelated causes. He looks up “Oswego nature activities pay phone,” “pay phone Oswego retreat,” and, as a last resort, “Oswego camp donkey,” but all he learns is that Oswego has many nature activities, inadequately catalogued pay phones, no public records of the locations of farm animals or livestock. The searches return thousands upon thousands of results, tranches of information peering into a small piece of someplace over two thousand miles away—but they don’t show him what he’s looking for. Patrick experiences a sensation of access intermingled with a deeper sense of helplessness. He searches “Earthbridge,” but any useful information is buried beneath entries devoted to a natural deodorant brand of the same name. He looks up “Oswego cult,” and finds a few different options: most have been defunct since the late 1990s, but there’s one that still seems to be mildly active, based on local news reports from a couple years ago. He enters the purported address of the cult into a window that lets him navigate a virtual map of the neighborhood, comprising photographs that seem to have been taken during some previous Halloween. The boxy little houses, painted white and yellow and somber blue, have carved pumpkins out front and scarecrows seated on porches. He presses the arrows to walk back and forth on this virtual street, but he sees no sinister cult leaders, no pay phones, nothing to give substance to the idea that his wife and daughter are far away, mourning and surrounded by sheep.

  “Wow,” says Horseshoe, “you are incredibly intent upon your phone.” He leans over and peers at Patrick’s screen. Patrick clicks it off quickly.

  “His condition,” says the Arm, “is our collective malaise.”

  “I only have a flip phone,” says Sam Sackler, the film’s director, a stocky man in his forties with a thick, trim beard disguising the true shape of his face. He reaches into his pocket and pulls it out to show to the rest of the group. The four of them stare at the smooth black object in the palm of his hand, primitively shaped, like a stone.

  “Sam,” says Horseshoe politely after a moment has passed, “I understand why the three of us are out here waiting for someone to give us directions. But you’re the director. Shouldn’t you be in there with Cassidy and the costume people and Brenda and Jay?”

  “This is a bit of a touchy issue,” says Sam. “I, of course, agree with you fully, but Jay and Brenda said they wanted me to ‘be surprised.’ I told them that, as a director, surprises cause mistakes and cost money. But they insisted, and they are, after all, the ones holding the cash bag.”

  Horseshoe and the Arm nod sagely.

  “Is it normal?” asks Patrick. “To be so secretive? Do you know that I didn’t even get to see a copy of the script—the script to a movie about my book—until everyone was reading it around the table? And then, when I read the script, it’s not even my story at all—it’s a freak mutation, like if someone who hadn’t read the book told someone else about it at a cocktail party and then that person went out and wrote a script from memory.”

  Everyone looks uncertain. Horseshoe shrugs.

  “What, am I crazy to be bothered by this?” Patrick huffs.

  “I’d rephrase that,” says Sam Sackler mildly, “and ask, instead, if it’s useful for you to be bothered. I’ve worked on probably eighty films over the course of my career, sometimes just showing up for a couple days’ labor holding a piece of reflec
tive fabric up to the light, sometimes standing at the helm of my own production. In no situation has it been useful to me to get all worked up about something, particularly when I’m planning on sticking around anyway for the cash and the résumé fodder. Sometimes, when I need to calm myself, I imagine a little boat made of folded paper, riding the rough currents of a river. That little boat is me: it goes with the flow and eventually it gets to where it’s going. I flowed all the way into my first director position, and now I’ve made five films that have my name on them.”

  Horseshoe jumps in: “As for the script, why not look on the bright side? Consider Theseus’s ship. A piece of wood from the hull is removed. An identical piece is set in its place. This happens thousands of times, until every piece of the ship has been removed and replaced by another identical piece. But guess what? It’s still the exact same ship! They can’t take that away from you.”

  “But the pieces aren’t identical,” replies Patrick. “That’s my entire point.”

  “Let me tell you an anecdote about the evolution of consciousness,” says the Arm, sitting forward in his chair. “There once was a little worm—a multicelled organism, but not by much. This worm was constructed simply, to do basic things like eating, moving toward food, moving away from enemies. But one day it encountered a negative stimulus in its environment that it couldn’t escape from or alter—an increase in temperature, for example. With no recourse to change the situation or save itself from the situation, the little worm turned to the only tool it had available to itself: adaptation. It created a little organ in its body that was designed to receive the negative signals caused by the negative stimuli: we call that organ ‘the brain.’ ”

  Horseshoe is nodding exaggeratedly, deeply.

  “Now, in thinking about the bad thing, it felt like it was taking an action against it, though in actuality the thing remained unchanged. It could take different stances on the terrible stimulus: it could think about how much it hated it, or question whether it was really all that bad, or even come to regard it with grudging respect as ‘character-building.’ In each case, the bad thing was transformed in the mind, providing an illusion of control, when in reality it remained intact. Consciousness was not created to help us solve problems; it’s an invisible machine whose sole function is to internalize problems so that we can live with them forever.”