Something New Under the Sun Read online

  “First,” said Patrick, “any biologist would tell you that the way you think about evolution is incorrect.”

  “That doesn’t bother me, because it’s a parable,” says the Arm.

  “I thought a parable was a story where the message remains unclear, or multivalent. Your story seems to have a clear message,” says Sam.

  “Or does it?” the Arm replies.

  “I’m just asking for some transparency,” says Patrick, “for a sense of which abnormal-seeming things are actually normal and which are alarming.”

  In the silence, Patrick can hear the whirring of an office fridge.

  “It feels like a betrayal to divulge observations that may not be to the benefit of this film,” says Horseshoe.

  “But to remain silent might be an even deeper betrayal,” the Arm reminds him, “a betrayal of art itself.”

  “There is one thing,” Sam Sackler interjects quietly. “We’re getting ready to start filming tomorrow, and Jay tells me all necessary funds are in place, but I hear from people around town that he and Brenda are still going around looking for investors. Maybe if they were raising money for another movie it would make sense, but I know they’re selling Elsinore Lane, because I get calls from them asking me to stop by this hotel or that so the two of them can have people inspect me. Tourists like to feed the animals, you know. I’m not complaining—as I said, complaining is not part of my philosophy of life—but if they already have what they need, why are they asking for more? And if they don’t have it, why are they telling me they do?” He pauses. “But I have to say, every project is weird. And when you’re in one weirdness, you kinda forget the others.”

  Patrick turns to the production kids. Horseshoe is looking down into his lap at his clasped hands.

  “So,” Patrick begins, “is it normal to be raising funds this late in the process?”

  “It’s just that the word ‘normal,’ ” the Arm replies, “really complicates the question. As I see it, normal is a distribution, and it’s impossible to tell, standing in one singular point within that distribution, what the shape that will emerge might be.”

  “Norms are always shifting,” agrees Horseshoe. “First we celebrate the advent of the wheel, then we wring our hands over restricting vehicular emissions. It’s what they call the march of history.”

  “A thing that seems abnormal today might be the first glimpse we get of a future world wherein the mores we hold dear become symptoms of mental decay or, optimistically, museum curios. We see a thing as anomaly, but that perception is only a sign of our inability to differentiate monstrosity from change.”

  “Sometimes a thing happening is its own prophecy,” Horseshoe says, nodding.

  “A prophecy is the only thing that can be real—more real, in fact, because it’s impossible to accept. Everything else is just a story told in the genre of realism,” the Arm adds. “Believable because it confirms the background of our expectations against a foreground of gentle, pointless surprise.”

  The door to the fitting room swings open abruptly as a costume aide in a stylishly disheveled topknot emerges, her arms full of high-necked Victorian dresses, gauzy nightgowns, and somber Puritanical blouses. She has a mirthless expression on her face. Horseshoe nods at her winningly, but she ignores them all. As the heavy door swings shut, a metal arm fixed to the top hisses into action, slowing its movement. The four lean to their sides in the stiff office chairs, straining for a glimpse of what lies within. They hear the sound of laughter: Cassidy’s like that of a sexy hyena and Brenda’s like silvered bells, Jay’s low, easy bass. There’s a curved white couch in the shape of a semicircle and a sound like a champagne bottle being uncorked. Then the door clicks shut, and the office lobby is quiet once more. Patrick has a troubled expression on his face as he unscrews the lid of a bottle of WAT-R and takes a long drink.

  “You know,” he says slowly, “I begin to wonder if there’s something going on behind the scenes of this movie, and if Cassidy could be a part of it.”

  For a long moment, no one says anything. Then Sam says: “Go on.”

  “You have this actress,” Patrick says, leaning forward and lowering his voice, “who’s known more for her performances off-screen than on, who’s trying to get any kind of a career going again. She’s probably willing to do just about anything for another chance to star in something. And then you’ve got this pair of producers with this weird secretive nature who kind of ooze this surreal sexual energy. Something about the whole setup feels rickety, temporary, like it’s not put together to last….” He trails off.

  “And then?” asks Sam.

  “I don’t know,” says Patrick.

  “Your mystery lacks a plot,” Sam says. He slurps at his coffee with his small pink mouth. “It would never make it past the pitch stage.”

  “I had a screenwriting professor back in college who used to say first you have to construct a plot, then you have to bury it, then you have to dig it back up,” says Horseshoe. “The plot you describe is either too buried, not buried enough, or not sufficiently constructed.”

  “But Patrick puts his finger on an odd dynamic that I think we are all sensing,” says the Arm. “That dynamic being a gut feeling that the people in that room over there are experiencing this project completely differently from us. That they see a completely different big picture than us, or that the picture they see is something we cannot act on or perhaps even understand. Why is their perspective so different from ours? Is it because they’re so beautiful? Or because they’re rich?”

  “Maybe we should try to be more understanding,” says Horseshoe in a ruminative way.

  “Lately,” says the Arm thoughtfully, “I’ve been wondering whether these differences go deeper than the random, unequal distribution of genetic gifts and family wealth at birth. I hypothesize that some people, a select but growing group, have evolved the ability to perceive money as a natural extension of their other sensory systems, the same way we perceive light via the photosensitive cells on the surface of the retina. To people like us, money is either an abstraction or something idiotically concrete—little rounds of metal, germ-ridden pieces of floppy paper worn down by passage from one hand to another, numbers on an ATM screen or a bank statement. But for them it’s real—present in a direct, nonmetaphorical, nonsymbolic incarnation. They encounter it as a physical thing in the world, even if it’s only the shimmer of money in its potentializable form. They don’t have to ask themselves whether an investment will pay off, whether it’s worth the risk, how much risk it involves: they simply see the money embodied in the proposition, like a piece of fruit hanging yea high above them, and they decide whether it’s worth the trouble to reach up and pluck it.”

  The Arm pauses for a long swig of WAT-R. On the underside of his pasty white neck, the Adam’s apple bobs rigidly up and down.

  “How would it appear to them?” he continues, wiping the wetness from his mouth with the back of his hand. “An aura? A scent? Impossible to imagine. Capital is real to them. Collateralized debt obligation is real to them and requires no explanation or thought to appreciate. Loss is malleable as putty and compound interest is part of the world’s clock, as obvious as the alternation of sun and moon. To us, this makes them wizards. But the reality is even grimmer. The last mass extinction happened two hundred fifty-two million years ago, at the end of the Paleozoic, when up to ninety-six percent of all marine species went extinct. Different theories, from global warming to meteor strike, aim to explain what paleontologists call the ‘Great Dying,’ but my favorite theory holds that it was the evolution of eyes in a small, select group of organisms that enabled them to hunt their blind prey to extinction. You see, even by the old rules, those individuals who understood money had a fierce advantage over everybody else. A shift like this would mean the extinction of our kind, we simple critters who believe money is produced linearly by longer,
harder work.”

  They listen, in the office silence, to the whine of the overhead lights.

  “A primitive eye is infinitely better than no eye at all,” says Horseshoe glumly.

  The door to the fitting room swings open again as the costume aide returns, her arms heavy with drapings of delicate metallic-mesh cocktail dresses, diaphanous white robes, stiff crinoline underskirts. Through the open door comes a tinkling of music and laughter and, ever so faintly, the sound of thin-walled glasses clinking together in a toast. As the door clicks shut, Patrick can hear Cassidy’s girlish voice squealing at the sight of something the aide has brought in. The four of them sit, waiting. They watch as the Arm fumbles with a protein bar, trying to tear it open at the little notch as the plastic bends and stretches. He readjusts, gripping it like a bag of chips between his fingertips, tugging at the tenacious seam of the packaging. Horseshoe holds out his open palm, and the Arm hands it over. They take turns trying to rend the wrapper with their teeth.

  Patrick stares at the door, troubled. To fill the silence, he squeezes the empty WAT-R bottle in his hand, letting it crinkle and clack. Then he decides to ask. “Hey, guys,” he says with a tentative tone. “Hypothetically speaking. If your wife and your daughter had gone off somewhere in upstate New York to live in some sort of complex with people you don’t know, and they wouldn’t tell you where they had gone and you couldn’t reliably reach them on the phone—what would you think? Would you take it as a pretty bad sign, like they were done with you?”

  The four men sit in their identical armchairs and consider.

  “Two parents, one kid, and a dog. I always thought that would be the perfect combination. That’s what I want, someday,” says Horseshoe at last.

  * * *

  —

  In the parking lot, the white van sits with its back doors agape, headlights cutting through a moving haze that rolls like fog. The sun is gone but a rusty color lingers in the cold night air, like the aftertaste of blood in the mouth on a dry morning. Cassidy Carter walks a few steps ahead, a soft fluffy blanket from Jay’s studio couch wrapped around her like a cape, as Patrick drags a dolly stacked high with sealed boxes. The dolly catches and twists, snagging on small concavities in the asphalt, forcing him to wrap his arm around the load as he tows, as if to comfort it. Her strappy white heels click ahead of him, punching little holes in the silence. When she reaches the open van, she mutters something under her breath. She turns to Patrick.

  “There isn’t any padding here, nothing to secure the cargo,” she complains. She looks at him expectantly and waits, her gaze as narrow as a cat’s.

  “What are you looking at me for?” Patrick responds. He jams his foot behind a dolly wheel to keep it from moving while he squeezes one hand with the other, rubbing out a cramp. His eyes are watering, though he can’t figure out why.

  “Well, maybe find some?” she says.

  “If I had some idea what was inside, maybe I would know how to secure them,” he says. What’s inside is heavy, unwieldy, irregularly shaped—he feels something slipping around when he resettles the boxes on the wheeled platform. From the jostle, he’s imagining bottles of premium liquor—Tito’s, Grey Goose, whatever a B-lister parties with when she’s struggling to stay off the C-list.

  Cassidy looks up at him, her gaze dark and pointed. “Let’s just say it’s valuable, not that fragile, but fragile enough that I want it cushioned and strapped in place.” She lifts herself into the passenger seat while Patrick hefts box after box into the cavernous interior. Stacked on top of one another in an asymmetric cube, the seven boxes look strangely vulnerable, surrounded by feet of empty space. When he slams the doors, the sound echoes through the valley, its aftereffect larger than the event itself. He climbs into the driver’s seat next to Cassidy, who’s scrolling through pages of emojis on her phone.

  “You know,” Patrick says, “I’m going to be loading these boxes into the van for you every day after work. Eventually, I’ll find out what’s inside.”

  Cassidy looks over, her gaze intent. At this moment, she looks like one of the characters she plays on-screen, a wide-eyed girl with a tousled mane and a can-do outlook on life. She looks more beautiful, more alert and refined, he notices, now that she’s paying attention to him. She stares at him longer than he thinks is polite, the blue of her eyes dark in the half-light.

  “I don’t share details about my salary with the public unless I want it to become Twitter bait,” she says flatly.

  “I don’t know who I’d tell,” Patrick replies. “Nobody I know would care.”

  “Okay,” she says. She pauses a moment. “You have to guess.”

  “Is it solid or liquid?” he asks.

  “This isn’t Twenty Questions,” Cassidy replies, annoyed.

  “Fine. Is it alcohol? Vodka? Fancy bottles of wine? Investment wine? Human blood plasma?”

  She shakes her head. “It’s water. Real water.” For the first time since he met her, Cassidy looks ill-at-ease, almost as if it matters to her what he thinks.

  “Why would you get paid in water?” Patrick asks, finding it hard to hide his disbelief. “Did your money person okay this?”

  “I forgot,” says Cassidy pertly, “you’re new to Cal-uh-forn-ya.” The word falls from her mouth with a cartoonish growl, and she laughs loudly and too long. A crazy laugh. They drive in silence, the brake lights from the cars ahead flashing on and off, outlining their faces in unholy red.

  “I feel like it’s a bad idea to get paid in stuff that comes out of the faucet for pennies a gallon,” he says.

  “You haven’t been paying attention, have you? Where you come from, WAT-R is just another bottled beverage product you can buy at the store. Here, it’s all you get unless you have a lot of money and a lot of connections. Brenda and Jay have great connections,” she adds, with a note of sadness. “Since you got here, every shower, every flush, every time you’re thinking of—it was all WAT-R. When they first switched over, you’d see the trucks two or three times a day delivering WAT-R in big jugs, and people were always talking about it. But now, if you pay for deluxe service, they put a tank in the basement and pump it up into the plumbing once a week. You turn the faucet and it pours out, just like in the old days.”

  She pulls a little flask out of her bag and takes a thoughtful sip.

  “I always hated the switch-over, all the cheesy slogans. ‘California’s homegrown liquid goodness.’ ” Cassidy makes a gagging sound. “Like it was invented for fun, and not because we ran out of regular water in the drought. But whatever. I use it in the plumbing like everyone does, but I don’t put that stuff inside my body. There was a time when I was seriously broke and I thought I might have to give up and drink the stuff like some freaking civilian, but then I got them to give me a few more Bellanex bucks.”

  “Is this some sort of lifestyle choice for you? Everybody I’ve seen here drinks WAT-R. It’s perfectly safe,” says Patrick, with authority. He thinks about his hotel room, the faucets on the sink that squeak dryly and produce nothing. The shower, which gives a thin, tepid stream of water when he turns it on, and the trickly sinks in the studio restroom, the restaurant, the coffee shop.

  “Brenda doesn’t,” Cassidy retorts. “Have you heard her do her little shtick? ‘Water? I don’t touch the stuff. Fish fuck in it.’ ”

  “I just don’t understand. WAT-R is water,” Patrick says, looking out at the oddly illuminated sky. “It may be made in a factory, but it’s the same, down to the molecular level. That’s all water is, a molecule. Or a recipe for a molecule. Water in its purest form is a diagram from high-school chemistry.”

  Cassidy just looks out the window. Off to the side of the highway, an orange glow fades into the starless sky. She can see the roadside bramble outlined in the brownish light, the earth hot and thirsty. Just a mile or two away from here, fire crawls across the landscape
, burning and burnt. Orange fronds, like a plant tossing in the wind, are the only thing seen clearly through a scrim of gray.

  “You don’t notice any difference?” she asks, turning to look at him. In the darkness, he can feel the intensity of her face pointed at him, unseeing, and it feels suddenly, inexplicably, like he’s playing a part.

  “It’s water,” he says, “only it comes in different bottles, different markups. All a swindle, I’m sure, an everyday injustice, but not a crime under the law of capital.”

  Cassidy frowns in the too-bright darkness. “It has a taste.”

  “You’re imagining it.”

  “The faintest hint of marshmallow. Or baby powder, or milk. Or maybe it’s that the feeling is wrong, the texture. Like touching dust on a tabletop in a room that nobody has lived in for a while. The gag of your throat when you swallow a hair. It’s less a flavor than…the awareness of a presence.”

  Patrick says nothing. NPR on the radio fades in and out, crackling through the cheap speakers. The van is cozy and dark, though he feels like something bad is about to happen. Then they round the bend and see the moving, living fire: stamped on the flank of the mountain like a brand, a neon sign spelling out a single illegible word.

  “They fight fires with WAT-R now,” says Cassidy, gazing out at the bright wound of light on the hillside. “They say it works even better than the old stuff. Why would that be?” Patrick should be watching the road, but he can’t help turning his head to stare into the blazing, catastrophic eye. The fire leaves a mark on his field of vision, a floating purple shadow like after staring at the sun. The side of his face feels warm, and he turns the van’s feeble air conditioning up another notch. To be so close to disaster, to skirt its hungry edge, and at the same time feel yourself completely safe: it makes Patrick want to hold a human hand in his own, feeling the thin, long bones under the delicate skin, confirming the fragility and persistence of life. The highway curves again, and now the wildfire is in the rearview mirror, a faint afterglow.