Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “I still haven’t seen a copy of the script,” says Patrick casually. “I don’t know if you need me to, you know, sign off on it or anything. I’d just be curious to see what your screenwriter has done with the book.”

  “Do we need him to sign off, Jay?” Brenda asks, warmly. “On the changes our screenwriter made? I don’t think so, right?”

  Jay shakes his head.

  “So maybe he can just scrounge up a copy of the script around the office?” Brenda asks. “Sometime next week? I’m sure there’ll be an extra one lying around when somebody isn’t using it.”

  The two nod at each other enthusiastically.

  “How are you enjoying California?” asks Jay, warmly, turning to face him.

  “I think there are coyotes living in the hill behind my hotel,” replies Patrick, distracted. “In the middle of the night they cry out—they sound like hurt children.”

  “They sure do,” says Brenda.

  Jay nods. “It’s how we live here, I suppose, pressed up against the underbelly of the wilderness. Just last month, a deer drowned in my swimming pool. No, really. We like to joke that we should have put the pool cover on.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for everything bad that happens in the world, Jay,” Brenda replies with sudden tenderness, placing a hand on his hand. “The world is a place where terrible things just happen.”

  She stands up unexpectedly, waving toward the mouth of the restaurant. Patrick can see that something has changed in the room. Though no one turns or stares, their bodies gravitate toward the unseen figure making her way through space dense with servers and hostesses and wait-listers angling for a table, the way the limbs of trees, bent subtly in the same direction, reflect the passage of wind and sun. Her presence makes actors of them all, as they set about doing the exact thing they had been doing before, carefully ignoring the focus of their attention. She parts the throng in a tissue-thin sweater and white jeans, the knees carefully and expensively torn. It’s Cassidy Carter, her hair like a doll’s and her face also like a doll’s, astonishing in person, like seeing a picture come to life. Under her left arm she carries a pearlescent white motorcycle helmet, the glossy surface scuffed on one side.

  “God, I’m so sorry I’m late,” she says breathlessly, leaning toward Brenda and grabbing her arm to pull her into a sort of half-hug. “I was at a meeting downtown about doing some ad campaign, and it took forever to get out of there. I’m starving; did you order any apps?”

  Jay stands up and envelops her in a hug. “So good to see you, Cass. Glad you could make it.”

  Patrick also stands up. “Hi,” he says, “Patrick Hamlin. Did you come on a motorcycle?”

  “No, what?” she says.

  “Your helmet,” he says.

  “It’s Chanel.” On the helmet’s flank, the conjoined “C”s glisten.

  “Listen, Cass,” Jay interjects, “what are you drinking? Tell the nice man what you want.” He gestures at the waiter standing near them, holding a basket of handmade tortillas.

  “I’ll have a double tequila with soda and a glass of water,” says Cassidy, her lips full and precise like the perfectly chiseled mouth of a Roman statue. She eyes the bottle on the table. “And I’ll take a glass for a little of that red, too.”

  “Yes, miss,” says the waiter, turning to go.

  “Wait,” says Cassidy. “I want water, not the knockoff, I want a hundred percent. Do you have anything nice, from Norway or Finland or something?”

  “I’ll bring you our menu,” says the waiter, nodding slightly.

  Jay slides into Patrick’s side of the booth, and Cassidy slips in next to Brenda. Brenda orders the chaparral-smoked mountain trout, and Cassidy orders the kumquat-grilled quail from the photo. When the waiter gets to Patrick, Jay steps in and orders an elk steak for each of them, cooked rare. “It’s his first time here,” Jay explains to the waiter. “He doesn’t know yet that this is exactly what he wants.” When the food comes, Brenda asks if Patrick would be willing to switch places with her. He squeezes out past Jay and lets her in. As Jay leans back against the soft, spongy material of the booth, Brenda leans over and cuts his elk into neat little squares. Under the expensive lamplight, each cube looks like an ounce of blood, fixed in an impossible, unnatural shape. Patrick looks down at his steak. He imagines an elk walking through pine forest at dusk, the soft crush of hoof on pine needles, a gleaming red wedge missing from its back thigh. Cassidy is pulling the legs off her quail and turning the tiny body over onto its back to dismantle.

  “So, Cassidy,” Jay begins. “We were having this scheduled sit-down with Patrick here, per our contractual agreement, and then Brenda had the idea of touching base with you before the real action begins. We thought we’d combine, make it into a party. What’s your mood—are you ready to start shooting next week? We have the table read tomorrow. Want somebody to pick you up?”

  “Oh, don’t bother, Jay,” she says with a smile that flickers a little, like a lighter low on fuel, before blazing into a big toothy grin. “I’ll get myself there, no problem. I love driving. And I’ve been getting up early every day for Bikram, anyway, so it’ll be real simple. I love starting the day with a little healthy sweat, to ease out the toxins.” She cocks her head and smiles like a sexy mouse.

  Patrick looks over at Cassidy: she’s sitting as straight as a schoolgirl, her chin tilted just slightly up so that her smooth white neck looks long, like a bird’s. In her filmy, sky-blue sweater and her spotless white jeans, she looks earthy and ethereal at once. It’s difficult, though not impossible, to square this poised, gracious woman with the feral girl in the video, swinging the jug of detergent like a gladiator’s club. He reaches for his glass and gulps down a throatful of WAT-R. The cold liquid presses outward against the soft, inner pink tube like a stone; its mass could choke him, but it vanishes so quickly into the dark below.

  “Well, let us know if you begin to feel even a whiff of fatigue and we’ll send someone over there with a bottle of water and some Emergen-C, and they’ll drive you straight to the office. It’s no problem. Maybe Patrick here will do it.”

  “That’s a great idea, Jay,” Brenda replies. “Patrick isn’t like any other PA. He’s a brilliant writer, and, to be blunt, he doesn’t have the experience the other PAs do, he’ll be clunking around the set. He needs a special task, and Cassidy needs a special assistant. It’ll be more interesting for the both of you than some nobody.”

  Cassidy looks bored. “I’ll drive myself tomorrow,” she says. “First-day-of-school stuff. I want to show off my car. After that, whatever.”

  Jay grins. “Then it’s settled. Patrick will ferry you to the studio starting next week.” He reaches forward and squeezes Patrick’s biceps two times in quick succession. “Saves us a bit on payroll, anyway, if we don’t need to hire a driver.”

  Patrick doesn’t bother to remind them that he doesn’t have a car. Brenda is looking at her phone. Patrick saws furtively at his steak as she types a response, emitting a blur of small clicks and beeps. Then Brenda begins to stand up. “Will you excuse us for a second?” she says to Cassidy and Patrick. “We need to get on a call,” she whispers to Jay. The two of them walk away slowly into the crowd, their heads close together.

  Alone in the booth, Cassidy looks at Patrick, unimpressed. She sighs and sinks down, gnawing delicately on a miniature quail wing. Her blond hair leaves a staticky golden web on the velvet upholstery.

  “So,” says Cassidy flatly. “They’re fucking.”

  “Who?” asks Patrick. A moment too late, he realizes she means Jay and Brenda, of course.

  “Who else?” she snaps. “Either they’re sleeping together, or she’s his mom. Cutting up his food. It’s bad news for both of us, but worse news for you.” She stares at him for several long beats. “How’s that steak?” she asks.

  “It tastes like it onc
e ate a lot of tough wild roots and grasses,” he replies.

  Cassidy laughs a loud, flat laugh that he hasn’t heard before. “Jay’s made me eat that elk steak before,” she confides. She grasps her wineglass around the bulb, the widest part, her nails clicking against it. “Now, instead, I do what I want. Listen, when you’re the actress, they want to see you eating salads with a knife and fork. It makes you look soft, and that really gets them off. That’s why I always make a point of ordering something at the high end of the price range. Something a little cruel that might make your average person feel bad if they took a moment to imagine how it died. This way, you tell them that they’re the ones who are soft.”

  She looks down at his East Coast loafers.

  “You’re new in town,” she says, sympathetically. Then she tosses back her entire drink. Brenda and Jay come in, their faces sobered, Jay’s smile a little less smug. They slide back into their side of the booth. Brenda catches the eye of a busboy and draws a checkmark in the air.

  “Are you two ready to go?” Jay asks, a tad grimly.

  “Sure, Captain,” replies Cassidy cheerfully. “Just one sec.”

  She picks up the little body of the cooked quail, just four inches long and picked clean except for the pale, slender left breast. In her delicate hand, the quail carcass is the size and shape of a human heart, a tender scrap of life that once darted through carpeting of leaf mulch in search of small bugs and hid for safety in the warm, dark rot of a hollow log. Because of their small brain-to-body ratio, quail are often described as the least intelligent of birds, useful in laboratory experiments because of the relative artlessness of their mental processes and the speed with which they gestate—with small brains and simple bodies, a quail can reach sexual maturity in just six weeks. Quail eggs hatch within sixteen to seventeen days, just a bit faster than the eighteen to twenty-one days in a mouse’s gestational cycle: for this reason, the experimental quail is often called “the mouse of birds.” But, unlike the mouse, the quail shares the diurnal lifestyle of human beings: it sleeps through the night in a single, unbroken stretch—except during long winter nights, when, like a human being, it sometimes wakes in the middle of the night and falls back asleep.

  Jay and Brenda watch with troubled looks on their attractive, successful faces. With the slightest of winks in Patrick’s direction, Cassidy brings the quail carcass to her mouth and bites into it firmly—like an apple. From deep inside its body, tiny bones snap softly in two.

  * * *

  —

  In the lobby of the Hacienda Lodge, a metal rack holds rows of instant-oatmeal packets and individually packaged breakfast cereals in the less-fun flavors, like Apple Jacks and Cheerios. A pitcher of 2-percent milk sits next to a pitcher of orange juice, condensation beading on the plastic surface. The coffeemaker is making a sound like a car’s engine, but nothing comes out: the pot is as empty as it was five minutes ago. Patrick stands at the waffle station, measuring out batter from a pitcher and pouring it into a Styrofoam cup. He must be hungover, because watching the batter slither out through the spout makes him want to barf. He opens the waffle maker and sprays it with a fine mist of fake butter, then pours in the batter and turns the handle to flip it. In forty-five seconds, the batter is cooked and the machine beeps. It makes a perfect waffle every time.

  Last night, he stayed up until four in the morning watching Cassidy Carter’s greatest hits:

  Camp Do-What-Ya-Wanna, Carter’s first lead role, where, in the absence of camp counselors or any other adult authorities, she quickly convinces her eight-to-twelve-year-old peers that the best form of government is not the completely unstructured anarchy that they instinctively pursue but a system of near-total social freedom tempered by collectivized labor and shared chores. In no time flat, she’s incentivized the other kids not only to restore the dining hall to pristine condition after an epic food fight, but also to grow basic staple crops in a sunny field adjacent to the campground and assemble a shortwave radio from scavenged parts so that they can contact the outside world.

  Happy Birthday, Miss Teen President! features Cassidy as the fourteen-year-old vegan punk-rocker Rousseau Sinclair, who assumes the role of commander-in-chief via an obscure clause in an earlier, legally primary draft of the Constitution. Shortly after her father, mother, and the entire presidential Cabinet are put into comas triggered by eating bad lobster at the inaugural dinner, Rousseau becomes not only the first female president of these United States, but the first person under the age of thirty-five to hold the highest office in the land. Despite some disturbing pro-monarchic undertones to the plot, the movie is a heartwarming ode to the possibility of compromise across political divides, as Teen President Sinclair convinces the House majority leader and minority leader to come together over a Pizza Hut dinner on a bill to ban trophy hunting in the continental United States.

  In each film, Cassidy Carter, the blue-eyed outsider with a nose like a beautiful, barely remembered dream, channels her golden-haired optimism into an irresistible, idealistic rallying cry. “This land is our land, and now this skateboard is your skateboard,” she tells the crabby, wizened Senate minority whip, as she teaches him how to do an ollie on the somber white steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Patrick wants to be dismissive of it all, but he can’t quite muster the cynicism: what red-blooded American doesn’t dream of becoming a true believer, a foot soldier for the worthiest cause? But the morning after, he’s dry-mouthed and distracted, ideologically queasy, and preoccupied by how many hours of movie he watched in quick, brutal succession the night before. It feels like a hangover, but he drank only a single drink at the restaurant and nothing but WAT-R for hours after.

  He still has a couple hours before the production kids show up to drive him to the studio, so he decides to walk to the Starbucks he saw when the rideshare was dropping him off last night, just a few minutes down the road. As he walks, he calls the number Alison gave him. It rings and rings without end, with no voicemail or answering machine to break the rhythm. He’s walking away from the hills, toward a white and shining strip of shopping at the end of his line of sight, wavering in the heat. On the newly poured sidewalk, there are no shade trees, and no foliage overhead to deflect the sunlight that presses down on him from above, making his scalp hot and tender to the touch. To his right, small, frail oaks with sparse leaves of uncertain green, girthed like a child’s arm and supported by ropes and stakes driven down into the soil. He feels a wooze of lazy despair pass through him, a feeling like suicidal ideation but lacking the specificity. Up ahead, rows of white stucco stores and offices, fading into the distance like a mirage. Though he takes step after step, somehow it doesn’t feel like he’s getting anywhere at all.

  In front of a frozen-yogurt store, Patrick sinks down to the curb and sits there in the shadow of a parked Range Rover. He feels a vein pulsing at his temple; his tongue is cottony and dry. He used the last of the jumbo bottle of WAT-R to wash his face this morning. He needs to buy another. Crouched in this patch of shade, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone. Then he calls the Oswego number ten times in a row, the spinning feeling in his stomach growing as the phone rings on and on. On the eleventh try, someone picks up.

  “Hello?” says the voice of a young man, someone in his twenties, maybe.

  “Hello?” asks Patrick. “Who is this?”

  “Who is this?” says the voice on the other end of the line.

  “Where are you?” he tries, growing irritable.

  “Where are you?” says the voice, laughing, like it’s a joke.

  “Look,” says Patrick. “I’m Alison Hamlin’s husband. I want to talk to her. Put her on the phone right now.”

  “Whoa, man,” says the voice. “Calm yeself. I just happened to be walking by and heard the pay phone ringing and I answered, as a matter of philosophy I believe in answering a call wherever and whenever it arises. That’s how we tend to
manage the telephone issue around here—we don’t get all territorial about stuff. I don’t see Alison around; she must be off in one of the cabins.”

  “Well, find that cabin and tell her I need to speak to her!” Patrick shouts.

  “I’m actually headed out right now for a hike. But, hey, I think I see your kid. Nora, right? Hold on.”

  The phone receiver drops with a clatter, and Patrick hears the sound of footsteps moving farther and farther away.

  “Hello?” he says, to nobody.

  Sitting in the parking lot, he watches the cars pull out and drive away. A large green van pulls in and cuts its engine, the sound uncomfortably human, like a death rattle. Then, softly, a voice on the other end of the line.

  “Hi?” it says, as thin as floss.

  “Nora, is that you?” says Patrick. Hearing her voice is unexpectedly emotional; his throat feels chokey; he’s so far from home. “How are you, sweetie?”

  “Dad, are you feeling okay? You sound…morose, I guess.” Nora’s speech, crisp and articulate, has often felt a little eerie to him, coming as it did from the mouth of a nine-year-old girl. The horror, he supposed, of waking up one day to find yourself watched by another mind, a mind capable of scrutiny and judgment.

  “No, honey, I’m fine. Where are you?”

  “In the woods. Up near the thumb of New York State. That’s what Mom says.”

  “What city, Nora?” Patrick presses.

  “I don’t know, Dad. I’m sorry. I’m not the one who does the driving.” Nora’s voice is calm, if a little bit confused.

  “You two drove there together? How long did it take? Did you feel safe on the drive, or did anything bad happen?”

  “It was a normal drive,” she says quietly. “I think so. It was long, I guess, longer than I’ve been on before. Did we do something wrong?”

  “No, it’s okay. Honey, you need to tell me what you’re doing up there. I mean, what’s it like?”