Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “Wait,” says Patrick, unsure what’s happening to him.

  She continues, soothingly: “Did someone drop you off here, or did you come on your own?” She stares at him. Boredom and sympathy mingle in her gaze. She holds up two clipboards. “Either one is okay—it just changes whether I give you one of the blue forms or one of the yellow ones.”

  He knows that the anger welling up in him is correct, though he can’t explain why. Something disrespectful is happening here, with the girl and her saccharine tone and the vaguely infantilizing roundedness of everything in the room. He knows that the emotion rising to the surface of his face only makes him look weaker.

  “I’m picking up for Brenda Billington,” he says, coldly, emphasizing the powerful name. “I don’t know who you’re mistaking me for, but I’m not filling out any forms.” The girl looks at him questioningly. He hardens his face, pulling everything tight, an angry customer.

  “What are you picking up?” she asks.

  “Look, I’m not sure,” Patrick says. “Brenda just told me to come here and collect a package. I don’t know how big it is, or what’s in it. I’m usually involved in work on this film. I work closely with Cassidy Carter on her projects.”

  The girl’s already wide eyes widen further, Patrick can see the white surrounding her iris as she registers this new information. “Oh, wow. Okay, hold on, I’ll try to figure this out.” She goes back behind the desk and looks through piles of things Patrick can’t see. The sound of paper is loud in the empty room.

  “So,” the girl says shyly, “what’s she like? Is she nice?”

  Patrick doesn’t answer. He’s looking past her, toward the far end of the hall, out of view, where he hears the sound of figures stepping out into the corridor, a murmur of voices swiftly tamped down again. A latch on the door turns, and the space is even quieter than before.

  “Right,” she continues, “I mean, why would that even matter? It’s not like I’m a fan because I think she’s a nice person, otherwise there are tons of randos you could be a fan of. I guess I’m just asking, you know, is she real? Would she order a double cheeseburger without holding any of the sauce, onions, et cetera? Does she own nail-polish remover?”

  “I think she would order the cheeseburger,” Patrick says, distracted. It’s a return of the ominous feeling he’s been having all week that nobody is in charge, alternating with the fearful certainty that the ones in charge are not on my side.

  “Yeah, I thought so. I read a profile of her once where it said she’s the sort of girl you could grab a burger with. That really rang true to me.”

  Patrick leans forward, tries to peer over the counter. A mess of Post-it notes in different kinds of handwriting, a sloping heap of paperwork.

  “Anyway,” she says, rubbing the bridge of her nose as she looks down the short corridor at the closed door. “I need to get my manager. He’ll know what’s here for pickup. Almost everything here is a drop-off. Obviously.”

  Obviously? Patrick watches her walk off, slip past the wooden door and into an area marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. The way she warmed up to him when he said Cassidy’s name made him think of calling his wife, telling her how the washed-up star he’s been working with may still have some pull—though he knows if he called he’d be unlikely to reach her. More likely, he’d get Klaus again, the smarmy Midwestern woodworker whose workshop sat adjacent to the barn wall on which the public pay phone was mounted. He always seemed to have a hand free at the exact right moment, and Patrick was coming to appreciate his sense of humor and the varied woodworking-related metaphors he employed to talk about Patrick’s pain, Patrick’s pushiness, Patrick’s ever-deferred need to pin down what exactly was happening over there in the campfire sing-along cult his wife had run off to. “Imagine that you wish to craft a tool, my friend,” Klaus said, his deep voice nasalized through the tiny meshed opening in Patrick’s smartphone, “in order to accomplish a very specific purpose. Let’s say you have a bunch of nails and you want to make a hammer. Do you create a hammer by hammering a piece of wood? Can you hammer a piece of wood into shape? No, you need to shape the handle, cut away at the extraneous matter, chisel the place for a thumb to rest, create a smooth and sanded domicile for the hand. The beauty of creating a tool is that you perform a thousand ambient, proximate actions in order to coax out the one function you really need. And though it feels like you’re beating around the bush, you are in fact preparing the bush to reveal what it holds within: a full and flourishing flock of red-winged blackbirds that burst out, full of joy, and circle the sun. Do you see what I mean, Patrick?”

  While Klaus was speaking, Patrick always felt that the meanings of his little folksy stories were as clear as hospital Plexi, but afterward he’d wonder: In this analogy, was his love the hammer or the nails? Was it the thoughtfully crafted handle, or the heavy, misshapen lump of metal that formed the head of the object, a monstrous element the rest of the object struggled to support? In the empty waiting room, he can hear voices from the far end of the long corridor, the muffled rasp of one voice arguing, heavy institutional latches sliding loudly in and out of place in the stale, sun-drenched air. He can’t sit still; he feels as though he’s been shoved back to some lesser developmental state, a child waiting to see the dentist, powerless over his own consequences. He stands up and straightens his slacks, lets himself wander into the mouth of the long corridor leading away from the office, where the ponytailed girl argues with her manager, pushing into the heart of the building. The combination of lemon-scented cleaner and freshly unrolled carpet gives him a feeling halfway between headache and fatigue.

  Deep in the corridor, there’s a birth-canal feeling. Patrick, I’m warning you, reads the message from Cassidy that just popped up on his phone. The hallway is so narrow he can feel the walls at his flanks, dim and silent and constrictive. He suddenly realizes that this building is something other than the utilitarian office zone it presented from the road. Miles of tight walkways coiled within the deceptive boxiness of the mirrored façade, hallways funneling toward deeply remote spaces at the center of the building, far from sunlight or unforced air. A tumbleweed-blond clump of hair wobbles in a half-lit corner. He takes two right turns, until he’s so deep inside the building that it gives off its own rhythm. Liquid shifts in the pipes above; air stirs slowly and comes to a halt.

  Then, in the hallway before him, he sees a sudden bright rectangle lit up as vividly as a flat-screen TV. It’s a window as wide as an aquarium wall, through which Patrick can see figures moving. He draws closer, stands at the edge of the glass. To his dark-adjusted eyes, the light is so bright it stings.

  Inside the frame, a dozen men and women wait in a tiled room, wearing shapeless gowns the vivid, manic green of the vans and lobby. Against the supersaturated hue, the pinks and browns of their skin seem to wilt, marred by wrinkles and folds and areas where the flesh has gone loose. Their bodies come in all ages, all sizes, all races: an old man with a concave chest and a thin-legged boy whose fish-pale body makes Patrick think of middle-school locker rooms. A young Asian woman sits open-mouthed, her expensive hair tinged with streaks of honey-blond and twitching gently in unseen airflow. If this group of people were seen together in public, wearing normal clothes and smiling, their presence together would be a riddle to solve. He watches them sitting on a scatter of chairs, or silently upright with an infinitesimal sway in their stance. Their gazes point in all different directions, each one looking at nothing in particular—but at different nothings, in different places.

  Then a door opens, and an assistant comes in. She wears the uniform of the Cassidy-obsessed girl at the front desk, a green polo and tan slacks. With her short-cropped hair, she reminds him of his sixth-grade art teacher, a woman who once stood at the front of the classroom and in one fluid gesture drew a flawless circle on a piece of butcher paper taped against the wall. Patrick watches as she walks over to a man with an uneve
nly shaved head and cups his jaw in her soft, slightly pudgy hand, tilting his gaze upward. With her other hand, she pulls a small bottle from her pocket, inverts it, and holds it above. A small nozzle hovers directly over his eyeball, an inch from the white. He sees the brief glint of liquid falling, and then the nurse shuts the man’s eyelids and massages them for a few seconds before sliding them back open and moving on to the next patient.

  One by one, the nurse places a drop in each eye of every man or woman or child in the room. When she rubs their closed lids, the gesture is gentle and grimly efficient. In a matter of minutes, she finishes and leaves the room. Patrick watches the inert figures fail to move, their small movements unconscious and barely perceptible, like flowers on an airless afternoon. Their moistened eyes glisten under the bright lights. Through the thick, presumably polarized pane of glass a moaning can be heard, but Patrick does not know whom to notify about this, whom to tell.

  On his way out the door, the girl at the desk hands him a flier. “You can give this to a friend,” she says brightly, “if you don’t need it yourself!” The green paper is printed with bold black text:

  ARE YOU OK?

  IF YOU ARE EXPERIENCING ANY OF THESE SYMPTOMS:

  MEMORY LOSS

  SWOLLEN FINGERS

  UNEXPECTED CLOTTING

  HALLUCINATION OF WATER

  HALLUCINATION OF BIRDS

  DIFFICULTY RECALLING MEMORIES

  UNABLE TO CRY OR SWEAT

  DENSE TEARS OR SWEAT

  UNREQUITED AFFECTION

  IRREGULAR OR INADEQUATE BLINKING

  MAN IN SUIT

  YOU MAY BE IN URGENT NEED OF TREATMENT!

  VISIT YOUR NEAREST MEMODYNE CLINIC FOR A CONSULTATION!

  * * *

  —

  Standing in the cool shadow of the soundstage, Cassidy Carter presses her phone to the side of her scowling face and listens to Patrick’s voicemail recording for the umpteenth time. She texts Brenda and then Jay, asking if they have an ETA on her pickup. She calls the motel in Azusa and leaves a message with the front desk: “Tell him that I’ve wasted almost three hours now waiting—that’s worth at least a few thousand in potential income. If he pushes me too far, I’m going to bill him for the opportunity cost,” she tells the apologetic front-desk boy on the other end of the line, whose teenage voice is as tender as a ripe nectarine. She scrolls through the list of contacts on her phone, names she owes a favor to and names that are good for a few hours at a club and nothing more. Her old manager’s number is still in her phone—she’s deleted it before, but always finds herself digging through old papers a couple days later, looking for the handwritten digits. Her high-profile exes are there, along with the secret exes she saved under innocuous aliases. She even has Rainer Westchapel’s number, though she’s never called. Of course he’d recognize her name, but the thought that he wouldn’t remember that afternoon on the hot, inland road makes her furious.

  As she swipes idly from the top of the list to the bottom and back, the only name that gives her pause is June’s. Her sister’s last text sits unanswered in her message inbox, two years old. She opens it up sometimes and reads it if she needs a little push for crying in a scene. Take care of yourself Butch, please go easy on your body and your heart. When she’s down on herself and looking to feel worse, she thinks of June, whom she hasn’t spoken to in almost three years, and meditates on all the happy, intact families who fuck up and still manage to forgive one another. She could phone June now, but why bother? More hushed, overly gentled questions about how she’s feeling, whether she’s being careful, whether she’s treating her life like a gift, reminders that she’s not good enough to be around until she stops drinking or doing drugs or lashing out in anger—in other words, until she starts acting more like June. Even imagining the conversation they might have fills her with the bad-news itch to call just to tell her sister that she uses drugs when she feels like it or needs to, drugs don’t use her. Instead, she phones Kiki Bennett, a hair-dye entrepreneur turned rapper, who doesn’t pick up. Scrolling down, she chooses another name, the daughter of a big-deal singer with an oversized, grating laugh. The phone rings and rings quietly in her hand. The summer sun presses down through her straw fedora, casting pin dots of bright white on her bare thighs. Between calls, she idly dials her own number, even though she knows no one is home to pick up.

  Thirty-six miles away, the phones ring in seven different rooms of Cassidy Carter’s seven-bedroom, eight-bathroom home, sitting unattended on its 1.3-acre lot, baking under the late-afternoon sun. As the temperature climbs, the central cooling comes on automatically, pushing new-smelling air through shiny gold vents. In the eight empty bathrooms, identical scented diffusers leak factory vetiver through oil-soaked reeds, saturating the room. In each unoccupied bedroom, a tufted queen bed frame upholstered in steely gray and adorned with decorative nail heads appears new and unused, coated in a near-imperceptible layer of dust. A vintage-look radio on the nightstand plays staticky top-forty to no one. Soft tufts of lint and old hair stir in the corners, shivering in the invisible breeze. After ten minutes, the air shuts off. In the kitchen downstairs, an internet-linked refrigerator senses the rising interior temperature and whirs into action, loudly ejecting dozens of ice cubes into a holding tank.

  On mottled granite countertops, a family-sized container of Scandinavian yogurt sits lidless next to a pint of organic blueberries, gradually reaching room temperature. A fly beats itself against the plate glass. The water heater in the basement below switches on and off at fifteen-minute intervals, keeping the water at a steady middling temperature in case someone was to enter the house, make their way to one of the eight generous bathrooms, and turn on the hot-water faucet. The water heater is hooked up to a household-sized sack of WAT-R Pure, the liquid murky and faintly blue within a thick cloudy skin of plastic. The house a half-living thing, multi-lunged and plushly organed, steeped in electricity and suspended in a continual sigh, the rhythm of its functions too massive, too slow, for any real creature. Breathing out and never in, exhaling constantly into the world.

  Out back, dark tufts of clover and nub nettles poke through the flagstones as the sprinkler starts up, broken, sputtering onto the dust. Wetness pools in the hollow around the fist-sized spigot, gathers, and overflows, trickling into a cluster of dead, embrittled rosebushes. When the wind sweeps through, the sound is dry, dry against dry: the scraping of edges paper-thin and multiple, expensive plants turned to tinder. Across the property line, the yellow brush grows thicker, thornier, and more wild. Gopher snakes slide smooth-bellied through the grasses, seeking warm, living meat in the hidden burrows; dull, palm-sized birds burst out and vanish again into the scrub. Every sound is a body moving through the world, a pair of eyes and a small trembling heart. The dust-colored birds dart in and out of the sky. Something launches from the dirt road, a grasshopper with wings that fold invisibly back into the torpedo of its body. Past a sign marking the petroleum line running beneath, bramble gives way to live oaks with small, hard leaves, nestled in the elbow of the canyon, where the water pools in the runoff.

  There, by the base of the oaks, a heap of fur in ragged brown and beige: the shape like a dog’s, but with a savage point to its muzzle. The coyote lies on its side in the open. Its breath comes calm and even, like that of a sleeping thing—if it’s dying, it doesn’t know. With eyes open and tongue trembling against the bone-white teeth, it stares straight forward, past the variegated grasses, and paddles with its feet, pawing at the air, running in place, running nowhere, as the raptors circle overhead.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  Viewed from above, the parking lot of the WAT-R SuperCenter on Sunset is a vast system of dark pools and narrow pathways, interconnected lakes that quench no thirst. There’s one lot for families wit
h more than two children, one for fuel-efficient and electric vehicles, one for mobility-limited customers and one for customers with compromised immune systems, a lot for Diamond Club members, who spend more than fifty thousand a year on WAT-R Solutions, and a special lot for Fusion Club cardholders, who spend three times that annually, paved in polished granite and ornamented by a lighted moving walkway that carries Fusion Elites to a private entrance, where automatic doors whoosh open with a sound like a sigh. Then there’s the overflow lot, extending eight stories beneath the gleaming glass cube: like a glacier, only a fraction of the structure is visible to the unaugmented eye. Patrick guides the bulky rent-a-van down narrow subterranean channels, turning left and left again, the turns tightening, like they’re spiraling down into the deep center of a nautilus shell.

  “Park over there,” says Horseshoe from the cargo hold, pointing at a narrow rectangular gap, better suited for a coupe. In the passenger seat, the Arm stares out the window with an emptied-out look on his face.

  “We’ll all have to crawl out the loading doors,” Patrick gripes, but he pulls in anyway, the vehicle crawling at a speed so low that it sometimes feels like it isn’t moving at all. He squeezes himself out through the driver’s side as Horseshoe escorts the Arm out the back, supporting his midsection and helping him to figure out the tricky door handle. It seems to Patrick that there’s something wrong with the older, taller kid, the one who seemed more in charge that first day by the pool (why can’t Patrick ever remember his name?), something that can’t be chalked up to unrequited love or getting baked before work. But Horseshoe insists that the Arm is simply a sensitive soul, and when his morale picks back up he’s sure to have gleaned new insights from this ruminative period.