Patrick pauses the episode and squints at the screen. There, in the back window of the white stucco villa, he finds the face of a sad-eyed brunette that he recognizes—from a previous episode, or from the un-screen world? Is it his imagination, or does Kassi lock eyes with her and then turn away, flinching, a rare and disturbing expression of horror disarranging the delicate, girlish face? He types s02e01 woman back window mower scene into the search bar of the Kassi Keene episode-guide Wiki, but the results are mealy and imprecise, weak cullings of summary and bland trivia, spattered with keywords from his search string. He opens a new tab and stares at the long, vacant rectangle of the search screen. He thinks of Alison in her purple yoga tank and tights, smooth-lined and side-planked, three thousand miles away, lifting one long arm elegantly up toward the ceiling, her delicate, sensitive head twisted upward in regard of nothing at all. He types, Who is the woman watching Kassi Keene from the mansion in s02e01? and erases it and writes s02e01 Kassi Keene hidden meaning. Suddenly the web unfurls.
Among the now familiar episode recaps and thinkpieces on what it means for Philip Marlowe’s mantle to be taken up by a spunky blond teenager, or what Cassidy Carter’s off-screen antics say about our antiquated Good Girl norms, Patrick discovers links to forums where users break down the hidden messaging in Kassi’s to-camera winks and smiles, the subtle foreshadowing in the episode titles, the punny names of local businesses, and the possible puns that went unchosen. Then there’s something called Kassi Keene Revelators, which boasts over twenty-three hundred members, 108 of whom are online right now, and which seems to be the only forum with new updates every day, every hour. On Revelators, they talk constantly about Missed Connections and TBR—The Big Reveal, a plot twist they believe had been planned for the canceled sixth season, a narrative mega-event that would have cast all of Kassi’s investigations in a newer, darker, more unified light and pointed the way to a mega-crime that exerts its lingering influence on the town of Paradise Cove years or even decades after it first took place.
luka_boy_ohX
Anybody on here ever notice that the demographics of Paradise Cove are not the same as most affluent seaside communities? My uncle lives in a town a lot like PC (East Coast though) and the most prominent group of people there are definitely the retirees. There are elderlies all over the place dressed in slumpy pastels, eating at fish restaurants and lining up on the sidewalk for weekend breakfast. Old people love the ocean. By contrast, Paradise Cove only has people who are pretty much young, teenagers or parents of teenagers or sometimes young adults like the hot IT girl from season 3. Also no real children. I would estimate the average age in town to be around 28 y/o.
Ntuit44player
Interesting to note that 28 years was the average lifespan in Ancient Egypt—the same country and people that Kassi is giving a report on in s03e04, just before learning her father is still alive.
diskordpro415
I definitely have noticed this myself and would add that abnormal population distributions often are found after major catastrophic events like war, natural disasters, or genocides. So this all fits very well with the HaydenStrange8 theory of the First Crime being something pretty big and also violent, as many of us on this site are familiar with. But with a place like PC, where almost everyone left behind is relatively young and hot, it’s not likely to be a catastrophe like war, where young children and the elderly are more or less exempt from the culling. (Ex. one of the less-known consequences of the Black Plague was a shortage of agricultural laborers, helping to speed the decline of the feudalistic agricultural rich.)
More likely it was something like a major biohazard disaster or eco-catastrophe, where the weaker members of a community are taken out disproportionately because of their physical vulnerability.
jonzeewhiskerz
Reading this I feel like you guys have never seen another TV show. TV shows are all young hot people. Except for the ones made for old people that might or might not show old people in them, or the ones for kids that are usually almost all kids.
HowDa132
By that logic, everyone on here who watches KKKD should be a hot person
jonzeewhiskerz
I don’t follow??
iyDkmnWU4mD
Usually on TV shows the producers do a careful job of trying to make the people in the background look normal and show a good cross-section so that towns look average. In Kassi Keene they specifically do not do this. In fact in most TV shows there is a pressure for realism and mimicry of the outside world, i.e. the Reality Simul. What happens on Kassi Keene is intentional. They are sending a message with so much nuance in it that many people like you are sure to miss it, but those who can process and understand TBR will be positioned perfectly to hear and to accept it.
EndlingInLove71
Jonzee: I am curious if you are 100% new to this community or whether you have done your research. Of course there are some ideas on here that can seem random if you haven’t been paying attention, but don’t walk into the NASA control center and start complaining that you can’t fly the rockets. Highr0nymussX’s video-tour through s2 is a good place to start. I find her splice of different terrified expressions on the faces of Paradise Cove extras in the background of Kassi’s scenes particularly convincing. There is DEFINITELY something horrifying going on in that town.
666Imp0Zing
Listen, here’s what we know about First Crime:
It involved the water supply
It happened either before Kassi moved to Paradise Cove or day of
Ron Nifton and Nifty Org were involved, possibly even the perpetrators
Kassi had her memory wiped at least three times but no more than 5, and others had their memory wiped a lot more
Lingering effects are connected to the consumption of Nifty Cola, though adults tend to feel the effect more than children, I dunno why, maybe because they are drinking more of it due to their larger body mass or having more spending money????
Everything else is just speculation!!!
Patrick clicks back to the video player. Cassidy’s features fill the small, rectangular field, blurry at the edges but crisply focused on her face: the shapely, sun-kissed nose as delicate and exact as a tulip. She projects strength and determination from the nose up, but her mouth twists with something hazier. It’s doubt, or maybe fear, which renders her delicate girl-face chimeric, a monstrous stitch-up of real and unreal emotions pushed into unnatural relation, a face reflecting a moment that never happened to a person that never really existed. Her lips glisten with an unreal slick that he knows, instinctively, tastes of factory-made cherry. By pressing PLAY, slipping back into this episode with the next one automatically queued, he is consciously choosing to feel the episode’s emotions rather than his own, he’s choosing to flush his entire system with a cleansing douche of concocted situations, concocted story, concocted feeling, and in doing so to substitute these high-gloss problems for his own concerns, drab and all too real. When the strategy succeeds, it’s almost as if he’s forgotten who he is—what is he, after all, other than a temporarily unique intersection of a body and its problems?—though of course he is still there, propped on his elbows, seal-style, on the motel bedspread.
Kassi Keene finishes the mowing, dead-heads the shriveled beige globes of an out-of-season hydrangea, and collects her pay in a white envelope. Then she walks over to the neighbor’s house and knocks on the door. From the front stoop, she grins her best young, harmless, professional grin, and introduces herself to the flustered man who answers. She says she was doing some yardwork next door for the Morehouses and heard a gunshot. He’s changed his shirt, but there’s still a spray of dog’s blood across the left side of his neck. “It’s a gift to see a young lady like you doing her civic duty, keeping an eye out for her community,” he says brightly, a triangular smile on
his expensively tanned face. “Kudos on that, which I find to be a very healthy sign of the coming generation’s moral fiber. But I have to say, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He grins at Kassi; she narrows her eyes. “So you don’t,” she says, “know anything about a man in a gray suit shooting your toy poodle with a Beretta 92?” The tight smile slackens, but still he insists: “Can’t say that I do, but of course I would call the police straightaway if I saw anything like that happening near me.”
Kassi’s face registers a sudden sadness, a disappointment, as if she can’t believe that anyone could deny the reality of a beloved pet’s death less than an hour after it occurred. Her smile is a short, quick blade as she turns and heads for her truck. “Well, it’s a rare treat to hear that nothing’s wrong. I don’t come across that so often. But be careful: Paradise Cove is the erosion capital of the world. We lose more than fifteen tons of sand per day to the waves and the wind and the foot traffic of tourists. What’s been covered up around here tends to come to the surface sooner or later.”
The motel air tastes of popcorn and hot dust. All afternoon, while he drove back and forth between soundstage and errands, the long afternoon sun had been pouring through the curtainless back window in the bathroom. The fan overhead pushes around the dust, a tint of ochre, something impure. Beneath it his sweat feels unclean, his skin a magnet for whatever grit swirls unseen in the gusts of easterly wind-flow, the flavor invisibly tinged with burning. As Patrick rolls over onto his back, his hand brushes the slice of exposed flesh between his tee shirt and his boxer briefs, and the sensation shivers his flesh. For a moment, he doesn’t recognize the touch as his own. With his eyes closed, there’s the familiar tremor of soft organic matter against living tissue, the irrefutable sensation of a desire not his own, a body curious about his own body, a body looking to feel. Like at a college party, when the hot whisper of a hand against his shoulder had him searching the press of young, humid flesh for the exact anatomy that had reached for his own. When he realizes what’s happened, something crushes a little inside him, oozing a sad, lonely juice. It seems hopeless to wish for somebody to phone him right now, to knock on his motel-room door, but he wishes anyway. He feels like Kassi Keene, ditched by her boyfriend, ditched by her father, motherless and alone, burdened beyond her years. The presence of his body gapes, receptive and opened up to the world.
With sudden interest, he holds his arms up to the light: the bitten-down cuticles, two hands well proportioned but marred by their almost imperceptible pudginess, a quality that he had always felt gave them an unintelligent look. His gaze slides down his still-muscular forearms, mossy with dark, coarse hair. Slowly, he turns his arms over, exposing their pale undersides, traversed by a single track of faded indigo. He twists his torso to turn off the light. Then, in the dark, he rolls onto his side, cradles his right forearm in the gentle grip of his left, and brings his lips toward the warm, living surface for a kiss. Skin meets mouth, but it’s a closed circle: he can’t snip the cord of knowing that links his will to his action to the sensation of both. He can’t un-remember himself as a man in his skivvies in an overheated motel room nursing one bristly arm, unbeloved, alone, trying to create in himself the physical sensation of someone else giving a fuck.
His phone shivers on the nightstand behind him, casts a rectangle of cool blue light. It’s a message from Cassidy: I’m ordered to go to Brenda and Jay’s fucking pool party tomorrow night at the ranch. Will you play driver? I know they’re expecting full persona, lots of shots, vodka luge, dancing in the fountain, all that bullshit. I don’t want to fall asleep someplace fucked up again and wake up to some stranger beating it to the sight of my bare feet.
* * *
—
The driveway is as dark as a backcountry road, narrow and straight, slicing the arid hills in two indistinguishable halves. In the darkness before them, patches of sage and coyote bush flare into bright view and vanish just as quickly, receding in the rearview as Patrick and Cassidy speed by. The pale hairs on her cheeks glow white-edged in the moonlight, and he feels with sudden certainty that something might happen tonight, most likely something bad. Out in the brush, long-limbed rabbits hunch in cover of milkweed, small lakes gleam with secondhand moonlight, and all is silent except for the dingy white vehicle in the hue of a ghost, groaning through the cool evening air. The estate appears on the horizon as a lick of warm flame, a lonesome piece of light that swells as they approach, revealing its finer details: a massive steep-roofed structure sided in blackened cedar, a five-car garage with reclaimed redwood doors, and a bonfire the height of a full-grown man burning in a pit at the center of the roundabout.
Smoothing her updo, Cassidy climbs out of the van and walks through the entrance before Patrick even has time to ask whether she wants to be escorted. She wears a short strapless dress in some sort of medium blue, a simple shape drizzling with long beaded fringe that sparkles expensively in the firelight. As she walks, the beads swing back and forth in time with her ponytail. When the valet comes to the van to take the keys, Patrick is startled to recognize him: it’s one of the production assistants, dressed in a white jacket, a thin-lipped skater with a spiky haircut. Yesterday he had been standing in the parking lot taking photos of the catering-tent collapse on his phone. Patrick had watched as he captured the image of the buckling structure, applied a rainbow filter to it, and put it on loop, so that the tent fell and rose and fell and rose again, a process as natural as breathing. Now, as valet, he opens the driver’s-side door and thrusts his damp palm out to receive the key.
Past the thick, overlarge door, the foyer is as big as a living room, lit by glowing curlicues of light that flicker inside expensively blown glass. The half-vacant space is strewn with furniture objects made out of some smooth-lacquered material and positioned at various heights, evocative of table, chair, console, stool, but not quite projecting the essence of any one thing. Patrick eyes the room beyond, where he sees a portion of Cassidy peeking out from behind a pair of men deep in conversation. Her skinny legs are a uniform, unnatural tan: a color like a Band-Aid. From the way the legs appear to be lengthening, extending, stretching themselves out, she must be leaning back as she talks with someone just out of view. He can’t tell, with such an occluded view, whether she’s enjoying herself or not.
“Could I offer you a glass of champagne as you start off this evening?” says a voice to his left.
Patrick turns and finds Horseshoe holding a gleaming brass tray. His smooth, sloping shoulders look deflated inside the large white uniform. On the tray sit a dozen asymmetrical flutes of sparkling liquid, the shade like wan gold, the glasses stemless and semi-opaque. Nothing in this place resembles itself exactly: every object a witty comment on the object category, a common shape boiled down to its gnarled core and then cast in expensive, heavy material.
“Oh, hey, Pat,” Horseshoe says, his face stirring from its false, servile professionalism to form the outline of a smile. “Are you here to work? If so, you’re late, and you’re probably in trouble.”
“I’m here to go to a party,” Patrick replies, and he pauses for a moment so the next line will register with its proper weight. “I’m here with Cassidy.”
“You mean as her driver?” Horseshoe asks.
“As I don’t know what.” He smooths down the front of his jacket. He’s left the top two buttons of his shirt undone, but when he looks around the room he thinks maybe he should have gone one further. “Why are you playing waiter at Brenda’s party? Is this some hazing thing?”
“A lot of us from the crew opted to work this event in the interest of making a few extra bucks,” answers Horseshoe. “I wouldn’t say these tasks are where our talents lie, but since flexibility and can-do spirit are prized in our industry, you could say that doing something we can’t do is, in fact, the truest culmination of our profession. At least, that’s what someone said back in the kitchen when we were preppin
g the crudités.”
“Are they paying you, you know, better than on set?” Patrick asks, mystified. “Is that why you’re doing this?” He takes a glass from the tray before him and downs it in four deep swallows. His throat clutches around the liquid, but it’s gone all too fast.
“The pay is the same at a per-hour rate, but because we’re doing more work than we would if not working, we’re being paid more,” he explains patiently. “We are making more pay than we would during hours in which we did not work, hours in which we would do ephemeral nonpaying activities, like polishing our own scripts or sleeping, instead. The pay increase over the unpaid scenario is practically infinity-fold if you look at it that way, an incalculability.”
A few guests take glasses from Horseshoe’s tray, drift on to the living room. He turns slightly and nods at them as they walk by, ignoring him. His crisp white jacket—long like a safari jacket, high-necked like a chef’s—twists and bunches against the disruptive motion.
“Of course,” he adds, pointing at his body, “we have to pay for the repair and cleaning of these uniforms if they sustain any damage. But if we do our tasks perfectly, they shouldn’t get damaged at all.”
“It’s cruel to make you wear white under those conditions.”
Something New Under the Sun Page 15
