“Fucking assassin!” Cassidy shouts at Horseshoe, who seems flattered at first to be yelled at by the star of Yesteryears and Daddy Lessons and his personal favorite, Daughter of Invention, until it begins to sink in how angry she is. “I don’t drink that fake water—it doesn’t touch my lips. Got it?”
“But it’s not fake,” Horseshoe says meekly, his eyes scared but amazed. He’ll be telling stories about this moment for years to come. “I got it from the dispenser with your name on it, I’m pretty sure.” There’s a dazed, involuntary smile on his face, something he knows he’s doing but can’t figure out how to stop.
“Don’t try to manage me,” she snaps. “I know the taste. I know when something’s not right. Oh my god, my heart is racing. I think I’m having a reaction, I feel…faint.” She turns to face the rest of the crew. “Listen, everyone, I’ll say this once. I have a deadly allergy to fake water. Anyone who tries to feed me that hyphenated crap as some sort of sick joke is fired.” She pauses, an unsteady look in her eye. “I don’t feel right. Someone find Patrick. Tell him to get me some good water from Brenda and Jay’s office.” She turns slowly, searching the wide, vacant spaces. “I think I need to sit,” she says and then she stops, breathing hard and swaying, transforming her body into a droopy flower. The crowd around her lurches into action; a folding chair is brought and unfolded, Cassidy’s pale, bony body arranged for comfort and fanned with a sheaf of production schedules. She murmurs apologies as she shields her face from the weight of the bright light looming above.
At the other end of the vast structure, in front of the catering tent, Horseshoe finds Patrick by the candy bowl, his breath reeking of sugar. He tells him that Cassidy had an allergic reaction and needs some water from the executive office. “Real water,” he says with emphasis, “or she’ll kill you.”
Patrick opens the heavy door and slips inside. Brenda and Jay share a single long, L-shaped desk, a glass pane balanced atop a spidery metal structure. He checks the files on top of the desk, memos in bolded, bullet-pointed Arial and piles of spreadsheets gridding blandly page after page. In the filing cabinets behind them, he finds eight pairs of velvet loafers embroidered with emblems of predatory animals and some jars full of prebiotics, postbiotics, herbal remedies pulverized and encapsulated. He can’t find any of the packages he and the other PAs have been picking up all over the Greater Los Angeles County. But then, in the corner, where Cassidy’s daily ration of water sits boxed and ready to be carted out to the big white rental van, Patrick sees manila folders with no label on the outside. Inside, invoices like the ones he’s been sent out with on pickups. He pulls out his phone and takes a photo of the first document, then the next, and the next.
Meanwhile, surrounded by concerned techs, assistants, and producers, Cassidy Carter’s condition deteriorates. She tilts her head back and moans, new sweat gleaming on her brow. She asks for water, then air, then water again. And suddenly she wilts in the folding chair, her shoulders slipping down the plastic chair back like a sweater sliding off a hanger, the whole body limp and flimsy and sliding slowly onto the ground. “She’s fainted,” they murmur to one another, as hands reach forward to grab the slender shoulders and elevate the head, press fingers and palms to her clammy skin. “Does anybody have Jay’s number?” they say, and “Who’s got her water, can you check on that?” But at the moment when someone suggests that they call an ambulance, she sits up, adjusts her wig, and picks herself off the ground. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she says, “I’ll get it myself,” and she walks off the bright and heavily watched stage, into the chilly darkness.
Sitting in a folding chair in a dark corner of the soundstage, she watches her phone light up as the photos that Patrick took appear on her screen, one by one. You don’t have to be a genius detective, she thinks, to notice that these invoices show payments owed to the film’s production company, not payouts to vendors. In her decade and a half of hustling on film sets and in TV studios, this would be the first project she’s seen that’s collecting on debts from surrounding businesses, rather than paying them off. She feels a little giddy with the discovery, and also a little dizzy. She tries to text Patrick with the news, but for a moment she can’t remember how to spell his name. It’s only later that afternoon that it occurs to her that she doesn’t really know what was in that plastic cup the kid handed to her on set. She meant to cause a scene, accuse him of making a mistake, but the kid was green and who knows what he gave her? It was only a sip, only for effect, but didn’t it have a strange taste? Not a taste but an aftertaste, not an aftertaste but a dark omen. Didn’t that sip of liquid remind her somehow of the sugar-sweet coating of a pill?
* * *
—
“So…how many of these places are we visiting tonight, boss? Don’t forget about the fire—we’ll be taking the long way to get anywhere.” Cassidy curls into the red plastic chair, her sneakers perched on the molded lip. She reaches out for another handful of fries, her arm brushes her smooth, bare knees. In the black lenses of her sunglasses, worn indoors to minimize recognizability, Patrick can see the reflection of rows and rows of fast-food fluorescents, lights designed to beam twenty-four hours a day. Everything feels oddly wholesome here, oddly familiar but shiny and new, like he’s young again. In Cassidy’s company, he feels at least ten years younger—to be more precise, it feels like he’s forgotten the past ten years of his life. He’s standing again at the start of a career, and anything could happen, some of it bad. Behind the counter, teenagers in red hats scoop servings of French fries and chicken nuggets from large, deep vessels.
“Well,” Patrick says, something fluttering in the middle space of his body, “I got about twenty-three addresses off the invoices in Brenda and Jay’s office. These six are in the San Fernando Valley, not too far. I thought we could try to cross as many of these off our list tonight as we can. They’re office-park locations; at least a couple seem to be memory clinics. For ROADies,” he adds, the slang sitting awkwardly on his tongue.
“Okay, okay, cool,” she replies. “We’ll have to take the highway, and it’ll be fucking slow. But it should be all right.”
She grabs his vanilla milkshake, swivels the straw around to check the thickness. Plastic shrieks softly against plastic, a material wail. She pops the lid off and holds the dripping straw in her right hand, while with the left she brings the cup of cold, sweet liquid to her glossy mouth. She replaces the lid loosely and pushes the cup back across the table into Patrick’s warm, empty grasp.
“Do you think we’re going to go inside tonight, poke around?” Cassidy asks.
Patrick remembers the dark hallway, the window into the room where he had seen those fully grown bodies posed and helpless. Eyes open and empty of will, empty of vigor. He shudders. He doesn’t want to feel the doors close behind him, shutting him in.
“I’ve never been inside a memo-clinic,” she says, more quietly this time. “My sister worked at one for a little bit, after she quit being my assistant. She always wanted to help people.” Cassidy’s pointy fingers claw quote marks into the air. “I was, like, Help me! Help your sister! But she couldn’t stand to be around the industry anymore. She said the business was rotting me like a tooth. As if there were something out there that wouldn’t rot you.” She laughs short, bitter. “She must have hated working at the clinic—she quit to go learn acupuncture. She had only been there a few weeks.”
“Does she still do acupuncture?” Patrick asks.
“How would I know?” she replies. “Am I a psychic mind-reader?”
“You don’t talk to her?” He’s thinking about his own distant loved ones, gallivanting in a hippie meadow as Klaus picks up his call at the pay phone. The technology that allows you to reach anyone in the world also allows you to perceive them ignoring you in real time. “I just find that incredibly sad. Family is something irreplaceable; you can’t just order another.”
“If y
ou have such a hard-on for family, why are you here with me, about to skulk around in dark parking lots? You could be at home sitting with your family in your family room.” When Cassidy says it, the word sounds like a slur.
Suddenly she sits straight. She slaps him on the shoulder and points.
“That’s my nose,” she says. “Over there.”
Patrick swivels in his chair. He sees girls, ponytails, a cluster of people vaguely linearized, waiting for their turn to order at the counter.
“The one with red hair,” she says, her voice matter-of-fact. “In the denim skirt. Watch her when she turns around.”
He watches. The girl is college-aged, short, with pillowy upper arms, a soft mass of wavy auburn hair. She talks to a couple friends as she waits in line, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. But as she turns around, Patrick seems to recognize her—there’s something intimate about her face, something he finds beautiful though she’s not at all his type. The strange girl gives him a creeped-out look. He’s old to her, no matter how young he feels inside. And then he sees it on her face, that unforgettable appendage, the slim bridge and the tip that curves up as gentle as a flower: the girl has Cassidy’s perfect nose.
“It’s spooky, right?” says Cassidy. “What a succubus.”
Patrick turns back to look at her. The sensation of turning away from Cassidy’s nose only to encounter Cassidy’s nose once again is unsettling. It seems to violate the principles of space and time, singularity, the vast and terribly lonely uniqueness of things in the world, existence a form of forced difference.
“This happens a lot?” he asks.
“I used to see one every day. I told my manager that we needed to crush it right away, either crush it or make some money off it. I tried to get a patent. The lawyers told me it was a sure thing, but the government rejected it three times. They said all the movies I had been in meant that my ‘invention had already been publicly disclosed.’ If I don’t own my own face, who does? In the end, those lawyers set up a licensing deal for me, so, whenever a plastic surgeon does an operation for someone who wants my name attached to it, a sort of guarantee of quality, I get about eight dollars. I used to get so many checks I never even noticed that royalty check, but now I know it shows up on the twelfth of every month, like clockwork.”
He stares at her, not knowing what sort of comfort to give, what sort of joke to make. The girl with Cassidy’s nose places her order at the counter and retrieves a gigantic soda. The oversized plastic cup is as thick as her thigh.
“That nose money keeps the lights on,” she says grimly, and suddenly she looks pissed off. “Are you ready to go yet? You know, I’m actually a really busy person, and I don’t have infinite time to help you with your project.” She grabs the empty, grease-soaked French-fry container and stalks over to the trash, crushing the stiff paper in her hand before tossing it in. She walks out to the van alone, her ankles narrow in her big white sneakers, her hair bright-edged in the streetlight glow and twitching in the breeze.
The first address is a freestanding building in an office park off the highway. The white van inches along on the GPS screen, the highway slowed by drivers up ahead who roll to a full stop to watch the living rim of fire climb the grassy knolls. The wind drives the neon line forward and into the unburnt valley, where the larger, bushier shrubs catch fire slowly, one side at a time. The burn moves from left to right, like reading a paragraph, the fresh flame reluctant at first and shy. He can hear the sound of it through the rolled-up window, feel the heat through the trickle of cool air seeping from the vents—the sound of the fire a burning muzzle, snapping vegetation in a hot, hungry mouth. Looking out at the hills, lit in intricate, mysterious designs, he feels inexplicably like he’s up in an airplane at night, gazing down at the lights of a city below. As they drive, Cassidy is turned away, closed off. She ups the volume of some top-forty ballad when he tries to speak to her. Pouring through the cheap speakers, the singer’s plush voice sounds fractured and moth-eaten, a disintegrating thing, and Patrick feels punished—like he’s been demoted from an intriguing peer to the lame dad of a surly teenage daughter. A sense of potential has evaporated, dissolved into the suddenly chill air.
They find the building at the far end of the empty parking lot, a drab beige-bricked thing with dark-tinted windows. Patrick parks the van, and as they walk to the entrance, their footsteps echo in the vacated space. Past a row of eucalyptus trees smelling sweetly of cough drops, the red gleam of the highway is visible. He and Cassidy press their faces close to the blackish glass, but all they see are their own faces reflected back in dim, impoverished form. They walk around to the back of the building, where broken-down boxes lean against a dumpster. The trash is a mix of office supplies and junk-food wrappers: frozen burritos, instant ramen, the slimy plastic packages that once held slices of bologna. Back at the front, the door is locked, with no hours posted, and Patrick squints in through the dark. A ghostly glimpse of the interior, the outline of cheap folding chairs and a stand of pamphlets. The name MEMODYNE stenciled on the wall.
“Does that look like a waiting room to you?” he asks. “Something medical? Like a clinic?”
She gazes into the dark space and laughs loudly.
“I think we’ve solved the mystery,” Cassidy says, falsely bright. “It’s a dump. We’ve found a dump. Great job, Brenda. Great job, Jay.”
“Have you ever heard of Memodyne?” he asks, but she says nothing, just stalks silently back toward the car. The next address is an eight-minute drive away, down broad streets scented by smoke. They pull into a strip-mall parking lot, the van crawling past shuttered storefronts at five miles per hour as Patrick checks the numbers above the door. 6830 DeSoto Avenue is a WAT-R store with two melancholy palms out front, the potted soil speckled with discarded pennies and cigarette butts. “Dump number two,” says Cassidy as they park. “Dump, the sequel. Dump and dumper.” The store is closed, but the tube lights stay on all night, casting a buzzing blue sheen on vats of WAT-R Fresh and WAT-R Deluxe, two lines that Patrick isn’t familiar with. By the register, a double-doored refrigeration unit stocks smaller bottles for impulse buys. As he takes down notes, she texts furiously, her head bent over her phone and illuminated by the small blue light.
“This WAT-R store doesn’t look like the other ones I’ve seen,” Patrick says. The ones he’s been to while picking up spare tanks for the set and returning the empties, or when the Hacienda Lodge is sold out of refills, are vast, eerily spacious showroom floors with the warehousing visible in the background. WAT-R movers whirring around the stockroom, plucking tanks and thick-walled plastic sacks from high up. “Why is this one so small?”
“Maybe it’s off-market,” she replies, not even looking up from her phone. “WAT-R is supposed to be cheap, but it’s still more than some people are ready to pay. They can’t forget how water used to come pouring out of every faucet for pennies. So some places sell samples and seconds from WAT-R Corp, or unused units of WAT-R that get consigned. Sometimes expired stuff, sometimes discontinued lines. It can be a lot cheaper, but you don’t know what you’re getting. That is, if you think you know what you’re getting when you go to the big stores.”
He takes photos of the phone number stenciled on the wall, the visible prices on the vats in the back. Behind the register is an oversized graph that shows where the different sub-brands of WAT-R figure in terms of purity and goodness. On the vertical axis, the scale goes from “Pure” to “Extremely Pure.” On the horizontal axis, the graph maps a range from “Slippery” to “Sticky.” Plotted all over are activities ideally suited to that particular nexus of purity and grip. Showering, for example, is best with WAT-R of moderate purity and a slippery texture. Drinking WAT-R, on the other hand, should have high purity and high stickiness, so as to aid in bodily absorption. Patrick tries to zoom in on the photo he’s taken, to read the tiny printed names of sub-brands and figur
e out if he’s been drinking and showering with the right stuff, but as the photo gets larger it dissolves into a meaningless shading of pixels and hue.
The third stop is a building four stories high at the corner of a busy road and a quiet residential lane. With its uniform windows and covered carport, the building looks like a converted chain hotel—a former Holiday Inn or La Quinta. Lights are on in the lobby, but nobody is behind the desk. Standing in front of the awning, Patrick takes a photo of the Memodyne sign out front, as Cassidy taps one message after another into the illuminated screen.
The fourth stop is in another office complex, but when they park, Cassidy refuses to get out of the van. “I need to get back home; my friend is bringing over some health supplies for me,” she says. “Can we just call it a night?”
“Health supplies,” Patrick says slowly, trying to make it clear through his delivery that he knows she means something else, something she won’t say out loud.
“Yeah, that’s right, Captain.”
“It can’t wait for tomorrow?”
“Why does this investigation have to be done on some emergency schedule? Did you hire me? Am I working for you?” Cassidy asks, acidly sweet.
“I thought you thought this was important,” he says.
“I realize that whatever’s gone rotten with Brenda and Jay, or the whole state of California, is totally new to you and feels like a very big deal. But a lot of people worked very hard to make it this rotten, and digging it all up isn’t going to shock them into making things right.”
“And it accomplishes more to go home and get fucked up on your white linen sectional?” He stares at her in disbelief.
She looks out the window with a smile on her face. “I get fucked up because then I don’t have to ask myself how things are. I know how they are. They’re fucked up.”
Something New Under the Sun Page 18
