Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  He turns the key in the ignition and backs out too fast. Then they’re on the highway, crawling through the same traffic, their silence complete. In the burning hills, hobbled oaks keel in the flames, the twisted limbs lost in conflagration and burning swiftly. A full crown is reduced to blackened glyph, inky signs in the bright night. When the trunks are dark and smoldering, the beetles come: scenting the infrared from miles away through sensors beneath their forelimbs, they fly ten, twenty, 130 miles, drawn to the heat and the flame and the newly charred brush. They fall from the brown and smoke-choked sky, as black as bullets, mating inside the still-burning fire. Under the smoky, oscillating light, a female fire beetle crawls along the blackened craw of a burnt bush, her hard belly protected by a special wax secreted to hold in the body’s moisture, to keep it from evaporating as she lays her eggs. In the months to come, her larvae will be born in the charred stump, grow in the charred stump, live off the charred stump, eating tunnels through defenseless matter, to emerge one day as a fully grown fire beetle, built to sense the heat of faraway burning and hurl its body in that direction for hours and hours of treacherous flight.

  There’s a dinged-up Audi with tinted windows sitting in front of Cassidy’s Secret Sunset home when the van lumbers into the driveway. As she gathers her keys from the cup holder, she feels Patrick’s stare hot on her cheekbones and knows that he’s demanding to be looked at, acknowledged.

  “Are you waiting for a good-night kiss?” she asks stiffly, trying to crack a joke.

  “Maybe this doesn’t seem that important to you,” Patrick says slowly, his delivery pitiful, thin. “And you don’t see the point. But I really do need someone here. I see all this stuff, but I don’t know if I’m seeing it correctly. It looks like a conspiracy to me, but everything else in the world is telling me it’s just fine, it’s all normal. If I’m alone when I look into this, if nobody’s around to see with me, I won’t even know if I’ve gone crazy. It’ll just happen, and then I’ll be completely gone.”

  The smoke-scented air seeps in through the open car door. Neither of them moves; they sit there in the velour seats as the insects cry from their unseen positions in the landscaped surround.

  “Okay,” she says at last. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Get a good night’s sleep and don’t go crazy. Not tonight.” She leans over and squeezes his shoulder so quickly that Patrick worries he only imagined it. As he drives back to Azusa, forty-five minutes in apocalyptic wildfire traffic, he hunches his right shoulder up and lets it sink back again and again, searching the grain of his movement for any difference, any sign, any lingering evidence that she had touched his body with hers.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Cassidy calls in sick, and Patrick drives to the studio alone. The film set doesn’t resemble a film set quite as much as it did the day before. Gone are the catering tables clustered with bystanders, and the bustle of crew rushing back and forth. Now the couple dozen who remain keep apart, as though speaking about this fragile situation could destroy it. They’ve brought in a new director, a gaunt old hippie in plaid pants, and Jay introduces him to the whole crew as Jarrel Toback, the director of some acclaimed foreign film in the 1980s—but when Patrick tries to look him up on his phone, he can’t find any trace of the guy on the internet. The Arm has taken to sitting in the darkest corner of the soundstage, the corner where they store all the extra wires, and drawing in a little black notebook. As far as Patrick can tell, all the drawings are of the crazy blond girl he saw on the highway—the Arm draws her in her bathing suit, lying on her towel, but also, more worryingly, in a formal wedding gown. Meanwhile, Horseshoe has been off set more than he’s been on it, slipping in furtively and filling his pockets with catering-table candy. Even Brenda, her polish bone-deep, has begun showing up in leggings and sweatshirts—though, judging from their inscrutable taupelike color, they are probably still very expensive.

  The new director gathers the techs and gaffers and grips together for a “group-building exercise,” and together they form a wobbly, dented hand-holding circle. Patrick watches from afar as their new leader hoists their interlaced hands up into the air. Last night, he had returned to the motel room and binged nearly half a season of Kassi Keene, until he passed out mid-episode, the eerie sunrise light glowing violet through motel curtains. Though he was watching the legendary final season, the season most scrutinized by the Kassi Keene Revelators and most supposedly rife with secret clues and occult messages, he found it difficult to focus on the incremental plotlines and knew that he would probably have to watch these episodes again later, maybe later today. At five this morning, he was watching the tail end of “Joint Proportionality,” an episode in which Kassi discovers that her beloved community-college economics teacher is being blackmailed about his fairly mundane marijuana habit by some nefarious enemy—probably, judging from the grammar and syntax of the random notes, a disgruntled Paradise Cove Community College student. He remembers the first half of the episode more or less—the questioning of various students with motive, the trip to the IT expert. But after that it gets fuzzy, it’s all fuzzy except for Kassi’s face, or does he mean Cassidy’s face, the big blue eyes and bubble-gum-colored lipstick so clear in his memory that he could have sworn he was there, standing in the room, the day those episodes were being filmed.

  Patrick takes out his phone and navigates to the /KassiKeeneTBR forum, checking the Big Reveal summary guide thread for the episode. As always, he starts out skeptical about the idea of a shadow storyline undergirding the flippant, cheery forty-five-minute narratives, but becomes more convinced as the various posters present their evidence. He’s absorbed the different acronyms and code words—RH for “red herring” and AH for “actual herring,” NCA for “Nifty-controlled agent” and TKO for “Team Kassi Overall.” He’s learned the vocabulary they use for discussing different types of clues: “signs” for little inadvertent hints left by the show’s creators, “signals” for things they want you to follow up and investigate on your own, “flares” for huge, mind-blowing discoveries.

  diskordpro415

  Ok so though this episode is not one of my all-time favorites, I do think it is one of the richest in TBR nuggets and does a lot to clarify the threads that serious watchers were following throughout previous episodes. Just to give you all some of the top signals and flares I spotted while watching:

  When Prof. Cabrillo receives the blackmail e-mail he shows to Kassi, there’s a GIF of his face pasted onto a dancing bear image, which hearkens back to the ransom note Kassi received in s02e17 w the donkey-bear GIF and shows that there is a link between the two crimes. Because the kidnapper in that ep (Bonnie Tasker) was killed with the other a-capella club kids at the beginning of season 4, the link can’t be literal—instead it’s a meta-link, the show telling us it sees a connection between these two diff crimes.

  The “blackmailer” uses language that is simplistic, but peppered with internet slang & shortened “words” that could be acronyms: ENUF, LTR, 4EVA. We’ve already established that acronyms have a secret life in Paradise Cove, and we should get deciphering the blackmail note because it could be a breakthrough.

  When Kassi and Prof. Cabrillo finally confront the blackmailer (Prof. Dickson, Cabrillo’s nemesis from the English department), you would expect the blackmailer to give some sort of defense or explanation of their actions—it’s what you could call a convention of the genre. But when they confront Prof. Dickson, he doesn’t do this, he goes on a rant about how something evil is happening in PC and then he throws himself off the cliff. I think this is a signal that his goal really wasn’t to blackmail Cabrillo, it was to draw Kassi’s attention to some important piece of the TBR puzzle. And he kills himself right before the cops show up—meaningful?? Did he have knowledge of double agents on the police force?

  JCtheDestroyer

  Great job on all of this, I agree
w/everything—and also I would add that Dickson is pictured in his classroom holding a copy of Hamlet. Hamlet is a play about a man who knows there is “something rotten in the state of Denmark.” Dickson knows too—and his death causes his message (the speech he gives on the cliff) to live on for long after his death, just like Shakespeare’s masterwork.

  BBGunn40x

  Dickson was definitely TKO. The actor who played him was already breaking through with a big role in the Marvel Universe. They always lure bigger actors to the show with hero roles, not villains.

  jonzeewhiskerz

  He was TKO??? He shot a gun at Kassi on the cliff. I think you got it twisted.

  HaydenStrange8

  The show intends for us to make bold connections between disparate elements: it knows that we, not Kassi, are the real detectives and that we have a view of TBR that she can never possibly achieve, because she is part of the flawed and corrupt system. She sees what the system shows her, but we have the bird’s eye view and can see so much more, including those things that lie in the system’s subconscious, things it is not even aware it knows.

  For this reason, I prefer not to use the term TBR, which refers to a plot reveal that may or may not ever have been planned for the show. I use the term TBP, The Big Picture, which stands for the actuality of Paradise Cove, a thing that can perhaps only be uncovered from the audience’s vantage point, through analysis and deep thought. TBR may or may not be real, and certainly never happened. But TBP is as real as the ground (we think) we walk on, the water (we think) we drink.

  GMB21078

  What is this, more TBR IRL bullshit? Some of us trust the writers and actors on this show. Some of us actually love the show and believe they know what they’re doing.

  Taxxxonomi

  Many of u can’t wrap your mind around IRL b/c it would imply that u have a Real Life to be In, and that’s just way too much for most ppl on here :P

  SheeplessInSeattle

  HaydenStrange8 is like the kid who comes along and knocks your sandcastle down so that you’ll be forced to build one with him. He destroys everyone else’s game because he doesn’t like to play alone.

  EndlingInLove71

  LOL…no kidding I knew a kid who would do that! Wonder where that asshole is today.

  DezasterPeace

  What caught my eye in this episode was the similarity between how the English lit professor died and this news article about a crewmember who fell to his death on the season 2 set of Kassi Keene. Just a few of the similarities: Peter Guerrera, the crew member who died, was working on a lighting repair about 63 feet above the point of impact. Estimated height of Paradise Cliffs, based on long shots and exterior footage? 68 feet. Guerrera was a snappy dresser and you can see what he’s wearing in the obituary photo—a striped blue button-down shirt, just like Prof. Dickson. The kicker? Guerrera was also an English major in college. So where does the line between fact and fiction truly exist? Doesn’t this scene resemble a finger pointing at the moon? Only a fool looks at the finger.

  PDX_DDavis

  If you want to peddle this conspiracy theory BS, take it to /KassiKeeneTBR_IRL. This is a forum for serious-minded fans of the show to engage in some deep reading and analysis, and try to reconstruct the missing information that would have been given in the following season’s true series finale. We’re seeking closure, not a tinfoil hat.

  GMB21078

  So you’re saying one random crew member had a completely random accident, the kind that happen all the time in workplaces, and the writers and producers of the show wrote it into some totally random episode years later as a way of—what? Calling attention to it? Memorializing him years later? Or are you saying there was foul play? Are you saying that it wasn’t an accident, it was a suicide? Just say what you mean. Stop being all ominous about it.

  ChZhChan05

  Correction: NOTHING is completely random

  EndlingInLove71

  As a computer scientist, I can confirm this. Randomness is not a property of the universe, connections are. Randomness is an illusion that projects sometimes when the links are too numerous to comprehend.

  Patrick feels the phone spasm in his hot palm. A message from Cassidy slides onto the screen: Good morning, sunshine…. When are we meeting up for recon pt. 2? I’m out of bed but you can assume it’ll take me a few hours to wake up. He looks at the clock—it’s almost three-thirty. The director and all the techies are lying down on the floor in the center of the space cleared for the exercises. They lie on their sides, bodies limp and relaxed and curled into a loose fetal position, while a woman standing with a stopwatch slowly counts up. She hits one hundred, then two hundred, and then, much later, seven hundred. Patrick texts back: It’s kind of a dead day on set. I think Brenda and Jay will let me off if I say I’m doing errands for you. Want a pickup?

  Pulling into the triple-wide driveway, Patrick sees no black Audi, no sign that anyone was ever there or had ever stayed over. He watches through the windshield as Cassidy steps out in sunglasses and a striped dress, her light-colored hair catching the sunshine and refracting it, drawing a golden halo around her heartlike face. She’s showing up with no complaints, none of the usual stalling tactics, and he can’t help but think she was waiting for him on the other side of that door, staring out the window, and wondering when he’d show—her face holding that peculiar mixture of innocence and awareness that he finds so strangely affecting in season five of Kassi Keene: Kid Detective, where her acting starts to leave behind the Nancy Drew tropes and show some real sophistication.

  “Are you ready for a tour of the picturesque parking lots of the San Fernando Valley?” she asks, eyebrows raised.

  “Well, we can start somewhere else on the list,” Patrick replies self-consciously. “I mean, there’s the San Gabriel Valley, Anaheim, Huntington Beach, even a couple of sites in Bakersfield. It’s not like the San Fernando Valley is the only place—we have options.”

  “I was kidding,” Cassidy says. “I could care less where we go, as long as we see some parking lots.”

  “Another joke,” he says. She’s being so agreeable. It occurs to him that, if she’s not invested in the mission, maybe she’s simply invested in spending time with him. Could it be that she feels a connection to him, something that he failed to notice?

  “Well, I think we could be doing more. I can get into places you wouldn’t imagine; I can get people to talk to me who really shouldn’t.” Through the dark shades he can see the focus of her eyes, boring straight into him. “People always want to please celebrities. Sometimes, when I worry that I’m really finally over, I go to a restaurant and order something crazy, something that’s probably never been on the menu. When it shows up, I know that I’ve still got it.”

  “Okay. If you’re willing to do the talking, I know where we should go next,” he says, starting the engine and beginning to back out of the driveway. He only feels a tinge of dread as he points the bulky vehicle in the direction of the clinic he visited last week where the Cassidy fan behind the front desk mistook him for a patient, and whose address he found in Brenda’s documents.

  As the building comes into view, Patrick feels the strangest sensation come over him, as though time is a piece of paper folded in half and some unseen hand is drawing its finger across his heart to make the crease. He looks out to his left and sees the white van sliding across the mirror panes of glass, its whiteness reflected back in gold, teal, and orange. Somewhere deep in his chest, like a lump of something swallowed and stuck in place, a voice is shrieking that it’s not right for it all to happen again: If he walks into that building and sees himself standing at the counter, he knows it’ll be his end. He’ll cease to exist, he’ll ignite, he’ll return to vapor and dust.

  As they pass through the sliding doors, a figure behind the counter screams and ducks. A moment later, the head po
ps back up, yellow hair disheveled but still silky and soft. Her hands cover her mouth, but he can tell it’s the girl he talked to on his previous trip to the clinic, wearing an expression that looks like terror, but is full of joy.

  “Oh my god, I can’t believe it’s you!” she says, looking past him, and Patrick notices for the first time that her unplaceable familiarity actually has an exact source: her nose, which is Cassidy’s. She smiles from a differently shaped mouth, but the nose wrinkles in the exact same way. It’s like looking at an old photograph or a badly drawn portrait, the resemblance inexact but intended to be identical.

  “Hey, girl,” Cassidy chirps with an easy, unforced friendliness, “I’m so glad to meet you! My friend Pat here told me that you were a fan, and I said I wanted to come and meet you too and hear about your life and this fascinating place you work in.”

  “I am so completely honored,” the girl gushes. “Did I win a contest or something?” She looks to Patrick now, searching for answers in his eyes, but he gives her none. “I swear, I think I’m your biggest fan. I mean, I swear, I basically learned to read so that I could read the novelization of Camp Do-What-Ya-Wanna. I love you. I actually was you—like, I dressed up as you from Five Moons of Triton for Halloween. This is so freaking cool!”

  “It is freaking cool! What’s your name?”