Where the fire has already passed, the ground is burning. Small licks of flame rise from the blackened earth, flickering like birthday candles in the dark. An orange color creeps through the black, fading in and out with a pulsing rhythm. The low, earthbound fire moves like liquid across the terrain—some bright, alien liquid climbing hills and tree trunks, flowing upward from the burly base of a coyote bush to hug its slender branches, heating the small, tough, delicately toothed leaves until they bloom with flame.
At the fire’s hot, live edge, the flames rear up to touch the unsinged tips of virgin grasses. Fresh matter burns brightest, surging and sinking, the sound of the burn a dull roar, like hunger in the belly of a man who’s walked all day. An observer would see intelligence in the way it crawls, seeking new substance to consume, the way it moves in small, tidy increments and sudden leaps. The way it seems to head for the homes, for the cars, for the firefighters standing watch with masks on to filter their air.
At the highway’s periphery, a helicopter passes overhead, dropping a sheet of WAT-R on a child-height fence of fire. Where the liquid smothers it, steam rises from the smoldering earth, still hot enough to burn the skin off a hand. The vapor resembles a scale model of the sky-sized smoke clouds overhead: rising from the blistered dirt, a wall of thick, pale translucence, it billows and folds and curls over itself like a body protecting its soft underside. With its frail, opalescent blue tint, it is more beautiful than it should be: if it were ordinary, you would not stop to watch it. But it drifts like a dream on the hot fire-borne wind, a gauzy shadow passing across the unburnt scrub, changing shape from cloud to mist, casting its almost imperceptible blueness on the unburnt oaks crouched tight at the base of the valley.
By the time the vapor reaches Cassidy Carter’s seven-bedroom home, its bluish tint has nearly vanished. Traces have settled on the shriveled brown leaves of her dead rosebushes, on the flagstones surrounding the red-clay badminton court. Neither Cassidy nor Patrick senses the presence of an unfamiliar substance in the air as they stand in the expansive backyard, staring down into the empty turquoise-painted depths of the defunct pool. But out in the canyon lands, where the fire rages on, nobody is around to notice that not everything is burning. Though the blaze blackens the grasses and trees and chaparral shrubs equally, there are some plants still standing oddly unscathed, small clusters of ground-hugging green vivid against the ash. Leaved like clover and sprouting tiny, pale-blue flowers, they resemble other low species creeping at the margins of the hiking trail, and yet they are not any of those species. They have no name and no genus, they stir infinitesimally in the wind. When the flames pass over the small blue flowers, they do not singe. In the clearing smoke, they remain sweetly blue, the color of aquarium gravel or adolescent sadness. If you plucked one and held it up to the flame of a match, it would not catch fire. It would stare back at you unchanged, soft blue against the enveloping heat. It would stare and stare until, suddenly, the sharp blue edges of its petals began to melt.
* * *
—
From the northeast, the wind carries the scent of scorched plants, of woody limb reduced to kindling, into Cassidy’s backyard. She coughs weakly as she lifts the silver briefcase, and her coughs echo around the empty concrete basin.
“It’s not deep enough,” Patrick says, backing away from the edge. Looking downward into the perspectiveless bowl gives him a headache, or something worse.
“Live a little,” Cassidy says, lifting the briefcase high above her head and then hurling it down toward the hard bottom. The metal clanks dully and bounces once before coming to a rest on its side. She giggles.
“God, I wish you hadn’t done that,” he groans. “We have to give that to Brenda and Jay eventually, and now they’ll know we tried to open it.”
“Will they?” Cassidy says. “Listen, did you see how much information I got out of that one trip to the clinic? If we can just get me into a few more of these places, fill in the missing links, crack open this briefcase, I think we’ll have a real opportunity to demand some better terms. Then it won’t even matter who did whatever to a briefcase.”
She strolls over to the shallow end of the pool and climbs the short ladder down into the trough. The heat of the sun bears down on the crown of her head, as she picks up the gleaming case and dashes it again and again against the cool concrete, until the blue paint is chipped on the curved walls and the uniform aluminum ridges are marred by dents and bent lines.
“We can make Brenda and Jay really pay us, cut us a real slice. You don’t have to be a PA anymore, Patrick. We could start a boutique production company, writing and producing movies for me to do.”
“You’d want that?” he asks, surprised. He should be insulted, but instead he feels amazed. She trusts him, and he hasn’t seen signs that she trusts anybody else in her life.
“Why not? You haven’t fucked me over yet, and it’s been weeks.”
He has a vision of himself with his hand on Cassidy’s back, steering her away from a flurry of camera flashes.
“Here,” he says, “give that to me.”
Patrick turns the case over on its side and examines the closure: a double combination lock with three numbers to the left of the handle and three to the right. Whatever force it takes to open one of the locks, they’ll have to apply it twice. He takes the long-nozzled lighter from Cassidy’s unused grill and flicks it on, holding the inch-long flame over the first set of numbers.
“From the pickup list, we know that they have some sort of relationship with these dementia clinics, with some off-brand WAT-R stores, with what seems to be internet ad-sales offices, and with a factory in Long Beach.”
“Be specific,” Cassidy responds. “Not dementia clinics in general, just these new Random-Onset–related clinics, Memodyne and ROADMap Inc and MemoryCare. And the factory is some sort of manufacturing plant. From the photos online, we can see the tanks and tubing and stacks coming out the top.”
“Right,” he says, “fine.”
“Is that working?” she asks.
The numbers gleam back at him, the material slightly darker, slightly less shiny.
“Not yet, but it’s only been a minute,” he says, flicking the lighter back on.
“Forget it. I know something that might work. I did it once in Kassi Keene.”
On the marble counters in Cassidy’s large, empty kitchen, she places the suitcase on its side and brings over a heavy-duty automotive flashlight and a magnifying glass. She shows him how to hold the light so that it floods the right side of the dial, and then she holds up the magnifying glass. Small particles of dust and paint are visible, crammed into the sanitized metal parts. Patrick watches as she begins turning the far-left dial one number at a time, tugging the bit over to the left so that she can see into the gears. She stops turning when she sees a small roughness on the otherwise smooth axis, and she moves on to the next one. She finds the rough spot on the second dial, and then the third, but when she tries to pop the latch, it doesn’t release.
“On the show, this only took ten seconds,” she says.
“We need to try something else,” says Patrick. “Do you have a drill, a hacksaw, something like that?”
“Just hold the light,” she says. “I found the right alignment; now we just have to find the right setting.”
She slides the three dials up one, punches the latch, up another, punches the latch again. On the third try, it pops open, but the metal case is too tightly made, and they can’t pry the top open enough to see inside. Cassidy starts on the right side, repositions the light, squints into the smooth, machined aluminum, seeking imperfection.
“We should get into that factory,” Cassidy mumbles.
“That would be great,” he says. “But what about security? Who’s going to talk to us? Do you know an Ashley over there?”
There’s only the sound of the lit
tle metal wheels turning, notch by notch.
“What do you think it all adds up to?” Patrick asks. “So they’re running some of their other business with resources meant for the movie, making us run around and do errands for them. Why?”
“Ashley said that business at Memodyne has spiked. When she started working, nine months ago, the place was empty, and now they’re completely booked. There’s a five-hundred-person waitlist for the next open bed. That’s what she says. She says there are people trying to get in every day, and nobody’s leaving. Except for, you know, a few of them.”
“No, I don’t know. What does that mean?”
“Ashley says a few of them die. Four or five a week.”
“Doesn’t that seem like a lot to you?” Patrick doesn’t know why this makes him so upset, but it does. “It should be news. People should know about it.”
“I don’t know—is it an impressive death rate? If you watch people for long enough, they’ll die, right? If you gather a lot of people together, you increase the odds of seeing it happen. I’m not an expert.” Cassidy gives a slight shrug, her eyes fixed on the lock.
“People don’t die because you’re watching them; they die for a reason.” He thinks again of the green-tiled room, the men and women too far gone to blink for themselves.
“ ‘Everything happens for a reason,’ ” she replies, like someone quoting from a movie that everybody’s already seen.
Cassidy presses the release button, and it won’t budge. She starts turning all three dials at once, notch by notch, but the latch won’t let go. “Do you want to give it a shot?” she asks Patrick. As he sits down, she leans over his shoulder, pointing to the slight gaps, showing him where to look. Her long hair brushes the back of his neck. Patrick wrestles with the mechanism for a few minutes, but his eyes can’t decipher the difference between a rough spot and a smooth one. As he stares into the round, distorted lens, his eye is drawn back again and again to the edges of the magnifying glass, where reality grows smeary. He sees the grain of the marble out of focus, a sort of depthless nebula refracted in the bulging lens, which gives him a sensation like vertigo. Eyes shut tight, he keeps his face pointed at the image but can’t bear to look. When Cassidy offers to switch back, he feels nothing but relief.
As she begins the slow work of brute-forcing the com-bination—starting at 000 and pressing the button, toggling to 001 and pressing the button—he goes to lie down on the sofa. He takes out his phone. For the past few days, he’s been checking on the /KassiKeeneTBR_IRL forum, and finds the IRL discourse more inquisitive and nuanced than that of the Revelators, even if he isn’t entirely convinced by their conclusions. Where the TBR obsessives puzzle endlessly over the real allegiances of minor cameo actors, the IRLers deal with something much more important: the real world. In IRL, they talked about The Big Picture: the idea that watching Kassi Keene was a type of mental training that prepared viewers to turn their eyes onto the world around them. They believed that the town of Paradise Cove was based on a real place—probably somewhere in California, though there was a subsection of IRLers who thought the signs pointed to coastal New England, possibly Maine—and that this real place had been the victim of a major crime that the government was covering up. Some thought the crime was a major toxic-waste spill, others a secret nuclear meltdown on the level of Chernobyl. Or a top-secret CIA experiment, or an alien abduction, or a coordinated effort to sterilize blond men and women. By following the map the show gave them, motivated investigators in the audience could trace the crimes of the show back to their real-life analogues. It made sense that, with a secret so dangerous, the show couldn’t be allowed to continue. So the IRLers sifted the celebrity-gossip blogs, looking for clues about Cassidy Carter and the other actors, the producers, and the writers who had worked so hard, for almost six seasons, to show them the light.
BTRlivinthrugivin
According to this article from last Friday, Cassidy called in sick to work on the set of her new film Elsinore Lane and hasn’t been seen in public since i.e. no clubs, no shopping, no pap appearances at all. What do u guys think? Personally I never bought the narrative that she was high/doing coke on the set in front of children/snorting heroin off sports cars/drinking until black out drunk and stealing a plane. One, a single look into that innocent face shows a person w/a very pure heart, as does her behavior in every movie I’ve seen, including her commercial for sweet potato tortilla chips. Two, it was always clear that the best way to discredit the lessons of Kassi Keene was to discredit the messengers. I have known people who struggled with mental illness and have seen that it can come from inside, but also that it can come from outside via substances administered incognito to trigger behaviors. You can make someone go crazy, and not leave a trace. They will never even know what you’ve done.
I am worried that she has been taken hostage again and is being given memory wipe. Thoughts? What can we do to help her?
EricBergson01
I have always felt this myself, but as far I knew was entirely alone in my opinion. Acting is a difficult, rigorous, high-skill business. You don’t have a career like Cass has had, two dozen hit movies and a world-renowned television series, while also being a total train wreck. Much more likely that she was under extreme pressure, possibly physical or chemical coercion, from the network and corporate interests that wished to silence the show. If you wanted to take CNN off the air, what would you do? Take out Anderson Cooper. It is as simple as htat.
tncb_raphael2
From your keyboard to god’s ears. I pray that someone is taking care of her and forming a barrier between her and those who would hurt her and influence her to hurt herself.
MinorKeeg2021
Wow. I’m astounded. [slow clap] I’ve never seen somebody chug so much Koolade in such a sort amount of time. Are you insane? You would have to be to think that Cassidy Carter is the victim in this. No one person has done more to derail Kassi Keene than her, not just bringing about the original end of the show and dancing on its grave in the press, but personally killing every attempt to revive or spin the show off with her public bad behavior. And if you need proof that she knows exactly what she is doing, and is a govt plant sent to undo the show from the inside, watch this video where you can see that she is pretending to be high, stumbling out of an SUV and falling, making weird moan sounds as she lies on the road…but then she turns and gives a wink to the E! camera filming behind her.
drx9ovbTT
They definitely should have cast Dakota Fanning in the role instead.
Halokix123
OMG. I never thought of this but I love it. Would have saved us all a lot of pain, and we’d probably know TBR by now.
BTRlivinthrugivin
LOL at someone coming on this forum to burn Cassidy Carter. None of this would exist without Cassidy Carter. Kassi Keene would not exist without Cassidy Carter. YOU would not exist without Miss Carter. You should shut your yap before you get moderated right out of here.
45VenturaPm
Go home
BTRlivinthrugivin
Um, no?
45VenturaPm
Sorry I meant to @ MinorKeeg2021!! lol
GeneKwok743
All joking aside, it’s incredibly frightening how easy it would be to put something in the water to change human behavior at a citywide or even statewide level. I’m not saying this is the crime TBP deals with, or that this is behind Cassidy Carter’s, shall we say, eccentric behavior in the public sphere. I am only saying that we place a tremendous amount of trust in facilities we never lay eyes on, much less see the inside of. And in processes that we do not understand, chemistry we haven’t mastered. Like Laika the dog, shot up into space on a rocket destined never to return, we know that we live but we do not understand how impossible our lives are, or how fragile.
This is why the show Kassi Keene is
so beautiful. Yes, there are problems in the world. But finally we have all the clues we need to decode it.
WolfWNoMaster
Just curious, what sort of things could people put in the water? Wouldn’t any additive be diluted beyond any efficacy by the vastness of the matter involved?
w GeneKwok743
WolfWNoMaster I work in a treatment and processing plant that shall go unnamed and unspecified. Every day I cross a walkway that goes directly above eight major vats where liquid is treated. If I had for example a brick of pure cocaine I could easily let it fall into just one of the vats, where it would be bottled up and sent all over California. Maybe it wouldn’t affect you very much, except put a little pep in your step, but it might not dissolve fully and one bottle could get more than another. And if that bottle were given to a baby, that baby could die instantly of heart failure. Same sort of thing if you substitute arsenic, virus, or even just caffeine. Effects could be vast, and difficult to decipher.
In fact maybe you should thank me for not doing anything at all
HaydenStrange8
Whenever someone tells you that a so-called “conspiracy theory” is too complicated, too convoluted to be true, ask them exactly how complex they feel reality to be. If they insist on its simplicity, then you know with confidence that they are an imbecile, and can sever the conversation with no guilt whatsoever. But if they admit reality’s complexity, the infinite layers of contradiction and indeterminacy that culminate in the cosmic indecisiveness of the quark, then there is no alternative but to consider the more confusing explanation the correct one. The million dollar question may be this one: why do we have so many conspiracy theories in our world? Who benefits from them, both epistemologically and in practical terms, and what one feature links every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard? Here’s a hint: it starts with a U.
Something New Under the Sun Page 21
