Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  Suddenly inspired, Patrick types the words “Gene Kwok processing bottling facility” into the search engine and turns up a result: Dr. Gene Kwok, senior operations manager at Alamitos Finishing Inc. The address for Alamitos Finishing is an exact match for the address of the mystery factory on the pickup list. He navigates to the IRL forum’s messaging function and sends Dr. Kwok a message, telling him that he happens to be Cassidy Carter’s manager, and she’d like to meet with him as part of the research she’s doing for a new TV series about facilities management. Then he gets up to tell Cassidy the good news, but she’s no longer at the counter.

  Standing at the edge of the empty pool, Cassidy clutches the silver briefcase to her chest, staring down at something Patrick can’t see. His body fills with apprehension, fear that she’ll—what?—jump? The briefcase gleams slowly in the hard afternoon light. He tries to shout, but what surfaces is a soft croak. He notices again that his throat is parched, there’s a tender, chapped feeling when he breathes, and all the WAT-R he’s drinking doesn’t do a thing to help it. She turns toward him, and on her face is a strange smile he doesn’t recognize. “Make a wish,” she says, and then she hoists the case high above her head and heaves it down into the blue below. There’s the sound of a bang, loud as a gun, and then a flutter like birds, birds taking flight, birds in the sky with their wings lifted by the breeze.

  Patrick walks to the edge and peers over. Down in the trough, the money forms a shaggy, mossy covering on the painted concrete. It’s a carnage of dull greenish-white, some of the bills lying sodden in wet leaf mulch, others fluttering low on the ground or caught up in the wind. A strong gust lifts a couple fistfuls out of the empty pool and carries them toward the gigantic house, dancing in the air. The paper rises up into the air like embers in a fire, and in brief little flashes he can make out faces on the fluttering paper—the faces of white men, all of them long dead.

  * * *

  —

  With accidents clogging the 405 and reports of protesters on foot causing disruptions on the 710, Patrick and Cassidy take Highway 1 most of the way down the coast and then switch to local roads. Winds are low today, and the fires burn in place. The voice on Cassidy’s maps app gives cool, calm suggestions to reroute, promising seventeen saved minutes if they cut through Torrance’s Old Town. They take the shortcut. Through the still-smoky air, the main street is a faded, worn-down color, like in old movies. Cassidy sticks her phone out the window to take a photo of a vintage Fosters Freeze stand as they roll past.

  In the ice-cream stand’s drive-through lane, a man in his sixties sits in the driver’s seat, staring out at the building. He scours the building’s exterior: chipped white stucco, the rainbow-striped awning, the picnic tables molded of royal-blue plastic. He can’t remember why he came here. He doesn’t think he wants ice cream. He doesn’t know anyone else who does. Did somebody send him here? Maybe his children or grandchildren? Warily, he turns the car engine on and backs slowly out and onto the main street. When he is in the shadow of several large, verdant mesquite trees, he begins to relax. He’s headed back home, or at least he’s pointed in the right direction. The sun on his face is warm, and makes his mouth feel parched. He blinks twice, three times. Then it occurs to him that, on a hot day like this one, some ice cream might be nice. Steep, towering cones of frozen sugar cream, the peak dusted with pulverized nuts and capped with a cherry. He puts his turn signal on. He turns left and left again, until he’s on the same road, driving back the way he came. When he sees the old-fashioned blue-and-white sign, his face lights up. Fosters Freeze, a name he recalls from the past. Hadn’t he come here sometimes as a child for a root-beer float and a fistful of fries? He puts on his turn signal and turns left, into the store’s narrow drive-through.

  A few blocks away, a woman turns the faucet. The WAT-R sputters several times, thin and hissing, and then nothing more. She turns the faucet off again, then on. A low moan comes from deep within the pipes. She slips on her sandals and opens the door. Even from a distance, she can see that her cube hasn’t been refilled: sunlight blazes through the large blue rectangle, setting the plastic aglow. She checks that the seal is tight around the plastic tubing. Only a little WAT-R sloshes around the bottom, hot from the sun, barely enough to fill a bathtub. She’s been waiting two weeks for a repair appointment, endlessly on hold with the WAT-R company to complain again about the liquid vanishing from her leaky unit. In Rancho Mirage, less than ten minutes away, the bigger houses receive same-day service from shiny trucks with hoses and nozzles mounted on the side. But in her neighborhood, you’re lucky if you hear the voice of a living human being before your phone drops the call, lucky if they read you some sort of number that you can give when you call back a fourth or fifth time. The woman has run her hands over every scuffed inch, looking for the flaw in the plastic, but all she finds is smug, sleek surface. The hole must be somewhere on the bottom, pressed up against asphalt, where it’s impossible to examine. With no repair, she’s had to pay for delivery twice a week, watching as her money runs out onto the street in dark rivulets, headed for the sewers.

  There are other neighbors out on the lawn, approaching their own cubes with wary interest. They stand barefoot on the neatly trimmed grass, in front of poured concrete pagodas and bushes bullied into jelly-bean structures. Nobody knows what it means when the delivery fails to come. They talk to one another across property lines, without setting foot on one another’s soil. They agree that the prices have been going up, even though they’ve been using less WAT-R than ever. They save the shower runoff in a pail and ration it out across the landscaped shrubs. They emulsify shampoo in their palms and work it to lather with the bare minimum of liquid. But the bills are unchanged, or they’ve crept higher. And at the SuperCenter on Sunset, doesn’t it seem like there’s more empty space on the shelves, more handwritten signs apologizing for running out of an expected item? Scattered across the tidy green lawns, the robins stand motionless but alive. Sometimes when you’re cutting the grass, you have to stop—step in front of the mower, pick up the petrified body in your hand, the tiny heartbeat pounding fast, and set it in a bush or on the sidewalk, someplace out of the machine’s path.

  As the white van turns toward the marina and the remnants of the industrial waterfront, Alamitos Finishing rears up before them like a fast-food castle, crenellated with piping. An unimpressive cement-colored box with only a fistful of exterior features—window, door, fire alarm—the building lacks a sense of scale, gives the impression of sizelessness. In the parking lot, Cassidy hangs her head out the window and holds her breath, counting how many seconds it’ll take for her eyes to discover something other than grayish wall. She reaches twenty Mississippis before Patrick messes up her concentration, fumbling with his WAT-R bottle, dropping the plastic cap on the floor near his feet, and then feeling around for it while he tries to steer one-handed into a spot. The plant is quiet on the weekend, Dr. Gene had said, and the lot is mostly empty. They climb out of the van, stare up at the enormous structure. From a flat roof dense with tubing, a chimney rises into the hazy blue sky, spilling a single, unending column of vapor into the sky. The vapor is thick and cottony, a slow-roiling giant that resembles a tree, and then an umbrella, and then a curving whale. But most of all, from every angle, it resembles a mushroom cloud.

  When they reach the entrance, Dr. Gene is already there waiting for them. In a tan suit jacket and brown pants, he has a face awkwardly poised between its actual age and one long ago, when the rudiments of his personality were etched as in wet concrete. Through his forty-eight-year-old features, Cassidy can see both the eleven-year-old boy who won the science fair three years in a row, and the childless bachelor dad whose dreams consist of attempts to lucidly prod his avatar into flight. She knows this type of fan, and knows that he’ll be asking a load of questions. As she walks toward him, she watches the expression on his face shift from careful neutrality to an almost unconsci
ous elation; his face smiles without his consent. When she extends her hand to him, he lifts it up toward his lips at first, before pausing and pushing it back down into a standard handshake.

  “Welcome,” he says with a slight, overgrown Southern accent, “to Alamitos. It’s an honor to have you both here. I know you have many questions for me about facilities management. I hope you’ll be willing to answer some, as well, about the mysterious circumstances behind your show’s cancellation. I know many Revelators would give their brother’s life to be able to stand with Kassi Keene and question her directly.”

  “Sure thing,” Cassidy says with a smile, before turning to Patrick with a scowl. “You didn’t tell me he was one of those creepoid forum fans,” she whispers into his ear, causing the nervework of his back to blossom with a thousand conflicting sensations that he tries to forget. “You better text our address to someone you trust, in case we never come out of here.”

  To Patrick, it feels as if they are dignitaries from a foreign country. Dr. Gene gives them each a hard hat and ushers them into a small motorized vehicle to tour the facility. He puts on a spinning yellow light to warn other employees to get out of the way, and he honks the little horn. They zoom through a large lobby where workers in sky-blue suits load large plastic barrels onto hand trucks. Seven or eight reasonable-sized houses could fit into that lobby, Patrick thinks to himself, stacked three high with room for front and back yards. Seven or eight houses like my own, he realizes.

  It’s been so long since he’s seen his home, he doesn’t even know how to picture it. He has some trouble remembering what’s in it, the makes and models of the electronics, the color of the couch, those little details that don’t matter until you realize they’re lost.

  Trucks drive along the floor of the massive industrial plant, ferrying matter from the entrance bays to far-off destinations in the building’s other limbs. The inside of the building feels as big as an outside. Up above, a lost seagull sails through the empty, enclosed space, the gentle color of its body a breach in the industrial gray.

  “So fun,” Cassidy says as the cart whirs through a broad, seemingly endless hallway. “It reminds me of working on the studio lot, getting driven from the set to the cafeteria for lunch every day. Sometimes my handler would let me drive, even though I was only thirteen.”

  “In fact,” Dr. Gene replies, “this vehicle is a more recent model of the same industrial carts you see in the background of episode nine, season four, when the Paradise Cove volleyball team is playing a game across the street from the Nifty Cola factory.”

  They stop outside a set of metal double doors separating the long hallway from a room decorated in a more effortfully fun style than the rest of the building. The walls are still laboratory-gray, but a long, glossy, zanily orange bar stretches across the middle of the room, surrounded by upholstered orange stools. On the wall behind the bar are countless bottles of WAT-R, some with familiar labels—WAT-R Extra, WAT-R Pure, WAT-R Wildly Wet (a colorful star-shaped sticker reads “For Kids!”), and WAT-R Renaissance. But there are also labels he doesn’t recognize—WAT-R ReGenerate, WAT-R Hype!, WAT-R Misty Morning Dew, and the technicolored liquid of WAT-R Kids Only No Grown-Ups Allowed! Several bottles marked by colored labels with numbers written on them in neat black Sharpie sit alongside the more polished products. Dr. Gene steps behind the counter and welcomes them to the tasting room, where VIPs can sample the whole versatile range of WAT-R products, as well as treat themselves to rare or discontinued products and new products still in the process of being refined. Patrick senses Cassidy tensing up nearby; he doesn’t have to look at her face to know what it says.

  “This is really, really thoughtful, thanks,” Patrick says, “but she doesn’t drink WAT-R. I should have told you in advance, so we wouldn’t put you out.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t drink?” Dr. Gene asks Cassidy, laughing. “Are you living like a camel, off the water stored in your back fat?”

  “I just haven’t tried it,” Cassidy says pertly. “I drink the old-fashioned stuff.”

  “Well, this is the place to try: you won’t find a better selection. You know, the old water wasn’t very good for you anyway. If you knew what goes on in found water, all the dirt and debris they try to filter out, the secondhand hormones and BPA, the fish eggs and other filthy animal waste—life is a dirty business—you would beg me for some brand-new water, made in a nice clean factory.”

  “I’m happy to be your guinea pig,” Patrick interjects. “I’m from the East Coast, so I haven’t been drinking WAT-R that long, but I think the stuff is great. And, besides, if she partakes, we’ll have to stop twice on the drive back.”

  Cassidy glares at him, but nods.

  “Okay, then,” says Dr. Gene, “lucky man. I’m going to start you off with a taste of our most luxurious product, and then of the special kind we keep in-house. It’s too good to sell.” He pulls out a bottle that Patrick has seen on WAT-R runs, usually kept behind the counter in a locked cabinet. It has a teardrop shape, and a cap made of plastic molded to resemble a multifaceted gem. “This is our answer to the vintage water market, those glacier waters scraping the bottom of Planet Earth’s barrel. It’s called Everpure.” The cap releases with a pop: there’s cork glued to the bottom to premiumize the experience. He pulls out a small, perfect glass and fills it with about an inch and a half of liquid. “Glass half full,” he jokes, and slides it over. That must be a common joke around here, Patrick thinks. He picks up the small glass and swirls the liquid around experimentally. It sloshes like water, perfectly clear. But maybe what Cassidy says about the stuff has stuck with him more than he knew: he can’t explain how, but the slosh seems a little slower than it ought to be, a little sluggish. He puts the cup to his lips and lets the mouthful slip through.

  “Doesn’t that feel like heaven, like silk streaming down your throat?” Dr. Gene asks. Patrick nods. His mouth feels briefly wet, then normal again. “Everpure is triple-milled, strained for a full twenty-four hours in a labyrinthine filter designed with the help of an installation artist from Finland. A series of glass chambers linked by delicate, charcoal-lined tubes, colored to resemble the spectrum of visible light. I can get you in to see that if you’d like.”

  “We’d love that,” Cassidy says quickly, glancing back at him.

  “Now, this,” says Dr. Gene, pulling a smaller, delicate flask from the shelf and pouring a finger’s width into a fresh glass, “is on a different level. This in fact has no level—it is entirely on its own, free-floating in the stratosphere. We call it, simply, One Hundred.” The bottle bears a small, gold-leaf “100” scrawled in faux handwriting, like a perfect score on a perfect test. “As you know, old water boils at a hundred degrees Celsius, and WAT-R boils at a hundred and four, due to its greater stability. Well, what the media doesn’t know, because we try to give them the big picture, not to overwhelm them with facts, is that a tiny percentage of our WAT-R also boils off at a hundred degrees Celsius, just seconds before the rest of it follows suit. What we’ve done is capture that little bit of liquid, less than a mouse’s mouthful from a vat the size of this room, and set it aside for our very special customers. It’s the rarest, choicest product from the purest part of the process. It’s our ‘premier cru.’ ”

  “Fascinating,” Patrick says, holding the little glass up to the light. The transparent liquid trembles beneath the bright bulbs. But it’s not the water trembling, it’s his hand. He lowers the glass and holds it close, gripping his wrist with his free hand, consoling it.

  “I’ll join you for a toast,” Dr. Gene says, pouring another glass and hoisting. “To Mother Nature, who sends us her rough drafts so that we may perfect her grammar!” They clink and drink. The rarefied liquid has a faintly sweet taste, a flavor that reminds him subtly of home, of running out onto a soccer field early in the morning, when everything you see is graced by dew, of the first kiss and th
e last kiss, of finding that one perfect person you were meant to spend your life with.

  “Isn’t it bad luck to toast with water?” Cassidy asks.

  “It’s not water!” Dr. Gene replies, laughing loudly, and after a beat Cassidy laughs too. “I’ll show you. Water is the village bicycle. Water has been through the butts of dinosaurs and the blood of the diseased. The water you drink may have been in the mouth of your worst enemy, and you would never know. Water is secondhand, but our WAT-R has never been used. It’s pure. It’s brand-new. It’s a whole different beast, as they say.”

  “What are the bottles with numbers on them?” she asks.

  “A sharp question from a true gumshoe,” Dr. Gene says, smiling, in a tone clearly devised for engaging with children. He pulls a new, yellow-labeled bottle from the shelf. “Here we have new products in the process of development. This one is getting good marks. Patrick, have a taste.” As the doctor pours the glass, Patrick feels as though time has slowed. The thin, clear column of water has a static quality, a stillness, it seems to hang in midair unmoving—until, suddenly, the pour is done and Patrick is lifting it up to his dry tongue as Dr. Gene and Cassidy watch intently. This one doesn’t slide so easily across the palate, nor does it swallow as smoothly as the other two samples. In fact, this one tastes thick and a bit heavy—he would even call it syrupy if there were any hint of sweetness, any hint of flavor at all.