by Andrew Post
I felt safe in the theater, here, now. Like I’d found an oasis the other Cassetera never had.
* * *
One afternoon Clifford shoved the office French door screeching open. He was all smiles. “Got the projector up and running!”
Together we went downstairs. He told me to take a seat in the empty auditorium while he ran upstairs to get the first two reels set up. The lights dimmed, and the opening credits to Pulp Fiction came up. No sound, unfortunately, but I’d seen the movie enough times on the rig to know what it should’ve sounded like. Just seeing the big yellow-and-red letters pop up gave me a thrill.
In the quiet auditorium, I applauded. Realizing I could, I gave a standing ovation. Clifford walked down, picked me up, and whirled me around.
We watched the movie together, quoting the lines we knew and making up the ones we couldn’t remember, but those were few and far between. Clifford had some home brew bathtub gin he’d managed to acquire. We drank it with ginger ale. He mixed the drinks for us—and a little too strong, for my liking. I sipped mine.
We reached the scene where Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace go back to her and her husband’s place. Clifford knew the monologue Vincent gives himself in the mirror about keeping his head straight and not sleeping with Mia, all the while she’s OD’ing in the next room. The bit about “jack off and go home” came up, and Clifford stumbled over it, doing the hand gesture as Vincent did it, too late to stop himself. He tried to recover by dropping his hand to the armrest.
“I saw that, you know,” I said, drunk enough to not feel abashed in teasing him about such a thing.
“Sorry, I . . . got caught up in the moment.”
“No, no. It’s fine. Totally fine. It’s just a moo-vie.” I heard myself. I giggled, accidentally belched. Thankfully, I didn’t fill Clifford’s lap with vomit. “Say, I got a question for you. Okay? You ready? Now answer truthfully, m’kay?”
He made a dubious smile.
I caught myself from falling out of the theater seat, laughed, and asked, “Do you like girls or guys? I don’t care either way. That’s all your business, man. I just . . . wanted to know. I was curious is all. Curious! Just freaking curious. Me. Curious.”
It was a surprise when he kissed me. “Friends,” he said. “Let’s just keep it at that, all right?”
I don’t know why I tried. It wasn’t like I was attracted to Thadius. Either way, it was a pretty good way to spend a night. Shame the fun wouldn’t last much longer.
* * *
Another e-mail arrived in my in-box from Thadius. He’d made it to New York. That’s all the e-mail said. I didn’t bother pulling Clifford away from his new project—replacing the balcony carpet—to tell him this. We often met up for meals, and I’d share it with him then.
I picked up spicy noodles for dinner that evening. Clifford snapped apart his chopsticks, listened as I told him about the e-mail. He seemed nonplussed. I guess I was too. There wasn’t much there to feel anything about.
I couldn’t help but think that while Thadius was in New York, scouring the city to find his husband, he’d end up disappointed. Because of the WTF, there was a good chance Hamish wouldn’t be the right age, and what if he’d found love elsewhere? I could see in my mind, clear as day, Thadius sitting in a bus station, crying into his hands while people passed him by. More lost than anyone had ever been before, wedged down a narrow dead-end alley of fate. I hoped for as long as he lived, he’d never have to hear “Without You” again.
I flinched at the sound of dinnerware clattering together. Tripping out of my daydream, I saw Clifford taking our plates to the kitchen.
I could hear him loading the dishwasher. “The sound system’s due to come in next week,” he called. “Maybe that night I get it set up, we’ll put Pulp Fiction on and watch it again, this time with audio. Better yet, do a whole Tarantino movie marathon. Sound like fun?”
I shut the tablet off. I didn’t want Thadius’s terse e-mail staring me in the face anymore. “What are we doing?”
Clifford stepped out through the swinging kitchen doors I was so used to seeing Beth or Ricky barreling out of. Different versh, I constantly had to remind myself. Different versh.
“What do you mean?” Clifford asked, face twisty.
“I mean, I understand why Thadius put together the Siren House. I just don’t understand what you and I are doing here, putting this theater together. I mean, no one can know about us. Who are we going to invite in? Or are we just going to watch these movies by ourselves?”
He sat back down. “Where’s this coming from?”
“What’s your plan about the Smocks, Cliff?”
He waved a hand at me. “We’ll talk about that later.”
“No,” I said, “I’d prefer it if you told me now. I . . . I mean, I like it here. I do. I like learning all this stuff”—I harvested and rebuilt the napkin dispenser on the table between us in a flash—“but why aren’t we making any moves toward stopping the Smocks? Because we’re not. At least none that I can see.”
“I’m putting this place together as plan B,” Clifford said, gesturing at the theater lobby around us. “If, for whatever reason the fight against the Smocks gets to look like it’d be too unwinnable, we’ll still have this. Eventually, you know, I’ll find someone who can maybe give me a new name, maybe even do some DNA tweak on us and give us some new coded strands or new faces or something so the Smocks will never know it was me who deserted and you who’s walking around with one of their priest’s fixins inside her. I just—”
“You’re a coward,” I said. It sounded to my own ears almost like a question, but I think that’s because I was surprised to learn this about Clifford, even though it’d been staring me in the face this whole time.
“Excuse me?” he said.
“Don’t you remember what they were doing? What you were doing when you were still with them? They’re burning people alive. They’re killing everyone, aging them all out of their own lives. I thought you knew that. I thought you wanted to stop them as much as I do. They tortured my friend Beth to death. Both my parents are dead because of them.”
“I thought your father left and—”
“I told you I saw him.”
“Right. When you were harvested, you sank down to the bottom of Lake Superior and had yourself a Hamlet moment.”
“Fuck you.”
“Sorry. I just . . . I realize you’ve lost a lot because of the Regolatore. And I hate the Smocks too. But we got away alive. We’ve already beaten them. We’re out ahead, Cass. We won. Here, we’re safe and everything can be great again. Blank slate, a fresh start. It’s rare to get a gift like that. We can put all that behind us,” he said, flicking his fingers as if to gesture at my versh.
This is just some rundown shack that Clifford, my white knight, had kicked down the door of and, seeing me, announced, “You there! You are, by some definition, desirable. Allow me to rescue you, and I’ll whisk you off to a world where we do nothing but sit on our butts and pretend those bad things didn’t really happen at all.”
“I want to continue to fight.”
“We are, Cass. By surviving.”
“This is hiding. Living on an oil rig for eleven years? That was surviving. Here, what we’re doing is cowering as if we don’t have a job out there that needs doing.” I showed him my palms. “We have this, Cliff. We can do something. We can fight them. We’re evenly matched with them now.”
“We’re not, though.” He groaned. “We can’t. We’re so outnumbered. They’ve got us no matter where we go. We can jump vershes again and again, but they’ll eventually find us. I thought you wanted to avoid what the other Cassetera went through. I thought you wanted some semblance of a normal life.”
“I do. But only after things are done.”
Clifford thrust his arm out, pointing at the front doors. “Then go. Find that fat, old, sad-sack friend of yours. Convince him the two of you can do anything to the Smocks—and do it.”
But I hadn’t harvested a living thing yet. I was scared I wouldn’t be able to put him together or that it’d be wrong and Clifford would end up like one of Thadius’s failed trials.
“Well?” Clifford said.
I looked at him squarely. “I didn’t jump vershes to become some . . . chained-up domesticated loaf squandering time when I could be out there making an effort.” I stood. It was more dramatic without crutches. Looking down at Clifford, I showed him my hand again. “I didn’t like having these at first, but they’re a part of me now. To not use them would be a complete waste. As great as a comfortable life sounds, I don’t want to look back in thirty, forty years and think I didn’t do a thing with these hands when I could have.”
Clifford cocked his eyebrows, blinked a few times, then looked at the floor. “Do what you have to do.”
Track 32
SONG 2
I left as soon as I got my things together. I didn’t have much besides my tablet, some of Clifford’s clothes I’d borrowed, and some money he offered and I reluctantly accepted. I went into Duluth at night to buy a jacket and some good boots. I had a feeling I’d be spending a lot of time on my feet. It was an odd thing, clothing shopping. Even odder was being out in the world where stores weren’t dark, gutted repositories of leftover junk. I pretended I was like any normal woman who occupied the shoe aisle.
Walking in, I’d completely missed the fact that this was the Mega Deluxo, the one two blocks up from the Siren House back in my versh. It was so different with all the lights on. Strange as it may seem, I missed those days navigating the shop floor by flashlight with Thadius. Here, everything smelled new, plastic, and fake, and it was too bright. The glare and ceaseless drone from the ceiling, a thousand burning fluorescent bulbs, gave me a headache and made my eyes water.
Once I found a pair of boots I liked, I walked toward the front of the store. I was so transfixed with the electronics department that someone had to ask me to please move forward. It was laid out the same, except the TVs were all up, the holoprojectors weren’t stolen, and there was no carwash-sized cauldron sitting in the middle of things. There was a kiosk there now, for people to choose electronic devices, holocapturing cameras of a much-smaller and sleeker variety than the typewriter-sized ones at the Siren House. And things that were like a tablet or a cell phone except they were called ordinateurs—and with them, cases and charms and stickers and screen protectors to personalize the devices.
“Will this be all for you tonight?” the lady behind the register asked, adding up my boots, jacket, satchel, and sweatshirt. The total was a lot more than I expected.
“I hope so,” I said, giving her all my money.
* * *
When I returned to the theater, I hoped Clifford wasn’t there. When I turned the corner, I saw a big delivery truck parked up the street with the big metal dolly ramp tongue hanging out. That’s when I remembered we were due to have our Wurlitzer dropped off.
I didn’t know how Clifford had so much money, and I never asked. I knew the life of a Smock was much like the military life. The moment Clifford joined, all his fundamental needs were taken care of. No need to buy food or clothes, no need to worry about finding a Laundromat or getting prescriptions filled. They had him covered. Part of me wondered if Clifford joined immediately after the bar where he worked closed. Maybe he’d dropped his money into a bank account to accrue a massive sum while as a Smock. The whole time he was enlisted maybe he never withdrew a dime, and once he became the Betrayer, he was a well-off Betrayer.
If Clifford was Thadius’s versh twin, I wouldn’t put it past him. Thadius was always six moves ahead of everyone else, mindful of how to roll out the facts when needed. It was as if life were all just one big performance to them. I’m sure if I accused either of them of such a thing, they’d quote Shakespeare at me, about all of life being a stage.
When I stepped inside the theater, Clifford was arguing with the delivery guys and didn’t notice me. He was pointing at the jukebox—a classic one, with the color-changing tubes. It housed what looked like a thousand CDs. “It’s not right,” he screamed at the guys wearing overalls.
I went around to the back of the bar, deposited my Mega Deluxo bag in one of the kitchen cupboards, unable to help overhearing. “This has CDs in it. This is going to be a rehipster joint, man, not some tired-ass trendoid hangout. I wanted the one that’d stream the songs in automatically. What am I supposed to do with this shit? I mean, look at this. Look at these bands on here: 4 Non Blondes, Crash Test Dummies? No one listens to that crap anymore. There’s no Arcade Fire on here, no Bright Eyes. Not even Vampire Weekend. Come on, get your heads out of your asses.”
The delivery guys didn’t care. They took their tongue-lashing, staring at Clifford with matching exhausted looks. “Look, buddy,” one said when he was done, “you ordered this one. The sheet says so right here. Trendoid playlist, says so right here.”
I was behind the kitchen door, trying to wedge my boots, now vacated of their paper stuffing, into my satchel, but I could hear the snap of him snatching the sheet from the guy.
After a second, “Fine. But tomorrow, I’m going to call this place where you shitheads work, and I want this thing taken back. Get the fuck out of my place. Now. Go.”
The door slammed. Clifford came around behind the bar. I heard him shove the half door aside, heard a scrape of a metal lid being unscrewed from a glass bottle, and a series of deep gulps. I emerged from the kitchen door. “Problem?”
Clifford set the homebrew gin down on the bar, hard. He kept one hand throttling its neck and turned to glare at me over his shoulder. He scoffed, looked away, upended the bottle again.
I wish no one ill will, but I was slowly beginning to see Clifford’s real side. It came out in flashes when things didn’t go his way. Honestly, seeing him frustrated now, knowing he had no intention of going after the Smocks—or help me go after them—gave me a small, malicious thrill.
“You really don’t want this thing?” I said.
The jukebox was nice, despite its not having the music he wanted on it. It begged to be touched. Even after being plugged in for just a few minutes, the arching tube on its front was warm to the touch. The colors were mesmerizing, swirling from blues and greens to purples and reds, to yellows and oranges. It made me think of the rainbow poppers, or as I knew them to really be now: the effect seen in the sky when someone jumped vershes.
“No. Those assholes sent me the wrong one.” He knew I knew what the exchange had been with the delivery guys not even a minute ago. He screwed the lid back down onto the bathtub gin and jammed it into its hiding place.
There was a key set into the face of the jukebox so that there’d be no coins required to play a song. I twisted it and flipped through the catalog, seeing a lot of what I recognized from my parents’ stuff as well as that very educational hard drive we’d found on the rig. Their music had become my music. I think I knew the words to some of the songs better than they ever had.
“Don’t break that thing,” Clifford said behind me. “It’s going back tomorrow if it kills me.” He removed his disguise of tinted sunglasses and a baseball cap, replacing them with his horn-rimmed glasses and red wool toboggan. He shoved the stocking cap to the back of his head like a yarmulke, so some hair spilled out onto his forehead. Apparently that was the desired look.
Ignoring him, I hit the randomize button on the Wurlitzer. The machine thumped, clicked, and through the window, I watched a CD get picked up by a delicate mechanical arm and set on a tray, making me think of a cauldron gearing up to scratch something together.
The jukebox had a narrow strip of LEDs above the keyboard where the names of the song and artist blinked a
cross for the song’s duration.
“Without You”—Mariah Carey
I heard a scuff of shoes. The music had been bouncing about freely in the theater lobby a moment ago, but as Clifford came closer, I could hear it bouncing off him. I could smell him then, that vague reek of caulking and industrial glue and paint, of environmentally friendly laundry soap and his spicy cologne.
“What is this song?” he asked, his voice tight.
Mariah reached the first chorus and really belted it out like only she could.
Clifford’s face, lit up in the changing shades of blue and green, stared at the jukebox, his brow crumpled. The way he stared into the face of the Wurlitzer, it was like it was spouting some prophecy he couldn’t fathom an argument against.
“You’ve never heard this one before?”
Absently, he shook his head. “I haven’t.”
Even though Clifford never had a Hamish, never met him, never had this song play as they met, it meant something to him. Certainly, Mariah had that effect on some people. I’d seen people tear up during her songs before, but it was usually those who had heard them before and probably had memories tied to them.
Clifford, remaining standing before the jukebox, soaked it up, stared into the machine’s face as if something inside was going to magically happen: a jack-in-the-box revelation, a sudden understanding, a comprehension of something big that couldn’t be known through repeated intervals of lessons but delivered all at once—bang—an enlightenment birthed from defunct technology, summoned from a compact disc.
The song ended. Clifford pushed a finger up behind the cracked lens of his glasses and wiped a tear away. He looked at it, the shiny hemisphere quivering on his fingertip accusingly, like it was the first evidence of something bad eating away at his insides.
“Did you like it?” I asked as the next song started.
