Tell the Machine Goodnight

by Katie Williams

  “I’m Calla’s manager,” Marilee said.

  “She’s practically my mother.” Calla beamed with enough wattage for both of them. “I mean, she taught me how to use my first tampon.”

  “Don’t be dramatic. You read the instructions on the box.”

  “Well, she bought me my first tampon.”

  “That may be true,” Marilee allowed.

  “You started young,” Pearl said.

  “What? My period?”

  “Your work.” Pearl fumbled for vagueness. “Your work in the industry.”

  Marilee’s eyes cut to Pearl, then away, and Pearl could tell in that one glance that the woman had read her and read her correctly: Marilee knew that Pearl had no idea who her client was. If this offended the woman, she didn’t show it, returning her cool gaze to Calla.

  And it didn’t really matter after all, Pearl supposed, not for the job at hand. Pearl could run the Apricity on a complete stranger as easily (maybe more easily) than a close friend. But then, there was the matter of politeness. Pearl would be staying in this house—“on premises,” the contract had said—for the next two weeks, so she should probably figure out what dubious talent this girl claimed, this woman managed.

  “I understand we’ll be running daily contentment plans,” Pearl said.

  “Stupid, isn’t it?” Calla replied.

  “Um. Is it?”

  “Phenomenally. I bet you’ve never had anyone ask for daily Apricities before. It’s like asking for daily dental checkups! Daily . . . colonics!”

  Pearl looked to Marilee for assistance, but the manager’s eyes remained fixed on Calla. “I, uh, suppose it is a rather robust course of—”

  “I mean, a person’s Apricity doesn’t change by the day!”

  “Actually, your contentment report can change over the course of your life. As your idea of happiness changes, so may your path to it.”

  Calla didn’t even blink at these lines from the manual. “But daily? Not daily.”

  “That would be unusual,” Pearl admitted.

  “Right? I told Flynn this was stupid, but he said it was either this or a therapist, and I do not trust those people. They’re the crazy ones! Don’t you think so?”

  “Therapists?”

  “Oh, all of them: psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors. I had a therapist once who told me that my personality type suggested that I would be likely to . . . never mind. Anyway, I said to Flynn, No therapists. And he said, Yes, something. So: you. You’re our ‘something.’”

  “Flynn—?”

  “One of the producers. Well, the producer really. He says we have to ensure my mental stability or whatever, which is powerfully unnecessary because, like I keep telling him, it’s not a big deal. I don’t know what they think is going to happen.”

  “Calla—” Marilee said, but the girl talked over her.

  “I’m a professional, after all. This isn’t my first time at the . . . what’s the saying? Roller rink? Cat show?”

  “Rodeo,” Pearl said. “‘This isn’t my first time at the rodeo.’”

  “‘Rodeo’? Really? I like ‘roller rink’ better. Like I was saying, this isn’t my first time at the roller rink. This isn’t my fifteenth time at the roller rink. But they all act like I’m going to—”

  “Calla,” Marilee said, louder this time, and the girl stopped short.

  “I wasn’t going to tell her.”

  “It’ll be daily Apricities,” Marilee said to Pearl. “As per the contract.”

  “Would you prefer a particular time of day?” Pearl asked, sneaking a glance at Calla.

  “We’ll let you know,” Marilee said.

  “Not too early,” Calla put in.

  “And is there anything in the results that I’m . . . to look for?”

  “We’ll let you know,” Marilee repeated, and Pearl knew enough to recognize when she was being dismissed.

  * * *

  —

  PEARL WAS LED UPSTAIRS and left alone in what were to be her rooms, a guest suite done up in faux-Gothic finery. She circled the suite, fingering the upholstery and fixtures, and confirmed what really she already knew from the lawyers and the car service and the house in the hills. There was serious money here.

  Though she’d grown up middle-class, the daughter of an insurance investigator and an optician, Pearl had, in her adult life, learned how to be among the wealthy. She’d had her first practice with Elliot’s family and then nearly a decade more with Apricity’s clientele. These were, after all, the people who could afford an Apricity reading, and these were the same people who wanted it most desperately, money having already ruled out the most obvious suspects for their unhappiness—toil, illness, and want—the real culprit still a mystery.

  This time, however, instead of a self-assured executive or silvered socialite, the possessor of all this largesse was a girl barely out of her teens. Pearl called Rhett to ask if he’d heard of a celebrity named Calla.

  “You mean Calla Pax?” Rhett had answered on the first ring. He answered all of Pearl’s calls these days, an unspoken agreement to reassure each other (themselves?) that things were better now.

  “I don’t know. Young. Redheaded. Busty.”

  “She had blue hair the last thing I saw her in, but that doesn’t mean anything, she’s always changing it.”

  “She’s an actress then?”

  “Mom. You didn’t even try looking her up, did you?”

  “I prefer your synopses,” Pearl told him. This was partly true, but it was also true that she had wanted the excuse to call him.

  Rhett was away at college, UC Davis, his first year. And Pearl? Pearl was left at home worrying. She worried when Rhett’s girlfriend, Saff, left for Northwestern, the status of their relationship unclear to Pearl, something Rhett described as, “We’re talking.” She pictured Saff meeting some Midwestern RA and breaking Rhett’s heart. Pearl worried when Rhett was assigned an international student for his roommate. She pictured Rhett and this foreign boy standing in the middle of an enormous quad, blinking around in bewilderment. She worried about venomous professors and clubby frat boys and the balance on Rhett’s meal card. She told herself firmly that she should not worry. Rhett was doing so much better. Pearl was superstitious and reverent, both, of this “doing so much better.” She had to keep touching it, as if it were the belly of an idol. She knew she would have to restrain herself soon, before the patina wore away and Rhett started avoiding her calls.

  “Look her up while we talk,” Rhett instructed. “Last name Pax, P-A-X.”

  Pearl obeyed, searching the name and projecting the results into the room. And yes, there in a circle around the high bed upon which Pearl sat appeared holographs of the girl who had answered the door. An army of Callas. What Rhett had said about the hair was true: blue hair, blond hair, black hair, pink. But the differences between the girls wasn’t what was remarkable. What was remarkable was the similarity.

  “What’s she so afraid of?” Pearl asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Each one, she’s screaming.”

  And it was true. Each of these rainbow-haired, translucent Callas had her mouth stretched wide.

  “Well, that’s what she does. She’s a screamer.”

  “Is that a type of music?”

  “Mom. She’s an actress.”

  “So . . . for horror movies?”

  “Sure. Skin Scythe? Skin Scythe II: Gently He Cuts?”

  “Sounds familiar,” Pearl lied.

  “But she’s gone beyond horror. She’s in a bunch of stuff: kidnapped-daughter movies, murdered-girlfriend-revenge movies, monster-destroys-a-city movies, terrorist-destroys-a-city movies, meteor-destroys-a-city movies. She’s big in VRs. Oh yeah, and she has a ringtone.”

  “A what?”

 
“It’s probably already on your screen. What’s it called? A standard option.”

  Pearl tapped Alerts & Sounds on her screen. The Callas blinked out, replaced with a list, and there it was between Beethoven and Clavier, a ringtone called Calla.

  “I found it,” she told Rhett, her voice tinged with awe.

  “Play it.”

  “No, they’ll hear.”

  “Who’ll hear?”

  “I’m at the office,” Pearl lied again. “Besides, I think I can guess what it sounds like.”

  “Screaming, yeah.”

  “So in these movies and games and things she just . . . screams?”

  “I mean, she acts. She has, like, different characters.”

  “All in peril.”

  “Sure, yeah. I mean there has to be a reason for her to you-know.”

  “A ‘screamer.’ And she’s famous for this?”

  “Very. I kind of can’t believe you’ve never heard of her.”

  “You know I don’t watch those sort of movies.”

  “Mom, it’s every sort of movie. Oh, and you’ll like this, her fans are split into two factions: Calla Lives and Calla Dies.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Calla Lives and Calla Dies.” Rhett’s voice had taken on an edge of enjoyment, the timeless pleasure of shocking one’s mother. “It’s like you said, she’s always in peril, and so some of her fans like the movies where she survives the peril, and others like it better when she’s snuffed.”

  “Snuffed,” she repeated.

  “Search ‘Calla Pax Pie Chart.’”

  “Do I want to see this?” But she told her screen to search it anyway, and suddenly a brightly colored wheel spun before her, a pie chart, and staggering within each wedge a tiny cartoon Calla with Xs for eyes. One of the Callas oofed over the cartoon butcher’s knife in her chest, another scrabbled at the rope twisting around her neck, a third’s head popped off and rolled between its cartoon feet. The chart tracked not just how often Calla’s characters lived or died, but when they died, and how they died. Pearl located the one wedge of the chart where a Calla stood unanimated and unmolested, her eyes dots instead of Xs. “She only lives twenty percent of the time?”

  “Sounds about right. When a new Calla movie comes out, there’s an actual betting line. Vegas odds.”

  “People put money on whether or not her character dies?”

  “Yeah. It’s a big thing. They lock down the movie sets. Leave pages out of the scripts. Make everyone sign something saying they can be sued if they leak.”

  “An NDA.”

  “What?”

  “A nondisclosure agreement,” Pearl said.

  There it was, the reason for all the secrecy. The producers didn’t want to squash the buzz around whatever movie they were making now, didn’t want to ruin the betting line.

  Pearl read from the chart, “She’s stabbed thirty-six percent of the time, strangled eighteen percent, shot seven percent. What’s ‘death by eagle feather’?” That slice showed a flurry of movement, but it was too thin to make out what was happening to cartoon Calla.

  “Oh yeah. That’s a good one. See, she’s camping with her friends on this, like, cliff, but there’s an old legend . . . Wait. Why are you asking about Calla Pax? You’re not giving her an Apricity, are you?”

  “No no no,” Pearl said.

  “But you said you’re at work.”

  “They’re considering her for an endorsement.” Pearl sat down on the edge of the bed as she repeated the cover story spelled out in the NDA she’d signed.

  “Really? For Apricity? Weird. I mean, you guys are supposed to be all about happiness, right? And Calla Pax is about, like, terror and death and stuff. Unless maybe it’s ironic?”

  “Yes,” Pearl said. She’d gone back to Alerts & Sounds, her finger hovering over the button that would play the Calla ringtone. She imagined that husky voice launched into a scream. “I think it’s meant to be ironic.” The wallpaper in the guest room, she noticed, was not actually classic Victorian scrollwork but human mouths open wide.

  * * *

  —

  “I WATCHED SOME of your movies last night,” Pearl told Calla. They were faced off on sofas in the sitting room off the foyer at their (not too early) meeting the next morning. The mobile of jellyfish spun lazily over Calla’s head, their tentacles waving; on the mantel behind her, the toy soldiers guarded their nest, rifles leveled at Pearl.

  “Really?” The girl beamed. “Which ones?”

  “The titles . . . let’s see—”

  “Were they action movies? Those ones all sound the same. Final Bullet, Pure Vengeance, Death Drop.”

  “Death Drop. I watched that one. And the one where you played the diplomat’s daughter. In Japan.”

  “Western Sunrise, Eastern Blood.”

  “And the first Skin Scythe.”

  Calla raised her eyebrows. “Wow. Triple feature. Don’t tell me you stayed up all night watching movies.”

  Pearl had watched not just three but seven Calla Pax movies; however, she only watched up until Calla’s character died, which was usually no more than thirty minutes in and was often the opening scene. The only film Pearl had seen in its entirety was Western Sunrise, Eastern Blood, where Calla suffered kidnapping, beating, branding, and almost rape by the Yakuza before she was rescued by her diplomat father, a man who had to cast aside deeply held pacifist beliefs and embrace a violent form of martial arts in order to save his daughter’s virtue and (secondary, it seemed) life. The final scene showed Calla reclaimed in her father’s arms, the bodies of her kidnappers piled at their feet, the sun rising behind them, a red orb.

  “You were good,” Pearl said. “Very affecting.”

  Pearl wasn’t lying. Though the movies themselves, especially watched seven in a row, were preposterous montages of bullet sprays and cleavage, serial killers and cleavage, airborne cars and cleavage, Calla Pax was affecting. When she was being chased through the woods (or through the serpentine streets of a foreign city or through the catacombs of an ancient race of human-bat hybrids), your breath caught in your throat. When she was finally cornered, you gripped the blankets. When she died, your hands flew to your mouth. When she screamed, that famous Calla Pax scream, it was your own release you felt.

  “I try to make the characters real for me, so they’ll be real for you,” Calla said demurely. After having memorized pages from the Apricity training manual, Pearl knew a practiced response when she heard one.

  “How old were you when you made Skin Scythe?”

  Calla’s eyes flicked up. “Pearl! You never ask an actress her age!”

  “I’m sorry. I—”

  Calla grinned. “I’m kidding. I was fourteen. Practically a fetus.”

  “And such an adult film.”

  In Skin Scythe, Calla played the plucky little sister whose skin the killer peeled off in one long, thin strip, hanging it from the tree branches outside the hero’s bedroom window. There had been a lot of screaming in that one. It was, unluckily, the last movie Pearl had watched before going to bed. She had the lurking feeling that her sleep had been filled with nightmares, though she couldn’t remember a one.

  “Oh, it was boring really,” Calla said. “Hours in the makeup chair. But not as bad as SS2. In that one I’m skinless the whole time.” She pointed at Pearl and started giggling. “Your face!”

  Pearl forced a smile, hoping to dispel whatever expression of shock or disgust had inspired Calla’s laughter. “It’s just . . . who thinks of these things?”

  Calla leaned forward. “Middle-aged men with tinted screen specs and superhero T-shirts.”

  When, moments later, he entered the sitting room, Pearl realized that this had been a spot-on description of Flynn the producer.

  Flynn perched on the couch’s arm, ruffling Calla’s hair
. “Hi there, superstar. Up with the birds today, I see!”

  “Hey, Flynn,” Calla said.

  Pearl opened her mouth to introduce herself, but Flynn got there first. “I’m Flynn and you’re Pearl.” He pointed at himself and Pearl in turn. His eyes did a quick scan, at first she thought of her figure, but then she realized he was reading whatever his screen specs were saying about her.

  Before Pearl could respond—if a response was even called for after such an introduction—Marilee marched into the room and planted herself in front of Calla. “We said eleven.”

  “Did we?” Calla sniffed. “I thought ten.”

  Pearl hadn’t seen either of them, or anyone else, since her arrival the previous afternoon. After her call to Rhett, she’d stayed in her guest suite for a couple of hours, unsure if she was welcome to move around the house. When dinnertime came, she’d wandered downstairs and found the first floor empty, though all the lights had been left on. On the kitchen counter she’d discovered a covered tray marked with her name, underneath its lid a salad of strange leaves, cheeses, and fruits, as delicious as anything she’d ever eaten. Also, bread and wine. When she’d finished, Pearl had washed her dinner plate in the sink and taken the remainder of the bottle up to her room, where she’d continued her Calla Pax marathon. During the opening credits of Death Drop, Pearl’s screen had lit with a request from Marilee for a meeting the next morning at eleven, and then, during Skin Scythe’s infamous peeling scene, a second alert from Calla saying that they needed to move the meeting up to ten. When Pearl had come downstairs this morning at half past nine, she’d found Calla already waiting in the front sitting room, a coffee service and basket of muffins set out on the table before her.

  “I think you know very well what time we said,” Marilee told the girl.

  Calla stared back, belligerent in her feigned innocence.

  Pearl averted her eyes and busied herself with her Apricity case, taking longer than necessary with the clasps. Flynn, she noticed, feigned nothing, watching the disagreement with open interest.

  “We were just talking,” Calla finally said. “About my movies. Pearl likes them.” Then, as if conceding a point, “Don’t worry. I didn’t say anything.”