Tell the Machine Goodnight

by Katie Williams

  Pearl was careful to keep her head down, but her thumb slipped and one of the clasps on her bag released with a click, loud in the tense room. She might as well have popped her head up and asked, You didn’t say anything about what?

  Pearl straightened, polite smile on her face, Apricity machine in her hands like a silver platter. “Shall we get started?” she said.

  “You and I will get started,” Marilee replied. “Calla will join us at eleven. As planned.”

  Calla glowered at Marilee. She grabbed a muffin from the basket and bit off its top as if this were an act of defiance.

  “Come on, darling.” Flynn held out a hand to Calla, opening and closing it. “There’s some music I need your opinion on.”

  Calla flicked a blueberry from her muffin onto the coffee table. She rose with a deep sigh, dragging her feet after him. However, the temper tantrum didn’t last even the length of the room, Calla saying brightly, “You definitely need my help. Your taste is terrible. Remember last week when I caught you singing along to . . .”

  “Usually it’s all I can do to get her up before noon, and today she’s downstairs making breakfast.” Marilee took Calla’s vacated seat and leveled her scowl at Pearl. “She told you an earlier meeting time, didn’t she?”

  “We really were talking about her movies,” Pearl said, adding, “She seems a little lonely.”

  Marilee blinked. “Yes. Well. Great artists are.”

  Great artists? Fortunately, Pearl caught the smile before it rose to her lips. There was something in how Marilee had said it—great artists—that told Pearl she’d meant it, that Calla was one of those. One of the greats.

  “You talked about her movies,” Marilee repeated.

  “That’s all.”

  “What did she say about them?”

  “Not much. That the makeup process for Skin Scythe was time-consuming.”

  “Yes. She complained about it bitterly for the entire shoot. What else?”

  “You and Flynn came in just then. But, Marilee, I want you to know that my discretion extends beyond the Apricity results. Even without the NDA, I wouldn’t reveal anything that”—Pearl gestured meaninglessly—“happened here.”

  Marilee watched Pearl for a long unsettling moment. “Calla’s current project is confidential.”

  “I understand. I won’t tell anyone about it.”

  “Yes, because you won’t know about it.”

  Pearl dropped her eyes. “My son explained to me about the betting.”

  “Betting?”

  “The Vegas odds. Calla Lives or Calla Dies.”

  Marilee dismissed this with a hand. “That’s not a concern. That’s not . . . anything. The current project is confidential for other reasons. It’s a licensing issue, actually. Patents and certain approvals.”

  “For a horror movie?”

  Marilee stared at her. “It’s millions upon millions. Of dollars.”

  “Oh.”

  “I tell you this so that you understand what’s at stake. Financially. Legally. Calla doesn’t understand—rather, she won’t understand. She likes to play willfully ignorant, which means she won’t be as discreet as she should be. She signed an NDA too, you know. You can help her avoid breaching it and save her, and me, the trouble of a lawsuit.”

  “Of course. But . . . how?”

  “By not asking her questions, by meeting at the times I specify, by doing your job and nothing more. If you review the agreement you signed, you’ll understand why this is to your benefit as well.”

  Pearl didn’t need to reread the nondisclosure agreement; the repercussions for any leaked information were severe enough that she remembered them quite well.

  “I’ll administer her contentment reports,” she told Marilee. “Nothing more.”

  “And you’ll share the results with me.”

  “All right. And Calla?”

  “No. Not Calla.”

  “If she asks?”

  “Become . . . imaginative.”

  “Can’t I just tell her that I can’t tell her?”

  “You can try that.” Marilee tilted her head, waiting for Pearl to arrive at the obvious conclusion: But it won’t work.

  “Shall I give you a report if—?”

  “Daily. You’ll give me daily reports.”

  “Like I told Calla, her contentment report is unlikely to change over such a short period of time.”

  “Yes, yes, like you told Calla and like the people at your company told me. I understand. All the same, a daily test for Calla. A daily report to me, even if you are telling me the same thing over and over again. I promise I won’t be bored.” She pressed her lips together, a stand-in for a smile.

  “Is there something you’d like me to look for?”

  “Any signs of unrest.”

  “You mean psychological issues? Anxiety? Depression?”

  Marilee frowned. “We don’t use those words. Tabloids use those words.”

  And doctors, Pearl thought, but she echoed, “Signs of unrest. Okay. Sure.”

  “She thinks I bully her, but she doesn’t understand.” Marilee reached forward and collected Calla’s abandoned blueberry from the coffee table, popping it into her mouth. “This is how I protect her.”

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT THREE DAYS followed the same pattern. Pearl woke early and took her breakfast tray (delivered by a posh catering service, she discovered on day two) to the garden out back and ate on the bench near the koi pond, attended by lacy trees, no neighbors in view. Marilee had told Pearl that she had the run of the first floor, but when on the second floor to keep to her guest suite. And stay away from the east wing! Pearl longed to joke with Rhett, but the nondisclosure agreement meant him, too. The rest of the morning Pearl spent catching up on paperwork that had been languishing on her screen for months. Otherwise, she was cooling her heels until eleven, when she met with Calla to run her daily contentment plan.

  At these meetings, Calla was as loquacious as ever, though Marilee had surely had a talk with her, too, because the girl didn’t again attempt to tell Pearl about any of her movies, certainly not the current one. Even if she had tried, Marilee was always nearby, in and out of the room on some task or another. Calla didn’t even ask what was on her contentment reports. The answer would have been nothing, or at least nothing alarming. In fact, as contentment plans went, the list was charmingly straightforward: Eat ice cream, take nature walks, adopt a dog. As Pearl had predicted, the plan didn’t change. There were no “signs of unrest.” In fact, it was one of the least controversial contentment plans Pearl had ever seen.

  Each noon, a town car came to pick up Calla and Marilee and take them to, Pearl assumed, the movie set. This left Pearl free for the rest of the day, free but restricted to the house and the garden. The first couple of days, she tried to scare up more work, but after spending two hours needlessly reformatting an Apricity intake form, she admitted that her time would be better spent in the garden rereading Jane Eyre. She wished she’d brought the model she was working on, a western bristlebird (Dasyornis longirostris), mud colored but for iridescent shimmers on the tips of its wings and tail.

  No one came home for dinner, unless you counted the catering service with Pearl’s tray. Pearl spent the evenings in her guest suite working her way through the Calla Pax oeuvre. Sometime after midnight, Pearl would hear Calla return, Marilee’s voice on the stairs, shepherding the girl to bed. Sometime after that, Pearl would fall into a deep cottony sleep.

  It was late in the third night that Pearl half woke to what sounded like Calla screaming. She thought it was her own memory of one of the movies and fell back asleep. In the morning, she remembered and wasn’t so certain.

  “Did you notice? We’re both named after objects,” Calla said at their next meeting, the Apricity swab still tucked
in the pouch of her cheek. The girl looked tired, Pearl decided, a sallow tone under the cover of her makeup.

  “Are we?” Pearl said.

  “Calla Pax. Think about it.” She handed Pearl the swab.

  “‘Peace lily’?”

  “Well, technically, ‘lily peace.’ So peace lily backward. It’s not my actual name anyway. I mean it is now. Marilee and I made it up.”

  “What’s your real name?” Pearl asked.

  “I don’t even remember anymore!” the girl said, her eyes sparkling. And of course this couldn’t be true, though it was, Pearl thought, a rather sad sort of joke.

  “You know what?” Calla said. “I don’t even like lilies. Peace is okay, as far as it goes. How about you? Do you like pearls?”

  Pearl smiled. “Not really.”

  “When you told me your name, the first thing I did was check to see if you were wearing any. Pearls, that is.” She leaned forward and whispered, “I was glad you weren’t. Can you imagine if you wore, like, a pearl choker and earrings? Or strands and strands of those long pearl necklaces? Like: Hi, I’m Pearl!”

  Pearl laughed.

  Calla sat back in her chair. “You can’t get too into it.”

  “Into what?”

  “What they call you.”

  Pearl glanced at the hallway, where Marilee had passed by moments before.

  “Calla,” she said quietly, “are you all right?”

  “Who? Me?” The girl gave a smile as loud, in its way, as her scream. “Of course I’m all right! What else would I be?”

  * * *

  —

  PEARL WOKE AGAIN TO SCREAMING that night, woke entirely, and knew this time that it wasn’t a movie. She rose and hurried down the hall, letting the screams guide her until she arrived at the door from behind which the noise issued. The screams continued, punctuated only by the breaths that fueled them. They didn’t stop even after Pearl knocked. Marilee’s warning to keep to her own room entered Pearl’s mind briefly as she opened the door.

  At first, she thought Calla was awake, for the girl was sitting up in bed with her eyes and mouth opened wide. But she didn’t turn to look at Pearl, couldn’t rightly be said to be looking at anything. Asleep still. Pearl knew you weren’t supposed to wake a sleepwalker, though she couldn’t remember if this bit of wisdom had an actual scientific basis. Besides, she could hardly let the girl go on screaming. Pearl went to the bed—a monstrosity set in the very middle of the room—gripped Calla’s shoulder, and shook it.

  The shaking wasn’t necessary. The moment Pearl’s hand made contact, Calla’s mouth closed, cutting off mid-scream, and her eyes focused. She blinked up at Pearl, then murmured her name, and Pearl felt a swell of protectiveness, tender and fierce. Where were the girl’s parents in all this? Did she have even a friend? Or was it just her, Marilee, and producers like Flynn?

  “You were having a nightmare,” Pearl said.

  “Oh.” The girl swallowed, rubbed her eyes with a fist like a child. “Was I screaming?”

  Pearl wasn’t going to mention this, but what else would explain her presence in the bedroom? She nodded.

  Calla’s mouth twisted to the side. “Marilee would call it rehearsing.”

  “That’s awful,” Pearl said despite herself.

  “I’m just kidding. Please don’t tell Marilee. About the nightmares. She’ll start sleeping here.”

  “Is it . . . the movie you’re making?”

  Calla’s brow wrinkled, then cleared. “I’m not supposed to talk about that.”

  “Right. Of course.” Pearl bit her lip, aware that she was doing the opposite of what she’d promised Marilee, persuading instead of dissuading Calla to confide in her.

  After a pause, Calla said, “You could sit down.”

  Pearl was still hovering. Calla shifted over and Pearl sat on the edge of the bed. The sheets were warm and smelled slightly metallic. Ozone. The word rose in her mind. It was the smell that came before a lightning storm. They didn’t have those in San Francisco, lightning storms. In fact, Pearl realized, she hadn’t seen a lightning storm since childhood, though she still remembered the smell.

  “What are you afraid of?” the girl said suddenly.

  “You mean now? Or in general?”

  “You’re afraid of something right now?”

  “No.”

  “I mean, you know, your fears. Yeah, in general. I know it’s a rude question.” Calla lowered her chin. “Will you tell me anyway?”

  “All right. I’m afraid of suffocating. And of snakes. I’ve been afraid of those since I was young.”

  “What else?”

  “My son.” Pearl hadn’t planned on saying it, but out it came. “I don’t mean I’m afraid of him. For him. I’m afraid for him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was sick for a long time.” Pearl took a breath, forced a smile. “But he’s better now.”

  “You’re afraid he’ll get sick again?” Calla peered at her.

  “Of course. And”—Pearl paused, then decided to go on with it—“I’m afraid of what happens now.”

  “To him?”

  “And to me.”

  “Now that you don’t have to take care of him anymore,” Calla said, and Pearl looked over, surprised at the girl’s insight.

  Calla sat up on her knees. “Do you want to know what I’m afraid of?”

  Pearl nodded.

  “The ocean. Not of sharks or drowning, but just the ocean. Being in the middle of it. It’s a type of agoraphobia. And I’m afraid of being operated on and the anesthesia wears off, but just part of it so that I can feel everything but I can’t tell the surgeons that I’m awake. And I’m afraid of spiders and cockroaches and centipedes. And being buried alive. Being buried alive with spiders and cockroaches and centipedes. They say you’re either afraid of animals with lots of legs or afraid of animals with no legs. You and I are opposites on that. It’s an evolutionary fear. But really most fears are. They activate the amygdala, which is like the brain we had before we grew bigger brains.”

  “You’re an expert on fear. But then I guess you would be.”

  Calla sank down in the bed, pulling the sheet up to her chin. “Doesn’t keep me from being afraid, though.” She yawned. “I’m going to try to sleep.”

  Pearl stood. She paused at the door. “No more nightmares.”

  Calla snorted. “A girl can dream.”

  * * *

  —

  MARILEE SAT IN ON THE ENTIRETY of the next morning’s Apricity session. Neither Calla nor Pearl mentioned the night before. Despite Pearl’s conviction that it wouldn’t change, Calla’s contentment plan now had a new item on it, the unambiguous command Sleep. Pearl showed it to Marilee while the girl was upstairs getting ready for the town car. Pearl did not, because she had promised Calla she wouldn’t, mention the nightmares.

  “You said for me to alert you—”

  “It’s her work schedule, that’s all,” Marilee said brusquely. “It’s unavoidable but, fortunately, temporary.”

  “When a contentment plan changes, well, it doesn’t happen often, so when it does, it reflects a substantial change in well-being.”

  Pearl paused, but Marilee didn’t reply.

  Pearl forged on. “Do you think it might be the film she’s making? I mean the content? That it might be troubling her sleep?”

  “Calla has been doing this from a young age.”

  “Exactly,” Pearl said. The look Marilee gave her prompted an immediate, “I’m sorry.” Though she wasn’t, Pearl thought a few minutes later as the sound of the town car faded down the street. She really wasn’t sorry at all.

  Pearl called Rhett for the third time in as many days. She couldn’t remember what they talked about, nothing forbidden. “Mom,” he said at the end of the call, “are y
ou sure you’re okay?”

  * * *

  —

  PEARL STAYED UP AS LATE as she could manage, but there were no screams that night, and after she fell asleep, no screams woke her. Perhaps Calla had forced herself to stay awake, too. At their session the next day, it certainly looked it. Her eyes were sunken and shadowed, her hair unwashed and unbrushed, and although she kept up her usual stream of chatter, she didn’t seem to notice that she reran the same topics, and even the same sentences, over again.

  That afternoon, Pearl got out her screen and called up the pie chart once more, watching the vivid wheel of cartoon Callas gasp, stagger, and fall over again and again. When she was Calla’s age, she and Elliot were newly married and had just moved to the city; she was pregnant with Rhett. Pearl had taken a job as a night secretary for a broker who traded in foreign markets. Her boss’s schedule meant that she had to walk five blocks through their run-down neighborhood in the middle of the night, her pregnant belly held out before her like an offering. It was, in retrospect, a shockingly foolish thing to do. One night a man approached her, blocking her path, and she’d thought, Here it is. But he hadn’t attacked her. No, he’d laid his hands on her belly and slurred, “Bless you,” beaming, “bless you.” After he’d shambled on, Pearl realized that she hadn’t been afraid, not even for a moment. How young she’d been! How fierce! And, she could see it now, how fragile that ferocity!

  Pearl left a note for the caterers underneath the lid of her lunch tray. And that night, after Marilee left, Pearl knocked on Calla’s bedroom door with the carton of cherry ice cream the catering service had brought her. Two spoons.

  “I’m worried about dripping on your bedsheets,” Pearl said, though they were already deep into the carton. “I just noticed this room is entirely white.”

  “It’s a replica of the one from Skin Scythe.”

  “Oh, Calla.”

  “Bedrooms are always white in horror movies. For the blood.”