Tell the Machine Goodnight

by Katie Williams

  “No wonder you’re having nightmares.”

  Calla frowned. “That’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “It must be a very scary movie, the one you’re shooting. For them to have hired me, I mean.”

  The girl shrugged. “Flynn and Marilee are just overprotective.” Her voice had grown aware, if not wary. Of course she’d have experience with people angling for something, would know the sound of a hidden motive.

  “I thought you might be interested in hearing what’s on your contentment plan,” Pearl tried.

  Calla put down her spoon. “You’re not supposed to tell me that.”

  “I know. But I think I should anyway. It says you should sleep, Calla. Sleep. And now I think you should tell me about the movie you’re making. I think it’s bad for you and—”

  “I’m fine!”

  “—and that it would help to tell someone about it.”

  They stared at each other, the girl’s chin set.

  “When I first got here, I had the feeling that maybe you wanted to tell me.”

  “Look, it’s not like I do everything Marilee says.”

  “Okay then.”

  “It’s just if I tell you, she’ll know. She’ll fire you. She said so on the first morning after I changed the meeting time. And I don’t want you to go. Not until . . . not until we’re done shooting my scenes. Or I really won’t be able to sleep. Okay? Okay, Pearl?” She reached out and laid her hands over Pearl’s, her enormous eyes gathering up what little light there was in the room, shining with it.

  “Okay,” Pearl relented.

  “So can we talk about something else?”

  “Yes, okay.”

  They ate ice cream in silence.

  “I could . . .” Calla paused. “I could tell you about my nightmare. Marilee didn’t say I couldn’t talk about that.”

  “Tell me.”

  Calla tilted her head. “I dream I’m in an experiment.”

  “Like a scientific experiment?”

  “Yeah. In a lab. And all those things I told you I was scared of—the centipedes, the ocean, and all that—the scientist is doing them to me.”

  “And you scream,” Pearl said.

  “That’s why he’s doing it. That’s the experiment. To make me scream.” The girl spoke deliberately, her eyes fixed on Pearl.

  “Calla? Is the scientist in the dream Flynn?”

  The girl’s mouth quirked.

  “What?” Pearl said.

  “Just, that’s a little obvious, don’t you think?”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER RETURNING THE EMPTY CARTON and spoons to the kitchen, Pearl stood in front of the rack of keys next to the garage door. She knew the icons on the key fobs, had matched them to the actual cars on the other side of the wall. Pearl thought about what would happen a week from now, once this job was over. She would return to the city, to her apartment. Her empty apartment. Rhett was gone. Elliot was long gone. The last man she’d dated, David, had removed himself from her life perfunctorily, efficiently, like unplugging an appliance from the wall. Pearl couldn’t blame him. Things had been terrible with Rhett. Pearl had been run through with fear, cantilevered like one of her models. But with fear came certainty. Fear winnowed down your options, gave you a clear course forward. Pearl had known what she had to do: save her son. She’d stood over his bed every night, just like she stood over Calla’s.

  With a thought, Pearl took a key from the rack and slipped it into the pocket of her robe.

  * * *

  —

  THE ENTIRE AFTERNOON was like a sequence from a Calla Pax movie. Pearl borrowed (stole) one of the cars from the garage and, after her daily meeting with Calla, used it to tail the town car down through the hills, over to the 101, and to an office building a few blocks away from the Sonoma County Airport. She parked across the street and watched Calla and Marilee enter the building, watched until the town car drove away. Pearl looked up the address on her screen and learned that the building was empty space, typically rented out to shipping firms. A filming location was her first thought. Yet there were only a few cars in the lot and no sign of equipment or crew. She waited another hour, witnessing no other comings or goings, before crossing the street and entering the building herself.

  The building was—and this stood to reason—as empty as the parking lot. The front desk was unmanned, the lobby vacant. The mounted directory was the old-fashioned kind with the stick-on letters, but they were all lying in a heap at the bottom of the glass case. Pearl didn’t need their assistance anyway, because as she stood there wondering which way to go, the lobby began to ring with Calla’s screams.

  Moving toward the sound, Pearl was struck with a sense of déjà vu, but then who wouldn’t be, running down a long unfamiliar hallway, featureless but for its doors, the sound of screaming in the distance? Everyone had had some version of this same nightmare.

  The door, when Pearl reached it, wasn’t even closed all the way, much less locked. Pearl slammed it open with her forward momentum and took two tripping steps into the room. She found herself in an office space, the cubicles pushed aside in a jumbled puzzle on the far wall. All the familiar faces were there. Flynn the producer stood in front of a large screen projection cast by one of the two strangers who flanked him. He’d turned at her entrance, but the tint of his specs hid his eyes, casting back two small slippery reflections of herself. Marilee sat a few feet away in an office chair, leveling Pearl with her most withering look. The screams still rang around them, preserving the moment and pushing it forward into the next moment.

  Calla.

  Calla lay in the center of the room, on her back in a glass tank. A glass coffin, Pearl’s mind amended. The girl was a source not just of sound but also motion, her hands brushing frantically over her own face and body, scrabbling at the glass walls, dark flecks flying from her fingertips. She was, Pearl realized, covered in bugs. Just then Calla turned. Her screams stopped for a single moment of silence as she caught sight of Pearl through the glass. Their eyes met. Then the screams started again, becoming Pearl’s name.

  Pearl scanned the room again—Marilee rising from her chair, Flynn taking a step toward the door, the young man standing by Calla’s tank with a Styrofoam cooler—and found that she didn’t understand.

  “Where are the cameras?” she said.

  No one answered her.

  Pearl started forward, evading Flynn, pushing past Marilee (pushing past her hard because the woman tried to grab her arm), before finally reaching the tank and yanking it open. Then Calla’s arms were around her neck and coming with them the beetles and spiders, but Pearl didn’t allow herself even a flinch as she lifted the girl out. She set Calla on her feet, helping to brush off the bugs that scattered every which way. The guy with the cooler took an uncertain step in one direction and then another, until Marilee strode forward, raised her foot, and set it down on a centipede with an audible squish.

  She sighed. “We’ll have to hire an exterminator.” Looked at Pearl. “What did you think you were doing?”

  “She was terrified!”

  “Precisely.”

  Calla was shaking out the last bugs from her shirt, and now Pearl saw the suction cups affixed to the girl’s chest, to her wrists and neck.

  “It’s not a movie,” Pearl said, thinking of what Calla had told her the night before. She surveyed the room, slowly this time. “It’s an experiment.”

  “We’ll have some more forms for you to sign.” Flynn was at Pearl’s shoulder. “Should we just go ahead and bring her on?” he asked Marilee. “I mean . . . !” He gestured around them. “She’s seen it. And we could use an admin.”

  “What is this?” Pearl said.

  Marilee sighed again heavily. “This is how leaks happen.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll sign your forms
.”

  Flynn gestured in the direction of the two strangers. “Shall we have our scientists explain it?”

  Scientists? Pearl thought. They looked like college kids in blue jeans.

  “Can . . . can I tell her?” Calla asked softly. She’d stilled mostly, though her fingers still twitched at her sides. She looked between Flynn and Marilee.

  Marilee nodded, Go ahead.

  Calla turned to Pearl, tucking her hair behind her ears. They were large ears, stick-out ears. Endearing ears. The light shone through them, making them glow pink. “It is like a movie,” Calla began. “Sort of is. You know how when you watch a movie, you kind of feel what the character is feeling? Like how in a horror movie, when they’re being chased by the killer, you’re scared, too?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, this is like that but more—” Calla’s eyes widened and she jerked backward. She stuck a hand into her hair, rustled it, and a spider fell out. “That’s going to be happening all day,” she said to Marilee.

  “If we hadn’t been interrupted—”

  “Just let me finish telling her.” She turned back to Pearl. “It’s like that same feeling but more direct. Flynn and them—the scientists—they make me afraid, and then they capture it.”

  “Capture? Capture what?”

  “The racing heart, the tingling palms, the adrenaline—but it’s more than that. They capture the feeling, the way I experience the feeling. And then they can, like, project it into other people. They can make people feel it.” She put two fingers to the center of her chest. “My fear.”

  Pearl touched Calla’s arm. “How?”

  “Auditory is the most promising route,” one of the scientists said. “And then auditory-visual, of course. We’re thinking of laying the tracks over Skin Scythe.”

  “Or sensors in a VR mask and gloves,” the other scientist put in, “lined up with the pulse points.”

  “Guys, guys!” Flynn put his hands in the air. “Stop talking. She’s going to have to sign all the forms now.”

  Pearl put a hand on Calla’s other arm so that she was holding the girl out in front of her. “What else did they do to you?”

  “You mean besides the bugs?” Calla shrugged and looked at her feet. “The other things I told you. Buried alive. The surgery where the anesthesia wears off.”

  “They didn’t actually—”

  “No. Just pretend. That’s why it stopped working. Because I knew it was pretend, I stopped being scared. So this week we did the bugs. The ocean is harder to do—sensors, a diving team.”

  “They’re traumatizing you.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re traumatizing her,” Pearl said to the others. “You know you are. That’s why you hired me, because you know you are.”

  “You signed a contract—” Flynn began.

  “Would you please stop talking about paperwork!”

  “I’m fine,” Calla repeated. “I agreed to do it. I want to do it.”

  “But why?”

  The girl’s gaze was as steely as Marilee’s. “Because it’s art.”

  “Calla. This isn’t—”

  “It is. And I’m good at it. Better than anyone else.”

  “Better at being a victim?”

  “But I’m not a victim. I choose it. I’m in control.”

  “You’re screaming in your sleep.”

  “Well, that’s what I do.” Calla extracted one of her arms from Pearl’s grip and lifted it in front of her face. A tiny bluish cellar bug ran the length of the limb. “I’m a screamer.”

  Pearl looked over, an appeal to Marilee, but the manager had her chin lifted, a small proud smile, unfamiliar on her face.

  Flynn nodded to himself. “We can use that in the promo.”

  Pearl stared between these two professionals, two adults, waiting for one of them to step in and stop this. Then she felt a hand find its way into hers, fingers intertwining. Calla.

  “Will you stay and help me?” And she was the girl again, not the actress. “Please, Pearl. Please?”

  Pearl watched the cellar bug make it all the way up the girl’s arm, disappearing beneath her sleeve. After a moment, she took the girl’s hand and helped her back into the tank.

  In a week Pearl will return home, the smell of her own apartment, after such a long absence, both foreign and familiar to her. She’ll walk from room to empty room, ending up in Rhett’s bedroom. The plaid comforter will be pulled up to the pillows, the sheets beneath unrumpled and unslept upon as she sits on the edge of her son’s bed. She’ll take her screen from its case, tell it what she wants, the list of sounds. With a fingertip she’ll press it: Calla. As the girl’s screams surround her, filling the room, filling the apartment, Pearl will lift her head, expand her lungs, and open her mouth wide. She won’t make a sound.

  8

  Body Parts

  The woman said, “Come here, dear, you have an eyelash on your cheek.”

  And Calla leaned forward.

  Why did you do that? Marilee asked her after. And oh, the reasons Calla could’ve given! She could’ve said:

  Because Lynley Hart, host of The Gray Hour and winner of two Peabodys, asked me to.

  Because her white buzz cut is a national symbol of journalistic gravitas.

  Because she told me she’d just become a grandmother. And what are you saying, Marilee, that you want me to become the type of person who doesn’t trust a grandmother?

  Whatever the reason, Calla did lean forward, eyes closed, stage lights hot on her face, expecting to feel Lynley Hart’s stately fingers brush her cheek and send the stray lash soaring. Instead, the woman’s fingers passed over Calla’s cheek and fastened onto an eyelash still attached to Calla’s eye. With an efficient snap of the wrist, Lynley plucked the lash free. Calla yelped. Not her million-dollar movie scream, more the squawk of a bird being plucked, which, Calla thought later, was kind of what she was.

  When Calla opened her teary eyes, Lynley Hart was already settled back in her chair, looking not the least bit embarrassed by what she’d just done. She produced a small plastic bag from the inside pocket of her blazer and dropped Calla’s eyelash into it. They both stared at it, that little curl of Calla.

  “You too?” Calla said.

  She could hear the distant rumble of Marilee trying to push past the ring of cameras and crew, shouting for Calla’s pretend boyfriend/secret bodyguard. The last time Calla had seen him, he was parked at craft services, eating square after tiny square of marbled cheese like Pac-Man eating pellets. Useless. But then, he’d probably say the same of her. After all, she was the one who’d leaned forward with her eyes closed, which was precisely the kind of thing she was not supposed to be doing.

  Why did you do it? Marilee asked her after.

  And Calla could’ve answered: Because she called me dear.

  There in the circle of cameras and lights, Calla said to Lynley, “You don’t believe it, right? I mean, you’re a rational person, smart.”

  Lynley Hart’s smile was a fixture installed in the brick and mortar of her face. Her lips didn’t so much as twitch. And Calla knew right then and there that the woman was going to pretend that she’d done nothing, that what had just happened . . . hadn’t.

  “Are we still filming?” Calla asked. “Can you at least tell me that?”

  “We stopped a few questions back.”

  Of course they had. Lynley Hart wouldn’t want a video to exist of her plucking bits off a young actress. Her gaze rose off Calla and landed on a person at the edge of the circle, a producer or cameraman. Calla wondered if the crew was in on it, if after the shoot, they’d cut Calla’s eyelash into millimeters, each one taking a piece for himself. Lynley nodded and over her shoulder a red light appeared, the one Calla hadn’t noticed winking out earlier. They were recording again.

&nb
sp; “Thank you for coming in today, Calla,” Lynley said smoothly. “It’s always a treat to have a young artist on the show.”

  Lynley slid her hand into the empty space between the chairs, the decisive handshake that ended each of her interviews. Marilee had fallen silent. Or maybe they’d carried her gagged and kicking out of the studio. Calla realized her palm was still cupped over her eye. She lowered it cautiously and stared at Lynley’s proffered hand, the squared-off tips of her fingernails. Calla felt like she was extending her own hand into a trap. But Lynley Hart already had what she wanted from Calla; there was nothing more she would take. Calla plunged her hand into the circle of light. A dry shake and it was done.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE GREENROOM, Calla and her pretend boyfriend occupied opposite settees and watched Marilee’s fingers skitter across her screen, loosing a furious swarm of threats. Marilee wanted to call a doctor to look at Calla’s eye, but Dr. Fleming was out of the country, and Marilee said they couldn’t trust his fill-in. Calla agreed. A doctor could get anything. A doctor could get a vial of her blood.

  “It was just an eyelash,” Calla told Marilee. “I’m fine.”

  “Why on earth did you lean forward?” Marilee asked.

  Calla could’ve answered: Because over and over I play the part of the damsel, and the one thing about the damsel—her heart is always true.

  “I guess because she asked me to.”

  Marilee’s lips pressed into a line, opening only to mutter, “Because she asked you to.”

  Calla could’ve pointed out that she was constantly doing things because Marilee asked her to, but she didn’t. After all, Marilee could’ve called Calla a little twit, and she hadn’t. A modicum of restraint keeps the world going round.

  Since the doctor couldn’t be called in, Marilee insisted on inspecting Calla’s eye herself, holding it open and peering in. So close, the pores on Marilee’s nose looked like seeds on a berry; her breath was a polite peppermint, sour coffee underneath. She called over Calla’s pretend boyfriend for consultation. He leaned in obligingly. Calla could tell it made him nervous to get this close to her. He was only allowed to touch her in front of the cameras or if someone tried to attack her; it was in his contract.