by Pratt, Tim
“Oh, lord?” said the harlequin. He wore great black wings, feathered by dead crows. He’d painted his face white, in the semblance of a skull. His genitals were exposed. He had once trysted with the tyrant, and sought always to arouse him again.
“I have discovered grief and guilt,” said the tyrant, who had not eaten or gone out for days.
Grief and guilt, like love, were unknown to the harlequin. “Shall I fetch the poet?” he said doubtfully.
“No,” said the tyrant, “I know how grief feels.”
The harlequin shifted from foot to foot. If the tyrant enjoyed his grief, the harlequin shouldn’t try to lighten his mood. He said, “The boy, Giorgio, seems well. But he does not understand that you have made him heir. He does not understand what it means.”
“He will understand many things in time,” the tyrant said. “I will teach him.” He straightened slightly, sitting among his pillows. “Harlequin, we have been together so long. I know I can count on you always.” He reached out and stroked the harlequin’s cheek. The harlequin shivered and sighed with pleasure. “I have a gift for you,” the tyrant said, and took a small, brightly wrapped box from under his robe.
The harlequin’s eyes lit. He tore open the box, pulled tissue paper aside, and drew out the morsel within.
“It’s a rare truffle from the Sinking Forest,” the tyrant said. “Worth your weight in gold, harlequin, and tasted only by the very wealthy. Enjoy it.”
The harlequin gulped the truffle greedily and chewed. Genuine ecstasy filled his crabbed features.
“I understand nothing surpasses its taste,” the tyrant said.
The harlequin only nodded, his eyes closed, trying to hold the already-fading flavor.
“It is all the more precious,” the tyrant said, “because it can be eaten only once. I have never tasted one. I must enjoy it vicariously through you.”
“Why only once, my lord?” the harlequin asked, absently stroking his testicles.
“The truffle is poisonous,” the tyrant said.
The harlequin wretched his death throes through the room, tumbling into the bloody reflecting pool and finally floating. The tyrant watched, and savored his sorrow, and nursed it in his breast.
“That was good,” he said aloud. “Not as good as Lucrezia, but good.” He rang a small iron bell, and bearers came to take the harlequin’s body away.
The tyrant nestled into his filthy blankets and wept.
Impossible Dreams
Pete was walking home from the revival movie house, where he’d caught an evening showing of To Have and Have Not, when he first saw the video store.
He stopped on the sidewalk, head cocked, frowning at the narrow shop squeezed between a kitschy gift shop and a bakery. He stepped toward the door, peered inside, and saw racks of DVDs and VHS tapes, old movie posters on the walls, and a big screen TV against one wall. The lettering on the door read “Impossible Dreams Video,” and the smudges on the glass suggested it had been in business for a while.
Except it hadn’t been. Pete knew every video place in the county, from the big chains to the tiny place staffed by film students by the university to the little porno shop downtown that sometimes also sold classic Italian horror flicks and bootleg Asian movies. He’d never even heard of this place, and he walked this way at least twice a week. Pete believed in movies like other people believed in God, and he couldn’t understand how he’d overlooked a store just three blocks from his own apartment. He pushed open the door, and a bell rang. The shop was small, just three aisles of DVDs and a wall of VHS tapes, and there were no customers. The clerk said, “Let me know if you need any help,” and Pete nodded, barely noticing her beyond the fact that she was female, somewhere south of thirty, and had short pale hair that stuck up like the fluff on a baby chick.
Pete headed toward the classics section. He was a cinematic omnivore, but you could judge a video store by the quality of its classics shelf the same way you could judge a civilization by the state of its prisons. He looked along the row of familiar titles—and stopped at a DVD turned face-out, with a foil “New Release” sticker on the front.
Pete picked it up with trembling hands. The box purported to be the director’s cut of The Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles.
“Is this a joke?” he said, holding up the box, almost angry.
“What?” the clerk said.
He approached her, brandishing the box, and he could tell by her arched eyebrows and guarded posture that she thought he was going to be a problem. “Sorry,” he said. “This says it’s the director’s cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, with the missing footage restored.”
“Yeah,” she said, brightening. “That came out a few weeks ago. You didn’t know? Before, you could only get the original theatrical version, the one the studio butchered—”
“But the missing footage,” he interrupted, “it was lost, destroyed, and the only record of the last fifty minutes was the continuity notes from the production.”
She frowned. “Well, yeah, the footage was lost, and everyone assumed it was destroyed, but they found the film last year in the back corner of some warehouse.”
How had this news passed Pete by? The forums he visited online should have been buzzing with this, a film buff’s wet dream. “How did they find the footage?”
“It’s an interesting story, actually. Welles talks about it on the commentary track. I mean, it’s a little scattered, but the guy’s in his nineties, what do you expect? He—”
“You’re mistaken,” Pete said. “Unless Welles is speaking from beyond the grave. He died in the 1980s.”
She opened her mouth, closed it, then smiled falsely. Pete could practically hear her repeating mental customer service mantras: the customer is always right, even when he’s wrong. “Sure, whatever you say. Do you want to rent the DVD?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I don’t have an account here.”
“You local? We just need a phone number and ID, and some proof of address.”
“I think I’ve got my last pay stub,” Pete said, rooting through his wallet and passing over his papers. She gave him a form to fill out, then typed his information into her computer. While she worked he said “Look, I don’t mean to be a jerk, it’s just—I’d know. I know a lot about movies.”
“You don’t have to believe me,” she said, tapping the DVD case with her finger. “Total’s $3.18.”
He took out his wallet again, but though it bulged with unsorted receipts and scraps of paper with notes to himself, there was no cash. “Take a credit card?”
She grimaced. “There’s a five buck minimum on credit card purchases, sorry—house rules.”
“I’ll get a couple of other movies,” he said.
She glanced at the clock on the wall. It was almost 10:00.
“I know you’re about to close, I’ll hurry,” he said.
She shrugged. “Sure.”
He went to the Sci-Fi shelf—and had another shock. I, Robot was there, but not the forgettable action movie with Will Smith—this was older, and the credits said “written by Harlan Ellison.” But Ellison’s adaptation of the Isaac Asimov book had never been produced, though it had been published in book form. “Must be some bootleg student production,” he muttered, and he didn’t recognize the name of the production company. But—but—it said “winner of the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.” That had to be a student director’s little joke, straight-facedly absurd box copy, as if this were a film from some alternate reality. Worth watching, certainly, though again, he couldn’t imagine how he’d never heard of this. Maybe it had been done by someone local. He took it to the counter and offered his credit card.
She looked at the card dubiously. “Visa? Sorry, we only take Weber and FosterCard.”
Pete stared at her, and took back the card she held out to him. “This is a major credit card,” he said, speaking slowly, as if to a child. “I’ve never even heard of—”
Shrugging, she loo
ked at the clock again, more pointedly this time. “Sorry, I don’t make the rules.”
He had to see these movies. In matters of film—new film! strange film!—Pete had little patience, though in other areas of his life he was easygoing to a fault. But movies mattered. “Please, I live right around the corner, just let me go grab some cash and come back, ten minutes, please?”
Her lips were set in a hard line. He gestured at The Magnificent Ambersons. “I just want to see it, as it was meant to be seen. You’re into movies, right? You understand.”
Her expression softened. “Okay. Ten minutes, but that’s it. I want to get home, too.”
Pete thanked her profusely and all but ran out of the store. He did run when he got outside, three mostly-uphill blocks to his apartment in a stucco duplex, fumbling the keys and cursing, finally getting into his sock drawer where he kept a slim roll of emergency cash. He raced back to Impossible Dreams, breathing so hard he could feel every exhalation burning through his body, a stitch of pain in his side. Pete hadn’t run, really run, since gym class in high school, a decade earlier.
He reached the bakery, and the gift shop, but there was no door to Impossible Dreams Video between them—there was no between at all. The stores stood side by side, without even an alleyway dividing them.
Pete put his hand against the brick wall. He tried to convince himself he was on the wrong block, that he’d gotten turned around while running, but he knew it wasn’t true. He walked back home, slowly, and when he got to his apartment, he went into his living room, with its floor-to-ceiling metal shelves of tapes and DVDs. He took a disc down and loaded it into his high-end, region-free player, then took his remote in hand and turned on the vast plasma flat-screen TV. The surround-sound speakers hummed to life, and Pete sank into the exquisitely contoured leather chair in the center of the room. Pete owned a rusty four-door Honda with 200,000 miles on the engine, he lived mostly on cheap macaroni and cheese, and he saved money on toilet paper by stealing rolls from the bathrooms in the university’s Admissions Office, where he worked. He lived simply in almost every way, so that he could live extravagantly in the world of film.
He pressed play. Pete owned the entire Twilight Zone television series on DVD, and now the narrator’s eminently reasonable voice spoke from the speakers, introducing the tale of a man who finds a dusty little magic shop, full of wonders.
As he watched, Pete began to nod his head, and whispered, “Yes.”
***
Pete checked in the morning; he checked at lunch; he checked after leaving his job in the Admissions Office in the evening; but Impossible Dreams did not reappear. He grabbed dinner at a little sandwich shop, then paced up and down the few blocks at the far end of the commercial street near his apartment. At 8:30 he leaned against a light pole, and stared at the place where Impossible Dreams had been. He’d arrived at, what, 9:45 last night? But who knew if time had anything to do with the miraculous video store’s manifestation? What if it had been a one-time only appearance?
Around 8:45, the door was suddenly there. Pete had blinked, that was all, but between blinkings, something had happened, and the store was present again.
Pete shivered, a strange exultance filling him, and he wondered if this was how people who witnessed miraculous healings or bleeding statues felt. He took a deep breath and went into the store.
The same clerk was there, and she glared at him. “I waited for you last night.”
“I’m sorry,” Pete said, trying not to stare at her. Did she know this was a shop of wonders? She certainly didn’t act as though she did. He thought she was of the miracle, not outside it, and to her, a world with The Magnificent Ambersons complete and uncut was nothing special. “I couldn’t find any cash at home, but I brought plenty tonight.”
“I held the videos for you,” she said. “You really should see the Welles, it’ll change your whole opinion of his career.”
“That’s really nice of you. I’m going to browse a little, maybe pick up a few things.”
“Take your time. It’s been really slow tonight, even for a Tuesday.”
Pete’s curiosity about her—the proprietor (or at least clerk) of a magic shop!—warred with his desire to ransack the shelves. “Do you work here every night?”
“Lately, yeah. I’m working as much as I can, double shifts some days. I need the money. I can’t even afford to eat lately, beyond like an apple at lunch time and noodles for dinner. My roommate bailed on me, and I’ve had to pay twice the usual rent while I look for a new roommate, it sucks. I just—ah, sorry, I didn’t mean to dump all over you.”
“No, it’s fine,” Pete said. While she spoke, he was able to look straight at her openly, and he’d noticed that, in addition to being a purveyor of miracles, she was pretty, in a frayed-at-the-edges ex-punk sort of way. Not his type at all—except that she obviously loved movies.
“Browse on,” she said, and leaned on the counter, where she had a heavy textbook open.
Pete didn’t need any more encouragement than that. Last night he’d developed a theory, and everything he saw now supported it. He thought this store belonged to some parallel universe, a world much like his own, but with subtle changes, like different names for the major credit cards. But even small differences could lead to huge divergences when it came to movies. Every film depended on so many variables—a director’s capricious enthusiasm, a studio’s faith in a script, a big star’s availability, which starlet a producer happened to be sleeping with—any of those factors could irrevocably alter the course of a film, and Hollywood history was littered with the corpses of films that almost got made. Here, in this world, some of them were made, and Pete would go without sleeping for a week, if necessary, to see as many as possible.
The shelves yielded miracle after miracle. Here was The Death of Superman, directed by Tim Burton, starring Nicolas Cage; in Pete’s universe, Burton and Cage had both dropped the project early on. Here was Total Recall, but directed and written by David Cronenberg, not Paul Verhoeven. Here was The Terminator, but starring O.J. Simpson rather than Arnold Schwarzenegger—though Schwarzenegger was still in the film, as Kyle Reese. Here was Raiders of the Lost Ark, but starring Tom Selleck instead of Harrison Ford—and there was no sign of any later Indiana Jones films, which was sad. Pete’s hands were already full of DVDs, and he juggled them awkwardly while pulling more movies from the shelves. Here was Casablanca starring George Raft instead of Bogart, and maybe it had one of the alternate endings, too! Here a John Wayne World War II movie he’d never heard of, but the box copy said it was about the ground invasion of the Japanese islands, and called it a “riveting historical drama.” A quick scan of the shelves revealed no sign of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, and those two things together suggested that in this world, the atomic bomb was never dropped on Japan. The implications of that were potentially vast... but Pete dismissed broader speculations from his mind as another film caught his eye. In this world, Kubrick had lived long enough to complete Artificial Intelligence on his own, and Pete had to see that, without Steven Spielberg’s sentimental touch turning the movie into Pinocchio.
“You only get them for three days,” the clerk said, amused, and Pete blinked at her, feeling like a man in a dream. “You going to have time to watch all those?”
“I’m having a little film festival,” Pete said, and he was—he planned to call in sick to work and watch all these movies, and copy any of them he could; who knew what kind of bizarre copy protection technology existed in this world?
“Well, my boss won’t want to rent twenty movies to a brand new member, you know? Could you maybe cut it down to four or five, to save me the hassle of dealing with him? You live near here, right? So you can always bring them back and rent more when you’re done.”
“Sure,” Pete said. He didn’t like it, but he was afraid she’d insist if he pushed her. He selected four movies—The Magnificent Ambersons, The Death of Superman, I, Robot, and Casablanca—and put the others
away. Once he’d rented a few times, maybe she’d let him take ten or twenty movies at once. Pete would have to see how much sick time he had saved up. This was a good time to get a nasty flu and miss a couple of weeks of work.
The clerk scanned the boxes, tapped her keyboard, and told him the total, $12.72. He handed over two fives, two ones, two quarters, a dime, two nickels, and couple of pennies—he’d brought lots of cash this time.
The clerk looked at the money on the counter, then up at him with an expression caught between amusement and wariness. She tapped the bills. “I know you aren’t a counterfeiter, because then you’d at least try to make the fake money look real. What is this, from a game or something? It’s not foreign, because I recognize our presidents, except the guy on, what’s this, a dime?”
Pete suppressed a groan. The money was different, he’d never even thought of that. He began to contemplate the logistics of armed robbery.
“Wait, you’ve got a couple of nickels mixed in with the fake money,” she said, and pulled the two nickels aside. “So that’s only $12.62 you still owe me.”
“I feel really dumb,” Pete said. “Yeah, it’s money from a game I was playing yesterday, I must have picked it up by mistake.” He swept up his bills and coins.
“You’re a weird guy, Pete. I hope you don’t mind me saying.”
Nodding dolefully, he pulled a fistful of change from his pockets. “I guess I am.” He had a lot of nickels, which were real—or close enough—in this world, and he counted them out on the counter, $3.35 worth, enough for one movie. He’d go to the bank tomorrow and change his cash for sacks of nickels, as much as he could carry, and he would rent all these movies, five cents at a time. Sure, he could just snatch all four movies and run now, but then he’d never be able to come back, and there were shelves upon shelves of movies he wanted to see here. For tonight, he’d settle for just The Magnificent Ambersons. “This one,” he said, and she took his nickels, shaking her head in amusement. She passed him a translucent plastic case and pennies in change, odd little octagonal coins.
