by Pratt, Tim
“I’ll put these away, Mr. Nickels,” she said, taking the other movies he’d brought to the counter. “Enjoy, and let me know what you think of it.”
Pete mumbled some pleasantry as he hurried out the door, disc clutched tight to his chest, and he alternated walking and running back to his apartment. Once inside, he turned on his humming stack of A/V components and opened the tray on the DVD player. He popped open the plastic case and removed the disc—simple, black with the title in silver letters—and put it in the tray. The disc was a little smaller than DVDs in this world, but it seemed to fit okay. The disc spun, hummed, and the display on the DVD flashed a few times before going blank. The television screen read “No disc.” Pete swore and tried loading the disc again, but it didn’t work. He sat in his leather chair and held his head in his hands. Money wasn’t the only thing that was different in that other world. DVD encryption was, too. Even his region-free player, which could play discs form all over the world, couldn’t read this version of The Magnificent Ambersons. The videotapes would be similarly useless—he’d noticed they were different than the tapes he knew from this world, some format that didn’t exist here, smaller than VHS, larger than Betamax.
But all was not lost. Pete went out the door, carrying The Magnificent Ambersons with him, since he couldn’t bear to let it go. He raced back to Impossible Dreams. “Do you rent DVD players?” he gasped, out of breath. “Mine’s broken.”
“We do, Pete,” she said, “but there’s a $300 deposit. You planning to pay that in nickels?”
“Of course not,” he said. “I got some real money from home. Can I see the player?” To hell with being reasonable. He’d snatch the player and run. She had his address, but this wasn’t her world, and in a few more minutes the shop would disappear again. He could come back tomorrow night with a toy gun and steal all the DVDs he could carry, he would bring a suitcase to load them all in, he’d—
She set the DVD player on the counter with the cord curled on top. The electrical plug’s two posts were oddly angled, one perpendicular to the other, and Pete remembered that electrical standards weren’t even the same in Europe and North America, so it was ridiculous to assume his own outlets would be compatible with devices from another universe. He rather doubted he’d be able to find an adapter at the local Radio Shack, and even if he could rig something, the amount of voltage carried in his wires at home could be all wrong, and he might destroy the DVD player, the way some American computers got fried if you plugged them into a European power outlet.
“Never mind,” he said, defeated. He made a desultory show of patting his pockets and said, “I forgot my wallet.”
“You okay, Pete?” she asked.
“Sure, I was just really excited about seeing it.” He expected some contemptuous reply, something like “It’s just a movie,” the sort of thing he’d been hearing from friends and relatives his entire life.
Instead she said, “Hey, I get that. Don’t worry, we’ll have it in stock when you get your player fixed. Old Orson isn’t such a hot seller anymore.”
“Sure,” Pete said. He pushed the DVD back across the counter at her.
“Want a refund? You only had it for twenty minutes.”
“Keep it,” Pete said. He hung around outside and watched from across the street as the clerk locked up. About ten minutes past 10:00, he blinked, and the store disappeared in the moment his eyes were closed. He trudged away.
***
That night, at home, he watched his own DVD of The Magnificent Ambersons, with its butchered continuity, its studio-mandated happy ending, tacked-on so as not to depress wartime audiences, and afterward he couldn’t sleep for wondering what might have been.
***
Pete didn’t think Impossible Dreams was going to reappear, and it was 9:00 before it did. He wondered if the window was closing, if the store would appear later and later each night until it never reappeared at all, gone forever in a week or a day. Pete pushed open the door, a heavy plastic bag in his hand. The clerk leaned on the counter, eating crackers from little plastic packages, the kind that came with soup in a restaurant. “Hi.”
“Mr. Nickels,” she said. “You’re the only customer I get after 9:00 lately.”
“You, ah, said you didn’t have money for dinner lately, and I wanted to apologize for being so much trouble and everything... anyway, I brought some food, if you want some.” He’d debated all day about what to bring. Fast food was out—what if her world didn’t have McDonald’s, what would she make of the packaging? He worried about other things, too—should he avoid beef, in case mad cow disease was rampant in her world? What if bird flu had made chicken into a rare delicacy? What if her culture was exclusively vegetarian? He’d finally settled on vegetarian egg rolls and rice noodles and hot and sour soup. He’d seen Hong Kong action movies in the store, so he knew Chinese culture still existed in her world, at least, and it was a safe bet that the food would be mostly the same.
“You are a god, Pete,” she said, opening a paper container of noodles and wielding her chopsticks like a pro. “You know what I had for lunch today? A pear, and I had to steal it off my neighbor’s tree. I got the crackers off a tray in the dining hall. You saved my life.”
“Don’t mention it. I’m really sorry I was so annoying the last couple of nights.”
She waved her hand dismissively, mouth crammed with egg roll, and in her presence, Pete realized his new plan was impossible. He’d hoped to endear himself to her, and convince her to let him hang around until after closing, so he could... stow away, and travel to her world, where he could see all the movies, and maybe become the clerk’s new roommate. It had all made sense at 3:00 in the morning the night before, and he’d spent most of the day thinking about nothing else, but now that he’d set his plan in motion he realized it was more theatrical than practical. It might work in a movie, but in life he didn’t even know this woman’s name, she wouldn’t welcome him into her life, and even if she did, what would he do in her world? He spent all day processing applications, ordering transcripts, massaging a database, and filing things, but what would he do in her world? What if the computers there had totally different programming languages? What would he do for money, once his hypothetical giant sack of nickels ran out?
“I’m sorry, I never asked your name,” he said.
“I’m Ally,” she said. “Eat an egg roll, I feel like a pig.”
Pete complied, and Ally came around the counter. “I’ve got something for you.” She went to the big screen TV and switched it on. “We don’t have time to watch the whole thing, but there’s just enough time to see the last fifty minutes, the restored footage, before I have to close up.” She turned on the DVD player, and The Magnificent Ambersons began.
“Oh, Ally, thanks,” he said.
“Hey, your DVD player’s busted, and you really should see this.”
For the next fifty minutes, Pete watched. The cast was similar, with only one different actor that he noticed, and from everything he’d read, this was substantially the same as the lost footage he’d heard about in his world. Welles’s genius was apparent even in the butchered RKO release, but here it was undiluted, a clarity of vision that was almost overwhelming, and this version was sad, profoundly so, a tale of glory and inevitable decline.
When it ended, Pete felt physically drained, and sublimely happy.
“Closing time, Pete,” Ally said. “Thanks again for dinner. I’m a fiend for Chinese.” She gently herded him toward the door as he thanked her, again and again. “Glad you liked it,” she said. “We can talk about it tomorrow.” She closed and locked the door, and Pete watched from a doorway across the street until the shop disappeared, just a few minutes after 10:00. The window was closing, the shop appearing for less time each night.
He’d just have to enjoy it while it lasted. You couldn’t ask more of a miracle than it was willing to give.
***
The next night he brought kung pao chicken and aske
d what her favorite movies were. She led him to the Employee Picks shelf and showed him her selections. “It’s mostly nostalgia, but I still love The Lunch Bunch—you know, the sequel to The Breakfast Club, set ten years later? Molly Ringwald’s awesome in it. And Return of the Jedi, I know a lot of people hate it, but it’s one of the best movies David Lynch ever directed, I thought Dune was a muddle, but he really got to the heart of the Star Wars universe, it’s so much darker than The Empire Strikes Back. Jason and the Argonauts by Orson Welles, of course, that’s on everybody’s list...”
Pete found himself looking at her while she talked, instead of at the boxes of the movies she enthused over. He wanted to see them, of course, every one, but he wouldn’t be able to, and really, he was talking to a woman from another universe, and that was as remarkable as anything he’d ever seen on a screen. She was smart, funny, and knew as much about movies as he did. He’d never dated much—he was more comfortable alone in the dark in front of a screen than he was sitting across from a woman at dinner, and his relationships seldom lasted more than a few dates when the women realized movies were his main mode of recreation. But with Ally—he could talk to her. Their obsessions were congruent and complementary.
Or maybe he was just trying to turn this miracle into some kind of theatrical romance.
“You look really beautiful when you talk about movies,” he said.
“You’re sweet, Mr. Nickels.”
***
Pete came the next three nights, a few minutes later each time, as the door appeared for shorter periods of time. Ally talked to him about movies, incredulous at the bizarre gaps in his knowledge—“You’ve never heard of Sara Hansen? She’s one of the greatest directors of all time!” (Pete wondered if she’d died young in his world, or never been born at all.) Ally had a fondness for bad science fiction movies, especially the many Ed Wood films starring Bela Lugosi, who had lived many years longer in Ally’s world, rather than dying during the filming of Plan 9 from Outer Space. She liked good sci-fi movies, too, especially Ron Howard’s Ender’s Game. Pete regretted that he’d never see any of those films, beyond the snippets she showed him to illustrate her points, and he regretted even more that he’d soon be unable to see Ally at all, when the shop ceased to appear, as seemed inevitable. She understood character arcs, the use of color, the underappreciated skills of silent film actors, the bizarre audacity of pre-Hayes-Code-era films, the perils of voiceover, why an extended single-camera continuous scene was worth becoming rapturous about, why the animation of Ray Harryhausen was in some ways infinitely more satisfying than the slickest CGI. She was his people.
“Why do you like movies so much?” he asked on that third night, over a meal of Szechwan shrimp, her leaning on her side of the counter, he on his.
She chewed, thinking. “Somebody described the experience of reading great fiction as being caught up in a vivid, continuous dream. Someone else said comics were the perfect medium, because they’re words and pictures, and you can do anything with words and pictures. I think movies are the most immediate and immersive form of fiction, and they do comics one better. People say movies are passive, or that the best movie isn’t as good as the best book, and I say they’re not watching the right movies, or else they’re not watching them right. My life doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, I’m hungry and lonely and cold a lot of the time. My parents are shit, I can’t afford tuition for next semester, I don’t know what I want to do when I graduate anyway. But when I see a great film, I feel like I understand life a little better, and when I see a not-so-great film, it at least makes me forget the shitty parts of my life for a couple of hours. Movies taught me to be brave, to be romantic, to stand up for myself, to not be treacherous, and those were all things my parents never taught me. Movies showed me there was more to the world than chores and whippings when I didn’t do the chores good enough. I didn’t have church or loving parents, but I had movies, cheap matinees when I cut school, videos after I worked and saved up enough to buy a TV and player of my own. I didn’t have a mentor, but I had Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. Sometimes, sure, movies are a way to hide from life, but shit, sometimes you need to hide from life, to see a better life on the screen, or a life that makes your life not seem so bad. Movies taught me not to settle for less.” She took a swig from her water bottle. “That’s why I love movies.”
“Wow,” Pete said. “That’s... wow.”
“So,” she said, looking at him oddly. “Why do you pretend to like movies?”
Pete frowned. “What? Pretend?”
“Hey, it’s okay. You came in and said you were a big movie buff, but you don’t even know who Sara Hansen is, you’ve never seen Jason and the Argonauts, you talk about actors starring in movies they didn’t appear in... I mean, I figured you liked me, you didn’t know how else to flirt with me or something, but I like you, and if you want to ask me out, you can, you don’t have to be a movie trivia expert to impress me.”
“I do like you,” Pete said. “But I love movies. I really do.”
“Pete... you thought Clark Gable was in Gone with the Wind.” She shrugged. “Need I say more?”
Pete looked at the clock. He had fifteen minutes. “Wait here,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
He ran home. The run was getting easier. Maybe exercise wasn’t such a bad idea. He filled a backpack with books from his reference shelves—The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies, the AFI Film Guide, the previous year’s Video and DVD Guide, others—then ran back. Panting, he set the heavy bag on the counter. “Books,” he gasped. “Read,” gasp. “See you,” gasp, “tomorrow.”
“Okay, Pete,” Ally said, raising her eyebrow in that way she had. “Whatever you say.”
Pete lurched out of the store, still breathing hard, and when he turned to look back, the door had already disappeared. It wasn’t even 10:00 yet. Time was running out, and even though Ally would soon leave his life forever, he couldn’t let her think he was ignorant about their shared passion. The books might not be enough to convince her. Tomorrow, he’d show her something more.
***
Pete went in as soon as the door appeared, at nearly 9:30. Ally didn’t waste time with pleasantries. She slammed down his copy of the AFI Desk Reference and said, “What the hell is going on?”
Pete took the bag off his shoulder, opened it, and withdrew his slim silver laptop, along with a CD wallet full of DVDs. “Gone with the Wind,” he said, inserting a disc into the laptop, calling up the DVD controls, and fast forwarding to the first scene with Clark Gable.
Ally stared at the LCD screen, and Pete watched the reflected colors move against her face. Gable’s voice, though tinny through the small speakers, was resonant as always.
Pete closed the laptop gently. “I do know movies,” he said. “Just not exactly the same ones you do.”
“This, those books, you... you’re from another world. It’s like... like...”
“Something out of the Twilight Zone, I know. But actually, you’re from another world. Every night, for an hour or so—less, lately—the door to Impossible Dreams appears on my street.
“What? I don’t understand.”
“Come on,” he said, and held out his hand. She took it, and he led her out the door. “Look,” he said, gesturing to the bakery next door, the gift shop on the other side, the bike repair place across the street.”
Ally sagged back against the door, half-retreating back inside the shop. “This isn’t right. This isn’t what’s supposed to be here.”
“Go on back in,” he said. “The store has been appearing later and vanishing sooner every night, and I’d hate for you to get stranded here.”
“Why is this happening?” Ally said, still holding his hand.
“I don’t know,” Pete said. “Maybe there’s no reason. Maybe in a movie there would be, but...”
“Some movies reassure us that life makes sense,” Ally said. “And some movies remind us tha
t life doesn’t make any sense at all.” She exhaled roughly. “And some things don’t have anything to do with movies.”
“Bite your tongue,” Pete said. “Listen, keep the laptop. The battery should run for a couple of hours. There’s a spare in the bag, all charged up, which should be good for a couple more hours. Watching movies really sucks up the power, I’m afraid. I don’t know if you’ll be able to find an adapter to charge the laptop in your world—the standards are different. But you can see a couple of movies at least. I gave you all my favorite DVDs, great stuff by Hayao Miyazaki, Beat Takeshi, Wes Anderson, some classics... take your pick.”
“Pete...”
He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “It’s been great talking to you these past few nights.” He tried to think of what he’d say if this was the last scene in a movie, his Casablanca farewell moment, and a dozen appropriate quotes sprang to mind. He dismissed all of them. “I’m going to miss you, Ally.”
“Thank you, Pete,” she said, and went, reluctantly, back into Impossible Dreams. She looked at him from the other side of the glass, and he raised his hand to wave just as the door disappeared.
***
Pete didn’t let himself go back the next night, because he knew the temptation to go into the store would be too great, and it might only be open for ten minutes this time. But after pacing around his living room for hours, he finally went out after 10:00 and walked to the place the store had been, thinking maybe she’d left a note, wishing for some closure, some final-reel gesture, a rose on the doorstep, something.
But there was nothing, no door, no note, no rose, and Pete sat on the sidewalk, wishing he’d thought to photograph Ally, wondering which movies she’d decided to watch, and what she’d thought of them.
“Hey, Mr. Nickels.”
Pete looked up. Ally stood there, wearing a red coat, his laptop bag hanging from her shoulder. She sat down beside him. “I didn’t think you’d show, and I did not relish the prospect of wandering in a strange city all night with only fifty dollars in nickels to keep me warm. Some of the street names are the same as where I’m from, but not enough of them for me to figure out where you lived.”
