The Last Projector

by David James Keaton

  Sniffing around, still unable to shake the voice they’d imagined for Bigby, she fantasized about him desperately trying to convince skeptics of the genius behind such an unassuming arsenal. She wondered if maybe they had more in common with their target than they previously assumed.

  She stopped in front of a clipping on the ‘fridge of him accepting an award from the local mayor, a man who looked like an alarming combination of every Marx Brother. The headline named a “Supercop Bigbee”

  Wait a minute, who is this, Dwight or Dwayne? she thought. Is it Big-bee or Big-bye? Fuck it. Same difference.

  There was also evidence of substantial gambling debt. Dollar amounts scrawled on Taco Bell receipts pinned with shiny toy-gun magnets, counting up instead of down, written in that distinct script relegated to panic. Also on the refrigerator were tournament brackets for March Madness wagering. On his broken bathroom mirror, a shrine of sports scores and newspaper strips that would have made a serial killer proud.

  “Is this Bigtreat’s motive for being a fuck? Gambling?” she asked herself in his mirror. “What a letdown.”

  Shit just got real, she thought. Real silly.

  Then she turned a corner.

  Ooh, this is a little better…

  Thumb-tacked to his bedroom walls were the carry-out menus for every pizza place in a 25-mile radius.

  Was that first pizza delivery a trial run? she thought, excited. Force some poor bastard to rob a bank with a fake bomb around his neck? Or had it just given him the idea to do it for real?

  She opened his freezer, hoping for human heads, but only found moldy peas. She dipped her finger in an ice-cube tray. Water. She put her hand against the fan box. It was running, but the cubes hadn’t frozen yet. This told her he had just been here. Next to a peeled sardine tin, she found an ominous-looking manila envelope that contained internal memorandum that detailed the entire neck-bomb case she and Billy had rolled up on. Red Magic Marker bled through one side of the envelope so the letters “I.A.” read “A.I.” on the other.

  “Robots!” she squealed, rolling it up to tuck it into her back pocket. Then she went back to the take-out menus on his wall. Pizzas were circled.

  The old ordering-a-pizza-for-somebody-else gag? The third-oldest trick in the book.

  She stood over the kitchen table awhile, playing with his toys. Until she decided “fuck the toys,” and started looking for the real ones. They were everywhere, too. She took the .38 out from under his pillow but left the baby teeth. She left the dreamcatcher in the toilet, hoping it had some affect on his dreams. She wondered if Billy’s had changed since he pulled it off his mirror.

  She thought of her favorite undergraduate creative-writing workshop experience, the last class she took before she dropped out for good. She’d written a violent, terrible story that everyone hated, and when it came time for her to workshop again, she was still pouting, so she attempted to write one that was even worse. In the days leading up to the class, there were some rumblings about how much everyone was really really hating her new story, about a Toilet That Predicted the Future, and they were probably going to skip that day. Then the day of class arrived, and there were only three of them due to this boycott. Which meant they missed the best line of all time when Jason the mystery kid that everyone wanted to get with took off his headphones long enough to mutter, “Why does the toilet tell the future? Whenever I look into a toilet, all I see is the past.” They dated for a year, but he peaked with that line. He called her writing “Technicolor Noir,” but still swore he knew what “noir” meant.

  She made one last stop at the freezer and left the tiniest of cassette tapes in one of the cells of the ice-cube tray, one of those new tapes mostly for answering machines, sometimes for little pocket recorders.

  Let him ponder that. Let all of them.

  Her baby tape bomb contained her best baby-like voice, calmly reading the license plate numbers of every car that cut her off, flipped her off, or just laid on the horn. Just in case. Billy’s was one of them. It was back before they met. She hoped that one day they all got a weird knock on the door.

  Oh, yeah, she took all his plastic explosives with her, too.

  Bucky Balls was standing at the release window when they let Billy go. Billy was getting back the change they’d emptied from his pockets, and everything else he’d forgotten he had on him when he regained consciousness, and B.B. was going through that whole, “Don’t let us see you again, fly right, etc. etc…” speech. But Billy didn’t really hear any of it. His nose just fogged up the bars until they opened as he studied the scabs on B.B.’s dreamcatcher tattoo.

  Just shut the fuck up! Billy thought. Then he realized it wasn’t a dreamcatcher tattooed on B.B.’s arm after all. He’d mistaken a feather for the action lines around a baseball bat. He had the goddamn Bad News Bears on there. All of them. Including the coaches. Including the sequels and the permanent memory of their diminishing returns.

  He had one person on his mind.

  When he got home, no one asked where he’d been. He went into the garage and polished the red eyes of his reflectors, stuffed his boombox full of fresh batteries, then made sure it was taped tight to the handlebars of his dirt bike. He ejected Billy Squier and searched the radio for voices, settling for Steve Earl’s “Copperhead Road” instead.

  “I went home with a brand-new plan…”

  A good lyric, but he no longer needed a plan.

  He sat on his garage floor and made some flyers of his own, head soaking up Magic Marker fumes to marinate his bad thoughts. He wrote:

  “Free Movies For Everybody! Come One! Come all! Free Popcorn! Free Halftime Show! Free Everything!”

  He put a lot of red, white, and blue on the posters, just like circus daredevils did. He made them all night, getting so into it he probably would have kept making them into the next night, too. It was lucky he’d scratched into his chest a way of keeping track of time.

  He went out and put his advertisements under every windshield wiper he could find. Then he made sure he hit every tow truck in town, too. But only the new trucks.

  The ones with the ramps.

  “It’s six years later, okay? A child’s bedroom. Jacki Ramirez is trying in vain to wake up her daughter.”

  “‘Please, honey, mommy has to go. Please, baby, I had to be there an hour ago.’ Is that what you want? Something like that?”

  “But she shakes the girl harder.”

  “‘Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease, Toni, this is important. I know you can hear me!’”

  “Perfect,” Larry said, clapping his hands. “Okay, then Jacki stares at her sleeping child. See, she’s had trouble getting Toni out of bed since what they called The Great Cat Integration of 2011. It ended with the willful destruction of all their clocks. Long story short, Anthony had finally moved in with them, and he’d brought two of his cats with him. Jacki already had a calico she called ‘Nell Gato,’ an undersized farm cat her cousin had rescued. From her first three years outdoors, Nell Gato had developed what Jacki was informed were ‘overactive anal glands,’ meaning she gassed you like a Bombardier Beetle if disturbed. She used to take Nell Gato to get ‘expressed’ at the vet, but she had more distaste for the word than the procedure and had stopped going. So Nell Gato’s ass was this time bomb when Anthony finally moved in with his animals…”

  “Why do I need to know all this? I can’t remember all this.”

  “Trust me, you need to get into this character’s head. Okay, so Anthony spent most of those early days resembling something like an idiot Spartacus, right? And you think about this image often. Broom in one hand, towel draped over his shoulder, ready to intervene when his two cats, Waffles and Sir Pizza, two short-hairs, flanked this hissing, spitting creature like raptors and got, first, a face full of anal secretions, then finally twenty right furry hands. And twenty right hands from N.G., or The O.G. as your daughter, Toni, always called her, was more like fifty, considering the fact that she was a polydactyl cat, two e
xtra thumbs like those Hemingways, but also seven claws per hand. You liked to joke that Nell Gato was about one generation from making a phone call…”

  “It’s too much backstory for just some dialogue.”

  “…but that would be the worst phone call ever!” Larry laughed, ignoring his actress. “So, yeah, the battles had been contained for awhile, you see. At least until Anthony busted out the Furbys. Not even a Furby! We couldn’t afford one, so we had a Blurby, the cheap-ass knockoff…”

  “I fucking hate those things! Terrifying. I’ll put a dick in my ass, but I will not feed a Furby with my finger.”

  “You ever hear them talk? The name ‘Blurby’ makes more sense, since its verbal ejaculations are exactly what you see splashed all over shitty movie posters.”

  “…and when Jacki asked why a grown man owned two mechanical gremlins that warbled and spit out baby talk and routinely demanded to be ‘fed’ with a fingertip on their grotesque pulsing beaks, Eric explained this away by insisting they were deterrents to keep the cats from scratching his TV…”

  “Wait, who the fuck is Eric? Isn’t he dead? I thought his name was Anthony? Who am I again?”

  “Right, Anthony, whoever. Anyway, Jacki knew it was really because the Blurbies were both yellow and black, Pittsburgh Steelers colors. But his cats were so afraid of the Blurbies, that just by placing them near anything he wanted protected, the cats would poof out into pinecones and never think of approaching. But something went terribly wrong when Blurbies were combined with anal secretions and mutant paws. Jacki called this final stage ‘Catageddon…’”

  “Great. Lots to think about. So, you want me to say-”

  “But something snapped in all of them! And at the time, any mechanical sound, any whirring of gears or voice from a speaker at all, even a transistor clock radio, became reason for the cats to jump on the nearest bare calf and play it like a harp. Waffles, the smaller cat of the two, would actually punch your shin, as if he was tenderizing the meat, or like a construction worker tapping on a wall looking for a stud to put in the nail. Waffles would work his way around the leg until he was away from the bone, so I guess that’s the opposite of a construction worker actually, but then he would lock on! Putting enough punctures in your skin that you’d think he was trying to deflate you like a balloon…”

  His actress sat down and blinked slow.

  “…and another problem was Toni’s alarm clock, this special clock. Shaped like a cat, it made a different cat noise on the hour, all twelve cats serenading you every morning, ringing the dinner bell for your juicy calves. ‘Cause what Jacki and Toni initially thought was some sort of soothing cat lullaby in the store turned out to be some sort of war cry to felines. The first time it went off, even sweet, little Nell Gato went for any bare skin on Toni’s body, and Eric ended up…”

  “Anthony.”

  “…Anthony ended up smashing the clock with his favorite hammer. He kept it under the bed for self-defense and got mad when anyone used it for anything at all. There were hammers and brooms and towels in every room these days, but no more clocks.”

  “So what am I supposed to be doing?”

  “You’re Jacki! And you know that hammer is under there. And you, Jacki, look around nervously for any cats skulking near the door, then turn to the small TV resting on the floor by the foot of Toni’s bed. You click it on and change channels until you find a loud talk show where the crowd is screaming at someone on a stage. The profanity ‘bleeped’ from the broadcast causes the little girl to finally open her eyes. Lately, it’s all she can count on for an alarm without getting cut up by fucking cats. Got it? Good. So… action!”

  His actress, Bubble, stepped into the room where her daughter, Toni, actually her real daughter, Bunny, was watching TV. Her daughter didn’t know it was a movie, but that was okay. She wouldn’t have been doing things any different.

  “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Bubble-as-Jacki said. “How is this show the only thing that wakes you up anymore?”

  “What’s up mommy?” Bunny-as-Toni asked, yawning.

  “You’re up. Finally. Come on, get dressed, gotta go.”

  “Awww, I want to watch the show. Fill in the ‘bleeps’ like you used to!”

  “Jacki smiles,” Larry said. “She used to play a game sort of like Mad Libs, replacing the glut of censored profanity with her own nonsense words. It made the morning talk shows almost bearable…”

  “Not right now. Later. Let’s go.”

  Toni had one last-ditch attempt to stall, so she burst into song. Peter Hannan’s strangely ominous theme song to the cartoon CatDog.

  “One fine day with a woof and a purr, a baby was born, and it caused quite a stir. No blue buzzard, no blue-eyed frog. Just a canine feline little cat dog.”

  Jacki waited out this storm. Until finally, her daughter playing her daughter said:

  “Momma?”

  And everyone in the room believed it. Larry’s heart soared.

  Toni pointed at the TV.

  “What?” Jacki smiled.

  “Why did she just call him ‘uncle dad?’”

  “Did she say that?” Jacki frowned. “No, what did she say, really?”

  “Bleep!”

  “Bleep right back atcha!”

  “Deep in a drawer somewhere,” Larry said. “A Blurby answers, ‘Bloop!’”

  “I hope not.” Jacki sighed, out of character again.

  Hospital, later that day. Jack walks into the emergency room, looking for his partner, navigating through the crowded halls and around the bottle of the power drink he’s guzzling. He finds two other paramedics leaning against a vending machine, drinking something a little stronger. They’re the veterans. The Mikes. One bigger than the other, of course, just like everything else in the world. They used to be sort of rivals around the E.R., as they were both EMTs when Jack and Rick were still EMS.

  Jack looks at them now and thinks, “Oh, how the mighty have fallen.”

  They’ve been around lately for lifeguard certificates. Most people would shake their heads at the idea of two drunken 50-year-old lifeguards, but a CFR certification would certainly be a leg up from the jobs they now held.

  “Hey, they still get to drive an ambulance,” Rick laughed once. Until they got in his way at a scene.

  The Mikes bounce around the lobby like it’s a ball pit. They’re happily ignoring the mounting afternoon chaos around them, hiding beers in their sleeves. Jack catches the tail end of their conversation.

  “…so, I say to this guy,” Little Mike is explaining, even trying a deeper voice. “‘If you’re not supposed to stick your thumb up an asshole, then why does it fit so perfect?’”

  “Good point,” Big Mike can’t help but agree.

  “You mean ‘cause it comes to a point?” Jack scoffs as he walks past and through the double doors, one eye squinted for the cacophony of pain and medicine that never comes. He ducks in on sleeping patients and smiling nurses, until he finally finds his partner Rick behind a curtain, on an empty cot, eating a sloppy joe with one hand while trying in vain to catch the pieces of burger falling from his face with his other. Jack was hoping for the promise of a Big Mike/Big Rick duel, but he catches sight of the Mikes heading out the door in a hurry. He’s pretty sure they stole something again. Big Mike is bellowing some existential rant, like he does whenever weekends are busy or slow.

  “Listen, I just know that it takes a pretty gnarly pair of nads to yank some poor soul from limbo and toss it into the ocean to ride the tail of that big ol’ thresher… shark. Of life.”

  Then the Mikes are gone, and Jack looks at Rick and shrugs.

  “What up,” Rick says around the burger.

  “What up. Ready to head out and wrestle some sharks?”

  “Just let me finish this,” Rick says, taking a last bite. “I know we won’t be hungry later.”

  Jack leans against the wall and drains the rest of his nuclear green electrolytes as an old and disheve
led orderly walks up in blood and dirt-stained scrubs. He jams a finger in Rick’s face, grinning.

  “Uh, can I help you, Derek?” Rick asks him, muffled with meat.

  “You finally decided to eat a shit sandwich for real, huh?” Derek laughs. “Got tired of wondering what they taste like?”

  “What?”

  “You know, a shit sammich!” The orderly is still laughing at his own joke.

  “Yes, Derek. You are correct. That’s exactly what I’m doing. Eating a genuine shit sandwich. And it’s everything I dreamed it would be.”

  “Thought so. Hey, hold on. That ain’t from my lunch is it?”

  “You know what?” Rick goes on. “I don’t care what anyone says, you can never get enough jokes about eating shit sandwiches…”

  “Did you know that they’re making little tape recorders that look just like hamburgers? The pickle slice is the tape. Or the volume. One of ‘em. You’d be lucky to get a shit sammich these days. At least it ain’t listening to you. We gotta be careful out there, right? Right…”

  “I think I’d notice that.”

  “No, they make them small, like the size of an apple. So you can hide them.”

  “Then why the fuck wouldn’t they make it look like an apple?” Rick says, laughing. “No, wait, if you’re gonna hide it, why the fuck make them look like anything at all?”

  Derek stops laughing, realizing he’s being mocked, and swipes the Louisville Cardinals baseball cap off Rick’s head before he can react.

  “You ever look at this fucking bird?” he asks them.

  “I don’t, but he does,” Rick says, nodding at Jack and reaching, trying to grab it back. “It doesn’t usually face me.”

  “No, I mean look at this fucking bird.” He holds it up high.

  They all look.

  “First off, the mouth? Why does the bird have teeth? I mean, it’s already got a beak.”