The Last Projector

by David James Keaton

  “What does that even mean?” Small Cop asks.

  “You know when they say there’s ‘six million stars’ or whatever? I mean, that’s a lot, but they could have said any big-ass number and it would have meant the same thing.”

  “Don’t you mean ‘six million Jews’?”

  “Watch the slurs, Sergeant. Everyone’s got a camera these days.”

  Derek snickers despite himself, and a couple heads turn. He mops faster.

  “Do you have to do that right now?” someone asks him with a nudge.

  Then the beeping of the EKG stutters, and they turn back to the broken man on the bed. He’s still pointing to the officer’s chest, fingers now twitching in desperation.

  “He wants your pen. Give him your pen, man.”

  “Maybe he wants to write something down!”

  “Bullshit. He’s lying,” Small Cop laughs.

  “How can he be lying with his hand?”

  “It’s his bad hand.”

  “Which hand is his bad hand?”

  “Depends on which hand someone uses for lying.”

  One of the officers wiggles a broken jaw that rustles like a bag of gravel, wincing as a busted incisor folds back onto his tongue, right where the taste buds used to register “sweet.”

  “Yeah, that’s his bad one,” he grumbles, afraid to touch the tooth.

  “He just wants your pen.”

  “Yeah, maybe to stick a nurse with it.”

  Fingers thick as sausages flutter and grasp, the first two digits walking on air, trying to reduce the space between them, the index finger finally tracing letters in the air between them in frustration.

  “He wants to write something down.”

  “Don’t do it,” Small Cop says, suddenly almost serious.

  “Why not?”

  “Did you hear what I said? He’s lying.”

  “Lying how? That’s not sign language. That’s a fuckin’ hand saying, ‘Gimme your pen.’”

  “Nope, don’t buy it. He’s full of shit. This man is the worst hand actor of all time.”

  “What?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of hand acting?” Small Cop sighs.

  “Like puppets?”

  “No. Hand acting. You ever see a movie where they zoom in on somebody’s hand going through a drawer? And all of a sudden the hand starts spending way too much time in that drawer? You know, picking up every battery and screw and paperclip, moving around just a little too much? Then it puts shit back down and floats out of the scene?”

  “Uh… no.”

  “Floats?”

  “Yes, floats.”

  “You watch too many movies.”

  “Well, I’m telling you, this cocksucker is lying. His hand can’t act for shit.”

  “Wait, are you saying hand acting?”

  “That’s just one kind. There’s hand acting, foot acting. You’ll usually get foot acting when a chick steps out of a car. In some movies, it takes a high-heeled shoe an hour to touch the fucking asphalt.”

  “I saw fly acting once!” a cop yells from the back.

  “Where was this?”

  “Once Upon a Time in the West.”

  “He’s right,” another cop agrees, even taking off his hat in respect. “That fly the cowboy finally catches in his gun barrel should have got an Academy Award.”

  The fingers on Mr. Flowers’ hand are now moving so fast they’ve disappeared.

  “Yeah, so should this guy.”

  “Just give him your pen. And give him a ticket to write on. He knows he’s caught. He’s gonna confess.”

  “Yeah, he’s gonna confess!”

  “Bullshit,” Small Cop snaps, and then they all reach up instinctively to protect their parking tickets. If there was one thing consistent about police officers, it was that, without fail, they all believed beyond a shadow of a doubt they were being lied to at all times.

  “You know who’s a good hand actor?” Big Cop says. “Sigourney Weaver. She is the greatest, and by that I mean the worst, hand actor of all time.”

  “In what?”

  “All three Alien movies.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Okay, in the first one? When she’s turning on and turning off the most complicated self-destruct mechanism of all time? All those buttons and switches she’s lovingly flickin’ and pushin’? Then in the second movie? When she’s gearing up to go get the little girl and taping all those grenades to her gun, plucking them out of the box as pretty as a little girl picking posies?”

  “I remember that shit!”

  “What about the third flick?”

  “I don’t remember. I do remember that she throws the most believable punch I’ve ever seen a woman throw, inside or outside of a movie.”

  “You know what other movie her hand is in? The Ice Storm. There’s a shot of it plucking some car keys out of a salad bowl, the keys of the man she’s having an affair with, and her fingers do this twirl with them that is just ridiculous. It’s hot though.”

  “You know what that twirl meant, right?” Small Cop asks. “Betrayal. Deception. Try to get that across with one finger.”

  “Who does she hit? An alien?”

  “Huh?” Big Cop looks down.

  “Who does she hit with the most believable punch you’ve ever seen? An alien?”

  “Nope, a fucking rapist.”

  At that, all eyes are back on Mr. Flowers. And his bad hand.

  Suddenly, the sheet begins to bunch up around his midsection, and a cop slaps it back down.

  “He really wants that pen.”

  “Don’t confuse an erection for desire.”

  “Fuck it. Here. Admit what you did, scumbag.”

  The officer lays a parking ticket across Mr. Flowers chest and then works a ballpoint pen around the tangle of tubes and wires and into his broken fingers.

  The officers tap the butts of their guns nervously.

  Because of the diagonal line with which a stroke divides the human body, it’s Mr. Flowers’ right hand that still works. So it’s the left half of Mr. Flowers’ mouth that smiles.

  He snaps a handcuff and plunges the pen into his own throat.

  Derek watches it all in slow motion, suddenly feeling like he’s swaying on the deck of a boat. He has to grab the doorway with both hands for stability.

  Impossibly, the pen goes all the way in, vanishing into the meat of Mr. Flowers’ massive neck. The tip of the ballpoint finds his carotid artery and unleashes a torrent of blood that washes over the first row of faces, grown men who now whimper like children, holding up smooth white hands in desperation as if in the path of an oncoming train. The blood pumps harder as one of the officers attempts to retrieve the pen, digging into the widening hole up to his knuckles.

  Derek imagines the pen lost in the highways of those big veins forever, on its way to a weary heart the size of a cop’s head.

  Then it’s over. The huge hand slumps. The EKG flatlines. And the cops finally let the doctors and nurses push through into the abattoir of blue uniforms now turned purple and their shocked, freckled faces.

  Small Cop looks over at Big Cop. They’re still smiling. They were in the front row, and not a drop hit them, of course. Derek, who will be cleaning the floor that evening, all evening, is suddenly convinced he’ll find red outlines of every officer on the walls and tile floor, like the shadows of blast victims at Hiroshima. Every officer but two, one big, one little.

  “That nigger was the best hand actor I ever seen,” a voice whispers in awe.

  Everyone nods. Nobody flinches.

  “Case closed?” Small Cop claps his dry hands like a gunshot.

  “Never leave it up to a jury,” Big Cop reminds them. And they’re gone.

  Then everyone begins to file out the door, no longer interested.

  Derek stands, keeping his mop arm’s length away as always so he doesn’t have to smell it. Most people approximate hospital populations like prison populations, that
is by the number of beds. Janitors and orderlies, however, calculate the number of toilets. So that’s 35 toilets per 10,000 human beings, Derek figures. And just like he knows three feet away is optimum for breathing in the lingering shit of all those patients, he knows those two cops are somehow responsible for everything that just went down.

  Then Derek stops scrubbing, frozen by a dilemma. If he was the rapist, Derek decides, he would have to do it again. Tonight. Just to prove these motherfuckers wrong. If he was the rapist, even if he knew that by stopping today his crimes would be forever pinned on a dead man, he would have to do it again. Just because these cops and their split lips and faces as red as a baboon’s ass couldn’t be right ever.

  He’d do it again tonight.

  Derek bends over to finish cleaning the yellow stains around the screws on the toilet lid, then flushes to get everyone’s attention. Then he does a twirl of his key ring with the same flourish he used to spin his lifeguard whistle when he was boy, back when he first started to notice the glut of lovely creatures populating his world. All that skin.

  On the way out, as the bottleneck of bruises loosens to let him and his bucket roll through, he turns and silently motions to the cops with his hand.

  No one doubts the sincerity of his gesture.

  At the end of the hall, he turns the corner and sees another huddle of uniforms surrounding a doorway. He lowers his head and begins to work his way through them towards the hiss and sputter of another machine.

  Larry was on his way to see his producer, The Damon Gold. Summoned to the mountain. The Fortress of Solitaire. Supposedly, this was to be a pep talk. Damon had mentioned something about a “team-building exercise” on the phone, but not a hint of concern for the cock-snapping brawl on the set.

  Team-building, my ass, Larry thought.

  When he pulled in, Damon was on his porch, between two white porch pillars like he was Supreme Commander In Chief, drinking something alien, something that was no color found in nature.

  “You wanted to see me?” Larry asked, eyes as twitchy as a couple of honey-pot flies.

  “Come on out back, Larry. I think we should talk.”

  Larry knew they were headed for the pool. He watched Damon take the corner with an extra swirl of his robe, revealing a tanned, well-muscled torso. He was disappointed this flourish didn’t reveal a giant red “S” on his chest.

  “A long time ago…” he started when they got to the aquarium shimmer of his backyard, “…when I was in a job I hated, just like yourself, they decided to have us do this task as one, to let us bond, so we’d feel like we were… in it together. Now, we were all disgruntled as heck after a half a decade of wage freezes, so we were in no mood for this, I can assure you. So imagine our surprise when they brought us into this conference room and opened the lid on a jigsaw puzzle.”

  “And that was your Christmas bonus,” Larry joked, not really listening.

  “Ha ha. Good one, Larry. No, it was even worse than that. We were just borrowing the puzzle from them. No one got to keep it. And it was “Bollywood” themed, jeweled elephants, and a black sky with way too many stars. They stood there and told us we were going to work on this puzzle together, one piece at a time every time we walked by that room. So if we went for a drink of water, restroom break, whatever, grab a piece and put it in. And when it went together too slowly for their liking, thought we were using it to milk the clock, they moved it into one of the empty cubicles the last layoff had vacated. It was right by the door, so you really did have to walk by it in plain sight of the bosses every time you wanted to piss or buy some pork rinds from the vending machine. And we worked on that puzzle, too, Larry. Hard. Because we wanted to believe what they said, that it would really make us feel like a team...”

  “Ha. ‘Burn Bollywood Burn!’ Did you participate?”

  “Me? Heck, no. I never put a single piece into the darn thing. But there was this girl who did even worse than that. She took a piece home with her so no one could finish it.”

  “Nice. Kind of a dick move, but nice.”

  Damon took a long drink, staring at him over the edge of his glass, then he went on.

  “So the puzzle was finished one day, except for this piece in the upper left corner in what would be that black, black nighttime sky. So you could see the white desk of the cubicle underneath. I never liked that job, but suddenly I felt like I had to figure out who took that puzzle piece. So I got as close as I could to everyone there, worked years longer than I would have, and when I finally got this particular girl to brag about the black puzzle piece of starry sky she’d tucked into the sun visor in her car, I pulled my pants back up and slapped that bitch open-handed across the mouth.”

  “Wow. What’s your point?”

  “Larry, you’re out.”

  “What?”

  “You never fit, that’s no surprise. But now you’re fucking everyone up, too. I’m gonna let Stevey direct. I know I owe you, so you’re not gonna be unemployed, I promise.”

  He turned from Larry and dropped his robe, easing himself into the glow of the shallow end.

  “I’m fixing up The Kid.”

  “The what?”

  “The drive-in? I bought it when the Butch Cassidy went facedown. And I’m gonna be switching it to adult features from now on. Can you imagine that on the big screen?” he asked, excited, back still to Larry. “Sex projected on a surface that large? Out there in your car, it would be like God watching the New York Subway bust through the tunnels and into the sunlight.”

  “I don’t understand what you think I-”

  “Shut up. I need a projectionist. My last guy is moonlighting at the hospital. A janitor or a paramedic or some shit. So he keeps falling asleep at the wheel. And by wheel, I mean the projector. Sleep. I should be so lucky.”

  “You must be joking.”

  “It’s a paycheck, Larry. Shucks, you’ll be showing your own movies!”

  For a second he believed things might work out. Larry had never been good at predicting trends. The most money Damon ever made was from an unremarkable videotape due to the bad translation his company left on the box. Angie Rides Actively. It was a cheeky hit due to the confusion, and the sequel, Angie Rides Ardently, was even bigger. That was the kind of success Larry could never duplicate, though his classmates back in film school kept trying, working to copy the hideous pre-fab cult films of Roger Corman’s protégés, something Larry knew would someday be the end of B-movies as we know it. Still, he dared to dream.

  Damon held up a finger.

  “When I say ‘your movies,’ you know the movies I mean, right? No more talk about that ‘real’ movie of yours, you get me?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “What were you calling that? Your life story? Skunkwaters?”

  “Fuck. You.”

  At that, Damon turned around, and for the first time Larry saw the numbers all over his body, digits of every size, script, font, language. No dollar signs on them, but Damon didn’t need dollar signs.

  Larry stepped into the water after him. It was so warm, it was like stepping into a mouth. Damon’s mouth. Damon did a little spin, graceful as the elephant Edison electrocuted

  “What are you doing, Larry?” he smiled. “Do you want to play another game of Marco Polo?”

  “Is that the one where you use bats?”

  “No,” Damon laughed. “That’s just regular Polo.”

  Larry’s arms suddenly felt all-powerful. He could almost hear the skin on his elbows creak as they split to let his muscles out to breathe deep. He scratched his arms so hard he thought they might ignite as he thought about how he’d fought Damon on his home planet last time. A planet where he’d forgotten his helmet in the confusion, surrounded by such a thin atmosphere. Larry squeezed a fist. He didn’t need a helmet this time.

  “Why did you change my script?” he asked Damon, but didn’t wait for an answer. He was chest deep in the ocean of this strange world with his hands around an alien’s neck
. He crumpled it like a new dollar bill until the George Washington’s face was unrecognizable.

  “Marco! Polio!” Larry laughed as he felt Damon losing strength and struggles turned to bubbles.

  Larry did much better this time around. Later, he decided it must have had something to do with the clothes that had weighed him down with water at first.

  Skins always win? Bullshit.

  You fought against the extra weight on your arms and legs, just like Harrison Bergeron before the shotgun. No, more like a batter in the on-deck circle with every doughnut on your bat.

  And when the doughnuts finally slid off your shaft and into the dust, before you struck out, for just that second, you were king.

  Even with Larry’s hands reducing his throat by half, Damon tried to swear the numbers he’d gotten his girls to smear all over his body in hypoallergenic watercolor body paint were just a joke. Gurgled something about it being Stevey’s idea, maybe Glen’s, maybe Joe’s. Sputtered something about tattoos driving Larry “batty” lately. Larry processed none of this.

  “I was kidding!” he bubbled around a crushed voice box, “They come off!”

  Then he went under.

  He put up a decent fight, but Larry felt thirty pounds lighter. A hundred pounds stronger. Wallet gone, engraved lighter gone, wedding ring gone, everything of value probably already bobbing in the filter, Larry didn’t care. He walked back to the ladder like he was walking through smoke. He turned to watch Damon float away, saw the black paint stain a cloud around his body and smiled. Larry spit green sometimes. This shit all made perfect sense.

  Is this what every animal does to try and distract a predator? Larry thought. Maybe we don’t see it unless we add water.

  He tried to imagine how many ridiculous tattoos an octopus would have with that many arms for a canvas.

  The ink is probably expelled after death, he decided. That’s the key to getting tattoos off forever.

  V.

  Larry Draws His One Monster and Watches It Shout – Introducing Evil Boll Weevil – Coconut Milk and Sea Monkeys Is How You Can Tell – The First Story Ever – A Blood Bubble under a Toenail Is Used to Signal Things Are Happening Now Instead of Then – Everyone Missing the Static between Stations after – Holding Hands over Elbow Creek – Ghost Pianos, Idle Hands, and Road Rage Rehearsals Teach Us – The Only Rule That Matters Is the Stick – Spunkwater Is – Face Down in the Skunk Waters – A Pocketful of Memories Won’t Answer the Question – How Did You Know My Name Was Jack? – A Mystery Man Jerks Off into a Tree Stump – Larry Forgets His Helmet in the Pool