The Last Projector

by David James Keaton

  It sounds crazy, but I remember thinking, just for a second, “Did he have an ejector seat?” Then that metal fist was drumming my head, and things got fuzzy.

  The hissing wreck rocks back and forth against the splintered but still-standing trunk, a small fire starting to burn near the back tires, one front wheel spinning. A dog howls in the distance.

  Come on, no one really hears a dog howl in the distance.

  I swear. I remember someone pulling me out while I’m thinking, “Why did the paramedics bring a dog?”

  We didn’t bring a dog. We didn’t get there first. Someone else go there first.

  I told you to shut the fuck up and listen. I thought you wanted to hear this.

  An arm reaches into the twisted metal and upholstery, and Jacki squints through the smoke to see the shadow of a man pulling the crushed passenger seat off her torso.

  At first I was grateful...

  The figure carries her from the wreckage, Jacki hanging limp across a pair of shoulders. One eye opens, and she looks back to the growing fire cooking under the car. She raises her head high enough to glimpse bare legs dangling from the tree, a strip of denim trailing from a toe. She watches a large dog suddenly run up to growl and snap at the shred of blue jeans. The dog catches the fabric on a tooth, and the tree limbs stretch and stretch, then rebound like a diving board as the dog shakes its mouth loose. The naked body snaps into a final contortion, arms and legs now pointed toward the sky that was denied.

  That’s when I blacked out. But I wasn’t out for very long. The car hadn’t exploded yet. The cars always explode, right?

  Jacki opens her eyes and through her blurred vision sees the dog back trying to grab Eric’s foot, now way out of its reach. Then her body is being pulled away so hard and fast that her own jeans, previously bunched around her ankles, fly off into the dark. Blood stings her eyes, and she struggles to raise an arm to wipe it away.

  Then she’s on the ground, laid out like a grave.

  She sees the shadow back up, then lean back in, now struggling to climb on top of her. She looks over the shadow’s shoulder to watch the dog jumping higher than the tree now, snapping at the naked boy as he finally begins to fly. The shadow grows frustrated with her body, moving her limbs to satisfy, and she concentrates on the dog, now flying, too, snapping at the moon. Then the shadow is bending her legs the wrong way, and Jacki carefully puts the palms of her hands down on the ground for leverage. Then she slowly lifts her rear off the ground so the shadow man can easily remove the underwear that she had only pulled to the side for Eric, the dead boy in the sky. The lace tears and snaps over the shadow’s other shoulder to catch and sway on the tops of some cattails in the drainage ditch. The shadow sways with them.

  Then the car explodes.

  I let him do it. I don’t know why. Maybe I realized I owed him. For saving my life. If he hadn’t come along, I would be dead. I know how that sounds, but it’s the truth. I can admit that to you. Or to anyone who asks. It’s just that simple. I won’t be questioned about this. I was grateful enough for my life to give him what he wanted. One thing was less important than the other.

  Finished with her, the shadow man stops to watch the car burn, and Jacki is sitting up now, too, up on her elbows, hypnotized by the same flames. She turns to find the shadow man in the smoke, but she can’t see anything but the dog running hard toward her, trailing spit, nostrils flaring. They embrace.

  Jacki’s house. Night. She’s standing silent at a window, her story finally told. Jack is looking at her in disbelief. She turns as if challenging him to judge her.

  Then she decides it’s time to drop the bomb.

  “I was in and out of consciousness, but I know it was you. I remember you there, Jack. I know it was you who held me next to the fire.”

  “No,” Jack says. “I…”

  “I thought you said you always get there first.”

  “Yeah, but not that time. The fire was out when I got there. When we got there. It couldn’t have been me. There was someone else.”

  “You’re lying. You held me.”

  “Yes, I was holding you. In the back of the ambulance! But someone else pulled you from the car.”

  Jacki turns her back on him again.

  “I don’t believe you. Maybe it wasn’t you. Maybe there wasn’t even a dog. Maybe I don’t fucking care anymore.”

  Jack doesn’t believe this, so reaches for the picture of her mother again, hoping to distract her.

  “What do you remember about your mother?”

  “Not much.” Then, casually, “She was raped.”

  “What?” Jack asks, still staring at the picture.

  “That’s how I was conceived actually,” she says, still emotionless. “At least that’s what my dad believed. She was attacked on Daytona Beach. Under a pier. The rapist was pretending he was blind, and she was helping him. She took him by the arm to show him the water. Or tell him the time. Something like that.”

  She walks toward the door, considers opening it.

  “‘Conceived!’” she laughs. “Isn’t that a great word?”

  “How is that a great word?”

  “It fits. It almost tells you everything you need to know. Now...” she opens the door.

  “Wait-”

  “The thing is,” Jacki says, cutting him off. “I can accept that that is how I was conceived. But I’ll never accept that’s how my daughter was conceived.”

  “So you’re not going to tell her.”

  “You know what, Jack?” Jacki laughs. “I think you need to get the fuck out of my life.”

  “You not telling Toni is the same thing as-”

  “I’ll be honest with you. The only thing more disturbing than wondering if you might have raped me in a car wreck six years ago, is wondering if you saved me from one.”

  “I find that pretty hard to believe.”

  “Why? I don’t want to owe anyone anything. Revenge, hate, guardian angels, I just have no time for any of that bullshit right now. I don’t need any of that shit...”

  She trails off, noticing that Jack isn’t listening. He’s found another photo on her wall, tapping the metal frame.

  “Now this is a good picture of you.”

  “I told you,” Jacki says, frustrated. “That’s my mother.” She points to the first picture he picked up. “And that’s my mother,” pointing down the hall. “And over there... that’s my mother. And that’s her, too. They’re all my mother! Why are you having trouble with this?”

  Jack is frozen, chewing on his tongue. Something horrible has just occurred to him.

  “Your mother was raped?” he says slowly.

  “I already told you she was. So what?”

  Jack reaches out an arm to brace himself against another photograph. To Jacki, it looks like he’s doing calculus in his head, and it’s painful to watch.

  “Listen,” he says. “I came here tonight to tell you that I believed that the same man who raped you six years ago is here, now, still doing that kind of thing. I came here to tell you that I believe that he chooses his victims because they fit a certain description. And I was going to tell you that, not only do you fit this description, it was you that he started with. You’re the prototype. That’s what I was going to say when I got here. Until I saw those pictures...”

  “Jack...”

  “...but now I think it goes back farther than that. I think he’d followed you for a long time. And I think it’s because you remind him of someone else.”

  He stabs the hanging picture with his thumb.

  “You remind him of her.”

  Jacki’s hand is back on the doorknob.

  “I think you should go.”

  Jack grabs her again, high on her bicep, like a cop.

  “No! Listen. This man raped your mother under that pier. Then she had you. And he raped you after the wreck. Then you had her...”

  Jacki struggles.

  “Let go.”

  “I’m tell
ing you that this man is your father. And I’m saying that this man is the father of your daughter. And I’m saying that he’s going to stay in your life until Toni is old enough, wait for her to get stuck under a car crash or pinned under a ‘fridge or trapped in a fucking revolving door and then-”

  Jacki breaks free.

  “Get out!”

  “Think about this. What if he’s been part of your family for longer than that? Wait, do you have any pictures of your grandma?”

  Jacki snaps and throws a half-punch, half-shove at Jack’s face. He ducks around it, staring at her in disbelief.

  “Whoa. I’m trying to help here-”

  “I told you to leave. I don’t want to hear any more of your theories. Don’t you realize that you’re the suspect in every new idea that comes out of your fucking mouth?! You are the most suspicious man I’ve ever met. You tell me you were there that night, you tell me you had your hands on me-”

  Jack’s back is up against the door.

  “No, no,” he pleads. “My hand was on you because his hand was on you. That night, you had a five-fingered hand print on your stomach and skin under your fingernails, and other evidence, too. And when I saw it I knew someone had to do something-”

  “Go!”

  “You never saw any of this because I made it all go away. I’ll admit I put my hand over the hand print, and I squeezed your leg even harder. Maybe that’s how I indict myself, but I took the chance. Maybe you felt me doing that, but me turning that bruise into nothing you would recognize was to erase his crime. I turned that bruise into a Rorschach Test, into something that only I could see, just another bruise on your stomach, or your leg, your arms, or just a hand on your hand, and I did this for you-”

  “Go!”

  Jacki shoves him aside and opens the door.

  “Go or I’m calling the cops.”

  “You know, you don’t make any sense to me, Jacki. You tell me to fuck off because you think I’m the man that raped you, yet you tell me that you owe your life to that monster?”

  Jacki looks through his open mouth, right through the back of his head to the night sky beyond.

  “That’s my problem, not yours.”

  She closes the door on him while he’s still talking.

  Later that night. A phone is ringing on the kitchen wall, and Jacki stumbles out of her bedroom to answer it. Her head sinks in exhaustion when she realizes it’s Jack. It’s always Jack. It’s his third call in an hour. She lays the phone on the floor, walking in circles in the dark, her bare feet squeaking on the tile like basketball shoes, letting his voice fill the room instead of her head.

  “…think about it. He covers them up perfectly, maybe using the same methods I did in the back of the ambulance that night…”

  Jacki stops in front of her refrigerator and touches the collage of magnets, family photos, recipes, stopping on her daughter’s artwork. The largest of Toni’s drawings is a purple crayon outline of herself, Jacki, and her grandmother. The portrait is titled “Meme, Mama & Mumu.” She smiles and flicks dried chocolate off the corner, then stops smiling when she sees an old photo of her and her father.

  “...maybe your dad was right, maybe this man was her father and your father and her father and...”

  Her hand tickles some more pictures, lingering on another one of her mother. She’s never realized how many eyes she’s attached to this appliance. They’re suddenly everywhere, following her like paintings.

  “...maybe I was trying to rescue you from the truth back then, but now I’m just trying to stop him... if this guy has been in your life for two generations then what stops him from going for three...”

  Her hand brushes her daughter’s drawing of a snarling dog she’s never noticed before.

  “...what if he goes after her? Of course he goes after her…”

  Jacki kicks the phone down the hall so she won’t hear him anymore, then she flicks the edge of a construction-paper Thanksgiving turkey that her daughter created from the outline of her own hand. She puts her shaking palm over top of her daughter’s. It isn’t much bigger, never has been.

  Same night. Jack’s secret apartment. In his head, he’s in the back of his ambulance. It’s six years ago. Then nine years ago. He’s in the back of all his ambulances, something like a dozen total.

  No, it couldn’t have been that long ago. He remembers The Deftones’ song “Passengers” coming from somewhere.

  “Drive faster, roll the windows down. The cool night air is curious. Let the whole world look in. Who cares who sees anything?”

  But his brain flashes to Jacki in the back of his ambulance, and his hand covering the black-and-blue handprint rising on her stomach. His hand fits perfectly inside the outline. Then he’s squeezing her stomach hard, erasing that crime at least, and her skin turns white, then purple.

  Back then, he thought he was changing things, and he was sure of his reasons. Today, he stands in an empty room and does nothing, talking to a phone balanced on his shoulder. He thinks of cops and the radios pinned up by their chins so they can confide in them like their conscience.

  “Maybe you’ve accepted what happened back then, Jacki,” he says, “And you’ve decided that your life was worth whatever you had to endure. So I’m sorry if I’m making it impossible to forget all over again... but I’ve been seeing these strange dog bites everywhere now... or maybe just tattoos of dog bites because that’s what he wants me to see… and maybe this man is killing instead of raping, using his dog to cover it up... chopping down his own family tree… I know it sounds crazy…”

  Miles away, Jacki sits down on the floor of the dark kitchen, paper turkey in hand, head down, phone pleading from across the room. Jack mistakes the rustling for encouragement.

  “...maybe you’re thinking that it’s too much of a coincidence, to know all of these things and not be the villain here, or worse, the rapist. But I swear it’s true, Jacki. Listen, this kind of crazy shit surrounds me. All my life I’ve dealt with coincidence and synchronicity and bad luck. This has happened to me in other cities, even across the ocean, but I helped all of them, even if they didn’t want me to. That’s all I want to do. Help you. You know that other apartment you saw? You think that’s strange? Here’s another crazy apartment story for you. Different time. Different place.”

  He turns on the light over his head, and sits down in the center of the empty floor to imagine the police interrogation.

  “One time while I was doing some Red Cross training, I met this other lifeguard by getting close in the water to perform ‘cross-chest carries’ all day. So we went back to her apartment one night to watch some Baywatch and fuck around, and as the sun was coming up and the alcohol was wearing off, I looked around and suddenly realized where I was. You know where I was? I was in an apartment that I’d lived in five years earlier. How about that shit? I knew I was in the same building when we pulled in, and I even said something to her about that. But I didn’t know it was the exact same apartment. And when I realized it was the same place, that I was lying in the same corner of the room I slept in back then, that I was staring at the same water tower out the window that I stared at every night half a decade earlier, I told her this, all excited. And she didn’t believe me.”

  Jack’s neck cramps, and he switches the phone to the other shoulder. He squints up at the harsh light and wonders if the neck pain is what makes cops such assholes.

  “Actually, it wasn’t just her that didn’t believe this. No one would believe me. So I ended up stealing one of her magazines she had tucked behind her toilet just so I could get the mailing label off of it. Then I made a photocopy of one of my old tax forms with my old address on it, that old address, and I emailed this proof to everyone who doubted me. This just made her more suspicious because now she starts to worry why I’m stealing her magazines and mail for whatever reason, even though I tell her the reason, and it’s a completely reasonable reason to be stealing mail. But she gets me so freaked out that I burn one
of the magazines I swiped from her in a panic because I know she’s coming over. It doesn’t burn nearly as fast as you’d think, so then I start worrying how weird this is going to look, so I steal a candle from one of my neighbors’ patios to cover the smell, and she sees me do this, too. And you know what happens after all this? You’ll never guess. Everyone started saying okay, maybe I did live there before. But if I did live there before, I must be some kind of apartment stalker. Like I was trying to meet someone who lived there after me. Like maybe I wanted to impress this girl by pretending I was psychic, maybe by mapping out the layout or walking around with my eyes closed without bumping the walls. I should have done that, actually…”

  The light bulb finally gets to him, and he clicks it off and sits back down, switching shoulders again.

  “So she just ended up breaking up with me because it was all too weird to believe. Or because she believed it all. Either way. But I think she dumped me mostly because her roommate thought I’d been watching their building for five years, waiting for my chance to get back in there for some insane reason. Maybe I had a something stashed under the radiator or something, she said. Maybe something horrible happened there, she said. I tried to explain that the worst thing I ever did in that apartment was punch through a wall because an ex-girlfriend put up a stupid Mars Attacks! trading cards poster. Or did she put up the poster to cover the hole? I can’t remember. I just know I wasn’t stalking anyone. And I certainly wasn’t stalking a building. Of course now that she’s gone, I’m wondering who lives there, just like they all said. And maybe it wouldn’t be too insane to figure out a way to bump into them or get inside, see what’s going on. And if anybody was going to hide something, dropping it down into the wall and covering it up with a Mars Attacks! poster might be the way to go...”

  On her end of town, Jacki crawls across her floor until the phone is next to her head. She closes her eyes, and Jack’s voice is muffled but still echoing around her skull. There’s something intoxicating about his level of crazy. Different than Anthony’s jealousy, unhinged but sort of innocent. She thinks someone should maybe help him, so he doesn’t dwell on things like this anymore. Put him down easy, like they do at the vet.