The Last Projector

by David James Keaton

“Actually it was my dad’s chair, okay? He did try to make a hunter out of me once. It didn’t stick, but that’s another story.”

  “Okay, just trying to follow this. So, you lived here, and hung out there, and hung out there, and now you live there and hang out here? Or there?”

  Jack sits on the floor in front of her.

  “Yep.”

  “Why?”

  “I just told you!” Jack says, scratching his head even harder.

  You’re gonna catch something…

  “When I would hang out there, when I lived here I mean, I had this hopeful feeling. I would get excited, find broken toys in the closets and bottlecaps in the corners and shit under the ‘fridge, and I would think about who used to live there and how things could be for us if we lived here, too. But when I moved in there, and started sneaking back in here, I started noticing pieces of the things we’d left behind. And I realized that none of that garbage you find in corners means a damn thing.”

  Jacki sits back down and thoughtfully kicks at the foot rest.

  “So, what happened with your dad?”

  “I don’t really remember,” he sighs. “He took me hunting when I hit 18. But it turned out we were hunting dogs instead of deer.”

  “Did you just say ‘dogs’?”

  “Yeah, strange dogs.”

  “Did you just say ‘strange’ dogs?”

  “No, I said ‘stray’ dogs.”

  “Yeah, no, you didn’t,” she says.

  Jack frowns and looks up at the ceiling, lost in thought again. Then she leans forward to take his hand but stops when the hunting chair creaks like it’s going to collapse.

  “Aren’t you going to open your box?” she asks after a minute. “She seemed to think it was important.”

  “Not in here. That would feel like moving in again.” After another minute he asks, “How does that saying go? ‘Don’t pick up strays’ or ‘Don’t pick up strange?’”

  “Don’t pick up strangers.”

  In her pocket is a picture her daughter had recently doodled. One of Toni’s teachers had sent it home with a note describing the disruption it caused and her resulting expulsion from the room. Toni had drawn six stick figures over top of each other in a swirling vortex of copulation, and it was clear due to the ease with which she was able to illustrate this scenario with a maximum of ten or twelve lines that she’d mastered this particular diagram after quite a bit of practice. Jacki had noticed some scribbles on Toni’s arms lately, but nothing discernible. Jacki was going to yell at her, at least prescribe the same amount of shame she routinely dealt on the boys who drew such things in her own classroom. But she’d stared at the drawing too long before she had a chance to discipline her daughter, and she found the world around the damp, wrinkled piece of notebook paper, particularly the perfectly circular holes between the female stick figures’ legs, fading into a blur. At that moment, she decided to drive to Jack’s apartment and have sex with him. To exert some sort of authority on the situation.

  But some time around his third or fourth rambling story, she’s changed her mind again, satisfied that she could have if she wanted to, even more satisfied that, in at least one variation of today’s events which remained nestled in her brain, she had gone through with this.

  And he will never know. But she tells him another story instead, which she figures should be worth more, if they were to weigh them both.

  “There was this speaker at my school, and he was standing there with a cane in the middle of the gymnasium, telling us all how he broke his neck in a motorcycle crash, but it was a ‘weird break,’ and it left him paralyzed on his left half rather than his bottom half, and we all listened about how he compared the new division of his body to a bagel, no, he said it was like a spaghetti squash, cut down the middle, insides rearranged with a fork, but sewn back up before consumption. His book was actually called Spaghetti Squashed, now that I think about it. So he talks about all this and how, before the ice-cream truck smacked into his motorcycle and changed the course of his life, he was just starting to get strong. Always a skinny kid, he was worried he’d be short and scrawny forever, and after growing six inches in as many weeks, he only had a good three months of ‘superpowers’ before the wreck. And the first thing he asked his dad when he woke up in the hospital was, ‘Will I be able to fuck? Play hockey? Travel to the moon?’ I guess he wanted to be an astronaut, too. So there wavering on the foul line, we get to hear how he does get married, and is presumably able to consummate it, how he is able to play goalie for a fundraiser at least twice, and, finally, how he’s able to travel to Moon Township, Pennsylvania, which was close enough, I guess. And when he gets to the part of the story where he confronts the ice-cream truck driver to forgive him, I couldn’t take it anymore. I shouted out, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ or ‘No one cares!’ or maybe it was ‘Keep that shit to yourself!’ Something like that. I was ashamed - I’m ashamed now - because I knew it was supposed to be this inspirational tale, of course. But it all felt so strangely performative and off-putting. I just couldn’t understand why it was necessary to share this trauma with anyone, including the ice-cream truck driver, especially the ice-cream truck driver, even though that part of the story was building up to be this big moment of forgiveness or whatever. But shouldn’t the ice-cream truck driver have gone looking for his spaghetti ass and begged him for forgiveness? I don’t know. I can’t explain it. He almost fell back, so visibly struck by my comments, arms all noodly on his cane. I’m sure it’s still a terrible memory for both of us.”

  “Hemiplegia. I’ve never seen it myself. But a body divided vertically cannot stand,” Jack jokes after a second of processing. “I wouldn’t dwell on it too much though. Kids say some crazy shit when they’re young.”

  “What? No, this was two weeks ago.”

  They talk in circles another few minutes or so, and she finally leaves, shaking her head and chastising herself for making the trip. A little later, now that Jack’s alone, he tears open the end of the box and dumps a dirt-caked animal skull onto the floor between his knees. He quickly turns out the light and runs to close the window. It takes him twenty long minutes for his fingers to find the skull with his hands and pack it back up. Then his fingers find Jacki’s glowing digits in his pocket, and he listens to the electronic simulation of a bell ringing in his ear, waiting for her to get home, waiting for her to climb back into his telephone so they can have a real conversation again.

  “Where do you think the phrase ‘barking up the wrong tree’ comes from?”

  Highway. Next day. Jack and Rick are pulling up to a car wreck on the highway where a smoking dashboard is still kicking out Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Death of a Martian.”

  “This Martian ends her mission, the nova is over. She caught the ball by the mission bell. Chase lizards, bark at donkeys, the love of a Martian…”

  Their ambulance’s broken siren is still sputtering like a backfiring engine, and it mercifully drowns out the bass slapping in the song, an instrument that Jack once heard can cause irregular heartbeats after prolonged exposure to funk. Also, Jack is driving, so the ambulance has gotten up on two wheels at least twice on the way there. Even after Rick told himself Jack wouldn’t be touching the steering wheel for another year at least.

  But they do get there first. The typical response time for an EMT is 12 to 15 minutes. Jack and Rick get there in six. And even though two men are stuck headfirst in the windshield of each of the cars, skulls cracked and leaking like old Halloween pumpkins, Jack is getting between the job and Rick as usual, talking his ear off and risking another punch in the mouth.

  “Get out of my way, man,” Rick warns him.

  “Listen, I open the box, and it’s a fucking dog’s skull. Did you hear what I said?”

  “Are you kidding me right now? We’ve got two-“

  “Yeah, I know. And I got us here fast enough to have this conversation. So let me have it. Plus, look at these guys. They ain’t going nowhere. They nee
d the Mikes for once, not us. But listen, I open the box, and this fucking skull comes rolling out! And there’s no note, nothing. So I’m thinking the skull is a message, right? I think about it all night, and I almost called the cops, but the battery in my phone is dead, even though the battery is the size of a box fan. So instead I get the address off the box and get to my computer and start messing around online…”

  Rick pushes past him and moves to check the closest body for signs of life. Once he gets a good look at the first driver’s head and how much of it is missing, he starts moving as slow as his partner. Jack, however, is moving faster.

  “…And I find out that someone bought this skull at some taxidermist, you know, for stuffed deer heads and whatnot. Only this wasn’t stuffed with anything but dirt, so it must have been the cheapest skull they had. Probably a coyote skull, actually-”

  “I thought you said it was dog.”

  “Dog, coyote, same difference! So anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. I start with this return address and do an internet search, find the house it came from is actually this business. But to get the phone number of whoever lives there, I have to pay ten bucks for one of those online private-investigator scams? But I pay it, and this internet P.I. gives me everything: the last five owners, a map of the house from the county assessor’s office, the cell phones of those last five owners, even a list of all the names of the neighbors within ten blocks and which ones, if any, are sex offenders. For just ten bucks, dude!”

  “That is a bargain,” Rick agrees.

  “Hold on, you’ll see how much a bargain in a second. So, I get the guy’s phone number who lives there and give him a call, pedaling to keep my phone charged. He’s not happy I have his cellphone, which is, by the sound of the motor, larger than mine, and apparently unlisted. Unless you have ten bucks to spend! And we get in an argument about how he can’t reveal who bought the skull because of privacy or whatever. And I’m going, ‘You’re not the fucker’s doctor! Tell me the name!’ And he says the person that ordered it is a ‘Jack Grinstead.’ And now I’m freaking out, thinking someone charged my credit card or something to send me a skull and fuck with me. So I tell him, ‘I’m Jack Grinstead,’ and now he’s even more suspicious and says I’m trying to pull some sort of identity theft.”

  “I could see that.”

  “So the last thing he says to me is ‘Check the people you live with. That’s the last thing I’m saying.’ But I keep pushing, and he yells, ‘Whoever got this for you, it was either a gift or a gag! And they’re close.’ And he hangs up. So I start going through the rest of the online info, making sure I get my ten bucks’ worth.”

  Sirens are approaching, working sirens, not warblers like their own, and Rick snaps back to work. He shakes Jack by the shoulder to steer him to the other car.

  “Great, man. Tell me about it later, okay?”

  “No, listen, here’s the thing. I’m checking the names of the neighbors around there, and…”

  Rick shoves Jack hard.

  “Enough! Get the fuck to work.”

  “No. You have to hear this. I’m checking the names-”

  Jack expected the punch long before it arrives, and he takes Rick’s fist all the way to the ground with him, still talking around the blood pooling over his bottom teeth.

  “And that’s when I see his name. ‘Derek Bromden. Registered sex offender.’ Derek. Derek Bromden. Three houses down. Ring a bell?” Jack spits red.

  Rick was going to hit him again, but now the bell is ringing.

  “That’s right,” Jack says. “Fucking Derek. That creepy old fuck we work with who jerks off into our lunch? Well, that’s apparently the most normal thing he does.”

  “So he’s a sex offender. So what. That’s like saying water is fucking wet.”

  “Not ‘so what.’ The skull! He sends me a skull… like he knows I know…” he trails off.

  “Knows you know what?”

  Then there’s a groan from behind them, and they’re both running. Jack goes for the second car. Rick back for the kit. The sirens are about one minute away now. Jack reaches the young man half in, half out of the back seat, wearing nothing but swimming trunks, lacerations all along his bare legs. Eyes wide, Jack runs past the boy and retrieves a twenty-dollar bill flapping against the nearby curb.

  He flips it over and over in his hand, recognizes the ladybug he drew in as the seventh President of the United States.

  He walks back to the boy and grabs him rough under his arms, propping him up against the side of the bumper and snapping his fingers in his face for attention. The boy groans.

  “Is this yours?” Jack asks him. Snap. Snap. Snap. “Hey! Where did you get this?”

  The boy blinks slow as Rick returns to crouch down next to them. Jack grabs the boy’s face by the chin, and Rick sees a look in Jack eyes that he’s grown used to already. A look he’s associated with Jack not doing his job.

  “Where did you get this?” Jack asks him again, louder.

  The victim seems to notice Jack for the first time.

  “Huh?”

  “Did you notice any dogs in the area?”

  “Dogs?” the victim looks terrified and tries to get up, grimacing in pain from sliced tendons in both ankles.

  “Jack!”

  Jack ignores his partner and keeps up the interrogation as best he can, even though he’s all out of questions.

  “Are you a registered sex offender?”

  The victim looks down the road at the flashing lights and parade of emergency vehicles, cops, paramedics, and firemen. Jack squeezes the boy’s face like he’s going in for a kiss, and Rick starts to pull him away. Then stops suddenly, stands, and walks off. He kicks around near the curb where Jack found the money, looking off into the bushes, confused. Jack gets up to join him and see what’s drawn his attention.

  “Something’s wrong here,” Rick says. “There’s no way she’s from the crash,” Rick moves a tangle of weeds with his boot.

  “Who are you-” Then Jack sees her.

  Curled in the brush is the severed bottom half of a female, jeans bunched around her ankles, body missing above the waist. Jack blinks at what he’s seeing, remembering back to when he was young and had to draw his own pornography, like most kids who couldn’t buy any.

  He’d start at the bottom of the girls, like this, and he’d be so eager that he’d draw everything too big so that she ran off the page, too. Right at the belly button like her.

  Jack drops the money as if burned.

  The police officers are snapping photos and taping off the area, as a particularly short officer asks Jack some questions.

  “And you found the money where?”

  “Right there in the gutter.”

  “Why did you pick it up?”

  “What do you mean, Officer…” Jack peers at his badge. “…‘Stansberries’?”

  “I mean, you stopped everything to grab this? They don’t pay you enough saving lives or what?”

  “It’s a natural reaction. You see money, and you grab it.”

  “I don’t know,” the cop laughs like he just solved everything. “I see two guys with their heads smashed in, and I’m moving toward them, you know?”

  “We were doing everything we could do for them.”

  “How long were you on site?”

  “What time is it now?”

  The officer looks at his watch.

  “It’s 6:37,” he says.

  “I don’t know. But we got here first.”

  The officer lets the arm holding his notebook drop and they look at each other for a little while.

  “What? You want a cookie?” the cop asks him.

  “Well, where the fuck were you?” Jack asks back, and the cop moves on.

  As Larry pushed through the concession stand, shoving through all the players, he screwed up the all-time high scores of at least three kids on the coin-ops. Larry noted the titles as he ran, Pac-Man, Joust, Donkey Kong...

  Th
e arcade games all had something in common, but he couldn’t quite place it.

  Then he eye-balled a gray door behind the counter, right as the entrance started swarming with patrons screaming for his blood. He heard barking in the distance, too, like in a prison-escape movie, right before some asshole got caught.

  Then it hit him. If it was one thing these new games had taught Larry, especially those three big ones along the wall, it was that you could run really fast out off one side of the screen and then magically reappear on the other.

  So he shouldered the door and crashed into blackness. Feet still red-lining, fully expecting to catch something hard and invisible in the face, he headed for a sliver of light coming from under a crack, and he threw his shoulder into that door, too. Then one more.

  He was in a long room, longer than seemed possible from the outside. It was immaculate, white like a laboratory, like heaven in the movies, with the gentle swirl of a clicking film projector in the center, spinning like a windmill that brought life-giving water up from the earth, not to drink, but to wash over the faces of weary heroes, cowboys, even dying villains.

  He was in the bunker.

  “At 2:07 p.m., it is assumed that Officer Dwayne “Bigbeep” Bigby pressed his hand-prints into the suspect’s face. This was likely to coerce him to go along with the robbery. These prints were discovered prior to autopsy when the only son of the coroner, Joseph McNutter, who was angry that he was forced to work the holiday, used a ballpoint pen to turn the outlines into two Thanksgiving turkeys. These turkeys were, as you all know, later matched with the sizable hands of Officer Bigbee.

  “Approximately 2:10 p.m., Officer Bigbee gave Mr. Bells a purple plastic sword and told him to use this ‘weapon’ to intimidate anyone at the bank who balked at the colorful device around his neck. Angela Strongarm then gave Mr. Bells the nine-page note, which would put him on a scavenger hunt immediately after the robbery, where he searched in vain for clues to remove the bomb. Reassembled after the explosion, the note read, in part: ‘Using your time attempting escape will leave you short of the 75 minutes needed to follow these detailed instructions. Do not delay.’ Earlier that day, a fake suicide note had already been mailed to local newspapers, claiming that Mr. Bells had lost days of sleep due to the noise of a dog park near his home. Side note: the stamp attached to the envelope displayed an obese, more mature Elvis Presley. This stamp was traced to the private collection of a local teenager named Amy Luck, whose involvement has yet to be determined…”