But this strange, purple bubblegum that he remembered so well had been given to him by a crazy uncle, fresh home from Vietnam. There were bricks of this gum tucked behind some open plumbing in the bathroom wall, but even if The Last Projectionist had stolen some corners to hang his posters, he’d never dare to blow a bubble with it. Then one night, the purple gum disappeared, and even the corners of Duel in the Sun had been ripped away.
That night after he saw those kids running around, The Last Projectionist studied the strange new bricks in the support rails under the screen. And he studied the weeds and mushrooms growing in every crack, straining like the blinded Samson to weaken the will of the world. He thought of the mushrooms the most though, imagining running a razor across them every morning instead of his chin, clipping them at the base with almost a knuckle-cracking sound and a puff of blood instead of spores. He imagined shaving the entire screen until it ran red, and it was oddly satisfying.
But even though he knew the green wires would bring it all down some day, it was the red and blue wires that scared him the most now. And the wires were everywhere. How long had they been multiplying? He didn’t know. He wondered if they’d been always hidden behind the roadmap of Creeping Charlie that reached higher and higher every year.
The only projectionist older than him had told him once that, kind of like a heat lamp, you couldn’t shine the warm glow of too many movies on any surface, including concrete, or it would eventually get infested.
“Everything turns eventually,” he told him. “Just watch.”
Now he wondered if he’d really said “infected” instead.
The Last Projectionist drank deep from his wooden goblet, then began to walk home through trees that seemed to bend and creak out of his way. He’d seen old drive-ins from the sky before, in library books or every time he flew home for a funeral. So he knew they left a mark on the landscape, like ragged crop circles, as if the UFO actually crashed checking out the prank.
He looked at his rows of cars one last time. Tried to ignore the screaming that was ruining his moment. He worried that the cars didn’t need drive-ins to gather anymore. Soon they wouldn’t even need movies.
IX.
The Very First 3-D Drive-In Movie – A Boy and His Dog’s Balls – Every Mothman Jacki’s Ever Known – Clear? – Ladybug for President Meets the One Who Knew – The Girl Who Loved Ice
Cubes – Clear – Hunta Virus – “Three More Minutes and You Never Happened” – Ouroboreaslis
“For the dog that chases its tail will be busy
Un-tied dog in telematic society
ain’t your average huckleberry hound
Why must I feel like that?
Aw, why must I chase the cat?”
-George Clinton “Atomic Dog”
In the distance is the screen of a drive-in, a sunset and a beach scene filling Jacki’s windshield with the promise of a spectacular wreck. She turns her ambulance straight for the movie.
Walking her hands across the top of the steering wheel, the ambulance leaves the road sideways, its headlights exploding through a sand dune, a beach someone had filmed in Toronto, pretending it was California, specifically the intersection of North Hollywood Boulevard and Pennsylvania Avenue, now projected onto Kentucky Street. A wall of sand blankets them as the family rolls down this beach, rebounding off a dune, all wheels flying over a sunburned boy leaning on his Jeep, finally crashing into the lumber supports under the pier. Distracted by the little girl on his legs, Derek doesn’t see the trusses and unmilled tree trunks coming at his half of the windshield until it’s too late. Glass showers his face, and blunt chunks of wood fly over and under Toni’s body to pummel him in the chest and groin. Behind them all, the boy reaches into his vehicle and turns up the volume on his Peter Gabriel cassette. Then he folds his arms like he’s doing everyone a favor.
“Down at the ocean lies a body in the sand. Big woman sits beside, head in hand. With heat from her skin, and fire from her breath, she blows hard, she slows deep in the mouth of death... burning, burning with the kiss of life...”
Then all the songs no one can hear anymore end, and all cassette tapes unspool and curl up their dashboards like snakes. Derek is doubled over Toni, trying to catch his breath as Jacki reaches over to unbuckle her daughter and pull her out the driver’s side door with her. Hissing through his teeth in pain, Derek picks red cubes of windshield from the corners of his eyes. Then he stumbles from the passenger side, one hand squeezing his heart, the other squeezing his crotch. The ridge in his pants from his fractured erection now resembles a fistful of something from the deli counter, bleeding through the wax paper. His dog, uninjured, whimpers and scratches at the back doors.
Derek’s rage builds, and he starts to lurch toward them when a second ambulance plows down the beach, Rick jumping from the driver’s door while it’s still cruising. Rick runs at Derek, and he’s almost on him when the dog crashes out of back doors and intercepts Rick instead.
The wrecked ambulance starts to burn. It burns easily, like they were meant to burn, like the vulnerable rolling room of a home they always resembled.
The dog goes for Rick’s throat, like a good dog, knocking him onto his back with his arm clamped in its jaws. It snaps at his neck, and Rick finally gets a grip on the dog’s snout, at the cost of most of the webbing near his thumb, then Rick gets his own mouthful of fur as he bites its neck right back. The dog’s teeth stabbing through the love line on his palm, then moving down to his life line, Rick struggles to bring his thumbs up and into the dog’s pinballing eyes. His thumbs push down and in, and the dog yelps and kicks, fight gone, now struggling to get away. Rick stares at it its face in his hands for a moment, hesitating to apply enough pressure to rupture its eyes and blind it for good. Instead, he struggles to his feet and dumps the dog back into the burning truck and slams the doors behind it.
Instantly, Rick regrets his move as the dog crashes back out through a shattered window and knocks Rick down again, smoldering fur filling his nose. Rick gets a mouthful of burning snout and bites harder. The dog screams and backs off, now submissive, tail curled under its balls. It slinks under the pier and is gone.
Toni runs to follow the dog and disappears into the dark. Derek turns to follow them both, but Jacki grabs his arm and spins him around easily. He’s still hunched over, weak, one hand squeezing the red ruin between his legs. Bloody and dazed, Rick stumbles over to them.
“Who the hell are you?” she snarls at Rick. “I don’t need any more of you crazy fuckers.”
Then Jacki steps past him and punches Derek in the face. When her hand comes down to swing by her hip, Rick sees she was holding a jumble of keys in her fist, the ignition key protruding from her knuckles. Derek screams and grabs his face, and one of his thumbs slips into the hole where his eye used to be and his scream climbs so high it’s inhuman. Jacki looks down to see most of his eye, deflated and dripping, hanging from the key, and Rick changes his mind again a third time about blinding the dog.
Jess is there now, too. Rick points to the pier, and she runs after the child, faster than he can. After his eyes adjust to the shadows, he finds all three of them where the beach meets the wood, petting the injured dog to comfort it.
“Hello?”
Toni peeks out from behind a pole under the pier like she did when she was hiding behind her mother’s leg as the dog buries its bleeding snout in the sand to cool it down. Jess gently examines the child for injuries as Derek keeps screaming in the distance, but now it sounds more like words again.
“Don’t you understand?!” he’s asking Jacki. “Every man you’ve ever met, without exception, is a piece of shit. Think of yourself sitting in front of a slideshow with their faces, one after the other, clicking on the screen. Think about how every one of these creatures that you’ve encountered has disgusted you or failed you or fucked you over in some way. Think about it!”
Jacki figures “fuck it,” and does what Derek asks. She sits in the sand n
ext to him and closes her eyes. In her head, she’s sitting at a desk in a classroom, and behind her are the sounds of a slide projector humming and clicking through the images:
The first pictures are of her mother, walking with Derek under the pier all those years ago. Then Jack. Then her grandmother? Jacki looks to the projector in the back of the room, and isn’t surprised to see Derek is teaching this class.
“...first, you have the ones that have had a tragedy in their lives. Look close how they want to make the death of their mother or father all about them, and how they think, maybe without even knowing it, what money, attention or “Get Out Of Jail Free” cards they accumulate because of this. Think about how every good deed is for a selfish reason, and anyone who helps you only helps themselves...”
The next slides are two cops, one big, one little, smiling side by side.
“…next are the accusations…”
Then come the two rival paramedics, Big Mike, and Little Mike. But this slide turns into a movie, and the Mikes are jawing away, Little Mike going on about the first books he ever read:
“…and I was losing interest in all the Mothman Prophecies bullshit, until it got to Louisville’s contribution to the sightings. It reads as follows. ‘According to the Louisville Kentucky Courier-Journal, July 29, 1880, two men, C. A. Youngman, & Bob Flexner, reported seeing “a man surrounded by machinery which he seemed to be working with his hands.” He had wings or fans on his back, which he was flapping rather desperately to keep aloft. The startled men watched him flutter unsteadily out of view.’”
“Did you memorize that?” asks Big Mike, looking around Little Mike’s hands for a book.
“Yep. Someone has to pass it on to the next generation.”
“Your Mothmen suck,” says Big Mike. He’s from Pittsburgh and very defensive about the origin of the creatures.
“Bite your tongue! Our Mothmans might not be scary, but they work harder than yours. Are we moths or men?!”
“Should it be ‘Mothmen’ or ‘Mothmans’? Why does ‘Mothmans’ sound so much more accurate?”
“Do they even know what movie they’re in?” Jacki asks no one in particular.
Then a storm rolls in out the classroom window. Something starts falling from the sky. She hopes it isn’t frogs. Derek’s voices continues.
“…now think about how people in power wait for an emergency to ask you something that they never would in a normal situation. A cop asks a rape victim if she was a virgin, just because he wants to know. Maybe they don’t do this consciously. Maybe it’s such an essential part of being human that they don’t even know they’re doing it...”
The next slide clicks. It’s Jacki’s father.
“…see that man? Okay, I don’t know whose slide is up in your head right now, but I do know, whoever it is, he wronged you. You can always make that bet.”
The next slide is the doctor sneaking up on her daughter with the needle.
“See that man? I don’t know who he is either, but I know he lied to you, too...”
Another slide clicks into place, and Jacki stares at the face on the screen a moment. Then gets up from her desk and leaves the classroom. It’s raining in the hallway. Hailstones in the rest of the lecture halls. She turns the light off and slams the door behind her, in her head, her feet sinking into the damp sand outside the classrooms, and Derek’s voice turns desperate.
“Where are you going?”
Jacki opens her eyes and sees Jess leading Toni back to her mother, and all three of them start walking down the beach. Derek, sand and glass crusting his remaining eye, is now blind for real, and forgets all the behaviors he’d memorized when he faked it. He falls after two steps.
“Who’s there?!” he cries.
“Who do you think? That’s my daughter.”
“That’s right,” Derek laughs. “She’s your daughter. And that means she’s halfway to me!”
Jacki stops, drops Toni’s hand, and walks back to Derek. She’s still clenching her fist around the keys in her left hand, and she punches him again before he can react. It’s a straight-on shot that punctures the one good eye he had left. Derek drops to his knees, head down, both hands over his face now, and Jacki asks just one question. More of a riddle really.
“If you can’t see me doing this to you,” she asks, sincerely. “Did I really do it?”
Derek stumbles around, trying to grab anyone he can, flailing around for his family.
“Without me, you’re not even here!” he screams. “Not just somewhere else, you and your daughter are not even alive. Jacki, no, please, you’re half me, and she’s three quarters me. One more generation and the child will be all mine. Check the math…”
He lets this insanity sink in, and Jess looks to Rick. Rick holds up a hand that promises to explain everything later, but he doesn’t look too confident that it would be possible. Then Derek stops bumbling and raging and slumps into the sand, head down, arms limp. Blood drips like tears, and he grabs his head again, mumbling, barely audible.
“You ever wonder about why you’re with the three of us, Jacki? Why all our names are the same? Derek? Eric? Jack? Rick? These aren’t even names. ‘Jack’? More like verbs, all of them. This is no accident they almost rhyme. We all keep going back to what we know, even if it has never worked, like a dog to its own sick. You know why? Because it’s delicious.”
His finger comes out of his eye with a POP! like a toddler’s thumb being pulled reluctantly from his mouth.
“…where’s my dog...”
He tries to whistle for it, blood bubbling through his lips instead, but the dog doesn’t come. Derek finally collapses, facing sinking into the beach like a sand crab after a wave.
Jack walks up behind them all, rubbing his head in the distance, carrying some equipment like he’s ready to do his job.
“Did I miss anything?”
Seconds later, cop cars are piling in, too, blue and red dividing everyone’s faces.
And as they all run toward Jack, he waits until their hands are on him, or on the conducting metal flank of the ambulance so the electricity can handcuff them together. Wired together forever. Then he reaches inside his toolbox and hits a button.
“Clear?” he asks, knowing they’re not.
“At some point after that, there will be a brawl. Resisting arrest? Lots of arrests to resist. Everybody will have a head full of electricity from Jack’s defibrillating, and they will be seeing things a little differently. Big Rick and Big Cop maybe even have a battle to the death. Big Mike will jump in, too, while the Big Cop reveals he killed Anthony, thinking it was Jack, thinking it was The Bardstown Rapist. It would have confused everyone at the drive-in if they didn’t have their own problems to contend with. No one will even care about all these loose ends.”
“‘Why did you kill the girl?!’”
“‘Who?’”
“‘The babysitter with the money! The ladybug for President!’”
“‘Oh, her! To smoke you out?’”
“‘Really?’”
“‘I don’t fucking know. Ask him.’”
“Cut. Okay, good. Now Small Cop will tell Jack that he can appreciate his urge to make all their stories overlap. But get this. He can’t! And even his roommate will be there, because Larry wanted one of those final scenes that tied a nice bow around everything. The roommate will be his wife, of course, maybe, chewing ice as usual. She’ll be in uniform, an EMT-P, the highest rank of first responders. Jack won’t be able to look at her because that’s right about the time she and Jack started having problems, when she started to outrank him. And Larry will hire Rick to play Jack because awhile back he smelled semen in the back of the ambulance and realized that Rick had been renting the truck out for some Gonzo pornography, that is pornography with someone dressed like Gonzo from The Muppets…”
“Why do you keep saying, ‘Big Cop, Small Cop’? Don’t you mean Good Cop, Bad Cop?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
&nb
sp; “Cut!”
“What did you call me?” Rick laughs.
“ …just have Rick as Jack open those double doors and get a big ol’ whiff of Pyrus Calleryana, those white-petaled trees that used to be all around his first girlfriend’s brownstone, an earthy smell that Jack would try desperately to ignore when he’d come and pick her up, at least until her brother, always perched on the top step, flared his nostrils one night and laughed, ‘Careful, sis, the Come Trees are in bloom!’ This distinct odor will be radiating off the hot metal and sticky equipment, just like it is now, and Larry, I mean Jack, is furious. This is when he realizes that for all his self-righteous bullshit, Rick was using the ambulance for clandestine porn shoots, and that’s why he disabled the camera. Until recently, Larry would have thought it was unusual to go from a career in medicine to a career in pornography…”
“You know what rhymes with cut?”
The Last Projector Page 46
