A Lot Like Christmas

by Connie Willis

  I was going to have to feel my way along the passage, but I didn’t have a free hand to hold on to the wall with. Or to fish out my phone with so I could use its lit screen as a flashlight.

  This is all Jack’s fault, I thought, stooping to set down the 7-Up so I could get my phone out of my pocket. I flipped it open and held it out in front of me. And no wonder the passage was so dark. It went a few more feet and then turned sharply to the left in a kind of dogleg. If I’d kept going, I’d have run face-first into a wall.

  That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen, I thought, trying to figure out a way to hold on to my phone and the 7-Up. There wasn’t one—the cup was too big around—but if I could just make it past the dogleg, there should be some light from the screen to see by. I put my phone back in my pocket, felt for the cup, picked it up, and started down the passage again, counting the steps to the wall.

  “Four…five…” I whispered. “Six, sev—”

  And was grabbed abruptly from behind by a hand around my waist. I yelped, but a second hand was already over my mouth, and Jack’s voice was in my ear. “Shh. In here,” he whispered, and pulled me, impossibly, right through the wall.

  “A winner! You’ll be glad you came!”

  —Variety Online

  Amazingly, I hadn’t dropped the 7-Up or the bag of popcorn. “What do you think you’re doing?” I said, wrestling free of him.

  “Shh!” he whispered. “These walls aren’t soundproof. Did you spill any of the popcorn?”

  “Of course I spilled the popcorn,” I said. “You scared me half to death!”

  “Shh. Look, you can yell at me all you want,” he whispered, “but not till the next chase scene. And don’t take out your cell phone. I don’t want the light to give us away. Stay here,” he ordered, and I heard the swish of a door’s opening and closing softly, and then nothing but the sounds of pandemonium coming through the left-hand wall.

  It sounded similar to what I’d heard before and had thought was from the previews for Christmas Caper, but it was clearly coming from the theater next door, which meant it was Lethal Rampage.

  I couldn’t see anything at all, let alone enough to make out my surroundings, but this had to be the corridor leading to Christmas Caper because I could hear a voice intoning, “Coming this Valentine’s Day!” through the other wall.

  Good, the previews were still playing. I hadn’t missed the start of the movie. I would have time to tell Jack what I thought of him for grabbing me like that and still make it into the theater in time for the opening credits. If I could find it in the darkness, which was still absolute.

  Jack was back. I heard him shut the door. “Luckily, you only spilled a couple of handfuls,” he said over the crash of explosions from Lethal Rampage. “Which I ate. What took you so long? I was afraid the usher had spotted you, and I was going to have to come back out and rescue you.”

  “Where was I?” I said angrily. “I was standing outside Theater 17 just like you told me to. You lied to me—”

  “Nobody saw you go in the door to 28, did they?”

  “Don’t change the subject. You—”

  “Did they?” He grabbed my arm, jostling the popcorn.

  “No,” I said, only half listening. In between deafening explosions, the announcer on the Christmas Caper side of the wall was saying muffledly, “And now for our feature presentation.”

  “Look,” I said. “I’d love to stand here in the dark and fight with you, but I intend to see Christmas Caper. So if you’ll please let go of my arm, the movie’s about to start.”

  “No, it’s not,” he said. He squeezed my arm. “Hang on,” he said, let go, and moved away from me, and I could hear him doing something, though I couldn’t tell what, and then the wall I was facing lit up with the beam from a penlight.

  From what I could see in its dim light, we were in a narrow passage just like the one outside, with carpet on the floor and the walls and no strip lighting, but it was long and straight and ended in a wall, not in the entrance to the theater. There was no sign of the door Jack had just come through, though it had to be in that wall because Jack had taken off his jacket and laid it against the bottom of it.

  “To keep any stray light from seeping out,” he explained over the racket.

  “What is this place?” I said. “Where are we?”

  “Shh,” he said, putting a finger to his lips and whispering. “Kissing scene coming up,” and he must have been telling the truth because the gunfire and explosions were suddenly replaced by the strains of violins.

  He took the popcorn and 7-Up cup from me, tiptoed halfway down the corridor, stooped and set them on the floor, and then stood up again, listening with his finger to his lips. And apparently the lethal rampagers were back, because the romantic violins cut off abruptly, replaced by a blast of trumpets, lots of drumming, and the sound of revving engines and squealing tires.

  “Chase scene,” Jack said, coming back over to me. “Time to go to work.”

  “You said you were going to tell me what this place is. Where’s the theater?”

  “I’ll tell you everything, I swear. After we do this. Take off your shirt.”

  “What?”

  “Your shirt. Take it off.”

  “You never change, do you?”

  “Wrong line,” he said. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Are you sure we’re planning the same sort of crime?’ and I say—”

  “This is not How to Steal a Million,” I said.

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s more like Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Or I Love Trouble. Take it off. And hurry. We don’t have much time.”

  “I have no intention of taking off any—”

  “Calm down. It’s for the photos. Of this passage and the one outside,” he said, and when I still stood there, my arms crossed, “The camera the boy on your shirt is holding isn’t just a picture. There’s a digital-strip camera embedded in it.”

  And that was why he’d riffled through all those shirts in the Disney Princess boutique. He’d been looking for one with a camera. “Why can’t you just use the camera in your phone?”

  “When they scan them in the security line, they check your info against the police and FBI databases.”

  “Which you’re in because of the geese,” I said. “That’s why you wanted me to come with you, so I could smuggle in your camera for you.”

  “Of course. That’s what scoundrels do. They use the girl to smuggle the necklace through customs or to get the news story or to get them out of East Germany—”

  “This is not a movie!”

  “You’re right about that. Which is why I’ve got to get those pictures. So, do you want to give me that shirt or do you want me to take the camera off of it while you’re wearing it?”

  “Fine,” I said, pulled the T-shirt off over my head, handed it to him, and stood there fuming in my singlet while he turned the shirt inside out, peeled off the digital-strip camera, and handed the T-shirt back to me. I pulled it on while he snapped pictures of the passage, motioning me out of the way so he could get a shot of the long wall behind me.

  He snapped the end wall he’d dragged me through and the one at the other end, and then came back to me and listened a moment. “I’ll be right back,” he said, switched off the penlight, plunging us in darkness, and went out into the passage again.

  He was gone for what seemed like forever. I put my ear to the door, but all I could hear were detonations and screams from the Lethal Rampage side and disgustingly perky music from the other. I listened intently, afraid the din would subside any minute, but it didn’t, though on the Rampage side I could hear, over the crashing, the sound of muffled voices.

  Please don’t let that be the usher or Drome security, I thought, demanding to know what Jack was doing in here, but it must not have been because the door was opening again, and I had to back away hastily as Jack came in and shut it behind him.

  “Can you find my jacket?” he whispered, and I felt around for it
in vain, and then pulled my shirt off again and handed it to him to put against the door.

  “Thanks,” he whispered, and, after a few seconds, switched on the penlight again.

  “Did you get the pictures?”

  He waved the digital strip at me. “Yeah.”

  “Good. You lied to me.”

  “No, I didn’t. Besides, Jimmy Stewart lied to Margaret Sullavan, Peter O’Toole lied to Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant lied to Audrey Hepburn. It’s what scoundrels do.”

  “That’s no excuse. You promised you’d take me to Christmas Caper.”

  “And I did,” he said. “This is it.” He waved his arm to show the passage. “Welcome to Theater 28.”

  “This isn’t a theater,” I said.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Come on.” He grabbed my hand, led me down to where he’d set the popcorn and 7-Up. “Have a seat, and I’ll explain everything. Come on, sit down.”

  I sat down on the floor, my back against the carpeted wall, my arms folded belligerently across my chest, and he sat down across from me. “That passage outside splits in two and goes into the theaters on either side,” he said. “If I hadn’t reached out and pulled you in here, you’d have turned and followed that dogleg into Theater 30 and Lethal Rampage.

  “And if you’d turned the other way, you’d have ended up in Theater 26”—he jerked his thumb toward the wall behind him—“where Make Way for Ducklings is now showing, a fact you wouldn’t have discovered until you’d sat through fifteen minutes of previews, at which point you’d have thought you’d somehow gotten in the wrong theater, and go tell the usher, who’d tell you he was sorry, but you’d missed the start of Christmas Caper and he couldn’t let you in, but that there might still be tickets available for the seven o’clock. A neat trick, huh?”

  “But why—?”

  “They have to have a last line of defense in case a determined fan makes it past all the other firewalls. That hardly ever happens, but occasionally somebody does what you just did—can’t get in, buys a ticket for another movie, and then tries to sneak in to what they originally wanted to see.”

  “Why don’t they just not put up a marquee for it?”

  “They tried that, which is what made us suspicious in the first place, so they had to come up with an alternative plan. Which you see before you.”

  “Us?” I asked.

  “Oops, I almost forgot,” he said, scrambling to his feet and going to retrieve his jacket. He put it on, came back, and began searching through its pockets.

  “Now what are you doing?” I asked.

  “Trying to get this made before Lethal Rampage hits another quiet stretch.” He frowned at the red Coca-Cola cup. “You did get 7-Up, didn’t you? Not Coke?”

  “I got 7-Up.” I handed it over to him. “You’re not making a stink bomb out of that, are you?” I asked as he pulled out a flask and poured a brown liquid into the cup.

  “No,” he said, patting his pockets some more and pulling out a Terminator 12 commemorative glass and then a baggie full of lemon slices.

  He poured half the 7-Up-and-brown-liquid-and-ice mixture into the Terminator glass, added a lemon slice and a sprig of mint from his breast pocket, reached inside his jacket, pulled out a stalk of rhubarb with a flourish, stuck it in the glass, stirred the mixture with it, and handed it to me. “Your Pimm’s Cup, madam,” he said.

  “Just like the ones you made the night we watched Ghost Town,” I said, smiling.

  “Well, not just like them. These are made with rum, which was all Tom Cruise’s Cocktail Bar had. And when I made the Ghost Town ones, I was trying to get you into bed.”

  “And what are you trying to do this time? Get me drunk so I’ll agree to help you do something else illegal?”

  “No,” he said, sitting down next to me. “Not right now, anyway,” which wasn’t exactly a reassuring answer.

  “I got the photos,” he went on, “which is what I came for, and, thanks to you and that awful Dora T-shirt”—he raised his Coke cup to me—“I’m a lot less likely to get caught smuggling them out. But it’s still too risky to do any more investigating till I’ve gotten them safely off the premises.” He took a leisurely sip of his drink.

  “Then, shouldn’t we be going?” I asked.

  “We can’t. Not till Lethal Rampage is over and we can blend in with the audience as it leaves. So relax. Drink your Pimm’s Cup, have some popcorn. We’ve got—” He stopped and listened to the din coming through the wall for a moment, “an hour and forty-six minutes to kill. Enough time to—”

  “Tell me what’s going on, like you promised you would. Or are you going to tell me that’s classified, too?”

  “As a matter of fact, it is,” he said. “And you’ve already seen what they’re doing—covering up movies that don’t exist.”

  “But why? Most people don’t even care about the movies part.”

  “Oh, but they do. They think they’ve got a hundred to choose from, and that’s what makes them come all the way out here on the light-rail and stand in security lines forever. Do you think they’d do that just to buy a bag of popcorn and an overpriced Avengers mug? How long do you think Baskin-Robbins would stay in business if they only had three flavors, even if they were the most popular ones? Look at your friends. They may have spent today shopping and eating and—”

  “Picking up guys.”

  “And picking up guys, but if somebody asked them tomorrow what they did, they’d say they went to the movies, and they’d believe it. The Drome’s not selling popcorn, it’s selling an illusion, an idea—a giant screen with magical images on it, your girlfriend sitting beside you in the dark, romance, adventure, mystery…”

  “But I still don’t understand. Okay, they have to maintain the illusion, but it’s not as if they don’t have any movies. You said there were only four or five movies here that didn’t exist, and they already show some movies on more than one screen. Why not just show X-Force and The Return of Frodo in one more theater instead of making movies up?”

  “Because they’re already showing X-Force in six theaters as it is, and Starstruck just announced they’re building a chain of 250-screen Superdromes. Besides, I don’t think the moviegoing public’s the only people they’re trying to fool.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if you’re a film company, this could really work to your advantage. If your movie’s behind schedule, nobody gets fined or fired for missing the release date. You release it anyway, and then, when it’s finished, you put out the DVD and stream it, and nobody’s the wiser. Which, by the way, is what happened to Monsoon Gate and what I think probably happened to Christmas Caper. You can’t release a Christmas movie in February. It’s got to come out in December or you’ll lose your shirt. Figuratively speaking.”

  “Which means it might show up on the Net in a few months,” I said.

  “Yeah, and if it does, I’ll watch it with you, I promise.”

  “Do you think that’s what happened to the other movies?”

  “No. The Ripper Files never came out, and neither did Mission to Antares or By the Skin of Our Teeth. And why spend millions making a movie when you can do a three-minute trailer instead, pay the Dromes to block people from seeing it, and pocket the difference? The shareholders wouldn’t even have to know.”

  “Which would make it fraud.”

  “It’s already fraud,” he said. “And false advertising. There are laws against selling products that don’t exist.”

  “Which is why they don’t sell the tickets online,” I said. “But if they’re criminals, isn’t what you’re doing dangerous?”

  “Not if they don’t know I’m doing it. Which is why,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper, “we need to sit here quietly, eat our popcorn”—he scooted closer to me—“and watch the movie.”

  “What’s it about?” I whispered.

  “This guy who’s investigating a conspiracy when who should turn up but his old girlfriend. It�
�s the last thing he needs. He’s trying to stay invisible—”

  Which explains why he looked so dismayed when he saw me, I thought, a weight lifting from me.

  “And he knows he should probably get out of there before she blows his cover, but she already thinks he’s a—”

  “Scoundrel?”

  “I was going to say ‘wanker.’ ”

  “Scoundrel,” I said firmly, “and besides, he needs her to help him smuggle something in past the guards, like Kevin Kline in French Kiss.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Plus, he’s got some stuff to tell her, so he recruits her to help him, and in the course of their investigations, he convinces her to forgive him, like Olivia de Havilland forgives Errol Flynn and Julia Roberts forgives Nick Nolte and Whoopi Goldberg forgives—”

  “Jack. Because that’s what scoundrels’ girlfriends do.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Which is why you should—”

  “Shh,” I said.

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  “Kissing scene coming up,” I said, and switched off the penlight.

  “The most fun you can have at the movies!”

  —moviefone.com

  “How long does Lethal Rampage run?” I asked him a considerable time later. “That sounds like Final Scene music to me.”

  He raised himself up on one elbow, said, “It is,” and went back to nuzzling my neck.

  “But don’t we have to be out of here before it ends?”

  “Yeah, but you’re forgetting, it’s a Hollywood Blockbuster. Remember when we saw the reboot of Speed, how we kept thinking it was over and it wasn’t? Or The Return of the King? That had like seven endings. Lethal Rampage has got at least three more climaxes to go.”

  “Oh, good,” I murmured, snuggling into his shoulder, but a moment later he sat up, reached for his jacket, pulled a phone out of it, and flipped it open.

  “I thought you didn’t have a phone,” I said, sitting up.

  “Not one I wanted to get caught with photos on,” he said, looking at its screen. “Change of plans. There’s something I’ve got to go take care of.” He began buttoning his shirt. “Wait till the next explosion and then slip out into the passage and wait for Lethal Rampage to get out. And don’t leave anything behind.”