For a few weeks he worked in a multiplex in some state’s capital city. The glamour of the film industry was such that it wasn’t necessary for them to pay more than minimum wage. You have to steal, said a girl with permed black hair and bright sweaters. She only pretended to ring up the Dots and Cokes, shoved the bills in her bra. The manager, a short bearded man, came in at random and barked at the help. He was supposed to be off at the other theaters in the chain, but everyone assumed the bulk of his time was really spent nowhere, doing nothing—driving or television or selling some product or screwing some sad and masochistic woman. The boy left in charge was also eighteen, with red hair and a depression in his chest. He’d had heart surgery as a baby and could go any day.

He’s an idiot, said the girl with the perm. But I’m not complaining.

In the break room, she always listened to music that was both plaintive and angry, a monotone with a twang that didn’t originate from any real geography. This hopeless but energetic confusion was the soundtrack of her opposition to the city she’d been born in.

Take me away from all this, she said to Wade, and she laughed. She liked to pretend that Wade was a dangerous figure. Because she spoke more easily than he did, it was an easy game to play.

If all the films had started and the popcorn was made, he could wander in and out of the theaters, catching pieces of each film. They were all pretty much the same. They were less about stories than about a rhythm in which certain things happened at predictable intervals: the discovery of bodies, gunshots, people speaking in excited and desperate ways.

The refreshment stand glowed. They were standing behind the counter, waiting. Nothing was blowing up, and this was boring.

Have you noticed that boy? asked the girl with the perm.

An unhappy man stepped to the counter. The boy waited for his goods behind him, and stared at Wade.

He comes every day on his bike, she whispered, and stared, not hiding the fact. You see it out there, chained to the post? He always pays for the same PG movies, but sometimes he sneaks into the Rs.

When he got to the front and asked for some Hot Tamales and a Dr. Pepper, the girl talked to him in a false, cheery way, and then she confronted him.

You come here every day, she said.

It keeps me out of trouble, said the boy.

He slid a twenty across the counter. Wade took the bill quickly, before the girl could get her hands on it.

Mom works across the street, he said. He made some vague gesture and Wade didn’t know which of those ugly buildings might possibly contain her.

Her friend stays at our house, said the boy.

You don’t like her friend? said the girl.

His name’s Jack, said the boy. Mom’s afraid he’ll molest me.

He shrugged. He turned and stared at Wade.

Jack has knives, the boy said.

The girl reached out a finger and touched it to his chest, then acted like she’d been burned.

Ssssss, she said.

The boy ignored her.

You’re like that guy in that movie, the boy said to Wade.

I’m not, said Wade.

No, but you’re just like him, said the boy.

The boy smiled and walked toward the theaters. Wade didn’t like that idea at all. Once he was around the corner, into a dim carpeted hallway, you never knew which way he might go.

Cute, said the girl. If he was a few years older, I’d do him for sure.

It was the warmest day of the spring. Nobody was coming to the movies. The red haired boy was in the ticket booth, doing his community college homework. The New Farming and You was the name of his text. The new farming involved genetic modifications and large corporations. The boy had been telling Wade how most of the corn in this country had been planted from the same hybrid seed stock. Then some new fungus came along, almost wiped out a whole season’s crop.

You need to balance the advantages of diverse genetic stock with those of homogeneity for maximum yields and security, the boy had said.

Now he was highlighting more important sentences with a yellow marker. Wade had a rag in his hand. If you weren’t doing anything, you were supposed to have a rag in your hand.

Jealous? asked the girl.

I have to go to the bathroom, he said.

The bathroom smelled strongly of Glade Country Living Potpourri, which they were to spray liberally at every opportunity. That boy was alone in there, shoving tissue into his pocket. Wade nodded at him, and he nodded back. While Wade stood at the urinal, the boy stood at the mirror behind him, running water and splashing. Wade turned his head and caught the boy’s eyes in the mirror. He’d experienced something like this before; his stomach felt punched, and time felt laced with hidden meanings. When Wade turned around, the boy was tucking his undershirt into his jeans.

Do you know any good exercises to do? the boy asked. I wanna have a six-pack. I know about crunches, but I mean other ones too.

Wade shook his head. The boy shrugged, untucked his shirt and flashed his belly. There was an oval bruise on one side that looked like he’d been chewed.

You have a six-pack? the boy asked.

The boy was staring at Wade’s stomach, and then he made a motion like he was going to punch it, but stopped short. This gesture confirmed Wade’s feeling of the moment before. The boy laughed at Wade, and did it again, and darted away, even though Wade wasn’t moving. He said Wade was too slow, and then he was gone.

Wade checked himself in the mirror.

The hallway was empty.

Your turn, said the girl.

She gathered up her purse and a bulging plastic trash bag that seemed to be filled with her laundry, and she disappeared around the corner. Wade was stuck at the concession stand. All the movies had started. He was afraid she was bothering that boy, but when she came back a half-hour later, her hair was blond. She’d bleached it in the bathroom. He couldn’t stop staring. She looked different, as if he’d known her before.

Where’d you grow up? he asked.

She shook her hair and moved to catch the light.

Did you grow up on a farm? he asked.

She moved right next to him.

Kiss me, mysterious stranger, she said.

He was so startled that he did what she asked, then stepped back quickly and looked around. Her plastic bag was just sitting by the garbage, stuffed full of clothes that didn’t make any sense. Jeans and jogging clothes, a green jacket and a silky purple thing he didn’t know what it was.

Not very satisfactory, she said.

She picked up a rag.

I wanna be the mysterious stranger, she said. She flashed the money she had stashed in her bra, then dug a section of newspaper out of the trash. He looked through her plastic bag. The purple thing was a shirt. The girl stabbed a newspaper article with her finger. Give me a break, she said. Everybody knows it was the parents. In cases like that it’s always the parents.

She tossed the paper back in the trash, wiped down the immaculate counter. Wade wandered into the first theater. It was about a serial killer. Women into kinky sex kept getting murdered. The detective herself seemed on the verge of a lesbian affair. Wade scanned the sizes and heights of the heads.

The next theater over was action/adventure. A meteor was heading for the earth, and somehow saving the planet had fallen to a retired cop. There was a little head alone near the front, but Wade walked up the aisle and saw it wasn’t him.

The next theater involved murder as well. The cops had to date a lot of women they’d found through the personals to locate the killer. In the next theater over a clown was lecturing a child. Your grandmother needs you right now, the clown said. In the fifth theater, some paranormal activity was getting under way in a lightning storm. A radio frequency was picking up the voice of an air traffic controller’s dead father from thirty years before. Toward the back Wade saw a head he thought might be the boy’s, sitting next to an adult. He couldn’t tell if the adult was a man or a woman. He was pretty sure those were the boy’s tennis shoes, rocking the top of the seat in front of him. The boy’s had been black and purple with black laces. Sophisticated colors, thought Wade. He stood for a moment and let his eyes adjust to the dark.

The next day, the boy didn’t show up. The day after that was Wade’s day off. He sat next to a fountain downtown. A pair of shoes had been tossed over a telephone wire overhead. The sun was so bright it was hard to tell, but they seemed to be the same color as that boy’s.

Saturday afternoon was their busiest time at the theatre. It was Wade’s job to sit on a stool and rip people’s tickets in half.

I’m almost as tall as you, the boy said.

This was a joke, because Wade was sitting down. Wade could think of nothing to say, but he liked the way this boy would say just anything.

Let me see how tall you are, the boy said.

Wade stood, and the boy looked him up and down, and nodded. He rested his hand nonchalantly on the stool where Wade had been sitting. Wade sat down on it lightly, but as if he didn’t know it was there.

Hey, said the boy, but for a moment they just stared at each other and smirked, as if it had been a ridiculous accident from which they weren’t sure how to extricate themselves. Finally the boy pulled his hand out from under Wade, with a vigorous wiggling motion. There were no other customers around. The boy told him a joke about some jungle tribe that gave their captives a choice between death or getting butt-fucked by the entire tribe. The punch line was that the captive found death preferable, but that he would be killed by being fucked in the ass until he died.

Wade took the boy’s ticket, which seemed like a magic pass into a world of pleasure and illusion far more complicated than the movie title printed on it would indicate. The movie the boy was pretending to see was a romantic comedy, involving an exuberant poor woman and a dissatisfied millionaire.

Later, Wade stood in the back of a dark theatre and saw that the boy was sitting again with an adult. He believed it was the same adult. He wondered if it was the boy’s mother, or if it was Jack. There was some mayhem on the screen.

Wade didn’t know what he should do. He had done so little. That boy seemed to require something, an act of will.

A man followed Wade into the bathroom. Wade stood at the urinal and pretended to pee, and the man stood next to him. The man exaggerated the motions necessary to wield his own penis and glanced down at Wade’s. There was more fluttering and staring and aggressively banal conversation that halted and progressed to the point the man asked him what time he got off work.

I’m off right now, said Wade. Meet me in the lot.

The man was shocked. He kept looking back at Wade, to check that he was real, or maybe not.

I have to go, Wade told the girl with the hair.

She wasn’t surprised.

Are you coming back? she asked.

Wade wasn’t sure. She opened the register and handed him some twenties.

The man lived alone. He worked for a company that installed sprinkler systems. He kept talking about someone, kept describing this person in details both elaborate and vague, utilizing his own code involving military men, the working class, and buddies. There were no words he used more often than buddy and dude. He exhausted them both with his talk and his blowjobs, but he could only get to sleep with the TV still running. An entire town of people had been arrested for dealing drugs, early in the morning, still in their bedclothes. All of them had apparently been dealing drugs to a white undercover. Lawyers were trying to overturn their convictions after the undercover’s shady past came to light. The issue was also raised of who exactly could have been buying all these drugs on a regular basis if the entire town was dealing. Wade slept and woke again into the Home Shopping Network. It was all about diamonds and knives. It’s not my job to rescue anyone, Wade thought.

Whoever rescued the boy would get to give him pleasure, but it probably involved murder as well. He examined the twenties he’d been given, hoping that one of them came from that boy. Wade woke again later in the night in the strange bed and realized the man had been talking about Wade all that time he was going on about buddies and dudes. It was all so pathetic. Why even be a human being, he wondered. There was something barely hidden and basic this man didn’t understand. They were angelic beings compelled by a destiny, a destiny which had nothing to do with any of this. Wade wondered where he’d acquired such an idea; it seemed so extreme that it just might be true. His head was throbbing. The night hummed and Wade got up in a heated confusion as the man perhaps dreamed and dreamed. He got dressed and left the man there asleep.

On the radio, a man was listing symptoms. You aren’t sure who you really are, he said, or you don’t feel like yourself.

If enough of the symptoms suited you, it meant you were a candidate for some new syndrome. A feeling of loss that has no referent, the man continued. The need to be invisible, perfect, or perfectly bad. High risk taking or the inability to take risks. The feeling of carrying an awful secret, the urge to tell, feeling oneself to be unreal and everyone else real, or vice versa. Lost memories, or blacking out a period of years…

Wade felt that way sometimes. It seemed he’d been to some colleges. He’d learned things and had brief affairs with the men who kept up the grounds. But he could remember it all if he really wanted to. The man driving the car pulled over at a rest stop. I need to check my email, he explained.

Wade wasn’t sure how that was possible. The man sat at a picnic table and typed away at his laptop. They were somewhere in the desert, in transit from one dubious location to another. Their relationship was based on an accidental convergence of two paths of least resistance. They were both too lazy to try and change other people to suit their own preferences. Wade wandered off into the scrub. A dry gully twisted around through it and he could see how high the stream had been by the garbage that was stuck along the banks. Plastics and fast food cups and a surprising number of articles of clothing, shirts and rags and underwear, and bloodstained jeans. The desert was the worst place to hide evidence, because nothing decayed.

The land just went on. He was pretty sure there’d been human sacrifices around here, he could sense it. Blood had soaked into it. Blood was curdling and the sun was blazing. You couldn’t see the creatures, but they were out there, waiting and chewing each other for sure. They sucked up each other’s juices, he guessed. He walked haphazardly along the gully for some time, letting the heat and his thirst empty his mind. When he came to a barbed wire fence, he turned back. At the rest stop, the man was clicking his mouse and talking to him as if he’d been there next to him the whole time.

It really facilitates community, he was saying.

Wade guessed he was talking about the World Wide Web. This man thought everyone in the world together was turning into the planet’s brain. It had become the source of a mild but nearly constant irritation between them.

Not everyone has a computer, Wade said.

The man snorted.

I talk to people in Kenya, he said.

The man’s skin was dry, hair frazzled and bleached. He seemed crisped, a little bit fried around the edges, like an asteroid that had come through the atmosphere a few times too many. Wade knew that his time with this man was approaching its end. The sun was blazing out here and the electronic screen seemed grotesque. Wade thought there must a club of dictators or child murderers he was connecting with in Kenya. The man was wearing a stained undershirt and suit pants.

More evidence. Guilty, thought Wade, but surely nobody cared. He thought then that his mood was the same as America’s, or he thought that his mood was exactly “America”. The man shivered in the heat, as if he was finally ready to move on, but then he continued clicking away, a sort of hopeless scratching noise under the sun. There was a weird hair or blue fiber there where the shirt, drenched with sweat, was sticking to the man’s back.

 

© 2006 Stephen Beachy - Contributor's Bio

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