The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine Page 16

  Len watched a foul wad of greenbacks unfurl in the cup of the old man’s withered palm. Keith’s lips drew back in a feral grin of disgust, and Len resisted the urge to kick him under the counter. He hefted the camera. “You need a proof of citizenship to get a passport, sir, but a photo is just eight bucks.”

  “The photo, oui, the photo.” The old man tottered to the photo backdrop where he dropped his trash bag and clutched a leather case close to his heart. When he offered a toothless grin like the yawn of an ancient turtle, Len couldn’t help but smile back. So few people smiled any more; it was like finding ten bucks in the street.

  “I’ll put the picture in a reinforced envelope for you,” he said, “if you’re mailing it overseas.”

  The old man bellied up to the counter, his expression wary. “You are kind,” he said, “not like these cochons dégoûtants.” He set a worn leather case on the counter. “I have motion pictures camera. You shoot some footage of me, oui? For my family.” A starving man hoping for a crust, the old man put a deeply lined hand on Len’s wrist. “I need this very much. You like cameras, non?”

  “I think most machines suck your humanity out through your eyeballs.” Len gently disengaged his arm. “But this old camera isn’t hurting anybody. It’s almost like watching a magic trick. The image develops so slowly—like it’s waiting for you to want to see yourself bad enough before it gives you the goods.”

  The look on the old man’s face had changed in the course of the conversation, his twisted cockle of wrinkles relaxing, until his true face lay revealed, pink and moist and somehow youthful. He pressed a twig-like finger to his old leather case and spoke as softly as an addict sharing a tidbit of coveted dream stuff. “Never doubt, monsieur. Some machine, she help you see good.”

  They’d come together over the counter in sympathy, Len and the old man, but Keith slammed the box of sanitary wipes on the counter between them and they sprang apart. Keith smoothed his hair as Napoleon might have done had he worn a thinning mullet. “Time for mon frère to move along.”

  Before Len could say anything, the old man snatched up his garbage bag, shouldered the camera case and stormed out into the snow blanketing Washington Street. With the plastic bag banging into his knees, the old man hobbled through traffic, unmindful of the piss trail of beer he was leaving in the snow. His grip on the camera was far less casual; he cradled it as if he were afraid the passing cars would tear it from him. Once across the street, he glanced furtively around, and then vanished into the entrance of the Empire Theater. The precarious marquee had been updated: SUSPIRIA! KILL, BABY, KILL!! DEVIL’S NITEMARE!!!

  Wistful, Len smashed the box of wipes into Keith’s concave chest and yanked the miniature cell phone out of his ear with an audible plop. “Would it have killed you to be nice to the poor bastard? Christ, Keith. He’s just a lonely old man.”

  Keith snatched at his cell phone like a toddler deprived of its lollipop, and Sully gave a merciless bark of laughter. From that point on he filtered the undesirables into Len’s line. Len had his stapler stolen by a bag lady in a pink rain slicker, and had to call Sully over to remove a nut job who insisted Len speak into the empty battery compartment of a micro-cassette recorder. While Len worked, he glanced periodically at the sign across the street: Welcome to the Empire.

  At the end of the day, Len returned the miniature phone to Keith but, still simmering about Lizzie, he swiped the zero key of Keith’s register and dropped it into his pocket. Although the small act of sabotage had been inspired by that morning’s report of the TV burglar, it wasn’t the first time Len had done such a thing. Lizzie had spent hours making love to her cell phone and laptop, talking to Mr. Chin. Len had expressed his rage by stealing batteries, and staging elaborate laundry accidents, but Lizzie had laughed him off and taken the opportunity to upgrade. She said home electronics brought people together, but the funny thing was, with every thingamabob she plugged in, Lizzie became a little less friendly, a little less social, until one day she packed up her devices and vanished.

  Tormented by Lizzie-memories, Len stood in the snow outside the Empire Theater, breathing in billows. Under a cupped hand, nose pressed to the glass door, he scanned the lobby, expecting to see ticket takers, concession workers—at the least, a man in a tie guarding the velvet ropes. There was no one attending the candy counter, and the leaves of the plastic rhododendrons hung heavy with the dust of years.

  Len slipped the photo folder from his pocket, dislodging a molar-shaped object that landed soundlessly in the snow. When he bent to retrieve it, the silence of Washington Street howled down the back of his neck. Len plucked Keith’s zero key from the drift, and the folder with the old man’s photo slipped from his pocket into the snow.

  “Not a bad picture.” The old man was standing in the lobby door as if he’d been watching Len for some time, all turtle-grin and compost breath. “Nice angle hides my flobby chin. You will take footage of me with the motion pictures camera? The others say non, but I say, this man, he is one of us.”

  Len wasn’t sure he wanted to be included in whatever group would embrace a man who smelled of beer and urine, although guilt gnawed at him for thinking such a thing when he’d been so hard on Keith for his disrespect. He looked past the old man to the abandoned popcorn counter. “I just wanted to make sure you got your picture, but now I’m thinking I might be in the mood for a movie. Is the theater open? It looks—” Ancient, he wanted to say. Bald. Shabby. Empty.

  The old man waved Len in. “The Empire, she is lonely for company in the digital age. Come pay your respects, oui?”

  Holding his knit cap, Len stepped in. The moist, cavernous warmth was such a shock that the luminescent statue guarding the threshold to the house came as no surprise. It was a goddess of Mount Olympus, but it was also his favorite movie queens of days long past: Jane Fonda confronting the evil Durand Durand, Erika Blanc, stepping doe-like through a Carpathian village square. A wall of shattered television screens behind the statue reflected her glory from a hundred angles. For one confused moment, Len wondered where all of the televisions had come from, and then the hair on the back of his arms stood on end. The televisions of the dead; the old man was the murderous TV burglar.

  “Hey now.” Len backed toward the lobby door.

  The old man arranged the photo folder at the statue’s bare feet, unconcerned. He propped up a fallen candle, patted a limp bouquet of daisies into shape. “Terpsichore. These things roll in on their own. They are drawn to her. There is no thief.”

  A woman burst from the theater doors swinging a frying pan. “Jean Tom, Mr. Sergei brought the popcorn!” She stopped the pan mid-swing. “Well, I’ll be whipped. It’s Mr. Len.”

  The old man, Jean Tom, gripped Len’s arm. “Come in, oui? The others will be happy to see you.”

  “Hey, no,” Len said. “I’m not a grave robber. No matter how much I hate my job.” He pulled his gloves from his pocket, and out tumbled the zero key of Keith’s workstation.

  The woman brought a smooth, pale hand to her mouth to cover a smile. She shook the foil frying pan, making un-popped kernels rattle. “Popcorn and a film? We have a full house tonight.”

  It wasn’t right, and it certainly wasn’t nice, but the idea of two old psychotics robbing the dead of their TVs inspired the spastic belly-butterflies of incipient hysteria. Len plucked up the zero key and, using a trick he hadn’t done in years, made it dance over his knuckles. “Popcorn and a film would be swell.”

  The audience had lost its collective mind. Snapping at one another with bedraggled scarves, stamping across puddles of snow with scuffed galoshes mended with duct tape, they danced through the aisles of red velvet seats—dozens of shabby villains, all touching one another and laughing. The Empire rose over them in decaying splendor, moth-eaten velvet, peeling gilt wallpaper and leering cherubs. The silver screen was ripped at the edges, but still good in the middle.

  The woman in the pink slicker popped the corn over a camp stove, which
gave a flame when she turned a crank. A tall girl in charcoal eyeliner cranked on a gramophone, which spat baroque melodies from a porcelain disk. The man with the micro-cassette recorder cranked away at a tiny handle in its side, interviewing an ancient silver poodle while a middle-aged man in Ben Franklin spectacles knelt in the aisle, winding up a toy robot.

  Len wiped his eyes. Red candles burned in the empty light bulb sockets, runnels of wax trailing down the flaky wallpaper, and the smoke burned. “This is...what? A homeless shelter?”

  Jean Tom grunted, and shifted the leather camera bag slung over his shoulder. “The Empire is a shelter, Mr. Len.” The old man peeled off his beret, his hair salt and pepper waves spilling on the loops of his scarf. He grimaced as a woman in her seventies pattered by in a red flannel nightgown, blowing bubbles. “She is our refuge, the Empire, but not the kind you mean.”

  “Angels!” said the woman in the slicker. “It’s Mr. Len.”

  The people scrambled from the stage like puppies. A dozen-or-so leaped across the theater seats to congregate—wriggling—in the aisle. The pink rain-slicker woman shooed them from the gas burner, protecting the huge foil mushroom of freshly popped corn. The seat jumpers were a motley bunch, dressed in bits of business attire, message t-shirts, and taffeta skirts, and they crept forward to touch Len, beaming at him with ageless smiles.

  Angels of the movie theater. Kindred spirits.

  That they were illegal squatters was a certainty. From the moment he’d stepped into the theater, he’d known it wasn’t right for them to be there capering in the candlelight like children. Despite his minor vandalism of Keith’s computer workstation, Len was nothing if not law-abiding, and just being in the abandoned theater was enough to turn amusement into dread, especially when Jean Tom opened the leather case and Len had a look at the black machine lying inside. “Hey, Jean Tom, look. I know what I said about the Polaroid and all that, but I pretty much hate anything that needs batteries.” Home electronics took Lizzie away. They steal your soul, is what he wanted to say. But he couldn’t ever say such a crazy thing. Not even in a madhouse.

  Jean Tom brought out the camera. It was the size of a tin lunchbox with a lens at one end and a hand-crank, like the wire crank of a jack-in-the-box, on the side. “Touch her, Mr. Len.” Jean Tom put the camera in Len’s hands. “If you don’t love her, you give her back to me, and together we will watch the films on the marquee. We will have a triple feature!”

  Len glanced at the crowd, aware of how closely they watched him. It was inexplicably important to them all, that he do this thing for Jean Tom. Unlike Lizzie’s laptop and Keith’s cellular phone, this machine really had brought people together.

  As he took the camera and turned it in his hands, Len felt something inside the machine shift. The camera was heavier than he had expected, yet strangely buoyant and, as he held it before him, assiduously avoiding the perplexing crank, he felt a rush of joy for the smell of buttered popcorn. Ecstatic, the cinephiles pressed around him, reaching to touch the camera and Len laughed with them. If sharing a smile was like finding ten bucks on the street, this pre-movie bonding was like a shopping spree at Fort Knox. This was the kind of audience that made even the worst B-list movie into a religious experience.

  Hallelujah and amen, brothers and sisters.

  Len lifted the camera like an acolyte hefting a holy relic, aware of the absurdity, too amused not to pander to the crowd. A siren wailed out on Washington Street, a warning from another world, distant and meaningless. “Time to roll film,” he said.

  There was a flurry of excitement as the chair jumpers and the stage dancers bumped and pushed their way to the stage under the screen. They sat in mobs, some on each other’s laps, cross-legged, passing the popcorn hand to hand. Jean Tom directed Len to set the camera on the tripod, and helped focus its eye on the ancient movie screen. Jean Tom turned the crank, and a flashing leader appeared.

  The odd camera, it seemed, was also a projector.

  Well, why the hell not?

  Conscious of his bald spot and ever-increasing paunch, Len sat beside the rain-slicker woman, with his hands on his knees like a little boy. The perfume she wore struck him deeply, the same heavy musk that Lizzie had favored. In the hazy light, the rain slicker woman looked so much like his ex-wife that Len felt his heart open like a flower. It was incredible that he hadn’t noticed the resemblance immediately.

  With Jean Tom cranking the camera, the leader ran out, and the film started. On the screen, a woman with a micro-cassette recorder climbed into a silver coupe. With the device pressed against her wet, crimson mouth, she whipped the Jaguar through a crosswalk and ran over a man in a tweed coat walking a standard poodle. The man’s head hit the street with a sickening bounce and blood spilled from his cracked skull in a shockingly crimson torrent to pool around the poodle’s feet.

  “Mr. Sergei,” said Jean Tom. “Poor Mr. Sergei. Victim of the Digital Age.”

  In the audience, Mr. Sergei shook the recorder next to his cheek, spun the tiny handle to play something back that sounded like the thready tune of a music box. The poodle licked his ear and cocked its ear at the melody.

  Len watched the crowd, unsure of what he’d just seen. The clip was like a driver’s education film from the 80s, meant to convince teenage drivers to wear their seatbelts. The audience members closest to Mr. Sergei reached out in benediction and touched his head.

  Another leader—4, 3, 2, 1—and the man with the Franklin glasses appeared on the screen, lying in an operating theater while a beam of light sliced into his pulsating brain. A wall-eyed scrub nurse grabbed for her shrieking pager, the surgeon twitched and sent an errant beam of light across a swatch of healthy pink tissue, causing the patient’s feet to curl up like shrimp sizzling in a pan. “Mr. Dwayne,” said Jean Tom. “Poor Mr. Dwayne. Victim of the Digital Age.” The audience members whispered the chorus, in rounds like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

  Victim of the Digital Age. Victim of the Digital Age.

  Pushing away from the audience, Mr. Dwayne rolled onto his side and cranked the gear in his toy robot, sending it spinning and jerking across the stage. He wiped a string of drool from his mouth and used it to write D-W-A-N-E on the stage floor.

  The last clip blew frost over Len’s heart. On the movie screen, the pink rain-slicker woman sat in a motel room with a laptop, searching through photos of naked female bodies, bound and spattered with blood. The bathroom door opened and out came a smiling, wrinkled Don Juan in a velvet bathrobe. Don Juan saw that the rain-slicker woman had discovered his secret stash of pictures, and his pleasant expression never flickered. He took a syringe from the pocket of his robe, and stuck it into his lover’s neck, and watched her mouth go slack and drooling.

  Jean Tom was saying something about the rain-slicker woman and the Digital Age, but Len’s legs kicked out reflexively, and he backpedaled into the audience, which sighed and swayed around him like kelp in an ocean current. When presented with the pan of popcorn, Len blinked. He took another handful, unmindful of the dirty hands also dipping into the communal resource. “Great special effects,” he mumbled, wide-eyed. “Great crowd.”

  The pink-rain-slicker woman stroked his knee, her eyes like gleaming green jewels in the light of the film. “It’s a comfort to see them all together here, all the angels.” She gave Len a searching look, and then blushed. “You can stay with us, if you like. The rules are really quite simple.”

  “Um.” Len wiped away butter on the hem of his trousers and took her hand, feeling like a teenager on his first date. Surrounded by a gang of lunatics, knuckling smoky tears from his eyes, he’d never felt such a sense of belonging. It all seemed unreal, but still he sensed that they feared the things he feared, and loved the things he loved. He warmed the woman’s hand as they watched the short subjects unfold, and his thoughts went to Lizzie. “I lost my wife,” he said, struggling with the images unfolding on the screen. Victims of the Digital Age. “And it feels so good to be here with
you. You know how it is out there.”

  “Yes. We all feel that way. The Empire herself feels that way. Look at all of her empty seats, lonely for the company of those who once worshipped her. People watch the classics on TV as if their tiny screens and squeaking speakers could do justice to stories meant for the silver screen.”

  The emergency exit doors next to the stage rattled on their hinges until the mascara girl jogged down, hit the crash bar and stepped back to let an unaccompanied television set bump its way in. It thudded through the door and thumped its lonesome way up the carpeted steps, trailing its cord like a disconsolate tail. When the television set reached the top of the steps, it crashed through the swinging doors and rolled into the lobby to sit with its vagrant brothers at the feet of Terpsichore.

  Len looked at the pink-rain-slicker woman, at her face so caring and lovely. His eyes burned and he coughed. “Are you a film director? Are you filming a movie right now?”

  With a tender expression, she took the camera from Jean Tom and blew across the lens. “Jean Tom’s ready for his take, Len.”

  Jean Tom stood on the stage, nodding at the lounging crowd, winding and unwinding his dirty scarf until he’d knotted it into an ascot with shabby chic. “Crank it up, oui? Roll film.”

  There was no viewfinder, so Len framed the shot the best he could over the topline of the camera and turned the crank in the counterclockwise direction the pink-rain-slicker woman was indicating with a whirling finger. He expected friction, the sensation of gear teeth meshing and the sound of film rolling, but the motion was smooth and soundless, like drawing a paddle through oil. He cranked and cranked, and Jean Tom spoke.

  “It was a crazy Irishman who said it the best. ‘We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.’ It should have been a Frenchman who said this—” Jean Tom moved his age rounded shoulders in an expressive, Gallic shrug “—but the Empire makes me forgive the theft.” With a naked glance to the woman in the pink rain slicker Jean Tom swept off his knit cap, moistened his wrinkled mouth and began to sing.