Something New Under the Sun

Alexandra Kleeman

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780008339104

CHAPTER ONE

On the palm-sized screen it looks curiously real, like something he’s already seen. She slouches in the drugstore aisle, clawing the skin on the back of her hands, sunglasses black and gleaming in the halogen daylight. This is the girl: a bored blonde, her head at once too big and too little for her whittled-down frame. Smaller than life, shorter than expected, not as pretty, torso adrift within a pair of creased track shorts and an oversized black sweatshirt with GUCCI spelled out on front in serifed white letters. Bruisy shadows under her mouth where the light falls badly. The footage has a handheld wobble; from time to time it sinks behind a shelf and you can hear the sound of close breath, the body of the camera holder hovering out of view. She keeps taking a box off the shelf, putting it back, picking it up again. Against a background of sanitary napkins, pregnancy tests, and adult diapers, she looks aimless, misplaced, like a child rehearsing an adult gesture they’ve seen but not fully understood.

Patrick Hamlin shields his eyes from the California sun and squints down at the miniature face on-screen, shrunken behind oversized lenses. He can’t help but feel disrespected, seated off to the side of these production kids—half his age but wearing better clothes—slim-limbed youths who picked him up at the airport and then detoured without asking to this noisy poolside bar, nestled in the crotch of an overpriced hipster hotel. The potted palms by the bar all have smiles painted on their trunks, and sultry cartoonified eyes made to be photographed and uploaded to the feed. At check-in, bowls of red rubber condoms sit gratis, waiting to be snatched up by smooth-armed men and women delighted at the novelty of a cock that resembles a balloon animal. Now he’s jet-lagged and dehydrated, headachy from drinking a jumbo gin-and-tonic in the glaring bright, mouth dry and tasting of stale wool as he leans over to watch their video clips on a scuffed-up smartphone, the armrest digging into his soft belly. Plastic glasses litter the tabletop, as the kids slurp from twin Bloody Marys as tall as a toy poodle.

“What is this?” Patrick asks, as the girl in the video fingers the sealed opening of the little box, her gestures halting but not unsure. “What am I seeing?”

“You have to start from the beginning to get the full effect,” says one of the kids encouragingly, a Hispanic twentysomething in a short-sleeved button-up patterned with small embroidered horseshoes.

“Like a horror movie,” adds the paler, smooth-faced one holding the phone. His arm drifts toward and away from Patrick randomly, making it difficult to follow the tiny happenings on the tiny screen. “You need those shots of the suburbs and hedges and mailboxes to prep for the massacre that comes later. When the violence is unleashed, the viewer can’t comfort themselves by thinking it’s a neighborhood fundamentally different from their own. They’ve already swallowed the pill.”

“Like at the beginning of Scream, where she’s making popcorn on the stovetop,” says the one in the horseshoe shirt.

“Yeah, or in Triumph of the Undead Dead, where they’re in a used-car lot arguing over the price of a station wagon right before they get devoured,” says the Arm.

Devoured? Patrick has no idea what he’s supposed to be looking for. The girl on-screen is famous, he knows, but he can’t imagine why. She has long yellow hair and an overstuffed pout. She could be any teenager at the mall, an expensive mall, riding the escalator up and down in the afternoon stupor, clutching outsized shopping bags in both hands that swing slowly in the breeze. In the small, impossibly clear picture, her mouth is set in a stiff line, but somehow he senses that she could burst into tears at any moment. She reminds him of his daughter, or is it a combination of his daughter and his wife? On a screen in his mind, he sees their delicate mouths projected side by side, familiar lips that he’s wiped with a towel, precisely etched and painfully exact, the pale, satiny pink of carnations or cooked shrimp. Back on the East Coast, three hours ahead, they must be setting the table for dinner, portioning out scoopfuls of pasta and salad, his nine-year-old daughter frowning in concentration as she folds flimsy paper napkins in half. Lately, whenever he tries to picture their faces, whether smiling or unsmiling, the image won’t hold: involuntarily, he always sees the smooth lines tremble and collapse into twists of emotion, the unbeautiful shapes of someone about to cry.

“Skip ahead,” says Horseshoe Shirt to the other. “We’re losing him.”

“But think about how much of the story we’ll lose,” the Arm argues, “if we rush it. The ambient time, boredom, irritation, atmosphere. The texture. The suspense. A long stasis that, like winter blossoming into spring, reveals surprises within. What this sort of footage lacks in plot structure, it gains back in the quiet sorcery of something happening out of nothing, monotony upended by the eruption of something new. The cinephile in me can’t abide.”

“So true. But avoiding loss is impossible in a world that struggles to conjure even the basic sense of presence. Capture itself is a form of loss, all a matter of PPI,” Horseshoe replies, and they nod at each other solemnly. The video is dragged ahead an inch or so.

On-screen, the girl looks furtively toward the checkout counter, then back down. Silently, she slides a finger under the flap, splits open the little box, wriggles her hand into the aperture in the cardstock. She’s peering inside now as she pushes the contents around with the tip of a slender manicured finger. Now the shot is tightening, homing in on the box, which seems to be full of tampons. The girl deftly slides three of them out and pockets them without looking, staring straight out in front of her like she’s searching for someone all the way across the room.

“She’s stealing tampons?” Patrick asks.

“Shhh,” say the kids.

The camera lurches into motion, as the cameraman steps out from behind the shelves and speaks. Hey, Cassidy, whatcha doing? You gonna take those without paying? His voice is cheerily unfriendly. Is it that time of the month? You out of money? You on the rag, Cassidy? Smile into the camera—come on, baby. Cassidy looks up, her face soft and innocent and surprised for a moment, mouth slightly parted and revealing the tips of two adorably large front teeth. Then the features rearrange. What the fuck? growls Cassidy, her grip tightening around the tampon box as it caves in. You guys stake out the maxi-pad aisle now? Do you want to hide in my shower and watch me put it in? The cameraman giggles humorlessly. Come on, Cassidy, says his voice behind the lens. I don’t think your fans would appreciate that kind of language. Give us a Kassi Keene: Kid Detective salute, can you do that? The one from the TV show. Baby, you’re so moody right now. You got cramps? Cassidy lets out a weird, strangled sound. She hurls what’s in her hand right at the lens, and a mess of brightly colored cylinders bursts once, like big, clumsy confetti, as the camera whirls down to the drugstore floor and back up again, seeking her face. What it finds looks ferocious. Press delete, cunt, Cassidy says, her hand reaching. Or I’m appropriating that fucking phone.

So this is all being shot on a camera phone, Patrick thinks, scratching the side of his neck, where a stinging itch, like a bug bite, creeps across his hot skin. Incredible resolution. Phones, he thinks, are the one thing in the world that seem always to be getting better.

Now that the two of them are in motion, the incredible resolution of the camera lens seems less equipped to handle all the physical activity. She’s coming toward him with her hands out, clawlike, grabbing things off the shelves and hurling them, hard, at the arms or upper body of the man holding the phone, causing the picture to seize and tremble. He tries to keep up the nonchalant chatter, asking, Is it ’cause Five Moons of Triton was a gigantic money-suck that you need to shoplift your, uh, feminine devices? Times that tough for Kassi Keene? But it’s clear from the lengthening pauses in his trash talk that he’s in some degree of pain. As he backs away at an increasing speed, he’s running into the sharp metal corners of the shelves, knocking down prim rows of packaged cookies and crackers that fall to the floor with whispery thuds. At the same time, Cassidy Carter has driven him toward the exitless back of the store, into the aisle with the household cleaners, and is battering him with a value-sized jug of hypoallergenic laundry detergent.

She grips with both hands and swings it like a sledgehammer. A little bracelet on her wrist glitters in the light. She’s telling him to give her the phone, but she’s saying other things too: Fuck the menstruation-industrial complex for making her buy a pack of twenty-four when all she needs is one or two to get to the end of her cycle, fuck America for being a nation-sized landfill run by Lexus rednecks who’ll never in their lives be able to comprehend the actual spiritual profundity of Five Moons of Triton, fuck all her fans for buying the magazines with the stolen photos of one of her old Brazilian wax sessions, her fans are creepy goblins and would chop her into little bits and eat the pieces raw if they could, and they would take a billion photos of it and probably tag her in every single one. By now, the phone is on the floor, camera pointed up at Cassidy, who looms over it with a dark expression, her legs long and bronzed and extending improbably, impossibly, up toward the sky.

As she unscrews the lid to the detergent and upends it all over the cameraman’s occluded body, Patrick can’t help but think that female anger has an outlandish quality to it. In a face rigorously conditioned to be beautiful, ugly feelings come as a violation of basic principles, like the monstrously large species of coconut-eating rat he had read about on the internet, discovered on a tropical island when it fell from a tree onto a passing scientist. While she was clubbing the head and back of the cameraman, the lower half of Cassidy’s face had been screwed into a position of uncontrolled fury, the lower lip knotted and drawn down to expose her smooth, square teeth. At the same time, the upper half of her face, enveloped by sunglasses, seemed perfectly placid. From the nose up, there was a sort of fragile glamour that you could have fallen in love with on the spot—and it was a truly fantastic nose, actually, elegant but wholesome, lightly freckled, the tawdry bridge sleeking down to a delicate, chiseled tip. It was the sort of nose that reminded you at first of other noses you had loved in days gone by, but then began by degrees to eclipse those other noses, until all you could remember was this new nose, perfect and organic and whole.

If he was honest about it, Patrick had always sensed a disjunction, with girlfriends and mothers and even his own nine-year-old daughter, between the anger they professed to feel and the spectacular utility of that anger, to startle and confuse. He had the eerie feeling, when watching an angry woman, that he himself was being watched from someplace deep inside her—watched with the smooth, distant intelligence of a cat. Now, as he watches Cassidy shrug off the grasp of the drugstore employees who’ve banded together to try to restrain her, he wonders if there’s a tiny, childlike version of this woman pointing and laughing within the calm center of her rage. Suddenly, Cassidy grins. With one smooth movement, she reaches down into her track shorts, pulls out the spent tampon, and slings it at the cameraman’s prone body.

Namaste! she shouts, as she is led away.

“And that,” says the Arm, pausing the clip, “is Cassidy Carter. I can’t believe you didn’t know who she was. It’s as if we found you on a Micronesian island and we’re teaching you, like, what a flashlight is.”

“She’s that famous?” Patrick asks, tilting the last drops of WAT-R from his drinking glass onto his sweaty, reddening neck.

“More. She was a Happy Meal toy. I had two when I was growing up. I used to make them karate-fight each other.” Horseshoe makes rigid motions with his hands.

“Okay, she’s famous, but she’s clearly crazy,” says Patrick. “I just don’t think any serious film uses an actress who’s assaulted someone in public. On video. Over feminine hygiene. How could you guarantee that she’d behave herself? It’s too risky.”

“Crazy is bankable,” says the Arm, swiveling in his seat until he makes contact with their waitress. He lifts the empty WAT-R bottle and points to it with a hand shaped like a gun, then holds up three fingers. The waitress nods, gives a thumbs-up, and rolls her eyes. “So is free PR, like that video you just watched. So is the number-one nose in America, and the former face of Bellanex.”

“Bellanex?” says Patrick.

“That acne cream that caused seizures. It made a lot of money, though,” Horseshoe says, humming something that could be the Bellanex jingle.

Patrick stares down at the paused image. The girl is frozen, sandwiched between two drugstore employees in red vests, who hold her by the elbows. She’s looking back toward the camera with a gigantic, diamond-hard smile. With her right hand she gives a cheery two-fingered salute, like a Girl Scout, but cuter.

“I hear you, I see your point. But I’m going to have to veto her,” Patrick says with finality. He leans back in his seat and swigs his diluted gin to punctuate. Braided strands of plastic in the seatback squeal as he adjusts his mass.

There’s an uncomfortable silence. When the Arm speaks, he sounds a couple years older and somberer.

“Yeah, well, with my regrets,” he says, “you aren’t actually attached to this film with any veto power, per se. I hope you had a chance to look over your contract and the duties and responsibilities outlined, you know, therein.”

Patrick’s head begins to ache a little. He squeezes his eyes open and shut. Even when his eyes are closed, the light seems to find its way in, soaking the eyelid and turning his visual field a fleshy shade of red. There’s a knotty feeling in his throat, as he weighs the possibility of getting his phone out and looking up his contract right now, right in front of their bright, inquisitive twerp eyes. He looks out at the dull-turquoise pool, fully engulfed by the looming shadow of the hotel above. Neon-green pool floats shaped like hearts rotate aimlessly in the blue.

The Arm explains patiently: “Your contract stipulates that in exchange for the rights to your novel Elsinore Lane, the access to which is bestowed gratis, you will receive one paid production-assistant position, budget-contingent, which you may bestow at your discretion upon the individual of your choice. Including yourself, if you are your own choice.”

Horseshoe Shirt pats Patrick on the back a few times. “You’re one of us, man,” he says in a friendly way. From his underarm comes the waft of artificial cedar.

The Arm gives him a tight smile. “Don’t shoot,” he says, lifting his hands up in mock surrender. “Messenger.”

The waitress comes up with a tray carrying three bottles of WAT-R, each one molded into a faceted shape resembling a diamond, indicating its premium quality. California sunlight shimmies through the hard plastic, pale and golden at the same time, casting a pattern of dancing light on the bistro tabletop, like the bright mottle at the bottom of a swimming pool. She places the bottles on the surface in front of them. Slowly, one by one, she opens each bottle and sets the caps together on the far end of the table. She picks up the bottle in front of Patrick and pours it into his drinking glass. She does the same with the other two bottles and glasses. The WAT-R tumbles in, cold and transparent and odorless. She looks at the three of them sitting in silence and walks away, toward another table.

In the back of the Arm’s dinged-up four-door sedan, Patrick searches on his phone for the email his agent sent him, the one with the contract attached. The subject line is Re: Hello! and the only text is a phone number, his agent’s, so that he can call if he has any questions. He opens the contract searching for something to prove him right, but what it says is little different from what the Arm relayed at the poolside bar, where he had drunk so much gin-and-tonic that the generic techno piped in through hidden landscaping speakers lost its shape, turned to mush in his ears. As he reads, the terms of the agreement feel familiar to him, but far removed. “Approval-blind script consult,” he reads, and “standard etiquette budgetary maneuvers.” He remembers some of the phrases from that first read, but they don’t sound as hopeful this time around. He thinks back to that first day, opening the contract, reading that term, “production assistant,” and feeling such a shiver of pride that he had to put the document down and pace around the house to manage his excitement. He phoned his wife.

“Isn’t that a job for a kid?” she asked, over the sound of trampoline springs squealing in the background.

“They’re called PAs,” he replied.

“I don’t know, Patrick. You tried to break a book contract once because you didn’t like the paper they were going to print it on. I think you like to be involved.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” said Patrick. “They want me involved. On set.”

There was a long screech, accompanied by a loud and violent thumping.

“What was that? It sounded terrible,” he said.

“Nora just did a backflip on the trampoline. Everyone was clapping.”

“If you think I should stay here at home, just say so. I don’t mind. I’m sure I can give them my guidance on some things over the phone,” he said, grouchily.

But Alison hadn’t put up much of a fight after all. After that brief phone call in the middle of Nora’s gymnastics class, the question never really came up. Patrick had signed the contract, and Nora had learned how to do her backflip on the springy, ultramarine-blue tumbling floor. Almost a year had passed since that conversation, enough time for the studio to contract out the adaptation, put together a crew, and secure a soundstage to film in—but when he stopped to ...