The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (23 page)

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, u
nconcerned. 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.”