The Children(93)

The theater’s facade sizzled against the deepening evening. Heart-stoppingly glamorous, a visitor from a vanished time. Where a movie title should be, pointillist carnival bulbs spelled out the words film still. Above that, larger and in lit cursive tracing, the panoramic.

Entry was timed. A woman in a shirtwaist dress and victory rolls stood in the ticket taker’s booth. She put a hand out for Guin’s phone, glancing at her digital ticket then dropping the phone out of sight, trading it for a perforated check tag. Her smile was as red and white as a picnic cloth. “Enjoy the show.”

Disconcerted, Guin nodded without smiling back. She pushed through double doors emblazoned with a sunburst, making it over the threshold before swaying to a stop.

The lobby was—impeccable. An ocean of oxblood carpet, a chrome-and-glass candy counter, and to the right a series of theater doors, dimpled like red banquettes. A heavenly ceiling mural brimmed with underdressed gods, looking down on a small crowd of people in midcentury garb. It was a thing, apparently, to dress for this. Guin in her jeans and jacket was the sole blot on the landscape.

Her senses swam and settled. The lobby was almost too perfect. She found herself looking for the flaw. Some disruption to Ennis’s feat of temporal displacement. Evidence of industry, imbalance, human error—a code-required Exit sign, a twenty-first-century cough drop wrapper ground into the carpet.

But the very air was correct. So dense with gold and scent and old-fashioned bustle you could practically cut a slice of it, like wedding cake. What it felt like, Guin thought, wandering the lobby in a not wholly pleasant haze, was walking inside a dream. Someone else’s.

Then she had it. She had it, and her whole skin twitched.

This was what the Ninth City would feel like. This glorious midcentury fever dream, all hot buttered nostalgia and art deco curves, felt less like a place than a vision manifested. Guin was flattened beneath a wave of queasiness that made her brace herself briefly, inadvertently, against a stranger in a slim-cut dinner jacket. He frowned at her, moving away.

Breathing out, she resumed her reconnaissance. Past the candy counter was a wall of framed black-and-white publicity shots, signed in varying flavors of illegible cursive. Vamps and ingenues, villains and heroes. She didn’t recognize a single one. Were they real bygone actors, modern-day subjects in period drag, computer-generated facsimiles?

They looked real. A constellation of stars indigenous to some slightly altered Earth.

Guin turned from the photos and gasped, heart making a ragged leap. Then she laughed: she’d been startled by her own reflection, drifting among the lava-lamp floes of a foxed mirror. Like a ghost from a less fashionable future.

It pulled her a little ways out of her head. Ennis’s work wasn’t good for her, she knew this, but she was fine. And what she’d seen so far was only prelude. The heart of the installation was the theaters.

There were three. Inside each a raked corridor of velvet seats led to a lit cinema screen, depicting a space from a film you’ve seen before, even if you can’t recall its name. Except there was no screen. Using lighting effects, Ennis created three movie sets visitors could walk inside. Because she’d read the reviews, Guin knew the first theater was black and white, the second cast visitors in glorious Technicolor!, and the third dusted them down, to desaturated 1970s effect.

Each screen space took you deeper, to the dream within the dream. How thinly could Ennis stretch reality before it broke?

A giddy couple—both dressed in shantung, one with stenciled brows stretching nearly to her temples—pushed past Guin into the first theater. After a moment, she followed.

It was smaller than she’d expected, a half dozen rows of seats between her and the ersatz movie screen. As she watched, the women in the vintage dresses—one fern green, the other a hot prom pink—clipped up a short stair, painted black and nearly invisible, and stepped inside.

They were drenched at once in the familiar grays of classic cinema. The effect was astonishing. The set was a domestic interior with an urbane cast, the apartment of some cosmopolitan movie couple. A newspaper editor and an actress, say, in a fizzy marital comedy. No, Guin thought as she approached. It was a drama. A thriller. The scene felt ripe with Hitchcockian menace.

People watched from the seats as the two women moved through the space. One made herself a drink from a bar cart, stopping periodically to preen, admiring her black-and-white arms. A man sat in a dissolute attitude on the sofa, breaking the fourth wall to wave at a friend in the audience. Guin hung back as another visitor, an elderly man dressed for a party on West Egg, strode past her and up onto the stage, into the screen. From human being to filmic figment. Incredible.

To what end, though? She’d read the artist’s statement, and there was far too much humanity in it. The universality of the cinematic experience, the beautiful brainwash, the shared delusion. Guin called bullshit. If she knew her brother at all anymore, she knew this: he didn’t count himself among the general population, and he didn’t give a shit about universal anything.

The woman at the bar cart receded farther into the set, hand clamped around a rocks glass. Behind the sofa, open doors led to a balcony, and beyond that a stylized impression of city sky. To the right were two doors. She disappeared through one of them.

Guin wondered how deep the installation went, and where it ended, as she stole down the aisle. She assumed the set would gain in clarity as she approached, but the opposite was true: it became more silvery, more luminous. Its glow was at once grainy and soft, like sugar dissolving in cream. She climbed the little stair, and at the lip of the screen she paused.