The Children(94)

She looked back into the white eye glaring at her from the projection booth. There was, as far as she could tell, no other source of light to explain the trick.

Music played from her left. It had been there all along, such a seamless part of everything she barely noticed. In the shadows below the stage were the hunched figures of a live septet. The dark rendered them faceless, their instruments glinting here and there with reflected illumination.

Guin reached a hand toward the flawless block of movie light. She expected to feel a tension as her fingers entered cinematic airspace. Nothing. Just the unsettling climb of grayscale: her hand, wrist, arm to the elbow, all shaded black and white, like Dorothy Gale sliding slowly back into Kansas.

Something, a false or flattened note, made Guin turn toward the unlit players. The violinist was looking at her. Masked, forehead to chin. All she could see of their face was a black glitter through the mask’s eye holes. And a twitch of the head. Don’t.

Guin looked forward again with a startled snap. Pulled her hand back. Clumsily she hopped off the little stair and raced up the aisle, past rows of seats that curved and repeated like the teeth of a marine mammal.

Back to the immaculate lobby, brimming with its hothouse odor of popcorn and rose absolute. Horrible. Haunted, she thought, and not by dead things. The haunting was in the weave, the whole place built in bad faith for some unfathomable purpose.

Over thick carpet, through the sunburst doors, back onto the street. Filling her lungs greedily with burnt kebab and rain as she walked straight into traffic with her hands held up like a rush-hour cop. All that mattered was getting away, putting the heavy metal bodies of moving vehicles between herself and Ennis’s awful theater.

The lights of a chain Italian place glowed in the middle distance and she staggered toward them. Fifteen minutes later she was destroying a plate of bad mostaccioli, oversalted marinara filling her mouth like neon light. She drank iced tea refills until her bladder ached and kept flexing the fingers of her left hand. The one that breached the movie screen.

She was possessed by the unshakable sense of having had a near miss. It was an animal feeling, a wild terror that could possess a person only after the threat is gone. That of a diver poised in green depths, swallowing canned air as the leviathan swims harmlessly away.

It wasn’t until she’d stuffed herself that Guin remembered her surrendered phone. She loitered half a block from the theater until a passing teenager agreed to retrieve it in exchange for twenty bucks.

The sense of close call lingered. Even when she was inside her hotel room with the heat on high. Even in the morning, at the airport, where she kept catching herself searching the faces of strangers. As if thinking of Ennis might draw him to her.

By the time she touched down at LaGuardia the feeling had faded. Her sense of the installation’s power lessened every day, until her panicked retreat struck her as ridiculous.

A few weeks later a link hit her inbox. After her Seattle trip she’d set a Google Alert for Ennis’s name. It was an article about the show, nothing new. She skimmed it and glanced at the comments. First idly, then with a sense of rising disaster.

I loved Film Still, said MaureenC_91. But it gave me a serious reality hangover. Anyone else experience this?

YES! someone replied. Even days later I feel kinda black and white Real life seems so flat and I’m actually finding my work is affected (I’m a graphic designer) I think I got too into it

Thank you for this, said a third person. I saw the show when it opened and haven’t felt totally myself since. Creative block, weird sleep etc. I’m a poet and honestly it’s got me kind of depressed.

A fourth commenter chimed in. That “show” if you can call it that was so dumb. My girlfriend made me go and the effects sucked and there wasn’t even movies playing. Get a life snowflkaes.

Things devolved from there. Guin closed her laptop and looked again at her hand. Turning it, studying it. Remembering how it looked dipped in the colors of another world.





Fifty

One day until Mother




Guin turned from the factory and began to walk. She heard the young man calling after her and walked faster.

Surely Ennis had made a better effort once, to cover his tracks? To make his installations more plausible? But people saw what they wanted to see. Knew what they always had known. Wasn’t she the perfect example? All these years she’d been holding on to the puzzle pieces of her childhood and its blazing end, shoving them together to form a picture she could live with. That wasn’t how they fit. It wasn’t the image they made.

What could she do? In practical terms, what was she supposed to do? She couldn’t stop this show from happening, any more than she could’ve put her hands up to halt the smoke rolling from the Farmhouse.

Was that an idea? Kill the factory with fire? Guin rolled her neck, breath catching. She didn’t even like firepits.

She walked along the water, tearing through dead-end ideas. Pay someone else to commit arson. Call Candy again and beg. Make her own TikTok account, issue a more convincing warning. Show up at Ennis’s old gallery, see if anyone there knew anything.

Actually. Guin stared into space, biting down on the pad of her thumb as she thought, so that later it would be ridged faintly in blue. There was someone she hadn’t tried yet who might have heard from Ennis. Who was embedded in the art world and would be more than happy to talk about him. With great misgiving Guin found her number, unblocked it, and sent a text.