This Location of Unknown Possibilities (31 page)

We share one thought, Lady.

SWINBURNE

Lizzie, fall to the rear with haste.

Misplacing villagers in this dusty maze is a fate we must avoid.

LIZZIE

Yes, milady.

They halt their horses as they approach the crash site.

SWINBURNE

Merciful heavens!

It appears to be a mechanical device, but as nothing I have before witnessed.

POTTER

I concur, Lady.

(nods)

Not even within the great mills of Lancashire have I seen such a leviathan mechanism.

LIZZIE

The villagers have fallen back, whispering of protection from demons. Perhaps it is a craft, milady?

POTTER

(impatient, dismissing the idea with his hand)

Nonsense, chavette.

LIZZIE

(shades her eyes)

What is your supposition, then, good Doctor?

POTTER

I cannot hazard a guess.

SWINBURNE

It is a scientific marvel, sprung from minds greater than those of the Royal Society.

We must investigate!

LIZZIE

Take care, Milady. There is darkness to it, an evil.

Marta grasped the fact of a direct relationship between what she observed under bright lighting on the scraped floor of a gravel pit carved from a field miles from the nearest town and what would eventually broadcast in the near future on the Psy/Fi Network and its international affiliates. Lack of experience forced her to speculate about the relationship's exact nature—what would be edited out, how well would Luna come across, what impressions would Lady Swinburne, weighted down by a museum's display of costumery, make, how much difference did the visual field outside the lens frame cause, and how would computer wizardry affect the tone or look of the finished product? Answers, she knew, existed short months into the future.

Lora had pitched Lady Swinburne as larger than life—as Amazonian, as Lara Croft and Eleanor Ripley combined, as fearsome warrior material—but here, despite intermittent seconds of heroic chin and fiery eyes, the thrift store layering recalled a character Carol Burnett might have played in one of the affectionate movie travesties of her variety show. To a casual viewer Swinburne passed as an eccentric traveling merchant, literally carrying wares on her back.

Marta pictured her excitement to see the finished product as a house sitting on wobbly stilts; the whole edifice swayed precariously, poised to collapse at the next slightest tremor.

A GIDDY THING

1.

“T
hat's a wrap, folks,” the AD announced, sliding off bulky grey headphones. He wound the long coiled cable around puffy ear cups and heaved the set toward the sun. “Woo fucking hoo!”

The loud round of cheering abruptly ceased. Expecting a roaring, rowdy atmosphere of TGIF celebration, Marta mouthed “What?” when the crew began swapping instructions, dialing calls, and busying themselves with equipment. Others dispersed, wiping dusty faces streaked with sweat as they strode toward the pit's narrow road.
Of course
, Marta thought. They'd been under the sun and breathing dust for days; icy beer and showers or lake water would easily best another minute milling about and talking shop inside a rocky heat trap of a hole.

As Lora made a call, Marta watched the animal handlers assist with dismounts, waving when Luna approached.

“Hey. They need me ‘right away' at some trailer up above.” She kept the index finger quotation marks raised high. “So can I talk with you later?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Except for this godawful blanket and getting orders and ‘advice' from every direction, that was fun, way better than the used car commercial, so thanks again.” Luna patted her forehead with a linen sleeve and joined the cast exodus. “We have to do interior shots next week, so they're flying me down to the studio.”

“Great. I was glad to help.” Luna turned as Marta spoke, waved, and trailed the others. She mimed “two minutes,” and Marta tracked the practiced efficiency of the crew who, she supposed, could strike a set in their sleep like carnies.

“Well, here's to another fine quality MOW almost ready to be launched at chubby faces across couch potato land,” Lora said, offering a toast with a styrofoam coffee cup. “It's a living anyway,” she added, studying Marta.
“Keeps the repo guys at bay too.”

“What's next?” Marta felt eager to change the topic. Judgmental muscle tugs reflecting half-baked thoughts about Marx and worker alienation during Lora's speech had apparently registered across her face.

“They'll shoot the rest back in the city and ship it over to the CGI guys. Oh, you mean for us? Back to the office, tie up loose ends, et cetera, et cetera, get ready to say goodbye to Joan's and this burg. Shall we?” Motioning toward the incline road, Lora secured the indigo bucket hat and began to walk. “You know, ‘Shooting on location' has a nice ring to it, like ‘Going to Hawaii,' but in truth after the first twenty-four hours or so everyone's just itching to get back home again. Keyword is, be careful what you wish for. We shot a snowboarder comedy a couple of years back,
Shreddin'
Too
or
Boardin' II
or something memorably sequel-y like that, at two ski hills hours apart. It shoulda been called
Cabin Fever Revisited
. Christ, I thought the whole crew was going to go all Jack Nicholson. We could not get out of there fast enough.”

“Hey, ladies,” Nicos yelled. “Puh-leeze wait the hell up, it's not a forced march, you know. Chill for a sec.”

“Well speak of the devil.” Lora said. Although the black sunglasses seemed impervious to light, she shielded her eyes as the men caught up. “Question: Where did you three disappear to?”

“Out of sight, but actually in the vicinity,” Chaz said.

“Yeah, Jake wanted to hang back by the video hut.” Nicos stood back and lit a cigarette.

“I didn't want to,”
Jake said. “
El cineasta
wanted an information session, so I was obliged. I texted that, right?”

“No, that's not a courtesy you extended to me.”

“Ah, well. Me bad. Anyway, you're up to speed now.”

“Thanks a heap.” Everyone watched their usual rowdy sibling badinage go off the rails; petty squabbling appeared to be the next destination.

“Would anyone like coffee before Craft Service slams shut?” Marta said as Nicos asked, “Okay boss, where to, what next?”

“Sure,” Chaz said.

Marta stepped back from the informal circle, pleased with Chaz's acknowledgement.

“The Hebe farm, anywhere but this drought zone,” Jake said. “I need to check out how much is left to clean up. Then the office.” He addressed Chaz while checking for messages: “As for you, you can get coffee later.”

“That's where we're heading, so let's meet in an hour.” Lora tapped her watch. “Do you want me to write that down?” Phones in hand, Jake and Nicos turned their backs to the overhead glare.

“We are going to the office now. We will see you in one hour,” Lora, speaking in a slow robot voice, directed the words at Chaz.
“Six zero minutes.”

“See you later, ladies,” Nicos said as he and Chaz scrambled to catch up with Jake.

2
.

S
peeding along White Lake Road, Marta listened politely. The receding location in the side view mirror provoked a twinge of wistfulness; second by second the crash site solidified as a pinpoint in history, an episode now relegated to memory.

Lora went over a raft of immediate goals and furiously tapped reminder notes. She apologized for thinking out loud and caving in to OCD. “Pulling up stakes is just a matter of checking off items from an accurate list.”

“Then we disappear, like thieves in the night?”

“Exactly, as if we were never here, ninja-style.”

“I'm already half-packed.” As for why, Marta saw no legitimate reason to share.

“Don't forget to pick up your per diem,” Lora said as Marta approached Joan's.

“Thanks, I won't. I have a few last-minute items to attend to as well, so I'll grab it then.”

3
.

L
ora scurried to the front desk and unlocked a metal box in a lower drawer. The envelope she retrieved featured Marta's name and a peel-on sticker of a roulette wheel.

“Just a token,” Lora said.

Marta checked inside: a printout of a map, casino tokens, and bills banded by a piece of folded paper that exclaimed, “What Happens in Penticton, Stays in Penticton!”
The other side listed the specifics of the wrap party: time, place, dress code. “Come as you are!” she read.

Marta caught up with work email within an hour; while deleting junk, departmental administrative updates, and the usual miscellany of queries and requests from incoming and outgoing students, textbook peddlers, and conference promoters, she scanned the tidings of sin dispensed by Exconfessio—the standard assemblage of guilt, misanthropy, and sexual misdeeds, with one poignant exception: “I have an overwhelming sense of not living up to my capacity, but can't seem to generate the missing ingredient”—and weighed each word of an unexpected note from her Floridian publisher, its subject line characteristically direct: “
Holiday Archetype Personality
:
2
.
0
???” She committed to holding off on that reply until resettling in the city.

4
.

W
hen Nicos drove by the trailer park at Vaseaux Lake, Jake snorted at seeing a lawn chair near a parked car.
That figures
, he thought. Xtina must be holed up there right now bored, alone, available at a computer screen, and trying her damnedest to lure visitors while he was stuck in the SUV's passenger seat. He'd kill to be straddled across that warm body, building up to spray long strands of pearl necklace. It wouldn't take a minute. Jake pulled the seat belt forward and turned to Chaz in the back seat.

“So, what's going on with you and the egghead?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don't play dumb. You know what I mean.”

“What's this,” Nicos said. “A showmance?”

“Showmance? Christ, do real people say that? I thought that was reserved for reality TV dregs.”

“What's your problem, man? You've been crapping on everybody all day.”

“My problem, man—” Jake's mouth gaped, an answer caught between brain and larynx.
The truth—“I'm tired and pent up and frustrated because I have not gotten laid despite the fact that I have literally walked for miles in fricking desert sand looking for it like some deranged bible prophet and the closest I got was in that trailer park we just passed by and a campground back a few kliks, where I could have gotten a sloppy blow job at midnight from a troll cupping a set of dentures in his palm”—belonged in a locked vault. Nothing else clever and foe-demolishing came to mind, and he couldn't smile away Nicos's charge. “How many years have you been in this business, Nicos? I mean, c'mon. A short-tempered boss can't be news to you, so enough with the ragging and cut me some slack. It's the last day of the shoot, do I really need to say more? So sorry, okay? Just give it a rest. How about I buy you guys a beer”—Jake remembered Nicos's stream of declarations about sobriety—“or whatever. There's a beer parlour just down the street from the office.”

“A tavern.” Nicos said. “Really? I didn't see one.”

“Yeah, really. It's there. And technically it's a beer parlour because we're in Canada, not the U S of A, eh.”

“Jeez, okay, professor.”

“A beer sounds great, Jake,” Chaz said.

“Head there now?” Nicos said.

“No, slack ass. We'll do the Hebe place first. I can be in and out in ten minutes.”

“Okay, boss, whatever you say.” Nicos accelerated.

“We're good?” Jake studied trees, guessing at what fruit they would bear.

Nicos focussed on the highway. “It's history.”

Jake nodded. The past behind them, order restored.

5
.

M
arta pruned the contents of the inbox listlessly and overheard Lora making arrangements with her boyfriend for airport pickup—detailed and repeated, as though instructions for a child: “Okay, okay, good, now just tell me exactly what you've written down on the pad.” Marta realized the email make-work project disguised unconscious dawdling. After all, hours stretched until the second—and, this round, surely successful—wrap party of her life began, and since both cruising up and down the valley in search of purpose and perspiring while staring at daytime TV in
#10
ranked as equally unappealing, killing time claimed the lead.

Being candid, though, she recognized the excuse beneath the empty hours rationale. Chaz's return and the inevitable conversation pressed on her mind; she'd noticed her eyes flitting toward the front of Joan's each time a shadowy form passed by.
Nesting already
, she thought with disdain. Really, no different than a caterpillar entering chrysalis? Just like that, hapless in the face of ancient, fundamental biological imperatives, the cocoon-spinning begins? As she sat at a desk making plans, had microcellular processes begun—neurons activating and chemical instructions racing through arteries and creeping into organs, all aiming to direct actions and assure species continuance? Was she no different than a marionette?

Men kiss in order obtain sex, while women do so to evaluate potential mates; this factoid her brother had touted last Christmas, taking a digression from justifying the breakup of a twenty three-month second marriage to unsympathetic familial ears. “Is that a fact, Mr. Science.” Marta's doubtful tongue poised readily with counter-arguments.

“Yup, it's a fact, proven in controlled lab conditions.”

“And I suppose infidelity with your secretary can also be explained away in a lab,” Marta said, always the able cross-examiner to Les' fumbling testifying witness.

“Ka-pow! She's got you on the ropes,” Dianne said.

“Now, now, you two.” Their father's placating caught no one off guard; he'd long played the impartial referee to Dianne's knee-jerk instigator.
The George and Dianne Speck Show
: a long-running family joke.

No, Marta decided. She desired a clarifying exchange and, as Lora would say, needed to tie up loose ends. Biochemical ulterior motives didn't come into the picture. Really, who wouldn't want illumination?

“Lora,” Marta shouted, “when are we expecting Jake and Chaz?”

“Just a sec, honey,” Lora barked from Jake's desk. “Believe it or not, I'm on hold. Really, I do not ever want an answer to the question, ‘Dear God, how much of my adult life has been spent on hold?'” She stood before Marta's desk a minute later. “You were saying?”

“Oh, Jake and Chaz, when do you expect them to return?” Marta had clicked off the computer and tidied papers.
With the desk's surface in order, she'd have no reason to linger.

“To be honest, I expected them by now. Jake said an hour, right?” Lora sipped from the lidded coffee cup. “Christ, that's hot. I dunno, could be they're off drinking somewhere dark and dirty. Men like their brass poles and exotic entertainment. Wouldn't be the first time. You can always text if there's something important. Is there?”