The Last Projector Read online

  And they had to slap in Saw XVIII, of course, a series that had run so long, much like Battle Royale with Cheese or the W.W.W.W.W West movies, it felt like they’d zipped around the sun, stretching out like taffy, both backwards and forwards in time and messing up the chronological order of all sequels and spin-offs forever. They weren’t out yet, but Billy was convinced he saw the last of the Saws when he was 2 years old, which had to be the ‘70s, he was sure of it. And he’d be just as convinced he’d see the first one when he was 50. Which was worse than just remembering all 50 of those films.

  Billy didn’t have the vocabulary yet to define it, but eventually he’d learn what an “anachronism” was just in time to realize there was no such thing, kind of like when he scoffed his way through his first book on Bigfoot. Kind of like when he snickered his way through his first court transcripts by Officer Bigbeep. There was nothing wrong with his recollection and never would be.

  Music, movies, and books followed you forward and back. Time was broken when it came to media objects. Occasionally, time could break when it came to music. But time would always be broken when it came to movies.

  Fuck books, though, Billy thought. Especially ones on Bigfoot.

  So, maybe he’d seen Saw before, maybe he hadn’t. But he knew three things for certain. First, the movie was terrible. Second, this movie had traveled forward or backward in time to give him a gift. And third, that the best gift of all was a simple, practical design for a neck bomb that they could duplicate quickly and trigger easily with any spring-loaded mechanism.

  A ring of shotgun shells around the neck.

  For the first time, they were quoting Young Frankenstein with a high-five and a manic, excitable, “This… could… work!” A couple trips to the corner store for ammo and mousetraps and their brains really started cooking. But they weren’t ready yet. Something was still missing.

  “More movies!” they cried.

  They tried Escape from New York since Bully’s brother had promised there were some collar bombs buried somewhere in there. And some Kurt Russell. This turned out to be a bit of a stretch. The movie didn’t really have a collar bomb at all, just these two, tiny, more-hypothetical-than-“microscopic” neck-bomb injections. And the movie forgot about those bombs, too, just like Billy and Bully did. It was like the movie equivalent of a dog’s electric fence collar. Unless it zaps, you forget it exists. Not that they weren’t into the movie. It had just hit the video stores that Tuesday, and full-size cardboard cut-outs of Snake Plissken were hard to avoid eye contact with, let alone the real-life, eye-patch-wearing imitators at the skate park. In fact, Bully swore she would backhand the next kid she saw in a sleeveless shirt and camo pants (like the punk that rented them these movies actually). She claimed the only thing stopping her from doing this was that she didn’t want to risk actually putting out some kid’s eye and making some fanboy’s wet dream come true.

  Then they watched Wanted Dead or Alive, another one of her brother’s suggestions, starring that asshole “guitarist” from Kiss (“Worst guitar player ever,” Billy’s dad said once. “But not half as bad as the drummer.”), and Billy had to groan when he realized it was Bully’s favorite bleach-blonde madman from Blade Runner playing a hero this time around. Then they both groaned even louder when the “bomb” turned out to be just a grenade the hero jammed in Gene Simmons’ ample mouth. “Well, at least his head blew up,” they shrugged.

  So, gun shy, they went down her brother’s list to the next recommendation, Runaway. And that’s when they realized her brother just had a hard-on for shitty movies starring the asshole from KISS. Plus, to add insult to injury, during the wobbly climax, Simmons’ head got injected by all these robot spiders, and for a second the music was winding up and convincing Billy and Bully that he was gonna pop, but then… nothing. She saved a special backhand for her brother after that.

  Next was The Fury, which was a total bust. They waited till the end when the music was gearing up for the bad guy to burst, as always, and, oddly enough, everything but the man’s head exploded. It spun around in slow-motion for about a minute to some classical tune, then credits.

  Discouraged after wasting so much time, and especially by the off-camera head smashing disappointment of the original version of The Fly, (Return of the Fly, and Curse of the Fly completed the triple feature at The Spotlight Kid drive-in, reflecting off Bully’s bedroom window the following weekend), they decided they didn’t need to find depictions in movies where a collar actually blew up someone’s dome, and they settled for renting any movie they could find where a cranium suffered massive trauma for any reason at all.

  Scanners finally made an appearance for posterity. Then Deadly Friend, where they couldn’t believe the pirate bitch from The Goonies got her head knocked off by something as soft as a basketball. Then The Beyond with its head twisted off like a piece of taffy, Chopping Mall with its clunky robot mall cops and their unlikely head-bursting lasers, Dawn of the Dead with the trusty shotgun through the afro, and even those three Nazi stooges at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, whose rubber heads deflated, melted, and detonated, in that order, and didn’t help our heroes in the least.

  Bully was licking another envelope addressed to “Officer Bigweek,” when Billy noticed her tongue was hanging lower than the last seven times she did this.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Maybe we should prank call him, along with the postal onslaught.”

  “There’s the bomb.”

  “Besides the bomb.”

  “Like what? Like order a pizza? That’s the oldest trick in the book.”

  She didn’t get the joke, and his heart sank. It had been sinking a lot lately.

  “I don’t know,” she spit. “It’s not you. I think it’s just Bigsqueak. He’s such a one-dimensional villain. I can’t get engaged.”

  “You mean ‘enraged.’ We’re already engaged, remember?” he laughed.

  “I just wish he was the one cop in the world that you didn’t hate. It would make this more interesting. It would make him special. Me, too.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Do I scare you?”

  “No,” she scoffed. “It’s like someone’s writing about us, but they’re being kinda lazy. We need one good cop to make the other cop seem bad. Like in the movies. It balances everything out, get it?”

  “Getting sick of the movies.”

  That night, because they had to, Billy and Bully finally ran into their favorite bumbling bear of a cop out in the world, outside his cruiser. It was inevitable with so many trips to the video store. Forget about the doughnuts, Billy told her. A video store is a cop’s best friend. A veritable second home by the sea.

  The cop was standing behind them, trying to hide the title Doppelwängers from everybody (they’d try to translate that porn name later, “Cocks that have faces just like their owners?”), but suddenly very interested in what was happening at the counter. Shoving everyone in line aside, he intercepted a particularly floppy dollar Bully had just handed to the video store clerk. He’d watched it leave her hand with interest, and now it seemed he was doing some quick math to get the dollar back with his change. This spooked Bully bad. They were close enough to smell him. They expected old pizza, but it was more like rotten oranges.

  Billy leaned in and noticed Bigbeep signing the name “Angela.” He tried to point this out to Bully, then asked what the big deal was about the money. The cop suddenly turned around, annoyed, before she could answer.

  “Did you two know that the life expectancy of a single dollar bill is one year?” he snarled, not recognizing either of them as a threat.

  They did not.

  “Did you ever wonder about that delivery guy? The one in the road?”

  “The one with the neck bomb and the confetti? Hell, yeah. Like what he was doing, how he got involved, whether or not he was in on the robbery.” She leaned forward, almost tipping the pizza box. “That’s what he
did, right? Robbed a bank?”

  “No, no, no,” Billy interrupted. “I’m talking about the most important detail that has yet to occur to anyone.”

  “Which is?” Bully asked.

  ‘Which is what was on the pizza that man was delivering.”

  “Uh...”

  “Think about it,” he went on. “Whether he was in on the crime or not, someone had to call and order the pizza. According to the chatter on your brother’s police scanner, supposedly someone calls in, puts a bomb on the pizza guy at gunpoint, or ‘bombpoint,’ and then forces him to rob a bank. But what kind of pizza did they order? Did they order one at all? Maybe the pizza guy slapped one together and just so happened to put on a combination of ingredients that have only been ordered once, by one man, ever in the history of pizza. Or a variety of ingredients that were desperately random, suggesting there was never any phone call? See what I’m saying? Maybe the pizza is the key.”

  “I feel ya. In fact, this is what I think is happening at this exact moment. Our main man, Bigbeep, is trying to reconstruct the pizza the man was delivering that day. It is his only solid clue. That’s why he took that slice with him.”

  “Heck, yeah! How many ingredient combos could there be? Maybe we crack the case right fucking now.”

  “Well, there’s a ton actually.”

  “Come on, a pizza is a pizza,” he said.

  “I’m telling you, you’d be surprised.”

  “There’s what? Pepperoni, mushrooms, olives...”

  “Pepperoni, mushrooms, black olives, green olives, Kalamata olives, sausage, green peppers, ham, anchovies, bacon, chicken, spinach, onions, broccoli, ricotta, mozzarella, asiago, parmesan, shrimp, tomatoes, alfredo sauce, artichoke hearts, garlic, jalapeños, feta cheese, goat cheese, ground beef, grapes and gorgonzola, curry, yogurt sauce with green onions, hot dogs, tandoori chicken, pineapple, mango, raw potatoes…”

  “There’s no fuckin’ potato pizza.”

  “…cream cheese, eggplant, salami, arugula, truffles, balsamic soaked figs, prosciutto, sauerkraut, sage leaves, capers and horse, mint mushroom, kale, head cheese, venison, rooster sauce, cilantro, squid, the most common in Japan, and, oh, yeah, ghost peppers, how terrifying is that name?” By the time she got to the end of her list, the pizza slice Billy had been holding was wilted.

  “How did you do that?” he asked her, awestruck.

  “Well, I used to…”

  “Be a cook?”

  “No, I used to...”

  “Deliver pizzas!”

  “No. I used to edit rap dictionaries.”

  “I was gonna say that next, I swear.”

  “Rapping about pizza is very popular in the hip-hop community. Believe it or not, there’s a rhyme for every ingredient on a pizza.”

  “Prove it,” he said, arms crossed.

  “‘I wanted extra anchovies, not extra gorgonzola. Pussy so hairy she looked like the Ayatollah. Pizza party, pizza party, pizza pizza, party party.’ Bam.”

  “You win. Hold on, that didn’t make any sense.”

  “Just hand me another piece.”

  “Piece of the pizza or piece of the bomb?”

  “Can we really just continue to do this? You know, without doing it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Pretending to do it. It’s fun to go as far as we can, see how close we get to the crime without the crime, but…”

  “We’ll see. Maybe we’re like any movie with a pregnant woman in it,” Billy said, “They always go off, no matter what they do.”

  “You never saw Fargo, did you?”

  “Nope, too long of a drive.” He flipped the limp end of the pizza into his mouth and talked around the bite.

  “Rapping dictionaries, huh? No wonder you keep changing Bigbeep’s name every six seconds. Make any money at it?”

  “A little. That’s about all you can get with an MFA, like editing, transcription stuff, some ghost writing.”

  “Ghost writing! That sounds scarier than ghost peppers. Why didn’t you do that?”

  “Tried it. Got assigned a biography of a local politician. Problem was he was a religious man.”

  “Why was that a problem?”

  “I never thought I was dyslexic, but I couldn’t seem to type the word ‘God.’”

  “Let me guess, you typed ‘dog’ instead.”

  “No, I kept typing ‘sog,’ bog,’ scrod,” sometimes ‘jihad.’”

  “Odd.”

  “Yeah, that, too.”

  Pizza, rap music, and faith in dogs. Billy would have to write this all down once he replaced his watch battery. These three things were catnip to her, and he thought maybe there was still a chance.

  Then the last piece of the puzzle hit them, the light bulb over the head, the elevator ding of inspiration, right around when they’d run out of exploding heads and started resorting to animal explosions in Peckinpah westerns filmed before the ASPCA came to Hollywood. Once they saw Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid sharpshooting the heads off those chickens in the opening credits, it was all over.

  Yes, actually shooting the heads off chickens.

  They had their solution. They would stop suspending disbelief. They would stop trying to make it real. They no longer needed to look for answers and inspiration in the imagined technology or prosthetics of a fictional storyline. From now on, they wouldn’t creep closer and closer to the Chronocolor TV screen in Bully’s basement to try and decipher exactly what special effects wizardry had been used to rupture a dummy filled with sheep entrails or whatnot. They’d only need to go frame by frame on the poor Gila Monster in The Ballad of Cable Hogue until they captured a real-life murderer.

  Even without their cold noses against the glass, they started to see it:

  A tiny spark. A tongue of smoke. Small explosive charges in key points around the fur, feathers, or scales. Angled inward around their throats. And they began to realize this kind of down-and-dirty, basement technology was much simpler than the elegant fiction of most films. And then, also inspired by his old driver’s license where he was still wearing that ridiculous shark tooth necklace, and, hell, they’d admit it, even inspired by a preview for Saw XVIII, inexplicably shown at the beginning of Saw XXX, they settled on a simple, practical design that could quickly duplicate the realism they were looking for: a ring of shotgun shells around an animal’s neck, waiting to be triggered with any spring-loaded mechanism. A couple trips to the corner store for ammo to go with the rat traps they’d already secured, and they were pretty much done. They attached a couple screws to the bale on those traps for a firing pin and then high-fived and low-fived each other like those clowns in Top Gun.

  They even rented a couple porn parodies to celebrate, Top Buns (bad) and Top Nuns (worse). They didn’t excite them at all though. Lackluster titles aside, they just didn’t believe anything they were seeing.

  But Bully was convinced their invention still lacked one final detail to make it their own. So she provided this missing link with last mad dash to her car, where she ripped the web of turquoise, twine, and feathers from her rear-view mirror (a birthday gift from Billy, actually) in order to give their collar bomb of eight shotgun shells and rat traps a little more finesse. It was a bit more unwieldy when construction was done, but they were satisfied it looked like the kind of thing you wouldn’t want to wake up wearing. Maybe the last thing you’d want to discover on your dog.

  As they crouched in the red glow of Bully’s taillights, Billy gently draped the finished contraption around his own neck, smiling and pretending to arm one of the traps with a click.

  “Does this mean we’re enraged?” he asked her, trying not to betray the squirt of acid reflux on his tongue, still green from the mouthwash he chugged on the way over to prepare for any potential smooching. He didn’t want to forget about the man who’d spit on him at the intersection, and that great, green yawn he’d passed on to Billy like a gift.

  “More like ‘engaged,’” she said, then reac
hed up to flick a stray feather nestled behind his ear. He sucked in a breath and vowed to steal every dreamcatcher at every gas station for her and pluck those spider webs like chickens. Then he wondered what spiders had to do with a talisman that supposedly soothed you to sleep.

  “Hey, sorry we had to trash your dreamcatcher, baby,” Bully purred.

  “Fuck it. It never worked anyway.”

  “And now it will do exactly the opposite, if you think about it,” she laughed.

  Billy still may have thought he was just going to scare the police officer. But now Bully was hoping they wouldn’t stop until they blew that goddamn dog’s head sky high.

  III.

  A Boy with an Unfortunate Tattoo Finds Himself – Pondering a Dog, Napping – Making Movies on Vacation (They Don’t Know What It Means) – Nine Minutes of Battery Left Can Lead Us – To a Pinocchio Situation – Dogs Playing Poker – Little Boy Blue and the Supermoon Will Tell You – You Can’t Make a Head Breakfast without Breaking Some Eggs – The Falcon Hears the Falconer Yawning – Catching Bubble – The Ghost of Jim Toad – Shock Collar

  “Didn’t take too long ‘fore I found out

  What people mean by down and out”

  -Led Zeppelin “Black Dog”

  Larry sat in his car, trying to cool down. He stared at his bloody knuckles as he listened to his tape player struggling to turn the eerie synthesizers of Thomas Dolby’s “Windpower” into the lonesome echoes that opened “One of Our Submarines.”

  “…missing, missing, missing, missing, missing, missing…”

  He adjusted his rear-view mirror to watch a neighborhood girl pacing her front lawn in despair. He was confident she had no idea there was a pornographic film being made on her street. But he thought it was likely that she noticed all the film equipment being carried inside, and was trying to get a bit of attention, just in case.