![]() ![]() “But think about how much of the story we’ll lose,” the Arm argues, “if we rush it. “Skip ahead,” says Horseshoe Shirt to the other. Lately, whenever he tries to picture their faces, whether smiling or unsmiling, the image won’t hold: involuntarily, he always sees the smooth lines tremble and collapse into twists of emotion, the unbeautiful shapes of someone about to cry. Back on the East Coast, three hours ahead, they must be setting the table for dinner, portioning out scoopfuls of pasta and salad, his nine-year-old daughter frowning in concentration as she folds flimsy paper napkins in half. She reminds him of his daughter, or is it a combination of his daughter and his wife? On a screen in his mind, he sees their delicate mouths projected side by side, familiar lips that he’s wiped with a towel, precisely etched and painfully exact, the pale, satiny pink of carnations or cooked shrimp. In the small, impossibly clear picture, her mouth is set in a stiff line, but somehow he senses that she could burst into tears at any moment. She could be any teenager at the mall, an expensive mall, riding the escalator up and down in the afternoon stupor, clutching outsized shopping bags in both hands that swing slowly in the breeze. She has long yellow hair and an overstuffed pout. The girl on-screen is famous, he knows, but he can’t imagine why. Give us a Kassi Keene: Kid Detective salute, can you do that?ĭevoured? Patrick has no idea what he’s supposed to be looking for. I don’t think your fans would appreciate that kind of language. “Yeah, or in Triumph of the Undead Dead, where they’re in a used-car lot arguing over the price of a station wagon right before they get devoured,” says the Arm.Ĭome on, Cassidy, says his voice behind the lens. ![]() “Like at the beginning of Scream, where she’s making popcorn on the stovetop,” says the one in the horseshoe shirt. When the violence is unleashed, the viewer can’t comfort themselves by thinking it’s a neighborhood fundamentally different from their own. “You need those shots of the suburbs and hedges and mailboxes to prep for the massacre that comes later. His arm drifts toward and away from Patrick randomly, making it difficult to follow the tiny happenings on the tiny screen. “Like a horror movie,” adds the paler, smooth-faced one holding the phone. “You have to start from the beginning to get the full effect,” says one of the kids encouragingly, a Hispanic twenty-something in a short-sleeved button-up patterned with small embroidered horseshoes. “What is this?” Patrick asks, as the girl in the video fingers the sealed opening of the little box, her gestures halting but not unsure. Plastic glasses litter the tabletop, as the kids slurp from twin Bloody Marys as tall as toy poodles. Now he’s jet-lagged and dehydrated, headachy from drinking a jumbo gin-and-tonic in the glaring bright, mouth dry and tasting of stale wool as he leans over to watch their video clips on a scuffed-up smartphone, the armrest digging into his soft belly. At check-in, bowls of red rubber condoms sit gratis, waiting to be snatched up by smooth-armed men and women delighted at the novelty of a cock that resembles a balloon animal. The potted palms by the bar all have smiles painted on their trunks, and sultry cartoonified eyes made to be photographed and uploaded to the feed. He can’t help but feel disrespected, seated off to the side of these production kids-half his age but wearing better clothes-slim-limbed youths who picked him up at the airport and then detoured without asking to this noisy poolside bar, nestled in the crotch of an overpriced hipster hotel. Patrick Hamlin shields his eyes from the California sun and squints down at the miniature face on-screen, shrunken behind oversized lenses. Against a background of sanitary napkins, pregnancy tests, and adult diapers, she looks aimless, misplaced, like a child rehearsing an adult gesture they’ve seen but not fully understood. She keeps taking a box off the shelf, putting it back, picking it up again. The footage has a handheld wobble from time to time it sinks behind a shelf and you can hear the sound of close breath, the body of the camera holder hovering out of view. Bruisy shadows under her mouth where the light falls badly. Smaller than life, shorter than expected, not as pretty, torso adrift within a pair of creased track shorts and an oversized black sweatshirt with gucci spelled out on front in serifed white letters. This is the girl: a bored blonde, her head at once too big and too little for her whittled-down frame. She slouches in the drugstore aisle, clawing the skin on the back of her hands, sunglasses black and gleaming in the halogen daylight. On the palm-sized screen it looks curiously real, like something he’s already seen. ![]()
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