Movieland

Chapter 35

"I told you not to hit him again."

"Sorry, sir."

"One more time and you're going to Punxsutawney. You understand?"

"Yes, sir. It won't happen again."

"Wake him up."

I blinked. A ring of lights blinded me. My head pounded. A soldier who looked like he should be working the Walgreens pharmacy counter held smelling salts under my nose. I twisted away but it was too late. The smell was pungent, like a thousand cats urinating into a lake of ammonia.

"I'm awake," I said, breathing out of my mouth. The guard hurried away.

I was standing and strapped to a metal table with my arms and legs spread wide like Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. My cast had been removed to cuff my arm into the metal ring. A wire ran from my elbow to a row of computers with blinking lights.

Was this the type of experience my parents envisioned when they signed a stack of papers and watched a crazy doctor implant a device into me?

"Max," Mr. Stowe said, stepping forward from the shadows. "It's time for your final exam."

He had changed into a white suit. I much preferred the too tight polo with the Lindley High School logo.

"Hate to break it to you, but I forgot to study again," I said.

"You've always been able to fake it before," he said.

Their idea for a finale was a sleek dungeon with cavernous steel walls stretching to a speck of light at a point far above. Two black sheets draped over large shapes like cells and were offset to either side of the row of computers. One of them had a thick hose running into the base. Water dripped from the connection. A cord ran from a computer and connected to the other cell.

Mr. Stowe typed quickly as he scanned a monitor.

"Now for the truth. You ready? I was eight years old when I discovered the movie-verse," he said, pressing a final key on the keyboard. He walked from behind the computers with his hands in his pockets. "Just a little kid, thinking movies were real. Then I went on my own journey. I saw it all, the entire history of movies, at least up until 1982. There's no real name. How could there be? No one runs it. It just is. No one knows where it came from. I jumped from movie to movie, at a whim, like a ride at a theme park, except for no lines. Get on, get off. Until I landed on a starship and witnessed, 'I find your lack of faith disturbing.' Death is death. In a movie, or out here. In there, reality blurs but still bites. They can heal when they want to. What lasted two days in the real world lasted a lifetime in there. One day I was ejected, like the end of the ride. I was eight years old when they found me in an abandoned factory. My adopted parents weren't so much interested in me as in where I came from. They spent the rest of my life trying to get back."

Mrs. X entered through a door in the back and took over the monologue. "They wanted to get back, and I wanted to rule it all. We went to the Lord of the Rings cartoon first. How you leave that out after all of these years, Eddie, I will never know. The movie-verse is not a maze. The only pattern is that there is no end. There will always be more: good, bad, funny, sad. We take your horrors and your thrillers and your 'How did that get made?', and we lump it in with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and anime and did you know Pixar has an actual block all to itself? We didn't do it. It just sort of happened that way.?

She checked the monitor Mr. Stowe was working at. He tapped his fingers against his leg. She nodded and continued.

"There is evil in the world. But it's not inherent. People confuse this part. Evil characters were all made to be evil. They were written that way. That's about as fair as writing someone to be a hero without giving them the choice. Character archetypes, they're not so much about choice as fulfillment. I set out to change that. I almost succeeded with Damien. He was my friend. Sharks are harder to train. Same with vampires, although not so hard when they don't thirst for blood. Then one day I happened upon The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy is a twerp, with her rat dog and idiot sidekicks. The Wicked Witch of the West is not evil. I've spent years with her. She's misunderstood. No one believes that because we stick with the hero's journey. Spend more time with The Wicked Witch and you'll know. Where do you think Maguire got the idea for his book? I took him for a spin to test out an early simulator.