The Cave by James W. Miller

The hollowed out and exhausted mother followed by a descending parabola of thirteen brown-haired heads crossed the already dark movie theater, the family that does that, that walks in late through everyone’s view. The animation had already leapt to life, and the children groped behind themselves to find their seats, eyes locked on the towering screen. In a short moment, the mother was asleep, having provided the only rare, small gift she could afford to give to this desperate and fatherless brood.

The smallest one, a boy of six, took the aisle seat. It was his first movie.

The sweet reek of popcorn and the chemical tang of carpet cleaner filled his nose. Hungry, he glanced around at those who scooped from trough-buckets and listened to the white noise of their chewing. Under the seat in front of him were a few stray kernels. Undisturbed by the detritus and movie floor sap, he reached down with pincer fingers to grab one and ate it.

“Ew,” his adjacent sister said, and shook her head.

He smiled broadly, revealing a broken front tooth behind which white, fibrous fluff churned.

When the credits scrolled, the line of children applauded, but the little one sank down into his own shadow, beneath his seat, and slithered under the row. The others did not notice. They rose up and recessed, the mother no more rested than when she started. Later, she would be mystified as she fed and bedded them, but she would assume perhaps she at some point had just miscounted. Thirteen is an unlucky number anyway.

The little one stayed behind, weaving himself under the chairs, through a forest of legs, delighting in half melted mints and crunchy malt balls, overjoyed at the remains of a spicy cola. The next show started, crowds lumbered in, and he popped up in the back row to watch the film again, exhilarated by his autonomy.

The world beyond held no allure compared to this cathedral of light and shadow, so he stayed. He stayed through the day. He hid out and slept through the night. He stayed the next day. He became the boy beneath the seats, a feral thing, a phantom and a winding snake. Lackadaisical cleaning crews never even laid eyes on him, and among the crowds, he was simply a wanderer whose family must have been parenting liberally.

He named himself Reel.

Reel grew lanky and thin on the limited sustenance, but soon came to realize that there was an underground of smuggled alternatives which, left a moment too long, became his – crushed sandwiches and broken chips, occasional, cellophane-wrapped to-go burritos, and even once or twice sushi.

Weeks stretched to months and the boy grew, thin and quick, satisfied. He pieced together a wardrobe of forgotten hats and pilfered jackets, clothes so mismatched he could have been the mannequin of a blind stylist. Reel moved through the theater like a ghost, his reflection in the concession stand’s polished surfaces a kaleidoscope of borrowed identities.

Cartoons gave way to epics. He became addicted to the frenzied rush of adrenaline cued by trumpets and strings, as ships crashed on the Pacific and a savage archetype swung on vines. He too was a pirate. He too was an explorer, unfettered by civilization and its discontents. Reports of wars on other planets and in nearby nations came to him on screen. He practiced menacing looks in the bathroom mirrors, saluting an army who saluted him back, their general.

In a Christmas film, a mom marked the height of her daughter on a kitchen wall with a green pencil. Reel did not mourn. He found a marker, and on a back wall, began his own marks – a slow and steady ellipsis, suddenly punctuated by a large gap before the next mark.

Years passed. One day a stern usher shushed a storm of rowdy teens, and one of them stood and punched the employee, a cold, hard, thud, causing him to stagger away. Reel leapt between them the way great heroes did, expanding his chest and extending both palms towards them. They paused only for a moment before perceiving their would-be challenger to be too small and too few, and the same boy drew back and smacked Reel as well. Reel recoiled and wriggled under seats back to a far corner of the room and out to another theater, his jaw stinging with new pain. Thereafter, he was no longer excited by war, but found commiseration with the underdog story of a beaten ring-fighter who returned to victory, and also the story of a soldier who abandoned his post at a divine call to become a monk.

A shy curiosity at the curved animated heroines turned into a hungry fascination with leading women, super-heroes dressed in skin-tight leather, lace-adorned maidens in period pieces who ascended from delicacy to valor, women who appeared to be around his age but who could express their hopes and ambitions to young men with the articulation of an old soul, which made the young men kiss them. They kissed in cars, on roller coasters, on mountain tops, at sunsets, inside burning buildings just before they fled. He imagined being the one who leaned in.

#

A young theater employee, Emma, noted without concern her peer who frequented the theater. Three times in one day he emerged from different venues, though she never saw him come or go. Feeling no loyalty to her employer, she didn’t report or confront him. This kind of behavior was as common as a shrug.

Emma resented the circumstances that had put her here – the job that she took to scrape together enough to attend the one community college, which she suspected would not pay for itself in employment, books that absorbed her waking thoughts but outsized the small town to which destiny had confined her, and few options. She kept a dog-eared copy of Plato’s Republic in her locker to read in the thin hours, a stark contrast of the grandiose ideas she wanted to ponder to the dull normalcy that enveloped her.

After midnight, as she locked the glass front doors, dropping the iron red rod through the crash bar, she heard a rustle behind her that made her freeze. She was alone, and she was not a fighter.

Spinning around, she saw maybe nothing; a peripheral blur no more than a wisp of smoke disappeared down a hallway. Against most of her instinct she went and turned the corner and called out a hello.

A hinge creaked.

She opened a theater door. “We’re closed!”

She thought a movement, shadow on shadow, was some trick of the dim theater lighting, but shadows couldn’t leave the trail of candy wrappers that now dotted an entryway she had already swept.

“Hello?”

She peaked around a corner into the auditorium of empty seats. Well across the room, huddled defensively, was the boy she had seen in and out of the theaters. He was not poised for attack, but rather, looked very much afraid that she herself might be a predator. For only this reason, she didn’t retreat.

“Are you ok?”

He hugged his knees to his chest and peered over them.

“Are you homeless?”

He shook his head no. She took a few steps closer. “Are you hungry?”

He nodded.

“It’s ok.” She pulled from her pocket half of a plastic-wrapped gyro and held it up as one does to a curious squirrel.

He approached her, timid and unaggressive. Seeing him fully extended, she guessed him for a couple of years younger, a bit taller but more slender. He received the gift, awkwardly and without thanks.

“You can stay tonight, but tomorrow you have to go.”

He only stared

She left, thinking this was as good a negotiation as she might achieve.

#

The next day, she did not see him, but she suspected he was there. He made no appearances the rest of the week.

Curiosity turned to fascination and concern. She began to leave small offerings where she’d seen him: a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, a bottle of water, a package of gummy bears. At first, they disappeared without a trace. Then, one night, she caught him crouched behind the screen of Theater Six, devouring her offerings with the desperation of a stray dog.

“I won’t hurt you,” she said softly, her voice barely audible over the rumble of a movie’s climactic score.

Reel froze, his eyes wide and darting. He looked like a boy caught in the glare of an oncoming car.

Emma crouched to his level, her movements slow. “You’ve been here a while, haven’t you?”

Reel nodded, his grip tightening on the sandwich.

“That’s okay,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the floor. “I think I get it.” Then, in a moment of gentle camaraderie, she said, “I’ll watch too.”

They viewed a small-run dystopian French film that followed a solitary woman walking through drought-ravaged landscapes with a copper watering can. There was minimal dialogue, muted shots of parched terrain and closeups of her blistered hands. In the end she burned pictures of her more lush childhood world, sending smoke into an empty sky.

Emma asked him what he thought.

“France is a terrible place to live.”

She hesitated, looking for him to grin, but he seemed to have said what he meant.

“You know that’s not real, right?”

He crinkled his forehead at her. Her stomach dropped at the sudden realization.

“None of this is the real world. The things on the screen are all pretend. Do you…never leave?”

He returned her quizzical look, as if he knew something she didn’t. “Everything is on screens. Everyone stares at screens all the time. I see them take them out of their pockets.”

“Yes…but,” she reached out and touched his chest. “Like this is real.”

He pointed to the screen. “That was real. The woman. The desert. She was sad.”

“She was a person pretending to be sad for the movie,” Emma said with some frustration.

“Why would you pretend to be sad about a drought?”

“There’s no drought!”

“There are droughts everywhere. I’ve seen them before.” He pointed at the screen where names were scrolling.

“These are just lights flickering on a wall. If you think this is real, you’re absolutely nuts.” She was both mystified and now frustrated. “Come outside with me.”

“Is it better than here?” He remembered from long ago only boredom, slow-moving life without a storyline.

“Come out and see.”

“If it’s so great out there, why does everyone come in here?” Then he added, “Why are you here?”

Her words stuck in her throat and she wondered if his self-imposed prison was not better than her own, dictated by geography and economics.

“You stay here,” he said.

She was suspended in the gray space where forms are stamped into particulars. In that moment she allowed that which had been sure to become unsure.

“Stay here,” he encouraged again, as if it was the obvious choice.

Against all reason, she did. She moved in with him. He taught her to pass between the seats like a mist between tree trunks in a swamp. They collected lost treasures, which brought her a surprising satisfaction. He taught her to hide, to seek and discover, to feed. They sat in their cave, watching the flickering shadows on the wall, swirling illusions made of colors taken from the real world, water color paint hovering in droplets.

Their love was born in the darkness between screenings, consummated among abandoned seats. She was for him kind of a translator. They would lie together, limbs entangled, as the credits rolled and the cleaning crew shuffled in. Emma would whisper stories of the outside world, and Reel would listen with rapt attention, trying to reconcile her tales with the narratives he’d absorbed through the years.

She continued to bridge the two worlds by showing up to work a shift and occasionally going home. In this way, she could guarantee protection for their sanctum. She brought stories to read to him about children in a room made of video screens that came alive and about a boy who climbed into the trees and never came down.

“Are these real?” he asked her.

“They are.”

She brought him treats.

“This is pho.”

No one brought soup to the movies. Umami broth and the tang of lime touched his tongue for the first time, and he raised surprised eyebrows.

“This is pineapple.”

It dripped down his chin and singed his gums.

“This is beer.”

Liquid ember trickled down his throat, and its deliberate warmth crept to all corners of his body.

“You ever get tired of the endings?” she asked one night, crouched behind the curtains.

Reel didn’t know how to answer. Endings just were.

She didn’t press him. Instead, she unpacked her latest contraband: day-old pastries, a warm jacket, a vintage video camera she let him hold.

“You know how to use it?”

He shook his head.

“You just look,” she said, tucking it into his hands. “And when you see something you want to remember, you press this button.”

Reel lifted the camera and watched her through the lens. It was heavier than he expected.

“Film me,” she said.

She was a blur of motion as she grinned and spun in circles on the theater stage. The light caught her hair like fire.

In return, he gave her a gift. It was a box the size of a large book, made from pieces cut off of a cardboard movie display, with two holes cut for eyes, like binoculars.

“Look through it at the light.”

When she did, she saw that the interior was a diorama of a row of movie theater seats, viewed from the back, with two lovers seated in the middle, one’s head on the other’s shoulder. Two people trapped in a box that they loved.

#

On one of her work shifts, Emma’s manager called her in.

“The theater is closing,” he said bluntly. “No one goes to the movies anymore.”

The words landed on her like a propellant from a catapult.

“What are we supposed to do?” she shrieked in a way that shocked him, having assumed she didn’t really like the job. He misunderstood which “we” she meant.

“Well, life throws us these curve balls,” he patronized, and proceeded to give her a lecture on how we make the best of things, lemonade and such, and how she had a bright future, which neither of them believed.

That night, Emma found Reel huddled in the projection booth, surrounded by unspooled reels of film like a king amidst the ruins of his fallen empire.

“Do you want to live together forever?” she asked.

“What else would I do?”

“With me?”

“Of course with you.”

“And watch the screens?”

“That’s all there is.”

“Ok, I need you to do something.” She reached into her backpack and pulled out the camera. She turned it on and handed it to him.

“Hold it up to your eye. Do you see me?”

He grinned. “Yes.”

“Now follow me.” He watched her take his hand through the small screen and watched her lead him down the stairs, through the dark hallway, past concession stands, and across the arched glass ceiling of the lobby. Towards the doors.

He stopped. “But….”

“Watch the screen,” she said. “Watch the story.”

The extended, interlaced arms, his and hers, pulled him behind her like a tugboat towing a stranded vessel. Through the glass doors, onto pavement his bare feet had never felt before.

“What are we doing?” He was a character without a script. No music swelled to tell him whether or not this was an end or a beginning.

“You have to find a way to be a part of your own stories,” she told him. “You can’t just watch other people’s.”

He felt like he did when he made a new mark on the bathroom wall.

The cold hit him. Outside smelled like rain and asphalt, nothing like the theater’s dank air. He stumbled as the wind pushed against him, unsteady as paper. Emma righted him with a warm hand on his arm. He scanned the world through the lens – the jagged line of rooftops, the streetlight halos against the night, the endless sky overhead. None of it was framed. None of it was safe.

“Film this. You’ll want to remember.”

Through the lens, the world shrank into something familiar. Emma stood in the center, hands in her pockets, her face soft and smiling.

“What do I do now?” he asked through the camera.

She tilted her head. “You decide.”

Reel pointed the device back at the theater, its light extinguished. Then he panned toward the horizon. Then slowly, he lowered the camera.

James W. Miller

Image: Old fashioned cinema seats from Pixabay.com. Brown wooden seats on a grey floor