The Last Days of Video (21 page)

“Are you trying to recruit me, Alaura Eden? To this Reality Center shit?”

“I think it could really help you—”

“Shut up, Alaura. Shut up and listen to yourself.”

“Waring, please don't.”

“Why would you call
me
unless this is one of those cry-for-help things?”

“It's not a cry for help. It's not a cry for help.”

“Well, that's convincing,” Waring said. “I'm coming to get you. Now.”

He hung up.

Twenty minutes later, Waring
was driving with Jeff in the ancient Dodge, his eyes fixed on the streaming road ahead, a phantom ride down an undulating country highway lined with infinite pine trees and the occasional dusty gas station. They were driving to Raleigh. Waring had found the address of the Reality Center in, of all places, a phonebook, which now sat on Jeff's lap, opened to a small map of the state capital. Both Farley and Rose had agreed to work, at a moment's notice, and they were currently manning Star Video—that Waring had “fired” Farley a few days ago at the Board of Aldermen meeting was not mentioned. Nor was it mentioned that Farley and Rose had arrived together: Star Video's biggest and smallest employees had apparently been hanging out together at a café down the street, talking about Farley's video store documentary, which they were now both working on. But Waring couldn't concern himself with these lesser entities.

I might lose Alaura, he thought, but not to some cult.

“So this is your car?” Jeff asked over the rattling scream of the engine.

“I park it behind the store,” Waring said, now regretting his decision to enlist this third lesser entity for backup.

“Why don't you drive it more often?”

“It's not registered. And I don't have a license.”

“I have a license.”

“So?”

“So maybe I should drive.”

Waring considered the suggestion—he
was
driving too fast. And he was still soused from the night before. So he pulled the car over, and they switched seats.

“So what are we doing exactly?” Jeff asked as he eased onto the highway.

“Search and rescue,” Waring said.

“But what's the actual plan?”

“We storm in, take her out.”

Jeff pointed a finger at his head, imitating a handgun. “Take her out?”

“No, idiot. Remove her from the building.”

Then Waring remembered the scene from
Pulp Fiction
, how Sam Jackson had said, “Take her out?” in the exact same way. The young joker was attempting to be funny, and Waring, annoyed that he had missed the obvious reference, barked at Jeff to speed up. When Jeff did not comply, Waring barked at him to pull the hell over. They reswitched seats, and a minute later, Waring once again careened down the highway, over an on-ramp surrounded by orange and yellow flowers, and onto I-40.

Sounding a little terrified (which wasn't an entirely unsatisfying sound in Waring's ear), Jeff said, “You really care about Alaura, huh?”

Waring sneered at the blurry road. He should have picked up a deep-fried ham sandwich for the drive—
that
would have helped with his hangover.

“I care about her too,” Jeff continued. “But if the Reality Center is something she wants to do—”

“She doesn't,” Waring said. “I heard it in her voice.”

“You what?”

“She just realized it's bullshit.”

“It is?”

“I told you, it's a pyramid scheme. She's actually paying them, probably her life savings, for the privilege of recruiting for them.”

Jeff reported how much money Alaura had said she was paying.

“I mean, fuck!” Waring bellowed. “It's a business scam wrapped in new age self-help mumbo-jumbo bullshit. I knew it, and now she knows it, too.”

“You got all of that from talking to her for, like, a minute?”

“She's my best friend.”

Waring—realizing he had divulged more than he intended—lit a cigarette, focused on the road.

“But what
exactly
are we doing when we get there?” Jeff said.

“We go in, be loud and obnoxious, bring Alaura to her senses, and bring her home with us.”

“You could really do that?”

“Do what?”

“How do you barge into a place? Where do you get the . . . the confidence?”

Waring glanced at Jeff, and he realized that the kid's question was entirely serious. Then Waring thought, for some reason, of his ex-wife. Her dark hair, her smart-ass sense of humor, her small body next to his in bed. Years ago, after their separation, he had planned to storm into her office in Manhattan and make a scene in the hopes of winning her back. But he had never done it. Because she hated him. All of his bluster would have been for nothing. That he'd loved her didn't matter.

But he could help Alaura now.

“I've got no advice for you, Jeff,” Waring said. “You just fucking do it.”

“But Karla, did you
follow a script?” Alaura asked again—she was straining to keep her voice calm. “In the diner, at brunch with Constance, when you first told me about Reality. Were you following a script?”

Karla frowned. “Where is this hostility coming from, Alaura?”

“I'm not hostile. I'm feeling strange. About recruiting.”

“It's not recruiting, Alaura.”

“It feels like recruiting.”

“You're sharing your experience, Alaura, with those you love.”

Alaura tried to roll her eyes, tried to act tough.

Then Thom Trachtenberg emerged from a door labeled “Private”; he walked toward them and laid a casual arm over Karla's shoulders.

“Hello, beautiful people!” he said. “Everything positive?”

Alaura watched Karla poke forward her perfect honeydew breasts, activate her internal radiance. “Alaura is experiencing apprehension with her goals for the future.”

“Is she?”

“No, I'm . . . well . . . not excited about recruiting,” Alaura said.

Thom shuddered with intense disappointment. “Recruiting?” he said.

“No,” Alaura said, realizing her mistake. “Not recruiting. What I meant was—”

“Alaura, I think we're seeing some of your self-doubt springing forth.”

“No, we're not. It's only that Karla used a lot of the same wording when she asked me to come here. The same wording from the script.”

Thom's voice lowered: “It's a guide, Alaura, not a script.”

“But the thing is—I don't have many people to call.”

“Nonsense. I'm sure you have friends and family.”

“I don't,” Alaura protested, almost whining. “Really.”

She looked down at herself, at the midnight blue Calvin Klein business suit she had purchased for today—she had never owned a business suit before.

Thom removed his arm from Karla's shoulders, stepped forward, and snaked his other arm around Alaura—a smooth transition from
one acolyte to another. “Alaura,” he said soothingly, now guiding her back to her cubicle. “It is
very
important that we take this step. It is only through helping others that we learn to love ourselves.”

“Maybe that's true,” Alaura said, “but maybe this isn't . . . my path. Maybe this isn't how
I
help people.”

“Sometimes our path is not clear to us, and we have to break through our fears, through those things that terrify us the most.”

“But aren't there some other energy exercises we can do?” Alaura asked weakly. “I'm sure there are some things about my past I haven't told you yet—”

“Now is the time to act. Now is the time to move
forward
.”

Alaura realized she was back in her cubicle, sitting in her chair, almost as if she'd been teleported here. She looked around her; Thom and his musky odor had evaporated.

But who could she call?

Oh God, she was on the verge of tears. She had to have friends who wouldn't think she was entirely psychotic for calling them about the Reality Center.

She thought again of Jeff. She had his e-mail address memorized. But God, what the hell had she been thinking? She'd been minutes, inches from seducing Jeff. It had been wrong, so wrong. Disgusting. She was over ten years older than him. And now he probably hated her, which she certainly deserved.

Finally a name popped into her head. Helen Silber, customer account number W443521. Helen always rented two
Bob the Builders
and the latest British comedy. She seemed sad, always that tired slump to her shoulders, always that same strained smile, so Alaura tried to be extra nice to her, tried to keep her away from Waring. Maybe Helen would benefit from Reality.

Another name: Bill Scranton, W423222. His son had Down syndrome. A nice man. Always asked how business was going. Never got frustrated when his son misbehaved, but still he always seemed exhausted by his life.

And another: Ed Clyde. She couldn't remember his customer number, but he always hung around, wanting to talk movies for hours. Jesus, he seemed so lonely, no one better to talk to than the tattooed girl at the video store.

She knew the names and stories and rental histories of a hundred Star Video customers. Sometimes, out in public, at bars or in grocery stores or on the sidewalk, customers would approach her and ask how she was doing, and more often than not, she could not remember their names—outside the confines of the shop, she was helpless. But now her memory seemed to crack open, a treasure trove uncovered in desperation, names rushing before her like the late-return list emerging from the Star Video printer.

This is a mistake
, she thought.
I won't call them.

But she Googled anyway, found their phone numbers easily.

They all like me
, she reassured herself.
And some of them seem like they could really use this.

All she had to do was call.

The moments inside the
Reality Center transpired for Jeff in painful confusion. But he had promised Waring that he would not leave his side, would not try to escape before they found Alaura.

Waring pulled the Dodge to a skidding halt, sprawling slantwise across two parking spaces. Waring hopped out of the car at once, and Jeff followed, hands thrust in his pockets, trying to look nonchalant. The structure in front of them that corresponded with the address in the phonebook was a dull, two-story building composed of an unidentifiable brown material and flat black windows and was surrounded by perfect maple trees that might have been clipped out of a magazine from the 1950s. The place looked like it had been designed to house an assortment of offices—optometrists, therapists, tax preparers—and not a weird life-training cult.

A sign above the building's main entrance, written in a font worthy of an evil corporation from a 1980s sci-fi movie, read:

WELCOME TO REALITY

“Let's do this,” Waring said.

“Okay,” Jeff said.

Waring led the charge. He pushed through a revolving door, and they found themselves in an expansive, immaculately clean lobby with black marble floors. It was warm in the building. Lined on the walls around them were several flat-screen televisions, all of them showing slideshows of people smiling, holding hands, walking around lakes, and doing trust falls.

“Ew,” Waring said.

They kept moving. A moment later, they'd passed through a brightly lit hallway and entered a wide-open, empty conference room. The ceiling here was thirty feet high. Upon a small stage to their right stood a lonely microphone stand, like both a musician and her entire audience had just fled the scene.

“What the hell is
that
?” Waring said, pointing upward.

Above them, running along the wall below the ceiling, was a series of weird quotes printed on large white boards.

“The Future Is Now,” Jeff read. “Isn't that, like, a contradiction in terms?”

“Yes, Jeff,” Waring said, smiling and nodding at his employee. “That's absolutely fucking right.”

Then a woman appeared in front of them. She was a well-put-together business type with an impossibly tight ponytail. She asked politely, but with a note of concern in her voice, if they needed help. Jeff was too embarrassed look at her, but he heard Waring say steadily:

“I'm Alaura's brother. We have a family emergency.”

“Alaura is unavailable, sir. I'll give her a message as soon as she's free.”

“No,” Waring said, his tone quickly rising, angry. “This is a
real
emergency.”

“Sir, I—”

Waring walked past her.

Jeff muttered an embarrassed apology and followed.