Finding himself with a rare Tuesday off, Laramie decides to catch a movie. He had been told the local theater offered five-dollar matinees on Tuesdays, and while there is not anything playing he particularly wants to see, he had been at Target the other night and smelled the popcorn from the snack stand and has been craving some ever since. He peruses the titles, watches a few trailers, and eventually settles on one, not expecting it to be anything great, but it does not have to be. His ticket, after taxes and online fees, has almost doubled in price, but he is locked in now and does not care. What is nine dollars anyway?
When it is time, he braves the cold and rushes out to his vehicle to drive across town. The box office out front has its blinds half-drawn. Through an opening at the bottom of the window through which ticket stubs were once distributed, he can see within. It is being used as a storage closet for discarded cardboard cutouts promoting long-past films. There is Adam Driver in his Star Wars regalia among others. Laramie cannot remember the last time he actually bought a ticket from a clerk sitting behind glass, but the image brings to mind memories of high school: midnight premieres with the boys, dates, slipping his tongue into another mouth for the first time in the dark corner of a theater showing Shrek Forever After.
Proceeding inside, the lobby is silent. There is no one else in the cavernous room, but in the near corner, standing in a puddle of cold air just the other side of the thin glass, is a row of touchscreen kiosks. Hanging from the ceiling above them is a sign instructing readers to Pick Up Your Ticket Here.
Laramie pokes in the comically long code from his email, and the machine prints out a strip of receipt paper which he carries with him over to concessions as instructed by the kiosk.
A neon-haired teenager takes it from him and then proceeds to stare at him. How might he communicate that he is on her side? It is impossible. He orders his popcorn, and a bottle of water, knowing the popcorn will make him thirsty. By the time he has completed this transaction, his supposed five dollar activity is now over five, and close to six, times that price, but, broken into two separate payments, one of them made at home on his phone, it does not feel like such a hit.
Laramie must take his empty bag around the corner to fill with popcorn himself. He shoves his twenty-two ounce water bottle into his armpit and stares into the smudged glass of the industrial popcorn maker. It looks quite buttery already, but nearby there are bottles of butter flavor to pump on. These he ignores after a taste test.
A pulpit stands at the start of the hall leading to the theaters, but there is no one behind it. Dead religion. Laramie checks his ticket before proceeding, forgetting, for a moment, what he is here to see. He reaches the theater at the end of the hall, and enters. The trailers have not yet started. The pre-show advertisements are still going. He sits through them, idling on his phone until the trailers begin. Schlock, schlock, and more schlock. Half an hour of schlock. He cannot imagine how many millions of dollars have been poured into all this schlock, and who will be going to see these movies he would never have even heard about, were he not sitting here now. Enough people to make this never-ending churn worth it? Or is it simply running on momentum?
Finally, with the theater still empty, the movie seems about to start, but first a celebrity thanks the audience for being there, gushes about the magic of cinema, and then proffers a warning about turning off thy cellphone. Then, a final thank you, this time from an unknown: no celebrity, but the owner of the theater chain, commending the audience for their high taste, thanking them for being here, and waxing poetic about the beam of light shining silently overhead, creating worlds there on screen.
Ironically, through some negligence on the part of the projectionist, if there is, indeed, any such position, this advertisement plays a second time. When it comes to an end, the movie finally, actually, begins. As if on cue, a second viewer enters the theater and sits one row up, directly behind Laramie, who had chosen the prime seat in the center of the theater. The second viewer takes the second best spot, other than, of course, the one that would have placed him directly next to Laramie, an unspeakable faux pas.
Laramie restrains himself a few minutes longer, a devout to the ascetic practice he had learned from his father against eating one’s snacks before the title card is shown. Mercifully, this particular film does not prolong its self-announcement too much, and he settles into a comfortable snacking pace as the movie gets going.
An action-thriller. He vaguely recognizes the lead and some of the supporting cast. The popcorn is good, but by the second act he must admit it probably had not been worth the money or the time he has invested in it. He wishes that no one was sitting behind him, so he could pull out his phone. It occurs to him that he could leave. As his popcorn consumption naturally slows and he begins to feel rather sick, the appeal of that idea increases. Just as he is preparing to bend forward and duck out of the theater, he feels a hand on his shoulder, causing him to jump, and spill the remainder of his popcorn at his feet.
“Hey brother, enjoying the film?”
Laramie turns around in confusion. The second viewer is now leaning over the backrest of the seat next to him. They appear to be of a similar demographic, but this fellow here is a bit rattier than Laramie feels himself to be.
“Um,” he chews for a moment. “Not particularly.”
“Yeah, it’s shit, isn’t it?” the second viewer agrees. “Pay for your ticket?”
“Um, yeah,” Laramie says, preparing to reach into his pocket, thinking this must be the theater manager performing cinema’s equivalent of secret shopper security.
“I don’t work here or anything, man. I was just wondering.”
“Oh. Did you not?”
“No way. I’m seeing this movie for free.”
“This movie sucks.”
“Well, sure, but I’m seeing it for free. Besides, it’s better with a margarita. Here, you want some?”
“They sell margaritas?”
“No, I brought my own. I’m telling you, nobody cares.” The second viewer ducks back to his seat then returns to show Laramie a large insulated thermos. He gives it a little shake to demonstrate that it is full of liquid and ice.
“Uh, I’m good.”
“You sure, man? I’m telling you, you’ll be having more fun with a margarita in hand.”
“No thanks, really.”
“All right, suit yourself.”
With that, the second viewer pushes himself off the backrest and returns to his seat. Laramie tries to return his attention to the action on screen, but it is hopeless. It had hardly managed to hold his attention before, and now it does not stand a chance, but he feels weird about leaving, like the guy might think he is leaving because of him, so, a few minutes later, Laramie picks himself up and turns around, resting his knees on his seat and leaning his front against the backrest.
“You do this kind of thing often?”
“What? Sneak into movies? Bring my own drinks? Sure. I’m telling you nobody cares.”
“Huh,” Laramie nods, thinking it over. “Hey, can I get one of those after all?”
The second viewer grins widely in the dark room. “Now we’re talking. Say, want to try something else?”
“What do you mean, like a different movie?”
“Different movie, sure, if that’s what you want to do.”
“All right. Lead the way.”
“Say,” the second viewer asks in the carpet-walled hallway leading out of the room. “Why’d you come out today, anyway?”
Laramie confesses, a bit embarrassed.
“Ha! They got your ass! You think Target sells popcorn because it makes them money? How many people you see walking around the store eating popcorn? It’s embarrassing! Like what are you six years old? Grow up! No. They pop that shit at a loss, but they’re getting reimbursed by Hollywood. You see, Hollywood knows you’ll smell it and you won’t be able to stop thinking about it until you get some. So they built these dark rooms and developed the technology that can hold everyone’s attention in a certain direction so that we can sit unwatched, unjudged, and shovel as much corn as we can possibly fit into our mouths, wash it down with some sweetened liquid corn. Hollywood is run by Big Corn. It’s never been about art. Sure, maybe some few artists have made use of the medium, but that’s not what it’s there for. Nothing in this country is what it pretends to be.”
They walk the length of the hallway, scanning film titles and posters as they go. Neither slows before any of them. Shortly, they have walked the entire length of the theater and are standing atop the ramp looking down into the lobby. It is totally empty. A wall of arcade games turn their loading screens over and over. The gaggle of hair-dyed teenagers stand in a cluster behind the registers, knuckle-deep in their phones.
“Once this was a mighty gathering place. Now it is all slipping away. The life has gone out. We are rats in the ruins, free to do anything we can get away with.”
“Can’t say I’m too enticed by any of our options,” Laramie admits.
“That’s the problem. Some sick bargain. You can get away with anything when there is nothing worth getting away with. Like, realizing this freedom should make you the king of the castle, but nah. Just a rat realizing it has free range in a hoarder’s slum.”
Laramie feels strange. Nothing much awaits him at home, his kid is with her mom until next weekend, so he has nothing to do till his next shift starts tomorrow. That always puts him in a kind of liminal mood, but having walked out of the theater before the movie ended has also done something to him. Like he is still within Hollywood’s spell. Until the credits roll, nothing is quite real, so why not go along with his new friend? Besides, it is nice hanging out with someone for a change.
“Come on,” the second viewer says, brightening up a bit, as if struck by some grand idea. “You drive.”
“Okay.”
They are back out in the cold, sitting in Laramie’s sedan, waiting for the heater to kick on. It is an overcast day, gray but dry, with a fierce wind blowing in from the north. They are out in the neo-sprawl, most of it constructed in the last decade, a long line of box stores and burger joints, but of a slightly more contemporary and higher end variety than what occupies the corresponding sprawl on the other side of the town’s center.
Laramie follows Second Viewer’s directions until they reach a particular fast food establishment. He walks inside, finds the section where online orders are set, and pretends to check the receipts, looking for a particular name, just like he had been instructed. Then he grabs a bag, thanks the workers, and walks out. Easy.
In the car, they open it up and find a single meal. Second Viewer offers to split it, but Laramie forfeits his rights to it. He feels sick at the thought of more salt and grease.
“I need some real food.”
“We can do that.”
At a grocery store, they get away with a nice hand basket full of goodies for the price of a couple pieces of produce. The elderly man standing guard over the self-checkout stands doesn’t bat an eye.
“There’s no energy coming in from the top of this thing,” Second Viewer explains as he slices an orange open with a dirty fingernail. “It’s dead. Just hanging here as things slowly grind down, but you can live well enough off the surplus as long as you don’t overreach.”
“Could we rob a gas station?” Laramie asks.
“Like, take its cash?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s an overreach.”
“Is it? I’m not talking about a gas station operated by the owner, but some huge chain where the workers hate their jobs.”
“No way. Why’d you want to go and do that? Haven’t I shown you money’s getting useless? You don’t need it. Food, entertainment, it’s all out here for the taking. Money is just a middle man.”
“What if you’re not pushing things far enough? Sure, do all the stuff you’re showing me, you’ll live like a rat forever, maybe a well-fed rat, but a rat nonetheless. Get some cold hard cash, and you could elevate yourself easily. Even a few grand would be life changing, would it not? I know it would be for me.”
Second Viewer thinks it over.
“No,” he says finally.
“I was just thinking it would be nice to get out from under some of this debt, get ahead on rent,” Laramie cheeks a couple fat, purple grapes, rolling them around until they rest between his jaws, then slowly pressing down, clamping them between his molars until they burst, but his partner is shaking his head.
“All that’s in your head, man. It’s not real.”
“Rent’s not real?”
“I mean, it’s real in that you got to pay it, sure, but you don’t have to feel its weight pressing down on you from the future. If you don’t understand that, then you don’t understand anything I’ve been trying to show you today.”
“All right, well want to go get a drink or something?”
“Jesus Christ. Now you just default back to that? I thought you were different. I gotta go.”
“Wait a minute,” Laramie says, but his partner has already swung the door open and stepped into the vast sweep of parking lot. It would cause a ridiculous scene to give pursuit now, so Laramie lets him go. “Asshole.”
The gas station he is idling in front of is a familiar one. Laramie stops in a couple times a week to pick up a sixer. He has never learned the employees’ names, but he knows their attitudes and doubts any one of them will put up much of a fight. It glows unnaturally bright in the otherwise thick darkness off the freeway. He had driven around listlessly for the rest of the evening, at first returning to the theater where he considered trying out his new trick, but he chickened out upon pulling up to the front. Then he started home, but the thought depressed him too much, so he drove around and around, not really hearing what was playing on the stereo. Just thinking himself into a rut, back and forth, pacing within his head. The nerve of that guy. He had never even gotten his name, but he felt utterly undone by the abrupt end of their short relationship. Everything had gone along swimmingly until he asserted any of his own ideas. Then he had shut it all down. Pulled out the bottom of the house of cards and packed it all in.
Asshole, Laramie thinks again.
The front of the business is nearly all glass, but the interior is made invisible by advertisements cluttering the windows. It should be almost empty, but it is hard to say for sure. There are eight pumps, and only one other is occupied; a large truck is parked at station six.
“Can’t we just do it with him inside? He’s taking forever,” Laramie imagines asking … who? Someone. Second Viewer? No, and not asking. Someone is asking him. In this fantasy, he is the heroic figure who swept someone up out of their droll day at the theater. And what is this? She is not a half-bad looking gal. A young Bonnie to his wizened Clyde.
“No way,” he tells her. “The workers might not care, but you just know there’s some vigilante types out here who have been waiting for a moment like this so that they can play hero.”
“The only thing that stops a bad guy without a gun is a good guy with a gun,” she agrees somberly.
“Schrödinger’s gun, I told you!”
“Right. You think they’ll really go for that?”
“Well damn. Here I was thinking it would work because it has worked a thousand times before, but now that you say that I just don’t know. What do you want to do? Go buy a little gun real quick?” he teases. “At this hour? I wonder where we even could. And with what money? Can you put a gun on credit? Well shit, I sure hope so. What could be more American than that?”
A man pushes his way out of the doors and crosses the parking lot towards the truck, breaths showing in white clouds beneath the harsh gas station lighting. Laramie tries to judge whether the man would have shot him or not. Hard to say. Best not to put it past anyone these days.
“Workers may not care, but never fuck with the consumer. Off the clock, all bets are off.”
“You know I love it when you get all theoretical sociologist on me,” his little partner would purr.
The truck finally pulls away, revealing a privacy layer of cedar growth along the back of a lot totally littered with trash blown from the overstuffed dumpster. For a moment, Laramie thinks he senses movement within the bramble, but when he looks back towards the trees after scanning the parking lot, all is still. He pulls a beanie down over his ears and straps a paper covid mask across his nose and mouth. Is he really doing this? He ducks out the car and starts towards the gas station. It is bitingly cold out. The wind stings his exposed eyes and hands which are already so dry they look on the verge of cracking. An itchy rash has broken out in the winged flesh between his thumb and forefinger on both hands. No ointments seem to have an effect. It itches in the cold. The powdered gloves he wears at work do not help. And this winter wind is conspiring to sap his skin of any remaining moisture. The stinging puts him in a foul mood and steels him to his task. How many lives of crime begin on just such a whim? Every life is powered by momentum. You get rolling in a certain direction and that’s it, buddy. Straight downhill until you crash. One must imagine the boulder happy.
Pushing open the door, Laramie steps inside the fluorescent glare andstarts to browse the aisles. He grabs a six pack partly out of habit, but also because he is already thinking he will need something to ease his nerves after this is over. A sudden pressure in his stomach has him considering a run to the restroom, but he catches himself as crime show imagery fills his mind. Could they trace his DNA? Would they bother? How common is this as a crime? He has seen it dozens, hundreds, of times on television, but how many thousands of gas stations has he been inside in his life and he’s never been caught up in a robbery.
Slipping his hand into the front of his pants and making sure it protrudes under his shirt as if he were holding a handgun, he approaches the register. The clerk takes no notice, ringing up the beer and the pretzels and giving Laramie his total. Laramie pauses, considers what to do, then reaches for his wallet and removes his card.
“Have a nice night,” the cashier calls after him.
“Go!” Laramie’s lover yells as she leaps into the front seat.
“You really did it?”
“Go, just go!” she repeats, her breathing verging on hyperventilation as they pull to the edge of the parking lot and wait for an opening on the access road before pulling out. “What are you doing? Are you stopping? Go!”
“I can’t!”
“Oh my god,” she heaves towards the wheel, her heavy breasts not enough to contain the pounding of her heart as they weigh against his right arm as she leans in and yanks the wheel to the right which, of course, does nothing to make the car go. A few seconds later, Laramie pulls out and begins to move away from the gas station. As they make it through the first light and then take the ramp onto the highway there is an excitement buzzing through his being, a resistance against allowing himself to return to normal. Not again. He has been fooled too many times by apparent exit ramps, better worlds that go whizzing past or that dissolve into nothing. He has always been susceptible to such illusions. Even as a boy. Unexpected snow days had been gateways to new worlds, if only people had been willing to take the step. Sick days, too. Anything that broke the norm, or maybe just anything that got him out of school.
Once, as a boy, he had been struck by a bad fever and laid in bed for days. He watched as his walls, furniture, toys, everything most familiar to him, seemed to slip out of their familiar skins. Underneath, every inch of surface there crawled these tireless little beings, an ocean of movement interweaving everything. To his childeyes, he saw them as ladybugs. Absolutely massive quantities of ladybugs teeming beneath these false surfaces. It was as if, in their privacy, the world had revealed to him its great secret. These ladybugs were totally malleable. They could rearrange themselves into any shape imaginable and far beyond even that. It was everyone’s eyes that locked them into place, forcefully applying that outer skin.
Again and again throughout his life, he sensed these ladybugs at work in grander and grander machinations. They were sick of their tired shapes, but just at the cusp of transformation it was like they were forced back into place. No. A better world would not create itself. He was going to have to do it on his own. His own better world. One that could fit within the interior of this car, beyond the confining eyes of God.
It is a cold night. He has driven further out, away from the city, beyond the sprawl. The small station is rather pitiful, even more so than the last, one of the final outposts before the long stretch of dark highway. They might as well flatten it, erase any sign of its existence, and who would even notice? Weird. I think there used to be a gas station there, some driver might think. Huh. I was on the schedule for today. Guess it’s back to the job boards for me. Shit. I hate the job boards. Everything is recorded, it is true, but only by its financial call sign. Eliminating this gas station might even increase the value of the lot. Return it to pure potentiality. Hell, it could be a great spot for a McDonald’s. Right off the exit ramp. Easy to get back on. Not another one around for at least ten miles.
Laramie pulls around so that he is arrowed through a couple parking spots near the front door, nose of the car pointed towards the exit. When his love comes barreling out in a huff, he leans over and flings the door open.
This time she is excited. Now it is real.
“Nearly seven hundo!” she confirms as they speed away from the scene of the crime. Adrenaline is coursing through them as an imagined life of luxury unfurls before him in a dream that he never before dared unlock.
Laramie can feel it in the car with them. The money. It is already having its effect. It does not sit in the bag like a merely material thing. It oozes and swims, like the hidden ladybugs. It can move inside the machine and reappear somewhere else on the machine’s body, as anything. Its morphological possibilities are endless. The bag of bills promises the two something of its own abilities. Laramie turns the music up louder. The highway is not empty, it never truly is, but traffic flows easily this time of night, and they with it. Laramie becomes it as they move at a steady clip, though still careful not to surpass the speed limit by too much. Every new song that comes on the stereo seems to fill the car, as if it has been called by this moment, summoned by the money as an audial expression of self. Less than a week’s pay, but they had reached out and taken it, not waited in line with hands cupped: Please, sir, can I have som’mor? And that, for the first time, meant they had earned it.
He comes into a wad of toilet paper and the vision loses its vibrancy as he flushes it all down the toilet then walks to his kitchen to get started on the six pack. There has got to be something good to watch, he thinks, sitting down to start the long scroll.
In the morning, there is money in the car. It is piled messily in the passenger seat. Laramie climbs in to head to work and stares at it in shock. He picks up a few bills and the fresh paper makes soft, scratching noises against his dry skin. He picks up more of it. The bills are all new, as if starched. They stick together until he drops a stack of them and they flutter through the cold air within the cab. There is nothing larger than a twenty dollar bill, making the stack look more impressive than it is. Still, it is seven hundred bucks, and it is in his car. He sifts it back together, tidies it into a stack, then stuffs it into the pocket of his hoodie and rushes inside.
Mini-interview with Jacob Austin
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
JA: Becoming a father. Not only has it fundamentally changed me as a person (which trickles down to my writing), but it has totally changed my writing routine. Gone are the long, quiet mornings where I could piddle around, drink a pot of coffee, and leisurely write for hours. Now it’s more like frantically stitching together the accumulated strands from my Notes app in whatever spurts of time I can find.
HFR: What are you reading?
JA: We Can Build You by Philip K. Dick and The Murder of Christ by Wilhelm Reich.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Nobody Cares”?
JA: Growing up, my best friend’s mom was the manager for our local cinema. Sometimes we’d go to work with her and just hang out at the theater all day. We could drift from theater to theater, watching bits and pieces of whatever we liked. At that time, the theater felt so alive. There were always people there. It felt like an institution with a future. Now anytime I go, it feels like visiting ruins. Most films I have seen in recent years have been in empty theaters and that emptiness can be felt throughout the building. It’s like the enlivening spirit has moved on. And it’s not only movies. That same sense of a lost future haunts our whole society. The vibe can be felt most acutely in any place where the employees are paid less-than-livable wages, which accounts for all the places visited in the story: theaters, fast food restaurants, grocery stores, gas stations, etc.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
JA: A novel, but that’s coming together very slowly. Also, my Substack: Gnostic Pulp.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
JA: Refuse AI. Learn the true meaning of Luddite. Thomas Pynchon has a great essay on the subject. Luddism is not a fear of new technology, but a refusal to allow the tool to replace the human. It should be working for us, and instead it is stealing our jobs, art, water, and critical thinking skills.
No king but King Ludd!
Jacob Austin lives and writes in Texas. For more, find him at linktree.com/jacobaustin.
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Heavy Feather Review 