Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

She wants so much to believe this isn’t a prank. None of these films are supposed to exist. They’re all just wishful rumors, fever-dreams of movie nuts everywhere.

“How do you …” she says, “I mean do you ever …”

“Screen them?” he helps her out. “Of course. You know the old Ballard Theatre? The Loftus Brothers just bought it. They’re reopening next week as Impact: The Car Crash Cinema. But I know a way in. Would you like to—”

“Would I like to,” she says and Propp laughs.

“Calm down,” he says. “There’s time for everything.”

He brings their cups over and slides into the booth opposite her. They both take sips. She burns her tongue, ignores the sting and says, “You’re really Terrence Propp?”

He sits back. “Who else?”

“And you really live down here?”

“Where else?”

She sits back, matches his posture and says, “How’d you find this place?”

He shrugs. “Exactly how you’d think. I was out at night, prowling, looking for shots. I used to do that. Take some speed and just wander all night. Find a way into the old buildings. Shoot the old machines. Shoot angles. Abandoned cars. Then I started to get hooked on old furnaces. Old boilers. Peerlesses. American Standards. Even a few industrial Marville — Negres. The bigger and greasier and more sinister looking, the better.”

“When was this?”

Another shrug. “I don’t know anymore. No, really. You see any calendars hanging on the walls? Time gets fairly irrelevant down here.”

“I know that feeling,” she says.

“You do?”

“You were shooting furnaces,” she says.

He agrees to move on. “I discovered I had a talent for getting into any building. So I spent nights moving through every basement underneath Verlin and Aragon and Waldstein. Must’ve shot a thousand prints—”

“Could I see them?”

He just shakes his head no, without any emotion. “I destroyed them all. One big bonfire—”

“The negatives—”

“Of course, the negatives. That was the point.”

“It’s just—”

“Please, Sylvia, don’t say it. They were horrible. Agonizingly boring. Who wants to look at a thousand prints of heavy machinery? What kind of man would take a thousand shots of old furnaces? One night I just woke up and realized what I was doing. Got disgusted with myself. And just started walking.”

“Underground.”

“It was chance. I just kept moving. I simply didn’t care where I ended up or just how lost I got.”

“And you ended up here,” Sylvia says, looking around the diner again.

“It wasn’t in this condition, believe me. But the moment I came upon it, I knew it was the end of the line. I just knew, it, you understand, in that way we all hope to know something. With that kind of certainty.”

“Can I ask,” she asks, “where you lived before this?”

“No place dramatic,” he says. “I moved from rooming house to rooming house. The weekly hotels. One room. Pay as you go.”

She leans back in the booth and stares at him.

“What?” he says.

“It’s just …”

“Go ahead.”

She takes a breath and says, “Why?”

He stares back at her as if trying to decide which of several possible answers to give. As if his decision will be determined by the look on her face.

“I like my solitude,” he says.

“So join a monastery.”

“Too many monks. And they’ve got that awful requirement these days.”

She raises her eyebrows and says, “Celibacy?”

He picks up his cup, self-satisfied, and says, “Faith.”

“You’re not a believer?”

He puts the cup down, comes forward on his elbows and suddenly looks exhausted.

“I believe in a lot of things,” he says. “I believe in my own mortality. I believe in sleeping when I get tired—”

He’s getting cute and she hates it. “Why did you bring me down here, Mr. Propp?”

“God,” he says, “such formality. Propp will do, Sylvia. Just Propp.”

“Why am I here?”

He looks down at the table, lifts his cup almost absent-mindedly and throws the remains of his espresso out the window. He looks up at her and says, “I heard you had something that might belong to me.”

She doesn’t want to give anything away.

“Who did you hear that from?”

“Oh, Sylvia,” he says, “you know how the Zone is. You just hear things.”

“From Rory Gaston?”

“Gaston?” he says, amused. “I’ve never met the man but I’m told he’s an idiot.”

“He holds you in pretty high regard.”

“Case closed.”

“Was it Quevedo?”

“Who the hell is that,” he says.

“You don’t know Mr. Quevedo? From Brody’s?”

“Brody’s?”

She stares at him, annoyed. “Okay, fine. You never heard of Brody’s. Good.”

“I’m not trying to be difficult, Sylvia. I swear to you. I know it doesn’t seem that way, but it’s very … it’s extremely difficult.”

“Maybe I should go,” she says.

“If you want to leave,” he says, now seeming to hold back a genuine agitation, “I’ll take you back up to the street. It’s possible, it’s entirely possible I’ve made an enormous mistake here.”

“Then maybe that would be best.”

He pulls his bottom lip in and chews on it. The action seems to calm him down. He says, “First just tell me. You’ve got something of mine, don’t you? What did you find, Sylvia?”

They stare at each other over the length of the table. Though they’re locked on each other’s eyes, Sylvia can see the fingers of his right hand flexing out and retracting, doing this awful, nervous fidget that Propp might not even be aware of. She should probably be terrified at this moment. She should probably be preparing herself to ward off some kind of attack, to defend herself in whatever manner she might find available. But she simply doesn’t feel any threat.

Instead, she senses a queasy desperation breaking over this man’s entire body, an engulfing wave of dread, as if he has a small window of opportunity to say and do the exactly correct things, to enact a specific response from her. Only she doesn’t know what that response should be. She doesn’t have any idea how she figures in this moment, in this bizarre life. But she does seem to matter here. Terrence Propp, reaching out now, taking her wrist in his hand, running his tongue over his lips as if he was about to propose marriage to her, as if he was completely unsure of her answer, Terrence Propp came looking for her. Was waiting for her. Knew an uncomfortable amount of information about her small life.

Clearly it’s not chance that brought her to this diner booth. It feels like forces are acting upon her. It feels like since the moment she took that camera, that Aquinas, Propp’s Aquinas, into her hands, coincidence and familiarity and boring routine have been vacuumed out of her life and replaced by things a lot less benign.

But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to be down here, ten, fifteen feet below the surface of the street, in the ruins of St. Benedict’s Diner, the only human to have made recent contact with the myth of Terrence Propp.

She looks away from his face when she realizes that what she’s feeling isn’t shock or reverence or even fear. None of those things that would normally be accorded to myth. What she’s feeling is something like pity. And she doesn’t know why.

“I bought a camera,” she says, “in an old store down on Waldstein. An old Aquinas.”

He takes a long inhale. “Where is the camera now?”

“At home,” she says. “It’s safe.”

He nods.

“Someone,” he says, “told you it might be my camera.