Last Night at the Circle Cinema (19 page)

“You take a cat—a living cat. And you put it into a box—a metal one, let's say. And you also put in a vial of hydrocyanic acid.”

“Why would we do this to the cat?” I asked, digging bits of chips out of my teeth with my tongue.

Bertucci rolled his eyes. “Because it's just the way it is.” He looked at the door, probably wondering where Codman was, if he'd show up, if showing up then determined whether he'd come through on the night of the Circle. “Along with the cat and the acid, there's ...” I reached out to take his shaking hand, quieting it with my own as he went on talking. “Anyway, it doesn't matter if you know what the acid properties are. You just need to understand that the cat's in there,” he pointed to the box, “and a vial and a tiny bit of other shit that has the ability to decay.”

I watched his face and tried to picture him explaining this to a class. His grant at UC–Berkeley involved being a TA and eventually giving lectures, and I knew he'd love it, crafting lesson plans, flirting with the hot physics undergrads if there were such a thing.

“Huh?” I cleared my throat. “I'm not trying to sound dumb, Bertucci. I just ... what?”

He clapped his hands, the sound drawing attention to the stillness in my room. He was frustrated, his voice sharp, and it set me on edge. “Okay. If a single atom decays, it trips a mechanism which then breaks the vial and thus kills the cat.”

“This is kind of a sick experiment. I can't believe this is the stuff you wrote about for your apps while I was busy talking about teaching tennis to the less fortunate.”

Bertucci softened for a minute. “What would you write if you were applying now?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe how I want to go to Thailand. And work with kids and elephants?”

“You do know your way around a curry.” He waited for more, like he knew I had it in me.

I took another chip. “I guess I'd write about your mom.” I paused. “Is that so weird?” Bertucci shook his head. Bee had died a while before, but when I said her name or spoke of her, it felt like it had just happened hours ago. “I mean, not her exactly. But, you know, how I took care—we took care of her. I just ... I feel like I can do that, you know?”

“You can,” Bertucci said.

“So what happens with the cat?” I asked when Bertucci didn't say anything else.

“It's a theoretical experiment.”

“Oh. So it's not like people are actually sitting there shoving a cat into a box to make a point?” I frowned. “Wait. What is the point?”

Bertucci stood up, leaving me on the floor feeling very small as he wandered around the room as though memorizing it, taking in the poster I had up, the framed photographs of me and Marta, me with Codman and Bertucci way back at the end of freshman year when I still had braces, my hair cut to my chin.

“It's in a box. It's a metal box with no holes. And you can't see in, so we can't know whether the cat is alive or dead. It's a superposition of states. Because you'd have to break open the box to know.”

I sat there feeling that the floor was somehow buckling beneath me, that I was in over my head but had no clue why or how I'd gotten there. “The observation affects the outcome, so you don't have an outcome?”

Bertucci nodded. “According to quantum law, the cat is both alive and dead.”

“Schrödinger's Cat,” I said and reread the text as though this time I'd fully understand it. “I hate cats.”

Bertucci stretched, the gray map dot T-shirt rising and falling as he did so. He picked up the collage on my desk, studying the photos, the ticket stubs I'd taped to posterboard, our original nametags. Codman's said, “Hi! My name's Jane.” Bertucci's said, “Hi! My name's not Steve. Can you guess what it is?” Mine said, “Hi! My name's Olivia but you may call me Frederica for short.”

Bertucci picked at his tag. “This is so old.”

“Don't ruin that!” I said. And then I read aloud a fun fact from the text. “There's a rumor that when he was a lot older, Schrödinger actually told an audience that he wished he'd never met the cat.”

Bertucci didn't answer and his eyes were kind of blank when he turned to look at me. And while I suspected Codman was breaking up with Lissa right then and that's why he wasn't at my house listening to the cat's peculiar fate, I couldn't be sure. I couldn't see in the box, right?

••••

One song ended, the few seconds of quiet bouncing off the Circle's concrete walls. Then another song started, this one unfamiliar. I was paused there, with Schrödinger and my bag, debating leaving or staying, feeling stuck in between.

I listened to the words.
Meet me in the middle of the night
. Okay, done. I listened more. The song was upbeat, catchy; had I heard it before? Yes. No. I put my face in my hands, trying to free up my mind enough to recall when. Bertucci's whistle. Whistling. The night of
The Rashomon Effect
? No. Marta's there. The main theater.

I picked Schrödinger up, and when he wriggled too much, I set him down. He took off behind the ticket booth and I chased him, bashing my already hurt shin on the ticket box that probably held bits and pieces of all the movies I'd seen. I couldn't let the cat just run away and be stuck in the Circle forever, so I grabbed it. In my arms, Schrödinger seemed to settle.

I slid my pack around front, unzipped the main compartment, and set Schrödinger in there. He mewed at me. “I'm zipping you in there,” I assured him. I zipped the sides but not the top, and he peeked his head and front paws over as I slung the backpack on.

The main theater! I could see it—the anti-Oscars. Bertucci whistling this tune incessantly. Me asking him to stop. “Romeo's Tune,” it's called. “All you need is a good speech and a balcony,” he'd said.

I gripped the backpack and sprinted, running as though being chased, desperate to get to the main theater, to the balcony, panicked that I would get there too late, that I would arrive to find Bertucci's body pitched over the side, lifeless and on the floor, his gray T-shirt making sure I knew
you are here
.

I tripped and stumbled, pulled myself back up without thinking, ditching the lobby and the exit doors in a frantic attempt to beat the clock.

I got to the balcony to find I was not alone.

“You showed up,” Codman said.

“No, you showed up. This time.” I paused. “Or, you know, you didn't just leave me to fend for myself.”

We stood there, not looking over the balcony's edge, not talking while I caught my breath. His green eyes locked onto mine as my chest pounded.

“Can I just tell you something and not have you make fun of me?” I asked, the words slight as I tried to make my breath even.

“Sure.” Codman looked out of breath too, though he hadn't been running or at least hadn't been on the stairs when I had. The music kept going, the cheery tune antithetical to the mood.

“‘Bring me stolen kisses from your room, '” I said. “Did you hear that? That line?” Codman nodded. It was possible he knew the songs as well as I did, or that he'd heard Bertucci whistle the tune.

“Is that what you wanted to say?” Codman asked me.

“No.” I gripped the edge of the balcony, fighting the urge to look over, to see the view, the height, what lay beneath. “Don't laugh. God, I hope you don't think I'm totally bonkers.” I took a shaky breath. “Codman, I'm petrified. Afraid to look down because ... because I'm worried I'm going to find Bertucci's body down there.”

Codman looked at me, came closer, put his hands out to touch me but then drew them back and into his pockets. “Oh my God, me too,” he admitted. “I mean, we won't. We won't.”

He took a step toward the edge, pressing his body into the balcony. I could see his legs shaking.

Slowly, so slowly, we peered over the edge. I could see it, the outline, splayed like a chalk body on the sidewalk, blood seeping into the time-worn carpet.

“Of course not,” I sighed. “Of course there's nothing.”

27

Codman

Of course there wasn't. Only, I couldn't shake that feeling.

Olivia and I were wired after that, glad and scared and relieved all at once, and then, right in the midst of all of those feelings, a light flickered on the screen in front of us. The heavy curtain was drawn to the side, and a film started up.

Blurred trees, first in spring, the green electric, the magnolias unfurled. Bertucci's view from the train, crossing the tracks from his side of town to the college campus. Spring merged into summer shots, the view of a baseball field with a large expanse of grass behind it.

“Is that the one near here?” I asked. Livvy nodded.

“He must have filmed this on his way to classes. Look—see the field was empty, then filled with Canada geese. Then baseball. Now ...”

“Bikinis. God love Bertucci.” The film paused, focused, zoomed in on a particular sunbather. White bikini, breasts spilling out just enough. Lissa.

“Nice.” Olivia sounded wounded. I reached for her arm, but she pulled it away.

Then the camera backed way up, unfocused, zoomed in again on another body, this one clothed. Olivia. Knees bent to her chest as she sat under a shaded tree with a book. She looked not at Lissa but at me, also on the grass, looking at Lissa.

“We had a picnic that day,” I said, and it was nearly a whisper. “I tried telling her the story and all I could ... she didn't respond how I wanted.”

“Yeah, well, you can't control everything, can you?” Livvy asked, her eyes forward, afraid to look at me.

“No, the thing is she couldn't respond right because she wasn't ... she isn't you. I kept waiting for you.”

Olivia groaned. “
You
wait for
me
? Give me a break. After everything that's happened? I've spent years wai—” She cut herself off, and the images kept coming.

On screen, Olivia sat reading, her mouth moving but I couldn't hear the words. She sat on a bed that wasn't hers, perched on the edge.

“Bertucci's mom,” she said. Olivia leaned forward as though magically the screen might show more, get wider, reveal the unseen. “She liked me to read to her. Bertucci listened sometimes. But I think it was hard too. For him to listen. Oh—look—there you are.”

I had come in one Monday when I knew Bertucci was at the hospital and picked up bottles from the back porch. They were lined up and nicely organized, which struck me as pathetic though it made for easier loading into the cardboard boxes I'd brought.

“He wasn't there. He was at the hospital.” My voice came out insisting this, though obviously it wasn't true. “Why?”

“He saw everything we did for him, I guess. Maybe he wants us to know that he knows.”

“What?” I felt the blood drain from my face. “Say that again.”

“He knows.”

“
I know
.
I know
. That's what he knows!” I flailed my hands. “Right.”

“What?” Olivia frowned, confused.

“Don't worry about it,” I said as more footage came on the screen. The outside of the hospital, a focus on the Emergency Entrance sign. Filmed only from the outside. He hadn't gone in. Then a shot of all of our shoes, discarded by the edge of the community pool. That part I'd seen him film. He'd said how reassuring it was, seeing the pairs of shoes together. How when he saw one shoe on the side of the road, all he could think was, where's the other one? What had happened? Something tragic, Bertucci said. Olivia, gazing out the window of Bertucci's bedroom, watching us play one-legged Frisbee like wobbly flamingos, painfully off-kilter but laughing.

“How did he manage to be in two places at once?” I asked.

Olivia shook her head, then sat up very straight. “Remember? The best directors capture what no one is supposed to see.”

I swallowed hard.
The Rashomon Effect
. “Did you find the tiny theater?” I asked. Olivia nodded.

“The impartial viewer,” Olivia said.

“He's not impartial! Bertucci—you are not impartial!” I yelled, and Olivia shot me a look that made me shut up.

“If he had a camera set up in his room—let's assume he had this much of the time if not all,” Olivia said. She looked scared again, glanced quickly over the balcony then back at me. “Do you think he saw ...”

I considered her. Not just the situation but everything that was Olivia Reinstein. Her long e-mails from exotic places. Her ability to find the subtext in everything I said. Her jealousy of Lissa's place in the high school hierarchy or her relationship with me. How Livvy looked beautiful when she was sad and how it killed me to see her that way. How I didn't have to explain myself, and how she actually enjoyed having dinner with my parents even if they picked at her emotional state the way they used chopsticks—that is, skillfully and not entirely without motive. How she was more than competence porn and actually the best of everything.

“You mean do I think Bertucci knew that we kissed?” I asked. Olivia nodded. “Did he have to see to know?”

“Schrödinger's Cat,” Olivia said.

“Blah-blah-blah huh?” I asked.

“I have a cat in my backpack, just so you know.” She motioned to it with her chin.

I looked at her with doubt. “A live cat? You hate cats.”

“It's a long story,” she said. “It involves quantum physics.”

The film flickered; crackling white spots appeared on the screen.

A final shot of a beach, the sand half water-darkened and half light, rocks spelling out our names, Livvy then mine then B-E-R-T-U- cut off by the rising tide as though he intended it to get washed away.

“The beach house. That day? Lakeville? Your disgusting theory of murders there?” Livvy looked scared, regretful.

“He had sand on his hands when he had that tuna sandwich,” I nodded. “We stayed at the house.”