A Perfect Universe by Scott O'Connor

Author:Scott O'Connor [O'Connor, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery/Scout Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Flicker

Occasionally, he was recognized. In line at the supermarket, sitting alone in a diner, piloting the airport shuttle. Strangers’ eyes up in the rearview mirror from one of the seats behind, trying to place his face.

They remembered the laundry detergent commercials, the antismoking PSAs. They remembered L.A. Heat, the police procedural on which George guest-starred for a season in the early ’80s. Sometimes they misremembered him as another actor who was the same age then that George was now, a graying, creased character player with a face that held a kind of battered dignity. When George was feeling up to it, he corrected them. They were folding time back into itself, he would say. He was a young man in the year they were thinking. He hadn’t always been this old.

Sometimes they remembered the movie. Young people, especially. These kids had seen it all; so much was available on their computers, their phones. They took a competitive pride in the obscurity of their interests. George could see victory in their faces when they remembered the title of the film. They started typing immediately, snapping pictures, sending out proof of their find.

Thalassa, they said. Weren’t you in that movie?

To George, it wasn’t a question, it was an accusation. Thirty years ago, the movie had played in theaters across the country. George was the leading man—his first and only role in a major studio film. It had opened with a brief, energized sprint, but then faltered quickly, disastrously. Stumbling through July, crawling through August. By Labor Day it was showing at odd hours in odd locations. Newspaper ads shrank from full to half to a quarter page, then to a single line tacked on to another movie’s announcement, the back end of a bargain double feature.

Over the years it had developed some kind of minor cult status. A curiosity, a joke, a cautionary tale. George had heard that film professors discussed it in budgeting classes, the perils of spending too much on too little.

Checking out a book at the library, drinking a cup of coffee in a cafe, they approached him, warily at first, but gaining a brazen confidence as they grew more certain. He’d answer for the commercials and the TV show and the PSAs, but when they called out the title of the movie he denied it.

I’m not who you think I am, he’d say. You must have me confused with someone else.

* * *

He was having a sandwich at the shuttle depot when his agent called with news of a remake. She said that the studio was restarting what it now called the “franchise,” planning a new version of the film as a summer blockbuster.

“They want me to be involved?” George said, before she could go any further. He had almost forgotten the little surge of hope that could come from answering the phone. He hadn’t been offered a part in years.

“Oh God, no,” she said. “That’s the last thing they want.”

The studio, she told him, was going to make the original movie disappear once and for all.

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