Last Call on Set

The warehouse was quiet when I started my last walk-through at eleven. I'd done that walk maybe six hundred times over two years, and I still couldn't do it fast. You'd think a person would get numb to it, but no. Every night the same thing happened to me. I'd push through the false door in the east wall and there it was, this whole 1920s speakeasy sitting in the middle of a warehouse like a shipwreck somebody furnished.

Mallory, by the way. I'm twenty-eight, and for the last two years my job has been standing between people and this set. Tomorrow morning the wrecking crew comes, and tonight is the last night this place exists as anything but rubble waiting to happen.

I checked the bar first, because I always checked the bar first. The brass rail had my handprint worn into it by now, I swear. The velvet curtains, the cigarette machine, the little stage where the lead actress did her big number. They built all of it for a movie that finished shooting in October, and now the movie's done and the set is garbage. Funny how money works. Somebody spent a million dollars on fake wood paneling and now it's a Tuesday.

I smelled like coffee and bug spray, which was my uniform for the whole run. I did the back corridor, the dressing rooms, the prop cage. All locked. All quiet. I stood on the stage for a minute with my flashlight off and let myself have the moment. Then I heard the door.

I knew the knock pattern before I heard it finish. Three slow, two fast. Emeka's been doing that stupid knock since we met at a friend's party three years ago, when I was twenty-five and he was twenty-six and he told me his flashlight was bigger than mine. It was not, to be clear. But he's a lighting tech, so I let him have it.

I let him in and he came in carrying a paper bag like it was a baby.

"Last night," he said, holding the bag up. "I brought a proper bottle. None of that stuff you drink."

"That stuff I drink is fine."

"That stuff you drink is paint thinner with a label on it." He kissed me, quick, then looked past me at the set and just stopped talking for a second. He's worked this set two years too, running lights, and I could see it hit him the same way it hits me. "God. Look at it."

"I look at it every night."

"Yeah, but you get paid to." He shrugged his jacket off. "Where do you want to do this?"

"Settee by the curtain. It's the comfiest thing in the building that isn't a chair I'm legally not allowed to sit in."

We sat down on the green velvet settee and he poured two glasses of the bourbon, and it was good bourbon, the kind I pretend not to like so I don't have to spend money on it. He handed me one and held his up toward the room.

"To the set," he said. "Two years. Best gig I ever had."

"To the set," I said. "And to never having to write 'saw a raccoon' in a security log again."

"You saw how many raccoons?"

"Eleven. I counted."

"That's a career, Mallory. Some people never see one raccoon professionally."

We clinked glasses and drank, and the bourbon went down warm, and for a while neither of us said anything. The single overhead amber lamp they left burning for the movie's last scene was still wired up, and it made the whole room look like a photograph of a room. That was the trick of this place. It always looked better than it was. Emeka built half that look himself and I don't say that enough.

"Three years," he said, out of nowhere. "You and me. Met at that party and now we're drinking in a fake speakeasy the night before they kill it."

"You're getting sentimental."

"I'm a little drunk and a lot sentimental, yes."

"Good. I like you better sentimental." I leaned into his shoulder. "You want to know the dumb thing? I'm going to miss this job. Security on an empty set. Worst pay of my life. I'm going to miss it."

"It's the quiet," he said. "You love the quiet."

"I love the quiet that has something in it."

That's when we heard the footsteps.

They came from the far side of the speakeasy, past the bar, and my hand went to my flashlight before my brain caught up. Then I heard a woman laugh, and I knew the laugh, and I put the flashlight down.

Mika came around the bar with her heels in her hand, and Randall was behind her, tie undone, holding a bottle of champagne that was about two-thirds gone. The lead actress and the first AD, who I figured had left with everybody else two hours ago at the wrap party. Mika is thirty-one and has been the most famous person I've ever said hi to on a regular basis. Randall is thirty-four and the friendliest man in show business, which is a low bar but he clears it.

"Don't arrest us," Mika said. "We were hiding."

"From what?"

"From leaving," she said. "We went out to the parking lot and we just couldn't do it. So we came back in and sat in the balcony like a couple of ghosts."

"Who's the security here tonight?" Randall asked, squinting at me, then his face cleared. "Mallory. Right. Mallory. Sorry, I've had champagne since seven."

"I know who you are, Randall. I've been walking past you for two years."

"I know, I know." He waved the champagne bottle at the room. "Is it strange that this feels like a church? Emeka. Man. Come here."

Emeka got up and took the hug, and I watched the two of them do the thing men do where the hug is half back-slap and all relief. Mika sat down on the other end of the settee without asking, which was fine, because Mika has never once asked to sit anywhere in her life.

"So this is it," she said, looking out at the amber light. "Tomorrow they gut it."

"Seven a.m.," I said.

"Seven a.m." She said it like a sentence being read out. "I did my first take of the whole movie on that stage. I flubbed it and the director kept the flub. It's in the film. The flub."

"I know. I watched the dailies on the monitor for the whole shoot."

"You watched my flub for six months?"

"Best thing on that monitor," I said. "That and the raccoon."

"There was a raccoon on the dailies?"

"Eleven raccoons," Emeka said.

Mika laughed and reached for the champagne, and Randall poured what was left into Emeka's empty glass, and I don't know how it happened, but suddenly the four of us were sitting on a velvet settee that had held three people in every scene ever shot on it and had never once held four.

"Okay, I have to say it before I lose my nerve," Mika said. She had that half-drunk brightness, but her eyes were steady. "This is my last night too. And I don't want it to be over. I want it to be a night, you know? A real one."

Randall cleared his throat. "What she's circling around is, we'd like to stay. If that's okay with the security staff."

I looked at Emeka. Emeka looked at me. We've been together three years and he's my best friend, and somewhere in there we'd both already decided the same thing before either of us said it.

"It's my last shift," I said. "Nobody's checking on me. Dawn, and then it's done."

"Dawn," Mika said, and held out her glass for more bourbon. "That's a deal."

We drank bourbon and told stories, which is what four people do when they're all pretending they don't want the night to end. Randall told the one about the fog machine catching fire in March. Mika told the one about the director making her do the staircase scene fourteen times. Emeka told the one about rigging the amber lamp upside down and nobody noticing for a week.

"That lamp is the whole movie," Mika said, looking up at it. "Every face I shot under that thing looks like they're keeping a secret."

"That was Emeka," I said. "He fought the gaffer for nine days over that bulb."

"Nine days," Emeka said, and Mika put her hand on his knee under the table, and I watched her do it.

Now here's the part where I explain something about us. Emeka and Mika had a thing six months ago, when she was thirty and he was twenty-nine. I knew about it, they told me together, and I stayed, and we don't pretend it didn't happen. So when her hand sat on his knee like it had a right to be there, I didn't feel my stomach drop. I felt something else. I felt curious.

Mika caught me watching and didn't move her hand. "Is this okay?" she asked me. Not him. Me.

"Depends what it turns into," I said.

Randall set his glass down careful, like the table might flinch. "And what might it turn into?"

I looked around the room. The amber light, the bar, the velvet, the last night any of it would exist. Then I said the thing I'd been half-thinking since the champagne showed up.

"Okay. Here's my proposal. A game. Everybody picks one spot on this set that meant something to them during the shoot. And we take turns going there and re-creating the memory. Whatever that means." I let that sit. "Clothes optional."

"Clothes optional," Randall repeated.