Other Worlds Than These

“I know you’re about to close, I’ll hurry,” he said.

She shrugged. “Sure.”

He went to the Sci-Fi shelf—and had another shock. I, Robot was there, but not the forgettable action movie with Will Smith—this was older, and the credits said “written by Harlan Ellison.” But Ellison’s adaptation of the Isaac Asimov book had never been produced, though it had been published in book form. “Must be some bootleg student production,” he muttered, and he didn’t recognize the name of the production company. But—but—it said “winner of the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.” That had to be a student director’s little joke, straight-facedly absurd box copy, as if this were a film from some alternate reality. Worth watching, certainly, though again, he couldn’t imagine how he’d never heard of this. Maybe it had been done by someone local. He took it to the counter and offered his credit card.

She looked at the card dubiously. “Visa? Sorry, we only take Weber and FosterCard.”

Pete stared at her, and took back the card she held out to him. “This is a major credit card,” he said, speaking slowly, as if to a child. “I’ve never even heard of—”

Shrugging, she looked at the clock again, more pointedly this time. “Sorry, I don’t make the rules.”

He had to see these movies. In matters of film—new film! strange film!—Pete had little patience, though in other areas of his life he was easygoing to a fault. But movies mattered. “Please, I live right around the corner, just let me go grab some cash and come back, ten minutes, please?”

Her lips were set in a hard line. He gestured at The Magnificent Ambersons. “I just want to see it, as it was meant to be seen. You’re into movies, right? You understand.”

Her expression softened. “Okay. Ten minutes, but that’s it. I want to get home, too.”

Pete thanked her profusely and all but ran out of the store. He did run when he got outside, three mostly uphill blocks to his apartment in a stucco duplex, fumbling the keys and cursing, finally getting into his sock drawer where he kept a slim roll of emergency cash. He raced back to Impossible Dreams, breathing so hard he could feel every exhalation burning through his body, a stitch of pain in his side. Pete hadn’t run, really run, since gym class in high school, a decade earlier.

He reached the bakery, and the gift shop, but there was no door to Impossible Dreams Video between them—there was no between at all. The stores stood side by side, without even an alleyway dividing them.

Pete put his hand against the brick wall. He tried to convince himself he was on the wrong block, that he’d gotten turned around while running, but he knew it wasn’t true. He walked back home, slowly, and when he got to his apartment, he went into his living room, with its floor-to-ceiling metal shelves of tapes and DVDs. He took a disc down and loaded it into his high-end, region-free player, then took his remote in hand and turned on the vast plasma flat-screen TV. The surround-sound speakers hummed to life, and Pete sank into the exquisitely contoured leather chair in the center of the room. Pete owned a rusty four-door Honda with 200,000 miles on the engine, he lived mostly on cheap macaroni and cheese, and he saved money on toilet paper by stealing rolls from the bathrooms in the university’s Admissions Office, where he worked. He lived simply in almost every way, so that he could live extravagantly in the world of film.

He pressed play. Pete owned the entire Twilight Zone television series on DVD, and now the narrator’s eminently reasonable voice spoke from the speakers, introducing the tale of a man who finds a dusty little magic shop, full of wonders.

As he watched, Pete began to nod his head, and whispered, “Yes.”

Pete checked in the morning; he checked at lunch; he checked after leaving his job in the Admissions Office in the evening; but Impossible Dreams did not reappear. He grabbed dinner at a little sandwich shop, then paced up and down the few blocks at the far end of the commercial street near his apartment. At 8:30 he leaned against a light pole, and stared at the place where Impossible Dreams had been. He’d arrived at, what, 9:45 last night? But who knew if time had anything to do with the miraculous video store’s manifestation? What if it had been a one- time only appearance?

Around 8:45, the door was suddenly there. Pete had blinked, that was all, but between blinkings, something had happened, and the store was present again.

Pete shivered, a strange exultation filling him, and he wondered if this was how people who witnessed miraculous healings or bleeding statues felt. He took a deep breath and went into the store.

The same clerk was there, and she glared at him. “I waited for you last night.”

“I’m sorry,” Pete said, trying not to stare at her. Did she know this was a shop of wonders? She certainly didn’t act as though she did. He thought she was of the miracle, not outside it, and to her, a world with The Magnificent Ambersons complete and uncut was nothing special. “I couldn’t find any cash at home, but I brought plenty tonight.”

“I held the videos for you,” she said. “You really should see the Welles, it’ll change your whole opinion of his career.”

“That’s really nice of you. I’m going to browse a little, maybe pick up a few things.”

“Take your time. It’s been really slow tonight, even for a Tuesday.”

Pete’s curiosity about her—the proprietor (or at least clerk) of a magic shop!—warred with his desire to ransack the shelves. “You always work by yourself?”

“Mostly, except on weekends. There really should be two clerks here, but my boss is losing money like crazy, with people downloading movies online, getting DVDs by mail order, all that stuff.” She shook her head.

Pete nodded. He got movies online and in the mail, too, but there was something to be said for the instant gratification of renting something from the store, without waiting for mail or download. “Sorry to hear that. This seems like a great store. Are you here every night?”

She leaned on the counter and sighed. “Lately, yeah. I’m working as much as I can, double shifts some days. I need the money. I can’t even afford to eat lately, beyond like an apple at lunch time and noodles for dinner. My roommate bailed on me, and I’ve had to pay twice the usual rent while I look for a new roommate, it sucks. I just —ah, sorry, I didn’t mean to dump all over you.”

“No, it’s fine,” Pete said. While she spoke, he was able to look straight at her openly, and he’d noticed that, in addition to being a purveyor of miracles, she was pretty, in a frayed-at-the-edges ex-punk sort of way. Not his type at all—except that she obviously loved movies.

“Browse on,” she said, and opened a heavy textbook on the counter.

Pete didn’t need any more encouragement than that. Last night he’d developed a theory, and everything he saw now supported it. He thought this store belonged to some parallel universe, a world much like his own, but with subtle changes, like different names for the major credit cards. But even small differences could lead to huge divergences when it came to movies. Every film depended on so many variables—a director’s capricious enthusiasm, a studio’s faith in a script, a big star’s availability, which starlet a producer happened to be sleeping with—any of those factors could irrevocably alter the course of a film, and Hollywood history was littered with the corpses of films that almost got made. Here, in this world, some of them were made, and Pete would go without sleeping for a week, if necessary, to see as many as possible.

The shelves yielded miracle after miracle. Here was The Death of Superman, directed by Tim Burton, starring Nicolas Cage; in Pete’s universe, Burton and Cage had both dropped the project early on. Here was Total Recall, but directed and written by David Cronenberg, not Paul Verhoeven. Here was The Terminator, but starring O. J. Simpson rather than Arnold Schwarzenegger—though Schwarzenegger was still in the film, as Kyle Reese. Here was Raiders of the Lost Ark, but starring Tom Selleck instead of Harrison Ford—and there was no sign of any later Indiana Jones films, which was sad. Pete’s hands were already full of DVDs, and he juggled them awkwardly while pulling more movies from the shelves. Here was Casablanca starring George Raft instead of Bogart, and maybe it had one of the alternate endings, too! Here a John Wayne World War II movie he’d never heard of, but the box copy said it was about the ground invasion of the Japanese islands, and called it a “riveting historical drama.” A