be mostly the same.
“You are a god, Pete,” she said, opening a paper container of noodles and wielding her chopsticks like a pro. “You know what I had for lunch today? A pear, and I had to steal it off my neighbor’s tree. I got the crackers off a tray in the dining hall. You saved my life.”
“Don’t mention it. I’m really sorry I was so annoying the last couple of nights.”
She waved her hand dismissively, mouth crammed with egg roll, and in her presence, Pete realized his new plan was impossible. He’d hoped to endear himself to her, and convince her to let him hang around until after closing, so he could… stow away, and travel to her world, where he could see all the movies, and maybe become the clerk’s new roommate. It had all made sense at 3:00 in the morning the night before, and he’d spent most of the day thinking about nothing else, but now that he’d set his plan in motion he realized it was more theatrical than practical. It might work in a movie, but in life he didn’t even know this woman’s name, she wouldn’t welcome him into her life, and even if she did, what would he do in her world? He spent all day processing applications, ordering transcripts, massaging a database, and filing things, but what would he do in her world? What if the computers there had totally different programming languages? What would he do for money, once his hypothetical giant sack of nickels ran out?
“I’m sorry, I never asked your name,” he said.
“I’m Ally,” she said. “Eat an egg roll, I feel like a pig.”
Pete complied, and Ally came around the counter. “I’ve got something for you.” She went to the big screen TV and switched it on. “We don’t have time to watch the whole thing, but there’s just enough time to see the last fifty minutes, the restored footage, before I have to close up.” She turned on the DVD player, and The Magnificent Ambersons began.
“Oh, Ally, thanks,” he said.
“Hey, your DVD player’s busted, and you really should see this.”
For the next fifty minutes, Pete watched. The cast was similar, with only one different actor that he noticed, and from everything he’d read, this was substantially the same as the lost footage he’d heard about in his world. Welles’s genius was apparent even in the butchered RKO release, but here it was undiluted, a clarity of vision that was almost overwhelming, and this version was sad, profoundly so, a tale of glory and inevitable decline.
When it ended, Pete felt physically drained, and sublimely happy.
“Closing time, Pete,” Ally said. “Thanks again for dinner. I’m a fiend for Chinese.” She gently herded him toward the door as he thanked her, again and again. “Glad you liked it,” she said. “We can talk about it tomorrow.” She closed and locked the door, and Pete watched from a doorway across the street until the shop disappeared, just a few minutes after 10:00. The window was closing, the shop appearing for less time each night.
He’d just have to enjoy it while it lasted. You couldn’t ask more of a miracle than it was willing to give.
The next night he brought kung pao chicken and asked what her favorite movies were. She led him to the Employee Picks shelf and showed him her selections. “It’s mostly nostalgia, but I still love The Lunch Bunch—you know, the sequel to The Breakfast Club, set ten years later? Molly Ringwald’s awesome in it. And Return of the Jedi, I know a lot of people hate it, but it’s one of the best movies David Lynch ever directed, I thought Dune was a muddle, but he really got to the heart of the Star Wars universe, it’s so much darker than The Empire Strikes Back. Jason and the Argonauts by Orson Welles, of course, that’s on everybody’s list…”
Pete found himself looking at her while she talked, instead of at the boxes of the movies she enthused over. He wanted to see them, of course, every one, but he wouldn’t be able to, and really, he was talking to a woman from another universe, and that was as remarkable as anything he’d ever seen on a screen. She was smart, funny, and knew as much about movies as he did. He’d never dated much—he was more comfortable alone in the dark in front of a screen than he was sitting across from a woman at dinner, and his relationships seldom lasted more than a few dates when the women realized movies were his main mode of recreation. But with Ally—he could talk to her. Their obsessions were congruent and complementary.
Or maybe he was just trying to turn this miracle into some kind of theatrical romance.
“You look really beautiful when you talk about movies,” he said.
“You’re sweet, Mr. Nickels.”
Pete came the next three nights, a few minutes later each time, as the door appeared for shorter periods of time. Ally talked to him about movies, incredulous at the bizarre gaps in his knowledge—“You’ve never heard of Sara Hansen? She’s one of the greatest directors of all time!” (Pete wondered if she’d died young in his world, or never been born at all.) Ally had a fondness for bad science fiction movies, especially the many Ed Wood films starring Bela Lugosi, who had lived several years longer in Ally’s world, instead of dying during the filming of Plan 9 from Outer Space. She liked good sci-fi movies, too, especially Ron Howard’s Ender’s Game. Pete regretted that he’d never see any of those films, beyond the snippets she showed him to illustrate her points, and he regretted even more that he’d soon be unable to see Ally at all, when the shop ceased to appear, as seemed inevitable. She understood character arcs, the use of color, the underappreciated skills of silent film actors, the bizarre audacity of pre-Hayes-Code-era films, the perils of voiceover, why an extended single-camera continuous scene was worth becoming rapturous about, why the animation of Ray Harryhausen was in some ways infinitely more satisfying than the slickest CGI. She was his people.
“Why do you like movies so much?” he asked on that third night, over a meal of Szechwan shrimp, her leaning on her side of the counter, he on his.
She chewed, thinking. “Somebody described the experience of reading great fiction as being caught up in a vivid continuous dream, and I think movies do that better than any other kind of story. Some people say the best movie isn’t as good as the best book, and I say they’re not watching the right movies, or else they’re not watching them the right way. My life doesn’t make a lot of sense sometimes, I’m hungry and lonely and cold, my parents are shit, I can’t afford tuition for next semester, I don’t know what I want to do when I graduate. But when I see a great film, I feel like I understand life a little better, and even not-so-great films help me forget the shitty parts of my life for a couple of hours. Movies taught me to be brave, to be romantic, to stand up for myself, to take care of my friends. I didn’t have church or loving parents, but I had movies, cheap matinees when I cut school, videos after I saved up enough to buy a TV and player of my own. I didn’t have a mentor, but I had Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. Sure, movies can be a way to hide from life, but shit, sometimes you need to hide from life, to see a better life on the screen, to know life can be better than it is, or to see a worse life and realize how good you have it. Movies taught me not to settle for less.” She took a swig from her water bottle. “That’s why I love movies.”
“Wow,” Pete said. “That’s… wow.”
“So,” she said, looking at him oddly. “Why do you pretend to like movies?”
Pete frowned. “What? Pretend?”
“Hey, it’s okay. You came in and said you were a big movie buff, but you don’t even know who Sara Hansen is, you’ve never seen Jason and the Argonauts, you talk about actors starring in movies they didn’t appear in… I mean, I figured you liked me, you didn’t know how else to flirt with me or something, but I like you, and if you want to ask me out, you can, you don’t have to be a movie trivia expert to impress me.”
“I do like you,” Pete said. “But I love movies. I really do.”
“Pete… you thought Clark Gable was in Gone with the Wind.” She shrugged. “Need I say more?”
Pete looked at the clock. He had fifteen minutes. “Wait here,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
He ran home. The run was getting easier. Maybe exercise wasn’t such a bad idea. He filled a backpack with
