Chapter 5 #2
Stellar Drift: Beyond the Veil was an expensive and deeply silly film.
The plot involved a crew of mismatched astronauts who discovered a rift in spacetime near Jupiter that led to a parallel dimension populated by bioluminescent giants.
The dialogue was functional at best. The villain's motivation was something about harvesting dimensional energy, which made no sense if you thought about it for more than four seconds.
The lead actor delivered his lines with the emotional range of a desk chair.
None of that mattered.
What mattered was the scale of it. A gas giant rendered in swirling bands of amber and rust that filled the screen from edge to edge.
A ship no bigger than a fingernail against the void.
The rift itself, when it opened, pouring light across the audience in blues and violets that seemed to drip off the edges of the screen.
An alien landscape of crystalline towers and floating rivers that the camera swept through in long, dizzying tracking shots.
The sound design alone was a physical experience.
Bass that vibrated in the rib cage, a score that swelled and crashed.
Scout gripped my arm through all of it. During the first action sequence, when the ship tumbled through an asteroid field in slow rotation while debris flew past in three dimensions, her fingers dug in hard enough to leave marks.
She didn't notice. She barely blinked. The 3D glasses sat on her face and behind them her eyes were wide and liquid, reflecting the screen's shifting light.
She forgot the popcorn. It sat untouched in her lap for the entire second act.
I reached over and ate a handful and she didn't register it.
When the crew first encountered the bioluminescent giants, enormous beings that moved through their crystalline world like whales through deep water, Scout leaned forward in her seat and her mouth fell open.
The creatures pulsed with inner light, turquoise and gold, and the 3D made them feel close enough to touch.
She raised her hand, almost reached toward the screen, then caught herself and put it back down.
The climax involved the rift collapsing while the crew fought to get their ship through, and the visual effects team had earned whatever they'd been paid.
Space folded in on itself like cloth being wrung.
The ship's hull buckled and reformed. Reality peeled apart in layers, each one a different color, and the 3D turned the theater into a tunnel of light.
The bass hit a frequency that rattled the seats.
Scout grabbed my arm with both hands and held on.
I looked at her profile in the flickering light and realized I was grinning.
I had seen hundreds of movies in theaters over the course of my life.
Big ones, small ones, good ones, bad ones.
I had never enjoyed a film more than I enjoyed watching Scout experience this one.
The movie was silly and spectacular in equal measure, and through her it became something else entirely.
The credits rolled. The house lights came up. People stood and shuffled toward the exits, pulling off their 3D glasses, checking their phones. Scout sat motionless in her seat. The popcorn sat cold in her lap. She still wore the glasses.
"Scout?"
She pulled the glasses off slowly, like removing a mask. Her eyes were glassy and enormous.
"Wow," she sighed.
We walked outside into the dusk. Port Townsend's Water Street had gone amber under the old streetlamps, and the bay was a flat dark mirror beyond the marina. A cool breeze came off the water as Scout stood on the sidewalk in front of the Begonia Theater with her 3D glasses still in her hand.
"That was..." She stopped, then started again. "I've read about space. I've read Bradbury and Asimov and Clarke. I thought I understood what they were describing. I thought my imagination was sufficient."
She looked down at the plastic glasses in her hand.
"It was not sufficient."
"It's a lot, the first time."
"A lot?" She shook her head. "Thomas, when those creatures moved through the towers and the light came off them, I thought...
I felt like I was in the water with them.
Like they were real and I was real and we were in the same place.
" She pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum. "My heart hasn't slowed down. Feel it."
She took my hand and pressed it flat against her chest. Under the worn denim, her heart slammed against my palm.
"The science was nonsense," she said. "The dialogue was dreadful.
That man was certainly no Laurence Olivier.
And I don't care. I don't care about any of that.
Because I have never in my life seen anything that big and that beautiful, and I didn't know.
I didn't know that was possible. I didn't know you could sit in a room and have someone pour an entire universe into your eyes. "
She looked up at me. The streetlamp caught her face and the dusk gathered blue in her hair.
"Thank you for this."
"You're welcome. I was so glad to be with you for your first time. And there's more."
"More?"
"More," I grinned.