Bosses of Light and Sound

The story begins in 2003, where it ends: Look at Kelli. Look at her in the sunlight. You’re not used to seeing her outside the theater, and you’re struck by the way her eyes grab the light, the middles crackling gold.

The story also begins in July of 2001. Kelli sits at the Valley Cinemas projectionist’s desk, on the second floor. She wears black pants and a red shirt that’s turning pink from over-washing. The shirt’s front pocket is embroidered with Valley Cinemas and the company logo—a jagged line that’s supposed to contour a series of mountainous peaks and valleys, though it looks more like the EKG of a cokedup heart.

Kelli is bored, and she’s still young enough to believe that her boredom is special. She has one of those faces that makes it seem like she’s always pissed off, but (and here’s what’s so unfortunate about Kelli) she’s practically never pissed off. Not even a week from now, when Brody, her ex-boyfriend, shows up to the theater holding hands with Misty Caldwell, and later that same night, she looks down through one of the projection windows and sees, in the otherwise empty theater, someone who could only be Brody slung way back in his seat, with Misty’s blond head doing a rhythmic bob over his lap.

I’m still here in 2001, still stuck on Kelli’s scowl. It’s something in the eyebrows, I think. Too much tense muscle tissue? Maybe the scowl is why Management have put her in Projection. Run afoul of the high school blondes in Concession, and Management will stick you somewhere else. Kelli has nothing but kind things to say about those girls, but she has definitely failed to fit in somehow or she wouldn’t be up here. Maybe the GM, Tina, figures Kelli doesn’t have the right mug for slinging popcorn at eight hundred percent markup. That’s a job for the bubbly ones.

Kelli is closing tonight, which means she won’t get to leave the theater parking lot until well after midnight. The sprawling dark of the projection hall is sentineled by eight projectors gunning 5,000 watts of light and movie magic at flat white screens. Each projector’s quartz bulb contains several atmospheres of pressure, and burns hot enough to melt right through celluloid, should the film snag, which Kelli hopes it won’t.

She spends long hours sitting at the projectionist’s desk, which is located sort of mid-hallway, in a neutral zone between chattering machines. On the wall over the desk, there’s a dry-erase board that we projectionists use to delegate work and leave each other notices, like number three needs oil, or number six has been cold-starting. Mostly, though, we use the board to sketch places we’d rather be. Tonight, Kelli illustrates the cosmos, with the rings of Saturn well-defined.

It’s not so noisy here at the desk, and Kelli has her portable CD player and a pair of desktop speakers. She’s still in her Pink Floyd phase, and can’t stop playing “Welcome to the Machine.” She doesn’t connect with the hip indie rock that the girls downstairs like, and she really doesn’t connect with the pitch-perfect pop music that her other friends are always talking about. Kelli plays some guitar. Years later she will start listening to Riot Grrrl and form a band of her own: Brainwrap, a moderately successful punk trio. Then she will mellow out, start smoking more pot, go through her Joni Mitchell phase. But for now, Pink Floyd.

The back wall of the hallway comes alive with lambent, inverse images of movie heroes, cataphracted sea monsters, homicidal robots on parade. These images are not magical, and Kelli isn’t hallucinating. She’s witnessing one of those unintended visual tricks that happens as the projected images vault off the windowglass and create a backwash of light. A paradox of the projection hall: always crowded, always lonesome.

Sit here with Kelli...