I was so many days putting a rough cut together that I kept insisting to myself that I couldn’t be sure about what I thought I had, that nobody could remember so much with any degree of accuracy, especially if you work out of sequence, the way I do. But deep in my heart, I did know. I think I knew before I even started editing the raw material, when I saw how much raw material there was to work with, and I just didn’t want to admit it. Because that was supposed to be impossible, you know. No one — and that is no exclamation point one double exclamation point — had ever found a combination of memory bits that, when assembled, would yield a complete, finished feature without interpolation or reconstruction. It just didn’t happen because it just wasn’t possible.
But there it was. The Return of Little Latin Larry and His Loopy Louies, His Luscious Latinaires, and His Lascivious Latinettes; music not only intact but in quadronic poly-sound, and every single member of the audience present and accounted for at all times. My editing program said there were no greyed-out areas whatsoever anywhere, and while you might be able to fool a person for awhile, you can’t hypnotize an editing program. But even then, I still didn’t want to believe that I had a complete feature with no reconstruction or interpolation necessary, so naturally, I took it for a spin.
I set the pod on Outcome: Surprise Me and zipped myself into it. I know my blood was completely clean, because I cleaned it out myself. Not doping; the blood never actually left my body to be recirculated. I used the in-body nano-machine method, even if it does give me a psychosomatic itch. It didn’t take long, though, because I stay pretty clean between features; it was really just to make sure there wasn’t anything lingering from the last one I’d done, a weird short subject called “But What About Moose and Squirrel?” which I cannot even begin to explain to anyone outside this particular clan who all claim ancestors from a particular area in Philadelphia. I just didn’t want to see anything out-of-context showing up and interfering with my concentration in any way. Then I set the IV drip for full feature, no intermission, closed my eyes, and went to see the triumphant return of Little Latin Larry.
It opened with split-screen — very tricky to do behind the eyelids, I wouldn’t have thought it possible on the first edit, so right away, I knew I had a double relative in there somewhere. Which is to say, either my audience member was also related to the band, or one of the band was related to the audience member. Or — astounding to think of, but stranger things have happened — both. And with both sets of memory bits present in each one. You don’t usually find that sort of thing can remain coherent, let alone linear in any way but, as I said, stranger things have happened.
Anyway, on the left hand side of the screen, you were going in the back door with the band, to the dressing room, while on the right, you were going in the front entrance of the bar. The perspectives on both were so well-realized, I began to think that maybe I’d been duped somehow and I had someone else’s finished product sizzling around in my brain chemistry, even though I knew that couldn’t possibly be — I had edited every moment out of pure raw material, and if there had been any finished product in there, it would have showed itself immediately as already refined. You can distract a person, but you can’t bribe a solution into disguising its molecular structure.
I have to say that as soon as I got used to the split-screen, I loved it. On one side, you could see the band getting ready, all the members psyching themselves up and getting into character. The Loopy Louies were like bikers, guys in denim and old sweatshirts who whaled the hell out of their instruments. Three guitarists, one drummer, and they were all in a little world of their own, of course. Bass guitarist is a husky guy with a lot of thick black hair, a day’s growth of beard and carrying around a bottle of something amber-colored with a label that says “Jim Beam” on it. He offers everybody a swig, including the Latinettes, who are teasing each other’s hair and putting on make-up on top of make-up on top of make-up. And then up in the top left corner of the screen, you get his bio: Lionel LeBlanc, graduate student in English, writing a thesis on Milton. Yes, Uncle Miltie! The guy is a scholar of Berle’s Divine Comedy and he’s wandering around with a bottle of Jim Beam and burping. You’ve got to love it.
The Latinaires are such a precision dance team that they can take the bottle from the Uncle Miltie scholar, swig, and pass it on to the next one without missing a beat or a hand gesture. They’re all mouthing something about a great pretender, the purple satin shirts look like liquid metal, the tight pants and the pointy shoes are positively low-rider classic.
But you just know that the Latinettes did their hair for them. The four girls keep running over and putting more spray on their curls, even though the Latinaires are protesting left and right that they don’t need any more. Then the girls tease each other’s hair even higher — they’ve got great big bubbles on their heads, and in back it’s something called a French twist. They’re all wearing halter-top dresses in a leopard print and pointy-toed flats that they can do the Twist in.
And then there’s Larry. Little Latin Larry. He really is little — maybe five feet, four inches, about as tall as the next tallest Latinette (the tallest one is close to six feet, over that if you include the hair, of course) and very Latin-looking, even more so, somehow, than the Latinaires, who are all, to a man, perfectly Spanish, according to their bios. The three Rodriguez brothers and their cousin the Cheech man. Larry is also their cousin on their father’s side; on Larry’s mother’s side, however, he’s Italian. Or so the bio tells me.
Meanwhile, out front in the bar, the audience is getting into character. This is, apparently, one of those time-warp occasions, where everybody would pretend it was a time that it wasn’t anymore. Which is to say, the kind of music, the kind of performance the band gives is mostly something from twenty or thirtyyears before — everything here is a little vague, but that’s a product of the Collapse and we’re all used to it.
The crowd in the bar doesn’t seem to be aware of any time difference. Either they’ve always liked this music, or they don’t know any time has passed. Orthey don’t care. Or they wouldn’t care if they did know. As the bar becomes more crowded, you start getting audience ghosts — a common occurrence, really, for a lot of these sorts of events. Usually, you don’t worry too much about them, they’ll disappear after awhile if they’re real ghosts and if they’re not, they solidify and fall into place wherever they’re supposed to fit in. These did neither.
Ghosts kept following me around in the bar and I couldn’t decide what was really happening — whether they were some product of the memory bit, either the ancestor’s imagination at work or the descendant’s, or whether the memory bit had been corrupted or polluted in some way, mixed in with some memory bit that didn’t belong, or whether it was something in my own chemistry that was intruding.
Wherever they were coming from, they were a nuisance and they showed no sign of fading away, no matter how hard I ignored them. I’d just have to try editing them out on my next time through, I thought.
I found the biker chick again, sitting with half a dozen biker guys at the table I had passed out under before. I didn’t think she’d notice me — this was split-screen, after all, so I wasn’t entirely there — but she did. And as soon as she saw me, the split-screen effect was gone and I was in the bar only. The Cleopatra eyes started to widen in an expression of recognition, which was, of course, impossible — no character in a memory sequence remembers any more than a person’s photograph would remember who looked at it. Then it was like she dropped a stitch; the expression that had started out as recognition ended as puzzlement and I could all but hear her mind in operation. She’d thought I was someone she knew, but she was wrong. Or was she? Now she was suspicious and a suspicious biker is a scary bit of business, even if she isn’t real. I really hoped that we didn’t have a memory of a situation. It’s only a very select portion of the clientele that has any appreciation for being beaten up in a bar fight.