They liked old stuff.

It was an arms race between the two of them, seeing who could unearth pictures of the most obscure era, the corner of the past — past pop culture, past fashion — that seemed most indisputably like the past. They both subscribed to Twitter accounts that aggregated fascinating relics and would fling links back and forth at one another in their downtime on set, iPads on their laps. And when they showed up in the morning and left at night (or showed up at night and left in the morning, if it was a night shoot) they showed up and left in street clothes that were not from one decade in particular but were a kind of distillation of old-ness, the kind of thing that would prompt the odd barista or receptionist to say, “I love your (garment)… Totally throwback.”

He hated the term “throwback,” it reminded him of an ill-advised stint, in that perilous chasm between “child star” and “working adult actor,” as a white rapper. It was possible to be a rapper and be white and not be a “white rapper.” But at 15, it had not been possible for him.

But he was 22 now and she was 21 and he drove a matte-black early-50s pickup truck that he had found on Craigslist back when it was red, and when he’d driven it onto the lot of the Santa Monica man who was going to restore it, the balding man with a long salt-and-pepper beard had said, “Dude, that’s what I’M talkin’ about.”

She drove a late-60s BMW, sky-blue and purchased from a indistinctly European guy she later described to the makeup woman as “porn-y.”

He had been featured in a GQ fashion spread about the cultural significance and essential American manliness of the plain white t-shirt. There was a petition that went around online when she hadn’t been cast as one of the Manson girls in a forthcoming TV movie.

She was dying to see it, though. She knew the girl who ended up playing Linda and she knew for a fact the pretender hadn’t done her research.

There was a post on this Tumblr she liked about an abandoned 1950s suburban housing development on a tiny strip of land between LAX and the ocean. She forwarded it to him. He seemed to respond almost before she sent it:

We’re going.

She had regretted mentioning it to one of the wardrobe ladies, who begged to be taken along — “I am SO into freaky stuff like that.” But she remembered the wardrobe lady had to pick up her son from her ex-husband on Friday nights after they wrapped, if they wrapped on time, and it looked like they were going to, so she was able to invite the lady to go with them that night without any fear that she might actually come.

After wrap he followed her to her place in the coolest part of an uncool part of town, and she parked the BMW in her carport and went inside to change into more appropriate shoes, tennis shoes she had almost thrown away when the costume designer had described them as “SO early-90’s Boston,” but decided to keep once the designer admitted she only thought of them as early-90s because her father had had a pair just like them when SHE was growing up, but he had been wearing them since the 70s.

While he waited, he cued up a Hank Williams Pandora station and toggled the FM knob until he found the radio frequency his little iPhone device had created. The truck idled in a solid, satisfying way, and she came out and hopped up and then he drove them down to the 10, and once on the freeway he rolled his window down with the hand-crank and let the wind blow through his haircut.

He backed the truck up to the barbed wire in a stretch where there were no streetlights. There was a heavy blanket in back and they threw it over the top of the fence and it was easy climbing since they were starting halfway up thanks to the truck bed.

They both told each other how not worried they were about getting in trouble: they had peers who did a lot of drugs and fucked other people’s wives and husbands and you could get away with a lot if you were smart about it, so certainly you could get away with breaking into an abandoned curiosity for purely anthropological reasons. They were both sober. He had a flask but he always had a flask, it was less about the booze and more about the flask. The flask had an Apache head engraved on it, the way everything cool and manly seemed to before, say, 1975.

Their feet landed on the grass on the other side. Neither of them had a scratch. He pulled the blanket down, folded it up, and tucked it beneath his arm. They walked.

Neither of them had brought a flashlight. They’d both forgotten but then retroactively justified it: a flashlight could attract too much attention. And they both agreed a flashlight always made things scarier. Raking that beam around made everything eerie and you never knew what would show up in the light. Darkness was just dark. Darkness with a spot of light moving around it was where you really got into cat-jumping-out-and-giving-you-a-heart-attack country.

They walked down a broad street with one-story houses on either side that ran perpendicular to the water. The antique streetlights were unlit and a fire-hydrant, which he almost tripped over, looked like a friendly Iron Age robot. She walked wide around a storm drain.

Planes would appear overhead every couple minutes, most of them hitting a point in the sky high above the ocean and then slingshotting around, just as their red-eye had done a few weeks back when they’d flown to New York for press week.

The absence of a flashlight was starting to defeat their purpose. There wasn’t much in the way of moonlight, the night sky a low layer of glowing cold. Her eyes were starting to do that thing where darkness gets so dark it’s velvet. It was hard to see all the specific architectural details. It was hard to see anything except a grey band of ocean at the end of a dark corridor.

They got there. She thought about living here when living here was a thing you could do, the way you were in this kind of perfect anonymous American suburbia and then you were at the Pacific Ocean with no intervening layer of beach-town. Leave your house and turn left: America. Leave your house and turn right:

There was a lump in the ocean.

How still could whales be, he wondered. Maybe a whale had been beached and then the tide came in and nobody had noticed because you weren’t legally allowed to be on this strip of coast.

Then it rose.

You could really only see its shape as a silhouette against a dull horizon. It was a dome of black, and it had arms or legs or tentacles. It really didn’t matter what you called them, they were good for grabbing, and they grabbed him, and they grabbed her, and they were screaming as the thing pulled them in.

They were hanging upside down, and neither could hear the other one screaming because each of them were screaming so loud. The thing drew them in, and there was this incredible stench, and a kind of sloshing gastrological rumble that slowly became voices, and the voices told them:

The thing was older than the world. By being there they were violating an ancient agreement between life on Earth and not-life in the stars. And not the stars the Apollo astronauts he admired so much had been trying to reach. The dead weird ones between the ones you could easily see.

It didn’t do anything but hold them and talk in its way where the words could not be understood but also created pictures in your mind you could not turn away from.

It showed them a time before “back in the day.” It showed them a time before “day.”

She held it together physiologically but she found herself earnestly wishing for death at several points. He pissed and shat in his two thousand dollar jeans, the ones that had come with a card detailing everything that was known about every man who’d worn them since 1939.

It let them go before the sun came up. They eventually reached the fence again. He realized he’d left the blanket, and they both scaled the fence and braved the barbed wire without complaint, and it tore at their young bodies and neither one of them cried out or said or felt anything at all.

When they got in and he turned the car on, the radio was still tuned to a blank static-y non-station, and that was fine. They listened to white noise and took the freeway back to her place, where he dropped her off at sunrise and she got out, and neither one of them made any attempt to make eye contact before he drove away.

On Monday his agent called him: there was a big role for him in an upcoming remake of a movie from the 80s. He told his agent he never wanted to so much as think about anything old ever again.

“Got it,” said his agent. “Originals only. Maybe just this one, though? I mean, this is a really hot script.”

He reiterated forcefully.

“You could be waiting a while,” his agent said.

He told his agent that was fine.

On Monday night she asked that one wardrobe lady if the wardrobe lady wanted the dress she’d worn to set that day. She’d bought it because it had a wonderful kind of 1940s USO-tour thing to it. Now it felt heavy and suspect on her skin.

“Sure,” said the wardrobe lady. “I live for great old stuff like this. You really don’t want it anymore?”

She shook her head.

“Suit yourself,” said the wardrobe lady. “But what are you gonna wear home?”

They were alone, and that was good, because what she felt that what she was going to say was strange and embarrassing. She asked the wardrobe lady if anywhere, anywhere in their whole trailer and truck, if they anything new, and not just new in the sense of being recently manufactured. Not owing to any trend, not harkening back to anything. New.

“That’s not really what we do,” said the wardrobe lady. “I mean, if you wish this show were a little more Star Trek, all I gotta say is, you and me both, babe.”

She was happy to be rid of that dress. She’d settle for a hoodie until the right thing came along. She felt certain she would know it when she saw it.

Illustration by Sara McHenry - http://heypais.com