Whenever Cyrus Mattingly sees an automated ticket machine, he thinks of closed factories and good men thrown out of work, of winds whistling through the shuttered prairie towns of his youth, and he feels a combination of rage and despair so acute he usually ends up clenching his fists until the nubs of his filed fingernails make white indentations in his palms. He’s never considered himself a political man. His life affords him freedom from politics, along with many other things. But there’s no denying that the automation of the world around him and his country’s complete disregard for the places where he grew up go hand in hand. Throwing good men out of work circuit by circuit and swipe by swipe.
He avoids swiping now. It’s one of Mother’s many rules.
Cash only. Nothing traceable in the days leading up to a snatch. That includes his ticket to the 7:15 p.m. showing of Sister Trip.
Another rule: wear clothes that hide the bulk of your figure. Nothing so ridiculous as a trench coat and sunglasses. More like light waffle-print coats and baggy hooded sweaters, even when it’s a touch too warm out to justify the outfit. The whole world’s got cameras now, she constantly reminds them, and your figure can give away as much about you as your face. And she’s right. Cameras and automated ticket machines and those QR code things you can read on your phones. It’s like humans are trying to get rid of everything that requires effort. And that’s a shame. He’s found great peace in his efforts. But he didn’t find it alone.
Dressed in a button-front leather coat and a Dallas Cowboys baseball cap, Cyrus walks through the entrance to the AMC NorthPark Center, leaving the cheerful buzz of the shopping mall behind him. The crowd’s thick, but it’s not quite what he’d hoped. The movie business is also changing. He’d read an article just the other day that said the type of film he’d been using for years now, the “chick flick,” they called it, was showing up in theaters less and less. These online companies, the streamers, they called them, were making them so women could just sit at home on their sofas and watch one right after the other. No driving to the theater, no parking. No running into a man like him.
That was all well and good, he guessed, but it made it all that much harder for him to find new seedlings.
Used to be he could hit a multiplex on any given weekend and there’d be at least three or four to choose from. Movies about wedding planners who finally find love. Movies about sisters finding ways to get along that also snag them new boyfriends. Movies where the majority of the audience was women, most of them alone, some in the company of reluctant husbands and boyfriends and, more recently, homo friends, who seemed just as interested in the movie as they were.
But for the past three weeks there’s been only one film in wide release that fits the bill. He’d call it meaningless, but it’s so packed full of twisted, damaging messages about what it means to be a woman, he can’t dismiss it so easily. It’s called Sister Trip. The plot concerns three sisters who go on a road trip together. At every stop along the way, their inappropriate loudmouth behavior is rewarded with either new friends or degrading sex they pretend to enjoy. In the end, they finally make it to the lookout point where they’re supposed to throw their grandmother’s ashes off a cliff, but not before disrespecting almost every man they come across and pretty much disrupting the natural order of things everywhere they go.
He’d much rather see a film in which all three sisters came across a man like him out in the dark, a man confident enough to break their spines. But while plenty of women attend those kinds of films, plenty of men do, too, so that’s a no go.
A small popcorn and a soda, which he pays for in cash. Then he keeps his head down as he makes his way through the thicket of moviegoers in between him and his theater. It’s like the crowd’s moving in four different directions. Another second or two and he realizes that’s exactly the case; they’re all staring at their phones as they walk, most of them completely unaware of where they’re headed.
When he arrives at the red velour seat he picked out when he