FOMO

By William Auten

Today at ten in the morning, Mr. Snickerdoodle isn’t having much to do with the scenery and the commotion and the crew and the props passing back and forth in front of him so many times that neither his tawny eyes nor his tufted ears can keep up with electrified people and things scurrying to and from various places, at least not where he sits, stressed out, having plopped himself on his rear end in a kind of protest, tail convulsing, dropping down onto the dusty floor, the smoke-black tip never touching the ground, tail sharply rising again in a spasm whenever voices shout or wheels squeak or metal clanks metal or another backdrop painted like an evening rattles by.

With Studio Six freezing, the warm mid-morning sun, in which he would typically lounge at this time of day, locked and shuttered outside the door and windows, it’s safe to say he really isn’t up to snuff for his shoot. The concrete ground is ice cold. His paws had to navigate debris that he’s never felt or smelled before. The moat of green-yellow artificial lights surrounding him hums and buzzes and hums and buzzes. Static hovered over him no matter what parts of the room he had started retreating into but then retreated from his retreat. Bit of a confused mood he’s in, but it’s hard to tell, given that his face is perpetually frozen in a state of adorably smashed confusion. His cooperation skills smolder on a low kindle, not the level of amenable warmth his trainers had promised in the contract. The turquoise-inlay bolo tie looped around his neck isn’t helping the situation.

For about twenty minutes, Mr. S has preened and pranced around the outside of the communal litter box until, finally, Ken clued in on the number of Mr. S’s drive-bys on his vanilla-caramel-ice-cream-swirl legs, drifting back and forth under the edges of Ken’s phone, and his refusal to step into the litter box’s dry spots sans lumps, of which there are several because Karen scooped it clean after the first round of filming involving Mr. S’s co-stars who weren’t any more excited to be here but have been more willing to participate in what pays the bills and puts food on the table for Karen and Ken and keeps employees, such as Mr. S, off the streets, out of the shelters, and away from irresponsible owners, as well as from population control, the euphemism for a terminal end.

By 10:37, Ken places a separate, personal, and private litter box for Mr. S off the soundstage, away from the lights and cameras, in the darkness at the back of the filming area and near the food table. “Don’t worry,” Ken says to the catering coordinator, scrunching his nose as he tries alleviating her concerned look and passive-aggressive protest by bypassing her apprehension altogether, “He probably won’t touch it. Fish is more his thing. He had breakfast before we left.” Extending her fingers inside the body bags of her disposable gloves, the catering coordinator tenses her right shoulder up to her gauge earring and black pixie haircut again, as she did just a few seconds ago, agreeing to this and him by not fully agreeing to this and him, and asks, again, by not directly asking, if this is really a good place for him to be in. “Him” being Mr. S, though she never says that. And “this” being the catering table glistening under the studio’s back row of artificial lights, far away from the filming action of the tightly packed studio, the table’s plastic surface methodically layered with drop cloths, napkins, plastic cups and utensils, and omnivore, vegetarian, and vegan options. The golden Chinchilla Persian looks up at the catering coordinator as she tries ignoring him and slides a tray of red-dusted deviled eggs and deli meats away from the edge and his tawny line of sight. She glances down at Mr. S again. Perpetual sad and adorable look in return from the cat. With her hip, the catering coordinator taps the tray a little deeper into the middle of the table, one more time.

Aware of a change to his situation but keeping his uninterrupted look of natural bewilderment on his face, Mr. Snickerdoodle cocks his head at Ken, casting his eyes up at the animal wrangler, and then sinks his head down towards the litter box before reluctantly and delicately stepping into the litter like a sharply dressed passenger squeezing in between two malodorous drunks on the subway for the last available seat on a long ride home following an all-day string of kill-the-messenger meetings, phone calls, and e-mails. “See?” Ken says, smirking at Mr. S, “Not so bad, you little sh…” Ken cuts of his own profanity-laced response as he chokes on a clump of brownies, roasted turkey, and sharp cheddar rolling down his throat.

It’s still early in day one of the next episode in this new direct-to-Web series, the bulk of the filming to come in the mid-morning, just before noon, when all the animals involved, human and feline, can focus better, but it’s already been a long two-and-a-half hours for the two-person outfit of Push Paws, one of Hollywood’s leading supplier of animal actors. “I can see why Dad got out,” Ken mumbles as he catches a grinding look from his sister who is on the soundstage and handling some of the other cats. After wiping his stunned and food-crusted mouth, Ken chases his snack break with a few gulps of dark-roast coffee, cream, no sugar, and tongues out any remaining brownies, smoked turkey, and sharp cheddar from his front teeth before clearing his throat and, one last time, eyeing Mr. Snickerdoodle, who winds himself round and round in the litter box, unable to land on any spot available only for him. “Hey…,” Ken says, tapping the box with the toe of his onyx and volt-green Crocs. Smashed-face confusion as a response from Mr. S who stops following the end of his own tail and tracks in the sand to momentarily look up. “Don’t go anywhere,” Ken says, throwing away his napkin, hiking up the belt to the underside of his bulbous belly, and stuffing a water bottle in the back pocket of his khakis before walking back onto the edge of where the film lights end and the next scene is waiting to begin.

The director with round mauve-tinted glasses and a headful of lush brown hair, slicked back in a power ponytail, emphasizes that this shot needs to be treated like it’s just another day, another dollar at the rollicking saloon a few blocks off Main Street and near Miss Citronella’s brothel and the boardinghouses for the migrant workers that, as the digital series unfolds, Mayor Thelma set up for the hard-working cats new to the area and its hills filled with silver and opportunity but unfortunately continues to attract dogs of all shapes and sizes, led by a lethargic French bulldog appropriately named Butterball.

For the upcoming interior shot of P.H. Ticklebottom’s saloon, Karen tries to get LC (Lil’ Concordia) positioned at the end of the old timey piano where Prescott, swiveling ever so slightly on the leather stool, scatters his yellow eyes back and forth across the horizon, waiting for what will be his cue to slide his fat orange head down the keys in the middle of a Stephen Foster classic, marking most of the ivories with his scent in one clanging swoop. Karen motions to Ken, who waves back to his sister. She waits for him to move. He eventually does, putting down his phone, slowly stepping onto the set, and picking up the pace of his last two steps when he makes eye contact with her. “Get them, please. We’re ready,” she says, being conscious of softening her voice with him, as she throws her sweaty forehead to the two blue kennels behind her.

Backlit by the soundstage lights, her five-foot-ten, Art Garfunkel–haired brother, who’s very much into the TRX sessions down at PCH Athletic Club, although they have yet to give him the results he wants, sighs, unglues his finger from his phone, stalls on his way to open the first kennel, phone still in hand, and then sighs again, cheeks puffing out, as he puts away his phone and opens the first kennel’s and then the other kennel’s gate so the two shorthairs, one shaded silver with amber eyes and, the other, a calico, can scamper out and stretch before Ken wrestles them in position at one end of the bar, placing their hats and vests and badges on top of the bar crowded with a cigar, a deck of playing cards, and a few shot glasses topped off with watered-down cola. He loads the toy plastic guns with a smoke emitter handed to him by the propmaster, the second one after Ken cracked the hammer of the first while fast-drawing the plastic revolvers from his own fleshy hip and muttering, “Draw, you mangy varmint.”

Watching her brother stumble with the basic work she’s asked of him, Karen glowers before bringing her mind to a positive image she’s been clinging to since earlier this year. Thinking about singing some of her favorite rock songs eases where she is, who she’s with, and where she has emotionally been the past few months, this image of her swaying on a stage in front of a crowd and, awash in a spectrum of all the colored lights she can imagine, having dusted off her devil rock-horns and polished up her voice, which last made an appearance at Tweety’s Thursday night karaoke in Playa Del Rey shortly after the fourth of July and right before her son became very quiet and unusually solitary.

Deputy Hamburger sliding from Ken’s arms like wet pizza dough onto the saloon’s moon-lit floor rips apart the image of her belting an outro chorus. “Come here, you little…” Karen hears her brother curse as he scrunches the scruff of the calico and slings the unhappy tornado of a feline back into the middle of the saloon. “Fiver,” he shouts to her, walking off the stage, opens a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and whips out his phone while dousing his bleeding hand.

Karen inhales deeply and exhales even more deeply because she would love to step off the soundstage and have just one of her brother’s incessant five-minute breaks he returns to here and there, several already this Monday morning. She knows her brother’s fivers are mainly to catch up on his dating-app profile or, as he swears, his job searches, but Karen knows it’s mainly his dating-app profile because not only has the financial well gone dry for her brother but also the romantic well. She knows she needs to bring up the amount of time he spends on his dating app, and at the TRX studio, for which she has agreed to pay, given that she can’t afford to pay him a salary, and the lack of time spent searching for a job in the recovering California real-estate market, perhaps getting his old one back at Valley Homes, but she can’t just yet. She knows that he helps with Russ and is pitching in at work until she cleans up their father’s accounts and sells Push Paws or until Ken lands on his feet.

But buddy Chuck isn’t helping. Ken has talked nonstop about his buddy Chuck encouraging Ken to be “so honest, so real” with his dating profile that no lady would ever swipe left and that this kind of brash confidence would unleash his desired effects in the most important areas of his life—“all of them,” according to Chuck. Which area, exactly? Which one? Karen has said to herself, rolling her eyes at this because the advice, which Ken seems to be tightrope-walking blindfolded, is from Chuck; Chuck whom Karen has known when he and Ken started hanging out together as freshmen in high school and have not separated since, both boys reaching their respective and yet shared peaks, topping off, circa the state football quarterfinals against Ventura High twenty years ago and at the season-ending party at Tío Loco Tacos; Chuck whose sole purpose in life, then and now, is “to make bank” and “keep my metab crazy up.” At one stop in Karen’s life, this was cute and endearing and naïve, putting up with the juvenile antics of her younger brother’s friends, but the years have refashioned her innocence even though she refuses to accept the age that has wrapped around her, pressing her so tightly at times that the colors of life in front of her have palled.

And yet, herself shocked at this admittance, Karen reluctantly and privately admits that this advice from Chuck has stuck with her since she heard it from Ken shortly after he had to move in with her and Russ. “So honest, so real.” And yet, with the sounds of high-octane singing and electric-guitar solos in her head dying out like a star, she wants more than a fiver to catch her breath after all the four-legged wrangling, hair balls, meowing, and in one of the corners of Studio Six right before filming started, a cat-on-cat accident involving Mick Jagger and Leo, the two big-boy velvets who don’t put up with anything or anyone else, especially when they are in the same room together. She catches the grey colors spreading in her head and sees the image of her singing on stage, a candle flickering in this grey.

“You OK?” she forces through a smile, mouthing it to her brother as a cutout full moon on a painted night sky with baying coyotes rolls behind her. Ken tilts his bandaged thumb up before looking back at his phone.

Returning to the soundstage, her sleepy-eyed brother dresses Deputy Hamburger, looks over him once more, and after Karen’s gentle nudge, apologizes to the cat while he creases the calico’s collar, flattening the forest-green vest and re-looping the gold watch on one of the vest’s buttons. The good deputy looks straight ahead into the lights, and yawns. Ken rests Sherriff Pantaloons’ paws on the toy gun’s handle. Ken takes several pictures with his phone, snickering at the shaded-silver polydactyl ready to smoke that six-bullet wheelhouse holstered low on his hindquarters.

“Is he good to go?” Karen asks her brother, motioning to the spot of furry light circling, stopping, and circling in the litter box near the catering table. She tightens her two knee pads and kneels behind the bar, prepping the area where Mr. S will stand while Ken or Karen move his front leg back and forth over the bar, cloth in one paw, sliding a mug of watered-down beer with the other.

Ken shrugs. “Yeah, I think so.” Aiming Sheriff Pantaloons’ other toy gun at the saloon’s fake-wood floor, he looks down the sight and makes several gunshot sounds, quaking his lips as the aftershock.

“Hey…,” his sister exasperates, swiping the incoming streaks of grey in her brown hair off her face with her wrist, dragging with them sweat and some makeup, “You think so or you know so?” She finds a smile, digs it out, and gives it to him.

“I’ll check,” Ken sends a delayed response to her and pushes himself up with the help of the bar, knocking it so far out of place that the L-shaped masking tape underneath is exposed. He waddles over to the catering table and the private litter box where Mr. S has yet to deposit anything.

At the sound of the bar having screeched across the floor, the director looks up from his laptop and sniffles, the mauve lenses bouncing up and down, power ponytail not moving. “We need Props in here…again,” he radios in, staring blankly at Karen one more time before returning to his keyboard.

Behind the bar, Karen swallows hard and flops down, close to crying but not wanting to roll herself in her emotions, especially on the first day of shooting, which now feels way too soon. Her teeth have quickly accumulated another yellow coat from the amount of coffee she has consumed and the time she hasn’t made for brushing them. But she has made time for this production and its demands and prepping for it the last several days, mostly on her own, though Ken was present, lounging in a chair at Push Paws’ office, helpful when asked to help out but not helping on his own. She has had to pour all she has psychologically left into the business she inherited from her retired parents, struggling week by week to pick up more opportunities, wherever the scraps may lie, and move them, even as the rows of green lights in front of her life turn yellow and red, while also having to deal with Russ’ evolution from isolation and withdrawal, from all social activities at home and school a few weeks ago, to pinching his classmates on the cheek, often so repetitively and aggressively that he leaves bruises, having started with pinches on the face but has, according to his fourth-grade teacher, moved to “other parts of the body.” Ms. Gutierrez and Karen agreed that, all other factors remaining mostly constant in Russ’ life, the death of Marcus must be the root.

It was Karen’s decision to put down their cat, but she wanted Russ to be part of that decision, a family decision. She wanted him to understand that Marcus had a good life but that it wasn’t the same for him anymore, that the things he loved to do with Russ, the things Russ loved to do with him, the purring, the lap-sitting, the playing with string and a ball loaded with catnip, had faded away. She used the phrase “quality of life.” She explained that phrase as best she could. She tried reusing some of the phrases that her father had told her the first time she had experienced this very thing, repeating what her father emphasized. “One of the family.” Not merely a pet. She said what she could, altering a few words, removing or replacing others, flattening the phrases and their meanings, placing the meanings and the sentiments firmly on Earth, nowhere else, not above, as she had once believed. Russ nodded and then ran away, slamming the door to his room. After several minutes, Uncle Ken put down his phone and knocked on his nephew’s door.

That night she thought of her father who had always told her that animals are not afraid to die. “We need to help them, however we can, when they’re at that point,” he said as the two of them stood over the body of her first cat. She was a year younger than Russ, and she asked her father about heaven for animals, about the souls of animals, about what the Bible says about animals, about God and Jesus and the animals. “I’d like to think so,” her father answered before kissing her on top of her head. “We’re responsible for them. We outlive them.” And then afterwards, idling in the parking lot of the vet’s, they both could not stop laughing. Her father retold the old family joke that Fergs, when he was a kitten, was supposed to be a dirty-snow-white cat, but he couldn’t shuffle off his tabby coat in time. They were stuck with him that way because he was stuck in it.

And so sitting behind the bar of a saloon filled with cats, dressed in period costumes, meowing and hissing and surrendering to the faux-wood floor, and the grunting sounds of two beefy props guys pushing the bar back onto the L-shape pieces of masking tape, the gas lamps inside the saloon flickering on and off, the cutout moon on a painted sky rolling into place behind the saloon’s front window, the image that asks her to step out of this infinite maze of grey is the upcoming trip to Dave Duvall’s Rock N Roll Fantasy Camp. And yet, it too is quickly fading, losing its brightly colored voice. She would let everything that’s in front of her unwind: her brother, her son, even the two-month contract to work on Old West Cat Town that’s keeping the family business and the thirty-year legacy of her parents vibrant for a little longer. One part of her wants to follow the string leading out of the neutral-colored maze enclosed around her. And yet, another part of her knows that she should stay where she is, inside the cold colors coming on their own, falling, one after another, as they sometimes, and often, do, the landslide of cold colors that can’t be stopped, the quiet witnesses of ordinary days.

If she could, she’d let this all uncoil at the entrance of the camp she’s been eyeing ever since Double D himself, older, bloated, less hair, less makeup and lip gloss, reunited with his old band for the final reunion tour, announced on his Web site the dates for his rock camp. Space Is Limited! Sign Up NOW! And so she did, listening on loop to Destination’s “Chose or Lose,” the power love-ballad that MetalMemories.com says, “remains the one-hit wonder’s biggest and best, and puts bad-boy Duvall’s soft side on full display,” that song that had bewitching effects on the teenage Karen, the tones and lyrics about corporal wishes, shadows taking over, a red light diffusing in the shadows.

Entering her credit card info, her pulse spiked that night, like it did the first time she secretly listened to this kind of music, old ache in her heart, old desire, old seizure, the music squeezing her, and she wrote a list of the songs she would want to perform, all these songs that had been banned when she was teenage Karen Elizabeth, except for one song and one band that her parents had approved. She had told Siri to make a new note reminding her of the dates for Dave Duvall Rock N Roll fantasy camp. Siri complied, saving the event as Dave Dubai Rick Roll Camp.

One of the gas lamps pops, causing the cats that hadn’t already flopped to the floor during the break to army-crawl across the ground. Sherriff Pantaloons scampers into the kennel, and Prescott runs his fat orange head over the piano keys. Hand on hip and scratching his eyebrow, the director calls for a lunch break so Props can fix the lamp and so production can regroup afterwards. He casts one more stare at Karen before grabbing his coffee cup, avoiding a row of tin-foil stars ready to dangle between the nightscape and P.H. Ticklebottom’s windows, and steps into the sunlight, the studio’s metal door slamming behind him.

Ken plops down next to his sister. “Whew…,” his chubby cheeks expand, “l-o-n-g day.” He swipes on his phone.

Karen closes her eyes as she exhales.

“You sticking with Maiden?”

“What?”

“Your band camp.”

“I changed it, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not going now.”

Unfazed, Ken continues, “You could completely stun them with ‘Run to the Hills.’” Ken looks down. “That’d be so real,” his voice drifts towards his phone.

Karen sighs, looks at her brother, and then looks away. “I was actually thinking about singing a Stryper song.”

“What?” His face glued to his screen.

“Stryper. ‘Always There for You.’”

Lifting his head away from the phone, Ken can’t keep a straight face. “Stryper?”

“Yeah…,” she glances at him and then looks straight into the tubers of cats lounging and sleeping all over the saloon. “I like the lyrics. They’re open. They can mean something different to each person.”

“OK…cool.” He looks back down. After a few seconds, he looks back up. “Stryper.” Several seconds of his fingers swiping away. “We haven’t listened to them in, like, forever. Really? Them?” he turns his phone horizontally. “They’re not even real metal.”

“They are too. They sound metal.”

“Power-pop-keyboard-watered-down metal. Not re-al metal.”

“You’re one to talk, Nickelback.”

“They’re rock, not metal,” Ken quickly counters, thumbs punching away on the keypad. “I like their attitude. Plus, Stryper? That was so long ago when we went to church. It was the only thing they’d let us listen to back then.”

Karen watches Ken use his white Push Paws polo shirt to clean his phone’s screen, dragging the brightly lit Web page of a portfolio of women closer to the logo of a dog, cat, horse, and lizard. “Look them up,” she says, nodding to his phone.

“No, I remember what they look like. Yellow and black leather. Sparkly. Way too clean. Bible verse everywhere you turned.”

“No, the song…the lyrics. It’s only ‘you’ and ‘I’ in that whole song. Nothing else. Nothing preach-y. Love, loneliness, the world closing its door. You can sing it to whoever,” she shrugs. “Besides, the tune is pretty jammin’.”

After a few more minutes of selecting about five women from his search results, Ken says, “You practiced so hard, too.”

Karen looks at him and then at Mr. Snickerdoodle who has finally dropped double-duty in his own private litter box but continues to circle himself, looking adorably remorseful and confused because he can’t quite figure out what to do with the small turd clinging to his fluffy back leg.

“I heard you in the shower and in the car every morning waiting on me. You totally sound like Dickinson,” Ken raises his fist in the air, voice in vibrato. The director walks by them, flops his power ponytail, and then turns back around just before Deputy Hamburger can weave his leg. “Plus you were crushing so much tea and honey. Your voice was so ready…so real,” Ken swipes his phone. After a few more minutes of silence, he says, “Just…you know….” Her brother takes his time, sucking in air for big breaths and letting them out with a wallop from his gut. “If you want…you know…if you change your mind and want to go, I’ll watch Russ. I got all this,” he motions to the cats starting to knock over glasses and props in the saloon.

Karen looks into the fake nightscape.

A few more minutes of silence pass. “You don’t have to miss out,” Ken says, flipping his phone back to vertical, scrunching his nose at a photo of a dark-haired woman, eyeing her neck all the way down to her low-cut top. “Chuck says…”

“Chuck says…,” Karen’s voice blends into her brother’s and then fades off with her smirk and an eye-roll as Chuck’s Google+ profile of him finger-gun-pointing to his lifted shirt and abs underneath appears in her head.

“Yeah, it’s his new thing. Making stuff so real, so honest, not missing out. They go hand in hand, you know? So, if you change your mind…,” he shrugs.

Karen remains focused on the gas lamps dimming, night forced on in the saloon.

After a few minutes of his fingers working their fleshy magic over his greasy keypad, Ken cranes his neck down more towards his phone. “Stryper. Yeah, OK, it is a good song. Nothing too heavy. OK, yeah…I can see why you’d do that. That’d be so real.” He closes the tabs with the video and lyrics and returns to his scrolling.

Half-smiling, Karen continues looking into the false nightlife assembling in front of her, a generic moon and generic stars shaped by someone’s generic hands. In the light of her bedroom, she sees her suitcase, the dent it’s making in the memory-foam mattress, lying there, waiting to be unpacked, waiting to be moved in the opposite direction she had first wanted, time waiting to be spun out of her. Hard-shell, navy blue bordering on black, a red collar wrapped around the handle, next to her contact info, so she would know it’s not a stranger’s but hers to take.

William Auten is the author of the novel Pepper’s Ghost (2016, Black Rose Writing), a 2017 Eric Hoffer Book Award finalist for contemporary fiction. Recent work has appeared in Bluestem, BULL, Gravel, the museum of americana, and Permafrost.