Travis D. Roberson
Editor’s Note: This piece has brief allusions to suicide/self harm. Please read with care.
Disciples of Buster
Call them the Disciples of Buster. This is their pilgrimage.
1,924 steps down into the belly of the earth, where their sanctuary, their church—The Nickelodeon—awaits. They dream of this moment: the day they meet The Projectionist and elect their eternity.
The Projectionist is not a prophet. Disciples don't believe in that kind of thing. This is not a religion, even if it might seem that way. The Projectionist came up with the idea, inspired by the actor whose name they borrowed for their movement. Surely you've seen the film. If the answer is no, then what have you been doing all this time—watching Youtube? That's what Steph would have said. The movie's called Sherlock Jr. and Buster Keaton is who I'm talking about. You know who he is, right? Neither did I. Until I met Steph.
Buster plays a projectionist in the movie. The whole thing's silent, black and white. What do you expect from a movie that came out in 1924? That's where The Projectionist got the idea for the amount of steps a Disciple has to conquer to get down to The Nickelodeon—1,924, the year Buster's film hit theaters. Or whatever passed for an AMC in those days. Anyway, Buster's projectionist has dreams of becoming a great detective. That's the key word: dreams. He's up in the projector booth one day and dozes off. Next thing you know, his spirit is standing there, amazed that he's somehow managed to detach himself from his own body. And this Ghost Buster, he goes ambling up the aisle of the theater, a little perplexed by the whole affair. Then he's climbing into the screen. The audience, they seem unaware of the miracle before their eyes, the way the images Buster's trapped inside keep changing. One second he's rolling on a city street, nearly getting wiped out by a speeding car. The next second he's trapped between two male lions, trying to not end up as their next meal.
That might sound a little frightening, but the scene gave The Projectionist an idea. Back before he built The Nickelodeon down in the sewers, he worked at The Museum of Light and Sound—the kind of respected institution that frowns on superhero flicks and mid-film snacking and shows five hour long Cambodian films. The Projectionist had projected Sherlock Jr. so many times he lost count. The museum even invited a piano player to give the film a live soundtrack during screenings. It was the five hundredth time, or the thousandth, and The Projectionist was up there in his pitch black roost, once more watching Buster fall asleep and wander into the silver screen, and he thought, I've projected so much celluloid, but I've never projected myself.
That's how the Disciples tell the story—how Steph told it—and that's how I'll tell it to you. Why go on watching movies when you can choose to disappear inside them?
If you're journeying the sewers like me—tackling the 1,924 steps—The Fundamentals of Astral Projection is one of two items you're required to bring with you. To join the Disciples of Buster, The Projectionist mandates you read the book cover-to-cover at least three times—study it, know it, practice projection before you ever attempt a pilgrimage to The Nickelodeon. Astral Projection (Disciples call it AP) doesn't come easy. You'll fail more times than you succeed. It took me a solid eight months of practicing to ever pull it off. I felt like Buster in Sherlock Jr.—all of a sudden I was somewhere else and that somewhere wasn't my body. But there was no movie screen for me to climb inside. Instead, I just floated there, pressed against the ceiling of my apartment, staring down at my unconscious self on the sofa. I had never looked so peaceful.
After that, I started AP'ing all the time just to prove I could. On bus rides. At work, when I should have been doing anything other than evacuating my body. Late at night, after I got home, I'd lay in bed, close my eyes, and set my intention on the same place again and again. Peeling out of my chest and arms, I'd float out the 4th story window of my apartment building and drift across town. I never did anything more than hover in Steph's apartment. It was empty by then, scratches on the parquet floor revealing where her bookshelves and bed used to be. When a new couple moved in I stopped AP'ing there.
On step 748 I decide to take a break. I'm not sure how long I've been walking, but the muscles in my calves keep score. All the steps have a number carved into them so you can keep track of your journey and how much farther you have before you reach The Nickelodeon. I'm alone for a while, listening to the sound of sewage running through the guts of the city above me, when an elderly couple hobbles out of the darkness, their arms hooked together.
“Mind if we take a breather with you?” the wife says.
“Go ahead,” I say, motioning to the empty space next to me.
They ease down onto the rough concrete and lace their hands together. I watch from the corner of my eye while they pass a canteen back and forth. The elderly man reaches into his backpack and produces a copy of The Fundamentals of Astral Projection. “Done any reading?” he says.
“Not today,” I tell him. I'm afraid to admit I broke one of The Projectionist's cardinal rules: I left my copy of the book at home.
His wife nudges him with her elbow. “Cleve, let her relax.”
Cleve rolls his eyes in a playful way. “There's nothing wrong with a little conversation, Vera. We're all sitting here, aren't we?”
“I'm sorry, dear,” Vera says to me, flashing a row of white teeth.
“Really, it's okay.”
The sound of flowing water punctuates the silence between us. When I first started my trek down the 1,924 steps, the water's rank smell infiltrated my nose; I considered turning back. This is another of The Projectionist's tests—can you endure the stench? Are you dedicated enough to abandon all discomforts? Does The Nickelodeon mean that much to you.
I take a Slim Jim out of my backpack and go to chewing. Not sure if a meat stick with the ingredient MECHANICALLY SEPARATED CHICKEN was the best snack to bring with me, but it seemed like the right choice when I was packing. The thing with braving the steps, it's not like scaling a mountain or running a marathon. There's no seasoned vets out there on YouTube providing recommendations on the best approach. The steps are a one way trip. If you're successful in your pilgrimage, you don't return from The Nickelodeon.
Halfway through the Slim Jim, Cleve asks me another question. “What's your top five?” Vera nudges him again. He swats her elbow away.
“Excuse me?” I say, swallowing.
He studies my blank expression and elaborates, “You know, your top five favorite films.”
“Oh.” I ball up the empty Slim Jim wrapper and stuff it into the side pocket on my backpack. Cleve looks disappointed when I shrug. “I can't say I'm much of a film buff.”
My answer piques Vera's interest. “What do you mean?”
“I never really got into movies. I watch a lot of YouTube.”
Cleve makes a face like he's got bad indigestion. “I'm sorry, dear,” he says, “and I hope you don't take offense to this or anything because you seem like a nice enough girl, but if cinema isn't really your thing, then what exactly are you doing here? This doesn't seem like the pilgrimage for you.”
I don't take offense because Cleve's got a point. This confession of mine is the main reason I've avoided getting trapped in conversation with Disciples I've encountered.
“Don't get me wrong,” I say, “I watched all the movies on The Projectionist's syllabus. I liked a lot of them. My fiance—she was more of the film buff. I saw a lot of stuff because of her.”
“So you've seen Sherlock Jr,” Vera says.
“Never thought I'd like a movie with no sound.”
Vera nods her approval. “I guess we all come to The Projectionist in our own way.”
I can tell my answers bother them. Cleve and Vera no longer have the warm, welcoming demeanor they had before. They gather their things, pass the canteen one more time, and sling their backpacks over their shoulders.
“Well,” Cleve says, “good luck on your pilgrimage. I'd say we'll see you down in The Nickelodeon but—” He knows he doesn't have to finish the sentence.
“What did you both pick?” I ask.
The question coaxes a smile out of Cleve. He flips his backpack around and unzips it.
“We picked the same film,” Vera explains. “We plan on going together.”
This is the second item The Projectionist requires you to bring on your pilgrimage—the film you plan on sealing your soul inside. Format does not matter, he claims. Cleve seems ready to put that to the test. He produces something that looks like an old vinyl record. Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck. Roman Holiday. I've never seen it.
Cleve grins deviously. “Laserdisc,” he says.
I've seen fellow pilgrims with VHS tapes and DVDs, USB drives, even a few film reels—but this is the first laserdisc I've encountered.
“Think he can project it?” Cleve says, with an eagerness that reveals he almost hopes to foil The Projectionist.
“No format can challenge The Projectionist,” I say, reciting one of Disciples' tenets.
Cleve and Vera smile. This is the answer they wanted to hear. I stay on step 748 a while longer, allowing them a head start to ensure we won't cross paths again. When I can't hear footsteps or murmurs anymore, I start moving.
1,176 steps to go.
I wonder how long it took Steph to make the pilgrimage, how many breaks she took and what kinds of snacks she brought with her. She loathed the smell of my prescription nasal spray, so how did she ever put up with the stench of flowing sewage?
Movies brought me and Steph together. In a sense. I worked the ticket desk at The Museum of Light and Sound. Steph paid the annual fee asked of all museum members, which gave her the privilege of unlimited access to every screening the museum put on. She came in once a week to catch whatever we were showing and always smiled at me when I handed her her ticket. Before I fell in love with her, I fell in love with that smile, the way she habitually tucked her strawberry hair behind her ear. She came in one stormy July afternoon soaked with rain and asked for a ticket to our screening of The Wizard of Oz, hair dripping water on the floor while she waited for me to print her ticket. Steph smiled like she always did when I passed her the ticket, but this time she looked down at the ticket like it was something important—money or a birth certificate.
“I've never seen it on the big screen. It's my favorite.”
She'd never offered so much about herself in our brief exchanges before, so I felt the need to reciprocate. I confessed to her I'd never seen The Wizard of Oz.
“Seriously?” she blurted, blinking water out of her eyes. “You work in a film museum.”
I shrugged. “All I do is print the tickets.”
Steph grinned. Most of the time when I admitted to not having seen Star Wars or The Godfather or The Wizard of Oz, it was met with so much ire and disbelief from whoever I told that I ended up annoyed. People like pretending that you must have been raised in a bunker just because you haven't seen a movie they cherish. As if life is nothing but a long series of rep screenings and Blu-Ray menus. With Steph, though, I didn't feel that way. She wasn't judging me. She was excited to meet someone who had never seen her favorite movie, to share the joy it brought her with others.
“We should change that some time,” she said. “I doubt you'd want to come to work on a day off just to see a movie, though. There's always the DVD at my apartment.”
A week later we got drinks before we went back to her place and sank into her big sofa. Steph had a TV that took up an entire wall, hooked to speakers I'm sure her downstairs neighbors loathed. I sat next to her, sipping cheap wine, and watched The Wizard of Oz for the first time. She made me wait until the credits rolled before I could go down on her. We kept this routine up during the early days of our relationship: Steph invited me over to show me a film she adored, and then I'd show her the tricks I knew with my tongue. It's not that I didn't like the movies she showed me. I just liked Steph a lot more.
Her apartment became more of a home for me than my actual cramped studio. Things accumulated. Hairbrushes and underwear. My special sulfate-free toothpaste. Laying naked in the dark in Steph's bed, our bodies exchanging warmth, we divulged the intricacies of our lives. I told Steph about the car accident when I was 7, how it robbed me of a mother and father and forced my grandparents into raising me. Steph told me about her mental breakdown when she was 19, the suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization. I still cherish those vulnerable moments, free of clothes and emotional armor.
I wasn't scared off by the amber pill bottle Steph kept on her kitchen counter. Everyone was on meds these days. At least she was taking care of herself. What scared me were the long stretches of despondency, when the only way I could interact with her was sitting next her while she watched a movie. Steph disappeared inside herself for months at a time, barely speaking besides a few one word answers. She lost herself in lives she imagined as better, staring blankly at her TV and imagining she was Dorothy Gale or Amélie.
It makes sense she fell for The Projectionist's teachings. We were walking down the sidewalk one night when a copy of The Fundamentals of Astral Projection fell out of her bag. I picked it up and laughed at the title. “What is this?”
Steph snatched it away. “Nothing.”
One night I woke up and rolled over. Steph was still awake, her face bathed in artificial light while she scrolled through the Disciples of Buster's Instagram page.
“I know him,” I said, blinking at a blurry photo she scrolled past.
“The Projectionist?”
“Yeah, from the museum.”
It seemed like a lot of hokum back then. I didn't start taking it seriously until she disappeared. Her family went wild, came to the city demanding answers from me but I had none to give. After a while, even the police threw their hands up. “Sometimes people leave and don't want to be found,” a detective told me. It wasn't until afterward that I connected the dots. I don't know why I never told anybody. Probably because they would never believe me. I know how crazy it all sounds.
Now, here I am. Standing on step 1,924. The Nickelodeon glitters before me, adorned in a hundred old-fashioned bulbs that burn off the sewer's darkness with halos of gold. Film posters paper the walls surrounding an empty glass ticket booth. On either side of The Nickelodeon hang drain pipes spewing green water into a black pool around it. The Nickelodeon looks like a place out of time, some lost temple trapped beneath the earth centuries ago.
What The Projectionist doesn't teach his Disciples—what I learned from a YouTube video—is that back in the early 1900s, during the heyday of nickelodeons, the cheap theaters lured patrons in with flashy facades. But beyond the ornamented exteriors, a nickelodeon didn't offer much. Bare walls and uncomfortable wooden seats. As I pull open a door with a brass-plated handle, I discover The Projectionist has kept with tradition: the same old concrete walls that have entombed me for the past seven hours. Arrows painted on the walls direct me to the projection booth. My feet splash through puddles of stagnant water, soaking my sneakers. Before The Projectionist moved in down here, this place was a control room of some kind. A steel door speckled with rust bears the words PROJECTION BOOTH, scribbled over a faded sign that once read DEPARTMENT OF SANITATION. I knock once—twice—and the door creaks open.
The man standing before me is exactly who I remember from the museum. That quiet weirdo with his silver ponytail and round eyeglasses. He scratches at a chin littered in gray stubble. The Projectionist grunts and motions me inside.
The door clangs shut behind me. I'm not sure what to focus on, the massive projector in front of me, its lens angled into a hole carved out of the wall, or the two bodies on the floor, covered by white sheets. A wrinkled hand with hairy knuckles poking out from one of the sheets tells me its Cleve, meaning the smaller body next to him is Vera. “Sorry,” The Projectionist says, motioning to the cadavers. “I didn't expect another Disciple to get down here so soon.”
“They already AP'd?” I ask.
“Go ahead,” he motions towards the projector, its mechanical intestines clicking and whirring, “take a look.”
I approach the hole cut into the wall, monitoring The Projectionist from the corner of my eye. He hangs back, wringing his hands. Below the booth is a vinyl screen stretched between two metal poles, held there by duct tape and zip ties. This is what the Disciples of Buster make their pilgrimage for: this chapel of secondhand junk. Black and white images flash across the screen. Thanks to Steph making me sit through To Kill a Mockingbird and Breakfast at Tiffany's, I recognize Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. The two stars motor through the streets of Rome on a scooter, Audrey's lithe arms wrapped around Gregory's sturdy waist. I've never seen the movie but that doesn't mean I can't spot something that shouldn't belong. A scooter pulls up alongside them. The riders mounted on the scooter look too crisp to belong in this picture. They're grinning at Peck and Hepburn like they're the celebrities they were and not characters in a film. Cleve and Vera. They did it—interred themselves in the laserdisc spinning inside the projector. I back away and bump into The Projectionist.
“What do you do with them?” I say, pointing at the soulless bodies on the floor.
“I worked out a deal with a local medical school. They still use cadavers. For their students.”
I swallow. So that's what happened to Steph, her body carved up by some eager med student.
“Don't worry,” says The Projectionist. He’s registered the color draining from my face. “It's just your body. Your soul—” He angles his finger toward the beam of light dancing out of the projector—“is there.”
“Right,” I say.
He stares at the projector, marveling at the giant contraption, as if it's a loved one. “I built it myself. Multi-format. Pretty incredible, huh?”
I wonder if such an invention wowed Steph. I guess the ingenuity of it all should impress me, but all the projector looks like is a big collection of sprockets and gears. Who gives a fuck.
“Where do you keep them all?” I ask. “The movies we bring with us, I mean.”
“As a Disciple you should know we prefer the term film,” The Projectionist says. I try not to roll my eyes. “But I store them back there.” He hitches his thumb over his shoulder, toward another steel door behind him.
“Can I see?”
His Adam's apple bobs up and down while he contemplates my request. “I guess that's fine,” he rasps. He yanks the door open—another screech of rust—and I follow behind him into a narrow room lined with metal shelves holding the contents of every successful pilgrim's soul. DVD and Blu-Ray cases. Wrinkled VHS boxes. Yes, even big laserdisc sleeves like what Cleve and Vera carried with them. “It's organized by format, alphabet, and year of release,” the Projectionist explains. I'm glad he saved me from asking; it helps me locate The Wizard of Oz with a little more ease.
There's thirteen DVD copies of The Wizard of Oz, their uniform spines glistening with the reflection of the fluorescent lights above. Even though they all look the same, I know which one is Steph's right away. I tilt it toward me, thinking about all the times I watched Steph crack this case open, delight spreading over her face. She loved this movie so much. More than she loved me. Now she lives inside it.
“Put that back please,” The Projectionist says.
I turn and look at him, the DVD still in my hand. “You don't remember me, do you?”
He scratches the stubble on his chin. “Um.”
“I worked at the museum,” I say. “I printed the tickets. I used to see you walk by before you went up to the projection booth. One day you just stopped coming in.”
“I found my calling.”
I shake my head. “All these souls—there's people who miss them.”
The Projectionist doesn't react to this, which lets me know he doesn't care. “But they're happy. They're where they belong.”
“People belong in the real world.”
The Projectionist nods at Steph's copy of The Wizard of Oz. “Who were they?”
I swallow and clutch the DVD closer to my chest. “I loved her,” I whisper. I don't tell him that Steph loved me too, that she radiated so much love but just didn't know how to channel it, and when loving turned too overwhelming for her, she imagined other worlds for herself, worlds with clear cut rules and resolutions. I don't tell him how I felt Steph slipping away from me for so long, how it's so much worse when you know you're losing someone who doesn't want to lose you but doesn't know how to hold on. I blew an entire paycheck on a ring I thought Steph would like, proposed to her thinking it would keep her here. The idea of marriage's romantic monotony made Steph run even faster, straight into a movie screen just like Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr.
Other things I don't tell The Projectionist: about all the YouTube videos I watch, some of them lessons in self defense, so I know when he lunges for the DVD in my hands that a palm heel strike to the nose will put him down. He writhes on the floor, screeching and gripping his face while his nose pumps blood through the cracks between his fingers. I don't tell him that I originally learned the mechanics of AP'ing so I could make the pilgrimage to The Nickelodeon and project myself into The Wizard of Oz. So I could always be with Steph. But that was grief's puppetry.
Once The Projectionist stops crying, I help him to his feet and pass him the DVD.
“Project it,” I say. He looks into my eyes, the threat of another palm heel strike lingering in my scowl, and whimpers. I follow him to the big projector and watch. He moves like a surgeon, delicate and precise, stopping Vera and Cleve's adventure in Roman Holiday and transferring the laserdisc back to its sleeve. The Projectionist uses his shoulder to wipe away another stream of blood from his nose as he cracks open Steph's copy of The Wizard of Oz and loads the disc into a slot on the projector.
The projector whirs. A beam of sepia light spills from the lens, funneling toward the screen below us. The Projectionist backs away, holding his face again. I'm scared to step forward. Scared of who I'll see. For a while I listen to the projector hum. I watch the light shooting from the lens and stand there waiting until it shifts to color, marking Dorothy's arrival in Oz. Thanks to Steph, I know this comes at the nineteen minute mark. I step forward and there she is, standing right next to Dorothy clacking her ruby shoes together. Strawberry hair hanging in her face. Steph has her own pair of ruby shoes on. She's never looked happier. And I know that look on her face—that smile she used to flash me at the ticket counter inside The Museum of Light and Sound. The longer our relationship went on, the less I got to see that smile. I thought it was me that made Steph smile that way. But it wasn't. Movies brought her that joy, distant worlds that were not her own.
Another thing about YouTube: if you're curious enough, you can find plenty of videos that teach you how to make your own explosives. I unzip my backpack and brush past two more Slim Jims I packed for the journey back up the 1,924 steps. I take out the homemade dynamite I've been carrying with me since I started my pilgrimage.
“No,” cries The Projectionist, but he doesn't dare come near me.
I wedge the dynamite into a hole on the projector and slip a lighter out of my pocket. This dynamite isn't powerful enough to harm me or The Projectionist, but it will ruin his invention and that's all I want. Will he rebuild his projector? Maybe. But for a while it will stop the Disciples of Buster, hopefully long enough for them to find an escape better than vanishing from the world before they should. Steph's copy of The Wizard of Oz won't survive the blast either. I wonder where her soul will go when that happens, if makeshift dynamite is capable of destroying something so powerful and ethereal. Wherever her soul goes, I hope it goes on dancing like she is right now, twirling and skipping while Judy Garland sings.
I light the fuse. Sparks whip through the air. I turn around and look at The Protectionist. “I really do love this movie,” I say, wiping tears from my eyes.
Travis D. Roberson is a New York based writer and artist originally from central Florida. Travis’ work appears or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Cutleaf, Pithead Chapel, Juked, and many other publications.
