Motel. Pool. by Kim Fielding Page B

crept up behind him without Tag noticing. He was blue-shirted and earnest-looking. “Have you watched videos on one? Amazing. Let me show you.”
    Before Tag could stop him, the salesman grabbed the iPad and tapped away a few times. Something science fiction came on the screen, all zooming stars and darting spacecraft. Then the salesman tapped again to a jungle scene with a million shades of green.
    “Impressive,” Tag said. Which was true enough but irrelevant.
    “It has more pixels than HDTV. The engineering is really cutting-edge. I’ll tell you, I can hardly watch movies on my flat screen anymore.”
    “That’s great.”
    “So do you think you’d be interested in the full-size or the mini?”
    What Tag was interested in was getting rid of this guy. He smiled sweetly. “I’m not sure. Can you give me more time to play with it?”
    “Sure! That’s the idea of the store, because we know once you spend some time with our products, you’ll be hooked.” With a cheery little wave, the salesman wandered away until he was accosted by a middle-aged man and his tween son.
    Tag turned back to the device. He did a general search for Jack’s name but didn’t find anything useful. Not the right Jack. Because although he’d accepted Jack’s existence back at the dam, it wasn’t until he got confirmation in print that the reality sank in. Not only was Jack Dayton a ghost instead of a hallucination, but he’d once been a young man, an actor who appeared in two small roles before he died.
    After a bit of fruitless browsing, Tag made his way to the website for the Flagstaff newspaper. Jack’s name didn’t come up there at all, but their archive only went back to the nineties. Jack found a salesclerk—not the previous one; this time it was a girl with her hair dyed black and red—and asked for a pen and paper.
    She frowned at him as if she weren’t quite sure what he was talking about. “The iPhone has a built-in note-taking app. Or if you want something fancier, there are a bunch of productivity tools like—”
    “Paper. I just want dead tree and ink, please.”
    After a dubious look, she headed into the back of the store. He thought about apps while he waited. It would be great if they had them for really useful things, like keeping you from making shitty decisions or zapping some feeling back into your heart. Or stabilizing ghosts so they didn’t have to worry about keeping themselves together or being sucked back to the middle of nowhere.
    The girl returned and handed him a paper and pencil. “I couldn’t find a pen,” she said. The paper was an invoice of some kind, but it was blank on the back.
    “That’s fine. Thanks.” He waited for her to go away before he wrote down some contact numbers for the newspaper. While he was at it, he scribbled some more information—the names of the movies’ producers and director, a couple of the technical details, the few tidbits he could glean about Jasper, Arizona. He wasn’t sure what value he expected any of these notes to have, but they might come in handy somehow.
    He left the store before anyone else in a blue shirt could grab him, and he wandered the mall for a while. It was a frightening place, with headless mannequins and vacant-faced shoppers. Music was pumped through the sound system, but he didn’t recognize it. Even the food court was scary. Everything was fried or sugared or covered in cheese, and people were shoving mounds of the stuff into their faces and washing it down with soft drinks big enough to drown in. And every surface in the complex was hard and plastic and shiny, mass-produced in China and prettied up with sparkles and glitz. Nothing was real—not even him. Time didn’t exist. The entire world could have disappeared in a bang—one of those nuclear blasts from the fifties grown bigger over the decades—and Tag and the others would still pace the halls and check the price tags, oblivious.
    Tag needed to get out of there. He needed his