"Having an End of the World 90s movie marathon Friday, Jamie."

Jamie thumbed the cord of the phone which the building manager, fed up with Jamie hanging around the front desk all day, had finally installed for him.

"Mostly a lot of Y2k fear-mongering, but it seems appropriate with that virus in China. You hear about it? Anyway, Samson will be heartbroken if you can't make it, he picked the theme for you."

Silence.

"Come on, Jamie, it's not good to stay in like this. You heard of depression?"

"Of course I've heard of depression."

"Well let's do something then!" her voice made an attempt at a leap. "I'll come over if you want. We can watch Bicentennial Man. I'll help you hook up the Blue-ray player and we can watch the special features. You still haven't seen them, right?"

He hadn't but wasn't interested.

Lydia sighed into her receiver. "Not everyone's going to like your movie, Jamie. One of the down-sides to not being a one-man population is that other people are gonna tend to not be you."

The cluster of interviews that had immediately followed "Just-Jamie's" mysterious emergence from the underground bunker almost six months ago had slowly but surely waned, only briefly reinvigorated by his recent arrest, which had been a fast source of amusement for the media-obsessed public for a full week. After that, however, they found something else, and Jamie slid back into mild obscurity. With the exception of a few follow-ups from some of the early networks checking in on him every now and then, Jamie was mostly left alone. It was no breaking news if the man from the bunker hadn't been seen leaving his Austin apartment for two weeks.

"Listen, do you wanna know something kind of embarrassing?" Lydia asked.

Jamie didn't answer but listened to the gentle crackling of the connection between them.

"Jamie?"

"Hm?"

"Are you listening?"

"Do you want me to listen or do you want me to answer?"

She made an exasperated sound and Jamie couldn't help but smile.

"Okay. I love M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. Absolutely love it. That scene when Bryce Dallas Howard is holding her hand out, waiting for Joaquin Pheonix, and you can see the creature getting closer in the background— Oh my god! Chills every time! Even having seen it however many times— and I know you don't know who he is— but the point is," her voice leveled out and she took a breath. "Critics hated it. It's considered the movie that signified Shyamalan's decline. It was so bad that people wanted to retroactively revoke his Sixth Sense Oscar nom.

"And yet, I don't care! People can trash it all day, give me a long list of everything that didn't work about it: the cheesy twist, the clunky dialogue— whatever. It won't change my mind. I don't care what anybody says. No one can take away my love of that movie. And they shouldn't. What you love about a movie is for you. Not everyone is going to connect with it the same way. That’s what makes the movie special for you. Does that make any sense?”

One of the news networks that followed up with Jamie from time to time found out that his favorite actor was Embeth Davidtz. Soon they were able to get him an interview with the woman who now more closely resembled her character toward the end of the film, aged up makeup and prosthetics, than the adult version of Little Miss and Portia, whom she'd actually played.

Jamie was instructed backstage not to shake hands and didn't, but greeted Mrs. Davidtz and thanked her for agreeing to the interview.

"That's remarkable," Embeth said, eyes bright. "You sound just like him!"

Jamie smiled, face warm. He looked down, more from instinct than to read the cards in his hand. It wasn't unusual for people to point out to him whom he sounded like, and although it had begun to bother him, he found he didn't mind it from her.

They began the interview.

Older though she was, Mrs. Davidtz was no less lovely and Jaimie couldn't stop smiling. They'd asked him to prepare some questions and he had. Though she might have been acting—she was an actor, after all—she seemed as fascinated with Jamie as he was with her and it eased much of his nervousness. He asked her what she felt the movie was about, to which she admitted it had been a very long time since she'd seen it, but recalled a strong overarching message.

Jaimie waited as the actress went silent for a while. The silence was stretching on so long that Jamie was beginning to think that he was meant to do something more. He thought of Lydia in her interviews. She had a natural way of coaxing more out of a person. He tried to imagine what she would do in this situation.

Jamie soon found, however, that Mrs. Davidtz wasn't waiting for him, but only thinking about the question.

"Chris Columbus is probably the better person to answer this question, but I do recall a message of the power of connecting... the way it transcends. We aren't defined by our biology, but more our capacity to..."

"Love," Jamie heard himself say, then swallowed.

"Yes." Embeth smiled.

He didn't have many more questions after that. He asked her what her favorite movie was and what other sort of movies she'd been doing since Bicentennial Man and gathered from the list that she was more famous now than even then. They said goodbye and Jamie went home.

When the virus spread, everyone went inside. Each to their own bunker.

This time, Jamie had not one but a whole selection of movies he'd collected over the past few months to tide him over. Different too was that he could now leave if he chose, and did so occasionally to walk in the park or go to the grocery store. He liked that with the masks, no one seemed to recognize him. Noone gave him those odd, prolonged looks or said, "Hey, you're Bicentennial Man, right?"

Returning home one day with his bags of groceries in hand, Jamie passed a man who was sitting alone in the common area.

On the TV screen Jamie saw an actress he recognized. He thought he'd seen some of her movies before but this one didn't look familiar.

"What's that?" Jamie asked.

The seated man looked back over his shoulder at him, face half-covered. He eyed Jamie up and down a moment and Jamie thought he knew what he would say. Instead, the man said, "No spoilers. I'm not caught up."

Jamie went around and sat on the adjacent couch. He wasn't totally sure but from the costumes and set designs, he guessed the movie was set in the middle ages. A historical drama from some time with kings and queens. And dragons, apparently— fantasy then.

The story played a while longer and when it ended there were brief credits, and when those ended a new sequence began that seemed to summarize in fast cuts what had happened before. And then came the opening credits and a new scene.

"And this just keeps going?" Jamie asked after a few cycles of this.

"Yeah, for like eight seasons."

"Huh."

"If you want, you can borrow season one. I'm done with it."

With his warm groceries and DVD set in hand, Jamie made his way up to his apartment.

From down the hall, Mrs. Crawford, the building janitor, called out to him. "Hey, whatcha got there, Jamie? New movie?" She paused in her mopping. Jamie could see her eyes smiling above a cloth mask.

"No," Jamie said and eyed the thick case. "A show. Do you want to watch?"

The old woman seemed to think about it a moment. Then, after looking over her cart with the various cleaning supplies, bleaches, and sanitizers, all of which she would apply again the next day and the next and the next, at last, Mrs. Crawford looked up at Jamie. "A break would be nice."

"Great."

Jamie unlocked his apartment door and they went inside, together.

End