Blueprints of the afterl.., p.19
Blueprints of the Afterlife, page 19
“…it’s a thought-provoking series… state-of-the-art effects… wall-to-wall action… more than a little tenderness…” Neethan doesn’t even know to whom he is talking now. His brain has officially taken a bow and outsourced this responsibility to his mouth alone. Away it chatters and smiles, two things it is superbly good at and can accomplish by itself, as far as Neethan is concerned. Listen to it go, chuckling and joking with a moony young reporter who so clearly wants his dick. Which, dammit, remains at three-quarters salute despite the Klan fantasy. His and Myra’s pheromones are still doin’ it right on the red carpet. Think of it this way—she is probably smelling his cologne and getting aroused. Quid pro quo. Beth-Anne tugs at his elbow, introducing him to Dirk Bickle.
“Dirk?” Neethan says, snapping back into the moment. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Bickle looks old. Worse, he looks bloodied. His face is scraped and bandaged and one leg is entombed in a cast. Holding himself up with crutches he attempts a pained smile. Around his neck hangs a bogus laminate identifying him as a reporter from the Homeless People Channel. He snuck in, obviously.
“Neethan, my biggest success story. I am so glad to see you.”
“What happened to you? Who did this to you?” Neethan takes his former mentor’s arms and pulls him close.
“Don’t worry about me. I came to pass along a piece of information. It’s about your birth mother.”
Neethan smiles defensively. “She’s alive?”
Bickle shakes his gray head. “Afraid not, Neethan. And it gets weirder. Not only is she dead, she’s been dead for five hundred years.”
Neethan laughs. “WTF, Bickle? You’re messing with me, right? Are these bandages and bruises a joke?”
The old man sighs. “We saw the prenatal paternity test you took with regard to Ms. Fairbanks and discovered a few new things about your profile. The technology wasn’t up to snuff when you were coming up through the academy. Otherwise, we would have told you sooner. First, it’s true. You’re Native American.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
“And you’re the last of your tribe.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re the last of your genetic line. There are no other living relatives from your particular gene pool.”
“Who were they?”
“We haven’t figured that out yet.”
Neethan steadies himself against a barrier. “So what am I supposed to do with this information? I’ve got a series to promote.”
“You have to go to Seattle. Find out what happened to your tribe. Just follow the red carpet.”
“Now, Bickle, why would I want to do that?”
Bickle leans forward and speaks into Neethan’s ear. “It is Kirkpatrick’s will.”
And like a ghost or screen dissolve, Bickle backs away and other cameras and reporters fill the gap with their chattering questions and klieg lights. Beth-Anne takes his arm again and whispers, “Kelli, Staci, and Brandi from the Kids Super Network.”
Neethan now faces three preteens, each a billionaire, standing in a row, clutching one another’s arms and jumping in unison. “OMG!” they scream. “OMG!”
“Hi, ladies,” Neethan says, causing the middle one to faint. The other two fan the middle one’s face until she returns to consciousness. Over their heads three lenses bob and weave, behind which squint three cameramen.
The preteen on the left, Kelli, asks the first question. “What’s your favorite movie?”
“My favorite movie is… Gifted Children’s Detective Agency.”
“Oh, my God, do you have a girlfriend?” Staci asks.
“Not currently. I’m single,” Neethan says, provoking an intensified bout of high-treble squealing and unison jumping, not to mention a quick glance from Ms. Fairbanks, presently interviewing with the Clothing Optional Network.
“Favorite color,” Brandi says, looking close to vomiting.
“Aubergine.”
“What’s the series about?” all three ask together.
“Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin, Season Four, is the latest in the award-winning Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin franchise. I play Dr. Uri Borden, a clone scientist who gets involved in the uprising and must decide whether to abort… You know, there’s a whole spiel on it on the B-roll. Just have your producers pull something from there.”
The three young journalists refuse, insisting that Neethan repeat the boilerplate. He sighs and complies. When the camera stops rolling the three tweens drop the overwhelmed bubblehead shtick and resume the conversation they’d been having about a new branding firm in which they’d invested considerable time and capital.
Haunted by Bickle, horny by Myra, Neethan proceeds down the line. His hard-on has begun to soften, still firm but perhaps not as unyielding as it had been before he’d been asked his favorite color. He recalls fondly the movie-star sex in which he’d engaged with the starlet, the kind of sex in which the two people are fucking the variety of characters the other has played rather than anything one might rightly call another person. At one point Neethan had been fucking Sherri Nettles, the civil rights attorney Myra had played in Prom Queen: Ground Zero while she had been fucking his Gordon Lamphiere, the morally ambivalent assassin of Saucy McPherson’s Game.
I’m the last of my line, he thinks. So what? The idea feels antique, belonging to another generation, something too complex to trip him out. Cameras claw at his face. He extends his hand again, to a Portuguese-language station’s arts and entertainment reporter, and from a thousand feet under the sea hears himself prattling about the series he’s made, a series he doesn’t entirely understand, owing to the brilliance or ineptitude of the director, but about which he speaks with utter confidence and enthusiasm. He watches himself shake more hands, recite more spiels, grin his panties-dropping grin, and knows that this parade of surfaces is about to come to an end. He’s going to Seattle. He’s going to follow the red carpet. He’ll find out where he came from. It’s Kirkpatrick’s will.
Commercial break.
Inside the restaurant, the red carpet spills to fill the entire floor. Neethan’s agent Rory Smiley meets him at the door. Rory is a short man but doesn’t have a short man’s hair-trigger personality. This is probably thanks to the fact that he suffered through a case of premature puberty, for instance growing facial hair at the age of four. He’d been taller than the rest of the kids in his class until high school, and still thinks of himself as taller than everyone, including Neethan, who towers above him. The premature puberty had been a matter of some brief national attention, with a camera crew following the young Rory around his Montessori school as he worked with golden beads and the pink tower, addressing his classmates in a commanding baritone. Every morning his doting parents had given him a bubble bath and a shave, and by nap time his five o’clock shadow would start to come in. It’s a drag being a preschooler with ball hair.
“Hi Rory. I’m Native American, apparently,” Neethan says, squeezing his agent’s shoulder.
“Tonight, my friend, you can be anything you want,” Rory says, offering a Macanudo.
Neethan takes the cigar and bends down low to allow Rory to light it. “No, really. I’m an Indian. I just found out.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
A host appears, a newman-looking guy with a wobbly eye, and shows them to their table. Rory orders a dozen kinds of sushi and four kinds of sake. “And a booster seat, if you could,” he says.
The restaurant fills with flacks disgorged from the red carpet. Beth-Anne, her job complete, seeps into the background with the other bottom-feeders gathering about the open bar. Myra enters, a celestial event best witnessed with a space telescope, and is seated at the opposite side of the restaurant. Neethan recognizes the guy who did his hair on Stella Artaud heading straight for the booze. The portion of the restaurant Neethan and Rory occupy is roped off, intended for VIPs, with other sections set aside for lower-magnitude studio employees and the journalists and their crews. Now is to be expected an onslaught of permatanned studio execs with big teeth and fists of gold jewelry, wanting to press flesh with the talent. Until then, Rory intends to go over some recent projects that have been pitched Neethan’s way.
“So I’m at lunch with Julian Moe yesterday and he says to me, ‘Rory, what I wouldn’t give to spend an hour with Neethan and get his thoughts on this Abraham Lincoln biopic I’m developing.’”
“Told you, Rory, I’m biopicked out.”
Rory raises a hand, lowers his head in a “hear me out” type of gesture. “I’m with you, friend. In fact, the first thing I said was, ‘Julie? Why’re you wasting my goddamn time with your talk about a biopic? You know Neethan is biopicked out.’ So he says, ‘Listen, Rory, I know Neethan has had a string of biopics. But I’d be committing directorial malpractice if I didn’t at least touch dick tips with Mr. Jordan about this. It’s built on a proven formula. (This is Julian still talking, by the way.) It’s built on a proven formula. It’s a remake of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln.”
“Can you see Myra’s table from where you’re sitting?”
Rory cranes his neck. “Not sure. Might be that table surrounded by studio brass. Anyway, Julian keeps talking, says, ‘Rory, listen. I’m looking for an A-lister with gravitas. I’m looking for someone who can shoulder the burden of portraying the motherfucker who freed the slaves. El presidente. And no one can fill those presidential pants like Neethan F. Jordan, do you hear what I’m saying?’”
“Is there a love interest?”
“Yeah, well, no, sorta. She dies in the first act.”
“Pass. Next.”
“So I got this call from a friend of a friend of a friend at a little production company you may have heard of—Remote Sasquatch Productions? And whisper-whisper-whisper I hear they’ve got Phil Knickerman’s new script, a fantasy drama of sorts. They’ve got Susan Rauch set to direct, up-and-coming young director, you can feed off that kind of cred, and it involves unicorns. It’s not a starring role but they thought of you for the part of Osama bin Laden.”
“Do I get a nude scene?”
“Great question. I’m on it. Next I have a starring role in a picture called The Quadriplegic.”
“It involves not using my arms and legs?”
“No, actually. See, it’s an inspirational story about a quadriplegic who regains the use of his limbs thanks to the Bionet.”
“That kind of thing happens all the time.”
“True, which makes it a topical human-interest-type story.”
“What’s the angle? Why should we care about this former quadriplegic?”
“He robs banks.”
“Go on.”
“With a wise-cracking chimpanzee sidekick.”
“You know I like having a sidekick.”
“Based on a true story.”
“Pass.”
Presently, approaching from the table’s starboard side is Big Serge Davis, a VP of marketing at Fox. Big Serge’s enhanced-tooth grin seems to precede him; the rest of his body appears to be an appendage of this rapacious dental expression of joy. His teeth are easily twice the size of other people’s teeth. Neethan exposes his own teeth as the executive approaches and then their hands come out like the wimpy claws of Tyrannosaurae rex. Neethan stands and the two figures crash together, front to front, laughing and half-speaking their greetings, which come out like, “Neeeeeethaaaaaa!” and “Saaaaaairrrr!” Two glottally communicating giants, they clutch and squeeze each other’s arms, slapping shoulders, opening mouths to expose pink Sonicared interiors of mucousy tissues. From Neethan’s mouth still dangles his cigar, held precariously in place by lower lip moisture. After a minute or so of this, they verbally indicate their good-byes and Neethan sits down as the first wave of sushi arrives.
He hears Myra laugh across the room. He imagines himself as Marcello Mastroianni pursuing an Anita Ekberg version of Myra up a Roman spiral staircase. His mind spins a series of lip-locked fantasias with swollen strings and wonders if there is any way to think about their brief comingling of bodily juices besides cinematically. He and Myra had accidentally rolled into each other’s gravitational fields during the hours of rehearsal for their full-frontal nude sex scene. Their own personal “meet cute” moment. Then, crap, a pregnancy. For the first time, while chopsticking a piece of ikura gunkan maki, he wonders who the father might actually be. In the movie, Uri Borden discovers a secret cabal of Indonesian scientists who engineer a method of remote Bionet fertilization, in which they hack birth-control systems to release artificial spermatozoa into women’s uteruses. Coulda been something like that with Myra. Maybe a fanboy hacker in his bedroom somewhere, bored of just jerking off to the 3-D X-rays of Myra’s internal organs, decided to hack his way into her uterus and impregnate her online. It could happen, he supposes. He’d done some reading in his trailer to prepare for the role, learning a little about how the Bionet interfaces with reproductive systems. You can find out anything about anyone’s physical condition via the Bionet. You can track T-cell count, endocrine levels, the squirtings of various enzymes from specialized valves, brain activity, some said even thoughts. Dreams?
Neethan maneuvers a firecracker roll into a saucer containing equal parts wasabi and soy sauce.
“Earth to Neethan,” Rory says, waving chopsticks in front of his client’s eyes.
“Maybe you could get me some Native American roles,” Neethan says, as if that’s what he’d been thinking about all along.
“Did you even hear what I said about The Man Who Got Marketed to Death?”
“Are you talking about a movie or my life?”
Here come more brass, a trio of them now, jolly, spines bent back into concavities while the arms beckon, thrust at forty-five-degree angles from their bodies, a grandparently come-here-you-rascal kind of hug-inducing posture. Neethan rises and accepts their cheek kisses and let-me-get-a-look-at-you affections. He’s never met them before but they don’t know that. They feel they know him intimately. Have watched his genitals do their magic on the big screen as well as the magic of his acting skills and uncanny comic timing. More than know him, they feel they own him. And like an objet d’art in a glass cabinet they want to take him out for a quick polish and a moment of admiration. His face is fused in their minds to spreadsheets, and they like the numbers they’ve been looking at. Leathery little men with little hair, they run their hands up and down Neethan’s arms, pausing at the elbow, sharing confidences and dirty jokes. The duration of this encounter is say about two minutes. Then they depart, leaving Neethan free to chew on something that involves fish eyeballs.
It is Kirkpatrick’s will.
Neethan’d really been looking forward to kicking back with a movie in the theater at his place off Mulholland tonight but, thanks to Bickle’s sudden appearance, that isn’t going to happen. No refuting the wishes of Mr. K. Neethan knows as soon as he is powered up on sushi and receives the figurative blow jobs from the executive class, he will be locating the exit and striding along the red carpet to wherever it might lead. Behind him he will leave a lousy release party under way in a decent Japanese restaurant with waitresses rigorously trained to pretend they don’t recognize him. Already, mentally, he is out the door but physically he is rooted here with his agent who is laying down project after project that begs to be rescued by his involvement. He can play an autistic savant, a tennis pro, a gay hustler, a frustrated novelist, a blind violin maker, a psychoanalyst on the make, a ship captain harboring a deadly secret, a mutant capable of spitting poison from his eyes, a mortgage company representative, the Pope. None of it sounds Native American enough. Now that Bickle has laid down all the cards with regard to his ethnic identity, it would be nice to parlay that knowledge into a role in which he gets to play that identity and maybe in the process learn about what that identity is like. Because now when he thinks Native American he thinks casinos and smallpox blankets and that’s about it. And if he gets bored being Native American he’ll move on and be something else for a while, like an unfrozen Viking with a lightning bolt sidekick.
A mixed-sex group of studio people cross the room to the table, midlevel departmental directors and such, people responsible for budgets, shouting compliments on his performance over the restaurant’s derivative music. Flock-like, they glom on to the table and chortle borrowed insights, eyes spreading wide in expressions that have as much to do with plastic surgery as with emotion. They are all drugged, Neethan figures, strapped to a biochemical thrill ride that approximates optimism. Or they simply conceive the world this way, an endless series of release parties and occasions to get close enough to smell the rancid breath of the talent. They appear pleased with themselves. They throw their heads back when laughing as if to make sure no one doubts the magnitude of the hilarity they are enjoying. Across the restaurant he catches sight of Myra’s open mouth similarly engaged in laughter and pictures her lips curling around the tip of—hey now, here is the Klan again, igniting a cross in some poor Southerner’s front yard. Neethan looks down in time to see a twitching fin of something on his plate. Rory chortles with the ring of midlevels that fortifies the periphery of their table. Now there is nudity happening at a table nearby; things have progressed to that level pretty quickly. The open bar gushes libations into marketing department bloodstreams. A man in a bow tie visibly vibrates at a table across from the disrobing table, jacked up on some kind of Bionet-delivered kick. Pretty soon someone will discharge a handgun, Neethan suspects. It feels like that kind of night.
