An image materializes: framed by the open limousine door, the red carpet stretches past a phalanx of press to the vanishing point. Neethan Fucking Jordan steps from the private interior of his transportation into this real-time, flash-lit, and filmed public spectacle, the red path slashing wound-like across the parking lot, the rented polyester fiber unfurled alongside a barricade behind which photographers and camera crews wait encumbered with their gear. To his right stands a vinyl backdrop some ten feet high printed with thousands of logos for Season Four of Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin. Neethan models a pair of black sunglasses, prototypes from his line. His face tingles from a facial. Two Altoids effervesce on his tongue. The product holding his hair in a swept-back wave is composed of organic materials harvested from ten countries, six of them war zones. Black pants, jacket, leather shoes crafted by hand in a little-known region of Italy where livestock still wander dirt roads, a white starched shirt with the top button unbuttoned. Neethan is a tall dude, six-eight, and watching him come out of a limo is like watching a cleverly designed Japanese toy robot arachnid emerge from a box, propelling a torso on which nods his head, across which is splashed a smile of idealized teeth, teeth so gleaming you could brush your own teeth looking into them, teeth that still look fantastic blown up two stories tall on the side of a building, a sexual promise to nameless fans encoded in bicuspid, molar, incisor, and canine. The arm rises, a wave, a hello, an acknowledgment that the assembled journalists exist and through the conduits of their cameras exist the public. Neethan F. Jordan has arrived!
As these things go, the first twenty or so yards of carpet are reserved for photographers. Crammed three deep, the back two rows of shutterbugs wobble on progressively taller step ladders. They scream his name over and over as if he might mistakenly turn to face the backdrop. This part used to perplex him. Obviously they have his attention, he knows he is expected to pose. Why the name yelling? Ah, but here’s why—by yelling his name so voraciously they make it impossible for him not to smile. Neethan pivots, does an open-mouthed smile like what crazy freakin’ fans!, transforms his fingers into guns, transitions into mock-angry… into slightly amused… into humbled… into ecstatic… each expression provoking cluster bombs of flashes. He imagines photo editors clicking to find the right image to complement the editorial slant of the accompanying 150 words.
“People! Yes!” Neethan exclaims and that’s all it takes for the shouting to boil over, rising to Beatlemania temperatures among the photogs. Pointing out individuals behind the spastically stuttering cameras, he says, “Jimmy! Isamu! Marti, you dress so sexy! I can hardly take it!”
Out of the many things Neethan can’t fathom, what he most can’t fathom is anonymity. He knew it only briefly as a child. The vast unfilmed, the people nobody knows anything about, are conceptually exotic to him. The only time he gets close to understanding how it might feel to be unfamous is when he plays one of them. In those instances he is expected to empathize with the plights of migrant farm laborers and other people doing, you know, stuff like that. He can’t tell anymore whether he’s done something to instigate his fame or whether he has merely been chosen as its filter. Fame is a sticky, candy-like substance; a river of it courses through his life. It is as close to religion as he will ever likely get. Of course the kicker is he lived in a group home in Seattle until the age of six and has never known his birth parents. The staff at the group home couldn’t agree on what he was, ethnicity-wise. Filipino? Mexican? Whatever it was it had brown skin and black hair and a honker of a nose. As a kid the nose had haunted and shamed him until the rest of his Cubist handsome face rose around it like a village maturing around a cathedral. Then one day a woman named Mrs. Priest showed up. The hope that she would be his mom lasted about fifteen minutes. Nope, he was being hustled to another group home of sorts, the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential, where he wouldn’t have to clean toilets or empty trash. He was only expected to become one thing: famous.
At present a lithe form appears unobtrusively in Neethan’s periphery. He speaks sideways through a motionless smile, “I suppose you’re Beth-Anne.”
“Yes, Mr. Jordan,” says the assistant publicist. She wears a $4,000 dress and a lanyard with a laminated card indicating she belongs on this side of the barrier. Brunette, boobs. She takes his arm and leads him a few feet down the carpet to the first of the television crews.
“This is Access Hollywood,” Beth-Anne whispers. “Geri McDonald-Reese, reporter.”
As the words enter his ear Neethan is already extending his hand and broadening his smile, providing full-on gums now, processing Beth-Anne’s info concurrently as he speaks. “Access Fuckin’ Hollywood! Hell yeah! I haven’t seen you since the premiere of The Barack Obama Story!”
Was this the slightest blush from Geri? One of the A-list celeb reporters, bordering on famous herself, she is rumored to have been canoodling on yachts with a qputer-technology magnate. She swims through celebrity like a little amphibian, accustomed to imbibing from the medicine cabinets of capital-n Names. She’s wearing Michel D’Archangel; Neethan recognizes the jacket from the fall show. Her camera guy hovers over one shoulder, partially obscured in shadow. Maybe it isn’t a blush. Maybe she isn’t so blown away that he remembers she exists, as the less evolved reporters downstream will be.
“Neethan,” she says, “let’s do this, shall we?”
“Roll it.”
Geri speaks into the microphone. “I’m here with Neethan Jordan at the Season Four premiere of Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin, the preapocalyptic thriller created by Burke Ripley. Neethan, tell us a bit about your character—”
“Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin, Season Four, is the latest season 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 the messiah. It’s a thought-provoking series, featuring state-of-the-art effects and wall-to-wall action, with more than a little tenderness.”
Geri says, “Tell me a bit about what it was like working with director Burke Ripley.”
Here it’s appropriate for Neethan to take his hand and place it on his forehead, sweeping his hair back in a gesture that communicates having survived challenging, creatively rewarding work. “What can I say about Burke? He’s a genius.” Neethan remembers, then pretends to remember, an anecdote, chuckling. “You know, everyone thinks of Burke as this intense, driven guy, but he’s got a playful side to him as well. We happened to be shooting on Halloween and he showed up to the set dressed as me.” Neethan laughs at his own not very funny anecdote. Message: I can make fun of myself despite my perfection: I am more like you in this regard: it’s safe for you to like me: please desire me: please give me your money for the honor of desiring me. “I mean, he had the glasses, the hair. He even got my makeup girl to match the skin tone. Walked around the set that morning grinning like an idiot, just like me. Hilarious.”
What was that, about eight seconds of dialogue? He figures the piece will probably run one minute. Intro, red carpet montage, a bite from him, preview clip, bite from a costar, more montage, closing summary.
Presently, from Beth-Anne: “Tom Parsons, Fox Entertainment News.”
“Tom!” Neethan says, arm cantilevering from his trunk, using the handshake as a Judo-esque method of pulling this Tom character closer, slapping him on the back in the kind of hug grown men give their dads. He has never met this guy. Clearly someone on the downward slope, career-wise, probably accustomed to reporting hard news, probably glorified those FUS days when reporters braced against hurricanes or emoted beside a slag heap that up till then had been a megamall. Now he was feeding the machine that barked for nubile starlets to release their gynecological records. Tom Parsons, graying at the temples, doing his professional best to convey a sense of levity, failing for the most part, probably owing to the fact that he’d never been within pissing distance of the caliber of celebrity that was Neethan Fucking Jordan. (Real middle name, btw. He’d had it changed legally around the release of Legislative Deception.)
Tom says, “Harvey, you ready? Rolling? Okay. Neethan! I understand you just started a new philanthropic venture.”
Neethan’s lips fall around his smile. He cocks his head to one side, a little low, eyes raised semiwaif-like. “Thanks for asking, Tom. The Neethan Fucking Jordan Foundation has a simple goal—help kids to stop abusing the Bionet and stop becoming each other’s embodiments…” Neethan’s mind goes into another room and cracks a Bud as he recites his spiel about the nonprofit that bears his name. There is one part of him that moves his mouth while another part imagines a highlight reel of Tom’s career. Here is Tom the young reporter blubbering and weeping into a wind-scraped microphone before a scene of utter smoking devastation. “Oh, my God! All of Atlanta! Holy fucking shit! Oh, people, dear Jesus Christ, we’re all going to die! Get me the fuck out of here!” A few more clips like this pass through Neethan’s head, shots of Tom on a makeshift raft on a vast expanse of polluted water, confiding in the camera that he’d just consumed his dead cameraman’s thigh. There’s only so much of this FUS footage Neethan can imagine so he logs out. “…because, uh, when you give a child a future, you give humanity a future,” he concludes.
Tom seems satisfied with the answer and asks what the new season is about.
“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 the messiah. It’s a thought-provoking series, featuring state-of-the-art effects and wall-to-wall action, with more than a little tenderness. Thanks so much!”
According to Beth-Anne, the next reporter is Nico Renault from Hollywood Japan Network. Nico’s recently had his face tattooed to look like the Kabuki-made-up Gene Simmons of the pre-FUS rock band Kiss. He wears his hair in bright blond spikes. He also wears the body of a cow suit without the head, the rubber udders protruding at crotch level, lending the getup a rather multipenised look. Neethan remembers Nico from when he hosted Fuck Show. He’d been a guest once, on the same night as the recently defrosted Ted Williams. The slugger had stolen Neethan’s thunder and the movie star still resented the whole disaster. During the skill-testing segment of the program, Williams had outperformed Neethan in a contest where they dressed up as porcupines and raced through a labyrinth trying to spear as many apples as they could with their spines, with each apple representing $10,000 given to the charity of their choice. Thanks to thawed Ted Williams’s skills, a few hundred kids in the Dominican Republic now had protective eye wear. Not one of Neethan’s finer PR moments. The blogosphere had chortled at the clips of him rolling around in the porcupine suit seemingly incapable of spearing an apple. But he’d been doing a lot more drinking in those days and had been adjusting to the LA/Tokyo jet lag. He’d vowed never to do Fuck Show again.
“Neethan Jordan! Tell me about the size of your balls!” Nico says.
“Nice ink, Nico,” Neethan says, in no mood to play along. “You still molesting little Malaysian boys?”
“Neethan Jordan! When are you going to perform penetration again?”
“You’re still on the air?”
“Neethan Jordan! Please tell us when you will fuck for the world once again!”
“I’m surprised you made it to this position on the red carpet. I thought you’d be stuck with the Icelandic-language print journalists.”
“Neethan Jordan! Japan wants to know! When are you to finally decide to get your nipples pierced!”
“I still think Ted Williams had an advantage.”
“Neethan Jordan! Please say a few words about your show!”
“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 the messiah. It’s a thought-provoking series, featuring state-of-the-art effects and wall-to-wall action, with more than a little tenderness.”
“Neethan Jordan! Japan says keep on rocking and rolling!”
Into the camera: “And you keep rocking and rolling, too, Japan.”
Oh, Japan. Neethan imagines those humble underwater salarymen going about the business of falling in love with pieces of furniture enhanced with human-like appendages designed for stroking, in domed Tokyo beneath the sea. Watching this interview on their little TV sets while eating Philly cheesesteak sandwiches washed down with Korean malt liquor. Through his head races a montage of movie clips from Seijun Suzuki, Nobuhiko Obayashi, newsreel footage of Hiroshima, early 1980s video of teens grinding to Elvis, a vending machine that can make moral decisions, happy-go-lucky corporate towers, a bowl of steamed rice, geishas, Nobuyoshi Araki bondage stills, Hello Kitty. In short, the sum of what Neethan know about Japan. Oh yeah, and samurais.
“Next is Eric Bibble from The Exploiter entertainment news.”
Eric Bibble, young guy with a smirk, bow tie and sport coat, bad hair, off-gassing vibes of contempt, shakes Neethan’s hand like some Midwestern vice president of sales, like a man who has been told explicitly by his father to always give ’em a firm grip. “So, it’s Neethan Fucking Jordan. How’s this junket treating you?” Eric asks.
“Fantastic, Eric. I love being out here face-to-face with the swell folks of the entertainment press.”
“I understand Myra Fairbanks is claiming to be carrying your baby.”
Neethan is prepared for this. Surprised, actually, that the question hasn’t come up sooner. “Eric, I’m glad you asked. I saw the prenatal paternity report today, which indicated conclusively that I am not the father. And I just want to reiterate what I’ve been saying all along—these allegations are really unfair to Ms. Fairbanks.”
Eric’s smile slackens. “You’re not the father?”
“Nope.”
“Okay, well, I guess that’s all the questions I have.”
“Really? Don’t you want to ask about the new season of Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin?”
“Sure, okay.”
“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 the messiah. It’s a thought-provoking series, featuring state-of-the-art effects and wall-to-wall action, with more than a little tenderness.”
“So, you really didn’t father the child? Did you even sleep with her?”
Neethan stretches out his arms and cocks his head in a Come on! Of course I did! gesture. All this coulda seemed calculated, scripted even, because at that moment another limo pulls up and slo-mo deposits the very Myra Fairbanks under discussion on the carpet, not yet showing her pregnancy bump, wearing Nikki McGee, pivoting, blonde, pulchritudinous, a human mirror-ball reflecting supernovae of camera flashes. Myra ratchets her face into a smile, teases the preorgasmic paparazzi, blows kisses, and casts a quick, withering stab of a glare at Neethan, who stands eclipsed on the carpet. They speak to each other in a few short seconds with their eyebrows.
I didn’t think you’d show, Neethan eyebrows. I hope this means you’ve gotten over your—
Go fuck yourself. I’m doing business right now.
Hey, girl, you know if the paternity test had come back positive, I would have—
I’m getting interviewed by Geri right now. Leave me alone.
Watch out for Eric Bibble. He’s going to ask you who the father is.
His magazine’s already photographed my ovaries. I doubt they could get any more invasive.
Beth-Anne says, “Wanda Mesmer, Clothing Optional Network.”
Neethan wonders why, if clothing is optional, no one on the Clothing Optional Network ever opts to wear it. Shivering nude in the chilly Hollywood evening stands the blonde, pert-nippled hostess of one of CON’s top-rated shows, Foreign Policy for the Layman. From time to time Neethan has jacked off to it. He knows he’ll be expected to express an opinion on the Brazilian slave trade or the recent piracy off the Ivory Coast. The cameraman squats to get a from-below shot, his dong dragging on the pavement.
“I’m here with Neethan Jordan at the press event for Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin,” Wanda says. “Neethan, what do you make of General Gordon’s recent imposition of martial law and the incarceration of hundreds of Kentucky’s procloning dissidents?”
Neethan braces himself, sensitive to offending any potential Deep South Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin fans. “It’s an unfortunate situation,” he says. “I just hope both sides can come together and work things out like they did last year in Arkansas.”
“How can you call the Arkansas accord anything but an unmitigated failure? Scores dead? The formal expansion of rape prisons? Are you telling me you approve of the confederacy’s suspension of habeas corpus?”
“I’m…” Neethan starts, defaulting to his wide smile. “Look, Wanda, I understand there’s a lot of turmoil in the Deep South right now, and I truly feel for all those Neethan Fucking Jordan fans down there who are in a world of hurt. Cut. Now for the other version. Look, Wanda, I just want order restored in one of the greatest cultural regions of the world.”
“Nicely done,” Wanda says, teeth chattering.
“By the way, I dig what you’ve done with your pubes,” Neethan says.
“I have a new stylist. What can you tell me about the new season of Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin?”
“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 the messiah. It’s a thought-provoking series, featuring state-of-the-art effects and wall-to-wall action, with more than a little tenderness.”
Neethan finds himself recalling his first leading role, as the unfrozen Viking hero of Him and Him. From the thawed wastes of Scandinavia appeared a fully equipped Norse warrior, reanimated by scientists and paired with an animated bolt of lightning to fight environmental crimes in corruption-plagued Chicago. The movie’s title derived from the fact that neither character had a proper name. Whenever they showed up to electrocute and battle-ax their way to justice, bystanders would simply exclaim, “It’s him! And him!” Heavily made up to resemble a hirsute berserker who’d spent a couple thousand years encased in a block of ice, Neethan hadn’t been all that recognizable, but he’d loved the role. Day after day he’d show up at the studio lot, get made up and costumed, stand in front of the green screen to grunt and wave a variety of bladed weapons. At one point in the movie he and the other Him, the lightning-bolt guy, commandeered an ambulance and engaged in a high-speed chase beneath the El. Except the whole scene had been created in the fabricated stationary interior of the vehicle, rocked on hydraulics. His costar, a boy named Georgie Walker, wearing a head-to-toe green bodysuit to be CGI’d postproduction, quivered and buzzed beside him. Neethan bellowed, waving a bloody battle hammer out the window. No one could explain how a medieval Viking had learned to drive, but no matter. Audiences ate it up and Him and Him won a lesser-known technical Oscar. Since then it had been three or four pictures a year, contractually obligated junkets, Champagne in flutes in houses perched on the hills, locations in the less ruined parts of the world, endorsements of Japanese canned coffee and shoe inserts. Becoming famous had been a process similar to losing his virginity. He’d been convinced so explicitly from so many sources that fame would solve every problem he’d ever had, vault him into a state of permanent euphoria, that when it actually happened he considered his glittered surroundings and thought, Okay, not what I imagined. But shit, man, playing that thawed Viking had been a hoot. He wanted a role like that again, one in which he was only required to grunt and ax bad guys.
“Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin, Season Four, is the latest in the award-winning Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin franchise…” Neethan speaks absently to the next journalist, a schmuck from some online-only outfit. He smells Myra’s perfume, concocted in a Swiss lab from an Amazonian water beetle and endangered alpine flowers. He replays highlights of their carnal encounters, loops the image of her ass raised up off the bed, spread to reveal the anal aperture and beneath it the valley of pussy. Is he getting hard? Jesus, okay, think of the Ku Klux Klan, quick! That usually does it for bone prevention. All it would take would be one cameraman to pan down and notice his newly pitched tent and it would be all over the tabs. The Klan starts disrobing, revealing themselves as tattooed strippers with thongs. And some of them are even black! Fucked up, Neethan. He shoots an eyebrow over to Myra, who’s giggling with Eric Bibble, touching him lightly on the shoulder, engaging him fully in her celebrity tractor beam. What Neethan wouldn’t do to transform himself into Him (the Viking, not the lightning bolt), carjack a taxi, and get the fuck out of here right about now. But the red carpet stretches interminably onward, allegedly leading to the doors of a sushi restaurant where the release party is to be thrown down. “… I play Dr. Uri Borden, a clone scientist who gets involved in the uprising and must decide whether to abort the messiah…”
So about that messiah (spoiler alert): As far as Neethan can fathom, Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin foretold of a day when the qputers and their attendant monks would instigate a mass wave of virgin births, remotely impregnating girls around the world with a race of Nietzschean übermensch messiahs. In the show, Neethan, as Uri Borden, learns of the virgin births when a teenage girl enters his clinic complaining of cramping and losing her period. Her parents can’t or won’t believe she’s not lying that she’s never had sex, and urge her to abort. As Uri races against the clock, uncovering more evidence that the pregnancy is part of a vast plot instigated via the Bionet, he is pursued by members of a radical offshoot sect of monks who want to bring about the second wave of FUS. (In the trailer, Uri Borden exclaims, “You mean they want to restart the Fucked Up Shit? Shit! That’s messed up!”) So the film had some heavy research behind it. There were actually folks out there who wanted to bring back the FUS. More than not understanding the unfamous, Neethan can’t wrap his head around this brand of nihilism. He’d studied some of the pro-FUS propaganda for the role, boned up on Peter Ng, and from what he can tell the argument goes something like this: Humanity got what it deserved with the FUS, reducing itself to one-fifth its original size. Seeing that the worst of the FUS was over, the traumatized survivors got back to work, reconstructing and applying new technologies, more or less cleaning up the joint. As this reconstruction effort rolled along, the memories of the FUS atrophied and a great surge of optimism and brotherhood seized the world. Hugs all around. But the shit, certain Ng-inspired revisionists argued, had never really ceased being fucked-up. In fact, they said, the shit was by nature fucked-up. Human nature, they argued, was designed to destroy the planet, a biological version of a gigantic asteroid or volcanic freak-out. Neethan shuddered. Good thing these Ng acolytes were relegated to the fringe. Shows like Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin were meant to keep them there. It was through the efforts of the qputer monks that humanity would continue to thrive and once-extinct species would be brought miraculously back to life. Cities would reconstitute themselves, obliterating the memories of their previous thermonuclear levelings. Hand in hand, folks of mixed ethnic and religious backgrounds would sing before the cameras, in fields of daisies.
“…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.
It is Kirkpatrick’s will.
Neethan stands up so fast his knees strike the underside of the table, upending glasses of sake. “This is fucked. I gotta get out of here,” he says, though no one hears him over the laughter and music. He heads instinctively for the men’s room. On the way he bumps into a baked-looking busboy.
“Which way to the red carpet?” Neethan asks.
The busboy nods his head toward the kitchen. In a few long strides Neethan is through the double doors, the red carpet of the restaurant contiguous with the strip of carpet wending through this steamy zone of screams and clangs, a couple dishwashers engaged in an honest-to-God fist fight, a sushi chef cursing in Japanese about his assistant’s lack of a work ethic, clouds of rice steam, airborne plates, and impolite language in three languages flying across various planes of vision. Neethan barrels onward, somewhat unnoticed, past the walk-in freezer to the back door and a clump of waitresses taking a smoke break, to the alley, where the red carpet slithers around a corner and intersects with Hollywood Boulevard. Neethan stumbles onto the famous thoroughfare and sees that the carpet stretches ahead as far as his eyes will focus, block after block, westward toward La Brea. The glittering slutty trinket shops of a reconstituted Hollywood frame his gaze. How is it that after the world seemingly ended, this obnoxious place rebuilt itself from scorched rubble to resume the manufacture of dreams? Why had this, of all places, been a priority? It feels as improbable as his own destiny and origin, beckoning to him from beyond the lights.