Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 12

Oh, j.a.pan. 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, n.o.buhiko 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, n.o.buyoshi Araki bondage stills, h.e.l.lo Kitty. In short, the sum of what Neethan know about j.a.pan. 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-ga.s.sing 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 f.u.c.king 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 a.s.sa.s.sin?"

"Sure, okay."

"Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin, Season Four, is the latest in the award-winning Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin 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 c.o.c.ks 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 b.u.mp, wearing Nikki McGee, pivoting, blonde, pulchritudinous, a human mirror-ball reflecting supernovae of camera flashes. Myra ratchets her face into a smile, teases the preo.r.g.a.s.mic 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 f.u.c.k 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 a.s.sa.s.sin," 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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 f.u.c.king 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 p.u.b.es," Neethan says.

"I have a new stylist. What can you tell me about the new season of Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin?"

"Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin, Season Four, is the latest in the award-winning Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin 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 t.i.tle 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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, endors.e.m.e.nts of j.a.panese 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 s.h.i.t, 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 a.s.sa.s.sin, Season Four, is the latest in the award-winning Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin 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 a.s.s raised up off the bed, spread to reveal the a.n.a.l aperture and beneath it the valley of p.u.s.s.y. 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! f.u.c.ked 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 f.u.c.k 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 a.s.sa.s.sin foretold of a day when the qputers and their attendant monks would instigate a ma.s.s wave of virgin births, remotely impregnating girls around the world with a race of Nietzschean ubermensch 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 s.e.x, 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 f.u.c.ked Up s.h.i.t? s.h.i.t! 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 s.h.i.t, certain Ng-inspired revisionists argued, had never really ceased being f.u.c.ked-up. In fact, they said, the s.h.i.t was by nature f.u.c.ked-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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 reconst.i.tute 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 d.i.c.k. 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 h.e.l.l are you doing here?"

Bickle looks old. Worse, he looks bloodied. His face is sc.r.a.ped 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sa.s.sin, Season Four, is the latest in the award-winning Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin 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, h.o.r.n.y 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 s.e.x in which he'd engaged with the starlet, the kind of s.e.x in which the two people are f.u.c.king the variety of characters the other has played rather than anything one might rightly call another person. At one point Neethan had been f.u.c.king Sherri Nettles, the civil rights attorney Myra had played in Prom Queen: Ground Zero while she had been f.u.c.king his Gordon Lamphiere, the morally ambivalent a.s.sa.s.sin 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 inept.i.tude 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 p.u.b.erty, for instance growing facial hair at the age of four. He'd been taller than the rest of the kids in his cla.s.s until high school, and still thinks of himself as taller than everyone, including Neethan, who towers above him. The premature p.u.b.erty 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 cla.s.smates 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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 d.i.c.k 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 bra.s.s. 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 motherf.u.c.ker 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."

"Pa.s.s. 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."

"Pa.s.s."

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 s.e.x scene. Their own personal "meet cute" moment. Then, c.r.a.p, 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.