by Jim Carrey
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2020 by Some Kind of Garden, LLC
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019954114
ISBN 9780525655978 (hardcover)
Ebook ISBN 9780525655985
Cover painting by Jim Carrey
Photograph by Linda Fields Hill
Cover design by Chip Kidd
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Authors
For my big brother John
For the name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.
—MARSHALL MCLUHAN
PROLOGUE
They knew him as Jim Carrey.
And by the middle of that December his lawn had burned to a dull, amber brittle. And at night, after the sprinklers’ ten minutes of city-rationed watering, the grass blades floated in pooled water—limp and wasted like his mother’s hair in the final morphine sweats.
The city of Los Angeles had been moving hellward since April, with bone-dry reservoirs and strings of scorching days, the forecasts reading like a sadist’s charm bracelet, 97-98-105-103. Last week an F-16 had flashed like a switchblade through the ash-filled sky just as one of the gardeners on the Hummingbird Road estate collapsed of sunstroke and fell into seizures. The man fought as they carried him to the house, saying the Virgin Mary had promised him a slow dance for three dollars in the cool shade of the ravine. At night came the Santa Anas, those devil winds that sapped the soul, that set police sirens wailing as the sunsets burned through napalm oranges into sooty mauves. Then each morning a smoggy breath would draw across the canyons and into the great house, passing through air filters recently equipped with sensors to detect assassination by nerve gas.
He was bearded and bleary eyed after months of breakdown and catastrophe. He lay naked in his bed, so far from peak form that if you watched through a hacked security camera at this moment you might barely recognize him, might at first confuse him with a Lebanese hostage. Then, in a swell of facial recognition, you’d realize: This is no ordinary shut-in watching television alone on a gigantic bed, and as the bloodred Netflix logo glared from an unseen TV you’d say, “I know this man, I’ve seen him on everything from billboards to breakfast cereals. He’s the movie star: Jim Carrey.”
Just weeks ago, thirty seconds of home security footage was leaked to The Hollywood Reporter by some traitor in his extended personal-protection apparatus. In it Carrey bobbed facedown and fetal in his pool, wailing underwater like a captive orca. His publicist, Sissy Bosch, told Variety that he was preparing to play John the Baptist for Terrence Malick, who conveniently declined comment. The video sold for fifty thousand dollars, a sum just large enough to inspire that most sacred of animal behaviors—a spontaneous market response. After the fifth paparazzo scaled his backyard fence, his security team had it raised to fifteen feet, electrified, and fringed with razor wire, an eighty-five-thousand-dollar job including the city council bribe. Jim had since begun to hear the sizzles and squeaks of electrocuted wildlife as a sorrowful necessity, animal sacrifice to his godhead. And while some believed Sissy Bosch’s John the Baptist story, most noted that it didn’t explain Carrey’s weight gain, or why some heard a distinctly Chinese accent in his moanings.
It was now 2:58 in the morning.
He’d been watching television for seven hours.
The binge had started with an episode of Ancient Predators featuring Megalodon, the super-shark terror of the ancient seas. Then came Cro-Magnon vs. Neanderthal, the story of how these early humans parted as cousins on the African plains, then re-met as strangers in Europe, only to begin a contest of genocide. Cro-Magnon had slaughtered without mercy, leaving famished Neanderthal orphans staring out from French caves into a blizzard, whose screaming whiteness, Jim knew, was that of total erasure. He was half French Canadian and learned from the narrator that he carried Neanderthal DNA within him; he was descended from these orphans. Feeling their doom as his own, he’d begun crying tears of desolation and then, unable to bear these, he’d hit pause with his grease-slicked thumb, freezing the screen on the tiny Neanderthal faces. For ten minutes he lay trembling, muttering “Oh God…” over and over until Netflix, greedy for its own bandwidth, reset to the main menu, casting its red glow over him and his guard dogs—identical twin, steel-toothed Rottweilers who both answered to “Jophiel.” Their name was shared for the sake of efficiency in emergency, so that if one of Jim Carrey’s many enemies broke into the house and he had only seconds to act, he could summon both with a breath.
Fearing this was the moment when he would discover his own long-standing nonexistence, questioning even the value of an existence as part of a species forever looping between horror and heartache, he wondered if the latest viral news story vexing his publicists was right. Had he actually died while snowboarding in Zermatt? He’d seen a YouTube video about how time behaves strangely in death, your final seconds distending, yielding rich washes of experience. What if he had died in recent days, arriving not in a hell or a heaven but rather a bedbound purgatory?
He’d heard stories about the Los Angeles morgue. Bored attendants taking gross pictures of the famous fallen, selling them to TMZ for down payments on houses in the Valley. He flipped to YouTube, whose algorithms, like reading his mind, offered a montage of celebrity death photos. A shot of John Lennon. Face puddled on a gurney. Splayed out for the crowd. If they could do this to John Lennon…
His mind now conjured an image of his own lifeless form, swollen and foul, the morgue goons standing above him, cameras blazing.
“Fuck…,” he breathed, unsure if he’d breathed it or not.
He’d gone to the bathroom, trying to reclaim existential certainty with a warm rush of urine through his middle-aged urethra. His heart was racing. What if it failed in his sleep and they found him in the morning, caked in his own excrement? What if the entire flight of paranoia that had brought him to this moment of feared death was a premonition of a future death, the Zermatt snowboarding disaster just fate’s deft misdirection? No, if death should come, he’d look his best—crevice as clean as a whistle.
Thus resolved, he’d sat on his Japanese toilet and evacuated his bowels, wiped himself, and hopped in the shower, thoroughly sponging the orifice, then drying and powdering himself. He moved to the vanity mirror and kept going, trimming his wiry eyebrows, plucking the wolf hairs from his ears, rubbing bronzer across his forehead, his neck, around his clavicles in a broad swoop, so he looked l
ike a Grecian bust.
Now he was ready for the boys at the morgue.
Here was a great star, they’d say. A box-office god of the kind they don’t make anymore.
Now he was marginally less afraid.
He settled back into bed and began watching the first thing Netflix offered: Pompeii Reconstructed: Countdown to Disaster.
“This was the Hamptons or Riviera of the ancient world,” said the host, Ted Berman, an off-brand Indiana Jones in a thrift-store fedora. Once again, Jim felt reality blurring into fiction as a digitally animated cloud of burning ash billowed up from Mount Vesuvius, the computerized notion of a camera’s POV rose with it, high above the city, then stopped and panned into the volcanic crater, which suddenly seemed so very endless and all-devouring that Carrey cried out, “Security inventory!”
“Internal zones clear,” replied his house, in the voice of a Singaporean opium heiress who summered in Provence. “You are safe, Jim Carrey.”
“Defense barrier status?”
“Fully electrified.”
“Let’s do a voltage surge. Just to be sure.”
The television’s light dimmed as he heard a sound like a giant zipper being pulled around the property, twenty thousand volts of electricity surging through his razor-wire fence.
“Tell me I’m safe again,” said Carrey. “And loved.”
“You are safe. And loved.”
“Tell me something nice about me.”
“Your monthly water usage is down three percent.”
“Flatterer.”
The television regained brightness. The program resumed.
An earthquake had just rocked Pompeii, a natural phenomenon that the Romans had never experienced. Some thought it was the first act of a miracle and stayed to see more. Others were less sure, fleeing through the city gates.
“No one could have guessed,” said Ted Berman, “that all who remained would die.”
A succession of desperate moments with the documentary’s main characters: a shipping magnate and his pregnant wife; young sisters born into a brothel; a high-ranking magistrate, his family, and their African slave.
Eyes tearing, Jim wondered: Was it wise to keep watching Pompeii, with the images of megalodons still fresh on the brain? With those Neanderthal orphans still paused in their French cave? Charlie Kaufman once told him that cinema’s guiding illusion of distinct frames effecting fluid continuity was the same trick that creates the impression of time in the mind—that past and present are invented concepts, necessary fictions. Were he and the Pompeians just disparate squares of celluloid? Were they feeling the collapse of his world just as he was feeling the destruction of theirs? Was there only one pain? If this was true, then it must hold not only for the original Pompeians but for the actors playing them, people struggling for the next job.
To be seen. To matter.
Money was in charge now. Money had made them all indentured dreamers.
I don’t have to be like this…
I could leave right now and just be happy…
But what would happy look like? At that moment, he couldn’t remember.
An awful grief pulled him deep into the bed, multiplying his every pound a thousandfold. He summoned the strength to lift his thumbs and text Nicolas Cage, a man whose artistic bravery had always given him courage: Nic? When you said the spirits of the dead are all around us, did you mean that poetically, or truly?
But his exquisite friend did not answer.
Nic? again.
Again, no reply.
Seconds fell like loads of granite on top of him.
He considered abandoning Netflix.
He would eat the tuna Nicoise in his refrigerator, then go outside and maybe play-drown in the pool. He raised his head off the pillow, ready for action, but then stopped, suddenly sure that he owed Pompeii’s dead a full and unbroken viewing.
He pressed PLAY.
Sets of unearthed remains were being digitally reconstructed by archaeologists from Frankfurt. Where, Jim Carrey wondered, would this technology be when he was dug up? What would people of the future conclude about him? Could they ever guess at what had writhed within his skull? His flayed father? His sweet-suffering mom? Might they one day reconstruct the ruins of the mind as well as those of the body?
The skeletons of the two sisters found in the Pompeii brothel had malformed teeth, the effects, the researchers concluded, of congenital syphilis.
“They were born with this social disease through no fault of their own,” said Ted Berman. “Totally innocent and yet in constant pain.”
The girls now received their close-up in a dramatized flashback, latex pustules bubbling off their eyelids as they gazed up toward Mount Vesuvius. In 1993 the Guru Viswanathan had observed Carrey’s aura as “a glorious, radiant rose gold,” and taught him to sense its shiftings within his transient form. Now he felt it arcing out toward the television as the syphilis twins cowered beneath the volcanic rain. He feared his soul was being taken from him or—worse—that it was fleeing.
Jophiel, affection! he tried to say, but could only gasp as, on the TV, Vesuvius’s ash cloud blotted out the sun. Plunged into darkness, with a new appreciation for the word’s impossibility, Carrey finally managed to bark “Affection!” and immediately the two Rottweilers clambered up to lie on either side of him, licking the tears from his beard.
“Deep affection!” cried Carrey, and the dogs (who had been trained to treat whoever spoke those words as a nursing mother and regard themselves as exactly six weeks old) moved from merely licking his face to nuzzling his neck, their muzzles so warm that Carrey might have confused the Pavlovian error for true nurture were it not for their steel teeth grazing the outline of his jugular.
He looked back to the TV: a shot of human bones on a steel table.
“Female remains,” one of the Germans said. The camera zoomed in on a blue laser matrix completing the scan. “A wealthy woman. Perhaps eighteen years old.”
The program cut to a flashback: the woman in her villa, dining on a silk couch, a delicate beauty wiping her husband’s mouth with a kindness that, Jim knew, was drawn from the actress’s own way of loving.
The only truly selfless love he’d ever known, a giving without thought of taking, was with Linda Ronstadt in the rainy July of 1982. Sixteen years older, she’d sing him a Mexican love song, “Volver, Volver,” a yearning lullaby that would settle through him as she held him to her sun-browned chest, running her fingers through his hair. “Volver, volver, volver…”
The words traveling forward through time to this moment: “Come back, come back, come back…”
But how could he?
He was not the bright-eyed boy she’d held. Had he killed that innocent kid, then dissolved the body in the acids of debauchery? He envied the doomed Pompeian man and his tender wife. He felt terribly alone there on the bed, Linda’s voice whispering through him—
“Volver, volver, volver…”
As the laser matrix danced down the woman’s skeleton, pausing over a set of bones scattered about beneath her rib cage, one of the Germans typed commands into his computer. On its screen, renderings of the bones gathered in a digital womb to form a tiny skeleton. A few more keystrokes gave it a shadeless layer of pink skin, a pair of tadpole eyes, a half-formed hand. A tiny finger plugged into a cupped mouth—
“She is with child,” said the German. “Boy child.”
And now new tears of abandoned hope joined Carrey’s earlier tears of desolation.
“The cloud of superheated ash is collapsing under its own weight,” explained Ted Berman. “And while the woman and her husband were safe from falling pumice in their vaulted villa, they will now suffer Pompeii’s worst fate: thermal shock. As the air temperature reaches five hundred degrees, the woman’s soft tissues will literally explode, he
r brain shattering her skull.”
“No…,” said Jim Carrey.
“The baby’s skull also explodes. Perhaps a fraction of a second after the explosion of the mother’s intestines through her rib cage.”
“Please don’t,” he begged.
And then, across his billion-pixel screen, the volcanic plume collapsed beneath its own mass, cascading down the sides of the digital Vesuvius. The syphilis girls, the magistrate, the young lovers and their child, all of them and their dreams, carbonized: flash-assumed into the death cloud whose blackness darkened the Hummingbird Road bedroom as it rolled across the digital Bay of Naples. Carrey moaned sorrow, closed his eyes like a little boy.
When he opened them again, Ted Berman was walking Pompeii’s excavated streets in the present day. The camera panned across rows of plaster casts, bodies arrested in death, some with faces of abject terror, some guarding piled treasure with weapons, others tranquil, resigned. And finally: a husband and wife lying together, his hand on her pregnant stomach. And Jim Carrey, known for wild pratfalls and joyous mayhem—he curled into a ball and started weeping. Yes, he was a real mess. But once he’d shone so brilliantly. Oh, you should have seen him.
CHAPTER 1
A world before, he’d starred in a major summer spectacle, a movie that had effortlessly cruised to a $220 million global box office, with thirty-five percent of this fortune marked for Carrey personally, flooding into his financial reservoirs from distribution territories stretching, as was said, “from Tuscaloo to Timbuktu.” That the film was, even by his own estimation, firmly in his second tier only made its success sweeter: the greater the impunity, the closer to God.
He’d filled with the love of the crowd as the blockbuster rolled out and on, opening in London, Moscow, Berlin. He entered Rome as a slapstick Caesar, walking a hundred-yard-long red carpet where he saw a publicist crouching right in his path and—gauging the moment like a cliff diver the rising tide—tripped right over the guy, going down spread eagle, head and shoulders walloping the carpet so hard that the crowd believed he’d died right in front of them. Lying there, Carrey thought of his uncle Des, shot and killed in a Bigfoot costume while on his way to prank a corn boil. Some lunged to help the star. Others just gasped. Carrey let their concern build before bouncing up like a coil and giving every subsequent interview with one eye crossed.
