by Jim Carrey
“I’m in love with you,” said Quentin Tarantino, to Georgie.
“With me?”
“Yeah. From Oksana. The scene in the sewers. Stalin, what a dick. You and the power drill. How’d you sneak all that blood onto basic cable?”
“Mitch was into swapping reels at the last minute.”
“An anarchist.”
“Yeah, that’s what got him. That and the whole extraterrestrial arc.”
“Was he a believer?”
“I hope so. He once left the set for a whole week, walked eighty miles into the San Gabriels to take a meeting with a guy he thought created the human species.”
“I’ve watched every episode.”
“Of Oksana?”
“Yeah. I love all that Soviet shit. The fucking Nazis killed twenty million Russian men in World War Two. That’s why the women are so beautiful. The survivors got to be picky as fuck. The women think they’re over the fucking hill at twenty-four, and they start putting all that silver makeup on. And shit. It still haunts them, man. It’s why they’re paranoid. It’s why they sent that Turkish guy to kill the pope. I’ve been noodling around that, the Turkish guy and the pope. The Vatican’s got two flying saucers. Howard Hughes said he got to sit in one, and that was before he was all fucked up. Hey, did Stalin really jizz in Dixie cups—or was that just a conceit?”
“Dixie cups?”
“Or not Dixie cups. Whatever fucking cups the Russians had. Commie Dixie cups. The whole bastard daughter thing. Your origin story. Fuck, I love you.”
Los Angeles, a city built on golden sun and grand prizes, required strong belief in magic. Slight derangement was the first stage of the human filtration process, and she read it on his face as he spoke, the unhinged exuberance that had turned a video-store clerk into a legend and which now, by momentary contagion, showed her that the whole path here had been worthwhile. Quentin Tarantino knew her…Quentin Tarantino was her fan.
“Seems likely in that he was a maniac.” Tarantino was in full stride. “Crazy people love to play with their spunk. Soviet Union. Uncle Joe. Mother Russia. I’ve been circling the space. Noodling. We should have a meeting.”
“A meeting?” Georgie asked.
“I got my eye on you. There’s this part. Dunaway-esque. Brilliant. A she-devil that’d eat her own young, a killer instinct that comes in handy when werewolves take over her mining town. But they’re not just fucking werewolves. They’re a metaphor for economic predation in the wake of the collapse of the industrial economy!”
“Sure,” she said, unsure whether or not to take him seriously, but happy, for the moment, to believe that a real career might finally come to her. “It’s fun to play the heavy.”
“I don’t play, honey,” he said; then, with a wink, took his leave to pursue a passing tray of hamburger sliders.
Across the yard Nicolas Cage assailed Natchez Gushue.
“A Stone Age ax and a saber-toothed-tiger skeleton are coming up for auction in Shanghai. Seeing them triggered some crazy visions. Or memories. Or whatever. I think I’ve lived many lives, Natchez. I think I’ve been saving humanity for a while now.”
“I look forward to hearing about it. You should come by the bungalow.”
“But it’s urgent.”
“I’m really just here to enjoy the party.”
“You know how big a saber-toothed tiger is? Imagine two of them, one on either side of me. I wear a furry loincloth, my torso ripples muscles; I’m seven percent body fat at this point. I carry this giant Stone Age ax. Then, wandering these wastelands, I encounter, oh God, this vision, it’s so awful. It’s—”
“Aliens?”
“Have you dreamed this, too? Their spaceship is sleek, black, small. Like a scout mission. Their bodies poised to strike like giant pythons. My sabertooths attack, eager to defend me. The aliens kill them with their red plasma beams to which, once again, I’m immune. Only now, I have no fear. I go fucking berserk.” Nic’s eyeballs bulged. “I’m hacking away at them with my ax. Guts squirting everywhere.”
“Shall we get another drink?”
“I slaughter them, Natchez. I kill them all, or at least the guys on the ground. The spaceship lifts off. As it rises, this voice comes out of the air. It speaks to me.”
Natchez sighed, a cocktail-hour hostage. “What does it say, Nic?”
“It says, ‘See you in Malibu when the clock ticks no more.’ ”
* * *
—
There was dinner in the garden, a long table set for fifty, adorned with plum and lotus blossoms. Anthony Hopkins was given a place of honor beside Carrey. Hopkins watched as the star stuffed his face with his bare hands, devouring chunks of suckling pig, indifferent to the plum sauce smeared across his jowls. Then a piece of gristle flew out of Carrey’s mouth, landing grossly on the lapel of the white suit that Hopkins hadn’t cleaned since the day at Yale when Elise declined his proposal. He could take no more.
“You’re borrowing from The Grinch,” he leaned low and scolded, enraged that the jacket would now require cleaning. “Pick up your fork and eat like a head of state.”
Carrey froze with a fried piglet’s ear dangling from his craw, his own insecurities feeding the rush of an undeniably Maoist rage. First, he was livid at Hopkins for dressing him down in front of his peers. In ego defense, he decided Anthony was jealous of him. Of his talent, his youth. But then paranoia bubbled up within rage. What if Hopkins was secretly against him? Trying to make a fool of him? What if others were involved, coconspirators? What if this was the story they’d use to detract from his performance? Carrey wasn’t Mao, they’d say. He was just the Grinch. That’s it, that’s what they’d use to deny him his due when awards season came. Bastards. He scanned the table, reading every face for signs of betrayal. And then, just as quickly as rage had turned to paranoia, paranoia turned, as it does, to want of triumph. A colossal will formed within him, a determination to show Hopkins and everyone else that he was not only a fine actor but the finest of his generation. He’d planned to give a dinner toast laced with Marxist criticisms, comments against American capitalism, vampiric imperialism, just edgy enough to scare off the Disney execs, his class enemies, the same who’d crushed his father, who’d have broken him in the Toronto factories if he hadn’t escaped. Now he decided to make the air truly unbreathable for them. He rose from his chair, bone-dry desert wind rustling the leaves of the maples, an impish grin taking hold as he raised his wineglass.
“America is a failing fascist Ponzi scheme.”
The table quieted, silver forks settling on porcelain.
He imagined himself a great dragon, spewing fire—
“It doesn’t take care of its sick, doesn’t care for its poor. Doesn’t protect its children. Abandons its veterans and its elderly. America’s very God is a fraud, invented by marauding settlers to justify native genocide, a savage deity blessing a savage people, forgiving the napalming of babies in Vietnam, the starvation of five hundred thousand Iraqis in our own lives. And who at this table lost five seconds even thinking about that? No, we drown that out with our positive personal affirmations. We don’t even look after our own. The people who work fifteen hours a day doing our makeup, hair, and wardrobe have to invoice the studios six or seven times before they get paid. They beg while someone siphons interest off their money. And whose fucking idea was a fifteen-hour day in the first place?”
Wink and Al watched aghast, hoping this was all a bit, wondering when Carrey would switch to family-friendly impressions. Carrey looked down the table of gathered stars, his peers: Jack Nicholson, his close friend Noah Emmerich, Dame Helen Mirren, Brad and Angelina. And, just as Mao would have, leveled charges while holding out the chance of redemption.
“Once, we were artists. Pure! But we, all of us, we became a distraction, compromised for the sake of fame, comfort, the approval
of strangers. We spend our lives pursuing something as empty as ‘relevance’ and they use our fear of losing it to corral us. Dirty Malaysian money. Saudi money. We’ll take it all. What went wrong? We sing and dance not to entertain but to distract people from the crushing gears of a capitalist machine that has no ideals save for greed and violence. And let’s not kid ourselves, Hollywood is the best PR firm the gunmakers ever had. What a sick culture.”
“But what about artistic beauty?” asked Cameron Diaz.
“When you can perceive beauty there’s no excuse for serving ugliness. For aiding cons, inflaming desires, promising everything and delivering nothing. It doesn’t matter what you put on TV because people are so frightened and lonely they’ll watch it just to hear human voices and feel like they’re not alone. They’re so beaten down all they need is a soccer tournament every four years and they stay in their place. This is not a society. This is a system of soul-murder. And history will not be kind to us for our complicity, because we know better. The executives”—he nodded Maoishly to the Disney team—“they can say they were serving their god Mammon, but we artists can’t. We’re all East German playwrights now, complicit with the regime! And there will come a time of judgment. We’re destroying the planet. This cannot last.”
Leonardo DiCaprio, who had long shared these feelings, raised his martini Gatsby-style and cheered, “Global warming is a fever meant to kill a virus!” He was so enthralled by Carrey’s bravery that he accepted it when the star, now veering deep into Mao, continued in the slightest Cantonese accent.
“The American citizen is so lost he doesn’t realize he’s a factory pig. Drugged and poisoned from the cradle to the grave. Chained to impossible debts. Never ever free. Liberty? Bah! This is a land of invisible fences, we’re all prisoners watching Capra on movie night. But nothing lasts forever. Europe’s monarchies sent their sons to die in the trenches of the Somme just as surely as we drove Chiang Kai-shek into the sea. You think America will be different? You think this era, one not of consumption but of gluttony, will last forever? It will not…”
“We’re going six thousand miles an hour around the sun and nobody’s driving this bitch!” said Gary Busey from the woods, where, for his own reasons, he was halfway up an eighty-foot pine tree.
“There will come another crisis soon,” continued Carrey. “The capitalist scheme will collapse, the people will reclaim their rights. There will be violent unrest. Ask yourselves, Which side am I on? That of the people, or of the billionaires and their running dogs whose heads, I promise, will end up on sticks. The revolution begins now. The death of false gods!”
His peers cheered him madly. Carrey was Mao as he’d seen him on YouTube, standing before the Chinese Communist Congress, receiving endless flows of love, the adulation making him something more than a man: a vessel of longing, of dreams. Georgie gazed at him fondly, for the first time in weeks, then nodded to the waiters. They hustled into the kitchen and came out bearing the coup de grâce: two large cakes, half life-size, one of Mickey Mouse, one of Minnie, each impaled on a jagged chocolate-bark pikestaff, raspberry filling oozing down into puddles from their open wounds.
The guests roared even louder. If not exactly at the call to violent revolution—this was, after all, a gathering of millionaires—then at his very gusto, his defiant ballsiness. Jane Fonda, recognizing this all as a performance, made sharp whooping sounds unheard since her photo ops with the Vietcong. Through gritted teeth, with a raw sexual hunger, Lara Flynn Boyle said, “I wanna cut him.”
Meanwhile Kelsey Grammer, who had been warming up his vocal cords with soft humming through most of Jim’s speech, raised his glass to ejaculate lines from Shakespeare. “Let Hercules himself do what he may! The cat will mew and dog will have his day.”
“Dammit, Kelsey!” said Natchez Gushue. “Allow the man his moment.”
“What?” protested Grammer. “Does he get to just suck up the whole evening?”
Carrey knew now, totally, that he had it within him. The magnetic Maoist stuff. He wondered, with perfect grandiosity, if the Mao was not just prelude to a greater historic role. Ronald Reagan had won the White House, and Reagan was just a wooden day player compared to him. The Disney executives, fearing proximity to this kind of trademark sacrilege, rose from their seats, faces twisted in careerist fear, and fled the patio as the actors photographed the grisly cakes, sending them viral.
“What did you do?” said Wink, who couldn’t look at the confections for too long without risking memories of Nicaragua. Carrey glowered at him, smugly satisfied.
“Sick fuck’s getting off on this,” said Al Spielman II, who as a pillar of the business community was appalled, but as stress eater was eyeing the raspberry filling that oozed down Minnie’s breasts from the gaping wound in her head.
“He’s lost his mind,” said Wink, pulling Al by the arm to follow the Disney executives, assuring them this was just “some Andy Kaufman shit” that Jim had cooked up, that in time they’d tell their grandkids about it, and a couple of disturbing cakes shouldn’t interfere with business.
No sooner had they left than a great rumbling sounded from the Mojave, a noise like the grinding of vast metal plates. People had been hearing it all summer. Jaden Smith, who had recently become a flat-earther, offered his theory that it was cosmic wind vibrating along the planet’s edge like the reed of a clarinet. Gary Busey, now at the very top of the pine tree, pointed toward Orion and shouted out a different view. “Sure, the earth is a planet orbiting the sun. But what they keep from you is that the cosmos itself is riding on the back of an iguana swimming in the opposite direction! I jumped off that old lizard a long time ago.”
“Fools,” scoffed Lara Flynn Boyle as the sound came again. “It’s the crumbling of the wall that keeps the real from the imagined.”
And right she may have been.
Georgie quieted the guests for the special entertainment she had planned as much for her pleasure, and needs, as for Carrey’s. They all milled toward the house, ground lights dimming, making a stage of the patio. Then, from inside, came a zaftig blonde whose stage name was Helena San Vicente but who, to all eyes, was the perfect reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. Quentin Tarantino wondered if this was a hologram as she began her two-song set, starting with “I’m Through with Love,” ending with “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” her every swooning note and gesture honed just so, as if the spirit of the dead siren was summoned and guiding her. The crescendo bound them in wonder, her sequined bustier falling to reveal a tasseled bra, the bra falling, in turn, to show her ample breasts adorned with rhinestone pasties, Helena flaunting her assets excitedly, mesmeric proof of something utterly great living beyond politics: artistic immortality.
“Some men are following me,” said Monroe in her first moment on film, inviting a million popcorn-chomping American rubes to fill in whatever flavor of sex fantasy that crossed their minds. And after this they couldn’t look away. They’d visited their worst upon Monroe, had taken her life while she was young. And yet here—boulder rolling from the tomb, not blocks from where she’d died—here she was. Monroe, returned, a Technicolor Venus, an undying persona come to bind them. To resell them on the absurd hope that they, too, if luck was kind, might live, in whatever pale way, forever.
Where normally only a handful of guests would stay after dinner, nearly everyone remained, dabbing their tongues with MDMA, popping magnums of champagne, crowding to devour the cake flesh of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, some scooping with their hands, Quentin Tarantino cutting off Mickey’s entire left ear and happily giggling as raspberry filling gushed from the wound. Songs from the forties and fifties played across the house speakers—Tommy Dorsey, the Andrews Sisters, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald—midcentury rhythms casting innocence on them all, strangers taking strangers as lovers, coupling off among the shadows of the great estate, a pairing that found Georgie drinking champagne with the
young Monroe impersonator, studying the girl’s face like appraising a painting, gauging the degree of real beauty versus mere affect beneath all that foundation and concealer, trying, even, to place the origins of her voice.
“Where are you from?”
“West Hollywood.”
“And before that?”
“Oopsie!”
The girl splashed champagne down her cleavage, letting out a giggle. And Georgie, between the spill and giggle, decided that, more than just an apparition, this Monroe was an answered prayer. With predatory swiftness, she pressed her mouth to the girl’s chest, felt the body acquiesce as she licked the sweet wine from her cleavage. Then she took her by the hand and led her down to the Jacuzzi where Carrey’s Mao was already floating naked. Georgie watched Helena’s eyes as she unzipped her Versace gown, letting it fall it to the ground, feeling her beauty affirmed by the younger woman’s gaze.
“Come swim.”
Then Helena disrobed again, now with slightly less confidence, feeling Jim’s and Georgie’s eyes on her as she lowered herself into the water.
“Mr. Chairman,” said Georgie, with a grin. “May I present to you the great Marilyn Monroe.”
Helena giggled breathlessly, sidling up to him in the water jets. Her voice went tiny and girlish as she whispered into his ear, “I like a man with nukes.”
“You can kiss him,” said Georgie as Helena leaned close to Carrey, her face so true to the real Marilyn’s that he perceived no difference between the dead woman and the girl in the hot tub, his inner voice reeling to think that here, in his arms, whether natural or paranormal, was what Mao must have always wanted but never had: the greatest sex symbol ever produced by the West.
* * *
—
In the master bedroom wet bodies fell on fresh sheets. Georgie took charge of the encounter, guiding Helena by the hips as she rode the father of modern China.
