by Jim Carrey
A psychic had said it was the spirit of a pioneer woman who’d fallen into the ravine back in the days of Spanish rule, had broken her leg and gone into shock, rousing to find her only child, a daughter, missing, then hearing the little girl’s screams against the feasting yips of coyotes in the distance.
“She has dark hair with gray in it, and she’s screaming in your face,” the psychic told him. “She’s trying to scare you away. She lost her daughter and she wants yours.”
Following this report Carrey had begun to sense the presence himself, had always imagined the spectral pioneer woman as a deranged Nancy Reagan.
Tonight, the ghost came for him.
Tossing in bed, he dreams that he’s given Georgie all the children she’s asked for. Not one or two, but a dozen or so. He’s the kind of man who can handle it all. They are sleeping in a nursery down the hall, a huge number of infants, a litter, really. As he rises to check on them he hears demonic breaths, like from the flared nostrils of a bull—goff-goff-goff-goff.
Distress curdles Georgie’s perfect sleeping face.
He hurries toward the nursery.
Lowers his shoulder into the door.
It opens just six inches, then meets an awesome strength.
He sees, through the slat, Nancy Reagan’s unearthly black eyes, her razor-sharp teeth, bloodied off his babies’ flesh. She slams the door. All he hears is infant wails, tearing flesh, tiny carcasses thudding off the walls as she discards them, gnawed bare like chicken wings. She’s eating his children, you must understand, his tender children with Georgie, Georgie who left him weeks ago, who took his Frida Kahlo. Who won’t return his calls—
A week became two, then a month.
Thirty years earlier at Dangerfield’s Comedy Club, a bartender named Tony, a man who may or may not have killed some guys, had planted his finger into Carrey’s chest and told him, sagely, “You got a divine spark. You gotta protect it.”
Now he recalled those words, fearing that his terrors were a function of the spark having died.
His nights were haunted, his days without peace, fouled by clouds of ash and ceaseless construction noises. Directly across the ravine a Russian oligarch, Mikhail Svinyakov, had bought and razed four bungalows, joining the lots, building there a house whose sole reason for being was to launder his dirty money. And as Svinyakov’s filthy billions were without end, so, too, was his construction. The initial phase, finished six months ago, threw up a smug black ziggurat trimmed in red steel; Carrey had thought it was over. Then work crews and heavy equipment had arrived and begun compounding the monstrosity, adding an aquarium, a disco, a ten-car garage, water features that never stopped running, and a rooftop pool whose grand colonnaded cabana paid homage to the Bolshoi, outside of which Svinyakov had gotten his start scalping tickets, a showbiz origin that worsened everything by suggesting that, in some taunting way, the sonuvabitch belonged here. Thundering pile drivers, raging drills, belching backhoes, they gave Carrey no peace.
His mind, increasingly, resembled the parliament of some ludicrous Balkan republic. There was an anti-hippos faction blaming the pro-Maoists for their failed art project. There was a Georgie Did This to Us! Party, whose intelligence held that his ex-lover had recently sold a screenplay to Kathryn Bigelow, which Variety was calling Oscar-worthy, running a picture of her at a London dinner party seated happily between Tom Waits and Justin Trudeau. This news roiled the whole parliament, spawning a Betrayal Caucus that was in truth but the puppet of a Jealousy Bloc, itself merely cover for an Abandonment Front that (once identified) hastily rebranded itself Need a Pizza. He had a special pie-sized slot with a thermal receiving box installed in his front gate and, through this, several times a week, received large pies with supreme toppings accompanied by sides of cinnamon sticks with extra frosting. He’d scurry out to retrieve them like a feral child, waiting until the delivery boy had driven off to avoid any human interaction, sometimes wearing a terry-cloth robe, most times nothing at all. Always scampering back to the house, fearing the baby-eating Nancy Reagan. Then he’d lose all fears in gluttoning until the food was gone, his mind reset to grumbling.
There’s not one cell in my body that’s the same as it was seven years ago.
Where’d that guy go?
The person I was…
If he can vanish, what am I?
To what place, he wondered, did past selves go? Was it the same place from which, still, in the wee-est of hours, he’d receive calls from his dead father, still spewing gibberish tongues? And he’d take the calls, because how would Percy feel if he’d found a way to dial collect from the beyond and then got sent to voice mail by the son to whom he’d given all his dreams?
So Carrey would answer, “Hello?”
“Whaffagua? WHAFFAUGUA?”
“Dad, speak to me.”
“Afiggity cakkagey ploppo!”
“Speak…”
“AFIGGITY CAKKAGEY PLOPPO!!”
* * *
—
The next afternoon a text came from Nic Cage.
Just won a sixth-century sword at Sotheby’s in London. You gotta see the precision, the pride, the craftsmanship. The Saudis gotta lotta money, man. I really had to chase this fucker. It’s fucking Excalibur, Jimmy. Can I hide out at your Malibu pad for a while?
Why?
I got a beef with some otherworldly assholes.
Sure, replied Carrey. Enjoy it.
He plopped onto his bed. Soft sheets, cool pillows. He turned on Netflix and let its warm glow wash over him, its algorithms guide him.
CHAPTER 11
And now we return to the moment when we first met Jim Carrey.
He watched a documentary claiming irrefutable evidence that the earth’s alien masters would soon come to deliver the planet from its pains. He watched it in shaking wonder, the TV’s streaming images soon feeling oracular, more powerful and reliable than the fracas of his own mind. He watched thick-browed hominids capture fire. He watched the face of Christ reconstructed by quantum computers. He watched a team searching desperately for the lost manuscripts of William Shakespeare on Oak Island off Nova Scotia, where the Knights Templar had almost certainly buried them along with the Holy Grail. He watched real housewives of Beverly Hills having spirited Chardonnay fights, and he saw 4K digital renderings of Pangaea and the giant creatures of the ancient seas. He saw, even, his own younger self, a sketch from In Living Color, “Krishna Cop,” about a Hare Krishna cop who keeps reincarnating every time the bad guys kill him. He thought of those old days, of Keenan and Damon Wayans, who had given him a beautiful place to flourish in the garden they worked so hard to create; of the late nights writing with Steve Oedekerk. He marveled at how the decades had just flown by, watching his comic self die and resurrect in the sketch, again and again, ultimately achieving perfection as a holy crime-solving cow. He was left with a sense of time as insatiable, devouring even the gods with a BBC documentary about the last hours of Pompeii, the burying over of temples, the certainty of extinction that made billionaires plan Pyrrhic escapes to Mars. He was led, then, to a show called Afterlife, testimonials of sweet dopes who’d somehow gone to heaven and then come back to blather about it.
The pure deliverance, the rapturous hope.
Tears poured from Carrey’s insomniac eyes as he watched, as he imagined the soul’s flight from the body. Let go, let go, let go, he pleaded with himself, again and again, trying to shed his human husk. But there was never any ascension; he stayed right where he was, dissected by the YouTube algorithms that soon deduced his guiding interest, suggesting he’d enjoy seeing history’s top-ten celebrity autopsy photos: John F. Kennedy, face frozen in expiration, reddish brown hair filthy with skull-brains-blood; a close-up of Michael Jackson’s hand, a bar-coded tag dangling where the sequined glove once shone; Bruce Lee, mouth stitched shut like a football, sinking into coffin
satin—
You’re a commodity, just a commodity.
Even when you’re dead, it’s not their fault, it’s yours, you blooded the hounds…
Jesus became a tax shelter.
Fred Astaire’s ghost selling Dirt Devil sweepers on late night TV.
A shot of John Lennon. Face puddled on a gurney. This man, the greatest poet-songwriter of Carrey’s lifetime. Born in Liverpool during the Blitz. A working-class hero is something to be. Splayed out for the crowd. If they could do this to John Lennon…
Carrey went to the bathroom, scrubbed and made himself beautiful.
He’d look dashing for generations as yet unborn, if his heart should fail him tonight.
The clock read 5:17, 5:39, 6:40. And just as his eyes were closing—
Construction resumed at Svinyakov’s mansion. New drills, trucked in from fracking country, mighty rockcrushers that pound and blast, send tremors through his windows and into his skull. No point in calling the police, the Russian was within his rights. So Carrey fished a bottle of Ambien from the bedside table drawer. Shook two pills into his palm, swallowed them. A memory of Helena San Vicente here, on this bed. A reconsideration of suicide not as an act of desperation, but one of defiance. Another pill, then, finally, the gift of sleep.
* * *
—
He woke to the face of his daughter, Jane, and his six-year-old grandson, Jackson, who covered his mouth and nose against the foetor of night sweats and dirty sheets, declaring, “Smells like butt in here, Grandpa.”
“You owe me a dollar for swearing.”
“ ‘Butt’ isn’t a swear word.”
“It’s on the edge. What’s that?” Carrey pointed to a tome in his daughter’s hands, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.
“It’s for Jackson’s school. They’re doing Greek mythology.”
“Read it, Mommy,” said the boy.
“I’d enjoy a story,” said Carrey.
Jane opened the volume. This was his daughter, his beautiful daughter, whom he and his first wife, Melissa, had taken home from the hospital nursery to a studio apartment near MacArthur Park. Who’d beamed purest joy from a wicker basket as he and Melissa read Fante’s Ask the Dust to each other on the fire escape.
Now she read to him, flipping to a bookmarked page. “Prometheus could not bear to see his people suffer and he decided to steal fire, though he knew that Zeus would punish him severely. He went up to Olympus, took a glowing ember from the sacred hearth, and hid it in a hollow stalk of fennel.”
She passed the book to Jackson. “Show Grandpa how well you read now.”
Carrey sat up in the bed, giving his whole attention to the boy who proudly took the book, staring intently, slowly moving through the text, “He carried it down to earth, gave it to mankind, and told them never to let the light from Olympus die out.”
The words were like water to Carrey’s parched soul.
“No longer did men shiver in the cold of the night, and the beasts feared the light of the fire and did not dare attack them.”
“God, that’s beautiful,” said Carrey, head falling back on the pillow.
Then his grandson poked at his cheek with a hesitancy that reminded Jane of the young boy’s manner, earlier that month, with a stick and a dead bird. And this moment, this pitying gaze from his six-year-old heir, replayed in Carrey’s mind across the coming hours, translated into a resolve that if there was no reason to exist for his own sake, or even proof that he had ever existed for any sake, there was some reason to carry on for his little girl, for her little boy.
I’ll take HIPPOS, he texted Al Spielman.
What made you change your mind?
I haven’t.
Let him have the last word, thought Spielman, marveling at how TPG’s talent management AI had predicted that Carrey—if simply left alone and denied compliments of any kind—would accept the role in this forty-eight-hour window.
CHAPTER 12
The armored Escalade ground down a dirt path left off most maps.
The landscape shed its gridded certainties, slow-folded back into two-dimensional space, bands of ocher and blue.
The American desert is a pram of horror and wonder, the world’s last unfiltered portal to the beyond, a place where heaven and hell both touch the earth.
He imagined a nervous Oppenheimer, shot in choppy black and white, chain-smoking in his worsted wools, leading the atom bomb down a sheep trail just like this one, toward the place where was unveiled, deus ex machina, history’s ultimate plot device, the thing that might, to Carrey’s view, with even odds, destroy everyone and everything except the data that the earth shrieks out into space.
He thought of his old tweets drifting through Alpha Centauri as the car came to a stop, churning up a dust cloud through which he saw five geodesic domes, all gleaming in the sun. He imagined them as giant eggs hatching baby serpents, the creatures slithering out, glistening with birthing goo, as a man and woman appeared from inside the central structure, greeting him with tight corporate smiles.
“I’m Lala Hormel,” said the woman, a rail-thin blonde in her midforties, blue contact lenses frauding brightly above her hazel eyes. He noticed her signet ring as they shook hands, gold engraved with a screaming falcon. “I’m the TPG partner in charge of Hollywood operations.”
“And I’m Satchel,” said her junior associate, a pair of round glasses with prematurely thinning hair. “Satchel LeBlanc, I work with Lala.”
“I’m feeling better than ever,” said Carrey, as per his team’s suggestion. “And I’m ready to work again…”
“How nice of you to say.”
“I’m feeling so strong and excited to be back in the game.”
“How good for us to hear that.”
Then, an antagonistic glimmer in his eyes, speaking just a bit too loud:
“I play well with others!”
“We value that here,” said Lala, taking him inside the complex, explaining, “This is all proprietary technology from our investments in Korea and Silicon Valley. We’re five years ahead of the studios. That’s pure competitive advantage, Jim.”
Holy shit, they’ve taken over, thought Carrey as she walked him through the domes, each big enough for a 747.
“We’ve got animators, programmers, and renderers. We’ve got genius sound engineers and augmented reality interfaces. We—”
United Artists got close, Laser Jack Lightning tried to do it, but where the artists all failed, a big pile of money is gonna succeed.
“Here we have uncredited but well-compensated writers adjusting the script as our mainframes analyze all chamber output in real time…”
I feel like the first monkey in outer space, I’ll just do what I’m told, see if I get a banana, he thought as they came to a pair of air-locked doors.
“We have over a billion dollars of technology here,” said Lala, ushering him inside. “A lot of baddies who’d just love to get their hands on it. The Age of Misinformation has only just begun. Now, if you don’t mind—”
He was scanned for listening devices, then taken inside the control room, concentric rows of computers and workstations set behind a one-way mirror looking into a spherical beige performance space, the inner chamber. Seated at a central desk was the Millennial George Lucas, Lanny Lonstein, a pudgy redhead compensating for a weak chin with a wispy goatee. His forearm freckles sparkled in the halogen light.
“Jim, meet Lanny,” said Lala. “Lanny, Jim.”
“Jim Carrey…,” gasped Lonstein. At NYU he’d astonished the faculty with his deep readings of film texts, his belief that they contained a magic only revealed when a culture, like a person, gave up its soul at life’s end. That they revealed this meaning through repeated viewings, like recited prayer.
“I own all the Mask dolls. I keep ’em in th
e original packaging. I’ve seen Ace Ventura two hundred eighty-three and a half times. That’s an exact number. As a kid I’d watch it over and over. At NYU they told us we had to choose art or commerce. Ace taught me that was bullshit. Ace taught me you could pack the theaters while carrying out some brilliant fucking subversion.”
“We were mocking the concept of the unbeatable leading man,” said Carrey.
“You were eviscerating the whole Puritan ideal,” said Lonstein.
“And people love animals,” said Lala. “So many cute animals.”
“I’d like to be alone with Jim, if that’s okay,” said Lonstein.
“Of course,” said Lala, and left them there.
“I think cinema is, above all, a store of memory,” said the director. “Did you know that the first recorded memories were Babylonian seals? Little movie reels, carved rock cylinders that they’d roll onto clay, and out would come a story, of a harvest or a flood or a hero. Nude Bearded Hero Wrestling Water Buffalo; Bull-Man Fighting Lion. The same man being received by an enthroned deity, apparently descended from a glowing orb.”
“Ancient Aliens,” said Carrey. “I’ve seen that episode.”
“Yes, the Babylonians believed they had extraterrestrial origins.”
They locked eyes.
“Jim. We are living through the largest mass extinctions ever. Of languages. Of species. I want to make something to speak for us after we’re gone. They think we’re making some movie out of a tabletop game? Let ’em think that. Let ’em call it Hungry Hungry Hippos. We’ll know what we’re really doing. You and me. We’ll know that we’re here, with their billions, making the first human story ever recorded. I want to tell that first story to see us through these trying times.”
