Memoirs and Misinformation

by Jim Carrey

  “What story is that?”

  “The Epic of Gilgamesh.”

  A soothing, sating aroma filled the air as Lonstein’s assistant appeared with the meal that Carrey ate when he wanted to get back in shape but was not yet ready for the suffering of a real diet: two grilled nut-cheese sandwiches on spelt bread with a bottle of organic ketchup and a frosty can of naturally flavored mango LaCroix.

  Lonstein watched, pleased, as the star began devouring.

  “We think we’re immune to massive cataclysms? Nothing could be further from the truth. Unfettered capitalism is destroying the world. It can’t last.”

  “It yearns for its own destruction,” said Carrey.

  “I think celebrity does, too,” said Lonstein. “Celebrity, as we know it, is part of capitalism. Unsustainable. I think that’s why you all eat, at the end.”

  “Who?”

  “Elvis. Liz Taylor. Bardot. Brando. All the real greats gorge toward the end.”

  Carrey paused, a long cheese strand hanging from his chin. “Thanks?”

  “Don’t take it the wrong way, just something I’ve observed.”

  “Michael Jackson would have been a parade float if it wasn’t for his meds,” said Carrey. “That was his way of getting there.”

  “How do ya mean?”

  “Fifty years old? Fifty-city tour? Taking fentanyl to dance, propofol to sleep at night? That’s showing you the same thing.”

  “Which is what?”

  “That all personas eventually turn sarcophagal,” said Carrey, plainly. “And what’s the natural thing to do in a sarcophagus?”

  “Die?”

  “Not before you try to claw your way out.”

  “So let’s do this,” said Lonstein.

  And Carrey, later on, would recall how Lanny’s left hand trembled on the table, how his eyes had betrayed an almost sickly need of approval as the director took a deep breath, then belted out an eerily perfect, “Aaaalllll­lllll­llrighty theeennnnn!”

  * * *

  —

  He was wearing a black motion-capture bodysuit made of data-relaying fibers, and standing in the central chamber, equipped with the most precious fruit of TPG’s entertainment foray: a pair of million-dollar augmented-reality goggles, one of only four in existence, a quantum leap in production technology designed to address a long-standing complaint of green-screen actors—that it was hard to imagine a tennis ball as a Tyrannosaurus rex.

  They looked like ordinary tanning goggles, just a bit bulkier, and promised to show him the mainframe-rendered scenes in real time. “This is total immersion, the leap from acting to reacting,” Lala had bragged, unpacking them. “Don’t drop them.”

  Over half their estimated value came from projected pornography revenues.

  An ultraviolet laser light scanned Carrey’s torso, his face, his legs, relaying all data to the mainframes that inserted him into the digital person of Morris Simmons, a Middle American adman on a wild journey. He watched, with eerie fascination, as the black bodysuit turned into pleated shorts, a Chicago Bears golf shirt with a bulging belly. As his forearms puffed up like pressed hams. He laughed for the first time in weeks; he felt so free that he danced, first cautiously, testing the speed of the rendering engines, then gaily, even merrily, awed by delightful illusion. His fingers, always slender, were suddenly a family of Vienna sausages. He waved them before his goggled eyes, was half tempted to bite one as Lonstein’s voice came through his earpiece.

  “A friendly note that your fingers are not edible.”

  “They look delicious!”

  “Just wanted to show you what this baby can do,” said Lonstein, returning his digits to normal. “Okay. Let’s start with scene twelve: ‘Entry into Hippopotoma.’ ”

  The chamber transformed, each beige panel generating pixels of glimmering wonder, a holographic Hippo Babylon of terra-cotta houses protected by mighty walls. The depth of the rendering was simply awesome; he believed that every brick of this city had been baked in the sun. And then he gasped at the hippos themselves. Their features were endearingly cartoonish, but their flesh was so supple, their eyes so vividly alive. He marveled at them, carrying a Dunlop nine iron, walking through a crowded marketplace of mostly barren produce stalls.

  It was a scene of Black Friday bedlam, hippos battling to stuff their bags with desiccated mangoes. Then it became a proper melee. A newly arrived cart of mangoes had them gnashing their giant teeth, butting their massive skulls, drawing blood over fruit flesh, as fully savage an animal fight scene as a PG rating would allow. These, undoubtedly, to any observer, were hungry, hungry hippos.

  There was no written script; the time costs of revision and the unpredictability of actors and writers from draft to draft had been deemed an inefficiency by TPG, replaced with autonomous dialogue generation—

  “It’s a little early for a hurly-burly!” said a voice in Carrey’s ear, a voice so much like his own, and yet so much less taxing than original thought, that he almost accepted it as his true interior and didn’t speak the line until prompted again. He lifted a single comic eyebrow:

  “IT’S A LITTLE EARLY FOR A HURLY-BURLY!”

  He’d nailed it.

  Then, just like in a movie, trumpets blasted a royal fanfare and into the market came a hippo woman wearing a golden crown, the Hippo Queen, attended by five royal Hippo Guards whose presence stopped the violence.

  “Good hippos!” said the Hippo Queen, voiced brilliantly by Dame Judi Dench. “We are all brothers and sisters. And we all have one enemy—” She waited a ripe dramatic beat. “Who is our enemy?”

  “The Hyena Queen!” cried the crowd.

  “Yes!” She gestured across the marketplace, so many barren farm stands. “She steals our precious mangoes, fouls our water. She eats our hippo babies. And her fang bacteria is so bad, if she bites you you’ll lose your mind!”

  “She bit me once and I woke up married to a cocktail waitress in Reno!” boomed a voice from across the square.

  Carrey turned to see a bipedal rhinoceros whose swaggering gait and red necktie struck him as familiar even before all the hippos said, “It’s Rodney the Rhino!”

  This rhino bore strong resemblance to Rodney Dangerfield, the legendary comedian whom Jim had watched on the Ed Sullivan Show as a boy, not understanding the jokes but laughing because his father was laughing.

  Who, in Vegas, forty years before, had hired a young Jim as his opening act, mentoring him, believing in him, always watching his stand-up from the wings, laughing at his goofy innocence.

  Whom Jim loved and admired.

  Who had been dead for fifteen years.

  “Rodney?”

  “Let’s stay in the scene, Jim.”

  “Rodney’s dead.”

  “You’re not lookin’ so hot yourself, kid,” said the rhino as a voice in Carrey’s earpiece explained, “We’ve licensed his essence.”

  “That’s a thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fuck me.”

  “Let’s get back into it. Okay? One, two, three…”

  And Rodney the Rhino, surveying all the woebegone hippopotami, continued his bit: “I always said it. You can’t trust hyenas. They’ll laugh at anything!”

  He pointed to Carrey.

  “But this guy can save us!”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you’re the one who was promised.”

  “No way.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Nu-uh.”

  He turned to the many hippos like they were a comedy club crowd, pulling at his necktie and rolling his eyes. “Must I always be wrong?” He pointed to Carrey’s nine iron. “You’re the one, I tell ya! The guy from the Scrolls of Hippopotoma.”

  Four Hippo High Priests now appeared, unfurling a giant scroll to show a po
rtly man with a short staff. Carrey raised his hands in protest, but as the sun gleamed from the golf club all the hippos fell to their knees, convinced of his destiny.

  And if this all wasn’t enough to move him, the promise of just another second or two with even the animal form of Rodney Dangerfield was.

  “You’re the guy who’s come to save us,” said Rodney. “To bring back the clean water. And the mangoes. And the kids. Because of you, we’re all gonna finally get the respect we deserve! Ya with me?”

  And Carrey felt the right line birthed inside of him before anything came through his earpiece. He spoke it with his whole heart: “I’d go anywhere with you.”

  * * *

  —

  Over the next month, in the semi-magical chamber, Jim and Rodney wandered far beyond Hippopotoma. They battled Marauding Lions roaring primal menace, and Rodney saved Carrey’s life, goring two lionesses so gravely that the rest all retreated. Then they fought Sadistic Jackals, and here they were a team, Carrey riding Rodney like an armored tank, fending off the jackals with his nine iron, cracking jokes about how his short game had never been so good. Then they rested on a lush hillside, full moon hanging above, the landscape’s every pixel evoking Kenya’s Maasai Mara, Carrey laying his head on a foam block that he totally accepted as Rodney’s rhino belly.

  And why not?

  It all seemed so much truer and richer than the gray world outside, where ashes flurried heavy from the west, fire season in the hills. In the chamber the air was pure. He realized he didn’t want to leave his friend’s company. He loved how his life, or its forgery, was given meaning by their companionship. Their shared, noble mission.

  “That’s a wrap,” said a voice in his ear.

  And Carrey watched the rolling hills and the dusky sky dissolve. He mourned each fading pixel, the suddenly silent birdsongs.

  “Can’t we keep it running?”

  Across the one-way glass, in the production room, Lanny Lonstein shared a knowing glance with Lala Hormel, who flashed him a cautious thumbs-up.

  “Whatever you want, chief.”

  They ordered their teams to stay, and set the computers to indulge all tangents, wanting to capture each moment of these friends reunited across the barrier of death.

  The stars surged back to life in the chamber’s sky as the valley down below them filled with a thousand elephants in silhouette.

  “Sometimes they overdo it just a bit,” said Rodney.

  “Look, I know this isn’t real,” said Carrey. “But Jesus Christ I’ve missed you, man.” He choked up. “It’s so nice to hear your voice.”

  The rhino took offense. “How do ya know I’m not Rodney? Maybe this is just how us famous types carry on these days. Go ahead. Give me a try. Ask me anything.”

  “Who’s your favorite joke writer?”

  “The great Joe Ancis!”

  “What was your favorite impression of mine?”

  “The Amazing fucking Kreskin, kid! Funniest thing you ever did. Too bad nobody in America cares who he is.”

  “Okay, that’s pretty good. But people could google that.”

  Carrey thought hard, wanting, equally, to stump and to trust this machine. Something personal. Between just the two of them. Private, precious—

  “What did you say backstage at Caesars Palace about having sex after sixty?”

  “I need a champion cocksucker, man!”

  “How the fuck do you know that?”

  “The difference between a person and a computer isn’t so great anymore, kid,” said Rodney, gently rubbing Carrey’s shoulder with his horn, the sensors of the bodysuit convincingly pulsing each caress.

  “It’s like it’s really you,” said Carrey. “My God.”

  “Pretty swank, huh? Wish they had this before your dad died.”

  The cameras whirred along their cables, angling for Carrey’s response. And a few of the renderers felt unease, even guilt, as they watched what followed.

  “I miss him,” said Rodney. “Man, Percy. That guy was hilarious.”

  “I feel like lately he’s been trying to reach me.”

  “Reach you?”

  Now Carrey unburdened himself, voice trembling. “He calls my cell phone. Or something does. I answer. He starts telling me a joke, then he falls off into gibberish, this high-pitched squealing. It’s exactly what he did after my mom died. He lost his way at the end.”

  “He just had glitches, kid.”

  “Glitches?”

  “Yeah, glitches,” said Rodney. “Take a look at those elephants down there. A couple of ’em have been beeping in and out of existence this whole time. But you know what? You can fix anything in post. And meanwhile, look at these stars. You ever seen the moon so clear? They got so much of it right.” Rodney took an appreciative pause. “Just like your dad.”

  Carrey’s eyes welled tears.

  “You wanna see another little glitch?” asked Rodney, a mischievous glint in his eye. He stood, turned, raised his flap-like rhino tail. “I got no asshole! They didn’t give me an asshole! I eat half my body weight every day and I can’t shit.”

  Now they were bonded, the truest of friends. Their laughter echoed across the chamber, it seemed to go on forever, each note fully captured by the watching and listening computers.

  They roamed the digital savanna like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, sharing bits of their backstories, Lonstein grinning as Carrey told Rodney of the time he’d gotten ambushed by a boy with a peashooter in a Toronto apartment block, the time, age eleven, when he’d gotten caught humping the little green rug beside his parents’ bed.

  Soon Carrey missed Rodney when they weren’t together.

  At night, in his sleeping quarters, he’d lie down on a spartan cot, watching CNN, its resolution nowhere near as compelling as the scenes in the chamber.

  A billionaire casino magnate was running for president, his whole campaign a churlish collection of grimaces and playground insults. It was widely known that he kept a whole floor of prostitutes in the Vegas tower where he lived in a duplex penthouse, a situation that might have been legal in the state of Nevada if he didn’t get off on pummeling them all. It began with one lawsuit, then grew into dozens, more women emerging from across the years, pictures of bruised necks, broken noses, stories of choking to the point of unconsciousness. Threats made against their lives and the lives of those they loved. Their images and accounts sprawled across the news, but where these ought to have ended the magnate’s candidacy, they only fueled it. His base almost completely accepted his defense—that the women were mostly lazy millennials unfit for a challenging work environment. He was surging in the polls.

  And against this all, the New York Times ran an article reporting that navy pilots had filmed close encounters with stunningly advanced UFOs, that the government had multiple buildings storing parts of flying saucers just outside Las Vegas, strange metals defying identification. The story fueled light Twitter comedy, then joined into the ever-louder background noise—

  * * *

  —

  The world he saw on the news came to seem like a genre-fusing farce, its story lines ever less plausible, ever more dispiriting. The world of the chamber, by contrast, was all impressionist masterworks, images and plotlines manifestly finer and more nourishing than what, of late, was passing for the real.

  Time behaves strangely on a movie set.

  Days lurch into months.

  Seasons blur together.

  The sun was falling.

  He and Rodney were camped by a thin river, resting by a fire. Carrey was so certain, having left the script far behind, that a shining achievement was just within their reach. They’d defeat the Hyena Queen. They’d restore all the fish to the Hippo River and all the mango groves and all the hippo children would sleep well and safe. And he’d get a big summer movie
to boot. Ego and soul in rarest unison, he looked hopefully around the shadowy savanna and heard excited giggles. “Sounds like someone’s having a party,” he said.

  “Shhh!” said Rodney, tiny ears perking up with alarm. Then he whispered, “I know what a party is, kid. That’s no party, lemme tell ya.”

  The yipping giggles built, bouncing across the chamber, technicians peering like prison shrinks through the one-way glass. They’d been coding this scene for months, wanted to see what would win, the engineered mind or the human one, once all data was distilled and looped into the mainframes. Hyena eyes now appearing through the grass. Deep voids set with amber irises kicking back the firelight.

  Two sets of eyes.

  Five.

  Seven.

  Eight slobbering hyenas slowly taking form from the shadows, coats foul with mange and gore. Lonstein had given, and now—in homage to the original Gilgamesh, who lost his heart when he lost Enkidu—he would take.

  “Rodney!” Carrey cried, right atop the voice in his ear.

  The hyenas raced in from all sides, a rush of gnashing teeth and fur. Rodney, ever faithful, gathered to his feet, started swinging his great horn. He shattered one beast’s skull—saying “Oopsie!”—then launched another through the air, quipping, “Is that the best you got? You fight like a buncha pink flamingos!” Then, as if to answer his challenge, two other hyenas leaped on his neck. They clawed at his eyes, bit into his ears. Carrey swung his nine iron madly, trying to fend them off, as more beasts were rendered into the scene, leaping atop Rodney, fangs finding his soft stomach, tearing into his guts, blood spraying in the firelight, Carrey wailing, at once to the Fates and the control room.

  “What the fuck? It’s too much!”

  Lanny Lonstein marveled at his own genius, knowing he’d lose most of the gore in his final cut, but thrilled at how it had Carrey reduced to survival mode, totally convinced of the carnage, all his efforts useless against the moment’s single narrative demand: that Rodney was to die, but Jim would survive, and yet be changed. “Take me! Take me!” he screamed, these ad-libbed lines freed from cliché by raw fear. That drove the digital engines to detect approaching climax. “Stay with it,” said Lonstein, directing his programmers to complete the moment with a suddenly materialized thirteenth beast, greater and more terrible than the rest, surging up from behind him: the Hyena Queen, fangs like steak knives, eyes so knowingly evil that Carrey wets his bodysuit as the hyenas feasted on poor Rodney, their cackles multiplying, filling the star with a sorrow that rose like floodwaters over what rubbled walls still stood between his experiences in the chamber and his existence beyond it.