by Jim Carrey
“Where?”
“I’m in the new solarium,” he gasped, looking up through the torn ceiling, a final joke. “You can’t miss it.”
Then, through the smoke, the choking stench of burning plastics, he saw them, the Daughters of Anomie, an elite group of radicalized war veterans, all missing at least one limb, all come to save him from his world.
“My house,” said the star, deliriously, as the tallest of them lifted the dining room table off of him with a single awesome power squat. “My house!”
“Let it go.”
“My things!”
“Rejoice in the lightening of your load.”
“Who are you?” Chaplin’s cane held tight against his chest, he puzzled over these women in their oxygen masks and aluminized fire suits.
“We’re the DoA.”
“The Daughters of Anomie?”
“Relax.” They fitted a respirator on his face, picked him up by the limbs, carried him from his would-be grave, out into the foyer. He studied the waves of fire rippling across the ceiling above their heads, glinting off their titanium limbs. Then, outside, he saw the fire tornado dancing madly, a zillion embers rising like the city’s every selfish prayer, up into the night.
Dear God, please take this cellulite from my thighs, that I might know beach readiness…
Holy Lord, that I might fly private until the end of days, and so be closer to thee…
They carried him through his front gates, out onto Hummingbird Lane. They laid him in their Humvee, a hybrid model bought from Soldier of Fortune magazine. Carrey shivered as they unzipped their fire suits. Most had shaved their heads, marine-style. Their arms were strong and toned in olive tank tops, shoulders broad and powerful, like an Olympic volleyball team. Even their prosthetics seemed advanced, superior.
One woman wrapped him in a fire blanket while another pulled aside his bathrobe, jabbing his left buttock with a syringe.
“What did you give me?” asked Carrey, suddenly woozy.
“Just a little happy sauce, all natural from the poppy fields of Topanga Canyon,” said the woman who’d injected him, Bathsheba Brenner. She had joined ROTC at Harvard, an act of service to prepare for a career in government, then, as a Green Beret fighting ISIS in Iraq, she decided that terror was the new activism.
A sedative ease oozed over Carrey as the car screeched away from his house, radio scanning police and fire frequencies.
“The Getty’s fucking burning!”
“Tanker to Bonhill, tanker to Bonhill…”
“I’ve got thirty men pinned down here and—”
The radio cut to terrified screams as the Humvee reached Sunset. Before them, taillights stretching for a thousand hopeless yards, then vanishing into a Netflix-red haze.
Carrey’s lungs burned. He retched up a plug of ash-heavy snot. A titanium hand offered him a bottle of water. He looked up into the delicate face and twinkling almond eyes of the hulking commando who, as a man named Salvatore Marinelli, had been an aimless dog-track gambler and who, as a woman named Sally Mae, had found renewal in organic gardening and ethical bank robbery.
“Yeah, suck it down,” said Sally Mae, winking playfully.
All up and down Sunset Boulevard police struggled to maintain order, laying down magnesium flares, explaining to a sinewy bleach blonde in head-to-toe Fendi that, her claims to the Jif peanut butter fortune notwithstanding, she’d have to wait this out with the rest of them. “We’re all even now, bitch.”
Up ahead a family abandoned their Subaru, father hauling suitcases, mother carrying a wailing infant, their little boy holding his toy lightsaber at the ready, like he might protect them all. His mother reached to cover his eyes as, tearing through the traffic just behind them, came a man wearing only an IKEA bag with holes cut for his arms and head. He squeezed his scrotum like it was a clown horn, yelling “Honk! Honk!” as he weaved among the cars. People briefly forgot their predicament, stretching up their phones, flooding the already overloaded satellite system with Instagram shots of his bouncing septuagenarian genitalia. Then the air stilled before rushing up the escarpment where the fires roared ever hotter, ever higher. Carrey looked across the street to the Brentwood Inn. Its trysting residents were visible in the windows, some hurriedly dressing, placing calls to the loved ones they’d been betraying just moments before, a few staring horrified down Sunset as a jet of purple propane flames shot up from the street like it was a giant Bunsen burner. A shock wave rolled through the cars.
“It’s the gas mains,” said Willow, a West Virginia trucker’s daughter who’d joined the marines for college money, had twice saved her unit in Fallujah before losing her right leg to an IED, and joined the Daughters after the medical bills bankrupted her family.
Chunks of flaming asphalt rained down on the Humvee’s roof.
“Shit,” said Carla, a strikingly beautiful black woman, a sergeant’s daughter and West Point graduate who started each morning reciting lines from the Iliad while doing a hundred one-armed chin-ups. The loss of her left arm to an Afghan mortar attack had ended her combat career and plunged her into a clinical depression. She’d met Bathsheba on Twitter, had found her will to live restored by the younger woman’s theory that they could still serve America’s spirit by preparing for its political system’s inevitable self-destruction. “They’re all gonna go.”
Agonized screams, people burning in their cars, seeding chaos and havoc. Those with enough horsepower made for the median strip, the sidewalks. A Ford pickup on monster wheels knocked over a series of parking meters like bowling pins. Carla joined the demolition derby, slamming hard into a Kia just ahead of them, issuing commands.
“Bathsheba. Flash grenade. Right between the Yukon and that Sentra.”
Carrey watched Bathsheba pull the pin free with her teeth, admired the juxtaposition of her soft, pink lips on the dark military steel, the carefree grace with which she lobbed the grenade from the side window.
“We prefer nonlethal measures,” said Bathsheba to Carrey as they made their break. “Saw enough death in the desert wars.” She peppered a stubborn Mercedes with rubber slugs from a 12-gauge, shattering its back windshield as Carla gunned the Hummer up on the Kia’s hood, crushing the car to foil as they rolled onto Kenter.
“Christ!” said Carrey, afraid, confused. “What are you doing?”
“Strictly speaking?” said Sally Mae. “This is a kidnapping.”
“In the middle of a fire?”
“Gates open, doors unlocked. We never let a good crisis go to waste.”
“Why me?”
“ ’Cause we like you, Jim. We really like you.”
“You kidnapped me because you like me?”
“We’ve found that, if done right, kidnapping can be a positive experience for everyone,” said Bathsheba. “We started with Silicon Valley guys as a way of financing ourselves, keeping pace with the latest in prosthetics while also protesting big tech’s ceaseless predation on our privacy and dignity.”
“It felt right at first, but they got crazy tedious,” said Carla, swerving to avoid a Volvo. “Big entitled babies. They start screaming the moment you take them. So you gotta duct-tape their mouths, which triggers bullying memories. Then they start shaking and pissing themselves.”
“So you gotta hog-tie them, and that just makes it worse ’cause guys on the higher end of the spectrum hate being touched,” said Sally Mae. “Some got so anxious they couldn’t perform for us.”
“Perform for you?”
“After capitalism eats itself, we’ll have to rebuild,” said Bathsheba. “For this we’ll need good seed. A man like you can plant that seed.”
With these words a twanging boner took form beneath his bathrobe. Trying to keep his head in the apocalypse, he thought of his Brentwood neighbors, soon to be forced from their estates. Where would they all stay, when every
five-star hotel was booked? There were stories, in years past, of people checking into the Ramada Inn, fighting over slivers of melon and tiny croissants at the continental breakfast. A sobering thought, and one that had its desired effect, his arousal subsiding as Kenter became Bundy; then they turned onto San Vicente, charging over the median strip of burning coral trees toward the Brentwood Country Club.
The Humvee roared up a craggy access lane, then onto the course, kicking up chunks of highly valuable earth as it churned up the fairway.
“This’ll get us clear,” said Carla. “Then it’s back roads to Topanga.”
“Topanga?”
“We’ve got a safe house there.”
They joined a slow-moving convoy of SUVs that had smashed through the club’s chain-link fence from San Vicente, now a vein of fire.
Carrey pressed his face against the window—
FOUNDED IN 1947, said the club’s greeting sign, before vanishing into the flames. Ash and embers murmurating in the ruby sky. They passed a Buick SUV, its chrome rims amber with reflected fire. A redheaded girl in the back seat recognized Carrey and started waving excitedly. Her guilelessness was touching. He replied by curling the corners of his mouth toward his eyes, then arching his eyebrows up at a sinister angle that grew and grew until the girl recognized this as the face of the Grinch and lost all fear of fires in her giggling. They ripped across putting greens, forded an anemic stream, drove, finally, past a sand trap where someone was still golfing, trying, again and again, to smack his ball up onto the green, to complete his game. Carrey craned to see the maniac, recognizing him as his manager of twenty long years, Al Spielman II, seemingly at war with the earth itself, smacking, cursing, each swing just burying the ball deeper into the sand.
“Wait, I know that guy.”
“What guy?”
“That guy.”
“There’s no guy.”
“Stop the car!” said Carrey, who for all their differences still cared for Spielman, wished him well.
“You seem to misunderstand the captor-captive power dynamic,” said Carla, pulling clear of the trap, leaving Carrey to watch as a black smoke curtain billowed across the fairway, erasing poor Al from sight.
“We change,” said Sally Mae, setting her titanium hand on Carrey’s shoulder, the mighty woman’s empathy so deep, it seemed that he could feel it flowing through her alloy fingers. “Sometimes we do leave people behind.”
The radio crackled to life, a warped static that surged and subsided, fragmented and re-formed, over and over, metamorphosing, each time, toward the sweetest music Carrey had ever heard, notes whose healing power surpassed even that of the sacred solfeggio tones he had piped into his hyperbaric chamber.
“Change the frequency,” said Bathsheba, and Willow did, but the music reappeared, as if paired to the vision that now appeared in the western sky, a single shining disk.
It seemed, at first, a star magnified by a raindrop on a window. Except for how playfully it flitted along the pattern of a perfectly equilateral triangle. And how much larger it was, even in the distance, than any normal star. How its light didn’t glimmer so much as pulse.
“What’s that?” asked Bathsheba, pointing up.
“Drone?” guessed Willow.
“That’s a giant fuckin’ drone.”
“Maybe a weather balloon?”
“What are you, Operation Blue Book?” said Carrey. “That’s a fucking UFO. Cyborg commando women and fires and calls from my dead dad and now a fucking UFO? Who’s doing this?”
“Who’s doing what?”
“Ignore him. Just drive.”
“It could be TPG,” mused Carrey.
“Who’s TPG?”
“TPG owns CAA. And they own my digital essence. And probably yours. They got a hundred giant mainframes out in the desert. This could easily be happening in one of them.”
“A computer simulation?”
“Why not?”
“ ’Cause we just pulled you from a burning house, asshole,” said Carla. “We’re real goddamn people. People who’ve suffered and lost and been changed by suffering and loss.”
“Our pain proves that we’re real,” said Bathsheba.
“Ever feel the limbs you lost?” asked Carrey.
“Don’t go there.”
“But you do, right? Phantom pain. In legs and arms that have been gone for years. Sometimes people feel things that aren’t there.”
“Give him another injection, Bathsheba.”
“I actually think he’s making sense.”
Carrey’s iPhone vibrated in his pocket.
“Gimme that,” said Sally Mae, then saw the caller’s name.
“It’s Nic Cage,” she announced. “Should we let him take it?”
“I dunno,” said Bathsheba. “He reinforces oppressive tenets of systemic patriarchy.”
“Actually I think he’s hot,” said Carla. “And his deeply expressionistic acting perfectly captures the madness of our age. It’s no mistake that his technique draws from Germany in the twenties. He’s a seer.”
“I more than agree,” said Willow. “Cage is like the Chuck Yeager of the dramatic arts, breaking through barriers once deemed impassable.”
“All right, all right,” said Carrey. “Can I have my phone please?”
“You’re a goddamn hostage,” said Willow. “We’ll control the communications.”
“I dunno,” said Carrey as Cage rang to voice mail. “If TPG’s buying up digital essences, they probably got Cage’s and they’ll just keep torturing us until we take the call. They’ll throw awful things at us. They’ll take away the people we love and—”
“Give him the phone,” said Sally Mae as Cage called again. “He’s spiraling.”
“Fine,” said Carla. “Put him on speaker. And no dicking around.”
So Sally Mae accepted the call, flooding the Humvee with the atonal horror of Nicolas Cage singing gaily from the beloved Christmas carol “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
“Way up in the sky, Little Lamb! Do you see what I see?”
“Nic?”
“A star, a star, dancing in the night!”
“Yeah, we see it,” said Carrey, eyeing the spacecraft. “We’re all looking right up at it.”
“I’ve seen this before, man! In my Malibu Memory Retrieval.”
“I know, Nic. I was there.”
“Where are you now?”
“Right now? I’m with the Daughters of Anomie.”
“The feminist commandos? Fucking cool!”
“Yeah, they’re all right,” said Carrey. “Anyway they’re kidnapping me, we’re going to Topanga.”
“Shya, you’ll never make it,” said Cage. “Topanga Canyon’s a kiln. You don’t belong up there unless you’re fucking ceramic. And this flying saucer? I know these guys. I’ve seen their gross snaky faces. They’ve been following me across the globe, I bought ten houses to get away from these squirmy motherfuckers, but they just kept showing up. I spent so much dough refurnishing. It really stank.”
“Ugh,” said Bathsheba. “It’s all about him.”
“Take that back!” spat Cage. “Whoever you are, you take that back!”
“I won’t.”
“Look, I’m known for playing the reluctant hero, but don’t think you can kick me around. Shit’s about to get”—Cage inhaled then on his end of the phone, for his own reasons, struck five dramatic and angular poses before booming operatically—“RAAAAAWWW! And the government won’t listen to me ’cause apparently buying a black-market meteorite puts you on some kind of fucking list. So I haven’t chosen this, okay? This is a weight that’s been thrust upon me. Crushingly…” His voice quavered, softening the hearts of the Daughters of Anomie. “Come to me, Jimmy,” Cage concluded. “All other roads lead to death.�
��
A burning knot of palm fronds fell onto the windshield.
“Where are you, Nic?”
“At your house up in Malibu.”
“Why?”
“You said I could stay here.”
“When?”
“Last month.”
“I meant for a day or two.”
“Yeah? Well, necessity is the motherfucker of invention, man. Come to Malibu. Take the old Pining Path to Santa Monica, then drive up the beach from there.”
“What’s the Pining Path?” asked Bathsheba.
“A system of back roads to the beach,” said Carrey, who had taken this route during his brief but joyous affair with Pamela Anderson in the summer of 1996. “Lovers used them during the days of the morality code, to avoid being seen as they left town.”
“The tide’s coming in now,” said Cage. “The water will keep you safe. It’s your only option.”
“Topanga’s burning,” confirmed Willow, checking fire feeds on Twitter.
“Then we don’t have a choice,” said Sally Mae.
“Hurry,” said Cage. “And Godspeed.”
So they drove down the fairway, past the blazing clubhouse, out through the smoldering front gardens. Then they turned onto Baltic and took the old Pining Path, weaving through neighborhoods of frightened people hosing down their lawns, gathering all their valuables. Soon they reached the Santa Monica Pier, planks and pilings straining under hundreds of evacuees. Medics triaged burn cases; restaurants handed out meals. The famous Ferris wheel was empty but still spinning, purple neon slicing through the smoke. They muscled for a mile along the Pacific Coast Highway, then, up ahead, saw the rear edge of the Topanga fires. Even Willow, who’d killed seventeen during the battle of Fallujah, gasped to see the hills all garish tangerine. “It looks like a napalm strike,” she said.
The traffic was locked all down the highway, forcing them on foot. They cleared out of the Humvee and walked onto the beach, trudging heavy with weapons and ammo, past stray dogs and horses, soaring palms burning like torches atop the escarpment, lighting their way.
Then, amid a city in grievous pain, struggling against the rising surf, body strained beyond capacity, Carrey collapsed of exhaustion. So Sally Mae, who as a free safety for Staten Island University could bench-press four hundred pounds, scooped him up. He wrapped his arms around her neck, felt her augmented breast against his cheek. He closed his eyes, drifting into sleep for just a moment before startling—
