Memoirs and Misinformation

by Jim Carrey

  “Georgie?” he gasped.

  “She’s safe. She’s in Puerto Rico with Lin-Manuel Miranda.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I follow both their Snapchats. Now relax.”

  Then the firelight refracted off the woman’s titanium prosthetics, into Carrey’s dilated pupils, stretching and feathering into full-grown angel’s wings.

  * * *

  —

  Just outside Malibu, they saw what had stopped the northbound traffic—a sixty-car wreck where the canyons ran nearest to the sea. And as the sirens screamed in climax, an Exxon tanker truck gave up an eardrum-blistering blast, gas flames vipering in all directions, engulfing, once again, a casino bus dense with carbonized bodies frozen in struggle, mouths agape midshriek, faces twisted in pain, hands seized in clawing actions. There’d been a rush to the ocean; the strongest had made it to the rocks at the top of the beach and died there, in a pile. The rising surf had cleared a sliver of safe passage just beneath it, wet sand defying flames. And here the sea carried away the dead, accountants, plumbers, schoolteachers, and artists, breaking waves turning them to common slurry. Carrey clung to Sally Mae as she carried him over the surf, seeing people from his past among the cremains as the waves rolled in and took them away.

  There, curled in a tight U, in a khaki suit and brown tie, he saw his uncle Jim, for whom he’d been named, a jeweler who, for his Catholic confirmation, had given him a penknife engraved with an ancient saying, THIS TOO SHALL PASS AWAY.

  The surf rolled in, pulled away—

  He saw, half buried in hot pants and a star-spangled tank top circa 1989, the early fitness guru Richard Simmons, hands clutching a bag of powdered-sugar Donettes.

  The surf rolled in, pulled away—

  Another body, eyes pure fear, a platinum wig dangling from bobby pins, Helena San Vicente, tossed by the tide, and then swept away.

  Carrey’s old faith now rose over all later existential musings, his lips suddenly making prayers like the nuns had taught him, “Hail Mary full of Grace…,” something deep inside still believing that these words could conjure real magic, could summon the virgin mother of an Aryan man-god to protect and guide him. He prayed with tragic hope, at once telling himself that the Daughters of Anomie were the avatars of angels and wondering why his mind was wired to believe in a soul. He prayed not once but many times, as Sally Mae carried him over the heartbreaking sand.

  The Malibu Colony’s lights came into view, among them those of his own house, where Nicolas Cage, standing watch on the second-story sundeck, sighted them all through binoculars. “Dare forward!” he cried, thrusting his hard-won medieval sword toward the heavens. “All that you were sure of, you must now leave behind. The hour of contact is upon us. Time to see all sides of the diamond.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The patio was fringed with razor wire, piled with sandbags.

  Carrey entered his house exhausted, stomach cramping from the miles-long walk, throat and lungs burning from smoke inhalation, but he would find no immediate peace. A crate of Uzis sat on the kitchen island. Over in his breakfast nook, Sean Penn, Kelsey Grammer, and Gwyneth Paltrow were all seated Indian-style, struggling to assemble a shoulder-fired missile system whose many components lay scattered around a crate marked ARMED FORCES OF ANGOLA.

  “Stinger reprogrammable microprocessor is a dual-channel ultraviolet tracking seeker and proportional navigational guidance missile system,” Gwyneth read from the instruction manual, sipping a glass of rosé. “The spectral discrimination of the seeker detector material, when supercooled by the argon gas in the battery coolant unit…” She searched among the scattered components, then, with a playful smile, picked up a tiny steel bulb, wondering aloud, “Is that this thingamajigger?”

  “No,” said Willow. “That’s the oscillation modulator.” She walked over and joined them, taking parts from the pile, expertly snapping them together, making more progress in a few minutes than they had all night. “Where’re the rockets?”

  “In the bathtub,” said Gwyneth.

  “What?” said Carrey. “The fuck are you doing?”

  “We’re preparing for battle,” said Kelsey Grammer, wearing an outfit entirely stolen from the 20th Century Fox wardrobe department: a Napoleonic overcoat, a World WarII–era steel battle helmet bearing four Patton-esque stars. And something of Patton’s spirit possessed him as he looked up at Carrey and, borrowing from Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, snarled, “Why don’t you jump on the team and come on in for the big win!?”

  “That’s good,” said Carrey. “You got that down.”

  “Why, thank you!” said Kelsey, relieved. “I felt good running the line in my head but—until you hear it out loud?—you just don’t know.”

  “We were watching the fires with Natchez when his place burned down,” explained Sean Penn, wearing Vietnam battle fatigues. “His third eye saw something his other two couldn’t handle. Guy’s on heavy benzos, not taking it real good. He’s been making the same sound for two days now.”

  “Mmmm…!” groaned Natchez, catatonic on the sofa.

  It was now clear to Carrey that Nicolas Cage had exceeded all reasonable definitions of beach home borrowing; had, rather, effected something far closer to wartime requisitioning. Someone had thrown a bale of razor wire on the daybed. Crates of hand grenades were piled atop the dining room table, a flamethrower leaned precariously against a thirty-pound gasoline tank. A bank of laptops purred on the kitchen island, a number of half-eaten vegan chicken wings scattered among them.

  “Fuck you do to my house, Nic?”

  “Like John the Baptist,” said Cage. “I prepare the way.”

  “What’s this gunk on all the windows?”

  “Silicone shatterproofing.”

  “Why would the glass shatter?”

  “ ’Cause we buried landmines in the side yard.”

  “Fucking hell, Nic! You know I’m anti-violence.”

  “Even Arjuna had to heed the call.”

  “Don’t you throw the Bhagavad Gita at me!”

  “Mmmm!” again Natchez moaned, like a bear many days in a trap. Carrey turned to see the stricken guru’s eyes bulging in their sockets. “Mmmm!”

  “Something in there’s trying to get out,” said Cage, then turned to the Daughters of Anomie. “So, you’re the leftist commandos?”

  “Ecoterrorists,” said Carla. “It’s a distinction with a difference. We could sack Exxon’s world headquarters with the hardware you got here, and probably have some left for at least a raid on Monsanto. Where’d you get it?”

  “El Chapo,” said Sean Penn. “He owed me a favor. What’s your story?”

  “I was One Hundred First Airborne, Korangal Valley. Willow and Sally Mae here were both marine snipers, eighty-seven kills between them. And Bathsheba ruled half of Baghdad before the scales fell from her eyes. How ’bout you boys?”

  “I once played a two-star general,” said Kelsey Grammer. “It was primarily a boardroom comedy, but Variety said I projected real authority.”

  “I was in Thin Red Line, Taps, and Casualties of War,” said Sean Penn, stubbing out a cigarette on his forearm. “Took basic training for all those roles.”

  “And you were great in them,” said Carrey. “Powerful performances.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Penn. “I can’t watch myself.”

  “The point is we’ll need to: we can hold our own,” said Cage. “And I’ve spent the last year in deep research, monitoring transmissions from the Boötes Void.”

  “Fuck’s the Boötes Void?” asked Sally Mae.

  “It’s the Great Nothing,” said Carrey. “I’ve seen this on YouTube. It shouldn’t be there. And yet—there it isn’t. A massive stretch of empty galaxy.”

  “Yeah,” said Cage, eyebrows popping wildly. “Or at least that�
�s what we’ve thought! But now we know the emptiness was just a ruse, the stealth technology of an awesomely advanced civilization. They’ve been transmitting information, it’s just so highly encrypted it flows right through matter. These are the bastards who’ve been following me my whole fucking life…” His voice broke with pain. “I fought these reptiloids a thousand times! Across eons and multiple lives. Not an eternal recurrence, naw, that’d be too kind. As a kinda torture. Along the way, I had a pretty good film career.”

  His tears, at least, seemed real, a description maybe of his frustration with typecasting or maybe a sincere reaction to this story he’d adopted as a personal faith while all other faiths crumbled. Carla felt real empathy for this man, for all men, as a silly species of wayward children playing at specialness.

  “Nic’s last claim, to past lives, is not scientifically verifiable,” said Gwyneth Paltrow. “But the rest checks out. We’ve captured the transmissions. Amazingly complex. They cloak themselves by bending light. Only a dynamic recursive neural algorithm can unbend it. Thankfully, I’ve learned to write those while running Goop.”

  “You learned algorithms from running a lifestyle website?” said Carrey.

  “I was motivated by the website,” said Paltrow. “I learned at MIT.”

  “You went to MIT?”

  “Absolutely,” said Paltrow. “You can do anything online. But that’s unimportant. What matters is this: the hour of contact has arrived.”

  With a sound of tearing Velcro, Cage produced a remote control from inside his trench coat. He cut the house lights with one click and opened the living room’s retracting ceiling to the night sky with another. Then the Oregon ecoterrorists and the Hollywood actors gathered close in the darkness, gazing up in wonder at the glowing orb.

  “Maybe they’re friendly,” said Carrey, “like neighbors coming over with a fruit basket?”

  “ ‘Friendly’ is a word they forgot long ago!” said Cage, doing an Elvis-inspired karate kick. “Gwyneth, you wanna show them?”

  Gwyneth Paltrow logged in to the computers, explaining, “I’m tasking a satellite loaned to me by my good friend Elon with scanning the space around that disk. Don’t be shy. Come closer.”

  They gathered around her monitor. The screen filled with an image of the sky above them. “This is our world as it currently seems,” said Gwyneth Paltrow. Then, with a flurry of keystrokes, the image changed drastically. There was no longer just one glowing object, but many, all around it, legions of light balls hovering right over their heads.

  “This is our world as it actually is. We count over five hundred of these craft. More arriving by the hour, gathering over Tokyo, Sydney, Paris. And almost every other major city on the globe.”

  She zoomed in on one ship, the images, at resolution, showing its perfectly streamlined form, beyond any human power of construction.

  “Who are they?” asked Carrey, voice suddenly boyish.

  Again from the sofa came the agonized mmmm sound, formed by a psychic landslide within the person of Natchez Gushue who, whole body seizing, slowly extruded the word of his horror: “Monsters.”

  Then, in a great failing pulse, the images of the saucers dissolved from the screens, leaving behind just an unremarkable night sky.

  “They know they’ve been seen,” said Bathsheba.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning Carrey woke early and lay in bed, scrolling through his iPhone.

  Twitter reported news of UFOs over twenty major cities.

  NORAD had scrambled fighter planes up and down both coasts. The pope was broadcasting a Prayer for Peaceful Encounter from the Vatican, where theologians worked furiously to reconcile scripture with the visitation, debating whether the spaceships were piloted by angels or demons. The Scientologists had no such quarrels. For them the saucers were ultimate validation. They were promoting a viral Instagram tile that said RON WAS RIGHT and calling senior members to their headquarters in San Jacinto, where a neon-lit UFO landing circle had been constructed, a buffet of champagne and truffled mac and cheese laid out, a thousand chairs arranged for an outdoor screening of Battlefield Earth. And while Carrey could accept every mad bit of this news—he was, after all, a man who had once spent many nights trying to free his soul from its presumed residence in his upper thorax—he was disturbed by what followed. An ad consumed his screen—

  It started with trombones playing sliding scales, honking each note like a sneeze as the camera went close on a familiar nose. A nose dripping mucus, and owned by a digitally perfect Marlon Brando, set in eclipse lighting to suggest the character of Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. He blew hard into a Kleenex, opened it to ponder its contents, then turned to address the viewer directly.

  “The horror! THE HORROR! The horror—of nasal congestion. I’m Marlon Brando. I did some pretty good acting when I was alive. Many considered me the best. But I’d have been even greater if I’d had Mucinex.”

  With the popping of a pill he was instantly healed, cheeks in high color, song welling, mightily, from where only phlegm had been just moments before.

  He took a deep breath, turned, velvet curtains parting behind him to reveal a packed Broadway theater, everyone cheering and throwing roses. He gracefully picked one up, held it to his nose, smelled it. Then a cut from Brando to a bottle of Mucinex in its own tiny spotlight at stage left, a single rose landing perfectly in front of it as the ad cut to video of light spheres dancing over Jakarta, riot police swinging billy clubs, brutally repressing a crowd of ten thousand terrified souls. Carrey pocketed his phone, slightly more depressed by the digital whoring of Marlon Brando than the plight of the ten thousand Jakartans.

  He walked downstairs.

  Gwyneth Paltrow had taken the guest suite. Sean Penn and Carla were sleeping on air mattresses, Natchez Gushue and Willow on the living room couches. Carrey had been trying to cut down on caffeine for several years but now that struggle, like so many others, seemed part of an abandoned world.

  He made himself a coffee, stepped out onto the porch.

  Kelsey Grammer and Bathsheba had drawn morning guard shift, but somewhere along the way had traded vigilance for wonder. Their Uzis lay forgotten in the sand as, holding hands more like schoolchildren than lovers, they stared awestruck beyond the waves where the front line of an alien armada hovered little more than a mile overhead, barely disturbing the ocean’s surface, emitting a rose-gold glow against the water, this light falling brilliantly over every grain of sand on the beach, seeming to calm the waves and the fires in the hills. It filled Carrey with an abiding peace as it washed over his face, accompanied by the sweetest sounds he’d ever heard, the hovering spaceships emitting a divine harmonic that passed right through you in healing waves, freeing you from all fear, all shame, all dread…

  Carrey felt the dissolving of an inner weight that had grown so heavy he’d forgotten it was there. He felt a deep and connective presence in this moment, no dissonance between soul and body. It was a harmony so totally consuming he hardly noticed the animals lined up all down the beach. Horses set free from Malibu stables. Zebras and ostriches escaped from private zoos. House cats and dogs, birds flown down from the hills: all had gathered to the shore, great and small necks alike craning up at the armada, chirping, braying, eyes closed, like ur-beasts beseeching Noah or retirees on morphine at an assisted living center, depending on one’s view of the arrival.

  “The light pleases them,” said Kelsey. “It pleases us, too.”

  “It’s like Prozac.” Bathsheba laughed. “And late June.”

  Carrey angled his head to receive a maximum dose of the magical light. He thought of the Atlanteans, vanishing into otherworldly glows.

  “The animals aren’t afraid,” said Bathsheba. “Why should we be?”

  They walked up the beach, followed by paparazzi angling for dream shots of celebrities, a
nimals, fires, and flying saucers all at once, barking inane questions: “Hey Jim, whaddya think of the flying saucers!?”

  “Is this really what you want to be doing at the end?” asked Carrey.

  “What else would we do?”

  The images were selling for so much money they didn’t stop to consider that money would soon be worthless. They flashed away as the actors and ecoterrorists strolled past the Malibu Colony homes, patio pools, and hot tubs become wildlife refuges. Stray llamas sipped from Sting’s waterfall, while a family of emperor penguins bobbled and splashed in his Jacuzzi. “You’re ruining the splendor,” snapped Kelsey Grammer to the paparazzi. “And you’re harassing these noble animals.”

  “Those guys bothering you?” boomed an avuncular voice from down the beach.

  Carrey turned and saw Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks flanked by a trio of private firefighters and a duo of burly security guards, yes. But still: Tom Hanks. It was impossible to hear him and not feel some restored faith in human goodness.

  “Mornin’!” said Kelsey. “And a fine one, at that!”

  “It’s like the first dawn!” said Hanks, gesturing to the animals lined up down the beach, basking in the sweet light, the alien armada just beyond them. “Or the last one. Either way I feel like a billion bucks. Hey, is that Jimbo?”

  “Hey Tom,” said Carrey, warmly. “You stuck it out?”

  “Fire department got overrun in Mandeville.” Hanks shrugged to acknowledge his extensive private bodyguard. “Had to fight it out ourselves.”

  “Private security is the death of democracy,” said Bathsheba. “A return to the Hobbesian state and an affront to the people’s dignity.”

  “Who’s that?” said Hanks.