by Jim Carrey
And just like that, his feet left the earth.
Weightless with joy, freed of burdensome memories, delighted by happy ones, which became his total awareness. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Chasing a puck across a frozen lake. His mother in high color. Healthy, jolly. Instigating dinner-table food fights. It was understood, when she made her special cherry cheesecake, that half was to be eaten, half to be thrown. Glistening airborne cherries and her melodic laughter, which, he realized now, had become his own. His brother, John, had matured early, was fully developed by age ten; Carrey and his sister Rita would ambush him in the shower, finding him in full pubescent bloom, mortified as they pointed and sang, “Hair, hair, long beautiful hair…!” Performing in the living room, aged eight, jokes landing, his father turning to the guests, saying, “He’s not a ham, he’s the whole pig!” Waiting on the balcony of their apartment to see his father driving home his new car, a brown Vauxhall, to Carrey’s young eyes a marvel of engineering and achievement; the car in which, one summer, the whole family drove four hundred miles to see the Sleeping Giant, an island in Thunder Bay that looked like a resting Indian chief. Drawing as a boy, cartoons he made, a man called Marvin Muffinmouth. A train to Sudbury, six years old, drawing Marvin Muffinmouth, walking up the aisle of the car, showing Muffinmouth, proudly, to the other riders. The kitchen table where, age two, he’d contorted his face, again and again, resisting a spoonful of pureed cauliflower, sending his family into hysterics, discovering a gift, and a weapon.
You must understand that Jim Carrey and all the others on that beach, they were very happy, meeting better ends than nearly all of the hundred billion souls who’d come and gone before them. Better than death by Spanish steel. Better than most of them deserved. And for Carrey it all grew better still as he heard a voice calling him back. Linda Ronstadt. She was thirty-six again, a Mexican princess. “Volver, volver,” she sang, suddenly right beside him, holding his hand. “Come back, come back,” she whispered as he laid his head against her chest. As he became, for the first time in decades, entirely unbothered. He was the space of contact between his cheek and Ronstadt’s skin. He was Ronstadt’s fingers in his hair. He was the music of both their voices, singing “Volver, volver…Come back, come back…”
Then a sharp clawing around his ankle as, down below, on the fifth try, Nicolas Cage, Sean Penn, Willow, and Sally Mae succeeded in lassoing him with two hundred yards of climbing rope. There followed an angry, violent tugging as they yanked him away from his bliss, as if Carrey were an updrafting zeppelin. He resisted, seeing the rope as a slithering boa constrictor, kicking and flailing, struggling mightily back to Ronstadt, toward the candied nothing that lay beyond her embrace.
But finally they landed him, dragged him thrashing from the light field and pinned him down on the sand. “Linda,” he bawled, again and again, pained by his broken rapture as they carried him back to his house and laid him out in his bed.
CHAPTER 15
Entering the rapture beam was euphoria, and being yanked out left Carrey’s mind frail and fuzzy, able to grasp only the faintest wisps of experience, present and past.
Natchez Gushue’s bone-white body bobbing in a bathtub, vertical slashes down the wrists.
The ammonia stench of smelling salts.
A plastic spoon full of macaroni and cheese.
Then some clarity returning: Linda Ronstadt was lying beside him. She’d been watching him sleep, it seemed. He admired her teeth, as he had decades before, the incisors slightly angled in. He’d forgotten this. So much that had once been so precious, he’d completely forgotten.
“What are you?”
“I’m a memory,” said Ronstadt. “A remnant, I’m not real.”
“Memory’s a kind of reality,” he said. “Better remembered than forgotten.”
It was raining outside. The room smelled like warm caramel and orange blossoms.
“One day,” she said, with her impish smile. “One day, if you live long enough, you’ll find that more people have forgotten you than still remember you. Maybe at a gas station. Maybe getting coffee. Even those who know you will just know old pictures. You’ll be given over to the big forgetting. And free.”
His clothes were ragged, soiled. She helped him take off his shirt and curled beside him. She laid her head on his chest, and they fell asleep that way, the rain getting heavier outside. And as they rested, systems around the world failed.
Broadcast booths emptied.
Militaries devised and abandoned plans of defense.
The have-nots shish-kebabed the heads of the haves into grisly totem poles.
Tan Calvin had learned that apocalypse was best composed in counterpoint, the honeyed visions of rapture most powerful when set against stark scenes of civilizations twitching out their last. Time moved along normally for those near the light fields, the billions lining up for miles, drawn to oblivion, but for those who still valued living, it dragged. As mere days seemed to pass in Carrey’s Malibu bedroom, savage weeks tore through the wider world. Jim and Linda watched it all on his iPhone, Calvin’s planet-ending broadcast streaming on every platform, a sleek video feed set to an otherworldly funeral dirge. It was the greatest show anyone had ever seen.
They saw the vice president of the United States, a smarmy Methodist preacher with the most insincere face to ever disgrace a human skull, announcing his ascendancy to the Oval Office following the casino magnate president’s abdication. The casino magnate, said online commenters, had given the aliens America’s nuclear codes in exchange for the promise of endless extraterrestrial pussy and a luxury condo development in the Andromeda Galaxy. Pool footage showed the first family rapturing in a private light field, rising up into the ships. The vice president was now in a Cold War bunker, the full Congress behind him. But as he laid his hands on the Bible to take the oath of office, a detachment of marines declared loyalty to a senator from Wisconsin. Automatic gunfire rang out. Blood sprayed across the camera lens. Screams and mauling—
And so like this, earth’s final inhabitants were forced not only to watch their own erasure, but to find it totally addictive.
“It could have been so different,” said Carrey. “What a big canvas we had to paint on. And this is what we composed?”
Then came a nuclear launch by the Japanese, whose atomic weapons program had been the collapsing world’s best-kept secret. But the missiles just skipped off the light fields, some of them bouncing into the sea, others zipping upward, exploding in the thermosphere, a failed display of might that took the rapture from a merely popular product to a sizzlingly hot one. Why fight a man who was impervious to a full-on nuclear attack? And who was offering a painless path to sweet oblivion? Families filled the streets of towns and cities everywhere. Apartment buildings emptied into whistling hollows. The rain fell harder, the sky pulsed ruby beyond the windows.
“I’m hungry,” said Carrey. “I’ve never been hungrier.”
The sun grew dim.
He and Ronstadt were eating grilled cheese sandwiches, watching TMZ drone coverage of Laser Jack Lightning and his followers assaulting a saucer hovering over a Coffee Bean& Tea Leaf in Venice Beach.
The Scientologists, while imperfect, had been more correct about the basic nature of the cosmos than any other religion. They wore magnificent gold spandex bodysuits, woven of a material that blocked out both the rapture light and hostile thetans. They fought with plasma blasters specially developed for them by Raytheon, the only human-made weapons, it seemed, capable of penetrating the light shields. Which really pissed Tan Calvin off.
Thirty seconds into the assault and a ghastly breed of killer robots swarmed out from the saucer, all shooting crimson death rays. The Scientologists were overrun. John Travolta had long ago commissioned a special battle wig for the major role he believed he was destined to play in this intergalactic showdown, a rainbow-strobing, fiber-optic pompadour
whose frontal swell was so menacing that its designers had privately dubbed it “hair-o-shima.” But even Travolta’s hot new look was no match for Calvin’s killer robots. Deeming the battle lost, he fled to the waterfront, a wounded man slung over each shoulder. Only Laser Jack Lightning was steadfast. A final close-up showed his leading man’s face all courage and ferocity as he blasted away, unyielding, declaring, “Every part I’ve played has trained me for this moment!” He vaporized two of the sentinels, crying exultantly, “It’s beautiful, man!” grinning from ear to ear in the face of death. “It’s BEAUTIFUL!” Then in a crimson flash he was gone, broadcast cut to static.
“Why does it have to end this way?” Carrey asked Ronstadt, watching.
“You’d prefer what—a flood?”
“It’d feel more meaningful. To me, at least.”
“It’s all accidents, Jim. The whole world, the whole universe. A life. Accidents. It’s not personal, not any of it. If it wasn’t this, it’d be some asteroid. Or the heat death of the sun.”
She smiled, kindly.
“It’s ending,” he whispered, resting his head on her chest. “What do we do?”
Then, like a nesting doll, Ronstadt’s memory shared a memory.
“Remember when we went to Tucson?”
“Yeah.”
“When I was little my grandmother took me to a church there. It was all this beautiful pink stucco. And the choir sang so gorgeously. It was run by Benedictines. I didn’t believe the hocus-pocus, but they weren’t dumb. Saint Benedict lived after the fall of the Roman empire. It was the start of a thousand years of darkness and lies. Repression. A whole world ending.”
“So what did they do?”
“They went up into the mountains, into the caves. They settled for finding some peace in their own minds. They lived off scraps of kindness.”
He struggled to keep his eyes open.
“You were good to me.”
“We were good to each other.”
Their breaths found common time, his mind’s many fists unclenching as he fell into healing slumber. When he woke up, she was gone. He rolled his head from the pillow to see Cage, Sean Penn, Carla, Sally Mae, and Willow standing above him, faces covered in battle paint.
The smell of burning rubber wafted up from the beach.
“Where is she?” said Carrey, concerned only for the loss of Ronstadt.
“You’ve had a trauma, man,” said Sean Penn. “You’re not alone. Nuclear exchange on the Indian subcontinent. Two million dead in a morning. We’re living in a world that’s blowing itself to pieces as fast as everybody can arrange it.”
“The Russian army was wiped out defending Vladimir Putin’s secret mansion on the Black Sea,” said Cage. “The U.S. Congress turned to cannibalism after learning their emergency food supply went bad in 1981. The Chinese politburo is all living in a submarine. It’s down to us.”
“Don’t us me,” spat Carrey. “I want Linda.”
“That’s the rapture beam talkin’,” said Cage. “Shake it off. Fight’s coming.”
He tossed Carrey a sleek silver pistol.
“What’s that?”
“Plasma blaster. Travolta brought them.”
“I’m nonviolent.”
“Violence is our way of life now.”
Carrey opened the blinds and peered outside. Travolta and the Scientologists had fled from their battle, landing on the beach in an inflatable raft with an outboard motor, refugees in their own city. The saucers had departed. Just a few were left up the beach, maybe a dozen still hovering over downtown Los Angeles.
“They started leaving yesterday,” said Sean Penn. “Sent out an electromagnetic pulse, took down the whole power grid. Wiped out all the bank records. We’re all beginners again.” This last part made him smile. “Mop-up crews were sighted up by Oxnard, moving down the coast.”
“They’ll be here by morning,” said Sally Mae.
“The same guys who took out Laser Jack?”
“Worse than that. These are Striders. Each twenty feet high, covered in scales sharp as Ginsu knives.” Cage held up his hand. “What a burden, to be chosen.”
“Why’d you pull me out, Nic?” said Carrey. “I was ready to go up with Kelsey Grammer and Bathsheba. With Cher.” He leaned up out of bed, grabbing Cage by the collar. “I was out! Goddamn you! I was out. What the fuck do we even do now?”
“Now we fight,” said Sean Penn. “That’s what remains for us, here. No more lives of comfort, no more pampering. The human animal, back to hunger. We fight for our very survival.”
“We fight for jasmine tea,” said Gwyneth Paltrow, entering from the en suite bathroom in a vintage YSL beret, face painted with green and black combat stripes. “We fight for memories of pear-and-arugula salads in Bridgehampton. We fight to reclaim a world filled with so much joy your only concern is laugh lines on your face, maybe a little neck work, at a certain point.”
“We fight,” said Sally Mae, interrupting, “for a world reborn free from inherited privilege, rapacious capitalism, body shaming, congenital fame, predatory lending practices, and government-protected pharmaceutical cartels. A world where privacy is a right, not a word.”
“We fight to avenge the Laser Jack brigades,” said John Travolta, appearing from the hallway. He’d fully recharged his battle wig; its fibers surged angry waves of yellow and red. His gold spandex bodysuit had shrunk several sizes in Carrey’s dryer, and it squeaked as he entered the bedroom. “We fight for disco fever and rigorously enforced intellectual property rights.”
“Jimbo,” said Sean Penn. “Are you with us?”
Carrey knew his line even before it arrived in his head. He picked up the Scientologist plasma blaster, caressing it with a gesture that might have seemed overwrought in simpler times but was perfectly suited to this hour of planetary climax. In the voice of a seasoned hitman accepting one last job to put his daughter through college, he said, “Yeah, what the fuck.”
* * *
—
The Daughters of Anomie were the only ones with any real combat experience.
In Iraq and Afghanistan they’d seen how an advanced civilization could be defeated with wits and cunning and after discussion had chosen the Malibu Country Mart—a high-end outdoor shopping mall—as the most advantageous combat setting.
“I don’t care if you took basic training for Hamburger Hill,” said Carla as they gathered around a hastily drawn map of the mall. “I don’t care if you were a mighty warlord in one of your fucking past-life regressions.”
“I battled the warlords,” said Travolta, protesting. “We were the only ones who could help.”
Carla reached her titanium hand under the table and flicked his left testicle through his gold spandex bodysuit. “Suppressive!” said Travolta, wincing in pain.
Ignoring him, Carla continued, “You listen, you take orders. It’s the only way we make it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Sean Penn, lighting a fresh Camel off his old one.
“I want Nic Cage, Sally Mae, and Jim Carrey on this antiaircraft gun above the Chipotle. Watch the hills. Start firing when you see them. Lure them in, then abandon and fall back. But you fire until the very last. Draw them down onto Cross Creek Road. Right into our Claymores.”
“Make those alien cunts confetti,” said Gwyneth Paltrow, clapping her hands. The battle paint was changing her. “Dance to the music of their agony.”
“It’ll definitely slow ’em down,” said Carla. “That’s when Paltrow, Sean Penn, and I all launch white phosphorus grenades from Urban Outfitters. Distract them, turn their flank. Then Willow, Travolta, and the Scientologists? You light ’em up with plasma blasters from Taverna Tony, the Greek restaurant.”
“Ugh, Taverna Tony’s my favorite!” gasped Travolta. “The fried halloumi? So worth the calories.”
>
“Yeah?” said Carla. “Well, tonight they’re serving grilled alien. They’ll be caught in a cross fire. As Carrey, Cage, and Sally Mae close in from Chipotle—more plasma blasting, clearly—cutting off all escape. A classic Taliban trap. This is how I lost my arm and leg.”
She hiked up her pants to show them all the titanium leg. It revived their spirits, some proof that the powerless could prevail over the powerful, so inspiring the actors that they now competed to own the moment with a line for the ages.
“Let’s make some alien widows,” said Sean Penn.
“Let’s turn ’em into mincemeat and masticate ’em!” said John Travolta.
“Let’s pour some salt on these SLUGS!” said Nic Cage.
“Let’s kill for killing’s sake and rejoice in how it changes us,” said Gwyneth Paltrow. “I wanna play Slip ’N Slide in their fucking guts.”
“I don’t know if this is real,” said Carrey. “But I can’t afford to doubt it.”
* * *
—
The night sky was muddy red.
The rain poured down in sheets as they hauled armaments across the Pacific Coast Highway and began to turn a shopping mall into an extraterrestrial slaughterhouse. They planted Claymores all down Cross Creek Road, smashed out the windows of Taverna Tony and Urban Outfitters, and stacked both storefronts high with sandbags, making them gunners’ nests. With makeshift pulleys they hoisted Cage’s antiaircraft gun onto Chipotle’s roof, lumbering not just under the weight of steel but the compacted grief of all who’d come before them, people who’d done their part to keep the human candle burning, the martyred millions of Cambodia and Pompeii, the nameless dead of all the wars edited from history books for digressing from central narratives. Carrey thought chiefly of this last group as they huddled under the tarp, because he knew that, with no one left to tell their story, it was to this group that they’d belong if their lives ended here. Cage scanned the hills with his binoculars. Sally Mae sat at the guns, rolling up her shirtsleeve, unlatching her prosthetic arm from its socket. A titanium bolt was fused into the bone beneath the stump, the skin around it chafed and raw from hauling and lifting. As she rubbed the scar tissue with lotion, Carrey felt a withering fear consume him.
