by Jim Carrey
Penn was first to fall. A Super Strider shot a raspberry ray clear through his right arm, cleaving it at the joint. The limb fell into the mud. There was no cover in sight. He crouched and took the still-burning Camel from his severed hand, lifting it defiantly to his lips and pulling a final, sating drag as a second death ray sailed through his beating heart. He died thinking of his child, a boy or a girl, it didn’t matter, it would be born feral and free, would do its part for the rebuilding of the world, the creation of a new moral system across the hard years to come. Sean Penn’s consciousness was safe in this bliss even as his body crumpled to the ground, seared and scalded by the Super Striders now just a hundred yards away, cannons blazing.
They took Cage as their next target, jockeying to smite him as a carrier of immunity, their death rays finding him as he bounded across the street. How many get to choreograph their final seconds? He died just as he said he would, turning to face their swarm, laughing at them, even, because if the worst threat they had was oblivion, that was fine by him, an endless vacation from the torments of being. He fell in slow motion, arms stretched toward heaven, face a vision of Christly surrender. You did things that hadn’t been done, that others were afraid to do, thought Carrey, watching Cage’s body hit the ground with an excruciating wheeze.
You gave me courage.
He thought of the Pietà, Jesus laid out in the Virgin Mary’s arms. Voices from some catacomb inside of him prayed to her, asking for safety, for velocity, and, failing these, for a death as exquisite as Cage’s.
Then he was turning the corner around the Café Habana, its concrete shielding him from the fusillade, his whole being crying out for a return to the place where—thrashing, frightened, struggling to breathe—a squirming species began its story five hundred million years before, a genre-bending tale of fantasy and comedy, action and adventure, murder and magic.
He ran like running was the last language left, eyes set on the sea.
CHAPTER 16
The Super Striders made a game of wrecking the shopping mall, sheer wrath rejoicing in itself, death beams falling through the night mist, bombarding the stores, a temple sacking, to some view: John Varvatos, L’Occitane, Lululemon, all burning.
All signs and names turned to carbon, given over to the winds.
Jim Carrey ran with the vision of a dying Nic Cage still clawing at his heart.
He ran from annihilation, toward the hope of escape, face covered with grease and strange blood. He scurried across the highway, then down an access lane toward the beach, where, charging out from a driveway, right into his path, came a large and frightened beast, a creature fled from some eccentric’s private zoo.
A rhinoceros.
He froze in its gaze, and it froze in his. A moment of interspecies appraisal in which Carrey felt his heart flush with hope at the scintilla of a chance that this was his old friend Rodney Dangerfield. That Lonstein had been guiding them toward this, the old duo reunited, using one-liners and sheer pluck to turn the tide against the Super Striders.
“Rodney?” he whispered.
And listened hopefully for an answer as the animal’s eyes went wide. Then it grunted, flared its nostrils, and charged. Carrey fled down the road, toward the rear gates of a beachfront mansion, leaping over them and falling into a hedgerow as the raging rhino crashed its horn between the gates’ steel posts. The beast struggled to dislodge itself, but the steel had cut deep into its skin. It made terrible cries, sounds like from a broken kazoo, nothing human in there. The Super Striders were on the highway, strafing the oceanfront mansions, impacts spawning heat devils across the night.
And now the star recalled the single rule he’d learned watching chunks of human history on YouTube and Netflix: in dire moments one must flee and not look back. He ran down to the beach, scanning its breadth for some mode of escape. But this was a rich man’s paradise: no motorboats, no sailboats, just paddleboards and lounge chairs, American leisure, in its ultimate hours, not so different from lying in state.
Then in a flicker of raspberry light—
He saw the rubber dinghy that had carried Travolta and his men up from Santa Monica. He charged down the slick low-tide sand, pushed the craft toward the water, blood in his throat, groans and grunts forming the last prayers as naturally as they had the first. The killers were on the beach now, raspberry death raining all around as the boat hit the water, as Carrey yanked on the outboard motor’s pull cord.
Once, nothing.
Again, desperate, nothing.
Turning, he saw the death squads. Some danced in celebration, their gleaming alloy beaks shaking with apparent laughter. Others had stopped their exoskeletons around piles of charred bodies, slithering down from their captain’s pods to feast on human barbecue, broadcasting their conquest to delighted viewers back home. And it wasn’t clear to Carrey if they were vomiting from secondary mouths or ejaculating from unseen sex organs, but thick sprays of black fluid spurted from their lower torsos as they bucked in gorging peristalsis.
And here, we must pause to note, Jim Carrey was different from others who’d left everything behind in flight. There is some comfort in being eradicated by your own kind, a knowledge that this was part of the species’ compact, that the blade could have swung the other way. A solace that, however meager, is unavailable to those slaughtered by aliens. He soiled himself in fear and yet welcomed his stench, a human stench; he found it comforting and familiar as the Super Striders tightened their cannons on his stretch of the beach. As, sobbing and pleading, he yanked on the outboard motor. Again, again, again—
Then, finally, barely, it came to life, vibrating hope through his every cell as he climbed into the raft, ducking low, gunning for the only safety available, that of open water.
* * *
—
He lay flat, like in a bed, afraid to move, telling himself that each elapsed second brought him safety. He prayed to his remnant gods for preservation, but without sufficient faith to dare looking back for nearly an hour. Then two miles out into the Pacific, shivering in his shit and his fear, he lifted up his head to glimpse the coastline. It had become a dancing pyre, the Malibu Colony in flames; his home, too, with Chaplin’s cane inside, gone with the person he’d been and the world that had formed him. There are, it has been sung since Troy, tears for things, and mortal things do move the heart. He cried now, for Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage, for Sally Mae and Carla, whose fates he’d never know. For his daughter, for his grandson, wherever they were. He cried, even, for Wink and Al, and despite all the grievances between them what he’d have given to have them in the boat, to help him plan, to console and encourage. Well, maybe not Al, whose overeating would be a problem in any resource-constrained environment and could even lead to cannibalism. But Wink, yes, definitely Wink, who at least had played the good cop. Who had believed in him when others didn’t. Who had combat experience, who had seen men die, just as he had now, and what a miracle it was, Carrey marveled, that Wink had retained any humanity after all the loss and pain that he now knew as well, the sorrow that filled him as he motored farther out to sea, the coast becoming just a rim of burning villages, a dying filament—
Oh fallen world, he thought, lines coming to him as naturally as in the desert production chamber. You cried out to the stars to free you from your loneliness, and they did, but they took all else as well. And what am I now?
A man and his world are entwined. You can’t demolish one without injuring the other.
Who had he been?
A god of the cultural marketplace.
What was he now? A creature on a dinghy ten miles off the California coast, his vast estate reduced to just a single rucksack left behind by Travolta. It contained two canteens, a first-aid kit, and a dozen Cookies ’n’ Cream Laser Jack Lightning–branded yogurt bars, wrappers printed with Jack’s chiseled torso in silhouette. As he admired the sculpte
d abs, Carrey’s memory flashed to The Last of the Mohicans, or at least Daniel Day-Lewis’s whitewashed portrayal of that man, not just allowed but applauded in a bygone cultural era. Maybe these yogurt bars and the sudden vision of healthy native persons was a cosmic invitation, he wondered, a brief flush of hope. He’d find an island, get in sick shape. He’d be just like the last Mohican. In a way, he might even be the last Mohican, insofar as all humans have a common ancestor.
How did that movie end?
It seemed vitally important to know, a narrative model to guide him. But he’d seen so many movies. The endings all blurred together. Did the Mohican get shot by the French? Or did he have a baby by a waterfall? Carrey needed so badly to know, closing his eyes, beseeching the full smorgasbord of possible creators for an affirming memory, coastline fading to nothing.
And then he was floating in total darkness.
Panicked, he turned the dinghy toward his best guess at east, madly gunning the engine, hoping each fuel-draining throttle would recenter his world. Here was a man who was decades removed from visiting a gas station, who assumed a functioning GPS on every dashboard. Who cursed John Travolta for leaving him a day boat with a fuel tank only big enough for tooling around the marina as the gas ran low and the engine sputtered. Who punched his own face and screamed until his voice broke and nothing came out, enraged to lose his only bearing.
Important to put out good energy, he told himself, slumping exhausted into the dinghy.
Vital to affirm, to manifest, to go to sleep with positivity and gratitude, communicated warmly to the cosmos. It came to him, a single buoyant thought:
TPG owns nothing now.
* * *
—
He woke beneath a hazy sun, head throbbing. He pissed deep amber off the dinghy, into the endless gray-blue waves, ripples doomier than prison bars.
He was thirsty, just half a canteen left.
Two swigs, three if he was careful.
You could distill water from the sea, he knew. He’d watched this on survival shows. It had to do with molecular bonds. It was a matter of persuading the salt to fall out of love with the water, and it involved a tarp and an old plastic bottle. Or maybe a magnifying glass. He’d seen it, but the details had trickled off his mind.
So much information, toward the end, had trickled off the mind.
He drank just enough to wet his swelling tongue, ego madly searching for something with which to fight despair, settling, finally, on the vaguest and so least assailable of hopes—
Trade winds.
Memories of a Twitter infographic. The oceans were a living system. And he was part of that system, this was certain, he knew, having just pissed into it. And that system was part of greater systems spanning a creation which, give or take the odd death squad, was basically kind and benevolent, or at the very least indifferent.
Trade winds.
He visualized them spiriting him up north, to Oregon. Saw himself coming upon the Daughters of Anomie’s deep forest paradise. He saw Sally Mae and Jane wearing crowns of moss. He saw his grandson, Jackson, growing strong, poised to lead in the pure new world. But then the vision fell apart. He saw the happy village raided. He saw starving decades, barren fields, pitched battles over stores of gasoline and Spam, the world returned to primal maulings. He felt the skin blistering on his forehead.
He was no longer thinking about trade winds.
He was curling himself into the rim of shade that fell from the dinghy’s side, tucking his head low, rubber craft rising and falling on the swells.
He was vomiting over the side, stomach acid burning his mouth.
He was swallowing down his last water, body demanding it, bile stinging his lips, his chin, his tongue. He was dizzy, washing his face clean in the sea, gargling the water, then gulping it down, powerless against the demands of his thirst.
He was asleep, dreaming of swallowing sandpaper.
He was awake, nighttime now, his thoughts dragged like granite slabs on sledges.
The ocean was more than still; it was polished obsidian.
The stars shone crystalline and bright, all reflected perfectly on the water’s surface, the thick central band of the Milky Way completing its spiral around the boat, a sacred wheel, infinite time and space freed from any axis. He dared his head over the side, expecting to glimpse infinity, seeing, instead, a haggard, unshaven creature, eyes hollowed by hopelessness.
He spat at the ghoul, then turned to see he wasn’t alone.
Perched across the dinghy was Ted Berman, host of BBC’s Pompeii Reconstructed: Countdown to Disaster. “I’ve seen many ruined civilizations,” said Berman. He wore his appropriated Indiana Jones outfit, complete with thrift-store fedora, and spoke in his convivial TV-host manner. “But I’ve always wanted to come here, at the end of it all, with the last man, Jim Carrey.”
“Berman?” said Carrey.
“The mind, deprived of sleep and nutrition, cedes higher functions and seeks a soothing exit reel,” said Berman, as if addressing an unseen audience. “Each epoch has its own gods and beseeches those gods as it ends. Jim Carrey, here, is not so different from the last Pompeians. Kanye West, though manic, was possessed of real genius. What God remains, at history’s end, but abstract forms?” He produced a ram’s horn from his knapsack.
“What’s that for?” asked Carrey.
“We’re passing through a thin place,” said Berman. “A zone where worlds touch.”
He raised the horn to his mouth and blew a plaintive note, a low wailing, the sound of a suddenly sentient lamb lamenting its slaughter. He held it until his face reddened, until the veins bulged on his neck and all the stars in the unified field of water and sky began to vibrate, then to swirl—
First, in chaos.
Then, toward an intricate pattern, an incandescent flower with endless petals, each ten million light-years long, a sparkling mandala across the heavens, and Carrey listened like a schoolboy learning of flight as Ted Berman explained, “This is the shape of all that has been. All the lives that have ever been lived. And the light that shines from them is every dream and every memory, every hope and every wish.”
“Yes,” said Carrey, warmed. “It’s just like that.”
“And it’s always been there. It just needed the appropriate quiet to reveal itself.”
Berman blew his horn again, a slightly higher pitch. The flower petals turned to blazing fractals swirling in perfect Fibonacci spirals and Carrey gasped raw wonder as Berman, with all the authority vested in him by a BBC gig and a bachelor’s degree from Cornell, said, “This is the true shape of time, an endless spiral of spirals.”
And Carrey gave a raspy giggle to think that he’d ever worried about the constraints of a human life span. About his waistline. That he’d ever spiked an avocado smoothie with couture amino acids. That the mystery of time’s endlessness had been hidden from him all his days, waiting for someone to cajole it into view with the proper notes of music sounded at the proper point on the spiritual meridian.
“We’ve learned so much tonight,” said Ted Berman, putting down the ram’s horn. “And now, I’d like to say a few words about our sponsor: Slim Jim’s meat sticks and beef jerky snacks.”
“Huh?” asked Carrey, confused. “What about time and—”
“Slim Jim’s meat sticks and beef jerky snacks are bold, spicy, and made out of the stuff men need,” said Berman. “Satisfy your hunger and snap into a Slim Jim today!”
And then, from his backpack, he produced no fewer than ten of the beef jerky snacks, holding them up, fan-style, like winning poker hands. “Jerky, Jim?” he said.
Forgetting all communion with guiding geometries, Carrey leaped on him like a wild bobcat. He tore the Slim Jims from Berman’s clutches, ripped away the plastic wrappers with his teeth, planted his canines into the juicy meat, gnawing, c
homping, feeding, sucking, guided by an inner roaring until that roaring quieted, and then he fell asleep, belly full, animal cells fed.
* * *
—
He woke without a memory’s faintest glimmer, pain shrieking through his hands.
With horror, he saw the flesh was gone from his fingers, ripped away, as if by piranhas. The bones were bare, blood smudged, nerves and tendons severed, dangling loose. He screamed, then winced in screaming, throat burned by stomach acids. It hurt, even, to swallow.
He curled fetal, shivering-shock, whimpering.
Use your brain, use your brain, use your brain…
Where was he?
At sea. In a boat. What was this kind of boat again?
Dinghy.
Hardly a word, so onomatopoetic—
Dinghy, dinghy, dinghy…
He was Jim and he was in a dinghy…
Asserting this basic truth, he felt one with the pitching craft, Jim and Dinghy, Dinghy-Jimmy, Jimsy-Dinghy, Jinghy Dimmy, he said, giggling, Jimsy-Dinghy, Dimsey Jinghy, and he laughed so hard he spat a plug of blood-streaked bile into his palm. He stared at it, saying, Snivaloggh, again and again, snivaloggh, snivaloggh, laughing like laughter was never a business.
He lay on his side, coughing up plugs of snivaloggh.
He hadn’t retched so violently since he was a boy with the scarlet fever, or the flu, or whatever it was…
