The Last Days of Jack Sparks

by Jason Arnopp

  ‘It’s not,’ says Astral. ‘It’s looking at me.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ says Howie. ‘It’s looking straight at me.’

  Everyone else says the same. Mimi is somehow looking at all of us at once, which makes me feel ill deep inside. Do we all need MRI scans? I certainly need some cocaine and a tequila slammer.

  ‘Mimi,’ says Lisa-Jane, her cool evaporating, those drawn-on brows urgent squiggles. ‘Is that you? Nod if it’s you.’

  Astral growls and opens his mouth to reprimand Lisa-Jane for taking control. Then his mouth stays open when the Mimi face nods its head.

  Everyone cheers. A team who just scored the winning goal.

  Contact has been made.

  Discipline gives way to chaos, as people fire questions up at the face.

  Ellie: ‘Are you really the Mimi we created, or are you a spirit passing by?’

  Johann: ‘Is there life after death?’

  Pascal: ‘Are you a time traveller?’

  Howie: ‘Can you confirm that my neighbour is trying to kill me?’

  I want to ask a question too, but everyone’s so loud and my throat is sandpaper and there’s a jackhammer pulse in my temples.

  Everyone yells questions up at Mimi. Pure word salad.

  Elisandro puts his hands together, then jerks them apart: ‘Stop!’

  Mimi vanishes into thin air. It doesn’t blip out, but rather melts away.

  Something desperate ignites me. Something that believes Mimi is a real ghost. I flash my teeth at Elisandro and snarl, ‘Oh, nice work, dickhead.’

  Elisandro launches himself across the table and clocks me one on the jaw.

  I grab him and topple back blind, losing my balance, dragging him down with me, white hot with hate. Before we hit the ground, my knuckles slam into something small and round and hard in a sea of soft flesh. Elisandro makes a glottal choking sound as his falling body weight smacks the wind from my lungs. He wrenches himself away in panic, crawling off across the carpet. Ellie stoops, her arms outstretched to intercept him. Mother and toddler.

  ‘Asshole,’ she spits at me.

  Johann’s eyes are molten grey steel. His whole body flexes as he steps towards me, pauses, mutters some admonishment to himself, then joins the others crowding about Elisandro. I just loll around on the carpet, winded, checking that my jaw still works.

  Elisandro clutches his throat and croaks as Ellie cradles him from behind.

  This transient physical pain feels secondary to my mental anguish.

  The push and pull.

  Science sweeps in to provide a crutch, just as it has since I was five years old. I’m reminded, with as much impact as Elisandro’s fist, that this experiment actually isn’t good fun. Neither is my determination to expose them for making the video.

  All of this is tearing me apart.

  The firestorm of fear and rage at the back of my throat engulfs the room. ‘You think I don’t know this is all total bullshit? You really think I’ve been going along with this utter crap?’

  Our astonishment after seeing Mimi invests this war of words with an electrical charge. Forked lightning flashes out of me as I accuse the Paranormals of rigging the whole Mimi Experiment. They deliberately alienated Professor Spence, I say, because they knew he’d see right through the artifice when the table started moving. Probably because he and his own bunch of fakers had employed the same tricks in the seventies. So they’d wanted him on board at the start for the PR cachet, then just blanked him till he walked.

  Astral’s face turns purple as he tries to bellow me into submission, while Lisa-Jane screeches that I’m ‘a paranoid coke-head prick’, but I just keep repeating myself until the full force of my disgusted bile sinks into their dumb heads.

  ‘And I know full fucking well,’ I tell them, my forefinger a jabbing gun, throat sore from shouting, ‘that you stupid shits made the YouTube video. And now it’s all going to blow up in your faces.’

  Bex stirs a straw around in her new pina, making the little umbrella fall out.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘So much for the whole stealthy-playing-along thing.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, tonguing a cracked tooth. ‘That’s gone for good.’

  ‘So all this stuff happened this afternoon? What did they say when you accused them of making the video?’

  ‘Oh, there was a whole load of shouting and big eyes and American stuff, until we all got tired of fighting. So we shifted to this other meeting room – one without a table – and made a circle with our chairs, talking it out like adults.’

  She’s getting impatient. ‘And the outcome?’

  Despite my nagging need for coke, I’m unable to suppress a smirk. ‘I pissed them off even more.’

  ‘You’d better be kidding,’ says Johann. The others, even Pascal, are equally aghast.

  ‘I’m serious,’ I say. ‘Either we relocate the whole experiment, or I’m out. I won’t even include this farce in the book. And you’ll have to sell your arses on Hollywood Boulevard to fund the rest.’

  Howie scowls at my ignorance. ‘Hollywood Boulevard. You mean Sepulveda.’ He then looks relieved when Lisa-Jane breaks the silence.

  ‘How exactly do you think we achieved the illusion of a floating fucking head today, Jack? I’m so psyched to hear this.’

  I shrug. ‘Who knows what your fancy gadgets do?’

  ‘I’d be happy to talk you through it again,’ says Pascal. Even my favourite Paranormal’s gone all passive-aggressive.

  ‘Listen, man, this is so counterproductive,’ says Astral. ‘We just made our biggest ever breakthrough. We should all be celebrating, but here’s you, peeing all over it.’ He spreads his words out slow and thick, believing me stupid. ‘Now you listen up. We did not make that video.’

  My hands curl back into fists. ‘People have killed themselves because they think the video proves the afterlife. Your little self-promotion stunt has cost lives. You’ve given people false . . .’ The words catch in my throat and I have to compose myself before I choke up and lose it altogether.

  ‘Come on, Jack,’ says Pascal. ‘You’ve got the wrong idea here. We need to patch this up and move on.’

  ‘Well,’ I manage, ‘I’m offering you a way to do that. I believe you’ve rigged that meeting room and that table, somehow, some way. So tomorrow, we move to my friend’s studio up in the hills. Big Coyote Ranch. We use a brand-new table you’ve never even seen before and your equipment stays unplugged.’

  I silence their protests with a raised finger. ‘At least for a while. And then we see what happens. If we still experience phenomena like today’s, I’ll be stumped and converted. Everyone wins.’

  Enjoying the barrel I have them over, I hammer my proposition home. ‘Now if that isn’t scientific, then what is?’

  Grudging acquiescence rumbles around the room. Elisandro gets up, hurls his chair against a wall, then goes to stand outside.

  ‘And one last condition,’ I tell the others, with special emphasis on Pascal. ‘A fucking important one. You undo whatever you’ve done to my social media.’

  Pascal looks genuinely mystified.

  Bex drops her bombshell question as we walk along Sunset towards the House of Blues. I didn’t want to go out tonight – I’d much rather we stay in and punish the bedsprings. All that lost sleep hangs heavy on my eyelids, and I’m jonesing for my twin fixes of cocaine and social media grandstanding. Alcohol seems a poor relation.

  ‘Have you been telling people we’re a couple?’ she asks, springing it on me fast. A panther strike from the bush.

  I grind to a halt so fast a granite block may as well have sprung up in front of me. ‘Who said that?’

  Turns out Astral friended Bex today. He did this knowing that my social media’s up the creek, so I couldn’t see his sly move. Then he messaged Bex and oh-so-casually asked how long she and I had been a couple.

  ‘So you told him we’re together?’ she asks.

  ‘What did you say back?’
/>
  ‘Answer the question.’

  Every cell in my body wants to hunt the guy down and beat him. ‘Well, how would you feel if I had told Astral that?’

  ‘Jack, how many times do I need to say “Answer the question” before you answer the bloody question? Did you tell Astral we’re together?’

  ‘Only because he asked, to see if the way was clear, the big sleaze.’

  She smirks awkwardly. Half laughs. ‘Let’s . . . not go changing our relationship status just yet, yeah?’

  My self-esteem plunges on a bungee cord.

  ‘Oh God,’ I say. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Would you mind if we go back to being mates?’ she adds, reworking the bungee cord into a noose. ‘I think of you as one of my best mates, and I don’t want to mess it up for the sake of, you know, a holiday . . . thing.’

  ‘I totally get that,’ I say, unable to grasp how the future I’d begun to imagine for us could be rejected. ‘Never thought anything different.’

  We wade on through pale yellow pools cast by street lamps. Stunned into silence, I check social media as a reflex, only to be reminded that most of my accounts don’t exist. It’s so infuriating, not being able to put myself out there. Ideas for great posts keep hatching, then flying around my skull with nowhere to go. A hard ball of unfulfilled self-expression festers in my gut. My followers probably think I’m dead. I plan to start new accounts everywhere, but these things take time. Now that Bex has poured cold water on us, I no longer feel like shooting a new YouTube video tonight – it’s so much harder to hide your misery on those things.

  The rest of the night is a dying dog, but we get by. It helps that the hot and noisy House of Blues has bands onstage, something to watch. When potentially difficult silences sweep in to consume us, we swat them away with words, any words. Trite observations about strangers. We both know we’re avoiding the issue of what sex has done to us, but some conversational barriers may as well be granite blocks.

  As the drinks go down, some of our old rapport returns, even though it feels forced. ‘If you had to have sex with an animal,’ Bex asks me, ‘which would it be?’

  I can’t think of anything funny to say.

  She thinks her own answer over. ‘I’d have to go for a giraffe, because I wouldn’t have to look it in the eye.’

  Our dinner server becomes excited about our nationality. ‘You guys are from England?’ he exclaims. ‘Hey, do you know Neil Yates?’ We stare at him, somehow keeping it together. Bex covers her mouth with her hand. The guy walks off baffled, still believing England to be a small village.

  Tonight I sleep on the sofa, while Bex takes the bed. For the second night running, I don’t dream of Maria, which is wonderful. If she still has some problem with me, what’s she waiting for? It feels like the curse has lifted. Perhaps the curse was only ever cocaine.

  Despite Maria’s no-show in my dreams, a whole horde of angry imagery crashes around my head till morning. Not content with sabotaging my online presence, Astral has wrecked me and Bex before we even had a chance.

  Which makes this personal.

  Until tonight, I’d wanted to expose Astral Way and the Hollywood Paranormals.

  Now, I want to destroy them.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Pascal aims my phone so I can see myself on the screen. I’ve instructed him to do it this way, so I can have absolute control.

  ‘Bit to the left,’ I tell him, snatching at one of the infernal insects that buzz non-stop around us. ‘Bit more.’

  Pascal prods his specs back up on the bridge of his nose. ‘I promise you, Jack. We haven’t done any of this stuff you’re accusing us of.’

  ‘I said a bit more to the left. There. Ready? Three . . .’

  Onscreen, behind me, you can see the sawn logs that comprise Big Coyote Ranch’s roof. You can see most of the front porch, ideal for sitting down to play banjo. This place may look rustic, but inside there’s a million dollars of studio tech.

  ‘Two . . .’

  Offscreen, behind Pascal, lies a hazy panorama. A row of boulders mark the cut-off point where this broad crest sweeps deep into forbidding stony gulfs shared by other hills. Uncomfortably steep roads snake back down towards the distant metropolis. From here, the City of Angels resembles several grids pushed together in an irritatingly arbitrary fashion.

  ‘One . . .’

  Sitting high off Mulholland, the ranch occupies several acres, with few neighbours. Ever since the global crash, record companies have sent their bands to less glamorous locations, and Big Coyote’s owner, my expat mate Rod, has reeled against the ropes. This week, no one’s recording at all, so he’s handed me two sets of keys and left us to it. He’s one trusting guy, Rod, but then we go way back to the late nineties, when an influential NME article of mine put Big Coyote on the map.

  ‘. . . Action.’

  Hearing the beep, I strap on my web face and launch the spiel. Because I’m convinced Bex will change her mind, today I’m still powered by caffeine and caffeine alone. Maybe the whole relationship status thing temporarily threw her. Best to stay off the Charlie, even though I’m strung out. This morning I was so tempted, I even got that chalky taste in the back of my throat, as if my body had generated an emergency supply. But if I can’t have coke, I can at least bask in the light of a million YouTube eyes, while dealing Astral a blow to the kidneys.

  ‘So I’m up here at Big Coyote Ranch,’ I tell the camera, ‘with a ghost-hunting group whose name escapes me. I’ve moved the Mimi Experiment from Culver City to the Hollywood Hills, to rule out any trickery from them. Never trust a true believer, even if they do claim to be a scientist. Let’s go inside and see the new table we’ll be using. Oh, and see if you can guess which of these people is Jabba the Hutt in disguise . . .’

  Pascal follows with the phone as I walk through the front doors, which are flanked by vending machines, two glowing sentries. Star and cameraman, we cross the spacious reception lounge lined with empty black leather sofas and dotted with flight cases containing the Paranormals’ equipment. The group sit around our new square table, staring daggers. Of course, they perk right up when they realise they’re being filmed. Oh yes, they try to establish themselves as real characters.

  I seize the chance to humiliate them. These people who think they can whitewash me out of the Mimi Experiment coverage like some dirty little secret. Circling the table, I play up to the camera, taking the piss, quizzing them. I ask Astral if he feels any affinity with Jabba the Hutt. Johann about the importance of physical fitness to the dead. I ask a subdued Howie whether his neighbour has killed him yet. Caught in the headlights of the internet, they maintain fixed grins, even as their faces redden and they shift from one buttock to the other.

  Astral’s grin drops clean off the moment filming ends. ‘You done?’

  ‘No, you’re all done,’ I say, restraining myself from physically assaulting him as I snatch back my phone from Pascal. ‘Hope you’ve planned your defence. “Oh Jack, we can’t believe it, Mimi didn’t appear this time – and it’s your fault for changing location!”’

  Astral mumbles something I can’t hear, and I ask him to repeat it. Ellie jumps in: ‘You can be damn sure nothing’ll happen if we just trash-talk for hours. Convivial and carefree, remember?’

  ‘Oh yeah, sure,’ I say. ‘Because you’re all the very opposite of uptight.’

  Ellie flops back in her chair, overplaying her exasperation.

  ‘Everyone’s hands where I can see them,’ I say. ‘And the equipment stays inside those cases.’

  Lisa-Jane’s eyes are only happy when they roll. ‘Sure thing, Ghost Cop.’

  As the others begin a stilted conversation, Astral fixes his poisonous gaze on me. He finally hates me as much as I hate him. I stare back until he looks away.

  I examine my phone to check YouTube’s reaction to my new exclusive Big Coyote Ranch report. I have the phone set to auto-upload everything I film, because I can’t conceive of needing a se
cond take.

  I blink at what I’m seeing, as if blinking will solve the problem. The new clip has failed to upload, because my YouTube account no longer exists. Someone has obviously hacked into my account and deleted it.

  Around the table, people stiffen as my enraged glare hammers into them all.

  The table lurches upwards so hard that we jerk our hands away. It leaves the floor and keeps rising until it smashes into the ceiling.

  As plaster chips rain down, we leap to our feet and stagger back with our chairs. The table stays up there, motionless, its surface jammed against the ceiling. Sir Isaac Newton’s nemesis.

  For once, nobody speaks.

  Shock and awe.

  When it leaves the ceiling, this table doesn’t just fall, it throws itself down. The legs bash the carpet so hard that the whole thing ricochets off at an angle.

  One leg punches Astral in the paunch. Winded, he struggles to hold the table still. It bucks and rams a corner hard into his mouth, shattering teeth and freeing blood.

  Elisandro and Johann leap over to help tame this wild horse.

  Something catches my eye, up by the ceiling.

  Mimi is back.

  Or whatever the hell this thing might be.

  The insane floating face now has a real edge to it. A spiteful edge that makes me forget to breathe.

  ‘Holy God,’ says Howie, seeing Mimi too. Everyone else thinks he’s talking about the table situation.

  ‘Mimi,’ says the face. ‘Mimi.’

  I wouldn’t know how to describe the voice. Distorted, not quite human. Like the ever-changing face, it’s neither male nor female.

  Everyone gawps up at the apparition, shaken by our baby’s first words.

  Our attention is split between that face and the table, which thrashes harder, challenging the combined efforts of wiry Elisandro, ripped Johann and man mountain Astral. The three men shake and strain as they fight to control it.

  Elisandro shoots a glance at the rest of us. ‘Any time you like. Any time.’

  ‘Won’t do no good,’ barks Johann. ‘This thing’s insane.’

  We onlookers don’t move or make a sound. Gripped by a silent, rising hysteria.