Knife Fight and Other Struggles
Page 18
At that point, a phalanx of Disney cast members had burst into the room, fired off a Taser into Jerry’s ass and, with nothing but that and a commandeered restraining wheelchair, effectively ended the meeting.
But the meeting had lasted long enough for Jerry Wylde to leave his mark. As Max lay alone in the dark room, halfway down the biggest adrenaline crash of his life, he played Jerry’s words over and over in his head: Look out for Jim. Jerry Wylde was a lunatic, thought Max, and not a particularly unique one either. Look out for Jim, he’d said. The trouble with guys like Jerry Wylde, thought Max, was they figured they could motivate you with nothing more than some meaningless catchphrase—Look out for Jim, for Christ’s sake—and make you dive off a cliff with it. Like that was all it took.
Max got out of bed. The linoleum floor was cold under his bare feet. They kept these rooms too cool—after three years in New Delhi, Max was used to the heat, and he could have stood a little Florida sunshine. Right now, the only light came through the drawn blinds of a single window, and it cast only the faintest, greenish glow over everything.
“Look out for Jim,” whispered Max. He shuffled over to the window, put his hand on the blind.
As he did so, there was a terrible crunch! sound, as of breaking glass, followed by the escalating moan of spreading cracks. There was another sound as well, somewhat more distant, and for Max the room got even cooler.
It was the sound of wind. Big wind. Max inched the curtain back, looked out through the spiderweb cracks of the window, and saw just how big a wind could get.
Three thick-waisted tornadoes were dancing across the Magic Kingdom under a sky green as a frog’s ass. The infirmary was second-storey, and most of his view was blocked by a grass-covered berm, but Max could see the top spires of Cinderella’s Castle as one of the tornadoes brushed against it. For an instant, it seemed as though the wind was working like a lathe on the fantasy parapet, sending bits of it flying off like woodchips, but then the funnel shifted maybe three dozen feet the wrong way, and the tower disappeared inside it.
“Look out for Jim,” said Max, as one of the other tornadoes began to grow and moved away, the castle now erased from the skyline. Then something else slammed into the window, shattering it—and once again Max was running, slamming open the door to the hallway, which was already filling up with patients and orderlies and security guards. No one seemed to notice him as the adrenaline started pumping and his survival instinct—his “inner Jim”—took over.
“Look out for Jim!” he yelled, and pushed his way into the first stairwell he saw. In no time at all, he was safe in the tunnels under the studio theme park. He would be stuck there for seven and a half days, while Atlantica’s first-ever foray onto the mainland United States reduced eighty percent of Walt Disney World to the swamp and scrub and mud from which it had sprung.
By the time the job was done on Disney, Max’s agent had done pretty much the same thing to his contract with Shoorsen’s producers in New Delhi. Against his agent’s advice, Max handled the talks with Jerry Wylde himself.
EPISODE 1:
THE PASSION OF THE VOLE
Max took advantage of the screen and mini-bar in the wide seating in back as the two fan-surgeons up front found some dry highway and hauled inland to Rio. The weather was the shits, and Max didn’t want to know about it. So rum cooler in hand, he shut the Weath-Net scribe—which was tracking a tentacular offshoot of Atlantica scraping its way down the coast—and settled on one of the Argentinian sitcom feeds. They were showing the first season of Happy Days, when Joanie was a kid, Fonzie was still a greaser more threatening than lovable, and Ron Howard at least superficially resembled the mid-twentieth-century teenager he was supposed to be playing. It was the only season of the show with any artistic integrity as far as Max was concerned. Although it had been dubbed in Portuguese, he watched it raptly as Dan steered the amphibian over and around the remains of the highway into Rio. He suspected both of the fans were glad he’d found something on the screen. Like most fans Max had encountered through his career, these two ran out of conversation after the first hello.
Max was glad for the distraction of the screen himself. He hadn’t seen Jerry Wylde—even onscreen—for something like three years. Wylde’s Kingdom had enjoyed a good seven years at the top of the ratings, but now it was faltering and most networks had shunted it to the bottom of the schedule. “I’ll show you an endangered species,” Wylde had said in one of the early promos, in front of a loop of Jim lobbing hand grenades into what Wylde’s team of researchers believed was the last African mountain-gorilla nest in existence. “Now that’s endangered!”
The limousine crawled up the highway into the suburbs of Rio and finally stopped behind the ruins of a shopping mall. There was a sleek yellow VTOL executive shuttle waiting for them when they arrived. The flight crew were huddled in the lee of a little Quonset shelter, arguing in Italian.
James and Dan jumped out of the limo, opened the door, and hauled Max out. The rain was coming down so hard now that, when Max turned his face toward it, he felt like he was drowning. He was only able to make it across the dozen feet to the hatch of the shuttle because his two abductors-fans-surgeons-whatever-the-hell-they-were helped him.
“This is where we get off,” said James.
“Take it easy, Jim,” said Dan, smiling through the downpour. Max thought both fans looked relieved to be rid of him, and he didn’t blame them. Max sighed and turned to climb into the relative dark of the cabin.
“Max Fiddler,” said a voice he recognized instantly.
“Mimi?”
The shuttle’s cabin was a reinforced bubble affair, with round windows spread polka-dot across the walls and ceiling. The woman sitting inside was just a shadow against a rainy circle of slate-dark sky. “None other,” she said. “You look great.”
“Thank you,” said Max. “I feel like a drowned vole whose balls were cut off with rusty nail clippers.”
“From what I hear about you lately, that’s got to be an improvement.” Although her face was still obscured in silhouette, there was a familiar smile in Mimi’s voice. It was a familiarity that chilled Max; he should never have gotten to know this woman so well. She patted the seat beside her. “Come sit by me,” she said.
Max hesitated.
“Oh Christ, Max, get some self-esteem. We’re going to be working together—the least you can do is sit beside me on the way out.”
“All right.” Max sat down beside her as the hatch behind him swivelled shut and the sounds of the storm stepped back a few yards. With the storm farther and Mimi nearer, Max’s eyes adjusted and he got a good look at the woman behind the voice. The years had been far kinder to her than to him: the line of her jaw and cheek was as smooth, her wide brown eyes as intelligent, her mouth as wide and generous as ever; and her jet-black hair, although tied back in a thick ponytail, showed none of the grey that had begun to fleck through Max’s thinning mane over the past few months. No, Dr. Mimi Coover looked every bit the innocent woman-child she had been when, as a young Canadian marine biologist, she first signed with Wylde’s Kingdom as technical consultant on the televised slaughter of the last three living St. Lawrence beluga whales.
“Prison seems to have agreed with you,” said Max.
“Careful, Maxie,” she said. “There but for the grace of God. . . .”
“I meant it kindly,” said Max.
Mimi shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I didn’t actually serve much of my sentence; my skill set’s in short supply these days, and GET snapped me up pretty quickly for their oceanographics lab. Serving my sentence saving the environment I was so bent on destroying. And with only a little social engineering. . . .” Max grimaced (“social engineering” was Mimi’s euphemism for “alcohol-assisted seduction”) “. . . gaining access to an otherwise classified library of abstracts and raw data you would not believe.”
“Lucky you,” said Max.
“I do not want to know,” said Max.
“Think,” said Mimi, “Nautilus.”
“What does an exercise machine have to do with anything?”
“Nautilus. You know—Captain Nemo? Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea? The giant—”
Max couldn’t hear what Mimi said next—the turbines had begun to cycle up for takeoff, and it took a second for the noise-dampers to kick in.
“—Well I’ve found a nest of them!” finished Mimi. “A nest! Filled with hundreds of them! Hundreds, Max! Nobody’s been able to find more than one in nature, and here we’ve got a nest! Jerry is positively thrilled. That’s why he wanted you back—this is going to put Wylde’s Kingdom back on the charts.”
“Whatever,” said Max. “I’m tired.”
“Tired, hmm? We’ll see about that.” Mimi sidled closer as the VTOL lifted off the pad and started its queasy ascent over the storm. She rested her head on Max’s shoulder, and her hand fell on Max’s thigh. He felt her fingernails through the cloth of his jeans. “You weren’t being literal about being a castrated rodent? Were you, Jim?”
“Actually,” said Max, “yes. Pretty literal.”
Max settled back in his seat as Mimi’s hand withdrew and she sighed. The old survival instinct, Max thought, was finally kicking in. It was about time.
The world looked better at ten thousand feet.
For one thing, Max could see the sun—and some uninterrupted blue sky. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen blue sky and taken it for granted. Atlantica and its bastard offspring had darkened the planet’s surface pretty effectively, and every time the clouds moved you went out and basked in it, melanoma be damned. It was tough to get worked up about something as trivial as skin cancer under the too-rare brightness of direct sunlight.
From up here, even Atlantica didn’t look so bad—clean white cotton balls marching off forever, mixing into a vortex so wide you needed to be in orbit to see it for what it was: the beast that had wiped out close to half the Earth’s population over the past decade and set the other half on the fast track to a soggy and wind-ravaged stone age.
It was no wonder, thought Max, that Jerry Wylde’s star was waning under such a cloud: Atlantica had made the so-called Last Great White Hunter redundant.
In Jerry’s first season, Atlantica wasn’t charted as anything more than a grouping of hurricanes in the mid-Atlantic: Hurricane Colin, Hurricane Donald, Hurricane Elroy; then Freddy and Gerhardt and Helmut; Irving and Jacob and Kenneth and Lothar; Marvin and Noel and Otto. Only when it persisted past the usual hurricane season, crested the alphabet at Zoe and survived past Christmas, did Weath-Net name it for what it was—Atlantica, Earth’s answer to Jupiter’s spot—the world’s first persistent superstorm.
Then, Jerry Wylde was already halfway through the twenty-six-episode first season of Wylde’s Kingdom, building his studio on the S.S. Minnow, a loaded-down oil tanker anchored off British Columbia, and fending off subpoenas from a dozen different governments. With the help of Max and a team of zoologists, he had identified and exterminated eight species of animals that were headed that way anyway.
The first season was a good one for Max. He didn’t even mind being only addressed as Jim by everyone he saw: hell, in half a season he’d become more famous as Jerry Wylde’s athletic animal troubleshooter than he’d become in six seasons as Shoorsen’s pink-bellied second banana.
Jim did everything: jumped from helicopters into alligator-infested swamps, staged commando raids on lion prides, reprised his debut with the rhinos on an African veldt in the two-part special Rhino Revenge—this time armed with a Russian-built hammergun and benefiting from some heavy-duty air support. He even had his own line of action figures—which sold like hotcakes—and a prime spot in the Wylde’s Kingdom console game, which, although less successful than the show, still made Jerry Wylde a mint.
By the end of the show’s first season, Atlantica had taken a sizable chunk out of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and reduced the islands of the Caribbean to little more than a few depopulated atolls.
As Jerry and his crew were preparing for the second season with a trip to the fragile, still-icy regions of the Antarctic, the Global Ecological Trust was beginning to mobilize. It probably shouldn’t have surprised anyone that the multinational force sworn to restabilize the planetary ecosystem by persuasion or force should target Jerry Wylde and his nose-thumbing television program as public enemy number one.
One person it didn’t surprise was Jerry himself. It turned out he had good reason for locating his studios on board an oil tanker: when the GET gunboat pulled up alongside the S.S. Minnow, demanding Wylde surrender to the justice of the world court, Jerry asked hypothetically how many years they thought he’d get if he were to blow the stopcocks on the tanker’s two million barrels of crude oil and spread it all across the West Coast salmon beds—which he said would be easy to do before, as he put it, “you get a single one of your Greenpeace-surplus Zodiacs into the water, you tree-hugging candy-ass dupes.”
Predictably, the GET ordered the gunboat’s withdrawal, and the second season of Wylde’s Kingdom kicked off without further harassment—although Jerry was effectively Polanskied from GET-signatory nations ever after.
And so it went. Tidal waves exfoliated Hawaii and the Philippines after California made good on its century-old promise to slide into the ocean. Waters continued to rise, with the ever-swelling Atlantica egging them on. Meanwhile, Jerry and Jim slogged their way through season two, then season three, and then half of season four.
Jim probably could have stayed on for longer quite comfortably. The nice thing about working with Jerry was it didn’t require you to think much: Jerry had it all worked out. On Jerry’s advice, Jim fired his agent and lawyer, and let the Wylde’s Kingdom accountants look after him so he could concentrate on the work.
Max had been used to keeping himself in shape, but only as the camera demanded. Jim, on the other hand, had to not only look good, but be good. Sit-ups and weight training with a Hollywood-refugee personal trainer wouldn’t cut the mustard—so Jim spent his every waking moment not in the infirmary in the Minnow’s training maze with the former SAS team that made up Jerry’s personal guard.
So, yes, Jim probably would have continued in such a way indefinitely, a willing lapdog to the Wylde’s Kingdom entertainment machine, were it not for the arrival, in the middle of the fourth season, of the new crew of naturalist consultants led by Dr. Mimi Coover.
In I, Jerry, the ghostwriter professed not to have a clue about what drove the wedge between Jim and Jerry Wylde. A third of chapter twelve was devoted to a maudlin and accusatory meditation on the falling out: “Did I neglect Jim in some horrible, horrible way? Did I miss a single feeding, fail to exercise him, neglect his entertainments for even a second? Was I such an irritating seatmate on the trans-Atlantic flight of life that there was no other way?”
Ah, if only Jerry had known. Sitting on the shuttle, Max studiously avoided looking at Mimi—although he was hotly aware of her gaze on him. On board the Minnow he had fallen in love with her, and he had to admit he was deathly afraid of repeating the mistake here in the stratosphere.
As Jim, Max had lived the life of an aesthete. Between training and performance, there wasn’t much time remaining in his day for anything but sleep. Although Max later learned his inbox was overflowing with every imaginable kind of sexual offer, Jerry never gave Jim a chance to read a word of it.
So when one night Mimi stole down to Jim’s dressing room, dressed in nothing but a pair of retro-porn cutoff jeans and a lumberjack shirt with several of the buttons strategically removed, Jim was defenseless. And when she breathlessly informed him
she had watched him in action since she was a child—spotting his heroic potential in the very first season of Look Out for Shoorsen!, then seeing it realized past even her pubescent dreams in Wylde’s Kingdom—Jim was lost to her.
Yet if it were as simple as that—a beautiful groupie, a secret rendezvous in the dressing room, followed by a few more secret rendezvous in the training room, on the bridge, in three of the Minnow’s lifeboats . . . just that, and Jim would have been fine. But Dr. Mimi Coover was more than a groupie. She was a marine biologist; the kind of marine biologist who would sign on board the Minnow to work for Jerry Wylde. And she had . . . ideas.
“Do you ever wonder,” she said one rainy night as they lay sweating underneath the tarpaulin of Lifeboat 6, “why Atlantica?”
“Yes,” said Jim immediately.
“And California? Why now?”
“They’d been predicting a quake like that for years,” said Jim, then, when he felt the sweat-damp skin of her thigh peel disappointedly from his own, added hastily: “But, yes, I do wonder why now.”
Mimi rolled over onto her stomach, propped up on her elbows so she looked down at Jim. “It’s true what you say, though. We have been predicting a massive, continent-splitting earthquake along the San Andreas fault—and for decades, not just years. Just like we’ve been anticipating a superstorm like Atlantica for years, and we’ve been warning about the rising of the oceans, and we’ve been worrying about mutant viruses like the ones vectoring across North America and Asia right now. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised?”
“Guess not,” said Jim.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” she continued, “that half the Earth’s population is drowned or starved or dead from disease; that the United Nations is gone, replaced by an ecologically overcompensating military machine that throws you in jail if your car doesn’t pass emission standards and shoots you without trial if you cut down a tree in your backyard. And I guess I shouldn’t be surprised Jerry Wylde and his throwback hunting show, which seems to be doing nothing but hastening the process of planetary death, is the ratings hit that it is.”