by Will Self
The last thing I saw before the door was slammed shut was Margaret Atwood slumped by a storefront, a pathetic styrofoam begging cup on the sidewalk in front of her. I’d had no idea dystopic novels were selling that badly. Then, as the van pulled away, through the tinted rear windows, I spotted Kazuo Ishiguro, the British novelist – another writer who’d had many of his works adapted for screen; but, while to be down and out in Hollywood was one thing, why was he wearing that curious robe, which looked like a couple of camping mats and an election placard strapped round his torso? And what was he wearing on his head? Was it a hat – or a house? And if it was a house – which one? Darlington Hall, as featured in The Remains of the Day, or Netherfield Park?
But I had no time to reflect any further on these mysteries, for the van’s driver – who was hidden from me in a sealed compartment – must have seen a break in the traffic and accelerated, and I was thrust backwards on to the point of a hypo. I felt the drug ooze into me – then my consciousness, tissue-thin to begin with, was balled up, wadded and thrown away.
I get it back standing stark naked in what appears initially to be a featureless room: plain white walls, a high ceiling with recessed lighting diodes. Then I see, lying on the smooth white floor, the silky pool of a Spandex bodysuit. Next, I notice a single prop: a stop light, such as you might see at any LA intersection. It’s working, and as I look it changes from the red DON’T WALK to the green stick-figure with its legs parted. There’s no smell at all, except the stray whiffs of my own sweaty armpits – yet I sense altitude and aridity, and wonder if the room might be in a desert, say, the Mojave.
‘Put on the bodysuit,’ a voice crackles through a hidden speaker. I’m a little miffed – at forty-six I’m proud of my toned appearance, and, despite the kidnapping and the drugging, the idea of displaying myself naked to unseen voyeurs is the most arousing experience I’ve had since the girl in the CGI riot involuntarily came on to me.
The speaker crackles again, ‘Put on the bodysuit – or we will send someone in to put it on you.’ This time I reluctantly obey. It fits me like bespoke and, as delighted by my new clothing as I’d been with my nakedness, I swing my arms this way and that, then flex my legs. ‘Be still!’ the disembodied voice orders me. A door whines open and a huddle of white lab coats come bustling in, one of them pushing a shopping cart full of small balls covered in Velcro. They’re all wearing V masks and as they cluster round me I ask – I think entirely reasonably – ‘What’s going on, guys, is this part of the demo?’
But if they’re the children of Xenu they aren’t letting on; without speaking they begin sticking the Velcro balls on to my bodysuit, one each at all of my joints: ankle, knee, hip and so on. It’s done in a matter of seconds, then they retreat back through the moaning portal. I’m equally pleased with my new bobble suit, which resembles one of Leigh Bowery’s rather more restrained costumes. I start doing knee bends and humming Divine’s ‘You Think You’re a Man’ until meany-voice rasps: ‘Stop that!’, then begins ordering me about:
‘Now, do exactly what I tell you: walk towards the stop light, then wait for the green man. No! That’s too fast, begin again ... Better. Now wait ... OK, cross.’
I don’t snap back, ‘Cross what, exactly?’ I understand what’s wanted of me – you don’t get anywhere in life without being able to take direction. Besides, I enjoy strutting about in my bobble suit, while crossing intersections is something I’ve been doing for days now – it may be typecasting, but at least it’s my casting.
After we’ve done crossing for a while, the voice commands me to amble around the periphery of the room, then to assume various conversational postures, then pretend to take notes, then photographs. Next the V masks reappear, pushing before them a platform on wheels and a swivel chair, while two more bring up the rear carrying a table. With these new props the voice’s directions become more complex: it wants me to pretend to sit at the table and eat, to write, and then to make a phone call. After which I’m urged to lie down on the platform and feign sleep – in a foetal position, and also thrashing about in the flicker of REM. Next I’m to roll over and fake masturbation, before rising, sitting backwards on the swivel chair and straining my way through a realistically effortful shit.
All in all, over the course of an hour or so, a Marcel Marceau on crystal meth, I recapitulate the entire gamut of physical actions I might expect to perform in the average day. It’s an exhilarating workout, but, even as I prance and dance and stop and swing, something’s nagging at me – eventually I ignore the next direction and instead stand with my face petulantly downcast.
‘Bend over,’ orders the voice. ‘I said bend over,’ it reiterates. ‘Bend over or we will MAKE YOU bend over!’ it barks.
‘I truly want to do my best for you guys,’ I pout, ‘but what I want to know is what’s my motivation here?’
‘OK, OK,’ the voice fizzes, ‘you gotta point. Just bend over for us this last time and then we’ll get to your motivation, OK?’
I bend over.
The Vs come bustling back in; some spirit away the platform and the table, others remove the Velcro balls from my suit and depart with them. ‘Sit on the chair,’ orders the voice. A pair of Vs return with a basket of tiny plastic balls and begin expertly attaching these all over my face using some kind of clear adhesive. They stick balls to my lips, top and bottom, to my frown lines and to still more of my frown lines, all along my brows and on my eyelids, they near beard my chin with these nurdles. When they’re done there must be over a hundred of the things hanging off me, while presumably I look like a sufferer from some hideous alien skin condition.
‘Face the wall,’ the voice spits, then it coos, ‘Ree-lax.’
If the body workout was exhausting, the psychic one is both more demanding and more satisfying. The voice begins simply enough, getting me to frown, smile, scowl, laugh, mime soliloquizing, dialoguing, arguing and shouting. Soon enough, however, the directions become more complex: I’m to adopt an expression of weary pity, existential angst, frozen pride, justified hauteur. Then I’m asked by the voice to appear as if I’m listening intently to the recursive eddies of flute and woodwind that flow into the oceanic melodies of the Andante to Mahler’s Sixth—
‘Whoa,’ I cry, ‘that’s a hell of a subtle mien!’
‘You can do it,’ the voice urges – and so I unstitch my brows, flutter my eyelids and suck in my already hollow cheeks, because I’m beginning to warm to the voice – love it a little even. I can imagine that if we were penned up together for long enough in this rehearsal room we might have an affair - hadn’t I already pretended to masturbate for it?
‘Great!’ the voice cries. ‘I believed that one. ‘Next try conveying the countenance a character in a narrative might adopt, were he to realize not only that he was a character, but that the narrative itself was—’
‘What? Unstable – deconstructed altogether?’
‘Let’s just say ... decentred.’
‘Interesting,’ the voice sighs. ‘Although perhaps just a tad forced.’
‘All right, d’you want me to go again at that one?’
‘No, let’s move on, we don’t have all day – how about this: a kind of “whither the Left” wistfulness, incorporating an acknowledgement of the bitter-sweetness of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a harder-edged perception of the fissiparous effects of post-9/11 conflict?’
‘That? – That!’ I guffaw. ‘C’mon, that’s first-grade stuff: watch me.’
When I’m done, the voice seems gratifyingly transported. ‘Beautiful,’ it groans, ‘just too, too beautiful, darling ...’ Then it pulls itself together and crackles. ‘A still easier one: give me man-having-tiny-plastic-balls-torn-from-his-face, followed by a mickey finn.’
And that one is easy, because the V masks come barrelling back in and I have someone to do the scene with. I’m still frantically mugging when the pearlescent drop appears at the bevelled end of the hypodermic and the house lights go down, and the
spot focuses in tighter ... tighter on my face ... and ... blanks ... out.
I came to being thrown from the back of a Lincoln Town Car that was taking the bend in Mulholland Drive immediately to the north of Runyon Canyon Park at twice the limit – or so I estimated as I windmilled into a ditch right at the feet of a family of joggers in full nylon kit.
‘Oh my God!’ the mommy ejaculated.
‘Oh my god,’ the daddy rather more agnostically echoed her.
‘OMG,’ their tweenage daughter cried.
‘Oh!’ said a toddler in an all-terrain buggy.
‘Wuff!’ said their Airedale, nuzzling between my thighs with his square-haired head.
‘Frodo!’ the mommy called it, reeling the poor unfortunate in by its extendable lead. Once the dog was landed the daddy approached:
‘Are you, like, OK?’
‘Kind sir,’ I said, clambering to my feet and straightening my torn clothes, ‘there is no question of similitude at all; thanks to Laura Harring’s breasts I have been spared any serious injury.’
He didn’t recoil, nor did the rest of the FoJ – once they’d floated off on their air soles, paws and tyres I realized why: it may’ve felt as if shells full of silicone gel had broken my fall, but for the second time that day my fingers crept up my T-shirt and discovered only the same old skimpy pectorals. Ho-hum, I sighed, picking bitumen from my knees, snuffling up the bouquet garni of the mesquite and looking out over the Los Angeles Basin. I may’ve lost the breasts, but I stood at last on those exposed ribs and gullies of the Sierra, stacked with hundreds of thousands of dollars of firewood and the palm froth of kindling. In the distance the skyscrapers of Downtown rose up straight as ruled lines, the Y-axis for Huxley’s graph of civilization’s boom and bust.
From the angle of the sun I estimated it was a couple of hours until dusk. A more timorous hiker would’ve probably given up at this point, slumped back down the hillside to his bungalow at the Marmont, eaten far too many cashews and nutted-out in front of the TV, but I was made of more suicidal stuff: I would follow the great silicone migration along the escarpment. True, my circumambulation had been ruptured by the van and the car rides, and I had also been kidnapped, possibly even abused, although this was debatable: was an actor like a child, passively acquiescing to perverted direction because she knew no other authority?
And now that I came to think back over the episode, as at first I made my way along the verge of Mulholland, then dived down a winding side road into the dark heart of affluent suburbia, it dawned on me that not once during that strange interlude had the voice referred to me by name. Who was playing me, then? As I walked I ran my hands over my face repeatedly – but one angular middle-aged male face feels pretty much the same as the next, and it wasn’t until I crept under a carport and crouched to frame my features in the wing mirror of an Infiniti that my hunch was confirmed: this was not homely Pete Postlethwaite’s face, or Thewlis’s haughty mien. But as to whose lumpy nose, rag-rolled cheeks and equine teeth were described on this face mask – well, I was at a loss, so I squeezed a blackhead.
And soon lost interest, plodding on along the road towards Mount Olympus. Somewhere up here Huxley’s house had burnt down, a domesticated fireball of mystic books – what was it his friend Gerald Heard had said? ‘Man is the general name applied to successions of inconsistent conduct having their source within a two-legged and featherless body.’ Poor Aldous, his visual field so savagely foreshortened by myopia and his attention span – sooo long, a stretch limmo of awareness, capacious enough to seat the entire casts of all the movies ever shot in Hollywood, in Culver City, in Burbank, in the Valley. Will Hay and the Fat Boy sat up with the driver, and in the back compartment Manuel P. Zlotnik carousing with Miss Pearlstein, Carol Goodenough ... and all the rest.
That was Aldous’s misfortune: spaced out in Schwab’s, he had seen Los Angeles’s hair was burning, that her hills were filled with fire, and with that he broke through from the monochrome world of the 1950s to the other Technicolor side. Poor Aldous: if all the movies ever made had been spliced together, wound on to a reel the size of a Ferris wheel and projected on to a screen two inches in front of him, it still wouldn’t have been long enough to divert him, it still would’ve seemed over in a blink of his mescaline eyes. For he had seen the future: the after-image of the movies, flickering on the inside of his lids.
I had noted the flyers for Location Services stuck in the mailboxes along Willow Drive, and now I reached Laurel Canyon Boulevard only to discover that in my flat-footed abstraction I had lost the straight way and that the sun had dipped behind the shoulder of the mountain. The canyon was a deep place and with Saturday fast fading the snorting beasts were rampaging back from the beaches, their headlights piercing the gathering shadows. The hardtop snaked between steep bluffs terraced with real estate and there was no sidewalk. I got out the map crumpled into my pocket, but once I’d unfolded it saw that the available routes back to Sunset were all equally wiggling – they wormed across the rumpled paper, the apotheosis of the grid, as if the plotting pens of an EEG had simultaneously registered the nightmares of the city’s entire populace.
I tried walking on the left-hand side of the road, but each time I rounded a bend I was horribly aware I was invisible to the beasts that came at forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour, panting hydrocarbons, their fenders-for-jaws snagging the pandanus along the verge. I sprinted across to the right – but here my terror was still greater, for each time a beast came charging up the hill, its headlights ignited visions in my eyes – while they, I knew mos’ def’, could see nothing at all.
I tried switching from one side of the boulevard to the other as it wound down through the canyon, so as to provide the beasts coming from either direction with the greatest possible visibility – but this was no good, for darkness was upon us all now, and as I pelted like a picaro (or do I mean a picador?) beneath the points of their chrome horns I couldn’t prevent myself from witnessing the abominations inside these Escalades and Infinitis and Tahoes. I may have been a cryogenically preserved Disney head bowled chuckling down this lane of death, I may have been a silica grain impelled by time, but at least I wasn’t like these ... these ... sinners.
No wonder they couldn’t slow down, when this lustful man’s penis was so engorged, so turgid, that I could see it thrusting up towards the windshield. No wonder they couldn’t see me, when this gluttonous family’s minivan was so stuffed with their own fat and discarded food that even as they screamed by I noted the high tide of gnawed drumsticks, frayed corncobs and crescent burgers pressed by paps and thighs against the greasy windows. No wonder they had no care for the future, when, like this derivatives trader, they urged their Crown Victorias forward, while their heads were reversed.
This last beast, sightless, sunless, ravenous, clipped my shoulder and sent me flailing into a drive. I wasn’t injured at least the skin wasn’t broken, and only swirled into an oily multicoloured whorl when I pressed it with my thumb – but I was finished. I slumped down on the concrete, my throat combusting with nitrogen, nitrogen oxides, water vapour, particulate matter and, of course, hydrocarbons. It was the nadir – and then he came, and I was lifted up.
He came, tripping down the side of the boulevard, his silky three-quarter-length pants shimmying as his highly toned calves took the stresses of descent in their stride. He came, strips shaven into his scalp beneath the arms of his shades, a tattoo of a torpedo on his stringy neck, a tuft of hair on his decisive chin. He came – and when he saw me there, washed up on the shore by the metallic storm, he stepped aside and pulled away the headphones that cosseted his noble ears.
Despite the whoosh of the boulevard, I registered familiar close harmonies, staccato yet melodious cheeping from the tinny-tiny speakers: ‘Whatsoever thou dost affect, whatsoever thou dost project, so do, so do ... (Aff-ect! Pro-ject!) And so project all, as one who, for aught thou knowest, may at this very present depart out of this life ... out of it, out of it ... (Pr
o-ject! Dee-part!) And as for death, if there be any gods, it is no grievous thing to leave the so-ci-ety of men—’
‘Hey,’ I said, ‘what happened to the Latin?’
‘Excuse me?’ He hadn’t noticed me before I spoke.
‘That’s NWPhd, isn’t it? I saw those guys rehearsing down at USC a couple of days ago.’
‘Aw,’ he said, shaking his head dismissively, ‘I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that, this is my roommate’s MP3. I just grabbed it as I took off – this ain’t my kind of shit at all.’
‘You don’t dig Aurelius?’
‘Or who?’
‘Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and stoic philosopher – it’s his Meditations those guys are rapping, I just wondered what’d happened to the Latin, they usually do the Latin as well as the English.’
‘Oh, OK, I getcha – my roomie, he did say this was some kinduva remix, so maybe they, like, dropped the Latin to make it more commercial, or some kinda shit like that.’
It had been a long and substantive speech – which I was grateful for, but I needed more; he, however, seemed intent on leaving, pulling the headphones back on and turning to resume his goatish descent. ‘Hey, wait!’ I cried.
‘Say what?’ He turned back.
‘You aren’t going to walk all the way down Laurel Canyon, are you?’
‘Fool, I live up there a-ways, so I do the walk down to Sunset twice daily – I’ve a little problem with my licence, you dig. The only time I don’t walk down is when I skateboard.’
‘Skateboard?’
‘You heard it. I got me one of those big three-foot boards with the meaty wheels. I start back up a-ways by the park. Man, I tellya that thing goes – I guess I must be hitting thirty by the time I get to here, and when I drop back an’ brake, the sparks fly.’
