by Will Self
I spotted where the filming was going on from a long way off: there were maybe twenty or thirty trucks and SUVs parked along the kerb, and around a hundred techies wearing carpenter jeans and T-shirts merchandising Pacific Northwest grunge bands were milling about performing essential tasks. They were all elbows and earrings and had mouthfuls of crocodile clips but no time for me because time was at a $50-per-hour premium. So I pushed on through and discovered maybe fifty or so boys and girls armed with clipboards, and one of them fetched Brad, who swished his lips open in what I supposed was a welcoming smile – either that, or he might’ve been trying to dazzle me with his teeth.
‘There’s not a lot happening,’ he said, ‘but feel free to wander around – we’ll be doing a couple of takes ... soonish.’
The house was a 1980s riff on the modernist Case Study aesthetic, all sliding glass doors, wide windows and external conversation pits. A portable generator burbled power on the ground floor, and this was piped up the steep concrete stairs to where cameras, lights and monitors were clustered about the small zone that was to be immortalized. It took over an hour for the eight producers, four directors, seven lighting cameramen, fifteen sound recordists and thirty-eight lighting technicians to be happy with the set-up. I found the process utterly absorbing, all the more so because in order to get the lighting and the camera angle exactly right I was asked to sit on one of the banquettes as a stand-in for Pete Postlethwaite, who was late on set.
When he eventually arrived he came skipping up the stairs looking tanned, relaxed, fit and debonair, with two or three achingly beautiful personal assistants tripping along behind. He barely glanced at me as Brad made a fragment of an introduction – ‘Pete, this is—’ – and skipped on to a zone of mirrors and clothes racks where twenty or thirty makeup artists and wardrobe assistants began prepping him.
I might have been offended, were it not that Postlethwaite’s arrival was immediately succeeded by a still greater commotion – a running back and forth of production crew, the collective making of manifold phone calls, the passing of orders up and down the chain of command, the mournful note of a bosun’s whistle. I hunkered down in a corner and made myself as small as possible; when I looked up again a mass of denim legs was shuffling along the corridor. I stood and peered over their shoulders.
The cynosure of all this activity was looking grimly at a tray being held in front of his overly familiar face, a tray containing a selection of watches – the straps gold, chrome, leather; the faces jewelled, plain or black. It was Kevin Spacey – I recognized him instantly, because in common with all movie stars he had that quality of being pre-known, his face not so much a visage as an a priori category waiting to be filled with a serviceable identity. In this case the limp pennant of a mohair tie, the clever prostheses that filled out his cheeks and neck, the still more skilled weeding out of his hair and the inspired tarnishing of his teeth confirmed that he was portraying Dr Zack Busner.
As Spacey’s hand ranged over the watches, picking one up and then dropping it with a ‘chink’ clearly audible because of the hushed reverence of the 250-strong crew, I was visited with an overpowering intimation of death: Death pressed me back against the rough concrete wall, Death rubbed my belly, Death circled my wrist with his bony finger and bony thumb and all the rottenness of this world oozed from the holes in his skull.
‘OK, rolling.’ Brad’s instruction was incredibly downbeat – no bullhorn, no gofers yelling, ‘Quiet on the set please!’ We couldn’t see the players from where we stood, only a monitor upon which the fuzzy black-and-white figures of Spacey and Postlethwaite confronted each other, seated either side of a concrete coffee table. A clapperboard was waved in front of the camera scrawled with: ‘107 #I. INT. DAY. Busner’s consulting room, Venice Beach’. Then:
BUSNER: How’s it going with Shiva Mukti?
CLIENT: OK, I guess.
BUSNER [provocatively]: He’s a neat guy, Shiva, but kinda dull.
CLIENT: He shot movies of me when I was, like, freaking – then played them back to me.
BUSNER: Did it help?
CLIENT [giggling]: Help ... well, I guess with the movies – and a little bit with reality—
‘OK, that’s cool,’ Brad called, and the whole schmozzle ground to a halt. Spacey stood up and began rolling his shoulders, presumably to ease the tension of performance.
‘Where’s Philbin?’ Brad asked a nearby AD, ‘I need Philbin here right now – and tell him to bring the sides.’
‘Philbin!’ ‘Philbin!’ ‘Philbin!’ The name echoed away through the house and in a short while a fussed-looking writerly type – small, glasses, needlessly sensitive face – came hustling up clutching a handful of A5-sized yellow pages.
‘OK, Philbin.’ Brad took the sides from him and shuffled through them rapidly to find the right scene. Maybe seven or fifteen men and women in business suits materialized out of nowhere, and the entire group adjourned sideways through sliding doors on to a roof terrace, where they formed a promenade of couples, passing the yellow pages back and forth between them.
Eventually some sort of consensus was reached, because Brad and the blackleg writer came back with the relevant side and they bent over it together. Brad said, ‘Uh, yuh, uh, so ... here, and here – I don’t like that – that doesn’t seem to me the kinda way he’d say that at all.’
‘It’s too, uh, teen?’ Philbin ventured tentatively.
‘Yeah!’ Brad was delighted. ‘You got it, Philbin, it’s too goddamn teen, now put some words in his mouth that have got more ... more ... ’
‘Gravitas?’
‘I’ll grab your fuckin’ ass if you don’t hustle, Philbin,’ Brad laughed, and the writer withdrew to a corner with the script editor and the script editor’s four assistants. Spacey was now doing neck rolls.
After a few minutes Philbin was back with the new sides and Brad okayed them and Spacey and Postlethwaite scanned them fast like the pros they were, and the makeup and wardrobe people stampeded out of shot and the clapperboard was waved in front of the camera again: ‘l07 #2. INT. DAY. Busner’s consulting room, Venice Beach’. Then:
BUSNER: How’s it going with Shiva Mukti?
CLIENT: OK, I guess.
BUSNER [provocatively]: He’s a cool guy, Shiva, but sorta dull.
CLIENT: He shot movies of me when I was, like, freaking – then played them back to me.
BUSNER: Did it help?
CLIENT [giggling]: Help ... well, I guess with the movies – and a little bit with reality
There was no denying: it was an improvement – far more plausible. But I knew there’d be at least twenty or fifty more takes before they nailed the scene down and I had six or seven miles still to go. I didn’t want to disturb Brad while he was shooting, so I asked one of the gofers to tell him goodbye from me. She said she’d make sure Brad’s PA got the message: ‘He should know you’ve gone by early next week – midweek at the latest.’
I set off along Dell pursued by the sinister intimations I’d had when Spacey was sorting through the watches. Watches! Such a cliché – whether on wrists, mantelpieces, or melting in the corner of Dalí canvasses, timepieces were always just that. Still, what did I have to fear? I’d survived it all, and here were the cheery apartment blocks surrounding Marina del Rey, their balconies like the open draws of filing cabinets, their sunbathing tenants brown-papery in the afternoon sun.
I’d survived it all, and here were out-of-work hoofers break-dancing with placards advertising real estate brokers at the intersection of Washington and Lincoln boulevards – tossing them up in the air, then catching them behind their backs. There was a metaphor there, but I was too weary and footsore to reach for it; I only wanted to keep on going across the Ballona wetlands, where Leonardo DiCaprio had flown his Spruce Goose, and the Native American juju had repelled the developers and the toxic effluent from Hughes Aircraft had been pumped away and the egrets and the herons waded ... I only wanted to keep going, but there was this awful
tinnitus plaguing me – bass notes and bum notes, a sax riff that pierced me from ear to ear.
The sidewalk gave out and I went on, the fenders of SUVs shaving my cheek. I wanted to keep going – but out here in the middle of the marsh, where freshwater floods met saltwater tides and the wrack was Infinitis and Escalades and trucks and town cars, all mired in solid oil, I spied a figure tailing me from the front. How long had he been there? Had he been keeping tabs on me all the way from the Chateau Marmont, or from still further back along my circuit? He was in shirtsleeves, a jacket slung over his shoulder, and although I thought I recognized the set of his shoulders and the shuffle of his gait, every time I tried to catch up (the bass doubling time, the sax beginning to rock), he accelerated as well. I slowed down and he slowed down, I hopped and he hopped, I skipped and he skipped.
Tiring of this, I stopped – and he stopped. The tinnitus faded to a distant plink-honk. We stood twenty yards apart for a minute or so. I turned back to face Marina del Rey, then whipped back round – I’d caught him out: it was Mac Guffin. ‘So it’s you,’ I called. ‘Should I be afraid? I mean, when you turn up people generally get dead – even your clients.’
‘Especially my clients,’ he called back. ‘My clients have a near 100 per cent fatality rate.’
‘But you don’t let it get to you, do you, Mac?’
‘I try to maintain a regular disposition.’ He held his hands palm up, the laughter lines creased around his trustworthy brown eyes.
‘What’re you trying to tell me, Mac – that the worst has already happened?’
‘I figure someone had to, Will: you’re a dead man walking. You’ve been dead since Laurel Canyon.’
‘Was it the implants?’ I asked, kneading my breasts through the damp fabric of my T-shirt. ‘I mean, I know suicide rates are way higher for the women – the people who’ve had them.’
‘No.’ He shook his head pityingly. ‘It wasn’t the implants; it was that dumb-ass report you wrote. You didn’t think you could get away with saying those things about the sigmoidal flexure of TC’s penis without getting clipped, didya?’
‘Well, I dunno ...’ I hung my head in the sweet breeze coming in off the wetlands.
‘Y’know what it was, Will, it was attention-seeking.’ Mac shook his head; he didn’t seem so happy today.
‘I ... I just wanted to belong.’
‘Well, now you do belong: to the departed. And, while we’re at it, it’s 10.2 and 67 degrees.’
‘I had no idea it was that ... big.’
‘No’ – again the weary shake – ‘you had no idea.’ And he turned his back on me and trudged on along the scrappy verge. Having no alternative, I followed my Charon, the swish-swash of the traffic fading imperceptibly into the moody horns and sucrose strings of a pickup orchestra fucking over The Isle of the Dead in Westwood.
Which faded out on the rise, where Mac halted and I turned back, hoping for a sweeping panorama of the coastline, but saw only a sign for La Vista Motel and the highway in its mid-ground of embankment and plantation, up above the blue screen and a few dabbles of cirrus. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve gotta leave you here, man; there’s a hiking trail along the bluff to the playa – kinda neat walk.’
‘Neat walk!’ I spat. ‘What is this crap?’
‘Y’know,’ Mac said, observing me with impatience and pity, ‘some people walk for fun, Will, for leisure – to have a good time.’
‘I ... I don’t know what to say ...’
‘You mean there’s no illusion of a core self that’s giving you direction?’
‘Ye-es, I s’pose so.
‘Well, what can I tell you,’ he said, sucking his moustache; ‘this is an amazingly complex piece of software – there’re bound to be some glitches. I mean to say, this has to be the first time anyone’s tried it.’
‘Tried what exactly?’
‘Kidnapping someone, forcing them to undergo systematic motion-capture filming and standard-deviation face tracking, then replacing them with a 3-D image of themselves.’
‘So that’s what was going on – I wondered. Boy’ – I shook my empty head – ‘they must have been laughing when I asked what my motivation was.’
‘Yeah, kinda ironic: they knew all about your motivation and I have’ta give it to you, Will, you were on to something, you got close, but there was no way they were going let you find out who killed the movies—’
‘So they killed me and replaced the actors playing me with an animation.’
‘You got it.’
That’s why I’d been feeling so exiguous, so thinly drawn – and that’s why my thoughts came to me unbidden, and I had no sense of smell, taste or ... touch. I wondered how far back it all went – to the CGI riot in Hollywood or even before that? But there was no point in speculating, not when I’d paid someone to discover the truth for me. ‘Tell me, Mac.’ As I spoke, I expertly rolled a cigarette with one hand, struck a non-safety match on my thumbnail and lit it – now that I was a simulacrum of myself cliché came unbidden, and smoking was a stylish breeze. ‘If I’m a 3-D image of myself, then what exactly am I being projected on to? I mean, what’s all this stuff, is it LA or just a blue screen?’
Pity gave way to impatience as Mac rolled down his sleeves and fastened his cuffs. The dirty work had been done. ‘I’m a detective,’ he snapped; ‘not a fucking metaphysician. You want answers to that kinda appearance/reality stuff, go ask the Wachowskis.’
That was it: no farewell, no bear hug; he just turned and strolled away from me, the happy detective out for a Sunday afternoon promenade. While somewhere out in the Valley, in a darkened home studio, an overweight claustrophobic, headphones clamped on his head, crunching Cheerios and messing about with a synthesizer, turned the volume back up on the Rachmaninschmaltz.
Having nothing else to do, I went on. Isn’t this what we do: go on, no matter how depersonalized and useless we feel, no matter how lost in our own lives and confused about our role in the universal – if any? I went on past the Westchester golf course and saw the first sharks’ fins cutting through the wavy air on the far side of the savage fences. I went on to the junction with Sepulveda and made a right, and then a right again for the terminal. I went on through the curtains of light falling from between the decks of the overpasses, and I went on past the birches in their triangular concrete pots and the benches shaped like aerofoils – fly away, you writing bums! I went on until my rubber soles married with the treads of the escalator and carried me up to departures, and I went on through security and groped my way towards the Air France lounge.
Sitting in there, I looked about me at the other whey-faced travellers contemplating the imminent hurl skywards. They did their best, rattling the sections of that Sunday’s LA Times, making last-minute phone calls, fiddling in their laptops – but it was hard. The light in the lounge was yellowing, like a fishtank that hasn’t been cleaned, and the sounds were all muted except for Lionel Ritchie singing ‘All Night Long’ – which was far too loud. And I thought, well, I may be dead, but who’s to say everyone else isn’t as well?
So I did my best to conform and called Stevie Rosenbloom to say goodbye – and got Ellen DeGeneres: ‘That’s you gone, is it?’ she said, and I could only mewl:
‘You knew, didn’t you?’
‘I kinda did,’ she admitted, ‘although I wasn’t in on the whole thing, I mean it was like the tag line for the movie, “The Strangest Vengeance Ever Planned’.’
‘What movie?’
‘Touch of Evil.’
I broke the connection without saying goodbye. Of course! And that’s why when I reached the colonnade in Venice I had felt so peculiar. I had never circumambulated Los Angeles at all, only remained standing exactly where Welles had executed his famously circuitous tracking shot while the entire city walked around me.
The Heathrow flight was called and I staggered towards it. Then we were taxiing and then we were taking off, accelerating along the timeline of the Sierra as it desc
ribed civilization’s boom and bust, and then the plane lifted off from the runway of LAX and began almost immediately to bank round over the ocean, bumpily gaining altitude. I looked back and below to see enormous cracks snaking across the Los Angeles Basin, some following the boulevards, others cutting through the freeways. I watched, bored, as the Baldwin Hills slid into Crenshaw and Hollywood tumbled down into the Wilshire corridor. The Downtown towers bowed, then curtseyed, then disappeared in boiling clouds of dust, the Sierra itself humped up into a vast breaker of earth, lava and fire that came surging down, annihilating all of Pasadena and East LA in a matter of seconds.
The final thing I saw before the first clouds began flickering by was the dome of the Shrine Auditorium standing proud of the maelstrom, the crescent atop its elegant spire glinting in the rays of twilight’s last gleaming.
12
Will Hay and the Fat Boy
‘And that’s what happens to you when you don’t take your medication,’ Shiva Mukti said in the matter-of-fact way psychiatrists affect in order to cope with the extremities of mental delusion.
We sat and stared for a while, first at the pots and packets of my medications, which he had lined up on the desk – the Seroxat, Dutonin and Carbamazepin – then at the near-obsolete VDU monitor with its mushroom plastic casing that sat whirring at a queer angle on the fake wood veneer of a refectory table.
