The Fourth Wall

by Williams, Walter Jon

  FROM: HvyMtl

  I gotta admit that ESCAPE TO EARTH was impressive. Of course the fact that Makin is the UGLIEST FREAK IN THE WORLD only helped.

  FROM: Tempest Royal

  It was terrible what happened to Roheen in New Delhi. I think I might have a solution.

  FROM: Corporal Carrot

  There’s our trailhead!

  FROM: Hanseatic

  So does that mean that the next episode takes place in England?

  FROM: Corporal Carrot

  Roheen pretty well looked as if he were going to China.

  FROM: Rajkamari

  WE LOVE YOU SAMENDRA!!!!

  FROM: Jaxon31

  Samendra is a fagit hahaha

  FROM: LadyDayFan

  Tempest Royal might be an agent for the Steyn. Or however that’s spelled. But whoever she is, she seems to be London-based.

  FROM: HvyMtl

  Jaxon, don’t you know any other wordz but fagit?

  FROM: Jaxon31

  HVYMTL YOU ARE A FAGIT TOO HAHAHA

  FROM: Trishula

  Sean Makin you should enjoy your temporary material success, because soon you will lie in the pit of the lowest hell.

  FROM: Jaxon31

  HA HA HA WHAT A FAGIT HAHAHA

  FROM: Corporal Carrot

  Do we think Trishula is a real person or embedded in the ARG somehow?

  FROM: HexenHase

  Trishula’s melodramatic style seems to derive from bad fantasy novels or movie supervillains. I think Great Big Idea employs better prose, don’t you?

  FROM: Jaxon31

  YOU PPL RL FAGITS HAHA!

  FROM: Lola17

  WE LOVE YOU SEAN!

  FROM: MaddHaxx

  How about putting out some of that love in MY direction, Lola?

  FROM: Corporal Carrot

  You know, there are some really unkind people posting on this blog.

  FROM: MaddHaxx

  Get lost, caporal. We were here first. The loser LUGGAGE BOY belongs to US!

  FROM: Jaxon31

  hahahahaha hes’ ours!

  FROM: LadyDayFan

  Hmm. When MaddHaxx says that Sean Makin belongs to him, does he mean to David Sivinski, 4801 Crosley Ave, Duluth, Minnesota? Because that’s who MaddHaxx seems to be.

  FROM: Corporal Carrot

  David is the name on the address and the Internet account, but I’m thinking that MaddHaxx is actually David’s son Paul, who is thirteen years of age and attends Ordean Middle School.

  FROM: LadyDayFan

  Good call!

  FROM: Hanseatic

  Wow! The Sivinskis are in the phone directory! If we called and asked for MaddHaxx, do you think we’d get an answer?

  FROM: LadyDayFan

  So MaddHaxx— Have we got your number?

  FROM: Hanseatic

  MaddHaxx? MaddHaxx? Suddenly it’s very quiet in here.

  FROM: Hippolyte

  Amazing how a certain personality type, emboldened by anonimity, is silenced when his true identity is revealed.

  FROM: Jaxon31

  U ppl R assholes haha

  FROM: LadyDayFan

  We’re not fagits? Whatever those are?

  FROM: Hippolyte

  I meant “anonymity,” of course. Bad fingers!

  FROM: Burçak

  While you were looking into MaddHaxx, I’ve been checking out Mr. Jaxon. He seems to be Neal Jackson—clever disguise, there! And his internet account is billed to 1315 South Harbor Boulevard, Anaheim, California.

  FROM: LadyDayFan

  Uh-oh. It looks like Mr. Jackson has a couple convictions for DUI.

  FROM: Hanseatic

  Bad credit rating, too.

  FROM: Hippolyte

  All this in just a few minutes! What else might we discover if we actually put our minds to this?

  FROM: Corporal Carrot

  Unless I miss my guess, Jaxon has lost his driving license, and he has nothing better to do than drink in front of his keyboard and release his inner troll.

  FROM: Jaxon31

  I cd do the same 2U, asshats.

  FROM: LadyDayFan

  Frankly, we doubt you’re intelligent (or sober) enough to penetrate our brilliant disguises. But you’re welcome to try.

  FROM: Hippolyte

  I’ve been looking into Trishula. He seems to be a harder nut to crack.

  FROM: Hanseatic

  We’ve only just begun.

  FROM: Farzana16

  Sean, do you know if Samendra has a girlfriend?

  FROM: Corporal Carrot

  Yee-haw! Saddle up, boys! There’s a new sheriff in town!

  INT. SOUNDSTAGE—DAY

  Joey’s back on the job, but he’s not the same Joey. He’s subdued. He’s cooperative. He accepts Carter-Ann’s suggestions without comment and implements them. He watches us all with a dead expression on his face, his eyes walking from one person to the next: me, Jean-Marc, Carter-Ann, the others. His work is professional, but without his usual joy, his usual flair, and without improvisation. He just follows the storyboard he’s created for his computer.

  Which is fine, as far as it goes. It’s a good storyboard. But he no longer seems interested in following up chance opportunities to improve what he’s laid out ahead of time. It’s like he just wants to get the job over with, then go home.

  Whatever he’s feeling, Joey isn’t letting it show. He’s keeping it all under wraps: the resentment of Carter-Ann, the humiliation from the kowtowing he must have done to Dagmar, the fury at the constant interference. I half-expect to see him walk in with an explosives vest and take us all out of the picture.

  Joey’s disinterestedness isn’t as important as it might have been at an earlier stage of the project. By now we’ve all got momentum. I understand Roheen, and I don’t need a director to get me into the character or explain his actions. Everyone else is into their own routines, and the production runs beautifully.

  Carter-Ann is quietly triumphant. She doesn’t abuse her power in any obvious way, but that’s because she doesn’t have to. She remains polite and soft-spoken and completely superior. She’s got Joey’s neck pinned beneath her heel, and that’s fine with her.

  We reshoot the banquet scene in a single day. I view the old scene before we start, and now I find it bitterly obvious where I failed. Overplaying, turning Roheen into a greedy clown. No wonder the Chinese hated it. I only wonder that people in North America found the scene bearable.

  Instead of diving face-first into the food, this time I yearn at it. I look at the food, I fondle it with my eyes. I reach out with my chopsticks as if I were about to caress a lover. I look at the meal with something like religious devotion. And when I taste it, I let it rest in my mouth, giving off flavor, barely chewing at all while I screw my features up into an orgasm face.

  The cameraman is laughing so hard that the camera keeps shaking and blowing takes.

  I’m happy again. I’m working, and I think I’m working well.

  Joey doesn’t tell me it’s good, though. At the end of the day he calls a wrap, and goes off to the editing room with Allison.

  INT. SEAN’S SUITE—NIGHT

  I know I’m important again when I get a call from Kari Sothern.

  “Congratulations,” she says. “You seem to be a worldwide phenomenon.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “You should see the fan mail I get from Tanzania.”

  She laughs. “I’m going to quote that,” she says. “Can you give us an interview?”

  “Love to,” I say, “but—”

  “Great! How about right now?”

  “But,” I repeat, “you’ll have to clear it with Great Big Idea. They’re controlling all the publicity.” I’m already scheduled to make the rounds of local talk shows, and in the wake of the unexpected success of the film—three hundred million subscriptions by the end of the day—I’m being shopped pretty hard to the networks.

  It’s early evening. Simon has dropped me off at the
NoHo, and I’ve got my feet up on the coffee table, contemplating a hole in one of my socks. A room-service meal of pasta primavera has been wheeled in, and sits half-eaten in my lap. The room smells strongly of garlic.

  I’m exhausted, but then I’ve been exhausted for so long that it’s almost normal. I really wish I had a beer.

  “Great Big Idea,” Kari says, “isn’t being very forthcoming.”

  Probably for good reason. Kari used to be an editor on the Weekly Tale, a tabloid newspaper loaded with gossip, innuendo, and scandal, a vast amount of which it either invents or shamelessly creates itself. Now the Tale has a daily half-hour show on the Glamour Channel, and Kari produces it. Watching or reading the Tale gives you the same odd thrill as, say, professional wrestling, and for the same reason—you know it’s fake, but you have to admire the brio with which they put on their act.

  “You could just make shit up,” I tell her, “like you usually do.”

  Kari, like most reporters, is immune to insult. “Maybe,” she says, “you can give me something off the record.”

  “Like what?”

  “Nataliya Hogan is in this picture, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you give me anything? I won’t quote you directly.”

  My fingers stroke the panic button hanging around my neck—hold it down for three seconds, and guards come bursting in—and I consider telling Kari about the phony proposal, or maybe about the monologue Nataliya wrote. I could go on about the ego, the entourage, the obliviousness to any other person, the complete narcissism…but why?

  However much she annoys me, Nataliya is one of us. The tabloid reporter is one of them. The tabloids prey on people like me, turning us into freaks for the amusement of the sadists and geeks and groupies who read their publications.

  Every time I’ve talked to one of them, I’ve had cause to regret it.

  “Nataliya was only on the set for a few days,” I tell Kari. “She was perfectly professional. She knew her lines. She was fine.”

  “What was it like working with her?”

  “I only had one scene with her. She was great—very funny.”

  Her tone turns suspicious. “You’re not giving me much.”

  “I don’t have much.”

  “You’ve been more cooperative in the past, Sean.”

  I stir my pasta with my fork. “I’m boring,” I say. “I’m boring because I’m working. I get up in the morning and go to the studio and work all day and then come home and learn my lines for the next day. You want anything exciting from me, you’ll have to wait till I have time and leisure. Right now, it’s just a fucking job.”

  It’s not true, exactly—I don’t mention that I’m being stalked by a homicidal wannabe in an SUV—but what I’ve told Kari is what I wish were true. I’m an actor, and it’s pretty well all I want to be right now. I don’t want to be dodging murderous drivers, I don’t want to think about Jaydee’s death, I don’t want to watch snarling people ripping each other to pieces on the set every day. I don’t want to try to work out what Dagmar is up to with Deeptimoy Srivastava. All I want to be is in front of the camera and working.

  “Listen, Sean,” Kari says. “Escape to Earth is the hottest thing to hit the planet since New Year. It’s the first serial to be presented to audiences since Buster Crabbe’s time, and it’s a hit. Everyone’s talking about whether it’s the end of conventional cinema.”

  “Of course it isn’t.” I feel this hardly needs pointing out.

  “I need something. What Great Big Idea is handing out is just press releases about the technology. What I need to know about is the people.”

  I swirl some pasta onto my fork and eat it. Then I take a second bite.

  “Or,” Kari says, “you could tell me what happens next.”

  “What happens next,” I say, “is that I finish the production and go on vacation. I’ll send you a postcard from wherever I end up.”

  “What happens next in the story.”

  I laugh. “You want to know how the movie ends?”

  “Sure,” she says. “You could slip me a script.”

  I laugh even harder. “Why would I?”

  “We’d pay you.”

  “How much?”

  “Last time we paid you ten thousand.”

  Yes, I thought. For a little thirty-second bit of digital media that wrecked Melody Chastain’s career. If I’d known it was going to be that big, I would have asked for more.

  “I needed money then,” I said. “I don’t now.”

  “Sean,” she says, “we’ve been good to you.”

  I fork up another bit of pasta. “‘Vodka-raddled has-been,’” I say. “Am I quoting your paper correctly?”

  “Sean—”

  “You didn’t even get my drink of choice right.”

  “Sean,” she says, “you know we’re going to dig.”

  For a moment I feel a tremor of fear, and then I shrug it off. They’re not going to find out about Timmi, not after all these years—and if I’m very lucky, they’ll find out the identity of my stalkers.

  “Dig away,” I say.

  “We don’t have to dig very far,” she says. “There’s the Melody Chastain video.”

  She is referring to another desperate episode in my career, when I was broke and provided Kari with candid photos of my fellow celebrities in exchange for money. I took the pics with my handheld, at parties or clubs, and most of them were harmless enough, just the subject looking stupid, unsightly, or silly. They’d end up in the tabloids next to a headline about whether they were too fat, or too thin, or too old, or had benefited from cosmetic surgery, or needed the benefits of cosmetic surgery, or were otherwise inadequate compared to whatever the Tale thought they should be on that particular day.

  All harmless fun, until I struck gold. There I was at a party at Cindy Ray’s, smoking a blunt in privacy on the tennis court, when Melody Chastain had her celebrity meltdown practically in front of me. I was partly concealed by the bushes around the court and no one saw me there.

  As a kid actor, Melody had two hit television series, and then went on to star in three big movies. Her career arc was a mirror of mine, soaring up where mine crumbled into the cellar, and she was so talented and so clearly deserving of success that I hardly hated her at all. But her private life was a twelve-car freeway pileup: her engagement to Nathan Marley ended when he dropped her for the tennis player Liz Hughes; Melody then had a widely publicized lesbian relationship that likewise cratered when her partner dumped her; and then there was the wedding in Reno that lasted three days before both parties sobered up and moved to annul.

  There I was on the tennis court smoking when it all came down on Melody at once, and she erupted, screaming, throwing drinks, hurling furniture. She is a tiny person, but she showed amazing strength. She kept yelling about a florist and how this florist had screwed with her somehow by delivering flowers to the wrong place. I had my handheld out fast as thought, recording the whole scene. Cindy and Odis Strange and Melody’s hapless date were trying to calm her down, and then Cindy’s schnauzer—who may have been afraid that Cindy was being threatened or something—ran onto the scene, barking. And Melody, screaming and weeping, kicked that dog, and then kicked it some more while the dog yelped in pain, and then chased the dog around the patio trying to kick it and failing. Then Odis and Cindy grabbed Melody under the arms and carried her off while she collapsed weeping, and that was that.

  The video was less than thirty seconds long. Before midnight, I had sold it to Kari and killed Melody’s career.

  The American public is amazingly tolerant of celebrity behavior on the whole. We can drink rivers of alcohol, snort mountains of cocaine, fornicate till our parts explode. But whatever you do, you can’t kick a dog. Kicking a dog is worse than cheating on half a dozen spouses, worse than committing a dozen hit-and-runs. Worse than invading a foreign country.

  That video was the end of Melody. Her next films flopped, not because they were
bad, but because the public didn’t want to see the evil dog-kicker. Her career had collapsed into a sub-basement lower even than mine.

  I wouldn’t have sold the video if I’d known the sensation it was going to cause. If I thought anything about it at all, I figured the video would cause sympathy for Melody, because she was in such obvious pain.

  But she kicked the dog. And that was that. And she became another victim of the public’s expectations, Hollywood child exploitation, and most importantly of Sean Makin.

  I keep destroying people. I never mean to, I never plan it. But my path is strewn with wreckage, all of it human.

  Sometimes I think I might just as well be evil. I could, for instance, become my father, raking in the money and spending it recklessly, not caring how I got it or where it came from or who got hurt. I could become Richard III and strive for power and try to crush those who oppose me. Then there might be a reason for all the suffering I seem to spawn. But instead it just happens, and I’m left looking at the devastation and wondering how it became connected to me.

  “Melody Chastain video?” I hear myself saying. “What Melody Chastain video?”

  “You know the one.”

  It has by now occurred to me that the conversation might be recorded. I am not about to give them any rope to hang me with.

  There’s no actual record of my sale of the video clip. I handed over a memory stick and got a stack of hundred-dollar bills in return. This happened late in the evening, after banks had closed, and I remember being impressed that the Tale had a stack of money that big sitting in the office safe, just in case someone like me wanted to sell it something juicy.

  “If you want to talk to me, contact Great Big Idea,” I say. “And otherwise, I’ll see you around.”

  “Okay, Sean.” Kari sighs. “But whatever you do—don’t kick the dog.”

  Next day I go into Dagmar’s office and tell her about Kari’s call. “She says she’s going to dig,” she says.

  Dagmar laughs, shakes her head, and thinks for a moment. “I’d better make sure to give her something, then,” she says.

  I leave and don’t think anything about it, not till I see the Tale that appears midweek. It has a picture of Roheen with the headline ESCAPE TO EARTH—PLOT SECRETS REVEALED! I’m pissed to think that Kari must have got to someone, until I snatch up the rag and read the article, and I discover that someone sold Kari a bill of highly damaged goods. There are no scenes in this film set in Turkey. There’s no one in Escape to Earth named Kristeen or Fuad or Mehmet.