“Nicely done,” Wanda says, teeth chattering.
“By the way, I dig what you’ve done with your pubes,” Neethan says.
“I have a new stylist. What can you tell me about the new season of Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin?”
“Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin, Season Four, is the latest in the award-winning Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin franchise. I play Dr. Uri Borden, a clone scientist who gets involved in the uprising and must decide whether to abort the messiah. It’s a thought-provoking series, featuring state-of-the-art effects and wall-to-wall action, with more than a little tenderness.”
Neethan finds himself recalling his first leading role, as the unfrozen Viking hero of Him and Him. From the thawed wastes of Scandinavia appeared a fully equipped Norse warrior, reanimated by scientists and paired with an animated bolt of lightning to fight environmental crimes in corruption-plagued Chicago. The movie’s title derived from the fact that neither character had a proper name. Whenever they showed up to electrocute and battle-ax their way to justice, bystanders would simply exclaim, “It’s him! And him!” Heavily made up to resemble a hirsute berserker who’d spent a couple thousand years encased in a block of ice, Neethan hadn’t been all that recognizable, but he’d loved the role. Day after day he’d show up at the studio lot, get made up and costumed, stand in front of the green screen to grunt and wave a variety of bladed weapons. At one point in the movie he and the other Him, the lightning-bolt guy, commandeered an ambulance and engaged in a high-speed chase beneath the El. Except the whole scene had been created in the fabricated stationary interior of the vehicle, rocked on hydraulics. His costar, a boy named Georgie Walker, wearing a head-to-toe green bodysuit to be CGI’d postproduction, quivered and buzzed beside him. Neethan bellowed, waving a bloody battle hammer out the window. No one could explain how a medieval Viking had learned to drive, but no matter. Audiences ate it up and Him and Him won a lesser-known technical Oscar. Since then it had been three or four pictures a year, contractually obligated junkets, Champagne in flutes in houses perched on the hills, locations in the less ruined parts of the world, endorsements of Japanese canned coffee and shoe inserts. Becoming famous had been a process similar to losing his virginity. He’d been convinced so explicitly from so many sources that fame would solve every problem he’d ever had, vault him into a state of permanent euphoria, that when it actually happened he considered his glittered surroundings and thought, Okay, not what I imagined. But shit, man, playing that thawed Viking had been a hoot. He wanted a role like that again, one in which he was only required to grunt and ax bad guys.
“Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin, Season Four, is the latest in the award-winning Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin franchise…” Neethan speaks absently to the next journalist, a schmuck from some online-only outfit. He smells Myra’s perfume, concocted in a Swiss lab from an Amazonian water beetle and endangered alpine flowers. He replays highlights of their carnal encounters, loops the image of her ass raised up off the bed, spread to reveal the anal aperture and beneath it the valley of pussy. Is he getting hard? Jesus, okay, think of the Ku Klux Klan, quick! That usually does it for bone prevention. All it would take would be one cameraman to pan down and notice his newly pitched tent and it would be all over the tabs. The Klan starts disrobing, revealing themselves as tattooed strippers with thongs. And some of them are even black! Fucked up, Neethan. He shoots an eyebrow over to Myra, who’s giggling with Eric Bibble, touching him lightly on the shoulder, engaging him fully in her celebrity tractor beam. What Neethan wouldn’t do to transform himself into Him (the Viking, not the lightning bolt), carjack a taxi, and get the fuck out of here right about now. But the red carpet stretches interminably onward, allegedly leading to the doors of a sushi restaurant where the release party is to be thrown down. “… I play Dr. Uri Borden, a clone scientist who gets involved in the uprising and must decide whether to abort the messiah…”
So about that messiah (spoiler alert): As far as Neethan can fathom, Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin foretold of a day when the qputers and their attendant monks would instigate a mass wave of virgin births, remotely impregnating girls around the world with a race of Nietzschean übermensch messiahs. In the show, Neethan, as Uri Borden, learns of the virgin births when a teenage girl enters his clinic complaining of cramping and losing her period. Her parents can’t or won’t believe she’s not lying that she’s never had sex, and urge her to abort. As Uri races against the clock, uncovering more evidence that the pregnancy is part of a vast plot instigated via the Bionet, he is pursued by members of a radical offshoot sect of monks who want to bring about the second wave of FUS. (In the trailer, Uri Borden exclaims, “You mean they want to restart the Fucked Up Shit? Shit! That’s messed up!”) So the film had some heavy research behind it. There were actually folks out there who wanted to bring back the FUS. More than not understanding the unfamous, Neethan can’t wrap his head around this brand of nihilism. He’d studied some of the pro-FUS propaganda for the role, boned up on Peter Ng, and from what he can tell the argument goes something like this: Humanity got what it deserved with the FUS, reducing itself to one-fifth its original size. Seeing that the worst of the FUS was over, the traumatized survivors got back to work, reconstructing and applying new technologies, more or less cleaning up the joint. As this reconstruction effort rolled along, the memories of the FUS atrophied and a great surge of optimism and brotherhood seized the world. Hugs all around. But the shit, certain Ng-inspired revisionists argued, had never really ceased being fucked-up. In fact, they said, the shit was by nature fucked-up. Human nature, they argued, was designed to destroy the planet, a biological version of a gigantic asteroid or volcanic freak-out. Neethan shuddered. Good thing these Ng acolytes were relegated to the fringe. Shows like Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin were meant to keep them there. It was through the efforts of the qputer monks that humanity would continue to thrive and once-extinct species would be brought miraculously back to life. Cities would reconstitute themselves, obliterating the memories of their previous thermonuclear levelings. Hand in hand, folks of mixed ethnic and religious backgrounds would sing before the cameras, in fields of daisies.
“…it’s a thought-provoking series… state-of-the-art effects… wall-to-wall action… more than a little tenderness…” Neethan doesn’t even know to whom he is talking now. His brain has officially taken a bow and outsourced this responsibility to his mouth alone. Away it chatters and smiles, two things it is superbly good at and can accomplish by itself, as far as Neethan is concerned. Listen to it go, chuckling and joking with a moony young reporter who so clearly wants his dick. Which, dammit, remains at three-quarters salute despite the Klan fantasy. His and Myra’s pheromones are still doin’ it right on the red carpet. Think of it this way—she is probably smelling his cologne and getting aroused. Quid pro quo. Beth-Anne tugs at his elbow, introducing him to Dirk Bickle.
“Dirk?” Neethan says, snapping back into the moment. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Bickle looks old. Worse, he looks bloodied. His face is scraped and bandaged and one leg is entombed in a cast. Holding himself up with crutches he attempts a pained smile. Around his neck hangs a bogus laminate identifying him as a reporter from the Homeless People Channel. He snuck in, obviously.