“Neethan, my biggest success story. I am so glad to see you.”
“What happened to you? Who did this to you?” Neethan takes his former mentor’s arms and pulls him close.
“Don’t worry about me. I came to pass along a piece of information. It’s about your birth mother.”
Neethan smiles defensively. “She’s alive?”
Bickle shakes his gray head. “Afraid not, Neethan. And it gets weirder. Not only is she dead, she’s been dead for five hundred years.”
Neethan laughs. “WTF, Bickle? You’re messing with me, right? Are these bandages and bruises a joke?”
The old man sighs. “We saw the prenatal paternity test you took with regard to Ms. Fairbanks and discovered a few new things about your profile. The technology wasn’t up to snuff when you were coming up through the academy. Otherwise, we would have told you sooner. First, it’s true. You’re Native American.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
“And you’re the last of your tribe.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re the last of your genetic line. There are no other living relatives from your particular gene pool.”
“Who were they?”
“We haven’t figured that out yet.”
Neethan steadies himself against a barrier. “So what am I supposed to do with this information? I’ve got a series to promote.”
“You have to go to Seattle. Find out what happened to your tribe. Just follow the red carpet.”
“Now, Bickle, why would I want to do that?”
Bickle leans forward and speaks into Neethan’s ear. “It is Kirkpatrick’s will.”
And like a ghost or screen dissolve, Bickle backs away and other cameras and reporters fill the gap with their chattering questions and klieg lights. Beth-Anne takes his arm again and whispers, “Kelli, Staci, and Brandi from the Kids Super Network.”
Neethan now faces three preteens, each a billionaire, standing in a row, clutching one another’s arms and jumping in unison. “OMG!” they scream. “OMG!”
“Hi, ladies,” Neethan says, causing the middle one to faint. The other two fan the middle one’s face until she returns to consciousness. Over their heads three lenses bob and weave, behind which squint three cameramen.
The preteen on the left, Kelli, asks the first question. “What’s your favorite movie?”
“My favorite movie is… Gifted Children’s Detective Agency.”
“Oh, my God, do you have a girlfriend?” Staci asks.
“Not currently. I’m single,” Neethan says, provoking an intensified bout of high-treble squealing and unison jumping, not to mention a quick glance from Ms. Fairbanks, presently interviewing with the Clothing Optional Network.
“Favorite color,” Brandi says, looking close to vomiting.
“Aubergine.”
“What’s the series about?” all three ask together.
“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… You know, there’s a whole spiel on it on the B-roll. Just have your producers pull something from there.”
The three young journalists refuse, insisting that Neethan repeat the boilerplate. He sighs and complies. When the camera stops rolling the three tweens drop the overwhelmed bubblehead shtick and resume the conversation they’d been having about a new branding firm in which they’d invested considerable time and capital.
Haunted by Bickle, horny by Myra, Neethan proceeds down the line. His hard-on has begun to soften, still firm but perhaps not as unyielding as it had been before he’d been asked his favorite color. He recalls fondly the movie-star sex in which he’d engaged with the starlet, the kind of sex in which the two people are fucking the variety of characters the other has played rather than anything one might rightly call another person. At one point Neethan had been fucking Sherri Nettles, the civil rights attorney Myra had played in Prom Queen: Ground Zero while she had been fucking his Gordon Lamphiere, the morally ambivalent assassin of Saucy McPherson’s Game.
I’m the last of my line, he thinks. So what? The idea feels antique, belonging to another generation, something too complex to trip him out. Cameras claw at his face. He extends his hand again, to a Portuguese-language station’s arts and entertainment reporter, and from a thousand feet under the sea hears himself prattling about the series he’s made, a series he doesn’t entirely understand, owing to the brilliance or ineptitude of the director, but about which he speaks with utter confidence and enthusiasm. He watches himself shake more hands, recite more spiels, grin his panties-dropping grin, and knows that this parade of surfaces is about to come to an end. He’s going to Seattle. He’s going to follow the red carpet. He’ll find out where he came from. It’s Kirkpatrick’s will.
Commercial break.
Inside the restaurant, the red carpet spills to fill the entire floor. Neethan’s agent Rory Smiley meets him at the door. Rory is a short man but doesn’t have a short man’s hair-trigger personality. This is probably thanks to the fact that he suffered through a case of premature puberty, for instance growing facial hair at the age of four. He’d been taller than the rest of the kids in his class until high school, and still thinks of himself as taller than everyone, including Neethan, who towers above him. The premature puberty had been a matter of some brief national attention, with a camera crew following the young Rory around his Montessori school as he worked with golden beads and the pink tower, addressing his classmates in a commanding baritone. Every morning his doting parents had given him a bubble bath and a shave, and by nap time his five o’clock shadow would start to come in. It’s a drag being a preschooler with ball hair.
“Hi Rory. I’m Native American, apparently,” Neethan says, squeezing his agent’s shoulder.
“Tonight, my friend, you can be anything you want,” Rory says, offering a Macanudo.
Neethan takes the cigar and bends down low to allow Rory to light it. “No, really. I’m an Indian. I just found out.”
“Whatever you say, boss.”
A host appears, a newman-looking guy with a wobbly eye, and shows them to their table. Rory orders a dozen kinds of sushi and four kinds of sake. “And a booster seat, if you could,” he says.
The restaurant fills with flacks disgorged from the red carpet. Beth-Anne, her job complete, seeps into the background with the other bottom-feeders gathering about the open bar. Myra enters, a celestial event best witnessed with a space telescope, and is seated at the opposite side of the restaurant. Neethan recognizes the guy who did his hair on Stella Artaud heading straight for the booze. The portion of the restaurant Neethan and Rory occupy is roped off, intended for VIPs, with other sections set aside for lower-magnitude studio employees and the journalists and their crews. Now is to be expected an onslaught of permatanned studio execs with big teeth and fists of gold jewelry, wanting to press flesh with the talent. Until then, Rory intends to go over some recent projects that have been pitched Neethan’s way.
“So I’m at lunch with Julian Moe yesterday and he says to me, ‘Rory, what I wouldn’t give to spend an hour with Neethan and get his thoughts on this Abraham Lincoln biopic I’m developing.’”
“Told you, Rory, I’m biopicked out.”
Rory raises a hand, lowers his head in a “hear me out” type of gesture. “I’m with you, friend. In fact, the first thing I said was, ‘Julie? Why’re you wasting my goddamn time with your talk about a biopic? You know Neethan is biopicked out.’ So he says, ‘Listen, Rory, I know Neethan has had a string of biopics. But I’d be committing directorial malpractice if I didn’t at least touch dick tips with Mr. Jordan about this. It’s built on a proven formula. (This is Julian still talking, by the way.) It’s built on a proven formula. It’s a remake of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln.”