“Can you see Myra’s table from where you’re sitting?”
Rory cranes his neck. “Not sure. Might be that table surrounded by studio brass. Anyway, Julian keeps talking, says, ‘Rory, listen. I’m looking for an A-lister with gravitas. I’m looking for someone who can shoulder the burden of portraying the motherfucker who freed the slaves. El presidente. And no one can fill those presidential pants like Neethan F. Jordan, do you hear what I’m saying?’”
“Is there a love interest?”
“Yeah, well, no, sorta. She dies in the first act.”
“Pass. Next.”
“So I got this call from a friend of a friend of a friend at a little production company you may have heard of—Remote Sasquatch Productions? And whisper-whisper-whisper I hear they’ve got Phil Knickerman’s new script, a fantasy drama of sorts. They’ve got Susan Rauch set to direct, up-and-coming young director, you can feed off that kind of cred, and it involves unicorns. It’s not a starring role but they thought of you for the part of Osama bin Laden.”
“Do I get a nude scene?”
“Great question. I’m on it. Next I have a starring role in a picture called The Quadriplegic.”
“It involves not using my arms and legs?”
“No, actually. See, it’s an inspirational story about a quadriplegic who regains the use of his limbs thanks to the Bionet.”
“That kind of thing happens all the time.”
“True, which makes it a topical human-interest-type story.”
“What’s the angle? Why should we care about this former quadriplegic?”
“He robs banks.”
“Go on.”
“With a wise-cracking chimpanzee sidekick.”
“You know I like having a sidekick.”
“Based on a true story.”
“Pass.”
Presently, approaching from the table’s starboard side is Big Serge Davis, a VP of marketing at Fox. Big Serge’s enhanced-tooth grin seems to precede him; the rest of his body appears to be an appendage of this rapacious dental expression of joy. His teeth are easily twice the size of other people’s teeth. Neethan exposes his own teeth as the executive approaches and then their hands come out like the wimpy claws of Tyrannosaurae rex. Neethan stands and the two figures crash together, front to front, laughing and half-speaking their greetings, which come out like, “Neeeeeethaaaaaa!” and “Saaaaaairrrr!” Two glottally communicating giants, they clutch and squeeze each other’s arms, slapping shoulders, opening mouths to expose pink Sonicared interiors of mucousy tissues. From Neethan’s mouth still dangles his cigar, held precariously in place by lower lip moisture. After a minute or so of this, they verbally indicate their good-byes and Neethan sits down as the first wave of sushi arrives.
He hears Myra laugh across the room. He imagines himself as Marcello Mastroianni pursuing an Anita Ekberg version of Myra up a Roman spiral staircase. His mind spins a series of lip-locked fantasias with swollen strings and wonders if there is any way to think about their brief comingling of bodily juices besides cinematically. He and Myra had accidentally rolled into each other’s gravitational fields during the hours of rehearsal for their full-frontal nude sex scene. Their own personal “meet cute” moment. Then, crap, a pregnancy. For the first time, while chopsticking a piece of ikura gunkan maki, he wonders who the father might actually be. In the movie, Uri Borden discovers a secret cabal of Indonesian scientists who engineer a method of remote Bionet fertilization, in which they hack birth-control systems to release artificial spermatozoa into women’s uteruses. Coulda been something like that with Myra. Maybe a fanboy hacker in his bedroom somewhere, bored of just jerking off to the 3-D X-rays of Myra’s internal organs, decided to hack his way into her uterus and impregnate her online. It could happen, he supposes. He’d done some reading in his trailer to prepare for the role, learning a little about how the Bionet interfaces with reproductive systems. You can find out anything about anyone’s physical condition via the Bionet. You can track T-cell count, endocrine levels, the squirtings of various enzymes from specialized valves, brain activity, some said even thoughts. Dreams?
Neethan maneuvers a firecracker roll into a saucer containing equal parts wasabi and soy sauce.
“Earth to Neethan,” Rory says, waving chopsticks in front of his client’s eyes.
“Maybe you could get me some Native American roles,” Neethan says, as if that’s what he’d been thinking about all along.
“Did you even hear what I said about The Man Who Got Marketed to Death?”
“Are you talking about a movie or my life?”
Here come more brass, a trio of them now, jolly, spines bent back into concavities while the arms beckon, thrust at forty-five-degree angles from their bodies, a grandparently come-here-you-rascal kind of hug-inducing posture. Neethan rises and accepts their cheek kisses and let-me-get-a-look-at-you affections. He’s never met them before but they don’t know that. They feel they know him intimately. Have watched his genitals do their magic on the big screen as well as the magic of his acting skills and uncanny comic timing. More than know him, they feel they own him. And like an objet d’art in a glass cabinet they want to take him out for a quick polish and a moment of admiration. His face is fused in their minds to spreadsheets, and they like the numbers they’ve been looking at. Leathery little men with little hair, they run their hands up and down Neethan’s arms, pausing at the elbow, sharing confidences and dirty jokes. The duration of this encounter is say about two minutes. Then they depart, leaving Neethan free to chew on something that involves fish eyeballs.
It is Kirkpatrick’s will.
Neethan’d really been looking forward to kicking back with a movie in the theater at his place off Mulholland tonight but, thanks to Bickle’s sudden appearance, that isn’t going to happen. No refuting the wishes of Mr. K. Neethan knows as soon as he is powered up on sushi and receives the figurative blow jobs from the executive class, he will be locating the exit and striding along the red carpet to wherever it might lead. Behind him he will leave a lousy release party under way in a decent Japanese restaurant with waitresses rigorously trained to pretend they don’t recognize him. Already, mentally, he is out the door but physically he is rooted here with his agent who is laying down project after project that begs to be rescued by his involvement. He can play an autistic savant, a tennis pro, a gay hustler, a frustrated novelist, a blind violin maker, a psychoanalyst on the make, a ship captain harboring a deadly secret, a mutant capable of spitting poison from his eyes, a mortgage company representative, the Pope. None of it sounds Native American enough. Now that Bickle has laid down all the cards with regard to his ethnic identity, it would be nice to parlay that knowledge into a role in which he gets to play that identity and maybe in the process learn about what that identity is like. Because now when he thinks Native American he thinks casinos and smallpox blankets and that’s about it. And if he gets bored being Native American he’ll move on and be something else for a while, like an unfrozen Viking with a lightning bolt sidekick.
A mixed-sex group of studio people cross the room to the table, midlevel departmental directors and such, people responsible for budgets, shouting compliments on his performance over the restaurant’s derivative music. Flock-like, they glom on to the table and chortle borrowed insights, eyes spreading wide in expressions that have as much to do with plastic surgery as with emotion. They are all drugged, Neethan figures, strapped to a biochemical thrill ride that approximates optimism. Or they simply conceive the world this way, an endless series of release parties and occasions to get close enough to smell the rancid breath of the talent. They appear pleased with themselves. They throw their heads back when laughing as if to make sure no one doubts the magnitude of the hilarity they are enjoying. Across the restaurant he catches sight of Myra’s open mouth similarly engaged in laughter and pictures her lips curling around the tip of—hey now, here is the Klan again, igniting a cross in some poor Southerner’s front yard. Neethan looks down in time to see a twitching fin of something on his plate. Rory chortles with the ring of midlevels that fortifies the periphery of their table. Now there is nudity happening at a table nearby; things have progressed to that level pretty quickly. The open bar gushes libations into marketing department bloodstreams. A man in a bow tie visibly vibrates at a table across from the disrobing table, jacked up on some kind of Bionet-delivered kick. Pretty soon someone will discharge a handgun, Neethan suspects. It feels like that kind of night.