by Jim Carrey
Grammer, who in 2006 joined Gushue in meditations upon the Malibu mudslides where Natchez had helped Kelsey retrieve memories of his mother holding him in the moments just after his birth. Kelsey had seen every blue grain of her eyes, and in retrieving this image said he felt, however fleetingly, unconditional love. So was born another gospel in a country already frothing them from its mouth: Gushueism—a word at which critics often would exclaim, “Gesundheit!”—was a hodgepodge of extreme sports and regression therapy leading adherents not away from the brutality of man and nature but, rather, headlong into both. What his following lacked in numbers it made up for in status; Grammer had, over the years, seen to that. Small, illustrious groups often gathered on the ocean-facing patio of the Carbon Beach guesthouse where Natchez spent his days contemplating—he sometimes bragged—“the jagged edge of America’s dream.”
Jim and Georgie joined them as a Pacific hurricane hit Malibu, a storm that had killed hundreds south in Mexico; then, tired but still hungry, turned up the California coast. He found her even more alluring in person. He knew that past-life memories were sometimes recovered here and wondered if the same forces that were uniting him and Georgie now had done so before. Had they loved in other lives? Would they retrieve visions of those encounters? That would be something. He pictured them in timeless lovemaking, eons speeding harmlessly by as they burned through the positions of the Kama Sutra, and in this he grew so aroused that he failed to notice the half-stunned interest with which Georgie studied the other guests, his peers.
So this was it, she thought, standing among the A-listers on the patio. They all worked together, worshipped together. They shared agents and lawyers and gurus. It was a regular fame cartel. A rigged game, at least until someone brought you in.
“Are you excited?” Carrey asked her.
“Sure,” said Georgie; then, noticing Gwyneth Paltrow in a pair of thousand-dollar heels across the way, removed her own scuffed pumps and placed them in her bag, taking the role of barefoot hippie girl as her strongest available option.
Paltrow was in pain. She had spent the past week yachting off Cannes with Brian Grazer, hosted by moneyed Moroccans speaking in hushed tones, trading wheat for oil; oil for assault rifles; assault rifles for artillery shells. They wanted film investments to launder dirty cash. She’d hated how this thrilled her.
“Feel nature’s might, her majesty.” Natchez sat with legs folded on a wicker sedan, belly bulging beneath a linen tunic three sizes too small. “We are breathing. We draw deep breaths.”
“We are Orpheus entering Hades!” boomed Kelsey Grammer. “Explorers of the great within.”
“And we remain quiet until the spirit moves us,” said Natchez. “We are assiduously refraining from narration, from observation, from cross talk.”
“Indeed we are quiet,” said Kelsey, in a stage whisper. “We hushed, we blessed few.”
Natchez could read his disciples’ faces and, in the quivering of Gwyneth Paltrow’s lips, sensed an inner journey had begun even before she spoke: “The Spence School. Manhattan. Senior year. It’s early May and I really feel the spring coming on. A third-floor biology class, after school. Dust grains dancing amid columns of vernal light.”
“Utterly sublime,” said Kelsey Grammer.
“Cross talk!” snapped Natchez, then calmly, “Gwyneth. Continue.”
“We all got frogs to dissect. I was reticent at first, but when the knife hit the flesh it’s like I lost all fear. The blade seemed to guide me. So precise, so efficient. I finished the frog in a single class. So then the teacher, Mr. Libertucci, he gave me a cat. I finished that in two days, it was like some greater force was driving me to see how it all connected, to find out what makes it meow. So then he gave me a fetal pig.” Paltrow’s brow furrowed as her inner eye surveyed the past. “I’m seeing it now.”
“Yes,” said Natchez. “Dare forward.”
“I’m seeing the tiny pig, in the wax-bottomed dissection tray…” Her face fell as she continued, “Eyes shut, almost like a sleeping child. And something’s coming up from within me. I fight it, I have to fight it—”
“Don’t fight it!” said Kelsey Grammer. “Be as the lotus.”
“Goddammit, Kelsey!” snapped Natchez.
“It’s an awareness that I’m not here for learning. I’m here, all alone after school, I’m here for the joy of pulling a blade through flesh,” said Paltrow.
“Whoa, girl,” said Goldie Hawn.
“I’ve been looking forward to this all day.” She let out a deranged giggle. “The pig is an intelligent animal. A closer relative. A greater thrill, then, to dismember. Oh dear, I probably shouldn’t be sharing this.”
“You must!” said Natchez. “Dare forward!”
“I pull my scalpel down the abdomen,” Gwyneth said, “I tear the fascia away, I’m in total control. I hack through the rib cage, its voided eyes looking at me.”
“Its gaze,” said Natchez, softly. “How does it affect you?”
“I feel guilty, maybe. Also lucky.” A sudden light came across her face. “It’s death’s gaze.”
“Death’s gaze?”
“I want death to know I’m not afraid!” blurted Kelsey Grammer, tears of sudden realization rolling down his cheeks.
“Kelsey!” boomed Natchez. “Stop hijacking other people’s epiphanies! Gwyneth, what happens next?”
“I cut its fucking head off!” exploded Gwyneth. “Okay? I’ll tell Mr. Libertucci I did it to examine the vertebrae, but that’s a lie. I did it ’cause I could. It’s not enough to feel death’s gaze. I want to do death’s work. To deal death. I—”
“Lordy-lord,” said Goldie Hawn.
“I stare into its fucking gaping pig eyes as I cut through its spine. And I’m sad, with each motion, to know I’m closer to the end. Because we’re studying botany next. Guru?”
“Yes?”
“Is there such a thing as evil?”
“No, my dear,” said Natchez. “Not on this porch.”
Carrey squeezed Georgie’s hand as if to say: Have you ever seen magic like this? She gave no response. She, too, had traveled back. Suddenly she was six years old again, her face pressed against the incubation chamber of the only sibling she’d ever felt close to, Denise, born two months premature. A fragile chest, beet red, begging small breaths from the world.
Denise now worked at a jewelry kiosk in a mall outside Iowa City, subsisting on minimum wage. A sadness for the smallness of her sister’s life filled Georgie as Sean Penn lit an unfiltered Camel from the burgundy velour La-Z-Boy that was his recognized seat. The smell of cheap tobacco took Carrey back to the Titan Wheels factory, to working with his father and brother, all their money pooled for heat, gas, and food. He was sixteen, still a boy, and yet with a full-grown rage inside of him, an urge, so very natural, to destroy the factory that took them as no different and less precious than the piles of steel truck rims marked for buffing and blasting. He remembered slamming a pallet truck into the conveyor belts, again and again and again.
Below him, the waves crashed. And yet he declined to share this memory. He held Georgie’s hand as the trauma gripped him, a panicked child. And her touch drained his pains away. For him it was further proof of her chosenness. For her? It was the start of a long journey into his hauntings.
“Animal-faced Pez dispensers,” said Sofia Coppola. “Lined up on a Sonoma windowsill.”
“Purple plastic testing containers warm with diabetic urine,” said Goldie Hawn, “sitting on the kitchen counter of my blind uncle Warren.”
“Strawberry-flavored codeine,” said Sissy Spacek.
It had been six months since Sean Penn had shared any memory, and that had been only two words: “Bloodstained doilies.” All came to attention as he spoke from the burgundy La-Z-Boy, never once turning from the storm.
“A bald child
in a Ritz-Carlton swimming pool. It doesn’t matter where. This kid’s already outside space and time. His skin’s almost translucent. He’s six or seven. Head’s still big on the body, and that amplifies the skull cavities, strains the muscles of his little neck and shoulders…” He coughed. “Something bulging from inside this little kid’s chest, jutting at odd angles against the skin…”
“Fearless.” Natchez regarded Penn as more peer than pupil.
“…and it’s a chemo port. Bandages. Surgical tape. What are they trying to do? Buy him a few more months. Weeks. Or maybe just a morning in a Ritz-Carlton swimming pool. Five hundred bones a night. Peak season. People trading coward glances as slowly they all get out of the water like he’s some turd. Contagion. They ain’t taking any chances. In ten minutes he’s all alone there, turning weak circles, skimming his hands across the water’s skin…”
“Did you fear the death in him?” Natchez whispered.
“Nah,” said Penn, with a rasp. “I feared the death in them.”
“Marvelous.”
“I could use a glass of water,” said Nic Cage, “I’m getting very thirsty.”
“Follow that thirst,” said Kelsey Grammer. “Dare forward, Cage.”
“Next time you will leave the porch,” said Natchez. “We have discussed the importance of respect and noninterference. Yet you do not learn.”
And Grammer, chastised, quieted as Cage shared what would be the strangest memory of the night. “I see the city of Los Angeles,” he began. “All in flames. Burning. I see flying saucers hovering above the canyons and—”
“What the fuck is this?” said Goldie Hawn.
“I’m saying what I see. Please respect my flow.”
“Continue, Nic,” said Natchez. “Please.”
“I see these aliens with exoskeletons, like iron spiders, shooting death beams everywhere. A bowel-twisting firepower. Aw, man, all these demon-red death beams. Sky covered in smoke. The End Times sun, it’s red like a, like a—” For a moment they hoped the memory would trail off, but then it came to him: “Like a baboon’s ass.”
“This is a memory?” said James Spader.
“When you put the bucket down the well and you bring it back up you don’t always get water,” said Cage. “Sometimes you get a wolverine that’s been trapped down there forever and he claws out your eyes. So yeah, I’m seeing a big baboon-ass sun. I’m charging down the Pacific Coast Highway. Fires burning in the canyons, buildings reduced to smoldering rubble. I lead a band of Last Survivors and we—”
“He’s grandstanding,” said Kelsey Grammer. “Sheer narcissism.”
“Continue, Nic,” Natchez said. “Kelsey, hush.”
“We fight these aliens. Come to kill us. Giant snaky guys. Skin all slick and glistening black. I lead the Last Survivors against these extraterrestrials who have come to annihilate humanity. Armageddon. They shoot us with these death beams, but the death beams, they don’t affect me. Because my DNA? It’s not like other DNA. Coppola genes are different. That’s why I’ve felt so out of place my whole life. It’s the burden I bear to save everyone and—”
“This is a plagiarism of War of the Worlds,” said Kelsey. “Mule-fucked with the Christ myth, is what this is. He enters groups and he cannot help but sabotage for the sake of his own need to feel special. He did it in Goldblum’s drama class—”
“Don’t you Goldblum me.”
“You made a farce of that workshop!”
“It was a Nouveau Shamanic experiment. A venture to the freedom that lies beyond the edge of annoyance.”
“Hush, both of you,” said Natchez. “Time runs in all directions. So, then, must memory. No temporal judgments here, please. Nic, continue.”
Now Cage rolled his eyes back so only the whites showed, and no one could tell if he was being serious or not as, in a voice deeper than his natural speaking tone, he said, “The death beams, they bounce off me. Like peas. Everyone else? Not so lucky. Flesh bubbling off their bodies. Death beams zinging and zooshing all around. This flesh-rendering heat. I can feel it down in my bones, can feel the marrow simmering.” He clawed at his arms. “Now a big alien’s coming at me. He’s hideous. It’s—Oh God, he’s so horrific. I can’t even—”
“You must!” said Natchez.
“He’s got red eyes. A fat red stripe down his snaky body. He’s got fangs. He’s bearing down on me, bent to kill, there beneath the baboon-ass sun. I’m so afraid of my destiny, which is to fight this guy. Oh God, I’m so afraid…”
“Snakes beneath the baboon-ass sun?” said Kelsey Grammer, incredulous.
And Natchez might have banished Grammer to sit inside by the water cooler were he not so attuned to the battle raging within the man who, of all possible names, had chosen to call himself Cage. “Don’t recoil, Nic. Dare forward.”
“Okay. I’m going forward. Now it’s even clearer. I have a sword of ancient steel, a relic of the Crusades. I left that out so far because it wasn’t relevant. And I know, in my gut, it’s the only thing that can kill an alpha alien. Which is my destiny. I close on him, lunging with my sword. But he dodges me. Rears up. Spits this black snotty stuff in my eyes. Oh God, I can’t see. It smells so horrible, the alien snot. Ack, get him off me!”
“Fight it, Nic!” said Kelsey Grammer as Cage began to gag.
“He’s coiling around me. Constricting me, like a boa…” Cage, tearing at his neck, trembling. “I’m losing my grip on my sword. I’m feeling my arms go limp. I’m looking into the alpha’s red serpent eye and I’m feeling…”
“What do you feel?” said Natchez. “What comes over you?”
“Afraid…” Cage’s lip curled, eyes trickling old tears. “Oh God, I’m so afraid.”
“There, there,” said Kelsey, suddenly pitying, laying a hand on Cage’s shoulder with such kindness that Natchez forgave all his earlier trespasses.
“How very kind of you, Kelsey,” he said. “How deeply empathic.”
“Baby’s gonna go,” said James Spader, pointing to a little shed on the beach below, nearly submerged in the surf. As they rose to watch, Carrey and Georgie held each other’s eyes for a second of deep appraisal. There was an excess of eagerness about him that she chose not to question. He emoted what he felt to be the golden light of love; she gave him her hand. Then they joined the rest, watching the structure torn from its foundation, smashed by the ocean, yielding inflatable alligators and flamingos to dance on the dark waves.
“Storms are getting stronger. Waters rising. The earth is growing angry,” said Natchez. “Soon there will be nothing here but fire, water, and mud.”
Thank God I found you, thought Carrey, staring rapt at Georgie’s silhouette.
CHAPTER 3
Now two lives entwined.
The boy who’d fled Toronto’s factories and the girl still fleeing Iowa’s cornfields agreed that, the night being young, they should go to Carrey’s beach house. They took his Porsche down the Pacific Coast Highway, satellite radio playing the seventh movement of Fauré’s Requiem: “In Paradisum.” While no classical aficionado, Carrey was moved by the music, sensing the majesty of the chorale as inseparable from the breaking power of nature, soundscape and landscape joined in the conjuring of the dead:
In paradise may angels lead you
On your arrival, the martyrs receive you
And lead you into the Holy City
Jerusalem—
An ecstasy overtook Georgie as she entered the film star’s Malibu home, bought on a $10 million whim, a glass box of dreams.
She made twenty thousand dollars per episode of Oksana, an income secured after years of professional struggle and compromise. Yet when she had tried to buy a Laurel Canyon ranch house and gone to Chase for a mortgage, the loan officer rejected her, citing the famously short life spans of secondary characters on basic cable thrillers. S
he’d sat in her leased Prius, humiliated, ashamed—and enraged. Now she wondered at the blitheness with which money chooses some over others. Georgie had read of Carrey’s breakup in the tabloids, had even watched Renée Zellweger receiving a bull’s ear from Morante on the website of Pamplona’s Diario de Navarra. She asked if he and Zellweger were truly finished, and he hemorrhaged.
“The Navajo elders joined our spirits, Renée and me. And after the breakup I felt like my spirit had been torn apart. I felt this wound I feared would never heal. But lately, Georgie, I’ve felt that wound closing. Lately I’ve felt whole.”
“You have?”
“Yes. And guess what?”
“What?”
“Guru Viswanathan taught me to see all the colors of my aura.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. And after Renée it was bleeding out all its bright colors, just becoming this mucky gray. At night I’d feel an evil spirit in the house, this old woman with oily hair and a jaundiced face hovering over me as I slept, sucking all the color from my soul. I’d wake up screaming. But that’s also stopped. You know how?”
“How, Jim?”
“It stopped when I saw you.”
Here, Georgie knew, she’d found a rich, powerful star desperate to be loved. Desperate to believe. In Natchez Gushue. In Freudian confusion mistaken for destiny. In anything kinder than chaos. And gazing at his mother’s eyes set in Georgie’s face, Carrey marveled at the sheer benevolence of a creator who, working through local cable providers, would not only reveal but deliver her to him. Renée, he told Georgie, was only preparation for the true love now at hand. And Georgie, for all her later grievances, hurried to close the deal.
“Do you know what your aura looks like now?” she asked.
“Well, the colors vary from…”
“I can see it.”
“You can?”
“Yes. It’s a shining, golden light.”
Whatever his later failings, it was she who kissed him first. Her own miracle, more or less, was also at hand, the journey begun on Greyhound buses crossing Iowa’s endless nowhere arriving at its long-sought somewhere.