by Jim Carrey
“Wanna go upstairs?” he asked.
She nodded. They went to the master suite. A slow montage of sexual joining suggests that, somehow, this love is different from all other loves. A dance of wanting bodies, the whispering of impossible promises. The storm’s lightning pulsing against the gold-leafed painting that hung above the bed, an Orthodox icon of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding her superstar bambino, gifted to Carrey by probable murderers during the Russian premier of Bruce Almighty. Carrey gazes into Georgie’s eyes—his mother’s eyes—suckles her breast, his mother’s breast, moves inside this near-total stranger like each thrust might restore him to the lost peace of the womb.
“Come for me, Daddy,” she purred.
* * *
—
Within six months they had arranged for permanent karmic joining with a Melanesian spirit ceremony, held at Kelsey Grammer’s home in the Malibu Hills.
Paparazzi choppers swarmed overhead, purchased by TMZ from the Marine Corps, still war painted black. Nicolas Cage served as Jim’s Spirit Witness, breaking from the filming of Bangkok Dangerous to attend the wedding. His stuntman on the production had worked with Georgie’s first husband on Fast and Furious 3 and told Cage of their divorce: the poisoned protein powder, the Mazda Miata theft. He voiced his concerns just days before the wedding, when the two friends met at Cage’s Bel-Air mansion for a Brazilian jiujitsu sparring session.
Stripped down to their briefs, sun low in the west, they circled each other in a black-sand dojo ringed with mastodon skeletons that Cage had won in Mongolian auctions. Carrey often wondered why they always fought at dusk. Was every moment in their lives just a scene demanding setting? Was the trap of persona everywhere upon them? The sun poured raspberry through the ancient rib cages, striping Cage’s face in shadow and fire. Pleased with this visual effect, he made his plea.
“I’m frankly concerned, Jimbo. I say step back from this one. I’m hearing some heavy stories about her past. Talking auto theft. Talking rat poison.”
Georgie had already given Carrey her side. “Those are her ex-husband’s lies.”
“Even the mamba has its truth.”
“Lumumba?”
“The mamba. It’s a big snake. Look, I think the Renée wound has you falling for a knife fighter who may not mean you well.”
“Georgie’s taken my pain away.”
“So would cyanide.”
Taller and thus favored by the physics of combat, Carrey lunged at Cage, who fought dirty, gouging Carrey’s eyes, saying if blindness was what he sought it was easily achieved. Carrey peeled Cage’s hands off his eyes; Cage peeled Carrey’s hands from his own hands. Vying bodies became vying fingers: Cage’s thumb, unusually large from birth, dominated Carrey’s pinkie, snapping the digit at its base knuckle. Carrey howled, surged with adrenaline, and threw Cage to the ground. They wrestled until their sweat-slicked bodies were covered in black sand, more suggesting aboriginal demons than millionaire actors. Finally Cage employed deception. He sighed, relaxed, feigned surrender. Then, just as Carrey relented, Cage crashed an elbow into his head, gashing the flesh of his eyebrow.
“You tricked me!”
“Only so you’d see! I’m looking out for you, Jimbo. In this scrapyard of dreams that we call home. This polluted meadow of bourgeois fantasy. This common grave of consumerist longing. This neon carrot dangling ever closer—”
“What are you talking about?” Carrey said, eye swelling shut.
“Celebrity, asshole. The iron maiden of a mass persona. The Torquemadan impalement of any chance at a true self. What if you’re just a means to an end for this woman? Hey, only know what I hear. She’s a knife fighter. Push comes to shove I’m hearing she would bury it to the hilt.”
“I love her.”
“Said the dopamine.”
“I feel it in my soul, Nic, the place where Natchez was leading us. I feel a great peace. Renée was an equal. Everyone approved. Now she’s with Don Alfonso. So where did that get me? We need to be loved and touched.”
And, after pausing to appreciate just how perfectly the fiery sunset and mastodon shadow cleaved his face, Cage said: “We all suffer reverberant primal pains. Ancient men, getting eaten by vicious beasts? They wail inside us still. Why do you think we grapple here in this place of aged bones? Vanity? Boredom? Theatrics? Wrong! We battle ancient mojo in my black-sand shadow dojo! I just want to be sure you’re going into this protected. With eyes open.”
“There’s no need,” said Carrey. “Me and Georgie see each other’s souls.”
What was Cage to do? He’d played his best hand. He gave Carrey a kiss on the cheek, unsure if it was one of blessing or farewell.
Days later Cage stood beside his friend for the Melanesian Spirit Ceremony at Kelsey Grammer’s house. Carrey’s eye was still swollen half shut, his pinkie splinted.
Carrey’s daughter, Jane, watched from the front row. He had her with his first wife, Melissa. She was a true child of Hollywood, had once smiled before banks of cameras as her father pressed her seven-year-old hands alongside his in a square of wet cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Growing up, more honest with herself than most, she wrote in her diary about celebrity’s gravitational field—
The older kids want to be my friend just because of my dad. There are real friends and there are fake friends. I don’t blame them but I see it.
She’d seen its toll on her father’s psyche. The ego-distending adulation. The wrenching fears of abandonment. How the last box-office smash only raised the bar for the next project. Watching the ceremony, pregnant with her own child and, through that child, perhaps, filled with the hope of better things, she wished only for her father to be truly and lastingly happy with Georgie.
Who was a lonely bride.
Her father was deceased; her mother claimed sickness to avoid travel. None of her siblings attended. Her only guests were the Stalin girls. There was Oksana herself, played by Caprice Wilder, renegade child bride of a Greenwich hand-soap executive who drove to Los Angeles after 9/11 with only a meager alimony and the resolve to die famous; Olga, Oksana’s loyal enforcer, played by Lunestra Del Monte—a woman named off of a MySpace plebiscite, she would later claim to have been a Kremlin agent in fact as well as fiction—and, finally, Stalin’s youngest daughter, played by Kacey Mayhew, a former Memphis River Queen decrowned for making gonzo pornography under the name Ford Explorer.
Birds of paradise squawked from golden cages and a choir of Melanesian orphans sang as the newlyweds were showered with hibiscus petals. Carrey told Us magazine that his spirit felt unbound from his body, then felt Georgie’s hand turning his face so the cameras could capture his unbrutalized side in a newlywed kiss.
All but one guest wished them well.
Katie Holmes attended with her then husband, a colossal action star whose real name, for legal reasons, cannot be given here. Hence, we shall call him Laser Jack Lightning. So there she stood beside Laser Jack: Katie, coal-eyed beauty, who had met Jim in the twenty-seventh chamber of Will Smith’s backyard labyrinth two years before. Together they had found their way out of the maze, had, like Hansel and Gretel, grown close through shared peril. She noted a woodenness about Jim and Georgie’s kiss, an ominousness in the speed with which the bride turned from her groom to the cameras.
Why, Katie wondered, eyeing them at the altar, is false love so proud, and true love so fearful? She smiled at Carrey with sad concern as he walked down the aisle, while Laser Jack flashed him a billion-dollar grin and a red-carpet thumbs-up.
* * *
—
Jim and Georgie’s bliss was so great they made plans to enjoy it forever: at the Pasadena Longevity Center they had stem cells drawn and proteins synthesized for custom therapies promising to extend their shared life deep into the twenty-first century.
Age was just a disease, they were assured
, curable like any other.
And yet bad winds were blowing…
Mitchell Silvers went missing from the set of Oksana for three days, returning in a semi-stupor, claiming he’d been abducted by an extraterrestrial television producer named Tan Calvin. But Angelenos have breakdowns all the time; Georgie, like most, just assumed he’d changed up his medications.
* * *
—
She had always wanted to visit New York, and that September, shortly after the Malibu ceremony, Carrey took her there for what might reasonably be called a honeymoon. They stayed at the Mercer in SoHo. Jim dreamed the neighborhood back to its 1980s heyday. He imagined all remnant graffiti the work of Basquiat, painters and poets and experimental musicians making love in the lofts, a lush, private fantasy of bohemia. For Georgie it connoted less artistic purity than brute arrival. Mercer, Greene, Wooster, she walked the streets without thought for their artistic or industrial pasts. The posh boutiques sang of paradise, and the paparazzi awaiting their exit from the hotel each morning, and following them through the days, made this, by far, the greatest role of her career, the mad rush of reality TV minus the sand flies and starvation.
Lunching on the sidewalk at Cipriani, she realized that all you had to do was sip water in the presence of Jim Carrey, eat salad with basic table manners, and, just like that, you entered social media’s theater of a billion eyeballs. In centuries past, you had to kill on the battlefield or make a fortune in cargo shipping to join the aristocracy, but in Late America, miracle of miracles, you just needed to consume tuna tartare in the proper context. Her Oksana costars sent her heart-emoji-adorned links to shots of them on the sidewalk, pictures often taken only minutes before. Soon she was searching Getty Images for fresh visions of herself, meticulously planning the next day’s wardrobe for the Jim and Georgie Show. They ate dinner in a Chinatown restaurant, happy to discover they were still attracted to each other in overhead fluorescent lighting. They saw Equus at the Shubert Theatre, seated front row as guests of Daniel Radcliffe, who received them after in his dressing room, kindly playing along for a photo wherein Georgie, with outstretched, wiggling fingers, appeared to be casting a hex on him. Outside the theater they ran into Carrey’s chief handler at the Creative Artists Agency, Gerry Carcharias, who invited them both to join him at the Christie’s modern and contemporary auction the following evening.
* * *
—
It was a cool night, streets slick from a light drizzle. They dressed like for the Golden Globes, then piled into the Escalade, the car stereo playing Sketches of Spain as they drove up Lafayette, sidewalk lamps shining off the wet streets, Carrey telling Georgie that there was nothing more perfect than listening to Miles Davis in Manhattan in the rain, with her. Inside the auction house they sat with Carcharias and his second wife, Zandora, watching the rich capture treasures. A Warhol Monroe went for $50 million. A zebra by Damien Hirst, the great embalmer, fetched $25 million. Hockneys and Rauschenbergs fluttered between five and fifteen. Georgie struggled to conceal her exhilaration watching the paddles fly as a Russian oligarch battled Saudi twins for a Basquiat that went for $8 million. And Carrey’s mind reeled as Gerry Carcharias bought a Hopper for $12 million, the agent seeming to have more disposable cash than any actor Carrey knew.
From what place had these dark fortunes been hatched?
Then a Frida Kahlo self-portrait went on the block, and Georgie gasped.
“You like it?” asked Carrey.
She’d always loved Kahlo’s work, the feminine fearlessly encountering itself, the heroic struggle to escape from Diego Rivera’s shadow. She nodded.
“Do you want it?”
“Stop.”
“You do, I can see.”
“Jim!”
And with this, sharing heated grins with Georgie after each successful bid, Carrey flew into pursuit, battling a Dallas oilman, a Japanese retail magnate, an agent of the sultan of Dubai, all chasing poor Frida from a million to a million two; from a million two to two million flat—where the Texan dropped out—to $2.2 million, where the Japanese retail magnate quit. Now it was just Carrey against the sultan’s lackey, and he was Jim Carrey; he wasn’t going to be bested by some hand-chopping despot.
“Do I have two point eight?” said the auctioneer.
Both met the challenge.
“Two point nine?”
Carrey raised his paddle like an ax.
“Three? Three point one?”
And there it was his.
Press captured the moment from twenty different angles, all showing Carrey glowering inappropriately at his vanquished foe, and Georgie in heaven, having received a gift worth more than her family’s wealth going back generations. They made love against the window of the hotel suite, both staring out through the glass, and all the windows of the city staring back. Let them watch, both Jim and Georgie felt, let them share in this moment, watch us cum, let them feel the joined thrills of spiritual union and victory at auction. Each believed that the other’s fevered pledges—“I love you,” “I’ll always love you,” “I’ve only loved you”—were true, or at least not spoken to deceive. It was all too much to dream. And left Georgie so infatuated with Jim, and with the promise of a life filled with moments like this, that she told herself it was just a clerical error when, two weeks later, the Frida Kahlo arrived at the Hummingbird estate and, after unpacking it from its wooden crate, the art handlers gave her a certificate of sale which listed the piece as the sole property of one James Eugene Carrey.
CHAPTER 4
Then came the autumn of Mitchell Silvers’s death.
An extraterrestrial subplot emerged in Oksana’s fourth and final season when Georgie’s character, Nadia Permanova, encountered a wormhole in a Kievan sugar-beet field. She was guided through it by singsong voices, received on the other side by willowy light beings who gave her lucid visions of her past. She saw her five-year-old self slaying her own identical twin, wandering snowdrifts in stamina-building exercises, and finally she relived a medical procedure received on her fourteenth birthday as a frightened girl in a Red Army hospital, where a surgeon drew his scalpel beneath her belly button. The trauma of this memory sent her vital signs racing, forcing her abductors to end the encounter and return her to earth. The scene had enraged TNT executives, who were already developing a space franchise with a nephew of Ridley Scott. They gave Silvers a dressing-down, saying he’d be making DMV collision reels if any of Stalin’s daughters so much as bought a helium balloon.
At home that night Silvers found an even-greater superior awaiting him, the intergalactic reality producer Tan Calvin. Calvin’s people, Silvers had learned, were plagued by horrible body shame. The cosmos had given them so much: a cushy perch in a quiet stretch of galaxy, minds so powerful they’d moved from the wheel to quantum physics in a single century. But physical beauty had been denied them. They had, in response, mastered shape-shifting, donning appropriated forms to indulge escapist fantasies and to avoid traumatizing their colonized peoples. For Silvers’s benefit, Calvin had chosen the form of a champion rower from Oxford’s class of 1913, a man whose thick, wavy hair and alabaster skin had inspired poetry among his peers before a Krupp shell killed him at the Somme.
He laid a powerful hand on Silvers’s shoulder. “You of all people would agree that what’s good for the greater program is what matters. We require a new direction.”
A black Beretta lay on the table. “Just a little more time,” Silvers begged. “Give me one more season.”
Calvin replied with a farting noise.
“Please,” said Silvers, rushing to his dining table, crafted from a sequoia that was a sapling when Calvin wrote the Christ myth from scraps of pagan lore.
“I have ideas,” he explained. “So many ideas!” He rolled out his final opus across the table, a plot-tree forest filling six feet of butcher paper, a thousand story line
s that would send Joseph Stalin’s daughters to distant galaxies, escaping all detection until massive Nielsen ratings had made Mitch mighty.
“It’s not just you, Mitch. We’re winding down the whole earthly production. We’re moving on to the Inner Triangulans.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter. Human things have long since jumped the shark. Extinction is destiny, that’s never been a secret. I’m doing you a kindness, Mitch. Dark days ahead. Systemic collapse, fiery wrath. Toddler cannibalism.”
“Toddlers?”
“As soon as their teeth come in. It’s a crowded interstellar entertainment marketplace. Takes ever more to break through the clutter.”
“Calvin.”
“What?”
“Let me see your real face.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Please.”
“I revealed myself once to a girl here a long time ago. I still regret it, I’m cruelly maligned for it. You people have such a narrow view of beauty.”
“Please. I want to see—”
But both Silvers’s curiosity and his will to resist were dissolved by a flash of Calvin’s eyes. Then the condo’s stereo switched on, Slavic wailings sadder than piss-stained snow gaining in volume as Calvin said, “Pick up the fucking gun, Mitchell.”
Silvers palmed the weapon, face beading sweat; Calvin’s tongue licked his perfect teeth just before he coolly instructed, “Slowly, not a trace of fear in your being, you will rise from your chair and move toward the window.”
Silvers obeyed, standing, walking into a brilliant light suddenly washing into the room: golden, calming, relieving him of the burden of himself. Whatever happened now was fine. Fated. Nothing bad could come from a moment that felt so totally good—
“Mitchell Silvers. Are you ready for your parting gift?”