Nobody expected it.
Nobody knew what to do.
Everybody tried to stay in character.
Cameramen shot authentic footage of cameramen shooting faux footage of a wide-eyed director, Roy Poole, who fucked up his lines and shouted out garbled orders from a highchair. Perched atop a great knoll of tracking equipment, the real director, Johnson Bakos, reprimanded Poole with a bouche forte-chic red megaphone, but Bakos told the crew to keep shooting; they’d seen worse, much worse, and they’d make this scene work yet.
Caught off guard, Jack Fenelli, Beaulac’s opponent, here and in matters of the heart, balked at the starting line; he fell forward like a strongman’s mallet. And he had been slated to win the race in the script. The backside of the refrigerator strapped to his back had been decorated with a flashy turbothruster. Beneath the image, this sobriquet:
GREASED LIGHTNING
The refrigerator crushed Fenelli and he sort of exploded, veins and vines of gore skittering across the pavement, blood spattering the horrified and underpaid extras that surrounded the improv spectacle, wondering whether they should cheer or run away. They looked to Bakos for guidance. Bakos made an imperiled frogface.
Stencilists had not yet doctored Beaulac’s refrigerator.
He made it to the finish line, fifty yards down Scrimm Street. He was on all fours by the time he got there, and a considerable quantity of sand had leaked from a turncoat aperture in the refrigerator door. But he made it.
Malingerers observed Beaulac with confused agitation as he rose to his feet and dispatched the refrigerator with a great bellow, then moved his arms in circles, smoothing the kinks from his rotator cuffs. At the starting line, makeshift orderlies uneasily reanimated the flattened corpse of Jack Fenelli.
Standing at her post, Sasha Crack ran her eyes up and down a palmscreen, controlling the text with a retinal line of flight. Bakos had constructed a set of Poppy Lincoln’s character traits for her to memorize and internalize. Negative traits far outweighed positive ones. In fact the latter consisted of only three items:
skinny
big tits
“street smarts” (simulated)
The former, on the other hand, looked like this:
heavy smoker
anti-psychotic prescription (weaning)
pothead
clonazepam addict
terrific mood swings
emotionally volatile
vaguely bipolar
history of cancer in family
hair falling out
hairy pussy
dry cunt
issues w/body image (anorexia and/or bulimia)
obsessed w/self-portraits
promiscuous (STDs?)
allows strange men to masturbate in front of her
does not exercise
kisses/fucks like fish
white trash
lives w/parents
epileptic
Crack had read and reread and processed and reprocessed and inscribed and reinscribed the traits hundreds of times, and yet she still couldn’t believe it. How broken and fucked up could this weird broad be? Typical Bakosian femme-doll, though.
Lost in a reverie that oscillated between enmity for the director and would-be empathy for the character, Crack didn’t hear the clapboard. By the time she came back to herself, he was literally breathing down her neck.
She crushed the palmscreen in a fist and snapped into the mind/body apparatus of Poppy Lincoln, whirring like a dimestore stereo.
Beaulac wore a sign around his neck that read:
FUTURISTIC HIGHTOPS
TIGHT RACING PANTS
KEVLAR SLEEVELESS COLLARLESS SHIRT
In reality, he wore flipflops, corduroy slackpants, roomy longsleeved wheatgrown white shirt.
Startled, Lincoln said:
[Deadairdeadairdeadairdeadair.]
Crack couldn’t remember her line.
“Line!” It happened to be the right line.
“Bitch,” griped Roy Poole. He stood in front of Bakos’ star cameraman, striking the same authoritative pose as his boss.
Beaulac took Lincoln by the arms and squeezed her elbows. Hard. “I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said, gazing purposefully into her eyes. “I’m not gonna hurt you. I’m not gonna hurt you. I'm not gonna hurt you.”
The pain was unbearable. A corrosive moan exited Lincoln’s gash, lips opening onto her face like the lobes of a Venus flytrap.
“I will possess you,” whispered Beaulac. Fingernails sunk into her flesh. “I already possess you, my love. Winners take all . . .”
A rivalry had formed three episodes ago between Roy Poole and Seneca Beaulac for the affections of Poppy Lincoln, who had slept with both characters and told both of them that she loved them unconditionally, to the “End of Time.” Insane with jealousy, the faux director dashed forward—he was an older man, early sixties, but he could run all right and even gained speed, despite bowlegs and two halfass knee replacements in the left leg—with the intention of . . . he forgot what his character was supposed to do. Something violent. And he remembered that, whatever he was supposed to do, Beaulac would triumph. Quickly, cleanly, painfully. But what sort of blow or maneuver had he been scripted to execute, if only in a preliminary stage? Nothing came to him. Unlike Sasha Crack, the actor playing Poole, Neil MacCurtain, only skimmed scripts, preferring spontaneity to constructedness (or, as some detractors argued, to quality). He wasn’t a good actor, but nobody was, no matter how much they prepared or practiced, or didn’t. Nobody was really very good at anything in the industry. Talent had died with the modernists. Things got done, though, and dipshits got paid. Nothing else mattered.
Splitseconds before impact, MacCurtain decided that Poole would simply punch the fucker as hard as he could in the nose. He cocked his elbow.
And Seneca Beaulac, cradling Poppy Lincoln like a blunderbuss, roundhoused him on the chin, cracking and dislocating the mandible. Poole went down like an anvil. He struck the floor face first, shattering the mandible. He tried to scream but could only gurgle and choke as gore flowed out of his mouth and fanned across the concrete.
“Ding dong that cunt is dead,” announced Bakos. Then, gesticulating at Beaulac: “Enter her now.”
Martially enraged, as if a neural circuit had blown, Curd broke out of character for the first time in years, eyeballing the director. “Enter her? What kind of thing is that to say? ENTER YOU!!!” His face cracked like a broken thermometer. “You don’t tell me who to fuck, primate. I fuck whoever and whatever I fucking want, whenever I fucking want, you fuckin’ whore!” Normally Curd would have blitzed Bakos, but he knew the director was baiting him—poorly, of course—and he wasn’t about to let Poppy Lincoln off the hook. He dipped her like a ballroom dancer, formally and with crazed exactness, and somehow he managed to work a thumb into her snatch (unscripted). She gasped. Moaned. Poole’s crew moved in closer, choreographing furious beavercams, while Bakos’ crew encircled the standoff and shot footage in BASIK (Bullettime Anamorphic Schizflowed Ionized Ka). Beaulac removed his thumb, flicked moisture from the nail, and pulled Lincoln erect. He ran a hand up her leg (tearing pantyhose) and waist (tearing garter belts) and across her breasts (squeezing, pinching) and finally gripped her neck like the handle of a medieval sword.
The kiss was deep.
The kiss was violent and confused and foul; drool mixed with drool and produced more drool. From certain angles, they looked like they might be trying to eat each other’s heads. And yet an unquestionable erotic quality distinguished the ersatz fuckscene. Nobody could explain it—lexicons had been shrinking at an alarming rate in recent years, prompting the few vocabularians who still had manageable supplies of word hordes at their disposal to wonder if lexicons, collectively, had always-already run on empty—but they couldn’t deny it either. This was the very definition of Curiosa, of Dirty Love. And Beaulac knew it. And Curd knew it. Emblazoned by a corona of epistemological certainty, he proceeded to wow o
nlookers, forcing them in and out of character by sheer masculine (viz., hairdo) prowess and execution and dynamism, and Poppy Lincoln, helpless, devolved into Sasha Crack, devolved into jelly, numb and stupid with ecstasy, on the cusp of reality, of sanity. She could only do her best to endure the melodrama of her lover’s incontrovertible technology without submitting to unconsciousness.
She failed.
Somewhere in the future, the clapboard clapped, and the credits rolled.
Memento Mori
“Sir,” said the concierge, “there’s a problem with your blood.”
“Problem?” Curd licked the wound and rolled a tonguetip across the crown of his teeth, eyes on the ceiling.
The concierge shook his head in grave regret. “The appliance isn’t recognizing your DNA. I’m sorry, Mr. Curd.”
“Curd. You know my name, asshole. Run it again, asshole.” He pressed his fingers into the illuminated countertop.
“Regrettably, I’ve already run it three times, and the appliance only permits one trinity per draw.”
“Fuck the appliance.”
“Yes, sir. Perhaps another sample? One never knows.” A quick smile interrupted the concierge’s aggrieved facade.
Irreality TV Show
It was to nobody in particular that he often made the remark.
CURD
(deadpan)
My only real objective in life is to tell the truth.
Then, invariably, he turned away, beveled.
The clockwork of his selfhood failed to compute the daily grind of technocultural interpellation. This happened more and more. Only one way to negotiate it: madness, fury, and hatred unleashed in no particular direction.
Homicidal gongs banged in the mnemonic distance. Soiled backpackers strummed ruined guitars in the rain, just beyond the Tall Window, on the brown grass, beside the exploded RV. The stench of loss. Love that never was and always will be.
A car door hushed shut. The sound byte produced a moment of canned euphoria.
As his portrayal of Seneca Beaulac failed to garner sufficient ratings—a common occurrence whenever the plague of an economic recession forced viewers to demolish their wallscreens with airhammers, ensuring themselves that, when the recession passed, they would be wiser for it, and they wouldn’t waste their blood on another wallscreen, an act of mental strength that lasted roughly three to four days, post-recession—Curd turned to the specter of ITV (Irreality Television). IBS (Irritable Broadcasting System) agents hounded him on a regular basis, fidgeting/loitering on sets and in dressing rooms, and it was a simple matter of making eye contact. He had his own show by lunch. Ironically, all shows, ITV or non-ITV, were ITV shows; irreality informed the diegeses of every media representation in the wake of The Fjord War, a twenty-year global struggle for the “colonization” of certain Canadian glaciers believed to “breath” mysterious Pleistocene chemicals that “hyperevolved” the human body and mind in controlled climates. But something happened, something bad, and the glaciers died, or revolted, or evaporated, or something. Whatever the case, the catastrophe “penalized” the real world, mutated the metaphysical socioscape, reducing all cultural extensions of that socioscape to an nth degree of meaning. Either subjectivity had schized, or objective reality had schized, or both. Probably both. It didn’t matter. Things didn’t add up like they used to for past generations. Understandably Curd found it troubling that ITV called attention to itself as a uniquely muscled arm of capitalizm, one that wielded a monopoly on the industry, when in fact it was all the same shit, everywhere, on every channel, on every screen, the same uncanny, troubled relationship between cause and effekt, desire and the socius. Curd was sure to let the producers, writers, editors, and directors of the show know how he felt about the discrepancy before signing a contract. His intent was not to enlighten minds, make a statement, or assert identity, but rather to lessen the load of ennui that beleaguered his character(s) and induced massive depressions whenever he failed to lash out at the world and the shitforbrained donkeydicks that populated and ran it.
A squadron of writers mulled over the first line of the show for weeks. What should it be? How might it dynamically capture the attention of viewers while at the same time appearing off-the-cuff, pedestrian, and in some respects altogether bland and irrelevant—the key to any good preliminary hook? This is what they decided on:
CURD
(deadpan)
There are a mass of schematisms, a host
of innate governing principles, that guide our
social and intellectual and individual behavior.
Curd stood in a bathroom, naked, shoulders slumped forward, upside-down triangle of fuzz on the chest, clenching the shaft of a dirty toothbrush as he spoke to the camera behind the mirror. Viewers immediately identified the monologue as plagiarism. At the same time, they couldn’t identify a derivative source. More problematic was that the monologue failed to accomplish its intended goal. The show was cancelled before the first episode had been shot in its entirety. And yet the first episode ran in its entirety, with beginning and middle and end, weeks later. And criticism of the show was slow to unfold. This spatiotemporal horseshit produced hallucinogenic fistfights among viewers and industry-goers alike. Curd escaped the fracas with meager flesh wounds and massive ego wounds.
Within a year’s time, possibly a month’s time, no longer than half a week, or a day—Curd received word that he had won the Pulitzer.
It was the first time the award had been given to an ITV performance in lieu of exemplary investigative journalism or noble media representations of Amerikan life, although the performance arguably fell into the latter category. The judges were inflexible. They hated Curd. Everybody hated Curd. But nobody could deny the artistry of his acting prowess, i.e., his ability to manifest (ir)real subjectivity, i.e., the way in which he conducted/constructed himself as an important and historic figment of reality.
He pretended to be surprised when he heard the news via idiotbox, despite pathological overconfidence in his ability to win the Pulitzer for something, at some point, in some strange matrix of implosion. He thanked Management and told them he wouldn’t be able to attend the awards ceremony, whenever it was, in light of a previous engagement involving “insert bullshit here.”
Origins, viz., Get Me Somebody Who Has Killed Somebody
In Which the Director Insists He Speak to a Man Who Has Killed Another Man, or a Woman, or Whoever, for Whatever Reason, by Accident, on Purpose, Etc., So That He Might Probe & More Effektively Understand (If Not Empathize with) the Posttraumatic Anxiety That Plagues the Killer, and Ultimately So That He Might Discuss & Convey This Anxiety to His Protagonist, Curd, Who Must Kill Somebody in the Next Episode, then Kill Himself & Return from the Dead, & Yet “It Must Be Understood,” the Director Announces Before the Day’s Introductory & Final Shoots, “This Is Not a Zombie Narrative. If Anything, It Is a Narrative About Being & Nothingness, Fear & Trembling, Exile & the Kingdom, Capitalizm & Schizophrenia . . .”
And after Curd rose from the dead, he ran through his lines with more frontal efficacy than he had perhaps ever managed to accomplish in the past.
Inevitably his thoughts turned to history. A hauntology of meaning and resonance struck him like the exclamation point of a teenage hardon. Stillshots, camcorder footage, blockbuster action sequences passed across the egoscreen.
His parents.
They manifested in a Zapruder altverse on a planet that was more earthlike than earth itself. Corroded pinks leaned into aggravated greens. Dad wore the black hat and the black suit and the thin black tie with the black shiny belt and the winedark shoes. Mom wore the retrohousewife thing. They stood in the yard and looked at Curd, faces blurring/burning in and out of focus. Synthetic remixes of Beach Boys harmonies and Alka-Seltzer jingles reified their Dire Presence.
How they didn’t understand him. His artistry. From the beginnings of consciousness, he had perceived himself as a harbinger of true creative exploration, even though
it would be years before he could articulate it. His parents were oblivious, then and now.
Comprehension escaped them like abused housepets.
Their awe of the simple things, the trivial things. Their condemnation of his lifestyle, even as a child.
Fort Mackinac, whitewashed and snaking, stately palisade, rested on the south face of the ripe Michigan island. Erected in the 18th century, it was the site of two seminal battles in the War of 1812 and served as a military outpost until 1985, when the gates closed. Today it served as a museum. Curd visited once a year, every summer, for a week, with the Boy Scouts (Troop 290), who patrolled the fort, standing at various posts, e.g., the gun platforms, making certain tourists didn’t wander “onstage” during canon demonstrations, but generally standing there and looking hazily authoritative, and obtuse, naïve in any case, wearing kneehigh socks, skintight cargo shorts, merit badge sash across the chest, ponytail scarf strangling the neck, and on the head, a weird hat. He and his cronies got it in their heads to steal some goddamn muskets. No particular reason other than Young Male Sociopathy, and they planned it, and they did it, only, as they marched across the parade ground of the fort in broad daylight, cucumbercool, with a seasoned actor’s shiteating confidence, guns slung over their shoulders in handsome burlap sacks, Jeremiah Worst tripped and impaled himself on an errant bayonet. The blade sunk into his chin at an angle and slid through the junkyard of his skull, severing the retinal cords of an eyeball, which promptly exploded from the socket and skittered across the grass, wowing spectators, terrifying them like an epileptic nightmare, and Jeremiah fell to his knees, the blade of the bayonet an antennae poking out of his weird hat, and then he fell onto his stomach, flat, in slow motion (from this point on, violence perpetually, unrelentingly unfolded in slow motion), confused, deranged . . .
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