by Jason Arnopp
There’s no question that I should have been in love with Bex. And I always loved her as a person and as a friend. But my overriding urge has been to fuck her brains out. The more unobtainable she was, the more she became an achievement I wanted to unlock. A VIP lounge I could never access. Yeah, grim. I used her as a character in my work to cast me in a more favourable light. Because if someone as funny and cool as Bex gave me the time of day, even to the extent of living with me, then how bad could I be? Thank God Bex didn’t read those books, or she might have been creeped out by this flatmate who seemed so smitten.
I’ve never felt capable of love, or really understood it. My dad laid down the template: never look back. Move on, cold as Christmas. Don’t get tied down, don’t even think about what you’re leaving behind.
In the cavernous archives of my mind, my dad is the faintest presence. Barely a shadow. Sometimes I catch an evocative smell or feel a resonance I suspect is linked to him, because I can’t place it anywhere else. Or I’ll detect negative character traits in myself that I can’t ascribe to Mum. But that’s it.
Oh, he tolerated having one kid – especially a golden boy like Alistair. But when the second screaming bag of shit and piss popped out, I was the straw that broke his back. Rationally, I may now suspect that’s not the whole truth, but emotionally it’s too late. I’m programmed. You can rationalise a baseball bat, but it still drastically changes the shape of your head.
Three years, eight months and seventeen days after I was born, Dad stole off towards the sunset, never to be seen again, at least not by us. Mum burned all photos of him on the garden barbecue when I was four. I still remember how that smoke smelt and what it did to the back of your throat.
I swear my first memory is the noise our mum made the day she realised her husband wasn’t coming back. She locked herself in their bedroom and made these slaughter noises. The sound of animals being carved up alive.
Alistair and I were in the living room, hearing all this. I was too young to understand what was going on, but I clearly remember him giving me this look before he went off to knock on the door and see if Mum was okay.
Oh God, that look.
Hear that? it said. Do you hear our mother howling her head off? You made that happen. You’re the reason our dad left.
This baseball bat is my earliest memory.
Family life only rode downhill after that. There were some good times, but mostly Alistair resented me, and I suppose I resented the extra time he’d had with Dad. One night, when Mum had sunk a bottle of red, she yelled through my bedroom door, saying how she wished she’d never had me. I was seven.
I could barely remember Dad’s face, but apparently I didn’t need to. All I had to do was look in the mirror. Naturally, out of me and Alistair, I had to be the one who resembled him.
And my mother could barely look at me.
I was all those barbecued photographs made flesh, back to haunt her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Inside this howling body tube, this roaring tunnel of moulded white plastic, there’s far too much peace. Way too much alone time.
Can nothing be done to make an MRI scanner less of a coffin?
Last night, I didn’t have the Maria dream. I didn’t wake until the morning, with Bex’s bare heat curled around me. Happiness has been a stranger for some time, but this morning he and I were on nodding terms.
Those fat lines of coke called my name from the bathroom sink. With one sweep of my hand and a spin of the tap, I washed them down the plughole. Straight away I felt the addict’s pangs of regret, but I’m determined to straighten up. To gain true perspective on everything. It’s time to stop taking the easy way out.
So here I am. Doing what the doctor ordered, with a rubber panic-bulb in one hand. Wanting, needing to rule out the possibility that something’s wrong with my brain. But a full-body scanner is a tough place for a man who likes to forget. All I can think about in here, in the grip of cocaine withdrawal, are bad memories and death. Guilt and shame.
Last summer. Alistair becoming more terse with each new voicemail.
‘Jack, I really think you should come back to me.’
‘Jack, I don’t know what you’re doing, but we need to talk.’
‘Jack, what the hell’s wrong with you?’
Endless emails from him too, most of which I ignore. Some of which I read through slow ketamine eyes. Fast cocaine eyes. Heavy-lidded bong eyes, on the other side of the cosmos.
Delete, delete, delete.
The nurse’s soft voice mercifully interrupts. She speaks into my headphones from out there in the world of the living. ‘You’ll feel a scratch on the back of your hand. Just a little imaging solution, as we discussed.’
If there’s a hell, it’s full of people locked in coffins, alone with their thoughts and their worst memories.
My mother sitting at a slatted wooden garden table. Her hand shaking as she lights a cigarette.
Me, driving through rain, Alistair yelling abuse.
As a needle pricks my vein, I start to freak inside this cacophonous tomb. I want to squeeze the panic-bulb. I want the Zippo, but it’s in the jacket I was told to remove.
The nurse must spot my restless, twitching feet, because she returns to my ears: ‘Just another twenty minutes, Mr Sparks. Please, try to go to your happy place.’
I don’t think I have a happy place. This possibility makes me ache.
I try to imagine sitting on a beach. Which, given the noise levels, inevitably becomes a beach next to a construction site.
I change channel to sit in a noisy pub with unlimited free drinks and multiple lines of cocaine chopped out on the bar. I imagine being loaded, buzzed up, feeling like The Man.
That doesn’t do the job either. Which cranks my anxiety, until I realise a pub is not my happy place – it’s my escape route.
Bex’s face takes centre stage. No beach, no bar, just our Brighton flat. We’re on the big fat yellow sofa. She holds my hand and stares into my eyes, then tells me everything’s all right.
Through the year of Drugs and beyond, Rebecca Lawson has been my anchor. My flesh-and-blood cocaine.
But how I’ve used her. I’ve seen her, over the years, as a body to be conquered, as a crutch, as someone to manipulate.
I’m going to make it all up to her.
Hey, maybe this could be something solid, something secure.
Maybe, even if I can’t feel love, this could be an actual, proper relationship.
‘Thank you very much for coming in,’ says Roger Corman. I’m literally on the edge of my seat in his San Vicente Boulevard office, wondering what he’s about to tell me.
When I came out of the med centre, unsure how to feel about the three-day wait for results, I was surprised to find a voicemail from Corman’s PA, asking if I was available to meet. I phoned back fast. The octagenarian is a legend in independent film-making, having been responsible for over four hundred movies, which often tick the horror genre box, like Piranha (1978) and Children of the Corn (1984). He gave the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Jack Nicholson their first breaks. He’s also a marketing genius, hailing from that generation that really knew how to use trailers to sell a picture, regardless of whether everything in those trailers was in the finished article.
In person, he’s genial and dapper in a black suit and white shirt. His New Horizons Picture Corporation was one of the companies I’d emailed about the video, but the only one that has asked me in for a meet. Everyone else has now responded, on the phone, by email or in person, with variations of ‘No, we did not make the video, you gigantic freak.’
After all this searching, will it turn out that Roger Corman shot the damn thing?
‘I’d like to discuss this YouTube video with you,’ he says across his desk, voice soft. He’s writing notes on a yellow legal pad. Reading upside down, I can see the capitalised heading ‘GHOST VIDEO’.
I grip the arms of my chair as he says, ‘This thing has gained a
great deal of hits on YouTube. It’s a very powerful piece of film-making, don’t you think?’
I can control myself no longer. ‘Did you make it?’
‘Oh,’ he says, with a chuckle. ‘Oh. I was about to ask you the same thing.’
What I feel here is a bizarre relief. ‘No, I kind of found it. Or it found me. Someone put it on my YouTube account.’
‘I see. So you don’t own the rights to it?’
‘No.’
We keep talking for a while, but I can tell that, from Corman’s point of view, the meeting has already served its purpose.
Reading that legal pad upside down, I see he’s written ‘PUBLIC DOMAIN???’
* * *
I stride into the Culver City experiment room with my head held high. Buoyed by a weird combination of sex, Roger Corman and the death of a recurring dream.
All the way here, I’ve pep-talked myself. I can’t control all the bad things I’ve done these last few years, but I can control what I do now.
I can still turn this day around, and every other day that follows.
I can get to the bottom of what’s going on with the video, with the Paranormals, maybe with my own paranoia.
I can make things work, really work, with Bex.
Everything’s fine and that’s a fact.
Astral soon dents my titanium. He takes me aside and says, ‘That girl Bex, man . . . Is she with you?’
My reaction is pure knee-jerk. ‘Yeah, she is.’
‘Cool,’ he says, nodding furiously. ‘Hey, you did good there, buddy.’
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I’ll treasure that note of surprise forever.’ Then I give him just enough cold, dead eye contact to communicate that this subject is closed. Of course, I know Bex isn’t with me, but there’s no way I’m letting Astral barge in.
I sit and fume over his impudence as the others crack on. Pascal musters the gall to speak at length about how quantum physics has made time travel all the more likely. ‘It’s possible,’ he says, ‘that what we see as ghosts are in reality time travellers. It could be that séances are a safe way for them to communicate with us.’ This notion is greeted by much earnest nodding and stroking of chins – as is Ellie, when she broaches the idea that this experiment could potentially attract a ‘genuine passing spirit’.
These sycophants congratulate Astral on a social media competition he’s running where the winner gets a follow-back from him. An idea he copied from me. The team are also ‘excited for’ a local radio interview Astral and Elisandro did about the experiment. An interview I never knew was happening and which probably doesn’t even mention me.
Checking my phone, I discover that my social media accounts have all disappeared.
Just . . . gone.
When I try to access them from my phone, the log-ins no longer work.
Speechless, I stare at the screen. I will it to change. A brand-new suspicion blooms: can this sabotage be sheer coincidence, the day after I refused to boost the Paranormals’ profiles any further? Is Pascal the friendly computer genius avoiding eye contact, or am I imagining that?
I cycle through apps and sites, hitting the same buttons again and again, but the results stay the same. The cornerstones of my online profile have been demolished. Only YouTube remains.
These people leeched me for followers, many thousands of followers, and now they’ve shut me down. Anyone invested in following the experiment can only get the skinny from them. The Paranormals jumped up on my shoulders, then gagged me. The one guy in the experiment who’s going to question it all.
I’m falling through a void. My cheeks are red-hot chilli peppers.
Everyone else keeps on delivering monologues about themselves.
I am Mount Vesuvius, circa ad 79.
Just as I’m about to let rip and roast them, that’s when the table starts to move and the face appears in mid-air.
* * *
‘A face? What do you mean, a fucking face?’
Here’s Bex on a high stool beside me at the Sunset Castle’s Tiki Bar, out by the pool. She’s demolishing a pina colada, still very much in holiday mode. Not to mention WTF? mode, now that I’ve mentioned the face. The moving table means nothing compared to the face.
‘And in mid-air?’
I’m still rubbing my bruised jaw as I nod, then tell her what I’m about to tell you.
Lisa-Jane is saying how she once sent Marilyn Manson a vial of her piss, when one corner of the table rears up all by itself.
The words curl up and die in Lisa-Jane’s mouth.
You can sense our collective pulse.
‘Okay,’ Astral intones, a tremor in his voice. ‘Let’s just keep on talking, guys.’
I abandon my chair and squat down, trying to find an angle where I can see everyone’s knees at the same time. I observe how the table shifts from standing on two legs, to one, back to two.
Catching my perplexed expression, Lisa-Jane sneers. ‘Time to open your mind, huh?’
‘If opening my mind involves trusting you,’ I say, ‘then forget it.’
Her nostrils flare. ‘Meaning . . . what?’
‘LJ,’ snaps Astral, more imperious by the minute. ‘Let’s stay focused here. What did you do when the pee overflowed on your fingers?’
I sit back down beside the others. All our fingertips rest on the table’s surface as it rises and falls in unexpected places. When one leg lands heavily on Howie’s alleged gimp foot, his howl of pain is lost among our excitable whoops.
Yes, our whoops. I kind of get swept away. Might as well enjoy this bullshit while dismantling the Paranormals’ reputation. Do the others look delighted because their specially doctored magic stunt table is functioning well? Yes. Could we achieve this same movement on any table, anywhere? No.
This particular table must conceal small motors. Tiny gyroscopes. Remote-control receptors, accessed by someone’s hand buried in their pocket. Or it’s controlled by an outside accomplice, monitoring everything through a camera hidden in one of Pascal’s gadgets. We live in an age where you can use a smartphone to switch on your central heating from the other side of the world. Or, according to Howie, induce a fatal insulin overdose via Bluetooth. Making a table move is no kind of stretch.
Lisa-Jane nods over at the camcorder: ‘Please say we’re rolling.’ Pascal nods.
I’m pretty sure Ellie sees the face first.
I think she says, ‘Oh my God, guys, guys . . .’, but it’s hard to be certain because the moment is so very shocking and she’s soon joined by everyone else gasping, swearing and fumbling for their phones.
Chills rush up my arms. This floating face is looking directly at me.
It’s suspended high enough so that most of us have to crane our necks. Same size as a human head, and with a human face, but genderless and strange.
I mean, it has two eyes, two ears, a nose and a mouth, but the nature of each element keeps changing. Slowly, fluidly, continuously. The eyes switch from brown to blue to green. The ears, nose and mouth change size and shape. Even the colour of the skin is restless, darkening and lightening.
The only constant is the attitude this apparition gives off.
It grins.
Not what you’d call a benign grin, either. This grin is more ‘Yeah, I’m here, motherfuckers, and now the fun starts.’ The eyes gleam. Mimi looks as pleased to see us as the Paranormals are to see it.
Is this supposed to be the same Mimi we created? It doesn’t even look like a woman. Although, thinking about it, we never bothered to discuss how Mimi looked. We just wanted results. Bragging rights.
Our first instinct is not to communicate with this entity, but to capture it.
‘Sweet mother of God,’ says Astral, stabbing sausage fingers at his phone screen. ‘I need to get a picture to Fox News.’ Elisandro tilts the camcorder upwards on its tripod, homing in for Mimi’s close-up. Pacing around in circles, Ellie says she’s going to call American Idol host Ryan Seacrest.
I couldn
’t say how I feel. My stomach does a figure-eight. What is this thing?
It’s the same push and pull of emotion I’ve felt while writing this whole damn book. That same internal war. As everyone else’s phones make their digital photo-snapping sounds, I don’t know where to look. I’m transfixed by the floating face, while trying to work out where the holographic projector must be. Even though holograms only work in dark rooms with special lighting rigs. Could this be some new, cutting-edge holo tech? Is that even possible? What kind of hologram were Tupac and Michael Jackson?
If the Paranormals have seen this spectre a hundred times during dress rehearsals, their acting is once again exemplary. While they gush and drool and photograph the face, I’m almost more tempted to photograph them, to document how genuinely blown away they appear.
When I get it together to take my own photograph of Mimi, I discover what the others are realising. When I tap the screen to zero in on the face, the little focusing square doesn’t materialise. You’d swear there’s nothing there to focus on . . .
‘Fuck,’ breathes Johann, goggling at his screen. ‘It’s not showing.’
I snap Mimi, then join everyone else in examining our camera rolls.
We’ve taken a whole bunch of pictures of the ceiling and the ceiling alone. Elisandro’s shoulders heave as he reviews the camcorder footage, which doesn’t show the face either. He then channels all his zealous steam into an attack on me. ‘There you go, Mr Big-Shot! That’s why there aren’t more real ghost videos.’
Astral beats him to the punch. ‘Yes, some of these things don’t come out on film.’ He says this unhappily, because he now has nothing to send Fox News.
The Mimi face beams down, as if enjoying the friction.
‘Why’s it looking at me?’ I wonder aloud.