by Jay Martel
‘I’m sorry, Amanda. What is it?’
‘Was Molina’s head cut off by the main blade or that little whirling thing in the back?’
Before Perry could react, Brent Laskey adjusted his backward baseball cap with the cocky confidence of an auteur. ‘The main rotor. My guy spins the helicopter upside down, flies it six feet off the ground and whack, no more head.’
Amanda smiled and made a note on her pad. Et tu, Amanda? Perry thought. He glowered at the class. ‘The question is really beside the point, since no one in the history of the world has ever used a helicopter to decapitate someone purposely, let alone flown one upside down.’
‘That’s what made it so awesome,’ said Heath Barber, another Fauxrantino. ‘It’s completely new. You literally nailed it, dude.’
As Heath and Brent exchanged a high five, Perry fought back extreme annoyance. In addition to encouraging Brent’s suspension of logic, Heath had flagrantly engaged in Perry’s linguistic pet peeve: the use of ‘literally’ to mean its opposite. Normally, Perry would have corrected this, but the conversation was already running away from him, devolving into a debate on whether you could fly a helicopter upside down. To his further irritation, this was the liveliest discussion of the term.
‘It’s physically impossible!’ Perry interrupted. ‘It breaks every rule of aero-fucking-dynamics, all right? It can’t possibly happen!’ The students stared at him, and he was immediately aware that he was talking too loudly. He cleared his throat and attempted a disarming smile, which came off more like an incongruous grimace. ‘It’s always fun to speculate, of course, but let’s move on.’
Given his certitude on the subject, Perry was more than a little surprised when Brent Laskey strode into the classroom the next day and dropped a newspaper clipping on his desk.
‘I guess that settles it,’ the student said.
Perry picked up the clipping and read this headline:
COLOMBIAN DRUG LORD SLAIN BY HELICOPTER
INVERTED CHOPPER DECAPITATES KINGPIN
CHANNEL 2
THE STRANGE THING ABOUT PERRY BUNT
At the end of the day, Perry gathered up his things and was almost out the door when he noticed the newspaper article. It was still lying on his desk where Brent Laskey had dropped it, transforming his 10 a.m. class into an ordeal. Perry’s students couldn’t seem to get enough of their teacher eating his words, piling it on to mock his discredited belief in believability. Only Amanda Mundo stood back from the feeding frenzy, looking on with an expression of concern that Perry perceived to be pity, which was somehow worse than if she had joined in his humiliation. Now alone in the classroom, he picked up the offending clipping and, after suppressing the urge to hurl it into the trash, tossed it into his briefcase.
Perry made his way from the college’s main building through the ochre air to the faculty parking lot, where he found his Ford Festiva dusted with a thin layer of ash. It was the penultimate day of August. Perry referred to August as The Apocaugust, the month that saw Los Angeles shrug off its veils of grass lawns, pleasant gardens and swimming pools and reveal its true nature as a searing, Old Testament desert. Blistering dry summer heat gave way to wildfires that filled the San Fernando Valley with acrid smoke, turning sunlight a sickly yellow and giving every resident – man, woman and child – the phlegmy hack of a chain smoker. Accountants received grim portents of their mortality.
Perry started up the Festiva, used his wipers to clear the ash from his windshield, and wedged himself into rush-hour traffic.
He was eager to get home and write.
Teaching isn’t all that bad, he convincingly told himself and the few friends who still returned his calls. Yes, he had lost his girlfriend, his BMW and his home in the Hollywood Hills. Yes, he was more likely to be called by a debt collector than his agent. But Perry Bunt hadn’t given up. In his darkest hours, pausing from reading the terrible screenplays of his students to watch a cockroach scuttle over bits of petrified food on the matted grey carpet, he would tell himself that he would find some way to write his way out of this jam. As he’d told Amanda Mundo in one confessional moment, he continued to believe in the limitless power of his imagination and the transcendent powers of creativity. Despite a run of failure that would’ve made Job switch careers, Perry Bunt was still stalking the Big Idea.
From his first memory, Perry had carried around the feeling that he was destined for greatness, and no amount of failure would disabuse him of this fanciful notion. After reading the news that aerial artist Philippe Petit had walked a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center, six-year-old Perry had tied a rope between the chimney and a tree in the garden and started across. He always felt that it was the sound of his mother shrieking his name that had caused him to fall, but it’s doubtful that he would have made it in any case, even with the fishing rod as a balancing pole. He broke his right leg, and fractured his skull. Lying in traction in the hospital, two metal plates in his head, Perry was mystified that his daring feat hadn’t generated any media attention.
Encouraged by his parents and teachers, Perry gave up the tightrope for the typewriter and became a prodigy of narrative. For his graduate project in college, he’d written an earnest 612-page novel reimagining Don Quixote as a shell-shocked war veteran on a road trip across America, and it had the distinction of being read nearly all the way through by his faculty advisor.
Subsequently, Don Hoder was published by a small college press and nearly read by several critics, who pronounced Perry ‘promising’ and ‘a novelist under the age of thirty to watch’. Since these accolades did little to pay off his student loans, Perry had moved to Hollywood and, by twenty-eight, had become successful enough to acquire debt on a scale that made those loans look like microcredit.
Now he was still in debt but devoid of prospects. Still, Perry Bunt clung even more tenaciously to the belief that he was destined for greatness, unequivocally certain that one day, against all odds, he would regain his confidence and become more successful than ever. This, Perry knew, was the Underdog Story, another of the seven story templates from which all Hollywood movies were constructed. But, again, that didn’t stop him from believing it.
The strange thing about all of this was the fact that Perry Bunt was right: he was destined for greatness. Stranger still was the fact that the Earth’s survival depended on it.
CHANNEL 3
THE LAST DAY OF AUGUST
Perry made his way home to a shoddily built stucco apartment building above Ventura Boulevard named, with unintended hilarity, the Wellington Arms. Temporarily perched on the side of a steep hill overlooking a major earthquake fault, the crumbling Arms was one of many apartment complexes in the area that offered shelter to those who were either down on their luck or too young to know the difference.
In the small studio apartment that served as kitchen, bedroom and study, Perry made himself a sandwich and turned on his laptop. The month before, he’d had what he once would have called a guaranteed sale (back when things sold at all), a Big Idea so commercial that no studio executive would be able to resist its shapely, crowd-pleasing contours. It was an action-thriller entitled The Last Day of School, the story of a team of teenaged terrorists who infiltrate the First Daughter’s high school to kidnap her. The only man who can stop them? The math teacher, a former Navy Seal, drummed out of the service years before by whom? The President himself.
Perry had wanted to be an author, but the public preferred movies to books, so he’d become a screenwriter – just before the public gave up movies for watching videos of cats playing the piano. Yes, he’d succeeded in chasing his culture downhill, always a step behind. In The Last Day of School, however, Perry believed that he had found the biggest of all Big Ideas, a story that would not only turn out to be internet-proof but writer-proof as well. First of all, it had teens, oodles of teens, more teens than he could think up good names for. Teens had become very important to the movie business, since they seemed to be the on
ly demographic with the inertia to escape the gravity of their small screens and actually transport themselves to a cinema. The Last Day of School would not only bring in the teens, but present them with better-looking versions of themselves screwing and killing each other. How could it fail?
Tonight, however, Perry was having trouble mustering the self-delusional momentum that every obscure writer needs to overcome the fact that no one is interested in reading him. He had made the mistake of mentioning the idea for The Last Day of School to his agent, Dana Fulcher of Global Artistic Leadership Limited, and the pause as he waited for her response, which he recognized as the sound of someone looking on their call log for someone more important to talk to, had severely battered his confidence. Her delayed, obligatory ‘That’s fantastic, Perry, can’t wait to read it,’ did nothing to soften the blow of that deleterious silence. Perry avoided writing by checking his e-mail repeatedly, marvelling at the technological advances that had turned the once daily disappointment of not receiving mail into thirty or forty disappointments a day. And then there were the numerous phone numbers on which he received no voicemails or texts.
It now seemed like there were infinite ways to not get good news.
As Perry stared once more at his empty mailbox, an ad for swimsuits popped up onto his screen: tanned, handsome surfers and beautiful models lounged on the beach. It was almost like his computer was taunting him.
He turned away from his computer and considered the large stack of unread student screenplays that hovered by his desk. Caught between his own script and those of his students, Perry opted for a different but just as futile activity, the evening masturbation (one of only two daily activities he enjoyed, the other being the wake-up edition). In this he had no lack of encouragement, for the internet was set up like a lawless frontier town where even banks peddle prostitutes and contraband out the back. To this extent, his computer was much more efficient as a portal for pornography than as a screenplay typist. The range of choices, in fact, was paralysing. When Perry finally settled on a website with an acceptable balance of smut and attractiveness, he was interrupted by a knock at his door. Staggering across the room while pulling up his pants, he peered through the peephole at Noah Overton, a young, well-meaning neighbour with the kind of random facial hair that Perry was certain that people in their twenties grew just to bother him.
Noah held a clipboard and stared at the peephole with an air of righteous calm.
Perry tiptoed back to his desk and sat quietly. If he opened the door, his neighbour would request a donation to save the oppressed, the war-torn, the endangered, the globally warmed or all of the above (i.e., a Chechnyan polar bear), brandishing a brochure that declared: ‘The Free Must Remember the Oppressed’ or ‘The Earth Has a Fever and We’re the Virus’, and Perry would once more be forced to face his inadequacy as a human being, not to mention the disappointment in Noah’s large brown eyes and the inevitable lecture: I’m sorry, Per, that you don’t think the [name of species or nationality] is worth saving, because I do. I happen to think the whole planet is worth saving. And that’s what we’re talking about right now – the whole planet is going to die unless all of us start working to save it, one [name of species or nationality] at a time. Will you join me? Starting today? Come on, Per.
Perry shuddered at the thought of this. How can you save the world when you can’t even save yourself?
Searching for something to distract him until Noah gave up and moved on to the next door, Perry’s eyes lit on Brent Laskey’s newspaper clipping. He picked it up and read it. It was a pretty straightforward news story, though not particularly well written. Perry considered the possibility that Brent Laskey and his goateed, baggie-shorted cohorts had fabricated the clipping as a practical joke on their teacher.
Noah’s knocking had ceased. Perry opened his laptop and typed ‘death by helicopter’ into Google and discovered in .17 seconds that the story was all over the news sites. As far as it was possible to tell, it seemed completely legitimate.
This caused Perry to wonder. While he had admonished his students repeatedly over the absence of reality in their writing, maybe he was the one who needed a dose of it. Maybe what he considered to be incredible was in fact happening somewhere on the planet at this very moment.
To test this theory, Perry typed the words ‘magic monkey’ into Google. One of the worst scripts of the term, written by Heath Barber, involved the discovery by zoologists of an African ape that could grant wishes. Within seconds, Perry was reading news reports about an orangutan in Borneo, who villagers claimed had saved their village from a mudslide. Heath couldn’t have copied this idea, either; the news item was dated two days after the script had been read in his class.
Perry proceeded to enter key words from three other scripts: ‘murderer clown’, ‘deranged physicist’ and ‘breakfast cereal superpowers’, and they all retrieved news reports that vaguely mirrored the bizarre events he had criticised his students for conceiving.
The clincher was Honk If You Hate Jesus. This was a dreadful screenplay by Doreena Stump, the born-again schoolteacher. It told the story of an evil atheist, who tormented a small Midwestern town by driving his Volvo around with a bumper-sticker that read ‘Honk If You Hate Jesus’ until, finally, the righteous townspeople rose up, pushed the Volvo into a ditch and, in a scene that would make a slasher film-buff blanche, tore the evil atheist limb from limb. Perry found a related news story from the month before in which the bumper-sticker had read ‘Honk If You Love Satan’ and the atheist had been merely maimed, not killed.
Perry shut his computer and sighed. It was only a matter of time before all his students came in wielding newspaper articles to justify their awful scripts. He would have to come up with a response before the next morning’s class.
* * *
The day that changed Perry Bunt’s life, but not, incidentally, the fate of the Earth, began the same as most. Perry rose, showered, dressed and, while brushing his teeth in his filthy, windowless bathroom, did his best to buck himself up, postulating that maybe today would be the day he would ask out Amanda after class. She would not only accept, but carefully lock the classroom door, throw him down on his desk and... Perry had orchestrated many different scenarios around this basic premise, but he wasn’t picky. Any one of them would do. Stranger things have happened, he thought, conveniently forgetting that it’s the strange things you want to happen that never do.
He left the Wellington Arms and drove to a nearby convenience store for coffee. It was here Perry had the first of the many uncomfortable encounters that made up his day, with a homeless man named Ralph. Ralph, standing in the searing sunlight next to the convenience-store entrance, wore a large, stained, down-filled jacket and a hat sporting two cup-holders for beer (currently empty). He gripped a handmade cardboard sign that read: ‘They’re Watching’, the jagged scrawl of the penmanship more than adequately reflecting the insanity of the message.
Other than making a left-hand turn at a major intersection, getting past Ralph was the scariest thing Perry would have to do today. He usually succeeded in circumnavigating him while avoiding eye contact, but today was different. Just when Perry seemed to have a clear Ralph-free passage to the door, the homeless man stepped into his path. Perry had no choice but to look into the man’s face. His scraggly beard and overgrown eyebrows framed two slate-blue, piercing eyes, the eyeballs of choice for Siberian huskies and visionary lunatics. The heat also made it impossible not to smell Ralph, and this was not a pleasant experience, unless you relished the combination of alcohol, cigarettes, perspiration and faeces.
Ralph spoke, unleashing a froggy voice that seemed to emerge from a giant reservoir of whisky at the centre of the Earth. ‘Ralph knows the aliens are watching,’ he said. ‘How about you, Buddy?’
Perry put a hand to his chin as if to suggest that he was taking the question seriously, all the while wondering why only crazy people and highly paid professional athletes referred to themselves in
the third person.
‘You don’t say,’ he said.
Ralph nodded frantically like a dog with a jar of peanut butter stuck on its muzzle.
‘I’m telling you, Buddy. They use us! They use us for their own fun!’ The hairs that jutted from Ralph’s nostrils like mutant whiskers quivered in excitement. ‘We have no choice but to play their little games!’
Perry nodded slowly. Then, in a sudden surge, darted around Ralph and through the double glass doors. Once safely in the store, he paused for a moment, basking in the air-conditioned cool. Made it. He found his way to the coffee dispenser, filled a cup the size of a small child and stepped into line at the counter. He glimpsed briefly at the tabloid magazines stacked next to the register, one of which boasted the headline: ‘Secret Government Films Reveal: Elvis Sighted on the Moon’.
Is it any wonder there are so many crazies? he thought.
Perry peeked out at the parking lot and was relieved to see that Ralph had stepped away from the door to harass a couple walking towards their car. Seizing the moment, he threw down two dollars, scurried out of the store, jumped into the Festiva, and sped away, like a thief fleeing the scene of a crime.
By the time he strode into his 10 a.m. class, Perry had enough caffeine pumping through his bloodstream to pretend that he was happy to be there. Amanda’s presence in the front row helped.
He began the day’s discussion by quickly recounting his internet discoveries the night before.
‘So, from now on,’ he said, ‘I will no longer tell you that you need to ground your scripts more firmly in reality.’ Sardonic applause filled the air. ‘Reality has obviously become fluid at this point and is of no use to us. I wouldn’t be half-surprised to find out that Elvis really was on the moon.’ Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Amanda looking surprised. She probably doesn’t realise I’m joking, he thought. ‘I will, however, continue to ask you to make your scripts more believable to me. And that’s not going to change.’ A few students emitted sarcastically loud moans of disappointment.