by Jay Martel
‘Again: I can’t tell you anything else. It’s for your own good.’
‘If they’re already going to kill me for what I know, why not tell me more? They can only kill me once.’
Amanda sighed. ‘Even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.’
‘Try me.’
Amanda chuckled drily in disbelief. ‘I can’t tell you.’
Perry steeled himself and attempted to inject as much menace into his voice as possible. ‘If you want me to keep your secret, I think you’d better.’
Amanda laughed again. ‘Please. You have no leverage here. No one would believe you, whatever you told them.’
Perry realised immediately that she was right and dropped any semblance of intimidation. ‘All right. Then let me appeal to you as a fellow writer.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’ve spent my entire life trying to figure out what happens next. Then this happens.’ Perry pounded the dashboard adamantly, surprising himself with his conviction. ‘I could spend the rest of my life wondering what this was all about. That’s torture. And it’s not like anything I’ve ever written or even thought about. I’ll never figure it out! I’ll never know! That kind of thing could drive a person insane. So you have to tell me. If I’m a bit part in somebody else’s crazy story, I demand to know how it turns out. It’s my right as a writer and as a human being.’
Amanda seemed mildly amused by his diatribe. ‘You have no rights whatsoever,’ she said. ‘And no one’s writing this.’
‘You know what I’m talking about,’ Perry said. ‘You were in my class. You know that you can’t leave your audience hanging for too long – if you do, you’ll make them angry and lose them. You can’t end a movie on a cliffhanger, and you can’t end our relationship on an unsolved mystery.’
Amanda stared at him blankly. ‘Because I’ll lose you as an audience member?’
‘No,’ Perry said, trying his best to sound authoritative. ‘Because you have respect for me as a teacher and, most of all, respect for the basics of storytelling. If you don’t tell me what’s going on, you’re consigning me to a fate worse than death. I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering. Don’t do that to me. I’m begging you, as one writer to another, please don’t leave me hanging.’
Amanda smiled and shook her head. She took a deep breath. ‘I guess I have always wanted to tell one of you.’
‘One of who?’
‘You people.’
Perry frowned, confused. ‘What people?’
‘You know. The people who live here.’
‘Los Angeles?’
Amanda shrugged. ‘Sure. Why not?’
‘OK,’ Perry said. ‘Then tell me.’
Amanda considered this for a moment. ‘OK, I will.’ She seemed surprised by her words and shook her head in disbelief. Perry hunched forward in his seat with anticipation, but Amanda didn’t speak for several moments. Her eyes seemed to focus on a distant point miles beyond Perry’s dirty windshield. ‘I’m not sure why I’m doing this, really,’ she said. ‘I think it’s because... I like you.’ She said these words with amazement, as if each one was an egg plucked from her mouth by a magician. Perry was both thrilled by this revelation and put off by the fact that it came coated in so much disbelief. ‘It’s very odd, but true nonetheless. I like you and I think you have a right to know.’
‘OK, then,’ Perry said, prompting her, but she continued to stare out the window. He lay back on his headrest, looking at the roof of his car. ‘Jesus. This is like a TV show where they leave you hanging so you’ll come back for more.’
Amanda returned her gaze to Perry. ‘It’s nothing like that,’ she said.
CHANNEL 6
THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT
‘Our audiences are too sophisticated for that kind of manipulation,’ Amanda said. She twirled Perry’s car keys on one finger.
‘Cable viewers?’ Perry guessed. Amanda laughed again. The laugh was starting to get on his nerves. ‘Are you going to tell me or not?’
Amanda let the keys fall into her lap. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t know where to begin.’
‘What’s going on in the back room of Galaxy Entertainment?’
‘We’re producing entertainment.’
‘What kind of entertainment?’
‘You might call them reality shows.’
‘Oh,’ said Perry, who couldn’t disguise his distaste of the genre. ‘I don’t know much about that.’
‘You know about this show. It’s happening right now, all around you.’ Perry stared at her blankly. ‘We produce Earth.’
‘Is that on the Discovery Channel?’
Amanda shook her head. ‘We shoot events here on Earth and send them across the galaxy. What you saw was one of our control rooms where we select feeds from millions of different cameras for broadcast. The ‘slug monster’ you referred to is Guy, one of our directors. Guy is a Nakeeth.’
Perry was looking at Amanda for a while before he realised that his mouth was hanging open. He closed it and tried to swallow. ‘A Nakeeth,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Amanda said. ‘Nakeeths have 462 eyes with independent motion, which make them excellent directors.’
‘Makes sense,’ Perry said, his mouth completely dry.
She went on to tell him that she, the Nakeeths and her other co-workers were from an advanced human civilisation spread out amongst hundreds of planets that, like most advanced civilisations, enjoyed nothing more than being entertained by those less advanced.
‘Everyone who lives on Earth has been in a show at some point,’ Amanda explained.
‘Comedies or dramas?’
‘When you tell stories about yourself, are you the hero or the fool?’
Perry thought about this for a moment. ‘The fool.’
‘Then you’re in a comedy,’ Amanda said. Perry stared at her, frowning. He hadn’t realised it until this moment, but he’d spent most of his life thinking he was in a drama.
Amanda talked about her civilisation’s voracious appetite for comedy, and how there was no place like Earth when it came to producing thousands of laughs per second – more than enough to sate the appetite of even the largest of interstellar empires or, as Amanda referred to it, ‘the savviest, richest demographic in the Milky Way’. Galaxy Entertainment, an entertainment conglomerate, used hundreds of high-powered satellite cameras, as well as tiny mobile cameras installed on small self-propelled robots called ‘flies’, to spy on all kinds of activity on Earth and broadcast it across the galaxy. Perry felt compelled to interrupt.
‘Flies?’ he said. ‘Flies are cameras?’
‘Not all of them,’ Amanda said. ‘Just the blue ones.’
Perry nodded as if this explained everything. ‘And we stopped under the freeway because the satellites can’t see through it.’
‘Right,’ Amanda said. ‘It takes about three feet of steel or ten feet of concrete to keep them from picking up anything.’
Perry took a deep breath. ‘And you all really find the stuff that goes on here interesting?’
‘Oh yes,’ Amanda replied. She regarded Perry’s stunned look with bemusement. ‘You really thought no one was watching?’
‘I guess I’d never really thought about it.’
‘You watch each other. We watch you. Some scientists think we’re being watched by a more advanced civilisation in another galaxy. Everyone’s watching someone.’
‘But... it must be incredibly boring.’
Amanda shook her head emphatically. ‘Earth has always been one of our best planetainments. I mean, the events that occur here are so incredible that we used to just shoot them and put them right on the air. We barely had to edit – which is how our viewers like it: raw, unmanipulated footage of terrible and ludicrous behaviour. But then recently—’ Amanda paused, as if trying to choose her words precisely. ‘Well, the ratings started sagging a bit. There’s a lot of competition out there. For a while, we were the only company with a chan
nel devoted to primitive terrestrial life. Now Eden Entertainment has an entire cluster of them in Vega 6, and they’re all getting better ratings than we are. Then there are the winged monkeys on Altair 7, which everyone loves. So we’ve been under pressure to... goose things up a little. When I started working here, the channel had a strict non-intervention policy, meaning we couldn’t mess with the talent. But lately that’s been relaxed, and all the producers have been scrambling for a way to boost ratings. That’s why I took your class.’
Perry had a realisation. ‘The scripts... You were stealing ideas from my class.’
Amanda seemed completely unfazed. ‘Please, Mr Bunt. Like no one in Hollywood ever stole an idea.’
‘Did you use any of mine?’ Perry asked, unable to keep a certain hopefulness out of his voice.
‘Yours?’
‘My scripts.’
‘No,’ Amanda said. ‘We were more interested in your students’ work.’ Perry’s shoulders sagged. His screenplays weren’t even good enough for aliens. Still, he thought, she could’ve gone to any class in the world and she’d chosen his.
‘Well, you must have liked my class,’ he said.
‘Definitely,’ Amanda said, and Perry’s heart tripped. ‘We’ve been monitoring hundreds of screenwriting classes, and yours produce absolutely the worst scripts we’ve ever read. A drug lord assassinated by helicopter! That’s the kind of thing that’s going to get people watching Earth again. Of course, it took a few million to rig a helicopter to do that, but it was totally worth it.’
Perry tried to hide his disappointment. ‘Then why’d you stop coming to class?’
‘We thought maybe you were onto us,’ Amanda said. ‘You talked about God stealing ideas from your students.’
‘Well, I certainly knew something weird was going on,’ Perry lied.
Amanda unfastened her seat belt. ‘I’m going to get back to work. You’re going to keep our secret, right?’
Perry shrugged. ‘It’s no big deal – I hear stuff like this all the time.’ Amanda frowned at him. ‘I’m kidding,’ he said.
Remaining impervious to the joke, Amanda nodded slowly and opened the car door. Watching her step out onto the sidewalk, Perry couldn’t help thinking that despite the fact that she was an alien TV producer exploiting the Earth for entertainment, and that she’d threatened him with disappearance, and that she’d stolen ideas from his class without bothering to steal any of his, she still had the nicest smile he’d ever seen.
‘Wait,’ he blurted.
Amanda paused. ‘Yes?’
‘Would you like to get a cup of coffee sometime?’
She sighed with exasperation. ‘Really?’
‘I just thought—’
‘We can’t ever see each other again. We never even had this conversation. Do you understand?’
‘Right. I know. I just—’ Perry’s voice trailed off. ‘I’ve never met anyone as beautiful as you are,’ he blurted. Amanda turned down one corner of her mouth sceptically. ‘That’s a stupid thing to say, but it’s true. And I really have enjoyed getting to know you. Granted, you have a very strange job, but does that mean we can never see each other again?’
‘Yes,’ Amanda said. ‘That’s exactly what it means.’
Perry nodded back, trying his best not to appear hurt. ‘OK.’
‘OK,’ Amanda said. She turned to get out of the car, then hesitated. ‘Are you sure you understand?’
‘Yeah. Just a lot of information to take in.’
Her face softened. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Bunt,’ she said. ‘It must be. Like I said, you seem like a nice guy, especially for an Earthle.’
‘A what?’
‘An Earthle,’ Amanda said. ‘That’s how we refer to all of you.’
‘Earthle?’
‘Yes.’
Perry grimaced. ‘That makes us sound so lame.’
‘Whatever.’ She fanned one of her hands impatiently. ‘What I’m trying to tell you is that I’m actually very sorry that I can’t come to your class anymore. I really did enjoy it.’
‘Me too,’ Perry said. And then she was gone, the sound of her clicking heels quickly receding into the rush-hour cacophony of Ventura Boulevard.
* * *
That night, Perry ate a Chinese takeaway and watched TV without appreciating the irony. On the screen, a handsome man with a helmet of grey hair was describing a large earthquake that had struck Russia earlier in the day. The late-night news was even more depressing than usual: Food shortages! Fuel shortages! Earth warming! Death imminent! But Perry didn’t notice. His mind was somewhere else.
The Earth was being watched by aliens.
Every crazy person in front of every convenience store was right.
Watching what? Perry stared up at the chipped icicle ceiling. They weren’t watching now, were they? How could they be? What possible pleasure could be taken in watching a man sitting in a room watching another man? But then why would they want to watch anything he did? The only thing more boring than living his life, Perry thought, would be watching it.
He stood and paced like a caged animal. He wiped the grease from his mouth with a paper napkin, opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto his small balcony for the first time since the year before, when he’d attempted to barbeque a hamburger and set off fire alarms throughout the building. He walked to the edge and gazed up at the top of the ridge behind the Wellington Arms, taking in the great mansions of movie moguls, the homes of the men and women who had traded successfully on the dreams and aspirations of humanity without knowing that, to the galaxy, their great blockbusters were less entertaining than his students’ awful screenplays.
He looked up at the sky. It was free of the usual smoky haze and dotted with twinkling stars. No, he thought. It can’t be.
Back inside, he opened his laptop and clicked from one website to another, as if an explanation to what had happened inside Galaxy Entertainment could be found if he looked hard enough. News sites, porn sites, blogs and gossip flickered before him in a meaningless blur of information. On one site, an ad popped up on his screen for surfboards, featuring attractive, barely dressed men and women on a beach. What is the deal with surfing? Perry wondered, before remembering he’d spent a fair amount of time researching surfing on the internet. He’d impulsively made Drake Blakely – the boyfriend of the President’s daughter in The Last Day of School – a surfer without knowing anything about the sport. But his web server’s computers, tracking Perry’s activity, had decided that he was a surfer – not just an internet surfer, but on water as well – and was marketing to him accordingly. As Perry was creating a character for his screenplay, the internet was creating a character for him.
Everyone’s watching someone.
Perry was about to shut his laptop when a voice spoke to him from his computer. ‘What do you want to see?’ He looked down at the screen. A woman with skin that seemed too tight for her body lounged on a pink divan in a zebra-print bikini. ‘I’ll do whatever you want.’ A distant man’s voice responded, and Perry realised that his visit to one of the porn sites had automatically opened a live video chat for men interested in paying to watch a woman with too-tight skin lounge on a pink divan.
Perry slammed his laptop closed. He stood and stepped back onto the balcony, searching the night sky. You’re crazier that we are, he thought, but not by much. He laughed out loud at the insanity of it all – the idea that both Earth’s inhabitants and its aliens had been reduced to nothing more than watching. Let the country descend into ignorance and apathy, let the Earth burn up in its own emissions, let the universe expand into nothingness, just tell us: What’s on TV?
Perry felt somehow lighter and wasn’t sure why. Then it occurred to him: there was no reason to spend time searching for the secret of the universe or contemplating the existence of God. There was someone out there watching all right, but based on their choice of viewing, he was pretty confident that they weren’t any more enlightened than him or an
yone else.
Not that Perry was religious. While his parents were both devout Presbyterians, Perry had a fickle relationship with the Almighty. When he found a belief in God comforting, such as when he was sitting in the back of a discount-airline jet preparing to land, he believed. (It sometimes occurred to him that the God he occasionally prayed to would be foolish if He trusted the wishy-washy faith of someone like Perry, and thus completely unqualified for the omnipotence that being God no doubt required, but this didn’t stop him from issuing such prayers of convenience.) But when Perry wasn’t airborne, waiting to find out about an important job or afraid that he might have a sexually transmitted disease, he wasn’t religious. In fact, he had often viewed his life as nothing more than a nearly unbroken chain of meaningless humiliations. Now, however, he knew that the humiliations were no longer meaningless. He wasn’t a loser; he was an entertainer. They were out there watching.
‘I see you,’ he said to the night sky, and laughed some more. Laughing felt good so he kept doing it. Then he imagined aliens on the other side of the galaxy watching this man laughing for no perceivable reason and laughed even harder. He was interrupted by murmuring and peered down to see an elderly couple sitting on the balcony below, staring up at him with concern.
‘Don’t worry,’ Perry told them. ‘None of this matters.’ And he laughed until the couple rose from their chairs and retreated into their apartment.
Was he going crazy? Perry had to seriously consider this. The sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard were clogged with washed-up screenwriters in stained superhero costumes, posing for tourists and muttering loudly to themselves between sips of gin. Giving into delusions was an all-too-predictable third act for a failed fantasist. And yet Perry had never felt more sane.
Wearing the cleanest boxer shorts he could find, he stood under the fluorescent light in his grey, windowless bathroom, flossing with vigour in case anyone was watching. He was no longer a failure living alone in a cramped dingy apartment; he was a star performing for trillions. He smiled sharply into the mirror. The teeth were a little yellow; he’d have to take care of that.