by Jay Martel
Perry, sitting in the passenger seat, interviewed Noah exhaustively on all the organisations he worked for and the just causes he believed in until Noah interrupted. ‘Man, what’s with all these flies?’ He picked up a street atlas and swatted at a fly on the dashboard.
Perry gasped and yanked the atlas out of Noah’s hand. ‘Don’t do that. The flies are good. You have to trust me on this.’
Noah shook his head. ‘Per, I feel like you’re going through something really heavy right now. You want to talk about it?’
‘I want to talk about you and all the work you’ve done for this planet.’
Noah sighed. ‘Look, it’s OK. I’ve done counselling at rehab centres.’ He glanced meaningfully over at Perry. ‘I’m serious. You can tell me what you’re on.’
They pulled into the nearly empty parking lot of the church. While Perry was interested in helping Noah load more dinner trays into the van, Noah thought Perry’s enthusiasm might be put to better use as a volunteer at the shelter and directed him across the parking lot.
The shelter for displaced persons at St Jude’s occupied the basement of a block-like annexe that was built onto the side of the hundred-year-old sanctuary in the 1970s in an ecclesiastical splurge of cement and stucco. Perry followed a ramp down the side of the building and pulled open a heavy metal door. The first thing that hit him was the smell, an odd combination of cleaning solvents, body odour and human filth. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw a large, drab, windowless room filled with benches and mostly inert bodies, some sitting up at tables over metal trays of shapeless food, others lying down on the floor next to shopping trolleys full of what appeared to be garbage. One side of the room opened onto a kitchen, where volunteers stood at a steam table serving food to a long line that shuffled slowly by. At a nearby table, a group of leathery men, dressed as if they had walked by an exploding thrift shop, gazed at Perry standing in the doorway, a blank stare from dull eyes. The room was a violent, mocking contrast to the sunny afternoon outside.
Perry couldn’t help but smile. This is the perfect place, he thought. They’ll see Earthles helping other Earthles. If this doesn’t make them realise what good people we are, nothing will.
‘Shut the damn door!’ a large man wearing a ski cap yelled from a bench.
Perry hesitated, unsure if the man was yelling at him.
‘The flies, man! You’re letting in flies!’ The man was right: to Perry’s great joy, flies were zipping around him through the doorway. He shut the door, but slowly.
After asking the servers at the steam table, Perry located the volunteer coordinator, Father Michael, a handsome young priest wearing a short-sleeve tunic and carrying a clipboard. It was Father Michael who had expanded the meals-on-wheels programme into a fully-fledged soup kitchen. While the other priests at St Jude’s were initially dubious about Father Michael’s enthusiasm for helping the poor, it had paid great dividends for the parish. While membership at other churches had dwindled in recent years, overall attendance at St Jude’s had actually risen as the homeless filled masses after breakfast and before dinner.
‘Excuse me, Father.’ Perry navigated across the busy dining area and approached the young priest. ‘Noah Overton said I should talk to you. I’d like to help.’
‘I’m sorry,’ the priest said. ‘We don’t start volunteers on Thursdays. Come back on a Monday or a Wednesday.’
Father Michael clearly considered their discussion over, but Perry continued standing in his path. ‘I really want to help and I’m here today.’
The priest shook his head. ‘Unfortunately, I’m extremely busy right now – I’m literally going out of my mind.’ While Perry fought the urge to offer the priest an exorcism, Father Michael said, ‘You’ll have to come back’ and slipped through a door marked ‘Staff Only’. Above the door was a TV mounted on brackets. The sound was off but Perry saw a sombre news anchorman and the words:
SPECIAL REPORT – CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Perry fought the urge to panic and desperately surveyed the room around him. He noticed a muscle-bound man with a buzz cut mopping the floor.
‘Excuse me,’ Perry said. ‘If there’s some other work in the shelter you need to do, I can take over here.’
The man eyed Perry suspiciously, then continued mopping. Perry noticed several flies landing on a nearby table. ‘You must really care about people,’ Perry said to the man.
‘What?’ the man said.
‘You’re a volunteer, right?’
The man chuckled derisively. ‘I busted some guy in the face,’ he said. ‘I was either down for assault or community service.’
‘Oh,’ Perry said. ‘But you are still here helping, aren’t you?’
The man glared at Perry. ‘You queer or something?’
‘Uh, no,’ Perry stammered. Sweat sprang out of his forehead. ‘I just wanted to point out that it doesn’t matter why you’re here... you’re still doing a good thing... making that floor so... shiny and... bright.’
The man brandished the mop like a club, waving it in Perry’s face. ‘Get the fuck away from me!’ he snarled. Perry jumped back and quickly made a wide arc around the man towards the main entrance. Here he fixed on an old woman, gnarled and leathery, attempting to push a shopping cart loaded with bags through the metal door. One of the cart’s cracked wheels had become caught on the threshold. Perry rushed to her assistance.
‘Let me help you with that,’ he said. He took hold of one end of the rusty cart in order to pull it through the door.
‘Don’t touch my cart,’ the old woman said.
‘I’m just going to help you get it through the doorway.’ Perry gently tugged at the cart.
‘Nooooo!’ The old woman yanked the cart away from Perry with all her strength, slamming it backwards into the doorjamb and causing it to topple over onto one side, sending myriad shopping bags onto the floor of St Jude’s Shelter for the Displaced.
* * *
Amanda carried the container holding all her Earthly possessions down the hallway towards the elevators, closely followed by two security guards. While passing a screening room, she heard hysterical gales of laughter and poked her head in the doorway. Dennis the receptionist and an associate producer rocked convulsively in their seats. On the screen, Perry Bunt ran around a dark room chased by an angry old woman. The old woman, amazingly fast for her size and age, was occasionally able to lunge at Perry and deftly pummel him with her fists. Encircling this chase were rowdy homeless men and women, cheering on the spry senior.
‘What’s going on?’ Amanda asked.
‘Hey, Amanda.’ Dennis gasped for air and wiped tears from his eyes. ‘They were going through the selects this morning and came upon that Earthle we brought in here. Remember? The one who had a show for five minutes?’ Amanda nodded her head, watching as Perry slipped on a food tray and fell to the floor of the shelter. Dennis paused to chortle ecstatically, then continued. ‘He’s totally hilarious. He thinks he can stop the finale by showing us that Earthles are basically good, but—’ Dennis fought back another fit of laughter. ‘But the more he tries to do it, the more abused he gets!’
Months later, when Amanda would think back to the last days of Channel Blue, she would often ask herself when she first felt what might be called love for Perry Bunt. This is the moment she often came to: seeing Perry on his lost humiliating crusade, running at full speed from a crazy old lady. It made no sense to her in the moment or even later, but there it was. She wasn’t coming down with a case of Satanism. She wasn’t going crazy. She simply cared deeply about the fate of an Earthle risking everything to save his planet. And like every great producer of entertainment, she had the audacity to think that other people would, too.
‘How long have we been tracking this feed?’ she asked the associate producer.
‘Half an hour,’ he said. ‘A technician sent it to me a few minutes ago.’
‘Are you going live to air?’
The associate producer gla
nced away, clearly uncomfortable. ‘Not sure Mr Pythagorus will go for that.’
‘Do it,’ Amanda said.
The associate producer nervously smoothed his hair with one hand. ‘I’d like to. I mean, this is good stuff. It’s just that you and this Earthle are kind of on the outs right now.’
Amanda glanced over at her shoulder at the two guards, who kept a respectable distance in the hallway. ‘I’m still your boss,’ she said.
The associate producer shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Amanda. I’d love to help you out, but I can’t.’
* * *
After several volunteers, Father Michael, and two other priests pulled the old homeless woman off Perry, it fell to Noah Overton to escort him off the premises. When they walked out of the basement door, Perry paused, surveying the sky and the dingy walkway. Where are the flies? Panic gripped his stomach. Where had all the damn flies gone? Had they stopped watching?
‘I’m sorry, Per,’ Noah said. ‘I know you really want to help, but you were making everyone really uncomfortable in there. You have to go.’
Perry fought down his agitation. If he was going to show the sympathetic side of Earth, he needed Noah’s help. Jesus – his neighbour was practically the poster boy for hopeless causes. Now more than ever he needed to appear sane and rational. ‘Noah, you have to listen to me,’ he said. ‘If I can’t show that human beings are capable of being good, the Earth is going to be destroyed.’
Noah’s great brown eyes were tinged with sadness. ‘It’s hard to see you like this.’
‘If I gave you a jar full of flies, would you carry it around with you?’
Noah shook his head. ‘Why would I do that, Per?’
‘Why have all the flies been following me around?’ Perry took a deep breath. It was now or never – he had to tell him everything. ‘Because they’re cameras.’ He fixed Noah’s doubtful expression in the steadiest gaze he could muster. ‘An alien race has been watching Earth for entertainment, but they’ve decided to blow us up because they’re sick of watching. The thing is, they’ve only been watching the worst of the worst. We have to show them what we’re capable of!’
Noah sighed. ‘Promise me you’ll get some help.’
Perry finally saw what he’d been searching for: a blue fly perched on the wall nearby. He smacked the wall and nailed it. ‘You see?’ Perry said, holding his hand up to Noah’s face. ‘It’s a camera!’
‘No, Per,’ Noah said softly. ‘That’s a fly. A very dead fly.’
Perry examined his palm and saw what appeared to be an unappetising smudge of wings and fly guts. ‘You have to look at it closely. I swear to God, there’s a camera in there somewhere.’
Noah turned away. There was nothing more he could do. ‘Goodbye, friend.’ With a final mournful glance, he entered the shelter and left Perry outside, wiping his hand on his blue velour pants and staring at the sky.
CHANNEL 17
THE PROPHET
Perry crossed the church parking lot, scanning the air for flies. A passing nun glanced at him furtively and bustled by. He could only guess at what he looked like in his dirty blue tracksuit, bruised, beaten and haggard after two days without sleep. But he didn’t care anymore. The naked burka girl pens had been sent out; a crisis was escalating in the Middle East and the Earth had only days before Nick Pythagorus’ machinations reduced it to rubble.
Perry didn’t see any flies but he had to assume that someone up there was still watching. He had to because it was Earth’s only hope. And if they were watching, he had to do everything in his power to be perceived as the kind of person that you wouldn’t want to kill. In other words, he had to do some good – as quickly as possible. Now that the homeless shelter was off-limits, that meant helping someone out here.
He looked around the half-empty parking lot. Birds sang in the trees and a passing car radio played salsa music. It wasn’t exactly a war zone. Still, there had to be something he could do.
He heard shouting and turned towards it. A run-down park bordered the parking lot. At one end, a small cluster of homeless people sat on decrepit swings and playground equipment, eating boxed meals from the shelter. They watched as two men shoved each other, scuffling and shouting among the wood chips. One held a cupcake that the other struggled to reach.
Perry trotted across the asphalt and entered the park, accelerating into a run as he approached the fight. Without hesitating, he grabbed the scraggly man holding the cupcake.
‘Stop this!’ he shouted. He took the cupcake out of the man’s hand and threw it as hard as he could. It sailed like a frosting-covered comet over the playground equipment. ‘No one gets the cupcake!’
Perry’s actions were so decisive that both men dropped any pretence of aggression and stared at him, confused. Perry, in turn, felt an obligation to explain his sudden act of pastry vandalism.
‘There’s no more time for fighting. We have to start being good to each other or the world is over.’
‘Because of the aliens?’
Perry turned to the man who’d been attempting to grab the cupcake and realised, to his shock, that it was Ralph.
In the hours since Perry had seen him, Ralph had somehow deteriorated back to his dirty, shambling homeless configuration – and then beyond, to an even more dilapidated state. It was if he had left Perry on Ventura Boulevard and rolled up and down a hill of garbage for the next five hours.
Perry had decided that he wasn’t going to waste any more time talking about aliens to people who thought he was crazy to begin with, but since Ralph had brought it up, Perry nodded. Ralph’s eyes grew wide. It was as if two puzzle pieces in his broken brain had slid together.
‘It’s not a show,’ he muttered.
‘No,’ Perry said.
‘That’s what you were trying to tell me. Right, Buddy? The aliens are crashing our planes because we’re not good to each other!’
‘Basically, yes.’
The other homeless regarded Perry and Ralph sceptically. This seemed to spark some fire in Ralph, who turned to the scraggly man he’d been fighting for the cupcake and strode directly towards him with his arms outstretched, like an old-fashioned movie monster closing in on a victim.
Perry cringed. But to his surprise, Ralph threw both arms around the scraggly man.
‘I love you,’ he said. After what seemed like minutes to Perry and probably hours to the scraggly man, Ralph released him, turned to the rest of the group and pointed emphatically at Perry: ‘Listen to this man! He knows what’s going on!’ The homeless stared at Perry, who was still trying to catch up with this odd chain of events. ‘Tell them, Buddy,’ Ralph urged. ‘Tell them how we’re all going to die and how it’s not a show. How the aliens are going to destroy the Earth.’
The motley group waited for Perry to speak. Perry had never enjoyed public speaking – it was one of the reasons he’d become a writer. It was always so much easier to seem witty when you spent hours writing it beforehand. When he’d been a successful screenwriter, his awkwardness in meetings had been considered charming; the way he sometimes paused for an uncomfortably long time before speaking was thought to be an endearing eccentricity that only confirmed his status as a savant. After his fall, however, these same qualities were viewed as terrible liabilities and proof that the failure of his screenplays was no accident.
‘Well,’ Perry said after a long pause. ‘It’s true.’
‘Ralph told you!’ Ralph bellowed to no one in particular, then turned his intense blue eyes back on Perry with disconcerting focus. ‘What can we do, Buddy? Tell us! What can we do to save ourselves?’
‘Help each other,’ Perry said. ‘Just... try to be decent and... unselfish.’
‘No one gets the cupcake!’ Ralph yelled ecstatically.
‘No one gets the cupcake,’ one of the other men repeated, as if to see how it sounded coming out of his mouth. The other homeless continued to focus their attention on Perry, their scepticism now tinged with interest.
‘It may even be too late,’ Perry said, warming up to his speaking role, ‘but we have to hope that it’s not. We have to hope that the aliens are still watching us, and that everything we do or say will have a bearing on whether they decide to destroy the Earth.’
As he spoke, he noticed that more homeless from the shelter were approaching, attracted by the commotion.
‘Tell us more, Buddy,’ said one leathery woman to Perry. ‘How did you find out about these aliens?’
‘Yeah,’ said a toothless man. ‘Do they have those disgusting big white heads?’
‘No,’ Perry said, and proceeded to tell the growing group how he had found out about Galaxy Entertainment and their plans for Earth. Sometime during his story, the bells above them tolled for seven o’clock mass. No one in his audience made a move towards the church.
By the time Perry had recounted his journey to the shelter, the crowd listening to him had tripled. The men and women leaned forward, straining to hear him, occasionally yelling, ‘Louder!’ to Perry or ‘Shut up!’ and ‘Quiet!’ to someone else. Ralph worked the periphery of the crowd, bringing listeners in closer to Perry and fielding questions. Perry noticed Father Michael standing towards the rear of the crowd, his arms folded across his chest.
During one pause in Perry’s story, the priest cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, ‘It’s not too late to attend mass! If you’re interested, please join us in the main sanctuary!’
‘No thanks,’ a homeless man replied. ‘We’re listening to Buddy.’
Father Michael, unfazed, shouted again, ‘Please come and join me in a prayer for peace! The Middle East needs our prayers tonight!’
‘We’re not playing with that God stuff anymore!’ Ralph shouted back. ‘There are aliens trying to destroy the planet! We have to stay out here and help each other.’