by Jay Martel
‘Don’t be silly,’ Amanda said. ‘You’re all the descendants of murderers and lunatics.’
‘All of us?’
Amanda nodded. ‘Is that so weird? You read the news. You didn’t think people normally behaved like they do here, did you? The World Wars, the genocide, the massacres, the random killings – more mayhem and violence every day than 3000 channels can show.’ She shook her head in awe. ‘It’s been a history totally different from ours. Our Civil War was a lesson to us, the beginning of a new era in which we learned to channel our aggression into the pursuit of a balanced civilisation. Your history—’ Amanda gazed at Ventura Boulevard, her eyes filled with awe. ‘It’s a history no one could have imagined. Terrible and shocking, beautiful in moments, but mostly tragic and always compelling.’
Perry stared numbly out of the window, his face frozen in a shell-shocked grimace. His mind whirled, struggling to process the onslaught of disturbing information. The Earth was only 150 years old, a theme park that had been turned over to maniacs – thirty-two of which were his great-great-great grandparents. No, he thought, it can’t be true. And yet, why would she make something like this up? What was her motivation? Why lie to him now? He’d forced her to tell him. Unless... it had all been arranged this way. Unless this was just another part of the show. No. It couldn’t be. He knew them well enough to know they wouldn’t like this. Yes, he was being tortured and they loved that, but they liked their torture on the outside where their flies and satellites could see it. To the galaxy, this was just dead air.
They made us.
It explained a lot, actually. Now he understood why Galaxy Entertainment was so cavalier in its decision to destroy Earth. They considered it theirs, after all. Perry had seen enough of his screenplays decimated by the whimsical notions of studio executives to know that there was nothing pretty about being owned. They owned your script and could do whatever they wanted to it. Why should owning your planet be any different?
It also explained the contempt that Amanda and the other executives had evinced for Earth’s inhabitants, the ‘Earthles’. To them, he and his fellow criminal lunatics would always be something less than human. And if Earth’s own tortured (and short) history had shown anything, it was that this superior attitude was a slippery slope towards mass murder.
Finally, it explained the bizarre hoops he’d been forced to jump through. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, Perry realised that Bunt to the Rescue was at best a Sisyphean exercise. A show, even a hit show, would never be more than a postponement of the inevitable. As long as Earth was the property of Galaxy Entertainment, its end was only a few lost ratings points away. It is possible to hold a loaded gun to someone’s head and not kill them; but if you keep it there, eventually you will.
Amanda studied the hardening expression on Perry’s face. ‘I know this can’t be easy to hear—’
Perry spat out a derisive laugh. ‘Oh no. It’s fine. I mean, if the planet has to be owned by someone, at least we’re in good hands. It’s not like we’re being threatened with annihilation by a bunch of aliens who have destroyed hundreds of other planets just like ours.’
Amanda shook her head. ‘It’s not like that. All of us who care about Earth know that a planet like this happens once in millennia. You could put POFs on every habitable world in the galaxy and never reproduce what happened here. It’s magic, pure magic – that’s the only way to describe it. You can’t wreck it all for short-term gain.’
‘Yeah,’ Perry said. ‘Why blow it up before we can do it to ourselves, right? Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of the whole exercise? Because we will do it. You know we will, don’t you?’
Amanda squinted at Perry, trying to read his attitude. ‘You’re being ironic.’
‘Am I?’
‘I think I may have more faith in your planet than you do.’
‘Oh really? That’s rich. Honestly. That is beautiful.’ Perry’s mouth twisted into a sneer. ‘You talk about how sick we are. But this is all you, isn’t it? This is all part of your “balanced civilisation”. Nice balance. You get perfect genes, thousands of channels and orgasm pills. We get suffering, murder and death.’
‘I can’t go into our entire history right now,’ Amanda said, ‘but you have to understand that planets like Earth are the reason we survive.’
‘Then you shouldn’t,’ Perry snapped back. ‘Jesus – don’t you see? You’re the ones who are sick.’
Concern flickered across Amanda’s face. ‘Mr Bunt, you have to believe me when I say I have always been the biggest fan of Earth and its people, ever since I was a small child. I mean, I had posters of it on my wall.’ She took Perry’s hand in her own and smiled. ‘How else can you explain what just happened here?’
Perry gazed at the woman sitting across from him. Only moments before he had held her in his arms and had felt that he knew her. Now he realised he never would. He pulled his hand away.
‘That’s easy. I thought I was in love with you. Though you probably don’t understand that. I’m sure that “love” is one of those terrible animal traits that got left on the laboratory floor.’
Tears filled Amanda’s eyes. ‘It isn’t,’ she said, ‘though right now I wish it was.’
Perry opened the door and stepped out of the van. His feet touched the cracked sidewalk and he started walking, his steps echoing off the overpass. It felt good to be out in the air. That’s something he never thought he’d feel in Los Angeles. He heard her clamber out the door, her feet following him down the sidewalk.
‘Don’t do this,’ she called after him. ‘Mr Bunt, I’m on your side.’
Perry kept walking.
‘Perry!’
The shock of hearing his first name from her lips caused him to stop.
‘If they see you walk out from under the freeway, they can’t edit it. One shot will be us together in the van, the next will be you walking alone. You’re breaking continuity.’
Perry smiled ruefully. ‘Exactly.’
Amanda stepped backwards, as if the wind had been momentarily knocked out of her. She steadied herself. ‘You’re killing the show?’
‘What a shame,’ Perry said. ‘Your big hit. Your on-air debut.’
Amanda’s pale face flushed with hurt and anger. ‘It’s not about that.’
‘I’m sure you’ll be able to find yourself another monkey to torture.’
‘You’re the only one who can stop the finale!’
Perry kicked a loose chunk of concrete from the sidewalk into the gutter. ‘If what you’ve told me is true,’ he said, ‘the world needs to be taken out of its misery.’ He walked away, and this time she didn’t try to stop him.
CHANNEL 24
DEAD AIR
It took Perry more than an hour to make it back to his apartment building on foot. As he walked, yahoos in passing cars yelled unintelligible things at him. He’d found this to be a peril of being a pedestrian in Los Angeles – so few people walked, especially at night, that they became deserving of taunts. Granted, he was wearing a bloody, rumpled Armani suit, which probably didn’t do much to reduce the freak factor.
He arrived at his street and hiked up the steep grade from Ventura Boulevard to the Wellington Arms. He paused halfway to gaze out at the giant round light reflector in the sky – tonight at its full intensity – and the shimmering lights of all the fornicators below, spread out in an endless sprawl towards the horizon. All of them were doing whatever they needed to do to get ready for sleep and another day of entertaining their alien overlords, all of them no less pitiable than advanced Alzheimer’s patients, completely ignorant of who they really were and the imminence of death.
Those alien bastards, Perry thought. Those monstrous shit-fearing fuckphobic freaks. He took some small satisfaction in knowing that by walking off when he did, he had created a terrible story problem for the producers of Channel Blue. One moment, he and Amanda were driving along Ventura Boulevard; the next, Perry was walking alone along the sidewa
lk. Because the decisive moment of Bunt to the Rescue had occurred beneath a freeway overpass in a flyless van, no viewer would ever understand what had happened. And in television, even the television of the future, incomprehension was death.
Perry found his apartment much the same as he had left it. It appeared as if a rodent, probably a squirrel, had slipped in through the broken window and taken a few bites of the cheeseburger he’d left on the table. But that was it. His possessions, his worthless possessions, were all present and intact. He picked up the shotgun and opened the chamber. There was still a shell in it. He laughed, remembering his lame plan to stop the world’s destruction by shooting up an office building.
Why had he ever cared about the world anyway? What was it to him? It had served only as a stage for his humiliation. Not only his, but that of everyone around him. That’s how it had been set up. The dice were loaded, which is why Earth’s residents kept rolling snake eyes. A planet of suckers.
He opened a bag of chips and noticed a few flies buzzing around. No way, he thought. He found another empty jar in the kitchen and methodically trapped all of them. Sure enough, metallic blue glinted from their thoraxes. Of course they weren’t giving up. Hit shows came along once in a blue moon; they were going to do everything they could to keep Bunt to the Rescue on the air, even if it no longer made sense.
What the hell? Perry thought. The audience is out there, waiting. Give ’em what they want.
Perry raised the jar up to his face. The flies immediately ceased their fidgeting and pivoted so that Perry stared straight into their compound eyes. He cleared his throat and smiled.
‘Hello, alien masters, and welcome back to Bunt to the Rescue,’ he intoned, adopting a deep announcer’s voice. ‘Here’s what you missed while Perry Bunt was fornicating with Amanda Mundo under the freeway. Yes, that’s right. A dirty, lowly, stupid Earthle sexing up his producer. Sorry you missed it? I’m sure you are. Because you love the fornication, don’t you? Almost as much as you love the killing. Because your pathetic sterile civilisation has wiped out anything that was vaguely pleasurable about being alive.’
Perry knocked a cigarette out of the pack of Camel Lights, lit it on a gas burner and took a deep drag. Damn, it felt good. Why had he ever stopped smoking?
‘Anyway, Amanda and I fornicated. Did I mention that already? And it was fantastic. And after we fornicated fantastically, there occurred something that we call in the screenwriting business a “major reversal”. I learned that this whole planet is nothing more than a glass bowl stocked with insane goldfish for your amusement. You might have trouble understanding this, seeing how you’ve always thought of me as something less than human, but I found this news very disturbing. For many reasons. Not the least of which was the fact I thought I was in love with a woman who believes this depraved experiment is justified.’
He took another drag on the cigarette. ‘But I digress. Where was I? Right. After the fornication and the discovery of this disturbing news, Amanda and I had an argument – no physical violence, so I don’t think you would’ve been interested – and I quit the show. That’s right. I will no longer be rescuing your—’ Perry took another drag, recalling the exact words. ‘Entertainment And Recreational Terrestrial Habitat. So go ahead and blow it up. In fact, if I could, I’d do it for you, as long as I could take every one of you with me.’
Perry hunched in close to the jar, cigarette smoke fogging the glass. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he saw the flies take tiny steps backward. ‘Because if there were any justice to this universe, you would each die a horrible, painful, lingering death. Nick Pythagorus, if you’re watching, thank you for the plaque, but you should be playing with toys, not planets. Nine years old or not, I’d love to kick you in your smirky little face right now. Marty Firth, you no-talent brown-nosing hack, I’ll kill myself on the air if you let me take your Orbys and shove them one at a time up your ass. You’re the real parasite – that white thing in your ear should have you removed. Elvis, I was happier when you were dead, you fat freak. You don’t cancel me, OK? I’m cancelling you! And I never got a chance to tell you: I hate your music. You sound like a drunk hillbilly with the hiccups. As for your entire so-called “advanced civilisation”—’ Perry glanced down at the flies.
They lay on their backs, legs in the air.
He’d been officially pre-empted.
Perry unscrewed the lid and poked at the motionless flies with a chopstick, but they were unquestionably victims of dead air. He poured them down the garbage disposal and made his way to the bathroom, where he peeled off his filthy suit and took a shower, moaning as the water came into contact with his battered body. He dried off, put on whatever clean clothes he could find, ate another bag of chips and collapsed onto the fold-out bed.
He woke the next morning to the sound of his ringing phone. It took him a while to realise that he was back home. His first sensation was relief. This lasted for about two seconds before he remembered what Earth stood for. The ringing continued. He groaned and put a pillow over his head until it stopped. Unable to fall back asleep, he slowly sat up, feeling every bruise. The phone began ringing again. Exasperated, he picked it up.
‘What?’ he demanded.
‘Perry,’ a female voice said. ‘Perry, do you have any idea how long I’ve been trying to get a hold of you?’
‘Who is this?’
There was a stunned silence on the other end of the line, the silence of someone completely unused to their voice being unrecognised. ‘It’s Dana. Fulcher.’
‘Oh.’ Perry hadn’t recognised his agent’s voice simply because she never called him directly. The irony that it took the end of the world for his agent to call him was not lost on Perry. ‘What do you want?’
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Busy.’
‘We didn’t know what happened to you. We thought you might have run off and joined Buddy.’
Perry was sure he’d misheard. ‘Who?’
‘Buddy. The leader of the new cult all the crazies are joining? It’s all over the internet.’
‘I haven’t been on-line lately.’
‘Perry, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on. Are you with another agency?’
‘No.’
‘Then why haven’t you taken my calls?’
‘Because I don’t have the time.’
‘I’ve got an offer for your pitch.’
‘My pitch?’
‘The Last Day of School.’
Perry couldn’t help laughing. He couldn’t believe he’d ever made a living thinking up such dumb ideas. ‘Thank you, but I’m not interested.’
For a rare moment, Dana Fulcher was stunned into silence. ‘Not interested?’
‘No. You were right. It was desperate.’
Perry could almost hear the gears turning as his agent tried to comprehend words she’d never heard from a writer’s lips. ‘Well, I have some other news: Dead Tweet is back.’
Perry frowned. ‘Dead Tweet is dead. Del Waddle killed it.’
‘Del Waddle’s the one who’s dead. Car crash. They found him off Mulholland Drive.’ Perry’s mind whirled. The bullet that bounced off of Amanda’s force field must have killed him. And since no one would’ve wanted to explain how the billionaire shot himself while trying to kill two of his party guests, they faked up a crash.
‘Huh,’ Perry said.
‘Very tragic, of course. But with every ending is a new beginning, circle of life, you know, hakuna matata and all that.’ Dana paused for maximum dramatic effect. ‘I’m putting Tweet back in play.’ When Perry didn’t respond, she continued confidently, ‘Del was the only one standing in its way – everyone else over there loved the project. I’m getting you in the room with the VP of Development tomorrow.’
‘Don’t bother,’ Perry said.
Dana emitted a guffaw of disbelief. ‘Perry, I’ve been literally killing myself to make this happen.’
Normally, Perry would’ve l
et his agent have her ‘literally’. But today was different. ‘No, you haven’t.’
‘What?’
‘If you were literally killing yourself, you’d be dead.’
Dana Fulcher clucked her tongue. ‘Perry, I know what “literally” means.’
‘No. You literally don’t. But I’ll give you an example: I am literally hanging up.’ He hung up the phone and, with one smooth jerk, yanked the cord out of the wall. It felt so good he couldn’t believe he hadn’t done it years ago. His cell phone began ringing, vibrating itself across the kitchen counter. Perry picked it up, walked out to his balcony, and threw it as hard as he could. He thought maybe he heard it shatter on the roof of the house below, but he couldn’t be sure.
Since his kitchen was nearly empty and he was famished, he drove the Festiva to his local diner and gorged himself on eggs, bacon, pancakes and black coffee. A few dozen other descendants of criminals and lunatics were packed into the booths and tables around him. A television in the corner had the sound turned off, and showed the grim visage of the anchor of the evening news. You knew something was seriously fucked up when the evening guy was on in the morning. Sure enough, the chyron below him read: ‘Middle East Peace Talks Cancelled’. Perry sipped his coffee. Channel Blue’s producers had called off the computer virus, thus putting the conflict that would thankfully never be known as ‘The Stripper Pen War’ back on track. It would never be known as that, of course, because no one on Earth would be left alive to write about it.
How did he want to spend his last couple of weeks alive? Perry considered this question. By different paths, he kept arriving back at the same answer: with Amanda. Despite everything, he couldn’t escape the memory of holding her on the floor of the cable service van. And the tears in her eyes when he’d left. Dear God, he thought. I’m like a Jew in love with Eva Braun. He shook his head. It could be worse. If the world wasn’t ending, he’d torture himself like this for years.
He was signalling the waiter for his bill when a beautiful, blue-eyed brunette approached his table. Though stylishly dressed, her eyes were swollen as if she’d been crying and there was a red welt on the right side of her jaw. ‘Perry Bunt?’