by A. S. Patric
Success breeds success, and it was an orgy at the House the likes of which hadn’t been seen outside of trout farming. In all of us he bred that frenzy to live beyond the pale. We’d started teeming with his star-spangled frenzy day and night. Everything we dreamed was desperate, with divine images of our lives becoming somehow significant. Our mundane daydreams flashing with the discharges of apotheosis.
On the day of his first great speech to us, the quail eggs stayed in our mouths for half an hour. We were supposed to imagine our brains cooking them.
‘I want to see microwave eyes,’ he boomed into the theatrette as he strode the boards around us. ‘If you can’t find the heat in your soul to cook a little quail egg, how will you ever project yourself into the racial history of our species? How can you light up those ten-by-twenty-metre screens around the world? Project your desire. The heat of your blood is an electric current. Unleash the energy of your furious heart. Microwave that egg. Cook it!’
One of the girls swallowed her egg, and screamed afterwards when it did something unpleasant on the way down. She ran off the stage of the theatrette wailing and waving her arms, reminding some of us, still standing on that stage with eggs in our mouths, of Lavinia from Titus Andronicus—post chop.
She was back the next day, escorted by GiGi Tickle to the centre of the dining room—asked to stand and wait for another quail egg. All the other aspirants were about to act out a Roman scene in the time of Nero, where we had been starved for a week so the Emperor would see how we’d act if we were suddenly brought into a feast. The Patriarch was a remarkably convincing Nero.
She opened wide with eyes closed for the quail egg, yet none of us was surprised that Quail-lude had returned. Everyone knew we were fucking crazy as well. We were ready to chant ‘tweet, tweet, tweet’ like Tibetan monks gone mental with bird flu. We were ready to microwave eggs with our eyes. We wanted to learn how to fly. Wanted to find freedom— otherwise, like this swallower of quail eggs, we were free to go back to the suburban graveyards we rose from and reanimate our zombie lives any time we wanted.
Quail-lude got her stage name that day. We weren’t allowed to use our real names in Elysium House, so we gave each other nasty nicknames instead. We were waiting and hoping for our performance names.
After Nero’s lunch was finished, and the men had divested themselves of wine-stained togas and military cuirasses dripping with gravy, the women of their coloured translucent robes and Egyptian make-up, smeared with various sauces, Quail-lude removed that egg out of her mouth—dropped it—and we all watched it bounce. Hard-boiled! Doesn’t matter how she did it. She fucken did it. The grace of the gesture, the way she took the roar of applause. She deserved a name.
Then Emperor Nero waved down the clappers, whoopers and whistlers. We didn’t know what he would do. We watched him walk to her in his one-man parade, stop, and inspect her. She lifted her chin a most graceful millimetre and awaited his judgment. Then in an elegant half-bow he took her by the tips of her fingers and kissed the back of her hand. He introduced her to all of us while raising her arm, a princess about to assume a throne.
‘Jean Sommerway,’ he announced in the Voice of the Theatre. We all whispered it with the glory of celebrity passing through the red carpets of our hushed hearts, popping with a thousand flashes.
It was no longer Quail-lude. It was Hard-boiled Jean Sommerway. She could never again be thought of as Suburban. Because one thing you’ll never understand is how much we despised everything Suburban. You could call someone a mother-arse-fucking, father-cock-sucking suburbanite, and it would only be the last word that would hurt. The Suburban was some kind of poison of the soul that would seep into your head at night and kill your dreams forevermore, leaving you with a head full of dead flies.
A week later we went out onto the roof and stood on the edge of the three-storey country manor. Below were the rose bushes. A full array of all the colours of the rose, and lush green lawns sprawling out to the tennis courts, pools and croquet grounds, to eventually fall off the edge of the world that was the coast outside Warrnambool.
Each of us went out to the ledge above the roses and needed to convince everyone watching below on the rolling green that we really were going to do it—jump to our deaths. One of us had to talk them down, and be equally convincing in their belief that suicide was imminent.
‘I do not believe you!’ roared up the lion of the leotard. ‘And for that, you will never be forgiven. There will be no redemption for the lie that drowns the heart in tears of boredom. The lie is a disease of the blood that writes itself out in a fever of sincerity and conviction. This is what you’re searching for. Now you must allow the disease to destroy the body of this previous life. To kill the conception of truth. You must let the lie consume you so that I can believe you are a god come to Earth to split my head open with love. I might be the grandson of a Sydney laundress, but I must believe you—no matter what you say. Belief is your soul, yet God is blind and deaf. The only witness is the audience. There is no-one else to listen to your prayers so you’d better believe in every word you cast down to me. I must believe you or your soul is lost.’ The Patriarch stepped back, lifted his head, opened his arms with a lift of his chest and bellowed, ‘Begin!’
So of course, what with the recent triumph of Hard-boiled Jean and rumours of a role lining up with Russell and Nicole, an aspirant threw himself into the yellow and orange roses. It went wrong for him, whatever he was dreaming it would do for his fame. Maybe he imagined himself surviving, rising, victorious. A different kind of hard-boiled.
A few weeks later there was a tombstone that unfortunately bore the birth name of its body, Kenneth Kittle. The dates, and a Suburban font for ‘rest in peace’. Family and friends crying, saying they didn’t see it coming, and why didn’t he talk to someone, and he seemed such a happy lad, piling cliché upon cliché on his casket like flowers purchased from a 7-Eleven.
Everyone at the House refused to admit they’d even talked to Rose-diver. That we’d been in a scene with him. That we’d talked ambition into the new blue light of dawn breaking through the frosted morning glass of the windows.
Some of us thought he’d looked beautiful, broken amongst the flowers, a red rose resting across his left eye, even if it seemed just another cliché on reflection.
‘What Rose-diver didn’t understand,’ said a saddened Patriarch, ‘is that reality is the enemy.’ Having first extemporised some Shakespeare for this sad son of Shepparton, who, alas, had too much altitude. He walked among us, Henry before Agincourt, gazing into our eyes as though we were pitiful lost children who had somehow wandered into his thirty-room mansion, and all he was hoping for from us was the mere possibility of vision.
‘What Rose-diver couldn’t see was that reality is not your friend, as he so naively thought, diving into its fierce embrace. What has reality to tell us that we don’t already know from the mouths of a thousand mooks spoken each a thousand times to us through ringing ears? Even my grandmother, a lowly laundress of Sydney-town, knew this well enough to urge me to look beyond the trivial.
‘That we are born to die, we know. That we eat and shit, we know. That we love and fuck and produce squirming little creatures bearing some passing resemblance, we know. What else? What can they tell us of our ambition to ascend to the parapets of paradise, to find the man with the plan, and hold him to account for all this reality-wasted flesh?’
He was choked up with some kind of deep anguish that sad day. He stepped up onto a chair, and then onto a wobbling dinner table, glasses beginning to topple and fall. Crashing. Shattering at our feet and resounding with apocalypse.
‘We must look beyond reality and pull what we want from him into this world by force. We must reach into his nebulous heart and yank out a piece of everlasting love for ourselves. There is a destiny only for those who can tear out a few pages of history.’
Everyone knew the Patriarch was a descendant of a laundress. It didn’t make a lot of sense t
o many people that the ‘grandson of a poor Sydney laundress’ should figure as often as it did in his famous monologues and soliloquies. It did when you unveiled a little of his personal mythology, which he’d never speak about directly. It was whispered that his grandfather was Errol Flynn. Robin Hood, Captain Blood, Captain Courtney, George Armstrong Custer, etc, etc, etc. You could see the resemblance—in the right light. He also had that pencil moustache. So there was that.
And it was true (or at least certainly possible, which even the most sceptical would have to concede) that Errol was his grandfather. Who could deny the potential for a squirt of semen beside wooden buckets full of soapy water? Young Errol wasn’t just that—a messy bit of biology. He was a thing unforgettable. He was the one wild moment in an ordered, respectable life. He was the force of fate come to rap on your head—knock, knock, knock (whispering ‘tweet, tweet, tweet’ ever after). In a life of fish-and-chip newspapers he was a pristine stanza of raw poetry.
The Patriarch’s grandmother whispered these secrets into her beautiful descendant’s fresh, clean ears. She poured Errol Flynn into his blood because what he was, beyond the thirty seconds of barely felt pleasure, was a heady whisper into the damp ear of a heavy-breasted woman twice his age, who couldn’t help believing everything the fifteen-year-old blaze of fire whispered through her head—lightning-lit heavens parting for glimpses of rushing paradise.
‘You do not prepare to act. You are acting all the time. Those mooks out there in the “real” world are acting as well. Only difference—no imagination. That’s what they come to us for. For the imagination to conceive of their own lives beyond the basic bullshit biography of it.
‘Beyond the getting up to go to work and putting on their shoes. Beyond coming home and talking about sore feet. They come to us for the imagination they need to live their own lives. For the romance when they’re fucking their wives for the thousandth time. For a bit of a laugh and a chuckle when the brown man of the desert gets arse fucked for his oil. For a happily-ever-after when they’re looking at the North Pole melt.
‘They come to us for the imagination. It doesn’t matter if it’s truth or lies, a man seeing love in his soul mate anew, or some corporate pirate trumpeting democracy and freedom for the brown man. It’s imagination that guides us in everything. Without imagination, money is just paper. Without imagination, history is just murder. Without imagination, man is just a monkey.’
GiGi Tickle moved around the mansion and the grounds with the air of a stratospheric being about to be shunted out to another glittering global event. Even when she was running everything in Elysium House hands-on, from who’d be cleaning out the gutters and mowing the lawns to who was staying in which room. She auditioned prospects and she did a lot of the cutting as well.
More than any of that, she drew the magnificent robes of their personal mythology around the grounds and rooms of their storybook mansion. Those who weren’t there might have seen it as a case of The Emperor’s New Clothes, yet they would never have felt the vast movement of that majestic fabric pass across their faces, perfumed as it was with the flickering daydreams of the cinema generations. There were those of us who saw the Empress pass, and like children, pointed out to the embarrassed adults sceptically re-arranging their glasses, that the clothes existed, that we saw them, and they were everything an archangel tailor might have intended as worthy of endless nights of rhapsody and pleasure in Olympus.
People went on calling GiGi Tickle the Patriarch’s mistress. Saying she was a whore he’d fallen in love with at some point in his heyday. That was the story. The entire apocrypha purported that she’d been an LA prostitute he’d picked up at Ciro’s on the Sunset Strip, stolen from Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra after the two argued over who had rights for the night. Martinis were spilt. Immaculate Italian suits were torn or at least creased. This while the Patriarch was world famous as Elysium Zen on one of the most popular sci-fi shows ever made. Privately, he and GiGi were married. The Patriarch only ever called her the Mistress. She never called him anything except the Boy.
GiGi Tickle, mistress and whore, as full of lies as all that turned out to be—she was still the reason for anything at all being established out there on the Warrnambool coast. It all came from Elysium Zen, the show that made the Patriarch.
The movies (and the millions) came afterwards, as did the theatre (and its own successes), the return to Australia, and the creation of Elysium House (never known as anything but ‘the House’ to those of us who came to break through whatever had imprisoned us within ourselves). It was still all about Elysium Zen. It was the creation of that one persona. We’d all heard about the character and the show, but of course none of us had seen either until we got to the House.
Elysium Zen revolved around a scientist in the year 2012 who becomes a witness to the death of our planet. Not only our species, but the whole planetary experiment gone wrong. Professor Elysium Zen lives on a lunar base supervising the construction and flight preparation of The Moth, an AI-equipped ship with a crew ready to independently circumnavigate the sun for the first time. He watches with silent pride as The Moth sails away from him and his construction team at the moon base. There is global fanfare on the planet below, but catastrophic market crashes due to exhausted fuel supplies trigger a chain reaction of collapse and violence during The Moth’s historic six-month journey around the other side of the sun.
From the moon, Zen watches the world below descend into complete chaos. One beautiful image shows us the planet, half in darkness half out, the darker side flashing with nuclear explosions. Zen watches, one perfect sky-blue eye lit up with clear sunlight, the other dark with sleepless shadow, watching for days—not moving. The planet below him flashing again and again until it’s no longer blue. Earth goes white with ash.
After these many days of silent vigil, Zen falls into bed and a long fever of dreams. When he wakes, he knows how to combine frequencies of light and sound, beamed through particular crystals that had only recently been found on the moon. He sits in a glass chamber he has built. He travels into the past.
From here on in, every episode deals with Zen trying to avert the catastrophe he has just witnessed. In the next episode he goes back and kills a particular US president and comes back to find a new future, but one extended only by ten years before the same result. Always into the past to change something and always back to the moon to examine the outcome of his experiment. Sometimes it’s even worse. But he keeps trying, looking for some way to avert the seemingly inevitable fate of global suicide. He takes back technology and science, he kills other important figures like Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ, but nothing works.
In the final, unaired episode, creator Kris Kilderry has Zen swallow some of the moon crystals that have allowed him to move back and forth in time, to kill himself, but we are left with an image of blue lights in the night sky which may be Elysium Zen looking down on the birth of the world, or just the fade-out of his dying face in close-up as we roll to final credits.
And of course GiGi Tickle wasn’t a whore in real life. She played a prostitute on the show who Zen saved from rape and murder, and got the world an extra fifty years because of a genius son she produced from a night with Elysium Zen. (GiGi Tickle, the character, was the only role the Mistress ever played.) This was the final aired episode. The one the network chose to finish with. Zen loves his son and fifty years doesn’t seem enough. He goes back to tampering with the past. And things get worse. No matter what Zen does now, he can’t get the human race beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis—then in the recent past of Kris Kilderry’s life at the time of production.
The show fell into a black hole of contractual deadlocks between the creator Kris Kilderry and the bankrupt Shooting Star Studio, gobbled up by various other studios, passing contracts down from one incarnation to the next, year after year, like Chinese whispers. All this was wrangled with the Patriarch himself, concerning his own contractual rights after the show’s initial televisio
n screening. Every few years there were rumours of reruns, DVD releases and remakes. Decades of these rumours but nothing eventuated. All anyone knew of the show anymore was its reputation as the greatest sci-fi series ever made and Elysium Zen being up there with Captain Kirk, given grit by real tragedy.
So there were twenty-one forty-three-minute episodes, eighteen of which had been seen by the general public in the early sixties. Only months after cancellation, the last three episodes unaired, Kris Kilderry swallowed handfuls of sleeping pills. He was still alive. In a coma in LA for decades now. When Kilderry actually died, the Byzantine rights to the show would get taken out of the Patriarch’s hands, and whichever studio could now lay claim to it would swoop in and do with Elysium Zen what they would. Elysium Zen—Next Generation. The film version, The Happy Ever After.
We spent our time in that vast mansion acting, when we weren’t listening to the Patriarch’s sermons. It didn’t just mean preparing the night before a performance, for let’s say an adaptation of Orwell’s Animal Farm. We did that as a musical in the vein of Cats, in full animal dress, using no words other than the sounds of the animals themselves. It didn’t just mean days of memorising your lines for Lord of the Flies performed as a solo piece. (Another use of the pig outfit. You throw some tusks on it and you get an island boar.) It didn’t just mean the prep we did for Waiting for Godot as interpretive dance, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson filmed as drama in the flavour of Pulp Fiction. We took the scripts from the cheesiest pornos and performed them as pieces by Ibsen.
Which is to say we didn’t prepare to act, and then act. We were acting all the time. Brushing our teeth was acting. Be Anne Frank brushing her teeth. Not something you did as quickly as possible. You weren’t going anywhere. Gaze into those eyes as you brush your teeth. Think of all the other Jews getting exterminated out in the world. Think of never being released from the confined spaces of the Achterhuis, except into the same fate. Brush those teeth, one by one. Now look in the mirror and find that lovely Anne Frank smile.