Violet swiveled around to appraise the cargo. ‘Hi,’ said Henry, adjusting his towel.
Violet turned back to Leo. ‘You guys have done this before,’ she said.
53.
The shoot was going badly. Or perhaps it was just going as well as could be expected, given the suffocating constraints under which Øyvin was being forced to work. ‘Cut!’ he screamed. He was losing his voice. Yelling ‘Cut!’ was one of his favorite things about being a director, but given the number of takes required to get a passable performance out of Steak or Beef or Burger or whatever the hell his nickname was, it was clear that Øyvin was going to have to delegate that task to the first assistant director. ‘Someone get me a lozenge,’ he snapped at his assistant as he marched over to the B-grade bozo.
‘Angus,’ said Øyvin.
‘Call me Beef,’ said Beef.
‘I’d rather not,’ said Øyvin.
‘Suit yourself,’ said Beef, lighting up a cigarette.
‘Where did you get that?’ said Øyvin, snatching it out of his hand. ‘You can’t smoke here. It is prohibited!’
‘No one told me,’ shrugged Beef, who had, in fact, signed an agreement to that effect.
‘Kurt!’ screamed Øyvin. On the far side of Everest base camp, under the marginal coolness of a caterer’s marquee, Kurt pressed a cold can of Diet Coke against his forehead. ‘Be there in a second!’ he lied. Experience had taught him that he could safely ignore the first summons, and if he was lucky, the second, with no ill effect. Generally, whatever bug was up Øyvin’s arctic ass would find the ventilation shaft without any intervention on his part. It was a little like parenting, he assumed. Ignore the inconsequential and delegate the dangerous.
Øyvin sighed. ‘Beef,’ he said, trying a different tactic. ‘When you plead with Hawke to abandon his suicide mission, you have to actually try to convince him. You have to convince us.’
‘But he’s not even here,’ said Beef, gazing vaguely at a distant jet as it trailed a plume across the dehydrated sky. Øyvin thought about what it would feel like to smash a bottle of vodka over his own head. Or better yet, over Beef McDougall’s vacant skull.
‘I know he’s not here,’ said Øyvin. ‘That’s why it’s called acting.’
‘I mean he’s not here,’ said Beef, gesturing at the surrounding desert with a vague figure of eight movement. ‘In Nepal.’
‘You mean in Nevada,’ said Øyvin.
‘Same thing,’ said Beef.
Øyvin sighed. For the purposes of this shoot, that was essentially true. ‘Kurt!’ he yelled. And when Kurt gave him a half salute with a can of Diet Coke: ‘KUUUUUUUURT!’
Muttering under his breath, Kurt polished off the last delicious drop of soda and spat in the sand. Like chewing tobacco for the weight-conscious wimp, it left a long, dark, satisfying streak. ‘Be there in a second,’ he promised. Coming from Los Angeles, the threat of relentless desert sun had seemed as empty as his aluminum can. But this was something else. Light was no longer just a wavelength, it was an invisible burden, like taxes and cholesterol. His skin felt like it was sizzling under the 50+ broad spectrum blockout. His nose was a shade of red that only novelty reindeer should have to endure. He hated Nevada. But more than that, he hated Beef.
‘Beef!’ he said, slapping the actor on the back and in the process, hurting his hand. ‘My main man, my homie, mi hombre!’ And several other ghetto cowboy hybrids.
‘Hey, big guy!’ said Beef, with cautiously matched enthusiasm. Kurt wasn’t exactly ‘big’, but he was carrying a few extra pounds and Beef was hopeless with names. He thought that with such a jovial sobriquet he’d be safe. Unfortunately, in inadvertently sticking the boot into one of Kurt’s many soft spots, he managed to ratchet up Kurt’s level of hatred from ‘very high’ to ‘extreme’. But Beef could hardly be blamed for this stumble. He was, after all, an idiot.
‘What can I do for you, chief?’ Kurt had taken to calling the director ‘chief’, intended as a secret ironic put down and not as a Native American racial slur. Not that Øyvin was a Native American. He was, however, part Sami, with a Laplander’s slightly elevated morality and superior omega-3 hair shine. In Nevada, Ovyin had been mistaken for a Native American on more than one occasion, and he honestly wouldn’t have minded except that people were always asking him for tips on beating the casinos.
‘If you call me ‘chief’ once more, you’re fired,’ said Øyvin.
‘Not that it’s up to you,’ said Kurt, smiling smoothly, ‘but OK.’ He turned back to the object of his disaffection. ‘What seems to be the problem here?’
‘Hunter,’ said Beef.
‘Hunter?’ said Kurt, somewhat surprised. As far as he knew, Hunter wasn’t due on set for another week.
‘I can’t act without him,’ said Beef.
You can’t act full stop, thought Kurt. But he didn’t say that. Instead he turned to Øyvin. ‘I can’t do anything about the schedule,’ he said, with his terrible poker face.
‘Yes, you can,’ said Øyvin, who hated card games. ‘And even if you can’t, I can. This is bullshit,’ he said, casting an arm across the pseudo Kathmandu, with its army of extras and its absent leading man.
‘Is that a threat, chief?’ said Kurt. Øyvin almost laughed out loud. Did Americans really talk like this? He had to assume that they did. But which had come first, the bad dialogue, or the self-referential banality? ‘No,’ he said, taking half a step back, ‘this is a threat.’ And with a swift right jab – another relic of compulsory military training – he knocked Kurt succinctly to the ground.
It was the first thing that Violet saw as she strode on set in search of Aaron, but curiously only the second most interesting thing that she had seen that day. Apart from Gullalderen Moose, which she had quite enjoyed, she didn’t know that much about the young director. On the other hand, she knew Kurt personally and the crack of the Norwegian’s knuckles against Kurt’s jaw had sounded almost as painful as its Foley equivalent. And yet, she couldn’t exactly say that she was sorry to hear it.
54.
As he jogged barefoot along his private beach, Hunter realized that he had absolutely no idea what time it was. It was one of those seamlessly still days where morning and afternoon blend into one, the sun hidden behind a cloud of apathy, the ocean as charismatic as polished concrete. It was as if the minor earthquake in the middle of the night had shaken out the wrinkles and left a smooth sheet of slate across the sea and sky. Hunter quite liked earthquakes, because they reminded him of a game he used to play with his brother in the trash heap behind his stepfather’s house. The game involved peppering the trash heap with homemade explosives, setting them off and seeing who could stay upright the longest. Fortunately, in the days before internet instruction manuals, the bombs weren’t particularly incendiary and both Hunter and his brother survived the Darwinian experiment. Not only survived, but thrived: Hunter’s brother Harley went on to become a chemical engineer, and Hunter went on to play one in W.M.D., between them raising the average income of those born in their hometown by a little over ten thousand percent.
Hunter hadn’t been sleeping well. Unfortunately his history of substance abuse meant he couldn’t take anything stronger than a glass of warm milk so he had been spending his nights playing video games, watching pornography or having sex with his sort-of girlfriend as often as he could stand to have her around. Some time before lunchtime he would wake up, feeling like he had been run over by a truck, stagger out of bed and go for a jog along the beach, which he usually finished off with a quick dip in the ocean. And then he was right as rain, except when it actually was raining which, unusually, it had been for the past week. This morning was the first clear morning in a while, although it wasn’t exactly a blue wash.
Leaving his large surface area to drip dry, he took the hidden stairs up from the beach and padded past the pool, creating a trail of sandy footprints in the grass that the Mexican gardeners would soon erase. His house was like a crime scen
e in a psychological thriller, in which all evidence of habitation was removed as soon as it occurred and the nature of the crime could only be revealed by some particularly sophisticated sleuthing.
During Hunter’s absence, his assistant Freya had sidled into the kitchen where she was now making herself a tuna sandwich. Coincidentally, Freya was named after a distant cousin of Aphrodite’s, the Norse goddess of beauty, witchcraft, war and death, but despite a certain resemblance in their personalities, was no relation. After three years on Hunter’s staff, she had developed an uncanny ability to predict when she should turn up at work, consistently arriving ten minutes before Hunter returned from his swim, no matter what time of morning or afternoon. At least, Hunter considered this ability to be uncanny. In reality, Freya had an application on her iPhone called ‘Celebrity Assist’, into which she entered a number of variables such as Hunter’s shooting schedule, his caffeine intake, the moon, the tides and his girlfriend’s menstrual cycle. Celebrity Assist was only accurate to within an hour, so at the beginning of the predicted window, Freya sat on the balcony of her tenth floor apartment and chain smoked while she trained her binoculars on the beach, three miles to the south. Except on those occasions when she was feeling particularly annoyed at Hunter, when she would initiate a protracted lovemaking session with her girlfriend and deliberately turn up late.
‘Want some lunch?’ she said.
Hunter liked to play a game in which he pretended that he only ate organic, biodynamic or Rastafarian kosher food (depending on which nutritionist and/or guru was separating him from his money at the time), but due to his craving for protein/carbs/food that actually tasted good, caused by his production schedule/workout routine/antibiotics, on this occasion he was going to have to make an exception and ‘listen to his body.’
‘What time is it?’ Hunter asked.
‘About three-thirty.’
‘How much mercury is in that tuna?’
‘Less than in my mom’s teeth.’
Hunter took a deep breath. ‘Man that smells good,’ he said.
‘I got it from the Italian deli,’ said Freya.
‘The one in Venice?’
‘Yep.’
Hunter gazed out across the lawn, where a stocky man with a rake was creating an artistic pile of leaves, to be disseminated later with a leaf blower when Hunter was not around. ‘The one on Abbot Kinney?’ he said.
Freya took a bite of her sandwich. ‘Yep,’ she said.
‘You know what,’ said Hunter.
‘What?’ said Freya, wiping a drip of mayonnaise from the corner of her mouth.
‘When was my appointment with the nutritionist, again?’ said Hunter.
‘Thursday.’
‘Hmm. Maybe I should listen to my body.’
And so on.
Later, as Hunter polished off the last delicious morsel of his tuna, arugula and wasabi mayonnaise on sour dough rye in the terraced gardens, he wondered to himself, not for the first time, whether it was in his best interests to have a personal assistant who made such a fantastic sandwich. As if reading his thoughts, the sun appeared for the first time in days, flashed him a smile and gave him a little wink. ‘Don’t be such a jerk,’ she said, then promptly surrendered back into the iron sky. Hunter closed his eyes and rested his plate on his stomach, a little softer for the indulgence but infinitely more contented.
‘Don’t’ be such a jerk,’ she repeated. Hunter opened his eyes. Not the sun, but his assistant, was standing over him. In one hand she held his iPad; the other hand she extended towards his stomach, where his lunch plate rose and fell with the exertions of his diaphragm. ‘What?’ said Hunter, swapping his lunch plate for his iPad and struggling to sit up.
‘You heard,’ said Freya, nodding towards the iPad. Hunter looked down at the image, looked back at Freya, then, as if drawn by invisible fish hooks on his eyelids, back at the image again.
‘Wow,’ he said.
‘I was going to delete them –,’ said Freya.
‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ said Hunter.
‘– but then I forwarded them to your girlfriend instead.’
For a moment Hunter started. Then a broad smile started to spread across his face. ‘Right on,’ he said.
This wasn’t the reaction Freya had expected. ‘You want Candi-Ann to see this poor girl’s tits?’
‘Well she is bisexual,’ said Hunter proudly.
Freya snorted. ‘She’s about as bisexual as I am.’
Hunter frowned. ‘What’s your point?’
Silently, Freya shook her head. She didn’t have much time for women whose bisexuality was a fashion accessory. Candi-Ann was as shallow as she was sociopathic, but that didn’t mean she deserved to have Hunter’s promiscuity shoved in her inbox. ‘My point,’ said Freya, plucking the iPad from Hunter’s hands, ‘is that I didn’t really forward her the email.’
‘Hey! Give that back,’ said Hunter.
‘I’ll give it back to you after you’ve packed,’ said Freya, shutting down the device and turning back toward the house.
‘Why?’ said Hunter, digging his heels into the perfectly manicured lawn and wondering, not for the first time, whether it was in his best interests to have a personal assistant who made him take responsibility for his own life.
‘Because they want you in Vegas,’ said Freya, without turning back. Truly, if she survived the next two months without having to post bail or break up a girl fight, she was going to negotiate herself a bonus that would make her mortgage broker a very happy man.
‘I thought they didn’t want me for another two weeks,’ Hunter called after her. But his heart wasn’t really in the petulant whine. His heart was, in fact, in the middle of his chest, beating a joyful path to the owner of those breasts.
55.
Ares wasn’t happy. And when Ares wasn’t happy, the level of conflict on set escalated from its usual chaotic disharmony to outright hostility. Even the presence of Violet had done little to soothe Ares’ mood. If anything, it had worsened. Violet was looking lovelier than ever, the familiar glazed disinterest in her eyes catching the desert sun and cooling it to just above freezing. Ares was mesmerized by that look, because to him it held the promise of a melting acquiescence at the hands of his superior lovemaking technique.
Thanks to the prima donna director, Hunter was due on set any minute. It was too soon. Ares needed at least another week alone with Violet, calling her night and day with unreasonable requests, turning up at her hotel room unannounced, saturating her with his presence. To make things worse, he had heard a rumor that a couple of his sons, both legitimate and alleged, had turned up in Vegas and were hanging out at the Bellagio, flashing a platinum Amex.
Ares had never had much time for his children. That he had fathered any at all was a combination of bad luck, sorcery and his fondness for afternoon naps. The last time he accidentally slept with his wife, it had resulted in Hermes, whose conception she concealed from him by planting her fertilized ovum in the warm, nurturing and (as it turned out) extraordinarily adhesive chest feathers of an Athenian sea eagle. In the time-honored tradition, Ares had managed to ignore Hermes for the first thousand or so years of his life, until the newly appointed messenger god had turned up on his doorstep, heels aflutter, and smugly announced some trivial dictum from Zeus. Confronted with the solid reality of his son, Ares was reminded not only of the folly of eating too much roast turkey at lunchtime, but of the ignominy of having borne a son whose pre-adolescent penis was twice as large as his father’s and already the subject of a number of bawdy ballads.
He never really got over it. The only reason he had consented to Hermes interning at Olympic Studios was that Aphrodite had threatened to leave her husband and move in with him permanently if he failed to agree to her demands. And the last thing he wanted to see when he woke up in the morning was her perfect skin, smooth as freshly pressed paper and those bloodless eyes, hard as ballpoint pens.
And then there was Eros. Desp
ite all Ares’ alibis, excuses and denials, there was no question that the young god was his son. He remembered the occasion with blistering clarity. After leading an army of mortals into a fierce and barbarous battle, he had returned to Olympus to find Aphrodite waiting for him, not anxious or impatient, but serene and adoring, supremely confident of his victory. At that moment, he had fallen to his knees, buried his head in her scented robes and declared his love for the radiant goddess.
What a terrible fucking mistake that had been.
If only he had kept his mouth shut, or better yet, professed a love of violent combat. Then he might have been blessed with an heir worthy of the family armor. Instead he had an illegitimate son who, when faced with a choice between ‘fight’ and ‘flight’, was equally likely to bust out the lyre. At least Hermes could be consistently relied upon to choose the second option.
Ares took a bite of his dry vegetarian burrito and threw the rest disgustedly onto the ground, kicking it at a passing wardrobe assistant for good measure. The prospect of Hunter and Violet together was almost as unpalatable as the location catering but he was going to have to suck it up. ‘Pick that up,’ he barked at the wardrobe assistant, who had paused to scrape a piece of avocado from her shoe. ‘Of course, Mr. Martini,’ she stammered, gathering up the spattered mess of tortilla before hurrying off to the portable toilets to burst into tears and sneak a cigarette.
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