a real good time together
Cue the killing music, the stompbox madness. Red guitars celebrate a killer and a pederast. Kyle sits on a shiny chair tapping his engineer on his bald spot with the rubber end of a pencil, muttering this is it, this is it, this is it, with a tiny tap on it, a bonk on the is, a tap on the this. It is midnight. The next to last tape for this season. On screen: a good looking man with a knife approaching a bed, a blank and darkened stage, fake fog, red lights, a rock and roll soundtrack. Fade to a glare of sunlight. A still photo of a dead child.Would Donovan’s Jennifer Juniper be too much? Yes, it would. He nods. Public domain violins. Make it weepy.
In five minutes the cut’s been made, a sharp twenty second sequence. If, Kyle thinks, and not that he believes it, or would like anyone to believe it, if what he’s just done is art, what’s the source then, the inspiration, not the killer, not the act, not the acting, not life, but what, an intrinsic understanding of the plasticity, the beat of the deed, the audience’s gut-level reaction to this trash? He taps the engineer once more. Done.
"You’ve got the actor for the Turner sequence, right?" the engineers asks.
"Sure," he says, thinking, didn’t we do the Turner sequence? The man they’d caught already, in some photogenic diner, the photograph flashing on the screen, "if you see this man...", and a waitress turning around from the TV to the short order cook who was, from the prison shot on Kyle’s show, one of the Ten Most Wanted bastards, the man who killed his sister with a set of nail-clippers, Ivan Turner, the waitress thinking, holy shit, Kyle, when getting the news, also thinking, holy shit, remembering that scene from Fahrenheit 451 when the tube asks everybody to step outside to see if the criminal’s out there, and Kyle getting a hard-on and humming, I’ve got the power... and now, what? They’d done the Turner sequence. Hadn’t they? They’d done about a week’s worth of shoots, roughly enough programming to keep night-owls happy for six months. It’d been a blur, yes, but had he, could he have actually forgotten to do that one particular shoot, dramatizing the one time the 3 a.m. true crime toss-off had, in all actuality, caught someone, a true-blood brooding assassin, flesh and blood? Holy shit, Kyle thinks. The shoot’s tomorrow. Five a.m. Four hours from now. And now he thinks that he might have dreamt that shoot, it’d been so perfect. And maybe (he thinks) the dream’s right now, a nightmare spiraling from a moment’s lapse, an oversight. But he’s not dreaming.
He puts on his overcoat. He walks by blinking, brooding lights and overweight, chain-smoking infomercial editors, blinking shadows, blind corridors, an angel disguised as a phone operator, a strange executive type disguised as an angel, the devil in Haggar slacks, the men from Pragma who have been tracking him since the night before, who sacrificed a chicken and a newborn baby to Beliel to find out if everything’s on track, red candles saying yes, black candles humming no, yellow candles saying, wait, we’re not sure, could you hold on a minute?
Night is mostly noisy, cold, New York bowery, down to So Ho in a parody of a New York subway, quiet and dirty, followed now by just one Pragma man. Kyle is paunchy, dark, losing his hair---he is a caricature of what he thought old people looked like when they turned fifty. Fifty’s not old now. He taps out a Camel and lights it and no one tells him not to. No one’s there. Pragma has taught its people techniques to keep them from being noticed. They have spent years meditating, listening to self-hypnosis tapes tucked under their pillows, following a strict vegan diet, wearing rawhide underwear. They know their stuff.
A shade taps him on the shoulder. He apologizes immediately and is about to stomp out his smoke when a dead voice tells him not to.
"We’ve got your man," says the Pragma man. "He’s a good actor. Classically trained."
Kyle realizes he is not talking to a ghost. He is talking to a man impersonating a ghost. There is nothing to make him out, hardly anything in front of him but the man’s presence, and the card handed to him has that shimmering quality too till he tucks it in his wallet, and then he knows that it’s real, and takes up space. He must get on another train to get to the club etched on the card, to get the actor. Get, get, get, it’s on his mind right now, it’s the down beat in his head. Get. And the Pragma man is gone. And maybe he should have asked some more, or acted suspicious, but what, and why?
There is music blasting from a block down, Lou Reed’s Romeo Had Juliette, the last few lines of the song trailing down the subway stairs as Kyle walks up them---then a song he’s never heard of, strange and squeaky, about how everyone’s your friend in New York City, and everything looks beautiful when you’re young and pretty. He is thinking of another Lou Reed tune, half-gasping the words, "we’re going to have a real good time together / we’re going to laugh and shout together," thinking, maybe this actor won’t be so bad. It’s nearly two thirty. A few blocks away is a man considering a protracted love affair with a watermelon he’s kept in his refrigerator for months. There are people awake, and most are, in the biological sense of the word, alive, and some are reading minds or hunting dogs, and there are people cleaning or sweet-talking their guns right now, and some are levitating, and two and a half are falling in love, and the men from Pragma are looking into a 1952 Zenith television set and adjusting their reception to make out Kyle as he walks into the club, and taping the other shows for later. New York is not known for good reception. The V-hold isn’t holding.
The club is of the generic sort, a slight disappointment given the unusual source for the man, a nigh-invisible source, tolerant of smokers. Thinking back, Kyle recalls a bookish pipe tobacco scent to the shade. There are two naked women playing chess with Styrofoam phalli on-stage. There is moody, noisy music. He asks the bartender for a beer. The bartender says he has been asked not to give him one, and could he please talk to the young man in black by the glow-in-the-dark wasp? Kyle sifts through the crowd. They are all older than him, in their eighties, grooving to music made by children who could beat them at video games. Get, get, get. There’s the kid. In black. White trash from the looks, from somewhere out in pre-fab housing, and locked down strip malls, and the smell of rot and sea wafting in, but how do you know? A democracy of bad taste and turned out labels. The obviousness of the expensive get-up. He’s either truly rich, Kyle thinks, or dirt poor and not showing it, double on the latter. He sits across from the kid. A girl in beat uniform sidles up to him to a torch-song track.
"I want you to meet my sister," the kid says.
Kyle nods. Good legs, same blonde looks of her brother, both distinctly ruddy, well put together. She sits on her brother’s lap. Her brother puts an arm around her waist.
"I’m your man," the kid says. He slides over a manila envelope.
Kyle opens it. Standard glossies. Uneventful resume. A videotape formatted (at this he wonders for the first time tonight, truly surprised, almost aghast) in Beta, of all things.
"We don’t have a player for these things," Kyle says.
"Look, you don’t know where I’m coming from," the kid says. "You need an actor. I know your situation. My people know who you are, get it? We know."
The kid is making it sound like it’s a huge conspiracy. But, he thinks, it’s just an oversight, is all. Nothing else. He blooped on the schedule. A naked woman has just shouted out her checkmate, piercing over the club’s din. The chess-player bears to an uncanny resemblance to the twins, cuz that’s what they are, he realizes, twins, identical to a t save minor differences in gender. The sister is curling up to her brother. He feels like an intruder, a beggar... I am the only one in-between in this club, he thinks, everyone else is either too old or, take these two strange strangers here, too young. I’m the only one who makes sense. Get, get, get, he thinks, get. This is an important white trash person. Get.
"The shoot’s today at five," he says, defeated. There is something more to this kid, these people, these ghosts. Something in the works.
The kid says yes, he’ll be there, he knows where it is. On stage a new game is starting. The men from Pragma are watching the blurry women and arguing over whether to get cable. He offers to escort the kids to the studio but he says no, and when he asks if his sister would be keen on watching the shoot, the sister shakes her head, not a word from her, she slides off into a room of identical twins, forty-eight of them, twenty-four male, twenty-four female, partitioned by a bubble-wrap curtain splotched black and magenta, tacky eighties decor, and on their wrists is a U.P.C. code and on their left ankle, a Pragma tattoo, a rose, handcuffs, a hummingbird. The name of the club is, of course, the Parabola.
He walks back to the studio. It is four-thirty. The engineer is there, having just woken up from a night of fitful debauchery with Belial, courtesy of the Pragma people. On his face is the smile of hidden knowledge. He has fallen. Kyle doesn’t know it but he senses it, but there is nothing to set it apart from any other smile, but it is the source of plasticity, the secrets revealed to seraphim and short order cooks. The yellow candles are saying sure. The V-hold is holding. There is a tattoo of a rose on his left ankle. He has learned to play chess overnight. He has lost twenty pounds. He has a healthy head of hair.
The kid comes in at five on the dot. They do the shoot in two hours. The killer caught in a set of a diner built to resemble a diner that looks like a set of a diner. The waitress a parody of a waitress. A jumble of guitars. Sound f/x of a heavy cell door slamming shut. Kyle whispers cut. He hears a click. The engineer has shut the camera off and is winking at him. There are invisible men in overcoats pounding at a Zenith. There is a camera winking at a dark balding man who is walking head-on into morning, down a reasonable facsimile of the city, thinking of killers and mirrors. There are incontrovertible sounds and smells all around him, all real.