Blueprints of the Afterlife

shit you not—a couple paramedics coming down the steps carrying a sheet-covered body on a stretcher.

Shelley Wiggins?

Yep. She lived by herself in one of those thin little San Francisco town houses. They found her dangling from a rafter by an extension cord. I figured out where the funeral service was going to be, thinking cafe employees would show up who I might ask about the painting. When I got to the cemetery, no one was there, and after asking around at the main office I found I’d gotten the day wrong. It had been the day before.

Meanwhile, Erika was unable to track down any Dirk Bickles on the Internet. Actually, she did find one, but he was a ten-year-old kid living in East Bay. Wyatt, meanwhile, was starting to comb through the Vision Reprographics archives. He had more legitimate reasons for being down there than I did, and kept inventing excuses. He started flipping through ten years of boxes, one box at a time. A week went by. No luck.

After some missed connections I got the call from Star and we had a chilly conversation. She was clearly upset I’d been gone so long, didn’t understand why I needed to be down there. Besides—and she just sort of dropped this one near the end of the conversation—Nick was home now. In fact, he was standing beside her. He got on the phone and said, “What’s up, Luke?” I must’ve stammered for a while. He said, “Why do you keep looking for me, Luke? What are you hoping to find, Luke?” He kept saying my name, which really creeped me out. I had no good answer. Why did I want to find him? He said, “Your search really isn’t about me. It’s about getting off on the unknown. You want to be part of something. You suspect there’s some big secret you’re not in on and it kills you. You’re not part of anything. You’re not one of the selected. You’re just some crazy dirt- head being an idiot in the Bay Area. You have no idea how much of an ass you’re making of yourself. You have no idea how many people are watching you, laughing their heads off. Quit being stupid, Luke. Apply to college and get a good job. Get married and have kids. Die surrounded by loved ones. That’s your fate.”

“What are they doing to you, Nick?” I asked him.

“There is no ‘they,’” he said. “There is only ‘we.’ What we are doing is bigger and more important than anything you will ever get involved in. I don’t mean to taunt you. There’s still time for you to go off and have a successful life.”

“You’re not being yourself,” I told him.

“I’m more myself than I’ve ever been,” he said. “I am so thoroughly myself it isn’t even funny.”

“Who’s Squid?” I asked.

“How do you know about Squid?” There was a little edge of panic in his voice.

I told him we were going to find him.

He laughed and said, “And then what, man?”

I told him I didn’t know yet, but I could tell whatever he was doing was dangerous. The conversation went in circles like this for a while, like some junior-high-level film noir project. Through it all I had this suspicion that he was right. I was never going to be in on what he was doing. And you know what? Part of me really didn’t care anymore. Almost accidentally I had started to build a life for myself in San Francisco. I had a job, I had friends. The place I lived in wasn’t much to speak of, but I knew I could go in on a house with some roommates if I wanted to. The thought of going back to Bainbridge made me sick to my stomach. So I said good-bye to Nick, seemingly for good. I looked around my studio apartment with the bare mattress on the floor with no fitted sheet, my dirty clothes piled in a corner, paperbacks everywhere, and saw that I had been presented with a choice. The first thing I did was visit the nearest drugstore and buy a hair clipper. Back at my place I shaved off the beard and clipped my hair down to about a half-inch fuzz. If I was really going to find out what Nick and Bickle and Kirkpatrick were doing, I needed to change my whole life. I needed discipline, routine, and patience. Most of all, I needed lots of money. Lucky for me, I was living in San Francisco and it was the middle of the 1990s.

NEETHAN F. JORDAN

An image materializes: framed by the open limousine door, the red carpet stretches past a phalanx of press to the vanishing point. Neethan Fucking Jordan steps from the private interior of his transportation into this real- time, flash-lit, and filmed public spectacle, the red path slashing wound-like across the parking lot, the rented polyester fiber unfurled alongside a barricade behind which photographers and camera crews wait encumbered with their gear. To his right stands a vinyl backdrop some ten feet high printed with thousands of logos for Season Four of Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin. Neethan models a pair of black sunglasses, prototypes from his line. His face tingles from a facial. Two Altoids effervesce on his tongue. The product holding his hair in a swept-back wave is composed of organic materials harvested from ten countries, six of them war zones. Black pants, jacket, leather shoes crafted by hand in a little-known region of Italy where livestock still wander dirt roads, a white starched shirt with the top button unbuttoned. Neethan is a tall dude, six-eight, and watching him come out of a limo is like watching a cleverly designed Japanese toy robot arachnid emerge from a box, propelling a torso on which nods his head, across which is splashed a smile of idealized teeth, teeth so gleaming you could brush your own teeth looking into them, teeth that still look fantastic blown up two stories tall on the side of a building, a sexual promise to nameless fans encoded in bicuspid, molar, incisor, and canine. The arm rises, a wave, a hello, an acknowledgment that the assembled journalists exist and through the conduits of their cameras exist the public. Neethan F. Jordan has arrived!

As these things go, the first twenty or so yards of carpet are reserved for photographers. Crammed three deep, the back two rows of shutterbugs wobble on progressively taller step ladders. They scream his name over and over as if he might mistakenly turn to face the backdrop. This part used to perplex him. Obviously they have his attention, he knows he is expected to pose. Why the name yelling? Ah, but here’s why—by yelling his name so voraciously they make it impossible for him not to smile. Neethan pivots, does an open-mouthed smile like what crazy freakin’ fans!, transforms his fingers into guns, transitions into mock- angry… into slightly amused… into humbled… into ecstatic… each expression provoking cluster bombs of flashes. He imagines photo editors clicking to find the right image to complement the editorial slant of the accompanying 150 words.

“People! Yes!” Neethan exclaims and that’s all it takes for the shouting to boil over, rising to Beatlemania temperatures among the photogs. Pointing out individuals behind the spastically stuttering cameras, he says, “Jimmy! Isamu! Marti, you dress so sexy! I can hardly take it!”

Out of the many things Neethan can’t fathom, what he most can’t fathom is anonymity. He knew it only briefly as a child. The vast unfilmed, the people nobody knows anything about, are conceptually exotic to him. The only time he gets close to understanding how it might feel to be unfamous is when he plays one of them. In those instances he is expected to empathize with the plights of migrant farm laborers and other people doing, you know, stuff like that. He can’t tell anymore whether he’s done something to instigate his fame or whether he has merely been chosen as its filter. Fame is a sticky, candy-like substance; a river of it courses through his life. It is as close to religion as he will ever likely get. Of course the kicker is he lived in a group home in Seattle until the age of six and has never known his birth parents. The staff at the group home couldn’t agree on what he was, ethnicity-wise. Filipino? Mexican? Whatever it was it had brown skin and black hair and a honker of a nose. As a kid the nose had haunted and shamed him until the rest of his Cubist handsome face rose around it like a village maturing around a cathedral. Then one day a woman named Mrs. Priest showed up. The hope that she would be his mom lasted about fifteen minutes. Nope, he was being hustled to another group home of sorts, the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential, where he wouldn’t have to clean toilets or empty trash. He was only expected to become one thing: famous.

At present a lithe form appears unobtrusively in Neethan’s periphery. He speaks sideways through a motionless smile, “I suppose you’re Beth-Anne.”

“Yes, Mr. Jordan,” says the assistant publicist. She wears a $4,000 dress and a lanyard with a laminated card indicating she belongs on this side of the barrier. Brunette, boobs. She takes his arm and leads him a few feet down the carpet to the first of the television crews.

“This is Access Hollywood,” Beth-Anne whispers. “Geri McDonald-Reese, reporter.”

As the words enter his ear Neethan is already extending his hand and broadening his smile, providing full-on gums now, processing Beth-Anne’s info concurrently as he speaks. “Access Fuckin’