“I understand Myra Fairbanks is claiming to be carrying your baby.”
Neethan is prepared for this. Surprised, actually, that the question hasn’t come up sooner. “Eric, I’m glad you asked. I saw the prenatal paternity report today, which indicated conclusively that I am not the father. And I just want to reiterate what I’ve been saying all along—these allegations are really unfair to Ms. Fairbanks.”
Eric’s smile slackens. “You’re not the father?”
“Nope.”
“Okay, well, I guess that’s all the questions I have.”
“Really? Don’t you want to ask about the new season of Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin?”
“Sure, okay.”
“Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin, Season Four, is the latest in the award-winning Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin franchise. I play Dr. Uri Borden, a clone scientist who gets involved in the uprising and must decide whether to abort the messiah. It’s a thought-provoking series, featuring state-of-the-art effects and wall-to-wall action, with more than a little tenderness.”
“So, you really didn’t father the child? Did you even sleep with her?”
Neethan stretches out his arms and cocks his head in a Come on! Of course I did! gesture. All this coulda seemed calculated, scripted even, because at that moment another limo pulls up and slo-mo deposits the very Myra Fairbanks under discussion on the carpet, not yet showing her pregnancy bump, wearing Nikki McGee, pivoting, blonde, pulchritudinous, a human mirror-ball reflecting supernovae of camera flashes. Myra ratchets her face into a smile, teases the preorgasmic paparazzi, blows kisses, and casts a quick, withering stab of a glare at Neethan, who stands eclipsed on the carpet. They speak to each other in a few short seconds with their eyebrows.
I didn’t think you’d show, Neethan eyebrows. I hope this means you’ve gotten over your—
Go fuck yourself. I’m doing business right now.
Hey, girl, you know if the paternity test had come back positive, I would have—
I’m getting interviewed by Geri right now. Leave me alone.
Watch out for Eric Bibble. He’s going to ask you who the father is.
His magazine’s already photographed my ovaries. I doubt they could get any more invasive.
Beth-Anne says, “Wanda Mesmer, Clothing Optional Network.”
Neethan wonders why, if clothing is optional, no one on the Clothing Optional Network ever opts to wear it. Shivering nude in the chilly Hollywood evening stands the blonde, pert-nippled hostess of one of CON’s top-rated shows, Foreign Policy for the Layman. From time to time Neethan has jacked off to it. He knows he’ll be expected to express an opinion on the Brazilian slave trade or the recent piracy off the Ivory Coast. The cameraman squats to get a from-below shot, his dong dragging on the pavement.
“I’m here with Neethan Jordan at the press event for Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin,” Wanda says. “Neethan, what do you make of General Gordon’s recent imposition of martial law and the incarceration of hundreds of Kentucky’s procloning dissidents?”
Neethan braces himself, sensitive to offending any potential Deep South Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin fans. “It’s an unfortunate situation,” he says. “I just hope both sides can come together and work things out like they did last year in Arkansas.”
“How can you call the Arkansas accord anything but an unmitigated failure? Scores dead? The formal expansion of rape prisons? Are you telling me you approve of the confederacy’s suspension of habeas corpus?”
“I’m…” Neethan starts, defaulting to his wide smile. “Look, Wanda, I understand there’s a lot of turmoil in the Deep South right now, and I truly feel for all those Neethan Fucking Jordan fans down there who are in a world of hurt. Cut. Now for the other version. Look, Wanda, I just want order restored in one of the greatest cultural regions of the world.”
“Nicely done,” Wanda says, teeth chattering.
“By the way, I dig what you’ve done with your pubes,” Neethan says.
“I have a new stylist. What can you tell me about the new season of Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin?”
“Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin, Season Four, is the latest in the award-winning Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin franchise. I play Dr. Uri Borden, a clone scientist who gets involved in the uprising and must decide whether to abort the messiah. It’s a thought-provoking series, featuring state-of-the-art effects and wall-to-wall action, with more than a little tenderness.”
Neethan finds himself recalling his first leading role, as the unfrozen Viking hero of Him and Him. From the thawed wastes of Scandinavia appeared a fully equipped Norse warrior, reanimated by scientists and paired with an animated bolt of lightning to fight environmental crimes in corruption-plagued Chicago. The movie’s title derived from the fact that neither character had a proper name. Whenever they showed up to electrocute and battle-ax their way to justice, bystanders would simply exclaim, “It’s him! And him!” Heavily made up to resemble a hirsute berserker who’d spent a couple thousand years encased in a block of ice, Neethan hadn’t been all that recognizable, but he’d loved the role. Day after day he’d show up at the studio lot, get made up and costumed, stand in front of the green screen to grunt and wave a variety of bladed weapons. At one point in the movie he and the other Him, the lightning-bolt guy, commandeered an ambulance and engaged in a high-speed chase beneath the El. Except the whole scene had been created in the fabricated stationary interior of the vehicle, rocked on hydraulics. His costar, a boy named Georgie Walker, wearing a head-to-toe green bodysuit to be CGI’d postproduction, quivered and buzzed beside him. Neethan bellowed, waving a bloody battle hammer out the window. No one could explain how a medieval Viking had learned to drive, but no matter. Audiences ate it up and Him and Him won a lesser-known technical Oscar. Since then it had been three or four pictures a year, contractually obligated junkets, Champagne in flutes in houses perched on the hills, locations in the less ruined parts of the world, endorsements of Japanese canned coffee and shoe inserts. Becoming famous had been a process similar to losing his virginity. He’d been convinced so explicitly from so many sources that fame would solve every problem he’d ever had, vault him into a state of permanent euphoria, that when it actually happened he considered his glittered surroundings and thought, Okay, not what I imagined. But shit, man, playing that thawed Viking had been a hoot. He wanted a role like that again, one in which he was only required to grunt and ax bad guys.
“Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin, Season Four, is the latest in the award-winning Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin franchise…” Neethan speaks absently to the next journalist, a schmuck from some online-only outfit. He smells Myra’s perfume, concocted in a Swiss lab from an Amazonian water beetle and endangered alpine flowers. He replays highlights of their carnal encounters, loops the image of her ass raised up off the bed, spread to reveal the anal aperture and beneath it the valley of pussy. Is he getting hard? Jesus, okay, think of the Ku Klux Klan, quick! That usually does it for bone prevention. All it would take would be one cameraman to pan down and notice his newly pitched tent and it would be all over the tabs. The Klan starts disrobing, revealing themselves as tattooed strippers with thongs. And some of them are even black! Fucked up, Neethan. He shoots an eyebrow over to Myra, who’s giggling with Eric Bibble, touching him lightly on the shoulder, engaging him fully in her celebrity tractor beam. What Neethan wouldn’t do to transform himself into Him (the Viking, not the lightning bolt), carjack a taxi, and get the fuck out of here right about now. But the red carpet stretches interminably onward, allegedly leading to the doors of a sushi restaurant where the release party is to be thrown down. “… I play Dr. Uri Borden, a clone scientist who gets involved in the uprising and must decide whether to abort the messiah…”
So about that messiah (spoiler alert): As far as Neethan can fathom, Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin foretold of a day when the qputers and their attendant monks would instigate a mass wave of virgin births, remotely impregnating girls around the world with a race of Nietzschean ubermensch messiahs. In the show, Neethan, as Uri Borden, learns of the virgin births when a teenage girl enters his clinic complaining of cramping and losing her period. Her parents can’t or won’t believe she’s not lying that she’s never had sex, and urge her to abort. As Uri races against the clock, uncovering more evidence that the pregnancy is part of a vast plot
