Blueprints of the Afterlife

instigated via the Bionet, he is pursued by members of a radical offshoot sect of monks who want to bring about the second wave of FUS. (In the trailer, Uri Borden exclaims, “You mean they want to restart the Fucked Up Shit? Shit! That’s messed up!”) So the film had some heavy research behind it. There were actually folks out there who wanted to bring back the FUS. More than not understanding the unfamous, Neethan can’t wrap his head around this brand of nihilism. He’d studied some of the pro-FUS propaganda for the role, boned up on Peter Ng, and from what he can tell the argument goes something like this: Humanity got what it deserved with the FUS, reducing itself to one-fifth its original size. Seeing that the worst of the FUS was over, the traumatized survivors got back to work, reconstructing and applying new technologies, more or less cleaning up the joint. As this reconstruction effort rolled along, the memories of the FUS atrophied and a great surge of optimism and brotherhood seized the world. Hugs all around. But the shit, certain Ng-inspired revisionists argued, had never really ceased being fucked-up. In fact, they said, the shit was by nature fucked-up. Human nature, they argued, was designed to destroy the planet, a biological version of a gigantic asteroid or volcanic freak-out. Neethan shuddered. Good thing these Ng acolytes were relegated to the fringe. Shows like Stella Artaud: Newman Assassin were meant to keep them there. It was through the efforts of the qputer monks that humanity would continue to thrive and once-extinct species would be brought miraculously back to life. Cities would reconstitute themselves, obliterating the memories of their previous thermonuclear levelings. Hand in hand, folks of mixed ethnic and religious backgrounds would sing before the cameras, in fields of daisies.

“…it’s a thought-provoking series… state-of-the-art effects… wall-to-wall action… more than a little tenderness…” Neethan doesn’t even know to whom he is talking now. His brain has officially taken a bow and outsourced this responsibility to his mouth alone. Away it chatters and smiles, two things it is superbly good at and can accomplish by itself, as far as Neethan is concerned. Listen to it go, chuckling and joking with a moony young reporter who so clearly wants his dick. Which, dammit, remains at three-quarters salute despite the Klan fantasy. His and Myra’s pheromones are still doin’ it right on the red carpet. Think of it this way—she is probably smelling his cologne and getting aroused. Quid pro quo. Beth-Anne tugs at his elbow, introducing him to Dirk Bickle.

“Dirk?” Neethan says, snapping back into the moment. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Bickle looks old. Worse, he looks bloodied. His face is scraped and bandaged and one leg is entombed in a cast. Holding himself up with crutches he attempts a pained smile. Around his neck hangs a bogus laminate identifying him as a reporter from the Homeless People Channel. He snuck in, obviously.

“Neethan, my biggest success story. I am so glad to see you.”

“What happened to you? Who did this to you?” Neethan takes his former mentor’s arms and pulls him close.

“Don’t worry about me. I came to pass along a piece of information. It’s about your birth mother.”

Neethan smiles defensively. “She’s alive?”

Bickle shakes his gray head. “Afraid not, Neethan. And it gets weirder. Not only is she dead, she’s been dead for five hundred years.”

Neethan laughs. “WTF, Bickle? You’re messing with me, right? Are these bandages and bruises a joke?”

The old man sighs. “We saw the prenatal paternity test you took with regard to Ms. Fairbanks and discovered a few new things about your profile. The technology wasn’t up to snuff when you were coming up through the academy. Otherwise, we would have told you sooner. First, it’s true. You’re Native American.”

“Doesn’t surprise me.”

“And you’re the last of your tribe.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re the last of your genetic line. There are no other living relatives from your particular gene pool.”

“Who were they?”

“We haven’t figured that out yet.”

Neethan steadies himself against a barrier. “So what am I supposed to do with this information? I’ve got a series to promote.”

“You have to go to Seattle. Find out what happened to your tribe. Just follow the red carpet.”

“Now, Bickle, why would I want to do that?”

Bickle leans forward and speaks into Neethan’s ear. “It is Kirkpatrick’s will.”

And like a ghost or screen dissolve, Bickle backs away and other cameras and reporters fill the gap with their chattering questions and klieg lights. Beth-Anne takes his arm again and whispers, “Kelli, Staci, and Brandi from the Kids Super Network.”

Neethan now faces three preteens, each a billionaire, standing in a row, clutching one another’s arms and jumping in unison. “OMG!” they scream. “OMG!”

“Hi, ladies,” Neethan says, causing the middle one to faint. The other two fan the middle one’s face until she returns to consciousness. Over their heads three lenses bob and weave, behind which squint three cameramen.

The preteen on the left, Kelli, asks the first question. “What’s your favorite movie?”

“My favorite movie is… Gifted Children’s Detective Agency.”

“Oh, my God, do you have a girlfriend?” Staci asks.

“Not currently. I’m single,” Neethan says, provoking an intensified bout of high-treble squealing and unison jumping, not to mention a quick glance from Ms. Fairbanks, presently interviewing with the Clothing Optional Network.

“Favorite color,” Brandi says, looking close to vomiting.

“Aubergine.”

“What’s the series about?” all three ask together.

“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… You know, there’s a whole spiel on it on the B-roll. Just have your producers pull something from there.”

The three young journalists refuse, insisting that Neethan repeat the boilerplate. He sighs and complies. When the camera stops rolling the three tweens drop the overwhelmed bubblehead shtick and resume the conversation they’d been having about a new branding firm in which they’d invested considerable time and capital.

Haunted by Bickle, horny by Myra, Neethan proceeds down the line. His hard-on has begun to soften, still firm but perhaps not as unyielding as it had been before he’d been asked his favorite color. He recalls fondly the movie- star sex in which he’d engaged with the starlet, the kind of sex in which the two people are fucking the variety of characters the other has played rather than anything one might rightly call another person. At one point Neethan had been fucking Sherri Nettles, the civil rights attorney Myra had played in Prom Queen: Ground Zero while she had been fucking his Gordon Lamphiere, the morally ambivalent assassin of Saucy McPherson’s Game.

I’m the last of my line, he thinks. So what? The idea feels antique, belonging to another generation, something too complex to trip him out. Cameras claw at his face. He extends his hand again, to a Portuguese-language station’s arts and entertainment reporter, and from a thousand feet under the sea hears himself prattling about the series he’s made, a series he doesn’t entirely understand, owing to the brilliance or ineptitude of the director, but about which he speaks with utter confidence and enthusiasm. He watches himself shake more hands, recite more spiels, grin his panties-dropping grin, and knows that this parade of surfaces is about to come to an end. He’s going to Seattle. He’s going to follow the red carpet. He’ll find out where he came from. It’s Kirkpatrick’s will.

Commercial break.

Inside the restaurant, the red carpet spills to fill the entire floor. Neethan’s agent Rory Smiley meets him at the door. Rory is a short man but doesn’t have a short man’s hair-trigger personality. This is probably thanks to the fact that he suffered through a case of premature puberty, for instance growing facial hair at the age of four. He’d been taller than the rest of the kids in his class until high school, and still thinks of himself as taller than everyone, including Neethan, who towers above him. The premature puberty had been a matter of some brief national