Blueprints of the Afterlife

attention, with a camera crew following the young Rory around his Montessori school as he worked with golden beads and the pink tower, addressing his classmates in a commanding baritone. Every morning his doting parents had given him a bubble bath and a shave, and by nap time his five o’clock shadow would start to come in. It’s a drag being a preschooler with ball hair.

“Hi Rory. I’m Native American, apparently,” Neethan says, squeezing his agent’s shoulder.

“Tonight, my friend, you can be anything you want,” Rory says, offering a Macanudo.

Neethan takes the cigar and bends down low to allow Rory to light it. “No, really. I’m an Indian. I just found out.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

A host appears, a newman-looking guy with a wobbly eye, and shows them to their table. Rory orders a dozen kinds of sushi and four kinds of sake. “And a booster seat, if you could,” he says.

The restaurant fills with flacks disgorged from the red carpet. Beth-Anne, her job complete, seeps into the background with the other bottom-feeders gathering about the open bar. Myra enters, a celestial event best witnessed with a space telescope, and is seated at the opposite side of the restaurant. Neethan recognizes the guy who did his hair on Stella Artaud heading straight for the booze. The portion of the restaurant Neethan and Rory occupy is roped off, intended for VIPs, with other sections set aside for lower- magnitude studio employees and the journalists and their crews. Now is to be expected an onslaught of permatanned studio execs with big teeth and fists of gold jewelry, wanting to press flesh with the talent. Until then, Rory intends to go over some recent projects that have been pitched Neethan’s way.

“So I’m at lunch with Julian Moe yesterday and he says to me, ‘Rory, what I wouldn’t give to spend an hour with Neethan and get his thoughts on this Abraham Lincoln biopic I’m developing.’”

“Told you, Rory, I’m biopicked out.”

Rory raises a hand, lowers his head in a “hear me out” type of gesture. “I’m with you, friend. In fact, the first thing I said was, ‘Julie? Why’re you wasting my goddamn time with your talk about a biopic? You know Neethan is biopicked out.’ So he says, ‘Listen, Rory, I know Neethan has had a string of biopics. But I’d be committing directorial malpractice if I didn’t at least touch dick tips with Mr. Jordan about this. It’s built on a proven formula. (This is Julian still talking, by the way.) It’s built on a proven formula. It’s a remake of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln.”

“Can you see Myra’s table from where you’re sitting?”

Rory cranes his neck. “Not sure. Might be that table surrounded by studio brass. Anyway, Julian keeps talking, says, ‘Rory, listen. I’m looking for an A-lister with gravitas. I’m looking for someone who can shoulder the burden of portraying the motherfucker who freed the slaves. El presidente. And no one can fill those presidential pants like Neethan F. Jordan, do you hear what I’m saying?’”

“Is there a love interest?”

“Yeah, well, no, sorta. She dies in the first act.”

“Pass. Next.”

“So I got this call from a friend of a friend of a friend at a little production company you may have heard of— Remote Sasquatch Productions? And whisper-whisper-whisper I hear they’ve got Phil Knickerman’s new script, a fantasy drama of sorts. They’ve got Susan Rauch set to direct, up-and-coming young director, you can feed off that kind of cred, and it involves unicorns. It’s not a starring role but they thought of you for the part of Osama bin Laden.”

“Do I get a nude scene?”

“Great question. I’m on it. Next I have a starring role in a picture called The Quadriplegic.”

“It involves not using my arms and legs?”

“No, actually. See, it’s an inspirational story about a quadriplegic who regains the use of his limbs thanks to the Bionet.”

“That kind of thing happens all the time.”

“True, which makes it a topical human-interest-type story.”

“What’s the angle? Why should we care about this former quadriplegic?”

“He robs banks.”

“Go on.”

“With a wise-cracking chimpanzee sidekick.”

“You know I like having a sidekick.”

“Based on a true story.”

“Pass.”

Presently, approaching from the table’s starboard side is Big Serge Davis, a VP of marketing at Fox. Big Serge’s enhanced-tooth grin seems to precede him; the rest of his body appears to be an appendage of this rapacious dental expression of joy. His teeth are easily twice the size of other people’s teeth. Neethan exposes his own teeth as the executive approaches and then their hands come out like the wimpy claws of Tyrannosaurae rex. Neethan stands and the two figures crash together, front to front, laughing and half-speaking their greetings, which come out like, “Neeeeeethaaaaaa!” and “Saaaaaairrrr!” Two glottally communicating giants, they clutch and squeeze each other’s arms, slapping shoulders, opening mouths to expose pink Sonicared interiors of mucousy tissues. From Neethan’s mouth still dangles his cigar, held precariously in place by lower lip moisture. After a minute or so of this, they verbally indicate their good-byes and Neethan sits down as the first wave of sushi arrives.

He hears Myra laugh across the room. He imagines himself as Marcello Mastroianni pursuing an Anita Ekberg version of Myra up a Roman spiral staircase. His mind spins a series of lip-locked fantasias with swollen strings and wonders if there is any way to think about their brief comingling of bodily juices besides cinematically. He and Myra had accidentally rolled into each other’s gravitational fields during the hours of rehearsal for their full-frontal nude sex scene. Their own personal “meet cute” moment. Then, crap, a pregnancy. For the first time, while chopsticking a piece of ikura gunkan maki, he wonders who the father might actually be. In the movie, Uri Borden discovers a secret cabal of Indonesian scientists who engineer a method of remote Bionet fertilization, in which they hack birth-control systems to release artificial spermatozoa into women’s uteruses. Coulda been something like that with Myra. Maybe a fanboy hacker in his bedroom somewhere, bored of just jerking off to the 3 -D X-rays of Myra’s internal organs, decided to hack his way into her uterus and impregnate her online. It could happen, he supposes. He’d done some reading in his trailer to prepare for the role, learning a little about how the Bionet interfaces with reproductive systems. You can find out anything about anyone’s physical condition via the Bionet. You can track T-cell count, endocrine levels, the squirtings of various enzymes from specialized valves, brain activity, some said even thoughts. Dreams?

Neethan maneuvers a firecracker roll into a saucer containing equal parts wasabi and soy sauce.

“Earth to Neethan,” Rory says, waving chopsticks in front of his client’s eyes.

“Maybe you could get me some Native American roles,” Neethan says, as if that’s what he’d been thinking about all along.

“Did you even hear what I said about The Man Who Got Marketed to Death?”

“Are you talking about a movie or my life?”

Here come more brass, a trio of them now, jolly, spines bent back into concavities while the arms beckon, thrust at forty-five-degree angles from their bodies, a grandparently come-here-you-rascal kind of hug-inducing posture. Neethan rises and accepts their cheek kisses and let-me-get-a-look-at-you affections. He’s never met them before but they don’t know that. They feel they know him intimately. Have watched his genitals do their magic on the big screen as well as the magic of his acting skills and uncanny comic timing. More than know him, they feel they own him. And like an objet d’art in a glass cabinet they want to take him out for a quick polish and a moment of admiration. His face is fused in their minds to spreadsheets, and they like the numbers they’ve been looking at. Leathery little men with little hair, they run their hands up and down Neethan’s arms, pausing at the elbow, sharing confidences and dirty jokes. The duration of this encounter is say about two minutes. Then they depart, leaving Neethan free to chew on something that involves fish eyeballs.

It is Kirkpatrick’s will.

Neethan’d really been looking forward to kicking back with a movie in the theater at his place off Mulholland