The Arsenal Files 8/The Arsenal Files Collection #8 (Arsenal Computer) (1996).ISO/doorware/rubyv60.zip/RUBY60-4

Text File | 1996-08-23 | 37KB | 598 lines

Copyright (c) 1996

                    And Marion Never Looked Lovelier
                          by Willard J. Rusch

      His first advertisement ran in every newspaper published in
the United States, from the Los Angeles _Times_ to the _Far
North Clarion_ of Blaine, Maine (circulation 9).  He spent
millions more to put the announcement on every paper's second page,
including those of the country's most prestigious dailies.  Editors
hastily reshuffled lead stories on biological warfare in Cyprus and
the execution of a celebrity convicted of murdering his wife.  This
lapse in journalistic ethics would have been fiercely denounced, if
even his most bitter opponents had not lost their energy for
deploring his bizarre stunts.  This included the entire citizenry
of Canada, from which he was banned after attempting to bribe the
people of Labrador into seceding from the nation and selling him
the entire province.  His passion for fly-fishing was notorious.

                ONLY FROM INCARN-ACTION PICTURES!
         YOUR FAVORITE DEAD MOVIE STARS IN ALL-NEW FILMS!

     Dazed but enticed, Americans murmured the words to themselves,
pondering the possible interpretations.  What was Jimmy I. Rapar,
the planet's first bona fide trillionaire, up to this time?  Had he
improved on film colorization?  Had he devised some intricate new
morphing process?  More sophisticated and cynical readers suggested
that Jimmy may have purchased every old film in existence, cut them
up frame by frame, and reassembled them into new products.  No one
was sure this was technologically feasible, much less legal, but
few doubted that Jimmy was capable of pawning off such
cannibalizations as "new" movies.  Three years ago, he had provoked
a disastrous naval mobilization by phoning the president, whom he
despised, and convincing her that exiled dissidents from the
Faroese Islands had gained control of Newfoundland.  More recently,
he had caused an octogenarian Brazilian coffee tycoon to keel over
at a masked ball in Monte Carlo.  The man lay bleeding from his
nose into a platter of braised asparagus, stone dead from terror.
Standing at the top of the entrance staircase was Jimmy, his face
covered with a burlap bag.  In one hand he held a whining chain
saw.  From the other, clutched by tangles of bloody hair, hung a
severed human head.  Jimmy laughed his way through the scandal,
telling European reporters that old geezers with bad tickers should
avoid riotous parties.  (He himself was the world's sole owner and
user of an artificial heart developed by his own medical
technologies company.)  The legal penalty for possessing stolen
body parts in Monaco proved to be negligible.
      Reading _The Village Voice_, film purists shivered.  What
abomination of the classics, they wondered, might issue from Jimmy
Rapar's brilliant but diseased imagination?  Certain film
archaeologists, however, felt guarded optimism.  They pondered the
endless list of legendary lost classics--Theda Bara's
"Cleopatra", the sixteen-reel version of Erich von Stroheim's
"The Wedding March", Todd Browning's original cut of "Freaks".
(The last one, according to legend, thrown off a bridge at the order of
a nauseated Irving Thalberg.)  Had Jimmy secretly spent billions
searching museum attics and dank vaults hidden below Hollywood
mansions for reels of disintegrating silver nitrate?  No one could
make a financial profit from such an enterprise, but perhaps Jimmy,
nearing his one-hundred and fifth birthday, now wished to be
immortalized in the history of high culture.  And what did Jimmy
care about money?
      But from the great majority of readers, the advertisement
evoked a less analytical response.  As they fantasized about
beloved dead stars in new narratives, they wondered, furtively, if
the most tantalizing and bizarre interpretation of "All-New Films!"
might be the true one.  Could Jimmy--could even *he* be so smart,
so rich, so daring?--could Jimmy have discovered a magical or
scientific formula for bringing the dead back to life?  Workplaces
emptied and churches filled.  Alone with their gods, people prayed
with an urgency certain to be heard in heaven.  "Let Jimmy bring
them back to life," they begged.  "Do *something* exciting, you
chintzy deity!"
      Eight months into the first year of the third millennium,
people were still shellshocked from the pain of realizing that
nothing extraordinary had happened when the three nines on their
digital clocks had turned into zeroes.  To even the most cynical
and abstemious, New Year's Eve in 1999 had seemed magical, a bridge
of golden light extending from the dog-dull late nineties into an
age promising universal celebrity and a recrudescence of the
high-rolling Reagan '80s.  Celebrations endured for weeks and
months.  Entire cities were overwhelmed by endless street
festivals.  But it was not only those inclined to carousing who
fell under the spell of the year 2000.  As the debauches rocked on,
predictions of impending paradise and perdition whipped the pious
into a sober frenzy.  From pulpit, mountain top, and barricaded
compounds, orthodox clergy, tranquil New Age prophets, and cult
leaders with bulging eyeballs issued promises and threats.  As the
days into the new millennium ticked away and the drunken hordes
caught their fourth wind, the spiritual masses retained their faith
that a glorious metamorphosis was near.
      Sometime in March, the effects of alcohol, drugs, and piety
reached an inevitable nadir.  Legions of the walking dead staggered
through mountains of trash, thirsty and sick.  Those who had
remained sober were no less spent, their hearts and minds vacuumed
by spiritual disillusionment.  Most Americans spent the first
months of 2000 AD denying that life in the new millennium was not
a whit less tedious than before.  Sometime in the first wet weeks
of spring, they faced each other blankly, admitting that the only
noteworthy occurrence of the new era was the spectacle they had
made of themselves.  As the year slogged along, the shame of their
earlier folly burned in their minds.  When winter arrived, the
advent of 2001 filled them with repressed rage bordering on
delusional psychosis.  Sober, straight, and dried out from
fantasies of the Millennial City, they braced themselves for the
monotony of a century that loomed ahead like several billion tons
of plankton left to rot in the slimy bed of a drained ocean.  With
less than three months to go before New Year's Eve, Jimmy Rapar's
headline finally roused them from the lethargy that the American
Psychiatric Academy had predicted might destroy western
civilization.  Desperate for details, they pored over the
advertisement's fine print with sweaty hands and dry lips.  But
they found nothing to explain Jimmy's enigmatic promise.
      Dancing with glee through his palace outside Chicago, Jimmy
let the whole world stew in its own sauce of despairing hope.  His
skeletal toes pattered joyously across the Venetian marble floors,
his skinny hairless legs as white as fish bones beneath the hem of
a chinchilla bathrobe he had won in a poker game from the Queen of
the Netherlands.  Reading newspapers and watching television around
the clock, chain-smoking Indonesian clove cigarettes and eating
nothing but hot fudge sundaes, he chortled like a troll over the
naivete of speculations from even the most intelligent
commentators.  Twirling his arms like an ingenue in the "corps de
ballet", nearly mad with rapture, he hurled scoops of vanilla ice
cream at his television monitors.
      He could not be reached for comment.  His private pier on
Lake Michigan was barricaded with sandbags as crack marksmen from
Paraguay were dispatched to the machine gun nests.  His home
militia was ordered to defend the palace from aerial approach with
bazookas and flame-throwers.  Furious reporters beat their fists on
Jimmy's towering stone walls until the granite ran with blood.  The
crowd of reporters and onlookers surrounding the palace swelled to
cover ten city blocks.  Gardens of neighboring mansions were
stomped into muddy cesspools.  Slow children and unfortunate cats
were crushed.  No one cared.  The deaths went unreported.  Jimmy
let them bleat and plead and threaten.  Nothing could break his
silence.
      After several weeks of seclusion, Jimmy whimsically made his
first public appearance on a cable access station in Scranton,
Pennsylvania.  News and entertainment moguls watched their sets in
glassy-eyed fury as Jimmy chatted sociably with Edna Corngold, a
woman only six years his junior.  Edna's show typically covered
gardening, embroidery, and duplicate bridge, but she had made an
exception for Jimmy.  Wearing a white suit with a pink shirt, Jimmy
flirted wickedly with Edna for several minutes, telling her that a
good sex life begins at one hundred, then began educating the
American public about his new product.  The rumors were true, he
stated.  His first movie would be silent.
      "I see it as a tribute," he told Edna.  "An 'hommage' to the
scores of stars from the silent era who will appear in
Incarn-Action productions.  An original score is being written
exclusively for the film.  The London Philharmonic will perform it
at the premiere.  No one has seen anything like this for close to
a century, Edna."
      Aside from wishing to honor the stars of the silent screen,
Jimmy had a personal desire to restore the silent movie to its
former grandeur.  Talking pictures, he claimed, had ruined the
motion picture industry.  For most of his life he had missed the
elegant silent pictures of his boyhood.
      "Don't you agree, dear?"  He took his host's wrinkled hand in
his.  Edna bobbed her head, enrapt.
      As he rambled through his memories of "Intolerance", the
original "Ben-Hur", and other silent classics, his famous cobalt
eyes grew misty.  From a pocket he pulled a handkerchief the size
of a pillowcase and honked into it unabashedly.  "I guess you need
to be very old like me or Edna here to understand what I mean," he
choked into the camera.  Sagging in her wheelchair, Edna suddenly
burst into wet panting sobs.  Jimmy joined her in a good cry for
the old days.
      No one knew that only a week earlier, Jimmy had attempted to
murder the scientist in charge of mixing his movie's dialogue
track.
      "It just won't work," the woman gasped as her co-workers
dragged Jimmy away from her and lifted her from the floor.  He had
tackled her from behind, knocking her over like a bag of grain and
landing on her back.  Before the others could intervene, Jimmy
jerked a telephone from a table and began wrapping the cord around
her neck.
      "No one says 'won't' to me!"  Drool flew from his thin white
lips.  "Fix it!  Make it work!"
      "You don't understand," she told him, still clutching her
throat as she shakily stood up.  "Your process, whatever it really
is, makes the 'images' move well enough."  A tooth popped out of
her mouth and plunked onto the floor as she spoke.  Everyone looked
down at the blood-smeared tooth, then back at her.  "But it would
take years," she continued, licking her lips, "to synchronize
the movements of the actors' lips and facial muscles with the
words in the script.  Maybe decades."
      "What about replacing their mouths with computer images?"
Jimmy demanded.  "What happened to that idea?"
      "We had to give it up," the woman answered, slowly retreating
behind a lab table as she spoke.  "Replacing facial quadrants on
*all* the actors in a feature film would require millions of
complicated images.  And even if we had the time, the final product
would look crude beyond belief."
      "Nora's right," added another scientist, an alcoholic
phonologist fired from Louisiana State University.  "It's easy
enough to use computer graphics to pop new footage into a scene
from _Casablanca_ for some ditsy commercial, but what you're
trying to do is whole different thing.  And we're still not even
sure that the fake voices of the dead actors will be very
convincing, not to mention aesthetically pleasing."
      Apoplectic, forehead bulging with engorged veins, Jimmy
bounded forward and took a roundhouse swing at the linguist.
"Aesthetics my bony ass!" he cried, wrapping his arms around his
chest and shaking with anger.  "What the hell is wrong here?  I
create *life* for you morons and you can't fix the lousy
*soundtrack*?"
      Stepping in front of the phonologist, who had easily dodged
the punch, another woman on the team spoke up.  A former cult
director with a degree in film from N.Y.U., Jimmy had lured her to
Incarn-Action with promises of promoting her new film at Cannes.
"The job might be easier, Mr. Rapar, if the film didn't have so
*much* dialogue.  Your shooting script has all the characters
talking their heads off.  In the classroom scene alone, the Judy
Garland character reads almost three pages aloud from Hegel."
      "She's right, Jimmy," said Nora, trying to sound
conciliatory.  "Make your movie more like a silent film.  Rely on
the visuals, not the words.  That's what critics want."
      "I hate silent films!" Jimmy screamed, stalking towards her.
"They're like sex without sweat!  Those stupid title cards with
flowery borders and those gaping expressions that make you think a
locomotive is bearing down on the actor!"  He swept a load of
recording devices from the table and threw himself across the black
tabletop.  Seeing Jimmy's long grabby fingers coming for her throat
again, Nora collapsed on the floor.  "And don't call me Jimmy!" he
shouted down at her, his head hanging over the edge.  Nora covered
her head with her arms, cowering.
      He fired the entire crew on the spot, but two days later they
were forgiven and summoned back to the central production unit.
Jimmy had found his solution.  Not only would the film be silent,
it would be so relentlessly silent as to eschew verbal
communication completely.
      "Eyes and faces, faces and eyes," Jimmy chanted rhythmically.
"Breasts and throats and pecs and thighs."  He loped around the
lab, white hair flowing down his back.  "Steroid biceps and
anorexic waists, smoking guns and smashing plates."  Gesturing at
the ceiling as though it were a vast screen, he dragged Nora with
him by her hand, occasionally pausing to embrace her with fierce
intensity.  "Bessie, my one true love, put those faces up there and
make magic for me.  We'll make the damn audience give up talking
*themselves*!"  Nora stared up at Jimmy's metallic gaze, her eyes
alight with terror.  Above her neck brace, she tried to give him a
nod.
      Part biblical epic, part drawing-room comedy, and part
Jacobean revenge tragedy, the first production of Incarn-Action
Pictures boldly crossed marketable genre categories.  The principal
cast included Gene Kelly, Mary Pickford, Natalie Wood, Bette
Davis, Spencer Tracy, Greta Garbo, Joan Bennett, Vivien Leigh,
Marie Dressler, Orson Wells, W. C. Fields, Vilma Banky, Rudolph
Valentino, Pola Negri, Groucho Marx, Lawrence Oliver, Bruce Lee,
Elvis Presley, Zasu Pitts, Burt Lancaster, Agnes Moorehead, Ramone
Navarro, Marion Marsh, Rock Hudson, Hattie McDaniel, Marlene
Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, Buster Keaton, Rin-Tin-Tin, Comet, King
Kong, and Joan Crawford.  Lillian and Dorothy Gish and River
Phoenix appeared in cameo roles as Numidian slave girls.  Non-dead
actors appeared only as extras in crowd scenes.
      Jimmy's greed to pack the film's publicity campaign with as
many mythic names as possible resulted in a Ziegfeldian revolving
birthday cake slathered with icing ornaments of faces dormant for
decades in the public consciousness.  Despite the running time of
over seven hours, no star was seen for longer than a few minutes.
Even the six major characters (played by Davis, Marx, Garbo,
Presley, Ball, and Kong) received no more than ten minutes of
screen time each.  The prologue begins with a Noel Coward-style
soiree attended by bored socialites.  A scream from the cook
(Pickford) interrupts a placid game of croquet when she discovers
the naked corpses of her employer's son (Valentino) and a
lascivious gardener (Wells).  With much breast-beating and
hair-pulling, the cook tells her employer (Ball) what she has
found.  This scene is interspersed with flashback shots of the two
men making violent love in the butler's pantry, the camera
cross-cutting between heaving body parts and low-angle shots of
croquet balls shooting through wickets.  Refusing to believe that
her son could be attracted to a gardener, Ball reveals herself to
be a psychic and abruptly begins to channel the spirit of her
great-grandmother (Wood).  With many stage-smirks and arched
eyebrows, the jaded guests participate in the seance, but just as
the spirit is about to reveal the murderer's identity, a
parapsychological catastrophe strikes.  All of the guests are flung
to various moments in the earth's past and future.  The
teleportation segment features a chaotic swirl of iris shots, matte
work, and fluctuating deep focus.  In a jarring allusion to the
Odessa steps sequence in Eisenstein's "Potemkin", Pickford flees
the metaphysical carnage by running down a marble staircase while
pushing a laundry cart.  An hour-long montage follows in which
Moorehead, Banky, Lee, Leigh, Jannings, and other party guests
arrive at the Battle of Hastings, a brothel in the circus of
Constantinople, the Janis Joplin gig at Woodstock I, and other
unexpected locales.  None of these characters is ever seen again.
As the montage ends, several guests are revealed landing in the
film's two key settings, Judea on the eve of the Battle of Jericho
and Oxford Castle in 1152 on the morning of Empress Matilda's
(Garbo's) escape from King Stephen (Groucho) across the frozen
River Thames.
      At this point, narrative coherence disintegrates rapidly, the
biblical and medieval plots being linked by several characters from
the seance (Dressler, Fields, Bennett, Olivier, Rin-Tin-Tin) who
somehow have gained the power to transport themselves from one time
period to another.  Still dressed (excluding the dog) in tuxedos
and gauzy Vic-wardian lawn frocks, they flit through the time
portals carrying messages and warnings concerning the complex
Hebrew, Assyrian, Anglo-Saxon, and Viking political conspiracies
that are developed in excruciating detail for the next three hours.
With minimal use of title cards, these sub-plots amount to little
more than varied set-pieces of personal and mass bloodshed.
Characters are tortured, maimed, raped, and killed with the
rapidity of chickens being dismembered and packaged on a conveyor
belt.  (No critic denied, however, that Crawford did the best
acting of her career as a maddened pharaoh (Presley) slowly broiled
her to death over a bed of flaming pitch.)
      Moving into the climax, the screen divides vertically between
the three temporal settings.  In the far left column, the heroine
of the biblical plot (Davis) entreats Goliath (King Kong) to elope
with her to "some country that's not so stinking hot."
Simultaneously, the center of the screen reveals the Empress
Matilda (in an outright refutation of established history)
murdering her cousin King Stephen and his Danish general, Ivar
Blood-Axe, by pushing them off an ice sheet and watching them sink
to their deaths under the weight of chain-mail and boar-tusk
helmet.  Back at the garden party in the screen's right column,
Ball, Pickford, and Wood merge their psychic energies to draw all
the surviving characters back to the present.  The biblical and
medieval sectors of the screen begin to dissolve, the sharp black
and white contrasts that have dominated the cinematography fading
into fuzzy greys.  Goliath's and Matilda's faces are frozen in
enormous, over-exposed close-ups as the guests materialize at
Ball's estate.  As the right column expands to fill the screen, the
camera slowly recedes for a high crane shot revealing bloody,
wounded, and diseased socialites scattered prostrate about the
croquet lawn.  (Only the Davis character has an enigmatic smile of
satisfaction on her face.)  A final image of Ball's Gatsbyesque
mansion, now revealed, without explanation, to be a mass of
smoldering black timbers, is superimposed upon the hostess' face.
Reflecting the dying light from her burned home, Ball's eyes are
ravaged by the pain of seeing her friends and home in ruins.  A
final shot of a trampled flower bed alludes to the peace montage
from "Intolerance", while also suggesting that Ball now realizes
that her son, after all, probably did have a thing for burly
gardeners.
      In its first month of national distribution, the film
out-grossed the combined total of all films released in 2000,
including Steven Spielberg's greatest hit, "Indy and Schindly XI:
Terror on Dinosaur Island".  Given a new drug of choice, people
forgot the shameless binges that had written 1999 into history's
footnotes.  The golden bridge leading to a new era had appeared
after all, merely one year late.
      Critical response to the film was no less torrential than the
popular reaction, reviews and analyses ranged from the superlative
to the excremental.  Jimmy's film was the zenith of tactlessness,
bloated production standards, and atheistic deconstructionist
anarchy.  For others, Jimmy had crystallized post-modern
aesthetics, bringing textual "verfremdung" to sadistic but
exhilarating extremes.  His film formed the ultimate social
critique of the "lost generation," the "me generation," the "punk
generation," "generation X," and the second millennium's final
propagation, "generation Gump."  The first scholarly analyses of
the film were completed within weeks, and soon pop culture
theorists of every variety were spawning a constant flow of
unreadable publications.  Ph.D. students across the country boldly
dumped computer files holding nearly-finished dissertations on
"Beavis and Butthead" and "Plan 9 from Outer Space".  No one
wanted to write on anything but Jimmy's film.  Swelling the tide of
popular, critical, and scholarly mania still higher, a flood of
lawsuits poured into the courts.  Before the film's premiere had
ended, litigation was initiated by no fewer than 500 separate
parties.  Lawyers representing descendants of dead stars from seven
different generations sued for libel, slander, and unlicensed use
of private names and photographic images.  The film was also made
a target by its potpourri of ethnicities, races, and sexual
orientations.  Spearheaded by the Viking Anti-Defamation League,
class- action suits were filed by coalitions of gays, feminists,
blacks, Jews, American and Maori Indians, by incest-, molestation-,
and impoliteness-survivors, by Arabs, Roman Catholics, the Coptic
Church, the SPCA, and the Lawn and Garden Workers Union.  Forming
a third front, all major film studios in America pooled their
assets to break Jimmy's corporate backbone and to have his film
withdrawn and destroyed.  Far from being cowed, Jimmy snorted and
charged like a bull, so invigorated by the challenge that his
artificial heart required a tune-up to keep even with his brain
energy output.  In roaring good humor, he reminded reporters that
his own legal team was large enough to populate Burbank.  He
controlled state and federal judges throughout California and New
York and played billiards regularly with two Supreme Court
justices.  Jimmy was confident he could keep his film in
circulation and his studio free of production bans until he died.
He couldn't care less what happened afterward.
      One night in February, Jimmy clicked off his bank of monitors
and went to bed early.  A Chicago station had broadcast a special
on the first convention held by the United Film Church of America,
an organization formed in the cultural shockwaves of Jimmy's movie.
Adherents to the sect believed that Jimmy had resurrected the dead
actors to create the third millennium's first sacred text.  It was
fitting, they argued, that the world's newest bible should be
conveyed through a non-print medium.  As proof of their faith,
church leaders insisted that no one could explain in scientific
terms exactly how Jimmy had devised his special effects.  (Church
members referred to the film's FX as Jimmy's "divine shewings.")
      Cozy in an ermine nightgown and a striped stocking cap that
trailed to the floor, Jimmy left his communications center for the
long walk to his bedroom.  As sheet metal doors slid shut behind
him, the corridor's high walls and steepled ceiling glowed in
iridescent green.  The mirrored floor, studded with uncut emeralds
from Jimmy's Peruvian mines, was tinted the same color.  The train
of Jimmy's gown swept lightly across tile and gems, the corridor's
only noise the patter of his bare feet.  Humming, staring into the
green reflections at his feet, he imagined himself as a film image.
Viewed from the doorway behind him, the striped candy cane of his
hat made him a child lost in a cathedral, a cartoon pre-pubescent
from a Disney animated feature.  But from the front, viewed in a
low-angle shot, his streaming hair suggested an unquiet blur of
spirit, a Dickensian phantom with greenish shadows carved into the
paper skin of its face.
      Pausing at a window overlooking Lake Michigan, he stared into
the darkness spreading up his palace walls.  Fog obscured the
lights of Chicago's Loop, but close to shore pinpoint lights
flickered through the blackness.  Jimmy recognized them as ships
keeping watch on his property.  Reporters, film students, disciples
from the United Film Church, their small craft filled his harbor
day and night, waiting.  He nodded in satisfaction, then continued
to his suite.  Soon he was tucked into the conjugal bed of Abraham
and Mary Todd Lincoln, which he had purchased at a bargain price
when the federal government needed cash to pay social security
benefits.  Ravel's "Sarabande", his favorite piece of music,
melted into the bright colors of his dreams.  With a bony finger,
he pressed a button that lowered the lights to a low dull blue.  He
slept.
      He awoke coughing and wheezing, opening his eyes to harsh
white light.  "What the hell"? he thought, jerking himself up in
bed.
      "Deal!" in a bass voice from the room's furthest corner.
      "Hey!" Jimmy yelled.  "Who the hell's in this room?  Who's
smoking that stinking cigar?"
      Someone had set up a poker table in his chamber.  Four men
sat around it in club chairs, chips piled before them, ashtrays at
their hands.  "How'd you get in here?" he yelled again.  "Speak
quick!  I've got a loaded gun here."  He was lying, but as he swung
himself out of bed, his foot came down on a button that would call
fifty guards to his room in less than twenty seconds.
      One man set his cards down on the table, shaking his head as
though with remorse.  "The putz is awake," he said.  "So now we
talk business, but later, we finish this hand.  No looking."
      "Get out," Jimmy snapped.  "In two seconds you'll have the
business ends of machine guns shoved up your asses."  But the four
men stood up and stepped closer.  Jimmy drew back, uncertain.
      Bald and fat, they wore monogrammed Turkish bathrobes that
reached to their knees.  Their tanned skin glowed with California
health.  Each man wore at least one large diamond ring.
      "It seems we have some contractual difficulties with your new
film, Jimmy," one of them said.
      "Serious difficulties," another added, puffing on a long
Cuban cigar with black wrapping.
      "The central problem," the third man said, "is that we want
to know how you did it."
      "Talk to my lawyers," Jimmy snarled.  "And don't call me
Jimmy."  But his hands shook as he talked, and his foot throbbed
from thumping the floor button.
      "Saul here says it has something to do with that temple you
excavated in Iraq.  Some kind of pagan thing from even before Moses
brought down the tablets, wasn't it?  Come on, Jimmy, don't be such
a goy, was it the temple?  Some kind of deal with God knows
what kind of pagan idol?  People said you spent days down there,
all alone.  Then you sneaked out all the contents at night with
your air force.  Oy, I wish I could've seen the faces on those
Arabs when they found out how you had robbed them!  World War III
is what it almost was.  And no one's seen those artefacts yet, I
don't think."
      "Go to hell!" Jimmy yelled.  "The transfer was covered by the
'98 Global Agreement for Antiquities Trade.  I won all the
lawsuits."
      "Then maybe something less exotic, more your usual type of
thing?"  This one wore a gold chain around his neck, the heavy
links lying on a bed of chest hair below his throat.  "That
physicist you made pals with, the one who disappeared until they
found his body in your lake in Switzerland?  So maybe he told you
some little thing you wanted to keep all to yourself?"
      "Or maybe you are the new messiah, like the nuts say?"
suggested the third man, exhaling a cloud of cigar smoke.  "Is that
what you want us to believe?"  They all laughed and slapped each on
the backs, puffing on their cigars.
      With a last kick at the button and a desperate look at the
door, Jimmy suddenly reached behind his bed's headboard and pulled
a lever.  A floor-length mirror shot upward, and he lunged into the
black rectangle.  As the mirror slammed down behind him, he could
still hear the fat men laughing.
      "Where's the stupid lights?" he shouted, groping through
blackness.  The hidden room was stocked with food and loaded with
communication devices for sending distress calls.  Groping through
the stale air, he shuffled and slid across the metal floor, hoping
to bump into the communications console.
      "So what kind of hospitality is this?" a voice said.  "We
come here to talk things over with you nice and friendly and you
slam a mirror in our faces?  So now you're Alice in Wonderland
already?"
      Jimmy screamed, leaping into the air and running forward
blindly, arms outstretched.  By luck, one hand came down on a
spring-loaded panel that retracted a segment of the wall.  Guided
by the whir of gears and pulleys, he took two long strides through
the opening.  The train of his robe was caught by the closing door,
but the smooth fur pulled off his shoulders easily, sliding down
his rib-cage and hips as he ran forward.  Naked, he began sprinting
up a circular staircase leading to the summit of his palace's
highest tower.  He reached the top wheezing like an ironmonger's
bellows, the artificial joints in his knees, hips, shoulders, and
elbows cutting into flesh and bone like razors.  Collapsing against
the crash-bar on a steel-plated door, he staggered from the
darkness into a freezing, starry night.  With shaking hands, he
braced the door with an iron bar before falling to his knees on the
icy stones.  Knowing that a fleet of helicopters had been summoned
automatically when the seal on the door was broken, he curled
himself into a tight ball, wheezing and coughing.  The blasting
Canadian wind frosted his skin a bright red.  How could Jimmy
Rapar, the world's most powerful man, be frozen raw at the top of
a tower like an Eskimo dying on an ice floe?
      "You better hope you're the messiah," one of the fat men
said.  "Good way to catch the influenza, lying on the cold ground
like that."  They all nodded their heads sadly, staring down at
Jimmy.
      At the sound of their voices, Jimmy jerked himself upright.
The men stood several feet away, blurred by wisps of fog blowing
across the battlements.  Jimmy retreated, his mouth hanging open,
his blue eyes white with rage and frustration.  When his back
touched hit solid stone, he turned and leaped onto the crenelated
ledge encircling the tower's surface.
      "Get off my tower!" he yelled, hopping about on the narrow
edge as he tried to balance himself against the winds. "My choppers
are on their way, and they're all armed!"  He raised his skinny
arms above his head, white hair streaming around his shoulders.
Against the night, his body was a sharp sliver of fish-bone
vibrating in a black wind.
      "Look, Jimmy--oh, you don't want to be called Jimmy, right?
Fine with us, Mr. Rapar.  All we want here is just the secret of
how you brought back all those stars for your dreck of a film.
'Fess up and tell us the big secret, Mr. Rapar.  You know, share
the technology, spread the wealth, just like they did when talkies
came in.  Then we go away just as nice as you please.  Wadda ya
say, Rapar?"
      "That's Ray-*pa'r*!" Jimmy yelled.  "Accent on the second
syllable, moron!  My name's a palindrome, not a damned homonym for
a sex crime!"
      Then Jimmy's foot slipped.

                            *  *  *  *

      In April of 2001, the first production of Incarn-Action
Pictures won fourteen Academy Awards.  Attending the ceremony as
Jimmy's guests, unknown individuals claiming to be Agnes Moorehead,
Elvis Presley, and Greta Garbo accepted acting honors.  Jimmy
himself, however, failed to appear.  The dead stars (or their
impersonators) gave special thanks to their producer for
jump-starting their careers.  The eleven non-dead acting nominees
boycotted the ceremony, releasing bitter statements about the
unfairness of competing with dead people.  But they found no
support.  Public sympathy for the dead, whom many perceived as
being disadvantaged, caused the non-dead actors to be accused of
discrimination.  To retaliate  against this unexpected spin in
spectator consciousness, the Screen Actors Guild passed a new
policy forbidding membership to any allegedly dead actors who might
apply for membership.
      "The Messiah Was A Trillionaire: The Jimmy I. Rapar Story",
the second release from Incarn- Action Pictures, made its premiere
in December of 2001.  Greeted by enthusiasm surpassing that of the
earlier film, the epic biography of Jimmy's life monopolized the
film markets so completely that three major studios declared
bankruptcy.  Publicity for the film was fueled by Jimmy's strange
absence.  Unseen in public for several weeks, he was rumored to be
dead, or kidnapped by the church consecrated to his films, or "en
route" to Mars in his own private spaceship.  No one knew who
controlled Incarn-Action Pictures and Jimmy's other holdings.
      Devotees of the United Film Church proclaimed that the new
film represented Jimmy's New Testament for the Old Testament of his
first movie.  Like the Christian old and new covenants, they
argued, Jimmy was prefigured in the first film and made flesh in
the second.  The Church Council issued treatises interpreting
Jimmy's many miracles in the new film.  Skeptical hosts of
late-night comedy shows made cruel jokes, but even the most
confirmed cynics could not deny the power of the film's final eerie
images.  Jimmy's naked withered body silhouetted against the storm
raging around his tower made satisfying spectacle, but the final
seconds after his fall from the balcony left viewers shaken and
disoriented.  Some said that Jimmy saved himself by clutching the
end of a rope ladder thrown from a helicopter.  Others claimed that
he fell like a shot into the black lake.  Most church members
insisted that Jimmy floated in the air like a spectral flying
reptile before disappearing in a flash of blue light.  Variations
on each scenario were as diverse and unlimited as the number of
spectators, and even after this miracle of infinite variety became
canonized by church officials, Jimmy's face spoke differently to
every audience.  Paralyzed in enormous close-up, laughing like a
demon, screaming, smiling with beatitude, his eyes glazed or clear,
his small white teeth clamped on his pink tongue, his lifted,
peeled, and sanded facial skin so close to the camera it became the
topography of a desert, a planet, the wilderness of his life
spanning an entire century, with one extreme border in a dead age
and the other in the flowering gold of a new era.

                                 -end-