Channel Blue (17 page)

The associate producer glanced away, clearly uncomfortable. ‘Not sure Mr Pythagorus will go for that.’

‘Do it,’ Amanda said.

The associate producer nervously smoothed his hair with one hand. ‘I’d like to. I mean, this is good stuff. It’s just that you and this Earthle are kind of on the outs right now.’

Amanda glanced over at her shoulder at the two guards, who kept a respectable distance in the hallway. ‘I’m still your boss,’ she said.

The associate producer shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Amanda. I’d love to help you out, but I can’t.’

* * *

After several volunteers, Father Michael, and two other priests pulled the old homeless woman off Perry, it fell to Noah Overton to escort him off the premises. When they walked out of the basement door, Perry paused, surveying the sky and the dingy walkway.
Where are the flies?
Panic gripped his stomach. Where had all the damn flies gone? Had they stopped watching?

‘I’m sorry, Per,’ Noah said. ‘I know you really want to help, but you were making everyone really uncomfortable in there. You have to go.’

Perry fought down his agitation. If he was going to show the sympathetic side of Earth, he needed Noah’s help. Jesus – his neighbour was practically the poster boy for hopeless causes. Now more than ever he needed to appear sane and rational. ‘Noah, you have to listen to me,’ he said. ‘If I can’t show that human beings are capable of being good, the Earth is going to be destroyed.’

Noah’s great brown eyes were tinged with sadness. ‘It’s hard to see you like this.’

‘If I gave you a jar full of flies, would you carry it around with you?’

Noah shook his head. ‘Why would I do that, Per?’

‘Why have all the flies been following me around?’ Perry took a deep breath. It was now or never – he had to tell him everything. ‘Because they’re
cameras
.’ He fixed Noah’s doubtful expression in the steadiest gaze he could muster. ‘An alien race has been watching Earth for entertainment, but they’ve decided to blow us up because they’re sick of watching. The thing is, they’ve only been watching the worst of the worst. We have to show them what we’re capable of!’

Noah sighed. ‘Promise me you’ll get some help.’

Perry finally saw what he’d been searching for: a blue fly perched on the wall nearby. He smacked the wall and nailed it. ‘You see?’ Perry said, holding his hand up to Noah’s face. ‘It’s a
camera
!’

‘No, Per,’ Noah said softly. ‘That’s a fly. A very dead fly.’

Perry examined his palm and saw what appeared to be an unappetising smudge of wings and fly guts. ‘You have to look at it closely. I swear to God, there’s a camera in there somewhere.’

Noah turned away. There was nothing more he could do. ‘Goodbye, friend.’ With a final mournful glance, he entered the shelter and left Perry outside, wiping his hand on his blue velour pants and staring at the sky.

CHANNEL 17

THE PROPHET

Perry crossed the church parking lot, scanning the air for flies. A passing nun glanced at him furtively and bustled by. He could only guess at what he looked like in his dirty blue tracksuit, bruised, beaten and haggard after two days without sleep. But he didn’t care anymore. The naked burka girl pens had been sent out; a crisis was escalating in the Middle East and the Earth had only days before Nick Pythagorus’ machinations reduced it to rubble.

Perry didn’t see any flies but he had to assume that someone up there was still watching. He had to because it was Earth’s only hope. And if they were watching, he had to do everything in his power to be perceived as the kind of person that you wouldn’t want to kill. In other words, he had to do some good – as quickly as possible. Now that the homeless shelter was off-limits, that meant helping someone out here.

He looked around the half-empty parking lot. Birds sang in the trees and a passing car radio played salsa music. It wasn’t exactly a war zone. Still, there had to be something he could do.

He heard shouting and turned towards it. A run-down park bordered the parking lot. At one end, a small cluster of homeless people sat on decrepit swings and playground equipment, eating boxed meals from the shelter. They watched as two men shoved each other, scuffling and shouting among the wood chips. One held a cupcake that the other struggled to reach.

Perry trotted across the asphalt and entered the park, accelerating into a run as he approached the fight. Without hesitating, he grabbed the scraggly man holding the cupcake.

‘Stop this!’ he shouted. He took the cupcake out of the man’s hand and threw it as hard as he could. It sailed like a frosting-covered comet over the playground equipment. ‘No one gets the cupcake!’

Perry’s actions were so decisive that both men dropped any pretence of aggression and stared at him, confused. Perry, in turn, felt an obligation to explain his sudden act of pastry vandalism.

‘There’s no more time for fighting. We have to start being good to each other or the world is over.’

‘Because of the aliens?’

Perry turned to the man who’d been attempting to grab the cupcake and realised, to his shock, that it was Ralph.

In the hours since Perry had seen him, Ralph had somehow deteriorated back to his dirty, shambling homeless configuration – and then beyond, to an even more dilapidated state. It was if he had left Perry on Ventura Boulevard and rolled up and down a hill of garbage for the next five hours.

Perry had decided that he wasn’t going to waste any more time talking about aliens to people who thought he was crazy to begin with, but since Ralph had brought it up, Perry nodded. Ralph’s eyes grew wide. It was as if two puzzle pieces in his broken brain had slid together.

‘It’s not a show,’ he muttered.

‘No,’ Perry said.

‘
That’s
what you were trying to tell me. Right, Buddy? The aliens are crashing our planes because we’re not good to each other!’

‘Basically, yes.’

The other homeless regarded Perry and Ralph sceptically. This seemed to spark some fire in Ralph, who turned to the scraggly man he’d been fighting for the cupcake and strode directly towards him with his arms outstretched, like an old-fashioned movie monster closing in on a victim.

Perry cringed. But to his surprise, Ralph threw both arms around the scraggly man.

‘I love you,’ he said. After what seemed like minutes to Perry and probably hours to the scraggly man, Ralph released him, turned to the rest of the group and pointed emphatically at Perry: ‘Listen to this man! He knows what’s going on!’ The homeless stared at Perry, who was still trying to catch up with this odd chain of events. ‘Tell them, Buddy,’ Ralph urged. ‘Tell them how we’re all going to die and how it’s not a show. How the aliens are going to destroy the Earth.’

The motley group waited for Perry to speak. Perry had never enjoyed public speaking – it was one of the reasons he’d become a writer. It was always so much easier to seem witty when you spent hours writing it beforehand. When he’d been a successful screenwriter, his awkwardness in meetings had been considered charming; the way he sometimes paused for an uncomfortably long time before speaking was thought to be an endearing eccentricity that only confirmed his status as a savant. After his fall, however, these same qualities were viewed as terrible liabilities and proof that the failure of his screenplays was no accident.

‘Well,’ Perry said after a long pause. ‘It’s true.’

‘Ralph told you!’ Ralph bellowed to no one in particular, then turned his intense blue eyes back on Perry with disconcerting focus. ‘What can we do, Buddy? Tell us! What can we do to save ourselves?’

‘Help each other,’ Perry said. ‘Just... try to be decent and... unselfish.’

‘No one gets the cupcake!’ Ralph yelled ecstatically.

‘No one gets the cupcake,’ one of the other men repeated, as if to see how it sounded coming out of his mouth. The other homeless continued to focus their attention on Perry, their scepticism now tinged with interest.

‘It may even be too late,’ Perry said, warming up to his speaking role, ‘but we have to hope that it’s not. We have to hope that the aliens are still watching us, and that everything we do or say will have a bearing on whether they decide to destroy the Earth.’

As he spoke, he noticed that more homeless from the shelter were approaching, attracted by the commotion.

‘Tell us more, Buddy,’ said one leathery woman to Perry. ‘How did you find out about these aliens?’

‘Yeah,’ said a toothless man. ‘Do they have those disgusting big white heads?’

‘No,’ Perry said, and proceeded to tell the growing group how he had found out about Galaxy Entertainment and their plans for Earth. Sometime during his story, the bells above them tolled for seven o’clock mass. No one in his audience made a move towards the church.

By the time Perry had recounted his journey to the shelter, the crowd listening to him had tripled. The men and women leaned forward, straining to hear him, occasionally yelling, ‘Louder!’ to Perry or ‘Shut up!’ and ‘Quiet!’ to someone else. Ralph worked the periphery of the crowd, bringing listeners in closer to Perry and fielding questions. Perry noticed Father Michael standing towards the rear of the crowd, his arms folded across his chest.

During one pause in Perry’s story, the priest cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, ‘It’s not too late to attend mass! If you’re interested, please join us in the main sanctuary!’

‘No thanks,’ a homeless man replied. ‘We’re listening to Buddy.’

Father Michael, unfazed, shouted again, ‘Please come and join me in a prayer for peace! The Middle East needs our prayers tonight!’

‘We’re not playing with that God stuff anymore!’ Ralph shouted back. ‘There are aliens trying to destroy the planet! We have to stay out here and help each other.’

Father Michael smiled, maintaining his calm. ‘I’m happy you want to help each other,’ he said. ‘But there are no aliens. There is only God. Your friend Buddy here—’ Father Michael extended his arm to Perry, ‘does not speak for God.’

A chorus of jeers rose from the crowd. Perry, mortified, waved his hands and shouted for them to be quiet.

Father Michael stepped closer to Perry and fixed him with a steely gaze. ‘What’s your game here?’ he said with disconcerting calm.

‘My game?’ Perry said.

‘Leading these lost souls astray,’ the priest said, advancing on Perry. ‘If you really want to help them do good, why not encourage them to come into church?’

Emboldened by the support of the crowd, Perry held his ground against the priest. ‘It’s not enough to sit in church. They’ve already watched us sitting in church.’

Father Michael arched his eyebrows. ‘By “they”, I suppose you mean... the aliens?’

Perry nodded. ‘They’re not impressed that people think they can go into church and be absolved for anything bad they’ve done. They actually thought it was hilarious for a while, but now they think it’s another example of why we should be destroyed.’

As Perry spoke, he saw Father Michael quietly give up on having a reasonable conversation. ‘I see,’ the priest said. He turned back to the massing crowd and spoke with his commanding baritone. ‘When any of you become tired of this crazy talk about aliens, the church will be open to you!’

‘Crazier than a virgin birth?’ shouted back the toothless man.

‘How about raising the dead?’ came other voices.

‘What about God talking from a bush?’

‘Crazier than a talking snake?’

The crowd continued heckling Father Michael until he marched back into the church wearing an expression of righteous indignation. Then it turned its attention back to Perry and demanded that he repeat different parts of his story again, answer questions, and give advice. Perry had used up all his adrenaline. As the sun sank below the horizon and the fluorescent lights that bordered the park flickered on, he felt overwhelmed by fatigue. He sat down but still had trouble keeping his eyes open. On his fourth or fifth time reciting the disasters that would end the world, he slumped over onto the grass and slipped into a deep dreamless sleep.

* * *

Perry woke to the ringing of church bells. He opened his eyes and saw the words:
THIS
END
UP
. It took him a few moments to realise that he was lying inside a refrigerator box that had been propped over him like a tent.

‘He’s up!’ a familiar voice said. Perry raised his head from a balled-up down vest and saw that Ralph was gazing down at him, flanked by two homeless men Perry vaguely remembered from the night before. Perry stretched his limbs beneath a makeshift quilt of dirty coats. He felt stiff and sore.

‘We’ve got some food for you, Buddy,’ Ralph said, holding a boxed breakfast from the shelter. Perry wiped the sleep from his eyes with one dirty blue sleeve and crawled out from under the box. He emerged into the morning light and was immediately set upon by Ralph and the other ripe-smelling men, who grabbed him and lifted him onto Ralph’s shoulders.

‘Let me down!’ Perry shouted.

‘No, Buddy,’ Ralph said. ‘They all want to see you.’

Perry surveyed his surroundings, disoriented and blinking in the bright sun. When his eyes adjusted, he saw that the park was now filled with hundreds of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder, all facing Perry. They weren’t just homeless, either. There were men wearing ties, well-dressed women, schoolkids with backpacks, men and women wearing blue velour tracksuits. Many held crudely made signs that read: ‘We Love You Buddy’, ‘Save Us’ and ‘No one Gets the Cupcake’.

They saw Perry and a huge cheer went up amongst them.

‘What’s going on?’ Perry asked when Ralph had set him back down.

‘They’ve all heard about the aliens and what they’re doing,’ Ralph said. ‘They want to hear from you what they should do to save the planet.’

‘Speak to us, Buddy!’ one of the crowd shouted.

‘No one gets the cupcake!’ another yelled, and the chant was eagerly taken up and repeated over and over.

Perry waved his hands for them to stop. A sudden silence descended as if he had pressed a mute button. He studied their smiling expectant faces and cleared his throat. ‘Be nice to each other,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Stop thinking about yourselves for a day. Go help someone.’