Channel Blue (24 page)

Amanda glanced over at him. ‘Are you really waiting for me to ask?’

‘He disappeared.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He disappeared. A helicopter flew over, he grabbed me, and then he wasn’t there anymore.’

Amanda shrugged. ‘Well, maybe you should stop talking to him.’

‘I really didn’t have a chance to talk—’

‘
Whatever
,’ Amanda said. She started up the van and accelerated out of the gas station, taking a hard right onto Ventura Boulevard.

They drove in silence for a moment.
What the hell is wrong with her?
Perry thought, but said, ‘What are you going to do now?’

Amanda’s eyes remained on the road. ‘I don’t know, Mr Bunt. I don’t seem to have a job anymore. Maybe I’ll look for one while you get your beauty sleep.’

‘Are you mad at me for some reason?’

‘You say you want to save the world, then you change your mind and just want to sleep.’

‘I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in three days!’

‘
Ooh, widdle baby needs his nappy-nap
,’ Amanda spoke in a disturbing singsong voice. ‘Guess I chose wrong, huh? You don’t have what it takes to save Earth. Maybe you never did.’

Perry’s face flushed. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’ he said. ‘Why’re you talking to me like this?’

Amanda didn’t respond. Perry stared at the cold set of her features as she steered the van beneath a freeway overpass, pulled over to the curb, shifted into park and turned off the ignition. He looked around. He recognised this place. This was where Amanda parked his Ford Festiva before she revealed to him the workings of Channel Blue.

‘Do you see any flies?’ she asked. They searched the van. He shook his head. Amanda did one more inspection, then fixed her eyes on him and broke into a huge smile. ‘We did it.’

Perry considered the possibility that the alien producer had gone completely insane. ‘What?’ he said guardedly.

‘We’re still on!’ she shouted. Perry continued to stare at her. Amanda proceeded to talk unbelievably fast while tucking her hair behind her ears. ‘I couldn’t tell you, because they’re still watching. It’s bigger than ever.
Bunt to the Rescue
has won the last three time periods hands-down!’ She giggled and took both of his hands in hers.

Perry wasn’t sure what to think, but her joy was infectious. He found himself grinning back at her. ‘Really?’

‘Yes. When I walked into the station, they practically gave me a medal! They all said they’d been completely wrong about you and the show.’ Amanda took a deep ebullient breath. ‘Marty Firth came up to me and admitted –
to my face
– that killing you off for ratings was the biggest mistake of his career!’

‘That was big of him,’ Perry said, unimpressed.

‘The viewers love you. And they love me. Isn’t that incredible? I never dreamed of being on camera. And they love it, love it,
love it
when I’m mean to you. That’s why I was just acting that way. They love that unresolved tension between us. Oh, Mr Bunt. It’s so incredible. We’ve got a hit!’ Amanda fell into Perry’s arms and kissed him on the lips as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And, for that moment, it was – until she pulled herself away. ‘We can’t do that anymore,’ she said. ‘We need the unresolved tension.’

‘Right,’ Perry said, disappointed. They stared out of the windshield for a moment, then slammed together like the last two cars in a demolition derby, tumbling between the seats onto the metal floor of the van, their hands feverishly groping each other as if bare skin held the secret to eternal life.

If there was one thing that Perry hated writing, it was a sex scene. Like car chases, sex scenes were obligatory in Hollywood blockbusters. The audience expected that at some point the hero and heroine, naked but not too naked, would flail their perfectly toned and hairless torsos against each other. Which posed a question: in an age when limitless pornography of all dispositions is within a click away, how do you make a simulated sex act between two movie stars interesting? The answer was: you didn’t. Everyone knew what was going to happen. The only thing you could do was make it quick – something Perry never had a problem with, in theory or in practice. In one script he’d written:

INT. BEDROOM – NIGHT

Tim and Veronica make passionate love.

Done! Let the movie stars hash out how much they will or will not show. Let the director figure out how to make their unoriginal mimicry of original sin interesting.

In Perry’s reality, however, sex scenes were
never
obligatory. If anything, they were the opposite: optional to the point of not existing at all. The frantic kissing and groping amongst discarded evening wear on the floor of the cable service van was no exception. He couldn’t believe it was happening but also couldn’t afford to doubt the reality of it: It was way too close to his fantasies for comfort.

Amanda broke off a long kiss with her hands still in his pants. ‘And we definitely can’t do this,’ she said between hot breaths.

‘Right,’ Perry said, quivering in ecstasy.

They resumed their plunder of each other’s bodies. Within moments, Amanda lay naked on the floor of the van with her legs wrapped around Perry, his pants bunched around his ankles.

Perry and Amanda made passionate love.

‘
Especially
not this,’ Amanda moaned.

‘No, never,’ Perry groaned.

‘Because
nobody
does this,’ Amanda yowled.

‘Nobody!’ Perry agreed, shouting at the top of his lungs.

‘Nobody! No!’

‘No! No!’ Perry yelled as they feverishly gyrated against each other. ‘No! No!
Nooooo
!’ And with that last ‘no’, Perry Bunt offered the biggest ‘yes’ possible in the known universe. He launched his own DNA deep into the galaxy of cells known as Amanda Mundo, searching for life where no man had gone before.

Moments later, they sat panting on the floor of the van, sticky and naked, staring into space. The van’s windows were fogged and the air inside more humid and foetid than a city park portable toilet in mid-summer. But Perry and Amanda were oblivious, lost in a post-orgasmic stupor.

For his part, Perry was mostly relieved. He’d spent the frantic minutes of coitus pouring all his energy into a single thought: please don’t come to your senses. To be with someone so beautiful, someone whom he’d thought about for so long seemed impossible; at any moment, he was certain she’d realise what she was doing and push him away. But miraculously, she hadn’t.

Now what?
Perry thought. He’d saved the Earth, become famous and made torrid love to the most beautiful woman in the universe. He’d never been so happy in his entire life. Still, he couldn’t help thinking:
there has to be a catch.
Nothing this good ever happened to the characters in his screenplays. And if it did, it would be followed immediately by a sudden reversal. But nothing was reversing – or versing, for that matter. He was simply sitting naked in a van parked beneath a freeway overpass on Ventura Boulevard.

‘So,’ Perry said, breaking the silence. ‘Do you think fornicating might make a comeback?’ Amanda laughed. ‘Come on. Better than the pills, right?’

‘Different, that’s for sure.’ She peered down at her sweaty body as if it belonged to somebody else. ‘I feel like I just rode a rusty bicycle through a swamp.’

Perry frowned. ‘I have to say, that’s pretty far down on the list of things I was hoping to hear.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Bunt, but you have to understand that this was absolutely the craziest thing I’ve ever done – and will ever do – in my entire life.’

‘Again,’ Perry said. ‘Not anywhere near the top.’

‘The sheer primitiveness of it!’ Amanda shook her head. ‘We were absolutely like two animals.’

‘You’re moving up the list,’ Perry said.

He now had a chance to consider Amanda’s body as something more than a blur of flesh. Unlike 90 per cent of humanity and 100 per cent of visitors to nude beaches, Amanda looked better with her clothes off than on. His eyes wandered around her phenomenal breasts, a gravity-bending combination of natural fullness and pertness that would cause any self-respecting Beverly Hills plastic surgeon to slit his own throat with a scalpel. And the ass! When she turned to gather her clothes, it was as if he was suddenly in the presence of a heavenly orb, an incredible clefted sphere of life-affirming roundness. Then he considered (very briefly) his own body, which from years of sitting at a computer had grown thick in the middle and spindly everywhere else. And really, was there anything quite as laughable in nature as the penis? In its current, nearly hairless state – courtesy of the decontaminating robots on the moon – it appeared even more ridiculous than usual, an odd worm with far too much skin. Or a tiny, faceless Shar-Pei puppy, without any of the cuteness. In any case, it wasn’t pretty. He self-consciously grabbed his underwear, held it over his crotch, and gazed back on Amanda’s smooth, flawless form. Maybe there was something to genetic engineering.

Amanda turned around and slipped her underwear up over her long legs, and he noticed something else. Two inches below her navel there was an indentation, a kind of second navel, except that it was an almost perfect perforation.

‘Is that a scar?’ he asked, then immediately regretted blurting out such a personal question. But Amanda didn’t seem to mind.

‘No. It’s my shunt.’

‘Your what?’

Amanda blinked. ‘For elimination.’

Perry felt repulsed but tried to show concern. ‘I’m sorry. Did you have some kind of surgery?’

She laughed. ‘We all do. Everyone has one.’

Perry blinked. ‘It comes out of there?’

‘It’s much cleaner and more efficient than the way you do it. Plus, we don’t have to squat over our own excrement like filthy animals.’

Perry stared at Amanda as she slipped her dress over her head.

‘You Edenites are too much. You look like humans, you act like humans...’

‘Why would you say something like that?’ Amanda snapped back, offended.

‘You’re like humans in every way except the way that matters. You’re like humans who are so afraid of being animals that they’ve forgotten how to be human.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ Amanda smoothed her dress, glimpsing her reflection in the rear-view mirror. ‘But if being human means fouling yourself every time you go to the bathroom, then who would want to be that? Put your clothes on, I should get you home.’

Perry unfurled the underwear he held over his crotch and slipped them on. ‘I’m afraid to ask,’ he said, ‘but what’s the next episode?’

‘I don’t know. They were still working on the script.’

‘Great,’ Perry said. ‘I’ll probably be asking Mike Tyson to help me save the world.’

Amanda laughed and slipped into the driver’s seat. ‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘You’re now very valuable to the channel. They won’t make the mistake of risking your life again.’

Perry stood up and, crouching to avoid the roof of the van, stepped over to where his pants lay in a tangled heap. ‘Isn’t it going to be weird when your viewers see the van drive out from under the freeway a half hour after it went under in the first place?’ He picked up the pants and there was a sharp clink of metal as something fell out of one of the pockets onto the floor.

‘They’ll make an edit back at the station,’ Amanda said. ‘We’ve got a delay because of transmission time. No one will know the difference.’

Perry spotted a small, inscribed gold plaque glinting up from the van’s floor. He remembered Nick Pythagorus at the gas station, grabbing his pocket as the helicopter descended. Perry picked up the plaque and read it.

532
ND
O
RBY
A
WARDS

B
EST
S
ENSELESS
V
IOLENCE

N
ICK
P
YTHAGORUS

P
RODUCTION
E
XECUTIVE
IN
C
HARGE
OF
E
XECUTIVE
P
RODUCTION
E
NTERTAINMENT
AND
R
ECREATIONAL
T
ERRESTRIAL
H
ABITAT

He read the last line twice before it hit him. ‘Earth,’ he muttered to himself.

The insane ravings of Nick Pythagorus suddenly made complete sense.

They’d made us.

CHANNEL 23

BREAKING CONTINUITY

Perry gaped at the small plaque in his hand, unable to move.

‘Come on, let’s go,’ Amanda called from the driver’s seat. She turned over the ignition and started the van. In a daze, Perry shuffled to the passenger seat. She glanced over. ‘You forgot to pull up your pants,’ she said.

He stared at her. ‘When were you going to tell me?’

‘I just noticed it now.’

‘Not my pants. Earth. When were you going to tell me what it was?’ He reached out and dropped the plaque on the dashboard in front of her.

Amanda turned off the ignition.

‘Were you ever going to tell me?’ Perry asked.

She gazed out the windshield. ‘I don’t know. Probably not. I thought about it. I really did. But you already have so much on your mind, I thought it was better if you didn’t know everything.’

‘Start talking.’

Amanda furrowed her brow. ‘There’s no point,’ she said. ‘It won’t change anything and you won’t like it.’

‘I don’t care!’ Perry barked, surprised at his own ferocity. ‘I want you to tell me everything. Right now.’ He picked up the plaque. ‘“Entertainment and Recreational Terrestrial Habitat.” How long have you people been here?’ Amanda looked away. ‘Did Galaxy Entertainment create the Earth?’ She shook her head. ‘Then who did?’

‘Please, Mr Bunt,’ Amanda said. ‘Don’t make me.’ Perry opened the door of the van and stepped onto the sidewalk. ‘Gerald O. Davidoff,’ she blurted.

Perry pulled his legs back in and closed the door. ‘And who the hell is Gerald O. Davidoff?’

‘He was a travel agent.’

Perry sighed. ‘This is not getting any clearer.’