Chapter Text
The world for the next weeks seemed painted a soggy black. We were shooting the Leviathan fight and I was for this reason in a state of near-constant sogginess. My brain, too, was soggy in a way it hadn’t been since puberty, as though it’d been replaced with one of the melancholy watercolors I had drawn in art therapy circa my brief stay in the psych ward, crude representations of skulls, birds, Kurt Cobain.
I found myself rereading Worm, which for me always betrayed mental disquiet. I posted a new chapter of an old Smugbug fic, a depressive denouement to what had begun as fluffy slice-of-life. Peri et al. roundly criticized my efforts, my poor prose and sentimentality, my tone-deaf attempts to return myself to the good graces of the fandom at large. I lurked and sobbed. I went too long between showers.
Siri, too, seemed to be slipping toward a total psychic break. She had stopped trying to conceal her day drinking. She swallowed vodka-Redbulls on set like they were pills, and in the evening I saw her sipping something that looked suspiciously like lean. She had yet, however, as far as I could tell, to lose her auteur’s edge, or eye for that matter. She watched so many kaiju movies in preparation for the Endbringer battle that occasionally she lapsed into Japanese without realizing it.
Great swaths of the studio remained flooded, even after the eighth arc adaptation had been completed, the idea being that it would cleanse the nooks and niches of insects, although of course this was a futile attempt. The mosquito problem got so bad for a few days that it was necessary to stop shooting, our first break in production. For that period I went on an adderall binge and wrote a forty-thousand-word fic whose climax was the gory suicide of Taylor Hebert. This one — entitled Antiochus, quite a trite affair, I saw when sober, full of hallucinatory clichés at the end, Lisa offering a kiss on the cheek, Brian saying sayonara with a single tear dripping down his jaw, that kind of thing — it drew a polarized response from the slack-jawed Discord imbeciles: Peri wrote backhanded praise, and yet I was still persona non grata in her circles.
I stalked Giselle and Ariel on social media, whose relationship was in the process of “blossoming.” I spent an inordinate amount of time imagining what their sex must be like, not out of jealousy nor even masochism, it was simply what I did, a quirk I’d harbored and nourished since youth like a refugee. I got drunk one night and made it a thousand words into a slurred and scatological account of their coupling, full of pzssyes, full of clints, full of ojzsies, before at last the shame broke through the Beefeater.
#
Siri told me one morning over martinis — as I had given up turning down her offers — that some “people” (quotes hers, performed with practiced nonchalance) from the studio were headed our way within the next week, wanting to discuss our progress, our overall happiness with the project. She used the word “boondoggle” at one point. She whispered it like an epithet.
So sure enough the following week there were two besuited spooks prowling around the studio as though intending to bring about democracy via election manipulation. They asked to speak with me the first day they were there. I invited them into my trailer and lay semi-rebelliously across the little sofa, and they took the two chairs before the formica table. They introduced themselves as Giles and Natch Pleiades (not brothers — it was simply a coincidence). “Taylor,” said Natch. “Taylor Schechter.”
“That’s me,” I said.
“Are you familiar,” said Giles, “with the similarities between movies and war.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Movies and war are the only domains in which a nation can bring the full brunt of its technological capabilities to bear.”
“Why tell me this?”
“Taylor Schechter, haven’t you ever thought it strange that the ‘studio’ funding this endeavor, this large-scale adaptation of an obscure piece of web-fiction, is one of which you have never heard?”
“I don’t follow industry news.”
“Studio Jelk, the one paying for your salary right now, isn’t exactly a film production studio in the conventional sense,” said Giles, and took a pull from his vape, which smelled intensely of rotten chocolate. “It is in fact more akin to a political action committee. Or perhaps a kind of shell corporation. A few enormously wealthy benefactors, whose names I am not at liberty to disclose, have pooled their resources together to fund this project.”
“Why tell me this? ”
“Miss Shechter,” said Natch. “These benefactors—with whom I have only interacted through a minimum of two intermediaries—insisted on you being the star of this adaptation.”
“Me? Why? How did they even know about me?”
“Hell if I know, Taylor.”
“We’re merely emissaries, Taylor.”
I considered this for a moment. My paranoia was vindicated, it seemed. All my dread became, at once, pragmatic. I shivered and squirmed around the sofa. Of course, there was comfort in vindication. Like Ms. Hebert, I found myself at the very bottom level of a conspiracy whose upper echelon was cosmic in scale, and this fact afforded me some relief, for it meant I was firmly “under control,” an actor on set and off. I snorted haughtily, which upset my interlocutors, judging by their wimpy grimaces.
“Is there anything, like, actionable, in all of this?” I said. “Can I do anything about it?”
“Not necessarily,” said Giles. “What we’re attempting to get across here, though, is that you are an integral part of this entire operation. In that light, if there’s anything problematic that you'd like to see change, here on set I mean, we are authorized to make that happen."
"Anything at all, Taylor," said Natch.
"Can I think about it, guys?" I said.
They said that was okay, that they'd stick around for a few extra days just in case. They handed me a slip of paper with a phone number on it. Then they were gone.
I asked Siri what her dealings, if any, had been with Studio Jelk, or if she had anything to say about my casting. She said, "Taylor, I'm in the dark here. All I know, really, is that they sign my checks, which is more than I can say about ninety-nine percent of film production places. They've given me carte blanche, and it's about damn time someone did."
That night I stuck around past nightfall. It became an entirely lightless place, this infected testing site, and I dared not use my phone to upset the totality of darkness. I fumbled and groped. Occasionally when I reached for the frame of a door I could feel some large arthropod crawl quickly over my knuckles. Eventually I found the prop room: I could tell because of the blips of hidden LEDs, the shimmer of high-vis latex. In the corner I found the Leviathan mask some of our stuntmen had donned for specific shots. The 1:3 setup of slits burned with brilliant turquoise light, which seemed to lock my vision in place, an effect not unlike an overabundance of Durban P. in the system. “You are under my control now, Taylor,” it said. “And I will crush you like a roach under a cookbook.” I rushed sweating back to my hotel room and slept for twenty hours, dreaming of sex and capes.
#
When stoned one evening I asked Ariel and Giselle to drinks. They accepted tersely, and so Thursday night I took too large a dose of Adderall (extended release) to forestall any fear re roofying or doing something too stupid when drunk—and I did intend on getting drunk, for alcohol had lately become my biggest vice. Something about the numbness it offered. Something about its anti-stimulation. It was the oppressive Other that freed me from the oversaturation of my many selves. I enjoyed, too, how twentieth-century it seemed.
So I arrived early at the swanky bar—Nettle & Duck LA, Cocktails and Tapas—and got two fourteen-dollar vodka-tonics in before Giselle and Ariel arrived, dressed in jeans and tees, although I could tell they were outfits worth somewhere in the low four digits. We found a booth, and they draped their arms over each other, and I ordered a double Jack and Coke. They got an overpriced bottle of nice moet to split. “What have you been up to,” I said zombie-ishly.
“We went for a hike,” said Giselle. “We kissed on top of the Hollywood sign.”
“It was magical, ” said Ariel, and gave me her best vulpine grin. “What about you, Taylor?”
“Staying busy,” I said. “Talking to Siri. Writing. I wanted to write an Emma/Lisa fic, something really toxic, but I thought it would be too weird with you two . . . you know?”
“Taylor,” said Ariel, and laughed in such a way as to denote concern. “You understand we aren’t really Emma and Lisa, right? You can do what you want.”
“Wait,” said Giselle, “you mean you actually write fanfiction? You’re a movie star; you don’t have to do that, ha ha. Live some fanfiction, girl!”
I expected Ariel to step up and defend me on this point, but she simply shrugged in passive assent. This made me shrink a little. I went wordless to the bar and got two shots of Tito’s and downed them quickly. When I came back the couple was pointing with failed discretion at someone coming out of the women’s bathroom. “It can’t be, can it?” they were saying. I looked in the direction they indicated and saw the greatest recording artist of all time, Taylor Swift. It was undeniably her, dressed in a strange, casual black veil and minidress. She was alone, sitting at the corner of the bar, drinking a Voodoo Ranger IPA from a can, the orange haze flavor. This was a sign from God, as far as I was concerned: I had never been “into” her music the way I had known people (bland, blonde freshman girls and effete men) to be; but I had always felt some kind of intense, even supernatural connection. We were two tall Taylors destined for world-historical greatness.
I stood and started toward her, even as my guests told me to leave her alone. I took the stool beside her and ordered more Tito’s. “Excuse me,” I said, “but you’re Taylor Swift?”
“I am,” she said, and lifted her veil. She was too bony to pull off the fit. Her eyes, however, made me nauseous with desire. “And, hey, wait, aren’t you that Taylor Schechter? The star of that superhero movie? You look great in the tabloids.”
“Thank you,” I said, and wiped vodka from my chin-dimple. “But I’m not quite a star yet. The production situation is precarious.”
“Oh, sure. It’s Studio Jelk, right? They’re a little shady, from my experience.”
It nauseated me further to hear her tongue that squelchy syllable: Jelk. “What experience?” I asked.
“In the old days they helped fund a music video of mine. ‘You Belong With Me,’ I think it was. There was a big party when production wrapped. I was, what, nineteen? One of the Jelk executives—I forget his name, but he wore this disgusting blue pastel suit—offered me a drink, and I suspect there was ecstasy in it, or something like that. I was sweating like a pig and so out of it. I got home safely, thank God, but as far as I know that guy is still top-level at Jelk. And people say my feminism is performative.”
She finished her drink and crushed the can. I excused myself to the restroom, stumble-sprinting, and paced for thirty seconds before the mirror, ignoring the sound of a man receiving fellatio in the far stall, thinking through the web of conspiracy and power with which I had been presented, thinking of the tenderness with which Ariel had touched Giselle. I didn’t realize it was the men’s room until I puked into the urinal. The man in the stall said the name of God when he came.