Paul McAuley: Residuals

Illustration by Steve Cavallo

On his way out, the motel guy switches on the TV and the AC without bothering to ask if I want either. The unit over the door rattles and starts to drip on the purple shag carpet. On a dusty screen, a cowboy hunkers down over the Sci-Fi Channel station ident, squinting from under a Stetson. It ought to be like looking at myself because the cowboy is supposed to be me. But it’s not.

The Omega Encounter is always playing somewhere on a rerun channel, I guess, but here and now it’s like an omen.

I’m still living off the Omega residuals because it’s my version of what went down, officially adapted from the “as told to” book Jay Anson did for me. Nyquist sold Starlight, the book Tom Fuckin’ Wolfe wrote with him, for twenty times as much to Universal.

There’s a little skip where there used to be a shot of a fly-blown, bloodied rubber cow carcass. It could be a censor cut or a snip to reduce the running time. When E.W. Swackhamer directed Omega, there were thirteen minutes of commercials in an hour of TV; now there are eighteen, so five minutes of each hour have to be lost from everything made before the nineties.

I don’t unpack, except for the bottles of Cuervo Gold Tequila I bought at the airport, and sit up on the bed, watching two days of my life processed and packaged as a sixteen-year-old movie-of-the-week.

It’s gotten to the part where I find the first of the mutilated cattle. I’m showing one to Mr. Nyquist, played by Dennis Weaver the way he plays McCloud, shrewd and upright. To tell the truth, Nyquist was always half bombed even before it all started, and had a mean streak in him that was nothing to do with drink. The bastard would hit Susan when he was loaded, going off like a firecracker over the slightest thing and stomping out, banging the screen door hard, leaving her holding her cheek and me looking down at my dinner. He was crazy even then, I guess, but still able to hold it down.

The movie makes me a lot more talkative than I ever was around Nyquist. Susan is Cybill Shepherd in her post -Last Picture Show, pre- Moonlighting career slump. I am Jan-Michael Vincent in his post-birth, pre-death career trough.

I watch until I follow the slime trails in the grass and see the lights of the mothership off in the distance hovering above the slough, and then I flip channels because I can’t stand to watch anymore.

They didn’t have the budget to do the aliens properly on TV and only used long shots, but I still don’t want to watch. I can take the expensive computer-controlled models in the movie because they’re too real in the way Main Street in Disneyland is too real. So perfect a reproduction it doesn’t fool anyone for a second. But show me a couple of out-of-focus midgets jumping around inside silvered plastic bags in slow motion with the setting sun behind them, and my imagination fills in the blanks. The sour reek. And the noise the things made as they hopped around, like they were filled with Jell-O and broken bones.

QVC is less of a blow to the heart. I drink tequila out of the bathroom glass and consider calling a toll-free number to order a zircon chandelier. Then I drink some more and decide against it.

Despite Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford (as Nyquist), and five million preinflation bucks of ILM, Starlight: The Motion Picture was a box-office disappointment. By the time the effects were developed, Omega had spun off a mid-season replacement series with Sam Groom (as me) and Gretchen Corbett that got canceled after three episodes. The aliens were old news, and everybody knew how the story came out. In Starlight, I’m rewritten as a codger farmhand who sacrifices himself for Boss Man Ford, stealing the film with a dignified death scene. Richard Farnsworth got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but lost out to the gook in The Killing Fields.

I give up TV and call my agent, using the room phone because my mobile doesn’t want to work out here in the desert, all that radar, or the microwave signals they send to the secret Moon colony (ha ha), and I tell him where I am. He says to watch my ass, and that when I get back he thinks he might have another hardware store commercial lined up (“fix your Starship, lady?”). It’s just for New York cable, but it’ll pay the rent a while. He doesn’t think I can pull off this reunion, is what it is, and I tell him that, and then I hang up and I watch an old Saturday Night Live for a while.

I was on one show for about five minutes, in a Conehead episode with Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin. Can’t hardly remember that night—I was drunk at the time—but now I guess those five minutes are always showing somewhere, just like everything else that ever went through a transmitter. If aliens out there have been monitoring our broadcasts like they did in old movies to explain why they speak perfect English, just about the first question we’d ask them was if they taped those lost episodes of The Honeymooners. I watch Chevy Chase do Jerry Ford falling over just about everything in the studio set, and drink some more tequila, and fall asleep a while.

It’s been a long day, the flight out from New York delayed two hours, then a long drive through Los Angeles, where I’ve never driven because I was chauffeured around when all the deals were in the air, and which is ten times more packed with traffic than I remember, and out into the high desert along Pearblossom Highway with all the big trucks driving in bright sunlight and blowing dust with their headlights on.

The phone wakes me up. I use the remote to turn down Dave Letterman, and pick up. A voice I haven’t heard for twenty years says, Hello, Ray.”

At first, only the Enquirer and the Weekly World News were interested. But when the reports came back and the FBI slapped a security classification on them, and Elliot Mitchell started making a fuss because he was transferred to the Texas panhandle and his field notes and his twenty rolls of film and six hours of cassette recordings were “lost,” Newsweek and Rolling Stone showed up. Tom Wicker’s piece in Rolling Stone said it was all part of a government plot stretching back to Roswell, and that the U.S. Army was covering up tests with hallucinogenic weapons.

Then the artifacts went on view, and ten types of expert testified they were “non-terrestrial.” It wasn’t a government conspiracy any more, it was a goddamn alien invasion, just like Nyquist and me had been saying. Mitchell had rewritten his field notes from memory, and sent photocopies to Science and Nature. He even got his name as discoverer on the new hyperstable transuranic element, which along with the bodies was one of the few tangible residues of the whole thing. I wonder how he felt when Mitchellite was used in the Gulf War to add penetrative power to artillery shells?

Then the Washington Post got behind the story, and all the foreign press, and the shit hit the fan. For a while, it was all anybody talked about. We got to meet President Carter, who made a statement supporting our side of things, and declared he would see that no information was withheld from the pubhc.

I was on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, back when that meant something. I did Dick Cavett, CBS News with Walter Cronkite, 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace, NBC Weekend News with Jessica Savitch. Me and Nyquist were scurrying to get our book deals sorted out, then our screen rights. People were crawling all over, desperate to steal our lives, and we went right along with the feeding frenzy.