Ryan Boudinot - Blueprints of the Afterlife

“Make me combat-ready,” he said.

I checked into the New York–New York hotel and collected my thoughts for a week. I ordered room service, watched TV, and stared out the window at the Strip. I started going out, walking at night, along wide sidewalks littered with flyers for escort services. I passed among the drunk, the destitute, the horny, and the wealthy like I was the only one who knew a bomb was about to go off. Like someone out of the Bible in this titty bar wasteland. Inebriated bachelorettes howling through limo sun roofs turned into centaurs farting exhaust. Cigar smoke and sunscreen. A bride in a maternity wedding dress. The carnal desperation of neon. I considered my fellow human beings and thought that it wasn’t that we’d become animals, it’s that we’d always been animals. Watching a gang of fraternity boys muscling through a casino esplanade was like watching ancient tribesmen, all of them bent on mating after the kill. The women appeared to be fixated on two primary consumer goods—shoes and handbags—as if they lived in a long-forgotten civilization now survived only by its baskets and trinkets. I didn’t belong to these people. I didn’t feel better than them, I just felt alien. In fact, I saw how happy they appeared to be and I envied them for it. I imagined the moment it would all stop, the silent pause before the plants withered and the rivers ran with blood. My bones rattled with the coming apocalypse. What could I do but cower in my room, ordering french fries and lobster and surf and turf, sitting naked on the floor watching the obscene glitter persist with its monied seductions on the other side of a bulletproof window?

After I got bored of the Strip I started going on walks to downtown Vegas. Between the Strip and downtown was a desolate stretch of porno stores, bars, old department store buildings that had risen in the sixties and now sold vintage clothing and old showgirl outfits. I crossed this littered zone stunned and out of my element and came to realize that the shock I’d suffered after Nick tried to kill me had never really dissipated, it had just moved outward from my body, encompassing everything I witnessed. A stripper ground her bald vagina against a brass pole. A transvestite who wasn’t fooling anyone scrounged change from his quaking hand to pay for video poker at a 7-Eleven. Then the downtown hub with its great mustached men from Texas and smoke-ravaged faces all around. Most of these eyes had gone out, become black and capable of reading only a deck’s worth of symbols, the spinning signifiers on a slot machine. But if you looked hard enough you could see that they knew what I knew. They knew there was a time limit, even if they hadn’t come to admit it to themselves. They knew all this was about to disappear, so they could be forgiven for believing the most sensible course of action was to order another round. I found a table in a gambling house saloon and ordered myself a whiskey. What a cowboy, right? I hadn’t been drinking since I got here but this seemed a good place to start. I was sitting there nursing my drink when a guy dressed as a giant carrot sat down next to me.

I’m sorry, a—

A carrot. His face was painted orange, poking out from under the leafy stem. The suit was made of felt and foam. You know, like any suit designed to look like food. His arms were in white long johns, ending in cartoonish, puffy white gloves. He asked if he could join me. I said sure. The cocktail waitress came by and asked if he wanted anything. He told her a Jim Beam neat. Then he extended his gloved hand and introduced himself as Tex, Man of a Thousand Flavors.

We sat for a while half watching the sports book. His drink came and he took a big swallow. I asked him what he did for a living. He said he dressed up as food for the openings of various restaurants and handed me his business card. Then he offered me a free smoothie coupon.

I told him I didn’t need a smoothie coupon.

Then he said, “I thought I should warn you about trying to track down Mr. Kirkpatrick.”

I told him to go on.

“Back in the early nineties I had a friend named Forrest who got wrapped up like you, trying to figure out who Mr. Kirkpatrick was,” he told me. “He was a good guy—copywriter, worked mostly on traffic safety brochures. Lonely, sexually confused. Was sleeping with my girlfriend behind my back, though that’s not really pertinent to my whole tale here. Anyway, Forrest started working for this company called Third Eye Communications. Early new-media consulting firm or something like that. It was hard to tell exactly what they did. He telecommuted, so he was never really in touch with anyone from the rest of the company besides his immediate supervisor. And my friend, he wanted to climb the ladder, right? He got in his head this nutty idea that he needed to prove to the boss what a great asset he was, how he was capable of more than seatbelt warnings and drunk-driving newsletters. So he learned that Mr. Kirkpatrick was the CEO and he became determined to find him and make his case. He was pretty naive about what it meant to work for a corporation. The more he tried to get in touch with Mr. Kirkpatrick, the more it seemed that the guy didn’t even exist, that he was just some marketing concept, a caricature of a visionary. Forrest went a little crazy. He became fixated on this idea that physical reality had undergone a fundamental transformation thanks to television. He kept drawing this figure over and over.” Can I have a pen?

Sure. Here.

So Tex took a napkin and drew something that looked like this.

Tex said, “This is what’s called a hypercube. It’s a four-dimensional object. You can think of it as a cube within a cube. The cube on the inside grows as the outside cube shrinks. So the content and context are constantly trading places. There’s a porousness between realities, see? Forrest was convinced that the Internet was about to become our contextual reality while physical reality turned into content.”

I asked Tex what had happened to this Forrest guy.

He said, “Some teens tripping on LSD crashed their pickup truck into the house he was renting, which was sitting over a bomb shelter. The whole place collapsed into the shelter but Forrest managed to escape. Then I punched him in the nose for sleeping with my girlfriend. I haven’t seen him since.”

As I listened to Tex’s story I wondered if he was the one who’d gone crazy. But I’d seen some wild shit in the last year or so. Talking to a guy dressed as a root vegetable knocking back Jim Beam was sort of the least of it.

“What I’m saying,” Tex said, “is that it’s not too late to go back to your old life. You had a good thing going there for a while. A life of leisure, living off your millions. You can still return to San Francisco and live with Wyatt and Erika, you can join the board of a nonprofit and build schools in Cambodia or distribute free books to migrant workers, whatever. You don’t have to pursue this guy.”

I said, “It’s all I have left.”

Tex shook his carrot head. He told me I could do as I pleased. He was really just looking out for my best interests. He had no motivation for getting in touch with me beyond that. I guess I believed him. He picked up the tab, shook my hand with his hilarious glove, and got up to go. But as he did, he said, “Oh, wait. The coupon.” He slid it across the bar. I thanked him and folded it and put it in my inner jacket pocket. I watched him leave through the smoky bar.

A week or so passed. I started wondering about my true purpose here in Vegas and concluded that I was supposed to witness something. Keep my head low, don’t drink more than a couple cocktails a night, stay away from the gambling tables. I went to shows. I fucking saw Carrot Top. Cirque du Soleil, Crazy Girls, the Blue Man Group. When I needed one I called an escort. I walked among tourists of all ages and ethnicities and shades of moral rectitude, just watching them. Looking for signs of what I was supposed to do next.