Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

I walked out on to the stage followed by Sansom, who was morphing — his hair reddening and curling, his face growing shinier and more venal — until he was not just an acceptable stand-in but a dead-ringer for the founding charlatan of Scientology. Hubbard approached and, raising a hand to my forehead, tipped me straight back into the mind-bath of Dianetic reverie, where I lay feeling the warm current of time course along my flanks and sweep between my parted thighs. Then Hubbard gave me a gentle push and I found myself carried swiftly upstream, my arms and legs mutating into flippers, then fins, then polyps — until there I was, beached in the Upper Palaeozoic, with Hubbard rapidly opening and closing his fleshy hand to simulate my shell, and so sending waves of anxiety through the audience of pre-clears unable to cope with their own molluscan memories.

As one genetic entity to others, I sympathized, yet at the same time I could feel that every single sleight, cramp, twinge and sniffle I had experienced in all my multitudes of animal lives had been accepted, digitized and rewritten in the binary encoding of my analytic brain, a smoothly functioning computational device with the power of a thousand networked super-computers — although this analogy is woefully impoverished, implying a clackety-plastic clunkiness to what’s beyond the grasp of any pre-clear, especially you .

I, the Thetan, lifted off from the stage, my silky-brown hair haloing my superfine 35,000-year-old features, and so L. Ron and I danced a pas de deux as, to the amazement of the crowd, we orbited the chandelier before touching down together, hand in hand. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Elron boomed, ‘I give you the first clear, Sonya Bianca, a physics major and pianist from Boston. In addition to her many other accomplishments, Miss Bianca has full and perfect recall of every moment in her life. But first, if you will my dear, please tell us how Dianetics has helped you.’

‘Well.’ To begin with my voice was tremulous and my pulse raced, but as I spoke I grew in confidence: ‘I had a strange and, um, embarrassing allergy to… well, paint.’

‘Paint?’

‘That’s right, paint — whether wet or dry; and if I came into contact with it at all — which is, as I’m sure everyone realizes, difficult to avoid, well, I got a painful itching in my eyebrows. Now the condition has cleared up and I feel… well, like a million dollars!’

There was a scattering of applause, but there were also mutterings of discontent and somebody called out, ‘Tell us what you had for breakfast on October the third 1942!’

I fidgeted with the hem of my twill skirt. ‘That’s easy, a bento box. The sushi and sashimi were fine, and I asked for a refill of miso soup, which I sipped together with mouthfuls of green tea from a china beaker—’

In a chain Japanese diner on Figueroa? I don’t think so — not a china beaker, only a lidded styrofoam cup, the textured dimples of which squeaked beneath my sweaty fingertips; across the road Felix the Cat pole-sat with a come-hither grin on top of a Cadillac dealership. ‘I’ve scheduled a meeting for you with Michael Lynton at Sony Pictures in Culver City this Friday — the thirteenth,’ said Ellen DeGeneres’s voice in my ear. Frank Tenpenny was sitting with a table of LAPD patrolmen next to mine — a more or less solid block of heavy-duty navy cotton accessorized with forearms, side arms and crew-cut heads on V-shaped plinths of white T-shirt. It was true about the bento box, though — the lacquered tray littered with rice lay on the table beneath my eyes. ‘Kinda unlucky, maybe…’

‘Maybe.’ I was mightily impressed at my ability to pick up my end of the phone conversation. ‘But then I could always pitch him a nightmare.’

She laughed throatily. ‘Pitch him a nightmare — I like that. Anyway, you’re set to see him at ten that day, and I can get you a five o’clock at the Marmont with Michael Burns — if you think you can get from Culver City to the Marmont by then? ’Course, you’ll need to get back by seven anyway ’cause I’ve arranged a little party in your honour—’

‘A party?! But I don’t know anyone — and no one knows me.’

‘Lissen, don’t worry, it’s a tiny affair — more of gathering, really.’

A useful little heads-up display map had appeared in the corner of my visual field, and using this I could quickly and easily estimate the mileage from Culver City to Hollywood, so said, ‘Actually, it appears eminently possible for me to meet with Burns — but listen, are you sure these guys want to see me, I mean, it’s not like I have anything to offer them and I don’t want to go squandering your agent capital.’

‘Puh-lease, David, you’re a respected actor — you’re bankable, guys like that are always gonna want to meet with you.’

I said nothing to her of the black-clad legs stomping the prone form of the studio head until it disintegrated into its encoding. We hung up. I paid the bill and found the Jeffs outside waiting for me. ‘Eat well, WW?’ asked Camera Jeff. I checked out my HUD health bar and saw that I had plenty of lives, so grunted affirmatively.

Jeff had rigged up a new gizmo during his lunch break, a tiny digital camera mounted on an aluminium pole he could hold at ground level, angled up to give a shot of my walking feet. I appreciated the thought he’d put into this amblecam — all the way from LAX I’d been agonizing that without sufficient close-ups of my feet they might be cropped, then grafted on to the legs of an extra in a crowd scene of a thriller featuring a psychopath hell-bent on shooting a politician the name of whom no one will ever remember. Really.

No sooner had I begun walking and Camera Jeff was turning over, than I realized this set-up had a radical effect on my point of view. Listen, I’m not a fool-I’d known for years how detached I was from the normal range of feeling, how solipsistic, how dissociated, so that on occasion I seemed to be observing myself acting out a predetermined role. Busner may have termed my malady ‘ebullient and productive’, yet all too often it felt merely hollow and miserable. What was it he had warned me about? What…

To the north-east the Downtown towers rained down light-spears that disappeared into the smog bank lying above Broadway and Bunker Hill. I glanced right and left and the fishbowl turned while my arms remained lifelessly projecting ahead. Was I in the world any more? Or was the world in me? Just before the Shrine Auditorium I had crossed the fault line where the plate of the old pueblo grinds against that of the new city, and now as I navigated east towards south central I realized I had crossed the border that separates LA from Los Santos.

The 45-degree downwardly angled shot was reminiscent of the bistro in the Place Wilson, but my POV remained hovering while the figure in the green T-shirt and green short pants advanced, long legs eating up the sidewalk. I wasn’t sure about the Mr T. Mohawk, but I liked the way I’d acquired a muscular build; nor could I see the point of the cross hairs, that, whichever way I turned, remained aligned — for I wasn’t armed. Indeed, although I was headed straight into the gang territories of East Los Santos, where the Ballas and the Vagos ruthlessly battle for supremacy, I felt not the slightest anxiety.

Neither anxiety — nor remorse, when I thought of the killing at the carniceria in East LA the preceding fall, the choking dust clouds when the digger went to work among the Civil War dead in the Evergreen Cemetery, me stuffing the bloodstained handkerchief into my pocket, then furtively adjusting its engorgement as I rode the bus back along 1st Street into town. These memories could have no purchase here, where a sweatshop full of wetbacks plying sewing machines swam out of the nuages maritimes . No! The sea mists had dispersed in the Baldwin Hills; this was some other phenomenon. If Mr Me went towards the sweatshop it increased in definition, until I could read the very headline of the sun-yellowed copy of La Opinión that lay in the gutter in front of it: ‘ Adiós Triunfal !’ Next to a photo of La Senadora Hillary Clinton, arm upraised as she gracefully bowed out of the contest.