Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

‘So that’s what was going on — I wondered. Boy’ — I shook my empty head — ‘they must have been laughing when I asked what my motivation was.’

‘Yeah, kinda ironic: they knew all about your motivation and I have’ta give it to you, Will, you were on to something, you got close, but there was no way they were going let you find out who killed the movies—’

‘So they killed me and replaced the actors playing me with an animation.’

‘You got it.’

That’s why I’d been feeling so exiguous, so thinly drawn — and that’s why my thoughts came to me unbidden, and I had no sense of smell, taste or… touch. I wondered how far back it all went — to the CGI riot in Hollywood or even before that? But there was no point in speculating, not when I’d paid someone to discover the truth for me. ‘Tell me, Mac.’ As I spoke, I expertly rolled a cigarette with one hand, struck a non-safety match on my thumbnail and lit it — now that I was a simulacrum of myself cliché came unbidden, and smoking was a stylish breeze. ‘If I’m a 3-D image of myself, then what exactly am I being projected on to? I mean, what’s all this stuff, is it LA or just a blue screen?’

Pity gave way to impatience as Mac rolled down his sleeves and fastened his cuffs. The dirty work had been done. ‘I’m a detective,’ he snapped; ‘not a fucking metaphysician. You want answers to that kinda appearance/reality stuff, go ask the Wachowskis.’

That was it: no farewell, no bear hug; he just turned and strolled away from me, the happy detective out for a Sunday afternoon promenade. While somewhere out in the Valley, in a darkened home studio, an overweight claustrophobic, headphones clamped on his head, crunching Cheerios and messing about with a synthesizer, turned the volume back up on the Rachmaninschmaltz.

Having nothing else to do, I went on. Isn’t this what we do: go on, no matter how depersonalized and useless we feel, no matter how lost in our own lives and confused about our role in the universal — if any? I went on past the Westchester golf course and saw the first sharks’ fins cutting through the wavy air on the far side of the savage fences. I went on to the junction with Sepulveda and made a right, and then a right again for the terminal. I went on through the curtains of light falling from between the decks of the overpasses, and I went on past the birches in their triangular concrete pots and the benches shaped like aerofoils — fly away, you writing bums! I went on until my rubber soles married with the treads of the escalator and carried me up to departures, and I went on through security and groped my way towards the Air France lounge.

Sitting in there, I looked about me at the other whey-faced travellers contemplating the imminent hurl skywards. They did their best, rattling the sections of that Sunday’s LA Times , making last-minute phone calls, fiddling in their laptops — but it was hard. The light in the lounge was yellowing, like a fishtank that hasn’t been cleaned, and the sounds were all muted except for Lionel Ritchie singing ‘All Night Long’ — which was far too loud. And I thought, well, I may be dead, but who’s to say everyone else isn’t as well?

So I did my best to conform and called Stevie Rosenbloom to say goodbye — and got Ellen DeGeneres: ‘That’s you gone, is it?’ she said, and I could only mewl:

‘You knew, didn’t you?’

‘I kinda did,’ she admitted, ‘although I wasn’t in on the whole thing, I mean it was like the tag line for the movie, “The Strangest Vengeance Ever Planned’.’

‘What movie?’

‘ Touch of Evil. ’

I broke the connection without saying goodbye. Of course! And that’s why when I reached the colonnade in Venice I had felt so peculiar. I had never circumambulated Los Angeles at all, only remained standing exactly where Welles had executed his famously circuitous tracking shot while the entire city walked around me.

The Heathrow flight was called and I staggered towards it. Then we were taxiing and then we were taking off, accelerating along the timeline of the Sierra as it described civilization’s boom and bust, and then the plane lifted off from the runway of LAX and began almost immediately to bank round over the ocean, bumpily gaining altitude. I looked back and below to see enormous cracks snaking across the Los Angeles Basin, some following the boulevards, others cutting through the freeways. I watched, bored, as the Baldwin Hills slid into Crenshaw and Hollywood tumbled down into the Wilshire corridor. The Downtown towers bowed, then curtseyed, then disappeared in boiling clouds of dust, the Sierra itself humped up into a vast breaker of earth, lava and fire that came surging down, annihilating all of Pasadena and East LA in a matter of seconds.

The final thing I saw before the first clouds began flickering by was the dome of the Shrine Auditorium standing proud of the maelstrom, the crescent atop its elegant spire glinting in the rays of twilight’s last gleaming.

‘And that’s what happens to you when you don’t take your medication,’ Shiva Mukti said in the matter-of-fact way psychiatrists affect in order to cope with the extremities of mental delusion.

We sat and stared for a while, first at the pots and packets of my medications, which he had lined up on the desk — the Seroxat, Dutonin and Carbamazepin — then at the near-obsolete VDU monitor with its mushroom plastic casing that sat whirring at a queer angle on the fake wood veneer of a refectory table.

‘Humph.’ I was not to be persuaded so easily. ‘You say that, but perhaps that’s what happens to entire civilizations when they don’t take their medication.’

‘Listen,’ Mukti said, solicitous, ‘I understand that you may feel a little… put out.’

‘Put out! Of course I’m put out — wouldn’t you be if you discovered it had all been a videotape that your psychiatrist had made of you? And such lousy production values as well.’ I drummed the table with my quick-bitten fingertips and longed for a cigarette.

‘You have to appreciate, don’t you, that these symptoms are potentially very dangerous: the paranoia, the visual and auditory hallucinations—’

‘Next you’ll be telling me that everyone I meet isn’t played by a well-known screen actor!’

He took a ballpoint pen from his jacket pocket and began to draw a series of boxes on the sheet of paper next to my medication. What was this, the beginnings of a storyboard?

‘No, that’s right — they aren’t actors, any more than you are. Capgras and Fregoli’s delusions, these are well described in the literature: the impersonation of people known to the, ah, patient — either by the famous, or by doubles. I admit, you seem to be experiencing a rather unusual combination of both, but, as Dr Busner has remarked, yours is an especially ebullient and productive schizothymia.’

‘You don’t understand, do you?’ I countered. ‘I like my delusions. They’re a form of entertainment for me — what the hell else is there to amuse me any more, now that film is dead?’

This seemed to stymie Mukti and he left off his doodling to examine me more intently through his antiquated pince-nez. Really, it was a ludicrous bit of miscasting: the white skin, the fluting voice, the thinning hair and the hoary old comic delivery — still, I was happy with it if it kept the credits sequence short. What I was less happy with was my trousers, which were painfully tight. Holding Mukti’s gaze, I surreptitiously loosened my belt — it wouldn’t be good if he realized that I had realized that he was being played by Will Hay.