Channel Blue (42 page)
Authors: Jay Martel
The air became strangely free of flies.
President Grebner received an anonymous letter. The author claimed to have been sequestered and tortured in a secret prison located in the caverns beneath Drummond Nash’s hunting lodge. The letter told the President that he must close all of the United States’ secret prisons or risk exposure of their existence.
The letter closed with the words, ‘What would Jesus ask you to do?’
Shortly thereafter, an investigation into the activities of a rogue counter-terrorism unit within the CIA was initiated in the US Senate. The secret prison in the Colorado Rockies was discovered and most of the prisoners freed.
One of these detainees, Alistair Alexander, was repatriated to England, where he promptly abandoned his study of literature at Cambridge. After his harrowing experience, the books he once loved seemed hollow to him; he decided that stories had never held any answers for him and never would. He sought out a conservative Muslim cleric with a reputation for anti-Western rhetoric and confided the realisation he’d come to during his incarceration in Colorado: that Drummond Nash was right. Alistair actually was the kind of person who wanted to kill someone like Drummond Nash or, for that matter, anyone vaguely like him. He was, by definition, a terrorist. ‘It took them quite some time to convince me, but in the end, they did it.’ The cleric put Alistair in touch with a fringe group that arranged for his passage to Pakistan, where he entered into a new field of postgraduate study.
As chance would have it, one of his teachers was Ali al-Zander. He never did see the Rockettes.
Since most of his work was considered secret for reasons of national security, Drummond Nash himself was never obligated to answer questions before the senate investigation. His new hunting lodge was rumoured to be in Idaho.
The President, meanwhile, took a three-week ‘leave of absence’, citing unspecified medical problems. Even in his medicated dreams he saw the face of Perry Bunt burning in the wreckage of a helicopter. He prayed daily and fervently for relief.
Galaxy Entertainment surprised Wall Street analysts by dissolving and selling all of its assets to another cable company. The offices on Ventura Boulevard were boarded up and eventually, after some major remodelling, converted into an International House of Pancakes.
On some Saturday mornings, Perry Bunt and Amanda Mundo could be found there having breakfast with their baby boy, Milo. Milo had been born with a full head of dark hair on a windy spring night that became, without portent or pretence, the greatest night of his parents’ lives. Perry and Amanda chose the restaurant not so much for the pancakes as for the location. But as far as Milo was concerned, it was all about the pancakes. He ate them in large messy handfuls, his ringlets inevitably coated in sticky syrup.
Perry resumed teaching screenwriting at Encino Community College. The administration had accepted the far-fetched excuse for his disappearance (he told them he’d hit his head on a dryer door at a laundromat and contracted temporary amnesia), which he suspected had more to do with the lack of people willing to teach screenwriting at a community college than anything else. To his surprise, he discovered a new love for his job. In a universe of infinite, unfathomable dimensions, he found that there was something deeply therapeutic about immersing oneself in finite imaginary worlds.
Amanda found employment in reality TV and quickly became one of its most sought-after producers. She actually enjoyed working and living among Earthles, despite their, well,
earthiness
– there really was no other way to describe it. Mostly she found their obtuseness comic, and she and Perry spent many nights after Milo was asleep drinking wine and laughing about their fellow products of fornication.
She missed her friends and parents in Eden, but knew she would see them all again. She’d managed to rewire a laptop and a satellite dish to communicate with her mother and father, and they promised to save up for a holiday on Earth.
She no longer saw any conspiracy involved in the events that brought her to Perry, no unavoidable fate or destiny that had somehow influenced her life’s events. In this sense, her Edenite sense of rationality was stronger than ever – with a major exception: Milo. In her mind, there was no explanation for Milo other than a miracle. When she watched him sleep, late at night, she felt as if she were turning her back on millennia of knowledge and staring into some unfathomable secret of the universe that was written in the swirl of his hair, the curl of his ears and the tiny saucers of his toenails.
The Earth, of course, continued to be a mess – even without anyone to watch it – its violent and toxic inhabitants seemingly hell-bent on finishing the job Galaxy Entertainment chose not to complete. Perry still couldn’t bring himself to read a newspaper, though once a week he would drive over to St Jude’s and volunteer with Noah Overton, serving meals at the soup kitchen. While recognising that he’d never be able to match Noah’s zeal for helping people, Perry had come to appreciate it. Every once in a while one of the diners would stare across the steam table, a look of nascent recognition on their faces, but fortunately none ever connected Perry to the martyred leader of a religious movement. Noah, meanwhile, had placed his adventures with Perry and Amanda in the category of ‘helping friends through a difficult time’. He was happy to see the couple seemingly liberated from the delusions that had turned the ill-fated trip to Washington into such a nightmare.
He had not hallucinated Gandhi or anyone else again, which he credited to his new vegan diet.
No one knew, of course, that Perry and Amanda had saved the Earth; few even knew the Earth was on the verge of being destroyed. And certainly no one knew that Perry Bunt, through guile, determination and luck, had lifted the yoke of entertainment colonialism from the world and its inhabitants. This was actually OK with Perry. Now that he had Amanda and Milo to share his life with, he didn’t care about being a hero. He no longer felt the tidal pull of destiny, the need to achieve greatness. His experience tangling with an advanced civilisation had given him a keen appreciation for mere contentment. He sat at the kitchen table with Amanda and Milo, a mug of coffee in his hand, and thought to himself,
What more could anyone want?
Well, success, for one thing. But Perry didn’t waste hours pining for this – which was good, because he didn’t have any. Despite the death of Del Waddle, his script
Dead Tweet
remained moribund, as did the rest of his unproduced oeuvre. And after he showed a willingness to return her calls, GALL agent Dana Fulcher promptly stopped returning his.
The Last Day of School
remained an unfinished monument to mediocrity; no longer did Perry hear the siren call of the Big Idea.
He began writing something about his remarkable experience in the guise of fiction, but quickly gave up on the project. Once written down, the adventure read as far too ludicrous and unbelievable, even for a fringe science-fiction audience. He realised that he was content to live the story of his life without having to claim authorship.
Amanda’s producing pay cheque paid for a nicer apartment, on the hill just above where Perry used to live. One evening, when Perry was giving Milo a bath, he impulsively decided to wash his son’s hair. While carefully wetting it with a washcloth, he noticed something he’d never seen before. ‘Amanda,’ he called.
‘Yes?’
‘Come here and look at this.’
Amanda walked into the bathroom. ‘What is it?’ Perry pointed to Milo’s scalp, where a birthmark was now clearly visible beneath his son’s wet hair: a small star.
In the bathroom in Los Angeles, on the western edge of the North American continent, in the Western Hemisphere of Earth, which orbited a Class 2 star on the far edge of the Milky Way Galaxy, which swirled near the centre of the fifty closely bound galaxies that comprise half of the Virgo Supercluster, Perry and Amanda exchanged a stunned look that was watched with great enjoyment by life forms gazing down from a universe away. These beings appeared nothing like Perry and Amanda and, in fact, were composed of different material entirely; they were immense and had many more dimensions to their corporeal forms. But they enjoyed what they were seeing nonetheless. They conveyed their intense enjoyment to each other by clicking loudly.
The clicks roughly translated as: ‘This was all worth it.’
We hope you enjoyed this book.
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The creation of Channel Blue would have been as unlikely as that of its fictional counterpart if not for the efforts of Katie Roberts, Peggy Orenstein and Louis Theroux. Ian Roberts and John Martel provided crucial and invaluable feedback throughout the process. Georgina Capel took on the unenviable task of finding an audience for it with astonishing gusto, intrepidly searching the known galaxy for readers. And finally I would be remiss in not acknowledging the support of my fellow cast-members: my mother, Ann, and my sister Melissa, as well my closest co-stars, Sarah, Cleo and Julian; our ratings may go up and down, but no one can deny our chemistry.
Earth used to be Galaxy Entertainment’s most lucrative show. The inhabitants of the Western Galaxy – the savviest, richest demographic in the Milky Way – just couldn’t get enough of the day-to-day details of the average Earthling’s life
.
But now Channel Blue’s ratings are flagging, and its producers are planning a spectacular finale. In just three weeks, their TV show will go out with a bang. The trouble is, so will Earth.
Only one man can save our planet from total destruction. And he’s hardly a hero…
“A look at the absurdities of modern-day America in the tradition of Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut.”
Louis Theroux
“Skip the blurbs and just start reading this very funny book.”
Michael Moore
“A funny, thought-provoking novel that’s one part Waugh, one part Vonnegut, one part Truman Show, all mixed together in one outlandish cocktail.”
Tom Perrotta
“Channel Blue is so entertaining, inventive, bawdy and sly that the acid of its social critique sort of sneaks up on you.”
Peggy Orenstein
JAY MARTEL is an award-winning writer and producer. He collaborated with Michael Moore on the acclaimed documentary
Farenheit 911
and was contributing editor at
Rolling Stone
for six years. This is his first novel.
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