Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good: A Novel

Yeah, like she’s going to hear him, trussed up as he is in his cowl of comforter. She? Assuming it’s Kate.

Dammit. The ol’ Do Not Disturb sign, that shushing finger, sure isn’t doing its job this morning. This is the third time in half an hour somebody’s come thumping, with an urgency that says let me out more than let me in. Another of Zane’s old jokes. What would James Dean be doing if he were alive today? Pounding on the inside of his coffin.

Doingg-doingg. Law and Order’s almost over, it must be just about noon. This is Matt’s last show anyway. His very last show, he’s made the commitment. No more tube. It’s a resolution at which he’ll fail, but that’s fine. Mariko, back when she quit smoking (Matt still misses the avid way she sucked each cigarette, like some sort of holy hookah), had to go cold turkey about ten times before it took. It’s high time Matt, too, started setting goals he can’t reach.

He’s already fallen short once today, actually—this is the second time he’s quit. A couple of hours ago he flicked off Kevin Scion (“The present is the future, can’t you see?”) and went for a stroll. Out on God’s green acre, under God’s bare, zillion-watt bulb, there was a fresh crop of fauna. One of those little black birds with the white spots, for instance, kind of like Saturday’s grackle but squatter, schlubbier. Starling? She must have been a mum because she had a grey mini-me hopping around after her, hectoring her for a beak-full of regurgitated bug. No go—mum kept cold-shouldering the poor little guy. Time to cut the cord, shove him out there on his own. The world as two things, me and you, self and other. A genuine, capital N–type Nature moment is what it was, and Matt, budding naturalist, was right there to take it in. He’s going to have to get himself a proper birding checklist, that’s two species already.

Sheesh, she just won’t give up. It’s almost time to check out anyway, head Zaneward. Hey man, sorry I split. You do want me here though, don’t you? When you said stay away, you meant come?

“All right, all right!” Matt rolls off the bed, tucks himself in en route to the door. Doingg-doingg—dammit, he’s going to miss closing arguments.

“Hi.” He’s got the chain on, peeking through the slot like a nervous perp.

“Hi. Um, can we talk?” Kate’s all gussied up again, and why not? Just back, presumably, from her second big date with the turkey baster.

“He’s around. We had kind of a …”—she pauses as a maid with a loaded trolley trundles past behind her—“of a tough time last night. They didn’t have a room here so he went over to the Holiday Inn. He’ll be back today, though. I don’t feel up to it.”

“Okay. Shoot.” From behind him somebody hollers “Objection!” over the banging of a gavel.

“I’m sorry,” says Kate. “See, what I figured was … I didn’t figure very well. I had eight floors, from the lobby up to here. I decided it wouldn’t matter as long as you didn’t know. Maybe you’d have a son or a daughter on the far side of the country, but there’d be no connection.” She shakes her head. “I wanted … I felt like I needed something, Matt. Something real. And you were … there was something about you.”

“Plus, I don’t know, I didn’t want it all to be up to me this time. God or whatever, I wanted something else to have a say.”

“Or whatever. Chances are …”—another pause while the maid cloinks by the other way—“chances are it won’t be yours. According to my chart … well, say fifty-fifty. What odds were you figuring when you bent me over the other night?”

Matt closes the door again. Onscreen these scenes work so nicely. There’s a soupçon of suspense—you wait for the sound of the chain sliding, or not. Will the guy open up again or leave the door shut? Is this yes or no?

It’s been less than an hour since that last knock. Checkout time has slipped past yet again—Matt’s called down to finagle one more night, what the heck.

It can’t be Kate, since there she is curled up at the far end of the couch. The two of them have been madly prepping, since he finally let her in, for a spot on The Newlywed Game. Bob what’s his name, not Barker but the other one. He was Erin’s fave—any-time she stayed home from school with a fake flu it was to watch him grill hubbies about their wives, wives about their hubbies. So Matt, tell us, what’s the biggest secret Kate’s ever tried to keep from you? They’ve run the gamut of personal trivia, from first kiss to favourite movie, from pets to pet peeves. Kate loves cats, hates crowds …

The point being what, exactly? Kate’s gathering clues (as she’s presumably been doing since the start) to help her make sense of her kid if she somehow confirms that it’s Matt’s—if it’s extra long and lanky, perhaps, and possessed of an extra heavy dose of wiseassery. But what’s in it for Matt? Is it really worth getting to know the mother of the maybe kid he’ll probably never meet?

“Yeah, about that,” says Kate. “The thing is, I told him.” She swipes at the air. “I just wanted him to go away. I wanted it really badly.”

“I see,” says Matt. “Is there … let’s be clear about this. Is there anything else I should know?”

“You’re sure now? To recap: I may be the father of your child. A guy who actually wants to be the father of your child may be lurking homicidally outside my door. That it?”

“Right, okay. So let’s sort this out.” Matt springs up, strides across the room and—no chain—throws open the door. “Who died?” says Zane.

It suits him, the lean new physique. He looks good, Zane does, he looks hot for about the first time in his life—gaining beauty, it would seem, even as he prepares to let it go. Or what if the virus is a hoax? He’s thinned down a bit, sure, but that’s because he’s been hitting the gym, cutting the calories. Matt has the urge to quick-jab him in the tummy, check out those abs.

“Yeah, thanks, I’d love to,” says Zane, shooing Matt backwards into the room.

Maybe—here’s a thought—maybe Zane looks good because he is good. He’s a movie man, after all, and in the movies goodness and beauty go together. How do you pick the hero or heroine out from all the extras? Same way you pick the saint or saviour out from all the sinners in some old masterpiece—it’s the grace, it’s the glow, and Zane’s got these things nowadays. Okay, so he’s also got those half-moon bruises under his eyes, but beautiful people are cultivating that look, aren’t they? The urban goth thing, sexily strung out?

Or what if he’s doing this to himself on purpose, for a role in one of his own movies? He’s emaciating himself for the part of an AIDS guy, bucking for an Oscar. It worked for Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, didn’t it? Thirty pounds, probably worth losing that to take home the hardware. So maybe he’s—

“Oh yeah, sorry,” says Matt. “Kate? This is Zane. He’s killing himself.”

Zane settles into one of the massive chairs around the conference-sized coffee table. Settles? Slumps. Subsides. “Funny thing, Mariko didn’t … Oh, sorry.”

“No, that’s all right.” Matt waves a hand in Kate’s direction. “No secrets here.”

“Okay, I was just going to say, Mariko didn’t mention you knocking anybody up. She didn’t mention Kate at all, actually.”

“So that’s how you tracked me down? You called Mariko?” Matt resumes the couch. Kate hesitates, then joins him.

“After I tried your dad.” Zane shakes his head. “Guy got kind of irked with me, I’m afraid. When I kept insisting you were there.”

Matt groans. That chest pain seems to be coming around again, wouldn’t it suck to die right now?

“Well, what was I supposed to think? You didn’t bother telling me you weren’t staying with him. You didn’t tell me much of bloody anything before you hightailed it yesterday, like some … Like some what?”

“Like some huffy high school girl,” says Zane. “Thank you. Anyway, he wasn’t gone long, just had a quick look around. I don’t think he ever figured out who I was.”

Matt swivels to face her. “Cameron?” he says. “What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been working on names. See, I want one that’ll work whether it turns out to be a boy or a girl. You’re naming the person, right, you’re not naming the sex? So I’ve been trying to think of movie star names that work like that.” She prods Matt’s thigh with a stockinged toe. “Movie star in your honour.”

“Lee,” says Kate. “Lee, I like that.” She strokes her tummy. “Lee, are you in there?”

Is it possible, actually, to picture a person who doesn’t exist yet? Matt’s often tried to envision the baby he and Mariko might cook up together. Actors, when they’re creating new characters, are supposed to splice together bits of different people they’ve known—Johnny Depp crossing Keith Richards with Pepe Le Pew for his pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean, sort of thing. Matt’s conjured a creature half-goofy (that’s his bit) and half-sublime. The result is almost beautiful.

He actually saw a baby once who seemed to qualify. This was a couple of years ago, just after he and Mariko quit trying. He (she?) was pale, but there was something Pacific about him too. Polynesian? Matt’s length, Mariko’s curious green eyes. They were on a trip to Washington, DC, to visit her dad, Mr. Kuul himself. The infant and his mum were behind them in the security line. As Matt scooped up his keys and his coins he watched them inch through the arch and then, since they beeped, get swept with the baton. Mum held baby out at arm’s length (she might have been a grossed-out dad in a sitcom) while he submitted to his exam. There was something about the look on the baby’s face at that moment—an antsy fuddlement?—that reminded Matt precisely of himself.

They stir at the same time, all three of them. Matt sighs, and he hears the others sigh too. There’s Kate, fetal at the far end of the couch; there’s Zane, slumped over in his chair like a baby in a backpack. Weird, how they all zoned out at once like that. They’d been gabbing in a dopey, desultory sort of way and then poof. Some primitive stress response, three panicky possums.

Zane wriggles upright. “Hey you two,” he whispers, “it’s rude to whisper.”

“Kate’s getting artificially inseminated too,” Matt whispers. “If she has a baby it might be mine, or it might be some other guy’s. There’ll be no way to know.”

“It won’t be that much of a mystery, I know stuff about the other man too.”

“There’s a catalogue. Donor 1508, he’s a phys ed teacher but he has a masters in math too. Hobbies, sailing and jazz. Outgoing, adventurous. Tall. Medium build.”

The Happy Heifer, tacked onto one of the family-type hotels just down from the Starlight, is diner style. Leatherette booths, Formica-topped tables. You flip through the menu in a phony jukebox on the wall. Each booth is brooded over by some dead movie star, a James (Cagney or Dean), a Hepburn (Audrey or Katharine). Bogart, obviously. Bacall. Here and there they’ve stretched to include a Victor Mature, a Hedy Lamarr. Oh, and this is gratifying, a shot of the original King Kong, all eighteen inches of him, blow-dried fluffy in his rabbit fur. He peers amorously at the empty left paw into which Fay Wray will later be rear-projected.

The three settle under the baffled gaze of Spencer Tracy. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, end days.

“Sidney Poitier?” says Zane. “Thanks.” He gulps from his just-delivered water, cubes pleasantly clacking. “He was so fertummelt to be working with Tracy and Hepburn he had to play the big scenes to empty chairs.”

“Oh,” she says. “And they cut out the kisses, right, the black-on-white action?”

“And then he died,” says Zane. “Spencer Tracy. Have you been there? He’s got a little rock garden in this cemetery in LA.”

“No, but I was at Al Jolson’s, Mariko and I. Statue of him down on one knee, all set to sing ‘Mammy.’”

Zane shakes his head at whatever he’s about to say. He’s got a half-grown goatee going too. Without the moustache it looks almost exactly like Bowie’s on the cover of the umgirl’s magazine. And then of course the mismatched eyes, the blue and the brown—it stays weird, this feature, never quite gets familiar. The endless asymmetry of it. Which came first, the odd eyes or the odd guy behind them? “Mercedes thinks I should turn myself into a diamond.”

“We’re mostly carbon, right? And what’s a diamond? So you pay them to crush you. All this”—he indicates his body with a two-handed mamma mia kind of gesture—“and you get about a half-carat.”

“Well that’s the thing.” In this light, in the glare of this fluorescence, you can start to see it. A hint of the AIDS face, the skull asserting itself beneath the flesh. New concavities of cheek and temple. Shanumi sleeping on a woven mat, pale light glinting off the coal-dark jag of her jaw … Is it possible for a person to choose this? “I’ve already given Mercedes a wedding ring. Mum and Dad wouldn’t want it. You?”

“I’d have to get pierced,” says Matt. “Ear, do you think?” He pinches the little flap where the umgirl had her new one. “Lip? Nose?”

This was one of Matt’s meditations in the early days: be a diamond. Meditating was a desperation move back then, almost an act of vengeance. Erin had gone crazy over her swimming (and over her swimming coach of course, the scuzzy Mr. Skinner) and you couldn’t talk to her anymore. Zane had gone crazy over his camera. Not movies yet, just stills, gorgeous grainy black and whites: a bike leaning against a brick wall, a cheerleader with a shiner half hidden by her pom-pom, a close-up of a whorled fingertip.

So Matt needed something to go crazy over too. He got his cue from Mr. Kumar, the Buddha thing you’d see him doing right there on the school grounds, the way it lifted him up above the ridicule. Matt got a couple of books out of the library, and before long he was at it on the floor beside his bed late at night, lotus-posing in his blue polar bear pajamas. His mum would poke her head in—“For pity’s sake at least put on some socks, you silly boy”—and then leave him alone. There was something called the Diamond Sutra which said that everything’s empty, that there’s no essence to anything, no ego, no self, and that recognizing this is enlightenment. It said that just getting yourself enlightened isn’t good enough, that it’s your job to lift everybody else up with you, and that the way to do this is to realize you’ve never been separate from anybody else anyway.

Wild stuff. Matt concocted his own system whereby he’d picture himself as a diamond, pure and translucent. Empty, so everything could pass through. He kept at this practice pretty much nightly until Erin died. Then—wasn’t this the very moment it should have been prepping him for?—he gave up.

“What can I get you folks?” No doubt she’s an actor too, this waitress, looking to be up on the wall someday. Pretty, but not pretty enough.

Kate’s been laying more of her fancy physics on them. River’s fancy physics. “The universe has ten dimensions, but we only get to experience four of them. What happened to all the others? Where did they go?”

“Clubhouse,” says Matt, and the others go diner as well, Denver sandwich, chicken caesar.

“I mean no matter … I’m good at taking care, is what I want to say. Really good. I’ve been practising for this, even though I didn’t know it.”

“It’s like I’ve been pregnant for years. And I’m not going to, you know, come after you. That’s not why.”

She smiles. She frowns. “It’s a lot to let go of. I know that.” And she’s up and off to the loo.

So, just the two of them. It’s weird. Is it weird? Craning over his shoulder at Kate’s retreating form Zane says, “She’s nice.”

“I guess she ragged on you pretty good the other day. She feels like a bitch.”

Zane puts up his dukes. “That’s my wife you’re talking about there, fella.”

“But she was right, I haven’t been good enough. And Nico, I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah.” Zane extracts a vial from his hip pocket, tips a pill into his water glass, watches it fizz. “I wish it’d been the other way around. I wish he’d made me sick.”

“It was that time out west.” Zane sips from his water, wincing at its effervescence.

“Who did the killer turn out to be? Remember that movie I was working on?” Zane’s got the knee-jiggle thing going bigtime.

“That basement suite of yours, what a dump. And you were raving about this woman.”

“She was the one, you just knew it. You’d planned not to see her, which was sweet, but I didn’t want to cramp your style. Nico and I had just met too. He was into me but I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure about much of anything at that point.” Zane picks up the Clark Gable salt shaker, the Vivien Leigh pepper. He taps them together, kissy kissy. “So I went out and met a guy. Narfi. Do you think that can have been his real name, Narfi? My one and only one-night stand.” Vivien gets Clark down on his back, starts bopping up and down on top of him, obviously into it. “Sweet guy, and he had condoms and everything but he wanted me to shoot up with him first. He was so insistent, he wanted me to feel that, what that’s like, to do it when you’re different.” Clark and Vivien have switched places now, Clark looking pleased with himself on top. “I knew it was stupid but I let him stick me anyway.”

“Stay home,” says Matt. For one addled instant it feels possible, that he could actually pass this message to himself back through time. “Just stay home.”

“Hi guys,” says Kate. “Hey, lean in.” She’s got her cellphone out and she’s aiming it at them camera-fashion. “Okay, now smile. No, not like that.”

Long before he met Mariko, Matt had hit upon the proposition that the most beautiful people are half-breeds. Hybrids. Mutts. There was Winnie Fulton back in high school, black mum and white dad. There was Freda something-or-other in undergrad. The guys called her Tex-Mex—behind her back, of course, since you couldn’t actually look at her and speak at the same time. And then the movies. Rita Hayworth for instance, Spanish-Irish, or Merle Oberon, Anglo-Indian. Something about the blending of races, the cross-pollination—you get this unearthly grace, this Platonic rightness of form. Surely this manifests a bedrock truth of some sort, surely it’s got the flavour in it of redemption, of transcendence.

Such was Matt’s theory. He laid it on Mariko the very night they met. In its own little way it was, for him, a transcendent sort of experience. They were seated side by side on a flight from Toronto to Vancouver. Mariko had been on business, Matt had just completed the business of burying his mum. Was that it, was that what tore him open, the loss? Matt babbled through most of the in-flight movie, a pretty decent murder mystery, waxing verbose about the essence of the form—its trick of transforming death into a solvable puzzle, its quaint notion that humans make sense, that they’re driven by neat little things called motives. Mariko kept having to tug at her headphones and turn to him, so he was treated, alternately, to the profile and the dead-on view of her, a moving mug shot.

“You should be one of those movie guys,” she said as the headsets were being collected. “In the paper. Or on TV, find an Ebert and be a Siskel?”

“Where are you from?” said Matt, as though this were an enigma that had haunted him all the days of his life.

“I’m from here, I’m from Vancouver. Oh, but before that? My dad’s from Estonia, my mum’s from Japan.”

Which is when Matt launched into his mutt thing. Mariko must have been put off—by the brazen flattery, by the objectification—but for some reason she still relinquished her business card as they filed off the plane. That beautiful woman.

So sure, Lee will be better looking if he or she is halfblack, fathered by 1508. Fitter too. More musical, more mathematical, just generally togetherer. So shouldn’t that be what Matt wants?

“Inside Eve,” says Matt. Zane’s been hounding him about his work again. Grub’s arrived, they’re digging in. “I’m writing about Inside Eve. Haven’t you seen it yet? My God. Smarts and insouciance, both. I’m describing it as Buñuel’s Belle de Jour meets—”

“No but seriously,” says Zane. “What are you going to do now? You’re free.”

“And you’re a liar-liar-pants-on-fire. Join the club. So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Step back and repulse monkey?” Matt effects a little tai chi flourish with his hands.

“Fall back on one of my other skills, I suppose.” He looks at Zane. And those would be?

“Oh.” A slightly fuddled pause. Then, “What about you, Zane? What are you working on?”

“Couple of things. A new documentary, something I’m pretty excited about. Maybe Matt said? About a guy on AIDS drugs, the life they give him.”

Mid-sip, Matt sets down his coffee. He’s instantly, absolutely at the limit of elation. “Fuggoff,” he says.

What have those extraterrestrials got against us Canadians? Seriously, have you seen the crop circles they’ve been foisting off on us lately? In the old world (check out the overworked canvas of Wiltshire, around Stonehenge) you get wildly sophisticated patterns, Busby Berkeley–type things. You get fractals, infinities, magnetic fields. You get corkscrews and kabalistic trees of life, dreamcatchers and haloed heads.

But here in Canada? Maybe a circle. If you’re lucky a couple of linked circles, a dumbbell.

A dumbbell? Is that supposed to be funny?

This intergalactic bigotry has failed to dissuade first-time Canadian filmmaker Aiden Zed from setting Radius—his hilarious, pathos-drenched mockumentary about “croppies” and their circles—right here at home. Word’s just gone out that a new circle’s been sighted in a soybean field near Toronto. Zed introduces us to a wild assortment of buffs as they make their frantic way to the site. They’re a gratifyingly diverse group, who in fact have only one thing in common. They’re all barmy. They’re all completely nuts.

But nuts in a nice way. Nuts in the way I am, the way you are (if I may). The almost irresistible temptation for the director of a mockumentary is to mock, to make the film’s subjects pay big-time for their vanity and their lunacy. Like all the best satirists, Zed loves the people he’s laughing at. He nudges his viewer and says, not, “Look at them!” but, “Look at us!”

So we meet Trish Ginch, who’s had the cataract in one eye cured by a crop circle and wants the other one done. We meet Hank Lagerfeld, who communicates with aliens telepathically through the device they’ve implanted in his head. (Hank’s scheduled to be sucked up into the mother-ship this time, so he brings his toothbrush and his hemorrhoid cream.) We meet psychics who read the circles as messages from God, from Goddess, even from good old Gaia, from Mother Earth herself.

One of the great pleasures of Zed’s film is how evenly it spreads its dismay out between the believers and the nonbelievers, the bunkers and the debunkers. The only sensible thing to say about crop circles, surely, is that they’re a mystery. Not one of Zed’s characters can live with this. Radius captures, with uncanny accuracy, the weird combination of attraction and abhorrence we feel for what’s truly beyond us.

This ambivalence reaches its fever pitch in Mr. Mc-Knee. A retired airplane mechanic, McKnee believes in the extraterrestrial origin of crop circles. He doesn’t want to, though, because this belief offends his sense of himself as a Thinking Man. So, with the help of his ne’er-do-well son, he goes around “hoaxing”—creating phony crop circles. His reasoning goes like this: if it’s possible for me to trick everybody else, then it’s possible I myself am being tricked—and I don’t have to believe anymore. This is as finely convoluted a bit of characterization as the movies have offered us in years.

Addressing the gang gathered in this new circle, Mc-Knee claims to have hoaxed it. His son contradicts him, claims it’s real. All hell breaks loose. Contributing to the bedlam is the roar of a combine: it’s harvest time, and Farmer Jones wants to get on with it. If and when you get to see this film (distribution has been deplorably thin), look forward to this moment. Tiananmen Square’s got nothing on Farmer Jones’s Circle.

Dinner’s done, but the evening can’t be over yet. The boys are still buzzed. Matt, for his part, can hardly breathe. His chest is tweaking him again but who cares. His kritikal work is blooming here, is what’s happening, it’s giving birth.

It’s taken Kate a while to get the hang of the whole thing. “You mean you”—levelling a finger at Zane—“are making a movie based on a review that you”—jerking a thumb at Matt—“wrote about a movie that doesn’t exist?”

They’ve already made progress on casting. Zane has it in mind to go Canadian. He’s ruled out anybody who’s already appeared in one of the Christopher Guest mockumentaries.

“So what are the crucial roles?” says Matt. “Well, me, obviously, the son. Martin Short?”

“William Shatner. Or no, Shatner could be the guy with the gadget in his head.”

Criticism and creation. Effect and cause. Future and past. The universe is flowing the other way now, the tide of entropy has turned. The world isn’t falling apart any longer but coming together, the shattered cup leaping whole back into your hand.

You’re supposed to rush for the cinema, that’s part of the rush, part of the ritual. They take the Taurus. While Kate deals with the highway (supper hour, but it can’t technically be termed suicide, can it?) the boys work their way through the paper to pick a movie. On such a night, where else could they possibly go but to the cinema, to the source?

It’s got to be a sequel, the echo of some film that’s come before—summertime being, in its essence, about memory, longing, regret. About other summers. On this the boys instantly agree. That narrows it down to thirteen.

Or does it? There are a couple of iffy cases. Take Exorcist IV, for instance, with its subtitle The Beginning. Is this a legitimate sequel? It was made after the first three episodes, but plot-wise it predates them. Properly speaking it’s a prequel. Is a prequel a particular kind of sequel, or is it—in its inversion of chronology, its folding back of time—a genre unto itself?

“I wonder what the most sequelled series of all time is?” says Matt during a lull in this debate. “Total Suckcess is up to fifteen.”

“Hey, maybe that’s how reincarnation works. Zane Four: The Madness Continues.”

Kate lets this go another few rounds before interrupting to say, “Horror, blah.” Which scraps not only Exorcist IV but Freddy vs. Jason and Jeepers Creepers 2, too. Progress.

There are a couple of comedies, but most of the remaining movies are action. None of them will be any good, but which will be most gratifyingly awful? This is the topic to which Matt and Zane turn all their cinematographic acumen. Until about six thirty, that is, when they realize that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is the only early show they can still make.

“Hey,” says Matt, “that’s the one I was supposed to be doing when I got fired.”

Twice, since his student days, Matt’s found himself in front of the camera rather than behind it, gazed at rather than gazing. Mariko hooked him up—this is back when they were living in Vancouver, the blissful big city—with a casting agent on the hunt for reliable extras.

“It’ll be fun, honey,” she cajoled him. “Back on a set again? Who knows what might happen?”

So along he went. The agent instantly pegged him as “a scrawny Nicolas Cage. Nicolas Cage if he worried more and never worked out.” A trifle harsh, but okay. Judging by Adaptation, Cage could certainly play Matt in the adaptation. Anyway, it got him a couple of parts.

Kissed. Bordello of Blood. One Canadian, one American. One highbrow, one lowbrow. Talk about yer range.

Extra-ing turned out to be a strange gig. You hung around the holding area for about fourteen hours a day, scarfing down free sushi, listening to the costume lady gossip about the stars. Who’s well hung, who isn’t, who’s in rehab, who’s out. Eventually some officious little prick with a walkie-talkie told you to go stand someplace and look natural.

For Kissed, Matt had his heart set on playing a dead guy. He saw himself stretched out on the gurney some night when Molly Parker crept into the morgue with strange love on her mind. Could he pull that off? Could he do dead when life incarnate was grinding up against him with its crotch? He never got to find out, since they cast him as a student instead, at the school where Molly went to learn embalming. Worse, his shot ended up on the cutting-room floor.

To check out his work, then, people had to rent Bordello, and pay very close attention to the choose-me scene at the whorehouse. “That’s me gyrating in the background. That’s my arm. No, there …” What people wanted to hear about was supermodel Angie Everhart. Were they real? That scene where she sticks her tongue down the guy’s throat and shoves his heart out through his chest, how did they do that?

Matt turned down the next two parts that came his way. Bystander-who-falls-during-chase-scene in Mr. Magoo. Bystander-who-gets-drenched-by-frolicking-whale in Free Willy 3: The Rescue. No sex, no death, what was the point? His agent cut him loose, and that was that. Mariko was disappointed of course, but you could hardly tell. What a woman.

For Radius, Matt fancies himself in a speaking part. Nothing major, just a line or two, some cranky cynic or what have you. He’d love to be there at the crop circle when things go insane. “Yooohooo. Anybody up there?”

Yorkdale, Toronto’s Taj Mahal. What a fuss over it when Matt was a kid. One of the architectural wonders of the era, the first megamall. It was de rigueur to lose your car there the first time you went, somewhere in that bewilderness of slotted carpark, and ideally to lose one of your kids once you got inside. Mammoth corridors, conditioned air, the place had the feel of a weather-controlled bubble on Venus, on Jupiter. Matt took Charlotte there for a Woody Allen on their first date. Love and Death?

A few things have changed. There are ten cinemas now, instead of the original two. Stepping into the lobby Matt feels as though he’s been miniaturized and tweezed into some high-tech device, cellphone or PalmPilot or BlackBerry. The LED lighting is all purply blue, blinking and scintillating; the requisite soundtrack of bleeps and bells and sirens is provided by the teeming arcade. An awful lot of other people have been miniaturized along with him, including many birthday parties’ worth of fizzy prepubescents. Pimply teens staff various counters, ready to sell you a coffee or a juice or a pizza or a burger. You can’t get a Fanta anymore, but you can get a keg of cola and a vat of popcorn, enough caffeine and sugar and salt to set your system humming before the Dolby kicks in.

Matt’s in the middle. Nobody holds anybody’s hand, but both Matt’s companions have to root around in his lap for their popcorn. There’s half an hour or so of sense-battering ads and epilepsy-inducing trailers. “In a world where …” The usual voice, that breathy basso. French name, La-something. Thunder Throat, people call him. The Voice of God. Matt did a piece on him once, proposing that he actually is the Prime Mover. “Where else should the Big Guy show up but at the cinema, at the house of worship itself?”

T3, it soon becomes clear, will not be without its pleasures. From the get-go there’s the trademark camp brutality, and a proliferation of Ah-nold in-jokes—you’re constantly being congratulated for having seen the first two instalments. Schwarzenegger’s new robotic nemesis, back from the future with him, is a T-X, a walking wet dream zipped up in red leather. It’s cool the way she uses her tongue as a data-gathering device (licking the hero’s bloody bandage, getting a palpable thrill from it) and the way she keeps plowing soon-to-be-Governor Schwarzenegger through walls and stuff.

On the whole though, hm. T3 may be better than Ronald Reagan’s last pre-politics effort—Hellcats of the Navy, that classic—but not by much. The carnage T3 affords is high-priced, but hardly apocalyptic. A lot of it’s just standard-issue car chase, though to be fair one of the “cars” is a massive construction crane on wheels, Arnie doing his wrecking-ball imitation on the end of the boom (Zane giggling groggily here). A couple of the gadgets are kind of neat, including what appears to be a mechanized pterodactyl with machine guns mounted under its wings. In general, though, there’s nothing much to make you run for cover. Worse, there’s precious little pheromone exchange, precious little sex-buzz between the two young stars, the soon-to-be saviour of mankind and his main squeeze.

Philosophically, too, the film’s a bit of a letdown. The misogyny and homophobia are no shock, but the about-face on free will is a bummer. Where the earlier versions argued for humanity’s control over its own fate, T3 proposes that Judgment Day has always been inevitable. Boooorrrring.

Critically speaking, then, the movie is crap. It sucks, and it’s Matt’s job to say so. Simple.

Or at least it should be. There turns out to be a complication though. The complication is that he loves it. He loves T3, just as he loved T2 and T1. He loves them all, loves every movie he sees, every movie he’s ever seen. A world-sized confection of sound and light ladled into his cranium, what’s not to love? Something fathomable is at stake, each loss will be redeemed, why would you ever let go? This love of Matt’s, like many great loves (he tells himself), is unspoken. Would people understand? If they caught him cheering or weeping at this kind of cretinous dreck, would they write him off? What, for instance, would DennyD say? Is there any way he’d credit both parts of Matt, his craving and his kritikal thought? Is there any chance he’d buy the line Matt uses in his own head—that you can love cinema even while you’re loathing it, in the same way you can be both appalled by and enamoured of schlocky old life itself?

When Matt gets to the “life itself” bit of any of his internal arguments he knows it’s time to move on. He redirects his focus to the screen—no great feat of concentration, given that the world is currently coming to an end up there. E is equalling mc2 in cities all over the ruddy place, LA outwards. Myriad sunrises, myriad mushrooms.

It’s over. Theme song, credits. And look at this, he’s crying, Matt’s crying—not the full hyuck-hyuck-hyucking yet, but his chest heaves with quasi-hiccups. No worries. By the time the lights come up no one’ll be the wiser.

“Hey, man, are you crying?” This from Zane, who’s just struggled upright—he’s been sleepily snuffling ever since the machines woke up and started butchering everybody.

The drive to Zane’s place is bizarrely quiet. Matt’s at the wheel—what with shuttling to and from The Sperm Shack or Mister Semen or what have you, Kate’s had it with big-city traffic. Matt reaches over and kneads her cotton-skirted thigh now and again. His plan is to dump Zane and whip back to the hotel with her. Shift the odds in his direction, why not?

Here’s a thought though: will he, in the event, be able to manage it? Matt’s organ hasn’t seen this much action since … well, since he and Mariko tried to get pregnant, actually. More recently—and until Sophie began seeing to his wife’s sexual needs—they’ve been down to a respectable (isn’t it?) once a week or so. Is he still in shape for this sort of binge? The image of Lee hovering there in the ether, will that stiffen his resolve or soften it?

So that’s where Zane’s lost weight has gone. Mercedes has got it. She’s graduated from big to huge, or maybe from huge to gigantic. Is this some kind of codependence thing, all the calories flowing one way? And she just keeps on getting younger, skin softening, eyes clearing. There’s something so pure about her, joy and fury as absolute as an infant’s.

“Use the upstairs one,” says Matt once the intros have been accomplished. Why not give Kate an eyeful of the outré leather gear on the landing? Might be fun to get her angle on that.

Zane excuses himself to use the other loo. Matt and Mercedes—and Siegfried, who’s up on his hind legs, snout buried in Matt’s crotch—are alone.

This is different. To get into the living room you push through a bead curtain, or what would have been a bead curtain back in the ‘60s but is now a curtain of film, strips of exposed 16 millimetre, a shifting shimmer of celluloid. Pretty cool.

“What?” says Mercedes. “Oh. That was Nico. He’s trying to Zanify things, make the place a little more comfortable for the man.”

There are new movie posters up too. Peter O’Toole as Lawrence, bleached and burned by the Arabian sun. A tuxed Marlene Dietrich flirting with that dame in Morocco. Newman and Redford as Butch and Sundance, going down together in a blizzard of lead.

Matt says, “Hey, I meant to ask, how do things turn out in your novel there? Summer …”

“Like I’d spoil it for you.” Mercedes fusses with a pot of amaryllis on the mantel, twisting it so that its phallic froth of blossoms is more advantageously displayed. Longish pause, and then she turns. “You’ll do something, won’t you?”

“Fuck you, Matt. About Zane.” Her face goes blubbery for an instant, then recomposes itself. “He’s trying to feel good, you know. I mean massage, acupuncture, reiki, he’ll do anything.”

“I know, yeah, that’s excellent.” Ziggy has redirected his attentions, and is having a hopeful prod at Matt’s hiney.

“The thing is, what if Zane’s actually … Hey, now.” Siegfried has fastened himself to Matt’s calf, and is humping away like the dickens.

“Don’t even think about it.” Kate drags herself into the room. She’s got on a studded leather collar and she’s leading herself, maybe a little too roughly, by a length of chain.

Brief pause, and then Mercedes really starts bawling. No, she’s laughing is what she’s doing. She’s cracking up.

Zane wanders in. He lets the scene run for another beat or so and then, “Cut!”

TUESDAY