35: Reckoning

Rousseau and Marengo Part 4 --------------------------- The surprise we feel at being fooled is often accompanied by the sudden re-realisation that others exist who are not merely actors in the theatres of our lives, and through this haze of dissolved borders a nudged reality comes into focus. The words secreted by Scrofa like a foul odour caused Tommy to about-turn with a brief wave, mouthing the words as he walked away in confusion. Had he remembered correctly? Was it really Tommaso’s line? Stopping, with a short gasp, he turned his head slowly to lock sights on the two men whispering like a pair of magpies who both laughed and held their empty glasses up to catch the attention of the invisible waiter. A quick reflex caused Tommy to grab the bottle of champagne from the serving table, to throw a white serviette over his arm, and to make a beeline for the broken circle. Gentlemen, if I may? A sly wink at Winkleman who was delighted by the pretence, recognising immediately the character of Sam Blanca, a converted con artist turned tricker of tricksters, from one of Tommy’s early movies, before serving Susperio who held out his flute like a white rose. The champagne overflowed, as was anticipated, and spilled spectacularly onto Susperio’s silk ballroom slippers. Still in persona Tommy raised a flutter of apologies much to the amusement of the circle who looked on enthralled as the hapless waiter patted down the dampened dandy with his serviette in waiting. With the scene re-enacted, he retreated from the applause underlined by the groans of a disgruntled Scrofa, whose wallet had just been swiped. Heading towards the basement, his cogitations, lubricated by suspicion, had now turned to quest. “Hey Tommy. Urgh, how’d you get down here?” Waving a red security card, and flaunting his charismatic smile as if to say, “Well, you know me!” followed by one of his classic lines: “Making it big ain’t easy.” “Wow. So… you’ve… been admitted, to the next circle? You’ve ascended! Congrats, that’s, awesome, I knew you had it in you.” Strangely affecting words of encouragement from a subterranean security guard directed at one of the all time superstars of the day, but it’s often in these awkward moments of unguarded sincerity that, like a small green bud coaxed out between the cracks of an otherwise arid vista, fragility speaks to power. “Just announced. Bunch of bores though. Thought I’d come and share the spoils with you instead. Got any cups?” “Tommy! You’re the best!” “So, how’s your holiday in the Inferno?” “Ah you know, apart from the constant clucking, not too shabby. Fancy a tour? Welcome to the SS Otis.” With a sweep of his arm the sliding door opened onto a large round room lit by a wall of monitors and a vast control board blinking like a cruel throng on the cusp of an abyss. “Recognise it?” “Is that from… Star Glyphs?” “Got it in one! Seriously, we’d all be dressed in tin foil if Captain Scrofa had his way.” “Well, the future ain’t quite what it used to be. How about the retinal scanners? Still fake?” “What do you think? Everything’s fake here.” And so it was, or rather, wasn’t. Not only had the iconography of the Inner Sanctum been lifted from the very movies that had made the Stars stars, but the sets too had been incarcerated in this mothership to lull these recalcitrant Joves into the stagnant mire of nostalgia. Tommy, under the ruse of research, swiped his swiped card at the archive entrance, enduring the drama of pupil dilation. “Welcome Suspirio” the door greeted in a robotic voice, sliding open, as Tommy glanced at Rameau to check that he hadn’t heard, and then sliding shut again with a smooth outtake of air, revealing an archive that was touchingly analogue. Stomach clenched; heart pounding; what had appeared as a perverse possibility only an hour before was now a glaring fact, ugly in its obtuseness. He opened a filing cabinet drawer, found his name, and there, bloated like a superstarsi file that would make an honest biographer blush, was his life in brief. Flicking through, flashes came into view like a trailer for a bad movie that he had already seen and soundly forgotten. His career was laid out before him as devised, planned and executed by Otis through a network of wiretaps, stools and spies. His character ‘susceptible to ego stroking’ had been coerced on multiple occasions before that egregious day. The final page of his file ended with a simple order: TnT: Fragile bond: to be annulled; signed, as were all the orders: S. S. Like a sleeper waking to the smell of smoke, Tommy had opened the door to find that the whole building was on fire. Removing as much from his file as he could carry, and acting as if the flames he felt licking his feet were in fact real, he hit the fire alarm and hurried to the basement carpark, jumped into his car and sped to the outer sanctum where the lost souls were gathering. As Suspirio stepped forward, wide eyed like a nocturnal creature pained by the rude intrusion of light, Tommy wound down his window. “I think you dropped something,” he said, throwing his wallet at his feet, coins jangling onto the asphalt and the red security card sliding into sight. A heavy lidded look was the only response he gave as Tommy sped off, leaving a heady scent of burnt rubber in his wake. What should have been The Great Awakening soon returned to The Great Slumber as the revelations were veiled in a mist of conflicting accusations that blew away on the breeze as OTIS paid its way to the truth. As the public lost interest in yesterday’s news, a truce was brokered with a more than generous offer: You can keep everything that we gave you, and we’ll keep everything that you gave us. Cut loose, he sought the only anchor he had left. Telling Tomasso about his ten years interred in Otis, he seemed to anticipate everything he was about to say like a racehorse a head ahead of its rider at every moment. The main ideas of OTIS were clear to him before a word had even left Tommy's mouth. “You? You were in OTIS?” “Well, no, not exactly. Hmmm. O. T. I. S.: Olav, Tommaso, Iris, Stefania. He wrote the book for us, well, about us, in a way.” “He? Us? What book?” “We were his students, Fantoft’s. It grew from his training notes, a kind of methodology, I guess, but it swelled into a beast. It was a kind of bildungsroman with cosmic overtones, half serious, half satire, interspersed with mock essays on fanciful applications of Innerology, quite a few that I’m sure you’re familiar with now. In essence it was a comedy, but it sounds like Otis didn't really get the jokes. I thought the manuscript had burnt with him.” Tommaso broke into an exaggerated smile capped by a frown as if to say sorry, as if it were all his fault. A deflated Tommy covered his face with his hands and let out a long sigh. With a new breath of life TnT was renamed TeT, under the influence of a new moon, and though Tommy could not appear in the movies due to a contractual noose held by OTIS, he found a way to orbit under the radar. Their first offensive, simply entitled Testament, was Marengo through and through, and Tommy too, as he was later to be understood. It took a simple fable from Fantoft’s novel, one that OTIS had been enamoured with to such an extent that it had based its whole Friday curriculum on it. The essence was that if enough people joined in a singular act of imagining that they could bring into existence something if not by name then with the power of a god. OTIS, taking it literally, had neither understood the metaphor nor the moral of the tale and so had raced headlong in its folly to create a creator. The opening sequence an ascending aerial view of a desert that gradually reveals an immense circle of people holding hands surrounding an old abandoned school bus. The intense humming of the crowd comes to a head when the bus, now just a tiny dot on the screen is rocked by an explosion that develops into a mushroom cloud that expands towards the lens, turning the screen first white then black. The camera then exits a mouth that has opened to scream, in a classic Marengo move. The movie starts on it’s tireless journey of encounters between the believers and the believed. Each person who steps forward to meet the god that they have just summoned into existence is shaken by an uncontrollable fear and it’s in these depictions that the movie is truly humane. Each person sees a different god, but all are dead eyed and silent. There’s no action, just sitting in the drivers seat of an un-drivable bus, each figure simply staring across the empty desert. Wailing people come and wailing people go; terror and atonement mix with terrible boredom in the stifling heat. This adamantly Botticellian adoration whose cast swarmed with notables of the time was notable for the star that had been invited to the party but who hadn’t shown up, or so it seemed. For Tommy Rousseau was named as the actor playing each incarnation of the sedentary god, spanning all nations and taking on so many conflicting forms that only the sacrilege of CGI could account for such an anomaly, but this movie certainly was no sacrilege. What accounted for the veracity of the many of the screams, and thus the pathos that the audience felt, was the fact that the actors on set all saw Tommy, and only Tommy, enter the bus, but when their cues came to approach, they found something quite other. As the final shot pulls back following the line of feet waiting to meet their made, it stops at a man in a gold tracksuit holding a cane, played by Tommaso himself. He slowly draws a curve in the sand that circles around to almost reach its end but is diverted from its path at the last moment, forming the stem of a question mark. The cane is lifted and the cane is brought down, turning everything black.