Knife Fight and Other Struggles (25 page)

Transcript of the subsequent meeting between Jerry and Max in the Disney World Trauma Center, from
I, Jerry
(pretty much how Max remembered it too):

JERRY
: Hello, there. I’m Jerry Wylde.

JIM
: Yes, I believe we have met. Just this afternoon.

JERRY
: And I’m sorry—you are . . . ?

JIM
: Max Fiddler.
Look Out for Shoorsen!
? Didn’t we have this conversation?

JERRY
: Max Fiddler. Ah, no. You’re Jim. Right?

JIM
: Max Fiddler. I am an actor.

JERRY
: An actor. Listen, Jim—I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but the one thing you are
not
is an actor. You have more
cojones
’tween those gams than half of those bozos on the pitch showed today.

JIM
: That is only because your triceratops spread their cojones across the pitch, Mr. Wylde.

JERRY
: You exaggerate. And they are rhinos. Triceratops are dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are extinct. Rhinos are alive and kicking. Where’d you go to school, Jim?

JIM
: Idaho. Why are you calling me Jim? I keep telling you my name is Max Fiddler, that is the name on the contract I signed, which by the way I also read all the way through, and I did not see any mention of rhinos in the—

JERRY
: Whoa, Jim. Settle down. I don’t handle the contracts, and we don’t have a lot of time for me to look into it for you anyway. But listen—let’s cut to the chase. I’ve got some new projects on the horizon—big projects. Stuff that’s going to turn Disney and Fox and the whole goddamn planet on its ear. Hey, riddle me this, Jim: what do you get when you cross a nature show with a fishing show?

JIM
: That would be. . . .

JERRY
: A hunting show! Ex-actly! Do you remember the last time you went hunting—sat in the scrub for hours with your dad’s old M16 and a box of hand grenades, waiting until the moment—the precious, perfect
moment—
that deer shows up in your sights?

JIM
: I’ve never been—

JERRY
: Never been hunting! Of course you haven’t! Who hunts deer these days?
I
can’t afford the price of a license, and I’m loaded! Okay, how about this: you ever shove firecrackers up a frog’s asshole? Watch that little bastard
hop
? No? Stick an aerosol can and a cigarette lighter under a wasp’s nest? Hold a magnifying glass over an anthill on a sunny day?

JIM
: Actually, not—

JERRY
: Gahh, you’re shitting me, Jim. I saw you out on that pitch today. That was not a prissy little rhino-hugging second banana from the subcontinent I saw climbing that goalpost. Oh, no. You’re one cold-blooded survivor, Jim. You’re a survivor, and you’re more.

JIM
: You tried to kill me.

JERRY
: Yeah, Jim. I guess I did. (Pausing sheepishly) And you know what? I think I succeeded.

JIM
: Huh?

JERRY
: Yeah. I look at you, and I don’t see any trace of that Max Fiddlehead—

JIM
: Fiddler. Max
Fiddler.

JERRY
: —Fiddle. Whoever. I don’t see any trace of that guy in you. You’re Jim—the guy that faces five sex-starved African bull rhinos, scales a sheer goal post then leaps—
leaps
through the air and knocks the camera op out of his seat to dominate the whole show! Forget
Look Out for Shoorsen!
—from now on, it’s Look Out for Jim, world!
Look Out for Fuckin’ Jim
!

At that point, a phalanx of Disney cast members had burst into the room, fired off a Taser into Jerry’s ass and, with nothing but that and a commandeered restraining wheelchair, effectively ended the meeting.

But the meeting had lasted long enough for Jerry Wylde to leave his mark. As Max lay alone in the dark room, halfway down the biggest adrenaline crash of his life, he played Jerry’s words over and over in his head:
Look out for Jim
. Jerry Wylde was a lunatic, thought Max, and not a particularly unique one either.
Look out for Jim
, he’d said. The trouble with guys like Jerry Wylde, thought Max, was they figured they could motivate you with nothing more than some meaningless catchphrase—
Look out for Jim
, for Christ’s sake—and make you dive off a cliff with it. Like that was all it took.

Max got out of bed. The linoleum floor was cold under his bare feet. They kept these rooms too cool—after three years in New Delhi, Max was used to the heat, and he could have stood a little Florida sunshine. Right now, the only light came through the drawn blinds of a single window, and it cast only the faintest, greenish glow over everything.

“Look out for Jim,” whispered Max. He shuffled over to the window, put his hand on the blind.

As he did so, there was a terrible
crunch!
sound, as of breaking glass, followed by the escalating moan of spreading cracks. There was another sound as well, somewhat more distant, and for Max the room got even cooler.

It was the sound of wind. Big wind. Max inched the curtain back, looked out through the spiderweb cracks of the window, and saw just how big a wind could get.

Three thick-waisted tornadoes were dancing across the Magic Kingdom under a sky green as a frog’s ass. The infirmary was second-storey, and most of his view was blocked by a grass-covered berm, but Max could see the top spires of Cinderella’s Castle as one of the tornadoes brushed against it. For an instant, it seemed as though the wind was working like a lathe on the fantasy parapet, sending bits of it flying off like woodchips, but then the funnel shifted maybe three dozen feet the wrong way, and the tower disappeared inside it.

“Look out for Jim,” said Max, as one of the other tornadoes began to grow and moved away, the castle now erased from the skyline. Then something else slammed into the window, shattering it—and once again Max was running, slamming open the door to the hallway, which was already filling up with patients and orderlies and security guards. No one seemed to notice him as the adrenaline started pumping and his survival instinct—his “inner Jim”—took over.

“Look out for Jim!” he yelled, and pushed his way into the first stairwell he saw. In no time at all, he was safe in the tunnels under the studio theme park. He would be stuck there for seven and a half days, while Atlantica’s first-ever foray onto the mainland United States reduced eighty percent of Walt Disney World to the swamp and scrub and mud from which it had sprung.

By the time the job was done on Disney, Max’s agent had done pretty much the same thing to his contract with
Shoorsen
’s producers in New Delhi. Against his agent’s advice, Max handled the talks with Jerry Wylde himself.

Max took advantage of the screen and mini-bar in the wide seating in back as the two fan-surgeons up front found some dry highway and hauled inland to Rio. The weather was the shits, and Max didn’t want to know about it. So rum cooler in hand, he shut the Weath-Net scribe—which was tracking a tentacular offshoot of Atlantica scraping its way down the coast—and settled on one of the Argentinian sitcom feeds. They were showing the first season of
Happy Days
, when Joanie was a kid, Fonzie was still a greaser more threatening than lovable, and Ron Howard at least superficially resembled the mid-twentieth-century teenager he was supposed to be playing. It was the only season of the show with any artistic integrity as far as Max was concerned. Although it had been dubbed in Portuguese, he watched it raptly as Dan steered the amphibian over and around the remains of the highway into Rio. He suspected both of the fans were glad he’d found something on the screen. Like most fans Max had encountered through his career, these two ran out of conversation after the first hello.

Max was glad for the distraction of the screen himself. He hadn’t seen Jerry Wylde—even onscreen—for something like three years.
Wylde’s Kingdom
had enjoyed a good seven years at the top of the ratings, but now it was faltering and most networks had shunted it to the bottom of the schedule. “I’ll show you an endangered species,” Wylde had said in one of the early promos, in front of a loop of Jim lobbing hand grenades into what Wylde’s team of researchers believed was the last African mountain-gorilla nest in existence. “Now
that’s
endangered!”

The limousine crawled up the highway into the suburbs of Rio and finally stopped behind the ruins of a shopping mall. There was a sleek yellow VTOL executive shuttle waiting for them when they arrived. The flight crew were huddled in the lee of a little Quonset shelter, arguing in Italian.

James and Dan jumped out of the limo, opened the door, and hauled Max out. The rain was coming down so hard now that, when Max turned his face toward it, he felt like he was drowning. He was only able to make it across the dozen feet to the hatch of the shuttle because his two abductors-fans-surgeons-whatever-the-hell-they-were helped him.

“This is where we get off,” said James.

“Take it easy, Jim,” said Dan, smiling through the downpour. Max thought both fans looked relieved to be rid of him, and he didn’t blame them. Max sighed and turned to climb into the relative dark of the cabin.

“Max Fiddler,” said a voice he recognized instantly.

“Mimi?”

The shuttle’s cabin was a reinforced bubble affair, with round windows spread polka-dot across the walls and ceiling. The woman sitting inside was just a shadow against a rainy circle of slate-dark sky. “None other,” she said. “You look great.”

“Thank you,” said Max. “I feel like a drowned vole whose balls were cut off with rusty nail clippers.”

“From what I hear about you lately, that’s got to be an improvement.” Although her face was still obscured in silhouette, there was a familiar smile in Mimi’s voice. It was a familiarity that chilled Max; he should never have gotten to know this woman so well. She patted the seat beside her. “Come sit by me,” she said.

Max hesitated.

“Oh Christ, Max, get some self-esteem. We’re going to be working together—the least you can do is sit beside me on the way out.”

“All right.” Max sat down beside her as the hatch behind him swivelled shut and the sounds of the storm stepped back a few yards. With the storm farther and Mimi nearer, Max’s eyes adjusted and he got a good look at the woman behind the voice. The years had been far kinder to her than to him: the line of her jaw and cheek was as smooth, her wide brown eyes as intelligent, her mouth as wide and generous as ever; and her jet-black hair, although tied back in a thick ponytail, showed none of the grey that had begun to fleck through Max’s thinning mane over the past few months. No, Dr. Mimi Coover looked every bit the innocent woman-child she had been when, as a young Canadian marine biologist, she first signed with
Wylde’s Kingdom
as technical consultant on the televised slaughter of the last three living St. Lawrence beluga whales.