Las Vegas for Vegans (10 page)

From the moon, Zen watches the world below descend into complete chaos. One beautiful image shows us the planet, half in darkness half out, the darker side flashing with nuclear explosions. Zen watches, one perfect sky-blue eye lit up with clear sunlight, the other dark with sleepless shadow, watching for days—not moving. The planet below him flashing again and again until it's no longer blue. Earth goes white with ash.

After these many days of silent vigil, Zen falls into bed and a long fever of dreams. When he wakes, he knows how to combine frequencies of light and sound, beamed through particular crystals that had only recently been found on the moon. He sits in a glass chamber he has built. He travels into the past.

From here on in, every episode deals with Zen trying to avert the catastrophe he has just witnessed. In the next episode he goes back and kills a particular US president and comes back to find a new future, but one extended only by ten years before the same result. Always into the past to change something and always back to the moon to examine the outcome of his experiment. Sometimes it's even worse. But he keeps trying, looking for some way to avert the seemingly inevitable fate of global suicide. He takes back technology and science, he kills other important figures like Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ, but nothing works.

In the final, unaired episode, creator Kris Kilderry has Zen swallow some of the moon crystals that have allowed him to move back and forth in time, to kill himself, but we are left with an image of blue lights in the night sky which may be Elysium Zen looking down on the birth of the world, or just the fade-out of his dying face in close-up as we roll to final credits.

And of course GiGi Tickle wasn't a whore in real life. She played a prostitute on the show who Zen saved from rape and murder, and got the world an extra fifty years because of a genius son she produced from a night with Elysium Zen. (GiGi Tickle, the character, was the only role the Mistress ever played.) This was the final aired episode. The one the network chose to finish with. Zen loves his son and fifty years doesn't seem enough. He goes back to tampering with the past. And things get worse. No matter what Zen does now, he can't get the human race beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis—then in the recent past of Kris Kilderry's life at the time of production.

The show fell into a black hole of contractual deadlocks between the creator Kris Kilderry and the bankrupt Shooting Star Studio, gobbled up by various other studios, passing contracts down from one incarnation to the next, year after year, like Chinese whispers. All this was wrangled with the Patriarch himself, concerning his own contractual rights after the show's initial television screening. Every few years there were rumours of reruns, DVD releases and remakes. Decades of these rumours but nothing eventuated. All anyone knew of the show anymore was its reputation as the greatest sci-fi series ever made and Elysium Zen being up there with Captain Kirk, given grit by real tragedy.

So there were twenty-one forty-three-minute episodes, eighteen of which had been seen by the general public in the early sixties. Only months after cancellation, the last three episodes unaired, Kris Kilderry swallowed handfuls of sleeping pills. He was still alive. In a coma in LA for decades now. When Kilderry actually died, the Byzantine rights to the show would get taken out of the Patriarch's hands, and whichever studio could now lay claim to it would swoop in and do with
Elysium Zen
what they would.
Elysium Zen
—
Next Generation.
The film version,
The Happy Ever After.

We spent our time in that vast mansion acting, when we weren't listening to the Patriarch's sermons. It didn't just mean preparing the night before a performance, for let's say an adaptation of Orwell's
Animal Farm.
We did that as a musical in the vein of
Cats
, in full animal dress, using no words other than the sounds of the animals themselves. It didn't just mean days of memorising your lines for
Lord of the Flies
performed as a solo piece. (Another use of the pig outfit. You throw some tusks on it and you get an island boar.) It didn't just mean the prep we did for
Waiting for Godot
as interpretive dance, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson filmed as drama in the flavour of
Pulp Fiction.
We took the scripts from the cheesiest pornos and performed them as pieces by Ibsen.

Which is to say we didn't prepare to act, and then act. We were acting all the time. Brushing our teeth was acting. Be Anne Frank brushing her teeth. Not something you did as quickly as possible. You weren't going anywhere. Gaze into those eyes as you brush your teeth. Think of all the other Jews getting exterminated out in the world. Think of never being released from the confined spaces
of the Achterhuis
, except into the same fate. Brush those teeth, one by one. Now look in the mirror and find that lovely Anne Frank smile.

When we ate together, each table became a stage. Nothing as prosaic as the Last Supper. It was the villains of James Bond gathered to dine together. It was the characters of
The Crucible
or
The Simpsons.
It didn't matter. It was
all
acting—
all
the time. You practised expressions of torture while you had a shit. If someone asked you how you were in passing while walking down a hall, it was time to bring out a De Niro-inspired monologue from Dostoyevsky's
Notes from Underground
_:
‘I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man. No, I am not a pleasant man at all.'

GiGi reported a migraine one night a few weeks before we were set to graduate from Elysium House. She also mentioned chest pain before retiring to bed early.

The Patriarch was standing in a small, cluttered prop room, off the side of the theatrette, with some of us who were close to failing. The lights were turned off. We could feel his breath across our faces in the perfect darkness. The exercise was meant to get us to understand the emanation of another being. The presence that needed to be projected if the right gravitas was to be found for stage or screen.

‘Be Atlas,' he whispered into our mouths. ‘Feel the groan of the species in your bones. Be Jonah in the mouth of the whale. Smell the stench of the world's hunger all around you.' We could hear each other breathing but it wasn't clear who blocked their nose or where the smell was emanating from.

‘Bring a trumpet when you're a messenger. Arrive on wings when you fly from the sun. Let me see how an idea explodes and show me you understand that words are the only keys to heaven.' One or two of us in that unlit prop room couldn't help feeling he was just another bloke, half fucking crazy with his own bullshit.

When he returned to GiGi he found her in their large walk-in wardrobe ‘looking for the exit' behind her coats and dresses. She was in a disorientated, agonized panic. He guided her back into their bedroom and tried to calm her, but her chest pains got sharper. It became apparent that she was having a heart attack. An anticoagulant administered in the hospital-bound helicopter released a clot in her brain. She was wearing an oxygen mask and her eyes were bloody from a subconjunctival haemorrhage. She couldn't see or understand a word the Patriarch was saying.

He was desperately hanging onto his wife's hand as though he were the one dying while they flew to the most exclusive hospital in Melbourne. Brain death occurred mid-air. Her body was kept alive for him at the hospital.

The Patriarch called in a series of doctors. Paid them anything they asked for to tell him that his wife would be okay. Physician after physician came, but no matter how he exhorted or beseeched them for some kind of medical miracle, there was an absolute response that nothing could be done. Every doctor left him in that hospital room with the same body, yet he could barely recognise it. When the machines were turned off a few days later, his wife expired peacefully. The Patriarch still hadn't had the chance to say goodbye to GiGi Tickle.

No speeches. No pronouncements. And for us it was, ‘Everyone out! Every single fucking parasite—out!' The manor on the Victorian coast near Warrnambool was emptied within a few hours.

Years have gone by and he's still in there. Alone. As wordless as a character in a silent film.

ONE IN A MILLION

It's winter. The night has that dead Melbourne air which would be brought to life by something like snowflakes. As it is, just flat black nothing, like endless empty roads.

A white Mitsubishi Colt with a door cannibalised from another year's model draws into one of the empty fuelling bays. After three in the morning. Nearing half-past. The 7-Eleven on Punt Road, near the Alfred Hospital.

The driver gets out and walks around the side of his car, spinning his keys around once on his finger; a distracted cowboy. He places the nozzle into the tank and waits, enjoying the smell of petrol.

Sometimes it's as long as five minutes before another car passes along the road. It's been about as long since an expression passed across his face. Nothing in his head. He gets lost in these long, middle-of-the-night dreaming minutes. In memories dissolving before registering.

The previous morning is already gone. Almost entirely evaporated. But in the clear light of day he'd taken a walk along tree-lined midwinter streets and felt a leaf fall onto his shoulder. Which in that moment felt like something as rare as being struck by a lightning bolt.

The trees naked to their bones. The last leaf of summer. A muffled and meaningless one-in-a-million.

The nozzle doesn't cut off when the tank is full. Fluid rushes out and down the side of the white Colt. Splashes across his boots and the bottom of his jeans. He pulls the nozzle out and there's little more than a slight look of annoyance animating his face.

He pours water from the 7-Eleven's grey plastic watering can to wash away some of the corrosive fluid from his paintwork. Forming petroleum rainbows in the water at his feet.

He walks into the 7-Eleven and pays with a credit card. The Indian woman working all alone through the night doesn't say anything to him. He doesn't say anything to her.

He walks back outside to his vehicle. Coming around the back end of his car, he places a foot in the glassy mixture of petrol and water and finds it simply skates out from beneath him and sails into the air, taking his other foot with it.

For a moment entirely airborne—his body falls to the hard concrete. Almost noiseless. He springs up quickly, lightly. Getting back into the white Colt with barely an expression on his face. Pain somewhere inside his body but none of it showing.

DAUGHTERS OF VESUVIUS

Rosetta's peasant grandfather was sitting on their couch trying to play Star Wars on PlayStation with the twins. He had spent most of his life working on an olive grove in the hills of Naples. Someone took a photo and the rest of the family laughed. Rosetta didn't even giggle. She might have been the only one who noticed the small dark stain around grandfather Niccolo's crotch in the photograph.

His hands always had a tremble to them even when he was motionless, and he walked carefully as if his bones might crumble into ash at any sudden movement. There was nothing useful he could do anymore so he drifted around their Toorak mansion finding places to sit quietly as the bustling Battista family, sometimes ten or twenty strong, filled the rooms with the noise of an endlessly celebrating village.

The walls had always been crowded with framed photographs. Mainly of Rosetta, Matteo and Mauro from the cradle to now, and many of the Battista nephews and nieces. There were also portraits of the family from Naples. It was like her Nonno Niccolo had stepped out from one of those photographs. He still looked more sepia than full colour.

Rosetta wanted to see Naples. She wondered if it would somehow feel familiar. The family had been planning a trip for years but then there were Father's hotels and they could barely spare him for more than a long weekend. Rosetta was fascinated by Vesuvius, which she knew was near her grandfather's olive groves, and she got her mother to ask Nonno if they had relatives who died there, in the famous eruption, even though her mother had already told her it was too long ago. Her mother started laughing when she translated Nonno as saying he remembered the eruption. Niccolo looked at his laughing daughter and granddaughter without smiling.

Vesuvius last erupted in 1944 and it was probably that eruption Niccolo meant when he said he remembered the explosion. Rosetta was enthralled by images of the exploding mountain she'd seen on the internet, and especially with photographs of the Ring Lady. She was a young woman they had unearthed recently who was still wearing emerald and ruby rings, two gold bracelets, and gold earrings. Another pair of gold earrings lay by her side, and those ones had pearls.

Nonno placed a small leather envelope on her lap and Rosetta opened it to find similar pearl earrings. She had shown her grandfather images of the Ring Lady on the computer screen. Rosetta kissed Niccolo on his forehead and thanked him for the gift with a jump and a spin, diving for a view in the nearest mirror. She wore them around the house the whole morning and as soon as her mother came home from shopping, Rosetta showed her the pearl earrings.

After lunch her mother told her there had been a mistake. Nonno had wanted to show his granddaughter the earrings— he had not intended to give them to her. Rosetta removed them from her ears and placed the earrings back into the leather envelope. When she returned the pearls to her grandfather he let them sit on the kitchen table before him as if he had no idea what the envelope might contain. Rosetta thought that perhaps he had given her the jewellery as a gift after all, and that his age was the cause of the confusion. Niccolo levered himself to standing, using the edge of the kitchen table. He shuffled away to the toilet and the pearl earrings were still waiting in the leather envelope.

The family didn't make many concessions to Nonno's lack of English and often watched films that he would not understand. Rosetta wanted to explain some of the details to him but her Italian was worse than basic. She understood her grandfather's favourite expression,
piano, piano con calma
and that it meant ‘quietly, quietly and calmly'. She'd never heard him actually say it. Her mother told Rosetta that, back in Naples, Niccolo used to say it all the time.