You Don't Know About Me (28 page)

“Is he alright?” Spring asked.

“He'll be fine, but he needs stitches sooner than later. Billy, if you wanna stay, grab your backpack from the front. If you wanna go, jump in. Just make up your mind.”

I looked at Spring. She was beautiful, but I couldn't stop thinking she really was a woodland fairy after a nuclear accident. “I gotta go.” I jumped in the van's front seat.

Spring handed her square of cattails to Momi. “Take these. They'll bring Wachpanne Papa luck.”

Momi took them with a nod of thanks.
“Hetchetu aloh.”
She hit the accelerator and whipped the van into a U-turn back across the playa.

Looking back, I saw Spring wave and shout,
“Hetchetu aloh!”
Her green, glow-stick hair and her green chest faded into the dusty haze.

Hetchetu aloh.
It was so indeed.

The van sped between the port-a-sans and the MOOP fence. I heard Nico groan in the back. I looked for him but it was too dark. “Aren't there EMS people here?” I asked.

“He needs a hospital,” Momi said.

“Is there one around here?”

“Don't worry. We'll find one.”

We raced through a gate and sped away from Burning Man. I remembered something, and yanked the cell phone out of my pack.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Calling Info to find the nearest hospital. No, I'll call nine-one-one.” I started to dial. A hand snatched the phone away. I whipped around and jumped.

Nico shut the phone. “No need for that.” He spread his hands and waggled them. “I've been
healed
!”

Momi turned on the overhead light. I stared at his chest. There was no blood, no wounds, not even scars.

“Say hello to Wachpanne Papa All Patched Up.” He grinned. “And what about you? Do we call you Billy Lost His Virginity?”

I kept staring at his chest.

Momi snickered. “If you ask me, he's still Gob-smack.”

“You're probably looking for this.” Nico reached behind him and pulled up a floppy rubber vest. The front was streaked with blood from two bacon-strip gashes in the upper chest.

I couldn't believe it. “It was fake?”

Nico looked hurt. “Absolutely not. We played our parts; the audience played theirs.”

“The unities were preserved,” Momi said, “as we say in the biz.”

“What biz?”

Nico leaned forward with a smile. “We told you, Billy, we're filmmakers.”

“And before that we were moment makers,” Momi added.

He laughed at my baffled look. “We're actors, Billy. That's what actors manufacture: moments. Hollywood never liked us as moment makers, but we were very good, and still are”—he shook the rubber vest—“at special effects.”

I turned front and crossed my arms.

The cell phone pushed past my shoulder. “Nice phone,” he said. “But didn't you say you didn't own one?”

I snatched it away. “It's not mine, I borrowed it.”

After a short silence, he asked, “So what pisses you off more? That I didn't really bleed while healing the world, or that you didn't get laid?”

“Don't be mean, Nikki.” Momi patted me on the arm. “Pardon my prick of a husband, William. When it comes to people's feelings he can be a total asshole.”

“She's right. But when it comes to giving an audience what they want I'm a saint. It was a magnificent exchange. We did some fund-raising for our film, they got a spiritual experience.”

“But it wasn't real,” I grumbled.

“Which raises the question: is any spiritual experience
real
? In the movie biz ‘real' is such a dodgy concept. I say spiritual experience is in the eye of the believer.”

I wanted to hit him, make him bleed real blood. I wanted them to stop so I could get out, go back to Burning Man,
and tell Spring and everyone that the Sun Dance was a fake. Then the Potlatchers couldn't come back next year and take their money. But I didn't. I shut my eyes and prayed. I prayed for God to tell me what to do.

I don't know if it was Him talking, or if it was just me writing a speech in God's name, but here's the answer I got.
Billy, tonight you sinned left and right. You put other gods before me by falling for that stuff about all religions leading to the same Tree of Life and Maker of All Things. You lusted for a girl sent to you by Satan. Who else would send a harlot with four eyes, a clay-slicked mouth, and green boobs? And now, with each mile you get farther from Burning Man, you bear false witness by not going back and exposing the frauds. But I will forgive all these sins if you don't break the fifth commandment: honor your father. Stay on the road to Portland, respect his last wishes, and retrieve the inheritance he wants you to have.

I opened my eyes and took a breath. “Are you going to Portland now?”

“Portland or bust,” Nico barked. “We have an un-movie to debut.”

“We'll drive tonight as long as one of us can stay awake,” Momi added.

I realized something that Nico had said didn't add up. “If your movie is finished, why did you have to go to Burning Man and do a fund-raiser?”

“Who said it was finished?” he asked.

“But you said you're taking it to a film festival.”

“We are, as a work in progress.”

“So it's not really done.”

“How can it be done”—his hand dropped on my shoulder—“when we haven't put you in it?”

I escaped his grip. “I don't wanna be in your movie.”

“Don't be silly. Everyone's in a movie. Life is a movie. You're in the movie of Billy William Whoever You Are. And now you're in the fantastic un-movie of Nico and Momi Potlatcher.”

Momi shot me a smile. “What could be better than that?”

I was too tired to follow what they were saying. I had to trust that God was putting me in their hands for a reason. I didn't want to hear their crazy ideas anymore. “Sleep,” I said. “Sleep could be better than anything.”

Momi pulled over and Nico made some room on the floor in the back. I took my backpack with me and Nico got in front.

We started again. My body was totally bonked. It didn't stop me from thinking about stuff. And I kept feeling the key tied around my neck, resting on my skin. I tried to imagine what Boot Heel Collectibles would look like, and the cache where I'd find the bad book. My thoughts also flashed back on four boobs: the two that stretched out of Nico's chest during the dance, and Spring's green ones. Then there was the fifth boob: me, for getting totally punked by the Sun Dance.

My zigzag thoughts finally wove me into sleep.

When I woke it was still dark; Nico was driving. Momi and I switched places so she could sleep. Darkness swallowed both sides of the road. The headlights showed we were still in desert or sage steppe. I kicked myself for not checking my GPS in the back and seeing how close we were to Portland.

“How long was I asleep?” I asked Nico.

“Long enough,” he said, then quickly added, “You'll be awake for sunrise on the Cascades.” He flipped on the radio. “How 'bout we listen to some unities?” No sound came out. “Oops, forgot. Squawk box is broken.”

“What are unities?” I asked.

He fluttered a hand in the air. “Just mini worlds people create for others to visit. Songs, books, movies, paintings: they're all unities. Each exists by itself and can be enjoyed or detested on its own. At first, you enjoyed our Sun Dance unity, then you discovered it had special effects, and you hated it.”

“I didn't hate it. I just thought—”

“That Wachpanne Papa and Yellow-haired Woman are scamming a bunch of burners. That's okay, that's
your
take on the Sun Dance. Our take is that we won another victory in the campaign to rob from the rich and give to the poor
in imagination.” Nico waved a hand. “But enough of us. What do you say we talk about
your
unity, Billy?”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone has a story: where you're from; why you're going to Portland.”

“I don't wanna talk about it.”

“Okay. Since you don't want to talk about the Billy unity, how 'bout we talk about some unity you experienced recently? You know, a book, a movie, even a video game?”

I thought about telling him about
Huck Finn
, but that would have led to personal questions, and there was one thing I'd learned from
Huck:
give a con man a glimpse of who you are, and he'll steal you blind. “I don't see movies,” I said, “and my mom believes video games are the stained-glass windows of hell.”

“Cool!” he exclaimed. “You're one of the few kids who hasn't been GLASSED.”

I thought I'd heard a lot of slang, but that was a new one. “What's glassed?”

“
G-L-A-S-S-E-D:
the George Lucas Action Sequence and Special Effects Disease.” He slapped a hand to his chest. “It breaks my heart to see kids sickened by it.”

“A movie or video game can't make you sick.”

“Ah, that's what everyone
thinks
. But if light flashing on a screen can trigger an epileptic fit, you better believe Hollywood can hit you with multiple doses of GLASSE until your imagination's poisoned and your brain's rewired.”

He sounded serious. As serious as Mom was about some of her gonzo-wonky cranial harmonies.

“Let me unpack it for you,” he said. “In 1975 a kid named George Lucas walked into a Hollywood studio and made a pitch that changed movies forever. He said, ‘I'm gonna make a movie with a big action sequence every ten minutes.' When Lucas's first Star Wars movie came out, the blockbuster was born, and Hollywood was infected by the first case of the George Lucas Action Sequence and Special Effects Disease. Now people all over the world crowd into multiplexes showing blockbusters and can't wait to get GLASSED. They line up to be the first to get GLASSED. They come back and get GLASSED again. People are getting GLASSED so much they should stop calling them movie houses. They should call them GLASSE chambers.” He did one of his shoulder laughs.

“What's so bad about seeing a bunch of action and special effects?” I asked.

He threw me a look, raising his bushy eyebrows.

“I mean,” I said, “if you know it's just a movie and you're seeing tricks, then you're not getting fooled.”

He shook his head and sighed. “If only it were that simple. I'll tell you how blockbusters rewire the human brain. Most of them flood your imagination with aliens, and mutant superheroes with supersuits and fantastic weapons. They overload your brain with worlds always being terrorized by psychotic villains who must be vanquished. And the only way to overcome these dastardly villains is always the same:
action!
This obsession with defeating evil through action breeds a contempt for its opposite:
inaction
. The
real
villains in blockbusters are the cousins of nonaction: idle
activities like thought, introspection, hesitation. On the surface, Hollywood's moral in all the blockbusters is good conquers evil. But under the action-obese surface of the movie screen, the real moral is far more insidious: Action good! Inaction bad!”

I tried to follow what he was saying. It wasn't easy, but I sort of understood.

“When it was only
movies
stuffing young minds with action-happy thoughts, it wasn't so bad. But then came the next deadly dose of George Lucas Action Sequence and Special Effects Disease. Gaming! With video games, whatever
inaction
survived between action sequences in movies got chucked out the window. In gaming it's
nonstop
action. Yes, there's a shadow of thought in gaming, but the mind's ability to blaze with introspection and quiet reflection has been dimmed to one asinine thought:
Do I pull the trigger or not?
”

I hadn't played a ton of video games, but it sounded like he was exaggerating. “All video games aren't that bad.”

Not seeming to hear me, he rattled on. “So after a kid spends his formative years being GLASSED in movies and gaming, he walks into the mess of real life with a brain that's been shrunk to an on/off switch. His brain has gone binary; the only thing it knows is action/inaction, on-trigger/off-trigger. And he knows from his training in GLASSE chambers that a superhero always,
always
stays on-trigger and blows away the villain!”

Trying to follow Nico's crazy thinking, I remembered how Ruah's ideas had also seemed totally whack. But Ruah
had sounded like a Sunday-school teacher compared to Nico. “Does any of this have to do with the movie you're taking to Portland?”

“Bingo!” he shouted. “Our un-movie is going to save the world from a plague of GLASSE houses.” His shoulders jumped up and down as he laughed at another joke I didn't get.

“How's it gonna do that?”

His face went serious. “When factories polluted the rivers, what did we do? We passed the Clean Water Act, cleaned up the rivers, and made America a better place. Well, for decades the movie factories have been polluting our imaginations and it's time we did something. We need to pass the Clean
Imagination
Act. And our antiaction un-movie is going to wake up the world and begin the process.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
triggered the Civil War.
Silent Spring
triggered the environmental movement. The first antiaction film is going to trigger the clean imagination revolution!”

“But people don't think their imaginations are polluted.”

“Of course they don't. In the nineteenth century people didn't think they got sick from germs until Louis Pasteur discovered microbes, and proved what made people sick. In the twenty-first century, Nico and Momi Potlatcher are going to prove how GLASSED is turning today's youth into popcorn-brained, action-drunk punks. They're gonna be called Generation Z if we don't do something. And
Z
is for
Zero
!”