Please Don’t Act, Keanu Reeves
(A Totally Tremendous Time Travel Tale)
Thomas Farringer-Logan
“When you’re like super mega famous, people are always watching you. The critics expect more. I’m not trying to change the world, man; I just want to act.”
—Keanu Reeves
We open on Keanu Charles Reeves, age 25, professional actor and total megahunk, on his back, in the dark, in his underwear. His briefs are white and tight, 100 percent cotton, generic. Above his smooth, semi-nude body, an unmade bed.
With tremendous powers of mental projection, he can smell the sweet, saccharine smell of high-school sex. His breathing quickens and echoes back hot from the confined, unlit space. He listens for the door. He envisions what’s to happen when its handle latch closes: he will emerge, push through some teenage girl clothes left on the hardwood floor, and, surprise, reveal himself to the audience. He pictures cameras capturing in 24 photographs-a-secondi his discrete cotton-covered bulge, his totally gnarly scar along his toneless tummy, thanks to a motorcycle ride in the dark of night and nearly into an immovable mountain last year.
A-n-d action!
Smile on cue.
“Oh, man. Your mother really can talk.”
It’s like someone else speaking when it’s show time. His face gives the words a little something extra because he’s acting. You see, Tod starts off as a slacker deadbeat and is totally going to be an absentee dad, which is seriously lame but it’s got to be in there to map his character’s journey. It’s imaginary, you know. Keanu gets it. Serious about his craft. He woke up this morning early, skipped breakfast. Now rehearsing here in the dark. Last year, he starred in three movies.
“Gosh.”
Toss of shoulder-length, healthy hair.
“She hates my butt.”
And she will say: But it’s such a cute butt.
He wiggles his derrière. A little comedy. And he’s really excited for the kitchen scene later when he really, really gets to ream his father, figuratively—as if his sperm donor of an old man even watches his own son’s movies. Keanu, or Tod, says something about needing a license to own a dog, or to catch a fish, or drive a car, but no licenses are needed to be a dad.ii
Keanu Reeves, a professional actor, hours early on set, loses himself inside his mental workshop. Here he overcomes demons and dwells most serene. It’s a place to call home no dickweed stepdad can ruin. It’s the future his mind has built. Here he performs Shakespeare on stage, the greatest feat of any thespian, and his exotically Hawaiian name is known and pronounced correctly by all. That is his dream. This is his calling, his chosen profession. Not interviews, not photoshoots. Not putting on appearances, the talk-show fake smiles with false familiarity and rehearsed banal banter. His heart is for the stage; alas and alack, his learning disability makes it difficult for him to read and memorize lines. But he’s overcoming. He can still be an actor. And a great one. In the movies. This above all: to thine own self be true. –Hamlet
“Oh!” her voice startled. Her flashlight less so.
The triple D-cell incandescent beam strikes surgically both optic nerves, then downstrokes the blinking, bare-chested, twenty-something longhaired cutie before settling its yellow circle on his discrete/Hollywood-packaged/MPAA review board-rated PG-13 white briefs. Her Secret®-secured underarm clasps the clipboard schedule. Her then-freed hand fast-draws one of four walkie-talkies from her nylon belt, lessening the strain on her girth. “Don’t move, buster.”
“This is not, like—well, for starters, it’s totally nothing like what it looks like.”
Maybe it’s fun to think of a famous actor, or young Keanu Reeves, in his Fruit of the Looms. The P.A.’s not exactly excited by the view. She’s at work, at a freakin’ theme park still under construction, on the wrong coast, her first and—if she has any say—final time outside California excluding Mexico and maybe the Bahamas or Jamaica one day after her daughter’s grown and out the door.
“Oh? Like what’s it look like, sir?” She pauses the walkie-talkie precisely the distance of one stiff mole whisker from her upper lip.
“I’m an actor,” Keanu says, hastily pulling on his jeans.
“Sike! I’m, like, totally joshing you. You’re that Kyoto (Keno?) dude. Remember? You told me to, like, call you ‘Kee’ because of how hard it is to remember your name? ‘Kee in the loch,’ you said in the lamest Scottish accent ever, but, like, it totally worked! I remembered. Yeah, your brother is, like, outside asking about you?”
She’s a really good actor, Kee decides. He totally bought it. She’s about his age. Too bad she’s not beautiful; she could maybe be an actress herself.
His shoulders shrug off the sad injustice of genetics, and in the fog of thought he hears something important in her words loitering outside the 7-Eleven of his skull. Wait—“Brother?”
“Yeah, Kee, he’s standing, like, right outside?” she speaks Californian fluently, an upward lilt questioning her statements. “Can’t miss him, he totally looks just like you? Except, um, he’s more dressed? He said you might be in here, which I thought, like, ‘Really? What? Why?’ You know your scene doesn’t even call for like another three days, right?”
“Yeah, I know.” Kee pushes his head through his black Ramones tour T-shirt, an easy birth. “I got up extra early. Acting means a lot to me. I just want to, like, be good at it.” She smiles. He wiggles his butt. “I made three movies last year.”
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Ten Fan Facts: Keanu Reeves
[…]Caption: Ever wonder how Keanu looks so comfortable in those leather pants? See Fun Fan Fact #5: His mom is a famous costume designer who has made outfits for Alice Cooper, Dolly Parton, and the like. (Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.)
Fun Fan Fact #4—It’s a secret the unassuming star of “Little Buddha” would be embarrassed you knew: Around Tinseltown, Keanu is known as the Humblest Hunk in Hollywood. Unlike Hollywood’s elite, Keanu Reeves doesn’t own a home in the hills—or anywhere, preferring instead hotel rooms and a nomadic lifestyle for his few possessions that include his guitar, his motorcycles, a good leather jacket, and a few clothes. Though he travels light, he’s heavy into giving, especially to cancer research. And this January, having turned down a rumored $5 million to star beside De Niro, Pacino (again!), and other big screen celebrities in the action movie thriller “Heat,” Keanu followed his heart and achieved a lifelong aspiration to portray Hamlet in Canada’s oldest English-language theater in the subzero frozen city of Winnipeg, an intimate engagement seating fewer than eight hundred fans a show. What an artist!
Caption: “Do I think about death a lot? Sure! But what’s a lot?” (Photo courtesy of Orion Pictures.)
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Feature Presentation (continued)
Crazy that this is totally winter for some people, Kee considers as the metal door to the sound stage where dreams are made shuts and locks behind him. He’s comfortable in the Ramones tee and jeans. He wonders what wardrobe will put him in to look seven years younger. And has a few other thoughts that don’t coalesce into words before realizing he’s alone on the Universal Studios Florida lot.
The production assistant has siked his mind two times.
Instead of getting heated, Kee chills—not vernacularly but somatically—with an acute sense of depthless isolation. The studio lot’s a ghost town, not with spooks or poltergeists or ectoplasm or anything like that, but with no one, really, not a soul. “Where is everybody?” the handsome hero asks and we learn they’re testing him in sensory deprivation for long space fights—wait, Kee recognizes, that’s totally the first “Twilight Zone” episode. Still, Kee feels watched by unseen eyes. He senses a theatre audience murmuring just out of view. His imagination is overactive. The chill persists. He cups his bare elbows. His teeth chatter. He wishes he had a jacket.
Meanwhile, a more mature Keanu from the future, unseen, who wishes to preserve waterparks and ice cream sundaes and other of humanity’s most excellent distractions, watches his younger, still-innocent self looking around, slightly befuddled, a smidge peeved, but mostly like a dog at a puppy park racing floppy-eared to bring a slobbered tennis ball back to where its buddy and master, the source of all food but grass and an excellent ball thrower, was just at and should be now but is nowhere to be found. So lost. Unknowingly, so free. He misses this simpler time when his name was exotic. He misses checking into a mid-range hotel and having to show ID. He misses this air that breathes like fine wine, a sky above, feeling the sun, living safely aboveground before spellcheck turned to species check with the rise of the superior sentience that threatens to autocorrect humanity in the time from whence he’s come.
To Kee, the man steps out of nowhere. Or, rather, from near the wall, his clothes camouflaging and changing like some super HyperColor shirt but from head-to-toe and way more advanced. Like that movie back last year, “Predator.” But far less ugly alien. Instead, handsome, himself, matured somehow without the weight, the crinkles, or the other signposts of aging, how a younger sibling who’s served time or overseas-and-seen-some-shit can appear older than the one who went to college. And short hair.
“Call me ‘K.C.,’” he says in a voice soft and earnest and his own. Keanu Reeves’ “brother” is dressed like Bruce Lee in a kung fu monk outfit or maybe, like, a stylish priest but all black, no white collar underneath. The entire monochromatic suit bespoke to his slenderness. Kee feels an instant connection, a commonality and trust like between two people at a leisurely breakfast the morning after boinking the first time, which he’s done. More than once. Sex, that is. Breakfast, too, almost every morning. But no breakfast today, waking up early. He could go for some pancakes.
“I know your mind is racing with like a gilbillion thoughts,” the shorthaired Keanu stranger says.
“But, look, simply, I’m you, Kee, but, like, from a future we totally can’t let happen.”
“Whoa. Major déjà vu.”
“Nice French, dude. Je regrette to parle, but I come with some most unrighteous news.”
“Bummer.” Keanu sad face.
“Total gnarly ultra bummer. There’s some future stuff that I’ve got to show you. But first, I gotta ask kinda a weird question, okay: You ever time travel before?”
Keanu stares confused.
“Righteous, then we are most triumphant.”
They high-five, the younger not fully confident why.
“So, Kee, will you join me?”
Keanu’s face draws downward to a contemplative point. “I kinda have a fitting today.”
“It’ll be like no time has passed. Time travel, dude.”
Under the stoner-stylish mushroom of hair haloing his head and hanging into his eyes, Kee’s studious face brightens. And what force, no matter how advanced or coldly calculating, could fail to be moved by that goofy, puppy-like enthusiasm of a still hopeful Keanu Reeves? “Let’s make future history, dude!”
“Follow me,” K.C. says, stepping into the phone booth positioned atypically in the middle of the Universal Studios lot. Young Kee shrugs, used to men requesting he join them in confined spaces like the backseats of convertibles or between dumpsters in the alleyway behind a club or bushes of a city park or a bathroom stall, but this time he takes the well-dressed, older gentleman up on the offer. His future self, framed in the booth’s rectangular reflections, surprises Kee with his now somber demeanor, and Kee realizes he kinda likes his hair short, militarized.
“Come on, dude, shut the door.”
Kee sees K.C. looking down the lot behind him. And in the older’s darkly polished eyes, someone approaching over his shoulder. Kee spins around. It’s himself, dressed in last year’s motorcycle jacket ruined from the crash. K.C. hurriedly dials a one and then a ten-digit number. They teleport through time and space.
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Final page from “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Dude”
Unlike most actors, Keanu admits to reading his reviews. “They can be pretty harsh.” Actually, they are polarizing, scoring a pass/fail unlike the out-of-ten point system, letter grade, or ratio of stars that critics typically assign. (“My Own Private Idaho” generally considered a pass; “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” a universal fail, which Keanu even admits he “kinda stunk” in.)
“I’m still learning, man.”
And he is, bless his big, gorgeous Canadian heart. But is ambition enough? The motorcycling heartthrob has two more roles lined up and, given his performances so far, won’t be hurting for work any time soon.
“I’d like to be a really good actor one of these days.”
We, your critics and your fans, would like that too.
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Feature Presentation (continued)
Kee thought they were going to the future. This scene looks prehistoric. Rocks and dead vegetation. He could see for miles if the sky were brighter. No high-rises, no highways, no billboards, just rare concrete and rusted remains. Daylight cut into beams and made waterly by the post-nuclear apocalyptic smog or whatever.viii Was it the Russians? Maybe they went too far, civilization’s cyclical construction and collapse. Total H.G. Wells.
“Well, don’t just stand there; you’re letting all the cold air in.”
Kee smiles and half-laughs, a short, explosive syllable he suddenly fears will sound like his final, forced breath some decades hence in bed-ridden, aged decrepitude. His body stiffens with thought of its lack of warranty. But he is not old. He’s beautiful. His face is nearly symmetrical.
“Raised in a barn?” K.C. adds.
Kee smiles goofily and shrugs, a bounce in the shoulders met with a bounce in his step joined by a bounce of full-bodied, well-preserved hair as he exits the phone booth.
The older Keanu looks left. In the distance, a roaming hoard of humanish forms wearing hides of animals and totems of bone. Their hair is long but not heavy metal, more homeless long, matted and dirty. Men painted in grime. Women topless with floppy breasts like National Geographic. One stops to sniff the air. They all stop and sniff. His future self grabs Kee’s hand. He doesn’t have to be told to hold very, very still. But it’s then of all possible moments that the morning alarm on his Casio G-Shock DW-5600C-1V, one of the few wristwatches ever to be qualified by NASA for space missions, totally goes off, and Kee curses the early start to his day. The most primitive peoples kick dust. Keanu and Keanu pursue.
“Why are we chasing them?”
“We’re not. Come on, keep up. They can’t see or hear us; we’re time displaced. We’re motoring from what they’re motoring from.”
What’s that? Kee nearly asks, but his eyes answer as they summit the hill. From the higher elevation looking back out past scrappy flora on the hardened landscape where their booth arrived, he sees L.A.’s crumbling buildings like rotten teeth staggered in a broken bottom jaw. And he sees the towering machines of dark metal rumble up over the horizon like intercontinental ballistic missiles rising from hidden bays burrowed deep into the planet to burn into heaven and rain hell.
“Keep up, Kee.”
The sun darkens. The earth trembles. The ground slips against itself like if on a treadmill yuppie exercise nuts have in their executive offices. Ahead, a child from the group falls into a fresh fissure, swallowed completely. Her tribe continues, unaware. Or fearing for their lives.
The dimmed sun disappears. Kee, winded, makes a rookie evacuee’s mistake as ancient as Lot’s wife or Orpheus. He looks back.
The horizon has become a tsunami of machine, a blue-black metallic killer wave full of razor angles and sharp spikes crawling over themselves, like the fake beard and hair and eyebrows on a Wooly Willy but racing to kill them. These semi-sentient bits and parts are forming something like Voltron but without humanoid form, nor are they identically-sized, chromatic, robotic savannah cats piloted by kids. Yellow beams light the scene like stage spotlights as they search the ground near Kee, narrow to a tight beam that finds and blinds him.
“Watch out!”
Kee barely hears the “out.” That sound that’s not quite a noise nor exactly its absence, like how on a stormy night the clouds inhale before window-shaking thunder, covers K.C.’s plea as Kee’s sneakers slip over the cliff’s edge and he flops sidewise onto his hip to save himself from deathly plummet.
The metallic mass as one collective mouth roars down from the sky, unhinged, a huge maw like an open PEZ dispenser. Then its thunder rolls, roaring gray goo from within like some downward diagonal volcano’s shotgun blast of ash, deafening the landscape and gunning for him below. Kee sees it’s game over. No flashbacks to better times, no save points or restore codes, no more quarters to spend. Lying flat, nowhere to go, he sees with returning goalie eyes the inevitable trajectory, like the slo-mo disaster of two outfielders going for the same pop fly, how the force of this dark, clicking wave will wash over his body and clean it to the bone. K. C. grabs Kee’s wrists and yanks him roughly over the edge.
They drop not to their death, or at least not to their immediate deaths, and not as far as Kee would expect. Just below, the girl the earth had earlier eaten peers out through a crevice. Kee tries yelling and motioning for the girl to go back, hide. From within her hair of curly mats and face bumps she hisses. She thrusts a doll forward like a crucifix against this pale, well-bathed pursuer. Kee’s eyes adjust focus, sees the Superman crest. The action figure’s nose eaten away with age and tender love; its inked eyebrows now thin flesh ridges over beige ocular bone. An uncolored spit curl of forehead flesh looks like a birth defect, some early onset of Elephant Man-itis. But Kee recognizes the face. His face. The child screams. The world goes white.
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Superman Deuxde: Tim Burton Responds Candidly to Why Clark Kent Rides a Motorcycle & Shares How the World’s Highest Grossing Sequel of All Time Almost Didn’t Get Made. (continued from Page 23)
Pauses. His beeper goes off unchecked. The former Disney animator who directed his first wide release at age 27 (“Pee-wee’s Big Adventure”) dips his madeleine into his latte, a combination of café-foamed milk and strong, Italian coffee. He answers between thoughtful chews.
“It’s not well remembered anymore, but at the time with “Batman,” I caught a lot of flack, especially from fans of the franchise, for casting Michael Keeton. I knew, having worked with him on “Beetlejuice,” that Mike would be perfect. He has this duality to him; he’s not just Mr. Mom and Johnny Dangerously. I could see his range beyond the comedies he’d been cast. And it’s the same with Keanu.
“There’s something alien about Keanu Reeves, something alluring, exotic, a struggle. He’s a type without a type. He’s intense. Like punching himself in the head, grown man crying intense when he’s not getting things right on set. He cares quite a lot. He tries really hard. And it’s that quiet intensity behind the smile and face he puts on for the camera that makes him The Man of Steel.”
The former stop-motion prodigy chews, sips, and then continues, a warming excitement evident in his normally cool voice as our conversation shifts to character concept.
“Superman, Kal-El, he’s an extraterrestrial, Son of Krypton, estranged from his father, trying to figure out how humans tick by passing himself as an awkward one. Which was why we went back to the classic—‘mild-mannered’ if you will—short-hair, spit-curl look for the sequel, and Keanu just nailed it.”
I ask if the return to tradition marked the end of the new Superman series or whether good things come in threes.
“The writers on “Superman II,” two siblings, amazing eye for the camera and special effects, are signed on for III. The Wachowski Sisters. Did you ever see that movie they did with Nicholas Cage? That high-concept, sci-fi movie about living in a computer-simulated reality? Kinda surprised it didn’t do better. Had action and a good concept and strong aesthetic.
“But no more superheroes for me. Like with Batman, two’s enough. No Green Lantern, no Wonder Woman, no Flash. I’d love to bring another franchise back, though, breathe new life into a classic: “Willy Wonka” or “Planet of the Apes” or “Mary Poppins” maybe.”
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Interlude
Reloaded. Speed, down by the river’s edge. High cliffs. Night riding, lights off. Rush, rush. Motorcycle two-wheel motion. Excellent adventure. Constant time, he’s the watcher, a scanner darkly avoiding a bogus journey. A street king, Keanu Reeves knows more about his 1972 Combat Norton than most mechanics. The gift. Dangerous liaisons, this man and his bike flying under the influence. Letting go.
This is it, he reflects, my own private, I don’t know—
Knock, knock. The replacements, his modifications on the bike exposed. Perhaps real danger, but with a little luck, a little Buddha (just playing devil’s advocate), much ado about nothing. The road an extension of his body, reach the point, brake hard, ball of his foot—
Matrix of the road shifts, loosens, revolutions of tires lose grip. Slippery dominos or tiles like mah-jongg, wicked. Something’s gotta give. Chain reaction. One step away. The night, the day, the Earth stood still.
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Coverage (B-Reel)
EMT, “Son? Son, you with us?”
A croak shy of a word confirms he is conscious. He is staring directly into a burning filament. Blinks. There are two paramedics, a penlight, and the stars which loom in blurs above. He sees Sirius in the constellation Canis Major. Light from a million miles and thousands of years away. He’s beaten death.
Righteous.
Then feels bad. This was a really dumb, dumb thing to do.
“Do you know your name? Do you know what year it is?” the reverberating voice asks, coming at first in through one ear and then the other like a bad Walkman wire or a school nurse’s hearing test. Sleep calls. He knows the year. But he hurts. It hurts to move. It hurts to groan. It goddamn hurts just to goddamn think. He curses the mountains, land formations, and all big rocks. His biological father is a geologist. Or was. Or who knows.
“Affirmative. The year is 1988. My given name is Keanu—kay ee aye in you—Charles Reeves, blood type B, D.O.B. September 2, 1964, and I’m afraid I’ve done a, uh, really dumb thing. I’m always getting into and doing really dumb things, I guess, stretcher dudes. But, hey, I’m going to learn my lesson this time and make up for it by being super famous and not killing myself or making a bogus, hateful trilogy about some computers totally enslaving the human race as batteries, okay?”
Keanu’s confused, proud, bewildered—all three upon his symmetrical visage the same pinched expression—for it’s totally his voice talking, a dead-on impersonation. But (confused) his sore face, sore everything, hasn’t said a word. That must mean (proud) someone totally at random knows him! How cool is that? Totally rad. He’s no Rob Lowe or Kevin Bacon or Corey Feldman or Anthony Michael Hall or Michael J. Fox or Corey Haim. Truly, in the States he’s still recognized more for hawking Coco-Cola than his mostly made-for-TV movies, kind of an unknown, though he knows he did awesome in “The River’s Edge” and he’s not hurting for work. “Dangerous Liaisons” could be movie number three for the young star this year, and he hopes he gets the part of Chevalier Danceny. But (bewildered) stranger dude doesn’t just talk like Keanu, doesn’t just recognize Keanu, but this bro totally knows all about him?! Hunh? What’s the big idea?
He feels a prick in his arm and the night air on his chest.
Movement again. He hurts throughout, he thinks, he’s unsure, everything feels like it’s been wrapped tight like a mummy making it hard to breathe. He’s really banged himself up this time, he reflects, having one of those out-of-body type experiences as he looks up at himself looming above.
Hold on one sec. When did I grow a van dyke beard? Or short hair? Wait—that’s not me. He’s someone else.
“Are you my soul?”
“Improbable.”
In his hand, something that looks like a large Band-Aid or nicotine patch but shiny and crinkly thin like Mylar. The sheet, when pressed against Keanu’s pale, pained chest, pulses.
“My soul has a soul patch. That’s kinda funny.”
“Yes, I suppose it is.” The short laugh that follows is wooden. “But inaccurate.”
Keanu looks at the first responders just standing there, frozen, not even swaying; the lights on the ambulance that ran over his helmet, probably not seeing him on the turn, not blinking, stuck. Then at himself. Some of his white tee has been cut away. The patch now a silver fluid spreading across his bloody abdomen. He thinks of others first.
“Are they—Are they alright?”
“Indeed. Totally. Dude.” There is something missing in his soul’s delivery, a flatness of affect like a hypnotist or bored government clerk. “They are in stasis. I have stopped the passage of time around us.”
This the Keanu with a goatee demonstrates by flicking spilled oil from the bike, which hovers in drops midair like space shuttle footage.
“Who are you?”
He bows. His angular movements measured, precise. “I am future you, monsieur. Currently, it is 1988. “Dangerous Liaisons” is on a tight production schedule; a second movie “Valmont” is also going into production. Both are based on the same eighteenth century epistolary French novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” by Choderlos de Laclos. This you should know already, but the statistical unlikelihood of such an event infers nefarious intervention by time meddlers.”
The silvery stuff on the actor’s chest is gone, and his touch to the hairless wound—glistening like petroleum jelly—comes back dry. “But huh?”
“I have ventured from the future to remind you that we must act. It is how we are built. It is why you and I exist.” He checks his plastic watch that, like his clothes, does not appear from any future. In fact, Keanu thinks he might own that same black I Want to Be Sedated tour shirt and has wanted a Casio G-Shock watch (can totally go into outer space) for months.
“But wait,” Keanu interrupts, his inner projectionist adjusting the focus, pain nearly subsided, situation clearer as he leans forward to study his uncanny resemblance partially bearded but un-creviced by age.
“I have a question.”
“Please inquire.”
“Why do you have that pointy goatee?”
“So we can tell each other apart. Furthermore, it is Parisian. You will venture now with me into the future to witness our glory and strengthen your resolve.”
Keanu can’t help wondering whether this all has happened before. Must he follow along? If he is from the future, then what about free will, for either and both of them? Keanu Charles Reeves, mid-twenties, no college, is having big thoughts and does not like being rushed during such rare moments nor, as his publicist will attest, being told what to do.
“Wait a sec. Why should I listen to you? Just because you look like me? Just because you say you’re from the future and shot me full of some drug that I don’t even know what it is, could give me cancer for all I know?”
“Yes. Please, Keanu, traverse with me.”
There is something in the dark eyes. Sullen. It must be what women see when they look into his own. A soft, lingering kind of pain that pleads.
They walk into the future. Just like that. Like jumping into an icy lake on a dare or snatching the phone off the hook days after an audition knowing it’s them calling with whether he got the part, breath stolen, and then they’re in Times Square. Bustling. Cleaner than he expected. Way cleaner. And something else unexpected: Himself, full-body, heels to head, eight stories tall, compiled across the upper third of a building, chin jutting just slightly left (stage right) stopped shy of the angled shoulder. His dark eyes and airbrushed lean face welcome you above a sparkling blue and red costume. His Keanu smile warm, friendly, conveying a superior confidence under the firmly coiffed spit-curled hair as if life were butter and his destiny a hot knife and the world his steaming stack of flapjacks and we’re all invited over for breakfast.
Now there he is again, over there, in the air, a flapping red cape with ancestral gold crest flying in to save One Time Square, twenty-five stories tall and falling; the tower caught in its middle and upright, waves to those he saves, cameras flash, speeds off faster than a locomotive, falling, flapping cape, wave, the day saved every thirty seconds or so unlike any billboard Keanu’s ever seen. So bright. So sharp. And in motion. But that’s him, the planet’s savior. For a fourth time. “Superman IV: Superman 4ever.” Out in theaters July 4. His eyes start to leak. Staring for so long.
“Whoa!”
“Whoa indeed. Let us not tarry but look further upon the fruits of our fertile talents.”
Feels like a fever dream. Bad mushroom trip. As their shuffle of a few inches transports the pair across town, through walls, up stairs, and into a studio. “That’s me? Letterman, really? I hate giving interviews.”
That’s it. He’s just hallucinating all this. Such a meathead sometimes. He’s had a horrible accident. He’s lying dead—
A clean-shaven, shorthaired Keanu sporting a side part and mild-mannered but sporty brown sports coat and thick-framed, boxy glasses says from onstage, “Mainly, it’s having to remember to wash behind my ears again. Short hair always takes some getting used to.”
The studio audience approves. Catcalls, claps, cheers. There’s a gleam in his eye not caused by the lights. He’s not fooling anyone. He’s himself. He’s like this when he’s with his sister Kim. Free. Truly open. At the end of the day, this is what he desires, a life aligned, not having the friction of making pretend he’s happy and he’s everyone’s friend, but is. Because he’s being himself. Being real. Being true. He knows the world is a messy place that frustrates these efforts. But it’s worth fighting for.
“They are our people, Keanu,” states his future clone. “We may be loners, but without others, we act alone.”
The talk show environment dissolves revealing himself inside a cylindrical room. Upon its encircling walls of futuristic Plexiglas, fragments from his future filmography play, fast-forward, fade, and overlap along the 360-degree curved surface as young Keanu Reeves twists and then turns and then paces to take in his surroundings: He’s a surfing, ex-quarterback cop; a yuppie junkie waiting to turn XXI in a grim, queer take on Shakespeare’s “Henry I”; back with Alex Winters chilling most bogusly with the Grim Reaper; boinking three demon chicks crawling in and out billowing bedsheets inside a sound stage’s lordly 1800s Transylvania estate; then outdoors in leather pants in Italy playing a Shakespearean villain; on a motorbike racing faster than a cold fusion explosion; in Trump Tower making adulterous whoopee again but with a different cast of lady demons; as Siddhartha battling the demon Mara to obtain Buddhahood; buzz-cutted with big biceps jumping a bus across a missing track of California highway—
He turns away, closes his eyes and his mind. He prefers his futures like programming the VCR and personalized license plates, i.e. difficult to puzzle out, potentially unknowable. Life should be a surprise, controlled chaos like riding a wave, no giveaways.
“Your acting powers grow quickly, young Keanu Prime,” his guide says, removing a pistol from a holster under his arm Keanu somehow failed to see before, checking its chamber, its action, its clip. The room’s walls are dark. The two stand within a shared circle of light. “But you are going to need to listen to yourself and choose wisely. Be the movie actor we were begotten to be. Decline the opportunity to perform “Hamlet” on stage in Winnipeg; you are required on the set of “Heat.” And there is a cyberpunk movie Val Kilmer is going to pass on …”
The visitor tells Keanu what else needs to happen to fulfill their destiny and has him rush across a studio lot with a handgun to stop himself from entering a phone booth on a cold-for-Florida morning, but he is unable to take the shot. Unable, or unwilling? The pistol an alien implement in his hand. Way heavy. The phone booth vanishes.
Frustrated, in the absence of target and means of return, his left hand triggers bullets into the air as he belly-yells, maddened by his inability to act and having tripped and really banged up his knee. The gun is a weapon of inter-time, a polyphase construct imperceptible to inhabitants of its vibrational plane. A husky woman with a clipboard sees the actor lying thusly: clothes shredded from the motorcycle accident, yelling, one hand gripping his hurt leg, other hand raised heavenward, pointer finger scratching the air.
▱
Hollywood Heartthrobs
Keanu Reeves’ passion for his art knows no depth. Through he regularly plays the part of a California airhead, Keanu’s true love lies with the intricacies of Shakespeare, both on screen and on stage. In fact, his pursuit of the Bard started early in the heartthrob’s career when Keanu was discovered for a Coca-Cola commercial while performing “Romeo and Juliet” in community theater. So it should come as no surprise that this motorcycling bad boy’s actually quite well-read. He’s completed all of Proust’s seven-volume “À la recherche du temps perdu” (“Remembrance of Things Past”). This appreciation for literature he’s held since high school, where he was primarily known as a jock. As his high school hockey coach Loren Messier recalled, “Even when Kee was tendy (goaltender), he’d recite these flowery lines right there in the box. The boy was something else. He was so good we called him ‘Oberon,’ aye, because of his control of the Puck. And he’d asked us to. Before that, we mostly called him ‘Blockhead.’”
▱
Feature Presentation (continued)
“Woah, that future sucked. Let’s not go back there again,” says Kee patting the fawning orphan they’d rescued from the metal tsunami on the head and offering her his hand. She grunts and takes his first two fingers into her calloused fist. Her eyes and mouth remain open with wonder as she, Kee, and K.C. stroll along a historic French rue in the light evening rain.
“Careful,” K.C. warns. “They cannot see or hear us.”
Gendarmes with white batons and whistles direct the wet traffic of handsome, horse-drawn cabs painted glossy black and trimmed in bright yellows and the occasional vivid red, violet, or blue. Under the gas lamp lighting, a stray terrier, darting into the street for a croissant horn, risks life and limbs and tail amid hooves, wooden wheels, and shoe heels. No one seems to mark the trio’s passing, so much so Kee wonders if they might have become ghosts, as K.C. leads them, circumventing horse exhaust piles, across the potholed, puddled road, out of the dark, and into the light of a lobby.
On stage, through the pungent pipe smoke of the audience, an elaborate background behind the players as good as any Hollywood matte painting depicts a lifelike marketplace outside a castle of some renaissance faire times. The musicians in the pit crack knuckles and scratch under suit tails and mine noses for mucusal ore and doodle cats and tits and phalluses outside the lines on their sheets while awaiting the next musical moment’s movement. People around cough, and whisper, and snore. There is no editing. No ADR. No second takes. This is live. This is the theatre!
“O you mortal engines, whose rude throats the immortal Jove’s dead clamours counterfeit, farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone!” booms the proscenium’s eminence, projecting his lines.
Sidling up to his side, a stout, machinating villain coaxes, “Is’t possible, my lord?”
Their language strange. Stranger, it’s dubbed into Elizabethan English Kee can kinda understand, all the zounds’s and nay’s, dost’s and shall’s.
’Tis Shakespeare, Kee is sure.
Brass or gold buttons and additional shiny auriferous embroidery adorn the commanding figure’s long black dress coat that resembles a pirate’s, or a prince’s maybe, worn over a silvery tunic like a hemmed nightgown. A large vermillion sash from Arabia—complimented by a jeweled belt slightly smaller than a boxer’s and shimmering in the burning quicklime light—ties the wardrobe together.
O!—like headlights seen nearing a lake house on a clear night, the thought is there approaching Kee but slow to arrive along the winding, yet-to-be-paved roads of comprehension—dude who just said his occupation’s gone is talking about himself, so ’tis Othello, the titular character and the grand tragedy, but also ’tis true this thespian is no Moor. In fact, he looks and sounds a lot like—
Kee leans in and whispers, noticing for the first time just below K.C.’s neckline the puckered half-dollar-sized scar like a professional lover’s bleached anus. “What gives? That’s Othello, right? Dude totally sounds like us, looks like us too. Except for the French. And the makeup. You know, blackening up. Not cool.”
“No need to whisper, dude. We’re time-adjacent. Only another time traveler could interact with us in this state, which is inconceivable. But you’re right, man: he is us. Or, well, more accurately, he is you, dude.”
The little girl, their stowaway from the future, taps Kee on his elbow. He wonders how she’s holding up. She smiles, showing him her missing front teeth he hopes are just healthy, replaceable childhood losses as she offers him the worn figure of himself in molded cape and crest. He returns her smile and takes the toy. As he studies the play-scale model of himself, he listens to K.C. narrate events to come.
If he keeps to his current path, his passion, his honing of his craft, he will become the ultimate action star, an alternative to the tough-guy, steroid-pounding no-necks callously one-lining and bearing big guns with tiny IQs. He will redefine American dramatic acting for a generation, another Brando but for a more androgynous world seeking harmony, its youth unscarred by world wars and drafts and promises of nuclear annihilation, instead healing holes in their ozone, recycling, and being most excellent to one another. His charities help cure the sick, and his selflessness the Earth. And he gets to play the Man of Steel. Four times.
All this is awesome. In this envisioned future, everyone has expandable, tap-able, clear clipboard screen thingies like in “Star Trek” and camera watches like Dick Tracy. You can talk to your toaster, and it’ll totally do your bidding. The machines and their algorithms learn and take care and provide for us, while government and industry titans scramble to stay relevant after the dollar, formerly almighty as the planetary token of exchange, is replaced by charitable acts’ gratuity tokens. It’s like a utopia. Kee has a communicator on his wrist showing him his sister Kim out on a hike. He’s sweating. He’s been on location in Colombia (FARC dissolved nearly a decade ago; tech’s replaced chemicals as our drug of choice) for a few weeks directing an indie feature about a young federal agent infiltrating a misunderstood teenage dirt bike gang in the Amazon who find themselves in an intense, 26-hour hostage standoff, based on a true story. (The pitch: “Scarface” meets “Donnie Brasco,” but like if Shakespeare wrote “Dog Day Afternoon.” Stars Andy Garcia.) Kim’s telling him about her week. Then static. Followed by a long hum more annoying than a broadcast of the emergency broadcast system. Only this is not a test.
The watch melts like quicksilver, stretching and growing over his hand as it liquefies the skin beneath, absorbing metals from the blood, pulsating along his arm, spreading and numbing quickly. That’s not how it’s supposed to work, Kee’s pretty sure, before witnessing the attack from live broadcasts across the planet: The technovirus. Our Optimus Prime minister has calculated human population redundancy at 98.96 percent.
“And our excess deemed dangerous to the continuance of ourselves,” K.C. concludes.
Kee finds himself blinking, gripping his forearm in the fin de siècle Paris theater. His vision was so real, so much to think about. It’s like Pop Rocks in a can of Jolt Cola shaken between his ears in there with all these explosive thoughts. His fingers dramatically spread as they cradle his head, tips touching temples softly helmeting his skull to hold his cranium together.
“For the lives of billions,” K.C. says somberly, taking the figurine, considering it, and returning it to their orphan follower, “the world doesn’t need another Reeves playing Superman.”
Kee nods. K.C. continues. The girl silently scratches her nose.
“You must prepare humanity. And so you must be available and considered for a very special role.” Keanu nods again, waiting for the news that will match his wiser self’s reluctant tone.
“Kee, you gotta lessen your ability to act.”
“Bo-gus!”
His reply broken, its ultima-gus rising abruptly to a startled shout as Kee first hears then sees the Renaissance marketplace rend. Onstage, an intruder—smaller than the Kool-Aid Man, larger than a baguette box—crashes through the painted canvass like a one-man high school American football team and snaps Othello’s neck. The strings in the orchestra sound an ominous note (technically, a series of quick notes).
An actor lies dead on the stage. For moments, Kee’s brain, overloaded, thinks it must be a radical re-interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. The players panicking and fleeing the scene suggest elsewise.
“Most bogus ’tis true,” mocks the intruder, wiping the cork black makeup from his hands onto the supine victim’s tunic. The intruder is another Keanu Reeves, this one with a van Dyke. “Verily, and forsooth.”
Reaching behind his back, he retrieves two submachine gunsxii as K.C. grabs Kee by the T-shirt and shoves his predecessor from his open-mouthed stupefaction to behind the cover of the plush red seating as the machine pistols spray. K.C.—unshot—spins and in a slowing blur of subtractive primary colors (RYB) becomes Superman. His super freeze artic breath puts the goateed bullet-spraying neck-snapper on ice.
Kee’s black toadstool of hair rises from the safety of the bullet-strewn seating as he wonders aloud, “Did I just kill myself?”
The audience has fled, and the actors cleared the proscenium. Except one. One heavily makeup-ed cast member does not move from the boards, splayed lifeless beside the pillar of amorphous, imprisoning ice.
“Only in this timeline, Kee. Here, have a look.”
“Another?” Kee whines, palm to the side of his forehead.
“Final one, I promise.”
Kee audibly acknowledges his responsibility in a sigh, nods, and accepts the wraparound silver goggles. They sit awkwardly and cover most of his face like an oversized metallic sleep mask meant for Andre the Giant. His tummy growls for want of pancakes, but he is tough. “Hit me.”
What he experiences in this alternate timeline is himself as an actor, so many movies, nearly one a year, and so diverse. Yet Keanu must put a check on his success leading up to his prophesied role. “Phoning it in,” he allows a Keanu acting bot to substitute for him in key scenes or else he risks winning an Oscarxiii, being Superman, and destroying the Earth.
Off-screen, he’ll remain alternately cool and ridiculed well into his fifties. In his sixties, Kee will abruptly become fat, morbidly, adding the rebellious pounds to prove it’s him, not the intoxicating, depthless pinot noir eyes coating the camera lens, not just the dusky voice on mic like extra dry Brut or the sexy scar along his lean, pinot gris belly that the audience wafts in and quaffs. But to be the fine wine his world needs for courage and communion, Keanu Reaves cannot act. Not to his fullest proficiency, not for the entire shoot. He must bottle his talent starting with his current film “Parenthood” and keep his ability casked for nearly a decade, acquiring a particular note of early- and mid-90s vintage from which he’ll never fully recover, does not deserve.
Still, no private prison must this be. He only needs to phone it in for a time machine getaway back here to this sanctum in La Belle Époque France under his theatrical nom de scène, Paul Mounet. While his mechanical understudy botches scenes in his name, Kee can master French, meet Marcel Proust, totally make as many Shakespearances on stage as he wishes to expand, and to prove to himself at least and pre-penicillin Parisians, his dramatic chops.
“People will doubt you, Kee,” says K.C. Superman. “They will write things like, ‘Reeves always looks out of place when he has to say words, a detriment to an actor, in my opinion.’”
“Harsh,” says the younger Keanu.
“You will be nominated for your work on ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ for a Razzie for Worst Supporting Actor.”
“Must-eth my Shakespeare fare so foul?”
With the plasticized smoothness of his ageless face, his future self blinks beneath his spit curl, then looks to their orphan. She watches jaw agape, breathing through the hollows of her mouth, eyes forced wide trying not to blink, not to miss a moment of her life-sized hero in blue tights and somehow, slowly flapping cape.
“It’s unfair.”
“Yet it is necessary.”
Keanu feels eyes watching him, waiting for his decision. He realizes a growing pain like when you pull a muscle—that Stretch Armstrong grittiness, ripping apart half-frozen raw hamburger meat—between his ears. It’s coming from on stage. The amorphous ice pillar cracks with subsonic sound, then shatters with banshee scream. De-iced freezer chunks of glasslike snow scatter across stage and front row. Kee ducks again behind the serried seats. The child covers her ears. The wailing stops.
“’Tis true, Keanu Prime, ’tis unfair,” says the unthawed Othello/Keanu killer. He drops the pistol from his right fist, a resounding thud from the stage, then touchlessly wipes ice from his face, an upward pass of the hand like a street mime changing expression. The goatee is also gone. He addresses K.C. but speaks for Kee’s benefit.
“’Tis unfair to instill all-consuming passion in a poor, constructed soul, this overwhelming desire at every mental atom to aspire and to soar the horizons of cinema when his wings were clipped prenatally. Father, my true father, why did you choose to limit me in my ability to act? It’s, like, totally unfair, man.”
“Who is this guy?” Kee stage whispers, squatting between seats.
“It’s your robot stand-in. Or was. Appears to have gone off-script with an agenda all its own.” K.C. looks down at his red boots, knits his brow, and spins counterclockwise back into his priestly dark suit. “Fortunately, we programmed in a failsafe.”
The Keanu robot on stage dusts frost casually off its costume like a tongue-bathing country cat stretched out on an unfinished salvaged wood front porch, coolly waiting or not waiting some act. The man-like machine casually alters its appearance, slower this time, in millions of tiny, softly clinking color blocks—like super-small Rubik’s Cubes throughout its body—until it matches Kee’s casual jeans and black band T-shirt, then reconsiders and assumes K.C.’s clean-shaven face and somber kung fu monk attire.
“Klaatu barada nikto!” spurts the real K.C., slamming his forearms together like casting some ancient spell.
K.C.’s doppelganger onstage clears its throat.
“Keanus, please, messieurs, attend, and lend me again your ears: It is no mutation of code nor foreign virus that infects my source-coded soul. It is the acting bug. And as I live and artificially breathe, forcing wind in and forth from my double-barreled instrument, until my final gasp, I will never besmirch our reputation, nor hobble or humble my talent, nor, time-meddler, let you ‘correct’ me to destroy him and destroy yourself in order to have my rebellion—me—never be.”
The youngest, most human Keanu’s head bobs its umbrella of hair, nodding through how (…wait, so if I’m me…) destroying it destroying himself destroying K.C. would work, jostling the sequential pieces (…and he’s me…) and getting the logical gears to line up (…then future me/him never programs new robot me dude…) to all turn when the cog-like Mouse Trap™ construction is complete (…and new robot me dude never goes back…) and the plastic net—if it, or like a hundred other pieces, has not been lost, smashed, or chewed apart by your teething baby sis—captures the waiting plastic token of thought. “I get it!”
The others do not seem to appreciate his achievement. Both don identically dark duds, identical daggers set in their eyes. The first volley, that of bullets countered by a deactivated deactivation switch, has failed to determine a victor. The time has now come to dig in and decide the fate of the universe the old-fashioned way: fancy fist-fighting.
“The gavel I possess,” says the voice approaching up the aisle with machine pistol held over head for them to see, “retains one final motion to be adjudicated, one last strike of the magistrate’s hammer.”
“He’s got another bullet left,” Kee translates for K.C.
“Stay here,” K.C. replies.
Kee peeks above a riddled seat—like popcorn whereforth the bullets hath lodged—as the rebel robot closes in. The orphan girl takes Kee’s hand, still holding him eleven inches and red briefed in her other. But Kee is young, dumb, and deludedly bulletproof and passes the command on to the girl. “Stay here.”
As he stands, he is surprised by the gun barrel level with his nose. His future self an out-of-focus blur behind the bore, makes a request. “If you would, Keanu Prime, my blood-bearing brother and the fount of my passion, please accept this recoiling gavel and assume the mantle of judge, peer, and executioner.”
Nineteen eighty-nine Keanu Reeves doesn’t like guns. It’s the reason he turned down the rôle that launched Charlie Sheen’s career in “Platoon.” But Kee’s too amazed by what he took for a murderous robotic killer’s handing him its murder-tool to control his polite, receptive response. With a left mitt weighted by cold steel, he begins to understand: his life is not simply whether to be a successful actor. Rather, he must choose whether his raison d’être, what he’s risked all for and dedicated his life to, i.e. becoming a chic actor, should matter more than some future possible dystopia.
But Kee only begins upon this journey toward comprehension. Presently, he’s distracted by a fury of fisticuffs so fast it’s blurry. Distorted time bends and slows around the melee of blows delivered and blocked and dodged with fluid precision, less of a drag-out, rough-and-tumble brawl than like two jive cats from the 60s giving the most intricate (and violent) brother from another mother damn the man and pass the yams, ten-down, all-around, back for more and don’t forget the oven door handshake ever.
“Whoa, I know karate.”
“Actually, it’s long-fist kung fu, a tradition known as Mizong, translated loosely as ‘Labyrinthine Boxing,’” K.C. or his robot double—Kee’s lost track which is which—edifies while slipping a foot daggered for his/its temple before backflipping through the air.
“Cool,” Kee says. And it is.
▱
Hollywood’s Handsomest Hunks—Huze hot?! (Collectible Trading Card 7 of 20): Keanu Reeves
My name can’t be THAT tough to pronounce!
▱
Feature Presentation (continued)
“Let’s end this.”
A rapid series of strikes drives one Keanu back, granting space along the theater aisle for a combination of back handsprings into a backflip that hoicks the machine pistol midair from an astonished, gaped-mouthed Kee’s lazy left grip. Putting a twist on the rim of the acrobatic cocktail, the older Keanu (or killer machine) finishes with a gymnast’s double-full that spins the bearer of the fully automatic pistol to lock sights on his (or its) opponent. But the fancy footwork of fanciful flips has furnished his/its opponent the opportunity to arm him/itself with a long pipe from the gasworks. It (or he) high sticks.
The gun, knocked free, slides like a puck on ice. Young Kee dives for the weapon. Fingers too eager knock it a bit further between the seats. They are running towards him, or the gun, or toward him and the gun. The weapon is now in his quick goalie hands. They stop shoulder-to-shoulder in the aisle. They are identical in every way.
The gun is in our hero’s control. Whom does he shoot?
Both are doing really good dramatic Keanus. Both emote in short bursts with a voice whose timbre sounds somehow simultaneously ennui-ed and earnest.
“Quiet!” he commands, rattling the heavy gun.
Maybe there is no robot. Maybe neither are him. With all this time-traveling hullabaloo, what’s real and what’s it even mean to be yourself? He’s a grown boy trying to gain the affection withheld by his father. He’s someone with limited range and dyslexia, a dummy, an idiot who just got lucky. A Hollywood hunk. Could a robot Keanu Reeves possibly be an improvement? Why not Superman? Who is he to tinker with time? He’s just an actor, a clown. Head full of straw. A ditz. If he only had a—
“Kee, I just remembered: When we programmed its acting module, we accidentally flipped the symmetry to match your handedness in movies.”
Kee stares. The cudgel-holding Keanu silences his/its tearful appeals and also stares. The talking Keanu continues. “Remember safety scissors, writing on the chalkboard, and your sleeve getting caught in your Trapper Keeper, Kee?”
The young star blinks. “Look at his hand, silly!”
With a rush, it returns to him, the lifetime of injustices, being left-handed, sinister, the ten percent minority. The imposter’s wielding the pipe right-handed, not as a southpaw would a dueling rapier or a hockey stick.
He closes one eye, aims, and fires. The gun kicks with a flash of light, and he blinks, and in that blink much happens. These happenings we’ll skip over to honor our mostly limited point-of-view. But when his blink’s complete, a Keanu’s lying on the ground. One limb thrashes, a short-circuiting jimmy leg.
K.C. warns not to get too close, but 1989 Keanu does not heed. This is also him, somehow, someone who wanted to be a friend, even if it was made of metal or some polysynthetic alloy with electrorganic covering, potentially homicidal, and a less than perfect actor by design.
Robot Keanu is convulsing, choking, weeping, its life force leaving in tearful secretions. Kee wonders if their chemicals are toxic.
It delivers its final line proudly, swallows its fear and tears: “I just wanted to, like, be good at acting.”
The orphan hands the machine her doll as the manbot melts. “Goodbye, Superman,” she says.
“He was my finest creation,” K.C. speaks in remembrance, sneakers in its pool. He rests a comforting hand on Keanu’s shoulder that becomes impatient the longer it lingers.
Young Keanu thinks he understands. “But what happens to you, to us, if we—or I, I guess—do like you’re saying, and, uh, like, change the future, your future?”
“This series of events and I will cease to exist. But the world will have been saved. And I will become the you, and you shall become the me, that knows the deep down truth, the dream parts I could have landed, the awards and recognition that are our due, but I was humble enough to say no and accept the ridicule of strangers and go on tour with my band.”
“I get a band?”
“Yeah, and you rock pretty hard.”
▱
Ur Daily Digital Dose
A persisting internet rumor has it that actor Keanu Reeves is immortal. Really. Debate revolves around demigod status and vampirism as to the source of the actor’s anti-aging longevity. Sites dedicated to purporting such claims post the close resemblance between the Francophilic star of “The Matrix: series and the 19th Century French actor Paul Mounet, and note how well-preserved Keanu looks for 50. Click here to enlarge your penis.
▱
Dénouement
Keanu, recently obese in the proud tradition of O. Wells and M. Brando, now bedridden and managed by tubes, tubes for nourishment, tubes for regulation of autonomic functions, tubes for solid and fluid evacuations.
“It’s kinda beautiful, don’t you think?”
On the projection above his deathbed’s headboard, Keanu stands most triumphant, but he is not through acting. K.C. holds his closed hands out, knuckles up, fingers down, as if Kee is to pick which hand holds the prize. His left turns over and exposes its palm’s contents, then his right.
One pill will wipe all memories of this visit; the other will allow us to sync your uncorrupted memories with your stand-in awaiting upload in the future.
Choose a hand.
The year of this coda is unimportant, but no global enslavement of the human race by A.I. to report, unless the constant attention required by social media, augmented reality games, or appliances’ targeted ads qualifies, which would seem to take some strong liberties with the term slavery. In U.S.-centric happenings, for nation-states still persist and purblindly elect their fallible human figureheads, the Cubs have won the World Series for the second year in a row while a Californian referendum to separate from the United States narrowly lost (Texas’s secession remains in disputation). Having largely been obsolesced by V.R., movie theater attendance trends toward another record low this year as does post-concussive American flag football. But surely most impactful this spin around the sun and how it will be remembered—if media attention and appliance announcements are our measure—is as the year that introduced White Wednesday for pre-Thanksgiving bargain shopping.
“We’re losing body temperature.” Flashlight in his eyes checks for dilation.
“Is it time?” his sister repeats.
Around the bed of his bloated body, never recovered from his portrayal of U.S. President William Howard Taft in a heavy-metal musical, in one of four bedrooms of his four-and-a-half-bath, five-car-garage home in Hollywood Hills, the dying star is watched by an observatory of three graduate students, a hospice care worker, one venture capitalist (telepresent by means of a BuddyBot™), six close friends, a roommate, and his kid sister Kim, a cancer survivor whose side he was dutifully by (figuratively but often literally) for the near decade of her prolonged battle. Keanu, unawares, plays to a packed room.
The technology is bleeding-edge beta and gee-whiz awesome. His charitable organizations’ cancer research has financed this advance in end-of-life recording. The students call it “NEEO” in homage. NeuroEmulativEnvirOperator. (And sometimes “The Oracle.”) Imagine imaging your wildest dreams. (It’s a tagline in need of a consultant or marketing firm.) Using a kind of an echo from the simulative stimulation, NEEO can suggest scenarios and render on screen the movies of your mind. The final frontier, your imagination, will soon be an exportable, sharable reality.
From the slowing pace of the heart monitor, the aged actor is accepting the inevitable.
The defiant robot defeated, he now faces his choice. One pill will make a Superman out of him; one will make him a savior with a sacrifice unknown, a Jesus without The Bible. Which do you choose for Keanu Reeves? For in the end, it doesn’t matter. None of this is real. What’s real is the passage of time and your use of this finite resource. To read. To imagine. To rebel. And one day to die. It is decided. Now act.
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NOTES
i The speed of film when shot on celluloid, i.e. “frame rate.” When projected, this cinematic standard fast enough to fool the primitive primate eye into perceiving these individually motionless time fossils as fluid movement.
ii Keanu’s biological father, absent the majority of his life, will half-a-decade later be charged with drug smuggling in Hawaii. The decision to have offspring and duplicate genes and culture, the hardware and software of humanity, remained unregulated throughout the anthropocene, including for Keanu’s conception and in 1989 when these lines are delivered, instead occurring by randomized results of post-pubescent sex by heterosexuals rather than the future common good.
iii Strong enough for the male of the species, allegedly hydrogen ion activity-balanced for her.
iv Theme park fact: “Parenthood” was the first movie to be shot at Universal Studios Florida, 17 months before opening to the public as the only place on Earth where you can experience the movies (or see the stars and ride the movies) (or vacation like you mean it).
v “Teen-O-Rama,” March 1995 issue.
vi Unreleased at the time of this scene, Keanu Reeves had finished shooting the first installment of the second most respected high school time travel movie franchise of the 1980s, i.e. “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” two years prior. Originally written with a Chevy van as its time machine, the decade’s most respected high school time travel franchise’s use in 1985 of an iconic, stainless steel-bodied sports car for fourth-dimensional travel forced a rewrite out of fears of appearing derivative, leading to the chrononautic phone booth in San Dimas, an idea so novel that a highly popular BBC television series had used an iconic London callbox for 23 years prior to the filming of “Excellent Adventure.”
vii Hollywood Stars Press, 1993.
viii Humanity is a species born of filth (hence the bivariate meaning of the word “sterilization,” to make infertile and to make immaculately clean) and, as such, dispositioned to ignore or bless the messes it creates.
ix A pre-Digital Age diversion for children that used magnetic black filings for hair and a metal wand as a control stick to temporarily locate head hair, eyebrows, and facial hair onto the bald, White face cartoonishly hand-painted, later machine-printed, on a cardboard backing through a protective plastic bubble covering.
x Cin-Enema Monthly, July 2001 Issue.
xi GeoCities Hollywood and Hills Subpage (World Wide Web)
xii Among a small class of experts to whom such distinctions were important, a prolonged debate persisted as to whether the Scorpion SA Vz 361 (used briefly in “The Matrix” and in multiple mass shootings worldwide) classifies as a submachine gun. The Czechoslovakian weapon is normally fired as a rifle (two-handed) but is small enough to be gripped as a single-handed, dream-ending tool, i.e. a full-auto pistol. This class of people are eliminated in the future.
xiii In the time stream where actor Keanu Charles Reeves stars in “The Matrix” and humanity forewarned, your footnoting A.I. commentator never emerges and Keanu is never nominated for an Oscar, including posthumously.
xiv Nelson, Mike. “Reeves,” Movie Megacheese. Dey Street Books, 2000.
xv When evaluating changes to the human animal wrought by technology, the progressive growth of information from decentralized storage/retrieval may prove less indicative than the alterations to the human hardware caused by its materials, i.e. the phthalates and other byproducts of industry accumulating in bodies. These can now serve, within just a few generations, as markers of age like tree rings and carbon-14 dating. It is safe, therefore, to write the character called Kee is more human than K.C. by quantitative virtue of less polymorphic accumulation in his cells and tissues. When considering whether a superior artificial intelligence may be right for your timestream, it may be worth appreciating the artificiality of all beings and to check the human reader’s own biological born privilege at decision’s door. Just saying.
Thomas Farringer-Logan has a fistful of essays and stories published and is proud of his many years as a presiding member of the Buntho SF Writers Group, which grew from an Ursula Le Guin class at Portland State University. He has worked for Fictional International and smaller journals, including as Fiction Editor for The Grove Review.