Channel Blue (2 page)

Never had someone so charming and normal taken Perry’s class, but this was only the beginning of Amanda Mundo’s uniqueness. In his successful years, Perry had met many beautiful women; he’d even dated movie stars (albeit briefly and without getting past first base). There had been stretches of Perry’s life when he’d gone
weeks
without seeing a female he didn’t want to have sex with – in Hollywood, unattractive women were encouraged to move or hide themselves in basements. And in Hollywood movies, this erasure of the non-beautiful went a step further. Every heroine’s name that Perry introduced into his screenplays was followed by a two-word character description: ‘
Extremely attractive
’ – unless the heroine was someone you might have a hard time imagining being extremely attractive, such as an ageing field hand or a crippled fishmonger. In this case Perry would describe them as ‘
Extremely attractive in a down-to-earth way’
. Had the movie executives read anything else, such as ‘
Good-looking for her age’
or ‘
Pretty despite her disability’
, their heads might have exploded. ‘
Extremely attractive in a down-to-earth way’
was the
minimum.

But for all this, Perry had never met – or dreamt of – anyone like Amanda. If she were to appear in one of his scripts, he wasn’t sure he’d even be able to describe her. ‘
Extremely attractive in a natural
way’?
‘Stunningly beautiful but not like any woman you’d see in a movie’
?
It took several classes for Perry to figure out what was different about her, but eventually he did: Amanda, for all her beauty,
didn’t seem to know she was beautiful
. It was as if she’d been raised on a remote island by the Amish. She never made him feel as if he was lucky to be talking to her, thus removing the self-consciousness that diminished every encounter Perry had experienced with the extremely attractive. He found he could actually talk freely to her and even, shockingly enough, be himself in her presence.

For her part, Amanda seemed genuinely thrilled to be taught by Perry, taking copious notes and laughing whenever he tried to be funny, which was by far the quickest way to his heart. When they began chatting after class, he discovered that she had a skill for revealing little, while simultaneously summoning forth his most personal details. Once he asked her where she was from. She didn’t baulk at this terrible cliché, but instead smiled and said, ‘Where do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I can’t quite identify your accent. I’m usually pretty good at figuring them out, too.’

‘Really?’ Amanda said with interest. ‘How do you do that? Have you travelled a lot?’ And just like that, the focus of the conversation became the summer after Perry’s college graduation, when he’d bought a Eurorail pass and managed to vomit in every European capital.

After another class, he opened up to her about the decline of his fortunes. Just when he thought he’d gone too far, that he’d repelled her with the stench of his failure and the musk of his self-pity, she hit him with the most blinding smile he’d ever seen.

‘This is just a second-act setback,’ she said. ‘You know how it works, Mr Bunt. You have over half the movie to come back.’ As if this weren’t enough, she added, ‘And I for one will be watching’, affectionately tapping him on the shoulder.

As she tapped him, the sleeve of her jacket pulled slightly up her forearm, revealing a small blue tattoo on the inside of her left wrist. Perry couldn’t see what it was exactly, but the mere glimpse of it stirred him in ways about which he felt immediately embarrassed. In his youth, only sailors and hardened criminals acquired tattoos, but now everyone under thirty seemed to have one and, for the first time, Perry understood why. The tap made his whole body feel warm.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Call me Perry.’

After this, he shared with Amanda his deepest secrets and most fervent hopes. He told her of his undying faith in the life of the mind and the power of creativity, how he knew there was a way to imagine himself out of his current situation.

‘I have no doubt you will,’ she said.

She became the star of Perry’s fantasies. In her smile he saw deliverance from the squalor of his lonely apartment. In her lilting laugh he heard the love that would help him believe again in his writing. In the touch of her hand he felt the confidence that he would one day not have to masturbate quite so often, but also, paradoxically, the need to do so almost immediately.

His fantasies, however, were always tinged with sadness, as he had no doubt that she was out of his league. Though she didn’t wear any rings, Perry was certain that a woman like Amanda had to have a boyfriend, and one who probably owned an unstained pair of pants. She never mentioned anyone, though, and the germ of hope that had infected Perry began to cause sleeplessness. He needed to know the bad news as soon as possible to be able to move on with his life. So in the middle of one of their after-class conversations, Perry blurted out, apropos of nothing, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

To his surprise, Amanda didn’t flinch at the Asperger’s-like awkwardness of this question.

‘Yes,’ she said, and Perry’s heart plummeted down an elevator shaft. ‘But—’ His heart shot back up into his chest. ‘He lives very far away. We’re trying to make it work.’

‘Right,’ Perry said, feeling the blood returning to his limbs. ‘Long-distance relationships can be very challenging.’ Just like that, he decided that Amanda’s boyfriend was history. Some day, before the term was over, Perry would ask Amanda if she would like to have a cup of coffee and talk more about her screenplay. She would gladly agree, and that coffee would become a date, which she wouldn’t even realise was a date until they found themselves in each other’s arms. This date would become several dates, a relationship and, eventually, the love that would save Perry from lonely misery.

This, Perry knew, was the Romance Story, one of seven story templates from which all Hollywood movies were constructed. But that didn’t stop him from believing it.

There was only one problem with this plan. While the other students routinely assaulted Perry with long and terrible screenplays that demanded his immediate attention, Amanda hadn’t turned in a single word. As the term went on, this became a source of anxiety.
Why is she in my class?
he wondered. Was she mocking him? Did she think she could just sit back and watch his degradation without participating in it?

‘Excuse me, Mr Bunt?’ In the back of the classroom, Amanda patiently continued to hold up her hand. It took Perry a moment to remember the current discussion. How long had he been staring at her? ‘I had a question? About Mr Laskey’s script?’

‘I’m sorry, Amanda. What is it?’

‘Was Molina’s head cut off by the main blade or that little whirling thing in the back?’

Before Perry could react, Brent Laskey adjusted his backward baseball cap with the cocky confidence of an
auteur
. ‘The main rotor. My guy spins the helicopter upside down, flies it six feet off the ground and
whack
, no more head.’

Amanda smiled and made a note on her pad.
Et tu, Amanda?
Perry thought. He glowered at the class. ‘The question is really beside the point, since no one in the history of the world has ever used a helicopter to decapitate someone purposely, let alone flown one upside down.’

‘That’s what made it so awesome,’ said Heath Barber, another
Faux
rantino. ‘It’s completely new. You literally nailed it, dude.’

As Heath and Brent exchanged a high five, Perry fought back extreme annoyance. In addition to encouraging Brent’s suspension of logic, Heath had flagrantly engaged in Perry’s linguistic pet peeve: the use of ‘literally’ to mean its opposite. Normally, Perry would have corrected this, but the conversation was already running away from him, devolving into a debate on whether you could fly a helicopter upside down. To his further irritation, this was the liveliest discussion of the term.

‘It’s physically impossible!’ Perry interrupted. ‘It breaks every rule of aero-fucking-dynamics, all right? It can’t possibly happen!’ The students stared at him, and he was immediately aware that he was talking too loudly. He cleared his throat and attempted a disarming smile, which came off more like an incongruous grimace. ‘It’s always fun to speculate, of course, but let’s move on.’

Given his certitude on the subject, Perry was more than a little surprised when Brent Laskey strode into the classroom the next day and dropped a newspaper clipping on his desk.

‘I guess that settles it,’ the student said.

Perry picked up the clipping and read this headline:

COLOMBIAN DRUG LORD SLAIN BY HELICOPTER

INVERTED CHOPPER DECAPITATES KINGPIN

CHANNEL 2

THE STRANGE THING ABOUT PERRY BUNT

At the end of the day, Perry gathered up his things and was almost out the door when he noticed the newspaper article. It was still lying on his desk where Brent Laskey had dropped it, transforming his 10 a.m. class into an ordeal. Perry’s students couldn’t seem to get enough of their teacher eating his words, piling it on to mock his discredited belief in believability. Only Amanda Mundo stood back from the feeding frenzy, looking on with an expression of concern that Perry perceived to be pity, which was somehow worse than if she had joined in his humiliation. Now alone in the classroom, he picked up the offending clipping and, after suppressing the urge to hurl it into the trash, tossed it into his briefcase.

Perry made his way from the college’s main building through the ochre air to the faculty parking lot, where he found his Ford Festiva dusted with a thin layer of ash. It was the penultimate day of August. Perry referred to August as
The Apocaugust
, the month that saw Los Angeles shrug off its veils of grass lawns, pleasant gardens and swimming pools and reveal its true nature as a searing, Old Testament desert. Blistering dry summer heat gave way to wildfires that filled the San Fernando Valley with acrid smoke, turning sunlight a sickly yellow and giving every resident – man, woman and child – the phlegmy hack of a chain smoker. Accountants received grim portents of their mortality.

Perry started up the Festiva, used his wipers to clear the ash from his windshield, and wedged himself into rush-hour traffic.

He was eager to get home and write.

Teaching isn’t all that bad
, he convincingly told himself and the few friends who still returned his calls. Yes, he had lost his girlfriend, his BMW and his home in the Hollywood Hills. Yes, he was more likely to be called by a debt collector than his agent. But Perry Bunt hadn’t given up. In his darkest hours, pausing from reading the terrible screenplays of his students to watch a cockroach scuttle over bits of petrified food on the matted grey carpet, he would tell himself that he would find some way to write his way out of this jam. As he’d told Amanda Mundo in one confessional moment, he continued to believe in the limitless power of his imagination and the transcendent powers of creativity. Despite a run of failure that would’ve made Job switch careers, Perry Bunt was still stalking the Big Idea.

From his first memory, Perry had carried around the feeling that he was destined for greatness, and no amount of failure would disabuse him of this fanciful notion. After reading the news that aerial artist Philippe Petit had walked a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center, six-year-old Perry had tied a rope between the chimney and a tree in the garden and started across. He always felt that it was the sound of his mother shrieking his name that had caused him to fall, but it’s doubtful that he would have made it in any case, even with the fishing rod as a balancing pole. He broke his right leg, and fractured his skull. Lying in traction in the hospital, two metal plates in his head, Perry was mystified that his daring feat hadn’t generated any media attention.

Encouraged by his parents and teachers, Perry gave up the tightrope for the typewriter and became a prodigy of narrative. For his graduate project in college, he’d written an earnest 612-page novel reimagining Don Quixote as a shell-shocked war veteran on a road trip across America, and it had the distinction of being read nearly all the way through by his faculty advisor.

Subsequently,
Don Hoder
was published by a small college press and nearly read by several critics, who pronounced Perry ‘promising’ and ‘a novelist under the age of thirty to watch’. Since these accolades did little to pay off his student loans, Perry had moved to Hollywood and, by twenty-eight, had become successful enough to acquire debt on a scale that made those loans look like microcredit.

Now he was still in debt but devoid of prospects. Still, Perry Bunt clung even more tenaciously to the belief that he was destined for greatness, unequivocally certain that one day, against all odds, he would regain his confidence and become more successful than ever. This, Perry knew, was the Underdog Story, another of the seven story templates from which all Hollywood movies were constructed. But, again, that didn’t stop him from believing it.

The strange thing about all of this was the fact that Perry Bunt
was right
: he was destined for greatness. Stranger still was the fact that the Earth’s survival depended on it.

CHANNEL 3

THE LAST DAY OF AUGUST

Perry made his way home to a shoddily built stucco apartment building above Ventura Boulevard named, with unintended hilarity, the Wellington Arms. Temporarily perched on the side of a steep hill overlooking a major earthquake fault, the crumbling Arms was one of many apartment complexes in the area that offered shelter to those who were either down on their luck or too young to know the difference.

In the small studio apartment that served as kitchen, bedroom and study, Perry made himself a sandwich and turned on his laptop. The month before, he’d had what he once would have called a guaranteed sale (back when things sold at all), a Big Idea so commercial that no studio executive would be able to resist its shapely, crowd-pleasing contours. It was an action-thriller entitled
The Last Day of School
, the story of a team of teenaged terrorists who infiltrate the First Daughter’s high school to kidnap her. The only man who can stop them? The math teacher, a former Navy Seal, drummed out of the service years before by whom?
The President himself.