Excerpt
from The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse: A Novel
by Jonathan Selwood
Just as I’m touching up the manic glint in Tom Cruise’s eyes,
another aftershock hits. I stumble back from the easel to try and keep
from toppling over, but with the hardwood floor shifting violently in
all three dimensions at once, it’s like trying to cross a cobblestone
street blind drunk in stiletto heels. Fortunately, a waist-high pile of
old
Celeb magazines breaks my fall.
The tremor ends just seconds after it starts, but a dry fog of lead paint dust continues to sift down from the ceiling. I wait a minute to make sure the ground isn’t going to start moving again, then limp over to turn on the clock radio next to the futon couch. A male DJ’s voice blares out in midstream.
“ . . . is roughly equivalent to dropping a bowling ball off the Eiffel Tower. Please remember that phones should be used only in the case of an emergency, and not to call up the station and request the ‘Earthquake Song’ by the Little Girls. Let me also remind the two or three of you who haven’t heard this before to refrain from firing up that crack pipe until you’re absolutely positively sure you don’t smell gas, to boil any tap water before drinking, and to slip on those Ugg boots before strolling over the broken glass and shards of jagged metal that most likely carpet your floor. . . . In other disaster news, one of our deservedly unpaid interns managed to spill wheat grass juice in all three CD players, so I’ll be dipping into the vinyl vaults as we wait with bated breath for the always riveting Cal Tech report. . . .”
X’s “Los Angeles” starts crackling through the clock radio speaker. I turn up the volume, and take a minute to look around at the disaster that was once my apartment.
Dirty plates and cereal bowls are stacked everywhere, improvised ashtrays spill out over piles of old tabloid magazines, and layers of spattered paint cake the hardwood floor in a riot of clown colors. For the past two weeks I haven’t seen my boyfriend, Javier, haven’t checked the mail, haven’t left the apartment for more than half an hour at a time. For the past week I’ve been too nauseated to eat anything but Trader Joe’s pot stickers. And for the past three days I haven’t changed out of my paint-spattered black T-shirt and jeans. All of this the result of my attempt to (in the words of my sociopathic art dealer Juan Dahlman) “launch my meteoric rise to fame.”
Of course, in addition to the mess are the five new canvases that Dahlman plans to sell for a whopping fifty thousand dollars apiece come my opening Sunday afternoon (he claims Sunday afternoon is the new Thursday). Paintings I originally conceived as a satiric bayonet into the partially hydrogenated heart of contemporary society, but which my two-hundred-dollar-an-hour media training coach has reprogrammed me to call “transcendently kitschy.”
Propped against my desk is Raphael’s Madonna and Child with the original faces replaced by Britney Spears and her son Sean. Hanging over the futon is David’s The Death of Marat featuring a turbaned and bloody Kurt Cobain in the bathtub. And on the easel itself is American Gothic redone with a smiling Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. As usual, the reproductions are technically flawless (with the exception, obviously, of the celebrity substitutions). I suppose if my new career as a sellout artist/media whore implodes, I can always move to Ibiza and become a professional forger.
The aftershock scattered my paintbrushes all over the floor, so I pick them up and carry them into the bathroom to clean. A new earthquake crack has appeared, running diagonally across the mildewed blue shower tile, but the two finished canvases I did with cobalt drier are still miraculously balanced on the towel rack. Placing the brushes in a coffee can on the soap dish ledge, I turn on the faucet. Rust-colored water spurts down into the basin, stops, then starts again with a shuddering of pipes, only to begin immediately pooling up from the paint-clogged drain. I shut the faucet back off, grab a bottle of “eco-friendly” drain cleaner from the ledge of the toilet, and pour the last of it in.
It takes a full minute of staring at the gaunt woman’s face in the mirror above the sink for me to recognize it. My skin has drained from what I’ve always thought of as an SPF 15 pale to a tubercular pallor, my cheeks have sunken in painfully, and the dark circles under my eyes now match my black hair and T-shirt. Jesus, even my eyes themselves seem to be darkening.
The sink finally drains, and I’m about to begin cleaning the brushes, when there’s a knock at the front door.
Copyright © 2007 Jonathan Selwood