That's Entertainment

Fuck it, it’s getting colder…

The afternoon sunshine’s wearing thin, and soon the night will creep around, and all
the good citizens will hurry home to their comfortable domiciles in places like Earle Street with leafy plane trees whispering, settling down with their loved ones to watch the Show. It’s tough; you never have any time to yourself these days, but perhaps that’s a good thing: idle hands
make work for the Devil. ‘Keeping busy’ is the mantra, the words that reassure….the mantra maintains a semblance of order like the low humming of unseen machinery…vibrational…and the world continues to turn.

On the wall, the holovision access is validated and we all assume our positions. The twins, now in their teens, lounge brazenly upon the luxuriously thick cream pile of the floor, sensuously flicking their voluptuous shining hair as they switch their impatient attentions between the holovision projections and the pvscreens in their hands. They are like sleek cats. My brother Robert is the eldest and about to Leave Home. He takes pivotal position onthe central leather roman, whilst Mum and Dad only half recline on theirs, fingers fidgeting, their minds still whirring with unfinished business. Only when the theme music triumphantly trumpets the approach of the show’s host, entering the arena like a champion gladiator, will they allow themselves to become subsumed by the Show… A fanfare for the modern man:

let’s welcome our host, our very own Angel of Death…..here comes Jack Macacque...

Spec-tac-ular!

Watching holovision is a Big Thing. We have to watch holovision in order to stay informed about what is happening in the Big Wide World. We want to know about things.

Me, I don’t buy it, and never have.

Watching holovision is a Big Thing. But I have this Theory about keeping busy and watching television and experimenting on the Olsens’ dog, which I shall tell you about when the time is right. Don’t want to come too soon, shoot my load so to speak… Usually, the only reason we assemble together in the living space of our dear domicile, is to get a hit of ‘Who’s Dying Tonight!’

There is no question that this show is anything other than a statement, a cultural statement, about who we are. I put it in the thesis. Good God-fearing holo-addicts, lapping it all up. This is the ultimate reality. We require a limited variation, just so that the patterns into which we match aren’t too repetitive, but by and large, the same old stories will do it.

…its so fucking cold….

We stare, our gaze fixed fascinated as the tears run, as the breath exhales, as the struggles are played out live and direct. Reality.

The horror, the horror!

We watch, our eyes fixated, drunk like wasps feasting upon windfall fruit, fascinated by shoulders that heave and then are still, by close-ups into contortions wrought by agony, by eyes in which milky clouds will gradually obscure the light. We watch, we consume greedily, we wonder what it will be like when our time comes.
And let’s hope Jack won’t be there to watch us as we go, gently or otherwise, into that good
night.

‘Who’s Dying Tonight’ is everyone’s favourite holoshow. Employers recompense their employees should clashes of scheduling occur. The random live broadcasts are the best, and the most heavily compensated. It’s a scramble to get back to one’s domicile in time…usually the producers only give an hour’s warning of an ‘External’, as they’re now
known.

According to the Theory, we passively accept and assimilate a dictated ideology through the medium of holovision. Yes, there is bound to be controversy. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart cannot bleed over, or something like that. From the top down, or from the bottom up, we can never really be sure. It’s probably best if I don’t reveal any more of the Theory, which is promising to be some sort of fucking philosophy or something. I doubt if the Theory is original: Jack didn’t think so when I put it to him.

Anyway, on this particular summer evening, only six days past but seeming like a millennium ago, Channel Six put it out that there would be an ‘External’, a live broadcast of ‘Who’s Dying Tonight’, at nineteentime.

“Hurry home tonight folks, you’ll not want to miss what is promising to be a great show tonight. This is your host, Jack the Mac, asking that question YOU’RE ALL ASKING… and you AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL want to know the answer, don’t you…

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO’S Dying Tonight!!”

The delivery of the prompt is important. Of course everyone wants to know the fucking answer. Jack the Mack’s voice is so full of confidence, so full of entertainment, rolling around my head like summer thunder… starved of colour, starved of form. We scent blood, we bay for blood like dogs, and we get it. Jack Macacque is the Main Man on Channel Six, the Helios of Holovision. He delivers us. His golden incisors shine in the studio glare. The all important prompt, the long drawn out phoneme, followed by the machine gun staccato, the hint of a nasal sneer...

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO’s dying tonight?

Sure, everyone wants to know.

The interesting thing about it, the thing that hooked everyone, the active ingredient, is that it could always be you.

I wrote my doctoral thesis on Jack Macacque. It’s boldly entitled Visual Pleasures, but it won’t be published now. Ostensibly, I wrote about the Show, its cultural value, its functions, its forms… My tutor suggested that I write to Channel Six, to ask for an interview.

When I met him, I pulled a butcher’s knife across his fat chest, just like they did in the Godfather, C19th, early cinevision. That would be settling old scores with style…

Spec-tac-ular!

Now of course, I’ll never get the chance. Its getting colder. Can’t feel my feet…

"Spare some change please sir!"

…fucking people…

God knows our family maintained its status. Robert was middle management, through and through. The twins would always have been able to carve out a good living in advertising or the sex industries. Mum’s position at the Community Hospital was relatively secure and Dad had done done well for himself in City Hall, was central to the smooth running of urban logistics. We lived in a beautiful old-fashioned clapperboard house on Earle Street, with lines of leafy plane trees patrolling the pavements, sentinels of status, cross-members in the post-urban life-structure. We were model citizens.

I suppose I’m now a man on a mission, when I was a boy only yesterday.

It happens in a flash. Suddenly you find out. The mission is to stay alive as unclassified, and it ain’t gonna be easy, no sir! You move from a level of deity to less-than-animal in a nanosecond. Fuck!

We’d be sitting out on the road, talking about this or that, with the sunlight playing dappled on our faces and we didn’t even notice it. Our status was assured, re-assured, our place in the structure was secure. Safe ground. As saplings, we rooted and grew. We had been modified for safe-keeping, just like everything else on the face of the goddamned planet. We were cultured like pearls.

We were just like everyone else we knew, or so we thought. The Williamsons next door, just the same as us, keeping busy, their children growing up fast, just like us. We mirrored them, not exactly, but just enough to re-assure each other that this was good, this was how it was meant to be. I didn’t like the way Williamson used to smell, I remember that. He smelled kind of
fishy, as if there was something going on beneath his epidermis that he wasn’t aware of. Maybe he was aware of it! Either way, he was a bit creepy. You could never be sure of what he was thinking. For God’s sake, he’s a level three in Administration! Those people have a lot going on in their heads, stuff which people like us don’t get to hear about. Who cares anyway?

How are we ever really going to know what really happened two hundred years ago or even yesterday? It’s only when you die that you find out, so we have to be patient and wait like good children, wait to find out.

Of course, you can always do what Joaquin Rodrigues did. Spec-tac-ular! He found out alright, and in no uncertain terms.

Joaquin Rodrigues, 21 years old, set to enter into a rewarding career following in his father’s footsteps in Trade, leapt naked from the thirty-second floor of the Trade Tower in the
Business Sector. He was maladjusted, so Jack the Mac claimed with that little smile, that little
smile which announced that the world had judged Rodrigues and found him wanting. His father unsportingly declined an interview and lost his position at Trade the next day, and now the whole family, all eight of them, are u/c. They moved on pretty quick, for sure. The speed of the change is surprising.

Joaquin filmed his descent and made legal provision for it to be made available, if it
survived impact, to ‘Who’s Dying Tonight’. I reckon that would have made for some pretty
sensational viewing myself, but somehow or another, Jack never aired the footage. All we got
on the show that night was some grainy seconds of grey urban landscape across which some featherless bird plummeted, a falling angel, a flash of colour, an open mouth, an unheard scream.

Anyway, there’s Jack the Mac, his gold incisors glistening like vampire’s needles. His live shows were always riveting. He guaranteed victory in the all-important ratings war for Channel Six, and now all the other channels screened his shows at the same time, staggering them in one minute intervals so audiences could channel hop to review the action scenes. I really feel for the producers. It’s such a desperate scramble for ratings out there….

Like I said, I’m a student. I should make that past tense, because my history has been amended now. I am u/c: I have no status, and no rights to status. I must survive how best I can, selling my ass while I’m young enough and selling someone else’s when I’m not.

Jack shrugged his shoulders in that devil-may-care way of his and walked out of the interview before I could say ‘Well fuck a duck!’ I don’t know what it was I said that pissed him off so. At least I can say I’ve met him, although there is unfinished business still between us, so I'd love to meet him again. Fat chance now though...

I don’t know how he does it. He keeps up a consummate performance, a true professional, and rumour has it he’s eighty-six years old! Now that’s what I call eternal youth! His hair is
whipped, like an ice-cream, an veritable edifice. He smiles, always smiles, so reassuring. We
want him for our father, for our brother, for our husband, for our lover. Jack the Mac. Fatjack
Man. Manfat Jac. If I can spin the permutations, perhaps I can understand. To name the thing is to take power over it; I read that in the Archives.

Fuck, it’s cold. I’m dreaming of how things used to be.

But I don’t know now, being u/c. We don’t get to hear when the next show is on, and besides, the only places to watch it, outside the Technology Stores, are always swarming with Snuffers, and you have to keep out of their hands for sure. I learned that last night. Luckily, I spotted them coming in time and ducked into a doorway as they gambolled past. A tight knot of devilish intent, all blades and pins, alighting on some decrepit nearby and hauling him away for ‘studiotime’.

I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. ‘Better not to feel, than to feel anything at all’: this was the mantra with which we had been seeded. But there is something nagging at me, pulling at me like an inflamed dental nerve, clamouring for my weary attention. If I just sit here tight
under this ventilation shaft and keep still, perhaps I will be mistaken for so much kipple and left unmolested to rot and ruminate.

Think. I can’t seem to think straight! I must think straight. I just can’t get him out of my
head. Fatjackmac. Fatfuc Macacque.

“WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO’S Dying tonight?”

It was sheer chance that I didn’t make it back to the old domicile on Earle Street in time for the Show. If the truth be told, and so often isn’t, I’d been feeling pretty pleased with myself. It felt like the world was my finely-muscled knot of mollusc, and that all I needed was a sharp knife to loosen the shell and a squeeze of lemon before I could throw it down my throat. I swallow a sympathetic lump when I think about the beautifully bound script which I had submitted that afternoon, working against the clock, delivering in the very nick of time….because I’ll never learn whether it made the grade.
“To hell with deadlines!” I yelled at my ashen-faced tutor, as I slapped the script down
on his cluttered desk. My leering smile was provocative, knowing, confident, so sure of itself.

How he must have laughed afterwards, when he saw the Show later… but I can’t bear any grudges, and probably would have done the same thing myself, given the circumstances. A little subversive Theory is a dangerous thing. What I didn’t realize is that it gets out, escapes the prison you make for it in your mind, flags itself visible to the very eyes that must not see it, informs upon you like a stooge. My tutor had no choice: the scripts are all digitally scrutinized in any case.

I was passing by the Sportspark, thinking about what I was going to do with the rest of my life after I had passed the Intellectual Matriculation. I was heading for a professional life, perhaps as a tutor. I missed the ‘runner’ for the extra Show, and didn’t know anything about it until I caught sight of Robert’s face on McGarry’s holovision later that night.

McGarry’s a hoot, that’s for sure. He always sees the funny side of things, and laughed like a drain when he realized what was up. The whole family had a good laugh actually. Like I said, I didn’t know there was even going to a be a Show until McGarry’s father called us in from the Tree House, where we’d been punching synthit into our veins, just for the craic. I didn’t make a habit of this. It’s just that McGarry had called me over at the Sportspark that afternoon. Usually I would have ignored him, declined his offer and walked away but because I’d just made the deadline, because I was feeling like the world was my oyster and all I needed was a sharp knife, I thought, what the hell? A little synthit’s not going to kill me. I deserve a little fun. Besides, McGarry told me his sister Brigit had the hots for me, so the expedition to McGarry’s treehouse had taken on various shades of expectation. After the synthit, we roared, we swooned, we laughed until we were purple in the face. Brigit climbed up, all smiles and hot
flushes, flashing her tits and arse at every possible opportunity, and nearly passed out when
McGarry punched one home for her. We laughed fit to kill ourselves.

When McGarry Senior called us in to the house, we wondered for a paranoid moment whether we had been rumbled. Of course, nothing serious could have happened. Our futures were golden, middle-management. The world as we knew it comprised of producers and consumers, and we were definitely destined to become producers. Producers of status, producers of meaning, Guardians of the Holy Grail. The future was bright.

Jack said at the interview that I was a little too clever for my own good. “Mind out you don’t cut yourself,” was his parting shot. Jackmack Fuc. Fatjack Fuck. Fatfuck Jac. He smiled like an executioner as he glided silently to the door.

McGarry’s living space is greater than ours. His father works in advertising and his mother’s a lawyer. They have it made! The holoscreen appears as if by magic on the long low wall that supports the vine-twisted columns that held up the reactive roof canopy. The cream pile here was denser, more velveteen, brushed like the coat of a pedigree animal waiting to be exhibited, and the romans were electrostatic gliders, the very latest in leisure, so that you could hover up in the darkness of the canopy musing on the nature of the firmament whilst still lying in the lap of luxury. McGarry’s house is much better than ours. McGarry Senior has real status: he is creative.

We settle down on the hovering romans, giggling as the synthit tickles our fancies, and me thinking that I was going to fuck Brigit really hard when the show was over, and her giving me the look which signals she’s ready and waiting. The holovision hums as the processor searches the transmissions spectrum and then a giant red ball appears in the centre of the room. I wonder whether Brigit would peel me grapes, warm them for me in her rosebud mouth and slip them to me with her wicked pink tongue….and then the red ball seductively peeled itself open to reveal the number lying inside the letter like a child nestled against its mother. Channel Six, the family channel. We heard the low fanfare of trumpets building, as the three dimensional numeral seemed to glow, burst into flames, intensify in the quality of its heat. The room temperature climbed discernably, and I increased my altitude accordingly, waiting for the Six to become white-hot, pulsing with anticipation, spinning faster on a vertical axis, growing in size proportionately to the living space, so that when he finally appeared in a puff of smoke which may have been a self-conscious nod to the theatricality of Showtime, Jack the Mack’s powdered face dominated the entire room, grinning inanely but with eyes like coals.

On those gliding romans, you can actually penetrate Jack’s talking head. I hear Brigit giggling away somewhere down there, and my cock feels hard and keening. The world seems good,
pregnant, full of expectation.

“GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD evening, folks!”

booms Jack in that ever-friendly tone, hands upraised to acknowledge thunderous audience applause. A pulsing red ball above Jack’s monumental hair signifies that this transmission is live, and I glide up to inspect it at closer quarters. I hadn’t bargained on having a ringside seat at the Show, and the McGarrys were being exceptionally kind in calling me in to share the experience. McGarry Senior was a creative, and could therefore afford to be generous with his consumption.

“Yes, yes, yes, Sweet Lord, its true” calls Jack, clapping his hands together to drive home his
conviction. Immediately a choir wavers, a chord is struck, harmony established, and Jack’s clapping is augmented by many hands.

“Oh yes yes my sweet Lord, we’re gonna find out tonight…”

“Hallelujah! Praise be!” shout the voices from the digital periphery and Jack beams beatifically,
his eyes blazing like prism-refracted light.

“Do you know what we’re doing tonight, folks, do you know what we’re here for tonight?”

The very material of Jack’s suit emanates a strange phosphorescent light, and I think about some of the cultural product that I have been studying.

“Do you know what we’re doing tonight, folks, do you know what we’re here for tonight?”

Fuck Jack back. I just didn’t get it. The peripherals mutter and gnash.

“Can you know what we’ll be doin’ tonight, my people?” boomed Jack, as the volume of his
voice increased, distorting only very fractionally. He is answered by a steadily growing roar from his ‘studio audience’, digital holomations...There was nothing to fear, no life, no death, no blood was spilt. It’s all part of
the Show! It’s Showtime!

Spec-tac-ular!

But that growing clamour plays host to something else, something darker. I didn’t catch it at the
time, so sure was I, and so complacent in my privilege.

“Yes my people, here we are together again for another exciting Exterrrrrrnal Transmission, out
here in the field. Here we are together again to bear witness, Sweet Lord!”

The clamour behind the luminescent figure posturing as if to thousands in the centre of
McGarry’s living space suddenly rose in pitch to a howl, and the McGarrys, all of them, even McGarry Senior, lean forwards and reach out their arms in response to the power of the this digital hegemon.
Jack sinks to his knees as the wail went up behind him, like a million mourners grieving for a dead princess.

“Let me lead you, my people!” he implores…”Let me show you the way!”

The disembodied mob howl their assent. The McGarrys nod fervently.

“Let me tell you my people…let me share with you…let me reveal to you...

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO’s dying tonight!”

The delivery, balanced until the last moment upon a fulcrum of expectation, topples over in relief, a cascade of affirmation responding behind, and The Popular Prophet springs to his feet, arms and legs outstretched, face contorted into an impossible smile. Fanfares blared, fireworks exploded, a spotlight ranged crazily over the spectacle.

“Hallelujah!” shouts McGarry, ludicrously throwing himself from his roman in imitation of the Great Man being so projected.

“Hallelujah!” shouted McGarry Senior in response. What is wrong here?

“Tonight my people, we have a veritable feast of entertainments for you…..of course, we’ll be
touring the Terminals with Doctor Mort, up at the State Hospital….and no doubt we’ll have the usual flurry of traffic accidents…our Eye in the Sky is always ready for the action just as it happens….and then of course, we have the Executioner’s Hour. The State Pen is really
humming tonight, folks, and just as we promised you on last weeks show, we’ll show you the
final interview with Crazy Dog Swarzenegger, The BUTCHER of San Narcisco, just before his execution by the State, LIVE ONLY ON CHANNEL SIX, the ONLY channel that deals with the ultimate issues. And as sure as frying eggs is frying eggs, we always keep our PROMISES!!!”

“Ain’t that the TRUTH!” exclaims Mrs McGarry, who rarely spoke, except in tongues, and whose eyes now glittered uncannily in the half-light.

“Because we know that it’s RIGHT to keep our promises, O Lord!” Jack Fuckmat makes eye
contact with eighty million across the eastern sector, and eight hundred million beyond.

“Yes, we do!” shouts McGarry, looking up at me with a malevolent grin on his face….what was happening here. What the fuck’s going on? Even Brigit’s peering at me in a really nasty demoniacal way.

“And because we’re RIGHTEOUS, dear Lord, we can know…yes we can know, dear Lord….”

There is a pause, loaded, heavily pregnant….Jack is begging for it, his plasticized face contorted into a mask of suspended resolution, so nearly there, his outstretched arms imploring, beseeching…. Altogether, Jack, the disembodied ‘studio audience’, the whole McGarry family and
eight hundred and eighty million viewers across the eastern sector scream,

“WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO’s dying tonight!”

The wall of applause is deafening. The McGarrys go wild, zooming around the living space on their romans like demented mosquitos in anticipation of a feeding frenzy. It’s weird, because I’m normally a part of this hate-in, subsumed by the group mind, but tonight something feels different. The holovision projection flickered for a moment and then clarified. Outside broadcasts sometimes lost a little in transmission but by and large, picture
quality is good.

The plane trees look horribly familiar. Isn’t that the Williamsons’ transport parked out on the brickweave? The holovision split into multiview, so that the target house was now visible from several different directions simultaneously. In the McGarrys’ luxury holovision set up, the scene like a model diorama, as if my house, my garden, has been miniaturized and beamed into every domicile in the east.

There’s Lucky’s kennel. There’s my old learner-
transport, rotting in the corner. This is my domicile, alright, and the lights are on… I’m very hot all of a sudden, a creeping horror. The McGarrys go very still, re-group together at the opposite end of the living space. Mr McGarry’s whispering to his son, who shakes his head slowly without taking his eyes off me. But I couldn’t give a fuck about the McGarrys. Let them eat cake! Who’s dying tonight? My dad, my mum, my brother and my sisters…..

I watch, appalled…a rustling of forms through the foliage of the back garden. Black assassins ripple past the parked transports. Silent gyrocopters lower assault troops onto the roof, and they efficiently make their way to the windows, waiting for the go go go… There is a
clink of metal, a patter of boots, there is frenzied whispering in the dark corners. The power is suddenly cut to the neighbourhood, and all the security lights go out. I remember how the Show has had to defend claims for losses against petty misdemeanours, committed by neighbours when the power is cut and the electric fences disabled. It’s a price the producers think is worth paying…still maintaining the public gaze. Good for business, a form of advertising.

Here he is now, somehow spirited into the centre of the action, standing outside my bedroom window. Maybe he thinks I’m still in there, oblivious to what’s about to happen. In close up now, a bead of perspiration tracking across his temple, his dead shark eyes glittering, he whispers hoarsely, urgently, but smiling, always smiling:

“So here we are folks, at tonight’s external down on the always sunny Earle Road, central west district. This house has been identified as a safe house for Terrorists, and the Administration
believes they may well be hostile… We have been granted special dispensation to record this
moment of TRUTH… Officer Grimm, how will you approach these goddamned TERRORISTS once you have penetrated the cell?”

I watch the McGarrys as they watch me… So they have a Terrorist now, gliding on one of their romans, watching the termination of his family on their goddam holoscreen…what a story for the dinner table…how they will feast! Of course, they’d always known…. They start laughing... the bastards!

“Well, let’s see our boys go into action and find out……

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO’s dying tonight!!!!”

Jack Macacque, grinning to the camera, gives the signal, a sleight of hand, a mantra, go go go.

Doors are kicked in. First thing’s first, the dog is silenced, pieu pieu, unlucky. The house is trashed by jackboots. Steadicam live action piped stinging hot into eighty million heads simultaneously…my mother screaming, hair seized in black gloved-hands…the twins dragged down the stairs… Robert, half-conscious and bleeding, strapped to the dining table where this morning I’d eaten fruity flakes and squabbled with my sisters… my father, handcuffed to the shower rail, naked, grey, cowed, terrified.

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT!

Jack the Mack steps over what was a nineteenth century heirloom from my mother’s side of the family, now a mess of splintered timber. It will all be gone by morning in any case. The Show’s cleaners move into a declassified property like a horde of ants. The transports will continue through the night. Most of the neighbours would have been watching, nodding their heads knowingly and congratulating themselves that they had always known, right from the outset, remembering so many anecdotes, that we were Terrorists.

Jack’s face reappears in the living space, grinning like a babboon; the bead of sweat has been airbrushed, and his impossible hair has been re-calibrated. All that remains is to deliver the hook just one more time, just so that you really have got them where you want them…..

“WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO’S dying tonight!”

I watch the McGarrys laughing as they watch me, watching the Admin Officers hold my mother down on one of those stupid Holbein imitations that she saved three years for to buy. She’s crying, pleading, but they slit her eyeballs with a razor, close up, so that the eyeball stuff splatters the camera. Eighty million pairs of hands reach up to touch eighty million faces in fascinated horror. The McGarrys all whoop and punch the air.

SPEC-TAC-ULAR!

I watch the McGarrys laughing, watching me, as I watch an Admin Officer, Officer Grimm, all gowned up, approaching my father, still handcuffed to the shower… There’s poor Dad frantically shaking his head, and the Officer revs his chainsaw… The comms responses are phenomenal. Jack’s new brutality policy seems to be paying off…we’ve never been treated to…this…before….

Abso-fucking-lutely spectac-ULARIO!

I feel sick, probably only a motor reflex, while the McGarrys hoot and cheer as the white tiles
are splattered, and eight hundred and eighty million duck the jetted red simultaneously… I watch as Robert is stretched out over the dining room table, a close up of electrodes so barbarously secured, those crocodile teeth clamping soft genitals, the convulsions twisting, the tongue blackened and smoking and the eyeballs melted just like marshmallow on a fork.

McGarry is rolling around on that creamy pile, biting the wool and pulling the strings like he’s
gone. Spec-tac-ular audience interpellation! Jack will be pleased!

Cut to Jack apologizing because the Transmitting Censor has had to restrict some footage of the twins, for the sake of public decency you know, so now, lets go over to the State Hospital for a little euthanasia…just as soon as we run some commercials. Don’t go away now! There’s still plenty more in store on…..

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO’s dying tonight!”

We fade to black for the commercials, and that goddamn theme music starts to reverberate around the McGarrys’ living space.

* * *

Well, I got out by the skin of my teeth, sure enough, and here I am, unclassified, undead,
subversive, somewhere, other, not wanted by the State. And now I have to decide what the fuck I’m going to do…

…it’s cold, so fucking cold..

Really, what can I do, who am I kidding? My life is over, my not-life just begun. But the Show must go on…well, that’s the Theory anyway.

That’s entertainment.