Chapter 31

“I know what those bastards are doing!” Tupac called down to Isaac. He roared against the howling wind as they rode the stripper pole from Thugz Mansion down to Earth. They plummeted at terminal velocity.

“What are they doing?” Isaac cried.

“They’re trying to put us back in the cave!”

“What cave?” Isaac called back, hoping Tupac was wrong. After Isaac’s adventures in the tunnels under LA, the thought of doing any more spelunking made him sick.

“Plato’s cave!” Tupac said, but that didn’t help Isaac much, who was more familiar with exploring the man’s closet than his cave.

“Oh, okay. What’s that?” Isaac asked. The skies darkened as they left Thugz Mansion’s plane of perfect existence and entered Los Angeles’ airspace and the accompanying June Gloom, which was so dense that it had become a layer of the atmosphere itself.

“Plato was one of the real O.G.s, you know? He had all these ideals. And he thought that humanity was trapped inside this cave. And inside this cave was a shadow puppet show,” Tupac lectured.

“Why is there a shadow puppet show inside a cave?” Isaac asked. “It’s not the venue I would choose.”

“It’s an allegory. C’mon, Isaac. Gimme a chance here.”

“What’s an allegory?”

“It’s like a souped-up metaphor.”

“Isn’t that a simile?”

“No, I used a simile to compare an allegory to a metaphor. Aren’t you supposed to be some sorta writer?”

“...”

“Now stay with me here, but like, this puppet show is going on, and all these niggas in the audience believe the shadows on the cave wall are real. That fox-shaped shadow isn’t just a shadow to them. It’s a real fuckin’ fox, you get it? Because they don’t. They can’t tell the difference because they’ve never seen one bouncing around the meadow or whatever. They’re in the cave. All they know is the cave. They don’t understand it’s puppets and tricks of the firelight.”

“I’m not following!” Isaac cried.

“It’s simple. We’re the people inside the cave, losing touch with reality because we’re controlled by shadows and tricks of the firelight. That’s all movies are, Isaac. Industrial light and magic.”

“Okay... but who are the puppeteers?”

“That a joke? The lizards! The Illuminati! Fox Studios! The police. Whatever you wanna call them. They’re the puppeteers, and Super Jesus 2 is the puppet. They want to put us in the cave and keep us there forever. If Zee’s right, anyone who watches that movie will be spent. Gone! Bam-fucking-boozled! I’m talking total vegetable status, okay? They’ll be completely controlled by the movie and will live inside it.”

“Why would the lizards do that? Ouch!” Isaac’s hands had begun to burn from the friction of his descent. The shea butter massage oil he applied to them before gripping and ripping the stripper pole was wearing thin on his palms.

“Control, Isaac, it’s always been about control. Slavery. Again. Slavery and subjugation. That’s at the heart of everything evil. Power. That kernel of truth is eternal, whether that kernel is in the center of the cotton seed we pick or the popcorn we eat at the multiplex. First, they enslaved our bodies, and now our minds. Instead of whips and chains, they’re using the entertainment industrial complex to keep us subservient, keep us sucking at the big ol’ TV titty for sustenance. That shit is fucked. Art used to bring us together, but now it’s tearing us apart, you know what I’m saying?”

“Not really!” Isaac shouted. He closed his eyes, trying to brace himself for an incoming flock of geese.

“Think of it like a tower of Babel situation.”

“The Brad Pitt movie?” Isaac asked through a mouthful of feathers.

“The Brad Pitt movie?” Tupac repeated. “Goddamn, man, I’m talking about the tower. The tower of Babel! The biblical allegory of how and why humanity is divided by our different races and languages. That’s what entertainment is doing to us, you understand?”

“That’s a parable, I think. Or a fable?”

“You’re missing the point. Open your eyes!” Tupac ordered Isaac, and Isaac did so, now seeing that he was beneath the June Gloom cloud cover. He screamed as LA’s cityscape rushed up at him. He couldn’t stop his momentum. The harder he tried to grip the pole to break his speed, the more his hands burned. Isaac braced for impact.

Despite Isaac’s imminent death, Tupac continued his lecture, “Humanity has become entirely too reliant on entertainment. What was once used as a diversion has become our raison d'être. It’s how we pass the time, it’s the balm to soothe our souls, and it’s the Goddamn prism through which we now see and relate to the world. The lives we lead are the lives we watch. It’s why everyone speaks in references. They have to! See? No one has any original experiences to relate to anymore. You have to use fictional characters as a stand-in. It’s an identity. So, instead of doing something badass yourself, you watch characters on TV do something badass, and now you call yourself a badass. It’s crazy.”

Tupac was right. Isaac closed his eyes again, preparing for death, yet his life did not flash before him. Other scenes did. Images from his favorite television episodes buzzed in his brain, taking the place of any authentic, lived experiences in the highlight reel of Isaac’s life. There was the Ozymandias episode from Breaking Bad, the Red Wedding in Game of Thornes, and Fullmetal Alchemist, the one where the mad scientist Shou Tucker fuses his dog and daughter together to form a chimera. Evidently, these shows were his fondest memories.

Tupac kept speaking, “Now there’s no more mass entertainment. Monoculture is a thing of the past. Died out in the 90’s. Everything is now designed for hyper-specific market segments. Ya know how 160 million people watched the MASH finale? That will never happen again, you know what I’m saying? We’re all watching different shit now, so we’re all living different lives. The tower of Babel split us across continents, but entertainment is splitting up our community. An anime fan has more in common with some weeb on a message board a million miles away than their neighbor who binge-watches Latin soaps. They’re the strangers. Divide and conquer. Divide and conquer. A person’s media diet has become their essence. Like the rings of a tree, you can take the references a person uses to carbon date them. Or to deduce their personalities. And that, in my professional opinion, is why we’re fucked. We’re already living in the cave, and no one knows it. It’s like that apologue about the boiling frog.”

“Argh!” Isaac screamed before impact.

“I feel your pain, brotha! Super Jesus is just the rock that will be rolled over the mouth of the cave to make it a tomb. The final nail in the coffin. This has been going on much longer than Super Jesus, you know. All that east coast-west coast rap beef I got caught up in? Typical lizard agenda. Divide and conquer. But I was on my bullshit back then, you understand? I let ego blind me.”

Boing! Isaac hit the Earth’s surface, landing on a green lawn. Upon impact, the ground depressed, comically, as if it had been made with flubber to soften Isaac’s fall. The earth then rebounded to its original form, bouncing Isaac up and shooting him high into the air, where he fell for a second time with only minimal bumps and bruises to show for it. He survived.

Even with his rough descent from Thugz Mansion, Isaac could only think of flubber and Flubber. Tupac was right. Again. Much like his fight with Seth, where he related the incident of being nearly eaten alive by his alternate personality to a Star Wars alien, Isaac could only experience this unique life event of falling from the heavens through the prism of a Robin Williams movie.

What was worse, if Isaac hoped to ever relay this experience to someone else, he’d only be able to do so by using flubber to illustrate his story, like how he had to use the Kubla Khan to describe his script writing. Already, no one knew what the Kubla Khan was, so how many people would understand his Flubber reference? What were Flubber’s credentials? Was it culturally canon? Certainly, no one under the age of twenty would understand Isaac. Would anyone over the age of sixty? Isaac thought, not realizing Flubber was a re-make of a 1960s film, The Absent Minded Professor, a piece of cultural ephemera wholly lost on him. However, Isaac was aware of the expression of “an absent-minded professor,” having been called that once or twice himself. Still, he had thought that term was its own stand-alone expression, not one originating from a movie, which was based on an even older piece of intellectual property, a 1940s short story called A Situation of Gravity.

Isaac was dizzy from the fall.

Since contemporary society had become an unintelligible Russian nesting doll of references, Isaac wondered how future historians would regard the primary sources from this era, which would read like any other era’s secondary. Could they ever hope to be fluent in a culture where Isaac barely understood his peers without the aid of an Urban Dictionary or Wikipedia to translate, provide footnotes, or act as a glossary? How many Marvel movies does it take to become fluent enough in the MCU to understand the references used in our Supreme Court opinions?

Communication was going to collapse altogether. Broken under the burden of its own dead weight, barriers to entry, and steep learning curves. It meant creative stagnation and cultural death. It’s what the lizards wanted: no more original thought, as everything new had to be a re-packaging of something old. If the lizards weren’t stopped, all content would fall into one of five categories: sequel, prequel, reboot, spin-off, or adaptation. Was this the Tower of Babel effect Tupac was referencing? Isaac had no idea because he only half understood that reference.

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Isaac had a question. “But if the plan is to use media to fracture audiences into smaller and smaller market segments to further isolate them from one another, then what about Super Jesus? That’s marketed to everyone.”

“Human beings are a contradiction, yeah?” Gracefully, Tupac dismounted the Thugz Mansion stripper pole, not needing to utilize the flubber-like properties of the ground to break his fall, though that didn’t stop him from dusting his shoulders off anyway. “We’re a people of paradox. It’s that tension that gives us our juice. People crave their own individual identities, yeah? So everyone chased their own little entertainment fetishes at first, delving deep into content made especially for them until they went right down the rabbit hole. That separation must have been step one in the lizard’s plan.”

“And step two?”

“People also seek community. They knew that, too, so the lizards introduced movies that could appeal to everyone, the superhero genre. That was step two. And now people can’t get enough. You see it now? Got us coming and going. The Illuminati is selling us the cure to the disease they introduced, the sick fucks. Except for the cure — Super Jesus — is just a new disease in disguise, you know what I’m saying?”

Once again, Isaac did not know what Tupac was saying but didn’t ask for further clarification. He was too embarrassed to do so again.

“Let’s go,” Tupac instructed Isaac, who did as he was told, falling in line behind Tupac. Then, for the first time since landing, Isaac looked around. They stood in a backyard with scrubby palm trees fencing them in, and he immediately recognized where he was.

“Knock. Knock,” Tupac called out in lieu of knocking on Anne’s back door. He didn’t wait for her to answer either, making himself at home by turning the handle and striding into the bungalow.

“Super Jesus is dead,” was how Anne greeted the two of them when they reached her office.

“What? When? How?” Isaac screeched.

“Where? Why?” Tupac finished Isaac’s inquiry for him in jest after exchanging pleasantries with Anne by dapping her up and embracing her in a hug as warm and comforting as a McDoanld’s hashbrown on a Sunday Scaries morning.

“Died during his most recent and last miracle,” Anne said with a grimace while leading them inside. “But it’s better if I showed you.”

Isaac expected Anne to reach for her crystal ball but grabbed her laptop instead, turning it around for both Tupac and Isaac to see. She pressed play on the video app she was using, which looked like a bootleg version of Youtube, lending credence to the idea that Isaac was about to watch a snuff film.

The video began, and its vantage point was from an LA highrise looking down on the proceedings, but the videographer recorded the event with their phone vertically, so two obnoxious black bars bordered the footage, compressing the image and irritating Isaac.

What he could make out from the picture, however, was the 405 freeway, somewhere between the 10 and the 90. This was the real belly of the beast, but traffic could have been worse. Of course, it was still bumper-to-bumper, but this was 2:30 PM bumper-to-bumper traffic, not 5:30 PM bumper-to-bumper traffic. Isaac could tell because the cars were moving in unison at 45 miles per hour instead of 15. As an LA driver, these were the best conditions one could hope for, the magic half-hour between the lunch rush and rush hour.

“Ahhhhh!” a woman screamed on the video recording. The sound was exultant. “I can’t believe we’re going to watch a miracle!” The camera panned to the shoulder of the northbound side of the 405, where Super Jesus stood. He was not alone.

Behind the superhero was an entire cadre of animals, dozens and dozens of them, two to a species. There were great blue herons, flame skimmer dragonflies, and even rarer species like the California legless lizards and the famous least bittern birds. (Conspicuously absent, however, were any cat-like creatures.)

All the animals Isaac saw were native to the Ballona Wetlands, a marsh on the wrong side of the 405 from where Super Jesus and the animals waited. Isaac only knew this because Dan, his tour guide, told him how the Annenbergs purchased the Ballona wetlands, a lucrative piece of real estate, under the guise of conservation. Something smelled fishy to Isaac, and it wasn’t the pair of California killifish he saw strapped to Super Jesus in a fanny pack-styled aquarium.

Super Jesus raised his arms akin to how Moses was classically portrayed when he parted the Red Sea, except Super Jesus tried to part the 405 traffic and lead these animals, two by two, back to the wetlands and salvation. It was brilliant, Isaac thought. For Super Jesus’ final miracle, the film’s marketing team synthesized the Exodus and Noah’s Ark Biblical stories into a third, more powerful story, Make Way for Ducklings.

At first, the cars didn’t stop for Super Jesus until he took his first step off the shoulder and into the highway. Then Anne’s laptop speakers crackled as the drivers in the video skidded their vehicles to a halt, which set off a chain reaction from LA to Irvine.

Super Jesus strode across one lane of asphalt and into another with supreme confidence even as the traffic continued ahead of him unabetted. In an organized fashion, the animals followed behind Super Jesus. Two by two.

One lane down. Only 13 more to go. Behind Super Jesus, another Super Jesus adorning a Super Jesus 2 billboard watched his back and cheered him on.

“Oh my God!” the video recorder squealed in amazement at the miracle. The camera panned to show the rest of the cheering audience. Everyone watched the miracle with noses and cellphones pressed against glass windows. The excitement in the air was palpable, infectious. The force was flowing.

Isaac smiled. Crossing the 405 on foot was one of the most beautiful things his eyes had ever seen. Despite everything he knew, Isaac was also excited to watch the Super Jesus sequel. He wondered if any pre-sale tickets were available for purchase.

When the camera focused back to the 405, Super Jesus and his companions managed to cross another three lanes. It was smooth sailing until a driver, distracted by watching the live stream of the Super Jesus miracle on his cellphone, didn’t see the procession in front of him. The driver slammed his brakes to avoid the crash, but it was too late.

The car fishtailed wildly and ran over a pair of pond slider turtles, setting off a panic among the animals. They broke ranks, charging off in all directions. Confused, a coyote pushed Super Jesus into oncoming traffic before he was ready. The next thing Isaac saw was Super Jesus getting swallowed up by the front end of a TCP-stickered Lincoln Navigator, and what the SUV left behind wasn’t easily identifiable as anything other than a tomato-based Hamburger Helper meal. A little flubber would have gone a long way, Isaac thought grimly.

Anne closed her laptop to silence the sounds of horror while the witnesses watched the ground-bound animals try to scamper to safety in a game of Frogger gone wrong. “That happened three days ago,” she informed Tupac and Isaac. “People all over the world are in mourning. Candle-lit vigils, cry-ins, you name it. People are losing their Goddamned minds.”

“Did you say three days ago?” Isaac asked, bewildered. “Are you kidding me? I was only at Thugz Mansion for a few hours at most!”

“Time flies when you’re having fun,” Anne remarked dryly.

“You’re telling me. I was only supposed to be there for seven days,” Tupac groaned.

Isaac was overwhelmed. Whatever fate Captain Flapjacks had in store for him while in the hands of Liz and the lizardmen was probably sealed by now. There would be no saving the cat. “I don’t get it,” was all he could offer.

“What is there to get? Super Jesus got turned the fucked up,” Tupac observed. “He dead.”

“But was it an accident? Or did the cats organize his death?” Isaac wondered.

“I wouldn’t put it past them,” Anne said.

“This was an inside job,” Tupac warned. “I know one when I see it. Lizards tried to get me with a drive-by in Vegas, and they got this nigga with a drive-over.”

“Why would they kill him? Does this mean they finished the reshoots?”

“Bury the evidence?” Tupac suggested.

“My guess,” Anne mused, “is that they’re trying to rile everyone up, gin up their emotions — their force —a bit more before enacting their final plan.”

“Has Fox announced anything new regarding the movie?” Isaac asked Anne.

“To honor Super Jesus’s death, they’re dropping the sequel’s trailer tonight at a live event in Century Park Plaza. Naturally, people are forecasting that the whole world will be watching.”

“Tonight?” Tupac asked.

“But tonight,” Isaac counted on his fingers to double check his math, “is….”

“Yes,” Anne interrupted, “tonight’s the summer solstice when the force is most potent. I don’t think that’s by mistake, do you?”

“A perfect opportunity for the lizards to surprise release the Super Jesus sequel and enslave everyone,” Isaac said bitterly. “Can’t you do anything to stop it?” He turned to Anne. “You’re the sister of Jesus Christ. Can’t you do something to magic it all away?”

“No,” Anne said.

“Please?” Isaac pleaded.

“I could, but I won’t.”

“Why not?” Isaac whined.

“I’m not going to save you. I don’t believe in it. That’s something my brother would do.”

“And your brother is hailed as a hero,” Isaac said to entice her.

“That’s the problem!” Anne crossed her arms in a huff. “Why? What made him so special?”

“He died on the cross, sacrificing himself for humanity,” Isaac explained to Jesus’s sister.

“Some sacrifice,” Anne scoffed, “in all my years, I’ve never seen a better case study in marketing. Honestly! It’s exasperating. If you’re the son of God, what is there to sacrifice? Did he have a couple of uncomfortable days? Sure. I’ll grant him that, but so do many of us. It’s not as if he’s history’s first martyr either. And what was he risking by sacrificing himself? Did he have any afterlife anxiety to worry about? Was he going to hell? I don’t think so. You want to hear my hot take? A single mother in Crenshaw suffers and sacrifices more than Jesus ever did on any given day.”

“Amen, sista,” Tupac added.

But Anne’s rant wasn’t over. “Much like Our Lady, Lana Del Rey, Jesus was born to die, so is fulfilling your life’s destiny really such a sacrifice? Well, is it? Like, what else was he going to do? Die of old age? Please.”

“…” Isaac let her vent. He had clearly infringed upon a sensitive intrafamily dynamic/sibling rivalry and didn't want to aggravate Anne further.

“Don’t you see what I’m doing for humanity is far greater?” Anne continued, “I’m allowing you to save yourselves. Now that’s true salvation. Jesus allowed humans into heaven, sure, whatever, but I’m out here trying to bring heaven to earth.”

“How?” Isaac wanted to know.

“Much like my brother’s father, I, too, work in mysterious ways. Do you really think it was by accident that you found that missing cat poster?” There was a glint in her eyes.

“What you call mysterious, I would call inefficient,” Isaac retorted. “What a convoluted way to get what you wanted.”

“When you’re immortal, Isaac, you can afford to play the long game. Okay? And you can join our ranks if you pull this off. Of course, that is if you want to be saved and overthrow the lizards.”

“Why wouldn’t I want to be saved and overthrow the lizards?”

Anne shrugged, “I mean, we’ve been living with the lizards for a millennia or so. Is the situation ideal? No, but an equilibrium has been achieved with them at the top of the food chain. There’s no doubt about that. They’re not exactly hunting humans to extinction, right? If anything, you’re their livestock, so it tends to be in their best self-interest to keep their livestock fat, happy, and protected from outside predators if they can.”

“...”

“So, do you want to rock the boat? Shake up the snow globe? Toss the cookies? Someone else will be in charge if you overthrow the Illuminati. You’ll be in charge. That’s a lot of responsibility. Do you think humans will do a better job than the lizards?”

“…” Isaac looked to Tupac for help before deciding that he wanted to star in his own allegory, his own fable, his own tall tale, his own hero’s journey. Determined and full of resolve, Isaac swelled up his chest before declaring, “Yes, we will. We will do a better job.”

“My nigga,” Tupac said while giving Isaac a congratulatory slap on the back. Isaac beamed. Whatever heaven was or wasn’t, it paled in comparison to the transcendence Isaac felt after Tupac categorized him, a white boy, as “my nigga.” That honorific, combined with Anne’s approving smile, let Isaac know he had made the right decision to take on and take down the Illuminati.

Suddenly, there was an unexpected knock at the door.

“Zee! You came!” Tupac blurted out when the door opened. “I knew you would!”

“I’m sorry, mates. I hope you don’t mind my eavesdropping while I was waiting in reception, but I couldn’t help but overhear some of what was being discussed. And, well, is there anything I can do to help?” asked Margot Robbie, all smiles.