Aggregation

CAUTION: Language and grisly images and reality TV

Nothing had happened at the mansion seemingly in forever. Which kinda, sorta was the whole point.

“I don’t give a fuck about manatees,” Mason growled. He then glanced anxiously down at the headset hanging about his neck with his $350 readers and the wood-gripped director’s lens finder that supposedly had belonged to John Ford. He’d hoped for a gig on Yellowstone or at least Yellowstone 1972, and after some flunkie for Taylor Sheridan told him who John Ford was, figured it might help give him some street creed with the Paramount-Plus folks. It didn’t, and he’d never yet used the thing. There were apps for that now, as if Soul Survivor remotely required technique or artistry. 

Chest pounding, he flopped back in his Adirondack. “Swear to God, if my mike had been hot just then, I’d have fed you to the sea cows. Even if this is CBS, the whale-humpers on Twitter would have cancelled me quicker than MAX killed Batgirl. Fucking labradoodles of the sea.”

Cayl took a measured beat. She’d been discovered by Jeff Probst after her work on Netflix’ Rudderless: Death of a Dolphin, which Probst had streamed while attempting to lure narrator Paltrow onto Glamping With the Stars. “Look, while we’re waiting out the strike, we could shoot some footage of the gang cooing over the manatees. Like you said, people love the, uh, fucking things – I could work up a stringout, maybe on the lines of the alliances forging a temporary truce after the blowout last ep. Harmonizing with nature, all that…shit.”

Mason peered out over the ocean. He didn’t get it – he truly didn’t. But he could see it even without fucking John Ford’s magic kaleidoscope. It’s why they’d picked this location on the coast, aside from the fucking ghosts which had yet to show their fucking dead faces and the tie-in with Paramount’s new King miniseries. Public interest in the supernatural – at least among Viacom/PP’s prime demographics -- had surged following the president’s claim to have been visited in the Lincoln Bedroom by the spirit of Ronald Reagan urging closed borders and the sale of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge amid a wholly inexplicable spike in Fairbanks and Juneau polar bear attacks. Paltrow’s 60 Minutes comments on the matter tanked Glamping, opening a prime Wednesday slot for Soul Survivor. Which had gone on hiatus four episodes in, amid the network editor/programmers’ strike and the incident that had occurred moments after the network cut abruptly from the live feed to the highly touted NCIS: Key West/NCIS: Chicago crossover accidentally aleady in progress. If you rewatched the network feed, you could see Probst glimpse away without dropping the shit-eating grin.

Mason pushed out of his porch chair. “Yep, sure, let’s go shoot some fucking sea cows. Oh, c’mon; you know what I fucking meant.”

**

Actually, as Mason squinted down, he decided labradoodles had more intellectual bearing. But Cayl was right – the standard collection of beautiful morons Probst had gathered this time were entranced by the dumb cows. Cows with a Harvey Weinstein face and, well, Harvey Weinstein’s physique. The strike had stifled Mason’s creativity. More agile than Weinstein, though -- at least the enfeebled, bristly version of Weinstein the attorneys had rolled past TMZ during the trial. Had he directed it, he’d once told Cayl, he’d have lost the Goodwill walker with the day-glo tennis balls.“Looked like a fucking Lifeline commercial. Nobody thinks Harvey buys his lube and rohypnol at Costco.”   

Cayl could but silently concur. One of her greatest attributes as an assistant producer, Mason acknowledged. Right this minute, in fact, Cayl was silently assessing the trio of West Indian manatees cavorting at the edge of the ancient pier as Mason rallied the seven remaining contestants.

“This is what the late Coach Hayden Fox would have called a team-building opportunity,” the two-time Emmy short-lister began soberly, assuming these Gen-Zers only knew Craig T. Nelson as Admiral Hornblauer on NCIS:KW/Chi/Hawaii/Vegas – if they even watched scripted shit any more. “I know we’re all pretty still pretty dazed by recent events, and I appreciate everybody keeping the faith while our brothers and sisters in the Editors Guild negotiate a workable contract. Word is, a new contract could be announced by week’s end.”

Truth be told, there’d been a virtual network blackout since The Incident – given the unaired debacle in Episode 4, a blessing in disguise for Mason. As for the “talent,” there was a seemingly unending supply of high-end food and drink, the unprecedented on-air hijinks and Venn Diagram fucking that had dominated Season 3 had set most of the gang free of their external obligations, and nobody was in any hurry to leave even a ramshackle, ostensibly haunted Shangri-La. The NDAs had scarcely seemed necessary, and there’d been no inquiries or edicts from Probst or Network.

“For right now, though, let’s set rivalries and alliances aside. Nature has given us a gift—“ Cayl snorted; Mason glared. “—and we thought we might capture this moment of contemplation and reconciliation for the winter premiere. Or, you know, the spring or summer premiere, or whenever. There’s no restrictions on shooting, as long as nothing goes into post-production. ”

Mason paused, looked down into the blank, bovine faces, then turned back to the manatees. A bristled snout popped above the water, nostrils flaring, and the director moved back a step. Cayl had set him straight after his previous threat, but he didn’t trust anything that big to stay true to its vegan vows.

“So what’s say we start the day with a moment of silence for Trey?”

A couple of the assembled ghosthunter/warriors frowned, looked out to the roiling ocean and the rocky beach where a flamingo and a gull were tussling over a dead tarpon, back up at the mansion, trying to define that something that seemed to elude them. Then all seven heads dropped into an attitude of prayer Mason had neither requested nor was permitted to request under network HR standards.

“Jesus,” Mason muttered, compounding theproblem. Cayl communed with the sea cows, who seemed oblivious to her human presence.

**

There was a truly ancient comedy on one of the implant streams — you could still find it if you were really determined, and if you could put up with the big hair, the outdated P9 references, the clunky coincidences and indecipherable callbacks that demanded the distractive FNote Track, and its quaintly sweet snark and naive notions of friendship and loyalty.

Re had seen it but once, at the post-coital urging of an NYU broadcast history student he’d banged maybe 30 years before. A “cult classic,” a “social phenomenon.” It had in fact been a fairly tasteless affair, as it turned out , making light of the near death of a whale for the purposes of promoting a sociopathic liar’s sexual ambitions. Re’d interned with the Global Oceans Rescue Federation, and they’d parted company over breakfast, both agreed, none too soon. Based on amicus filings by the World Wildlife Foundation, Greenpeace, PETA, and Seaworld’s See Cetaceans campaign, the episode was permanently pulled from streaming archives along with the infamous “We had a deal with the squirrels” episode.

But Re had savored and thus retained one quip delivered by the grandiloquent sociopath “George.” “The sea was angry that day, my friends – like an old man tying to send back soup in a deli.” The last true deli had been bombed by an extreme No More Methane cell following the U.S.’ fifth rejection of the Paris Global Climate Treaty, soup had all-but-vanished from restaurant menus amid the potable water shortages of the ‘40s, and in three decades watching the Atlantic become its own bouillabaisse and climate shifts rendering meteorology a dead discipline, Re joked (or considered joking) he’d never seen anything BUT an angry sea. There were so many things wrong there, but as a result, it was theoretically nostalgic.

Re nonetheless had booked this coastal cruise as his sabbatical gift – a celebration of a life aquatic, as some old Wes Anderson movie had put it, with his guilty avocational pleasure. Processing his mother’s estate, he’d come across three boxes of OG pulp-paper books. While it took some adjustment deactivating his Kinductive Reader implant and fending off the stares on the Metroways and the Impossible Coffee shops, Re rapidly became addicted to the works of Stephen King. The late 20^th Century/early 21^st author had specialized in the horror genre, and had been a key social force in the years leading up to the Second Civil War.

After an attack by a deforestation protester on the Times Square food concourse, he’d inloaded the collected digital works. He’d never devised how to disable the background audio track on the bone-conductive Kindle chip, but tolerating manipulative strings and creaky terror FX seemed a small price for keeping Re’s cranium intact.

“To your left, you’ll see one of the highlights of today’s Tour,” his Carnival-synched implant murmured.

Re perked and stared out the bubble’s hull, above the water line. The old estate was as virtually displayed on the website – a 19^th Century behemoth, weathered but steadfast and daunting on a bluff above the rocky shore. With one significant difference. The latest photo on the site had been taken in the early 2030s, and the fire-scarred clearing just west of the mansion had long-since healed over, if not the west wing itself.

“I don’t know if any of you are old enough to remember the television series Soul Survivor, though I’m sure you history buffs are aware of the events of October 24, 2027, and the scandalous legacy of Brookridge Manor. It was here that nearly the entire cast and crew of the paranormal reality show perished in a fire bombing/shooting spree by Trey Reedus, an apparently disgruntled contestant who’d been ‘ghosted’ during the program’s Tribal Séance only moments before. Reedus, a photographer from Ocala, Florida, had been savaged across social media platforms days before for manufacturing a deepfake video of Kellem Brookridge, the manor’s original owner and lumber tycoon, walking the halls of the mansion. Unfortunately for Reedus, Brookridge had died peacefully in his sleep in 1886 after losing both legs in an 1843 sawmill accident.”

A man of his time, Re reflected as a pod of dolphins glided below his feet. Reedus, not Brookridge. The Floridian’s photography had primarily appealed to lonely and libidinous web crawlers, and Trey was a member of several now-extinct cultural appreciation groups known for scrawling geometrically skewed swastikas on overpasses and synagogues and waging White God’s battle for the community expulsion of such literary terrorists as Judy Blume, Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Schultz, James Baldwin, and, of course, Father Stephen. Soul Survivor’s screeners apparently were as well-read as Mr. Reedus, who as they later discovered also had a tendency toward badly filtered transphobia and misogyny.

He had, nonetheless, been able to translate the writing on the wall, or Walls, as it were, and managed somehow to quickly stockpile guns and incendiaries in 21^st Century rural America after a failed Instagram campaign decrying “cancel culture” failed to command more than a few thousand likes and concurrent online threats against “the network Jews.” CBS carefully affirmed its steadfast commitment to the First Amendment, “if not to the specific views expressed by Mr. Reedus,” but the execs liked their viewership old and scared, not proactively psychotic. Luckily, Probst and Co. were able to hang their caps on outright fraud, which even by that point was a technical deal-breaker.

Well, luckily.

“An investigation into the tragedy revealed that the local realtor who leased the historic mansion had for years fraudulently claimed the Brookridge manor to be haunted, by her own admission to pursue historical landmark designation and improve resale appeal without having to make key code upgrades. At the same time, the families of the seven remaining contestants, crew members, and producers filed a multi-billion-dollar suit against CBS, Paramount, and the late Probst’s production company, and with public outcry narrowly edging demand for more of the same, competitive reality ended nearly overnight. As for Trey Reedus, authorities confirmed through dental records that charred remains found in the gutted parlor of the mansion were indeed the arsonist/murderer’s. 

“And ironically, because of his actions, Brookridge Manor was restored to the National Registry of Paranormal Sites 10 years ago, after an EPA hydrothermic research vessel spotted what looked to be trespassers on the condemned property, heavily dressed and without respiratory gear despite record October temperatures. In photos taken by the crew, the dozen or so trespassers could not be identified, and the crew could find no corresponding human heat signatures...

The implant went silent, and for one moment, Re was concerned he might have to have the cortical chip recalibrated or even replaced. Then the AI voice returned, slightly and artificially breathless, with an edge of synthesized wonder. 

“Oh, my. We have a real treat for our Carnival Paranormal Reward guests today. If everyone could please focus their attention on the pier to the left of the mansion…”

Re swiveled as the bubble rose a few feet above the waves. His heart quickened as he spotted it. A half-ring of figures, absurdly disturbing in jeans and flannel on a typical 120-degree October morning. He adjusted his glasses, and could make out that their heads were bent in, what, prayer? Officiated by a short, thin man in an expensive looking down vest, who stood out from the young, svelte men and women seemingly absorbed in his evey word. Several yards away, at the edge of the decipit old dock, a crouching ninth figure looked up, and Re looked abruptly away, uncertain whether what he saw under its shock of red hair was a refractive trick of the superheated water or some veil between spatial, temporal, or dimensional planes, or what he almost certainly knew it to be.

Re suddenly felt something nostalgic. Empathy. For this creature, for the seven eternally lost souls seeking, what, release, mercy, forgiveness, just an acknowledgment of something, anything beyond? 

“The ship biologist informs me an aggegration of manatees has gathered at the shoreline, and although we have no way of confirming it, it would appear the entity you see at the end of the dock is attempting to interact with them. Now, of course, manatees are not at all uncommon in this area – global boiling off the Florida coast forced a number of species northward, and with recreational boating and commercial fishing curtailed along most of the Eastern Seaboard and their habitable range extended, manatee numbers have grown nearly tenfold over the past decade alone. Recent research indicates that like dolphins, manatees may be particularly sensitive not only to sounds beyond our grasps, but also to spiritual energies. Who knows?”

Like a weak digital signal, the figures on shore flickered and eventually glitched out. Re fell back in his seat, incredibly both disappointed and…relieved.

“Our captain informs me a rapidly moving hyperthermafront is moving this way, so we’re going to head on out. Just to remind you – complementary high-resolution photos of this morning’s occurrence are now available on the forward deck. We at Carnival’s King’s Tour of Paranormal Maine hope it made your voyage even more supernaturally special.”      

Re smiled despite himself. As the horizon darkened in prelude to the next onslaught, the next overture building to a crashing finale, he was heartened by the notion that there might be another stage, a life after extinction. As the bubble settled back into the cradling sea, Re glanced at the rising depths beneath his feet to find a trio of bristled, bovine faces staring right back up at him, curious perhaps, perhaps pitying. The manatees trailed the bubble as far as their considerable bulk and meager stealth would take them, and as the small aggregation disappeared into the murk, Re tapped his left temple, brought up his library, and, in a moment of impulse, bypassed King for something by Melville.   

**

Cayl looked up as the manatees abruptly pivoted toward the open sea. It all began to come back to her again, as it did more times than she knew, as she watched what appeared to be a huge bubble rise from the rough surf. Mason and the Beautiful Morons were still eulogizing the psychotic monster who’d somehow caused all this and praying for, what, a timely end to the strike and short network/viewer memory?

Cayl shuddered as she reached out again to the pod or whatever they called a herd of sea cows whose GPS had gone woefully haywire, catching sight of the skin running from ruined nails into her jacket sleeves. The trio was about to bolt, and Cayl leaned over the dock to catch one last glimpse. The lack of a reflection didn’t register, and as the manatees retreated, she instinctively turned toward the house, toward the black hole that looked like some gaijin had emerged from this off-kilter ocean and taken a bite for the road. It was watching her, again, she realized. A mass of charcoal and dried blood, one arm now perpetually merged with a twisted, barely recognizable piece of metal. The redneck’s wet dream, Cayl mused, flipping it off two-handed.

The briquette-thing’s jaws unhinged, and it mouthed something, vestigial lips pursing on the first syllable, popping on the last. Same thing it’d said to her leaving the Séance Circle for what would be his posthumous 15 minutes.

“Wow, who writes your dialogue, you fucking overdone putz?” Cayl Rosenweig muttered.