The End Has Come

THE LAST MOVIE EVER MADE Charlie Jane Anders

People tossed around words like “collapse of civilization” and “post-apocalyptic,” but really everything was the same mess as always. Only without any soundtrack, since the whole world had gone deaf, and with a “militia” of guys in red bandanas swarming around killing everyone who got in their way, and putting loads of “undesirables” into prison camps. But civilization, you know, has always been a relative thing. It rises, it falls, who can keep track?

So some kind of sonic weapon had gone off the wrong way, and now absolutely everybody in the world had lost their hearing. Which was a mixed curse, sort of. Sneaking up on people was suddenly way easier — but so was getting sneaked up on. The fear of somebody sneaking up behind me and cutting my throat was the only thing that kept me from being bored all the time. I always thought noise was boring, but silence bored me even worse. And if you walked up behind someone, especially a member of the red-bandana militia who were keeping order on our streets, you had to be very careful how you caught their attention. You did not want a red bandana to think you were sneaking up on them. And often, you’d find a whole street of stores that were there yesterday were just burned-out husks today, or bodies piled in an odd assortment, like corpse origami.

I found myself sniffing the air a lot, for danger or just for amusement. If anyone had still been able to hear, they probably would have been doubled up laughing, because we were all going around sniffing and grunting and mumbling in funny voices as soon as we had no clue how ridiculous we probably sounded.

Almost every corner seemed to have red bandanas standing on it, looking bored and desperate for someone to fuck with them.

But meanwhile, I was Entertainer Explainer’s New Talent of the Month, because I’d managed to avoid getting murdered in an amusing fashion, and the video had gone mega-viral. I was seeing my own face on shirts and on people’s phablets more and more often. Our film showed the part where Reginald, the wild-eyed mustache dude in the Viking helmet, was chasing me around and trying to tear my arms and legs off, but not the aftermath, where Reginald got pulverized and lit on fire by the red bandanas. (That part, maybe, not as funny.) In any case, Sally and I were suddenly kind of famous, and we had to clear out our freezer to make room for all the meat and casseroles and stuff that people kept bringing over.

Everybody was bracing themselves for the next thing. We still believed in money, kinda-sorta, even after a ton of people had lost their savings and investments in the big default spiral. We didn’t not believe in money, let’s put it that way. We still had electricity and cell phone service and Internet, even though many parts of the country were on-again, off-again. The red bandanas and the rump government needed a cellular network as bad as the rest of us, because they needed to be able to organize, so until they figured out how to have a dedicated network and their own power sources, they would make sure it kept running for everyone. We hoped so, anyway.

Sally and I spent hours arguing about what sort of movie we should make next. All of my ideas were too complicated or high-concept for her. I wanted to do a movie about someone who tries to be a gangster but he’s too nice — like he runs a protection racket but never collects any money from people. Or he sells drugs but only super-harmless ones. So the other gangsters get mad at him, and everyone has to help him pretend to be a real gangster. And he does such a good job he becomes the head gangster, and then he’s in real trouble. Or something.

Anyway, Sally said that was too complicated for people right now; we had to shoot for self-explanatory. Some of the film geeks wanted us to make a movie about the fact that everyone was deaf, but that seemed like the opposite of escapism to me — which I guess would be trapism, or maybe claustrophilia.

Sally was all about recapturing the Vikings-and-Samurai glory, like maybe this time we could have Amish ninjas who threw wooden throwing stars. I was like, Amish ninjas aren’t high concept? I was happy to keep debating this stuff forever, because I didn’t actually want to make another movie. Whatever part of me that had let me turn calamity into comedy had died when I fell out of a window on top of Reginald and watched him die on fire.

Snow fell. Then hail, then sleet, and then snow again. Things felt dark, even during the day, and I felt like my sight, smell, and touch were going the way of my hearing. Only my taste burned as strong as ever. Everything was salty, salty, salty. You could slip and break your leg in a ditch and nobody would know you were there for days and days.

This was going to be a long winter.

I stared up at the giant scrolling light-up banner over Out Of Town News in Harvard Square. I blinked the snow away and looked a second time. It still looked like my name up there.

Okay, so this was it, the thing my school therapist had warned me about back in fifth grade: I was going narcissistophrenic and starting to imagine that toasters and people on the television were talking to me. It was probably way too late to start taking pills now.

But then a guy I had met at one of our movie shoots saw it too. He tugged my sleeve and pointed at the scrolling words. So unless he and I were both crazy the same way, it really did say my name up there.

A bus zipped past. (They’d gotten a few buses running again.) The big flashing screen on the front didn’t say, “WARNING. BUS WILL RUN YOU OVER. GET OUT OF THE WAY” as usual. Instead, it said, “ROCK MANNING, YOU CAN MAKE A CONTRIBUTION TO REBUILDING SOCIETY.” I grabbed the guy, whose name was Scottie or Thor or something, and pointed at the bus for more independent confirmation that I wasn’t losing it. He poked me back and pointed at a big screen in the display window of Cardullo’s delicatessen, which now read, “ROCK MANNING, COME JOIN US.” I grabbed my cell phone, and it had a new text message, much the same as the ones I was seeing everywhere. I almost threw my phone away.

Instead I ran toward the river, trying to outrun the words. Over the past few months since everyone went deaf, I’d seen the screens going up in more and more places, and now all of a sudden they were all talking to me personally. Computer screens on display at the big business store, the sign that normally announced the specials at the Mongolian buffet place — even the little screen that someone had attached to their golden retriever’s collar that would let you know when the dog was barking. They were calling me out.

I got to the river and ran across the big old stone bridge. In the murky river water, the letters floated, projected from somewhere in the depths: “WHY ARE YOU RUNNING? WE THOUGHT YOU’D BE FLATTERED.”

When I got to the other side of the bridge, Ricky Artesian was waiting for me. He was wearing a suit, and instead of the red bandana, he had a red handkerchief in his breast pocket, but otherwise he was the same old Ricky from high school. He held up a big piece of paper:

“Relax, pal. We just need your help, the same way we needed you once before. Except this time we’re going to make sure it goes right.”

As if I would ever forget the time I got blackmailed into helping Ricky’s crew make a propaganda movie — that was the start of me losing my mind. As our movies had gotten more popular, Sally had gotten paranoid that terrible early film, in which I played a heroic red bandana, would turn up online and ruin our credibility. But I was pretty sure it was lost forever.

Ricky had a couple other guys in suits behind him, also clearly red-bandana honchos. I thought about jumping off the bridge, and kept looking over my shoulder at a dark shape below me. The river had defrosted but still looked chilly. I looked over the edge again, tossed a mental coin and jumped.

The loose boat was right where I thought it was. It had drifted downriver from the Harvard boathouse, and I landed in the stern without capsizing it all the way. I righted the boat and found the oars. Someone had either forgotten to chain it up, or had vandalized the chain. I slotted the oars into their nooks and started to row. I’d never sculled before, but how hard could it be?

After half an hour of rowing as hard as I could, and going in the same circle over and over while Ricky watched from overhead, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. I texted Sally that I was in a boat trying to escape and didn’t know how to row. She Googled rowing. She said I needed to straighten out and row the same amount with both oars, and then maybe I’d stop going in circles. Also, go with the current. Meanwhile, Ricky and his friends were grabbing a big, scary-looking hook.

I tried to figure out what the current was. It took me a long while to find a drifting leaf and figure out I should go the same way. I tried to row in that direction, but the boat kept veering and swerving. Then I saw a bench right in front of me that looked like someone was supposed to sit facing the other way. So maybe part of the problem was that I was sitting backwards? I got myself all turned around, but I lost my grip on one of the oars and it floated away, much faster than my boat had gone so far. At this point, the hook snagged my boat, and a moment later I was a landlubber again.

“Hey Rock,” Ricky said. I was up to about ten percent accuracy with my lipreading. He held out his hand, and I took it out of reflex.

We all went for burgers at this little diner nearby, which had survived everything without changing its greasy ways. I admired that. It even had a little jukebox at each table, and the red checkered vinyl tablecloth with stray burn marks from when you could still smoke indoors. Ricky smoked, because who was going to tell him not to?

“i think it’s great you’re still doing the same thing as in high school,” Ricky’s laptop screen said. He swiveled it around and typed some more, then turned it back. Now it said: “you found something that worked for you, and you stuck with it. that’s kool.” I nodded. If Ricky had been talking instead of typing, he probably would have made this stuff sound like compliments. He typed some more: “you know i always liked you.” The other two guys didn’t try to say anything, or even read what Ricky was typing; they just ate their burgers and stared out the window at the handfuls of students who were crawling back to Harvard.

I didn’t try to contribute to the conversation either, I just read whatever Ricky typed. He hadn’t touched his burger yet. He told me about how he’d moved up in the world since high school, and now he was working for some pretty juiced-up people in government, and everything was really under control. You would be surprised, he said, at how under control everything was.

I nodded and half-smiled, to show that I knew what he meant, but really I didn’t think I would be that surprised.

I thought about the oar that had gotten away from me, floating downriver toward freedom, as fast as it could go. Where would it end up?

Ricky said I shouldn’t worry about a repeat of what happened last time. We were both older and more experienced, and he’d gotten smarter since then. But the thing was, he said, people were still in shock — almost like little children, right now. And they needed their cartoony entertainment to keep their minds off things. So here was the deal: he would get us resources — resources like we couldn’t imagine, like our wildest dreams were this tablecloth and the actuality was up there on the ceiling. And in return, we would just portray authority in a kind way. Nothing too heavy, like everyone wearing the bandana or any army uniforms or anything. Just occasionally we see that the militia and Army are trustworthy, and the people in charge have everyone’s best interests at heart, etc. Most of the time, we’d have a free hand.

I had to get up and go wash my hands so I could type on Ricky’s laptop. I didn’t want to get his keyboard greasy. Then it took me a minute to hunt and peck: “sally wont go for it she thinks you killed her boyfriend which duh you did.”

I swiveled it around before I could think twice about what I’d just typed.

Ricky’s eyes narrowed. He looked up at me, and for a moment he was the legbreaker again. I thought he was going to lunge across the booth and throttle me. Then he typed: “the robot guy?” I nodded. “that was a situation. its complicated, and many people were to blame.”

I tried really really hard not to have any expression on my face, as if it didn’t matter to me one way or the other. I ran out of hamburger, so I ate my fries slow, skinning them and then nibbling at the mashed potatoes inside. Everything smelled meaty.

“tell u what, just dont tell sally im involved,” Ricky typed. “just tell her the government wants 2 support your work.”

It was easy for me to agree to that, because I knew my face was a giant cartoon emoticon as far as Sally was concerned, and she would know within seconds that I was hiding something.

Ricky didn’t threaten to break parts of us if we didn’t go along with his plan, but he didn’t need to, and he only made some gauzy promises about payment. He did say he could get me some rowing lessons.

It took me two hours to find Sally. I almost texted her, but I had a bad feeling about my cell phone.

She was in a group of film students building a giant ramp that looked as if they were going to roll a mail cart into a snowbank. She saw me and then turned away to watch her pals slamming boards together. I nudged her, but she just ignored me. I remembered she’d said something about this movie they wanted to make about a guy who works in the mailroom and discovers a hidden doorway that leads to Hell’s interoffice mail system, and he has to deliver a bunch of letters to demons before he can get out. High fuckin’ concept. Anyway, she was pissed that I’d been blowing her off for weeks, so now I couldn’t get her attention.

Finally, I wrote just the name “ricky a” on my cell and shoved it in front of her without pressing send. Her eyes widened, and she made to text me back, but I stopped her. I grabbed a pad and a pen and wrote down the whole story for her, including the signs in Harvard Square. She shook her head a lot, then bit her lip. She thought I was exaggerating, but the guy who’d seen the signs showed up and confirmed that part.

“We’re so small time,” she wrote in neat cursive under my scrawls. “Why would Ricky care?”

Under that, I wrote: “1. He remembers us from hi skool, unfinished biz. 2. He likes us and wants to own us. 3. He hates us and wants to destroy us. 4. those guys are scared of losing their grip & they think we can help.”

It was a cold day, and I’d gotten kind of wet trying to escape in a Harvard boat, plus the sun was going down, so I started to shiver out there on the lawn in front of BU. Some students were straggling back in, just like at Harvard, and they stared at the set, abandoned half-finished against one wall. Sally gestured for her gang to get the ramp to Hell’s mailroom back into storage.

We piled ourselves into the back of the equipment van, with Zapp Stillman driving, and headed for the Turnpike, because the sooner we got out of town the better.

We got about half a mile before we hit the first checkpoint. There were soldiers with big dragonfly helmets standing in front of humvees, blocking off most of the lanes of Storrow Drive, and between the soldiers and the swiveling cameras on stalks, there was no way you would get past their makeshift barricades. They were checking everybody coming in and out of the city, and a hundred yards past them stood an exoskeleton thingy, or a mecha or whatever they call it, with thighs like Buicks and feet like dumpsters. I couldn’t really see its top half from my hiding place in the back of the van, but I imagined piston elbows and some kind of skull face. The kind of people who built a mech like this would not be able to resist having a skull face. My brother Holman had probably piloted one of these things in Central Asia or Central Eurasia, someplace Central. The pilots of these things had a high rate of going A.U.T.U., because of all the neural strain. This one wasn’t moving, but it was cranked up and operational because you could see the ground shivering around it, and there were fresh kills nearby: Cars still smoking, a few unlucky bodies.

Our van turned onto a side street as fast as possible, and we swerved back toward Boston University. By the time we got back there, Janelle had found some forum posts about the cordoning off of several major cities. It was part of a sweep to round up certain radical elements that threatened the shaky order: you had the red bandanas inside the cities, and the army outside.

We were still in the van, parked on a side street just off Dummer St., sheltered by a giant sad oak that leaned almost to the ground on one side. You could put a tire swing on that oak and swing underground and maybe there would be mole people. Mole people would be awesome, especially if they had their own dance routine, which I just figured they probably would because what else would you be doing stuck underground all the time?

I wasn’t sure if we should get out of the van, or if someone would spot us, but Sally went ahead and climbed out, and Janelle followed. I got out and stood on the sidewalk, shrugging in a sad ragdoll way. Sally stomped her foot and gritted her teeth. She tried some sign language on me, and I got the gist that she was saying we were trapped — every way out of the city would be the same thing. I just looked at her, waiting for her to say what we were going to do, and she looked weary but also pissed. This not-talking thing meant you really had to watch people, and maybe you could see people more clearly when you couldn’t hear them.

I studied Sally. She had the twitch in her forearms that usually meant she was about to throw something. She had the neck tendon that meant she was about to yell at someone, if yelling were still a thing that happened. Her mouse-brown hair was a beautiful mess bursting free of her scrunchie, her face so furious it circled back around to calm. Biting her tongue, the better to spit blood.

She wrote on her phone: “the army outside + red bandanas inside. occupation. city is screwed. we r screwed. trapped.” She erased it without hitting send.

I took the phone and wrote: “red bandanas + army = opportunity.”

She just stared at me. I didn’t even know what I had in mind yet. This was the part of the conversation where I would normally start spitballing and suggesting that we get a hundred people in koala costumes and send them running down the street while someone else dropped hallucinogenic water balloons from a hang glider. But I couldn’t spitball as fast with my thumbs.

I paused and thought about Ricky, and the other bandanas I’d met, and how they were so desperate to be someone’s hero that they were even willing to ask someone like me for help representing them. I thought about Holman, and how much he looked down on civilians, even before he got the A.N.V.I.L. socket in his skull. I thought about how Ricky and his guys had engineered a clusterfuck at that peace protest, making the cops think the protestors were shooting at them so the cops shot back. I thought about how the bandanas weren’t leaving the city, and the army wasn’t coming in.

“i think I have a bad idea,” I wrote.

All my life, there had been a giant empty space, a huge existential void that had needed to be filled by something, and I had never realized that that thing was the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile.

With its sleek red hot-dog battering ram surrounded by a fluffy bun, it was like the Space Battleship Yamato made of bread and pork, made of metal. This MIT student named Matt had been suping it up with a high-performance electric engine and all-terrain wheels, just saving it for the right occasion. And somehow, Janelle had convinced Matt that our little adventure was it.

The tires were the perfect mud color to match the lower part of the chassis, which Matt had rescued from a scrapyard in Burlington. The chassis had a tip as red and round as a clown’s nose on either side of the long, sleek body. This baby had crisscrossed the country before I was born, proclaiming the pure love of Ballpark Franks to anyone with half an eye. Just staring at it made me hungry in my soul.

All around us, Sally’s film-student minions were doing engine checks and sewing parachutes and painting faces onto boomerangs and inflating sex-dolls and making pies for the pie-throwing machine. The usual, in other words. I felt an emotion I’d never felt before in my life, and I didn’t know how to label it at first. Sort of like excitement, sort of like regret — but it wasn’t either of those things. It was lodged down where I always pictured my spine and my colon shaking hands. I finally realized: I was afraid.

People had told me about fear, but I had never quite believed it existed in real life. I watched Zapp Stillman blowing up a blow-up doll, and something wobbled inside me. I had felt guilt and self-loathing, especially after Reginald, but now I felt worry-fear. Zapp saw me looking at him and gave me a cocky little nod. I nodded back.

Sally was busy studying a big road map with Janelle, charting the escape route and where we were all going to rendezvous if we made it out of town. Sally had taken my vague arm-wheeling notion and turned it into an actual plan, which would let us escape to the Concorde Turnpike and make for Walden Pond, that place where Henry David Thoreau had built a comedy waterslide two hundred years ago. And then maybe head west. Find a quiet place (so to speak) to wait things out. Sally handed her magic marker off to Janelle and came over to stand with me.

“What changed your mind,” she wrote in ballpoint on a pad, “about doing more stunts? You were ready to quit, before.”

I took the pad and pen. Chewed the cap. Wrote: “Ricky won’t leave us alone. We gotta blow town and this is the only way. Plus this is different than just making another weird movie. If this works, maybe we ruin the red bandanas’ day. Maybe we ruin their whole week even. PAYBACK.” That last word, I underlined three times. Sally took the pen back from me and drew little stars and hearts and rainbows and smiley faces around it, until it was the most decorated “PAYBACK” you’ve ever seen.

One of our lookouts shone a flashlight, and Janelle nodded, and Sally and I got stuffed into a little cubby under the floorboards with no light and almost no air, with all the cameras and filming equipment on top of us. We were scrunched together, so her knee was in my face and my left arm dug into her side. Every few moments, the floor over us shuddered, like someone was knocking things around. Sally shivered and twitched, so I gripped her tighter. I was starting to freak out from the lack of light and air and entertainment options, but just as I was ready to wobble myself silly, Janelle and Thor (Scottie?) lifted the lid off and pulled us out.

So. Ballpark Figure was the last movie we ever made, and it was probably one of the last movies anybody ever made. It was a mixture of fiction, reality and improv, which Zapp Stillman said was pleasingly meta — we were counting on the bandanas and the army to play themselves in the story, but I was playing a fictional character, and so were Janelle and Zapp. My character was Horace Burton, the last baseball fan on Earth who had been heartbroken since the MLB shutdown and who was driving his giant hot dog vehicle to try and find the world’s greatest baseball players, in a Field of Dreams-with-lunch-meat kind of thing. Janelle was a former hot dog mascot who had turned Vegan but still wanted to keep dressing up as a hot dog, now just a meatless hot dog. And Zapp was some kind of coach. We filmed a sequence of the three of us piling into our hot dog car with some animated cue-card exposition, and posted it online with minimal editing, as a kind of prequel to the actual movie, which we promised would be posted live and streaming, right as it happened, on our video tumble.

By the time we were ready to leave town, an hour before dawn, the Ballpark Figure prologue had been up for a few hours, and we had a few thousand people refreshing our vumble over and over. I had slept a few hours, but Sally hadn’t slept at all and Janelle was guzzling really terrible coffee. Sally wasn’t going to be in the hot dog, she was going to be one of the people filming the action from — I hoped — a safe distance, using Matt’s remote-controlled camera drones, which I had insisted on. If nothing else came of this but Sally getting somewhere safe where she could start over, I could count that the biggest win ever.

As we rolled into the middle of the street and cranked the hot dog up to its maximum speed of fifty miles per hour, I had time as I clambered out onto the outermost front reaches of the metal bun to obsess over the contradiction between Horace Burton and myself. Horace’s goal, in this movie, was to take his hot dog out onto the open road and find the lost spirit of baseball. Horace didn’t want any trouble — but I, meanwhile, had no goal other than trouble, and (if I were being honest) no plans after today.

How was I going to play that, in a way that preserved the integrity of Horace and his innocent love of sportsmanship? In fact — I reflected, as I raised a baseball and prepared to hurl it at the shaved head of the red bandana standing on the nearest corner in front of a shuttered florist — that might be the reason why people root for the comic hero after all: the haplessness. This fresh white baseball was emblazoned with a slogan about bringing back the greatest game, and the story called for Horace to toss them out as a promotional thing, and to hit a militia member in the head purely by accident. So it was important for the story that I not look as though I were aiming. But I also couldn’t afford to miss. Horace is a good person who just wants to bring joy to people, and he gets caught up in a bad situation, and the moment you think Horace brought this on himself through meanness or combativeness, that’s the moment you stop pulling for him.

The baseball hit the teenager in the jaw, over the neatly tied red cloth that looked too big for his skinny neck, and he whipped around and fired off a few shots with his Browning Hi Performance, while also texting his comrades with his free hand.

I tried to wear a convincing look of friendly panic, like I hadn’t meant to wake a thousand sleeping dogs with one stray baseball, and danced around on the front of the hot dog so hard I nearly fell under the wheels. I slipped and landed on my crotch on the very tip of the hot dog, then pulled myself back up, still trying to toss out promotional baseballs and spread goodwill, and it occurred to me for the first time that I had spent so much time worrying that I was going to hurt someone by accident, it never even occurred to me that I would finally reach a point where I would decide to cause harm on purpose.

Our hot dog had red bandanas chasing us, with two motorcycles and some kind of hybrid electric Jeep. I had no idea if anybody was still shooting at me, because I couldn’t see anyone aiming a gun from where I stood on one foot and I couldn’t see any bullets hitting anything —

— until a bullet hit me in the thigh just as the hot dog swerved without slowing and we released the blow-up dolls in their makeshift baseball uniforms. The blow-up dolls flew behind us, and I saw one of them hit a motorcyclist right where the red bandana tucked under his round white helmet, so that he lost his grip on his handlebars and went somersaulting, and I felt the blood seeping through my pants like maybe it had missed the bone but hit an artery and I was cursing myself for forgetting to bring a giant comedy bottle of ketchup to squirt at people, because ketchup is like fake blood only more cheerful, when Ricky Artesian climbed on top of the third car of the five that were now chasing us and held up a big flatscreen TV that read “YOU MADE YOUR CHOICE ROCK TIME TO PAY.” And another bullet tore through my side just as the hot dog made another sharp turn and we disappeared into the tunnel from the abandoned Back Bay T extension project.

The hot dog came to a stop in a dark hutch Xed in by fallen rusted steel girders, just as one of our bready tires gave out and the whole vehicle slumped on one side, and our support crew set about camouflaging the Wienermobile with rocks and planks. Janelle climbed out of the cab and came over to show me the vumble, the insane number of hits we were getting right now and the footage, in a loop, of me hurling baseballs at the red bandanas.

Janelle noticed that I was pissing blood from my leg and my side, and started trying to get me to lie down. Just then a message came through from Sally, who was still masterminding the filming from a remote location: “theyre not taking the bait.” The bandanas were staying on their side of the line and not trying to chase us into the army barricades like we’d hoped.

I slipped out of Janelle’s grasp — easy when you’re as slick as I was, just then — and leapt onto Zapp’s bicycle. Before anybody could try to stop me, I was already pedaling back up the ramp the way we’d come, past the people trying to seal and camouflage the entry to the tunnel, leaping from darkness into the light of day. I raced close enough to Ricky Artesian to make eye contact and hurl my last baseball — absolutely coated at this point with my own blood — at his pinstripe-suited torso. And then I spun and tore off in the direction of Storrow Drive again, not looking back to see if anyone was following me, racing with my head down, on the ramp that led up to the Turnpike.

My phone thrummed with messages but I ignored it. I was already reaching the top of the ramp, all thoughts of Horace Burton, and lovable fall guys in general, forgotten. The checkpoint was a collection of pale blobs at ground level, plus a swarm of men and women with scorpion heads rushing around tending their one statuesque mecha and a collection of mustard-colored vehicles. My eyesight was going, my concentration going with it, and my feet kept sliding off the pedals, but I kept pedaling nonetheless, until I was close enough to yank out my last limited edition promotional baseball, pull my arm back and then straighten out with the hardest throw of my life.

Then I wiped out. I fell partway behind a concrete barrier as Ricky and the other bandanas came up the ramp into the line of fire. I saw nothing of what came next, except that I smelled smoke and cordite and glimpsed a man with the red neck-gear falling on his hands and rearing back up, before I crawled the rest of the way behind my shelter and passed out.

When I regained consciousness, I was in a prison camp, where I nearly died, first of my wounds and later of a fiendish case of dysentery like you wouldn’t believe. I never saw Sally again, but I saw our last movie, once, on a stored file on someone’s battered old Stackbook. (This lady named Shari had saved the edited film to her hard drive before the Internet went futz, and people had been copying Ballpark Figure on thumb drives and passing it around ever since, whenever they had access to electricity.)

The final act of Ballpark Figure was just soldiers and red bandanas getting drilled by each other’s bullets until they did a terrible slamdance, and I have to say the film lost any of its narrative thread regarding Horace Burton, or baseball, or the quest to restore professional sports to America, not to mention the comedy value of all those flailing bodies was minimal at best.

The movie ended with a dedication: “To Rock Manning. Who taught me it’s not whether you fall, it’s how you land. Love, Sally.”