Jonah was idly scrolling through Facebook to pass the elongated pandemic time when he recoiled in horror from the Buzzfeed headline accompanied by a photo of his sister Genevieve’s face. They were releasing the director’s cut of Rise Above Ruination.
The fact that nobody had even bothered to tell him triggered all his bad memories about that whole scene — which, granted, were always pretty close at hand.
He FaceTimed Genevieve. “Did you know?” he demanded as soon as she picked up.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice flat, bored. She was literally filing her nails. “And well, hello to you too.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well, talking about Rise Above Ruination always triggers you big time, that’s why.”
“I ended up on the cutting room floor! How was that supposed to make me feel?”
“Jonah, we’ve all told you a million times, everybody has told you this — it wasn’t personal. You didn’t end up on the cutting room floor. You always make it sound like that. Like as if you, as a human being, literally ended up on the cutting room floor.”
When they were kids, Genevieve and Jonah had both been cast in Rise Above Ruination (AKA RAR, if you’re a superfan), a post-apocalyptic action/sci-fi/thriller about a young girl who loses her family in the grim mayhem following environmental collapse, then has to devise a scheme to hitch a ride off of Earth to start anew on a planet for refugees. Although everyone agreed that the movie felt a little too Mad Max, Genevieve’s character still became iconic as the wise-beyond-her-years-but-still-adorable-tough-and-badass main character, Pixy. These days, Pixy images were frequently fashioned into memes about everything from having a really bad day to poking climate change deniers to being the kind of young woman who kicks somebody’s ass just for looking at her funny, making the whole thing inescapable for Jonah, even at this late date.
Jonah had played a minor part as Pixy’s twin brother, Paxson, a character who granted, died pretty early in the action after their family was attacked by nomadic, water-stealing marauders, a fate Pixy only barely escapes through her innate smarts and moxie. However, his entire performance was chopped. Entire. All that was left of him in the film were lightning-fast flashes of a wrinkled, often tear-soaked family photograph that Pixy famously carried in her pocket, her most treasured and in fact, her only possession other than a knife and the grungy clothes on her back. It could have been some stock photo with random people Photoshopped in, for all anybody knew.
“Seriously — don’t I get royalties or something? Why didn’t anyone tell me this was happening?”
“Maybe you will. I don’t know why nobody told you.” Genevieve sighed. “I mean, that would be good right? If you got some money. Maybe you should call our old agent, what’s-his-name. He might know.”
“What’s-his-name? That’s a horrible way to refer to Tony. So that’s how it is when you get rich and famous? Well, I still don’t know, even if I get some money out of it. If my performance was so bad that it ended up cut, then why would I want the world to see it? There was a reason why Cook took it out.”
“I think the reason was the movie’s run time was almost two and a half hours and he cut a shitload out. Nobody wanted a two-and-a-half hour action film back then, especially not this one. Stop fixating on this! God, why will you never just get over it?”
“That’s easy for you to say, you’re the one who’s still working as an actor now.”
“And the only reason you ever call me is to fight with me!” Genevieve yelled. “Can’t we just be normal!” She bleeped off.
Jonah threw the phone across the room.
Why was he so pissed? He talked to his therapist Craig about the whole Rise Above Ruination thing more than he even liked to admit. He continued to be obsessed with something that happened when he was 10. He was 28 now.
He knew far worse things happened to 10-year-olds all the time. He had a sense of shame about how badly this still made him feel, and how close he harbored and maybe even nurtured the resentment and, occasionally, rage. Still, it was what it was — the whole thing had really, really wrecked him.
He retrieved his phone to call Craig. “Director’s cut!” he yelled.
“Oh, I heard,” Craig replied; his usual calm, even demeanor was mostly a good thing but also sometimes completely infuriating. Like now.
“Great, even you already heard about this. I can’t even believe this.”
“Well, I ran across it on Facebook. TMZ, I think? It just showed up in my feed like these things do.” Craig paused. “Can’t you just reframe this as a positive development, Jonah? You felt so injured by getting cut out of the movie. Now, audiences will be able to see your performance. Maybe you can finally feel vindicated and then you can move on. And we can sort other things out, like your feelings about your parents’ deaths, your sister’s fame –”
“What if my part still isn’t in the director’s cut?”
“Well, I’m sure it will be. RAR superfans have always wanted to know more about Pixy’s actual family and what happened to them.”
“Oh my God, dude, why do you even know about RAR superfans? It wasn’t even that great of a movie!”
“It’s become a cult classic. You don’t have to denigrate it to feel better about yourself.”
Jonah groaned. Was Craig a superfan? The very concept felt like a possible betrayal, maybe some fucked up Trojan horse thing. “Look, I’m just telling the truth. Genevieve feels the same way. That it wasn’t really a great movie.”
“All right, Jonah, do some breathing exercises, be sure to keep up with your meditation and yoga practice — I think we both know what our next session is going to focus on.”
“Yep, got it, bye, thanks for your help,” Jonah said, hanging up and throwing his phone again, enraged at the big blow off.
The pandemic wasn’t helping matters. If this were a normal year, he would have gone out to meet friends, grabbed some drinks, maybe gone for a run, or even daytripped out of town for a long hike. Right now, though, he was frightened of the idea of virus in the hallways and stairwells in his apartment building. Due to his once-per-week travels outside his front door to get his mail, he knew for a fact that some of his neighbors were stupid maskless wonders, and it made him paranoid as hell.
Feeling so trapped made him feel even more triggered by the fact that his 10 minutes of fame had first died on the metaphorical cutting room floor and were now poised for a possible random resuscitation. Right now, it felt like a massive hulking monster, a huge reminder of how little control he had ever had over anything.
His phone rang in the corner and he ran to retrieve it. Genevieve, FaceTime, again.
“Look, I’ve been thinking, Jonah, why don’t you think about getting a job so you don’t constantly freak out about this one thing that happened when you were 10?” Genevieve was flapping her hand, occasionally blowing on her still-wet nails. Jonah knew this was a big sacrifice for her during the pandemic, doing her own manicures. Just like so many other celebrities, she had been doing a lot of those Instagram videos without makeup, and people ate them up — but she still liked to have her nails looking perfect, a different color every time. A couple weeks ago, he had tried to tell her that showing her adoring fans that she was actually human might not be the greatest plan for the long term, which had infuriated her. Today was the first day they had spoken since that particular dust-up.
“Oh, right, the old, ‘get a job’ routine,” Jonah said.
“Umm, yeah, it’s pretty normal, dude. The inheritance from mom and dad won’t last forever, you know. Unless you’re expecting me to float you for the rest of your life after it’s all gone, and I wouldn’t bank on it, buddy.”
“You’re really not helping, Genevieve,” Jonah said.
“God, get a grip, Jonah, dammit!” Genevieve hung up on him again.
As much as Jonah hated to admit it, she was right. It had been gradually dawning on him that his financial situation wasn’t great if he was going to keep on not working — his parents had left him a pretty ample inheritance (in fact, they left most of what they had to him, since Genevieve was more than set due to her acting career), but he’d blown a lot of money on activities that he’d rationalized would grow his “nest egg.” His day trading habit hadn’t gone well, nor had his repeated “investments” in some of his friends’ kooky inventions, most of which never panned out in any conceivable way, unless you counted him receiving a gadget that may or may not function as it was intended. Most of them were buggy if they worked at all and were collecting dust on a shelf or crammed in a closet. Like his stoner friend Joe’s Pocket Flapjack Maker, intended to make pocket-sized pancakes. He might have been a little bit too high the night he’d thrown in money for that one, because today, he wasn’t even sure why anyone would even want portable pancakes about the size of a quarter. (The prototype pretty reliably produced inedible, completely burned pancakes, but they did succeed in being pocket sized, at least.)
He was fine for now, but he didn’t need to be a financial planner to see that he could only go maybe five more years like this, tops. Which triggered even more of a shame spiral, which kept spiraling since he was stuck inside with no way to direct his own negative energy into some other pursuit or distraction. He was pushing 30 and he had no clue what he wanted to do for a living.
His phone rang. “Bro!” Jonah winced as his friend Chris yelled into his ear. “I had no idea you were in Rise Above Ruination!”
“Ah, so you heard the news. Yeah, I try not to talk about it,” Jonah said. Other than to my sister and my superfan therapist, he added silently.
“Damn, dude, your sister got so famous from that. That seriously sucks, you were robbed. Although I still think Genevieve’s super hot, so don’t tell her I think you got robbed.”
“Yeah, trust me, none of that’s lost on me. Including the fact that my sister’s hot. Did that sound weird? I don’t think she’s hot. But I’ve noticed that everybody else thinks she is. Yeah, that’s my life.”
“Man, I can’t wait to see all two and a half hours of that shit though,” Chris said. “That’s going to be so awesome.”
“But is it?” Jonah asked. “I don’t know, the movie is what it is, and if the director cut stuff out maybe that’s how the movie should be. Like how the viewers have always seen it.”
“Man, don’t you want your 10 minutes of fame?”
“It’s more like three and a half minutes total, to be honest. If they even include my footage.”
“You are such a gloomy guy sometimes, Jonah. But I think I can cheer you up. I have the craziest news.”
“Okay, hit me. I’m ready for different crazy news, I guess.”
“The jet pack I’ve been working on. The one you helped fund. It’s ready. It works!”
“What?” He would never have told Chris, but of all the inventions he’d invested in, the jet pack had been the one he’d had the least amount of faith he’d ever see. “Are you serious?”
“Dead serious.”
“It gets more than 10 feet off the ground?”
“Yes!” Chris practically screamed it. “I tested it last week. Try, like, 1000 feet in the air. I think it could go higher, too. I just got kind of scared, to be honest.”
“Holy shit. That’s crazy.”
“Wanna go test it?”
Jonah paused only a minute while he considered the cost-benefit analysis of navigating the plague aerosol-ridden halls of his apartment building and dodging a bunch of antimasker losers there and out on the city streets. He hadn’t been out of the building in weeks and right now, all he was accomplishing inside was this stupid shame spiral about something that happened to him when he was 10 years old. “Damn straight I do,” he said.
He met Chris in a large, thankfully empty park that was off the beaten track and after they elbow bumped, they jumped six feet away from each other, gazing at each other over their masks. The jet pack was pretty big, with two huge plastic tubular handles with a series of control buttons on them. Chris began cleaning those off with sanitizing wipes, which seemed fairly unlike Chris, but Jonah appreciated the effort.
Chris began rapidly firing off specs and tech speak, all of which sounded like Greek to Jonah. (That’s all Geek to me, bro, he thought to himself and giggled a little; fortunately, his mask muffled the sound and Chris was so excited to share his accomplishment that he didn’t even notice.)
“And it’s all thanks to you, my man, for investing in my invention! The world will finally have jet packs! The jet packs we were promised!” Chris concluded, waving a wipe with a flourish. He began showing Jonah the controls he would need to operate it.
Am I crazy? Jonah wondered, unsure if he was even properly following what Chris was even saying, which was probably important. Am I completely nuts?
“Is this even legal?” Jonah asked. “Airspace rules or something? I don’t know. Can’t drones violate those? I kind of think flying around in a jet pack might be worse.”
“We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Does anyone really care?”
“What if somebody around here rats us out?”
“Come on, man, nobody’s paying attention these days. And people definitely never look up. Not even in normal times.”
Jonah thought about saying something about how the pandemic didn’t make all laws null and void, but then realized being an incessant buzzkill could lose you friends and he was probably really pushing it at this point, then remembered his whole point in coming out was that he wanted to do something fun for a fucking change, and his dwindling financial reserves had helped fund this thing anyway. And Genevieve might be famous and one of the sexiest people alive (even without makeup), but she had never achieved a possibly highly illegal individual liftoff with a jet pack, now had she?
He began strapping himself in, fastening a series of heavy belts that he hoped were heavy enough. “You’re sure this thing is safe?” he muttered.
“Sure!” Chris replied, in an ultra-bright way that made Jonah think he wasn’t that sure at all, but everything was in service to the excitement of the present moment.
Jonah ripped off his mask and threw it to the ground, took a deep breath, and pressed the button.
Although the motor was godawful loud, he was surprised at how smoothly he achieved liftoff. Once he was about twenty feet off the ground, he hit the red pause button, a little freaked out. Sure enough, he hovered there, although the motor whirred louder like the contraption was making a slightly ominous complaint. “Keep going!” Chris yelled from below.
“How do I get back down when I’m done again?” he asked.
“Yellow button,” Chris said.
Fuck it, he thought. He hit the green button again and the jet pack chugged as he steadily climbed.
He could soon see the roofs of the houses around the park, a few missing some shingles; a cat crouched atop one (maybe he could rescue it on his way back?). He kept going, taking in the tops of some old, old trees; a cloud of blackbirds erupted from one, jabbering loud and insulted as he passed. Although his finger hovered over the yellow button, he nevertheless kept going… he surpassed the top of a nearby water tower. Someone, somehow, had graffitied a pretty impressive depiction of the coronavirus on top of it, along with the word “HOPE” in huge, bubbly letters.
Jonah thought that was so cool and it should have been enough, but he just kept ascending, a sense of wonder building within him.
Chris had become a mere speck below him, waving his arms — Jonah wasn’t sure if he was cheering him on, or trying to tell him to come back. The houses and roads were shrinking, becoming tiny, inconsequential. Vehicles looked like Matchbox cars. Soon enough, they were even tinier than Matchbox cars, crawling along their thread-like paths like ants, their drivers probably out seeking key items like toilet paper to hoard in their lairs.
As Jonah continued ever skyward, he suddenly clearly remembered his only lines of worth from Rise Above Ruination, Paxson’s dying words.
Avenge us Pixy! Run to the future and escape this dry, dusty death. Rise to the sky and never look back! Rise!
He laughed. He probably would have cringed then wallowed in the humiliation if he had remembered those lines on terra firma, but it all seemed hilarious while soaring into the vivid blue sky using an actual jet pack. Plus, maybe he was too fucking high, which made him feel even more euphoric. He was far, far above director’s cuts, hundreds of thousands of dollars down the drain, career questions that circled in his head endlessly and never came close to a resolution, the stupid, grinding sameness of the fishbowl existence his apartment had become during the pandemic, with the only meaningful interruption being the reopening of a wound inflicted on the 10-year-old version of himself that never seemed to heal.
It had all felt like such a suffocating mess down there. But up here, it all seemed so very small.
The air felt thin, he was literally seeing clouds now, not to mention — unbelievably — a 747 approaching, to pass him by. He squinted; he could just make out the pilots, their shocked expressions.
Jonah waved madly, laughing harder than he had ever laughed in his life. He had never felt so free.