Come and Watch a Man Die! Read online

you?!” screamed a character from the first Hellraiser film.

  “ANGELS TO SOME, DEMONS TO OTHERS,” replied Pinhead. “EXPLORERS IN THE FURTHER REGIONS OF EXPERIENCE.”

  “Don’t you channel, too?” Vidmar said to the interviewer. “You might not hear the gods, but don’t you resonate with something outside yourself? Why do you dress the way you do? Hold the opinions that you do? Celebrate the holy days that you do? Did you come up with them on your own? Or did you accept them, as they were, from a source outside yourself?”

  At that very moment, Sigmund was in the basement far beneath the gallery, in a concrete maze of industrial decay called the Pig Pen. He desperately needed a walk and some distraction. He could not shake the feeling that Vidmar was going to somehow embarrass him; Sigmund had too many contacts in attendance at the execution, too many potential partners, too many old heads watching him and waiting for him to fuck up. It was a fact that Vidmar could not physically escape from the gallery, and legally he had signed away his right to take a shit without one of Sigmund’s partners turning the product into a feature-length 3-D animation and keeping one hundred fucking percent of all profits. There was no way Vidmar could beat him. Still…

  Sigmund reached a door labeled RELAXATION ROOM. He entered and was buffeted by the stench of feces and the groaning of men bereft of humanity. The room was a square concrete chamber with a low ceiling lit by dim uncovered bulbs, and at its center was a fenced in area designed to look like a pig pen. It was full of young men destined to fill powerful positions but currently crawling on all fours, oinking and wallowing in feces. Four cameras watched from each corner of the room, unblinking and still and nonjudgmental. Sigmund crossed his arms and pretended to judge each naked young man thoroughly, though this was actually someone else’s job.

  “Ten years ago,” Sigmund mused aloud, “this sort of initiation would have been impossible. Hell, even a year ago an execution held for profit would have been practically impossible in the States. But not now.”

  He saw one man lying on his back while another sat on his face with heavy, jerking motions, grunting each time. Both men had purple, jiggling erections.

  “We were once gods,” said Sigmund, “and we will be gods once again. But the way is difficult… so difficult. Your dignity only holds you back. Do you realize that? If you preserve your dignity now, how do we know we can trust you later, when we need you? Do you understand? How can we make you senators, CEOs, and proud military men if all you do is worry about your image?”

  The young men were, of course, forbidden to speak or to respond in any way during their initiation. One, however, hunched over and violently broke wind, then laughed moronically. Sigmund nodded darkly. That one understood.

  But the nagging doubt tugged at him again. He turned away from the future leaders of the free world and called his aide’s cell phone. The young man picked up immediately.

  “Sir, where are you? I can’t find you anywhere!”

  “I’m not in the fucking gallery! Stop looking around with your mouth hanging open, you’ll make everyone nervous.”

  “Sir, ah, yes! Yes, sir.”

  “What’s on the monitors right now?”

  “Ah, sir, they’re showing, ah, something about the Hellraiser films.”

  “Let me see it.” Sigmund waited for what felt like an eternity. “Now, damn it!”

  “Sir, I – I – I don’t think I know how to link my cell to the, uh, the feed that’s on the monitors…”

  “Push the fucking video button and hold the phone up to one of the screens, I don’t need fucking HD quality, just an impression.” Sigmund stared at the screen on his cell phone until he saw a grainy image of one of Vidmar’s old interviews. Even at this visual quality, the man was insufferable.

  What is it about this cocksucker? thought Sigmund. What am I missing?

  He could just barely make out Vidmar’s words: “… travel the cosmos looking for select souls and giving them an experience taken to its most extreme lengths. The idea being that something priceless would wait on the other side of that experience.”

  “Oh come on,” Sigmund said aloud. “It’s got to be something more than that.”

  “… salvation, redemption, or maybe transcendence, transfiguration, an emotional transmutation into something else… those are just words, though. It’s probably something beyond words. The Cenobite monks were never quite sure themselves.”

  “That’s enough!” Sigmund shouted into the phone. “Pick up the phone again. Get the car ready. We’re going to his house.”

  “What’s that, sir?” stammered the aide. “You mean Vidmar’s apartment?”

  “His fucking childhood home!” Sigmund shrieked.

  Meanwhile, Vidmar sat in silence while the clock stepped inch by inch towards the last minute he would ever see. No one dared to look at him since Sigmund’s departure. The men of finance and politics continued their banal conversations or watched the hundreds of monitors. Now many of the monitors showed clips from Vidmar’s cooking show, which was called Served on Plates: Featuring Vidmar Links. It was this cooking show that caused many of the world’s elites to begin seriously discussing whether or not they should kill Vidmar Links.

  Served on Plates was revolutionary, first of all, because it did not include pre-cooked dishes. It was a common convention in cooking shows to begin with the cook putting the raw ingredients together, then one of two things would happen: 1) The cook would put the ingredients in the oven, and then remove a dish that had already been cooked, or 2) footage would be edited in such a way that the actual cooking of the meal would not be aired. For Vidmar, a cooking show that did not show the actual cooking of the dish was like a love story that ended when the two main characters decided to marry. Vidmar believed this practice was a contrivance, a lie, a shadow of reality.

  The first episode of Served on Plates featured the one and only awkward moment in the entire series. After Vidmar put together a pan of raw veal tamberlaine, he placed it in the pre-heated oven, checked the time on his watch, then said, “The great thing about those thin strips of veal is that it shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes before we can finally eat.” He then clapped his hands and looked around. The silence from the audience was deafening. “I’ll just clean up over here for a minute,” said Vidmar, and he began tidying up his dirty dishes. This went on for the longest twenty-three seconds in broadcast television, then finally Vidmar looked up and said, “Have you guys ever noticed that the people who run the world are completely amoral sociopaths?”

  This was the beginning of Vidmar’s revolution.

  Over the course of two seasons and fifty-two episodes, Vidmar Links talked about how the affairs of the world were managed while his meals were cooking – and people listened. Instead of railing angrily against the usual suspects in politics (as in, the dichotomy of right versus left), Vidmar spoke about corporate executive officers, hatchetmen who worked for the world’s largest banks, and officers who led private armies. He took the stuff of conspiracy theories and made it sensible; he was not shrill and he did not preach about the end of the world, he simply talked about the world behind the curtain and showed that it was real.

  In the first season’s finale episode, in which Vidmar coupled Southern giblets with pan-seared lima beans, he began with the statement, “Have you guys ever noticed that the people who start wars for profit already have a shit-ton of money, but they also have this bottomless hunger for more and more and more and it isn’t tempered by a sense of right and wrong like most people have?” According to most popular news outlets, this episode was solely to blame for the Winnipeg and Times Square veterans’ riots. Seventeen deaths, millions of dollars in property damage… and Nielsen ratings that guaranteed a second season.

  Guests were included in the second season. Vidmar refused to allow any famous airheads onto his show, but instead showcased only friends, roommates, and local characters. It was clear that Vidmar’s message was more than “just politics” w
hen he cooked up a batch of Cajun-style pancakes with hand-churned mint ice cream (topped with almonds) with his special guest stars, roommate Matt Chris-Mark and a local drug enthusiast called DJ Mystikal Weed 420. Matt the roommate was the very image of modern values and common sense: He was an atheist, a Democrat, and he wore an unassuming t-shirt and a sensible pair of jeans. DJ Mystikal Weed 420 dressed like a video game wizard permanently equipped with a goofball grin and a purple Santa Claus hat. Both cooperated in the creation of the meal. Vidmar pressed them about the existence of God. Matt calmly explained that religious fundamentalism and its legacy of intolerance was a thing of the past and that the universe came into being as a result of the Big Bang. Matt soon lost his cool – in fact, his faced puckered up like an asshole – when DJ Mystikal Weed 420 pressed him on how he could possibly be alive and not consider it a miracle.

  “It’s absurd to be alive, bro,” said DJ Mystikal. “It’s like, crazy, for one, to even think about rocks and shit like that. Why is a rock even there? You know? It’s molecules, right? But then on top of that, you’ve got like, molecules forming into DNA and shit. And that stuff is moving around!”

  “Yeah, well,” responded Matt.

  “You know? It’s moving around, bro!” shrieked DJ Mystikal, laughing as he