Swamp Story: a Novel, page 11
“Play it again,” said Ken.
Kark played it again, looked at Ken.
“Should I maybe say more words?” said Ken.
“Like what?” said Kark.
“I dunno,” said Ken. “But it’s like, I’m the one discovering this thing, and”—he nodded toward Slater—“he’s saying more total words about it.”
“I’m just reacting,” said Slater. “It’s like a natural reaction.”
“Right,” said Ken. “But it’s a long reaction. I say just the one sentence, ‘What is that thing,’ and you’re saying two sentences of reaction.”
“It’s really just one sentence,” said Slater. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know, looks like some kind of monster.’ ”
“That’s two sentences,” said Ken.
“Not really,” said Slater.
“Yeah, really,” said Ken. “Also I think we need to get the word ‘melon’ in there. Like a branding thing. I got Everglades Melon Monster T-shirts coming.”
Stu, who had been following the debate closely, said, “How about this. After Slater says his lines, we have Ken saying another line, to even things out word-wise. Can we do that, Kark?”
“Like tack it on at the end?” said Kark.
“Right,” said Stu.
Kark nodded. “We can do that. We can shoot it outside right now.”
The four men went outside, where Jesse, Brad and Phil were sitting in lawn chairs—Phil dozing; Jesse feeding Willa and thinking; Brad still trying without success to come up with something to say to Jesse.
Stu prodded Phil awake. “You OK, big guy?”
“Not really,” said Phil. “You guys done?”
“Almost,” said Stu. “Phil, this video, it’s fucking fantastic.” He looked at Jesse. “ ’Scuse my French.”
Jesse waved it away.
“Seriously, Phil,” said Stu, “you wouldn’t believe how good you look.”
Phil sat up. “I’m not recognizable, am I?”
“Not at all,” said Stu. “You look like this weird… blob thing.”
“Thank God,” said Phil.
“We’re just shooting a little more dialogue now,” said Stu.
“There’s dialogue?” said Phil.
“A little. Between Ken and Slater, when they see the monster, the two gladesmen reacting.”
“Gladesmen,” muttered Brad, shaking his head. Jesse looked over and gave him a smile that made his stomach turn over.
Stu wandered over to the edge of the clearing, where Kark, with Slater watching closely, was positioning Ken for his line.
“OK,” said Kark. “I’ll count down, and you say your line.” He put the camera to his eye and said, “Three, two…” He pointed a finger at Ken.
“It’s a melon monster, all right!” said Ken, staring into the lens. “And it’s—”
“Cut,” said Kark.
“What’s wrong?” said Ken.
“Don’t say it into the camera,” said Kark. “You’re saying it to Slater.”
“Oh right,” said Ken. “OK.”
“All right,” said Kark. “In three, two…”
“It’s a melon monster, all right!” said Ken dramatically, looking at Slater. “And it’s heading in the direction of Bortle Brothers Bait & Beer!”
“Cut,” said Slater.
Kark pulled the camera down. “You don’t say cut,” he said. “I say cut.”
“OK,” said Slater, “but that was two sentences.”
“No, it wasn’t,” said Ken. “I said it’s a melon monster, and it’s heading toward Bortle Brothers Bait & Beer.”
“Which is two sentences,” said Slater. “Plus, why’re you mentioning your store?”
“It’s called product placement,” said Ken. “Which I paid five hundred fucking dollars for.”
“He has a point,” said Kark.
“OK,” said Slater, “but maybe I should say one more sentence. Even up the word count. Maybe I say something about Glades Guy, for the branding.”
“Glades Man,” said Kark. “We can put that in another video. I think this one has enough dialogue. We don’t want to turn it into Citizen Kane.”
“Who?” said Slater.
“Never mind,” said Kark. “Look, lemme just edit Ken in and we can get this out on social media.”
“Like tonight?” said Ken.
“Absolutely, tonight,” said Kark. “You have a YouTube account?”
“Not yet. I was gonna—”
“What about TikTok or Instagram?”
“Not yet. I think I’m on whaddyacallit. MySpace.”
“Seriously?” said Kark. “MySpace?”
“Yeah, but I don’t remember my password.”
“Never mind,” said Kark. “I’ll create some Bortle Brothers accounts. We’ll put it up, send links out to some people, see if we can make this thing go viral.”
“You think it could?” said Stu.
“Only one way to find out,” said Kark. “Upload it and see what happens.”
He headed back to the cabin, trailed by Ken, Stu and Slater.
Meanwhile Phil had fallen asleep in his lawn chair. Brad and Jesse sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to Phil snore. Then Jesse said, “So this whole swamp monster thing was your brother’s idea?”
“Afraid so,” he said.
“And you guys have a store out here?”
“Yeah. Bortle Brothers Bait & Beer. We sell bait. Also, beer.”
She smiled again, and Brad’s stomach turned over again. “So you guys are the Bortle brothers?” she said.
“Actually, it was our dad and our uncle. They were the original Bortle brothers.”
“But you grew up out here.”
“Born and raised.”
“So you’re an actual gladesman.”
“I guess I am.”
“You know the swamp.”
“I do.”
Jesse looked at him for a few seconds. “There’s some… There’s some weird people out here,” she said.
Brad nodded. “Definitely. Any particular ones you’re referring to?”
Jesse started to answer, stopped. She wanted, very much, to talk to somebody about her situation, and Brad seemed like a nice enough guy. But most guys were nice to her, at least at first. She decided she really didn’t know him.
Finally, she said, “Nobody in particular.”
Brad nodded, waiting for her to say more, but she didn’t. They sat in silence for a while. Then Brad said, “Look, you don’t know me, but if you need anything… I’m not saying you do, but if you do, if there’s… if I can help with anything…” He pulled out his wallet and extracted a stained BORTLE BROTHERS BAIT & BEER business card and handed it to Jesse.
“Wow,” she said. “Professional.”
Brad smiled. “My brother had these printed up. He gets these ideas, like we’re a real company. He watches Shark Tank. Anyway, if you need to call me, the first number’s disconnected, but the bottom number’s my cell.”
“Thanks,” said Jesse.
Stu had drifted back over to the lawn chairs. He prodded Phil awake.
“Can we go now?” said Phil.
“Yeah,” said Stu. “They’re almost done in there. Where’s the head?”
“Over there,” said Phil, nodding toward where the head lay in the dirt, grinning at the night sky. “But I never want to see it again.”
Stu walked over and picked it up, handed it to Phil. “You never know,” he said.
“Oh, I think I know,” said Phil, taking the head anyway. He rose, painfully, and nodded goodbye to Brad and Jesse.
“Sorry again for running you over,” he said to Jesse.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Really.”
He shook his head. “I still can’t get over that. You could play offensive tackle for the Dolphins.”
“Why thank you,” she said.
Stu and Phil left. A minute later Ken emerged from the cabin.
“OK,” he said. “It’s uploaded. You ready, Brad?”
“Yeah,” said Brad, getting up. He turned to Jesse. “So… good night.”
“Good night,” she said. “Thanks for walking me back.”
“Anytime,” he said. “Really.” He immediately regretted the “really,” which he thought sounded desperate, although in fact he really did hope she would call him, although he couldn’t imagine why she would, based on the impression he believed he was making on her. He hated it, this yawning gap between what he wanted to say to this woman and the words that actually came out of his mouth. At the moment, what he found himself saying to her—his parting words, following up on “really”—were: “OK, then.” Having expressed that deep thought, he turned and followed Ken, moving quickly before he could blurt out something even stupider.
When they reached the path, Ken said, “You got no shot, you know.”
“What?” said Brad.
“With her,” said Ken, nodding back toward the cabin. “She is way out of your league, no offense.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Brad. “I’m not trying to… I’m not interested.”
“Really,” said Ken. “Could’ve fooled me.”
“Well I’m not interested in her.”
“That’s good, bro, because like I said, you got no shot.”
“That’s fine with me,” said Brad.
Chapter 23
The final edit of the Everglades Melon Monster video had a running time of sixteen seconds. Kark uploaded it to TikTok shortly before midnight.
By 9:53 a.m. the next day, it had been viewed 3,247 times.
The 3,248th viewer was a twenty-seven-year-old Brooklyn deejay and social media influencer known as Lemons Rockwell, who had 8.3 million TikTok followers. He was very, very high when the TikTok algorithm chose to show him the Melon Monster video. It instantly resonated with him. He decided to use it in a TikTok “duet,” meaning he created a split-screen video with the Melon Monster video running on the right side of the screen, and a video of himself reacting on the left side.
For the first two-thirds of the video—the Melon Monster walking, then turning toward the camera—Lemons Rockwell merely stared into the camera with a puzzled frown. When Ken appeared onscreen and said, “What the heck IS that thing?” Lemons Rockwell arched his right eyebrow quizzically. When Slater appeared and said, “I don’t know! Looks to me like it could be some kind of a monster!” Lemons Rockwell’s left eyebrow went up, joining the right one. When Ken said, “It’s a Melon Monster, all right! And it’s heading in the direction of Bortle Brothers Bait & Beer!” Lemons Rockwell smiled and nodded, as if the mystery had been solved.
That was it. That was the entirety of the Lemons Rockwell contribution to the original Everglades Melon Monster video: sixteen seconds of Lemons Rockwell reacting. He did not say a word. He spent less than three minutes on his duet, from conception to execution.
He posted it to TikTok at 10:17 a.m.
By eleven a.m. it had been viewed 238,436 times.
By noon it had nearly reached a million.
By two p.m. it was approaching five million, with no sign of slowing down.
It was also inspiring a wide variety of variations and riffs. People were posting duets of themselves reacting to the Melon Monster, or with Ken and Slater replaced by celebrities, including Pat Sajak, Homer Simpson, Adele, Barry Manilow, Jay-Z, and Margaret Thatcher. People were adding dubbed music to the video, and splicing in scenes from TV shows and movies, including The Godfather. People were inserting snippets of the Melon Monster into other videos, including a particularly sophisticated mashup with a grainy 1945 black-and-white newsreel in which the Melon Monster appears to be wading ashore with the Allied troops at Normandy Beach. In another the Melon Monster was dancing with a young John Travolta in a disco scene from Saturday Night Fever.
By the end of the day the phrase “It’s a melon monster, all right!” was everywhere on the Internet, and there had been hundreds of thousands of Google searches involving the phrases “Melon Monster” and “Bortle Brothers Bait & Beer.” Several Internet communities were engaged in intensive efforts to determine the identities of Ken and Slater, especially Slater, who suddenly had many ardent fans, mostly, but not all, female.
There was also a great deal of speculation about the original video. Many saw it as a joke or prank, but some saw it as a brilliant, so-bad-it’s-good marketing ploy—for a movie, perhaps, or a yet-to-be-revealed product, or Lemons Rockwell.
Still other people—a minority, but a highly motivated minority—took the Melon Monster seriously. These people were mostly members of a subculture known as cryptozoologists, who believed in what they called cryptids—creatures such as Bigfoot, the yeti and the Loch Ness Monster whose existence was not recognized by traditional scientists. The cryptozoologists were excited by the original Melon Monster video, which they analyzed, frame by frame, as though it were the Zapruder film. Some were skeptical, but some respected members of the cryptozoology community were convinced it was real, and possibly related to the skunk ape.
By midnight, tens of millions of people had seen some version of the Melon Monster. People in Taiwan were lip-syncing Ken and Slater. Less than twenty-four hours after Kark had posted the original video, more people—far more people—were aware of the Melon Monster than could name the current vice president of the United States.
And it was just getting started.
Chapter 24
“Wake up, Ken.”
Brad poked his brother, who had passed out on the couch in the cramped living room of the little wooden house behind Bortle Brothers Bait & Beer, the house they’d grown up in.
“Fuck off,” said Ken, shoving Brad’s hand away.
“No,” said Brad, poking him again. “You gotta get up right now.”
Ken rolled over, grabbed his phone, looked at it.
“Why?” he said. “It’s seven fucking thirty.” They usually opened the store at nine, sometimes later. It didn’t seem to matter.
“Just get up,” said Brad.
Muttering, Ken rose, staggered into the bathroom, urinated, staggered back out.
“What?” he said.
“Take a look out front,” said Brad, opening the door. Ken went out and walked around the side of the store.
“Holy fuck,” he said.
The Bortle Brothers parking lot, normally an empty expanse of rutted dirt, had a dozen cars parked in it. Two more were pulling in off the highway at that moment. A crowd of maybe twenty people—they all looked to be in their teens or early twenties—had gathered in front of the store. One of them, a scraggly bearded kid in a T-shirt that said LUKE, I AM YOUR UNCLE—spotted Ken and said, “That’s him! The guy from the video!”
The crowd surged toward Ken.
“Holy fuck,” he said again.
Chapter 25
Phil knocked on the door of the West Kendall condo and waited, steeling himself for the worst. This was the right move, because the worst was exactly what happened: His ex-wife, Laurie, opened the door.
“Hello, Laurie,” he said.
“What do you want,” she said.
“I, uh, I texted Stella. She said she was here.”
“Yes. She lives here.”
“Right. I have something to give her. The money for her school trip.”
Laurie stared at him for a few seconds, during which Phil was pretty sure she was thinking about unpaid child support. Then she said, “She’s in the kitchen.” She turned and walked away, leaving the door open.
Phil took this as an invitation, or at least permission, to enter the condo. He was surprised, because Laurie had never invited him in before. Laurie loathed him.
Not that he blamed her. He had, as Laurie’s husband, done a loathsome thing: He had cheated on her, and he had done it while she was undergoing treatment for breast cancer.
It could be said, in Phil’s defense—although nobody, including Phil, defended Phil—that there were extenuating circumstances. His marriage with Laurie had been on shaky ground for several years, and the original cause of that shakiness had been Phil’s discovery that Laurie was exchanging suggestive, sometimes borderline-explicit, texts with an old boyfriend. When Phil confronted her, she was ashamed and remorseful; she swore, sobbing, that nothing physical had happened, that she deeply regretted it, that it would never happen again.
Phil believed her, but the delicate balance of their marriage had been disturbed; there were nagging suspicions, a subtle undercurrent of tension. Phil, who had always been a drinker, dealt with the situation by drinking more, telling himself that it was Laurie’s fault, although the real reason was that he really liked to drink. His drinking got worse when Laurie was diagnosed with cancer—another good excuse for him—and he was very drunk when, after a late night with some newspaper colleagues in a bar, he had hasty, blundering sex in his car with a digital content provider he didn’t actually like at all when he was sober.
Word of this event got around quickly; these were, after all, journalists. Laurie confronted Phil and demanded that he do something about his alcohol problem. Phil, like most people with alcohol problems, insisted that he did not have an alcohol problem—that, yes, he had made a mistake, but he was under a lot of stress, and besides, hadn’t Laurie made a mistake too?
Laurie, sick and weak and scared, was not receptive to this argument. She kicked Phil out of the house and filed for divorce. This was traumatic for Phil, but it also gave him yet another solid reason, and more free time, to drink. He started showing up at the newspaper drunk, blowing deadlines and getting into vicious shouting arguments with editors. Eventually he managed to get himself fired. Which of course warranted more drinking.
Thus Phil transformed himself, in the opinion of everyone who knew him, from a likable family man and award-winning reporter into an asshole drunk who had cheated on his sick wife and lost his job. In time, as he descended deeper and deeper into loserhood, Phil came to agree with this unflattering assessment. He was not ready to give up drinking; it was the only way he knew to make himself feel better, or at least less bad. But he understood now that the cause of his problems was himself.
