Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

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******

He looked at the roaring, weeping room.

He was twelve years old in a biological human body, and demon in absolutely everything that actually mattered in the universe. And the massive room in front of him was doing exactly the thing that he had calculated it would do.

But the wave of that calculation actually crashing over him had not fully prepared the Incubus for the physical experience of receiving it.

He was not performed by the standing ovation.

He did not wave or pump his fist or weep false tears. He received the worship with the still, composed quality of a man who entirely understood what he had just done to the world, and was acknowledging the surrender honestly.

He rose slowly, gracefully from the piano bench.

He stepped to the center of the stage. He bowed—a proper, deep, aristocratic bow. It was formal and complete, the bow of someone who intimately understood what the gesture meant to some.

The deafening room continued to roar.

---

In a quiet, upscale apartment in New York City, thirteen-year-old Scarlett had been sitting completely, terrifyingly still from the first note of the grand piano through the devastating end of the vocal performance.

When the massive, roaring standing ovation began inside the Shrine Auditorium, Scarlett stood up too. She stood up right in the middle of her carpeted living room, automatically, involuntarily, before her conscious teenage brain had even decided to do it.

Her older brother, Hunter, sitting on the opposite end of the couch with a bowl of popcorn, looked up at her in bewilderment.

”Scarlett, you just physically stood up for a television set,” he pointed out, stating the obvious absurdity of the situation.

”I absolutely did not stand up for a piece of electronic furniture, Hunter,” Scarlett snapped back, her voice thick with emotion, her eyes absolutely glued to the screen. ”I stood up in respect for the performance.”

She stubbornly remained standing for the full, grueling duration of the room’s televised standing ovation. She watched the glowing screen as Marvin gracefully rose from the piano bench and delivered a flawless, aristocratic bow.

As she watched him, she felt the quality of something profound blossoming in her chest. It was an overwhelming feeling that she would spend the next several, formative years of her acting career desperately learning to identify and articulate more precisely.

But in this exact, raw moment, she knew it only as the profound, terrifying sense of having been invited *inside* something that mattered.

”He’s literally twelve years old, Scar,” her brother added, entirely unhelpfully, shoving a handful of popcorn into his mouth.

”I am acutely aware of his biological age, Hunter, thank you,” Scarlett said, not breaking eye contact with the television.

”But you literally stood up and clapped in an empty living room.”

”I know exactly what I did,” she said firmly, a fierce blush creeping up her neck.

She finally sat back down on the couch cushions. She looked at the flashing screen, where Billy Crystal was trying to regain control of the weeping, chaotic auditorium. She picked up the sweating glass of ice water she had carefully set down before the performance began, and she held it with trembling hands, completely forgetting to actually drink it.

”He is... he is completely extraordinary,”

Scarlett whispered softly. She wasn’t really speaking to her brother. She was speaking to herself, to the quiet room, to the universe, or to whoever the profound statement was actually addressed to.

Her mother, Melanie, sitting quietly in the adjacent reading chair with a script in her lap, looked over at her daughter’s starstruck, tear-streaked face.

”Yes, sweetheart,” her mother murmured softly, a knowing, sympathetic smile touching her lips. ”He absolutely is.”

---

Thousands of miles away, in the sweltering heat of Salvador. Adriana had been sitting completely frozen on the tile floor of her family’s living room.

Her hand had been pressed tightly against her chest from the first moment Marvin’s velvet voice emerged from the television speakers, and it remained clamped there until long after the roaring standing ovation had finally subsided and the American broadcast had abruptly, jarringly cut to a loud commercial for Coca-Cola.

She had not moved a single muscle. She had not spoken a single word. Tears had silently, continuously tracked down her cheekbones, ruining her mascara.

When the jarring commercial break finally began, effectively breaking the spell, she slowly, shakily took her trembling hand away from her chest. She let out a long, ragged exhale, as if she had been holding her breath underwater for five minutes.

Her mother, Maria, was standing quietly in the doorway of the kitchen, holding a damp dish towel, looking down at her weeping daughter with deep concern.

”Adriana, *meu amor*,” her mother said softly in Portuguese. ”Are you alright?”

”Yes, Mama,” Adriana whispered, wiping her wet cheeks with the back of her hand. ”I... I think so.” She stared blankly at the bright television screen where the soda commercial was playing. ”I’ve heard that *Titanic* song before. I’ve heard it on the radio many, many times.” She paused, her voice shaking. ”It was entirely different tonight.”

”It was a live broadcast, baby,” her mother offered gently.

”No, Mama. It was more than that,” Adriana insisted, her blue-grey eyes flashing with certainty.

She sat alone with this terrifying realization for a long moment. Then, driven by a sudden, frantic urge, she scrambled up from the tile floor and practically ran to her bedroom to find her copy of the *Titanic* soundtrack CD—the album she had bought in January, that she played constantly on her Discman, that she intimately knew every single note of.

She shoved it into her stereo system, found the exact track, pressed play, and listened intently to the produced, studio recording version of the exact same song she had just watched him perform live on television.

It was little different.

The studio recording was undeniably extraordinary; it was a masterpiece of pop production. But the live Oscar performance had been something else entirely. The recording was merely a beautiful, historical document of what the song technically was. Yes, it can make you cry, but only a few times..

The live performance had been the terrifying, bleeding thing itself, happening in real-time. It had reached through the cheap television speaker, crossed an entire ocean, and plunged its hand directly into her chest with a directness that she had not known was scientifically possible from something that was not happening in her immediate, physical presence..

She lay back on her bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the recording on repeat, and thought deeply about the boy with the blue eyes for a very, very long time.

---

Eight-year-old Emma Charlotte Duerre Watson was intensely watching the Oscars from the cozy, book-lined living room of the Watson family home in Oxfordshire, England.

The American broadcast was available on BBC Two, arriving with the slightly delayed quality of a massive international transmission that had crossed an ocean and several time zones. It arrived significantly past her strict bedtime. However, her indulgent parents had officially extended her curfew on the strict grounds that the Academy Awards were an educational, cultural special occasion.

She was sitting properly in her pajamas on the edge of the floral sofa, her small feet tucked neatly under her, her dark, bushy hair hanging loose around her shoulders. Her expression was that of an intelligent child who was operating at maximum cognitive attention, in a complex context that completely held her interest.

Emma was only eight years old, but she was already—in the slightly terrifying way of certain hyper-intelligent eight-year-olds—someone who possessed researched opinions.

These were not the fleeting, strong preferences of normal childhood, like preferring chocolate over vanilla. Those were universal and boring. Emma possessed considered, analytical assessments developed through genuine, intellectual engagement with the things she was assessing.

She had opinions about literature, which she consumed with the attention of someone for whom reading was a primary function rather than a recreational hobby. She had sharp opinions about adult people, developed through the careful, silent observation that came naturally to someone who had been watching the adult world very carefully for as long as she could remember.

And she had very strong, very specific opinions about Marvin Meyers.

She had read his novel *Kung Fu Panda* at age seven, and had immediately concluded that it was the most interesting, complex children’s book she had ever encountered...

Which was a high standard, given exactly how many children’s books she had already read through. She had earnestly asked her mother why a simple children’s book contained so much complex, Eastern philosophical subtext about destiny, illusion, enemy, fate, to reach out and so much more. Her mother had simply sighed and said it was a very long, Hollywood story.

She had then read *Ready Player One* this year. She was reading significantly ahead of its target adult demographic, but Emma’s reading comprehension level was not calibrated to her biological age. She had found it to be the most compelling, terrifying piece of speculative dystopian fiction she had ever encountered.

And then, there was the music.

She had first heard his wordless vocals through her parents, who had purchased the *Marvin 1* EP in the autumn to play during dinner parties.

The music had done to her exactly what it apparently did to everyone on earth: It reached into her mind and soul. It opened something dark. It produced the quality of feeling that she normally only associated with tragic Russian novels that deeply mattered, rather than cheap pop music that was merely enjoyable.

She had therefore been looking forward to the Oscars broadcast with the vibrating anticipation of a scholar who had an established, intellectual relationship with the artist being globally celebrated, and was eagerly looking forward to seeing that relationship receive massive, public confirmation.

When Billy Crystal made his hilarious, humbling jokes about Marvin’s staggering resume, and the BBC camera found the boy sitting in the Los Angeles audience, Emma leaned forward eagerly. She looked closely at his face on the screen with the evaluative attention she brought to everything in her life.

He looked—she searched for the exact right word in the advanced vocabulary of an eight-year-old—*settled*.

He looked exactly like someone who was sitting where they were supposed to be, and intrinsically knew it, completely without needing any of the adults in the room to validate or confirm it for him. She found this psychological trait endlessly fascinating. Most famous people she saw in magazines and on television had a sweaty quality of *performing* their celebrity situation for the observer. Marvin didn’t. He was simply existing in his power, and the observer could choose to watch him or not. He didn’t care either way.

She thought this was a psychological quality worth developing for herself.

When the live piano performance finally began, Emma sat very, very still. It was the complete, breathless stillness of a child who has been caught entirely by something massive. She listened with the whole of her eight-year-old intellectual and emotional attention.

The song reached her in the terrifying way that his music always reached her. It did not arrive through the tragic lyrics, which she was certainly old enough to process, but which she knew were absolutely not what was primary. It arrived through the quality of the sound itself. The specific warmth of his voice. The strike of his fingers on the piano keys.

And the lethal quality of the combination of those two things, which produced a painful flutter in her chest that she simply didn’t have an accurate dictionary word for yet.

She had the word *magic* available in her vocabulary. It was not quite scientifically possible, but it was significantly closer than any of the other available English words.

When the song ended and the massive, roaring standing ovation began, Emma sat up very straight, her eyes shining with unshed tears, and clapped her small hands together rapidly. She clapped with the complete enthusiasm of someone for whom the social, British management of public response was not yet a consideration.

Her father, Chris, sitting in the armchair reading a Stock Exchange newsletter, looked up over his glasses at the television, and then at his daughter.

”He’s quite good, isn’t he, Em?” her father noted mildly, in a classic understatement.

”He is absolutely brilliant, Daddy,” Emma stated firmly, her chin raised, speaking with the absolute, unshakeable certainty of eight.

---

— Teddington, London

Thirteen-year-old Keira Christina Knightley was watching the Oscars in the living room of her family home in Teddington, London.

She was also staying up significantly past her strict bedtime, also permitted as an educational special occasion. But she was watching the American broadcast with the vibrating energy of someone who had been working in the entertainment industry since early childhood.

She watched major, televised ceremonies with both the screaming enthusiasm of a genuine fan, and the cold, professional, analytical attention of an actress who was, in her own modest way, also grinding in the business.

Keira had a different relationship to Marvin Meyers’ massive body of work than most of the other girls currently watching this evening. Her relationship to the art was filtered through her own professional context.

She was already acting. She had already been on massive film sets. She intimately understood, at thirteen years old and from the grueling inside, something vital about exactly what it required to physically produce the quality of work that was being globally recognized tonight. And that understanding gave her a reverent kind of respect for the boy on the screen..

*Kung Fu Panda* she had read and deeply admired its thematic pacing. *Ready Player One* had terrified her and made her think about the future of digital media. But the *Marvin 1* EP had utterly destroyed her. It had done exactly what it did to everyone, and she had spent several weeks afterward lying on her bedroom floor, desperately trying to understand the mechanical mechanism of it from a professional perspective.

*****

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