The Other Ten Elephants. Sometimes they're late, and sometimes they're early, but they're usually there when you need them. Kind of like an IRS tax refund.
"Fellas!" i said. "This is indeed a pleasant surprise! I didn't think i'd be seeing you guys for a few more days, maybe."
"Splendid," they said.
"How did you get here? I came right through that there door"--i pointed, somewhat uselessly, as it turned out, since the place we were in was completely without light--"but you guys must have traveled a long way to find a back way in to this... wherever we are."
"Shortcut," they said.
"Well, in any case, i'm glad you're here. Say, let me introduce you to my new buddy, Mr. Jim Carrey, the actor."
"Pleasure," said the elephants, as one extended his trunk to shake Mr. Carrey's hand and instead smeared a thin layer of mucus on his left cheek, while Mr. Carrey extended his hand and forthwith impaled it on one of the elephant's tusks. Greetings concluded, we moved on to the business at hand.
"So we're stuck in here," i explained. "Either you guys need to help us open that door somehow, or you can show us the back way that you found."
"Dangerous," they said.
"The back way isn't safe?"
"Fraught."
"Fraught with danger? Jeepers, there can't have been that much danger. It only took you a couple of hours to get here."
"Circuitous."
"But i thought you said it was a shortcut."
"Sweet," said the elephants.
Giving up on getting an intelligible answer from the elephants, i changed the subject. "So how do you think we might get through this door? We've got a sledgehammer and wedge, and one of those things you slip down the car window to break into an automobile. All of them," i added proudly, "made out of my shoelaces."
"Hmmmmm" said the elephants, and then they conferred among themselves.
"Sledgehammer," they finally concluded, and one of them wrapped his trunk about the handle while another picked up the wedge. Jim and i backed away.
Then: "Twit," said one of the two elephants, and the other replied, "dingbat."
The one holding the sledgehammer had, predictably, nailed the other one on the trunk. I glanced significantly at my cinematic companion, a look which was of course wasted, as the place we were in was completely dark. A fight ensued, punctuated with such sobriquets as "geek" and "loser," at the conclusion of which the sledgehammer was embedded in the head of the one elephant and the wedge had somehow found its way up the trunk of the other. Neither appeared the worse for wear. Of course, it's difficult to tell these things when you can't see.
Then: "Charge," said the elephants, and Jim and i had just enough time to get away from the door as a stampede of ten (other) elephants rushed it. There was a hideous crashing and cracking sound, followed immediately by a blinding tide of sunlight.
The Other Ten Elephants had not only taken the door from its hinges, but had temoved the hinges from the doorframe, the frame from the wall, and about a fifteen-foot-wide expanse of wall from the building. They were now milling about in the late afternoon sun, leering hideously at each other in obvious pleasure.
"Well done, boys!" i said. "Now that's what i'm talking about!"
The next thing to capture my attention was the (at first) seemingly unremarkable fact that we were now standing in a lot scattered with planks and construction equipment, right adjacent to the building we had just broken out of--which turned out, on further inspection, to be enormous. By this i mean that it extended as far as the eye could see in either direction, and as far as the eye could see vertically, into the sky. What was in fact remarkable about this was that when i had entered the door, there had been an ocean and a beach on this side of it. Also remarkable, although i could think of no pertinent comment to make in response to it, was the presence of King Kong about fifty yards away, struggling with a couple of flesh-eating dinosaurs. I called Mr. Carrey's attention to the seeming impossibilities embedded in the scene we found ourselves in. "Wasn't this an ocean a few hours ago? With a beach, and people wearing 'Vote for Pedro' t-shirts, and a museum up on the bluff?"
He shrugged. "They're pretty good at taking sets down quickly and changing them out."
"Who?" i asked. "Who's good at taking down sets?"
"These people," he said, waving his hand expansively, as if to indicate the whole world, or at least as much of it as we were able to see from where we stood. "The motion picture industry."
"Well, wait a second. The film studio was on the other side of that door. This is supposed to be the real world."
"Nope," said Mr. Carrey. "Welcome to Hollywood."
"So... no. Wait a second. No. Wait. Do you mean... are you saying..."
A vampire rushed past us, followed by a gangster carrying a tommy gun, followed by a group of Italians in cowboy attire, followed, after a while, by Sigourney Weaver and an Alien. They disappeared through a gate in a tall wooden fence across the lot from where we stood.
"Are you saying," i continued, "that everything i have been experiencing for the past few weeks has been on the inside of a Hollywood movie set?"
"Coudn't tell ya," said Mr. Carrey. "I don't know what you've been experiencing for the past few weeks."
"Well," i said, "first there was prison, and the gruel wasn't half bad, and then the trial, where they wouldn't tell me what i was being tried for and nothing made sense..."
"Sounds like you were embedded in a Kafka novel," Mr. Carrey observed.
"...and the midgets in leisure suits exchanging gunfire with the prison guards, and i escaped through a grammatical absurdity, and found myself alone in the trackless jungle. Well, not completely trackless," i corrected myself, "because i was making a track in it myself, a 14-foor diameter circle, then a parallelogram. I really thought that parallelogram would get me out of there. But then, i was the one who failed high school geometry."
"Go on," said Mr. Carrey.
"Well then, after several days and being eaten by several jaguars, and crossing a vast tableland that was nicely set with a salad course and cocktail weenies, i eventually made my way to the river. I thought it was the Amazon at first, but later on it turned out to be the Tennessee maybe, or something else. Maybe Chickamauga Creek. Or possibly the Mississippi River, or the Rhode Island."
"That's not a river," Mr. Carrey corrected.
"Oh, right," i said. "So i hooked up with the weasels, who had grammar like Yoda, and we ate broccoli Twinkies and sang campfire songs about eating pigs alive, and after a few days we arrived at the sea. The weasels and i parted company at that point."
"And where did they go?" asked my companion.
"Well, let's see. Where did they say they were going? Wait a second... they were going to Hollywood! To become movie stars, like Arnold Schwarzeneggar. For all i know, they may be around here somewhere."
"Of course, if you were in Hollywood all along, they didn't have far to go."
"Good point. So then i took the raft--which, if i neglected to mention it earlier, was made out of my beard--"
"How crafty you are at making useful things out of your own clothing and body parts!" Mr. Carrey said admiringly.
"Well, shucks," i replied. "So then i then took the raft up the coast to see if i really had arrived at Chattanooga, as i suspected. And i ran into a wall painted to look like the horizon, and walked up a set of stairs, and opened the door, and you know the rest."
"So. Let me be sure i understand you. You are uncertain whether all those things happened to you within a Hollywood film set. That explanation seems implausible to you."
"Precisely."
"You would rather think that the real world behaves that way."
"Oh. Well, hmmm. I think maybe you have a point."
"Of course i have a point," said Mr. Carrey. "You've been experiencing a wild, big-screen adventure, your imagination caught up in a fantasy that is really bounded by a big movie studio set, and you've mistaken it for the real world. It's understandable. A couple hundred million Americans make the same mistake on a regular basis."
"So... but wait. That's impossible. Does Hollywood really have movie sets that take several weeks to get across?"
"You have much to learn, my man. Do you ever watch the news on TV?"
"Sure. It's my main source of information."
"Well, the set where they film all of that stuff is at least as big, i'd say, as the one you were stuck in."
"You mean the anchormen seated at their desks reading the news?"
"No, silly, that only requires a weeny little studio. I mean the actual footage of earthquakes and wars and Boy Scouts helping old ladies, and politicians giving speeches and whatnot."
"But the news on TV is about the real world. They don't film it on a movie set!"
Mr. Carrey smiled at me indulgently and continued. "The real question," he said, "is whether you have not only been stuck in a movie set, but also in a script. Maybe you've been in an actual movie and haven't been aware of it."
"Well, i know i've been in a blog..."
"What's that?"
"Gosh, you have been away for a while. It's a weblog. A kind of computer website. Like an online journal. You do remember the internet...."
"Hmmmm. Yes. Sounds familiar."
"Well, a 'blog,' or weblog, is a kind of computer journal that 15-year-olds keep online, by which to share with a reading audience of milllions everything they've done or thought during the previous 24 hours, using letters and numbers instead of real words."
"And no one has thought to shut this down as a public nuisance?"
"Too late for that. So, anyway, i'm in one. As are you, for that matter. We're in a blog."
"So who's the teenager?"
"It's not a teenager, it's a 42-year old guy with a bald spot and an obsession with something called 'paradigm management,' living alone with his cockroaches."
"Yikes. So here's the deal: we're in a movie set and possibly a movie script, which is in turn hosted on a blog being kept by some eccentric living in a vermin-infested house?"
"That's about the size of it."
"Depressing. More than depressing. But, well, we do what we must. Come on," said Mr. Carrey, "and let's see if we can find a copy of the filmscript you're in."
"Find it? We can find it?" This seemed to me a somewhat unsettling possibility. "What do we do with it if we find it?"
"Tamper with it."
I swallowed hard. "You can tamper with the screenplay for the movie that they've put you in--without your knowledge or agreement--and in so doing affect your own destiny? In the movie, that is."
"It's called 'free will.' Follow me. And you fellows," he said, directing his attention toward the elephants, "you want to tag along? We might be able to use the help. We'll need bodyguards."
"Astonishing," they said.
So Jim Carrey led us toward the gate through which had passed, just a few minutes before, the vampire, the Mafia hit man, the Italian cowboys, Sigourney Weaver and the Alien. | 
