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ayearofpike · 6 years

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Remember Me 3: The Last Story

Pocket Books, 1995 244 pages, 20 chapters + epilogue ISBN 0-671-87267-2 LOC: PZ7.P626 Rg 1995 OCLC: 31863011 Released February 1, 1995 (per B&N)

In her second go at life, Shari Cooper has become a best-selling young adult author, and her success is confusing her mission to help make things better. They're about to start shooting the movie of her first novel, and as involved as she is in picking the actors she starts to get too involved with her male lead. This starts to drive a wedge between Shari and her life/afterlife partner, who wants her to listen to the words of a wise teacher and how they might resonate with the teacher they had between lives. By the time she finally starts to listen, will it be too late?

Huh, my blurb makes this book seem readable. In real life, it's more of a patchwork crazy quilt of ideas (and whole scenes!) we've already seen, which doesn't take long to get frustrating. This is even worse in retrospect, with the knowledge that Pike never really wanted to write this book and mostly did it out of obligation to his publisher. It's pretty slapdash and sort of lazy, and even where it wants to be deep it's more like stomping in the kiddie pool than diving in (certainly compared to these other stories he's already done).

Remember my white-savior complaint about Remember Me 2? It's back here, and worse because Shari, in the beginning, seems to have totally abandoned her mission to help. Like ... a year of learning from a master in the afterlife, and your strategy for bettering Jean's home culture and community is to write teen thriller novels? And also to adopt as your pen name "Shari Cooper," the most saltine cracker of names, thus totally obscuring your assumed ethnicity when a best-seller by a visible Latina could raise the water level for all of us? When we start, she’s signing her most recent book, the story about herself that she ghost-wrote inside her brother Jimmy's body, which she submitted (against his wishes) because she "needed another best-seller." Again, this is printed under her pen name. Which is SHARI COOPER. Do you really not foresee any problem with this?

Let's be real: there is nothing here that is remotely in service of leveling the playing field or raising up the inner-city Latinx community that Jean Rodrigues came from. In fact, Shari has totally distanced herself from being Jean, aside from using the name when it's convenient. She barely mentions Jean's mother, she doesn’t even think about her siblings at home, she briefly talks about her old friend Carol who is sick in the hospital, and don't even get me started on how Lenny is not Lenny even a little bit anymore, but now totally Peter. He even goes by Peter now; I think they only identify him as Lenny once, again for convenience's sake. (To his credit, Peter appears to have taken on the service bit of his return to a body much more readily: he coaches disabled baseball teams, and later invites one of his homeless blind players to live with them.)

Shari pisses me off so much that I almost quit reading this book twice. But I'd be annoyed with myself if this blog was "reading all of Pike's books except one," so I finished it. Still, I'm going to skip ahead on the summary and probably leave a lot of things out.

The movie they're making is a sinking-boat thriller, where a nerdy kid invites seven bullies out on a pleasure cruise and then sinks it in shark-infested waters, leaving only one lifeboat. The star they've got lined up is a drug addict, but the producer has found someone else who knows all Shari's work and blew him away on a chance audition, so even though they're going to start shooting in just a few days he wants to switch actors. And sure enough, this guy makes Shari feel like he belongs in the role, even though he's cocky enough to suggest script changes before he has it and to kiss her during the reading. Or maybe it's because of that last part. She's very confused.

So Shari gets in a fight with her nerd villain actor not long after, and this dude both stands up for her and takes her away, out for a romantic dinner. Did I mention that Shari lives with a dude that she's been in love with across TWO lifespans? But she still goes with this guy, and he kisses her again, but she does have the good grace to back away and go inside, where Peter tells her all about a meeting she missed with a yogi who teaches meditation for unity.

They fall asleep, and Shari wakes up outside her body, feeling just like she did in the first book when she died only she knows she's not dead yet. She jumps into Peter's dreams, where the yogi is hanging out, and they talk about their feelings and their actions and Shari's headaches, which she still gets, naturally, because Jean fell on her head off a balcony. Then Shari suddenly appears in her brother's bedroom, where he's naked in bed with her best friend. Not Carol — the half-sister from her previous life. It doesn't matter, because even this friend isn't that important in this story. Shari's suddenly whisked to her mom's bedside — but not her birth mom, her switched-at-birth mom, her brother's mom, her murderer's mom — who is crying herself to sleep next to a copy of Remember Me by Shari Cooper. (This doesn't make a lot of sense to me either. Wasn’t this the lady who suddenly jumped to Amanda’s side and hired her a lawyer when she realized she was her birth child? Maybe I'm making this more confusing than it needs to be, but after all, Pike put all the strings into this crazy quilt. I'm just unraveling them.)

Then she hops to the fancy hotel room where her star is sleeping, and she jumps into his dream and sees a creepy space battle where purple ships are blowing up white ones. What does it mean? Shari isn't sure, but she wakes up (confusing her dreams and jumbling them together) and is inspired to start a new story: “The Starlight Crystal,” about a fleet of white ships returning to Earth after centuries of travel, having found golden enlightenment and been told to bring it home, only to be driven away by a vicious attack from a fleet of purple ships. As far as I can tell, this Starlight Crystal has nothing in common with the computer game from See You Later except the name and the fact that there is interstellar travel, and likewise with the novel that'll show up later.

(And let me just take a second to be annoyed that she remembered the dream sequence enough to write it all down for THIS fuckin’ book but acts like it was slipping away from her as she’s writing “The Starlight Crystal.” Like Pike forgot how to acknowledge the present-tense narrator describing the past between the first book and now. It really doesn’t hold up by comparison.)

In the morning, Shari goes to the set they’re constructing for the exterior boat scenes. They’re excavating a pit somewhere in the desert, which they’re going to fill with water and surround with matte paintings of the Caribbean and deposit their rental sharks. Yeah, rental sharks, four of them, and apparently it’s OK to just stick them in a dredged hole with trucked-in pumped water without raising any eyebrows. The new star shows up and asks to take her to lunch, which, sure, he’s supposed to be rehearsing a movie and she’s supposed to be finalizing the script and also she’s WITH SOMEONE, but they can go have a two-hour lunch in a fancy restaurant in Beverly Hills. He tells her that he’s read all her books, including Magic Fire, a shoutout to a Pike novel that hasn’t come out yet. While they’re flirting, he reads her palm and is taken aback by the break in the lifeline that indicates she should have died three years ago. He also calls her both Jean and Shari, which ... fuckin’ sloppy, Pike.

I didn’t mention that Lenny’s body is impotent, right? He’s paralyzed from the waist down, and so Peter can’t get up to much in the bedroom. Plus he couldn’t help fucking around with the chest-burster alien thing in the afterlife when all Shari wanted was to get laid after the prom in their imaginations. Like the one thing she’s constantly wanted is to have sex with Peter, and all she has are memories of the premature ejaculator of her Shari life and of Jean getting pregnant. She’s been celibate for four years, even while she’s been with the one dude she constantly dreamed about. So I get why she’s horny for New Star, even if I still reserve the right to be a little judgemental. It isn’t helping Shari that he has some kind of undefineable it-factor that at least she’s learned to attune to in her afterlife training.

But now Shari wants to know just who this dude is and why he has these compelling effects on her. So naturally she decides to hire a private detective. Specifically, she goes to the detective that solved her murder. She’s pretty vague about why she wants New Star checked out, which makes the detective uneasy, but when she offers to double his rate he takes the case. Then they all go to the yogi’s lecture. Well, not the detective, but New Star tags along with Shari and Peter and her brother, and he’s pretty much a total asshole while the yogi is explaining how to share and communicate and love and help and find unity. Also, the lecture starts and ends with unguided meditation, and Shari finds that her headache is gone without drugs for the first time in months. Basically, it’s the same scene from Sati, except Peter and Shari and New Star don’t let anyone else talk.

She wakes up again in the middle of the night to write, this time adding a description of the pursuit by the purple ship and attempted escape of the white ship. She stops when she runs out of words, and finds that she has startled awake the blind baseball player sleeping on her couch. He tells her all about what a great guy Peter is and how he hopes that Peter’s spine will heal someday so he can walk with her on the beach like he’s always wanted. Shari never knew this was something Peter wanted to do, because she’s a self-centered asshole.

The movie starts shooting early the next day, and Shari and her producer have to immediately fire one of the actors because she can’t handle being in water over her knees. This is a movie about a SINKING BOAT and nobody thought to make sure the actors could deal with water. New Star has a ballsy solution: have Shari play the role. She’s not an actor! The villain points this out! She flubs half the takes! But it’s a low-budget picture, apparently, despite being based on a New York Times best-seller, so they have to go with it.

Afterwards he takes her out to dinner again, while Peter’s at the yogi’s meditation class. Then they go back to her place so he can give her a full-body massage. Then they get naked and make out. (Shades of Chain Letter 2!) But before his ... uh ... purple spaceship can enter the wormhole to hyperspace, the blind baseball player comes home and walks in on them. He’s blind, so he assumes he’s caught Shari with Peter, and he’s contrite and apologetic and hides in the bathroom. So Shari sneaks New Star out of her house and then asks if the kid wants to go to Disneyland so he doesn’t hear when Peter actually comes in. After nine at night. Yeah, nothing weird about that. But he’s a kid, so he’s excited, and when they get home he asks Peter why he didn’t get out of bed and go with them if he’s awake now. So Shari confesses, and Peter cries, and Shari leaves.

She goes to the same hotel where New Star is staying, but doesn’t seek him out. I guess that’s one good thing I can give Shari: given enough guilt, she won’t immediately go climb on some dude’s jock. Instead, she writes more, about how the white ship jumps through hyperspace but the purple ship follows, and their ship is crippled from the pursuit so all they can do is send the crew off on the emergency escape pods and hope for the best while the captain and first mate hang behind to be boarded by the purple invaders and hopefully set off one last bomb and ruin the attackers’ plans.

During a break in shooting the next day, Shari goes to the detective, who has turned up some information on New Star. Specifically, he is a creep and an abuser who has beaten up his last two co-stars but because they didn’t press charges he’s walked. Shari doesn’t want to believe it, and the detective quickly susses out that she’s got more involvement with New Star than just being his boss. You came to a detective with good instincts, you idiot, what did you expect? At the end of the day, she calls Peter and apologizes again and says that there’s something she has to face, but that she loves him and hopes he’ll forgive her. And then in the middle of the night, her phone rings and it’s the movie’s villain, saying that someone is planning to feed someone to the sharks during the next day’s shoot and that she needs to meet him on the set to talk about it.

So who does Shari call to help her out with this situation, given what she just learned about New Star from the detective that day? That’s right — she’s a stupid idiot! They drive out to the set and find the villain waiting for them with a gun in his hand. He says that a real murderer’s only motivation is wanting to kill, and now he wants to kill. But first they’re going to rehearse. Shari and New Star must each paddle a lifeboat across the shark pond and back, and if they can both make it and come back and neither one bolts, they’ll both live. So Shari gets in the boat, which feels like it’s leaking, and quickly (through/around the panic) does her lap. But New Star refuses, and instead throws the villain to the sharks directly. Uh, no shit.

So the police come, and after hours in the clink Shari finally thinks to call the producer, who comes and gets her out immediately. She goes back to the hotel and sleeps for a whole day, dreaming about a golden being floating to Earth and living a life and dying and being reincarnated, each time hoping to impart a little more knowledge and love into humanity. When she wakes up, she remembers that Peter had wanted her to see the yogi one last time, but by the time she gets there he’s already left for the airport. She and Peter reconcile, but on the way home she gets a call from the detective, who must talk urgently. They pick him up, and he directs them to a certain address. A certain condo near the beach, where on the ground outside there’s a faint bloodstain that has never washed out.

It seems that the detective has read Remember Me by Shari Cooper. Also, he’s a GODDAMN DETECTIVE who was ON THE CASE it was about. Also, his daughter read it, the only one who would actually remember an angel and a devil showing up to scare her straight. He’s pretty freaked out at how this Latina from the barrio could possibly know what happened with saltine-cracker Shari in Huntington Beach, but she’s able to calm him down without actually answering his questions. I guess we have to accept that there are more than just knowable facts in this story, because the detective does and remembers that he’s called Shari because he learned some gruesome details about New Star. Which, so has Shari, first-hand. And they’re about to get some more, because New Star is at the door with a gun.

He pushes the detective off the balcony, I guess because nobody had gone off a balcony in this book yet. Then they drive to Shari’s grave, which he’s already dug up and is going to bury her alive with her old body. He throws her in the hole, and as she tries to climb out he nails her in the head with the shovel right where her headaches start. Like he knew. It seems that New Star is from the other side too, but his mission is to thwart the drive toward peace and unity. You know that dream he was having, the one that inspired Shari’s story? It’s all true, three hundred thousand years in the past, and Roger is one of the purple-ship aliens in a human body. And their grand mission is to ... kill a YA thriller writer because she’s getting too close to home. I don’t know why she has to be buried with her previous body, other than it happened in “Collect Call.”

So Shari looks to Peter for enlightenment and love to be the last thing she sees as she’s buried alive. Only he’s not in his wheelchair. The pain of his love being buried has magically healed his spine, and now he’s behind New Star with the shovel. Obviously they kill him, and then whisk Shari to a hospital, where she knows her brain only has limited time left but wants to get out to finish her story. Which she does: the captain blows up her ship and the aliens’, but only after remembering a fable her grandmother used to tell about a dragon stealing a heart and then being tormented to kill itself because the heart retained the love and desires of its body and wouldn’t stop beating. I don’t know, this seems like a pretty shitty story to kill someone over.

But then she realizes she has to apologize to someone. No, not Peter; that’s done and he’s still walking. No, not Carol, still sick in the hospital as far as we know — why would we be concerned with a bisexual Latina drug addict just because she’s Jean’s best friend and Jean’s body is dying? It’s her mom. NO, not her birth mom. NO, not her Latina mom. Switched-at-Birth Mom. Jimmy’s mom. The one who raised her. Which, OK, that counts for something. But anyway, she drives to her house and tells her that the story is true and that she can’t say why. Then she’s obviously in pain, so Switched-at-Birth Mom invites her to lie down in ... Shari’s bed. Where she dies.

The epilogue is literally Peter handing Jimmy the floppy disk that this story is written on and Jimmy finishing it. Which is maybe why the last little bit is about his mommy. But then again, Shari forced his body to write the first one, so maybe she guided him here too.

This shit is a hot mess, you guys. Let’s leave aside the fact that Pike didn’t really want to write it, and let’s leave aside the fact that all these pieces BARELY line up to form a coherent story, and let’s leave aside how the problems mentioned in the second book TOTALLY WENT AWAY for this one. Let’s even jump over how my Latino heart was stepped on and kicked aside along with the roots of these characters for the ENTIRE BOOK. Here’s the big issue: Christopher Pike wrote a story about an angel (I guess) returning to human form, with a mission to make humanity better ... and the BEST THING he could come up with, the DEEPEST POSSIBLE SOLUTION to our woes that crossed his sexy lizard brain, was that she needed to be a best-selling YA thriller author. Talk about an inflated sense of self-importance.

And with that, I am finally done with Remember Me 3: The Last Story. Which I am not ashamed to admit that I did NOT remember. Hopefully I will remember to NOT read it again.

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