Project Rainbow

Kent Baxter enters the Jackson, Minnesota EconoLodge like he owns the place, dragging behind him his luggage with a bad wheel, causing it to groan across the laminated floor. His eyes case the joint, taking in every substandard detail. Floral print barely clings on the walls. Tube lights glow sickly green in stripped housing. He’s strutting like a king come to court, whistling to the front desk. The concierge is too busy doom scrolling instagram to notice.

Ahem, he clears his throat. She doesn’t look up. His hand reaches forward to hit the bell. Ding-ding.

“Service,” he says loudly over the weak tink of metal while staring around the place. The young woman glares up from her screen, dark make-up accentuating her pale face in shades of Wednesday Addams.

His hand smacks the bell again.

“Dude,” she says loudly with her hands apart. “I’m right here.”

Kent’s eyes cast downward. His mustache ruffles across his lip.

“Oh, finally. I require your finest suite—” He leans down to read her name tag. “—Lizzie… is that a name or a label?”

He laughs like an old lawnmower struggling to crank start.

Her phone clatters on the counter.

She snaps, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“I’m only having fun,” he says then while pulling his wallet out and begins fumbling through cards. “Do you offer any discounts?”

“No,” she says firmly.

“AAA?”

“No.”

“Diner’s Club?”

“No.”

“Costco?” He looks closer. “Oh, that expired in 1998.” Next card. “Church of Satan?”

Lizzie raises a brow. Kent laughs before turning the card around.

“Kidding.” He laughs, big and over-the-top with his ill-maintained teeth flashing beneath the curtain of his mustache. “It’s my GoodRx card. The Bennies are in a bit of a tailspin right now.” The counter creaks under his lean. “Yup, lost the ol’ jay-oh-bee to the woke agenda. First they came for the cigar store Indians. Next, Kent Baxter, color commentator.”

Her hands move to the keyboard.

“You said a suite.”

Her counterfeit smile conceals her mocking snap.

“Yes,” he says, standing up straight before tugging down his suede suit jacket. “Your finest accommodations, see-voo-play. The name’s Baxter. Kent Baxter. You’ve heard of me.”

She sighs, bites her tongue, then hits the last few key strokes. Near the monitor, a machine spits out a keycard. She holds it up with a smirk.

“Here you are, my liege. Our finest accommodations.”

His face tightens as he reached to take it.

“Don’t you need to see my—”

“Your ID?” She shakes her head. “I recognize you, Mr. Baxter, sir.”

“You do?” He asks, almost shocked, before clearing his throat. “Of course you do. I’m an important person in the wrestling business. This mouth cashes checks like a Cash Advance bodega on the first of the month. Which way?”

She points. “That hallway. All the way to the end.”

He taps the keycard on the counter, winks, and says, “Thank you, Lizzie. You stay classy.”

Kent leaves with a swagger, lips pursed and whistling. Lizzie’s smirk flattens as he disappears into the hallway. Her mouth became thin, unfeeling, and her face slackened as black spreads across the white of her eyes like warm, heavy oil.

The busted luggage wheel thwacks and groans down the hallway, the perfect rhythmic baseline as whistle gives way to scats and wet-lip beat boxing. The water-stained walls earn an appreciative nod. “Very artisanal,” he says, looking closer at a splotch that looks strangely like Danny Devito as the Penguin. This is exactly the kind of high-caliber establishment that respects a man of his stature, a man on the comeback trail.

Inside the room, the dark is thick with bad memories. Silence. Then, an intrusion from the hallway: the whistling stops. A muffled huff. A frantic scraping at the key slot, plastic on metal.

“I will not be denied!”—the voice a dull, impotent thud through the cheap wood.

More scraping. A sound like an impatient tisk. A final, angry shove of plastic.

“By the Thunder of Zeus, I command thee to open!”

A pause. Then—a click.

The door doesn’t open, it blasts inward by a shoulder. Hard light from the hall blocks into the cell-like dark.

“Daddy’s home,” he says.

He flicks the light switch.

“In the name of Hotel California?”

He steps forward, feet shuffling. The luggage handle slips from his grip and it topples over behind him. Crash.

“This is not a suite,” he stews, jaw clenching. “It’s a tomb.”

Instead of a kingly bed with a lush duvet, there’s a full sized mattress on a metal frame shoved against the wall, blanketed in a pockmarked comforter in a shade of brown reminiscent of fecal matter.

“Uncomfortable.”

His eyes tick to the crude sailboat painting above the bed.

“Derivative.”

Then the nightstand with the cracked lamp crowned in a moldy lamp shade.

“Disgusting.”

He plops down on the mattress. The springs cry rusted under his weight. “At least there’s room service,” he reasons while grabbing the handle off the beige telephone, but when he holds it to his ear, the coiled cord ends severed with exposed wires like it had been chewed apart.

He stares. His mustache twitches.

7:12 P.M.—He’s in the lime-scaled shower. A weak, rust-tinged stream of scalding water sprays his face, plastering his elaborate hair to his scalp. One moment he’s singing Frank Sinatra. The next he’s crying—deep, heaving, quiet sobs that are stolen by the broken-bladed whir of the fan.

7:40 P.M.—A threadbare towel is knotted at his waist. He’s pacing the room, barking into his cellphone. “What do you mean you ‘don’t deliver there’? I’m at the EconoLodge!” He listens, his face tightening. “Abandoned? It has not been ‘abandoned for years!’ I am a guest! I’m talking to you from inside the building!” The line clicks dead.

8:01 P.M.—His reflection is fractured across a crack, silver-flecked mirror in the bathroom. “I’m Kent Baxter,” he says like a mantra while using a tiny comb to brush the wiry caterpillar above his lip. Then, once satisfied with the coif, he applies a leather mustache guard that hooks over each ear with metal wires. He hums while perfecting the fit, then sings, his voice a passable, theatrical baritone, crooning to his own reflection.

“Yum yum yum, somethings smellin’ a little fishy. Hey!”

“Let’s have some fun, I’m feelin’ a little frisky. Ohh!”

8:43 P.M.—Bedtime. He puts on a pair of royal blue silk pajamas and tucks himself in from chin to toes under the ragged blanket. “I am Kent Baxter,” he says between punching up the pillow before smashing his head into it. The nightstand and floor are a graveyard of empty, miniature Jack Daniels bottles that scattered around his forearm as he blindly reaches for the lamp.

9:03 P.M.—Snores fueled by whisky and undiagnosed apnea rattle the guard. A shadow in the corner detaches itself from the paint-chipped drywall and forms into a shape vaguely humanoid. Hoof-formed imprints sink into the stained carpet, carving an alternating path across the room, stopping at bedside where the shape coagulates into a solid, imposing figure.

From the gloom, a single, strong hand emerges with unnatural precision to place a small device on the nightstand in the ruins of miniature bottles. It’s a plastic figurine, a bobblehead caricature of Maraeth, sculpted with an impossibly wide Cheshire grin and glassy, iridescent eyes. The hand’s index finger lifts, then taps the oversized head with its sharp, black nail. It begins to bobble, nodding in agreement with the silent dark. Nod. Nod. Nod. The hand retracts, sinking back into the shadow, which flows back to the corner and merges once more with the wall.

The bobblehead continues its steady, silent motion. As it does, an imperceptible change occurs. It is not a sound, but a pressure. Invisible waves—raw data—begin to pulse from the nodding figurine. They wash over the sleeping form of Kent Baxter, passing through his silk pajamas and his skull. The Black Rainbow brainwashing signal finds his dreaming mind. In the bed, Kent’s breathing hitches. He groans, mustache flapping. His eyelids flutter, but he does not wake. He’s no longer dreaming of wrestling arenas or lost glory. He is dreaming of something else entirely. On the nightstand, the bobblehead nods. And nods.

You wake up at the announce desk in Montreal.

Every crash on the canvas, when the bodies slammed and the crowd screamed, I prayed for a broken neck. Imagining the YouTube views with my voice narrating the tragedy was enough to cure my hangover and get me through the night.

This is how I met Mara Durden.

You wake up in Louisville.

You wake up in Nashville.

Mara works part-time as a body collector for the county. When some OD hits the pavement or a jumper doesn’t bounce, the union calls Mara. They are a walking person. They go to the scene, zip up the stiff and wheel it to the morgue.

Some people are walking people. Some people are desk people. I could only work behind a desk. With a headset. And a slurpee cup filled with scotch and Coca-Cola.

You wake up in Green Bay.

I’m sitting in a rental car outside Lambeau. My hands are white-knuckled on the steering wheel as my call to the union president goes straight to voicemail. “Griggs, baby, it’s the Kent-Man. You know, your favorite col—wait, can I say color commentator? I’m so confused after tonight. Please, call me back. I just… I just…”

I take a deep breath and begin to bawl.

“I WANT MY JOB BACK! I’LL DO ANYTHING! I SWEAR TO GOD PLEASE GRIGGS! PLEASE CALL ME BACK!”

I’d like to thank the Academy.

You wake up in Chicago. I’m on my way to the arena to beg for my old job back. I get into an argument with the Uber driver because he won’t play my Jordan Peterson playlist.

“You son of a bitch! I’m paying for this ride and I want to listen to Papa J’s wisdom before my big meeting!”

He kicks me out of the car in the middle of an ICE protest. There’s a man in a frog costume. A one-eyed preacher screaming sermons. A bunch of no-bra wearing middle-aged lesbians with Hulk hands that have been carved into weird clenched vaginas.

This is how I met Mara.

I stumble back from the curb and that’s when I see the line of riot cops. They’re advancing, shields up, pushing back the chanting lesbians. The frog guy takes a baton to the knee and goes down like a wet sack. It’s chaos. It’s a Tuesday.

And that’s when I see Them.

They’re not chanting. They’re not holding a sign. They’ve climbed an armored ICE van parked on the sidewalk, and They are pissing on the windshield.

They stand on the roof, legs spread, squatting with Their pants around Their knees, grinning like a psychopath. Inside the driver is frantically wiping his own face, realizing the piss is leaking through the seals. Mara—I didn’t know Their name yet, but it’s Them—zips up, laughing. They drop down on the hood and tap the armored glass with Their knuckle.

“How’s the taste?” They shout, Their voice a sharp, amused gravel. “The only thing these hippies have to drink is kombucha and wheat grass.”

A riot cop spots Them. “Get down! Now!”

Mara turns, throws Their arms wide, and launches Themself off the van—a perfect stage dive onto the preacher, who collapses in a heap of robes and righteous fury. They roll to Their feet, grab one of the discarded, fist-shaped Hulk hands, and use it to cold-cock the charging officer in the plastic visor. The thwack of the foam is louder than the cop’s grunt.

They look right at me, blood dripping from a split lip. They wink.

I wake up in a tiki bar. Mara is sitting across from me. I get lost in Their cleavage flashing between the half-unbuttoned shirt as They sip a Mai Thai through a curly straw.

“You know, man,” They’re saying, “it could be worse. You could marry a fat billionaire thinking he’d kick the bucket in under five years and now you’re stuck being the First Lady launching an initiative focused on the health of children while your husband is cutting their healthcare and food assistance.”

“What?” I say. My head feels like I got hit with a brick.

“How’s the head?” Mara asks.

“Fucking hurts,” I say. I touch my eyebrow. Blood on my fingertips. “What the fuck happened?”

“You got hit with a brick.”

“I did? Were they aiming at me?”

They lean back.

“Does it matter?”

 “The hits keep rolling, don’t they?” The feels are coming. I hate the feels. I try chewing them back like puke after a three day bender but my emotions projectile vomit all over the table.

“I am Kent’s Useless Announcer Voice! How can you have a wrestling match without these golden pipes giving context to all the jibber jabber the play-by-play guy is spewing out. A reverse chancery? No one knows what the fuck that is, Regi!”

“It’s a side headlock,” Mara says before tossing a peanut in Their mouth.

“I had it all! Limo rides. A corporate Door Dash account. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label in my dressing room before every show! All in my contract—and it was supposed to be iron clad. Now look at me. In a tiki bar and there’s not even a hot piece of ass shaking her thang on the stage in a hula skirt.”

Mara sits forward. “What is a hula skirt?”

“A what?”

“A hula skirt.”

“Grass?”

They smirk. “And what is grass?”

My brain hurts. “A plant?”

Their elbows press to the table. They lean closer. “And what’s something that plants?”

My eyes widen. “A piledriver.”

Their fingers snap. “Exactly. Do you piledrive?”

“Oh no,” I say with a flick of my wrist. “Not since the 80s and that closet is locked tight.” My gaze sharpens. “Wrestlers piledrive.”

“And who tells the audience what a piledriver even is?”

I stand up to shout ‘me’ but I bang my hip on the table.

“Fuck—ah that’s smart—me. Yes, I do. That’s what I do. Fuck.”

Mara slides out of the booth and presses close to me. Their hand wraps around my waist and clamps our bodies together.

Gulp.

“You know what concerns Us, Kent?”

The Us isn’t including me. Mara had a way of talking. Strange. Often, but not always, They’d call Themself plural pronouns like They were Their own gender identity.

“Consumerism,” They say. “Individualism. Selfishness. It’s going to be the death of everything. This entire world is going to go up in a ball of flames, and you know why?”

I shake my head. Their squeeze tightens.

“The same reason people cut in line in the McDonald’s drive thru. They know the person at the other speaker was first, but fuck that lady who’s hanging on to life by a thread while her savage children scream and fight in the back. They don’t care. They want those nuggets, Kent, and They refuse to wait an extra two minutes for them.”

I stare into Their kaleidoscope eyes.

“That makes… a bizarre amount of sense.”

Their face darkens. “I’m going to save the world, Kent. Every last hungry hippo. Every last gazelle. Every last selfish human.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Doesn’t it? It’s called Project Rainbow.”

“Project Rainbow?”

“In Project Rainbow there are no announcers—only commentary.”

My heart races. My throat goes dry so I push myself away from them to grab the beer mug off the table. I guzzle it down, tipping backward, letting half of it rush down my chest, soaking through my cheap dress shirt.

A belch rattles in my throat as I set the mug down, then drag my forearm across my mouth. A satisfied ah hissines past my teeth.

“This is Kent Baxter,” I say in a smooth baritone. I’ve said it a million times but never did I proclaim it so emphatically. “And I’m the voice of…”

“… of Project Rainbow.”

I’m in a guest bathroom converted into a recording studio. There’s a green screen hung behind me and I have power strips from four different rooms to power the lights and sound equipment. Beneath me on the laptop, I see the live feed. Over my shoulder, in the picture-in-picture box, grainy, pre-recorded footage plays. The crew is in the arena control room, dressed in all black with rainbow googly-eyes attached to Their balaclavas. They’re cutting wires, rerouting the pyro board, their gloved hands moving with purpose. They disable the entire ring of concussion mortars, forcing 100% of the explosive power into the single charge set directly under the main event “safe spot”.

The feed cuts to the live show. The arena is packed. Music hits. The world champion storms out, finds his mark on the steel ramp, and strikes his signature pose, pointing both fingers to the sky. He holds the pose, waiting for the ring of fire that defines his entrance. He gets one, massive, overloaded KA-THOOM directly beneath his feet.

The champion is launched forty feet into the air, perfectly rigid, his arms still pointing up. He hangs there for a half-second against the Millennium Scope—a perfect, vertical silhouette—before gravity reclaims him. He rockets back down, crashing straight through the French-Canadian announce table, which explodes in a cloud of splinters and monitor glass.

I lean into my microphone, my voice smooth as silk. “Well, it looks like the champ’s chances of retaining just went splat. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we in the business call ‘a hard landing.’”

I laugh.

“Smashed him like a pinata.”

Mara says no one in Project Rainbow announces.

Frodo is dead on a slab in my kitchen. I’m surrounded by googly-eyed commandos.

“What the fuck happened?” I ask, trying not to ugly cry in front of the boys.

“In Project Rainbow, no one announces,” a commando says with a snap. All the others speak in unison.

“In Project Rainbow, no one announces.”

“Guys,” I say with my hands up. “You’re right. In Project Rainbow, no one announces… but this isn’t about Project Rainbow.”

I grab the commando to my left.

“Frodo is dead! He’s a goose and he’s dead now because of us, alright? Do you understand that?” I shove the guy away before turning to address the room while stroking the dead bird’s plumage.

“Yeah,” a commando says, voice muted by the fabric of the balaclava. “I understand.” His boots clomp on the floor as he steps forward. “In death, a member of Project Rainbow gets announced. His name is Frodo.”

“His name is Frodo.”

“His name is Frodo.”

The entire room is chanting and I’m weeping.

I lean down next to Frodo and whisper through tears, “I would have gone with you to the end, to the very top floor of MWA Tower.”

I wake up in a chair with a gun in my mouth.

The metal tastes like oil and my own terror. My hands are taped to the arms of a cheap plastic lawn chair. I’m in the center of an MWA ring, under a single ghost light in an otherwise dark and empty arena. Silk pajamas are sweat-soaked. The silence is vast.

Mara is humming. A low, buzzing, tuneless sound. They circle the chair, dragging the barrel of the revolver along the top rope.

“What’s your favorite word, Kent?” They ask, Their voice a playful, instructional gravel. “We bet it’s ‘I.’ You’ve spent your whole life loving only yourself.”

The barrel is so deep I gag, and the gun slips. Mara pulls it away, letting me hack and spit on the canvas. They laugh. A sharp, barking sound that hits the empty seats.

“Please!” I gasp, snot running into my mustache protector. “Please, Mara, I’ll do anything! I’m the voice! I’m Kent Baxter! I can help you!”

“I,” Mara says, tapping my chest with the gun. “I,” They tap my forehead. “I,” They tap my knee. “It’s a disease, Kent. A boring, selfish, little cage. You don’t love anything. You just love you.”

They jolt back, suddenly giddy. “So! We’re going to fix that. We’re going to perform a little exorcism. We’re going to cast the ‘self’ out. Send that ego spiraling down into the void where it belongs until there’s nothing left but an empty house.”

“But… but I am Kent’s… I am Kent’s raging…”

“You are nothing!” Mara suddenly shouts, the sound cracking like a whip. “You’re the empty house. And We… are moving… in.”

They slam the barrel of the gun back into my mouth, forcing my head back.

“This is your real comeback, Kent. This time, you’re not going to love yourself. You’re only going to love… Us.”

They pull the trigger.

We are sitting in the dark of the EconoLodge room in that awful, tacky chair by the wall. The air is so full. Full of the chemical stink, full of the dream, full of the pop. Oh, the pop was the best part! We pulled the trigger, bang, and the little logo-man just… vanished.

We wait. We wait! We wait for the dust to settle. Patience.

We hate patience.

(Yeah, fuck patience!) (Waiting is so for losers.) (We should have just cut his head off and be done with it.) (That sounds extreme.) (Kent Baxter is a liability. In Our timeline, he—) (Shhhh!) (What?) (They can hear Us…) (…They’re not supposed to do that!)

Don’t worry about them. Pay attention. Patience is key. The bleach needs time to scour the stain, and the stain was so selfish. So full of “I” and “me” and “my golden pipes”. We wait for the “empty house” to be truly empty.

And then— Snap!

His eyes just open. Like a doll. No groaning. No messy human sounds. No fumbling for the little mustache-cage. Then he sits up. Zzzzip! Perfect posture. Oh, We clapped. We love it when the toys sit up straight. We love it when the meat learns manners.

We stand. We glide. We flow over the carpet to the foot of his little bed. He turns his head. Click. His eyes find Us. And oh. Oh, look. The little bits of white are going dark. The color is running. Drip, drip, drip.

“Hello, big guy,” We whisper. This isn’t gravel. This is sugar. “Did you have a nice sleep? Did We burn the I out? Did We scrub the me away?”

We lean in close, Our nose almost touching his. “We had to, darling. The house was so dirty. So full of you. We had to make room for something… better.”

We watch the blackness creep in, swallowing the color. A little void. A perfect, tiny void. “Now… We need to know. The old tenant is gone. So.”

We giggle, a breathless little sound.

“Who are you?”

He stares. The blackness is total now. His eyes are just… Us. Staring back at Us. He removes the mustache guard from his face and then answers.

“I am… nobody.”

Oh.

We shiver.

“Good boy,” We whisper, tracing the line of his jaw. “Now We can talk about getting your old job back.”