Elimination Night

by AnonYMous

  This time, no cheering. Just a roomful of sweaty, quickly sobering faces. A modest ten percent gain? Was the man out of his fucking mind? We’d be lucky if the ratings didn’t fall by that much! What the hell was he talking about? Was he thinking of a different show?

  “Hmm,” said Sir Harold, answering the silence. “Well, it’s late, and I’ve got to be on a plane to Germany tomorrow morning—a few local difficulties. So a good night to you all.”

  Then he left through the wrong door, tripping Bibi’s fire alarm.

  In spite of the noise and the flashing lights, no one spoke or moved for a very long time.

  19

  Fallen Icon

  THE NEXT MORNING, I avoided the news: no Twitter, no Facebook, no TV… nothing. I didn’t even switch on my phone. If Project Icon had made the morning headlines for any other reason than an unprecedented jump in the ratings (Breaking: “Every Man, Woman, and Child in America Watches Season Premiere of Singing Competition!”), I didn’t want to know. I mean, what good would it do? The number of people who’d tuned in the previous night was now beyond anyone’s control.

  In reality, of course, the curiosity was just about killing me. After all, my future life with Brock—not to mention my writing career—depended on the show’s success.

  A new season of Icon wouldn’t make the news all by itself, of course. (Other than on Rabbit News, which had been running shameless puff pieces since early December.) But if the daily network rankings published overnight by the Jefferson Metrics Organization moved in any way that could support ShowBiz magazine’s predictions about the show’s imminent death, no TV anchor in the country would be able to resist the opportunity to run a clip of Bibi Vasquez and Joey Lovecraft instead of reading aloud the latest minutes from the Federal Reserve.

  I suppose it was the unreasonable pressure from Sir Harold—a.k.a. Mr. “Modest Ten Percent Gain”—that made me want to pretend the Jefferson Metrics Organization didn’t even exist. There was just no plausible reason to believe we could hold on to twenty million viewers and then add another two million—as he’d suggested—and all in the first night of the season. And if missing the numbers was a certainty, then why bother going through the whole demoralizing process of hearing it on the news, along with all the inevitable talk about our cancellation?

  So, that morning, with a champagne hangover, I took my usual shower, drank my usual three cups of coffee, left my apartment at the usual time of just after nine o’clock, but in a total information vacuum. NASA could have accidentally blown up Canada a few hours earlier, and I wouldn’t have known any better.

  I was off the grid.

  I’d gone dark.

  Dark or not, however, I was still expected to report to my borrowed cubicle at the global headquarters of Zero Management on Sunset, where I was going to be working until the live shows began, assuming season thirteen ever got that far. So I unlocked my bicycle from the rack outside, and ten minutes later, I was at the office.

  And guess what? Everything seemed normal. The lobby was empty aside from Reza, the security guard, who was reading the latest issue of Uzi Enthusiast magazine. The TV was muted and tuned to a finance channel. And from the speakers embedded in the ceiling came the unmistakable chorus of Ernie Bucket’s “Ain’t Pretty, But Sure Can Sing.” I marveled at how it sounded even worse than the first time I’d ever heard it.

  Ping.

  The elevator arrived.

  I stepped inside and hit “PH.”

  Ping.

  Now I was surging upward to the whine of a distant pulley mechanism. Seconds later, the doors opened with a knock and a clang. I took a breath. I always take a breath when emerging into the Zero Management lobby. I swear, the view is better from up there that it must be from space: San Gabriel Mountains to the north, sunlight mirrored from the snow on the peaks; the giant shards of glass that made up downtown to the east; a great slab of ocean to the west; and of course La Brea Avenue, a glowing lava stream of hot metal, cutting south over the horizon.

  But something wasn’t right. It was Stacey, the receptionist. She was nose deep in a tissue. By the looks of things, it wasn’t the first tissue she’d used that morning, nor would it be the last. She was so distraught, in fact, that she didn’t even notice me. So I walked quickly past, hoping this was a romantic problem (her Belgian boyfriend, Fufu, seemed obviously gay to everyone who’d met him) and not related to the Jefferson Metrics Organization. There was something else amiss, though. The cubicles to either side of my own were empty. As were all the others.

  Where the hell was everybody?

  I tapped awake my computer and reached for my phone—I couldn’t keep it switched off forever. And that’s when I saw it: my browser homepage, which was set (as a matter of company policy) to the ShowBiz magazine website. Below the masthead, there were no stories—just two words, in the biggest, boldest, blackest typeface I’d ever seen:

  FALLEN

  ICON!

  Oh… fuck.

  I clicked on the link, hoping the story wasn’t what I feared.

  It wasn’t. It was worse.

  At the top of the page was a screenshot from the previous night’s broadcast: Bibi with her hand over her mouth, and Joey in the background, slightly out of focus, grimacing—like they’d both just heard shocking news. ShowBiz must have trawled through every last frame of the first episode to capture that moment.

  Assholes.

  Below was a story by that annoying little scumbag Chaz Chipford, whose title had been upgraded (I couldn’t help but notice) to “Executive News Editor.” They’d even given him a byline picture, in which he smirked chubbily from under a reddish mullet.

  He had written:

  Bloodbath for revamped Rabbit warblefest!!! Ratings CRATERED during season thirteen premiere—down THIRTY percent overall; TWENTY-EIGHT percent in the target demo. Worse: It lost its number-one position to Bet You Can’t Juggle That!—the most dramatic upset the nets have seen in more than a decade. Sources tell ShowBiz that ex-backup dancer/Icon showrunner Leonard Braithwaite has been summoned to The Lot this morning by irate Big Corp honcho Sir Harold Killoch, who plans to “tear him thirty new assholes.” Is this The End for the Icon-ic show? Nigel Crowther certainly thinks so. And unless the impossible happens over the next few days, ShowBiz has to agree…

  I sank into my chair and watched as the operating system of my phone finished loading. The screen flashed from black to white a few times before the default icons finally appeared. Then—after a lengthy search for a network—it informed me of all the things that had happened, phonewise, since I’d gone off-line the previous evening: “Missed calls (518). Text messages (164). Voicemails (107).”

  This was it. Armageddon.

  Before I had a chance to do anything: a barely recognizable voice from the other end of the room.

  “STACEY! SWITCH ON THE BLOODY TVS!”

  No response.

  “STAAACEY!!”

  Nothing but a muffled sob from the direction of the reception desk. Stacey was still a mess.

  “STAAAAACEY!!!”

  Len was moving closer now, at speed, kicking away chairs and wastebaskets as he went.

  “STACEY, ARE YOU STILL FUCKING ALIVE? SWITCH ON THE TVS.”

  He staggered into view. Holy crap, he looked bad. His tie was askew, his pants were creased, his fly was open, and… wow, his face… it had broken out into a tramp-like, whiteish-gray stubble, the color spectacularly at odds with the golden sheen of his recently upgraded Merm. He couldn’t have looked any worse if he’d spent the night in prison. I actually wondered briefly if he had spent the night in prison.

  “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!” he yelled, right in Stacey’s face. “DID YOU HEAR WHAT I—”

  With another sob, the dozen or so flatscreens that hung from the office ceiling came to life. All were now displaying the same image: Nigel Crowther, shirt open almost from the waist, sunglasses on, makeup applied, his toilet brush of a hairdo practically quivering with sm
ugness and indignation. He was standing beside a lime-colored Lamborghini while several aggressively branded network news microphones bobbed around in front of him like demented sock puppets.

  A live-impromptu press conference was underway.

  “Of course it’s all over,” Crowther was saying. “Why do you think I left? Any reality franchise that can’t get—oh—at least twenty million viewers on a weekly basis should be put out of its misery, if you ask me… which, obviously, everyone is.”

  Those twinkly eyes.

  That self-satisfied grin.

  I wanted to throw something at the screen.

  Now the TV reporters behind the camera were shouting over each other. To an inaudible question, Crowther responded, “Bibi and Joey? I have no opinion.”

  More shouting. As before, it was impossible to hear exactly what he was being asked. “Isn’t it obvious?” Crowther laughed. “Like the rest of America, I wasn’t watching.”

  He tried to walk away, but the news people weren’t done yet.

  “Look, I’ll say one last thing,” announced Crowther, turning back to the camera and raising both palms. “Project Icon is the past. The Talent Machine is the future. I know that. You’re all smart enough to know that. The American public knows that. And I would hope that Sir Harold Killoch and the Rabbit network now realize that after the frankly embarrassing numbers we’ve seen today. Now, if you’ll please—”

  “Mr. Crowther! Mr. Crowther!”

  “Please… I have to… seriously… excuse me.”

  Still more shouting, but the vertically hinged door of the former Icon star’s million-dollar ride had now powered open, and he was already climbing inside. Once seated, he gripped the thick, animal-skinned wheel and gave a final pout to the cameras. It was obvious he was loving this. Indeed, his expression suggested a kind of furtive sexual pleasure. The car’s engine blarped and wheezed. Then Crowther winked—oh, the smugness—before disappearing behind a slab of green as the door hissed back into place, locking automatically. A caption appeared over it: “CROWTHER—‘Icon is past, Talent Machine future.’” The car made a noise like a dinosaur being slaughtered inside a volcano, then flattened itself against the pavement. In the next instant, only dust and vapor remained.

  Len spent the rest of the day in the hospital. “An allergic reaction to something,” said his assistant, vaguely. I suspected it had more to do with him not wanting to become the proud owner of thirty new assholes, courtesy of Sir Harold Killoch. As for Stacey, she went home before lunch. No one else dared to come to work, leaving me alone in the office. I didn’t even have my little green pills for comfort: they weren’t in my bag, which meant I must have left them in the bathroom at home—again.

  Of all the days to forget…

  So I just sat there and tortured myself by searching for “Icon” and “cancellation” in Google News. We were the biggest story of the day, that was for sure—and I suppose there was a perverse reassurance to be found in that. I mean, at least people cared. But the fact we’d lost the number-one slot to Bet You Can’t Juggle That!— the appeal of which mostly derived from the likelihood of a fatal accident each week—was surely the end, as far as the show was concerned. Sir Harold might have put up with a thirty percent viewership decline for a while, but he’d made it clear that on no account whatsoever would he tolerate a number-two position.

  This was about pride, not economics.

  “I don’t believe in ‘managed decline,’” ShowBiz had quoted him saying just a few days earlier. “If an asset isn’t performing for Big Corp, I believe in elimination. And y’know what? I’m pretty sure Len Braithwaite and his team wouldn’t have it any other way. I mean, these are the guys who’ve been doing exactly the same thing to their contestants every week for the past twelve years! They even invented a name for it: ‘elimination night.’ So I think it’s perfectly reasonable for me to say to them, ‘Look, if you can’t hold on to your audience—well, then I’m afraid you’ll have to face an elimination night of your own.’”

  I wondered if the very first episode of season thirteen had been our elimination night, or if this was a humiliation yet to come. Not that it really mattered at this point. There were another six prerecorded shows left to air—two per week, for the next three weeks—so even if the cancellation order came later than expected, it was still pretty much a certainty that we’d never make it to Greenlit Studios.

  Essentially, my job was over. It was just a question of turning up every day until the inevitable happened. Meanwhile… all I had in the bank was five hundred dollars. Five hundred lousy bucks. That wouldn’t even pay for a one-way ticket to Honolulu, never mind a year of meals, rent, and beachside mai tais at the Hua-Kuwali Hotel.

  I was so depressed by all this, I almost forgot to check the actual reviews of our first night with the new judges. The ratings had been so bad, it seemed irrelevant what the critics had to say. But curiosity eventually got the better of me, so I tapped “Icon” and “reviews” into Google, and then… yes, I laughed. I sat there at my desk, alone in the global headquarters of Zero Management, and I laughed my ass off.

  The reviews were… well, see for yourself. Tripp Snuggins in the New York Chronicle:

  Joey Lovecraft has all the makings of an unlikely new American sweetheart. Sure, the White House might once have declared war on him as a toxic substance in his own right—with none other than President Reagan nicknaming him “Joey Dumbass” for that illadvised parachute jump over Manhattan—but as season thirteen’s natural protagonist, he brings wit and warmth and humanity to the circus; a welcome relief from Mr. Crowther’s well-worn horrible-isms.

  There was more like this. A lot more. And while Joey was overwhelmingly the critics’ favorite, he wasn’t the only recipient of praise. The Dallas Morning Bugle said Bibi “lent a new sense of occasion to the proceedings,” while the Los Angeles Mercury even found a compliment for JD, noting that, “the man is obviously so in fear of his job, his vocabulary has finally moved beyond the inane, maddening cry of ‘Booya-ka-ka!’ Please, Mr. Coolz, keep this up!” Even the contestants seemed to have gained some fans. On YouTube, for example, 198,234 people had rewatched Mia Pelosi singing “The Prayer.” Without a doubt, season thirteen had been as much of a critical triumph as it had been a commercial failure. So did that mean a word-of-mouth campaign could save us? Perhaps a #savejoey hashtag on Twitter? Not likely, unfortunately. As Len had once explained to me at great length, the season premiere of any show is nearly always the highest-rated episode until the finale. Hence the term “natural falloff,” which describes the second and third week declines in audience that networks expect as a matter of course. And the usual falloff is about ten percent—which in our case would mean losing another million and a half viewers.

  Even if a comeback managed to offset some of that, we were still screwed.

  There was no point staying in the office any longer: might as well go home, order that long-overdue takeout from The Gates of Eternal Destiny, get the two-dollar wine flowing, turn on my new TV, and pretend that everything was going to be absolutely fine. But my day hadn’t stopped getting worse just yet: As I waited for the elevator, I felt a buzz inside my purse. Pulling out my phone, I learned that my one hundred sixty-eighth text message of the day had just arrived. So far, I’d ignored them all. Not this one, though. Don’t ask me why, but I tapped the screen to read it.

  Bad move.

  With a thud, my head fell against the wall.

  Please, no—not now, not today.

  Groaning, I checked the screen again. In a cheerful little green speech bubble:

  “REMEMBER! DATE WITH BORIS TONIGHT. SEVEN O’CLOCK — NO BE LATE! (HE WAIT FOR YOU UNDER PALM TREE OUTSIDE.)”

  I’d totally forgotten that Mr. Zglagovvcini had actually gone through with his ridiculous plan to set me up on an Internet date. I’d meant to cancel, days ago. But I hadn’t. There’d been too much going on. And now it was almost 6:45. Boris—whoever he was—would be arriv
ing at my apartment in the next fifteen minutes, and Mr. Zglagovvcini would be watching from behind his heavy red curtains.

  He’d become like a grandpa to me, Mr. Zglagovvcini. Always bringing me cookies that Mrs. Zglagovvcini had made, asking me how I was, showing me photographs of his sons, who now lived in Berlin. He’d be upset if I just didn’t show up: It would be an insult. I should have cancelled in advance, like I’d planned to. But I hadn’t.

  There was no getting out of it.

  20

  Maison Chelsea

  “LOOK, BORIS,” I BEGAN, awkwardly, as I climbed off my bicycle, lost my balance, and clattered into the sidewalk with a startled ring from the handlebar bell. “There’s been a—uh, oof, dah, grrr—misunderstanding. This whole, y’know, this Internet thing—”

  Boris reached out to grab my hand.

  I motioned to him—as best I could, given that I was on the floor with my feet in the air and a bicycle on top of me—that I could manage on my own, thank you very much.

  “As I was saying,” I resumed, now upright, dusting myself off. “This whole—”

  “You speak English,” said Boris, with surprise.

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just from your e-mails. I thought… y’know, you write with an accent.” He laughed. Boris didn’t seem nervous. He was also… dammit, I didn’t even want to admit this… not bad-looking—by the standards of an Internet date, anyway. Or that’s what I assumed, having never been on an Internet date before. Hair longish and brown. A couple of days’ stubble. Hazel eyes. Not short. I mean, okay, the suit was a bit odd—who the hell wears a suit in LA?—but it was at least in a tan color and went very nicely with the fitted white shirt underneath.

  “Look, about those e-mails, Boris,” I said. “I didn’t actually—”

  “You like Japanese?” he asked, suddenly.

  “The food?”

  “No, the trains.”

  “Huh?”

  Boris laughed again and play-punched me on the arm. “Messin’ with ya,” he said. “Yeah, the food.”