by Ray Succre
A tear rolled down his cheek.
“…just like new.”
CUT TO:
Silence. EMERY gives a slow pan of the audience. The insects, the humans, the quiet revery of his speech and product pitch. Then a roaring crowd. Blinding strobes of flash. All standing and slamming their hands and limbs together. Beth, the girls, Belmont and Belmont’s insect wife and half-human offspring, and Jamison, Heller… clapping and shouting and cheering.
FADE BLACK
Emery’s eyes were closed tight. His head felt to split in two. The invertebrate voices crowded out his own thoughts, slamming against the inner walls of his skull, repeating and repeating.
“PARADIGM! NEW DAWN!” they shouted.
The tears left his eyes as he squeezed them tighter. His head pounded in pain. He breathed then and forced his eyes open. They were forever. He could hear them all.
“PARADIGM! NEW DAWN!” Perfect unison.
Warren Tult was there, in the third row. He removed his face, his crooked smile being torn off with it. Dozier laughed from his cretinous recesses and the mandibles of each insect in the crowd jabbered their cheers and hails. It was then that Emery saw it, his M1, propped inside the award podium. Had Merrill prepared the weapon? The 10-inch, blued, steel bayonet was affixed and in active position. There was a ready clip on the floor near the stock. Beside it lay his Musette bag, packed with ammunition should he need to reload. He certainly would.
Emery bent and retrieved the weapon he knew so well. Readied it and took aim on a larger of the beasts. His hands calmed and he inhaled sharply before holding his breath.
“PARADIGM! NEW-”
Emery fired. Dozier’s grotesque head popped to the side and a gray, gelatinous substance sputtered upward, the jaws gnashing and the nice suit soaked in the insect’s blood discharge. Emery turned ten degrees left in the precise motion of a panning camera, swallowed, aimed, and fired. Another creature’s head was sheared open. Ten degrees to the right. Panning.
CUT TO:
Sights. The combustion of powder and the hurtling of lead. Caution. Movements practiced. Exactness. Necessity. Training.
ZOOM TO:
The lower mandible splintering from the face of a little one. Squeals. Emery swiveled again and, as he took aim, could see that Bernie Dozier has been replaced with another Bernie Dozier. The executive was not injured, an infantryman of their rank that had simply been dragged aside while another stepped up to take his place. Emery needed to spend more time with his family. He fired another round.
More eggs than bullets, he heard in his mind. This began to repeat as more insects picked up the feed and re-broadcast the message. It built up and circled his thoughts, crashing against the inner wall of his skull like mad gulls against a cliff face. The mantra was ingeminate and came from a living network. More eggs… more eggs… Emery swayed back, the rifle slipping from his hold to the floor. He couldn’t see Beth. More eggs than bullets. The man screamed without sound.
The din of the creatures escalated into a boisterous, condescending laughter then, twisting his body as if the utterance from each of these individual insects bore with it an intrinsic pain in his collective nerves. The nightclub jerked left and yawed over on itself. He grunted and fell into the podium, faint of balance, knocking it over. He was quick to follow it to the floor. He sat there on the empty stage beside the toppled podium, microphone feeding back and filling the air with squelch and horrid squeal. Joining into this was the hiving noise of wings and the hissed, clicking laughter of the horde. His shoulders dropped and he peered at them, defeated, unable to gather the strength to stand, weeping and dying and holding his rifle and holding his Emmy and feeling his own thoughts being driven from his head by the constant, near-metallic jabber of the infestation. They had returned to their grand mantra.
“PARADIGM! NEW DAWN!”
And then the intercom sputtered to life overhead. The audience quieted as a woman’s voice, Beth’s voice, emanated from the speakers down into the large room. Emery tilted his head up and his lip quivered. He could see her again in the audience, having obtained a large microphone. Her voice carried over the intercom and filled the hall.
“Husband, your brother called. He says your mother is in the hospital. He’s on his way to see her right now. They call it a stroke. Your ticket is at the front desk.”
The podium had not fallen over and neither had he. They were resurrected. Emery stood before it with the microphone nudging against his lips, waiting for his voice to give it clarity and meaning. He reached for the glass of water sitting near the microphone’s base and had a long drink, then set it down and brought a cigarette, shaking, to his lips. The people watched. The insects watched. No advertisement page. No rifle. No Merrill and no intercom.
“Thank you,” he said, nodding and leaving the stage. There was a brief surge of further ovation as he exited. Heller passed him and gave him a pat on the shoulder, Heller with the silk streaming from his ass across the stage, then upward to the web he had created in the eaves. Emery stepped down and descended to the floor, made his way up the aisles to his row, and quietly waved as he wormed around the knees of others, toward his seat. When there, he gave a last wave and sat down. On stage, Heller began his announcement of the next award.
“Well, I bet you’re glad you came tonight, after all. That’s four of them, you,” Beth said leaning over to his ear, so proud of him, so impressed, knowing he now had two more Emmy’s to place with the others on the shelf in the garage. She squeezed his arm in excitement. Emery nodded and leaned back. The night had honored him with two Emmys, one for his writing, and one, not strictly his own, for best new show. This, beyond being deep and secure footholds in his career, had effectively drained all the blood out of Jamison’s power over him. He would hire a third writer in the next few days, gain more time with his family. Things would be different after tonight.
Beth looked around for a moment, checking on the distance of the children from her voice, and then placed her lips against Emery’s right ear.
“You were very handsome up there,” she said. Emery smiled. He gave her a quick glance of happiness. This was a grand night. Her eyes shifted emotions then and, after another cautionary look about, she returned to his ear. He waited. After a moment of inhalation, she told him a thing. His blood heated and he exhaled, somewhat shocked at her brazen statement. He cleared his throat and tried to hide the surprise in his voice.
“That’s… audacious of you. And demanding. And wonderfully lewd. I love it.”
“You’re interested, then?”
“Oh yes.”
“Good,” she said, mischievous and a little proud.
“The after-party won’t be too long. We’ll be home in no time,” he said, “I’ll make certain of it.”
Chapter Eighteen
He stood with Jamison, as if cohorts in shame, two boys that had stolen their father’s car and run it into a hydrant. The father sat behind his desk with a pale complexion, having been strained much in recent days by the onset of a direction change, involving his status in television. The path of the network now seemed to be leaning toward situational comedies and saga shows. There had been a memo, and, shortly after, a list. The anthology format was worn and tethered to expense, and was no longer to be given much consideration. The father was to find work on a variety of other projects, but those he now hovered over were to be dismissed at the rate fans dropped off. The father was Bernie Dozier. His two boys, Emery and Sol, stood like mannequins atop his well-trafficked floor, boys arranged to be stand-offish, sharp of eye and good looking in the newest suits from the commercials. The list Bernie Dozier had received had weighed on his mind for several days. There were things he cared about on the list.
Dozier began his discussion with the two by approaching the trouble through a brief introduction about how the public was changing out from under them, and that certain expectations for network programs were beginning to change, as well, but he was not allowed
to finish this approach; Emery cut straight into it.
“Explain that. ‘Changing out from under us.’ Describe what’s changing and how you’ve measured it. Because I don’t believe you, and I’m not changing the show to be another sort of show.”
“Em, hold your horses, let me-”
“Show me that change, Bernie. Empirically. I want to touch it. Because I know it’s nonsense,” Emery continued. Jamison sighed.
“It doesn’t matter, Asher. It’s semantic, and this is only just the setup,” Jamison interjected, “What he means is ‘cancelled’. That’s what he’s getting at. The show has been cancelled.”
Emery’s blinks stuttered his eyesight with a strobe of the man before him. Dozier. Black. Dozier. Black. His temples warmed and his knees loosened a moment, having become as if seaweed. He kept them from wobbling as he stroked his hand through his slick hair, clearing his throat and wetting his lips.
“Cancelled,” Emery repeated as a choppy, overwhelming urge struck him. He reached quickly into his breast pocket for the cigarettes.
“Sol’s right. And it’s all of them,” Bernie said, “They’re shutting us down. Not just your show, but all three of my shows and one other prospect that doesn’t even have a finished pilot yet.”
“Shit, I was right. When does this take effect?” Jamison asked.
“Well, by their viewpoint, months ago. You two got a season, and it was a good one, but there won’t be a second.”
If a man was lazy and did a poor job, he could find his name on the troubled end of a termination slip. If a man disregarded schedule, was chronically late to the point of having no practical use, he could be fired. A man might be a hot-head and gossip, a manufacturer of problems who later socks his boss like Warren Tult had done, and that man would be fired. A worker might prospect where it was not appropriate, in the areas of a next position, a love affair, theft, or being the simple thorn in a lion’s paw, and for these could face his expulsion from the place in which he had committed his untoward acts. Many problems might arise in a given week, and termination was an accountable means with which to solve unaccountability. Emery had done none of these things, however. He was accountable, a dray horse. He was not lazy. He excelled where others fell behind. The work he performed was neither sporadic nor poor. Every atom in his televised being knew the ropes and the schedule, and he had not only lived by them, he had made certain others were living by them, as well.
“This is too sudden, Bernie. How much notice did you get?” Sol asked.
“Three days. I got wind of it Tuesday.”
“How do we get around it?” Emery asked then, “Who do we go to? Another network?” Dozier sighed then.
“You don’t go to anybody. CBS owns the show. When they kill it, it’s dead. If you don’t like it, you’re gonna have to talk to someone a helluva lot higher up than me. You can try the network producers, but they’d rather eat a bowl of shit than go tit-for-tat with a cancelled writer.”
Emery missed his family. He worked through the flus and ills of each season. He often rubbed his bleary eyes at one in the morning, in his small study, his hand a frantic honeybee over lines of dialogue. He was not late to work. Ever. He was late home always. Sacrifice had become his muse. His very position required him arrive early each day, and he did. He was no troublemaker, not a blustery sort, did not gossip, or give rumor a place in his head. He did not create problems. He created agency where there was only bedlam. He controlled himself between those lines of his life that were controlled by others. He did not attempt to dislodge his fellows, nor was he strictly licit. He was accountable where few could count. He was respectable where there was so little respect.
Emery was methodical, but had racing blood in him and an occupational ethic that, were it given legs and a place in the Hollywood Gold Cup, could have outrun just about anything on four legs. His temper rose and he fought back the urge to shout.
“We won two fucking Emmys. Two! In one goddamn night! How can they possibly cancel a show that pulls in two fucking Emmys in the first season?” Emery said, quickly losing the bout against his ever-raising voice.
“Yeah, and I got a Producer’s Guild Award. I love it, but Asher, it’s the creative types that give the awards. They don’t keep the budget or make the numbers. The audience is what keeps you afloat. Maybe it was different in New York, but out here, your demographic is your bread and butter. And anthologies don’t have much of an audience, these days. People want comedy. They want to laugh. Situational comedy is taking over, and if you’re not on board, you’re overboard, you see? If they watch drama, they want it to carry over. Remind ‘em what happened last week. These shorts just don’t get a following like they used to; too much like radio. The network is cutting you loose before you lose, so to speak.”
“We have a strong audience,” Jamison said.
“No, we have a small core audience. And they’re loud, but not much beyond that. When The Other Side comes on, most people are watching Bennie Mink lock himself out of his house over on ABC. Even Hitchcock is on the ropes and NBC is tryin’ to make a royal flush of comedies even as we speak. CBS needs a comedy to compete with the other networks, and The Other Side is right in the middle of the time slot the network wants for that comedy. Thing is, we’ve got speculation shows, and The Other Side is turning out to be one too many. My other shows are out because they don’t draw. Your show is out because it’s sitting in someone else’s seat.”
“The sponsors want comedies,” Emery said, angry.
“Now, hold on, Asher. Not everything is about the sponsors. Nestle and General Motors don’t care what we air as long as they can stick a commercial in it and make themselves look good. They’re in so long as we don’t screw up the balance.”
“No, this is a sponsor problem,” Emery repeated, “It’s obvious.”
“It’s really not. I wish it were, because a guy could fight that some, but this is worse. Our uncles are kickin’ us out. This bad news comes right from our own dinner table. And it’s not just us. Harry Thompson’s show is being thrown to daytime and I know for a fact The Tracker was just cancelled.”
“We have Orson Banry commissioned for an episode next season. The best scripts we’ve ever had are already lined up. Belmont has been giving me gold for two months now and it’s all set up for season two. It’ll be a lot stronger and better than the first season has been,” Emery defended, nervously lighting his cigarette and pulling a hard drag from it, trying to block out the insults he had in his mind, to continue speaking in a rational way. Jamison took over, rattling off with reinforcing, though defensive, statements.
“It’s true, Bernie. Emery’s setup for season two is amazing. Belmont, too. And the novelist, Banry. You know him. I’m telling you, you’ve only seen the half of it. Big actors, great stories, and the directors… shit, if The Tracker is going off the air, we could maybe get Claude Giroux to show up in an Other Side story. That’d bring in even more fans. We have everything arranged, Bernie. And we can arrange more. Easy. It’s all gonna happen, and under budget, for once. You should see the scripts Belmont and the new guy, Moffat, have been giving us. It’s a gold vein. We’re right in front of it. All we need is another season. We’ll prove the public wants the show. You’ll see it. It’s a given.”
Larry Belmont, beyond being a talent for which Emery had met few equals, was both young and fiery. His scripts were dark, based more in horror than those other arts of speculation, and while Larry had a great respect for Emery as a writer, a respect that held Emery as somewhat of a mentor, the young man did not write as Emery did. His work had some odd, though fascinating, conceits. The stories turned on themselves, crawled through muck with an expertise difficult to take apart. Most of them were marvelous scripts, and he had a firm seat in the second season, with seven episodes exclusively his own. Emery had found that going over Belmont’s stories was easy. You admired and let your pen fall here and there, for slight alterations, and that was the end. It was revisi
on, not re-writing. The thought had crossed Emery’s mind that, in the third season, the elder writer might take a prolonged hiatus from writing scripts to work on other projects, like the films for Pacific he needed to complete, and that young Belmont might be given the reigns as head writer for a spell, or indefinitely. Larry deserved it, and was hungry enough to perform well. Emery had found a touch of himself in the other writer, but one bettered from being able to jump straight into television, skipping the peculiar and uneven, lesser sung path Emery had been forced to take. Calvin Moffat had only been hired the week previous, as a third writer. He showed great promise but was unproven.
“He’s right, Bernie. The second season will change everything,” Emery said.
“No, guys. It won’t. There’s no show. And it’s not up to me. You’re fired, is all. And me. Don’t forget, I’m fired, too. From all three shows. That’s the bare fact. I suggest you start looking for the next gig, and fast.”
Emery’s hands clenched and his jaw drew taut. His memory brought him Beth, in the crowd during his acceptance speech at the Emmys, admiring him. His memory called up Bernie Dozier in the crowd, nodding with a stark and well-intentioned piety. The stars of television and the backdrop of that industry had engaged for a night of formal, hope-bejeweled celebration on the Los Angeles set. The speeches and the sentiment. All the thanks and every glimpse of the crew as main character, for once. The awards ceremony had been broadcast. The viewers had seen every person to cross that stage. The viewers had been informed of who was who and what was what. They just needed time to let it show in their habits, time to change the channel and settle things. Most anyone who had watched the Emmy’s, and who had not yet seen the show, would likely now tune in to see The Other Side, at least for an episode or two. Emery had them. They were waiting for him but they would not stay for long. His response to these viewers needed to be immediate.