Thank You and Good Night

by Ray Succre

If you set me down to stand on my own, I- I have stronger feet where my eyes are fed, see... where I might find that less of you is more of you.

  The camera makes a whirring sound then, something within it activating.

  EMERY:

  I know. You’re enthralled— the deadening things are like nutrient for you. You just want to film the deadening things. So set me down; I don’t care how hot it gets, I’ll blink for shade. You know me, and even though it’s spring outside it’s autumn inside. How hackneyed, but true. And did you know that all my frost-bit stalks have abandoned their temerity, and they don’t care? It’s frost that holds there, even in the summer. It’s true; I’ll stay breathing, but be deadened for you, old man. Are we in agreement?

  More whirring from the large camera.

  EMERY:

  Good. You should know that you’ll never find me enthralled like that. Like you. Because the sky knells over each hour, half-regaining its blue stock, and because the floor is death’s bitterest mulch. I’m like those things, right? Because I can release short pageants of peat, and you like to walk on that. So I’ll do it, but I want to just stand here while that happens. My spring, where I had all that sovereign green laying out my suits... that’s gone, and I will now always be receding, and drinking up the dizzy tips of air, because it’s not in my nature to go away. Full measure. That’s how a man lives. He lives full measure.

  We see and hear EMERY kiss the camera lens before letting go of it. He slowly walks back onto the shooting set. EMERY turns and we see him from the viewpoint of the camera to which he has just spoken. He is in a medium shot, centered in frame, looking as if he’s about to start up a narration for an episode. There is a slight spot of blur to the scene due to Emery’s kiss making a smudge.

  EMERY:

  (with a little anger)

  I know, I lost my mind. Fine, it’s lost. So what? I’m still on, sometimes, and I still have a typewriter. Well, I’ll fail; watch. Go ahead, set me down here and watch me vanish, without any invention, neither brisk nor primitive, and just watch me deaden, some pointless pulse in the unsettled scene of any unwritten act. Because that’s where you don’t live, in story. You’re not there; you’re elsewhere and you’re always on.

  We see him reach into a pocket and get his pack of cigarettes. He lights one, returns the pack and his lighter to his pocket. After a drag, he seems more settled, more relaxed. The smoke drifts about his head, rising up out of frame. He addresses us.

  EMERY:

  This doesn’t cost you anything. It costs me a lot.

  CROSSFADE TO:

  The flicker of a screen. A television activated. Comedy. Commercial. Drama. Winter’s end had brought the beginning of outer greenery, and when the film project was complete, The After Hours met the public in the late spring, in the rebirth time of things beyond windows. The movie was placed on the air in a cordial way. Emery had worked hard, and The After Hours had reached the screen. There he was, in private homes again. The style of the movie looked to be partitioned in his past, but was presented in color with new, sharp cameras, which he felt gave his complexion a bit of a burned, intricate pallor. He had been assured by the director that this was not the case, but there it was on the screen: He looked crackly and muddy in a way, not as watchable. He seemed overly tanned and his hair had no shine.

  Beth sat beside him on the couch as they watched the program in vivid color. Their bowl of popcorn sat between them while Vivian finished homework at the kitchen table. Rebecca, who had gone out for the evening, odd beads in her hair and an attitude of near complete disregard, was doing whatever it was she did when in the company of those two other girls from school. Vivian was doing well enough in school, but Rebecca had become a somewhat mouthy iconoclast, having fostered silly replacements for the things she supposedly saw through. Unlike her friends, she did seem to hold much respect for her parents, but even this felt to be on the wane. The world had become colorful and the gods on high had seen fit to turn society’s contrast all the way up. The whole of the juvenile world seemed to be going awry, in a way that was dismaying, yet also somewhat relieving. Perhaps things would change once the dust settled. Perhaps a touch of fairness might enter the world. This did not seem likely, and for every interesting thing of which Emery caught wind, there were other, problematic things encroaching on it.

  Television was somewhat the same as it had ever been, but for a short, renewed time, it felt to Emery as if the outset of an excellent date. He was forty-four years old, the decade was nearing an end, all new shows were broadcast in color, he had money coming in, and everyone was paying attention to everything. There was a war on in Southeast Asia and an American draft had been set into motion for some time. The sort of service young men would be taken into was a world that Emery knew much about and was staunchly against.

  The decade had given him, and much of the nation, much in the way of negativity, but his career now seemed to have survived its funeral, and while people he had known in the past were no longer living, others had been born anew. The gears continued turning and a toothsome wildness had infiltrated the culture. Never in Emery’s life had he encountered such a gap between the views of two generations. It was a volatile gap and everyone on either side had a great many opinions on the other.

  Rebecca and her misguided, crusader cohorts seemed a somewhat innocent bunch, though ill-conceived by their own, highly fashionable disregard for the fashionable. He had a new show that was an old sort of show, and on a new network that felt like an old network. People were less interested, considering the volatile state of the country and the war abroad, and so Emery had thrown every bit of himself into his project with the hope that what Victor Horowitz, a network executive, had proposed would be true: A show that would use Emery’s television movie as a diving board. If these three segments and their pejorative wrap-around were enjoyed by the public enough, it would become a weekly program. This, in effect, made the hour-and-a-half movie an extended pilot, unbeknownst to the general viewers. Emery knew that nearly everything in television happened unbeknownst to viewers.

  His name had been flushed down the toilet on the bulky mess that The Passing of the Hand had become, and the termination of The Deserter had caused a wavering network to conclude, finally and certainly, that he would always be more trouble than he was worth. These troubles, and the greater presence of news programs on the air, in collaboration with his diminished favor with the public and a nation divided in its views on nearly everything, had made him virtually unemployable.

  NBC was taking a risk in putting him on the air. At first, they had opted not to have him introduce the segments, and had hired the aged Jack Griss to serve this purpose, which was acceptable to Emery. After Griss backed out of the project, however, the network allowed a risk and put Emery before the camera. To Emery, once the notion had set in, this could be a way of revalidating himself and his image for the public. A manner of appeal.

  “That was very smooth,” Beth said, beside him on the couch.

  “Thank you. I looked okay?” He did not like his color appearance. She did, however.

  “You look handsome, but I’m not sure I like the cut of the suit.”

  “Ah. It was the lesser of evils. The other two suits were ugly on me.”

  The opening of the movie had run itself through and the first of the three stories had begun. His introduction for this first tale had been given the most revision, and he had chored over it with a sensation very close to obsession. It had to be perfect. It had to serve as a doorway to let the public know he was still worth their attention. He knew he was skilled, as did other writers and the networks, but convincing the public of this long enough to play a show before them was a daunting hill-climb in some very bad weather. His earlier work, no matter how awarded or known, may as well have never happened.

  Bennie Mink’s comedy show had finally been cancelled, but was immediately picked up by CBS, and Mink’s first new episode for Emery’s old network was one in which th
e aged comedian poked much fun at The Passing of the Hand, and even a few episodes of The Other Side. Evolution jokes. Alien gags. Slapstick in rubber suits. Even the credit animations had been parodied. Bennie Mink, playing his usual bumbling character, got into a costume resembling an ape, at one point, and played out a weird fantasy of being one that would do anything for a banana, and then seeming nearly to go mad upon witnessing a paper airplane. Near the end of the skit, Mink was still in ape costume, waiting in a long line to get into the Statue of Liberty tour. It was low and bothersome humor, and half of the skits in the episode were digressive jabs at Emery and his past productions. The program had ended with Mink giving a parody monologue (in hoots and grunts) while still in the ape costume. That CBS had allowed this was one thing, but Emery suspected they might have encouraged it. After all, Emery working for another network might become competition for CBS. Emery had in his mind a scene wherein he was able to meet with Mink and subsequently black one of the slapstick-hawking, goofy-faced buffoon’s eyes for him.

  Emery had grown accustomed to the heckling, in so much as it did not disturb him to the extent it once had. He was still recognized, but a cultural sort of fad had developed that included a slight disdain for anyone successful in the media. The kids were doing this, but their parents were flaring it on, and had botched so much of the industry that many of the popular shows were now base and without wit. A great watering down had begun; similar to what had happened with Hollywood in decades past. There were noticeable exceptions, but in general, things were becoming more entertaining than meaningful. This, to Emery, was another sort of evolution, and likely unavoidable. Every art saw it. The unfortunate proclivity to create in a way that pleased people would always begin drawing value, usually in money, and this in turn called in the businessmen. The businessmen resorted to numerical data and word-of-mouth from odd sources, sometimes themselves, and their power would invariably begin to overwhelm the fashion in question.

  Art always married Business, but after the excellent, heated honeymoon, Business hardened and solidified while Art went fluid, and all the arguments started there. Art invariably grew resentful of this behavior and wanted to talk all the time and Business became callous and abusive. Business would begin treating Art as property, and then Art would grow angry and cheat on Business until Business held Art’s hand again and everyone apologized through the thick layers of suspicion in the air. Neither understood the other very well. This was a cycle, and through such gyrations, new arts could grow between the cracks. It was the sponsorial rhythm of publicity in the arts, and history had witnessed these green blades shoot from the stony decay of generations. Certain people simply had to make things that were their own. Other people preferred to then take this uniqueness and make it widely available. There was money somewhere in that arrangement. Business and Art lusted after and defied one another, and Emery had now performed for both sides of the marriage.

  The trouble with Emery’s profession was that he was falling from it nearly as fast as he had once risen. He felt he had too much to offer for a burning out, but very few were conceding to allow him fade away with any sort of grace. It was as if a lever had been thrown between those reputations of genius and clown.

  Larry’s death was still within him, a sort of constriction he could push off for a spell, only to have it return. The loss of his mother, and the suicide of Sol Jamison had spun him dizzy, but these were things most people could have isolated and accepted. The terrible things happened once in a great while, and were the stuff of life. Being a man meant getting past these tragedies, but for Emery, the troubles and awful events had come at strange times and collided with one another, gaining more strength than they might have had on their own. Larry’s death had arrived at the near exact moment when Emery had begun to finally feel normal again, and this death had caused an opaque form of turmoil.

  These horrible things seemed no longer isolated. The cancellations and deaths and failures and illnesses were not rare. They kept happening with constancy. One on the heels of the last. Whenever good things were afoot… bad things were hidden in them. He had grieved, yes, and all was done, but grief was to be settled and relegated to the past. This was the only way to get through it. Emery could no longer hide things away in a box of woes. He needed to handle them and dislodge them. To get over the ills of life as they came. Unfortunately, many of these rode within the good things, and cleaning his slate meant getting past all of it: His successes and his failures. This was somewhat like a prolonged convulsion, but he wanted to clean his mind and heart for the years to come. He was attempting to essay himself from a particular mire, but he was trapped by the predicament of an insufferable power in memory, a thing that fought painfully to shape one’s future and perception, even against one’s desire and motive. He did not like himself much and wanted to be another man.

  Now was a new time with an approaching new decade, and his bag of tricks needed a clear run. The conundrum was that he was treated as if the proverbial old dog that had no new tricks, yet he was a mere forty-four years old, and no one had seen the majority of his actual tricks yet, had they? He had only given the world a few particulars he thought it might like, but this was only one of his skills. There were more. The majority more.

  Beginning with the onset of 1970, he would be traveling in a new direction. Theater, finally, as well as pilots for a variety of shows that were well-thought and just as fiery as his earlier work with All the System. He would not be reinventing himself, but simply showing more of his highly variable facets to the world. He was known as Mr. Speculative, but this had always been but a side-project to him. Larry had understood this, and his passing felt to be a marker that, among many meanings, contained the essence of moving on and looking out for the future. Emery was using this tragic event to signal his own, internal burying of the past. The inconvenience of this, however, was a vexation Larry had understood all to well: The past would not leave.

  Even then, Emery sat on the couch with his wife watching The After Hours, something so similar to his past work that he both wanted to both congratulate and kick himself. Beth was excited at the prospect of her husband heading a new show, if the movie caught flight. Emery only pretended to be excited. This trilogy of stories, if it were to function as a pilot and, after the numbers came in, be given the reigns of an anthology program, would be difficult and something Emery did not want to do. He needed work, but did not want to be inundated with it, exhausting himself as had happened with previous shows.

  There was a side of Emery that hoped the movie failed in its intent. The money would be grand, and having a show to exhibit his works was somewhat crucial, but his mind had already abandoned this format and he was functioning mostly in a prolonged, television-induced hangover. He wanted to start fresh, but with five Emmys, two previous charges of plagiarism, and a little public outcry peppering his career, there was no such thing. He would always be tethered and considered with an eye toward his strongest successes and his most abject failures. These things of his, for whatever reason, were incredibly potent in the public’s hindsight, but the negative always had a stronger hold on that opinion’s oily steering wheel.

  Creative control was source of contention for him. He needed it in order to keep a show his own, to foster his vision, yet with this control came all the backlash, all the exhaustion and missed family, all the foul events that clogged a writer’s skull and damaged his reasoning for wanting to share a story with the world. If The After Hours was chosen to be a show, he had already decided to give up contractual creative control. Management could be damned. He did not want to helm a show; he wanted to write it. That was all. Writing, not ruling. How wondrous it would be to type up scripts, being a writer, while some other poor heart-attacker dealt with all the troubles of production. This was how Emery had functioned before The Other Side, and it was the manner by which he wanted to do things in the future.

  Emery was a writer, one who had gripped the various levers of productio
n well enough, but in order to succeed in the wake of his failures, his relegation to the very gutters of television’s waning prestige, he needed to write, and only write. He would still host episodes, if they were to happen, but beyond hosting, he would write scripts and keep out of the business as much as possible. This would allow him to work on his other projects, and especially his plan on venturing into live theater, something he had struggled with since his outset in freelance. Giving up creative control would be a risk, but now was the time for such things. The new youth had figured this out. It was the one facet of their ideal-mongering that appealed to him, beyond the adoption and propulsion of the civil rights, which was necessary for all people, not just the youth.

  The two parents glanced over when Vivian entered the living room with her paper in hand.

  “All done?” Beth asked. The daughter nodded quickly and rubbed her eyes, tired from staring at white and nearing the sleepiness that always accompanied her bed time. Emery reached over for the paper but Vivian pulled it back a bit, which surprised him.

  “It’s fine,” the daughter said, slowly exiting the room and heading for her own.

  “Teeth,” the mother called. Vivian stopped and sighed, then made her way to the bathroom.

  The assignment that Vivian had finished was that of a short story. Three-hundred words and in the first person. Emery had been delighted by this and was looking forward to reading it when she was done, but she had drawn back at this. The father sat on the couch and stared at his work on the television, inattentive, mind adrift on the challenges of parenthood.

  “It’s funny,” he said after several moments, “She always wants to show me her homework, and I always look over it, but when she finally has an assignment I’m really interested in, something I actually know a lot about, she doesn’t want me to see it at all.”