Repeat

by Neal Pollack

  He complained about that for a few minutes. Alison poked away at her phone, not even feigning interest.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Trying to arrange something for later.”

  “Of course,” Brad said.

  He wondered if this relationship, the longest single one of his professional career, still had legs, or even thighs. Alison seemed to have lost interest in him around the time of Battlecats. He’d brought up this disinterest to her many times. “I can’t sell you if you don’t give me anything to sell,” she always said. Maybe he was hoping for too much. The idea that you could fall upward professionally in this town without actually working might have been a myth.

  “So what have you got for Fox today?” she said.

  “I think it’s a really strong idea,” he said.

  But it was a really weak idea. In fact, calling it an idea at all would be giving it too much credit. When Brad had started, he’d go into pitch meetings prepared, with twelve-page dossiers on each character, season arcs, episode outlines, a universe of possibilities exploding inside his head. He’d talk for a half hour, occasionally answer some questions, and then ten days later Alison would call him and say, “It’s not quite what the network is looking for.” Then two years later a much worse version of what he’d proposed would appear on the network, making him think that it was all just a big fat fucking lie. So he stopped trying.

  “Good,” she said. “I had to pull a lot of strings to get you this meeting.”

  You did not, Brad thought. That’s all these people did all day: sit in rooms and listen to pitches from fat, desperate hacks for TV shows that would never get made by anyone anywhere. Sure, not everyone in the world could get a development meeting, but once you were in the system, you had to really work hard to get completely expunged, like a washed-up veteran ballplayer who gets a spring-training invite out of courtesy.

  Sometimes Brad wondered what it’d be like to be on the other side of the ledger. It wasn’t a job he wanted really. But hypocritical, mendacious, and shallow as development work was, it at least qualified as steady pay. For once he wanted to be the one passing judgment. Then he hated himself for that thought. People built skyscrapers every day. They were transforming the world by their thoughts and deeds, and working for President Obama. The current editor of the New Century was ten years younger than he was and appeared on MSNBC almost every day. There was plenty of envy to go around. But Hollywood had limited Brad’s perspective. He was now officially envious of junior-level network TV development executives. He wanted whatever they had.

  “I won’t let you down,” he said, though he probably would.

  Their food came. Alison picked at a Greek salad while Brad snarfed his French dip with fries way too quickly.

  “This is my last lunch in my thirties,” he said.

  “On my fortieth birthday,” Alison said, “I learned that it’s really hard to OD on rum. But I managed to do it.”

  She always made Brad feel better about himself, which is why he still kept her on retainer. He wasn’t quite sure why she returned the favor. After all, 10 percent of zero is zero.

  Alison paid, a merciful act, and then she said, “You want to follow me over there?”

  “Why don’t we just walk?” Brad said. “It’s only three blocks.”

  “Really?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “They don’t let you onto the lot if you don’t drive,” she said.

  “Fine,” Brad said.

  They went outside. A weather pattern had begun to brew. The sky grayed rapidly, filling with strange, cloudy swirls interspersed with riveting cones of light, as though heaven were playing favorites with certain street corners. A gust of wind smacked the restaurant awning. Fat vortices of grit and garbage updrafted the breadth of Pico. Brad looked at the weather app on his phone. A High Wind Advisory was in effect for LA and surrounding counties. Was a hard rain gonna fall too?

  Brad raised his fists to the sky. “Why do you mock me, God?” he cried.

  Alison looked at him with pity. “You want me to give you a ride?” she said. “My car’s nicer than yours.”

  Wasn’t everyone’s?

  They parked in Lot C, a spot marked “TV Visitor.” The wind had reached sandstorm levels. It howled ominously through the garage slats, setting off car alarms. Brad and Alison escaped into a glass walkway, plastered with cartoon images to promote the new season of Family Guy. It swayed and rattled in the wind like a covered bridge above a gorge.

  An endless series of elevators and hallways followed, all of them adorned with wall-length posters of TV shows that Brad either hadn’t seen or absolutely hated. Why was he even doing this? He didn’t like TV, except for Mad Men and sometimes 30 Rock. He would have liked to be involved in making those shows. But he might as well have said, “I would like to help God make the oceans.”

  More than any of the other networks, Fox liked to ritually humiliate its show prospectors. CBS and ABC, which comprised the 2010 top tier, offered executive-class seating, up-to-date trade mags to read, and complimentary tea and coffee. NBC, still praying for the return of the Friends, had cheap plastic seats and neon piping, a doctor’s office in desperate need of a refresh, but you got the sense that they’d pamper their clients if they could afford to do so. Fox, on the other hand, despite having the deep pockets of a major corporation behind it, not to mention the endless millions of The Simpsons and Family Guy, liked to run its development offices like a frat house. That’s how Brad found himself sitting in a pounded-out beanbag chair, reading an old issue of Vice. He wondered if he’d ever be able to stand up. It felt like someone was running a belt sander across his sacrum.

  Alison stood next to him, texting furiously.

  “The pool man forgot where I keep the key to the back gate,” she said.

  “Right,” he said.

  Brad wondered what it would be like to have a pool man. Sometimes when his parents came to town, they stayed at a hotel with a pool, and occasionally he and Juliet would go to a pool party at the house of someone whose success they resented. Other than that, there were no pools in Brad’s life. More troubling, though, was his realization that he’d never even seen Alison’s house. He didn’t know where she lived, or with whom, other than her troubled adoptee. She’d been married about five years ago, but that status could easily have changed by now. How could the most important person in his career operate under such a veil of inscrutability? He was staggered daily by just how little control he had over his own life.

  An assistant, somewhere between twenty-two years old and total asshole, appeared with a clipboard.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said. “The last meeting is running a little bit long. Can I get you some water?”

  That was how the networks kept people in their places: making sure that by the time the meeting started, you had to pee so badly you couldn’t think. Everything was designed specifically to knock down the king’s petitioners. With so many millions at stake, the networks couldn’t afford to deal with uppity bottom-feeders.

  Brad chewed at his fingers nervously. It was bad enough going into these meetings prepared. But this time he had nothing, and he wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to bluff.

  Finally the time arrived. They got walked down a row of cubicles, occupied by another platoon of keyboard-clacking, noise-reduction-headphones-wearing entertainment-industry drones. These young people, who spent all day in a soulless office surrounded by cartoon swag, had no idea how fortunate they were. All around, windows rattled. Brad could see palm trees bending.

  Harsh winds indeed.

  The assistant took Brad and Alison into a conference room, which was enclosed by glass on all sides. The pitches the network actually wanted to consider took place in plush offices on another floor. This was where executives held the “courtesy meetings.” It was a simulacrum of business,
an illusion worthy of the opening reel of The Matrix. Brad sat down in an uncomfortable soft-backed office chair, one of dozens around an oblong plastic table. In front of each chair sat a phone with speakers sprouting from either side. Brad wondered if they were actually even connected to anything. He’d been doing this for a decade. Never once had anyone conferenced into a meeting.

  “They’ll be right in,” the assistant said.

  Brad nodded. Alison didn’t look up from her phone. She seemed to be smiling as she typed. Brad wondered if she was having an affair with the pool man, or maybe “pool man” was just a euphemism for something else, like “man who hung around the pool all day waiting for you to come home from work.” He wouldn’t put that beyond her reach. There were certainly people in LA who spent their days that way.

  The door opened. Executives entered. Alison activated.

  “Hiiiiiiiiii!” she exclaimed.

  The executives looked at her coldly. Brad realized that she didn’t know them. He wasn’t much surprised.

  “Thank you for coming in,” one of them said.

  They all shook hands. Brad had never seen two of them before. The roster was always changing. He no longer even bothered to learn their names.

  “Sure!” Alison said. “We’re very excited. You know Brad.”

  The third executive gave him a look that shriveled Brad’s heart.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I know Brad.”

  Trey Peters. Brad had been dealing with him for a decade. They’d never had any kind of exchange outside these meetings, via e-mail or anything else, and yet this guy clearly despised him, as he despised everyone. The smug bastard just moved from network to network, rejecting people’s dreams. Not that he had any green-lighting power; the decisions all got made two levels above him. Peters was just the guy who pulled the lever on the electric chair. If you had to meet with him, you were already dead.

  Outside the glass-walled room, Brad noticed, young people were gathering, holding tablets like interns at an operating theater. If you wanted to learn how to eviscerate properly, you needed to watch. And since the meetings were also available to hear on an office-wide intercom system, you could listen as well.

  The executives sat across the table from Brad and Alison and crossed their hands, as if to say, We cannot be impressed.

  “Well,” Alison, “for those of you who don’t know Brad, he wrote one of my favorite novels of all time, Going Postal.”

  “Going Nuclear,” Brad said.

  “Right,” Alison said. “Well, it came out a long time ago.”

  Brad felt a little twist of the knife. Alison didn’t like getting shown up.

  “And since then,” Alison said, “he’s been working on various TV shows and movies.”

  “Which ones, Brad?” said Trey Peters. “Not everyone in here is as familiar with your work as I am.”

  You bastard, Brad thought.

  “Battlecats,” Brad said very softly.

  “I’m sorry, what was that?” said Trey.

  “Battlecats,” said Brad louder.

  “Oh,” said Trey. “Battlecats.”

  “So tell us about your current project, Brad,” said one of the other executives.

  “Well, it’s a TV show,” Brad said.

  “How convenient!” Trey said. “We make TV shows here.”

  The other executives laughed too loudly. Brad even heard laughter from outside the glass walls. He began to sweat.

  “I really think it could be a new X-Files for you,” Brad said.

  “The X-Files?” said Tripp.

  “Yeah.”

  “That went off the air eight years ago. We’re not really looking for a new one.”

  “OK, well, my idea stands by itself too.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “So the main character is a guy.”

  “A guy, Brad? He is a guy like you?”

  It was liked being heckled by an ornery DA. Alison wasn’t paying attention, so there was no one to object on Brad’s behalf, and there certainly wasn’t a judge in the room. Unless that judge was Trey.

  “Well,” Brad said, “he’s kind of an everyman.”

  “OK, so not like you then.”

  Dick.

  “So what happens to this everyman?” asked another one of the executives, who was either dumb or trying to be nice or both.

  “He gets caught in an infinite time loop,” Brad said.

  “A what?”

  “An infinite time loop.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, it’s a loop in time. And it goes on infinitely.”

  “But how does it work?”

  “It’s kind of hard to explain.”

  “Go on, Brad,” said Trey. “Explain.”

  “Well, so, he’s a guy.”

  “You said that already.”

  “And time keeps looping around him.”

  “Right.”

  “So he keeps on having the same experiences over and over again.”

  “How so?”

  “He’s caught in a loop.”

  “The same experiences, though? Wouldn’t that get boring?”

  “He’s trying to find out what happened to him and trying to get out of the loop.”

  “You mean like Groundhog Day?”

  “No, that’s a comedy. And it takes place over the course of just one day. This is more of a mystery sci-fi thriller. Almost a Twilight Zone–like anthology show, but about one guy’s life. There would be stand-alone plots but also this through line where he tries to figure out what’s happening to him and why.”

  Alison had stopped texting and was now looking at him with something vaguely close to interest on her face. The more Brad talked about this idea, the better it seemed to him. Networks put stupider stuff than that on TV every year.

  “OK,” Trey said.

  That wasn’t exactly enthusiasm, but it wasn’t mockery either. Brad wanted nothing else from these meetings. He’d always thought that if they’d stop making fun of him for just a second and let him explain, he might be able to come up with something good. And now they were going to let him.

  This would be the moment that he transformed from Brad Cohen, Hollywood hack, into Brad Cohen, acclaimed showrunner. The next time he went to Comic-Con, it wouldn’t be as a fan or a cosplay enthusiast. He’d be all-access, a panelist. He’d never have to drive himself to San Diego again.

  “So . . .” Brad said.

  A shrill whooping noise went off, vibrating the room’s glass walls. It was punctuated by three long, discordant honks. Red lights began to flash everywhere. The woman who’d escorted them into the room burst in, looking a little scared.

  “That windstorm is whipping electrical wires all over the place,” she said. “They’re saying it’s a severe fire risk and that we have to evacuate the building immediately.”

  Whooooooop! Whooooooop! Whoooooooop! went the alarm. Hawnk! Hawnk! Hawnk!

  Alison said, “Well, maybe we should table this until—”

  Hawnk! Hawnk! Hawnk!

  Trey’s eyes filled with evil intent.

  “Keep pitching,” he said.

  “But Trey,” said one of the other executives, “we have to evacuate.”

  “We will,” Trey said. “But I really want to hear what Brad has to say.”

  “I don’t think—” said Brad.

  “Keep pitching!”

  Brad sighed. “OK,” he said. “So in each episode, the infinite time loop takes him to another place in his life, where he has to decide—”

  Hawnk! Hawnk! Hawnk!

  A window shattered, and someone screamed. The junior executives began to look really nervous.

  “Trey, I really don’t think—”

  “No,” said Trey Pet
ers. “We are going to finish this pitch meeting. I really want to hear what Brad Cohen has to say for himself because I admired his work on Battlecats so much.”

  “He has to decide,” Brad said, “what to do in that moment and how to find his way out.”

  Whooooooop! Whooooooop! Whoooooooop!

  Outside the conference room, young people who’d never experienced this level of terror outside of a Paranormal Activity screening were grabbing whatever personal electronic devices they could find and running around like frightened bunnies. Drops of rain the size of stinkbugs splattered the windows. It was as though Roland Emmerich were directing the day.

  Now the alarms wouldn’t stop. The air filled with an endless hawnking, and Trey Peters finally threw up his hands. “Fine,” he said. “Brad, you can finish tomorrow.”

  “I’ll call you to schedule him in,” Alison said.

  “Who are you again?” Trey asked her.

  Brad and Alison fled the meeting with something close to enthusiasm, clutching their shoulder bags like wealthy women walking through an alley. The building was filled with panicked people who earned their livings not returning phone calls until 6:30 p.m. There was no way out but the glass walkway, which shimmered with water like it was the central tunnel of a car wash. Brad could hear the hot, beautiful banshee wind outside.

  The garage floor was wet, as though a river had just overrun its banks. They got inside Alison’s Lexus SUV. Brad was relieved to smell the leather. He exhaled.

  “Well, that was bad luck, huh?” he said.

  Alison looked at him sternly.

  “Is something wrong?” he said.

  “That was so awful, Brad,” she said.

  “I know, right?” he said. “ ‘Keep pitching.’ What an asshole.”

  “No, I mean the pitch itself. A guy caught in an infinite time loop. What kind of fucking bullshit are you trying to sell?”

  “But—”

  “You need to lay off the pot,” she said. “It’s making you soft and stupid.”

  “But the pot is the only thing that gives my life meaning,” he said.