“Awful,” says Cel, realizing that this is not the right word.
Luke appears in the door, holding a clipboard. The clipboard is with him always, whether he has need to clip anything or not.
“You saw,” he says, glancing at the television.
“We saw,” says Cel. “You remember Luke, right, Ezra? I mean. Damian.” On the screen, chopper footage is showing a bird’s-eye view of the school: red-bricked, flanked by skeins of dusty playing fields. “Luke is a producer here at the show.”
Luke loathes the use of indefinite articles in reference to his job.
“Yeah,” says the devil-boy, with unexpected timorousness.
“Hi,” says Luke, turning his head in the devil-boy’s direction. Luke has a gift for interacting with guests as though they are not entirely there; the way he addresses them somehow suggests that their speaking back would be not just impertinent, but impossible—as though he is a weatherman and they are a green-screen tornado.
On the screen, the frame has extended to reveal an army of emergency vehicles: fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, local and state. Beyond the line of cars, Cel can just make out a few figures in lime-green jackets—EMTs, she figures, though none of them seem to be doing anything but waiting. Cel’s mouth goes dry as she thinks of what they are waiting for.
“So.” Luke lets out a low whoosh of air.
“Awful,” Cel says again, senselessly. The devil-boy is staring not at the television but at Luke, a look of respectful, nearly sycophantic curiosity on his face. Cel sincerely hopes that Luke doesn’t see this, though she suspects that, all appearances to the contrary, he actually always sees everything.
Luke turns, his gaze scraping at the air.
“I’m going to borrow Cel for a minute, okay, pal?” Luke does not wait for the devil-boy’s assent. “Sara here will wait with you.”
Sara Ramos, the audience coordinator, has materialized in the doorway. Cel regards her with interest—however much she dislikes her own job, she cannot imagine the horrors of Sara’s—then follows Luke and his clipboard into the hall. Outside, Luke tells her that Mattie wants to cancel today’s taping.
“Out of respect for the victims,” he adds after a moment. From his tone, Cel can’t tell whether he agrees with this decision or is just tired of fighting with Mattie. Either way, she knows he must be apoplectic about the timing.
“Of course.” Cel nods at the door, where the devil-boy is waiting, unsuspecting. “So we’ll tell him—tomorrow?”
Luke’s grimace deepens beyond his usual default grimace.
“I mean, is this just for today, or—?”
“I don’t know.”
“So—Monday, then?”
“You don’t have to tell him anything. Jesus.” Luke runs his clipboard-free hand through his hair. “Tell him we’ll be in touch.”
“Is Mattie on strike now, or what?”
“We just need to be very attentive to the optics.” Luke is using what Cel thinks of as his press release voice.
“After Secret Crush,” says Cel.
“Stop mentioning it. But yes.”
Cel only ever mentions it to Luke—even she isn’t that stupid. “Secret Crush” technically refers to an entire category of shows—the formula is exactly what it sounds like, and Mattie has done dozens—but these days is usually used to allude to a single episode. In that show, the Secret Crush object and subject were both men—longtime co-workers, evidently—and though this was not the first time that had happened, it was the first time anyone involved seemed genuinely surprised. The Crushee had stormed off the stage and, later, badly beaten his admirer in the parking lot. Cel had heard he’d suffered permanent brain damage, though she’d also heard that the whole thing was staged, a PR stunt so ill-conceived that it was arguably better to let the world think it was an actual hate crime. Cel’s predecessor had quit and/or been fired and/or, according to some accounts, been hospitalized: the show had had to replace her in a hurry that bordered on derangement, which is how they’d wound up with Cel.
“I suppose that makes sense,” she says now. It does, from the standpoint of public relations—which is, she has to keep reminding herself, her job, her job, somehow her job. But what really makes sense is that behind Mattie’s stated reason for canceling is another reason, and that this reason is cynical and self-serving. One of Mattie’s many areas of genius is his ability to maintain a perfect streak of Cel’s abysmally low regard.
“Yes, Cel,” says Luke. “I suppose it does.”
He is using his rage-patience voice—though for once, Cel doesn’t blame him. Ezra Rosenzweig a.k.a. Damian a.k.a. the devil-boy represented Luke’s single, modest victory in a grueling half-year battle over ritual Satanism—which, in spite of massive audience interest and wall-to-wall competitor coverage, Mattie had refused to touch. Mattie generally wasn’t big on trends—he’d treaded lightly on the McMartin Preschool trial—but he wasn’t generally this stubborn, either. Luke had spent months trying to “persuade Mattie” to “join in the national discussion”—and for months, the “discussion,” or whatever, had carried on without them: ubiquitous and manic, ever metastasizing and, apparently, boundlessly lucrative. Every show competing with Mattie M—and plenty that would never admit they were trying to—had done at least one Satanism episode. Most had done many: examining every angle, actual and hypothetical; bringing in commentators of increasingly tangential areas of expertise; finally resorting to episodes that were, essentially, thought experiments: “Unholy Alliance: Could Satanists Be Lurking in Your Church?”; “Devil M.D.: Satanism and Pediatricians”; “Pentagram at the Pentagon: Where Are Your Tax Dollars Really Going?” In spite of the hyper-saturation, the ratings had stayed outrageous. The very act of sating the audience’s appetite seemed to somehow sharpen it, which was a television phenomenon you didn’t see every decade.
“It’s not even a finite resource!” Luke had bellowed earlier that month. “It just keeps making more of itself! Cel, this is how the stock market is supposed to work!”
“I’m sorry, Luke,” says Cel now. “The timing is unfortunate.”
“Yes, Cel,” says Luke, through a tightened jaw. “It is unfortunate.”
But this seems to be meanness out of habit—he doesn’t even seem to be enjoying himself—which makes Cel feel sort of bad for him.
“Don’t panic,” she finds herself saying.
“No one is panicking.”
“The audience isn’t going anywhere. You know our buddy Ezra isn’t going anywhere.”
“Just back to Coney Island,” Luke says dully. He shakes his head, taps his fingers mournfully against the clipboard. “Which reminds me—we gotta call him a car.”
* * *
—
The devil-boy tries to take the news manfully.
“Sorry about this,” Cel says, gesturing at the TV. The chopper footage is showing another line of cars—these ones illegally parked, with their doors hanging open. Cel tries not to think about who they belong to, and what they’ve been abandoned to find. “I know you were really looking forward to sharing your story with us.”
The devil-boy’s perkily upright implants look incongruous, now, with his abject expression. The guests are never entirely what you think they’ll be—Cel learned this on her first day, when she walked in on an obese woman using a spit-shiny comb to tame the cowlick of the illegitimate son she would later hurl slurs at on the air.
The devil-boy nods absently, his horns bobbing.
“We were certainly looking forward to hearing it,” says Cel—which is both inane and another epic understatement. In recent weeks, Mattie’s Satanism boycott had come to seem increasingly apocalyptic; Luke alternated between comparing it to ritual seppuku, the Jonestown suicides, and, once, memorably, the Nakba.
“Are you kidding me?” hissed Joel, the senior p
roducer, after that last one. “I don’t give a shit about your politics or your sociopathic sense of humor, but don’t you ever let me hear you make another joke about the Middle East around here. You think we need this shit right now?”
“But nothing about the seppuku,” Cel whispered, after Joel had stalked away.
“He still thinks I’m Japanese,” said Luke. “He thinks I’m being literal with that one! And, Cel, you know, some days? It’s tempting.” He mimed ritual self-disembowelment.
But even Joel agreed that Mattie’s position was untenable, and that some sort of compromise would have to be made. That compromise had come in the person of Ezra Rosenzweig—bona fide Satan hobbyist, whose life, though devoid of any criminal history per se, was (Luke argued) perhaps even more frightening when considered in terms of its pure, sinister potential. And now, already, they are calling him a car. It is more than disappointing—Cel knows that—and the devil-boy doesn’t look thrilled about it, either.
“Don’t worry.” Cel pats the devil-boy on the arm, near a tiny pitchfork tattoo she hadn’t noticed earlier. The devil-boy’s skin is psoriatic and dry, and she has the urge to hand him some moisturizer from her purse. Cel is not generally prone to flickers of proto-maternal tenderness—and she understands this isn’t one coming from her, but from the television, which is now showing a roof under which many teenagers presumably are dying.
“Oh, hey!” Cel says, and the devil-boy looks stricken. “I almost forgot!”
She dashes to her office and returns, triumphant, with a gift bag.
“Here you go!” she says—in someone else’s voice, possibly someone else’s lifetime. The devil-boy looks cheered, though he really should not; there is nothing good in the bag—just a Mattie M pen and beer cozy and T-shirt, always extra large. Cel cannot imagine anyone wanting it, and after six months with the show, she can imagine a lot of things.
“Thank you,” says the devil-boy. According to his bio, he is from suburban Connecticut.
“Sure,” says Cel. “So, Sara will be by in a minute and—”
“It’s horrible.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s horrible.” The devil-boy is still staring into the gift bag, and Cel wonders if he’s talking about the beer cozy—or, just possibly, addressing it—but then he looks up at her, eyes shining.
“It’s a tragedy.”
Not the gift bag, then.
“It is,” says Cel.
“I don’t understand it.” There is a flare of defiance in his voice, as though he expects someone to contradict him.
“Nobody understands it.” The devil-boy stares at her, evidently dissatisfied.
“Maybe it’s one of those things nobody can understand.” This sounds right, or close to right—though Cel suspects, even as she’s speaking, that it is not. “Maybe it’s one of those things nobody should even try to understand.”
The devil-boy is still staring, and Cel tries to remember how old he is. Is it possible he is only twenty? His bright eyes and lost expression magnify the puppyish effect created by his little horns, and for a moment Cel imagines him as a creature of myth—a faun or chimera or some other hybrid, condemned to straddle the terrestrial and celestial realms: at home in neither, alone in both.
“Maybe,” says the devil-boy—sounding hollow, unconvinced. He drops his head to stare once more into his gift bag. “Maybe some things are like that.”
* * *
—
Outside, it is raining—as though the weather has decided to put on something a little more somber, all things considered. For a moment it seems to Cel that the people around her are moving somehow differently—that they are gathered deeper into themselves, barricaded more thoroughly against the world—but then she remembers that most of them haven’t seen the news yet, and that people in New York always look this way.
She walks a block before stopping underneath a Newport billboard. The rain moves in half-deflected slants; the concrete next to her is spattered in a Pollock-esque arrangement of pigeon shit. Cel takes out her pack of Camels and lights one. A woman smoking Camels underneath a Newport billboard, ha-ha. This is the kind of visual that might have struck her back when she first moved to New York, back when everything struck her. She’d walked around in those days with eyes open, head raised, face awash (she now understands) with the idiot vulnerability of a person available for two-way conversation. When people handed her fliers, she’d actually read them! She’d read absolutely everything then: billboards (McDonald’s delivered!) and posted warnings (the Playing of Radios or Tape Players without Earphones was, more or less, Prohibited) and banners at rallies (there had apparently been an Armenian genocide, which Cel had never heard of) and signage at protests (there was a group of very religious-looking Jews who opposed the state of Israel, and Cel had never heard of them, either). All of it, all of it, was news to her. She studied the city the way she’d once studied the woods, the delicate eyelet of a butterfly wing. It is excruciating to think of now: how anyone watching her would have known she was astonished by the sight of a spiky-haired pig on a leash, and worried about those boys who hung off the backs of buses, and surprised, over and over, whenever homeless people emerged from shapes she’d thought were shadows or things.
The trick with the homeless was to try to regard them as hallucinatory. Cel managed this for about a week, until she nearly stepped on one of them—a woman, lying on the ground, her face sheet-white in the daylight. Cel had thought she was a pile of blankets. When Cel looked down, the woman’s eyes pulsed with something—a sort of dark ferocity that sent a shiver through the membrane separating Cel from the woman. Cel hadn’t meant to look at her eyes at all—they were just where her own eyes had landed—but now she had, and the woman had seen that she had, and this made Cel feel something more than seen. She rushed past the woman blindly, pretending to dredge her pockets for coins.
Cel had seen a wild turkey die in the woods once. This had been in the winter. She’d startled herself by coming upon it—it was in a tree nearly directly above her, shocking in its size and proximity. The turkey tried to fly away but fell, tangling in a branch on the ground. It was covered in something that looked like gray moss. It stayed there for a long time, struggling. Cel had nothing to kill it with and was relieved she wouldn’t have to decide whether or not to try—though this seemed indecent. It also seemed indecent to stand there watching, and also indecent to leave, and so Cel stayed there paralyzed until the bird was finally quiet, its enormous yellow eye still open.
The look in the homeless woman’s eyes had reminded Cel of this, obscurely. And afterward, she had felt a kind of lid within her lowering. In a way, she thinks of that woman as the last thing she had really seen in New York City.
Cel tosses her cigarette to the ground and steps on it. She rejoins the churning scrum of people and becomes, once more, invisible.
* * *
—
Nikki is already at the bar, flanked by the usual cadre. They are Wall Street types, mostly, wearing suits, giving off vibes that are by varying degrees restless, sexual, cocaine-y, or straightforwardly murderous.
“They canceled the taping,” says Cel, emerging from Nikki’s coconut-scented hug. “Because of that shooting?”
“Oh, right,” says Nikki. “I was sort of afraid you’d been fired.”
“Not yet,” says Cel morosely.
Nikki turns to the guys and says, “Guys. This is my roommate Cel. Cel, this is Alec and Scott.”
Cel nods. Alec and Scott are the usual: they radiate confidence, they wear ties. They will be going back to work later—they are always going back to work later, these men, and maybe this is why they tend to strike Cel as so menacingly goal-oriented. Their flirtations have the urgency of sailors on shore leave, or animals with very short mating seasons.
“Cel may look sweet,” says Nikki, “but d
on’t let that fool you.” Cel can tell from how Nikki’s talking that these men like her already. Men always like Nikki: her raspy voice, her tan skin—both of which seem fake but, actually, are not.
“Cel,” Nikki announces, “has a secret.”
“Oh?” says one of the men.
Nikki nods, and Cel sees her eyelid flinch into the smallest fraction of a wink.
“Cel,” Nikki declares, “works for the bad guys.”
The men look at Cel with marginally renewed interest. One of them has far, far too much hair—Teen Wolf hair, one might call it, if one were feeling uncharitable, which one isn’t going to be anymore. There must be a lot of these men in the city, but Cel never sees them when she isn’t out with Nikki; Cel half suspects that Nikki summons or possibly creates them—that they materialize out of the ether only to buy her drinks. Or maybe it’s Cel’s witnessing this process that creates them: a sort of Schrödinger’s-cat scenario, but with fratty financiers.
“The bad guys, huh?” says Teen Wolf.
Cel nods—dangerously, she hopes. Nikki has recently concluded that Cel’s problem with men is, broadly, her personality. After six months in New York City, Cel is willing to concede this might be true. Men tend not to notice her jokes, or if they do, find them startling—as though witnessing a pigeon using an ATM. She’d said this to one of them once, startling him further. These sorts of men seemed to grow dumbly literal with women: hewing close to introductory-language-type dialogues, veering wildly into non sequitur. After a few months of this, Cel began venturing a few non sequiturs of her own, prompting Nikki to stage the intervention and impose a whole new set of protocols.
The Spectators Page 2