The Spectators

by Jennifer Dubois

  Cel wakes to the sound of the telephone. She turns around the clock on her bed stand: it is nearly one, which means it is Elspeth.

  “Did you see?” Even in times of calm, Elspeth never starts a conversation with hello.

  “Yeah.” On TV, a mute NBC is playing the usual. The coverage has expanded outward while Cel slept, though the facts, it seems, remain the same. They still haven’t found the one that is missing—Ryan Muller, according to the crawling-text box. The other one, apparently, was Troy Wilson.

  “It’s just.” Cel stops so she doesn’t say “awful” again; then she just stops.

  “Are you watching CNN?”

  “Yes.” Cel changes the channel so that this will be true. On CNN they are playing security footage she hasn’t seen yet. The shooters are standing outside a classroom—only moments before bursting into it, presumably. One of them, incredibly, appears to be laughing. Cel wonders if this is the one who escaped or the one who shot himself.

  “It’s crazy how young they are,” says Elspeth.

  It is true: the shooters are dwarfed by their ammo gear; even through the grainy video, Cel can see that one of them has braces. Abruptly, the taller one kicks the door open. There’s something performative about this—to kick open a door that nobody would have known to lock.

  “God,” she says. “It’s like they’re playing for the cameras.”

  “They probably are,” says Elspeth. “They’re probably copying some action movie.”

  “That’s horrifying.”

  “But it wouldn’t be surprising, would it? They’re swimming in the same cultural sea as the rest of us.”

  “Oh, don’t start.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Mattie canceled taping today.” Cel feels this fact should be introduced, regardless of her own interpretation of its meaning. The point isn’t that Elspeth is wrong about Mattie, but that she could be: the ambiguities of the situation must be acknowledged.

  “Very good of him,” says Elspeth. She is using the tone she reserves for when Cel is being “rhetorically elastic,” which is a term she coined especially for Cel. “Rhetorical elasticity” is supposed to explain how Cel wound up convincing herself that working at Mattie M might be a good idea—which, she will be the first to admit, it was not. But it’s also what allows Cel to tilt her head and regard even that sad fact from a different angle. Because what is “rhetorical elasticity” but a highly developed imagination? And what is imagination if not the very basis of empathy? And anyway, it doesn’t really matter what you imagine: only what you actually do.

  Cel realizes she’s watching the same anchor who was on that afternoon. She can’t believe they’ve kept her on so long. The anchor’s demeanor has changed in the intervening hours; gone is the breathless, gallivanting quality that sweeps through whenever a twenty-four-hour news channel finds itself reporting news that actually warrants its format. The novelty of substance has worn off, leaving only the stark fact of facts—which this woman is doomed (for how much longer? Cel wonders) to repeat and repeat and repeat.

  “Did you know that there are more people alive right now than have ever lived?” says Elspeth.

  “That can’t be right.”

  “Don’t you think that’s frightening?”

  “I think it isn’t true.” Cel changes the channel. “But if it were true, I think I’d kind of like it.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Cel had said this mostly to be contrary, but now she sort of means it. She flips through the channels: news, news, Steven Seagal movie, news. “I like the idea that if mortality can’t be beat, at least it can be outnumbered. It’s, I don’t know. It’s optimistic.”

  And what is optimism, after all, but a sort of inflated denial? Cel flips—news, MTV, infomercial about the perils and possibilities of making juice at home—and finally she finds it: an episode of Mattie M in syndication. It’s inevitable, at this or any hour.

  To Elspeth she says, “Do you know what I mean, though?”

  This Mattie episode is about co-dependent multiples: a pair of identical virgins that slept in twin beds, a set of pale middle-aged triplets still living with their parents. One of the triplets, Cel remembers, had cerebral palsy. She remembers that Joel had wanted a more dramatic set of sets—quads, quints, etc. He had yelled at Luke about it.

  “What do they expect?” Luke had said afterward, ominously unfazed. “IVF is only ten years old, and most of these people don’t even live to adulthood.”

  On the screen, the episode is nearly over. Mattie M is facing the camera for his final thought; the multiples, nonplussed, are arrayed at his side.

  “Do I know what you mean?” Elspeth is saying. “I don’t know, Cel. Do you?”

  Cel is always struck by how aggressively dorky Mattie looks on TV—pleated khakis, novelty socks; he doesn’t necessarily pull these off in real life, but he’s formidable enough that you do sort of forget he’s wearing them. On-screen, he exudes an aura of beleaguered middle management. The audience likes the juxtaposition between the guests and Mattie, which makes the show feel like the jubilantly anarchic crashing of a very square person’s party—more than once Mattie has reminded Cel of the rule-conscious fish in The Cat in the Hat. Cel clicks up the volume. The final segment music is playing.

  “That’s our show for today,” Mattie says. Even with the sound down, Cel can hear the tired wryness in his voice, which tends to ratchet up toward the end of the taping. It’s hard to reconcile Mattie’s on-screen persona with his reputation around the studio—where ever since the Satanism strike he has been regarded as a mercurial, irrational figure: an Old Testament–type deity who might, at any moment, subject you to arbitrary sacrifices and trials.

  “Join us next time,” he says, “when we’ll be exploring the darker side of Jazzercise.”

  Cel braces herself for Mattie’s sign-off, which she hates. She has caught her hatred from Luke, who communicates his displeasure every time he hears it—usually verbally, though sometimes through elaborate sighs and eye rolls, and once by thumping his foot in a way that reminded Cel very much of a cartoon rabbit.

  “Until next time, take care of yourselves,” says Mattie, “and let’s all try to understand as much as we want to be understood.”

  “God, I wish he’d change that,” says Cel automatically, in her best Luke voice (pedantic, baritone).

  “What?” says Elspeth.

  “Nothing.” Cel had forgotten she was still on the phone.

  “Are you watching Mattie M right now?” Elspeth is using her Concerned Clinician voice; her Do you have a plan to hurt yourself? voice.

  “It’s just on. I changed it.” Cel changes it, to make this true.

  There is a dense, evaluative pause. Cel glances behind her. The television casts a flickering blue cuboid on the wall.

  “Was that—I mean—were you talking to it?”

  “No—well.” Cel exhales raggedly. “It’s just—you know Mattie’s sign-off? ‘Try to understand as much as we want to be understood’? Well, Luke—the producer, you know, he’s sort of my boss? I complain about him all the time? Anyway, he thinks it’s really terrible, and he says so every day. So I was sort of doing an impression of him? Because at this point I hear it so much that it’s sort of automatic?”

  Elspeth says nothing. Cel is pretty sure there would’ve been a beep if she’d hung up.

  “It’s sort of a Pavlovian response,” she says, trying an Elspeth word.

  “Okay, Cel.” Elspeth is now using her indulging harmless delusions voice. “Listen—it’s really late. I’m going to bed.”

  “Me too.”

  “You should.”

  “I am.”

  She doesn’t. Instead, she watches the credits and waits to see her name�
��which, in spite of everything, is still a little bit exciting.

  Let’s all try to understand each other as much as we want to be understood.

  “It’s terrible,” Luke had declared on Cel’s first day. “It’s moralizing and clunky.”

  Cel had asked then if they could make Mattie change it—was anyone ever so innocent? She has since listened to Luke expound on his objections ad nauseam—It’s sentimental pseudo-religious pablum! I can’t stand that impulse to reify the self-serving! It’s like that Christian capitalism shit. Like, just admit you’re sociopathically greedy like everyone else—no one’s gonna blink, this is America!—but don’t try to erect some grand mythology around it. Cel knows now that the sign-off is one of the many topics on which Luke is best left unengaged.

  But Mattie used to be such a good boss, people tell her over and over. She hears this from Joel and Donald Kliegerman, from Sara Ramos the audience coordinator, from Jessica and Sanjith and once, very drunkenly, from Luke—and, even now, Cel can sort of see what they mean. Mattie is undramatic, civil, notably lacking in ego. His bad moods take the form of remoteness rather than tantrums; he is afflicted with the sort of self-loathing that tends to mind its own business. But ever since the Satanism debacle—as the months stretch on and the network’s ire mounts and Mattie’s refusal morphs from mystifying to infuriating to frightening—the consensus on Mattie has shifted. Opinions are split on the principle of his stance, or whether there even is one—where some see a meaningful distinction, others see only an inscrutable, very expensive hypocrisy. But everyone is united in the understanding that only Mattie can afford to do what he is doing, and if this is the direction fame is taking him they’d be better off working for a diva who throws plates at the wall.

  Another thing people like to tell Cel: how different the show had been, once. Cel hears this from everyone: from cameramen and producers, key grips and catering staff, security guards and chauffeurs. People who’d been at the show since the beginning spoke of its early years in tones of wonder, like the aged considering the baffling obsolescence of their own childhoods. Others described Mattie’s transformation with a sort of awed curiosity, as though discussing a discovery of science. It seems impossible that the universe is expanding and giant sloths once roamed Atlanta and there’s an African fish that breathes with a mammalian lung. And it seems impossible that The Mattie M Show was once nothing like its current incarnation—with its lurid carnie shit, its rubbernecking and mayhem—that its stories were once uncynical, anchored in substantive policy discussion, undergirded by a potent bleeding-heart agenda. And yet somehow all of it, all of it, is true.

  Over the months, this conversation came to seem a sort of Inquisition, a torment that would cease only with a credible profession of faith. Cel grew weary of trying to reassure people that she believed them—that deep down, she didn’t even find the show’s progression all that surprising. In a way, in fact, it was inevitable. There were only so many social dysfunctions, and only so many angles from which to explore them; once you’d run through your standard-issue welfare recipients and pregnant drug addicts and unmedicated schizophrenics, once you’d responsibly highlighted the relevant societal blind spots or institutional failures or governmental indifference they represented—then, sooner or later, you were going to have to go looking for something new. You were going to have to find people with issues too extreme to be widespread: exotic familial arrangements, startling degeneracies, vices and depravities the average viewer didn’t even know existed.

  And was it surprising that the more marginalized people tended to have the weirder problems, and a disproportionate willingness to discuss them on TV for one thousand dollars and a gift bag?

  And was it surprising that the weirder problems attracted the wider audience, or that the wider audience attracted the network’s attention?

  The rest was just centrifugal acceleration. Mattie M shot out in a new direction—going as far as the competition, then parodically further, until it landed in a place of high camp, or high kitsch, or maybe just low irony. Or maybe something else that Cel hasn’t thought of yet.

  It makes sense that the show’s veterans are defensive about it. Never do something for money that wouldn’t be a favor if you did it for free, Cel’s grandfather Hal had often said—and what he meant was not that you should be willing to work for no pay (Cel had once tried to explain the idea of an internship and was met with bottomless conceptual estrangement), nor that you should hold out for work you were (good Christ!) passionate about. Though his was a life spent in near-constant labor while slipping rung-by-rung down the economic ladder, he remained a committed capitalist to the bitter end. But he was suspicious of work without evident utility—he viewed this as the basis for many global iniquities—and he probably would have thought that there was something ugly about what the Mattie M staff was paid to do. And so Cel gets why the old guard endlessly invokes their standing defense—they hadn’t signed on for this—and maybe there had been something valuable about the show back in the good old days, when it was still a lot like Comment. Cel could even believe this, too, though she had to take everyone’s word for it. By the time she had a real TV, The Mattie M Show was already well on its way to what it would become—and the early episodes, for obvious reasons, never show up in syndication.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Cel knocks on the door of Luke’s office. Inside, he’s watching television: coffee mug in one hand, remote clutched in the other. Out the window, the light is clear; the sky has a polished, marmoreal look, like the heavens on a chapel ceiling. Cel loves the view from Luke’s office—which, combined with his personality, makes her feel like she’s inside the aerie of some enormous bird of prey.

  “Shh,” says Luke, though Cel hasn’t said anything yet.

  On the screen, yesterday’s murderers are still wearing ammo gear, still kicking down doors. Still? Still, again, eternally. Luke changes the channel. NBC is showing a shot of the White House flag at half-mast; on CBS, a newscaster is diagramming a map of the school, with bathroom-door stick figures denoting the victims. On Channel 5, Pete Streetman is listening as a frizzy-haired woman lambastes the usual. “Mortal Kombat,” she says. “And Marilyn Manson, and the breakdown of the two-parent family—” ABC is showing a still of the president, gray-haired and ruddy-faced, flanked by a retinue of solemn advisers. On CNN, two pundits are speculating on the question of sociopathy versus suicidality in the killers. Luke flips back to Channel 5.

  “—video games,” the frizzy-haired woman is saying. “Violent movies, kids going to school dressed made up like corpses, The Mattie M Show—which these shooters, apparently, watched regularly.”

  Luke puts down his coffee cup. Cel has the impression he’s been holding it precisely for this moment.

  “Half the country watches The Mattie M Show regularly,” says Pete.

  “Well, that’s precisely my point,” says the woman. She is wearing a black blazer, and jewelry too sedate to be at all visible on-camera: this might mean she hasn’t been on TV before, though for a local channel that doesn’t tell you much. “Did you know that every Mattie M fight winds up viewed by eleven million people—often over the course of many years? And with syndication, an encounter that may only last a moment in real life can be an eternity on television.”

  Cel wishes Luke would turn up the volume. She can hear the woman fine, but she has the sense that there might be something more to understand than what is actually being said—the way a sound’s menace can seem to depend on the quality of silence surrounding it.

  “Who is this woman?” says Cel.

  “Please let her be far-right,” says Luke. “Preferably stridently evangelical.”

  “Did you know, Pete, that during a twenty-four-hour period a person could watch an average of nine Mattie M fights across six different stations?”

  Rhetorical questions
are insufferable, statistics even worse—but this woman manages to deploy them with humility, as though she’s only just discovered this information herself and is as surprised about it as you are. Cel inches closer to the TV—gingerly, as though she might have to disarm it.

  “I did not, Suzanne, but I’ll certainly take your word for it.” Pete is speaking deliberately, which probably means he’s exhausted—Cel wonders how long he’s been on. She writes down the woman’s name: Suzanne Bryanson. What kind of name is that? It sounds made up. “But I think some of our viewers will say, ‘Hey, The Mattie M Show—you know, it may not be to everyone’s taste, it may be crass, but really, how much does that matter?’ ”

  Suzanne Bryanson is shaking her head without interrupting him—the sort of deference which might indicate something (political professionalism?) in a man, but in a woman just comes standard.

  “Even if Mattie M is trashy,” Pete says, “isn’t it a little much to be framing it for murder? At the end of the day, isn’t it really pretty harmless?”

  “It isn’t harmless if it inculcates indifference.” Cel wishes Pete had made her answer the first question before asking another. “It isn’t harmless if it contributes to our collective moral deadening.”

  “Jesus fuck,” says Luke. “Who is this person?”

  “Could she be a candidate for something?” This seems an innocuous possibility. Republican politicians bring up Mattie fairly regularly—the line between conservative voters and Mattie M viewers being an uncontested fact of rhetoric, if not reality—although it’s possible the cultural left hates him even more. But this woman is obviously not from The New Yorker—and, in spite of “moral deadening,” something about her is starting to seem not-quite-Bible-thumper, either. It’s the barely subdued hair and less-than-demure voice, combined with the fact that whatever case she’s making has permitted a woman to go on TV and make it in the first place. It’s all adding up to more Silent than Moral Majority—which would make Suzanne Bryanson something more along the lines of Concerned Mom: just an average American woman (wife, mother, saint of homestead and hearth) driven by circumstances to speak common sense to power. And though Suzanne Bryanson may indeed be concerned, and she may even (who knows?) be a mom, she is also clearly a professional something. She just used the word “inculcate” on a local-access cable show! Cel is sure she had her reasons.