Cel sees a flicker of approval run across Luke’s face; he likes snappy conclusions, even when they’re attached to arguments he doesn’t personally endorse.
“Conveniently,” he says, “letting viewers off the hook lets us off the hook as well.” He says it acidly, but Cel knows that off the hook is precisely where Luke would like to be; he has articulated this critique so adroitly that no one else will be tempted to try. “But if we don’t address it on the show, then how do we address it? Should Mattie author an op-ed in the Times? Should he canvass the nation door-to-door?”
“We could issue a statement,” says Jessica, exactly as Sanjith says, “Anything but a statement.”
“So we’re saying he needs to talk about it, but we’re not going to let him talk about it on his own, you know, talk show?” says Jessica.
“Well, what if we sent him somewhere else?” says Cel. “That’ll cast him as, like, a pundit. It’ll give Mattie a chance to switch into his Donahue mode, which we all know he loves. And whoever hosts him will probably be happy, because they’ve already overplayed this thing so badly that getting anyone’s opinion for the first time is gonna seem like a scoop.”
“Where would we be looking at for that?” says Donald Kliegerman. This must mean he likes the idea: Mattie loves specifics.
“I’d start with the morning news shows.”
“There’s Wake Up Tristate!”
“There’s Tod Browning in the Morning.”
“He has a good relationship with Abe Rosen at PBS,” says Sanjith.
“You’re funny,” says Luke.
“We could try for Lee and Lisa,” says Jessica.
This elicits several groans and one Bronx cheer from the assembled. Lee and Lisa, though undeniably in the morning, is only very questionably newsy. Its framework is nominally point-counterpoint—Lee is supposed to be slightly right of center, Lisa slightly left—though their conversations tend to seem less like debates than bad, very mandatory flirting.
“All right,” says Luke. “Wake Up TriState!, Lee and Lisa, Tod Browning. Give him three options, let him think he’s doing the deciding. Choice within constraints.” Luke draws a line underneath the list, then glances at Cel. “I had little brothers.”
Donald Kliegerman declares these “good thoughts,” and ends with an anemic pep talk about commitment and community. Poor Donald Kliegerman. His job is irrelevant as well as impossible, and Cel imagines this is the reason for the gravity with which he tends to deliver corporate jargon, even when well beyond the hearing of anyone who might be impressed by it. She once heard him discuss intermodulation distortion at a karaoke bar. His continued employment here, like Cel’s own, is an enduring mystery of the show.
Though not, of course, the only one.
NOVEMBER
On the day of Cel’s job interview, it rains. By the time she arrives at the studio, her glasses are terminally befogged; everything around her is rimmed with a watery opacity. In the lobby, professional people sweep by all around her—impeccable, imperturbable, untouched by subway or city or sky.
She rides the elevator to the appointed floor and offers her name at reception. The door opens, and a bespectacled Asian man emerges; he is wearing a tie and sneakers, and his haircut looks very expensive. This, Cel figures, is Luke Nguyen—though the man does not confirm this, only nods and juts his jaw in a way that suggests Cel should follow him. He does this all without seeming to actually look at her, and she wonders how he knows who she is. Though really, who else could she be?
In his office, Luke produces a piece of paper and begins scanning it with a pained expression. Behind him, an enormous picture window looks out onto a smeared Seventh Avenue. Cel wishes she hadn’t worn the glasses. She does need them—her perpetually neglected right eye is now legally blind, her depth perception eternally askew—but it is Manhattan, and she doesn’t have to drive, and so she wears them only sporadically, and often for effect. She’d worn them today to look commanding, and now feels too committed to take them off.
Luke glances up after a moment.
“Please have a seat,” he says, and Cel realizes she is standing directly in front of a chair. She sits.
“You can take off that raincoat, you know.”
“Oh, sure,” says Cel, unzipping.
“What is that color, anyway?” Luke is still scanning the paper—which, from the back, appears to be Cel’s resume. “Would we call that…turmeric?”
Cel tries not to panic. She looks passably normal on a glance, she thinks, but there are a hundred tells if someone looks at her too closely: her slightly large skirt; her slightly wrong shoes. Her teeth, if she smiles—which certainly she won’t, but this guy seems like he might be able to somehow see them anyway.
There is a knock on the door, and Cel jumps unprofessionally.
“Luke?” A man appears in the doorway. He has enormous headphones and also an enormous head.
“Yep.”
“Can I grab you for a sec?”
“We’re sort of in the middle of something,” says Luke. Although it hadn’t felt like they were. On Luke’s face is an expression of extreme impatience—a dismay that might actually prove terminal.
“Sorry.” The man bobs his majestic head. “But we’ve got kind of a situation.”
On “got,” Cel can hear he’s from Boston. A seizure of association commences, a hybrid of archetype and memory. Santa-sweatered teacher in New Hampshire. Red-nosed lobsterman in a squall. Ruth’s worst brother eating a plate of mashed potatoes at her funeral.
“Can you come down for a minute?”
Luke looks at Cel.
“Go ahead,” she tells him. If he is gone long enough, maybe she can even steal a glance at her resume—she wouldn’t mind revisiting some of its claims.
Luke regards her for a moment. Is that suspicion on his face—does he not want to leave her alone in his office? Or maybe it’s only her. It’s only her either way, she supposes.
“No,” he says slowly. “Come along with me.”
Had she sounded overeager to be left? Cel wonders as she squeaks her way down the hall. Or had he somehow seen her teeth already? She runs her tongue along the top row—a habit she must quit, she knows, before it becomes unconscious. Growing up, the only thing she felt about her teeth was a dim gratitude they weren’t worse; all things considered, it seemed a pretty good deal to have average teeth—default teeth!—for free. But it turns out that in New York, default isn’t average; here, it seems, only perfect teeth are invisible. Average teeth are like Southern accents or pregnant midsections or yarmulkes or track marks or Kaposi’s sarcoma bruises—data that flagged you for further consideration, if not necessarily judgment. And because Luke had noted Cel’s teeth, he’d decided it was best not to leave her unsupervised in his office—with its computer and fax machine, its press strategies and market research, its incriminating documents that any number of tabloids might buy and that Cel, for all he knows, might peddle. He doesn’t know anything about her, after all, except for all the things he thinks he does.
The squeaking of Cel’s shoes has turned to squelching. She has the sense someone has addressed her. It’s the large-headed man, suddenly beside her.
“I’m sorry?” says Cel. Is it possible she’s forgotten his name? His head is even larger up close.
“I said, you’re really wandering behind the curtain today.”
“Oh. Yes.” Cel is aware that the man must be taking stupidly short strides to keep pace with her; Luke is six feet ahead of them, walking with a harassed-looking gait.
“Wrong way, Eli,” he says to what seems to be no one but turns out to be a tiny, incredibly well-muscled man in a tube top. Eli turns without a word and heads back in the other direction.
“He hands out roses to the audience at commercials,” says the headphone man. “They always vote him
Most Sexy.”
“Oh. Huh.” Cel glances at her waterlogged shoes, ponders the incredible length of this hallway. “So have you been working here long?”
“Well, this show is only five years old. Though I bet that seems like a long time to you.” He laughs. “I know I’m not supposed to ask how old you are.”
Cel wishes he would ask something else, then, so she’d have something to reply to.
“I worked on Comment before this, though,” the man is saying. “So I’ve been with Mattie a while. Or Matthew, as he was back then. You never could have convinced me he’d put up with such a stupid nickname, but there you are. You never can tell about people.”
“That’s true.” Cel is becoming incrementally aware that someone down the hall is shouting, and that this has been going on for a while. “You never can.”
Luke hastens his pace; Cel quickens her squelching. They round a corner, and Cel sees that the shouting is coming from a diminutive blond man in a white denim jacket. He is yelling at an impassive-looking black woman. Cel feels obscurely deflated.
“What seems to be the problem here?” says Luke, in a different voice than Cel’s heard so far.
“This psycho here thinks I stole his pager,” says the woman. Cel wonders what landed her on the show—a reflexive question that in the months ahead will come to seem less like curiosity than camaraderie. What’re you in for?: the question of one inmate to another.
“So you admit it!” shrieks the man, and Cel is almost disappointed that things may resolve so quickly. She really had expected to see her first melee.
“And what am I gonna do with your skanky-ass pager?”
“There was a chain of events that took place.” The man raises a finger—quaveringly, with a sense of grave import—then launches into a monologue. It begins with a motorcycle and his own unlikely survival and subsequent special relationship with God and includes—alongside several claims Elspeth might call “delusions of grandeur”—a pretty interesting theory about Scientology. Celebrities are attracted to the idea of a hierarchical structuring of humanity, he says, because they think they are higher persons already. Cel finds this part marginally persuasive.
“That guy is coked up to the tits,” mutters someone behind her. But Cel doesn’t think so; there is something familiar in the syncopated restlessness of the man’s speech. She has the sense she should not be seeing this moment, and she wishes she could somehow keep this man away from everyone: the cameras, the audience, the assembled crew. Though this, she realizes, is not exactly the idea around here.
“All right, all right,” says Luke, clapping his hands like a high school teacher who knows he’s outgunned. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to calm down.”
I’m going to have to ask you—what a strange phrase: meant to sound authoritative, yet almost goofily deferential. Issued like a command, when really it’s only the most timid gear-up to a request.
“He is clearly very nuts,” adds the woman. Her tone suggests she thinks that that should settle it. And, after all, it should! They should all declare this man off-limits—beyond the parameters of sportsmanship, or whatever governs things around here. And yes, Cel understands, of course she understands, that gawking is the point—that The Mattie M Show offers not only the lurid thrills of spectacle (“I Refuse to Wear Clothes!” “You’re Too Fat for Porn!”), but also the darker satisfactions of judgment. How dare these people live such lives—how dare they let us know they do? And certainly, communal judgment has its virtues: where would civilization have gotten without it? One could argue that participating in such a ritual is, in fact, an ancient, sacred duty, linking tribal council to Greek chorus to jury box to studio audience—on and on and on, throughout all of human history. But nothing one might argue seems to have anything to do with the man shouting on this soundstage. Watching this man on a talk show would be less like seeing a circus performer swallow a sword and more like watching a trapped moth beat itself to death against a screen. Cel cannot imagine it would make for very good TV.
“Nuts,” says the woman again. Now she just sounds bored.
“Security is on the way,” announces Luke.
“And who the fuck are you?” shouts the man.
He is standing up on arched, nearly tiptoed feet and is staring right at Cel.
“Sir.” A security guard is behind him, finally, placing a pancake-sized hand on his shoulder.
“Not you!” the man bellows. He points at Cel. “Her! You!”
Cel can feel the entire room’s attention turn toward her.
“Are you deaf?” The man grimaces in a way that’s nearly lupine, and Cel can see that his teeth are like hers. “Can you talk? I am asking you a question, and the question is this.” He pauses—he knows he has the room—and then explodes: “What the fuck are you looking at?”
“Hey, there,” says the security guard. His grip looks firm, but his tone is gentle, which makes Cel trust him.
“I’m not leaving till I get some answers,” adds the man, almost apologetically.
Cel waits for someone else to do something for as long as she can stand, which maybe isn’t all that long.
“Well,” she says—either finally or immediately. All eyes are upon her: she longs for death. “I was looking at you, I suppose.”
“Me?” The man sounds indignant.
“Yes,” says Cel, in a voice quite unlike her own. “I was looking at you and wondering about you.”
“You were wondering”—the man is still shouting, technically, but some portion of his anger is gone. Instead, there is a tentative, hollowed-out surprise—as though he has never known someone to wonder about him, and is going to be mad about it just as soon as he finds an angle. “And what were you wondering?”
“I was wondering if you were okay.” Which is a lie and also, somehow, the right thing to say. But before Cel can find out what she’ll say next, there’s a shift in the background noise and a familiar voice behind her says, “Aha.”
She turns, and there, somehow, is Mattie M. She has never seen someone so famous so close before. The immediate effect is a blend of creepy surrealism and even creepier intimacy, combined with a dreamlike sense that—though she has never had any conscious opinion about Mattie M’s height before—he is almost certainly too short.
“What’s the big idea around here?” says Mattie. “Having a secret rehearsal without me again?”
At this, light laughter—though no one, deranged or otherwise, could possibly find this sort of gee-whiz lame-dad thing funny. What Cel wants to know is how Mattie M got so close without her noticing: his stealth, alongside the adrenalizing jolt of his celebrity, makes her feel like she’s only just noticed a jaguar hanging over her in a tree.
“I’m Mattie,” says Mattie, turning to the guests. Cel hates when celebrities act like people don’t know who they are—though it’s true that the alternatives are worse. Mattie shakes the hand of the man and then the woman; calm has been restored, it seems, though Cel can’t quite see how. All Mattie did was appear. He doesn’t seem especially tyrannical, though perhaps everyone is so terrified of him that his presence is enough to shut everyone up preemptively. Cel thinks of all those countries where authoritarian despots suppress long-simmering internecine wars.
“Are you Meredith?” says Mattie, turning to Cel.
“No.” Meredith, it turns out later, is a giggly dominatrix with cystic acne.
“She’s interviewing,” says Luke, from somewhere else.
“And it’s so great to meet you!” Cel shoves out her hand, helplessly. “Big fan.”
Mattie pauses, and a ripple goes through his eyes. Cel is fairly sure that “big fan” is SOP: it doesn’t mean you actually are a fan, or even that you necessarily know exactly why you should be—only that you are aware that other people do know, and are. It’s a primarily symbolic exchange—on
e dog offering another its neck—and Cel thought it was customary. But the flash in Mattie M’s eyes makes Cel wonder if she’s miscalculated this. Maybe she sounded too much like she was trying to make him believe her.
He didn’t, as it turns out, and Cel will learn later that this worked in her favor: Mattie, as a general matter, despises his own fans. And so it is this moment of uncharacteristically graceless lying that will wind up landing Cel her job: a triskelion of karmic confusion she just about deserves.
Back at the office, Luke tells Cel he’ll be in touch. It seems he’s forgotten they haven’t actually done the interview. When she’s halfway down the hall, Luke calls her back to collect her raincoat; he holds it at some distance from his own body, as though the color itself might be hazardous. The way he is holding it, it does look very yellow.
The huge-headed man is in the elevator on the way back down.
“Hi again,” he says, and Cel nods at him. The digits above her flash silently downward; there are, of course, a preposterous number of floors. Cel stares, trying to summon another question for this man: in New York City, even the height of the buildings presents social excruciations heretofore unimaginable.
“Mattie—does he—I mean.” Cel gives up: he’s not going to be her boss, anyway. “Does he always sneak up like that?”
“He does!” The man seems entirely too pleased, she’s noticed. “No one knows how he does it, but you do sort of get used to it.”
“He sort of materializes at will,” Luke will tell her later. “The trick is never to let him see you jump.”
“And you know, I didn’t mean to say that Mattie isn’t a good boss, even now,” says the man a moment later. Can he possibly believe Cel is still at risk of being hired? “It’s really more that he’s—different.”
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