“Look,” says Mattie. “I’m sure there were many, many things these kids were into. Countless things they saw and read and did, most of which we’ll never know about. We’ve heard they liked Mortal Kombat, and that they had a poster of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and that they had a copy of Mein Kampf—”
“So you’re saying—don’t blame you, blame Hitler?”
“Holy shit,” says Luke. “I have never in my entire life heard someone Hitler himself.”
Cel closes her eyes. Maybe this isn’t real—maybe she’s delirious from stress, or maybe this is the first symptom of the psychosis she’s long thought was never coming for her. Or maybe she’s just having a stroke! She thinks of this possibility with happiness.
“No,” says Mattie. “I am saying we didn’t know these kids, and now we never will.”
Cel resists the urge to cup her head in her palms; she settles for cradling her cheekbone in her fingers, where she can discreetly dig them into her face.
“Sounds like a job for The Mattie M Show,” says Lee. “Any chance you’ll do an episode?”
“The rest of you seem to have it covered,” says Mattie.
“There has been a lot of coverage,” says Lisa. “And there’s also been a lot of blame. Blame flying every which way!” She flaps her hands at the air, as though to disperse a circling bat. “But before we get to all of that, I want to ask you, Mattie: who do you blame?”
“Who do I blame for the shooting?”
Lisa nods.
“Would it be too obvious to say the shooters?”
He manages not to sound sarcastic here, which is good; they’ve warned him of the risks of coming across as condescending, especially with Lisa.
“The shooters, yes, of course.” Lisa laughs again—the exact same triad of notes—though it seems a little sinister in repetition: the laugh of a talking doll in a horror film, right before it comes to life. “But if we had to look beyond the shooters. Which I think a lot of people think we do? And when people do that, what an awful lot of people see is you.” There’s an icky intimacy in her voice now: the tone of a much more private performance. “I mean, not only you, obviously! Also video games, movies, music—violence in pop culture, generally. But because of the shooters’ relationship to your show—”
“Relationship?” says Luke.
“—there’s been a lot of focus on you. When people look beyond the shooters, you are what they see. So I’m wondering—what do you see?”
“What do I see when I look beyond the shooters?” says Mattie. “Well, I suppose I see their guns.”
“What?” shouts Luke, and Cel drops her scone.
“Well, that can’t be all that surprising, can it?” says Mattie, and Cel wonders if he’s mocking them a little, his handlers, watching impotently from the greenroom. Because they have drafted him a bulleted list of topics not to venture, and guns are decidedly on that list. Guns, they have told him, are a losing game—even on a show like Lee and Lisa where the point, sort of, is to argue. It’s that rare issue that manages to make everybody look bad all at once, and bringing it up can do no one any favors. They have discussed this with Mattie at some length.
“I mean, what actually killed those kids?”
“Fuck!” says Luke, kicking the file cabinet.
“Well, people killed these kids, would, I think, be the counterargument.” Lisa blushes, presumably for sounding smarter than she’s contractually obligated to be. Cel read somewhere that she has a degree from the London School of Economics.
“Well, that’s an interesting perspective, Mattie,” Lee is saying. “Though I know at least one person who’d like to disagree with you. He’s actually here today, as a special Surprise Guest.”
They play the Mattie M Surprise Guest air horn, and the opening bars of the theme music.
“Oh?” says Mattie, in a faltering, good-humored sort of voice.
“I’d like to welcome Blair McKinney,” says Lee. “A sophomore at Circle Valley High School and a survivor of last week’s shootings.”
A spiky-haired teen with an underbite appears on the second monitor. Across from him sits an identically styled Lee—same tie, same gelatinously coiffed hair, same look of just and bottomless concern. The interview is pretaped, evidently, though it will seem live to viewers. Luke has become slack-jawed and silent, agape with the dawning dimensions of this new horror.
“So we understand, Blair, that you’d rather not talk about what you experienced during the shooting,” says Lee. His voice conveys a gentleness Cel would not have believed fakeable before she began working in television. “We completely respect that, and I know our viewers will, too.”
He says this as though this is a point of personal honor, not a contractually mandated condition of the kid’s appearance; the idea must be to emphasize that some talk shows have boundaries.
“But I understand you’ve agreed to talk with us a little about the days leading up to the shooting, and specifically about this Mattie M skit we’ve all been hearing about. You say it was actually a class assignment, is that right?”
The kid nods shakily. “Yeah,” he says. “For English class.”
“And what was the idea of this assignment?”
“Well, we had this media studies unit? Where we were learning to, like, interrogate the media.”
“And what did that involve?”
“Well, we’d talk about, like, advertising, and how nobody thinks it works on them but then really it actually does? Or about, like, why the ratings system thinks violence isn’t as bad as, um, some other stuff. But mostly we talked about TV.”
“And you watched TV, too, is that right?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sounds like a pretty fun class.”
“It was,” says Blair. “Ms. Stinson was awesome.”
“And Ms. Stinson, your teacher—can you tell us what happened to her?”
“She, um. She died.” There’s a brief roiling across the kid’s face, like he’s trying to suppress a sneeze, but he gets it under control. “Yeah, she was in a coma at first, and then she unfortunately passed away on Thursday.”
“I’m so sorry,” says Lee. “She sounds like a really special teacher.” He waits an obnoxious, respectful beat. “So the Mattie M skit was an assignment from Ms. Stinson?”
“Well, she was always encouraging us to do, like, projects and sh—and stuff. Skits and interactive stuff. Like, a couple people read only really left- or right-wing newspapers for two weeks and then tried to have a debate about the issues but they couldn’t because they couldn’t agree on any of the actual facts? Which I guess was kind of the point. So our idea had been to do like a Mattie M–style show.”
“You talked about The Mattie M Show a lot in your class, is that right?”
“We did, yeah. It was really easy to talk about because everybody watched it. I think even Ms. Stinson did, a little, but she never liked to tell you what she actually watched at home.”
Lee laughs—fondly, a little proprietarily, Cel thinks, as though this were a shared memory.
“And what happened in your Mattie M skit?”
“Well, we’d thought we’d do, like, a Surprise Guest thing.”
“Based on Mattie’s Surprise Guest episodes.”
“Right.”
“And who was it you were surprising in the skit?”
“Well, Ryan and Troy.”
“Ryan Muller and Troy Wilson?” says Lee. “The shooters in last week’s attack?”
“Yes,” says the kid. He is speaking very quickly now, and Cel can see the sheen of sweat break out above his upper lip. “The surprise was that they were actually the guests on the show in the first place, so it was kind of, um, subverting the Mattie M paradigm, I guess? The idea was that in an era of trash TV, and in the age of, um, irony—aren’t w
e all sort of the potential stars of a Mattie M episode? We were trying to be, like, critical.”
“Sounds like you put a lot of thought into it.”
The kid shrugs. “We did, I guess.”
“And how did Troy and Ryan react to the skit?”
“I mean, they weren’t happy about it,” says Blair, and bites his lip. “Honestly, Ms. Stinson wasn’t too happy about it, either, once she found out they hadn’t been in on it.”
“Had you thought about how Troy and Ryan would react?”
“Well, I mean, they sort of reacted negatively to everything, so.”
“It sounds like they weren’t very well liked.”
At this, Blair hesitates. “Well—no.” He gaze flicks off-camera, and Cel wonders who is coaching him. A lawyer, she hopes, for his own sake. “But that wasn’t why we did the skit.”
“No?”
“Well, what I mean is, that was sort of part of it. Because they were, as you say, not well liked, but the bigger thing was that we were not well liked by them. And by ‘we’ I mean everybody. I mean, I never thought they’d do anything like what happened. But they did just sort of seem to basically hate people and they didn’t make any big secret about it. It was sort of like this joke, actually.”
“What was the joke?”
“Just how, like, antisocial they were. It was like a joke they were in on. Like this one time, Ryan went as Freddy Krueger for Halloween? He could be pretty funny, actually, sometimes.”
“So you thought they wouldn’t mind?”
Blair flicks his eyes in the other direction; he’s looking away from whoever’s there in the room with him. “We thought they might not mind it,” he says quietly.
“So tell me what happened after the Mattie M skit.”
“Well, Ms. Stinson wasn’t happy, like I said. I mean, she thought it was really original and interesting and that my impression of Mattie—I was playing Mattie—was really good, and she said she would have given us an A if we’d asked Ryan and Troy’s permission first.”
“What grade did she give you, may I ask?”
“She hadn’t yet,” says Blair. “She said she’d have to think about it. I guess she was still thinking.”
“Okay,” says Lee. “Now I’m just going to ask you one last question—not about the shooting, but about right before. Is that still okay with you?”
Oh, Christ, thinks Cel. Blair nods grimly.
“What did you think when you first saw Troy and Ryan enter the classroom with guns?”
“Well, at first I thought it was their project.”
“Their project?”
“Well, we all did, for a second. Because we’d talked a lot about violence in media and we knew that’s what their presentation was on. And so we thought they were doing, like, Mortal Kombat. We thought the guns were fake. A lot of people still think Ryan thought the gun was fake, but I don’t know about that. I mean, how could you not know?”
This is an interesting question. Cel can tell Lee hasn’t heard this part before, but that he doesn’t want to disrupt the careful crescendo he’s constructing in order to pursue it now.
“When we talked earlier,” says Lee, “you said that this moment made you realize something about The Mattie M Show. Can you share that realization with us now?”
“Well, I didn’t realize anything right then. I was just trying not to—trying not to get killed.” Cel can feel him wanting to glance left again, but he manages to keep his gaze on the camera. “But then later, in the hospital, I realized that the shooting might have been, like, revenge for the whole Mattie M thing.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
“Bad,” says the kid. “Kind of guilty. Like a part of this is my fault.”
“Blair, I don’t think anyone would ever say any of this is your fault,” says Lee. “You’re an exceptionally brave young man who has been through a terrible thing. There’s been a lot of debate this week about who or what besides Ryan and Troy is responsible, but I think we can all agree you’re not responsible. You’re a sixteen-year-old kid who did a school project, imitating one of the most popular television shows in history, and this is absolutely not your fault.”
“Maybe not,” says the kid. “But I still wish I’d never done the skit. I wish I’d never even seen The Mattie M Show.”
“Well, you’re certainly not alone there,” says Lee, and the kid smiles a little. “There’s nothing we can do about that, unfortunately. But what we can do, Blair, is give you the chance to say whatever you want to Mattie M right now. We can promise you he’ll get the message. Does that sound like something you’d like to do?”
The kid nods.
“So tell us, Blair: if you could say anything to Mattie M right now—if you knew that he’d be listening—what would you say?”
“I’d say that maybe if I hadn’t watched his show, then none of this would have happened. Or maybe it would have happened anyway. I don’t know. But I also know I wish I hadn’t done what we did, and that I wish he didn’t do what he did, either.” He’s becoming more animated now: Cel can tell he’s rehearsed this part not because it’s scripted, but because he means it. “I’d say to Mattie that I’m only sixteen, but I can deal with wishing I’d done things differently. I’m only sixteen, and I’ll be dealing with that for the rest of my life. I’m a high school student and not a celebrity and I’ve never been on TV before today, and I can deal with admitting I was wrong. I’d like to say to Mattie that if I can say I’m sorry, then maybe he should, too.”
And Mattie almost looks like he might, when they cut back to him, but the thing’s been choreographed so that there isn’t time: Lisa is declaring That’s our show! and leaning over to thank Mattie for coming. He says something back, but neither Cel nor the audience can hear it. They’re playing him out to “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.”
FOURTEEN
semi
1979
The seventies ended with a whimper.
All around us was the feel of a city past its prime: a too-ripe fruit, a fading party, a starlet aging into tragedy. Junkies passed out in the parks amongst their lemon rinds and needles. The smell of citrus undercut with shit. The sixties hadn’t smelled great, either, yet this filth seemed more abject—the stink not of rebellion, but defeat. The revolution had come and gone, leaving nothing more than the detritus of a weather event.
All of this seemed to energize Matthew, perversely. He spoke endlessly of strategy: of issue voters and voting blocs and ethnic groups. He was bullish about the immigrant working class, in whose midst, he believed, lurked many potential voters. Not among the Hungarians, of course, since they preferred a harder line on communism (“Of course,” I echoed faintly); on the Greeks, he was agnostic. But he was hoping to chip away at some of Koch’s other bases—the Italians, the Poles, the Jews—especially the doves, and especially the young. You didn’t have to feel like an American to feel like a New Yorker, he said, and these second-generation voters were New Yorkers through and through—no matter what language they spoke at home, no matter who they rooted for in the Olympics or the more ambiguous wars. He didn’t expect them to go canvassing the city, or to argue with their families about him over dinner. But he believed in the quiet power of double lives—and that all immigrant children were, to some extent, living them—and he believed in the possibility of anonymous votes, unprophesied by polls, that might deliver him the election.
He was quoting Blondie again, I figured; I was coming to blame a lot of things on Eddie Marcus’s lunatic confidence. He was one of those dangerous people whose expectations in life had actually been fulfilled. Coming from him, a jaunty Panglossian worldview could seem nearly credible—you’d start to wonder if it wasn’t all just a matter of attitude, in the end. And Matthew’s charisma was such that a career of national prominence would not have s
eemed outlandish, if one didn’t have all the details—which Eddie Marcus, it seemed, still did not.
Matthew’s own doubts about the campaign were frightfully utilitarian. He fretted over how the “straphangers”—I guess he meant commuters—might react to a transit strike; he thought it might play well for Koch. Though deeply committed to the unions, he worried about the potency of the TWU; its history of militancy would compound the political liabilities of a fare hike (“obviously,” he said)—which were already considerable, since deterioration of the subways was New Yorkers’ top concern, after crime and dirt and education. And there wasn’t even enough money in the budget to repair defective undercarriages, let alone buy new subway cars!
“But if you’re elected,” I said once, listlessly.
“The mayor doesn’t control the budget,” he snapped. “That’s one of New York’s biggest structural problems of governance!”
Though he could also sound quite inspiring, at times. He could almost make you believe that an acknowledgment of reality’s ambiguities was not a useless dithering, but a righteous first step toward action. He could nearly persuade you we were on the brink of a renaissance; that Times Square—with its strip joints and cheesy massage parlors and movie theaters catering to the most unoriginal perversions—was in fact the very center of the universe.
“Anything is possible,” he liked to tell me. And also: “If it’s true there’s nothing new under the sun, that’s because everything has happened once already.”
Real estate agents were beginning to sell people on the idea of returning to New York, a fact he found senselessly promising.
“You can sell people on anything,” I said one time. He was stroking a phantom line above my eyebrow to which he had some long-standing attachment. “And if they buy it, then that’s politics.”
“If they buy it, then that’s reality.”
“If they buy it, then that’s theater.”
“Cynical is easy, you know,” he said. “It’s everything else that’s hard.”
“Oh yeah?” I brushed his hand away. “I hadn’t heard that one before.”
The Spectators Page 17