The Spectators

by Jennifer Dubois

  Luke has tracked down Mattie’s former intern, recovering from mono in Jersey City, and drags him in for interrogation. His name is Jeremy Sampson-Lopez, and he says the same thing the current interns have said: yes, Mattie has access to his mail; no, he never seemed particularly interested in reading it; and the interns themselves don’t read his letters, exactly, as much as scan them for their central demands. Fans are sent a head shot, whether they ask for one or not; hate mail is cursorily examined for explicit threats. All of it gets recycled afterward and, except in the case of the extraordinarily creepy, no names are written down. Jeremy Sampson-Lopez thinks there might have been some letters like this around the time of Secret Crush, but this was before he worked here and before the time frame of the shooter’s letter, anyway.

  He looks terrified as he reports on all of this; his swollen lymph nodes are the size of plums. Cel doesn’t have the heart to haul him in before Mattie, hoping to shock his conscience. If Mattie still has a conscience, it is certainly unshockable by now.

  * * *

  —

  At one o’clock, Cel heads to Mattie’s dressing room. Through the door, she can hear some echoey, desolate choral music. She stands outside for a moment, gathering herself.

  Inside, the music is much louder—deep voices coiled to a close, hollow-sounding chord. Mattie is faced away from Cel, staring in the mirror.

  “Ah,” he says. “I see they decided to bring in the big guns.”

  Cel watches her reflection flinch: is it possible he does not hear the things he says?

  “Mattie,” she says. “We need to talk.”

  “We do, do we?”

  “We need to talk about this letter.”

  She is using the singular to be optimistic.

  “Do you know how much mail I get in a week?”

  “I do, actually. I’ve spent all morning looking into it.” Cel is glad he’s still facing away from her; she’s beginning to develop a real fondness for the back of his head, relative to its other side. “But you apparently wrote back to this one.”

  “I write back to a lot of my mail.” He flicks his eyes toward her in the mirror. “Believe it or not.”

  He reaches over to turn up the volume on the cassette player. Cel is somehow surprised to see the music is actually issuing from a modern device. Something about the singing sounds impossibly remote, as though coming from a well or a cavern or an unheated island church in the middle of a dark Balkan lake.

  “If you have a memory of this letter, Mattie, you have to tell us,” Cel says. “This is the only way we can help you.”

  “Did I ask for anyone’s help?”

  A fair point, Cel thinks—which is precisely the sort of thinking that makes her so ill-suited to this moment. Fundamentally, she knows she is an unpersuasive person; she has no real ability to convince anyone of anything—that a particular idea is true, that a specific action should be undertaken. The only parts of her job she’s ever been good at involve deflection. She could have been an assistant in a magic show, an accomplice in a long-running con. What she cannot do—what is ludicrous for her to even try to do—is to exhort.

  “You could get arrested!” she exhorts, and Mattie laughs right at her.

  “I don’t think so,” he says. “But in the unlikely event I should be issued a subpoena, I assure you I will be fully compliant with the law. I promise not to resist arrest on live television. I promise not to pull a Ruby Ridge in our studios. Does that put your mind at ease? Until then, I have a witch hunt to sit out.”

  “Are you the witch, in this scenario?”

  “Maybe there’s more than one.”

  “I would like to know why you are doing this.”

  “I’m not sure we established I’m doing anything.”

  “I would like to know why you think someone would do this. Why a person in your position would conceal letters from a murderer.” She can almost see him stifling an objection. “Fine, an alleged murderer.”

  “I was a defense attorney. I don’t do prosecutors’ jobs for them. I’m certainly not doing Tod Browning’s job for him.”

  “You are doing Tod Browning’s job for him! If you don’t talk about the letters, that means he gets to talk about them instead.”

  Mattie rubs his eyes for a long while, then looks at her.

  “Well, what about this, then?” His eyes are red and somehow wobbly-looking. “Just as a hypothetical. What about a person who made a promise, and is trying not to break it?”

  “A promise? To the shooter?” Alleged shooter, she thinks automatically but will not say. “But—I mean—he’s dead. I mean, for one thing.”

  “Exactly,” says Mattie. “So it’s too late to ask permission. Or forgiveness.”

  The music seems to get louder again, even though Mattie hasn’t touched the dial. Cel feels as though the space between here and wherever those singers were is amplifying, along with the time between now and whenever they were singing. She pulls her sweater around her; she thinks the music might actually be making her cold.

  “You realize that this decision can only do further damage to the show’s image,” she says.

  “I realize that it is likely to further complicate my own,” he says. “Yes. But I am further aware that this show will do just fine without me, if it comes to that.”

  “I don’t think that’s the network’s view.”

  “Oh, please.” Mattie sounds a little annoyed, finally: well, good. “I’m sure they’ve got head shots of a dozen different replacements on file. I’d be surprised if they aren’t holding auditions.”

  Is it possible he has a point? Mattie M is neither the star nor the soul of The Mattie M Show—neither its Oprah nor its Lorne. He is a variety-show MC, more or less, and these can outlive their hosts—The Tonight Show baton passing from Allen to Paar to Carson to the new guy, Leno. Though really, Mattie’s role is less like Carson’s than Ed McMahon’s—playing the straight man to the show’s antics, serving as an onstage proxy for the audience—and though it is certainly not true that anyone could do it, it seems likely that a lot of people could. Knowing this makes Cel feel sorry for Mattie all over again—he is an unusual person living an unusual life in which he is largely beside the point. The hardest part of changing is changing back—Cel knows because she’s done it—and it’s probably too late for Mattie now. Cel is so, so lucky to be young, she realizes. She has never really thought of that before.

  “You have a commitment to your employees,” says Cel. “A lot of people work here.”

  “Yes, and a few of them even want to.” Cel ignores this. “But my employees aren’t the only people I have commitments to.”

  “You mean the viewers? You hate the viewers.”

  Mattie never denies this.

  “I mean the public,” he says quietly.

  And now Cel hates him again. The public, good Christ. Does he think he’s Winston fucking Churchill? These are the things that Luke would think, and maybe even say out loud.

  “Speaking of which.” Mattie turns around. “The Gun Control Alliance has invited me to speak at a rally.”

  “What? Why?” But no, Cel knows the answer to that. Why does anyone want Mattie anywhere? So that people will look in that direction.

  “I’ve accepted their invitation.”

  “Do you think you’re Winston fucking Churchill?”

  “Certainly not,” he says seriously, which makes Cel want to throw things. Any remotely normal human would be furious at her—how can Mattie just sit there and listen? And then more or less agree with her? Relentless rationality is a kind of gaslighting—a form of psychic abuse in the workplace! Maybe she can file a complaint with HR.

  “How did this even happen?” she says, and Mattie shrugs. Don’t shrug, don’t shrug, don’t shrug, Cel thinks at him, then remembers Mattie is not on TV
at the moment.

  “They approached Eddie,” he tells her.

  “I have no idea why you trust his judgment.”

  “I certainly consider his judgment,” he says. “I don’t regard it as definitive.”

  Cel grits her teeth; she will not be lured into abstraction.

  “I would like to know, please, just why you are doing this.”

  “Would you believe I actually believe in this issue?”

  “No.” Though Cel still can’t quite believe she is talking this way, she is starting to expect that Mattie will let her. She thinks of that character on MASH, the one who keeps not being allowed to kill himself. A tragic figure trapped in a comic plot: the ultimate indignity.

  “You’re a hard person to argue with,” she says.

  “I’ve been told I’m hard to agree with.”

  “That too.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Mattie says. “This isn’t your fault. I wouldn’t want your job.”

  “I hear that a lot these days.”

  “Me too.”

  Something about this strikes Cel as funny, and she begins to laugh. She laughs until she hiccups, and then she says, “This situation is absurd.”

  “Yes,” says Mattie. “But what is faith but a gesture on the strength of the absurd?”

  He shrugs like this is something people say regularly, which makes Cel start to laugh again, and this time, Mattie laughs, a little, too.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  semi

  Ten years into the plague, and what are we left with?

  We’re left with double consciousness.

  Paulie, warbling along with Jean Stapleton to the All in the Family theme song. Paulie with a sheet pulled over his face.

  The Stonewall today: its arched, little doorway, its gated park leafy and sedate. The Stonewall back then, with its black door and wishing well and many gorgeous extinct taxonomies. Its flame and brownie queens, its screamers and scare drags, its chickenhawks and nellies and little dress-wearing nymphs too lovely for any gender. They are creatures of myth today: but when I was a boy, my boy, dragons and unicorns walked the earth.

  We’re left with slogans; they snag in our heads like jingles.

  Say it clear, say it loud: gay is good, gay is proud.

  Death to the Fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people: the way Brookie signed all of his correspondence, for a time.

  We’re left with the punch lines, the cheap little dramatic ironies.

  Anders the bouncer, run out of his career by Fidelifacts, later became an informant for the FBI. There was an article about it after he died. Nick and Peter would have wanted to know.

  We’re left with fragments of language. “Firn”: snow left over from previous season. “Apophatic”: knowledge of god obtained through negation. These were written down in a notebook, back when one still groped for metaphors.

  We’re left with the sound of a ringing telephone. In certain moods, at certain hours, the blinking light of an answering machine can look like a lighthouse observed from sea.

  * * *

  —

  And we’re left, of course, with the consolations of art.

  After Iceland, I wrote a play in something of a fit. Everyone who was still at it was writing about AIDS, and this is what I did, too—not only is it mostly impossible to be original, there are times you shouldn’t even try. In the end, my play was an afterthought: a modestly elegiac retrospective of what had happened, not a voice crying out in the wilderness to warn against what would. It was far too late for anything I wrote to matter; and anyway, Larry Kramer I was not. I’d always been squeamish about art as political communication, back in the years when this was an opinion anyone could afford. Like everyone else, I’d gotten over my objections—abandoned my slavish Nabokovian conception of Art as some exceptional magisterium, existing above and apart from us, its mortal subjects. What was this, in the end, but a form of religious belief? If faith was inescapable, at least let mine be useful: let me lend my dubious talents to a cause!

  And so I tried—for months and years, I tried. I tried to write something stirring and morally elevating; I tried to embrace a sort of socio-medico-realist aesthetic. But in the end, I could not. When I tried to pare my art down to its political scaffolding, it seemed there wasn’t one; there were only people—ones I’d known, or known better by imagining. I’d spent too many of my formative years absorbing complicating information, maybe: when it came down to it, I did not know how to assert anything in art—even (or perhaps especially) all the things I knew were true and right.

  In the end, the play’s form reflected these neuroses. Its structure juxtaposed classical conventions—tragic flaws, cathartic crises, a chorus of plague victims offering prophecy and lamentation—with a metafictional shuffling of endings and beginnings, linearity and content. The versions shifted with every performance, and the cast members rotated through the parts. Causality ran backwards some nights and forward on others: the anguished death prompting the tepid political reaction, then the other way around. Scenes were swapped in and out, and I added new material regularly. Start the narrative arc in one snapshot, and the play became a morality tale; moving the ending could change it from redemptive to nihilistic. It matters very much where you end a story: this becomes what you remember, and this becomes the point. The play was called The Spectators and was, I knew, the very best work of my life.

  Nevertheless, it was a minor project, completely irrelevant politically. I’d imagined it would be received as a thoroughly playwright’s play at best—at worst, a loathsome and exploitive gimmick. Instead, it was something of a hit, as these things go; the shuffling made people want to talk about the version they’d seen, and then see it again. Its initial run was extended, and I began to earn a small amount of blood money. It even developed a fan base amongst the artsy teenage girls of one of the city’s better public high schools. They came on the weekends and liked to stand around in the lobby afterward, clutching at each other and weeping.

  On the show’s one-year anniversary, the theater throws a celebratory production.

  The evening is appropriately restrained—bookended by sedate preshow cocktails and vigorously earnest postshow discussion. The production turns out to be one of the bleaker versions, though the director claims they had not planned this. Afterward, I am invited onstage for a Q&A with the audience. A man stands and explains that the narrative conception of the play—with its fragmentation and repetition, its endless circling around the central point—is a classic reaction to trauma. Stephen would have liked this, probably. Myself, I have my doubts—I suspect that the really classic reaction to trauma is simply to die, which is why the truly traumatized among us are not here to tell their po-mo stories. Still, I nod politely at the man. Like most Q&A questions, his isn’t a question at all.

  At the after party, I stand beaming amidst plates of carefully curated cheeses; around me, black-and-white production photos are arrayed on the walls. I’m criminally flattered by all of it, of course, and wish more of my surviving friends were here to see it. Although the theater had offered me a whole big bloc of tickets, in the end I hadn’t really invited anyone. Brookie, in an unprecedented expression of interest, keeps vowing to come see it one day—maybe because he knows this is a promise he will not be expected to keep. Although who knows: both he and the show have lasted longer than anyone’s projections.

  The after-party is winding down when I feel a hand on my shoulder. I can somehow tell it belongs to someone very handsome.

  I turn around—and yes, the man is very handsome, as well as very young. Probably too young; certainly too handsome. I am not the androgynously doe-eyed sprite I once was—I have developed a slouch and a bit of a paunch—though it seems petty to complain about aging badly when one is lucky to be aging at all.

  “Are you Septimus Caldwell?”r />
  “Semi,” I yelp. “Dear Lord.”

  I can tell he wants to ask what kind of name is Semi. The answer is it isn’t one, and neither is fucking Septimus.

  “I’m Scott Christakous,” says the man, offering me a firm, somehow decisively heterosexual handshake. “We’ve spoken on the phone.”

  Ah. Yes. The journalist.

  “I’m sorry for bothering you here—I know this isn’t the time.” He scans the room—de-rouged cast members holding flowers, picked-over platter of cheese and fruit. “But I’d really like to talk to you. I’ll be at the bar next door, if you’d be willing to meet. No rush—I’ll be there all night.”

  * * *

  —

  As if I don’t have other plans! Though, as it happens, I do not. I wouldn’t want to detain any of the crew or, God forbid, the actors—even if I didn’t find their ceaseless extroversion tiresome, which increasingly I do. Anyway, any journalist willing to sit through two and a half hours of experimental theater at least deserves a hearing. If I’d had half a clue what he looked like, I might have even called him back.

  At the bar, Scott Christakous tells me he has an idea for a journalistic encounter. I ask him what the hell is that. It sounds like something Brookie would have done in the seventies, and these are things generally best avoided.

  He tells me it’s just a creative way of asking somebody a question.

  “I thought this was supposed to be a character study,” I say.

  “It was.”

  “And?”

  He shrugs. “Mission creep.”

  “Because of that kid and the letter? You’re a regular Bob Woodward.” There’s probably a Deep Throat joke in here somewhere, but I’m certainly not going to be the one to make it. “Anyway, I don’t see how that has anything to do with me.”