“Well, that isn’t really the point,” says Scott. “The point is that there’s pretty much insatiable interest in Mattie M at the moment, and he isn’t giving a whole lot of interviews. The point is we’re looking for a way to get his attention.”
“I doubt anything gets his attention these days.”
“Well, we have a feeling that this will.”
He gives me a shrewd look then, but doesn’t ask any questions. He must already know the answers, and that somewhere within them lurks my darker motivations for anything I might agree to do to Matthew Miller. He’s gambling that I’ll be more susceptible to indulging those impulses if we don’t discuss them directly, and in this, he probably is right.
I tell the journalist he’s going to have to be a whole lot more specific about what this this is, and he takes a jaunty swallow of beer and asks me if I’ve ever heard of Secret Crush.
* * *
—
“Are you supposed to have the crush, in this scenario?” Brookie asks the next morning. He is having another good day: out of bed and halfway dressed, with enough energy to be bossy.
“Not exactly,” I tell him. “It isn’t meant to be so literal.”
I am quoting Scott verbatim. “It isn’t meant to be so literal,” he told me the night before. “This is more about surprising Mattie with a person from his past, the way they do on his show. We’re hoping your encounter with him will be disarming. A jumping-off point to a broader conversation. You went to school for theater, NYU, is that right?”
“God, you people are creeps.”
He laughed and said I didn’t know the half of it. Then he launched into the details. The idea, he said, was to send me to The Mattie M Show as a VIP Audience Member—a preposterous status which Scott could apparently help me secure through some contact he had at the show. As a ViPAM, in the parlance, I’d be entitled to one (1) Mattie M Meet-and-Greet—this typically meant fifteen minutes of autograph-signing at the studio, but perhaps Mattie would opt for a more private venue once he saw my name on the list. My job, either way, was to record the audio of our encounter. What Scott Christakous and I did with the recording would depend on its content. Anything touching on the Ryan Muller letters could be pitched to news outlets; anything personally revelatory could attract massive sums with tabloids. We could present the recording and transcripts in isolation—with or without my identity obscured—or we could pitch the thing more as a narrative, casting me as the protagonist (he included this, I assume, in case I had ambitions of stardom). But almost anything would probably find a home somewhere, he said, and for quite a bit of money.
“So he’s a mercenary,” said Brookie.
“I guess that’s what you’d call it.”
“I think you should do it.”
“Of course you do,” I say. “You always hated Matthew.”
“I didn’t hate him personally. My objections were strictly structural.”
“If someone wanted to pay me to assassinate Matthew Miller, you’d probably think I should consider that, too.”
“That would depend on a lot of things,” he says. “But I mean, think about it. Here you have a chance to have a conversation about absolutely anything and know that people will listen. You could talk about AIDS funding for an hour and the National Enquirer would probably still publish the highlights.”
“So what am I going to do—show up with a body bag? Throw some paint on his fur coat?”
“Ask him why he hasn’t done more shows on AIDS. Read him a monologue from your play. Show him a picture of Paulie at the end. He’ll remember Paulie, right?”
“I think so.”
“Or just talk to him like a human being,” says Brookie. “Exactly what you say isn’t the point. The point is to gesture toward something that matters, and know that the entire country will look where you’re pointing.”
“I just can’t see it doing any good,” I say. “If this was five years ago—”
“But it isn’t.”
“Well, right. It isn’t. And I’m pretty sure the nation is paying attention by now.”
At this, Brookie laughs, and turns up the volume on the TV. On-screen, a concerned-looking matron is speaking very quickly about the Ryan Muller letter. Brookie flips to the next station, which is showing clips from a video game. The third is Beavis and Butt-Head; the fourth is a commercial for Alka-Seltzer. The next is Matthew talking to a leather-suited woman with enormous, colorfully be-tasseled breasts. This might be The Mattie M Show, or it might be another show running a clip in order to critique The Mattie M Show: who can tell anymore?
“It’s a commentary on the thing,” Paulie liked to say, whenever he did something we could not stand.
“It’s also the actual thing,” we’d tell him.
I turn back to Brookie. “Okay,” I say. “Point taken.”
I expect Brookie to sum it up for me anyway, but he doesn’t. Maybe he’s giving me some credit for once, or maybe he’s just getting tired. It’s been a while since he’s talked this much. Selfishly, I want to keep him talking.
“Well, the only thing I know for sure is that awareness-raising is not on this journalist’s agenda.”
“So hijack the agenda,” says Brookie, getting back into bed.
“Secret Crush, though? It’s grotesque.”
“It isn’t more grotesque than parading bodies through a church.” Brookie’s voice is growing hoarse. “It isn’t more grotesque than pleading with Republicans. And anyway, there’s no tactic too grotesque for the thing itself.”
No argument there. For a moment, we say nothing. On the screen, the leather-clad woman is shaking her breasts with what seems like defiance; the crowd is either yelling or booing or catcalling or laughing.
“I don’t want it to seem like blackmail,” I say at last.
“Don’t think of it as blackmail.” Brookie’s voice sounds chipped, and I can tell he’s going to fall asleep as soon as he gets the last word. “Think of it as a favor he’s owed you for a really long time.”
* * *
—
Does Matthew owe me any favors? I certainly thought so, once. This is the entitlement of youth—or my entitled youth, at any rate: the belief that suffering is unnatural to the universe, instead of its given state. The question now isn’t Matthew’s debts, but mine—what I might owe to the ones who got sick, the ones who died. The ones who fought and organized while I chanted along behind, holding signs and half-shouting slogans, because I never did feel totally comfortable with shouting or with slogans. The ones who’d used whatever artistic gifts they had to say something that mattered, when it mattered—with zero hope of public adulation, with zero hope of cheese plates. The ones living afterlives as material—as my material—whether they would have wanted to or not.
In a mostly conquered land, living is a form of complicity.
Like almost everyone, I’d cared for my friends; I did not fear meeting their wrathful ghosts down darkened hallways. But what had I done in the political sphere, in the world of public action? Besides enjoying the modest prestige of stylishly writing a story that everybody knew, then quietly cashing the royalty checks.
I stare at Brookie: sleeping and still-beautiful, his spatulate chest shifting slowly under the sheets. He is nearly dead and yet not too weak to lecture me until he passes out. The old Brookie would have marched me straight to the studios.
And in the end, I decide that this is who is making the decision—not me, but the once and possibly future Brookie. It’s his ghost who is driving: it’s his phantom hand upon me, grabbing me by the collar and shoving me out onto the stage.
At the pay phone in the lobby, I call to tell the journalist that I am at his service.
TWENTY-FIVE
cel
“What is faith but a gesture on the strength of the absurd?” Cel asks Luke
on Monday morning.
“God, he just doesn’t quit with these Catholic non sequiturs, does he?”
“It’s Kierkegaard.”
“How do you know that?”
“I asked.”
They are filming the long-delayed juvenile-delinquent episode, finally. The guest list is mediocre. There’s the boy who knifed his father—a classic sociopath: empty-eyed and charming. There’s the mother of a teenager who’d shot his girlfriend and then himself on the night of their junior prom. There’s a compulsive thief whose only notable achievement is being banned for life from every big-box chain department store in the nation. There’s a cheerful, stylishly chubby girl with cat-eye glasses and hoop earrings who’d tried to shoot her mother and missed. In the pre-interview, she’d laughed when Cel speculated that, on some level, she hadn’t really wanted to kill her mother at all.
“Oh no,” she said breezily. She was making a little pagoda out of toothpicks from the craft services table. “I really, really did.”
“Mattie also says the letter thing’s a witch hunt,” says Cel.
“Oh, that’s the witch hunt?” he says. “Cel, this whole show is a witch hunt!”
“You need to shush, somewhat.”
“Why? It is! Don’t you know who is watching it? The fucking puritans, that’s who!” He issues a little shriek-laugh and kicks the doorframe. “A witch hunt! Good God! And he’s, what—Joseph Welch?”
“Don’t you always tell me that producers need to be invisible?” says Cel, closing the door. “You are being highly visible at the moment. I mean, your voice really carries in the hallways.”
Also, Cel has a headache. She was out with Scott until four—first dinner, then the Comedy Cellar, which was, unbelievably, his suggestion. When the early show was sold out, Cel agreed it was a great idea to wait for the late one, because she was twenty-four and living in New York and what was any of that for if she didn’t do things like this? Also, her job was a joke. Also, she was drunk, which seemed to be happening more often these days. Waiting for the show, they both got drunker; Scott let her complain about her job more than anyone should be allowed to complain about anything on a first date. He was, undeniably, very handsome. Obvious handsomeness tends to make Cel wary—suggesting, as it does, some kind of suspiciously straightforward relationship to life—but then again, Scott laughed at all the right jokes, including her own. The material at the Cellar was solid, aside from the cheesy crowd work—Cel insisted they sit in the back—and an extended exchange between two lounge-lizardy types that reeked of padding. Things tended to get weird at the late show—Cel had been to enough of them to know—though when Scott asked Cel if she’d been here before, she only told him, “Sometimes.”
Afterward, they’d made out for a while in the taxi, even though the meter was still running, and Scott kissed in a way suggesting essential soundness and normalcy. This was a relief; you couldn’t always tell ahead of time. And instead of assuring Cel that he’d call her, he asked her to call him, which seemed encouragingly progressive—though Cel is too tired to unpack the precise reasoning behind that thought. She does have the worrisome sense that she may have promised Scott VIP tickets to the show, though she truly cannot fathom how such a conversation might have come about.
“You know,” Luke is saying now, “in a way, I can almost—almost—understand writing that kid back. He was about to become a mass murderer, right? So I’m sure his letter stood out. Why it cried out for response is unclear, but hey. Mattie, like the Lord Our God, works in mysterious ways.”
Cel crosses herself.
“And as fuckups go, this is huge, and definitely very, very weird—and not in an on-brand sort of way. But there have been worse fuckups in the history of the world.”
“Hitler, as Mattie himself pointed out.”
“Exactly! You might find worse fuckups in the history of entertainment, even, if you really started digging.”
“Homicide comes to mind.”
“And that’s the talking point, right there! Mattie M Did Not Actually Murder Anyone. All he had to do was admit he needed the people on his payroll, who are employed for precisely such occasions, to say so.” Luke’s voice has downshifted slightly. “And then, not to tell us? I mean—I even get that, in a way, as a human. But to conceal it and then try to spin that as some—matter of conscience? After he let us go out there and fall on our swords, take flak for him…”
Luke never mixes metaphors; Cel accepts this as another sign of the End Times.
“I knew his ethical preciousness was going to come back to bite us all in the ass!”
“Do you know you’re sort of shouting again?”
“I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. I kept saying, you’ll see, you’ll see, you’ll see. Well, now they saw.”
Cel isn’t sure who the “they” is here, but she knows better than to inquire. On the sidewalk below, Cel can see an emaciated figure—gender indeterminate—in a great corvine overcoat. It is ninety-two degrees. The world is full of marvels.
“You know something that really bothers me?” says Luke.
“I think I know a lot of them?”
“It’s the pointlessness! I mean, if you’re Larry Flynt, it makes sense to develop a late-in-life dedication to civil liberties. But this gun thing—it’s not even strategic! It’s horrible for the show, alienates the fans, and Mattie’s only talking about it so he can pretend he’s actually some completely different person.”
“I don’t know,” says Cel. “Sometimes I think that’s what he’s doing the rest of the time.”
“Well, that’s what most people are doing most of the time, and they still have to do their jobs.” Luke sighs. “I don’t know, Cel. I think there’s something deeply sinister about the guy’s crypto-Christianity, or whatever it is.”
“I don’t know why you’re so sure he’s religious.”
“I don’t know why you’re so sure he isn’t.”
“He was listening to some sort of choral music Saturday.”
“Oh, of course he was. That poor cultured moral genius, slave to the common people’s id. Forced to interview the great unwashed, when all he really wants is to be left alone to listen to classical music in his tower. Poor thwarted statesman, heir to our progressive dreams! Poor exiled king of Zembla, unrecognized by us all!”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“A witch hunt!” Luke barks, sending Cel jumping. “Ha! Have you no decency, sir, at long last? Have you none?”
“Do we?”
“Oh, but we’re agnostic about our decency, Cel, which is a kind of decency in itself.” Luke shakes his head; he’s finally starting to sound a little tired. “I mean, who does Mattie think he is to this kid—his fucking priest?”
Cel shrugs. “I think he sort of thinks that he’s his lawyer.”
* * *
—
“I do not understand how you’re losing this argument,” says Elspeth on Sunday afternoon. “I don’t understand how you’re still having it.”
She means about the letters. Outside the window, men are playing music—they’re there every day in their porkpie hats, strumming guitars hooked up to portable speakers—though Cel only ever listens from a distance.
“Mattie’s just really good at arguing,” says Cel. “I mean, he was a lawyer.”
“He was?”
“He was a public defender. I’ve told you that before. I’ve told you that a million times.”
She has, probably.
“Well, that doesn’t make hiding those letters any less insane,” says Elspeth. “That doesn’t change the fact that he has got to turn them over.”
Cel stares at her toenails, which are pink; yesterday, she’d submitted to a “mani-pedi” with Nikki, in honor of the date with Scott.
“Why, though?” says Cel.<
br />
“Why what?”
“Why are you so sure he has to show me the letters?” Cel realizes she is drumming her fingers against her chin; she hopes she hasn’t caught this gesture from Luke. “I mean, why are you so sure that’s the right thing?”
“Uh,” says Elspeth, with a derision that sounds, frankly, kind of mannish. “Well, the fact that Mattie doesn’t want to do it is probably the first clue.”
“But that’s, like”—Cel gropes—“circular? I think. Like you’re saying we know Mattie is bad because he does the wrong thing, and we know this is the wrong thing because Mattie is doing it….”
Is that logic or the opposite of logic? Somewhere along the line, Cel should have been paying closer attention to something.
“Uh, no.” Elspeth is staring at Cel uncomprehendingly. “I wouldn’t say that is how we know those things.”
“Then how do we know them?” How do you, is the real question.
“Well, some people use their consciences, Cel?” says Elspeth. “They’re like a shortcut through these sorts of quandaries? So you don’t have to think quite so hard all the time.”
“I have a conscience.”
“I know. I’m reminding you. Why are your toes like that?”
“I got them done.” She wiggles them. “With Nikki.”
“Well, of course you did.” Elspeth shakes her head violently; her green hair remains astoundingly still. “Amazing. Next thing we know, you’ll be one of those women who cuts out articles about what kind of jeans best fit your body type. One of those women who’s, like, earnestly seeking guidance about that.”
Cel regards her feet, flexing her toes one by one. It’s true they don’t look like her toes, exactly, but why should that be any sort of criticism?
“You know that doesn’t mean anything, right?” she says.
“What doesn’t?”
“Being one of those people who does this or that thing. One of those people who cuts out articles about jeans, one of those people who gets a pedicure. I mean, do you really think that kind of stuff matters?”
The Spectators Page 26