Ollie nodded sagely, considering this request. “Or maybe it would be easier and safer if we just spent the rest of the weekend in the panic room.” He arched an eyebrow.
TJ had no visible reaction. Very slowly and very coolly, he said:
“How about you show me where that is, partner.”
IX
Steve locked his door behind him and bolted the hurricane shutters. He had no idea if he could fall asleep with imminent violent death lurking in every shadow and around every corner, but he was genuinely exhausted.
He lay on his back still in his clothes, on top of the bedspread, in case any murder sounds needed investigating in a jiffy. He kicked off his shoes, closed his eyes, and folded his hands on top of his chest.
Like a body in a coffin.
Once that thought occurred to him, he dropped his hands to his sides.
Just beyond the shutters, a group of small frogs or large bugs, some invisible mass of crawling vermin, hummed and hummed and hummed like the quickening pulse of night.
The dread weighing down every fiber of Steve’s being sank into his eyelids.
He was just about to drift off when a knock at the door snapped him to attention.
He froze, then turned his head to one side:
“Who is it?”
“Zoe,” came the whispered response through the door. “C’mon, open up!”
He got up. He unlocked the door and opened it just a crack. On the other side she was fidgeting in gym shorts and a gray T-shirt that depicted a generic human outline shooting both hands up in triumph and the words I POOPED TODAY!
“Let me in, let me in.” She pushed past him to get inside.
Steve looked out onto the landing but didn’t see anyone. All the doors lining the belvedere were closed. “Is somebody after you?”
“Not yet.”
He locked the door and turned to face her. Zoe was wringing her hands and looking bashful.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Can I, ah, spend the night here? I really—I tried it by myself in there, and I, I didn’t like it. Not at all.”
“Sure,” he said, “but how do you know I’m not the killer?”
“How do you know I’m not?”
“Your jammies don’t look like they could conceal a weapon. Unless you’re planning on snapping my neck Steven Seagal–style.”
“No, I’ve never been able to generate that much torque with my wrists.”
Still, he didn’t take his hand off the doorknob. “You sure you wouldn’t rather be with TJ?”
She looked askance. “I thought you looked funny when you found us together. Look—that was nothing. He’s still an asshole. He wanted us to work together. Form an alliance.”
“Against me?”
“Oddly, no. He hates Dante Dupree more for some reason. Your name didn’t come up.”
“Oh, so I’m nice and nonthreatening? Is that why you’re here?”
“Dude. Are you…are you actually offended that I don’t think you’re the killer? Seriously?”
“Look, my masculinity is in a tender state at the moment, sorry.”
She sat on the bed. “You have this adorable sad-puppy quality about you.”
“You’re not helping.”
“Sad puppies are hot. I think you’re…well, I can’t lie. I’ve been fantasizing about you since tenth grade.”
“Those must have been some reruns.”
“To a girl who wanted to be funny? You bet your ass they were. And I don’t know…this whole experience…it’s kind of hot, right? Fight Thanatos with Eros? That’s a natural impulse, isn’t it?”
She patted the bed next to her.
He took his hand off the doorknob.
Steve said:
“Natural or not, I’m going to encourage it.”
X
At midnight the wind off the ocean grew noticeably, punitively cooler. And stronger. The hushed sounds of the palms brushing against one another grew louder, bolder; wordless voices rising in mounting panic.
Nevertheless, Ruby Ng kept her hurricane shutters open. She faced the night sitting cross-legged on her bed and thumbed her way through every conceivable level of the flip phone’s primitive settings until she confirmed its network connection was entirely one way. She couldn’t get on any external website or app. Apparently all she could do was contact one specific other phone.
So that’s what she did, typing:
We need to talk.
She waited a full minute for the response:
U didnt come to libary u werent there
She frowned, considering her response, before thumbing:
I was there. Then Janet got shot.
No answer for a while, then she added:
I still want to hear what you have to say. Can you still meet tonight?
This time the response came much quicker:
U no were playroom is
She quickly sent:
Yes. Meet you there in thirty minutes? 1am?
K
Instantly she jackknifed off the bed and collected a small travel-size can of mace out of her purse. Until Janet was shot, she’d thought it was overkill to come back to the room and get it, but hell no, not anymore.
From her purse she also grabbed a “personal alarm,” a big black button at the end of a lanyard that, when pressed, emitted the world’s loudest, most annoying sound. Basically, it was a rape whistle on steroids. Her mom had ordered it for her on Amazon when she moved into that apartment in Koreatown because everyone (Mom said) knew that Koreans were a racist people who looked down on Vietnamese and didn’t they have gangs there and you can’t let them think they can mess with you and maybe you’ll meet a nice Korean doctor with a penis and get married and carry on the family bloodline as God and nature intended?
Ruby was also armed with a vague knowledge of aikido acquired two years ago during a series of weekly classes at the Long Beach LGBTQ Center. She was pretty good about going for five weeks, until her tour schedule heated up and she never went back. Other than not quite being able to shake the nagging feeling she was personally legitimizing a Euro-American stereotype by learning martial arts, Ruby discovered that the step-step-grab-throw-pivot movements required to kick someone’s ass without actually kicking their ass—per aikido’s philosophy of nonviolence—was so complicated it was like memorizing VCR instructions for her own body. She was pretty sure that when confronted by a rapist in a dark parking lot, trying to remember some Olympic-level gymnastics routine instead of just sending a non-nonviolent kick straight to his balls was going to get her killed, or worse. Also, all aikido moves seemed to dump your opponent on his back, looking right up at your highly punchable crotch, which was the area she was generally trying to protect in the first place. That seemed like a design flaw in this whole system of self-defense, if you asked her.
That said, if the Dustin Walker Island Killer came at her with a knife (and not a shotgun or a bazooka), and the mace nozzle jammed, and her personal alarm failed, she was fairly confident she could grab her assailant by the wrist, flip him onto his back, and then run like hell for help.
Ruby put both her phones on silent (no vibrate) and took off her shoes, slipping barefoot onto the belvedere landing and closing the door silently behind her. She padded downstairs, quickly, making sure she was alone. She was. She couldn’t see anyone on the grounds either. The pool, the fountain, the distant cabana were all pretty well lit by a few scattered lampposts. Palm shadows bobbed like scythes against the white plaster walls. There was no sound but sighing trees.
She stole into the playroom a full twenty-five minutes prior to the agreed-upon meeting with her mystery correspondent.
Of course, he wasn’t much of a mystery to her.
She had figured out it was Oliver Rees.
For one thing, Ruby had been a psychology major in college. For another, she had been a woman her entire life. It was obvious to anyone with half a brain and an entire vagina that Ollie was
a classic aggrieved male, underdeveloped sexually as well as emotionally. A textbook case of someone acting out perverse domination fantasies on a cohort largely comprised of people of color and women and queers. And if he could prove to the handful of cis straight men he had invited along that he was superior to them (even if he did look as though Danny DeVito had asexually budded off a smaller, completely hairless Danny DeVito), well, then so much the better.
Also: she had seen him carrying around one of those Orange Baby Man franchise binders, which she had recognized from the time she’d intercepted him for Comedy Ambush. Clearly he had some kind of business arrangement with Dustin Walker and the two were in cahoots.
Double-also: Ruby knew enough about Ollie’s Orange Baby Man operation that his elaborate prop gags, puerile though they may be, required a formidable amount of tactical planning and technical expertise to execute. Exactly what was required to pull off something as insane and insanely complicated as what they were being subjected to here.
She looked around to satisfy herself that she was alone. Then she climbed into the ball pit and burrowed her petite body as far as possible beneath the surface of the multichromatic spheres, making sure she could still survey the room through tiny gaps in the top layer.
She was not afraid to die. Not for a cause that was right—and outsmarting this asshole who was terrorizing her and her colleagues, oppressing them, making them live in fear, was the rightest cause she had ever been involved in.
Ruby had a natural, assured patience honed from many, many hours lying in wait for the unsuspecting. Tipping your hand too soon was the gravest sin in the hunter’s religion. Usually she passed the time by going over her stand-up routines in her head, attacking each joke word by word, weeding out stray adjectives, practicing the length of pauses.
In this instance she worked on her vows for her wedding, which she knew in her heart of hearts she would be saying out loud soon.
Hey, ’Vette. Look at us, standing here at last. I can tell by your face you hardly believe it? Well, makes two of us. You finally won. You finally wore me down. And I’ve never been happier to lose any fight ever.
She didn’t check the time. She never did. Any anticipatory movement could give the game away.
You used to say all the time that comedy was my real wife, that you felt like my mistress. And putting up with all my touring and traveling and career bullshit—can you say bullshit during wedding vows? If not, sorry, bring me a time machine—I hope you know now how not true that is.
You are my one true love, ’Vette, now, then, and always.
She did not know when, exactly, the sliding glass door to the pool area slowly opened. She just flexed her grip on the mace and made sure she knew where the button of the personal alarm was by her clavicle.
The door opened all the way and a figure stood in the opening. It was outlined in black by light streaming in from the patio beyond, so she couldn’t make out who it was. She would know for certain soon enough.
She braced herself to leap out of the pit, but the balls beneath her feet simply shifted; she moved her legs a little but still found no stable foundation off which to leap out—a foundation that had been there just moments before.
Ruby didn’t want to cry out and give away her position, but she heard the metallic shudder of gears beneath her and suddenly realized she was kicking her legs and not finding purchase—there was no beneath beneath them. The mass of balls she was encased in was falling down as the floor of a pit yawned open below, and she was going with them.
She let out a little cry and released both the mace and the alarm at the same time, lashing her hands outward for the edge of the pit. But it was already too late. She was sinking far away from the rim. All her clawing fingers found were more plastic balls falling in the same direction as she was.
In an instant, her bravery cratered: she was afraid to die. She was fearless only if her death meant something, if it was to strike a blow against her enemies and her community’s enemies. She was afraid to die stupidly, or to die pointlessly, to die anonymously, like any other faceless schmuck, which is what she had convinced herself she was not, because that was what she needed to give her life meaning.
TOK, TOK, TOK. She could hear the balls dropping a considerable distance and bouncing at the terminus of the pit far below.
In her animal panic she made several stark, staccato sounds, almost like barks, and the figure approached the edge of the pit. Ruby saw her outline—oh my God, she was wrong, it was a her. It was a her!
Then the balls, like sand through the hourglass, smothered her vision, and she realized the figure she had been looking at wasn’t a real thing at all, but Yvette, in her flowing white wedding dress, holding her bouquet and shaking her head at the tragic fact that Ruby didn’t listen to her and came here over her objections—that Ruby never listened to her at all, in fact. Never in their entire relationship. It was always comedy first. Always career. Yvette knew who Ruby’s true love really was.
She opened her mouth to say I’m sorry, I’ll always be sorry, now I’m coming back to your side and never leaving, but the last of the balls in the pit beneath her fell away and then there was nothing between her and the void and into it she dropped.
When Ruby Ng landed, she at last learned where all the blades in the house had gone.
“We Need to Talk”
You know what else I hate?
Yeah, there’s more than one thing. I know. I’m as shocked as you are. Yeah.
Actually, I do hate a lot of things. It’s true. My mother says it’s to keep more room in my heart for love.
(Beat)
God, I hate my mother.
But that’s not relevant to the current discussion.
And I have to warn you, when I tell you this, you’ll never get it out of your head. It’s like the video from The Ring. You’ll see it everywhere. It’s like a curse. Seriously. This happens in movies and TV all the time.
Like, I was watching this classic film, The Adventures of Cosmic Carson. Dustin Walker. Yeah. Anybody see it?
One…two of you?
Huh.
All three of us must have been on the same flight.
Anyway, in this movie, there’s this one person sitting in a room.
You know, like they do in movies.
And then another person comes into the room, and sits across from her, and says, “We need to talk.”
“We need to talk.”
I mean, is that line really necessary? When you need to talk to someone, you never go up to them and say, “We need to talk.”
Because, for one thing, by saying that four-word phrase, you’re already talking to them. So by making the statement “We need to talk,” you’re already doing the thing you’re declaring you need to do. You’re not even waiting for permission or acknowledgment from the other person. It’s a real microaggression. It’s like verbal mini-rape.
Yeah.
I know.
You don’t say, “We need to talk.” You just talk. Because you’re a real person. You’re not fictional.
At least, I hope you’re not.
Otherwise I’d be doing this show to an empty room.
And that would be weird.
(Beat)
I don’t understand what screenwriters are thinking. The first guy is already in a room eating a sandwich or examining the naked corpse on the slab or staring out through the bridge screen at the empty vastness of space.
You know, depending on what kind of movie it is.
So then the second guy comes in and says, “We need to talk.” Are we at home on the couch now supposed to be like, “Oooooh, talking. They let us know that’s gonna happen. In a fictional scene. Now I’m interested. I thought maybe they were going to play hacky sack for twenty-five minutes. But no, there’s going to be talking. Awesome sauce. Quick, bring Grandma in from the bathroom.
I don’t care if she is in mid-dump.
No. Get Bà Nôi off the toilet right now, I
said. She specifically said to come get her the second any talking happens.”
“We need to talk.”
Really? Do you need to talk? Are you sure? Why? Is this like that movie Crank where you’ve been injected with some kind of poison that will kill you if your lips stop moving?
In kung-fu movies, two guys don’t come in and say, “We need to kick.”
In horror movies, the maniac in the mask doesn’t say, “We need to stab.”
In pornos they don’t say, “We need to screw.”
Well.
Maybe in some pornos they do.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the writing in porno movies is really bad.
Hollywood, don’t be like pornos.
“We need to talk.”
You don’t need to pump the gas, man! I’m already watching. My ass is in the seat. I am ready and willing to be entered by, you know, your thoroughly focus-grouped and committee-conceived corporate entertainment product. Don’t say “We need to talk,” just start talking. Geez.
It makes me want to go all Elvis on my TV.
Except I’m very anti-gun. Very anti-gun. I don’t own a gun. I can’t shoot the TV.
(Beat)
I do own a vibrator, though. I could throw my vibrator at the TV.
My vibrator is industrial strength. Yeah. I sprung for the Leviathan™. It’s powered by sixteen D batteries. Yeah. It’s like being finger-blasted by an entire WNBA team at the same time.
Except in, you know, more convenient portable form.
The Leviathan™ people did not pay for that endorsement, by the way. No. I don’t do that. I do not do corporate sponsorships. That was a purely spontaneous testimonial.
There is one big difference between the Leviathan™ and a WNBA team, though, which is that you can’t bring the Leviathan™ into the bathtub with you. Otherwise…no, it’s just not a good scene. It’ll ruin your day. Believe me. I know. I tried. Yeah. I’m not proud about it, either.
Ten Dead Comedians Page 12
