Repeat

by Neal Pollack

  For the rest of the morning, Brad sat in the atrium, watching people come out of the room looking shattered. A few seemed confident. Finally, after Donald Ziriax emerged saying “I fucked that” and walking straight into the lobby and onto Fifth Avenue, it was over. They waited another fifteen minutes, and then one of Barbara’s assistants posted the callback list on the door to the conference room. There was a bum rush. Some people whooped. Others turned away silently, heads down. A mother patted her son’s back and said, “You’ll get it next year.” Brad’s name was on the list, right at the top.

  Barbara emerged flowingly, like Gloria Swanson coming down the staircase in Sunset Boulevard. She grinned.

  “OK!” she said. “Are you excited?”

  “Yes!” said the remaining thirty-five people.

  Barbara sighed. “I said, are you excited?”

  Yes! Wahoo! Whoop. Applause.

  “That’s better,” she said. “I’m excited too. Why?”

  She made a little inch sign with her thumb and index finger. “Because I’m this much closer to going up to my hotel room and soaking my feet. But beyond that, I’m excited because we’ve narrowed it down. Here’s the good news: you all did the best on our pop quiz. And now you’re officially in the Jeopardy! contestant pool.”

  Dreams did come true in America. They were coming true right now.

  “But just because you’re in the pool doesn’t mean that you’re going to get to swim,” Barbara said. “You’ve got to show us exactly what you can do.”

  After an hour-and-a-half lunch break, the doors opened. First, they took a hundred-question test. Brad knew the answers. Then it was time to face the theme music. They would play simulated games with simulated buzzers, the equivalent of taking live batting practice against an actual pitcher.

  They got called up in threes. Brad felt himself instinctively clicking on his pen. The longer the day went, the more nervous he felt. His confidence cracked slightly. Suddenly, he wanted this. Minutes passed slowly.

  “Brad Cohen,” he heard someone call.

  “Huh?” he said, looking up.

  “It’s your turn,” Barbara said. She gave him a little smirk.

  He hustled up to the podium. Next to him were the air force guy he’d talked to before and a college admissions counselor from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

  Barbara said, “Brad, tell us about yourself.”

  Well, Brad thought, I’ve been born three times, but every time I’m about to turn forty, I get reborn as a fully sentient baby. That makes me nearly 114 years old on a human scale. I was the editor of the New Century magazine and a pundit on MSNBC and also a failed screenwriter. And if this scenario doesn’t work out, I’ll probably get born again and have to spend another two years sucking on my mother’s tit.

  But that’s not what he said, because he didn’t want them to call security on him. Instead, he said, “I’m an independent scholar from right here in New York City.”

  “What does that mean, independent scholar?” asked Richard the contestant coordinator.

  “I audit classes at universities.”

  “What kinds of classes?”

  “Whatever I’m interested in. Right now I’m missing a graduate seminar on the history of industrial-era Britain.”

  “Sorry to make you miss the class.”

  “That’s OK,” Brad said. “It’s pretty boring.”

  “But how do you make your living, Brad?” Barbara asked.

  “I invested my bar mitzvah money in the stock market, and it’s gone pretty well from there,” Brad said.

  The crowd laughed.

  Brad said, “I’m serious. I’ve never had a job.”

  In this lifetime, he thought grimly.

  “First time I’ve ever heard that,” Barbara said. “Are you married?”

  No, Brad thought. Yes. Maybe.

  “I used to be,” he said.

  “I’ll ask no more questions,” said Barbara.

  “I appreciate it.”

  It was time for Brad’s sample game.

  “Brad, you get to pick first,” Barbara said.

  “OK,” he said. “I’ll take Literary Birthplaces for two hundred.”

  Barbara said, “I’ll name the fictional character. You have to name where they were born.”

  The first clue was “Tiny Tim.”

  Brad pounded the buzzer. He didn’t get in. The air force guy did and answered “London” correctly. Air Force bopped over to Potent Potables for two hundred and nailed down “gin.” A half-dozen questions passed. Brad wasn’t having any luck. He smacked the buzzer hard like a car horn and caressed it softly like a kitten. Nothing could get it to respond.

  “Brad, you’re coming in too early,” Barbara said.

  “OK,” Brad said.

  “Sports Stadiums for six,” the college admissions counselor said.

  The answer was simply Tropicana Field.

  Brad hit the buzzer. He saw a light.

  “Brad?” Barbara said.

  “What is Tampa?” Brad said, and then he was off. He knew that Uncle Tom from Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been born in Kentucky, and that George VI was Queen Elizabeth II’s father.

  Then he hit Potent Potables: “What is a Tom Collins?”

  “What is mescal?”

  “What is rum?”

  The buzzer hummed in his hand. He fingered it like a . . . like a clitoris, he thought. No, wait, that’s sexist. But it’s also true.

  It was a trivia clitoris. And he was its master. Brad Cohen, the king of the trivia clit.

  Six weeks later, his phone rang.

  “Brad,” said the voice on the other end. “It’s Barbara from Jeopardy!”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to call,” he said.

  “I bet you have,” she said. “You cocky bastard.”

  “Well?” Brad said.

  “Well, how’d you like to be on the show?”

  “I’d like that a lot.”

  “Your episode is taping in five weeks. Can you make it out to LA for that?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ll have to pay for your own plane ticket. We have a hotel discount near the studio for the contestants.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “I figured it wouldn’t be for an independently wealthy bar mitzvah money investor.”

  “It wouldn’t be, and it isn’t.”

  “You’re a strange guy, Brad Cohen.”

  “Don’t I know it?” Brad said.

  “Alex won’t know what to make of you.”

  “He’ll have to make a lot of me when I keep winning.”

  “Most people lose,” she said. “That’s the way it goes. We tape five episodes a day.”

  “I won’t lose.”

  “I admire your confidence. You got every single one of the answers right on the practice test. That doesn’t happen very often. But it all evens out on taping day.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “That we will. We’ll be mailing you an orientation packet today. And then we’ll see you on the twenty-first.”

  “And the twenty-second,” Brad said. “And the twenty-third.”

  “We only tape two days a week,” she said.

  “OK,” Brad said. “The twenty-eighth then.”

  And all summer long.

  Five weeks later Brad Cohen lay in bed in his fifth-floor room at the DoubleTree in Culver City, California. To reduce noise, he’d asked for a room on one of the top floors, away from the 405, which the hotel faced on one side. His bedside clock said 4:15 a.m. Even though he’d been out like Snow White at 8:30 p.m., he still hadn’t gotten eight hours.

  There was a plastic bottle of water on the bedside table, warm to the touch. Brad sat up and gulped the entire bottle. Then he s
tood, stretched, went to the window, and opened the drapes. A garbage truck moved down Sepulveda. Parking-lot lights illuminated the Dinah’s Fried Chicken sign. A slender crack of gray began to spread across the horizon. This was it. The day he was going to tape Jeopardy!

  Brad dropped to the ground and did twenty quick push-ups, and then another ten not as quickly. His breathing was more labored than he would have liked. So he sat still, like they’d taught him to at the Brooklyn Zen Academy, where he’d taken meditation classes in preparation.

  In his mind he sat at the center of a cone of brilliant white light. Everything around him was one—all the noise, all his thoughts, the stained carpet beneath the pillow he was sitting on—a unified field of awareness.

  He put on some sweatpants and went downstairs. There was a Starbucks in the lobby just opening for the day at 5:15 a.m. Brad ordered the first pour. He sat in a lounge chair and sipped it, feeling strangely nervous. In his last incarnation he’d appeared on TV hundreds of times, usually live. But this was different. This was the Super Bowl.

  Upstairs, he took a shower, shaved, and packed a duffel. They’d asked him to bring a change of outfits in case he appeared on more than one episode. He’d packed ten outfits, including three different sports coats, in two different suitcases. Of course he’d appear on more than one episode. He picked one, camel’s hair, or at least fake camel’s hair, a light blue shirt, and a black tie, no pattern, like they’d asked.

  By that time it was 7:15 a.m. Room service knocked. They’d brought him a glass of orange juice, a bowl of fruit, and a spinach, mushroom, and cheese omelet. He was disappointed to see that they’d left off his side of avocado. That really would have helped.

  It was good for the mind.

  Two hours later the contestant shuttle bus pulled up inside a covered parking area on the Sony lot. The passengers got out, Brad included, like clowns exiting the world’s most intellectual circus car. All of them had suitcases or duffels or garment bags full of dress clothes. They stood in a glass enclosure waiting to be sacrificed in the Brainiac Thunderdome.

  Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. The small talk had been exhausted. They just wanted to play, to get their hands on the buzzers, to see the board, to stare into the face of Trebek.

  Finally, a man appeared, midforties, big smile, dressed not too fancy.

  “I’m Jeremy Wolf,” he said, “the lead contestant coordinator. I’ve had this job for fifteen years, so I can tell you the answer to all your questions: no, yes, no, and Alex is not going to grow his mustache back.”

  That got a nice laugh.

  “So are you all ready to play Jeopardy!?”

  “Yes!” the contestants, including Brad, all responded.

  They knew the drill by now.

  “Good,” he said. “Come with me.”

  They walked maybe twenty feet. There it stood, Sony Pictures Studios Stage 10. A six-thousand-foot-tall talismanic photo of Alex Trebek watched over the lot like a benevolent Canadian god.

  They passed through a metal detector and put their bags through an X-ray machine. As they went through a side door, Brad craned his neck to get a glimpse of the set, and so did everyone else, but Jeremy Wolf kept them together, like the sheep his namesake liked to eat. Brad got a faint glimpse of a glass case containing many Emmys and photos and memorabilia.

  They were in a green room. It wasn’t technically green, more a lightish blue, but it was a “greenroom,” a waiting area for the Johnny Gilbert–narrated apocalypse. There were buckets of soda cans and plastic iced tea and carafes of coffee, a huge plastic catered dish of fruit, and another full of cardboard-looking Danishes, bombs of jelly and frosting that were bad for the brain. There were fifteen contestants and four contestant coordinators. They sat at a long conference table, while a few more sat on couches. All of them had clipboards.

  Brad had signed his name fewer times when he was applying for a housing loan. There were tax forms and nondisclosure agreements and forms to agree that he understood the rules. He also had to fill out some chatty information forms, including the dreaded “personal anecdotes.”

  Brad had to choose three interesting things to say about himself. The most interesting thing—the fact that he was, apparently, caught forever in an infinite time loop—would be rejected out of hand and would probably get him thrown off the show. Most of his other good anecdotes, like when he’d insulted Newt Gingrich in an elevator or traveled to Berlin two days before the wall fell, sounded equally unbelievable and were all related to the first part. He couldn’t talk to Alex about how he’d met his wife, because he’d met her more than eighty years ago, and even though she was probably alive now, she wasn’t going to know who he was. And he couldn’t talk about his daughters, the oldest of whom, Claire, would only have been two years old in his normal timeline but didn’t exist in this one. That was a decidedly untrivial fact.

  So he played it safe, saying that his first word was “Elvis,” that he’d invested his bar mitzvah money in Apple stock, and he also added that he’d met Mike Ditka when he was a kid. The third wasn’t actually true from any lifetime, but it also wasn’t checkable.

  One of the contestant coordinators came by and looked at Brad’s sheet, nodding in approval. “Alex will like all of those,” he said.

  The morning’s carbohydrate and coffee highs had worn off. Everyone in the room was chattering and shaking nervously. Are you ready to play the Hunger Games? Brad thought but didn’t say, because The Hunger Games was still more than three years away from publication, and Suzanne Collins was still working as a writer for Clifford’s Puppy Days. Now there was someone who turned a children’s TV career into success. Brad wondered if he could have parlayed Battlecats better. If only he’d had better management, better luck, and more talent.

  Eighty years on, and he was still bitter about failing in Hollywood.

  This is what Brad remembered, and hated, about the entertainment business: the endless waiting in chairs. You waited and waited. Then someone finally appeared, flashed a smile, offered you a bottle of water, and crushed your dreams.

  Not this time, though.

  Screw you, Hollywood, Brad thought. Today I get my revenge.

  He would reclaim his dignity.

  On a game show.

  The door flung open. Barbara Stevens flowed in on a cloud.

  “Good morning, my little flowers!” she exclaimed.

  “Good morning!” her little flowers exclaimed back nervously.

  “Now I know you’re all excited to get out there and to see the set,” Barbara said. “But there are some rules we’ve got to explain.”

  They didn’t turn out to be rules so much. Everyone knew the rules. They were more like maxims for Jeopardy! success. The first, Barbara said, was “Play your game.” In other words, stick with whatever strategy you had when you arrived.

  “Rule number two,” Barbara said, was “don’t get flustered!”

  That was a laugh. The entire experience down to the arctic blast of the air-conditioning seemed to exist precisely to fluster.

  “Rule number three,” Barbara said, “get your timing down!”

  “Timing.” Here was the key to it all, the only thing that mattered. You weren’t allowed to buzz in until Alex Trebek was done reading the question. Even then there was a microcosmic delay before a set of lights (invisible to the home viewer) on either side of the question board blinked on. If you clicked the buzzer before then, you got locked out for a quarter of a second. If you clicked too much after that, a competitor would beat you to the answer.

  “It’s a high-wire coordination act,” Barbara said. “I won’t lie to you. One time we had a guy who hired two occupational therapists. He trained with them for weeks. His thumb muscles were huge. They looked like chicken drumsticks. Remember that movie Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, with Uma Thurman?”

  “Based on a Tom Robbi
ns novel,” said a guy at the table.

  Barbara touched her index finger to her nose.

  “Very good, Colin,” she said, “but save it for the game. In any case, this guy came in, and he was ready for the buzzer. He was going to destroy it. Anyone want to guess what happened to him?”

  “He won?” a young woman said sheepishly.

  “He should have won,” Barbara said. “His buzzer strategy was great. But he missed Final Jeopardy!, so he lost. This is a cruel game. Isn’t that right, Brad?”

  She remembers me, Brad thought. Why single him out? It didn’t matter. This was all part of the game.

  “I don’t know,” Brad said. “I haven’t played it yet.”

  “That’s the right answer!” Barbara said. “And also the wrong one. Jeopardy! is definitely a hard game. But it’s also fun! Remember this above everything else: you made it! You’re here! It’s going to happen! So have fun.”

  Around the table, everyone looked pale and terrified. Brad felt his confidence wane just a little. It felt less like a game show and more like the antechamber to a mass execution, with pictures of Alex Trebek on the walls. One of the contestants, a “project systems administrator” from suburban Chicago, stood up and ran to a bathroom.

  A door slammed. The man wretched, audible even over the loud bathroom fan. Everyone sat uncomfortably, waiting for it to end. The man emerged, looking sheepish. The right collar of his button-down shirt was a little wet.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Too much coffee.”

  “Nothing to apologize for, Gary,” Barbara said. “It happens all the time.”

  A few more seconds passed. Brad drilled his fingers on the table. Over on the couches, contestant coordinators shuffled through papers.

  “OK then,” Barbara said. “Who wants to see the set?”

  They beheld Oz in all its splendor. The set glistened, all purples and blues and oranges and reds. Whoever designed the color scheme must have really liked ’70s and ’80s Hot Wheels.

  Three podiums sat in a line, the word “Jeopardy!” behind them. The board went floor to ceiling, enormous, no dollar spared there. There were cameras all around, big ones, just to remind everyone: you’re going to be on TV.