by Edward Riche
He walked outside.
There was an intermittent wall of flame stretching from the Farinists’ hilltop all the way to the next promontory to the north. Even from this distance Elliot could see how the wind was feeding it.
His cellphone rang.
“Holy Mother, Walt . . .”
“Are we insured against this?” said a voice other than Walter’s.
“‘We’?”
“The investors in the vineyard. Last time I checked I still had a piece.”
“Who is this?”
“You wouldn’t fuck my wife. That didn’t look good.”
“Mr. Silverman?”
Something flickered in the vines. In his peripheral vision Elliot caught a spark and heard the pop of an old glass flashbulb on a Brownie camera.
“Present.”
“‘Are we insured against this’ . . . What’s ‘this’?” Elliot’s confusion was cascading.
“There’s been a fire down here. Started during the siege of the Faranist compound. Is this not on the Canadian news?”
“The Canadian news . . . I’m not following you,” said Elliot. Oh — right. Silverman thought he was still in Toronto! Elliot could smell the chaparral burning, smell creosote and the vapours of hot sap.
“Don’t you get the news up there in the wilderness? Never mind. The Faranists are planning to kill people in Los Angeles, something from the Bible about separating the wheat from the chaff.”
Now Elliot saw the bursts plainly: one, three, and then another two simultaneously. They were like flash pots. The popping sound was delicate but of a pitch that cut through the growing roar of the distant fire and a rising choir of sirens. Sinister forces seemed to be making some sort of mischievous movie out in his vines. Now flames were licking the vines at the site of the flashes. It was a tinderbox. Silverman was still talking.
“They’ve quite obviously gone insane.”
“Very much so, obviously insane. What’s this about a fire?”
“Started during the police assault. Conditions have been terribly dry down here and it started some wildfires . . . I don’t like being the one to break the news, but we’ve lost the vineyard.”
“Are you sure? I . . .” Elliot said. Fire had a solid hold in a grove of trees between the old field-blend grapes and the first Grenache vines he had planted years ago. Embers were passing overhead, shooting stars on a drunkard’s course. A comet killed the dinosaurs, thought Elliot.
“Hey, don’t sweat it, Elliot,” said Silverman. It was as if he were merely giving Elliot notes on the new ending the studio wanted for a picture. “The land alone is probably worth more now with the grapes gone. Who’s Walt?”
“My vineyard manager and winemaker.”
“He down here in California?”
“Yes.”
“Lives at your winery, I suppose?”
“Nobody lives there.” A gust raced under the fire and lifted it up like a blanket from a bed, flames flapped in the air, the great sheet billowing and then landing gently at a distance and catching all there ablaze. Silverman was still talking but Elliot had lost him for a moment. “I’m too young to have worked with Walt Disney,” Lucky was saying. “I will always regret that. He was a great man.”
“I guess.”
“You know why he wrote down Kurt Russell’s name just before he died?”
“Walt Disney?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know he had.”
“There’s another reason I’m calling.”
“About Kurt Russell?”
“No, your son, Mark.”
“Yes?”
“He was that cute kid in Family Planning, right?”
“Yes, he played Little Ricky.”
“I loved that show.”
“Really?”
“‘Really?’ Like, for real, did I genuinely enjoy watching the show? No, I fucking hated it, Jonson. It’s just something you fucking say! It was a fucking courtesy.”
“Of course, sorry.”
“So, Little Ricky is, I understand, doing hard time in Soledad Prison.”
“Yes.”
“A lot of child stars from our industry run into trouble later in life.”
“Indeed.”
“Animals used to be a bitch to work with too, but these days the training is . . . This town has been good to me, Mr. Jonson. I’ve become wealthy. I would like to give something back. I took the liberty of talking to the governor about Mark’s case.”
Elliot could hear shouts from the direction of Haldeman Estates and the sound of their irrigation system starting up.
“You what?”
“And it seems nobody sees any problem with him being transferred to a Canadian prison, to serve out the remainder of his sentence closer to you.”
“This is . . . I . . . I will have to speak to his mother . . .”
“Lucy’s in complete agreement that this is the right thing to do.”
“You’ve spoken with Lucy?”
“Lucy Szilard, yes. I’m producing her picture.”
“The documentary?”
“No, it’s an action picture, vehicle for Barry Hart. Lucy wants what’s best for Mark.”
“I . . . I’m sorry about that thing with your wife.”
“With Robin? It’s okay, next time. Listen, even if she wants me to, I won’t fuck Lucy and we’ll call it even.”
“I gotta tell you, Lucky —”
“Call me Mr. Silverman, please.”
“. . . Yeah, well, my position in Toronto, here . . . it’s not long-term. I can’t remember what was said on that conference call. If I was compelled to testify, I wouldn’t be able to tell them anything.”
“I was never on that call, Jonson, got that?”
“Right, sorry, I —”
“God bless Canada, Jonson. There’s no place like home.”
“They don’t say God bless Canada up here.” A gust fed the fire and Elliot could almost see something, something animated, beyond the vines. It did not so much emerge from the wall of trees as chalk itself out of the shadows with its white lines. Not lines — stripes. The animal advanced toward him in frightful bucks and kicks, with hard-muscled “horsehorsehorse” locomotion. There was too much spirit in the creature for it to keep straight, and it shied and danced laterally, side passing and half passing, on its way. When it stopped, as if considering where to next run, its show of teeth was more human than equine, the smile of someone deranged. It tossed its head, neck, and shoulders, pushed off with its hind legs, and was gone.
The phone was still at his ear but the line was dead. Elliot ran to the truck. Sprinklers, used to cover the vines in ice when there was a risk of frost, were whirling over at Haldeman. They had water galore there.
He was at the gates. In the side mirrors of the truck Elliot saw his winery as a hole in a towering curtain of incensed scarlet and orange. The smell was of something stronger than smoke: it was sour, a breath-stealing burnt black. It was elemental. Iron and sulphur and tar.
Four
HAZEL SAW TO IT that clippings of good press were placed on his desk every morning he was away. Critics were universally positive about the new season. Liberal cultural commentators heralded the return of the national public broadcaster to its founding principles. Victor Rainblatt, everyone agreed, had been a great Canadian.
But this night, two months after their debut, Elliot sat at his desk and confronted the numbers. Reason was perhaps their most critically acclaimed show in a decade. It had started poorly and declined steeply.
Les Les had benefited early from a measure of controversy, but now more people from Alberta were complaining about the show, by phone and email, than were watching it in the entire country. The show’s producers, who’d fought every compromise in its development, smelled doom and sent Elliot a panicked note about introducing “paranormal” elements to the show.
501 Pennsylvania was being called the “smartest comedy of the season,” an obitu
ary in television. They had lost the gang at Elliot’s weather office. They were big with the crowd that never watched television.
There was one exception. One show was that rarest of beasts, beloved by scribblers and rabble alike. Benny Tries Again, the program for which Elliot bore sole responsibility, was a smash. From his premiere, when Benny tossed Barry Hart, his first guest, off the set for being, as Benny put it, “a fake fuck,” people had been tuning in and staying. Soon after the opening-night debacle, the category of self-promoting celebrities willing to risk the show when they passed through Toronto dropped from the B’s to the C’s and D’s. But this did nothing to diminish Benny’s charm. His self-deprecation was so truthful — “After my last show I didn’t end up doing infomercials, I ended up living with a family of raccoons” — that it gave his cracks cred. And debased as he was, he was genuinely sympathetic to people’s woes. Guests were utterly disarmed and opened up completely. Of course, if you were a fake, like Barry Hart, an appearance was perilous. Starved of celebrities, Bennie interviewed his rather ordinary Canadian guests as though they were huge stars.
The numbers for news should have been cause for dismissal, but they were no worse than the competition’s. Television news was a dying animal. The one thing Elliot could crow about was the tremendous savings he’d made by purchasing International News Makers, a company in Mumbai, to gather and produce the broadcasts. They were fed the raw footage for the stories by satellite; the cameras in the studio in Toronto were robots controlled by a reliable cadre of cheap faraway Maharashtrians. There was a lot of grumbling about the change among the journalists, but watching as those of their peers who dared to complain were dispatched to the Yukon and Newfoundland, most kept their peace.
“Why do I HAVE to tell them they’re being cancelled?” Hazel was standing before his desk in an orange and cream gown, a girl’s princess costume all grown up and regal. By the way it gathered at the waist to show off her shape, Elliot could tell it had been custom-made for her.
“Where were you, dressed like that?”
“A gala, a fundraising gala for the opera.”
“That’s one of those Toronto elite things, isn’t it?”
Hazel ignored his remark. “You should tell them,” she said. “You’re the one cancelling them.”
“Hazel, yours was the privilege of delivering the good news when they were scheduled in the first place,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do, it’s the numbers.”
“Fuck you, Elliot. You agreed it wasn’t about the numbers.”
“I said it wasn’t entirely about the numbers. Whether the shows are worthy or not, I can’t piss away the public purse.”
“You are completely abrogating your responsibility.”
“My responsibility to what?”
“To . . .” Hazel thought about it. “To nation-build.”
“Maybe Canadians don’t want any more nation-building. Maybe they want to remortgage and blow the cash at some shitty resort in the Dominican.”
“Because Benny Malka is working out, now you think you’re some kind of programming genius?”
“Who accompanied you to the gala?”
“None of your business. What are you going to replace them with?”
“Shows Alice likes.”
“Who is Alice?”
“I told you about my weather office —”
“Not with the weather office again, Elliot.”
“Yes. And there’s a receptionist, Alice, a big woman, somewhat withdrawn, very private.”
“So guarded that she won’t even open up to the person who imagined her? Elliot, get help.”
“What do you think she likes to watch?” Elliot asked.
“I have to get back to my event, this is ridiculous.”
“She’s watching television right now, while you’re going to a gala. While I’m here at work. She’s watching television. She doesn’t surf the Web; husband Fred, with whom she hasn’t had sex in thirteen years, lives on the Web. He’s online now, in his room in the finished basement. Alice gets all curled up and cozy, maybe with a blanket and some snacks. Snacks are her weakness. Alice gets perfectly comfortable on the couch, and to forget it all, to forget the passive abuse she suffers at the office, the emptiness of her life at home, to forget that she is overweight and unloved, she watches television. So what does she watch?”
Hazel was avoiding his eye, as if contact would provoke a rage.
“She likes comedy,” Elliot said, “broad stuff, hates that cerebral junk. Nothing with a showbiz setting, no smarty-pants inside jokes, absofuckinglutely nudding ‘meta.’ She likes game shows for their hosts, they’ve got to be good people. She likes curling, especially women’s . . . She’s one of that number we’ve never been able to understand. In a drama she wants a protagonist she can root for, not damaged with a spinning moral compass, but a good guy. She wants a redemptive ending. She likes ‘uplifting.’ Television is her bestest friend.”
“Television has such a large circle of friends. How can anyone really be its bestest friend?”
“Because, at its bestest, television is a crowd-pleaser.”
“You know Alice well.”
“I do, finally, I do.”
“What does she drink?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You, ex of the beverage industry, should know. What does Alice drink, Elliot?”
“Pepsi.”
“I would have thought Diet.”
“I give her more credit.”
Elliot replaced Reason with a reality show called Canada’s Stupidest. It was good-natured fun, feeding off viewer-submitted stories of funny, dumb things friends and relations did. The producers of the Canada’s Worst series of shows called Elliot in a snit, claiming proprietorship and threatening a lawsuit. Elliot dared them.
Taking the Les Les spot and an extra half-hour, Elliot green-lit Murph Village, described by its producers as a “fun action-adventure-comedy-mystery-drama.” It was about the derring-do of the eponymous Des Murphy, a dashing yet sexually non-threatening boy-man and private dick in Vancouver. The scripts Elliot read made no sense but featured peeling tops and tires. (There was something charming about the CBC’s prudishness in the media age of the amiable anus. The national public broadcaster took the sight of a bra strap on a bare back for titillation, as well, thought Elliot, it should.) The pilot made Vancouver a character too, sunny as Malibu, colours digitally jacked so that it seemed built of Jolly Ranchers. Murph Village didn’t aspire to originality; rather, it covered, almost credibly, hits of the genre. It was junk, but it was “our junk.” Elliot’s only intercession was to ixnay a tendency to David Caruso–style sunglasses acting. There were limits. Weren’t there?
The cast of 501 Pennsylvania were said to test high, so Elliot kept the show but had the producers sack and replace the creative team with some fat guys and gals from Benny Tries Again. He eliminated the Friday-evening news and replaced it with Your Product Here, which recycled the best television commercials shown around the planet that week.
And to put truth to the fibs that got him the job in the first place, Elliot was in business with Lucky Silverman — one of Lucky’s outfits, anyway — as one of many international partners producing the miniseries House of Saxe-Coburg. The Canadian end was post-production at the CBC facilities in Mumbai and a young actor named Brad Hodder, who was to play a young Prince Philip. In an interesting turn, Barry Hart was taking the role of Wallis Simpson.
It had been weeks since Elliot had heard directly from Hazel.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: chat
I want to speak to you in person. I understand you will be in Niagara for a few days. I will drive down there tomorrow. I have something for you.
She was standing six metres from the front entrance, by the curb, smoking furiously.
“You’re not coming in?” asked Elliot.
“To a management seminar? At the Niagar
a Institute? You’re kidding, right?” Hazel squinted at a glassed-in display next to the front doors. “Which one are you? ‘Challenging Your Diagnostic Style’?”
“‘Managing Stakeholder Expectations,’ Node A17, actually.”
“Dear God.”
“My team are going to take away a lot from this experience.”
She gestured with her smoke to the glass in Elliot’s hand.
“How’s the vino?”
“Oh . . . I don’t know . . .” Elliot noticed that he was, indeed, holding a glass containing a transparent yellowish liquid. “I haven’t given it much thought.”
“I’ve just come from Dr. Palme.”
“Doctor who?”
“Jurgen Palme, the host of Reason. He was inconsolable.”
“You showed him the ratings, surely a rational man —”
“Everybody has feelings . . . yourself excepted, I suppose.”
“I gave the shows a shot, Hazel. But we’re the national public broadcaster. Without a public —”
“I also am obliged to convey a message from Kurt and Heather.”
“I don’t know any —”
“They’re the creators of Les Les.”
“Kurt?”
“They want to make it a drama. They want to make Claudette, the Québécoise, straight. She leaves Betty, the Newfoundland character, for a man, a nice one, South Asian Ontarian. Betty’s tested poorly and —”
“It’s too late.”
Hazel knew this was true.
“They are going to ask you to be president,” she said.
“I already got the call.”
“I didn’t think you had the French.”
“I don’t really, but theirs wasn’t good enough to tell the difference.”
“Is that why you raced off to California when Victor died?”
“What?” Elliot was genuinely perplexed.
“To look like you didn’t want the job, to let the other aspirants cut one another down in your absence? It’s being called one of the great Machiavellian moves.”
