The Spectators

by Jennifer Dubois

  We do; it ends; we sit. Mattie welcomes us once again to the show, although I somehow feel I cannot hear him—or maybe I’m hearing the countless other times I’ve heard him deploy this exact same phrase on TV. It’s possible I’ve seen it more than I think—it’s one of those shows, like Seinfeld or The Simpsons, whose entire canon you could internalize more or less by accident. Today’s guests are about what a person might expect. There’s a monosyllabic kleptomaniac, a sullen Oedipus who killed his father with a hunting knife. He has an ellipsoid of sebaceous acne across his cheek; he keeps tilting his head to get it out of the direct line of the cameras, which he alone seems to understand intuitively. There’s the shattered mother of a young man who’d killed his girlfriend, then himself, on their prom night. She speaks of her son—emphatically and exclusively—as a suicide; she refuses to look the pimply patricide in the eyes. Finally there’s a beaming, scrub-faced adolescent and the equally beaming mother she’d tried, and failed, to kill. Their dynamic suggests a duo whose harebrained scheme has launched them farther than they’d ever dared to dream: they both seem absolutely delighted to be on television.

  Matthew listens to their stories kindly, murmuring his sympathies. He ventures the most obvious speculations—you must have been so frightened/angry/sad—and they nod, astonished at his perception. He asks straightforward questions, then turns to offer reassuring declarative statements to the audience. The whole thing reminds me of the way he’d talk to people outside subway stops, as a campaigner and then a public servant. He had a habit of aggressively empathizing with every complainant; they all walked away with the sense some tacit promise had been made, and maybe half the time, this was true. But you could never tell from the conversation, because he sounded sorry for everyone. Once, this had seemed compassionate; later, it looked sinister. To see it again now, here, is just confusing.

  The commercial break is a ninety-second interstice of dead-aired flurry. Matthew doesn’t look at us. He doesn’t look at the guests, either, when they try to glance at him for encouragement. They smile at each other instead, in nervous solidarity: some of them are victims and some of them are murderers, but they are all on TV. All distinctions pale in comparison to this fundamental fact.

  When we return from the break, Matthew moves into the audience. There’s a kind of clunkiness to this, a sense of community-theater-type blocking. It’s finally registering with me that, in this moment, I have some tremendous power over Matthew. I could vault over the three rows separating me from Matthew Miller. I could touch his hand, or kiss him in a way that would tell everyone the truth of what had passed between us once. I could sneak up behind him and punch him right in the kidney. Isn’t this why I’m here? To remind him that sometimes ghosts turn into poltergeists? I wonder how long it would take the security guards to tackle me. The steroidally burly men hovering just offstage are fake, of course, but I wonder if they are also real. Or would others be summoned—some secret, untelegenic army emerging from behind the curtains?

  Matthew’s questions are taking a turn toward old-school Comment: what sorts of mental health services had been available to the families, whether they’d been able to access any support or funding, what their insurance and educational systems had afforded them. Even the planted audience questions are starting to feel a little wonky, as though everyone here has been tasked with conducting some kind of dreary social survey. One such querent emerges from my row, and Mattie comes right over to hand her the microphone. His head turns in my direction; I gulp down one breath, two; his eyes look through me.

  At this, I feel a perverse satisfaction—something reminiscent of the way I’d feel when I’d come back from some epic walk, in the months after Matthew left, and find my feet were bleeding.

  Matthew’s line of questioning has turned toward guns. He wants to know how everyone who’d used one got it; of the ones who didn’t use guns, he wants to know why not. The mood in the audience has settled into determined politeness; the headphoned producer to the left of me looks concerned. My own boredom is tinged with nostalgia, and I stare at Matthew, for the first time, with something like fondness. It is possible, even now, to imagine him serving on some kind of congressional committee—from a certain perspective, it isn’t hard to imagine him as a senator. But then, it isn’t that hard, either, to imagine him as a pratfalling saltimbanque, doomed to wander the world, playing whatever kind of fool is in fashion. Condemned to use his gifts to parody his ambitions. From a certain angle, one could be tempted to view this as sort of the point: The Mattie M Show as an act of vengeance against the world that thwarted him.

  But real people do not live lives to prove points. That’s a mistake I used to make all the time in my writing.

  “Kind of a weird episode,” whispers the paisleyed woman; we have arrived at our final commercial break, somehow. I allow as how the episode was weird. Inside, I congratulate myself for not being this woman. For I had seen some of the world’s true strangeness in my time upon this earth; I’d seen things that this woman did not understand and could not fathom and would no doubt be obliterated by the knowledge of, like Lot’s unimaginative wife. For the first time, I look the woman square in the face, the better to take stock of our difference.

  But when I do, I find that something has changed; I know her less, somehow, than I did before. I look again, and something flashes before my eyes—not this woman’s life, but something like its opposite. For a moment, I feel the negative space that might enclose it, I feel the possibilities it might contain. There’s a disorienting vertigo—like déjà vu, or that pre-somnolent sense of dropping through fathomless floors. I can feel Paisley resisting the urge to ask me if I’m okay: just the sort of pointless Midwestern discretion my grandmother would have approved of. I nod once to tell her that yes, I am, so she doesn’t have to ask. I do not want to look at her again just yet. I let my eyes drift to Matthew, and feel Paisley’s gaze following my own.

  “He’s shorter than I thought he’d be,” she remarks. I study Matthew’s face in the monitor. Is it possible that if I look hard enough, some secret knowledge will come back to me? I know he had a scar dashing out from his left eyelid. I know he had thick white crescents on his fingernails. I don’t know what his smile looks like, or if I did, I have forgotten.

  “But I guess celebrities are never really what you think they’ll be,” she says.

  A woman rushes out to dust Mattie’s cheeks; he does not thank her, and he does not smile. Around him, be-khakied, be-walkie-talkied young people direct the administration of hair gel and bottled water.

  “Hardly ever,” I say.

  He didn’t really smile, I’m remembering now. He didn’t smile much, or laugh. Instead, he’d make his eyes pulse in a billion different ways—amusement or desire or skepticism or rage—an infinity of micro-expressions, so many that it was easy to believe he conjured each one only once: that it belonged only to the moment you were in with him, and that it would never come again.

  “It’s always kind of hard to remember that you don’t actually know them,” says Paisley.

  I turn to Paisley again, and this time I make it a point to look right at her.

  “Some people make it really easy to forget.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  cel

  On Tuesday afternoon, certain facts emerge.

  The studio is unhappy with Mattie’s “politicized” handling of the juvie show.

  They are threatening to can it and force everyone to work overtime.

  It is rumored that a “You’re Too Fat for Porn!” episode is being considered, because those guests are always easy to come up with on short notice—however:

  The unions have objections.

  The day had begun promisingly enough, with a pep talk from Eddie Marcus.

  “Hi there!” he’d chirped at Cel when she walked into the greenroom. He sounded cheerfully
noncommittal, as though he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to know who Cel was but was happy to extend his graciousness to all people of the world, regardless.

  “Have a muffin!” he added, gesturing toward the craft services table as though he’d arranged it for Cel personally. Obediently, she took one. She felt detached, nearly relaxed, as she nibbled it, watching the sound guy retape Mattie’s mic.

  When Luke appeared, Cel said, “Have a muffin!” He gave her a look like Fuck off. Cel smiled at him serenely. I am here only in an observational capacity, she told herself. I am the United Nations.

  This peace, however, was short-lived. Cel watched Eddie’s face turn pale in the first segment, positively pearlescent in the second, when Mattie went full C-SPAN. His neck still radiated a hearty tan; Cel wondered about bronzer. The mood in the room darkened, then erupted, with Luke shouting “What the hell!” He whirled at Eddie Marcus—flew at him, as they do in Russian novels. Cel was glad Luke had somebody else to fly at, these days. “Did you tell him to do this?”

  “Why the hell would I do that?” shouted Eddie. Cel wasn’t sure she’d ever heard such a rich person yell before—it thrilled her, a little, obscurely—though she didn’t think she believed him then, and certainly did not now, as it has further emerged that:

  5. Eddie Marcus had helped arrange Mattie’s speech at the gun control rally (Cel knew that part already), which

  6. Mattie fully intends to go ahead with.

  There is apparently nothing in his contract that explicitly prevented him from doing the rally—a fact helpfully pointed out by Mattie himself, when Cel dropped by his office to arrange the VIP Meet-and-Greet. His face had turned a strange color when he’d seen the guy’s business card—it was as though his skin curdled, somehow, right before her very eyes—and Cel wondered if he somehow knew him already. Scott probably would have mentioned that. Though then again, maybe he did—the whole conversation was so dim and hallucinatory she hadn’t even been sure it was real until Scott called to follow up, and at that point it was too late to ask questions.

  At a loss, Cel listens to her voicemails—which are, she is pretty sure, getting more unhinged. There are messages from Christians threatening to pray for Mattie, paranoiacs threatening to kill him. There’s a crackpot claiming to have seen Mattie and the shooter on a road trip and demanding payment for the details; he goes so far as to spell out his mailing address—at a P.O. box: where else?—and call back when the tape cuts him off. Cel imagines Mattie and Ryan Muller toodling around the country together—like Thelma and Louise, or like Humbert and Lolita? Cel has no idea.

  Cel heads to Luke’s office to complain. Sanjith and Jessica are there already, looking put upon; Luke looks exactly as put upon as usual. Cel wants to whine about her messages—she is put upon, too!—but everyone, it seems, has the same problem. There are journalists calling Luke about rumors that Mattie was himself a gun owner (Jessica rolls her eyes), journalists calling about rumors that Mattie might be gay (Sanjith yawns). There are journalists calling Sanjith wanting to rehash the Secret Crush debacle, journalists calling Jessica to try to resurrect some scandal from his moribund political career.

  “But why?” says Cel. “Isn’t the homicidal teenager fanboy enough?”

  “Nothing like some twenty-year-old low-level municipal shenanigans to really move copy,” says Luke.

  “I mean, what are they hoping to find—the Lindbergh baby?” says Cel. “Are they hoping he’s got a dead girl in his dressing room? Or a live boy?”

  She expects laughter, but all she gets is a snort from Luke. Sanjith looks stony; Jessica, frankly alarmed.

  “That’s a joke,” she says, and cringes. This is exactly what the VIP guy had said to her that morning, while making a bad one. “And it’s not even my joke, anyway. Some senator said it first.”

  At two, word goes out that Mattie and Eddie Marcus have been called into a meeting with net executives. This is a cause for rejoicing amongst the underlings—they may all be about to lose their jobs, but they are also, it seems, off the hook. They order pizza and scan the classifieds. There’s an emergent sense of camaraderie among them, now that it’s nearly over; one day, perhaps, Cel will remember all these people fondly—Sanjith and Jessica and even poor old Donald Kliegerman, that goon—as fellow veterans of a very strange, very dubious war. The invasion of the Falkland Islands. She can’t quite summon this feeling about Luke, because she has the suspicion he’ll find cause to call and berate her routinely throughout her life.

  Luke has recently arrived at a grand unified theory of Mattie’s behavior, which is that he’s trying to get out of his contract so that he can go back into politics. This, Luke says, explains everything—Mattie’s insane behavior the last few months, his total unconcern with the network’s wrath. A few months back, a journalist had called about a focus group held in midtown, in which participants were asked to consider the potential Senate run of a daytime TV host, and under what circumstances they might be willing to entertain voting for such a candidate. But the journalist didn’t seem to really think that this was Mattie—almost anybody else on television would make more sense—and Luke had mostly forgotten about it, until the announcement about the gun control rally.

  “Think about it,” Luke says now. “Mattie can’t quit, right? His only hope is to get fired. So he hatches a plot to lose the show as much money as he possibly can. When the show experiences a PR crisis, he makes it worse at every turn. That Hitler thing? Come on. He used to be a politician: you think he really doesn’t know how to not say the word ‘Hitler’ on TV? When the network tells him he needs a minder, he negotiates to bring in the very guy who ran his mayoral campaign. And suddenly he’s using every chance he gets to talk about guns. Why? Well, it’s not to help the show. It’s not to connect with our viewers. It’s not because he’s spent years talking about guns with the voters of New York City. It’s because he’s talking to the voters of New York State—because he knows that they, like everyone else, are paying attention.”

  “Luke,” says Jessica. “You sound like a crackpot right now. You sound even more insane than Mattie, and even Mattie’s not insane enough to do this.”

  “You are sounding a little New World Order, man,” says Sanjith.

  “I really think it could be true,” says Luke, and he actually sounds a little hurt.

  “Well, fantastic,” says Cel. “This is just what we need. And here I’ve already stuck my head in the oven once today!”

  Jessica and Sanjith stare as though she might do it again, right in front of them, and Luke declares the meeting adjourned.

  * * *

  —

  “Tough crowd,” says Luke, when the other two have left.

  “You’re telling me,” says Cel. “I mean, I know the oven joke was dark, but you can’t tell me it’s too dark for them. They work here, for Christ’s sake.”

  “It isn’t that the joke is too dark.” Luke crouches over his mini-fridge and produces two Cokes. “It’s that they don’t totally believe it’s a joke.”

  “Oh thanks,” says Cel. “So everyone really thinks I should want to kill myself?”

  “Certain kinds of people get to make certain kinds of jokes.” He hands her a straw. “That’s all.”

  “Oh. So who should I have been to make that joke?”

  “Well, a man, for one thing.”

  Cel rubs her eyes. “Well, thanks. I’ll get right on that.”

  “A white man, ideally. You want to start with a lot of authority, so that we can laugh when you squander some of it. So that we can consider the possibility of your wounds without getting too uncomfortable. With women, it’s like you’re walking around all the time with a life-threatening injury. And when you make a joke about it, it’s like you’re pointing right at it.”

  Cel blinks a few times. She isn’t sure she’s ever heard Luke say two totally sincere s
entences in a row; she’s certainly never heard him issue a dissertation.

  “Jesus, Luke. Is this the kind of stuff you say on dates?”

  “I just—you know what? Never mind. Forget it.”

  He spins his chair around; sighs through his nose; spins back.

  “I just mean—like, you know when a pudgy male comic talks about his body, and how unattractive it is, ha-ha? That’s the sort of thing that would seem really confusing from a woman. A man can point out how gross he is, and we don’t think he’s trading on something he actually needs to survive. So we laugh.”

  “We do?”

  “But we think a woman’s attractiveness is really, really important.”

  “You are a gentleman and a visionary.”

  “I’m using the societal ‘we’! Jesus. It’s fucking rhetorical, obviously. What I mean is, we as a society think attractiveness or whatever is so vital to a woman that it’s basically beyond irreverence. Or beyond her irreverence—for everyone else, it’s always open season.”

  Cel is aware that she is goggling now, gnawing rabbitishly on her straw. She has thought about this problem her entire life, but never articulated it so fiercely; she can’t believe Luke has thought about it at all, let alone developed a whole big thesis. It’s almost like listening to Elspeth and her theories, except that Cel never recognizes her life in those. She wonders what else Luke has theories about.

  “Jesus, Luke,” says Cel. “Were you a Women’s Studies major or something?”

  “I took a class,” he says, and Cel tries not to fall right over. “The point I’m trying to make is—you say the oven thing, a guy says the oven thing—they don’t think either of you are going to do it. They’re not, like, dialing a hotline. But when a white man makes a joke like that, we think he’s picking on someone who can take it. When you do it, we think we’re watching someone get bullied.”