The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

Dennis Etchison Inside the Cackle Factory

Uncle Miltie did not look very happy. Someone had left a half-smoked cigar on his head, and now the wrapper began to come unglued in the rain. A few seconds more and dark stains dripped over his slick hair, ran down his cheeks and collected in his open mouth, the bits of chewed tobacco clinging like wet sawdust to a beaver’s front teeth.

“Time,” announced Marty, clicking his stopwatch.

Lisa Anne tried to get his attention from across the room, but it was too late. She saw him note the hour and minute on his clipboard.

“Please pass your papers to the right,” he said, “and one of our monitors will pick them up. ”

On the other side of the glass doors, Sid Caesar was even less amused by the logjam of cigarette butts on his crushed top hat. As the water rose they began to float, one disintegrating filter sloshing over the brim and catching in the knot of his limp string tie.

She forced herself to look away and crossed in front of the chairs to get to Marty, scanning the rows again. There, in the first section: an empty seat with a pair of Ray-Bans balanced on the armrest.

“Sixteen,” she whispered into his ear.

“Morning, Lisa.” He was about to make his introductory spiel before opening the viewing theater, while the monitors retrieved and sorted the questionnaires. “Thought you took the day off.”

“Number Sixteen is missing.”

He nodded at the hallway. “Check the men’s room.”

“I think he’s outside,” she said, “smoking.”

“Then he’s late. Send him home.”

As she hurried toward the doors, the woman on the end of row four added her own questionnaire to the pile and held them out to Lisa Anne.

“Excuse me,” the woman said, “but can I get a drink of water?”

Lisa Anne accepted the stack of stapled pages from her.

“If you’ll wait just a moment — ”

“But I have to take a pill.”

“Down the hall, next to the restrooms.”

“Where?”

She handed the forms to one of the other monitors.

“Angie, would you show this lady to the drinking fountain?”

Then she went on to the doors. The hinges squeaked and a stream of water poured down the glass and over the open toes of her new shoes.

Oh great, she thought.

She took the shoes off and stood under the awning while she peered through the blowing rain. The walkway along the front of the AmiDex building was empty.

“Hello?”

Bob Hope ignored her, gazing wryly across the courtyard in the direction of the adjacent apartment complex, while Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore leaned so close to each other that their heads almost touched, about to topple off the bronze pedestals. They had not been used for ashtrays yet today, though their nameplates were etched with the faint white tracks of bird droppings. She hoped the rain would wash them clean.

“Are you out here? Mister.?”

She had let Angie check them in this morning, so she did not even know Number Sixteen’s name. She glanced around the courtyard, saw no movement and was about to go back inside, when she noticed someone in the parking lot.

It was a man wearing a wet trenchcoat.

So Number Sixteen had lost patience and decided to split. He did not seem to be looking for his car, however, but walked rapidly between the rows on his way to — what? The apartments beyond, apparently. Yet there was no gate in this side of the wrought-iron fence.

As she watched, another man appeared as if from nowhere. He had on a yellow raincoat and a plastic-covered hat, the kind worn by policeman or security guards. As far as she knew the parking lot was unattended. She could not imagine where had he come from, unless there was an opening in the fence, after all, and the guard had come through from the other side. He stepped out to block the way. She tried to hear what they were saying but it was impossible from this distance. There was a brief confrontation, with both men gesturing broadly, until the one in the trenchcoat gave up and walked away.

Lisa Anne shook the water out of her shoes, put them on and turned back to the glass doors.

Marty was already into his speech. She had not worked here long enough to have it memorized, but she knew he was about to mention the cash they would receive after the screening and discussion. Some of them may have been lured here by the glamor, the chance to attend a sneak preview of next season’s programs, but without the promise of money there was no way to be sure anyone would show up.

The door opened a few inches and Angie stuck her head out.

“Will you get in here, girl?”

“Coming,” said Lisa Anne.

She looked around one more time.

Now she saw a puff of smoke a few yards down, at the entrance to Public Relations.

“Is anybody there?” she called.

An eyeball showed itself at the side of the building.

Maybe this is the real Number Sixteen, she thought. Trying to get in that last nicotine fix.

“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to come in now. ”

She waited to see where his cigarette butt would fall. The statues were waiting, too. As he came toward her his hands were empty. What did he do, she wondered, eat it?

She recognized him. He had been inside, drinking coffee with the others. He was a few years older than Lisa Anne, late twenties or early thirties, good-looking in a rugged, unkempt way, with his hair tied back in a ponytail and a drooping moustache, flannel shirt, tight jeans and steel-toed boots. A construction worker, she thought, a carpenter, some sort of manual labor. Why bother to test him? He probably watched football games and not much else, if he watched TV at all.

As he got closer she smelled something sweet and pungent. The unmistakable odor of marijuana lingered in his clothes. So that’s what he was up to, she thought. A little attitude adjustment. I could use some of that myself right about now.

She held out her hand to invite him in from the rain, and felt her hair collapse into wet strings over her ears. She pushed it back self-consciously.

“You don’t want to miss the screening,” she said, forcing a smile, “do you?”

“What’s it about?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Honest. They don’t tell me anything.”

The door swung open again and Angie rolled her eyes.

“Okay, okay,” said Lisa Anne.

“He can sign up for the two o’clock, if he wants.”

Number Sixteen shook his head. “No way. I gotta be at work.”

“It’s all right, Angie.”

“But he missed the audience prep. ”

Lisa Anne looked past her. Marty was about finished. The test subjects were already shifting impatiently, bored housewives and tourists and retirees with nothing better to do, recruited from sidewalks and shopping malls and the lines in front of movie theaters, all of them here to view the pilot for a new series that would either make it to the network schedule or be sent back for retooling, based on their responses. There was a full house for this session.

Number Sixteen had not heard the instructions, so she had no choice. She was supposed to send him home.

But if the research was to mean anything, wasn’t it important that every demographic be represented? The fate of the producers and writers who had labored for months or even years to get their shows this far hung in the balance, to be decided by a theoretical cross-section of the viewing public. Not everyone liked sitcoms about young urban professionals and their wacky misadventures at the office. They can’t, she thought. I don’t. But who ever asked me?

“Look,” said Number Sixteen, “I drove a long ways to get here. You gotta at least pay me.”

“He’s late,” said Angie. She ignored him, speaking as though he were not there. “He hasn’t even filled out his questionnaire.”

“Yes, he has,” said Lisa Anne and ushered him inside.

The subjects were on their feet now, shuffling into the screening room. Lisa Anne went to the check-in table.

“Did you get Number Sixteen’s?” she asked.

The monitors had the forms laid out according to rows and were about to insert the piles into manila envelopes before taking them down the hall.

Marty came up behind her. “Which row, Miss Rayme?” he said officiously.

“Four, I think.’’’

“You think?” Marty looked at the man in the plaid shirt and wrinkled his nose, as if someone in the room had just broken wind. “If his form’s not here — ”

“I know where it is,” Lisa Anne told him and slipped behind the table.

She flipped through the pile for row four, allowing several of the questionnaires to slide onto the floor. When she knelt to pick them up, she pulled a blank one from the carton.

“Here.” She stood, took a pencil and jotted 16 in the upper right-hand corner. “He forgot to put his number on it.”

“We’re running late, Lees. ” Marty whispered.

She slid the forms into an envelope. “Then I’d better get these to the War Room.”

On the way down the hall, she opened the envelope and withdrew the blank form, checking off random answers to the multiple-choice quiz on the first page. It was pointless, anyway, most of it a meaningless query into personal habits and lifestyle, only a smokescreen for the important questions about income and product preferences that came later. She dropped off her envelope along with the other monitors, and a humorless assistant in a short-sleeved white shirt and rimless glasses carried the envelopes from the counter to an inner room, where each form would be tallied and matched to the numbered seats in the viewing theater. On her way back, Marty intercepted her.

“Break time,” he said.

“No, thanks.” She drew him to one side, next to the drinking fountain. “I got one for you. S.H.A.M.”

“M.A.S.H,” he said immediately

“Okay, try this. Finders.”

He pondered for a second. “Friends?”

“You’re good,” she said.

“No, I’m not. You’re easy. Well, time to do my thing.”

At the other end of the hall, the reception room was empty and the doors to the viewing theater were already closed.

“Which thing is that?” she said playfully.

“That thing I do, before they fall asleep.”

“Ooh, can I watch?”

She propped her back against the wall and waited for him to move in, to pin her there until she could not get away unless she dropped to her knees and crawled between his legs.

“Not today, Lisa.”

“How come?”

“This one sucks. Big time.”

“What’s the title?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then how do you know it sucks?”

“Hey, it’s not my fault, okay?”

For some reason he had become evasive, defensive. His face was now a smooth mask, the skin pulled back tautly, the only prominent features his teeth and nervous, shining eyes. Like a shark’s face, she thought. A residue of deodorant soap rose to the surface of his skin and vaporized, expanding outward on waves of body heat. She drew a breath and knew that she needed to be somewhere else, away from him.

“Sorry,” she said.

He avoided her eyes and ducked into the men’s room.

What did I say? she wondered, and went on to the reception area.

A list of subjects for the next session was already laid out on the table, ninety minutes early. The other monitors were killing time in the chairs, chatting over coffee and snacks from the machines.

Lisa Anne barely knew them. This was only her second week and she was not yet a part of their circle. One had been an editorial assistant at the L. A. Weekly, two were junior college students, and the others had answered the same classified ad she had seen in the trades. She considered crashing the conversation. It would be a chance to rest her feet and dry out. The soggy new shoes still pinched her toes and the suit she’d had to buy for the job was damp and steamy and scratched her skin like a hair shirt. She felt ridiculous in this uniform, but it was necessary to show people like Marty that she could play by their rules, at least until she got what she needed. At home she would probably be working on yet another sculpture this morning, trying to get the face right, with a gob of clay in one hand and a joint in the other and the stereo cranked up to the max. But living that way hadn’t gotten her any closer to the truth. She couldn’t put it off any longer. There were some things she had to find out or she would go mad.

She smiled at the monitors.

Except for Angie they barely acknowledged her, continuing their conversation as though she were not there.

They know, she thought. They must.

How much longer till Marty saw through her game? She had him on her side, but the tease would play out soon enough unless she let it go further, and she couldn’t bear the thought of that. She only needed him long enough to find the answer, and then she would walk away.

She went to the glass doors.

The rain had stopped and soon the next group would begin gathering outside. The busts of the television stars in the courtyard were ready, Red Buttons and George Gobel and Steve Allen and Lucille Ball with her eyebrows arched in perpetual wonderment, waiting to meet their fans. It was all that was left for them now.

Angie came up next to her.

“Hey, girl.”

“Hey yourself.”

“The lumberjack. He a friend of yours?”

“Number Sixteen?”

“The one with the buns.”

“I never saw him before.”

“Oh.” Angie took a bite of an oatmeal cookie and brushed the crumbs daintily from her mouth. “Nice.”

“I suppose. If you like that sort of thing.”

“Here.” She offered Lisa Anne the napkin. “You look like you’re melting.”

She took it and wiped the back of her neck, then squeezed out the ends of her hair, as a burst of laughter came from the theater. That meant Marty had already gone in through the side entrance to warm them up.

“Excuse me,” she said. “It’s showtime.”

Angie followed her to the hall. “You never miss one, do you?”

“Not yet.”

“Aren’t they boring? I mean, it’s not like they’re hits or anything.”

“Most of them are pretty lame,” Lisa Anne admitted.

“So why watch?”

“I have to find out.”

“Don’t tell me. What Marty’s really like?”

“Please.”

“Then why?”

“I’ve got to know why some shows make it,” she said, “and some don’t.”

“Oh, you want to get into the biz?”

“No. But I used to know someone who was. See you.”

I shouldn’t have said that, she thought as she opened the unmarked door in the hall.

The observation booth was dark and narrow with a half-dozen padded chairs facing a two-way mirror. On the other side of the mirror, the test subjects sat in rows of theater seats under several 36-inch television sets suspended from the ceiling.

She took the second chair from the end.

In the viewing theater, Marty was explaining how to use the dials wired into the armrests. They were calibrated from zero to ten with a plastic knob in the center. During the screening the subjects were to rotate the knobs, indicating how much they liked what they saw. Their responses would be recorded and the results then analyzed to help the networks decide whether the show was ready for broadcast.

Lisa Anne watched Marty as he paced, doing his schtick. He had told her that he once worked at a comedy traffic school, and she could see why. He had them in the palm of his hand. Their eyes followed his every move, like hypnotized chickens waiting to be fed. His routine was corny but with just the right touch of hipness to make them feel like insiders. He concluded by reminding them of the fifty dollars cash they would receive after the screening and the discussion. Then, when the lights went down and the tape began to roll, Marty stepped to the back and slipped into the hall. As he entered the observation booth, the audience was applauding.

“Good group this time,” he said, dropping into the chair next to hers.

“You always know just what to say.”

“I do, don’t I?” he said, leaning forward to turn on a tiny 12-inch set below the mirror.

She saw their faces flicker in the blue glow of the cathode ray tubes while the opening titles came up.

The show was something calledDario, You So Crazy! She sighed and sat back, studying their expressions while keeping one eye on the TV screen. It wouldn’t be long before she felt his hand on her forearm as he moved in, telling her what he really thought of the audience, how stupid they were, every last one, down to the little old ladies and the kindly grandfathers and the working men and women who were no more or less ordinary than he was under his Perry Ellis suit and silk tie. Then his breath in her hair and his fingers scraping her pantyhose as if tapping out a message on her knee and perhaps today, this time, he would attempt to deliver that message, while she offered breathless quips to let him know how clever he was and how lucky she felt to be here. She shuddered and turned her cheek to him in the dark.

“Who’s that actor?” she said.

“Some Italian guy. I saw him in a movie. He’s not so bad, if he could learn to talk English.”

She recognized the co-star. It was Rowan Atkinson, the slight, bumbling everyman from that British TV series on PBS.

“Mr Bean!” she said.

“Roberto Benigni,” Marty corrected, reading from the credits.

“I mean the other one. This is going to be good. ”

“I thought you were on your break,” said Marty.

“This is more important.”

He stared at her transparent reflection in the two-way mirror.

“You were going to take the day off.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

The pilot was a comedy about an eccentric Italian film director who had come to America in search of fame and fortune. Mr Bean played his shy, inept manager. They shared an expensive rented villa in the Hollywood Hills. Just now they were desperate to locate an actress to pose as Dario’s wife, so that he could obtain a green card and find work before they both ran out of money.

She immediately grasped the premise and its potential.

It was inspired. Benigno’s abuse of the language would generate countless hilarious misunderstandings; coupled with his manager’s charming incompetence, the result might be a television classic, thanks in no small measure to the brilliant casting. How could it miss? All they needed was a good script. She realized that her mind had drifted long enough to miss the screenwriter’s name. The only credit left was the show’s creator/producer, one Barry E. Tormé. Probably the son of that old singer, she thought. What was his name? Mel. Apparently he had fathered a show-business dynasty. The other son, Tracy, was a successful TV writer; he had even created a science-fiction series at Fox that lasted for a couple of seasons. Why had she never heard of brother Barry? He was obviously a pro.

She sat forward, fascinated to see the first episode.

“Me, Dario!” Benigni crowed into a gold-trimmed telephone, the third time it had rung in less than a minute. It was going to be his signature bit.

“O, I Dream!” she said.

“Huh?”

“The line, Marty. Got you.”

The letters rearranged themselves automatically in her mind. It was child’s play. She had almost expected him to come up with it first. They had kept the game going since her first day at AmiDex, when she pointed out that his full name was an anagram for Marty licks on me. It got his attention.

“You can stop with the word shit,” he said.

He sounded irritated, which surprised her. “I thought you liked it.”

“What’s up with that, anyway?”

“It’s a reflex,” she said. “I can’t help it. My father taught me when I was little.”

“Well, it’s getting old.”

She turned to his profile in the semidarkness, his pale, cleanshaven face and short, neat hair as two-dimensional as a cartoon cutout from the back of a cereal box.

“You know, Marty, I was thinking. Could you show me the War Room sometime?” She moved her leg closer to his. “Just you and me, when everybody’s gone. So I could see how it works.”

“How what works?”

She let her hand brush his knee. “Everything. The really big secrets.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know.” Had she said too much? “But if I’m going to work here, I should know more about the company. What makes a hit, for example. Maybe you could tell me. You explain things so well.”

“Why did you come here?”

The question caught her offguard. “I needed a job.”

“Plenty of jobs out there,” he snapped. “What is it, you got a script to sell?”

The room was cold and her feet were numb. Now she wanted to be out of here. The other chairs were dim, bulky shapes, like half-reclining corpses, as if she and Marty were not alone in the room.

“Sorry,” she said.

“I told you to stay home today.”

No, he hadn’t. “You want me to take the day off?”

He did not answer.

“Do you think I need it? Or is there something special about today?”

The door in the back of the room opened. It connected to the hall that led to the other sections of the building and the War Room itself, where even now the audience response was being recorded and analyzed by a team of market researchers. A hulking figure stood there in silhouette. She could not see his features. He hesitated for a moment, then came all the way in, plunging the room into darkness again, and then there were only the test subjects and their flickering faces opposite her through the smoked glass. The man took a seat at the other end of the row.

“That you, Mickleson?”

At the sound of his voice Marty sat up straight.

“Yes, sir.”

“I thought so. Who’s she?”

“One of the girls — Annalise. She was just leaving.”

Then Marty leaned close to her and whispered:

“Will you get out?”

She was not supposed to be here. The shape at the end of the row must have been the big boss. Marty had known he was coming; that was why he wanted her gone. This was the first time anyone had joined them in the booth. It meant the show was important. The executives listened up when a hit came along.

“Excuse me,” she said, and left the observation booth.

She wanted very much to see the rest of the show. Now she would have to wait till it hit the airwaves. Was there a way for her to eavesdrop on the discussion later, after the screening?

In the hall, she listened for the audience reaction. Just now there must have been a lull in the action, with blank tape inserted to represent a commercial break, because there was dead silence from the theater.

She was all the way to the reception area before she realized what he had called her.

Annalise.

It was an anagram for Lisa Anne, the name she had put on her application — and, incredibly, it was the right one. Somehow he had hit it. Had he done so naturally, without thinking, as in their word games? Or did he know?

Busted, she thought.

She crossed to the glass doors, ready to make her break.

Then she thought, So he knows my first name. So what? It’s not like it would mean anything to him, even if he were to figure out the rest of it.

She decided that she had been paranoid to use a pseudonym in the first place. If she had told the truth, would anybody care? Technically AmiDex could disqualify her, but the family connection was so many years ago that the name had probably been forgotten by now. In fact she was sure it had. That was the point. That was why she was here.

Outside, the rain had let up. A few of the next hour’s subjects were already wandering this way across the courtyard. Only one, a woman with a shopping bag and a multi-colored scarf over her hair, bothered to raise her head to look at the statues.

It was disturbing to see the greats treated with such disrespect.

All day long volunteers gathered outside at the appointed hour, smoking and drinking sodas and eating food they had brought with them, and when they went in they left the remains scattered among the statues, as if the history of the medium and its stars meant nothing to them. Dinah Shore and Carol Burnett and Red Skelton with his clown nose, all nothing more than a part of the landscape now, like the lampposts, like the trash cans that no one used. The sun fell on them, and the winds and the rains and the graffiti and the discarded wads of chewing gum and the pissing of dogs on the place where their feet should have been, and there was nothing for any of them to do but suffer these things with quiet dignity, like the fallen dead in a veterans’ cemetery. One day the burdens of their immortality, the birdshit and the cigarette butts and the McDonald’s wrappers, might become too much for them to bear and the ground would shake as giants walked the earth again, but for now they could only wait, because that day was not yet here.

“How was it?” said Angie.

“The show? Oh, it was great. Really.”

“Then why aren’t you in there?”

“It’s too cold.” She hugged her sides. “When does the grounds crew get here?”

“Uh, you lost me.”

“Maintenance. The gardeners. How often do they come?”

“You’re putting me on, right?”

She felt her face flush. “Then I’ll do it.”

“Do —?”

“Clean up. It’s a disgrace. Don’t you think so?”

“Sure, Lisa. Anything you say. ”

She started outside, and got only a few paces when the sirens began. She counted four squad cars with the name of a private security company stenciled on the doors. They screeched to a halt in the parking lot and several officers jumped out. Did one of them really have his gun drawn?

“Oh, God,” said Angie.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s the complex. They don’t like people taking pictures.”

Now she saw that the man in the dark trenchcoat had returned. This time he had brought a van with a remote broadcasting dish on top. The guards held him against the side, under the call letters for a local TV station and the words EYEBALL NEWS. When a cameraman climbed down from the back to object they handcuffed him.

“Who doesn’t like it?”

“AmiDex,” Angie said solemnly. “They own it all.” She waved her hand to include the building, the courtyard, the parking lot and the fenced-in apartments. “Somebody from Hard Copy tried to shoot here last month. They confiscated the film. It’s off-limits.”

“But why?”

“All I know is, there must be some very important people in those condos.”

“In this neighborhood?”

She couldn’t imagine why any VIP’s would want to live here. The complex was a lower-middle-class housing development, walled in and protected from the deteriorating streets nearby. It had probably been on this corner since the fifties. She could understand AmiDex buying real estate in the San Fernando Valley instead of the overpriced Westside, but why the aging apartments? The only reason might be so that they could expand their testing facility one day. Meanwhile, why not tear them down? With its spiked iron fences the complex looked like a fortress sealed off against the outside world. There was even barbed wire on top of the walls.

Before she could ask any more questions, the doors to the theater opened. She glanced back and saw Marty leading the audience down the hall for the post-screening discussion.

She followed, eager to hear the verdict.

The boys in the white shirts were no longer at the counter. They were in the War Room, marking up long rolls of paper like doctors charting the vital signs in an intensive care ward. Lights blinked across a bank of electronic equipment, as many rackmounted modules as there were seats in the theater, with dials and connecting cables that fed into the central computer. She heard circuits humming and the ratcheting whir of a wide-mouthed machine as it disgorged graphs that resembled polygraph tests printed in blood-red ink.

She came to the next section of the hall, as the last head vanished through a doorway around the first turn.

The discussion room was small and bright with rows of desks and acoustic tiles in the ceiling. It reminded her of the classrooms at UCLA, where she had taken a course in Media Studies, before discovering that they didn’t have any answers, either. She merged with the group and slumped down in the back row, behind the tallest person she could find.

Marty remained on his feet, pacing.

“Now,” he said, “it’s your turn. Hollywood is listening! How many of you would rate — ” He consulted his clipboard. “- Dario, You So Crazy! as one of the best programs you’ve ever seen?”

She waited for the hands to go up. She could not see any from here. The tall man blocked her view and if she moved her head Marty might spot her.

“Okay. How many would say ‘very good’?”

There must not have been many because he went right on to the next question.

“ ‘Fair’?”

She closed her eyes and listened to the rustle of coat sleeves and wondered if she had heard the question correctly.

“And how many ‘poor’?”

That had to be everyone else. Even the tall man in front of her raised his arm. She recognized his plaid shirt. It was Number Sixteen.

Marty made a notation.

“Okay, great. What was your favorite scene?”

The silence was deafening.

“You won’t be graded on this! There’s no right or wrong answer. I remember once, when my junior-high English teacher…”

He launched into a story to loosen them up. It was about a divorced woman, an escaped sex maniac and a telephone call to the police. She recognized it as a very old dirty joke. Astonishingly he left off the punchline. The audience responded anyway. He had his timing down pat. Or was it that they laughed because they knew what was coming? Did that make it even funnier?

The less original the material, she thought, the more they like it. It makes them feel comfortable.

And if that’s true, so is the reverse.

She noticed that there was a two-way mirror in this room, too, along the far wall. Was anyone following the discussion from the other side? If so, there wasn’t much to hear. Nobody except Marty had anything to say. They were bored stiff, waiting for their money. It would take something more than the show they had just seen to hold them, maybeWrestling’s Biggest Bleeps, Bloopers and Bodyslams or America’s Zaniest Surveillance Tapes. Now she heard a door slam in the hall. The executives had probably given up and left the observation room.

“What is the matter with you people?”

The woman with the multi-colored scarf hunched around to look at her, as Marty tried to see who had spoken.

“In the back row. Number. ”

“You’re right,” she said too loudly. “It’s not poor, or fair, or excellent. It’s a great show! Better than anything I’ve seen in years. Since — ”

“Yes?” Marty changed his position, zeroing in on her voice. “Would you mind speaking up? This is your chance to be heard..”

“Since The Fuzzy Family. Or The Funny boner.” She couldn’t help mentioning the titles. Her mouth was open now and the truth was coming out and there was no way to stop it.

Marty said, “What network were they on?”

“CBS. They were canceled in the first season.”

“But you remember them?”

“They were brilliant.”

“Can you tell us why?”

“Because of my father. He created them both.”

Marty came to the end of the aisle and finally saw her. His face fell. In the silence she heard other voices, arguing in the hall. She hoped it was not the people who had madeDario, You So Crazy! If so, they had to be hurting right now. She felt for them, bitterness and despair and rage welling up in her own throat.

“May I see you outside?” he said.

“No, you may not.”

The hell with Marty, AmiDex and her job here. There was no secret as to why some shows made it and other, better ones did not. Darwin was wrong. He hadn’t figured on the networks. They had continued to lower their sights until the audience devolved right along with them, so that any ray of hope was snuffed out, overshadowed by the crap around it. And market research and the ratings system held onto their positions by telling them what they wanted to hear, that the low-rent talent they had under contract was good enough, by testing the wrong people for the wrong reasons, people who were too numb to care about a pearl among the pebbles. It was a perfect, closed loop.

“Now, Miss Rayme.”

“That isn’t my name.” Didn’t he get it yet? “My father was Robert Mayer. The man who wrote and producedWagons, Ho!”

It was TV’s first western comedy and it made television history. After that he struggled to come up with another hit, but every new show was either canceled or rejected outright. His name meant nothing to the bean-counters. All they could see was the bottom line. As far as they were concerned he owed them a fortune for the failures they had bankrolled. If he had been an entertainer who ran up a debt in Vegas, he would have had to stay there, working it off at the rate of two shows a night, forever. The only thing that gave her satisfaction was the knowledge that they would never collect. One day when she was ten he had a massive heart attack on the set and was whisked away in a blue ambulance and he never came home again.

“Folks, thanks for your time,” Marty said. “If you’ll return to the lobby. ”

She had studied his notes and scripts, trying to understand why he failed. She loved them all. They were genuinely funny, the very essence of her father, with his quirky sense of humor and extravagent sight gags — as original and inventive as Dario, You So Crazy! Which was a failure, too. Of course. She lowered her head onto the desktop and began to weep.

“Hold up,” said Number Sixteen.

“Your pay’s ready. Fifty dollars cash.” Marty held the door wide. “There’s another group coming in. ”

The lumberjack refused to stand. “Let her talk. I remember Wagons, Ho! It was all right.”

He turned around in his seat and gave her a wink as she raised her head.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “It doesn’t matter, now.”

She got to her feet with the others and pushed her way out.

Farther down the hall, another door clicked shut. It was marked Green Room. She guessed that the executives from the other side of the mirror had decided to finish their argument in private.

Marty grabbed her elbow.

“I told you to stay home.”

“You’re hurting me,” she said.

“But you just wouldn’t take the hint, would you?”

“About what?”

“You can pick up your check in Payroll.”

“Get your hands off me.”

Number Sixteen came up next to her. “You got a problem here?”

“Not anymore,” she said.

“Your pay’s up front, cowboy,” Marty told him.

“You sure you’re okay?” asked Number Sixteen.

“I am now.”

Marty shook his head sadly.

“I’ll tell them to make it for the full two weeks. I liked you, you know? I really did.”

Then he turned and walked the audience back to the lobby.

Farther down the hall, she saw Human Resources, where she had gone the first day for her interview, and beyond that Public Relations and Payroll. She didn’t care about her check but there was a security door at the end. It would let her out directly into the courtyard.

Number Sixteen followed her.

“I was thinking. If you want some lunch, I’ve got my car.”

“So do I,” she said, walking faster.

Then she thought, Why not? Me, with a lumberjack. I’ll be watching Martha Stewart while he hammers his wood and lays his pipe or whatever he does all day, and he’ll come home and watch hockey games and I’ll stay loaded and sit up every night to see Wagons, Ho! on the Nostalgia Channel and we’ll go on that way, like a sitcom. He’ll take care of me. And in time I’ll forget everything. All I have to do is say yes.

He was about to turn back.

“Okay,” she said.

“What?”

“This way. There’s an exit to the parking lot, down here.”

Before they could get to it the steel door at the end swung open.

The rain had stopped and a burst of clear light from outside reflected off the polished floor, distorting the silhouette of the figure standing there. A tall woman in a designer suit entered from the grounds. Behind her, the last of the private security cars drove off. The Eyeball News truck was gone.

“All set,” the woman said into a flip-phone, and went briskly to the door marked Green Room.

Voices came from within, rising to an emotional pitch. Then the voices receded as the door clicked shut.

There was something in the tone of the argument that got to her. She couldn’t make out the words but one of the voices was close to pleading. It was painful to hear. She thought of her father and the desperate meetings he must have had, years ago. When the door whispered open again, two men in grey suits stepped out into the hall, holding a third man between them.

It had to be the producer of the pilot.

She wanted to go to him and take his hands and look into his eyes and tell him that they were wrong. He was too talented to listen to them. What did they know? There were other networks, cable, foreign markets, features, if only he could break free of them and move on. He had to. She would be waiting and so would millions of others, an invisible audience whose opinions were never counted, as if they did not exist, but who were out there, she was sure. The ones who remembered Wagons, Ho! and The Funnyboner and The Fuzzy Family and would faithfully tune in other programs with the same quirky sensibility, if they had the choice.

He looked exhausted. The suits had him in their grip, supporting his weight between them, as if carrying a drunk to a waiting cab. What was his name? Terry Something. Or Barry. That was it. She saw him go limp. He had the body of a middle-aged man.

“Please,” he said in a cracking voice, “this is the one, you’ll see. Please. ”

“Mr Tormé?” she called out, remembering his name.

The letters shuffled like a deck of cards in her mind and settled into a new pattern. It was a reflex she could not control, ever since she had learned the game from her father so many years ago, before the day they took him away and told his family that he was dead.

Barry E. Tormé, she thought.

You could spell a lot of words with those letters.

Even.

Robert Mayer.

He turned slightly, and she saw the familiar nose and chin she had tried so many times to reproduce, working from fading photographs and the shadow pictures in her mind. The two men continued to drag him forward. His shoes left long black skidmarks on the polished floor. Then they lifted him off his feet and he was lost in the light.

Outside the door, a blue van was waiting.

They dumped him in and locked the tailgate. Beyond the parking lot lay the walled compound, where the razor wire gleamed like hungry teeth atop the barricades and forgotten people lived out lives as bleak as unsold pilots and there was no way out for any of them until the cameras rolled again on another hit.

Milton Berle and Johnny Carson and Jackie Gleason watched mutely, stars who had become famous by speaking the words put into their mouths by others, by men who had no monuments to honor them, not here or anywhere else.

Now she knew now the real reason she had come to this place. There was something missing. When she finished her sculpture there would be a new face for the courtyard, one who deserved a statue of his own. And this time she would get it right.

The steel door began to close.

Sorry, Daddy! she thought as the rain started again outside. I’m sorry, sorry.

“Wait.” Number Sixteen put on his Ray-Bans. “I gotta get my pay first. You want to come with me?”

Yes, we could do that. Simple. All we do is turn and run the other way, like Lucy and Desi, like Dario and Mr Bean, bumbling along to a private hell of our own. What’s the difference?

“No,” she said.

“I thought — ”

“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just. can’t.”

She ran instead toward the light at the end, hoping to see the face in the van clearly one last time as it drove away, before the men in the suits could stop her.