Why?
Out of Control isnt just a series. We think of it as an entirely new paradigm. A new way to do television. Your storyAlison Shires storyis precisely what we intend to get out there. Our producers are people who want to give something back to the audience. Theyve done well, theyre established, theyve proven themselves; now they want to give something backto restore a degree of honesty, a new opportunity for perspective. The black ovals drew slightly closer to the scratched plastic. Our producers are the producers of Cops in Trouble and A Calm and Deliberate Fashion.
A what?
Factual accounts of premeditated violence in the global fashion industry.
Counter-investigative? Yamazakis pen hovered over the notebook.
It was a show aboutshows like Slitscan, Laney explained. Supposed abuses. There were no stools at the bar, which might have been ten feet long. You stood. Aside from the bartender, in some kind of Kabuki drag, they had the place to themselves. By virtue of filling it, basically. It was probably the smallest freestanding commercial structure Laney had ever seen, and it seemed to have been there forever, like a survival from ancient Edo, a city of shadows and minute dark lanes. The walls were shingled with faded postcards, gone a uniform sepia under a glaze of accumulated nicotine and cooking smoke.
Ah, Yamazaki said at last, a meta-tabloid.
The bartender was broiling two sardines on a dolls hotplate. He flipped them with a pair of steel chopsticks, transferred them to a tiny plate, garnished them with some kind of colorless, translucent pickle, and presented them to Laney.
Thanks, Laney said. The bartender ducked his shaven eyebrows.
In spite of the modest decor, there were dozens of bottles of expensive-looking whiskey arranged behind the bar, each one with a hand-written brown paper sticker: the owners name in Japanese. Yamazaki had explained that you bought one and they kept it there for you. Blackwell was on his second tumbler of the local vodka-analog, on the rocks, Yamazaki was sticking to Coke Lite. Laney had an untouched shot of surrealistically expensive Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey in front of him, and wondered vaguely what it would do to his jet lag if he were actually to drink it.
So, Blackwell said, draining the tumbler, ice clinking against his prosthetic, they get you out so they can have a go at these other bastards.
That was it, basically, Laney said, They had their own legal team waiting, to do that, and another team to work on the nondisclosure agreement Id signed with Slitscan.
And the second team had the bigger job, Blackwell said, shoving his empty glass toward the bartender, who swept it smoothly out of sight, producing a fresh replacement just as smoothly, as if from nowhere.
Thats true, Laney said. Hed had no idea, really, of what hed be getting into when hed found himself agreeing to the general outlines of Rice Daniels offer. But there was something in him that didnt want to see Slitscan walk away from the sound of that one single shot from Alison Shires kitchen. (Produced, the cops had pointed out, by a Russian-made device that was hardly more than a cartridge, a tube to contain it, and the simplest possible firing mechanism; these were designed with suicide almost exclusively in mind; there was no way to aim them at anything more than two inches away. Laney had heard of them, but had never seen one before; for some reason, they were called Wednesday Night Specials.)
And Slitscan would walk away, he knew; theyd drop the sequence on Alisons actor, if they felt they had to, and the whole thing would settle to the sea floor, silting over almost instantly with the worlds steady accretion of data.
And Alison Shires life, as hed known it in all that terrible, banal intimacy, would lie there forever, forgotten and finally unknowable.
But if he went with Out of Control, her life might retrospectively become something else, and he wasnt sure, exactly, sitting there on the hard little chair in Visitors, what that might be.
He thought of coral, of the reefs that grew around sunken aircraft carriers; perhaps shed become something like that, the buried mystery beneath some exfoliating superstructure of supposition, or even of myth.
It seemed to him, in Visitors, that that might be a slightly less dead way of being dead. And he wished her that.
Get me out of here, he said to Daniels, who smiled beneath his surgical clamp, whipping the card triumphantly away from the plastic.
Steady, said Blackwell, laying his huge hand, with its silvery-pink fretwork of scars, over Laneys wrist, You havent even had your drink yet.
Laney had met Rydell when the Out of Control team installed him in a suite at the Chateau, that ancient simulacrum of a still more ancient original, its quaint concrete eccentricities pinched between the twin brutalities of a particularly nasty pair of office buildings dating from the final year of the previous century. These reflected all the Millennial anxiety of the year of their creation, while refracting it through some other, more mysterious, weirdly muted hysteria that seemed somehow more personal and even less attractive.
Laneys suite, much larger than his apartment in Santa Monica, was like an elongated 1920s apartment following the long, shallow concrete balcony that faced Sunset, this in turn overlooking a deeper balcony on the floor below and the tiny circular lawn that was all that remained of the original gardens.
Laney thought it was a strange choice, considering his situation. He would have imagined theyd choose something more corporate, more fortified, more heavily wired, but Rice Daniels had explained that the Chateau had advantages all its own. It was a good choice in terms of image, because it humanized Laney; it looked like a habitation, basically, something with walls and doors and windows, in which a guest could be imagined to be living something akin to a lifenot at all the case with the geometric solids that were serious business hotels. It also had deeply rooted associations with the Hollywood star system, and with human tragedy as well. Stars had lived here, in the heyday of old Hollywood, and, later, certain stars had died here. Out of Control planned to frame the death of Alison Shires as a tragedy in a venerable Hollywood tradition, but one that had been brought on by Slitscan, a very contemporary entity. Besides, Daniels explained, the Chateau was far more secure than it might at first look. And at this point Laney had been introduced to Berry Rydell, the night security man.
Daniels and Rydell, it seemed to Laney, had known one another prior to Rydell working at the Chateau, though how, exactly, remained unclear. Rydell seemed oddly at home with the workings of the infotainment industry, and at one point, when theyd found themselves alone together, hed asked Laney who was representing him.
How do you mean? Laney had said.
Youve got an agent, dont you?
Laney said he didnt.
You better get one, Rydell had said. Not that itll necessarily come out the way youd wanted, but, hey, its show business, right?
It was indeed show business, to an extent that very quickly made Laney wonder if hed made the right decision. There had been sixteen people in his suite, for a four-hour meeting, and hed only been out of the lock-up for six hours. When theyd finally gone, Laney had staggered the length of the place, mistakenly trying several closet doors in his search for the bedroom. Finding it, hed crawled onto the bed and fallen asleep in the clothes theyd sent Rydell to the Beverly Center to buy for him.
Which he thought he might well do right here, now, in this Golden Street bar, thereby answering the question of what the bourbon was doing to his jet lag. But now, finishing the remainder of the shot, he felt one of those tidal reversals begin, perhaps less to do with the drink than with some in-built chemistry of fatigue and displacement.