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.
Kelly Link
The Specialist’s Hat
Kelly Link lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. She has worked in bookstores, libraries and as a babysitter. She once won a trip around the world by answering “because you can’t go through it” to the question, “Why do you want to go around the world”.
Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Century and, more recently, in Fence and online on Event Horizon. She won the James Tiptree Award in 1997 for her story “Travels with the Snow Queen”, which also happens to be the title of her collection from Edgewood Press.
“This story comes from three places,” explains the author. “A friend of my father’s was describing a house that he had lived in as a child, where he rode his bicycle upstairs, in the enormous attic. In Raleigh, North Carolina, at an outdoor folklore exhibit, I read a piece of oral history about snake whisky. Finally, in the Peabody Museum in Boston, I found the chant for the Specialist’s Hat, although the hat, of course, was missing.”
When you’re dead,” Samantha says, “you don’t have to brush your teeth.”
“When you’re Dead,” Claire says, “you live in a box, and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.”
Claire and Samantha are identical twins. Their combined age is twenty years, four months, and six days. Claire is better at being Dead than Samantha.