Текст книги "The Bazaar of Bad Dreams"
Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King
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Текущая страница: 27 (всего у книги 33 страниц)
I saw lots of horror films when I was a kid (you probably guessed that). I was an easy target, and most of them scared me to death. It was dark, the images were so much bigger than you were, and the sound was so loud that the scares continued even when you shut your eyes. On TV, the scare quotient tended to be lower. There were commercials to break the rhythm of the thing, and the worst parts were sometimes snipped out to avoid giving complexes to any little shavers who might be watching (alas, already too late for me; I’d seen the dead woman rising out of the tub in Diabolique). As a last resort, you could always go into the kitchen and grab a Hires out of the fridge, lingering until the scary music was replaced by some local huckster screaming, ‘Cars, cars, cars! No credit check! We’ll sell to ANYONE!’
One film I saw on TV did the job¸ however. At least the first hour or so of its seventy-seven-minute run did; the denouement wrecked the whole thing, and to this day I wish somebody would remake it and carry its hair-raising premise right through to the end. That film has perhaps the best horror-movie title of all time: I Bury the Living.
I was thinking of that movie when I wrote this story.
Obits
Keep it clear, and keep it in a straight line.
That was the gospel according to Vern Higgins, who headed up the journalism department at the University of Rhode Island, where I got my degree. A lot of what I heard at school went in one ear and out the other, but not that, because Professor Higgins hammered on it. He said that people need clarity and concision in order to start the process of understanding.
Your real job as journalists, he told his classes, is to give people the facts that allow them to make decisions and go forward. So don’t be fancy. Don’t go all twee and hifalutin. Start at the start, lay the middle out neatly, so the facts of each event lead logically to the next, and end at the end. Which, in reporting, he emphasized, is always the end for now. And don’t you ever sink to that lazy crap about how some people believe or the general consensus of opinion is. A source for each fact, that’s the rule. Then write it all in plain English, unadorned and unvarnished. Flights of rhetoric belong on the op-ed page.
I doubt if anyone will believe what follows, and my career at Neon Circus had very little to do with good writing, but I intend to do my best here: the facts of each event leading to the next. Beginning, middle, and end.
The end for now, at least.
Good reporting always begins with the five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why if you can find out. In my case, the why’s a tough one.
The who is easy enough, though; your less-than-fearless narrator is Michael Anderson. I was twenty-seven at the time these things happened. I graduated from URI with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. For two years after college I lived with my parents in Brooklyn and worked for one of those Daily Shopper freebies, rewriting newswire items to break up the ads and coupons. I kept my résumé (such as it was) in constant rotation, but none of the papers in New York, Connecticut, or New Jersey wanted me. This didn’t completely surprise my parents or me, not because my grades were lousy (they weren’t), and not because my clip folder – mostly stories from the URI student newspaper, The Good 5 Cent Cigar – were badly written (a couple of them won awards), but because newspapers weren’t hiring. Quite the opposite.
(If Professor Higgins saw all these parentheses, he’d kill me.)
My parents began urging me – gently, gently – to start looking for some other kind of job. ‘In a related field,’ my father said in his most diplomatic voice. ‘Maybe advertising.’
‘Advertising isn’t news,’ I said. ‘Advertising is anti-news.’ But I caught his drift: he had visions of me still grabbing midnight snacks out of their fridge when I was forty. Slacker Deluxe.
Reluctantly, I began making a list of possible advertising firms that might like to hire a young copywriter with good chops but no experience. Then, on the night before I planned to begin sending out copies of my résumé to the firms on that list, I had a goofy idea. Sometimes – often – I lie awake nights wondering how different my life might have been if that idea had never crossed my mind.
Neon Circus was one of my favorite websites in those days. If you’re a connoisseur of snark and schadenfreude, you know it: TMZ with better writers. They mostly cover the local ‘celeb scene,’ with occasional prospecting trips into the stinkier crevasses of New York and New Jersey politics. If I had to sum up its take on the world, I’d show you a photo we ran about six months into my employment there. It showed Rod Peterson (always referred to in the Circus as ‘the Barry Manilow of his generation’) outside Pacha. His date is bent over, puking in the gutter. He’s got a happy-ass grin on his face and his hand up the back of her dress. Caption: ROD PETERSON, THE BARRY MANILOW OF HIS GENERATION, EXPLORES NEW YORK’S LOWER EAST SIDE.
Circus is essentially a webazine, with lots of click-friendly departments: CELEB WALK OF SHAME, VILE CONSUMPTION, I WISH I HADN’T SEEN THAT, WORST TV OF THE WEEK, WHO WRITES THIS CRAP. There are more, but you get the idea. That night, with a stack of résumés ready to send out to firms I didn’t really want to work for, I went to Neon Circus for a little revivifying junk food, and on the home page discovered that a hot young actor named Jack Briggs had OD’d. There was a photo of him staggering out of a downtown hotspot the week before, typical bad taste for Neon Circus, but the news item accompanying it was surprisingly straight, and not Circus-y at all. That was when inspiration struck. I did some research on the Internet, just screwing around, then wrote a quick and nasty obituary.
Jack Briggs, noted for his horrific performance in last year’s Holy Rollers as a talking bookshelf in love with Jennifer Lawrence, was found dead in his hotel room surrounded by some of his favorite powdered treats. He joins the 27 Club, which also contains such noted substance abusers as Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse. Briggs shambled onto the acting scene in 2005, when …
Well, you get it. Juvenile, disrespectful, downright nasty. If I’d been serious that night, I probably would have dragged the finished obit to the trash, because it seemed to go beyond even Neon Circus’s usual snark and into outright cruelty. But because I was just messing (it has since occurred to me to wonder how many careers have started while just messing), I sent it to them.
Two days later – the Internet speeds everything up – I got an email from someone named Jeroma Whitfield saying they not only wanted to run it, they wanted to discuss the possibility that I might perhaps write more in the same nasty-ass vein. Could I come into the city and discuss it at lunch?
My tie and sportcoat turned out to be a case of serious overdressing. The Circus offices on Third Avenue were filled with men and women who looked a lot more like boys and girls, all running around in rock-band tees. A couple of the women wore shorts, and I saw a guy in carpenter overalls with a Sharpie poked through his Mohawk. He was the head of the sports department, it turned out, responsible for one memorable story titled JINTS TAKE ANOTHER SHIT IN THE RED ZONE. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. This was (and is) journalism in the Age of the Internet, and for every person in the offices that day, there were another five or six stringers working from home. For starvation wages, I hardly need add.
I have heard that once upon a gilded time, in New York’s misty and mythic past, there were publishers’ lunches at places like the Four Seasons, le Cirque, and the Russian Tea Room. Perhaps, but my lunch that day was in the cluttered office of Jeroma Whitfield. It consisted of deli sandwiches and Dr Brown’s Cream Soda. Jeroma was ancient by Circus standards (early forties), and I disliked her pushy abrasiveness from the start, but she wanted to hire me to write a weekly obituary column, and that made her a goddess. She even had a title for the new feature: Speaking Ill of the Dead.
Could I do it? I could.
Would I do it for shit money? I would. At least to start with.
After the column became the most-visited page on the Neon Circus site and my name had become associated with it, I dickered for more dough, partly because I wanted to move into my own apartment in the city and partly because I was tired of getting peon’s wages for singlehandedly writing the page that was bringing in the most ad revenue.
That first dickering session was a modest success, probably because my demands were couched as tentative requests, and the requests were almost laughably humble. Four months later, when rumors began to circulate of a big corporation buying us for actual strutting money, I visited Jeroma’s office and asked for a larger raise, this time with rather less humility.
‘Sorry, Mike,’ she said. ‘In the memorable words of Hall and Oates, I can’t go for that, no can do. Have a Yook.’
Holding pride of place on Jeroma’s cluttered desk was a large glass bowl filled with menthol-flavored eucalyptus drops. The wrappers were covered with gung-ho sayings. Let’s hear your battle cry, read one. Another advised (it gives the grammarian in me chills to report this) Turn can do into can did.
‘No thanks. Give me a chance to lay this out for you before you say no.’
I marshaled my arguments; you might say I attempted to turn can do into can did. The bottom line was my belief that I was owed a wage more commensurate with the revenue Speaking Ill of the Dead was generating. Especially if Neon Circus was going to be bought out by a major corporate playa.
When I finally shut up, she unwrapped a Yook, popped it between her plum-colored lips, and said, ‘Okay! Great! If you’ve got that off your chest, you might want to get to work on Bump DeVoe. He’s a tasty one.’
He was indeed a tasty one. Bump, lead singer of the Raccoons, had been shot dead by his girlfriend while trying to sneak in through the bedroom window of her house in the Hamptons, probably as a joke. She had mistaken him for a burglar. What made the story such a deliciously fat pitch was the gun she used: a birthday present from the Bumpster himself, now the newest member of the 27 Club and perhaps comparing guitar chops with Brian Jones.
‘So you’re not even going to respond,’ I said. ‘That’s how little respect you have for me.’
She leaned forward, smiling just enough to show the tips of her little white teeth. I could smell menthol. Or eucalyptus. Or both. ‘Let me be frank, okay? For a guy who’s still living with his parents in Brooklyn, you have an extremely inflated idea of your importance in the scheme of things. You think nobody else can piss on the graves of dimwit assholes who party themselves to death? Think again. I’ve got half a dozen stringers who can do it, and probably turn in copy funnier than yours.’
‘So why don’t I walk, and you can find out if that’s true?’ I was pretty mad.
Jeroma grinned and clacked her eucalyptus drop against her teeth. ‘Be my guest. But if you go, Speaking Ill of the Dead doesn’t go with you. It’s my title, and it stays right here at Circus. Of course you do have some cred now, and I won’t deny it. So here’s your choice, kiddo. You can go back to your computer and get humping on Bump, or you can take a meeting at the New York Post. They’ll probably hire you. You’ll end up writing shit squibs on Page Six with no byline. If that floats your boat, go team.’
‘I’ll write the obit. But we’re going to revisit this, Jerri.’
‘Not on my watch, we’re not. And don’t call me Jerri. You know better than that.’
I got up to go. My face was burning. I probably looked like a stop sign.
‘And have a Yook,’ she said. ‘Hell, take two. They’re very consoling.’
I cast a disdainful look at the bowl and left, restraining (barely) a childish urge to slam the door.
If you’re picturing a bustling newsroom like the one you see behind Wolf Blitzer on CNN, or in that old movie about Woodward and Bernstein nailing Nixon, reconsider. As I said, most of the Circus writers do their work from home. Our little news-nest (if you want to dignify what Circus does by calling it news) is roughly the size of a double-wide trailer. Twenty school desks are crammed in there, facing a row of muted TVs on one wall. The desks are equipped with battered laptops, each one bearing a hilarious sticker reading PLEASE RESPECT THESE MACHINES.
The place was almost empty that morning. I sat in the back row by the wall, in front of a poster showing a Thanksgiving dinner in a toilet bowl. Beneath this charming image was the motto PLEASE SHIT WHERE YOU EAT. I turned on the laptop, took my printouts concerning Bump DeVoe’s short and undistinguished career from my briefcase, and shuffled through them while the cruncher booted. I opened Word, typed BUMP DeVOE OBIT in the proper box, then just sat there, staring at the blank document. I was paid to yuk it up in the face of death for twentysomethings who feel that death is always for the other guy, but it’s hard to be funny when you’re pissed off.
‘Having trouble getting started?’
It was Katie Curran, a tall, svelte blond for whom I felt a strong lust that was almost certainly unrequited. She was always kind to me, and unfailingly sweet. She laughed at my jokes. Such characteristics rarely signal lust. Was I surprised? Not at all. She was hot; I am not. I am, if I may be frank, exactly that geek all the teenpix make fun of. Until my third month working at Circus, I even had the perfect geek accessory: spectacles mended with tape.
‘A little,’ I said. I could smell her perfume. Some kind of fruit. Fresh pears, maybe. Fresh somethings, anyway.
She sat down at the next desk, a long-legged vision in faded jeans. ‘When that happens to me, I type The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog three times, real fast. It opens the creative floodgates.’ She spread her arms, showing me how floodgates open, and incidentally giving me a breathtaking view of breasts snugly encased in a black tank top.
‘I don’t think that will work in this case,’ I said.
Katie wrote her own feature, not as popular as Speaking Ill of the Dead, but still widely read; she had half a million followers on Twitter. (Modesty forbids me to say how many I had in those days, but go ahead and think seven figures; you won’t be wrong.) Hers was called Getting Sloshed with Katie. The idea was to go out drinking with celebs we hadn’t dissed yet – and even some we had went for the deal, go figure – and interview them as they got progressively more shitfaced. It was amazing what came out, and Katie got it all on her cute little pink iPhone.
She was supposed to get drunk right along with them, but she had a way of leaving a single drink but a quarter finished as they moved from one watering hole to another. The celebs rarely noticed. What they noticed was the perfect oval of her face, her masses of wheat-blond hair, and her wide gray eyes, which always projected the same message: Oh gosh, you’re so interesting. They lined up for the chop even though Katie had effectively ended half a dozen careers since joining the Circus staff eighteen months or so before I came on board. Her most famous interview was with the family comedian who opined of Michael Jackson, ‘That candy-ass wanna-be-whitebread is better off dead.’
‘I guess she said no raise, huh?’ Katie nodded toward Jeroma’s office.
‘How did you know I was going to ask for a raise? Did I tell you?’ Mesmerized by those misty orbs, I might have told her anything.
‘No, but everyone knew you were going to, and everyone knew she was going to say no. If she said yes, everyone would ask. By saying no to the most deserving, she shuts the rest of us down cold.’
The most deserving. That gave me a little shiver of delight. Especially coming from Katie.
‘So are you going to stick?’
‘For now,’ I said. Talking out of the side of my mouth. It always works for Bogie in the old movies, but Katie got up, brushing nonexistent lint from the entrancingly flat midriff of her top.
‘I’ve got a piece to write. Vic Albini. God, he could put it away.’
‘The gay action hero,’ I said.
‘News flash: not gay.’ She gave me a mysterious smile and drifted off, leaving me to wonder. But not really wanting to know.
I sat in front of the blank Bump DeVoe document for ten minutes, made a false start, deleted it, and sat for another ten minutes. I could feel Jeroma’s eyes on me and knew she was smirking, if only on the inside. I couldn’t work with that stare on me, even if I was just imagining it. I decided to go home and write the DeVoe piece there. Maybe something would occur on the subway, which was always a good thinking place for me. I started to close the laptop, and that was when inspiration struck again, just as it had on the night when I saw the item about Jack Briggs departing for that great A-list buffet in the sky. I decided I was going to quit, and damn the consequences, but I would not go quietly.
I dumped the blank DeVoe document and created a new one, which I titled JEROMA WHITFIELD OBIT. I wrote with absolutely no pause. Two hundred poisonous words just poured out of my fingers and onto the screen.
Jeroma Whitfield, known as Jerri to her close friends (according to reports, she had a couple in preschool), died today at—
I checked the clock.
—10:40 A.M. According to co-workers on the scene, she choked on her own bile. Although she graduated cum laude from Vassar, Jerri spent the last three years of her life whoring on Third Avenue, where she oversaw a crew of roughly two dozen galley slaves, all more talented than herself. She is survived by her husband, known to the staff of Neon Circus as Emasculated Toad, and one child, an ugly little fucker affectionately referred to by the staff as Pol Pot. Co-workers all agree that although she lacked even a vestige of talent, Jerri possessed a domineering and merciless personality that more than made up for it. Her braying voice was known to cause brain hemorrhages, and her lack of a sense of humor was legend. In lieu of flowers, Toad and Pot request that those who knew her express their joy at her demise by sending eucalyptus drops to the starving children of Africa. A memorial service will be held at the Neon Circus offices, where joyful survivors can exchange precious memories and join in singing ‘Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead.’
My idea as I started this diatribe was to print a dozen copies, tape them up everywhere – including the bathrooms and both elevators – then say see-ya-wouldn’t-want-to-be-ya to both the Neon Circus offices and the Cough Drop Queen for good. I might even have done it if I hadn’t reread what I had written and discovered it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t even close to funny. It was the work of a child having a tantrum. Which led me to wonder if all my obits had been equally unfunny and stupid.
For the first time (you might not believe it, but I swear it’s true) it came to me that Bump DeVoe had been a real person, and somewhere people might be crying because he was gone. The same was probably true of Jack Briggs … and Frank Ford (who I had described as ‘noted Tonight Show crotch-grabber’) … and Trevor Wills, a reality-show star who committed suicide after being photographed in bed with his brother-in-law. Those pix the Circus had cheerfully put online, just adding a black strip to cover the brother-in-law’s naughty bits (Wills’s had been safely out of sight, and you can probably guess where).
It also came to me that I was spending the most creatively fecund years of my life doing bad work. Shameful, in fact, a word that would never have occurred to Jeroma Whitfield in any context.
Instead of printing the document, I closed it, dragged it to the trash, and shut down the laptop. I thought about marching back into Jeroma’s office and telling her I was done writing stuff that was the equivalent of a toddler throwing poo on the wall, but a cautious part of my mind – the traffic cop most of us have up there – told me to wait. To think it over and be absolutely sure.
Twenty-four hours, the traffic cop decreed. Hit a movie this afternoon and sleep on it tonight. If you still feel the same way in the morning, go with God, my son.
‘Off so soon?’ Katie asked from her own laptop, and for the first time since my first day here, I wasn’t stopped cold in my tracks by those wide gray eyes. I just tipped her a wave and left.
I was attending a matinee of Dr Strangelove at Film Forum when my mobile started vibrating. Because the living room–size theater was empty except for me, two snoozing drunks, and a couple of teenagers making vacuum cleaner noises in the back row, I risked looking at the screen and saw a text from Katie Curran: Stop what you’re doing and call me RIGHT NOW!
I went out to the lobby without too much regret (although I always like to see Slim Pickens ride the bomb down) and called her back. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say the first two words out of her mouth changed my life.
‘Jeroma’s dead.’
‘What?’ I nearly screamed.
The popcorn girl glanced up at me over the top of her magazine, startled.
‘Dead, Mike! Dead! She choked to death on one of those damn eucalyptus drops she’s always sucking on.’
Died at 10:40 A.M., I’d written. Choked to death on her own bile.
Only a coincidence, of course, but offhand I couldn’t think of a more malefic one. God had turned Jeroma Whitfield from can do into can did.
‘Mike? Are you there?’
‘Yes.’
‘She had no second-in-command. You know that, right?’
‘Uh-huh.’ Now I was thinking of her telling me to have a Yook, and clicking her own against her teeth.
‘So I’m taking it on myself to call a staff meeting tomorrow at ten. Somebody’s got to do it. Will you come?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe not.’ I was walking toward the door to Houston Street. Before I got there, I remembered that I’d left my briefcase by my movie seat and turned back to get it, yanking at my hair with my free hand. The popcorn girl was looking at me with outright suspicion now. ‘I’d pretty much made up my mind to quit this morning.’
‘I knew. I could see it on your face when you left.’
The thought of Katie looking at my face might have tied up my tongue in other circumstances, but not then. ‘Did it happen at the office?’
‘Yes. It was pushing on for two o’clock. There were four of us in the bullpen, not really working, just hanging out and swapping stories and rumors. You know how it goes.’
I did. Those gossipy bull sessions were one of the reasons I went to the office instead of working at home in Brooklyn. Plus getting a chance to feast my eyes on Katie, of course.
‘Her door was closed, but the blinds were open.’ They usually were. Unless she was taking a meeting with someone she considered important, Jeroma liked to keep an eye on her vassals. ‘The first I knew was when Pinky said, “What’s wrong with the boss? She’s all Gangnam Style.”’
‘So I looked, and she was jerking back and forth in her office chair, grabbing at her neck. Then she fell out of the chair and all I could see was her feet, drumming up and down. Roberta asked what we should do. I didn’t even bother answering that.’
They burst in. Roberta Hill and Chin Pak Soo lifted her up by the armpits. Katie got behind her and gave her the Heimlich. Pinky stood in the doorway and waved his hands. The first hard heave on her diaphragm did nothing. Katie shouted for Pinky to call 911 and went at her again. The second heave sent one of those eucalyptus drops flying all the way across the room. Jeroma took a single deep breath, opened her eyes, and spoke her last words (and very fitting they were, IMHO): ‘What the fuck?’ Then she began to shudder all over again, and stopped breathing. Chin gave her artificial respiration until the paramedics arrived, but no joy.
‘I checked the clock on her wall after she quit breathing,’ Katie said. ‘You know, that awful retro Huckleberry Hound thing? I thought … I don’t know, I guess I thought someone might ask me for the time of death, like on Law & Order. Stupid what goes through your mind at a time like that. It was ten to three. Not even an hour ago, but it seems longer.’
‘So she could have choked on the cough drop at two forty,’ I said. Not ten forty, but two forty. I knew it was just another coincidence, like Lincoln and Kennedy having the same number of letters; forty past comes around twenty-four times a day. But I still didn’t like it.
‘I suppose, but I don’t see what difference it makes.’ Katie sounded annoyed. ‘Will you come in tomorrow or not? Please come in, Mike. I need you.’
To be needed by Katie Curran! Ai-yi-yi!
‘Okay. But will you do something for me?’
‘I guess so.’
‘I forgot to empty the trash on the computer I was using. The one back by the Thanksgiving dinner poster. Will you do it?’ This request made no rational sense to me even then. I just wanted that bad joke of an obituary gone.
‘You’re crazy,’ she said, ‘but if you absolutely swear on your mother’s name to come in tomorrow at ten, sure. Listen, Mike, this is a chance for us. We might end up owning a piece of the gold mine instead of just working in it.’
‘I’ll be there.’
Almost everyone was, except for stringers working among the primitives in darkest Connecticut and New Jersey. Even scabby little Irving Ramstein, who wrote a joke column called (I don’t understand it, so don’t ask me) Politically Incorrect Chickens, showed up. Katie ran the meeting with aplomb, telling us that the show would go on.
‘It’s what Jeroma would have wanted,’ Pinky said.
‘Who gives a shit what Jeroma would have wanted,’ Georgina Bukowski said. ‘I just want to keep getting a paycheck. Also, if remotely possible, a piece of the action.’
This cry was taken up by several others – Action! Action! Piece-a-da-action! – until our offices sounded like a messhall riot in an old prison movie. Katie let it run its course, then shushed them.
‘How could she choke to death?’ Chin asked. ‘The gumdrop came out.’
‘It wasn’t a gumdrop,’ Roberta said. ‘It was one of those smelly cough drops she was always sucking on. Craptolyptus.’
‘Whatever, dude, it still came flying out when Kates gave her the Hug of Life. We all saw it.’
‘I didn’t,’ Pinky said. ‘I was on the phone. And on fucking hold.’
Katie said that she had interviewed one of the EMTs – no doubt using her large gray eyes to good effect – and had been told that the choking fit might have triggered a heart attack. And, in my effort to follow the dictum of Professor Higgins and keep all the relevant facts straight, I will jump ahead here and report the autopsy on our Dear Leader proved that to be the case. If Jeroma had gotten the Neon Circus headline she deserved, it probably would have been HEAD HONCHO POPS PUMP.
That meeting was long and loud. Already displaying talents that made her a natural to step into Jeroma’s Jimmy Choos, Katie allowed them to fully vent their feelings (expressed mostly in bursts of wild, semihysterical laughter) before telling them to get back to work, because time, tide, and Internet waits for no man. Or woman, either. She said she would be talking with the Circus’s main investors before the week was out, and then invited me to step into Jeroma’s office.
‘Measuring the drapes?’ I asked when the door was shut. ‘Or the blinds, in this case?’
She looked at me with what might have been hurt. Or maybe just surprise. ‘Do you think I want this job? I’m a columnist, Mike, just like you.’
‘You’d be good at it, though. I know it and so do they.’ I jerked my head toward our excuse for a newsroom, where everyone was now either hunting and pecking or working the phones. ‘As for me, I’m just the funny-obit writer. Or was. I’ve decided to become an emeritus.’
‘I think I understand why you feel that way.’ She slipped a piece of paper from the back pocket of her jeans and unfolded it. I knew what it was before she handed it to me. ‘Curiosity comes with the job, so I peeped in your trash before dumping it. And found this.’
I took the sheet, refolded it without looking (I didn’t even want to see the print, let alone reread it), and put it in my own pocket. ‘Is it dumped now?’
‘Yes, and that’s the only hard copy.’ She brushed her hair away from her face and looked at me. It might not have been the face that launched a thousand ships, but it surely could have launched several dozen, including a destroyer or two. ‘I knew you’d ask. Having worked with you for a year and a half, I understand that paranoia is part of your character.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No offense intended. In New York, paranoia is a survival skill. But it’s no reason to quit what could become a far more lucrative job in the immediate future. Even you must know that a freaky coincidence – and I admit this one’s fairly freaky – is just a coincidence. Mike, I need you to stay on board.’
Not we but I. She said she wasn’t measuring the drapes; I thought she was.
‘You don’t understand. I don’t think I could do it anymore even if I wanted to. Not and be funny, at least. It would all come out …’ I reached, and found a word from my childhood. ‘Goosh.’
Katie frowned, thinking. ‘Maybe Penny could do it.’
Penny Langston was one of those stringers from the darker environs, hired by Jeroma at Katie’s suggestion. I had a vague idea that the two women had known each other in college. If so, they could not have been less alike. Penny rarely came in, and when she did, she wore an old baseball cap that never left her head and a macabre smile that rarely left her face. Frank Jessup, the sports guy with the Mohawk, liked to say that Penny always looked about two stress points from going postal.
‘But she’d never be as funny as you are,’ Katie went on. ‘If you don’t want to write obituaries, what would you want to do? Assuming you stay at Circus, which I pray you will.’
‘Reviews, maybe. I could write funny ones, I think.’
‘Hatchet jobs?’ Sounding at least marginally hopeful.
