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  The two locked in an uncomfortable stare. Those eyes, lost in miserable giftedness, were aflame. She was being scarier than shit, again.

  “I’m right, aren’t I? There’s something you want to say to me.” He’d kill for a cup of coffee. Something to do with his hands. Something to make him forget. His eyes had the shifting-crawlies: left, right, up, down; like Beaver Cleaver caught jerking off.

  “Your show is going to be very powerful.”

  Alan didn’t exactly feel shook up by that one. He’d figured she was going to tell him something really horrible. Something monstrous that psychics tell doomed souls. Some cursing finality.

  But this was good news. Why the dread?

  Then, it hit him the way the punch line of a complicated joke suddenly goes from gas to solid in your thoughts—ka-boom: the genie appears with subtitles. He realized everyone in L.A. was too damn melodramatic, that was why. They all wanted the kleig-rub, and Mimi was just stroking the histrionic gloom.

  The ones who weren’t trying to act were trying to model. The ones who weren’t trying to model were trying to write screenplays. Or produce. Or write jingles. Or produce jingles. Or act in jingles. Or be a jingle. People talked about pilots not feelings, unless it was how they felt about pilots. The box-office bloodstreamers were leaking everywhere you went. Ideas or creative notions were regarded as signals from deep space if they were good. If they were bad, they were treated like bad dogs.

  L.A. didn’t need a mayor. It needed a director.

  “Then I really don’t have anything to worry about …”

  Mimi stood in the cramped bedroom-converted- to office, went to her bookshelf. Squeezed fingertips along books, found a musty hardcover. Slid it out, undusted a semicircle on the cover. Handed it to Alan.

  “Depends.” She’d lowered her voice and Alan tried not to feel her sawing him in half.

  “I want you to have this. Keep it, Alan. Read it if you need to. If not, it’s still yours.”

  He glanced at the book, accepted it. Grimaced at the odor: old bookstore smell.

  He rested it on the lap of his blue jeans, cleared a bit more of the semicircle of dust. The title looked him in the eye.

  MIND POTENTIALS

  Written by some guy named Seth Lawrence. First chapter, “Dwellers in the Mirage.” Second chapter, “Shadows Move.” Third, “Man as Slave.” Fourth, “The Divine Terror.” Fifth, “No Way Out.” Sixth and final chapter— “One Way Out.”

  I love it, thought Alan. Big laughs.

  “Thank you,” he said, politely.

  Mimi nodded, looked at her watch. Another appointment outside. They could hear him, in the living room, popping his ballpoint.

  “Alan, do you understand when I say your show is going to be powerful?”

  “I’m comfortable with the idea of success if that’s what you mean.”

  She shook her head sternly, suddenly angry. “Not success. Power. Incredible power. You have to be cautious.”

  “I don’t plan to let it go to my head. I’m not a kid.” He was thirty-four. He was a kid.

  The other appointment coughed.

  Mimi took Alan’s hand, gripped it tightly. But something was different. Her hands were cold.

  “Be careful. The next six months are going to change your life. Money. Power. And something else …” She shook her head, troubled beyond words. “… not sure. I see two—no, three people. The third is very bad for you. Very bad. You must …”

  Her breath stopped, face drained white.

  “Am I going to be all right?”

  Mimi made a groaning sound, pressed nails into his palm so hard he tried to pull away, seeing bloody slits. “Say the title to me, again. I need to hear it.”

  He spoke in a tense whisper, repeated it three times. She seemed to be crying yet no sounds issued, no tears. She saw the blood on his palm, quickly wiped it with her sleeve.

  “Stay in touch with me, Alan.”

  Oh, yeah, I’ll stay in touch with you, he thought. Every morning I’ll give you a buzz and—

  “Don’t make this into a joke.”

  Fuck. She was reading his mind again.

  “Well, what do you suggest? I let it keep me up nights?”

  “I have no doubt it will.”

  “What will? What are you talking about?”

  “Something inside you. Something that … wants out.” She looked off, trying to describe the borders of a grotesque Rorschach. “It will come out.” She seemed confused by more disconnected images. Lost but continuing to try, stricken, swirling in some awful place. “… it will live in both places. Inside … outside.” She suddenly saw it and jerked back from him.

  “Mimi …”

  She became calm, like the victim of an air disaster, sitting in stunned agony on a bloody runway, waiting for ambulances.

  “It’s a … monster,” she said. “He will bring tragedy. Murder. Pain.” Her heart flooded with psychotic impressions and Alan stood to go.

  “He’ll come out. He’ll find a way.”

  It was the last thing he heard as he left and ended up in the bar at Spago’s, drinking until it closed.

  act one

  the pitch

  Smog covered L.A. like thin, concentration camp smoke.

  “Andy, great to see you. I know this season’s been a circus with all the cancellations and strikes. How you been?”

  Alan could barely make eye contact with Andy Singer. All he kept seeing was Cleo’s imbecilic smile superimposed on Andy’s conceited face.

  Andy stretched, his iridescent Bijan shirt doing a trout shimmer. “Well, you know, ‘Cleo’ has been very good to us again this season.”

  Really? thought Alan. Got news for you, pal; if Cleo had been good to you, she would’ve cut your heart out and fed it to you.

  “Oh, yeah?” Alan smiled a little. But not enough to give it away. “Well, I’m not surprised. That show just really hits people.”

  Yeah, he thought. Like the bubonic stupids it hits people. Andy was delighted and giggled a bit. Alan stared at him, trying to imagine how so profound an injustice could’ve occurred.

  Andy was all of twenty-five years old and had been promoted to junior V.P. of programming for the network one year earlier. But regardless of whatever the hell it was he did for a living, he was fucking good at his job. Alan couldn’t deny it. No one could.

  The list went on and on.

  “Surgeons.” Forty-two share after the second week, up against the Super Bowl … there was no way, but Andy picked it.

  “A House for All.” Sweeps Week didn’t even make a dent. The other two networks threw-up Lethal Weapon 3 and a two-hour, tear-jerk cabala with Barbara Walters interviewing seriously maimed celebrities to try and stop it. And the goddamn thing cleaned their clocks like fucking napalm. Stupid? Sure, it was stupid. Serious faces, talking over serious family “drama” and crying at every break. But incest cuts into the veins. Mel and Barbara didn’t even get a chance to pull their pants down.

  “Cleo.”

  Well … what could you say? What could you actually call it? It sure wasn’t no comedy, Jack. But try to tell that to the rating’s points that were hugging that sucker like a beam of golden light.

  There wasn’t a writer in town who could stand to even watch the teaser. But they all wanted to write for it. Resids, kids. That show was going to ride into the sunset like Mighty Mouse, with a hundred zeroes between his furry little legs. Even if some guy got cut off at story and the script got finished in-house, he knew he’d pull down endless checks from syndie bread; foreign, domestic. Eventually the fucking Solar System would be bouncing “Cleo” into black holes. Even subfungi life-forms would sit around eating Doritos, watching.

  And Andy with his Shirley Temple hair, lame jokes, and vapid taste was responsible. Some said he’d disfigured the cosmic order. After all, “Cleo” was his “baby.” His “concept.” His guiding hand was there, every excruciating inch of the way.

  It was hard t
o decide which made one ulcerate more, the part about a castrating hag and her defiant cat Mr. Pink Nose, or the part about how the two insinuated themselves into the life of her merry, brain-dead son-in-law who resembled a more masculine Pat Sajak.

  “Dad” was trying to raise two daughters after his wife left him for some gonk Richard Belzer somehow got talked into playing, to much publicized regret. That’s when “Dad’s” former mother-in-law, the sarcastic, festering horror, Cleo, had decided to drop in and help him get along, with her agonizing homilies and fat, grotesque cat.

  Mr. Pink Nose had become quite the tasteless phenomenon after Andy suggested the hateful creature be given an opportunity to take a leak on someone in each week’s episode. As the laugh track shrieked, the editors would cut to a close-up of Mr. Pink Nose’s furry face. Then, as the sound of feline urine trickled hilariously, Mr. Pink Nose would make his trademark hiss.

  America was in love.

  But there was more. The character of Cleo’s grand-daughter, Poppy-Sue, was especially odious and the producers had attempted to recruit her endlessly overused line of dialogue, “I’ve never seen a butt with legs,” into mainstream vernacular. T-shirts, pull-string dolls, posters of people with butts where their heads would normally be. This was whoring at an epic level, and by any decent measure, a total nightmare.

  To say the show was widely despised would be putting you up for a Humanitas. It sucked. The lines were indescribably unfunny. The plots embarrassing. The actors couldn’t’ve gotten work in claymation. The theme song, as rendered by accordion, snare drum and strip-show cymbal plus some unnerving guy from a beer hall singing, was twenty-five seconds of sheer agony.

  OH CLEO, WHY DO YOU LAUGH SO MUCH?

  (BOOM, SPLASH)

  OH CLEO, IT’S YOU WHO BRINGS US SUCH

  (SPLASH)

  JOY! SUCH (SPLASH) JOY!!

  (SPLASH, SPLASH, BOOM)

  OH, CLEO, YOU MUST HAVE DROPPED

  FROM A CLOUD

  OF GOLD (BOOM, BOOM, BOOM).

  ONE DAY WITH YOU (SPLASH, SPLASH)

  AND THE WORLD

  WOULD NEVER GET (SPLASH, BOOM, SPLASH)

  OOOOOLLLLLDDDD!

  How could Andy live with himself? Creating that kind of Alzheimer drivel; airing it every week.

  And he was rich!

  “Cleo” was a prospering corporation. It wasn’t a show. It was U.S. Steel with sets and punch lines.

  And this twenty-five-year-old Flintstone vitamin was behind the whole thing. He’d been on the covers of Vanity Fair and Newsweek And the network loved him like they loved few persons or things in the universe. He had brought great riches to their barren souls. He had brought a smile to their disheartened faces. And last but not least, he’d helped them gross an extra eighty million in fiscal ’92.

  And he could barely write his name.

  They’d yanked him out of MGM when he was a reader for a big Italian producer and given him a shot because he’d discovered some good properties for the Italian guy and made several purely accidental moves that resulted in mushroom profits for Metro during an otherwise bad year.

  So, they give him an office and he picks a couple more properties that switch swill to box office and it’s another promotion. This time right into the sagging TV division. Then, he hits a homerun with lips. Movie of the Week. Three nuns out in the desert with an escaped-conrapist-psycho: “Sisters and Brother.”

  Bad doesn’t cover it.

  Reviewers are in pale stupors they hate it so much. Even the Catholic Church decries it. The Pope was rumored to have switched over to “Who’s the Boss?” Cardinals are calling the dreckish extravaganza “an abuse of human values as well as fundamental tenets.” Angry telegrams are beyond earth math. Hallmark doesn’t make cards for this level of outrage.

  And the goddamn show cleans up.

  Forty-two share. Even though he couldn’t figure out how to work a book of matches, Andy had invented fire.

  “So, what do you have for me?” Andy gestured in fast little circles with his right hand, its nails chewed to gross nubs. “I haven’t seen you for a while. Geez, you do some episodes for Bochco and all of a sudden I can’t get a call once in awhile?”

  Andy stared, nodding with amusement. Alan nodded back, smiling. Andy’s minions, lined on the couch, nodded equal amusement; intestinally blocked Kewpies. They were there to round out the meeting and served no identifiable purpose; full grown people, living complex lives in L.A., sitting pleasantly in this room, exuding nothingness for a living.

  “I’ve got something in mind for an hour show. Not really cop genre. But it’s action,” began Alan, seated on the rattan Kreiss chair before Andy’s huge, glass desk. The desk was so big, it resembled a sliding glass door, supported by thick travertine legs. Designer stuff. And Andy looked right at home behind it. The frizzy-headed video sultan, lost in the immense regality of his own success, surrounded by plants that looked like they came from a designer jungle.

  Everything was right. Like a perfect alibi.

  “What’s the direction?” asked one of the Kewpies, a good-looking black woman, never changing expression or tone of voice. Her blazer looked just like Andy’s, her pants silky and balloonish.

  Andy glared discreetly at the assistant. Don’t steal my fire, was the look. Don’t ask my questions. The assistant crossed arms, self-consciously. Andy’s sulky glare was enough to bring on jitters. It’s why his office was called the Nut-Cracker Suite.

  “I think what Diane means,” interpreted Andy, “is … we’re all intrigued.”

  All nodded, looking intrigued.

  “It’s the story of the return of the real individual,” said Alan. “The individual who can fight for himself.” He took a dramatic pause. “The kind we don’t have anymore. The kind we all want to be.”

  Andy stared at him. Lit a cigarette. Silence.

  “His name is A. E. Barek. A mercenary. That’s the name of the show I’d like to sell you guys: ‘The Mercenary.’ ” Alan knew it by heart. “He’s say thirty, thirty-five. Handsome. Powerful. Smart. Hero in small wars. Big ones. Gulf time, whatever. Comes home from one to a situation that has no use for him. Wife remarried. Parents and kids don’t understand him. He’s angry. Alone …”

  Andy snuffed out his cigarette.

  “What’s this angry guy’s franchise, Alan?” He held up a soft hand, palm forward. “Sorry to interrupt but that’s essential this season. Character pilots aren’t happening for us. People can rent Driving Miss Angst. We gotta give them a lasarium show … for a price.”

  “Affiliates,” explained one of the other Kewpies, nodding at Alan as if having just explained the theory of relativity.

  “Well, like I say, he’s a mercenary,” answered Alan. “A gun for hire.”

  Andy sighed and it made Alan nervous. Guys like Andy spoke in elliptical Morse code: enigmatic semi-nods and hmm sounds, when assembled in proper sequence, forming messages of rejection.

  “Well, of course so much hinges on how it’s written, Alan. Everyone in this room knows your talent.” He shrugged a little. “But frankly, the thing doesn’t really feel …” he struggled, “it feels, I don’t know,” he made a put-off, just-watched-a-cat-run-over face. “It feels … passé. Nobody’s watching that delayed stress, Viet Nam stuff much anymore. I mean, sure, if Oliver Stone wants to develop Platoon into a goddamn variety show, I could give him thirteen guaranteed.”

  There were scattered chuckles. The Kewpie beside Alan indicated a desire to talk. Andy nodded.

  “Just thought I’d mention Carsey-Werner is doing a pilot about a gay soldier division.”

  “Yeah, I know, ‘Pinks,’ ” said Andy, uninterested.

  “It does have a military backdrop.”

  Andy acknowledged the information, returned his stare to Alan.

  “Anyway, Alan, you know I hate to tinkle on anybody’s parade but … I mean, look, I pride myself on being one of the few people in this town who’ll green light in the room and I gott
a tell you, it doesn’t make me crazy.”

  That’s because you’re already crazy, thought Alan. He smiled at Andy. “Can’t have that, can we?”

  Andy was amused. You could tell because one side of his mouth rose a tiny bit and he spun slowly in his Roche-Bobois chair to face an infinite view to the ocean, far above L.A. congestion and swelter. Sort of like God.

  Then, he turned back. Then, he said: “Funny.”

  No actual laughter. Just, “Funny.” That’s how you knew you’d amused Andy Singer. He told you.

  “I left out one thing,” Alan added, quietly, knowing the effect his tone of voice had. “I think I know how we can make this thing the biggest hit on the air.”

  Andy stared like he’d heard this rap many times in his illustrious five-minute career. “Yeah?” he asked, politely, hoping he was wrong.

  Alan stated the idea, plain as day. “We play the violence for real and we do frontal nudity. Sex, four-letter words … whole bit.”

  The little sultan didn’t flinch.

  “I mean, guys, let’s face fucking facts. Your audience is down fifty percent. Cable and cassettes are taking too big a bite. Not to mention whatever Diller’s litter is planning next over at FOX to kick you around, and four labor strikes in three years. Craft unions, DGA, SAG, WGA. You guys lost, what? Fifty million? Seventy-five?”

  The room was listening.

  “Your programming can’t compete. People wanna see more. See what they wanna see. And what the networks are programming ain’t it.”

  Andy was amused again. But he wanted to hear more.

  “You gotta understand where people are at today. Out there.” Alan pointed through the huge window. “On the street.”

  Andy steepled chewed fingers. “And what are they saying?” He got up, walked to the window. Didn’t turn to face the room.

  “That they’re on a yawn drip feed with the network schedule.” There were tiny snickers. “But really … that they’re scared to death to leave their houses because crime on the street has gotten so bad.” He was speaking to Andy’s back. “Gangs. Drive-bys. Crack. Fucking psychotics every two blocks, looking to slice’n dice you ’cause they don’t like the color of your Reeboks, or ’cause your Rolex ticks too loud. How about acquitted cops with little temper problems and big batons. How about the fucking riots?”