Elimination Night (21 page)

I was off the grid.

I’d gone dark.

Dark or not, however, I was still expected to report to my borrowed cubicle at the global headquarters of Zero Management on Sunset, where I was going to be working until the live shows began, assuming season thirteen ever got that far. So I unlocked my bicycle from the rack outside, and ten minutes later, I was at the office.

And guess what?
Everything seemed normal.
The lobby was empty aside from Reza, the security guard, who was reading the latest issue of
Uzi Enthusiast
magazine. The TV was muted and tuned to a finance channel. And from the speakers embedded in the ceiling came the unmistakable chorus of Ernie Bucket’s “Ain’t Pretty, But Sure Can Sing.” I marveled at how it sounded even worse than the first time I’d ever heard it.

Ping.

The elevator arrived.

I stepped inside and hit “PH.”

Ping.

Now I was surging upward to the whine of a distant pulley mechanism. Seconds later, the doors opened with a knock and a clang. I took a breath. I
always
take a breath when emerging into the Zero Management lobby. I swear, the view is better from up there that it must be from space: San Gabriel Mountains to the north, sunlight mirrored from the snow on the peaks; the giant shards of glass that made up downtown to the east; a great slab of ocean to the west; and of course La Brea Avenue, a glowing lava stream of hot metal, cutting south over the horizon.

But something wasn’t right. It was Stacey, the receptionist. She was nose deep in a tissue. By the looks of things, it wasn’t the first tissue she’d used that morning, nor would it be the last. She was so distraught, in fact, that she didn’t even notice me. So I walked quickly past, hoping this was a romantic problem (her Belgian boyfriend, Fufu, seemed obviously gay to everyone who’d met him) and
not
related to the Jefferson Metrics Organization. There was something else amiss, though. The cubicles to either side of my own were empty. As were all the others.

Where the hell was everybody?

I tapped awake my computer and reached for my phone—I couldn’t keep it switched off forever. And that’s when I saw it: my browser homepage, which was set (as a matter of company policy) to the
ShowBiz
magazine website. Below the masthead, there were no stories—just two words, in the biggest, boldest,
blackest
typeface I’d ever seen:

FALLEN

ICON!

Oh…
fuck.

I clicked on the link, hoping the story wasn’t what I feared.

It wasn’t.
It was worse.

At the top of the page was a screenshot from the previous night’s broadcast: Bibi with her hand over her mouth, and Joey in the background, slightly out of focus, grimacing—like they’d both just heard
shocking news.
ShowBiz
must have trawled through every last frame of the first episode to capture that moment.

Assholes.

Below was a story by that annoying little scumbag Chaz Chipford, whose title had been upgraded (I couldn’t help but notice) to “Executive News Editor.” They’d even given him a byline picture, in which he smirked chubbily from under a reddish mullet.

He had written:

      
Bloodbath for revamped Rabbit warblefest!!! Ratings
CRATERED
during season thirteen premiere—down
THIRTY
percent overall;
TWENTY-EIGHT
percent in the target demo. Worse: It lost its number-one position to
Bet You Can’t Juggle That!
—the most dramatic upset the nets have seen in more than a decade. Sources tell
ShowBiz
that ex-backup dancer/
Icon
showrunner Leonard Braithwaite has been summoned to The Lot this morning by irate Big Corp honcho Sir Harold Killoch, who plans to “tear him thirty new assholes.” Is this The End for the
Icon
-ic show? Nigel Crowther certainly thinks so. And unless the impossible happens over the next few days,
ShowBiz
has to agree…

I sank into my chair and watched as the operating system of my phone finished loading. The screen flashed from black to white a few times before the default icons finally appeared. Then—after a lengthy search for a network—it informed me of all the things that had happened, phonewise, since I’d gone off-line the previous evening: “Missed calls (518). Text messages (164). Voicemails (107).”

This was it.
Armageddon.

Before I had a chance to do anything: a barely recognizable voice from the other end of the room.

“STACEY! SWITCH ON THE BLOODY TVS!”

No response.

“STAAACEY!!”

Nothing but a muffled sob from the direction of the reception desk. Stacey was still a mess.

“STAAAAACEY!!!”

Len was moving closer now, at speed, kicking away chairs and wastebaskets as he went.

“
STACEY, ARE YOU STILL FUCKING ALIVE? SWITCH ON THE TVS.
”

He staggered into view. Holy crap, he looked bad. His tie was askew, his pants were creased, his fly was open, and… wow,
his face
… it had broken out into a tramp-like, whiteish-gray stubble, the color spectacularly at odds with the golden sheen of his recently upgraded Merm. He couldn’t have looked any worse if he’d spent the night in prison. I actually wondered briefly if he
had
spent the night in prison.

“FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!” he yelled, right in Stacey’s face. “DID YOU HEAR WHAT I—”

With another sob, the dozen or so flatscreens that hung from the office ceiling came to life. All were now displaying the same image: Nigel Crowther, shirt open almost from the waist, sunglasses on, makeup applied, his toilet brush of a hairdo practically quivering with smugness and indignation. He was standing beside a lime-colored Lamborghini while several aggressively branded network news microphones bobbed around in front of him like demented sock puppets.

A live-impromptu press conference was underway.

“Of course it’s all over,” Crowther was saying. “Why do you think I left? Any reality franchise that can’t get—oh—
at least
twenty million viewers on a weekly basis should be put out of its misery, if you ask me… which, obviously, everyone is.”

Those twinkly eyes.

That self-satisfied grin.

I wanted to throw something at the screen.

Now the TV reporters behind the camera were shouting over each other. To an inaudible question, Crowther responded, “Bibi and Joey? I have no opinion.”

More shouting. As before, it was impossible to hear exactly
what
he was being asked. “Isn’t it obvious?” Crowther laughed. “Like the rest of America,
I wasn’t watching.
”

He tried to walk away, but the news people weren’t done yet.

“Look, I’ll say one last thing,” announced Crowther, turning back to the camera and raising both palms. “
Project Icon
is the past.
The Talent Machine
is the future.
I
know that.
You’re
all smart enough to know that. The American public knows that. And I would hope that Sir Harold Killoch and the Rabbit network now realize that after the frankly embarrassing numbers we’ve seen today. Now, if you’ll please—”

“Mr. Crowther! Mr. Crowther!”

“
Please
… I have to…
seriously
… excuse me.”

Still more shouting, but the vertically hinged door of the former
Icon
star’s million-dollar ride had now powered open, and he was already climbing inside. Once seated, he gripped the thick, animal-skinned wheel and gave a final pout to the cameras. It was obvious he was loving this. Indeed, his expression suggested a kind of furtive sexual pleasure. The car’s engine blarped and wheezed. Then Crowther winked—oh, the
smugness
—before disappearing behind a slab of green as the door hissed back into place, locking automatically. A caption appeared over it: “
CROWTHER
—‘
Icon
is past,
Talent Machine
future.’” The car made a noise like a dinosaur being slaughtered inside a volcano, then flattened itself against the pavement. In the next instant, only dust and vapor remained.

Len spent the rest of the day in the hospital. “An allergic reaction to something,” said his assistant, vaguely. I suspected it had more to do with him not wanting to become the proud owner of thirty new assholes, courtesy of Sir Harold Killoch. As for Stacey, she went home before lunch. No one else dared to come to work, leaving me alone in the office. I didn’t even have my little green pills for comfort: they weren’t in my bag, which meant I must have left them in the bathroom at home—again.

Of all the days to forget
…

So I just sat there and tortured myself by searching for “
Icon
” and “cancellation” in Google News. We were the biggest story of the day, that was for sure—and I suppose there was a perverse reassurance
to be found in that. I mean, at least people
cared.
But the fact we’d lost the number-one slot to
Bet You Can’t Juggle That!—
the appeal of which mostly derived from the likelihood of a fatal accident each week—was surely the end, as far as the show was concerned. Sir Harold might have put up with a thirty percent viewership decline for a while, but he’d made it clear that on no account whatsoever would he tolerate a number-two position.

This was about pride, not economics.

“I don’t believe in ‘managed decline,’”
ShowBiz
had quoted him saying just a few days earlier. “If an asset isn’t performing for Big Corp, I believe in
elimination.
And y’know what? I’m pretty sure Len Braithwaite and his team wouldn’t have it any other way. I mean, these are the guys who’ve been doing exactly the same thing to their contestants every week for the past twelve years! They even invented a name for it: ‘elimination night.’ So I think it’s perfectly reasonable for me to say to them, ‘Look, if you can’t hold on to your audience—well, then I’m afraid you’ll have to face an elimination night of your own.’”

I wondered if the very first episode of season thirteen had been our elimination night, or if this was a humiliation yet to come. Not that it really mattered at this point. There were another six prerecorded shows left to air—two per week, for the next three weeks—so even if the cancellation order came later than expected, it was still pretty much a certainty that we’d never make it to Greenlit Studios.

Essentially, my job was over. It was just a question of turning up every day until the inevitable happened. Meanwhile… all I had in the bank was five hundred dollars.
Five hundred lousy bucks.
That wouldn’t even pay for a
one-way
ticket to Honolulu, never mind a year of meals, rent, and beachside mai tais at the Hua-Kuwali Hotel.

I was so depressed by all this, I almost forgot to check the actual
reviews
of our first night with the new judges. The ratings had been so bad, it seemed irrelevant what the critics had to say. But curiosity eventually got the better of me, so I tapped “
Icon
” and “reviews” into Google, and then… yes, I laughed. I sat there at my desk, alone in the global headquarters of Zero Management, and I laughed my ass off.

The reviews were… well, see for yourself. Tripp Snuggins in the
New York Chronicle:

      
Joey Lovecraft has all the makings of an unlikely new American sweetheart. Sure, the White House might once have declared war on him as a toxic substance in his own right—with none other than President Reagan nicknaming him “Joey Dumbass” for that illadvised parachute jump over Manhattan—but as season thirteen’s natural protagonist, he brings wit and warmth and humanity to the circus; a welcome relief from Mr. Crowther’s well-worn horrible-isms.

There was more like this. A lot more. And while Joey was overwhelmingly the critics’ favorite, he wasn’t the only recipient of praise. The
Dallas Morning Bugle
said Bibi “lent a new sense of occasion to the proceedings,” while the
Los Angeles Mercury
even found a compliment for JD, noting that, “the man is obviously so in fear of his job, his vocabulary has finally moved beyond the inane, maddening cry of ‘Booya-ka-
ka!
’ Please, Mr. Coolz, keep this up!” Even the contestants seemed to have gained some fans. On YouTube, for example, 198,234 people had rewatched Mia Pelosi singing “The Prayer.” Without a doubt, season thirteen had been as much of a critical triumph as it had been a commercial failure. So did that mean a word-of-mouth campaign could save us? Perhaps a #savejoey hashtag on Twitter? Not likely, unfortunately. As Len had once explained to me at great length, the season premiere of any show is nearly always the highest-rated episode until the finale. Hence the term “natural falloff,” which describes the second and third week declines in audience that networks expect as a matter of course. And the usual falloff is about ten percent—which in our case would mean losing another million and a half viewers.

Even if a comeback managed to offset some of that, we were still screwed.

There was no point staying in the office any longer: might as well go home, order that long-overdue takeout from The Gates of Eternal Destiny, get the two-dollar wine flowing, turn on my new TV, and pretend that everything was going to be absolutely fine. But my day hadn’t
stopped getting worse just yet: As I waited for the elevator, I felt a buzz inside my purse. Pulling out my phone, I learned that my one hundred sixty-eighth text message of the day had just arrived. So far, I’d ignored them all. Not this one, though. Don’t ask me why, but I tapped the screen to read it.

Bad move.

With a thud, my head fell against the wall.

Please, no
—
not now, not today.

Groaning, I checked the screen again. In a cheerful little green speech bubble:

      
“
REMEMBER! DATE WITH BORIS TONIGHT. SEVEN O’CLOCK — NO BE LATE! (HE WAIT FOR YOU UNDER PALM TREE OUTSIDE.)”

I’d totally forgotten that Mr. Zglagovvcini had
actually gone through
with his ridiculous plan to set me up on an Internet date. I’d meant to cancel, days ago. But I hadn’t. There’d been too much going on. And now it was almost 6:45. Boris—whoever he was—would be arriving at my apartment in the next fifteen minutes, and Mr. Zglagovvcini would be watching from behind his heavy red curtains.