The Smash-Up Page 13

  And no, they’re not. Not anymore. Babyface cups Zo’s head so she won’t whack herself as she slides into the back of the cop car. It’s just like in the movies, except that Ethan’s inside this scene, and the criminal in handcuffs is his wife.

  The cops climb into the front seat, turn on their lights with a single whoop. The lights flash silently as the cruiser pulls out onto the familiar road, the one he and Zo have driven down thousands of times without any incident whatsoever. Ethan watches the car carry his wife into the distance, then disappear around a bend.

  He thinks about an article he read recently in The New Yorker: What if this is a glitch in The Matrix? Apparently it is. Apparently all of this is exactly that.

  Ethan gets out of the passenger’s seat, walks around the front of Zo’s wagon, slides into the driver’s seat. He feels around on the floor for Zo’s phone, then begins scrolling through her contacts.

  Wacha, Ariana, a filmmaker friend from New York.

  Wadsworth, Jeffrey, a Rainbow Seed parent, dad of Sargent Pepper, and yes, that’s the kid’s real goddamn name.

  Wang, Sara, an old Sarah Lawrence buddy.

  Watters, Jackie. Bingo.

  Ethan dials the number, gives Jackie the basic facts, not quite believing the words even as he says them: Zo’s been arrested, she’s at Starkfield Police Department, is asking for Jackie’s help.

  “You’re serious?” Jackie asks.

  He is. Yes.

  “They targeted Zo?”

  Targeted? “No, that’s not—” Ethan begins.

  “Ethan,” Jackie interrupts. “Tell me everything that happened.”

  “Zo…well, I guess she hit a cone.”

  “She hit a cone?”

  “More than one, actually. In a construction zone.”

  “Well, that’s a bullshit charge if I’ve ever heard one. Oh my God, I can’t fucking believe they’re doing this.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Hitting Zo with a bogus offense. Of course. This is how they do it. Political retribution is the oldest play in the book.”

  “No, Jackie. That’s really not what—”

  “Think about it, Ethan. Zo’s an activist. Cops target activists all the time. But they’re not going to get away with it this time, I promise you. They are not fucking going to get away with this.” And before Ethan has a chance to say anything else, there’s a click, then silence. And then he is alone in his wife’s car, staring at her phone.

  Sitting there, Ethan wonders if there’s a word, in some language, for the surreal sensation that your own life is a stage play that, after running smoothly for years, has veered wildly off-script. The other actors look the same, they’re moving around the same stage, but for some reason, nobody is speaking the right lines.

  And then there’s nothing else to do but start the engine, flick his turn signal, and put the car in drive. He’s just pulling out onto the road when the first of the construction workers return from their lunch break. In his rearview mirror, he sees them survey, confused, the wreckage.

  Maddy’s car is in the driveway, but the house is silent. Other than the jingle of Hypatia’s collar as she lifts her head from the new-not-blue sofa, the house is still. “Maddy?” Ethan calls out. “Mad, you here? You won’t believe what happened!”

  As if in response, his phone rings: it’s Fake Dr. Ash. Ugh, Ethan realizes he never rescheduled their call, he just blew the whole thing off. He should answer, apologize, try to explain. Instead, he flicks his phone to silent. He’ll call Dr. Ash later. First, he needs to get his head on straight, to make those phone calls to Children’s Hospital, to know that Zo’s okay. He needs, also, to figure out what to do about this whole Randy thing.

  Ethan sits down at his laptop, opens his email. At the top of his inbox is a message from Randy. From his personal account. The subject: EE TAPE FOR E—CONFIDENTIAL. Ethan hesitates, then clicks.

  The message is only a single line, followed by a link:

  E. Remember Riverstone Specials? Well, there’s more where this came from.

  * * *

  —

  Riverstone Specials? Of course Ethan remembers those. As he recalls, they were a colossal waste of time.

  Most marketing firms found actors and models from headshots and résumés—if they liked what they saw on paper, they’d bring someone in to read from a script, get a sense of how they look on-camera, how well they might represent the client’s brand. Randy did the same thing, more or less, with one exception: he wrote the scripts himself.

  Or…he paraphrased them, anyway.

  Randy took existing texts, from the most random of places—theatrical monologues, political speeches, presidential addresses, key moments from the Larry Flynt trial, Marlon Brando’s “horror” speech from Apocalypse Now, even the occasional clip from The Partridge Family or The Brady Bunch—then rewrote them. He’d remove each from context, then cast the whole thing in an entirely different voice, as if for a different genre. In Randy’s hands, Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot” speech was given mob-boss intonations, making the whole “everyone you love, everyone you know…nothing but a mote of dust” thing sound more terrifying than awe-inspiring. Nixon’s famous “Silent Majority” speech was given a James Joycean stream-of-consciousness twist, making it sound unnervingly like the ramblings of a madman.

  And what, Ethan had wondered, was the purpose? Did rewriting Hamlet’s soliloquy in the voice of a Valley Girl (“Should I, like, even, you know, be, or what?”) reveal anything about aspiring talent that Shakespeare’s original text couldn’t? Ethan suspected not, but Randy insisted he was missing the point. Don’t you get it? Riverstone Specials are proprietary. This way, we get to tell clients we’re doing something different, using methods that nobody else can. People love having access to something others don’t. Barely matters what it is, just so long as their competitors don’t have it!

  Ethan had known better than to argue—hiring talent was Randy’s job, not his. And the truth was, Randy did find talent. He had a gift for recognizing people with that ineffable something, the star power that made audiences sit up and pay attention.

  People like Evie.

  But what could Riverstone Specials have to do with a harassment lawsuit? How would it convince Evie to drop the suit?

  Ethan clicks on the attachment to find out.

  * * *

  —

  Evie’s on a couch. She’s young, far younger than Ethan remembers her ever being—God, she looks like she’s barely more than a kid here, had any of them ever been this young? Ethan recognizes the sofa, and the abstract print behind it: this is Randy’s so-called audition room.

  The sound on this video is turned off. For the first several seconds, Ethan just watches.

  Evie’s talking. She leans back in her seat, runs her fingers through her blond hair, pulls those full lips back into a shy smile.

  That smile: Ethan remembers it well, remembers it flashing at him beneath New York’s artificial skyglow on a night that now feels indistinguishable from a dream.

  On-screen, on this sofa, Evie looks at ease, as if she’s speaking off the cuff. Ethan can almost believe she is speaking off the cuff, that she’s just making conversation, except for this: her eyes keep flicking ever-so-slightly leftward. Reading something, probably. Evie’s good, though; her reading is subtle, barely noticeable. She’s just barely old enough to order a beer in this video, but already, you can tell: she’s a pro.

  Ethan hits the Volume button.

  “I mean, I just think it’s so totally, like, ironic. All those people, our, like, ancestors? They came here, searching. For freedom. For like, equal opportunity, rights, all that stuff. And when they landed on these shores, they founded, you know, the greatest country in all of human history.”

  Ethan scratches his head. Evie didn’t talk like th
is. She didn’t use extraneous likes or you-knows. Evie graduated from Andover, spent two years at Yale before leaving to launch her acting career. Whatever this is, these aren’t her words.

  “I mean, those people who sailed to, what’s that place called? Yeah, Plymouth, right?” she continues. “They were, like, actual heroes. Scions. And now they’re, what, second-class citizens? In, like, their own country?”

  Ethan hits Pause. It’s the word “scions.” Ethan remembers that word, remembers Randy repeating it in their kitchen, some sort of impersonation that Ethan never found funny. A political speech, maybe?

  Ethan closes his eyes, now, wracks his brain. Scions. When it hits him, he feels a wave of nausea.

  Yes, he knows exactly what this is.

  This is a paraphrase of David Duke, the bayou Klansman turned presidential candidate. Back in the ’80s and ’90s Duke managed—either despite or because of his pointy-hooded past—to generate round-the-clock national media attention for his campaign. The guy got interviews with Dan Rather, Phil Donahue, Ted Koppel…an entire hour with Larry King. Most of these reporters tut-tutted about Duke’s racism while somehow failing to notice that all their public hand-wringing was giving Duke the kind of publicity and legitimacy that money couldn’t buy.

  With every public condemnation, the man only grew stronger.

  Randy had been fascinated by Duke—by what Randy called his audacity, his media savvy, his sneaky, duplicitous use of language. Never mind that Duke lost his presidential campaign, and his run for governor after that; the guy could win by losing, just so long as he stayed in the spotlight.

  To Randy, Duke was proof: the key to getting big attention was a little bit of shock value and a whole lot of shamelessness.

  Apparently Randy wasn’t wrong about that formula. What, after all, is the current president if not the inheritor of Duke’s toxic legacy? Took a couple of decades, sure, but Duke’s strategy—and his odious message—made it all the way to the White House eventually.

  And now, on the screen in front of Ethan, that same message is on Evie Emerling’s lips.

  Ethan watches Evie run her fingers through her hair. She looks beyond the camera, toward someone just out of the frame. “I’m sorry, do I have to say this next part?”

  This is now all Evie, she’s not reading anything.

  And then, still Evie: “Please. I’d prefer to skip ahead. Or perhaps there’s something else I can read?” But the answer, from the man whose face Ethan cannot see, is no. The answer is that a professional works through her discomfort. The answer is he thought he’d seen something in her, but maybe he was wrong. The answer is that there are a hundred other girls Bränd can audition for this role, and does she want this job or not?

  And Evie does want the job, apparently, because after a pause, she takes a deep breath. Forces a smile, then makes that smile look genuine. Then she opens her mouth to read more.

  No, no, Evie. No, don’t. Ethan wants to reach through the screen, clamp his hand over her mouth, get her to stop speaking, to avoid saying the next part, and the part after that, and the part after that, because if Ethan recalls the speech correctly, it only gets worse, much worse, from here.

  Don’t say it, he wills Evie, even though he is decades too late. He knows, simply because this video is in his inbox, how it ends. He knows that Evie, in that audition room, is filled with ambition—you don’t go on to have the career like hers if you’re not hungry, if you don’t have the feeling that you can be somebody (and you’re right about that, young Evie: you will be somebody, you’ll be one of Hollywood’s most bankable actresses, you’ll pull in millions of dollars per film, you’ll be on the covers of magazines, you’ll walk red carpet after red carpet, you don’t need to do this). But right now, on this sofa, at this 1995 audition, Evie is still nobody. And reading the next part, says the man standing offscreen—the man who holds the power, the man whose face doesn’t appear, the man who will hang on to this audition tape for decades, who will digitize it, file it away, who won’t hesitate, someday, to edit it down into bite-sized clips and send it out into the world without context or explanation—is the thing she has to do to become somebody.

  Ugly words emerge from beautiful red lips, and Ethan sees—he sees clearly now—he shouldn’t have allowed this, not in the company he co-founded, not when he’s right on the other side of the door futzing around with spreadsheets and contracts and HTML code. And the problem is that Evie’s a terrific actress, because she says it all like she believes it. If Ethan hadn’t seen her hesitate just now, he’d think she does believe it.

  Ethan presses Stop. Tries to make sense of what he’s just seen.

  One of the reasons Randy Riverstone has been such a success is this: Randy understood long before most not only that the media landscape was changing but also what those changes would mean. It wasn’t just that the news cycle would be firmly and forever round-the-clock, or that there would soon be hundreds of channels broadcasting the day’s events, countless talk shows on television and radio. It wasn’t that each of these sources would in turn splinter, then splinter again, into gossip sites, then blogs, then into the veins and capillaries of social media…or that any story, reported from anywhere in the world, could be shared with a single click. It’s that all of these changes pointed in exactly one direction: the media was becoming a reaction factory. In an endlessly networked twenty-four-hour news cycle, few would have the time or resources to plan, to think, to analyze, to provide meaningful context. They’d all be too busy responding.

  And this meant the media could be manipulated.

  Put some raw meat in front of a news source—outrage or the outrageous, doesn’t really matter—and the world will gobble it right up.

  Ethan doesn’t have Randy’s instincts, never did, but even Ethan knows: if this clip of Evie were to be leaked to the press, even just a few phrases here or there, it would lead to a torrent of headlines—Evie Emerling Caught on Tape! Hollywood Star Revealed as a Bigot! There would be no questions about context, no chance for Evie to explain, to apologize, there’s no time for that anymore. The headlines would cease only when the world moved hungrily on to the next outrage, and by then it would be too late for Evie.

  There’s enough in this one tape to ruin Evie Emerling for good, and Randy says he has more.

  And Ethan’s the one who’s supposed to tell her?

  * * *

  —

  It takes Google just .77 seconds to return 123 million results.

  EVIE EMERLING: WIKIPEDIA PAGE

  Evelyn Rose Edelmann, credited professionally as Evie Emerling, is an American actress. She has received international acclaim for her work, including two Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Golden Globes, and one British Academy Film and Television Award. She was one of the world’s highest-paid actresses in 2004, though in more recent years, she has eschewed the spotlight….

  Ethan clicks some links, finds himself scrolling through interviews on YouTube: Evie with Charlie Rose, the women of The View, Regis and Kelly, Kelly and Ryan. Ethan follows all this with an image search: There’s Evie at the Golden Globes in an emerald gown. At Sundance in furry boots and a white parka. Stepping out of a limousine in an outfit that looks a bit like an I Dream of Jeannie costume. Ethan looks at image after image of the woman he once knew, the one whose career he once helped launch, and now is being asked to help to end.

  God. He needs to talk to someone, needs to get his head straight.

  “Mad?” he calls out again. Where is she, anyway? He goes to the bottom of the stairs, listens for noise. When he hears none, he climbs the stairs, still calling her name.

  Upstairs, Maddy’s bedroom door is closed. He raps lightly. When she doesn’t answer, he cracks the door just enough to see pink toenail polish pointing toward the ceiling.

  “Hey, Mad?”

  Silence.

  He p
ushes open the door a little more, pokes his head into the room. Maddy’s lying on the floor. Totally motionless. Sleeping, except…no, wait. Maddy’s not sleeping. Not at all. Her eyes are open, aimed at the ceiling. Her lips are parted, and her shirt’s unbuttoned revealing a pierced navel and an orange lace bra.

  There’s no movement of the eyes, no movement of the body. Nothing at all. Dead, she’s dead.

  Jesus Christ.

  A heart attack, a stroke, one of those aneurism things that nobody ever sees coming. Or no. Maybe some sort of overdose. Ethan’s at her side in a flash, shaking her shoulder. “Maddy! Maddy, oh God, Maddy, wake up!”

  Maddy opens her eyes. Frowns. “Goddammit.”

  Alive. She’s alive.

  “Are you okay?” His eyes move wildly over her face. “You’re really okay?” He tries to calm his heart, which is pounding so hard it feels like an animal inside his chest, trying to shake its way free of his ribs.

  Maddy sits up, looks annoyed. “I’m fine, all right? Jeez.”

  Maddy buttons her shirt, just a single button, above her navel. She looks past Ethan. “Sorry dude,” she says (to whom? To no one. No one’s there, it’s just the two of them, plus that cage-rattling creature in his chest). Maddy gets up, goes over to her laptop, starts punching the Volume button. “I really am sorry. I’ll refund you.”

  The computer responds by making a noise, some sort of grunt, human and deep. That’s when Ethan realizes there’s a face on her computer. Male.

  “You can hit me up again if you thought it was worth it,” Maddy tells the grunter. “No hard feelings if not. Again, I’m super sorry.”

  The face grunts again. Nods. Disappears. There’s a beep, like a call ending.

  “What are you doing?” Ethan asks. “I thought you were…” He doesn’t say the word “dead” aloud, doesn’t dare.

  Maddy keeps her eyes on the screen as she taps away at her keyboard. “I was working, okay?”