“I ain't never heard of it. I had to sell my TV. Don't you remember, baby?”
“You've never made a video of a man in a pirate costume? Or of a naked man in an art class?”
“No, no. No naked man, no pirate costume. But I'll try anything once. I didn't think I'd like sushi until I tried it, but then I did, and what do you know—raw fish. Tell you what, you bring the camera and the pirate suit, and I'll be waiting at my place, baby. Want me to phone out for a pizza or something? The cupboards are bare.”
The third Ann Wilson had disconnected her telephone number and left no forwarding information.
At the home of the fourth Ann Wilson, a man with one of those deep, lazy voices characteristic of very small boys who are shocked to have come through the wheelworks of their adolescence as very large men answered the phone. “Yeah?”
“Hello, is Ann there?”
“Who that?”
I gave him my name. “But Ann doesn't know me,” I said. “I'm trying to reach her because she might be the Ann Wilson who—”
“This is her boyfriend. How you know Ann?”
“I don't. I just want to talk to her so that I can ask her about some videos she might have sent my way.”
“Man . . .” He pulled the word out like taffy. “I think you don't want to be calling here asking for another man's woman. That's what I think. Where you meet Ann anyway?”
“Like I said, I don't know her.”
“Yeah, but where you meet her?”
“Maybe I should just go now.”
“I think you better, bitch.”
The fifth Ann Wilson did not answer my call, even after a dozen rings.
It was no mystery to me that people could react with disorientation when they were mistaken for someone else. I was on a first date once when a man presented himself at my table and said that he knew my work and just wanted to thank me from the bottom of his heart. I was too flattered to tell him that I couldn't have been the person he thought I was, a misjudgment that led to a great deal of disappointment and hostility when the woman I was with discovered a few nights later that I wasn't the sort of person strangers regularly approached with hosannas of adulation. Still, I have to say that the immense—and, as far as I could tell, genuine—bewilderment of the various Ann Wilsons I had phoned was a marvel to me.
The planetarium was unusually crowded that evening. The city had been experiencing the kind of perfect early-fall weather that sends people out in their thousands to look at the stars. The observatory had added a few minutes of footage to the tail end of the Wonders of the Visible Universe, including some new images of the Eagle Nebula, a dark shell of dust that resembles, to my eye, an owl rather than an eagle, but no matter. The nebula was illuminated from the inside by a dozen bright blue stars that set off the gold and violet tones of the surrounding dust cloud. There were pillars of molecular gas inside that looked as solid as oak trees, so sturdy I imagined I could climb them—and who's to say I wouldn't someday? When the footage ended and the crowd had dwindled away, the ushers came in with their long-handled maintenance brooms and swept the floor, working in the silent, cadenced, grimly efficient way of people who have no respect for what they do, but do it well.
I took a walk through the grounds of the observatory after I left the planetarium, heading for the slope along the back side of the main building. I decided I might as well try to reach the fifth Ann Wilson again, so I punched the redial button on my cell phone.
Someone answered on the second ring. “Yes, hello?”
“Ann Wilson?”
“Yes.”
“I've been trying to track you down all day,” I said. “I work for The Painfully Familiar Video Hour,” though I used the show's actual name, which is not The Painfully Familiar Video Hour. “We've been receiving submissions from an Ann Wilson who lives in Austin, Texas, and I thought she might be you.”
“Videos?” She laughed. “Where are you calling from?”
I was hiking through a stand of sugar pines where thousands of fallen needles—many of them still green—lay lightly on the long grass. “I'm at the planetarium,” I said. I realized more or less immediately, of course, that this was not what she meant, but before I could set my answer straight, she started laughing again, as though I were a precocious child who had just uttered his first five-syllable word.
“The planetarium, huh? Man, I used to love those places.”
“Me, too.”
“The way the stars drift over the dome in that big arc.”
“You should see the updated exhibits, the ones with all the latest technology. They use full-color video projection now, so it's not just the pinpoints of the stars like it used to be. Some of the images will knock the breath right out of you.”
“You mean like from the Hubble Space Telescope?”
“Yeah, those are the ones. I look at them and I just want to take myself there. Really. They seem like some kind of Heaven.” The sentiment in my voice embarrassed me a little. I felt as though I were making a connection between two free-floating ideas, though, and I continued talking. “You wouldn't need to go anywhere else. You could just settle in and enjoy the spectacle.”
“Well, when you think about it, you're already there, aren't you? I mean, you're right in the middle of it. If there's another Hubble Telescope halfway across the universe—though they wouldn't call it the Hubble, would they? The Spock Telescope, maybe. The Cylon Telescope. Anyway, if there's another telescope up there, someone else is probably looking through it and wishing he were here on Earth.”
“I guess that's true.” The pine trees rustled, stirred by a breeze so high and attenuated I could not feel the slightest trace of it on the ground. “Funny it never occurred to me. In any case, I didn't mean to go on like that. So, do you happen to be the Ann Wilson I'm looking for?”
“Nope. I've never recorded a home video in my life.”
“Damn,” I said. “Well, I enjoyed talking to you nonetheless.”
“Any time,” the fifth Ann Wilson answered. “Sorry to disappoint,” and she laughed again and hung up.
Some kind of night bird—it might even have been a frog—made a creaking noise overhead, and I paused to listen. A strong wind blew in from the south, carrying the smell of salt water and motor exhaust. I slipped the cell phone into my pocket, circled around the observatory, and made my way back to my car.
It was a little more than a week later that Leo was fired. We could tell something important was going on by the number of network big shots clacking up and down the hallway in their hard-soled shoes, and though we were all a bit curious, we spent the morning doing our usual work, sifting through the latest eructation of videos in our little office by the fire exit and the storage closet. The most promising entry of the day was a video in which one monkey stole up behind another monkey with an inflated paper sack and popped it. I forget who it was—it wasn't me—who said that the three pillars of comedy are monkeys, robots, and midgets, the reasoning being that monkeys, robots, and midgets are not quite normal human beings, but they all aspire to be, which is a condition that lends itself to comedy. Whether the theory is sound or not, I couldn't say, but I can tell you that we do receive a considerable number of videos every month featuring monkeys, and more than a few featuring midgets, and if the show is still on the air a hundred years from now, I have no doubt we will receive just as many featuring robots.
We were sitting at our own separate monitors, gradually cuing through our individual stacks, when the Second Goofy Man's personal assistant, Rachel, came to the door. “He wants to see you all in his office,” she said. “And fair warning.” She lowered her voice. “The big men upstairs just kicked him in the ass. He's ready to kick someone back.”
We followed Rachel down the hall. I could see the tiny scar on the back of her arm where the stapler had nicked her before it went whirling into the filing cabinet.
The Second Goofy Man was waiting for us in his office, smiling his most avuncular smile and standin
g beneath an inspirational poster of a seacoast in fading sunlight, captioned “Perfection: The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.” He had long since removed the posters that had originally decorated the room, promotional photos of the First Goofy Man and the Ken and the Barbie. The last I had seen of them, they were stacked behind a set of metal industrial shelves in one of the tape libraries.
On the office television set was a twitching freeze-frame from the video of the hiccuping minister—his arms open to his congregation and his cheeks distended in a monstrous bulge. The question the Second Goofy Man asked was obviously a trap: “Who deserves the credit for this?”
It was a few seconds before I decided to risk an answer. I said, “We all deserve the credit. It was a group discovery.” The video had aired on Sunday night. My guess was that someone from the Christian Right had organized a phone-in campaign the very next morning, the sort of wild-eyed protest we always get when we tiptoe into the dusty realm of religion: no respect for our heritage of values, the liberal media, boycott your advertisers—you know the script.
Leo must have been thinking the same thing, because he piped in with, “It wasn't a group discovery, it was my discovery. If you're looking for someone to blame, I'm your man.”
“I'm glad you said that,” the Second Goofy Man replied, and I knew all at once that the trap had been activated. He advanced the video a few frames, no more than four or five, and we were surprised to see what looked like a middle finger penetrating the edge of the picture, some petulant kid flipping the camera the bird. Another unspoken rule of prime-time television: you can intimate that the middle finger has been extended—inside a glove, say, or a foam hand—but you cannot display an actual extended middle finger.
Karen gave a single barking laugh. “Whoops.”
“Whoops, indeed.”
“You can't think we left that in there on purpose,” said Pram. “We didn't even know it was on the tape.” Which was true. Not only had nobody in our own office noticed, nobody on the entire production staff had noticed, nor had anybody in the in-studio audience. But clearly someone had—one home viewer with a DVD recorder and access to the Internet—and that was all it took.
“I'm sure you didn't,” the Second Goofy Man said. “But to be honest, I don't give a good goddamn. Say adios to Leo, folks. He's out of here.”
A silence spread through the room. “You're kidding, right?” Leo asked.
“I'm never kidding. Your position with this show is hereby terminated. You have until the end of the lunch hour to clear out your things. I suggest you get started.”
Leo just stood there trying to blink the shock out of his system until the Second Goofy Man said, “Didn't you hear me? Scoot,” and gave a dismissive little good-bye flicker of his hands.
Leo swung around to leave. As he vanished around the corner, the Second Goofy Man called out, “Stick that in your watering can.” Then he turned to us with a big triumphant grin on his chops, as though waiting for our applause.
Somewhere in the back of my head, I suppose I was still trying to work out a defense for the minister and his hiccuping Jesuses, the only trouble any of us had been expecting, because what I said next was “Neurologically speaking, the hiccup is just the final stage of laughter.”
Everyone ignored me, and rightly so.
“As for the rest of you good people,” the Second Goofy Man finished, “consider yourself lucky. The next person who makes a mistake that gets me chewed out by the network will be in the same boat old Leo is in. You can bet on it.” He straightened the knot of his tie, sat down at his desk, and made it plain by his silence and the posture he adopted that he meant for us to leave.
As we were heading out the door, he added, “And by the way, Miss Thompson”—Miss Thompson was Karen—“I do know what poltroon means. I can use a dictionary as well as the next guy. I'm not a complete ignoramus.” He pronounced the word with a long o and a short a, like hippopotamus.
The next few days were uncharacteristically gloomy in our corner of the studio. Karen, Pram, and I tried to get on with our work, but without Leo it was hard going. The tapes overspilled their baskets: hundreds and hundreds of yellow envelopes, like a display of burst melons. One of the fluorescent lights kept dimming out in a way that made me imagine I was drifting off to sleep. Every video we watched seemed to spotlight some bright-faced little kid falling over for no reason at all. The room echoed with their bawling as they hit the floor.
Every so often one of us would ask, “So are we going to talk about this?,” alluding to the incident with Leo and the Second Goofy Man, but there was little to be said. Karen announced that she had called Leo's home number a few times, and so had Pram, he said, but Leo wasn't there, or at least he wasn't answering the phone. I myself had dropped him an e-mail the day before, but had yet to hear back from him. We all hoped that he was on vacation on some warm, leafy island in the Mediterranean or the South Pacific, a place where the ocean never smelled like the highways, and not sealed away in one of the dimly lit bars he tended to frequent.
On Thursday evening, after the others had left, I stayed behind to pore over a few last videos. We still had a minute or so left to fill, and the production deadline expired at the end of the day—which usually meant six o'clock, but in this case meant whenever I managed to put everything together and pass it on to the production coordinator.
I had just decided to accept a clip of a squirrel being startled by an automatic sprinkler—fifteen seconds of funny ha-ha that could be stretched out, if need be, by five seconds of funny adorable on either end—when I set my hand on another Ann Wilson video.
My heart began to race. Finally, I thought, though until that moment I hadn't realized I was waiting for it. The truth was that I was half in love with Ann Wilson—in love, I mean, in that teenage way of a boy who spots a picture of a beautiful girl in his best friend's yearbook, a girl he knows he will never actually meet, though he can tell by the crookedness of her glasses and the way she hides her smile that he understands her more intimately than anybody else in the world ever could. The envelope was marked AUSTIN, TEXAS. 23 SEP 2003. I opened it and popped the tape into the VCR.
The footage began with a good half minute of darkness, salted with the sort of dissolving white sparks you see in unexposed videotape. I was about to fast-forward through it until I realized that the darkness was part of the film. What I was looking at was a cheap camcorder image of the night sky. It lacked the color and clarity of the Wonders of the Visible Universe, which was why I had failed to recognize it at first, but the night sky it definitely was. In the lower half of the image hundreds of what I suddenly saw were fireflies blinked out their messages to one another, giving off a cool greenish glow that was hard to distinguish from the light of the stars. Most of them remained below the horizon line, but occasionally one of the insects closest to the camera would go looping out into the field of stars and disappear like a meteor.
A grainy-sounding voice-over began: I look at them and I just want to take myself there. Really.
The speaker was obviously not a professional: that was my first thought. There was too much sentiment in his voice, a wobbliness to his intonation that you almost never hear outside of public radio or the least distinguished situation comedies. It took me a moment to figure out why he sounded so familiar.
The voice was my own—a Second Me—and the sentences I was speaking were from my telephone conversation with the fifth Ann Wilson.
Which meant that the fifth Ann Wilson had been the real Ann Wilson.
They seem like some kind of Heaven, I heard myself say. She must have recorded the entire audio track while we were talking on the phone, I thought. I wondered if she recorded all her conversations that way, a sort of Richard Nixon of the amateur video world. I tried to wrap my head around the idea.
There was just enough light for me to detect something moving a few feet away from the camera, a vague marshmallowy blur, and then a pair
of sparklers lit up, the kind children play with on the Fourth of July, and two streams of leaping white sparks showered out of the burning tips, flaring so brilliantly I could see the faces of the boys who were holding them. They couldn't have been older than twelve or thirteen. They began waving the sparklers around in the darkness to create simple pictures out of the light, leaving trails and swirls and speckles in the air. The afterimages lasted just long enough for me to make out a five-pointed star and a set of breasts, complete with nipples.
You wouldn't need to go anywhere else, I heard myself say.
I couldn't shake the strangeness of my voice. It was like a stand-in for the person I knew myself to be, an heir or a successor, just as the Second Goofy Man was a successor to the First Goofy Man—though in my case the Second Me was in all respects the better one. I kept my eye on the video. After the sparklers tapered down, the kids ignited another pair, and then a third, and then a fourth and fifth. There were times when it was impossible to tell the stars from the fireflies and the fireflies from the glittering traces of the sparklers.
You could just settle in and enjoy the spectacle, my voice said.
I sat there watching the many twinkling lights, the stars and the sparks and the fireflies, watching the kids as they drew boobs and penises and also their own names over and over again on the glassy night air, until the video ended and the monitor filled with hissing snow.
This is the story of the day I lost my job. It was a Saturday afternoon, clean and bright, just a few hours before the show's four o'clock taping began. A small number of tourists were already waiting by the front doors to claim their seats in the audience, but most of the production staff was gone for the day, including Pram and Karen, and the studio was all but deserted. Only the people directly involved with the taping of the program came into the building on Saturdays, and most of them took a long lunch break prior to the show's final sound check.
Before anything else, I stopped by my desk in the screening office. In the top drawer, exactly where I had left it, I found the original Ann Wilson video, the one with the art students and the nude model and the erection that rose with a faltering slowness into his gut, as though attached to some powerful hoisting machine. I took it out of its envelope and cued it up on my VCR. Then I turned the lights off and shut the door and aimed myself toward the elevator. The editing room, where the final arrangement of clips for the show was composed, was one flight up and two doors down the hall. I knocked on the door and, when nobody answered, used my spare key to work the lock.