Elimination Night - By Anonymous Page 0,42

we hadn’t gone anywhere near Ed Rossitto’s batcave in the sky. Instead we were seated in Rabbit’s garden commissary, which serves egglessegg scrambles and meatless-meat burritos to ageless movie executives with mortgaged dental work and two-rounds-of-golf-per-day tans. They seem so much slicker than the likes of Len and Ed, these movie people. But I guess when you strip away the gloss of their A-list casts and seven-figure budgets, they’re basically selling the same thing: stories of human conflict, with their highs and lows, tears and laughter, heroes and villains… only our stories cost a lot less to tell. Not that season thirteen of Project Icon was in any way cheap, of course. In fact, I’d seen our budget, and it had pretty much doubled since the previous season. That didn’t bode well, given everything that had gone down, both literally and figuratively, in Houston. ShowBiz was already printing vague rumors of “trouble in Texas.” Its latest story quoted David Gent as saying Rabbit was “ironing out issues with the new panel” but that the network still had “confidence in the show.”

Not total confidence, I noted. Just confidence—quantity unspecified.

“D’you think we’ll get cancelled before we even get to air?” I wondered aloud.

“Jesus Christ, Bill, keep it down,” Mitch hissed. “Never—ever—mention the C-word on The Lot.”

With that, his phone began to squirm its way across the metal table in a fit of groans and yelps, as if there were a small animal inside trying to break loose. He glanced at its screen and said, “Right, he’s here.” We both stood up. Mitch wiped his nose—at last—but only half-caught the foam, and there didn’t seem like a good moment to bring up the subject as we made our way to the narrow pathway outside. A longwheelbase golf cart—green canvas sunshade pitched over the three rows of seats—was waiting. The driver, who looked barely old enough for sixth grade, proceeded to transport us at the maximum velocity allowed by the vehicle’s tiny electric motor through fake Brooklyn backstreets, a miniature Sahara desert, and the scene of a crashed Boeing 747 filled with half-melted alien corpses.

“Imagine coming to work here every day,” mused Mitch. “No wonder these people are so twisted.”

Eventually, we jerked to a halt outside a beige conference hall at the other end of the property. Beyond the jungle-landscaped entrance: a beige lobby with beige walls, beige carpet, and an air-conditioning system so powerful, the place felt like an industrial meat locker. It couldn’t have been more than forty degrees in there. Ahead of us was a set of double doors, upon which someone had taped a sheet of laserprinted paper. “Project Icon: Fraternization Seminar,” it read. “Attendance COMPULSORY for all cast/producers. Starts: 3:30 p.m.”

The clock on the wall read 3:29 p.m.

Mitch and I looked at each other with here-goes-nothing faces, then pushed our way inside.

We emerged into a small yet plush auditorium with a low stage at the far end of the room and a dozen or so rows of fold-up seats, arranged in tiers. Suspended from the ceiling was a digital projector, and embedded in the walls were the yellow Kevlar cones of audiophilequality Bowers & Wilkins loudspeakers (blame Dad for my knowledge of such things). Behind us, meanwhile, was a generously stocked drinks and snack counter, the kind you might find in a business-class airline lounge. Knowing what was to come, I was tempted to pour myself a Maker’s Mark on ice. No one else was drinking, though, so I resisted.

Joey was already in a front-row aisle seat, next to Mu and Sue, both of whom had dressed for the occasion like soft-porn librarians. He was wearing high-top sneakers and a tweed suit with one pant leg cut off at the knee, all the better to display an actual-size tattoo of a tartan sock on his right calf. (He did this one himself while in London’s Pentonville prison for urinating on Buckingham Palace, because it made him smile every morning in his cell.) The novelty sock tattoo wasn’t the first thing to catch my attention about Joey, however. Instead my eyes were drawn to his fly-goggle sunglasses, the kind that Manhattan Project scientists might have worn during atomic bomb testing in the New Mexico desert. They served to only partially disguise a black eye of such severity, its purple-yellow tendrils crept all the way out to his middle cheek. This had been a gift from Miss “I Da Hoe”’s father, an ex-U.S. Marine and, as it turned out, committed member