it loses its number-one position. Old Harry—who celebrates his eighty-second birthday next week at Skullhead, his private island in the South Pacific—wants to spare it (or perhaps himself) any future humiliation. What few hopes remain now rest on a cast of untested new judges, after Sir Harold ordered Braithwaite to “nuke the panel.” JD Coolz remains—he’s cheap—but dud celebrity chef Helen DeMendes has been ankled, as has sourpuss tunesmith Kat Patrigliano. Rumor has it, only two “stars” will be hired to fill the three empty seats. Trouble is, no matter who comes on board, there’ll still be a gaping, Crowther-shaped hole.
Those two stars were now supposed to be in their dressing rooms, waiting for me to give them the run-through of the press conference, where in five minutes we’d reveal their names. But I’d knocked six or seven times now, and no one had answered.
Where the hell were they?
“Ahem. Hello?” I said, rapping on the first door again, hurting my knuckles. “Anybody there?”
Silence.
Another try, this time on the second door.
“This is Bill,” I called out. “For the run-through. We’re starting in two minutes.”
Nothing.
Out of options, I turned the handle in front of me and pushed. The door swung open to reveal an untouched room. The red sofas I’d bought on the Project Icon credit card for five thousand dollars apiece showed no creases. Neither did the five hundred dollar red silk pillows. Likewise, the red candles were unlit, the red iPad on its red docking station next to the red roses was still playing The Best of Enya, and the seal on the room temperature Pellegrino (placed on the red table, next to the red vase) was unbroken. In spite of the eight days it had taken me to furnish this room to such precise specifications, no one appeared to have set foot in it.
Same deal: leather bean bags fluffed and perfect. Mongolian dream catcher untroubled by a breeze from the switched-off wind machine. Giant vat of drinking water (marked “Kangen” in black Sharpie) still full to the brim and gurgling quietly to itself. And under the Broadway-style vanity mirror, a foot-long roast beef sub, placed strategically next to a square-jawed Action Man figure, who for reasons not worth getting into right now was dressed in nothing but a frilly pink Barbie doll bra. Attached to the latter was a note from Len, which read, “Best we could manage, I’m afraid!”
Uh-oh—something’s up, I thought.
And this was a problem. Because we were out of time.
3
Sanity Check
THINGS WERE PRETTY desperate at Project Icon after Nigel Crowther left. I mean, by most accounts, season twelve had been our worst ever. This was of course thanks largely to Crowther, who—in a blatant act of sabotage—had repeatedly told the audience to vote for Ernie Bucket, a cross-eyed Wisconsin tractor salesman with horrific facial warts and a single octave range (his debut album, Ain’t Pretty, But Sure Can Sing, would go on to sell a hundred and twenty copies, mostly in the greater Milwaukee area). Predictions of our cancellation were all over the Internet, and the crew’s morale was so low, I saw people—okay, one person—weeping at their desks.
As for me: Every morning, I woke up with a new plan to get on a plane to Honolulu.
That wasn’t an option, of course. Not if I wanted enough money in the bank to take a year off and finish my Novel of Immense Profundity. In fact, I was starting to wonder if a year would be enough, given the lack of recent progress.
So far, this was all I had written:
The old man’s knobbled, weary arms pulled at the oars, as a lashing rain drenched his robes. With each hellish clap of thunder, he thought of what his grandfather had told him when he was a boy: “Let ye be warned, my child! Never go out on the Black Lake of Sorrow when the shutters of the Old House are closed!”
It was epic, for sure. And it spanned generations. (I was quite proud of the grandfather character.) But as you’d expect at such a preliminary stage of the creative process, a number of plot issues remained. Such as: Who the hell was this knobbled, weary old man? Why was he wearing a robe? What was he doing on a boat, on a lake? Where was the lake? Why hadn’t he used a more convenient mode of transportation? Was the name “Black Lake of Sorrow” a little overwrought? (I’d already toned it down from the “Black Lake of Doom.”)