Elimination Night Read online

  Still, something didn’t feel right.

  I could tell.

  Moments before Bonnie was due to enter The Lion’s Den, I saw Teddy, Len, and Bibi huddling by the lighting desk. They were discussing something in great detail. Teddy was upset. Len was pointing. Bibi walked away, arms folded, then returned, scowling. More talk. Then whatever it was they’d been haggling over seemed to be resolved. Bibi took her place in the cage, Teddy disappeared, and Len made a long, whispered phone call.

  Five minutes passed… Len was still on the phone. Another five minutes. Snorts of impatience now from the crew. This was getting ridiculous. Finally, Len hung up. Instead of getting back to the shoot, however, he called Joey over. They had a short but violently animated conversation. Joey seemed pissed. Len seemed pissed, too. Then Joey called over Mitch, who seemed even more pissed. Mitch ended up doing that whispery-shouty thing, arms flying about all over the place. And then—at last—some kind of peace was reached.

  Mitch huffed off somewhere. Joey returned to The Lion’s Den with his fellow judges.

  Lights down.

  Mic check.

  Positions.

  And-a-three. And-a-two. And-a—

  Now: Bonnie climbing the stairs to the cage. Anxious music. Close-up as Bonnie reaches the top. She looks sensational: red shoes, gray pencil dress, hair in a layered ponytail. Extraordinary to think she’s just nineteen years old, that she has willingly dedicated the rest of her life to a man who will never walk or talk again. She gives a little wave to the judges—it’s too awkward for kisses or hugs in The Lion’s Den. Then she sits. Rebalances herself. Tips back. Tips forward. Looks down at the chair, laughs nervously, and then, with leg muscles pulled tight, she holds herself steady.

  “It wasn’t your strongest performance, babe,” begins Joey. “But like I said the other day—you’re an angel. And whatever happens here, I don’t want you to stop singing. Okay?”

  Bonnie nods, gulps. “It was that song,” she explains. “I shouldn’t have let them—”

  “It’s all about song choice, man,” JD interrupts, pointlessly. “You gotta pick the right song.”

  “But I didn—”

  “Dude, you had the Boo, but not the Ka.”

  “We love ya, Bonnie,” adds Joey. “Just remember that. Always remember that, please. Some things in life—as you know—are just out of our hands. And you gotta let ’em be.”

  A bluff is coming: This much is obvious to anyone who’s ever watched Icon before. The strongest contestant gets negative signals. The judges look weary, depressed. They shake their heads a lot. They smile like it’s all for the best. And then—how could this be happening?—the awful sentence begins: “I’m so sorry, honey, but…” Cut to the break. Everything seems lost. But it’s not. It’s just a bluff. When the commercials are done, it’s back to the studio, and the verdict resumes: “I’m sorry, honey, but… YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO SEE US AGAIN IN HOLLYWOOD! YOU’RE THROUGH TO THE NEXT ROUND!”

  So predictable.

  In the monitors, Joey and JD look weary, depressed—just as expected. Now JD is shaking his head, as if preparing for the worst. Here it comes. Here it comes.

  “I’m so sorry, honey,” says Bibi, attempting to smile like it’s all-for-the-best. “But…”

  Bonnie whimpers.

  The bluff is coming.

  Wait.

  Wait…

  “But… you’re out,” says Bibi, her face revealing no emotion whatsoever. “I’m sorry.”

  I’m choking. Everyone’s choking. The room is clean out of oxygen. This surely isn’t real.

  Why would they be doing this?

  “You’re going home,” Bibi confirms, almost like she doesn’t even believe it herself. “This is the end.”

  A photograph of Staff Sergeant Mike Donovan now fills the monitors. He’s looking strong and handsome before his injury. Then another photograph, this time of Bonnie and her husband on their wedding day: Bonnie is kneeling beside the wheelchair, clutching her husband’s only remaining arm. Mikey isn’t here today, thank God—his condition means he can’t fly. So he’ll have to watch this scene in February, with the rest of America. If he can bear it, of course. Now music is playing in the studio: “Last Post” bugle call. “He’s injured, not dead, you morons,” I’m thinking. Then back to Bonnie in The Lion’s Den. She’s holding it together. She stands up, thanks the judges in turn—each gets a lipless nudge on the cheek—and then she leaves the cage, managing a smile as she goes.

  Wayne Shoreline is waiting: “Tell me why you feel like you’ve failed your brutally injured husband.”

  “I don’t—”

  “It’s okay, Bonnie,” he says. “It’s all over. Let it out. This is a tragedy for you, right? How does this compare to the day you heard the news from Afghanistan?”

  She begins to respond, but up in The Lion’s Den, something is happening.

  What on earth is that… noise?

  Bonnie stops talking.

  Bibi, who had seemed so composed a few moments earlier, is making a terrible, pitiful sound, her blue dress crumpling around her like a punctured birthday balloon. Her hands are shaking. Her face is a flash flood of tears and mascara. A robotic-arm camera nosedives overhead for a better angle. If Bibi’s faking this, she’s doing a phenomenal job. Now her whole body is convulsing. She covers her face. Joey looks at her in bafflement, then turns to JD. They both shrug. Bibi’s wailing intensifies, so Joey tries to comfort her, but the effort is wary, halfhearted.

  “She’s so brave!” Bibi is protesting. “She doesn’t, uh, uh, DESERVE this!” JD is edging into the action now: With some trepidation, his left arm creeps across Bibi’s shoulder.

  Meanwhile: The sobs are getting louder, thicker, faster… wetter. “This wasn’t my decision!” she yelps, hugging a pillow. “I can’t believe we did this! I can’t… uh, uh… go on.”

  She goes limp. Literally—WHUMP!—face down.

  Another camera swings overhead.

  “Er, guys?” says JD, looking at the camera. Everyone’s thinking the same thing: What the hell’s he doing? First rule of television, never acknowledge the camera.

  “Jesus!” yells Joey, also breaking the rule. “Can we get some help here? We got a screamer!”

  KLUNK.

  Houselights come on. Everything stops. Then a blast of cool air as the emergency doors swing open. From behind them come loud, confident voices. “Where is she?” Boots on metal. A uniformed ambulance crew is now climbing the stairs to the suspended cage. I glimpse an oxygen tank, a stretcher, a survival blanket. Joey and JD are told to stand aside. Then a thick palm over the camera. For a moment: Nothing in the monitors but calloused flesh and a dirty wedding ring. Another camera ducks into the fray, almost cracking Joey in the temple. Len tries to stop it—“SWITCH THOSE BLOODY THINGS OFF!”—but he’s too late: Joey has already drop-kicked the telescoping lens, cracking the glass.

  Now sirens outside, as the fire department arrives—all of it, judging by the noise. The Las Vegas Police Department isn’t far behind. I no longer feel as though I’m on the set of a TV show. I feel as though I’m at the scene of a natural disaster. A steady beat of rotors above is making the walls vibrate. More sirens, at hearing-loss volume. As for Bibi—she’s no longer visible amid the uniformed personnel. They’ve picked her up and are carrying her down the stairs in a well-rehearsed sixteen-legged shuffle. People are yelling, pointing, running in all directions—with the exception of one man, who’s standing right across from me, surveying the chaos while talking calmly into his phone.

  It’s… Teddy. Is he dictating something? I move closer but he hangs up, passes the phone to an assistant, and with a tiny smirk, thrusts his hands deep in his pockets.

  He seems amused. No, satisfied.

  I look around for Bonnie, but she’s gone.

  18

  Vengeance Enough

  THE SEASON THIRTEEN premier of Project Icon was due to go out at eight o’clock on a Wednesd
ay evening, near the end of the month. It was hard to believe it was actually happening—but with every day that passed, it seemed less and less likely that Sir Harold Killoch would order the preemptive cancellation that ShowBiz magazine kept predicting so confidently on its front page. Billboards went up. Listings were printed. And then the very first sneak-peeks began to air during Rabbit prime time—most of them featuring Joey being either pixelated or bleeped.

  Seven months it had taken us to get this far—thanks to the sanity checks, the contract negotiations, the audition tours, and then Las Vegas Week. It felt more like seven years.

  My plan was to watch the show at home in my pajamas—a luxury I obviously wouldn’t have when the live episodes began. I’d even bought my very first TV for the purpose. Yeah, I know: How very nineties of me. But the show wasn’t going out live on the Internet, so I didn’t have any choice, and as much as I wasn’t exactly looking forward to seeing how the auditions had been edited together, there was no way I was going to miss it. I had the whole evening all mapped out, in fact. At around seven, I’d open a bottle of wine from my super-special reserve—i.e., the stuff that cost more than two dollars a bottle—then I’d order a chicken tikka masala from The Gates of Eternal Destiny (Full Bar & Restaurant) on Sunset, and then, when my one-woman feast arrived, I’d sit on my bed with my plastic glass and disposable cutlery and cringe alone at Bibi’s distracted gazing, JD’s booya-ka-kas, and Joey’s… well, his general offensiveness. (“That performance was almost as crazy-ass hot as your daughter,” he remarked to one of the older contestants during the early auditions, apparently unaware that the girl in question had only just celebrated her twelfth birthday.)

  My fantasy night in never happened, of course. Len wanted the judges and “a few key members of staff” to watch the season premier together—yet another effort to promote camaraderie. In reality, the only thing it promoted was an argument between Bibi and Joey over where the screening should be held. Joey, who was booked to play a gig with Honeyload in Kuala Lumpur the night before, said it should be at his house, because he was a sixty-two-year-old man, and he’d be exhausted from all the traveling. Bibi countered by saying that because she was looking after quadruplets (or rather, she and her twelve nannies were looking after quadruplets) the gathering should take place at her place. Joey then pointed out that he lived at the top of Sunset Plaza Drive in the Hollywood Hills, a more convenient location for pretty much all the executives and producers who’d been invited. Bibi responded with the observation that her house was bigger, more expensive, and had twice been featured prominently in Architectural Digest magazine. Plus, she had her own private movie theater.

  And so it went on.

  Bibi won, naturally. Which meant I had to take the hour-long journey to Secret Mountain, and then the hour-long journey back home again. Only this time—no surprise—Bibi didn’t send David to Little Russia in the Rolls-Royce to pick me up. Instead, I had to take a cab, which charged me four hundred dollars (thanks to an obviously rigged meter) for the ride. Worse luck: The cab wasn’t allowed beyond the military-grade checkpoint at Secret Mountain’s entrance.

  “That’s prohibitive, ma’am,” said the spectacularly obese woman who filled (quite literally) the gatehouse. “No taxicabs, buses, coaches, minicoaches, or multipassenger vans.”

  “Prohibitive?”

  “It’s on the sign, ma’am.”

  “Don’t you mean prohibit-ed?”

  “Read the sign, ma’am.”

  This wasn’t going anywhere. “Okay,” I said, changing tactics. “I’m here for the Vasquez residence.”

  “Name?”

  “Sasha King.”

  “… I only have a Bill King, ma’am.”

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “You just said your name was Sasha, ma’am.”

  We went back and forth like this for—oh, forever. Eventually, it was established that, yes, I was indeed Bill King, and no, this did not mean an exception to the no-cabs rule could be made. So my unshaven driver with his jerry-rigged meter performed a U-turn in the fire lane and declared that I now owed him an extra eighty-five dollars for waiting time. I paid him and climbed out onto the street. There was no alternative: I was going to have to walk to Bibi’s. Uphill, in the dark. With no sidewalks. The woman in the gatehouse told me it was “probably less than a mile” but given that she looked as though she’d never walked farther than a few yards in her life, I wasn’t about to take her word for it. In fact, the Google Maps app on my phone informed me that it was two miles.

  At least I’d worn jeans and flats.

  This no longer seemed like such a good thing when I reached the house, however. I’d underestimated—by some degree—the grandness of the occasion. This wasn’t going to be a bunch of us sitting around in wearable blankets, chugging domestic beer, and laughing at inside jokes, as the e-mailed invitation had suggested. Oh, no. By the looks of things, it was going to be something more closely resembling an awards-season aftershow party. Bibi’s driveway already resembled a Concours d’Elegance, what with the vintage gull-wing Mercedes, next to three black Range Rovers, next to a glowering Aston Martin. And more cars were arriving by the minute, greeted by a line of valets in red “BV” monogrammed jumpsuits. They ignored me as I crunched wearily through the gravel between them.

  At the door, I was met by the same housekeeper as before. If she knew who I was, she didn’t acknowledge it. This time, she led me in the opposite direction to the kitchen, to a separate wing of the house. We walked all the way through it to the other side, exited into an rose garden, and followed a stone pathway to an outhouse, which I assumed from the vintage Gone with the Wind billboard at the entrance was Bibi’s private movie theater. Tuxedoed waiters greeted me there, holding aloft trays of champagne and mini lobster rolls. I inhaled three of the latter before getting through the door. And then… well, there I was, feeling catastrophically underdressed. Bibi was wearing some kind of orange-plumed minidress with matching plastic go-go boots and a necklace with enough diamonds on it to fund a minor African civil war. Edouard was in a three-piece suit, as were the couple’s five pit bull puppies. Len had turned up in his chalk-stripes. Joey sported a kilt. And just when I thought things couldn’t get any more uncomfortable, I noticed a terrifyingly familiar outline across the room: a jagged edge, almost like a royal crown. White-silver in color. Yes, there was only one man on earth who could be identified with such ease by the mere shape of his hair.

  Sir Harold Killoch.

  I felt as though my soul had just frozen over.

  Surprisingly, however, the evening turned out to be a relaxing affair—at first, anyway. The wide red armchairs in the theater were the softest things I had ever sat on. The champagne was delicious. And after the lobster rolls, we were each presented with a single, luxuriously battered french fry, followed by a buffet of candy served in little paper bags. And the show? Well, it was better than expected. I even teared up for a moment during the bit when Mia Pelosi walked onto the podium in a purple ball gown and sang “The Prayer.” The editors had earned their wages, that was for sure. Especially when it came to Bibi. One or two moments notwithstanding, they’d managed to cut the tape in a way that made her seem entirely focused on the contestants throughout, rather than gazing beyond the set at Teddy’s cue cards, as she’d done throughout most of the Houston and Milwaukee auditions. What surprised me more, however, was her presence. You didn’t feel it in person, when she was just this tiny, glittery… pain in the ass. But up there on screen, no matter where she was in the frame, it was extraordinary. She was—for want of a better way of putting it—a star. When the cameras were on her, Icon wasn’t a reality show any more: It was a blockbuster. Amazingly, Joey didn’t have this same effect. He was more entertaining, no doubt whatsoever. But he wasn’t an event in his own right.

  When the hour was over, the lights came on to the double-ting of silver on glass. The screen went black. And then Sir Harold appeared in front of it—spoon a
nd champagne flute in hand—grinning in a way that could have been taken as either sinister or paternal. I decided on the latter. It might have been the booze.

  “Well, well, well,” he began. “And to think they said you’d never make it this far.”

  Nervous laughter.

  Sir Harold looked slowly around the room, as if mentally identifying each employee in turn, calculating their value, their cost… their usefuless to the whole Big Corp operation.

  “Seriously, everyone,” he continued. “Very well done. Really, I really mean that.” With his hands still full, he mimed applause. “I know you’ve all been reading about yourselves a lot in the press lately. And if you believe ShowBiz magazine, which I don’t, by the way”—this prompted more laughter, and mutters of “Chaz fucking Chipford”—“you guys are facing an either/or situation with The Talent Machine. Nonsense! I truly believe that both shows can thrive.”

  Silence.

  “Well, don’t you?”

  A desperate cheer filled the room, led by Len, who sounded almost hysterical.

  “And the proof of that I’m certain will come tomorrow morning,” Sir Harold went on, his tone unexpectedly hardening. “With all the hype around season thirteen, and our greatly increased budget to attract the very best in talent”—he pointed in turn at Joey and Bibi—“I’m very, very excited to see where the ratings come in. Even a modest ten percent gain in the metrics will really prove to the world the ongoing strength of this franchise. And anything more than that—well, that’s just gravy!” He paused for a moment, resuming in a more contemplative tone. “Y’know” he said, “In the village of Nbdala, South Africa, where my dear mother was born, they have a saying, and it translates something like this: ‘For the wise farmer, a good harvest is vengeance enough.’ So here’s to silencing our critics with a good harvest, eh? And to some gravy on the top, heh-heh-heh.”

  Up went his glass.