The reporter may have smiled. But he couldn’t get a clear view; she’d turned away quickly and squatted over the grip’s black box. All at once she was masculine as a baseball catcher.
“Yes thank you Mr. Grissom. Now you choose yourself: do you wish to stand or sit?”
At which the two bulbs inside the reflecting aluminum bowl exploded, and for several moments Grissom was suspended in a bright blindness through which the Oriental woman moved authoritatively, shouting in her other voice: “Yeah now, yeah now…all right so cut it…you can count it up or you can count it down but you better get it on either way….” Grissom smelled spearmint gum, then an oppressive lime breath freshener, then spearmint gum again. When his sight at last returned, the blonde girl was holding her compass-thing under his eyes, blurry against the bridge of his nose, and the grip was tucking a wire around his — Grissom’s — lelt thigh.
“It is three,” the girl called, sounding firm again.
“When they’re old like that,” someone else shouted, “the face just goes.”
“Mr. Grissom, please relax,” the reporter said when he jerked his leg away from the muscular grip. “Please, let us do our setup here, just stand still, you see what I mean.” She was out of sight, behind him possibly. “Time’s running short, and besides, you should understand before we begin, Mr. Grissom, you should understand that we are on your side. We are, ah, think of us as a company or an agency that works for you. Yes you do know that, don’t you. We work for you.”
“Give it some back light.” The Camera/Face loomed up once more. “There’s no time to tweak the chromo-levels and I’m telling you, his face will just go.”
The sectioned jade suit came in view again. Before Grissom could find the woman’s eyes, however, the grip was back on him, this time sprinkling Grissom’s cheeks and forehead with a kind of powder. It felt gluey, clingy.
“And Mr. Grissom? Another thing, please. Our viewers would be interested in knowing if you’re related to the astronaut, the American astronaut, you see who I mean.”
Already he was shaking his head. But could this be him, actually? Hey Grissom — the same person? Now that his eyes were shut the reflector lights had turned the inside of his lids a strange burnt orange, a color he couldn’t recall ever seeing before. His face prickled under its new coating in a way that made him think of a match just dipped in sulphur. Worst of all, he was responding sensibly to something he knew was the fakest friendliness he’d heard in his life. Yet Grissom kept shaking his head. This question, he thought with the same heightened reasonableness he’d used earlier, is a question I have been asked many times before.
“The astronaut,” he said when the grip moved away, “was no relation. My father came from Greece.”
“I see,” the reporter said.
Grissom’s eyes seemed slower adjusting, this second time around. The figures were no more than darker folds in a shattering orange sun.
“And oh yes, Mr. Grissom? That reminds me. Do you have any family you want with you now?”
“No.” His knees too, he noticed, were trembling badly.
“You wife perhaps, Mr. Grissom? Children or, ah, other?”
“No.”
“Your typical executive,” the grip said. He’d hardly bothered to lower his voice. “Like the song says, Starbaby: ‘It’s just me, me, me, me.’“
“Now that song,” the blonde girl said, “is a new song.” She sounded as if she were smiling. She appeared to have moved over beside the grip.
“I see,” the reporter said, “I see.”
“Counting two sixties to fifteen in front!” the grip shouted.
Beyond the aluminum reflector, beyond the crew’s sudden zombie stiffness, in the back of the house by the basement doors, Syl sat at the kitchen table talking on the telephone.
“Hello Susan?” she said. “Yes it’s your sister again, your sister who married a caveman. He’s going ahead with it. Louie is going on TV.”
“Now,” the reporter was saying to Grissom meantime, “there’s one last thing, very important.” She stood beside him, speaking now at high speed, but she still had her face averted. It seemed she’d frozen, looking up at the ceiling. “Very important, Mr. Grissom. Don’t be afraid to let your feelings show. In this business, Mr. Grissom, we work with what people can see. We have a saying, ‘You can show them what you can’t tell them.’“
“Hey,” Syl said over the phone, “Susan, hey, it’s like this. The whole world knows before his family knows. His own family has to find out on the TV. Hey, who does he think he is?”
“Mr. Grissom,” the reporter said quickly, “tonight for example we have only thirty seconds to get the job done. We have a thirty-second spot, plus a thirty-second shadow. Ah, fifteen seconds’ leeway, that is, before and after. Anyway Mr. Grissom, the point is, you can be a superstar with whatever time you get, or you can put millions of viewers to sleep. The choice is yours.”
“I can’t live with the man,” Syl told her sister. “Here Louie’s always saying, ‘respect the family,’ ‘protect the family.’ And then he shoves me into the garbage! Hey, thirty years we’ve been married, is that nothing? I loved him, is that nothing?”
“So Mr. Grissom,” the reporter said, “we want you to show them somebody who’s all one feeling, you see what I mean. We don’t have time for any gray areas. And I think you want the same thing. You want to show them.” Grissom nodded, fast, with her. “Yes you’re all business now. So then let’s start working it up, Mr. Grissom. Watch yourself on the TV, yes watch yourself, I know it helps to jack those feelings up. And oh. Oh I nearly forgot. You will have to watch your language of course, Mr. Grissom. But otherwise go for it. Go.”
“Counting one sixty to fifteen in front!” the grip yelled.
“Oh Godgodgod,” Syl said, “there he goes.” With her free hand she touched the phone receiver. She ran her finger round and round in the tears on the plastic, as if fondling a rosary. “Susan, how can I forgive him? I can’t.”
“Watch my language?” Grissom said.
He felt his tears gluey with the face powder. He heard his voice breaking. And in that moment of his question, finally, he got one good look at the reporter’s face. She came up so close and unexpectedly that the businessman could see nothing but makeup. He saw pancake, the gloss that crusted over the cheekbones. Painted eyebrows, eye-shadow, eye-liner, the thick and artificial moisture of the mouth. Just one good look at her face and then he knew she had no face. He thought: Yes. Those cunts behind the mirror, those cock sucking buttfucking cunts of sharks behind the mirror — yes they showed me the truth.
“I can’t live with the man,” Syl repeated, off by herself.
“Watch my language?” Grissom repeated. “All right, how’s this. Don’t you blankety-blank-blanks think it’s time to join the human race?”
Chasing Names
Not that we hadn’t struggled time and again to escape, to leave behind the agony of having died nameless. Not that, faced with our deaths, we’d given up caring. No. From the beginning of our time here we’d turned our backs on the hurtful earth, as if it were a calendar scratched with the fingernails into the bricks of Death Row. Instead we’d dragged ourselves towards brighter possibilities. We dragged ourselves towards the stars. We knew even then that the stars were the others here, the ones unlike us: the men and women who’d died with names. Against the dark, their ghosts shone like gods.