Biblical (30 page)

“If you like.” She turned to the window, her face emptying of the little animation that had been there. “I won’t be here. Still.”

Jack Hudson did a mental calculation of the age of the commissioning exec producer sitting opposite him and guessed that he had worked in television longer than Tony Elmes had been alive. The TV industry had become an infantocracy, falling into the careless, inexpert hands of adolescents, their shiny, fresh faces full of blank enthusiasm and their heads full of guff. But, if Hudson was honest with himself, it had always been that way; it had been like that when he himself had been a young man with a shiny, fresh face full of blank enthusiasm and a head full of guff.

Jack Hudson’s face wasn’t fresh and shiny any more. The middle-aged man who stared back each morning from the shaving mirror told him that, confronting him with a reality Hudson couldn’t accept. Dark good looks and even darker vigor had turned saturnine and sullen. How could he be in his late fifties when he’d been twenty-five just the other day?

It wasn’t that Elmes was a moron or ill-educated – far from it – it was just that he belonged to that plugged-in, instant-info generation that seemed to have appeared from nowhere. Nor, really, was Elmes an asshole, but at this precise moment it comforted Hudson to think of him as one.

The two men sat in a doorless ‘encounter space’ on the fourth floor. Hudson remembered when meetings had been in offices or conference rooms – rooms with doors. People didn’t have meetings any more, they had ‘head-to-heads’ in ‘encounter
spaces’ installed to ‘deformalize interactions between creatives’. It was all bullshit. When he had started in the business, if you wanted to ‘deformalize creative interactions’ you took a director and producer to the bar on the corner of Fifth and got drunk. Some of Hudson’s best documentary ideas had been pitched through a whiskey glass. Now he sat, his despair oozing into the soft leather of the low club chair, with an exec producer who looked as if a barman would ask him for ID, in a doorless fourth-floor room that was all soft couches, occasional tables, corporate artwork on the walls and an espresso machine in the corner.

“All I want is to make good television, Tony,” he repeated.

“That’s what we all want to do, Jack. And that is exactly what we do here.” Elmes answered with a hint of admonishment.

“I mean good television the way we used to. Quality TV, quality documentaries, quality dramas. Not more reality crap.”

“Jack, we don’t produce crap. Reality, yes – crap, no. There is a public appetite for reality shows and there is no way to avoid them. What we do here is create reality television that strives to be better than the rest.”

“Great … competing to be the tallest man in Lilliput. Reality shows and soaps are lowest-common-denominator television – you know it, I know it, everyone does. It’s not even reality – it’s real people
pretending
to be real people, playing their own lives like movie parts. It’s lame, it’s cheap, it’s feebleminded.”

“That’s just elitist crap, Jack. I never took you for an intellectual snob.”

“Saying that we shouldn’t screen child pornography simply because there would be a market for it isn’t elitism or intellectual snobbery, it’s simple common sense and decency. The only thing stopping some people in this business catering for needs like that is because it’s illegal. Take that away and Christ knows what would happen.”

“You don’t really believe that, Jack …”

“Don’t I? Give people enough license and they lose all boundaries. The idea of comedy in the Roman Coliseum was to have contests to the death between gladiators who were blind, crippled or kids. And in the arcades beneath the Coliseum, you could buy anyone for any purpose, including children. That’s what people will sink to … the only difference between now and then is we have the technology to deliver it faster and better. The Internet is our Coliseum and television is catching up. We need to take some kind of moral stance.”

“Moral stance?” asked Elmes incredulously.

“You know what I mean … I just want to make television we can be proud of.”

“I appreciate that. And there is no one working in this department who is not aware – who is not in awe – of your pedigree and reputation. But the time for the kind of program you’re pitching is past. I’m sorry – and I really
am
sorry – but that’s the simple fact of the matter.”

“You telling me I’m washed up, is that it? No place for my documentaries in this Brave New World of pseudo-celebrities and fake reality?”

“Christ no, Jack. But I
am
saying that the Golden Age of television, as it is imagined, is behind us, much as it pains me to say that. We can no longer justify the budget for what are basically political documentaries. We don’t broadcast television, we narrowcast it. I don’t know if we can even call it television any more – at least as many people watch our output on PCs, tablets, handhelds, smart phones as do on conventional television sets.”

“Doesn’t that just mean that we have a bigger than ever audience? People are smart, Tony. They’re only dumb if you treat them like they’re dumb. I believe there’s an audience for this …” Hudson stabbed a finger at the two proposals that lay on the table between them.

“I’m sorry, Jack, but we’re not the people to make them. This
isn’t about winning Big Sky or Full Frame awards, it’s about winning viewers. About solid Nielsen.” Elmes sighed, leaned back in his chair and ran the fingers of both hands through his dark hair. As he pushed his hair back from his brow, Hudson noticed with malicious gratification that Elmes’s hairline was receding. I may be getting old, Hudson told himself, but at least I’ve got a full head of hair.

“I know it’s difficult to accept,” continued Elmes, “but things have changed. This is all about living reality, not the Ken Burns effect. Like you said, at one time American TV audiences were interested in the world around them, looking outwards and into the lives of others. That’s all changed. Television isn’t a telescope any more, it’s a microscope. It’s all about looking inwards, at ourselves, at lives like ours. I’m not saying that’s right, but that’s the way it is.”

“So that’s it?”

“That’s it. Or at least as far as your pitch ideas are concerned. Sorry.” Elmes leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table and closing the distance between him and Hudson. “I want you to know something Jack: I watched your stuff all the time, when I was at school and then college. All your documentaries. I always considered them – and still do – as an essential part of my education. You were a huge influence on me … an inspiration. And a big part of why I chose television as a career.”

Hudson held his hands open in a
so-what’s-your-point?
gesture. It was a small-minded, ungracious act and he knew it.

“Yours is a talent that is still needed,” Elmes continued, undeterred. “A talent we can still use to great effect. Your name behind a project still carries a lot of weight. Gravitas. And I think we have something that would be perfect in your hands. Something that would benefit from a producer of your experience. And it is a documentary.”

“Okay, let’s have it,” Hudson sighed.

“Have you ever heard of someone called John Astor?”

Macbeth and Corbin crossed back over the open green space of the Upham Bowl, in front of the main administration building courtyard, passing a maple tree that stood elevated on a small knoll. When he’d been at McLean, Macbeth had spent many afternoons sitting on the grass at the foot of that particular tree, writing up research notes. He had always understood why, for many, McLean had provided an environment for creative effort: it had been here that Sylvia Plath’s bell jar of depression had been lifted, albeit temporarily, inspiring the poet to write her only novel.

“So what do you think?” asked Corbin as they sat eating lunch in the de Marneffe Cafeteria.

“About the Carbonara or about Deborah Canning?” Macbeth stirred his pasta with his fork. “I’m beginning to get an unpleasant feeling that you
didn’t
forget about my last patient here. The one I treated in that very same room.”

“Debbie is exhibiting the same classic Dissociative Identity Disorder traits your patient did: depersonalization, derealization, amnesia and personality-trait loss.”

“Yeah, I get that.” Macbeth frowned. “But my patient displayed the key symptom: multiple personalities. Debbie doesn’t have multiple personalities; she’s struggling to hang on to the one she’s got.”

Corbin leaned forward. “What if there are alters – personalities she retreats into but doesn’t show us? These absences
she has – the long periods she believes she doesn’t exist because there’s no one there to validate her existence – she could be escaping into other identities. It’s just that her alters play out internally, in her head, and we don’t get to see them.”

“Listen Pete, any Dissociative Identity diagnosis is controversial. There have been
no
diagnoses outside the US and even here there’s a large body who think it’s hooey. I stuck my neck out with my DID diagnosis of my last patient here and it ended up with him dead and me before a committee. It’s the reason I went into research. You want my opinion on Debbie? Cotard’s Delusion. It’s the most elaborate and coherently structured case I’ve seen, but that’s what I’d go for.”

“But she doesn’t believe that she’s dead,” said Corbin.

“Believing she’s non-existent is the same thing and more consistent with her internal logic – plus her work has added a very specific twist. Patients with Cotard’s Delusion of Death often believe they inhabit the world as disembodied spirits. It’s just a belief in ghosts is not part of Debbie’s premorbid intellectual architecture.”

Corbin finished a mouthful of food. “I know DID is controversial and that you had your fingers burned – but I went through your case notes and I think you were right. Your patient’s suicide was unforeseeable, given his progress, and had nothing to do with your diagnosis. I think that Debbie is displaying many of the same symptoms.”

“God, Pete, that’s a stretch.” Macbeth thought for a moment. “Okay, let me talk to her again. There’s a cop coming in from California – Ramirez. He wants to talk to her if you’re okay with it. I’d like to be there too.”

“Okay,” said Corbin cautiously. “But I want you to remember that I called you into this as a colleague and a professional, not because of your previous involvement with Melissa. I want Debbie to remain the priority.”

Macbeth nodded. “Of course.” He gave Corbin Ramirez’s contact details.

“I’ll see what can be arranged.” said Corbin. “By the way, I meant to show you this …”

They had reached the main administration building. Corbin struggled with the file he was carrying, eventually taking out a foolscap sheet of lined paper and handing it to Macbeth. It was filled from top to bottom with neat, very small and very careful handwriting.

“When she was first admitted, Debbie spent entire days writing that same line, over and over again. I have thirty pages exactly the same as that one.”

Macbeth read the line.

WE ARE BECOMING
.

“John Astor the founder of the Astor dynasty,” asked Hudson, “or John Astor the Internet spook everyone’s talking about?”

“The latter,” said Elmes. “And he’s more than an Internet spook. Much, much more. The FBI have a strangely serious interest in him and he’s rumored to be connected to some kind of cult.”

“One of these fanatical religious groups?” asked Hudson.

“This is where it gets confusing. Some reports link him to Blind Faith, the fundo-Christian group, others with a group calling themselves the Simulists, some kind of science-based Doomsday cult. They’re behind the
we are becoming
‘graffiti’ you see all over the place. Remember how they found the billionaire Samuel Tennant starved to death in his Park Lane penthouse?”

“I remember …”

“Tennant was connected to the Simulists. There’s a rumor that, just before he did his Howard Hughes act, he claimed to have gotten his hands on a copy of Astor’s book,
Phantoms of Our Own Making
.”

“This is all beginning to sound like some New World Order, Illuminati conspiracy crap,” said Hudson.

“Hear me out, Jack. I put a researcher onto Astor’s history. Turns out there is one. It doesn’t make much sense, but it’s there.”

“In what way doesn’t make sense?”

“For a start, the chronology of it means Astor should either be dead or impossibly old. He was important in twentieth-century philosophy, but more as a shadow than a figure. He’s claimed to be the author of several incredibly influential philosophical works, none submitted for publication and most in the form of private correspondence with other philosophers, particularly philosophers of science.”

Hudson leaned forward. “Go on …”

“Well, despite his correspondents being meticulous preservers of such writings, none of these letters or essays have survived his death.”

“But he’s supposed to be still alive …”

Elmes shrugged. “We don’t know when, where, how or even if he died. Nor do we know where and when he was born. You see, John Astor’s existence only comes to us through these writings. Almost as if he exists only in reflection by others. I’m telling you, it’s a mystery. And one I think you are the best person to clear up … and to make one hell of a documentary about it.”

Jack leaned back into his chair again, his expression wary. “And exactly how is a piece about a mysterious twentieth-century philosopher, who may or may not have existed, sexier than the European Integration piece I’ve just pitched?”

“Okay … For starters, we know that philosophers from Henri Poincaré to Karl Popper and a whole lot of others were aware of or had contact with Astor and many were greatly influenced by him.”

“So?”

“Just taking those two examples, Poincaré died when Popper was ten years old. How could Astor have had peer-level friendships with them both? For that matter, how could he possibly still be alive today? Yet there are mentions of him – of clearly the same character – in the writings of half a dozen philosophers of science right through the twentieth century, up until
today. And this is the doozy – there’s an urban legend that if you manage to track down the manuscript for Astor’s book, reading it drives you mad. That’s what’s supposed to have happened to Tennant.”