Faces in Time (35 page)

As her fingers unfold the paper freshly removed from the envelope delivered only moments ago to her by courier but dated nine years earlier, she braces herself for bad news. At the sixteenth word, fear shoots through her.

“You don’t know me, but you were my only friend in a time that’s been erased from the world, although it will always have existed within me. Before you deem me insane, consider the following: I know you love no one more than your late grandfather, your favorite fruit is an avocado, and your high school boyfriend died in a car accident and the last words he said to you were, ‘I think we should see other people when I go off to college.’ When you confided the latter to me, you said that I was the only one you’ve ever told that to. If you’ve never said that to anyone now that you’ve never known me, then you have proof that I’m telling the truth.

“While the future is always subject to be changed, you died on September 25th. That should be tomorrow if this letter has arrived on time. Your ex-boyfriend, Edmund, who used to work at the home with you, broke out of prison and strangled you. It had already been a traumatic week for me before losing you. I’m sure we were only friends because I paid to be a resident at the assisted living home at which you worked—after all, I never saw you when you were off on Sundays—but, besides just doing your job, you were kind to me. You gave me a card on my birthday and bought me a stocking filled with candy for Christmas. None of the other caregivers were like you.

“When you were gone and my last dream had been crushed, I lost my fears of what might go wrong and finally tried to go back in time as I had planned years ago. It worked, and, Elise, I got her—the one I pined over my whole life; the one you listened to me talk about every day. She’s with me now as I write this. I have all that I ever wanted, and I’ll never end up in a sad little room, crushed and afraid. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving you to die.

“If the things I’ve mentioned are wrong—namely no convict ex-boyfriend, the world’s changed enough through my interference that you’re safe. If what I’ve said is true, if you have an ex-boyfriend named Edmund who has been in jail, then please protect yourself. I don’t know everything the future holds; I may not be alive at the time you’re reading this. So, this letter was written nine years before it’s been scheduled to be delivered to make sure it got to you even if I couldn’t. If I’m alive; I’ll be there looking after you on that day. But, be aware that you could very well be alone.

Take excellent care,

C.”

It’s just behind the glass doors that lead from the back of the lobby to the parking garage in which they sit. It all started about an hour ago when David heard Chester’s hotel room door open and close. Being awake for his own reasons, David decided to come out into the hallway and accompany Chester on his trip to get some fresh air.

The last few minutes of conversation have happened like this:

“I just feel like I’ve already blown it,” David wheezed.

“What makes you think that?” laughed Chester for the first time since they came down to the parking garage and sat down on the trunk of David’s car.

“We went out, had dinner, caught a movie, got gelato after, and nothing happened.”

“Didn’t you have a good time?”

“Sure, Janet’s amazingly cool. She even catches my
Star Wars
references. It’s just I was too chicken to do anything, and if she wanted something to happen, maybe it would’ve. So, maybe she didn’t want anything to happen.”

Chester laughed.

“Man, you’re really going to laugh at me—right here to my face?”

“No, David, that’s not it. It’s just you don’t even know.”

“Don’t know what? What’re you talking about?”

“I’m not supposed to say, but I promise you haven’t blown it; call the girl.”

“Well, what’re you talking about? You have to tell me now. You can’t say something like that and not tell me.”

“Oh, man, I don’t know; I promised.”

“Come on, I’m out here with you in the ever-fragrant parking garage at three in the morning. That deserves some inside information. We have a parking garage confidentiality clause—isn’t this where all crooks plan their crimes?”

“On TV it is.”

David said quietly staring off into nothing, “And they all seem to get caught on TV too. Guess that doesn’t help my case any.”

“No, no, it doesn’t. But, we’re not criminal masterminds, so I’m going to tell you anyway.”

David’s stare returned from the nothingness to Chester saying, “Janet tried to call you one day this week. She was so nervous that she threw up before she could get up the courage to dial your number.”

“What?”

“I swear it’s true. She really liked you too and is worried that she’s going to mess it up with you.”

“Really? She seems so confident.”

“She is, except in her love life. Bad divorce’ll do that to you.”

“So, she really was nervous trying to call me?”

“Yeah, in fact Cindy made Lucky call me to find out if you were interested in Janet. Lucky wasn’t too happy about it, but Cindy kept telling him what to ask me over the phone. That’s when he told me Janet was so nervous that she threw up—I think he spilled the beans just to irritate Cindy as payback for making him call me about it in the first place.”

“A girl that cool is nervous about calling me. Wow. Now, I’m really nervous.”

“What?”

“Now, there’s more pressure to not mess it up. If I’ve actually got a shot with a girl like her, the pressure’s harder. If I don’t have a chance at all, then I have nothing to lose and can just try to enjoy the ride.”

“Look, Dave, the only way you can mess this up is to not call her. She was calling you to ask you to go to some wedding—Cindy and Janet’s niece or something, I think. If you don’t call her soon she’s going to end up going with some jerk she doesn’t even want to be with. You’ve got to make your move.”

“Alright, I’ll give her a call.”

“Good, and don’t be nervous. Rhonda and I went with all of them to the zoo, and she was asking about you the— ”

That’s when Chester’s eyes grew focused and intense, forcing David to follow their direction to the cause.

Four eyes follow a shiny pistol barrel. It’s just behind the glass doors that lead from the back of the lobby to the parking garage. It’s in the hand of someone who has just stepped out of the elevator which is at a ninety-degree angle to the glass doors, just out of sight for Chester and David.

David’s hand goes to his goatee, stroking the thinly trimmed layer of brown hair beneath chewed fingernails.

The body slowly steps into their view. The casual and relaxed manner of walk are more nerve-racking than the depth of night in which it’s happening or the shining metal hand cannon coming their way.

A man with a thick, wild, black beard steps forward and pushes the glass door open with his free hand.

“Oh, Omar, it’s you. You can’t sleep either?” Chester asks.

“No, I was sleeping so well that I thought I’d try it out in the garage amidst the exhaust fumes.”

Through years of TV writing, his words have been broadcast in many living rooms more often than the voices of the families that live in them. His personality has made an imprint on the culture of the country and much of the world, yet he has no problem awkwardly stepping on the bumper and taking a seat next to David and Chester on the trunk of the car, pressing his plaid pajamas against the car’s dusty body.

Leaning forward to look around Chester to Omar, David asks, “Not to be second-guessing you, Mr. Executive Producer, sir, but do you think it was such a great idea to walk out the elevator door with the gun first—glistening in the hallway light? Our man Chester here is a bit jumpy with a deranged killer after him.”

“Was it really that bad, Chaz?” chuckles Omar.

Chester responds, “Could’ve been worse. You know, if you walked in wearing a hockey mask, a gray wig made to resemble your mother’s hair, a gleaming machete covered in entrails in one hand and a chainsaw in the other—yeah, it might’ve been a little worse than the gun.”

“You’ve been watching too many weird movies.”

“Where do you think I get the fodder for our critically-acclaimed satirical commentary? Weird entertainment is an ironic goldmine.”

David laughs into his turn at the verbal jousting, “A-h-h-h, satirical, ironic, and fodder all used in the same response. Does it get any better than that? That’s why I dropped out of my doctorate in computer science,” altering his voice to a more sophisticated tone, “Inside any happy man, aestheticism and the allure of an apt appellation are more appealing than avarice and ambition.”

Chuckling starts and Chester says loudly, “Not to mention ostentatious alliteration.”

Laughter escalates for elen seconds and then ebbs for seven.

“God, are we pathetic or what? Out here in the middle of the night, giggling like schoolgirls, sitting on a car, and completely enthralled with our own playing with words. If we were any more full of ourselves we’d be cannibals,” offers Omar.

David answers, “No dork possesses more self-absorbed geekery than the writer-nerd,” pausing for the line’s absorption before pointing out, “By the way, he prefers Chester. He hates Chaz.”

“Is that right, Chester?”

“Well, yeah, but it wasn’t a big deal.”

Omar explains, “No, someone’s name is always a big deal. Know the name of everyone on your set—the name they like to be called. Every episode will turn out better that way; trust me. Have the same celebration for the crew on their birthdays as you do for the stars. It’s the only way to have a team. And for the love of God, you better get the same size cake for everyone. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve had to hear someone complain about that. Heaven forbid Jane’s cheesecake was a little bigger than John’s carrot cake. It can bring a whole production to a halt faster than an L.A. earthquake.”

“That’s mighty nice of you to do things that way,” David says.

“Well, nice or not, it’s the most practical way to run a creative ship—you’ll end up with better quality shows when everyone’s happy. It’s the best strategy for the opportunist whether they’re a great person or just interested in the bottom line productivity. It’s Machiavellian and saccharine at the same time.”

“Mach-a-Saccharine?” David asks.

“Something like that,” concedes Omar.

Chester
smiles and says, “We should trademark Mach-a-Saccharine as a new business leadership model. It’ll be the new idiot buzzword, the next
multimedia
,
proactive
,
paradigm
,
sustainability
or
facilitate
. We could put out books and double-talking overpriced seminars.”

“Yeah, we could probably talk Mirkwood into giving the seminars for free. Can’t you see him spouting out some inanity to a group of people just to see who buys it? It’d be like an amusement park for him. Remember when he swore to all the women on staff that he read chocolate helps speed up the metabolism and aids in losing weight? He kept it up until nearly all of them were adding candy bars to their lunch. Hell, by the second week of him swearing to it, I almt believed him too,” says David piling on.

Chester adds, “A joke’s never over for Mirkwood until he gets to say the word ‘suckers.’”

“Sounds like a good policy for life to me,” Omar says.

Throughout Omar’s career, he’s enacted some highly successful policies and habits of his own. To the bewilderment of every writer on
Most Hipness
and any other show Omar’s produced, whenever the writers have been stuck on a plot point or a line, Omar’s immediate response has always been right and usually became the most memorable line in the entire episode. The most intimidating aspect of this strength is that it takes Omar no time at all to come to a solution—as soon as the dilemma is explained to him, the answer is shooting out of him. And, he’s never asked for detailed help until after the entire writing staff has been stalemated for hours on the issue. His instant solution is mind-boggling.

This uncanny skill is loved and hated simultaneously just like Murphy’s Law. Loved because it happens on cue a statistically improbable number of times. Anything that defies logic is a deviant and innate curiosity to man. Maybe it gives us hope that we can overcome the probability of the world around us, most notably Ben Franklin’s first certainty of life, but maybe to lesser extents, too, such as overcoming the low odds of recovery from a nasty illness, marrying at a late age, or winning a lottery. Hated because its unnatural accuracy seems more powerful than any performance we could muster to challenge it.

It’s not much different than the love-hate relationship of the public to a celebrity. The celebrity is loved when viewed vicariously as one displaying the charisma that we might possess ourselves, a trailblazer who proves it’s possible for the rest of us to achieve the same fame. But, the famous one is hated when viewed as competition to our own abilities, usually happening when the celeb has stayed popular long enough to make us realize they have something we’d like to have but we’re making no progress toward obtaining. It’s what makes many applaud the rise of the famous yet still gloat at their fall: loving someone for reminding us of what we’re capable, but then hating the same person for obtaining it, jealously wishing they’d lose it. Deplorable. Hypocritical. Inexcusable. Enslaver of all the discontented. Defeated only by the humble.