Romance
Kill the Mic
by Dana Keller
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Everybody Shut Up. · Ep. 403 · Thu
10:00 Cold open · 10:10 Gong: meetings that should be emails · 10:31 GlowThread demo
Sponsor GT-403 GlowThread Couples Compression · Vote: none (sponsor rider) · Guest: none
JEN
Her mother called at the light on Broad and Hague. She'd have been sitting with the phone in her hand since Jen's usual time.
"Your collar," her mother said.
"Good morning, Mom."
"I'm only saying it was nice of him. Not everybody would tell you. Your father wouldn't have told you. He'd have let you go on television like that and said something in the car." In the background, Jen could hear the kitchen TV on low, the local news doing traffic. "I had two new entries yesterday. FAIRLY, with a Y. And the other thing."
"What other thing."
"The Jen-K-Fairly. With the number sign. It's not a typo, technically. I put it in anyway. I made a note in the margin that it's not a typo."
The light turned green. The car behind her honked once, politely. Jen closed her eyes for a second, then opened them and went.
"Mom, please don't post about the collar."
"I haven't posted about the collar."
"Are you going to?"
"Hm," her mother said, and let it sit there long enough that Jen passed two more lights. "Sunday."
"I know. I'm driving."
"I know you're driving," her mother said. "I'm the one who told you."
The thing on the table in the credit office was a cardboard box about the size of a toaster, and it said GLOWTHREAD on every side in silver letters, and Brandon was standing next to it in a fresh polo with both hands flat on the lid, as if something inside might try to get out.
"Morning," Jen said.
"Good morning," Brandon said. "It's socks."
"Okay."
"It's compression socks. For couples." He opened the box. Inside, in plastic sleeves, were pairs of very tight socks in matching colors, navy and navy, gray and gray, and something called Sunrise that was two pinks that didn't quite match. "You buy them in a set. They're for long flights, and nurses, and people who stand all day. It's the same agency as QuietMouth. I'm the same agency. They gave me both."
Lou was on the table again with the rundowns in her lap. Kyle was in his chair with the cereal mug. Doug was at the end, under the window, reading something stapled. He looked up when Jen came in and then back down. He'd shaved, she noticed, and nicked himself doing it, a small dark spot at the hinge of his jaw.
Brandon held up an index card for Jen. It said ALIGNMENT in his careful printing, and under it, smaller: GlowThread brings pairs into alignment.
"We're not saying alignment on air," Jen said.
"I can rewrite it." He already had another card ready. It said TOGETHER-STRENGTH. He looked at it as he held it up, and she watched him read it and lose faith in it in real time.
"No," Jen said, gently.
"The brand deck has twelve approved words," Brandon said. "Alignment is number one."
"What's twelve?"
He checked his phone. "Snug."
"Use snug."
"I can't open with snug. Snug is twelve." He put the cards down on the table in a little stack and squared it with both hands. "And it has to be a two-person demo. It's in the rider."
"What rider?"
"The rider's the part of the contract with the rules in it," Doug said, from the end of the table. He held up what he was reading. It was the contract. "They bought the slot after the stool. The rider says the product has to be demonstrated by two persons, one of whom is staff." He turned the page over to check. "Of visible rapport."
Jen looked at Brandon.
Brandon raised his hand, not very high.
"You wrote of visible rapport," Jen said.
"Legal wrote two persons," Brandon said. "I added the rest. They watched the stool, and the vote, and the regional said, Get us that. I'm sorry. I didn't think anybody would read the rider."
"I read the rider," Doug said.
"I know that now."
So there would be no vote today. Jen understood that the way she understood that the parking lot was gray: it was a fact, and there was nothing to do about it. Yesterday, at least, two hundred people and a few thousand phones had put him in her ear. Today a sock company had paid for it. She found that she minded that more, and she didn't want to look at why.
"Who's the staff?" Kyle said, with his spoon in the air.
There was a pause.
"I'll do it," Doug said. He folded the contract closed. "It's my name on the deal memo. If anybody upstairs has a problem with the demo, they can call me about it instead of calling Jen."
Lou put a yellow dot on page four of somebody's rundown with her thumb and didn't say anything. Kyle looked down into his cereal. Jen looked at Doug and he looked at the contract, and she understood that he'd decided this before she walked in.
"Fine," she said. "Brandon, write me one card. One. Say what they do."
"They're tight," Brandon said, miserably. "That's what they do."
"Then say that."
"One True Thing," Jen said, when the red light came on. "The check-engine light in my car has been on for two years. I've decided it's decorative."
The room laughed, and the Wall filled with pictures of people's own dashboards, a whole orange field of little engine shapes, from Dayton and Mansfield and somebody's tractor in Wayne County.
Denny's Gong was meetings that should have been emails. He worked the aisle for a while, a nurse, a teacher, a man who'd sat through an hour about a new stapler, and then he got to Row D, where a retired insurance adjuster in a golf shirt stood up and took the mic in both hands like he'd been waiting his whole career.
"Ninety minutes," the man said. "On the font for a parking sign. Not the sign. The font. There were handouts. There were three versions of the handout."
The room groaned in sympathy.
"And at the end of it," he said, warming up, "my supervisor, Dale Pruitt, who I want everybody to know still lives on…"
"Kill it," Lou said in Jen's ear, and his mic was gone. He kept going for a few words with no sound, pointing for emphasis at nobody, and the room cheered him for it. Then, when the mic came back, he said, "Anyway, it was Helvetica," and sat back down on his own.
"Gong him!" somebody yelled anyway, for the principle of it, and the whole room took it up, and the meter on the Wall climbed and climbed and flashed at the top. Lou looked at the man in the golf shirt for a long time. Then she nodded, and Denny swung, and Earl went through the floor and into everybody's feet, and the adjuster put both arms up like he'd won something.
Marcy, at the end of the desk, said something about Helvetica that got her a pink sticker on the back of her hand from Lou during the next break. She wore it for the rest of the hour like a ring.
Up in Glass, Doug stayed in Glass. In her earpiece he was calling the show the way he had on Tuesday, level and dull, and he didn't say anything to her that wasn't a time or a camera. Twice she caught her own hand up at the earpiece, waiting for the rest of a sentence that wasn't coming.
They went to break before the demo, and Brandon came apart.
He was standing just off the set by Camera 2 with the box of socks at his feet and four index cards fanned out in his hand like a bad poker hand, and he was mouthing the words on them to himself, and she could see from the desk that his lips weren't keeping up with his eyes. Jen watched him cross out a line with a Sharpie, then write something above it, then cross that out. He pulled a fresh card out of his back pocket. It already had something on it. She was close enough to read it: READ THIS SLOWLY AND DO NOT IMPROVISE.
He looked at it. He put it at the back of the stack. He started writing on a fifth card.
Lou took the fifth card out of his hand.
She didn't snatch it. She just reached over and took it, the way you'd take scissors from a kid, and she put a green sticker on the back of his hand where the card had been, and held out her other hand for the rest of them.
"One card," Lou said. "Make it true or make it short."
"The deck has twelve approved words."
"Then your regional can come down here and do the demo himself," Lou said. "One card."
Brandon stood there with the green sticker on his hand. Then he crouched down, put the last card on top of the sock box, and wrote on it in letters big enough that Camera 2 could have read them from the back of the room. He held it up for Lou.
THE SOCKS ARE TIGHT. TRY NOT TO FALL OFF.
Lou read it.
"Fine," she said, and put the other four cards in her back pocket with her stickers.
Doug came down the stairs from Glass during the break, and Lou met him at the bottom and pointed at his feet.
"Left shoe off," Lou said. "You stand. She does the sock. You're not sitting on that stool again. I'm not doing the stool every day."
He sat down on an apple box, the wooden crate the crew used to make short people taller, and untied his left shoe and took it off. His sock was brown. Jen happened to look down at that moment, from where she was standing by the desk with the GlowThread sleeve in her hand, and his right shoe had come up a little at the cuff of his trousers, and the sock on that foot was navy.
"Your socks don't match," she said.
He looked down at them as if he'd been introduced. "No."
"Do you know that?"
"I do now." He put the left shoe next to the apple box, very neatly, toe and heel lined up. "The boxes with my clothes in them are still taped. I've been getting dressed out of whichever one I opened first." He stood up in one shoe and one sock. "I haven't found the rest of them."
She didn't say anything to that. He'd been in Columbus maybe a week, and he hadn't unpacked. She filed it somewhere and couldn't have said where.
"Thirty," Lou said in her ear.
Jen pushed her sleeves up.
The red light came on. Brandon, off camera, held up the card.
"This half hour is brought to you by GlowThread Couples Compression," Jen said to Camera 2, and held up the sleeve, navy and navy. "For long flights, long shifts, and people who stand all day. The socks are tight." She looked at Brandon's card. Brandon looked back at her, white to the lips. "Try not to fall off."
The room laughed. The Wall rained something, silver threads, falling.
"Our executive producer," Jen said, "has volunteered."
Doug stepped onto the set in one shoe. The room saw him and made the noise it had made yesterday when it heard him on the speakers, and up on the Wall #JenKFairly came back so fast it was like it had only been waiting offscreen. He stood by the end of the desk and lifted his left foot about four inches, in the brown sock, and put one hand on the desk for balance.
"Other hand on my shoulder," Jen said. "If you fall on me on television, they'll run it at Christmas every year until I die."
He put his hand on her shoulder.
It was heavier than she'd thought. She could feel the whole width of it, the heel of his hand on her collarbone and his fingers over the back of her shoulder blade, and she could feel him trying to keep his weight out of it and not quite managing. She crouched down in front of him with the sock. The room went ooooh, like a school bus, and she didn't look at the room.
The brown sock came off easily. She held it up for Camera 2 between two fingers, a brown sock, and put it on the desk, and the room laughed again. Then she worked the GlowThread sock over his toes.
It was tight. The copy didn't say how tight. She got it over the ball of his foot and then it wouldn't go, and she had to put her thumbs inside the cuff and pull, like pulling on a boot, and his foot came forward and his hand tightened on her shoulder and she felt him wobble, the whole weight of him coming through his palm into her, and then catch himself.
"Sorry," he said, low. The mic on her lapel caught it. So did two hundred people.
"Hold still," she said.
She got it over the heel. Her fingers were on the back of his ankle, on the warm skin under the cuff of his trousers, and then the sock was over it and she was rolling it up his calf, and she understood very clearly, with Camera 2 a few feet away, that she was crouched on the floor of a live television show putting a sock on a man she wasn't dating, and that his hand was on her shoulder, and that she could feel his pulse through the side of his ankle. She kept her face completely still. She didn't look up at him. She looked at the sock, which said GLOWTHREAD down the side in silver, and smoothed it flat with both hands.
"Snug," she said, to Camera 2. Off to the side, Brandon made a small noise.
Down the desk, Marcy leaned into her mic. "If the sock fits," Marcy said, "the Wall already voted."
Doug laughed, short and surprised. His hand moved on her shoulder when he did, and she felt that too. She stood up. He put his foot down. The sock was so tight it made his foot look like it had been vacuum-sealed.
"We meant to say that," they both said, at once, and stopped, and the room lost its mind.
Brandon dropped the card. It slid face-up under the desk, THE SOCKS ARE TIGHT, and Camera 3 followed it all the way and held on it, because the director up in Glass had a sense of humor nobody had ever been able to stop.
"We'll be right back," Jen said.
The red light went off. He took his hand off her shoulder. She could still feel it, the shape of it, warm through her blouse and blazer, and it was a stupid thing to be able to feel and she felt it anyway. She looked up at him to say something, she didn't know what, and stopped.
He was pale. Not the stage-light kind. His face had gone gray under the eyes and around the mouth, and he was looking at the Wall over her head, at #JenKFairly going up and up in yellow, and for a second before he saw her looking he looked like a man watching water come under a door.
Then he saw her. He picked up the brown sock from the desk and put it in his pocket.
"Thanks," he said, and walked back toward the stairs in one GlowThread sock and one navy one, and forgot his shoe.
She found the shoe by the apple box after the show. It was where he'd left it, toe and heel lined up, a plain brown lace-up with the heel worn down on the outside edge.
She picked it up. She could have given it to Kyle. She could have left it on the stairs.
She carried it around the back of Glass to the hallway with the vending machine, because that was where he went to eat, and she was most of the way down the hall when she heard Linda.
It was on speaker. Or it wasn't, and Linda was just that loud. Jen stopped by the corner where the hallway bent, under the fluorescent tube that ticked, and stood there with his shoe in her hand.
"... the collar and now the sock, and I said produced, Doug. I said it in writing. I said it in capital letters."
"You did." Doug's voice. Level.
"So is this Kaminski? Is she pushing this? Because if she wants to do a thing with you on air, I need to know about it before the Wall does. That's my job. That's what Six is for."
Jen held still.
"No," Doug said. "It's me. The Wall voted for the first two. The sock was the sponsor. It's in the rider. If you want it to stop, you can call GlowThread, and they'll tell you they paid for it."
"Don't tell me who to call."
"Okay."
"And the beekeeper." There was a sound, like Linda had put down a cup hard. "Kyle's got him on Friday's sheet again. I want him off. I don't care what his handwriting says. If he's on the sheet tomorrow, you cut him, or I find somebody who understands what this show is for."
"He's on the sheet," Doug said. "I initialed it Tuesday."
There was a silence on the line, and then Linda said, quite pleasantly, "Then you'll explain that to me in person," and the call ended. Jen heard it end. There was a little three-note sound.
He hadn't said her name. She'd been standing there waiting for it the whole call, braced for it, and it hadn't come.
She came around the corner.
He was standing by the vending machine with his phone still in his hand, in his one GlowThread sock and his navy sock, no shoes now at all, because he must have taken the other one off to match. He looked up and saw her, and saw what she was holding, and he rubbed his hand down over his face from forehead to chin, and then he laughed, once, without much in it.
"You left this," Jen said, and held out the shoe.
He took it. He put one hand flat on the vending machine and stood on one foot and put the shoe on without untying it, working his heel in with one finger, and the vending machine hummed under his hand, and she thought about his hand on her shoulder and looked at the vending machine instead.
"How much of that did you hear?" he said.
"The part about the rider."
He looked at her. He knew that wasn't all of it. He let her have it anyway.
"She's going to come down here," he said. "She said in person."
"She never comes down here." Jen leaned her shoulder on the wall. "She's never been past the lobby. She doesn't know where Glass is. If she comes, she'll go up the wrong stairs and end up on the roof."
"There are stairs to the roof?"
"There are stairs to everything. It was a furniture store. They had a whole floor of mattresses up there."
He almost smiled. He bent and checked the knot on his shoe, though it didn't need checking.
"You didn't have to do the sock," she said.
"Somebody did."
"You could have made Kyle do it."
"Kyle would have fallen on you," he said, and straightened up, and she found that she was standing a little closer to him than she'd meant to be, there under the ticking light, close enough to see the nick on his jaw where he'd shaved. They stayed like that. After a second he picked his phone up off the top of the vending machine and looked at it, though it wasn't doing anything.
"Kyle wants me in Glass," he said. "He sounded worried."
"He always sounds worried."
"I'm starting to get that," he said, and went.
When she came up the ringing stairs ten minutes later to get her bag, Kyle was standing at the printer with a page in each hand, saying "sorry, sorry, sorry" to it while it made a grinding sound and blinked an orange light. Lou walked past behind him with a coil of cable over one shoulder, and without slowing down she reached out and hit the side of the printer once with the flat of her hand, just above the paper tray. The grinding stopped. The orange light went green. A page came out.
"Thank you," Kyle said to the printer.
"You're welcome," Lou said, and kept walking, out the door and down the stairs, and Kyle turned around and looked at the empty doorway for a second longer than he needed to.
Then he saw Jen and remembered what he was holding. "Okay. So." He held one of the pages out to Doug, who was in the chair at the board with his headset around his neck. "Linda bought software. It's called Segmently. It writes rundowns. You tell it what kind of show it is and it fills in the whole hour. She wants to try it next week." He swallowed. "Instead of me, I think. Or with me. She said with me."
Doug took the page. Jen came and read it over his shoulder.
It was a rundown, the same as the one Lou stickered every morning, every segment and every time down the side, but cleaner, in a font nobody at Dayspan used. Open (Jen K.): signature honesty moment. Gong: relatable outrage. It had filled in everything. It had filled in a sponsor that didn't exist yet, and a Hot Topic about air fryers.
Halfway down the page, the guest line for Friday was blank. Just the word GUEST, and a colon, and white space.
Under it, in blue pen, pressed so hard the paper had dented, in Kyle's small crooked handwriting, it said John (colony health) and three question marks.
John was the beekeeper. He was the guest Doug had initialed on Tuesday, the one Linda wanted gone, the one nobody could remember booking the first time. And here he was again, written in by hand under the line the software had left empty.
"I printed that ten minutes ago," Kyle said. He sounded like he wanted somebody to tell him something. "The line was blank. I had the pen. I was holding the pen." He looked at the page in his other hand. It was the same, and it also had John written under GUEST in his handwriting, with a fourth question mark. "I must have done it while it was printing."
Nobody said anything. The printer hummed.
"We're not giving the hour to something that can't fill in a name," Doug said finally. He took the pen out of Kyle's shirt pocket, wrote keep in small letters next to the question marks, and gave Kyle back the page and the pen. "Tell Linda we'll look at it."
"Are we going to look at it?"
"We're looking at it now," Doug said.
Kyle took the pages and went back to his corner. On the board, by Doug's elbow, there was a brown sock, folded into a square.
It was after four when she went out to her car, and the day had gone flat and gray over the lot, the kind of Ohio afternoon that looked like it might do something and never did. The SOFAS letters over the dock were just shapes.
She didn't get in. She put her bag down by her front tire and leaned on the driver's door with her arms folded and her keys in her hand, and looked at nothing, at the road and the gas station across it and a man walking a dog that didn't want to be walked.
She heard his car door before she saw him. He'd been sitting in it. He came across the lot with his jacket on and a bag of pretzels in one hand, the big kind with the twist tie, and stopped a few feet away, by her back bumper.
"Dinner?" Jen said.
He looked at the bag. "It was in the glove box."
"Is that dinner?"
"Tonight it is." He held the bag out toward her. "My plates are in a box too."
She took a pretzel. It was stale. She ate it anyway.
"Linda called you," she said. "You didn't use my name."
"No."
"That's twice this week."
"I know," he said.
She looked at him. He was standing with the bag of pretzels in front of him in both hands, plain jacket, one shoe a little more scuffed than the other now from where she'd carried it, and he was looking at her the way he looked at the rundown, like he was going to read the whole thing before he said anything about it.
"I've been in that building eleven years," she said. "I know what happens. Every EP figures out the same thing, and it doesn't take them long. When Six wants something, they say I want it. When they want something, they say I want it. And I'm the one who finds out about it."
"I'm not doing that."
"I know." She pushed off the car door and stood up straight. "I keep waiting for it anyway."
He nodded, slowly, like that was fair. He held out the bag again and she took another pretzel, and they stood there by the back of her car eating stale pretzels in the parking lot while the gray went darker over the gas station, and a truck downshifted out on the road, and somewhere inside the building, faintly, through the open dock door, she could hear Earl being moved, the low brass shiver he made whenever anybody so much as touched the stand.
"Ruthie Cole emailed the booking line again," he said.
"What does she want?"
"She doesn't want anything. She wanted Kyle to know that Carol has started a Facebook group." He looked at the pretzel bag. "It's called Jen K. Fairly. With the typo. It has four hundred members."
Jen laughed.
It came out of her before she could do anything about it, out loud, in the parking lot, not a TV laugh, the real one she didn't use at work, the one her mother said sounded like a car not starting. She put her hand over her mouth. It didn't help. He stood there with the pretzels and watched her do it, and he didn't laugh with her, he just watched, and when she finally stopped and took her hand down he was still looking at her, and he looked like he'd been handed something and didn't know where to put it down.
"Tomorrow's Friday," he said.
She knew what that meant. Ask me Friday. She'd said it to him on Tuesday under that ticking light, and he'd remembered it.
"I know what day it is," she said.
She picked her bag up off the asphalt. She unlocked the car. He stepped back out of the way of the door, onto the painted line between the spaces, with the pretzels.
"Tomorrow," Jen said.
"Tomorrow," Doug said.
She got in and shut the door and started the car, and he stood on the line while she backed out, and lifted one hand about an inch when she pulled away.
Neither of them said Carol was wrong.