Rebecca Makkai: Music for Wartime

But she just stares at me. “Because you can’t tell people how to feel,” she finally says. “Those aren’t their real emotions.”

“Right,” I say, “but we’re not telling them what to do. We’re just playing Cupid.”

“You’re playing God.”

I do sense that she’s talking about more than just the show, but I’m too tired to work it all out. When the risotto is done cooking, she puts it in the refrigerator without eating any and heads to bed.

Vito Corleone dies with an orange peel in his mouth, and I call to Beth that she’s missing the best part.

Astrid sits down in the interview chair and asks if we can turn the cameras off. “Sure,” we say, and give Blake, the camera guy, the signal to cover the red light but keep taping.

She leans forward and says, “I know what you guys are trying to do. With your questions about Leo. I get that you’re supposed to create drama and everything, but frankly this is insulting.”

I look at Ines, hoping she can lie better than I can. “All we’re doing,” she says, “our role, is just to speed along what would happen in the real world if we had a lot more time. Let’s say in real life you know a guy, and maybe after six months, something starts to happen. Okay, so here we don’t have six months. We have two more weeks, and that’s if you stay to the finale. We’re not making you date him, Astrid. We’re just stirring the pot.”

“Well, I want you to stop.”

“Okay,” I say, “sure,” although Ines is looking at me strangely. “Turn the camera back on, Blake. Remember present tense, full sentences. So Astrid, tell us about this week’s prompt.”

She straightens up in the chair, tucks her hair behind her ear, and smiles, suddenly full of energy. “This week’s challenge is Love. I’m super excited to show the judges I can go beyond simple blown shapes and do something really spectacular. I’m really gonna rock this one.”

Ines and I take our only half hour off in five days to head out to the one coffee shop in Strathersburg, and we must look odd perched there at the tall table with our BlackBerrys, surrounded by men with newspapers and potbellies. “Why in the hell did you say we’d leave her alone? Tell me it’s part of some master plan.”

I don’t tell her I’m suddenly and deeply sick of messing with people. I say, “We need her on our side. She’s not an NPD.” The casting directors are great at spotting borderline narcissistic personality disorder, the kind that makes you just crazy enough for great TV but not crazy enough to destroy a camera with a baseball bat. The best casts are around 50 percent NPD, but no more. Astrid was picked for her charisma and talent rather than her belief that she was destined to be famous. “I see her shutting down in interview if she thinks we’re manipulating her.”

“I’m just saying Kenneth had very high hopes for the Love challenge interviews.”

“You can go to town on Leo, then. Tell him she’s pregnant with his child.”

Ines laughs, pretends I’m not annoying her, and we finish our lattes. “I wish you were living at the colony. I’m not into hanging out with the camera guys.”

I wish I were, too. The loneliest thing in the world is lying awake beside someone asleep. Beth snores quietly, like a little girl, and she turns her back and grabs all the sheets up around herself. It feels as if she’s ignoring me, as if — through her closed eyelids — she should be able to see that I’m sad. She should startle awake and ask what’s wrong. But she never does. She just mumbles and steals another pillow, and I’m alone in the dark for hours with my worst thoughts.

As we walk up the endless grass hill to the colony, our shoes in our hands, Ines says, “You don’t seem happy.” She’s known me a few years, on and off, so I figure she’s probably right. “Can I ask something? Why exactly are you with this person?”

I’m saved from answering by Dale running toward us, telling us Kenneth is pissing mad that we’re late and asking if we brought back lattes.

“Where do you think we’re hiding them?” I ask, and he swears and runs his hand through his Mohawk and races back to the house.

Ines takes off to help mike up the judges and I check in with Kenneth, and the whole time I’m tearing at my thumbnail and trying to answer her question, as if I’m a contestant and must answer the question, and must rephrase the question as part of the answer.

I am with Beth because:

I’ve been fighting against her leaving for so long that it’s the only thing I know how to do. It’s like that’s my character arc, like some producer has said, “We need you to be the high-strung girl with the short hair who doesn’t want her girlfriend to leave.” And, like the best contestants, the ones chosen for their compliance, the ones who are secretly actors in their real lives as well as pianists or dancers, I go along with it. Because what other role do I have? Because who else am I?

Ines and I always sit in at the back of the judgment room so we don’t have to get debriefed before the interviews. Kenneth is brilliant. He lines the five remaining artists up in front of the bookshelves, then tells them we won’t tape for a few more minutes — when really, the cameras are already rolling. He tells them to stand still for the light guys, and then says, “We’re having more digital issues. We’re gonna be here pretty late tonight, folks.” And the sleep-deprived artists, dehydrated and trying to hold still and awaiting judgment, give the most beautiful looks of disgust and despair. The cameras are getting it all. The editors will splice it in with shots of their work being critiqued, or a competitor winning.

Kenneth has managed to pull something like this off every episode, and they always fall for it. Once he had a camera guy give all the contestants incomprehensible instructions in a thick accent, while the other cameras captured the grimaces of confusion. At the third judgment, he directed Ines to have a loud phone argument with a boyfriend in the corner of the room. That time we had enough snickering and eye-rolling to manufacture an entire implied rivalry between Leo and Gordy. It became one of our best plotlines.

Later, Ines and I will ask the artists, one by one, to go through the whole day, speaking in the present tense and pretending they don’t know what’s ahead.

“I’m so nervous,” they’ll say, long after the judgments are over, “because I don’t know if the new puppets are even going to hold together.”

The glorious present tense — that blindest of tenses, ignoring all context, all past and future failures.

Even the losers, the ones who know they’ve just been sent home, are somehow willing to talk about their work optimistically, as if they’re about to strut onto the stage of the colony’s Little Theater and show their best stuff. We’ll say, “Okay, it’s ten minutes before the show starts, and you’ve just been called in. What are your hopes? What are you excited about?”

And off they go, like puppies who don’t get that no matter how many times they hump their master’s leg, he always swats them with the paper. “I’m so excited for the judges to see my work!” cry the artists who’ve just been mocked and upbraided and grilled for the two hours that will be edited down to five on-screen minutes. As if by trying hard enough, they can convince us to love them again.