David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“Will this do?” asked Gray Skirt.

There was that tone again. Was it mocking? He just couldn’t tell. She was standing at the open door of a small room, gesturing withinward. There was something curlicued about the flourish of her gesture, which finished palm up and elbow sharp, as if she were serving from an invisible tray. He realized she hadn’t squarely met his eye all morning. Mark quickly scanned the room. White file boxes were stacked tight as Legos against one wall. Four vacuum cleaners leaned like sentinels against another. Watercooler jugs lined a third. But there, on the fourth wall, was a window. High up, but a window, and he could tell that it would open.

“Yes, thank you very much. This should do just fine,” said Mark. “The natural light helps to clear my mind.”

“Of course.”

“Would you see that I’m left alone for, oh, ten minutes?”

Gray Skirt checked her BlackBerry. “You can have eight, I’m afraid. You’re needed in Makeup.”

“Right.” He was pretty sure by now that she was unimpressed by him. But that whole issue had receded in importance. What he needed to do now was smoke this joint in his pocket out that window there.

The door clicked behind Gray Skirt, and Mark assessed the window. Shit. It was, like, six feet up. Holding a water jug by its fat neck, he rolled it across the floor until it sat beneath the window. Balancing one-footed on the jug, he looked like a high-school trophy, though holding a joint instead of a volleyball. The window was an in-swing affair, and opening it with too much force, he lost his balance, fell backward, and landed hard on his wrist and ass.

Eyes on the prize, though. The joint was still in his hands. He righted his water jug and rolled a second one beside it, then stood on the two of them like a rodeo act on two horses’ backs. This was more like it. He thumbed his lighter, and the joint crackled in tiny fire. He craned his face out the window and smoked with intent. Inside of a minute, he felt the drug come on, covering his worries and drowning his doubt, just as the tide comes in to cover the jagged sticks and stones of the lapped shore. The bleat and rumble of midtown came up to him on a warm breeze. An air conditioner somewhere near ticked and whirred. He looked at people making money on telephones behind glass across the avenue. One man did jumping jacks before a huge TV. He saw a pigeon whorl and flap and hide its gray self against the grit of a roof.

But then flapping up beside the pigeon came the worry that maybe he was unprepared for this Margo! thing. He’d done a few TV spots already, but they were brief appearances, medium-market morning shows, for which he had to fill only a few minutes, the beaming hosts thick and flat with praise for Mark’s work. For the corporate retreats and seminars he led, he needed only platitudes. Substance is fine, but it’s presentation that hooks an audience, eye contact and lots of hands, a talent he’d inherited from his father.

Below him, a cop car was bellowing and whooping at the truck blocking it from the avenue; the truck crept into the stream, against the light, and the cop car sharked around, went hurtling uptown. Above, a jet escaping LaGuardia left a rumble in its dust — a tube of people, remember, being missiled around the globe. What fun, what a world. No, he wasn’t going to blow it. People hawked crappier stuff than his all the time. And he was no fraud, just a little tired of his own shtick. Wasn’t that evidence of his integrity? Here was his chance to step it up. His mother would be watching — she’d have the whole tire store watching, probably. She loved Margo. When he told her that he was going to be on the show, she’d actually dropped the phone — he’d heard the phone bounce on the floor and then heard the cat food scatter across the kitchen linoleum.

“You have something to say,” he said aloud to himself, standing on his pedestal jugs. “You have something to offer.” And he turned his shut lids to the distant sun and let its rays soak his sight; sparkly amoebas swam in a pink sea. He took ten deep breaths.

Then his phone rang, and he startled, nearly fell from his jugs. He looked at the call to reject it. But the name displayed — though it caused him to wince on the inside — was the one name he could not reject. He stubbed his joint into the corner of the window frame and flicked it toughly into empty space. He pressed ACCEPT.

“Hello?”

“Mark. James Straw here.”

“Mr. Straw!” Mark exulted. He started loading his mouth with the little dissolving mint strips he used after smoking.

“Marjorie Blinc tells me you’re going on that woman’s show today.”

“Yes, sir. Margo. Backstage now, actually.”

“I told you, Mark. Don’t call me sir. I feel that we’ve become much closer than that.” Straw had said this a couple of times, but he had not yet said what form-of-address level they had reached.

“Indeed we have…Mr. Straw. Indeed we have.”

The dead air that followed was weird. Straw usually let you know quickly what it was he wanted. After a moment, Mark had to prompt him. “What did you want to speak about, Mr. Straw?”

“Calm down, boy,” said Straw cheerily. “I’m calling you to wish you good luck. Big day for you, I know. I want to help you get that laserlike clarity that you’ve given me so many times. Even I get some nerves before a board meeting, or with that nasty business with Congress last year. You taught me a way through all that.

“Now, I’ve heard that this Margo lady can be tough. One minute she’s saying, That’s so sad, that’s so interesting, and then, wham, she’s caught you in some lie.” Mark hadn’t even been considering that. “Well, I want you to know that I know you can shine on her show. And just to be safe, I’ve made it very clear to Margo’s organization that everyone at SineCo — and I, personally — have every faith in you and your work.”

“Well, thank you, Mr. Straw. That, um, that means a lot to me.”

Someone knocked at the door. “Mr. Deveraux. Two minutes.”

“They’re calling me now. I should go.”

“Of course. Of course. Listen, Mark?”

“Yes?”

“I probably don’t have to point out that today would be an excellent opportunity to engage in some of the cross-integration that we spoke of. That you agreed to.”

It was a moment before Mark understood. “Yes, of course. I’m excited about that part.” Shit. What exactly had he agreed to?

“Excellent. Excellent. Well. Look it in the eye, Mark. Look it in the eye!” This was one of the maxims in Mark’s philosophy: Whatever you want, you should look it in the eye.

There were clipboards and headphones all around him as Mark was shepherded from Makeup to the little on-deck circle backstage. He heard Margo say his name and imagined his mother’s thrill and pride at hearing it also. The chief clipboard told him to go, and he went. Into the spotless pretend living room of the stage; into the one-way gaze of ten million people.

He gave Margo’s hand a squeeze, did the wave-into-the-lights thing, seated himself in the guest chair with slightly exaggerated settling-himself motions, and — this was the easy part — nodded bashful confirmation while Margo told the story of the sudden, stunning success of his book.

The way Margo made it sound, Mark might have found the cure to a terrible disease or brought clean water to Africa. She said he had changed millions of lives. Then she mentioned, as if it had just occurred to her, that she was an early promoter of Bringing the Inside Out .

“I’m not sure that had anything to do with its success,” Mark said, interrupting her, and he smiled, mid-sip, over the rim of the mug of fair-trade green tea that had been awaiting him on the little celebrity side table. Margo seemed caught short. Was he really saying this? Who would think it wise to cross her?