John Kenney - Talk to Me

The light had changed. So had the women’s faces. It can’t be him, they thought. No, no. It’s just a crazy person.

Simon and Polly were waiting for Ted outside of Tamara’s office. When Ted had walked through the lobby he’d felt people staring at him. Not like most days. Not like, “Hey, there’s Ted.” It felt different. It felt whispered and dangerous. An assistant showed them in.

Tamara, Max, and two men who introduced themselves as the network’s lawyers. All standing. Not good, Ted thought. It’s over. They’re standing. It’s real and I’m about to be fired.

They sat around a table.

“Firstly, thank you for coming in, Ted,” Tamara said. “I know this is a very difficult time. Can I offer anyone water, coffee, something stronger?”

No one said a thing. Tamara smoothed her skirt without looking at it.

“Right. Ted. After careful thought, we believe it would be in the best interest of the network if you resign.”

“I heard on the radio.”

Tamara’s poker face faltered here. “Yes… well… I’m sorry for that. Bit of a miscommunication with our crack PR team. We’re amending so it will be reported as a resignation.”

“Good luck with that,” he said.

He wanted to scream. He wanted to beg forgiveness. He wanted another chance. He wanted to be made clean. He wanted to rip the drapes off her windows and throw one of the lawyers to the ground, punching him repeatedly in the face, a hockey fight, blood everywhere. But that was deep, deep down, in places he’d learned to hide from the world. Unless that world was your wife and daughter, who had a front-row seat to your anger and distance and emotional wasteland.

Ted said nothing. Emoted nothing. To the point where even Tamara was unsettled. Secretly she’d hoped for an explosion, a meltdown, a good story to share at the dinner party she was attending that evening. You’ll never guess what happened at the office today.

“Why?” he said finally.

And here it was Tamara who blinked, whose face gave away confusion and annoyance.

“ Why ? Are you joking ?”

“No. I’m the furthest thing from joking. After almost twenty years of consistently superb ratings, hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue generated, dozens of Emmy awards, I’d like to know on what grounds you’re firing me.”

She wasn’t ready for a fight. She assumed he’d go quietly, the wounded animal in the woods left to die.

“Because,” she said, “there is currently an iPhone-captured video of you on YouTube trending at”—and here Tamara tapped at her MacBook Air, fingers dancing over the keyboard—“8,743,981 views. And your daughter’s story isn’t helping much.”

“I’m fully aware of that. But I’ll ask again, why are you firing me?”

Tamara turned to Max, an expression that suggested she was smelling something particularly repugnant.

One of the lawyers started to jump in.

“Ted, no one is firing you. We’re asking you to resign…”

“Excuse me,” Tamara said, the anger in her voice palpable. “What part of this aren’t you understanding, Ted?”

Ted stayed cool, though he did lean his broad frame over the table. “I made a mistake. I apologized. I’ll do that again if you want. I’ll have the girl on the air. I’ll do a series on men who don’t understand anger or the power of outdated words. But I don’t understand how a single mistake outweighs a twenty-year career. I lost my temper. I had a bad day. I didn’t kill anyone. How?!”

And here Tamara sat back, anger gone, because she felt genuinely sorry for Ted. He had no idea how the world had changed. He thought it could go away. He didn’t understand that the internet was the first creature in the history of the world that could live forever. It never died.

Tamara folded her arms across her chest, looked down at the table in front of her. She sighed and looked out the window.

“You’re right,” she finally said. “You didn’t kill anyone. And you have served this network with honor and distinction for twenty years. And for that we owe you an enormous debt of gratitude. And I wish you could have continued to sit in that chair for a few more years, go out on your own terms, a special final evening where we review your finest moments, create a banner with its own typeface and theme song, run a full-page ad in the Times . But what’s happened, what you did, while not murder, was, in the year 2016, a kind of murder. You killed yourself. You killed your brand. You might as well have killed someone. Ted, we might have a better chance of putting you back on the air if you had committed vehicular manslaughter. If, in other words, it had been an accident, something that the angry masses could understand. But you… you screamed at an innocent young girl, a hardworking immigrant, someone’s daughter, and you called her a Russian whore. The internet… the world today… and the world is nothing if not the internet, Ted… it never, ever forgets. Or forgives. There is no mercy anymore, Ted. Because we can see it again and again and again, as it happened. Not a story in a newspaper but that actual event. And it makes us angry. And we want you to pay. Not the we in this room. We want you in that chair, wooing viewers, bringing in pharma marketing dollars. We want steady as she goes. But they… the foaming-at-the-mouth anonymous commentators… they want you to pay. Deep down they’re excited because it’s not them. They know it could be any one of us. They know. But it’s you today. And you have to die.”

Tamara found that she was leaning forward on the table, that the eyes of those around her were wide. She sat back, breathed deeply, smoothed her skirt again.

“The world changed, Ted. Every thing changed. Letters to the editor? Picketers? Boycotts on the sidewalk? Coups d’état? Please. Do you know what the most powerful force in the land is? It’s not Congress, those useless, spineless wankers. It’s not the soulless hedge fund boys in Greenwich or the pond scum on Wall Street or the C-suite who will do anything for a profit. It’s the comments section on any story, any tweet, any video. It’s comments, Ted. Comments rule the world. Do you think I control this company? Or the board? Because we don’t. Not really. There is a new power. This company, though it would never admit it, is controlled by anonymous posters. Grimy, possibly nude, portly men sitting in dark rooms, posting comments late at night after a long evening of vigorous masturbation to exceedingly filthy online pornography. They comment and comment and incite other comments and foment the anger. Do you know how angry these people are? They have a petition with… wait for it… almost four million signatures. Do you know what kind of comments we’re getting? I don’t know, either, because it was so astronomical that our website crashed. Nuance is dead. In its place, we have judgment. Instant judgment. That’s the world we’re living in. There’s no truth. There’s no fact. There’s only what you can get to trend. And it’s only getting worse.”

Tamara took a folder with Ted’s resignation, noncompete, nondisclosure, and radically reduced pension due to a breach of a morality clause, and slid them to Polly.

“Please review, sign, and return these within twenty-four hours. At twenty-four hours and one second, they are null and void and you get nothing. Is that understood by your counsel?”

Polly nodded.

“Odd question, I know,” Tamara began, “but might I ask if you recently went skydiving, by any chance?”

Ted looked up at her, startled. “I… yes. Why?”

“Oh. No reason. Except someone named “ArmymanRayRay” has posted a video that appears to show you either having an accident or trying to kill yourself. Quite a popular post.”