“Would you recommend the enchiladas?” Parcell Prescott asked me as we all took our seats at the Long Barracks Steakhouse, a tourist place across the street from the Alamo.

Well, almost all of us. Sal looked at me, rolled her eyes, and went to the bar. She hadn't wanted to come, but I told her I couldn't do it without her.

“Enchiladas?" I responded. What sort of a question is that? "Never at a steakhouse.” Someone needed to set that man straight.

He might be the president of the Network, but he had a lot to learn about regional cuisine. Parcell Prescott was a man of about sixty, wearing a sleek blue serge suit and tortoiseshell glasses. He smiled a lot.

“They smile with their teeth,” Saligia had once said of the Network Executives. “You try and do that to a dog, he’ll bite you. These people aren’t human.” That woman does employ a good deal of hyperbole in her talk.

With Sal sulking on a stool across the room, it was just the three of us attending that unofficial meeting. Prescott, Ida, and I.

A waiter appeared with a bottle of champagne. Prescott took the bottle and filled our glasses.

“Oh, and steaks, all around,” he said, dismissing the waiter.

Prescott turned to Ida. He was about to say something, but instead addressed me.

“Congratulations!” He held up his glass.

So far so good, I thought. I'd been apprehensive when I learned that the head of the Network had just arrived, unannounced, on the morning train from LA.

Ida, too, seemed surprised by his visit. It was almost painful to watch her thrown off balance.

However, Ida Mayfield didn't get to where she was without being able to play the game. But the same could be said of Silverio Moreno.

We both lifted our glasses and drank along with Prescott.

“Congratulations, Mr. Moreno,” Prescott continued. “For delivering us our highest ratings ever! It’s a treat when something good can come from something bad.”

Ah, the unfortunate drama with the jumper.

Prescott placed his champagne flute on the table and shifted in his chair.

“My dear Ida,” he said to her. “Word has reached me that you’re on something of a tear.”

“Excuse me?” Ida attempted a smile. “I was not under the impression, Parcell, that you sent me here to clap people on their backs. I came to investigate a serious incident.”

“It is my understanding that this incident, as you call it, has been taken care of. The body disposed of in an unorthodox, yet effective manner….” Prescott looked at me. “Correct?”

I responded with a vague nod, more interested in watching Ida’s inelegant attempts to regain her composure.

“It is important,” Ida said, squaring her shoulders, “for all parties to make sure that such an incident does not repeat itself. There are procedures in place to keep that sort of thing from happening. Procedures which, in my option, have become quite lax.”

“Understood, Ida,” Prescott said. “Well put.” He turned back to me. “I trust that things are returning to normal at the station. All hands getting back on track and doing the good work. Don’t forget to keep these stellar results coming, sir. I mean, my goodness, these ratings are the highest since last year when that chap on your show turned out to be a cannibal! As I recall, we sent you a hefty bonus that month.”

“It was much appreciated,” I said. “I bought a Zeppelin.” I held up a finger to a passing waiter. “Might we have some rolls and butter.”

“Excuse me?” Prescott said.

“An airship,” I explained. “A small three-man model. But an airship, none-the-less. Maybe we can take a ride while you’re in town. I keep it in a hangar on the south side of town.”

I was confident that Prescott wouldn’t take me up on the pleasure flight. He really didn’t like to mingle with subordinates, which was he how he thought of me. In truth, my Zeppelin was just an old army surplus observation blimp, and I doubt three people could have comfortably shared the gondola. Also, the airfield wouldn’t let me use hydrogen, and there was nary a liter of helium to be found in all of San Antonio. Not that Prescott needed to know any of this.

“I am afraid I'll not have time,” he said, just as I had expected. “I will be departing on the afternoon train. I’m glad to have learned that things are well in hand here. Back home in LA, of course, everyone loves the unexpected and intimate drama of Serpientes y Escaleras.”

“Live television should be exciting,” I said giving him my humblest self-depreciative smile.

“That is its magic,” he said in full agreement.

That was the thing with these TV executives. With them you got nothing but a bunch of mixed signals.

Ida was sent to play the bad cop. Rebuking our sloppiness. Then Prescott comes in to praise our exciting edginess.

But I could navigate such things well enough, I suppose. Swim about in the gray areas.

“We’ll do our best to keep the surprises coming,” I said, sneaking a glance to see how Ida was taking it all.

Not too well.

“Wonderful to hear, sir,” Prescott said. He looked up. “Ah, our steaks have arrived!”

###

I had hoped that when the meeting was over, I would have an idea as to when Ida would be heading back to LA. I was happy to learn that Prescott didn’t plan to stay, but as for Ida’s time-line, nothing was said. So, I don’t know what, if anything, came out of that meeting.

Lunch, yes. I did get an excellent steak. Though the baked potato had enough butter and sour cream to drop me into a coma. When I returned to the penthouse, I had to fight to remain focused on an important little project I had recently begun.

Working with my hands took my attention away from my inner, mental activity. Therapeutic, in a sense.

Because, if you ask me, thinking is the worst. The absolute worst thing. I envy those who meditate. What I assume they can do, after years of practice, is to flip some switch in their brain, and mute all that chatter. Probably not how it works. But wouldn’t that be a joy?

I couldn’t stop the stampede of diverse thoughts, but I could inject a modicum of calm so they weren’t always trampling one another.

Ida Mayfield, that lone individual, five and a half feet tall and certainly tipping the scales no more than would an English Sheepdog, little Ida was causing the majority of my mental turmoil.

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She wanted a particular set of results. Something which could be measured and predicted. Her presence was like having a referee checking and rechecking the rulebook, and holding it up to our faces when she felt someone had drifted away from those absolute parameters. She demanded that we all agreed as to what was black and what was white. What was right. What was wrong.

As I said earlier, I prefer those murky and hidden inlets. And the truth is, when I’m not allowed to swim in the waters of ambiguity, I panic. Well, that might be too strong a word. But I do stop having fun.

During lunch, there was a moment when I thought I had reasserted my position. I mean, it was my show. Parcell Prescott understood that. Right?

But when Sal and I were walking back to La Vida Tower, she suggested that I had accomplished little more than shaming Ida. It had been a fleeting victory which might just make things more strained. At least until Ida returned to LA.

Sal was probably right.

Often I told myself that I was good at playing politics. But I wasn’t. Intrigue eventually bored me. And all that poking and prodding and manipulative teasing I would do to play people off one another just created disharmony and distrust. Mostly because I never finished what I started, and everyone would be left pissed off at me. And each other.

But how else, other than intrigue, could I get what I wanted when the Network provided my only access to the airwaves and thus my beloved audience?

Lord knows I couldn’t just be straightforward in my demands. Neither Ida nor Prescott had any interest in what I wanted from the show.

Ida’s absolutism was that of a humorless and dogmatic bureaucrat. She demanded that the show must be consistent on what makes one contestant more virtuous than another. “Don’t confuse the viewers, dammit!” she would say. “None of your moral relativism. You’ve been explicit that Door Number One is Salvation, while Door Number Two is Damnation. Be firm. Be declarative. And, for fuck sake, be consistent!”

There was a simple wisdom there.

And I hate simple wisdom.

It left no room for the element of surprise. The shocking twist.

Ida felt I inserted a capricious trickster element into the show, at times sending the rascals and libertines through the door of virtue, and the self-sacrificing followers-of-rules through the door of vice. Quite true. But I was making a point, I really was.

Ida refused to listen.

As for Prescott, the man had little concern as to who went through which door.

“Sy, the Network’s contract with your production company simply states that two contestants, for each episode, must exit through those doors,” Prescott was fond of saying. “One through Number One, one through Number Two. And though our contract makes no stipulations about the ratings, we both know that fewer eyes on screens will have a consequence.”

He never said it aloud, but I knew Prescott understood that my unorthodox moral code, which so confounded Ida, keep our viewers returning week after week.

As for my Vision, the Network cared not a fig. If I ceased to be useful to their ratings, I’d be replaced. I had been in this business long enough to know even the most venerated celebrity was disposable.

I don’t want you to think that the fickle nature of show business was weighing on me. I’d never put much interest in job security. What I feared most was not being able to complete what I felt was the underlying purpose of the show. Ever since the Changes, with such a remarkable thinning of the population, I came to the conclusion that everyone who was still in this world had a part to play in something important. And because of my level of fame, I had to assume that my part was rather grand. I needed the time to figure out if my theories were correct. I didn’t need Ida and her ilk slowing down the progress of my experimentations and discoveries.

Therefore, because I needed to quiet down all those thoughts, I was trying my hand at making a video recorder. I had to delve deep into my memory of that semester I spent studying electrical engineering. Though I’m afraid much of my class time had been spent dozing in the back of the room—a result of frequent late night gigs with my surf rock band, Alamogordo Beach.

So far I had not electrocuted myself while working at the kitchen island of my penthouse, soldering the electrical leads from a spare studio camera to a transcoding box of my own design.

Earlier in the day, Rose had come up to the penthouse to talk. The interruption was probably a good thing, too. I had almost inverted the wiring of a 200 volt capacitor. That would have been very bad news! Let me just say, when working with machines that plug into the wall, look up the term reverse polarity. For some idiotic reason, there is less standardization in the world of professional electronic components that you might think.

Rose was caught up in some generic existential crisis. Generic? Well, generic for someone working on Serpientes y Escaleras.

I felt it high time to clear the air between us.

Tighten up our bounds of mutual trust.

No more secrets! Or, at the least, fewer secrets.

I let her know that I knew all about her deceased brother. And that I was a keen enough observer of human nature to see that she had come to work on my show so that she could be here when her beloved brother Lionel came through one of our arrival portals.

I didn’t sugar-coat it. Told her straight out that such a thing was a long-shot, at best.

Probably I am the last person one should come up for solace. I’m afraid that I blathered some banal bromides to her about “chin up” and “stay the course.” How things worked themselves out over time, and that we were lucky to have her sensitivity and intelligence.

Maybe it did help her. You know, in the way my hobbies and projects pull my mind away from intrusive thoughts.

She then switched gears and delivered on what I had been waiting for: her description of traveling through the mystical aether, as she psychically hitchhiked inside the minds of our contestants.

Fascinating, for sure, but short on factual information. Of course, every little piece of the puzzle gets me closer to turning my Plan from an amorphous wad of what-ifs and dare-I-evens into something polished and implementable.

Implementable?

Well, you get what I’m saying.

Rose planned to continue her experiments. Most important to her was to hitch a ride with one of the show’s losers. Take a peek behind Door Number Two.

It fit into the scientific method. Collect a range of data sets and compare them, but I doubted that those two doors our contestants left through really went to different places. I mean, there were two different doors through which they arrived, but I noted no discernible differences between those two groups. Why would the mystical exits into our building be that different than the entrances?

However, that was just conjecture on my part.

And I knew that Rose—once she got the courage—would be able to tell me if Door Number Two might hold secrets different from Door Number One. Oh, she’d manage. Rose possessed two wonderful qualities. She was headstrong, and persistent.

I wasn’t convinced, however, she’d do it tonight.

But I wasn’t in a great hurry.

First I wanted Ida gone.

And then there was the question as to whether or not my special electronics project would amount to anything.

The technical novice would struggle to make sense of the mess on my kitchen island. I would excuse you for not even being able to realize that there were three separate devices because off all the wires, tools, technical reference books, eggs shells, and that dirty wire whisk. Those last two things were because I had been making some tapioca pudding.

First, there was the spare television camera. Then there was the old Akai GX-77 reel-to-reel tape recorder which was normally stored up in the control booth, but never used. I wanted the Akai to record the images from the camera. But, of course, the Akai reel-to-reel was an audio recording deck. So, the trick was to get the camera’s electromagnetic signals converted so that they could be recorded (for eventual playback) onto the 1/4 inch magnetic tape. Which brings us to the third contraption on the counter. My home-made transcoding box.

The camera wasn’t a part of this invention, creation, whatever you wanted to call it. Not really. It was just to test things out. Eventually I would be using the cameras downstairs in the studio.

If this all sounds nuts, I guess it was.

In an ideal world—meaning, before the Changes—I’d simply use some digital thingy and that would be it.

But those thingies are all gone.

It helped that my technical training predated digital technology. A technology which no longer existed. I had seen it happen as the Changes took place. All the computers, cell phones, gaming consoles, MP3 players, all those marvelous gadgets began to vanish. Systematically erased from the world. We had not been thrown back to the stone age, really, just back to the analog age.

The fact that television was still about—though the programming meager—seemed odd. But no more odd than the retrograde technology we were left to use. And for some reason (or, perhaps, no reason at all) videotape technology was also gone. To add to the confusion, one could still encounter the occasional audio recording device (such as the reel-to-reel tape deck on my kitchen island), but there seemed no existing devices to record images.

But that’s not true, I hear you say. What about that videotape Ida brought from LA?

Strange, right? That the Changes seemingly affected different parts of the world differently.

Unless she was lying.

Though if Ida was being honest, that meant a complete archive of my show did exist. I won’t lie. I’d like to have all those tapes. And a machine to play them on. But I’d be damned if I would ask the Network for anything. I never want to be beholding to the Parcell Prescotts of the world. So, I’d have to make my own gear to create my own archives.

Besides, if my creation did work, it might help me move further down the road of my grand inquires.

My creation?

Would you look at me. Such ego. My re-creation, at best.

Oh, hang it all! My brilliant re-creation!