It was my favorite part of the day. Just before showtime. Some performers dreaded it, some loved it. But I guarantee you, we were all addicted to that nervous but very focused energy that comes from the cocktail of high-octane agitation and the potent percolation of neurochemicals throughout the gray matter. When it all flowed freely, you were unstoppable.

Booted into action by fear, elation, a sense of amaranthine immortality!

It also made most members of my tribe insufferable. But, as they say, it got the job done.

Half an hour before we went live, and I was already ensconced at my station on the studio set behind my vintage 73-note Rhodes piano.

I stood there watching the show-before-the-show: all those rituals of the performers and the technicians as they preened and prepped. Even after years in the business it still fascinated me.

Many who worked in industry quickly take refugee on the leeward, jaded side of show biz. How sad!

Myra, our floor manager, was one of those types. She had polished her jadedness until it could cut. In her case, it served a crucial need—Myra was the stern adult surrounded by willful, inattentive children. Thank god I didn’t have her job. Can you imagine? Me?

Myra kept things running smoothly and on time. If it wasn’t scribbled on her clipboard, it simply didn’t exist.

But, I wonder. Should I bother to describe someone not crucial to our story? And, also, did I just commit some dreadful narrative blunder by outing Myra as a minor, supporting character?

No matter. I’ll plunge ahead. Give some thumbnail introductions to the other people working on my show. Don’t worry too much about who’s who. It’ll all fall together eventually.

Our lighting and camera guys were fairly interchangeable. I’ll help the reader out here and not even bother with their names. They never made much of an impression upon me, anyway.

I had more of a soft spot for Hal, our director. Hal reminded me of my father during his final years, when drink became his only dependable pleasure. A shallow pleasure, to be sure. Hal, like my father, was warm and confiding when tipsy, and awash in penitent remorse when hungover. Both men also kept their heavier evening bouts with the bottle locked neatly away in solitary indulgence. Of course, even when relatively sober and on the job, Hal remained up in the tech booth—pretending to busy himself with equipment—and thus one might completely overlook the man.

I glanced over and and watched as the hair and makeup team fussed with their brushes and spritz bottles. Such dour expressions on their androgynous faces. And why was their hair so flat and lank? Was it intentional? They looked like they played in a Velvet Underground tribute band and had spent the night at an airport sleeping in chairs. Was it any wonder I had forbidden them from rouging my cheeks or teasing my hair? And when I say hair, I mean, of course, my white pompadour wig which I could prep with double-sided toupee tape and position perfectly on my head in seven seconds flat.

Adjacent to the hair and makeup table, flanked by racks of clothing, Raul perched on his stool. With nimble and fastidious fingers he was hand-stitching the hem of my sequined jacket where it had snagged, only minutes previously, on the edge of my music stand. Ah, Raul, my wardrobe wizard!

In the past, I had handled my own outfits, just as I now manage my hair and makeup. I mean, I have been dressing myself since I was a tyke. However, Raul, well, he gets me. He has a flair that makes my own choices timid by comparison. Imagine a hypothetical (but very plausible) scenario where I showed up wearing Merlot velveteen harem pants and a two-tone ruffled Bellamy shirt. Raul would favorably appraise the ensemble. High points just for that! Then, so softly, suggest: “Nice, and it does make an impact, but what would you think if we were to add….” And he would produce some additional gewgaw or garment that, when placed upon my person, would cause everything to harmoniously snap into perfection. Things that defied all the rules of aesthetic harmony would somehow, under Raul’s hands, hum and purr with an inner contentment. If there existed somewhere the perfect polka dot cummerbund that would compliment a pair of tartan socks in the tricolors of the Italian flag, that man knew where to find it.

Raul glanced my way with a smile and held up five fingers. Five minutes and he’d have my jacket ready.

And then that horrible Ida Mayfield swanned by, eclipsing Raul.

She was like a rat someone had decided to treat as a pet. Scampering here and there, sniffing and licking and dragging its genitalia over the flatware—just generally spreading who knows what all over the place.

And judging. That’s what Ida was doing. Looking for flaws in the way we did our show…so that she could take her opinions back to her bosses in LA, tell them what a bunch of amateurs we were out in Texas.

She made her way slowly up the tiered seating where our studio audience would soon be placed. I half expected her to check under the seats for chewing gum.

Now that I think about it, Ida Mayfield did not so much resemble a rat. Her body shape was all wrong. Maybe a mantis. But a mantis doesn’t scamper. It stands in the open, reaches out, pulls you in, and mechanically and methodically eats your head until only an oozing stump remains.

For the sake of convenience, let us just say a rat-mantis hybrid.

“Behind you, Sy,” Raul whispered, having come up behind me. His words pulled me from my musings.

Raul had trained me well. I immediately dropped my arms down and moved them out from my body. In a fraction of a second, Raul had me clothed in my vibrant, impertinent jacket. “Dress bravely,” he had once told me. “Clothing should be unapologetic.”

Once Raul had headed back off to his cluster of rolling garment racks, I eased open the drawer on the table beside me and inventoried the contents. The hard candies were in abundance. But the chocolate was running low. I made a mental note to restock.

My mother would be appalled. Not for reasons of nutrition. No. It would be because I had everything alphabetized, left to right. From Animal Crackers, to Zagnut. Mother abhorred those who embraced order.

I selected a piece of candied ginger—the miraculous rhizome that is packed with beneficent flavonoids essential for a healthy spleen.

I looked over and watched as Valerie and Ed, our audience wranglers, exchanged a few words with Myra before they headed down to the Processing Lounge to collect their charges. They looked after the well-being of those delicate souls. But they also were responsible for the energy level in the room. The emotions of our studio audience—down to each and every individual—must be managed to perfection. Their applause and gasps of surprise was what conveyed the entire show’s tone. My music could only do so much.

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It wouldn’t be long now. Our studio audience would soon be quietly filing in through the double doors, having come up from their dormitories on the floor below. I cannot overstate the convenience of keeping an entire studio audience on the premises. I should have thought of it years ago.

To some it might seem unorthodox. But I suppose it wasn’t too far removed from keeping chickens. Just make sure they have enough food and water. Don’t allow them to wander off. Keep the bathrooms stocked with soap and toilet paper—though that was not so much a chicken thing.

Our audience never complained nor threatened to riot.

There were no shivs hidden beneath pillows.

All was as it should be.

The dead should be peaceful, right? Of course, they should also remain dead. But somehow each of our guests had been inexplicably reconstituted back into a live human being and magically deposited upon a chair in one of two tiny yet very special rooms on the 28th floor of La Vida Tower. They came to us with no instructions. No packing slip, no invoice. What else could we do but build a game show around them? It’s what we TV people do. Don’t judge.

We protected them. Not just with locked doors. But also by making sure they never learned that they had died. One of the obvious benefits of their amnesia (a fortuitous side-effect of their mysterious transportation) was that it forestalled any sort existential crises that, you know, might result from that sort of shocking revelation. Didn’t want one of them to freak out and jump from a window.

Like what happened on Wednesday. That dramatic and tragic…can we call it an escape attempt?

The less said about that incident the better!

Dr. Lydia Hetzel was supposed to be responsible for the emotional and spiritual well-being of all the guests who lived on the 28th floor. I could tell the pressure was getting to poor Lydia.

As showtime approached, she was standing in a corner, out of the way, with hands clasped to keep from biting her nails. Once our audience arrived and had been seated, I knew her eyes would be ceaselessly scanning those reconstituted individuals, vigilantly looking for any danger sign. Though I’m not sure how suicidal ideations in the dead might present.

Hollywood couldn’t have provided a more perfect overwound psychiatrist. A fragile, brittle stick of a woman, Lydia’s pale skin edged toward albino. She wore her fine blond hair in a bun high on the back of her head so tight I don’t think she was capable of closing her eyes all the way. I once wondered if she were to let down her tresses might there be one of those cinema moments? You know, “Why Dr. Hetzel…you’re beautiful!” Those thoughts ended the day I walked into her office without knocking as she was rebunning her hair. She looked like a spider in a cheap wig.

But today, even though her hair and tailored white medical tunic were all wrapped up and buttoned down, it was obvious to me that were Lydia to forgo her morning decaf for a cup of the real deal, it’d be all over. I for one hoped never to be around when that bent and bulging door that barely held back her trembling tangle of neuroses finally gave way. I imagined it would resemble when some poor sap opened a prank can of peanuts and dozens of spring snakes flew out—and when the hammering hearts returned to normal, everyone’s first thoughts were: those snakes will never fit back in there!

Perhaps that all came out cruel. It was not my intention. I am very fond of Dr. Lydia.

She has an important role in this tale, so I should be forgiven candidly sharing my personal assessment of the woman. For the sake of the narrative.

Michael—currently our senior-most Reader—also has an important part to play in this story. Be prepared to see more of him in many chapters to come. Though, I must confess, I’m not a fan of that little toad. And as such, I’m at a loss of anything nice to say about him. Let me think. Ah, yes. He had very nice hair. And he did an admirable job of maintaining it.

This brings us to our other Reader.

Not Bianca. You have no reason to be introduced to her. After her acute psychic tailspin, she was awarded a year’s salary and carried off to a sanatorium on the quiet side of town.

I’m speaking, of course, about Rose.

Could she be the true hero of this story? I wonder. I, of course, assume it must be me. But I’ll leave it to you to figure that out as things develop.

Ever since Rose first walked into La Vida Tower, I knew she would show us great things. I had to wait, though. For weeks she mostly fetched coffee, filed paperwork, and edited all those typos from Michael’s interoffice memos.

But with Bianca out of the picture, we all would finally see Rose shine as our newest Reader.

You might be wondering why Rose fascinated me so much.

Sure, she was smart and inquisitive. But there was also her secret agenda. Secret is always the best kind of agenda, am I right? I sniffed it out at the very beginning. You see, Rose had a brother, once. He died. And that little fact convinced me that Rose had answered our help wanted ad with the desperate hope of being in the studio when her beloved brother was resurrected as a member of our studio audience.

Rose might be wily, but I was wilier.

It had been tough for me to watch Rose try and make sense of the goings on in the locked suites and rooms of the upper floors of La Vida Tower. You see, the true nature of our very special audience members was only given to employees on a need-to-know basis. Some HR nonsense imposed by the Network. So, Rose was stuck with vague conjecture about how the show really worked. That, along with whatever she was able to glean from her snooping. But now that she was part of the inside circle, with her own master key, I got to watch as she skulked around whole new parts of the building hitherto off limits. It was still her first day with all-access, but already her Nancy Drew game had been kicked up several notches. And she was relentless.

I wasn’t sure if I should be the one to tell her that the portals didn’t work that way—the chance of her brother popping in on us at La Vida Tower was, while not strictly impossible, astronomically unlikely.

For now, I was happy to watch her prowl. And to watch her premiere performance on the show! I was one hundred percent certain she’d amaze us all. If Lydia was correct and Rose had astonishing psychic gifts far beyond the previous Readers, maybe I could finally begin work on realizing my own secret agenda.

Time to get my head back in the game. How long had I been rolling about in the wallow of sorrow and self-pity? Silverio Moreno, I reminded myself, you are destined for greatness. Now shine, sir. Shine!

Things were looking up!

Myra breezed by to give me the ten minute warning until show time.

She pulled back the curtain of Sal’s hidey-hole to make sure our hostess had heard as well. I caught a glimpse of my Sal as she nodded from the shadows. She spent the half hour before we went on air engaged in her steadfast rituals behind the sheet she nightly tossed over the fire sprinkler pipe overhead. Hidden back there, in the dim light, dressed in her custard-colored kaftan, she playing endless games of three-pass Klondike. Every so often she could be heard muttering some vocal exercise tongue-twister. Lately it had been something about Fiona and her Carrara Ferrari. Any minute, I knew, Raul would slip back there and help Sal into her costume, followed by the androgynous twins to freshen Sal’s face and lacquer her hair with an heroically toxic volume of Aqua Net.

Of course, I had my own little rituals. Tinkering with the equipment in my cramped announcer’s station. My electric piano, my microphone, various over-ride switches for the electronic game board. If I felt particularly funky, I’d tune up my left-handed Gibson ES-335 that supposedly once belonged to Cesar Rosas.

Tonight would be a good show, I could feel it. I rummaged around in my snack drawer and selected a banana. Gotta keep the potassium levels up. I looked around the studio and watched Michael and Myra conferring with Rose.

I opened up a manila folder atop my piano and flipped through a sheaf of papers. It was the personnel file of one Rosalinda “Rose” Aguilar. I nabbed it from Lydia’s filing cabinet. There were the results of Rose’s psychic profile tests—that 1200 Fitzroy score. And a bit of family history (with a paragraph about that dead brother, Lionel being his name). Precious little in the way of employment history. A degree in Communications (which I’d try not to hold against her). And absolutely no experience in front of a camera or an audience.

No matter. I had confidence in her. Besides, she contrasted so well with Saligia. Her youth, her, optimism, and that perfect red dress.

As that thought rolled through my mind, Raul stopped by Rose to make sure the zipper pull of her dress was tucked out of sight before he disappeared behind the sheet to attend to Sal.

I dropped the banana peel into the little wicker basket hidden by the piano. Rose paced at the back of the studio, trying to prepare herself for the sort of performance which preparation really won’t help with at all. Nerves be damned! Her style and pluck would carry her through. I was sure of it.

God, I’m a shameless voyeur.