But, of course, the cameras are not the only problem. It’s not that Ben isn’t familiar with the phrase “Filmed before a live studio audience.” It’s not even as though he’s neverseena live studio audience before—he’s seen several studio audiences, and been in a few himself, and they’ve all been, to the best of his knowledge, one hundred percent populated by fully alive people only. But Ben has never seen a live studio audience for an actuallive productionbefore; every time he’s been in or around one,it’s been for something that was being taped, and would pass, before being broadcast, beneath the merciful eyes of an editor.
No such eyes will pass overLate Night Live with Brian O’Malley, unless you count Ben’s helpless ones; the audience knows this. Ben’s not even totally sure how he can tell—if it’s something about the body language, the looks on their faces, what. But somehow, to look at the crowd in front of that stage is to know that everyone in it is thinking something along the lines of,God, I hope something crazy happens tonight.
Ben swallows as the theme music begins to play; when Brian O’Malley walks onstage, he takes a breath. Pete’s the first guest, and according to Priyali, he just has to chat a little bit about himself, like a normal person, for two minutes. Then there will be a commercial break, and then he’ll have a brief five-minute cooking segment. Barely a cooking segment, really! Pete’s just making a cocktail and searing off a steak that’s already been cooked sous vide—even Renata could do that, and she’s always been hopeless in the kitchen.
“It’s going to be fine,” Ben whispers to himself, more a prayer than anything else. “It’s going to be fine.”
Thirty minutes later, when he and Pete are shivering together in front of the studio, bathed in the striating red-and-white glow of the fire truck lights, Ben says, “Do you know, I think I jinxed it?”
Pete’s voice is hollow, like his eyes, like his laugh, which is less a laugh and more a flat and toneless, “Ha. It was you, huh?Youturned the burner up as high as it would go, and thenyouglugged enough oil into the stupid pan tocountry frythe damn steak, and thenyouwere the one who dumpedwateron agreasefire? That was you?”
“Ah,” Ben says carefully, because, no. That had all been Pete. “Well. That’s notexactlywhat I’m saying?—”
“Water on a grease fire.” Pete shakes his head, looking haunted. “I’ve known better since I was ten—younger, probably. If my father sees this, I’mnevergoing to hear the end of it. Why did Idothat? And why did Isayany of that stuff, in the interview part, that was… I mean,why?” He folds his arms over his chest, still wearing nothing but the tight black T-shirt Priyali put him in, and moans, “I couldn’t stop thinking about all thecameras, and all thepeople,and it was like my body was just…moving on its own! Making terrible decisions! He asked me if there were any signs in my early life that I’d be into cooking and I saidVirgo, Ben! I’m not even a Virgo! I’m a Taurus! And it doesn’t matter! I only know because one of my exes told me it’s why I was so stubborn, and I think he just wanted me to pet-sit for his turtle!”
Ben, whoisa Virgo, and who knows this because Renata is constantly sending him weird memes that say things like “Big Virgo Energy” invariably followed by the wordsit u, decides now is not the moment to say so. Instead, carefully, he offers, “Anyone could have been confused?—”
“Could anyone have burned down the studio?” Pete says this with a wildness that makes Ben grimace.
Still. “You didn’t burn down the studio,” Ben says, in the most soothing voice he can muster. “You, okay, you lightly singed a small section of the soundstage; I’m sure that’s happened hundreds—well, dozens—well, I’m sure you’re not the first person to set something on fire in Studio 8B, anyway. But it’s all still there?—”
“They had to evacuate thebuilding?—”
“Only the floor we were on!” Ben protests. Then, at Pete’s narrow-eyed glare, he admits, a little more honestly, “Well, okay, and the two floors above us and the three floors below that, so a total of six floors, but! It’s a big building! There are—uh—well, the elevator had buttons up to seventy, so that’s, what? Six overseventy, uh…like, eight percent? They had to evacuate eight percent of the building; that’s practically no evacuation at all. That’scloserto no evacuation than it is to evacuating everyone.”
For the first time since they walked—well, ran, pursued by an employee in an orangeFloor Fire Safety Officervest screaming, “This is real, people! This is not a drill!”—out of the building, Pete looks something other than dead inside. One eyebrow quirking up, he asks, “Did you just do that calculation in your head?”
“Oh,” Ben says, surprised, but before he can answer, Brian O’Malley is walking up to them. He’s still wearing the tailored blue suit he was sporting behind the desk during taping, and there’s a dark jacket in his hand, swung up over his left shoulder. His carefully structured coif of thin, wheat-blond hair is being utterly destroyed by the wind, but if he notices, he doesn’t seem to care. He walks up to Pete and Ben with the confidence of a man who has been famous long enough to burn away any concerns of what anyone thinks of him, and claps Pete, hard, on the shoulder.
“I tell you what,” Brian says, shaking his head, “I’m still not sure if your little schtick is on purpose or not—ithasto be, right? But if it is, having met you—then you’retoogood at it, man. It’s unsettling. The ratings for tonight arecrazy,and Priyali got our social team to upload the clip right away, and it’s already everywhere.” Hand still on Pete’s shoulder, Brian peers at him, his expression tightening. “But if you’re not doing it on purpose, right, then ratings or not, I think maybe I did a bad thing, asking the team to book you. The sort of thing that wouldn’t sit right with me. If that’s the case—” And here he swings the jacket off his shoulder, pulls out a business card, and tucks it into the inner pocket. Ben realizes it’s Pete’s bomber jacket at the same moment, handing it back to Pete, Brian finishes, “Then you give me a call, all right?”
Pete stares, blankly, from Brian to the jacket he, Pete, is now clutching tightly in one hand. “But… I burned your studio down!”
Brian grins. “Nah,” he says, waving a hand. “It’s seen worse. Anyway, anything’s better than the week we had the horses.” He nods to Pete, and then, to Ben’s surprise, to Ben, before saying, “Gentlemen.” Then he’s walking away, whistling something under his breath which Ben realizes, in the seconds after Brian vanishes from earshot, is in fact theLate Night Livetheme song.
For a moment, they just stand there, the jacket dangling from Pete’s hand, staring after him. Then, because he thinks someone reallyshould, he asks, “Um, Pete? Are you…all right?”
Pete blinks for a second. Then, slowly, he says, “I think…that I’m great. Because—stay with me now—I must be asleep. This is all some kind of insane anxiety dream! And any second now I’m going to wake up, and I’m going to say to myself, ‘Pete, you idiot, I can’t believe you really thought any of that was real, you never have to worry about making a fool of yourself in front of Brian O’Malley, because that kind of thing doesn’thappento people!’”
“I regret to inform you that this is reality,” Ben says, hating himself for it a little.
Pete groans. “In that case? I need a drink.”
Ben thinks that’s fair, in the circumstances. He thinks that if he were Pete, he, too, would want a drink. Perhaps several drinks. There is the chance that he might want to move past drinking and progress to attempting to sustain an amnesia-inducing head injury, but decides it’s best not to suggest that just now.
Instead, they attempt to get a drink. They try first at the bar nearest to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, which, Ben realizes as they walk in, is an obvious mistake. Because the whole place banks on its proximity to the building, and the various shows filmed inside, it is often playing those shows for its patrons. Tonight everyscreen within is lit up with images of the burningLate Night Liveset, Pete’s hapless, trapped expression immortalized next to the dancing flames; when they step inside, Pete blanches, turns on his heel, and walks right back out, which Ben can’t blame him for.
But the next two places they try aren’t much better. At the first one, they only make it ten feet past the door before someone calls, “Oh my God, wait, that’s him! That’s the guy from my phone! Dude, we werewatchingyou, you straight up burned thatsetdown—” Ben never finds out the end of this sentence, because he’s too busy following Pete, who had turned tail the minute he heard the words “that’s him.” And at the third place, they manage to get all the way to the bar without incident, but as they’re halfway through placing their order, the bartender’s face lights up with amusement, and she says, “Holy crap, wait, aren’t you that guy from the?—”
“NO!” Pete yells this so loud several bar patrons turn to stare; Ben wishes he could flip some switch that made Pete invisible, or unrecognizable, until he was back to a more even keel. “I’m notanybody, fromanything, you don’tknowme, you’ve neverseenme, goodbye!”
When Ben catches up to Pete this time, he looks frustrated nearly to the point of anguish. That’s why, before he can think better of it, Ben hears himself saying, “Why don’t we just go back to my place?”
It’s not the sort of sentence Ben usually says. In fact, if he’s going to be entirely honest about it, Ben is more the type to come up with excuses why someonecannotcome back to his apartment. If the place had actually been fumigated as many times as Ben has claimed, it would be an unlivable toxic hazard, killing anyone who stepped foot inside. But it’s just easier, isn’t it, to claim fumigation, or that a fictional roommate is hosting a party, than it is to tell the truth. Ben has never found a situationwhere it was socially acceptable to say,I don’t want you to come back to my apartment because it’s the place where no one bothers me and you’re bothering me.And, indeed,I don’t want you to come back to my apartment because over the last month and a half every cup and bowl I own has slowly migrated into the general region of my editing desk, is also not, in his experience, a winner.
However, hehas in fact asked Pete to come back to his apartment, and when Pete immediately accepts, he looks so relieved that Ben can’t bear to take it back. Instead, he spends the short walk to the subway trying to behave like a normal person while mentally cataloguing things like the last time he did dishes, or laundry. He is relieved to remember, feeling like it was a long time ago, that he spent the time between getting home from work and leaving to meet Pete tonight stress-cleaning the place, so it should be in fairly decent shape.
This leaves Ben, on their fifteen-minute ride to his usual subway stop, to instead try to behave like a normal person while thinking histrionic thoughts like,Pete’s going to be in my apartment!andMy apartment is where my bed is!andYou know what kinds of things people get up to in beds, Ben, don’t you? Or has it been so long that you’ve forgotten?It is, in a word, distracting. Ben’s fairly certain he isn’t pulling off “normal person,” and honestly, he’d be pleased to discover he was even managing “only slightly off-putting.”
