Chapter Nineteen

WHILE steps are taken to contact The Assassin, the rest of the new Counter-Insurgency Plan is begun. With initial mole "Rosencrantz" having blown himself up in an act of spontaneous combustion, his brother-in-betrayal, code-named "Guildenstern," becomes the focus. The idea is to put forward an Establishment clown to counter the Underground's famed Jelly Boy.

"The problem I see with this," The Man in the Black Hat murmurs over his cellphone to Boss Eggers, "Is that Guildenstern is a clown. I mean, he's REALLY a clown, with makeup or without. We don't want another insane Rosencrantz who'll piss off not just the underground, but everyone."

Boss Eggers is silent. Guildenstern is his hireling.

The movie screen shows a close-up of the black veil obscuring the thoughts of the Black-Hatted One as his mumbling words appear on the soundtrack.

"I'll gladly back this clown-- but I expect a return from him. He's been a mole for how many years now? How many paychecks? What are the results? Every time I've tried contacting him he's taking a nap!"

"You're not supposed to contact him," Eggers snaps.

On the soundtrack are heard gurgly whimpering noises of frustration coming from the Man in the Black Hat.

"The Underground yet lives!" he whispers in a choked voice as rebuke, then hangs up.

The screen wipes him off to reveal Boss Eggers in his posh San Francisco office with movie set backdrop. An expression of bemusement falls over his surly face. His confidence never wavers. Eggers shakes his head and laughs.

The next day: a new cable-TV show debuts: "Talking Books with Roody McDoody."

A clown in a garish red-and-yellow polka dot clown suit, with makeup smeared over his face, jumps through a sheet of paper saying "ROODY!" on it. A paid studio audience of fourteen people cheers.

The clown waves his arms about.

"Whoop-Whoop-De-Doo!" he hoots. "Welcome to the Roody McDoody Show! Kids, we are going to talk today about books. There are Good books and then there are Bad books. Here is a Good book."

Roody holds up a copy of The Corrections. The audience cheers.

"And here is a Bad book."

We can't see the title, but the camera focuses on the word "ULA" on it.

A chorus of boos.

The screen then displays blown-up photos of various underground personalities, including King Wenclas. The clown throws colorful oversized darts at them. He's not very adept. The darts fail to stick.

"ROO-DY! ROO-DY!" the studio audience chants.

The clown tries again. He begins to sweat, further smearing his clown makeup. A face of desperation is glimpsed beneath.

Inside a Brooklyn flat, The Man in the Black Hat, watching it on TV, turns to his wife.

"This is horrendous," he says.

The clown is worse than Neal Pollock.

The Roody Show moves into the Interview segment.

"Kids, let's give a Big Roody hello! to award-winning novelist Francine Prose. Whoop-Whoop-De-Do!"

"Yaaay!" the paid audience cheers on cue.

Ms. Prose, dressed in a chic pantsuit, looks uncomfortable on the clown set, but is a trouper. Roody plops down in one of the plush chairs provided on stage, glad to be done with the Darts segment. He's exhausted. It's the most work he's done in decades. "Could use a beer right now," he's heard over the microphone muttering to himself.

"May I sit down?" the prim author asks, clearly not understanding the show is supposed to co-opt the Underground. Etiquette has been suspended.

"Why the hell not?" Roody says, prodded from his reverie, feigning to snap into action while not doing so. While leaning back in the armchair and wiping his smeared forehead with one hand, he uses the other to signal the audience.

"Yaaay!"

"So, Fran baby-- tell us about yourself," he says to the esteemed author.

"Okay." The lean and sultry-hued well-bred middle-aged middle class essence of boozhification begins, carrying the self-love of a five year-old.

"In my award-winning book to writers I emphasize the peculiar and precious solitary experience, the almost-religious bond between 'writer' and 'reader' which must not be hindered but needs to instead be strenuously advanced through the indoctrination I mean the education of readers to give them the proper necessities for understanding what we the trained writers of the Academy bring to the page. It's a quiescent procedure by necessity of maintaining our difference from improper and, well, insufficiently screened writers and readers who like bacilli or a virus might infect the Body Literati with their vulgarity and improperly screened. . . ."

Roody points to the audience from his seat as he gazes at the ceiling.

"Yaaay!"

"Keep it going, Professor," he encourages the very proper Ms. Prose, who's stopped. "You have the floor, my dear."

She continues what has to be one of the most boring monologues ever recorded. All the while she studies her host, who during his days as an establishment plant in the underground was infamous for falling asleep every time asked to do anything. She wonders if he's narcoleptic for real. Grittily she continues discussing her book. Roody's head is rocking around on his neck as he leans farther back in his comfortable chair. It's been, after all, for him, a stressful day. The demands made on him lately by his overseers are altogether too much. He'd rather think about something tranquil, like his days as an affluent WASP before various divorces diminished his finances. His times relaxing with a Scotch and soda on his yacht. With a smile he remembers.

Prose: "--rather than capitulate to narrative demands, the best writers of today, the most celebrated anyway, like Jonathan Franzen and Alice Munro, will luxuriate over the words and over every last trivial detail of the story's environment to create a framework of sympathy not with the characters but with the task of the writer who has the unfortunate obligation to fill pages with craftings of words so that the reader becomes trapped in the art with no interest beyond the feelings imbued in the observational process. Counter-intuitively, this is good--"

The red-headed producer of the show looks concerned. Her blue eyes gape. Roody has missed one of his scheduled "Whoop-Whoop-De-Do"'s. Members of the paid audience begin to sneak off. Roody's head now is tilted fully back, his mouth open.

Prose: "--the requirement to not judge, to not bring unreliable human opinion into the narrative or rather the text because to narrate presupposes a narrator, a judgement, an authorial authority when our task is generously to describe, with gentle patter, innocent and unthinking patter lulling the mind-- "

Roody: "Zzzzzzzzzzzzz. . . ."

The host is snoring! Loudly and irreverently snoring. The last audience member is heard to say, "They don't pay enough for this shit," before running off.

Ms. Prose glances toward the producer, who has five minutes to kill. This is live television. The producer makes a rotating gesture with her hand, a signal to keep going.

"--the work stripped of the extraneous, of meaning, opinion, society, emotion, we the reader can focus on what is most necessary to the art which is the word on the page itself disconnected from the necessity to thrill or even communicate--"

Prose continues talking in her ultra-refined way as time runs out. With her last monotonous words, the camera focuses on the sleeping clown while graphics flash on the screen over his image: "ROO-DY! ROO-DY! ROO-DY!" Then the image fades to darkness.