“Some income streams have dried up,” Senderovsky said. “Because of the virus,” he lied.
“Be that as it may,” the contractor said.
Senderovsky began coughing into his fist now, the same dry, monstrous heaves that rocked him at the dinner table. The contractor stepped away and pulled up his mask. They were wearing them in the wealthy villages now. Just the other day, Senderovsky had seen an old man in a blue surgical mask walking behind a little masked girl on the main street of a gingerbread town, and the scene struck him as the beginning of the end of the world.
“I’ll always have money for you,” Senderovsky said. “Please, just start the work. It’s imperative.”
* * *
—
Around this time of financial troubles, his Los Angeles agent called, her voice smooth and deceptively creamy like a chilled chia-seed parfait. “How’s my favorite Russian novelist-cum-screenwriter?” she breathed into the phone.
The virus had stopped production, but now that the middle classes were in bed in their underwear for the foreseeable future, the need for “content” was greater than ever. According to his agent, another series had failed to be renewed at the network, a medical drama about people dying of contagious diseases, and now they were scrambling to replace it with something funny and far removed from the dystopia of the present day. Senderovsky’s script had again found favor with the network’s mercurial head.
“I’m ready to go, but he won’t sign off,” Senderovsky said of the Actor. “He doesn’t want it to be funny. He wants The Odyssey.”
“Screw him,” the agent said. “Tell him we have a slotski at the networkski.”
“He’s an executive producer.”
“So is my cat at this point. Or I should say my koshka.”
The agent had been a Russian minor in college.
“You know how he is. He lashes out at me. He’s competitive. He’s flirting with my wife.”
“What are you, the Commissar of Hurt Feelings? Don’t act like a child, Peter Panovich. We got a series to make.”
“Can I ask for an advance against my back end?”
“Ha ha ha! You still got it, humor-wise. And I know exactly who should direct the pilot.” She mentioned the name of an Indian woman, whom Senderovsky recognized from a science fiction series he had tried to enjoy. “I visited her vacay house in Kerala,” the agent said. “She has a lovely family and a lovely home.”
Senderovsky now recalled that the agent had said the same thing about his house and his wife and child upon visiting a few years prior. Like a fool, he had carried those words in the little purse he had sewn beneath his heart as a child, a repository of all the American words his parents would never utter. He had once again forgotten a cardinal rule: that a person living beneath an eternally blue sky could find comfort in the gray landscapes of others. As long as there was wheatgrass and yoga somewhere in the world, everything and everyone was “lovely.”
Still, a slot! And talk of actual directors and actual pilots. Now he had a clear mission and an even clearer obstacle. His entire life hinged on his ability to move it out of the way.
* * *
—
Dee and Senderovsky were on the porch’s weatherproof sofas overlooking the meadow and the sheep farm beyond. The carpets of grass and the far horizon still soothed Dee, but not to the same extent as when she had first arrived. She, too, was starting to wonder, although without any of Vinod’s philosophical gambits, if any of this was real, if she had been trapped and mounted like one of Nabokov’s helpless butterflies for the amusement of Senderovsky or some much-higher power.
“I have here,” Senderovsky announced, presenting a sheaf of papers to Dee, “the pilot to our series. I’m dying for you to read it.”
“Sure thang,” Dee said. “I love everything you do. It’s always funny.”
A Fokker D from the nearby aerodrome for antique planes made a stuttering pass around the bungalows and was now heading back to the mowed stretch of grass that served as its landing strip. Senderovsky thought he could make out an iron cross on the side of the old biplane. More slegs blankes? Was he being watched from the air as well?
“And there’s a tiny favor I’d like to ask,” he said. “If you read it and like it, maybe you can spend some time with our thespian friend and tell him so. I think it would be so helpful for him to hear a perspective from someone he really respects.”
Dee laughed. Her mouth was graceful, Senderovsky acknowledged, in the same way he found the mane of the palomino down the road graceful. “I feel sorry for him,” Dee said. “That algorithm is so dicked up.”