Faster on My Own: Chapter 12
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Bright lights shone in Steven’s face. Sitting across the desk from him was a little goblin in a bow tie. The makeup smoothed out the host’s face until had no contours, like someone had airbrushed him onto reality. This was Steven’s big test run, to see whether the audience would accept him as a leader or tear the meat from his bones. The director said, “Alright. We’re live in 5, 4, 3…” then signalled two and one.
The host snapped his head toward the camera and said, voice completely nasal, “Welcome back to the Holmann Hour. Today our guest is Steven Williams, author, lecturer, shit-stirrer, junior VP of Marketing at Vita-Tech. Steven, it’s a pleasure to have you on.”
“Great to be here.” He glanced at once at the bright lights and blinked, then told himself not to do that.
“You’ve been in some hot water the last couple weeks.” Holmann chuckled, but it just sounded like someone swallowing a bunch of marbles.
“Oh, is that why you had me on? I thought you wanted to talk about basketball.”
“Not quite. You’ve been drawing quite the crowds lately. I’m sure my audience has seen the footage, I know they loved it.” Holmann gestured to empty space, where a screen facing the desk assured them a picture of a nazi punching a protestor had been edited in. Steven hadn’t done any events, of course, but the audience would receive him better if they thought he fit into the provocateur mold that they were so familiar with. The speakers just behind the cameras played the sound of a crowd cheering. “I thought so. They just wouldn’t be my audience if they didn’t.” There was no audience. Only the people operating the cameras, some sound guys, a director, a ladder shoved in the corner, and a man whose job Steven couldn’t decipher that stood with his arms crossed and a burning cigarette in each hand. “What do you think about these kinds of fights cropping up at your events?”
“I think it’s fine. Obviously some of these fights are started by plants. Paid agents, you know the rest. But the appropriate response to someone trying to suppress free speech is violence. We must leave nothing on the table in our defense of it.” As he said this, Steven congratulated himself for his calm, level voice. He couldn’t afford to blow this chance by stammering or vomiting or accidentally slipping into a discussion about abolishing intellectual property laws. Even though it really made no sense to him that someone could draw a mouse and then own that for a hundred years.
“I see. Now, I agree with you entirely. Everyone saying they want to get rid of free speech needs to be shot.” Holmann smiled, revealing a row of gray teeth. Steven wondered if only dentures could become discolored like that, or if it could happen to real teeth. He couldn’t decide which would be worse. “However, a lot of the criticism you’ve faced suggests that you’re supporting the suppression of free speech.”
“That’s not true. So when we say speech we don’t mean words.” Steven knew that what Holmann had just raised, disingenuously, was completely correct. He just had to confuse the issue a little bit. “We are talking about qualified speech-acts. These speech-acts, which rely on speech-fictions and speech-non-fictions to combine into real speech potentiality, are a proposition. Positive and steadfast. Not all the words we say are like that because some are all speech-fictions, which reduces the potentiality to zero. It’s noise, it’s a chimpanzee hooting, you disregard it. And I think anyone with any kind of sense knows the difference.”
“You know,” Holmann leaned back in his chair and flipped his tie out of his jacket. “I think everyone who’s trying to hit you over this is nuts. You’re completely right. Wasn’t that protester trying to attack you anyway?”
Steven smiled and nodded, a bobblehead across the desk from Holmann, who was trying to cut off his angle, to take the meat of the commentary to be made. He leaned forward on the desk, hand flush against the wood desktop, warm from the lights. “Between you and me,” Steven winked at the camera. “I think the reason he attacked me was that he was paid.”
“Paid by who?”
“Hard to say. When you speak the truth, you make a lot of enemies who live on their lies. Soros is an obvious possibility, but there’s a thousand rich liberals who are more than happy to throw their money at silencing people who threaten them. And it’ll work. I’m willing to bet that, this time next year, I’m out of a job. You can’t fight them forever. They’re too strong and too rich and they are always watching.” Steven exhaled. Holmann would have to stretch himself pretty far to come up with something to overshadow that, though Steven worried that he had gone too far. It was, after all, still possible to discredit oneself in the world of conservative media. Not easy, but certainly possible.
Holmann coughed a couple times, then lunged forward at the desk with his finger in the air. Steven flinched and a mild chuckling emerged from the speakers. For as unhinged as the show and Holmann were, Steven had to admit that they coordinated well. “You know this show is no friend of Soros. He’s paid all kinds of protesters.”
“Of course.” Steven wished he had gotten paid to protest. It would’ve prevented quite a few hungry nights when he was between jobs.
“Well, is it possible that he’s also paying hitmen to come out to these crowds and find a moment where they can kill people he wants to silence?” Holmann’s eyes bulged as he spoke. For the first time, Steven considered the possibility that Holmann meant the conspiracy theories he posed to his audience day in and day out.
“No. I mean, certainly he’s paying them.” Yes, replace possibility with certainty. No one likes a gray area, so give them black and white. “But I think he doesn’t want to kill anyone. He doesn’t want that because you can’t humiliate a dead conservative. Their words live on, unconquerable forever. No, he’s paying money to discredit us. So we walk around in lives made of our own coffins, a subject of ridicule. That’s how he tries to win.”
“Interesting. That’s interesting stuff.” Holmann pivoted to a camera. “We’re going to take a quick break, then when we come back: Are chemtrails turning people into reptilians? No, but maybe?” The lights dimmed, and Holmann stood up from his desk and extended his hand to Steven. “That was dynamite, kid. Thanks for coming on.”
“Any time. I had a lot of fun here.”
As Steven left the stage, Holmann said, “You know what, I think a lot of people are going to hear our message tonight.” Steven didn’t know how to feel about that, but his stomach gurgled.
Ashwin glared at the television. A man with a face he knew, improbably situated beneath a coif of professionally styled hair and above a suit and tie, was on the screen. Ashwin shut it off after only a few sentences. Steven couldn’t be serious. He knew that fascism weaponized these free speech quibbles. When Caroline had told him Steven’s plan, Ashwin dismissed it as preposterous. Both the plan itself and the likelihood of Steven carrying out. After all, Steven had once descended into a fury over a too-complimentary drawing of a police officer. Such a wholesale transformation should have been beyond him, but Ashwin couldn’t reconcile that thought with the man he had seen on the television.
He arose from his couch and walked over to the kitchen. Many of the white tiles on the floor had been stained brown from years without replacement. The single incandescent light flickered as Ashwin poured cold, already-cooked rice into a pan. It stuck together in clumps that Ashwin poked and prodded apart. His plan, what had always guided his interaction with Steven, was to let whatever flight of fancy he was on burn itself out, then Steven would return to his normal state. In many ways, Steven had been like a tetherball. No matter how fast he got going or knotted up he was, he’d eventually end up in the same spot. The pan sizzled as Ashwin dropped in some broccoli and chickpeas.
There was no longer room for a quiet return to the same spot. Steven’s appearance on the Holmann Hour would hit the rest of the group like a bomb. With any luck, it wouldn’t fracture the group. Many of them had made errors which Ashwin helped them work through with minimal embarrassment, and Steven committing such a grandiose error could be explained as natural to his character. He tapped the spatula against the counter. Unlikely, he thought. They would want to take action, as they often do. Ashwin could only hope to direct that thirst for action in its most useful direction.