Cancel Culture

Nathan meets a playwright; two of them, actually.

Cancel Culture

Abraham Rokanowski Kamotsky liked to say he was gifted an arc of grand destiny at his birth. Nathan wasn’t sure he believed in destiny but counterpoint: that name and no less than a dozen smash hit plays in four working decades. So, maybe?

Playbill probably agreed; they announced his thirteenth, and most likely final work with the headline “Legendary Playwright Returns to Broadway with Unnamed Project.”

The buzz was intense, unmissable. Six months later, Sam (flaunting them everywhere): “Opening night tickets!”

Nathan saw them on her Insta. Apparently she literally danced around the newsroom waving them in people’s faces. Hope that works out for you, Sam, he thought.

It did not work out for her.

After three weeks of increasingly disruptive protests on the street in front of the Winhurst Theater, the management company pulled the plug, breaking its contract and throwing the entire production out on its ass 48 hours before curtain.

Sam (horrified, on Instagram): Noooooooooo! She came to see him in his apartment, too agitated to sit down, pacing around his living room in livid, ecstatic fury. “I was taunting Neil this morning! This morning, Nathan! He struck out on Ticketmaster! He was upping his bid on Stubhub! I was laughing in his face! UHHHGH! How could this happen to me?”

“It’s a mystery,” Nathan assured her.

That got her attention. She spun on him and locked eyes, probing his soul aggressively for any sign of sarcasm.

He took a step backwards. Shit.

“You think I deserve this.” J'accuse!

He swallowed. “I didn’t say that--”

“You didn’t say it.” She took a step forward, “but you think it.”

Don’t break eye contact. Don’t confess. Maintain your innocence! Don’t look away. Nathan looked away. “Sam...”

“What?!”

“It was a play about three divorced women who create a virus that transes kids...”

She threw her hands up. “I cannot believe this. You? Of all people? Pro-censorship?!” Aghast! Disappointed! Aghast!

“Named ‘The No-Fault Reich.’” Because, apparently, according to Mr. Kamotsky, uncontested divorce was the equivalent of Nazi Germany or something. Nathan found the whole thing almost unendurably embarrassing.

“This is America, Nathan!” Since he was here, and the mob of protesters who had gotten the whole thing canceled weren’t (and, probably, since there was one of him and a whole bunch of them), it seemed he was getting the brunt of her fury. “We used to be the country that put on masterpieces like The Producers! Now a living legend like Kamotsky can’t even get his magnum opus hosted!” She shook her head in amazed wonder at the shocking decline of her society.

In the silence, “I’m not saying anyone deserved to be canceled, I’m just saying it was... you know?” Easy to see coming.

She wasn’t quite buying it. No, scratch that. She wasn’t buying it at all. “You do think he deserved it, though.”

“I think it probably would have been better if he’d worked out his divorce with a therapist or something, yes.” That was as much as he was willing to admit.

“I had opening night tickets, Nathen. Opening night!” Sam moaned softly in despair. “... I wonder if they’re worth anything.” her eyes traveled to his laptop, open on the kitchen table. “Don’t think you’re getting out of this,” she was walking over to check eBay.

Nathan checked his phone. Missed call: Cohen. Two of them. Crap. He called back on speaker. “Hey, Boss. Sorry. I was caught in something. What’s up?”

Nathan could feel Cohen wanting to scold him for being unresponsive, but a) Nathan was on a leave of absence from the newsroom and b) Cohen needed a favor. “I need you to take a story--an interview. Local.” Cohen sounded stressed.

Sam, from across the room, “Leave him alone, Cohen! He’s on a--”

“When,” Nathan asked.

A moment of silence. “Right now,” Cohen said. “Tonight.” Urgent.

There’s no way it’s him, Nathan thought. No way at all. Total coincidence. “I... could. Who--?”

“Kamotsky,” Cohen said. “He wants to make a statement.” Cohen exhaled the way he did when he was about to greenlight a really bad idea. “He wants to make it to you.”

Sam had come to attention, staring with unconcealed envy and open-mouthed disbelief. And calculated opportunism. “Tonight--wait--” She was coming around the table. “ARK wants to talk to Nathan? Why?”

Don’t... get your hopes up. “I did a #MeToo thing about him.” His ‘negotiations’ with young actresses. “Years ago,” he said. Back when MeToo was a thing. “Cohen, you’re sure he asked for me? He hates me.”

“I’m absolutely sure,” Cohen said in a flat way that foreclosed any other possibilities. “He demanded we send you over. Offered an exclusive. The only statement he’ll make on record regarding...” he refused to say its name, “that play he wrote. He wants you there. In person.”

Sam was staring at him. “He’s for sure gonna kill you.” To the phone, “Cohen, I’m here with Nathan.”

“I’d noticed.”

“You can’t send him by himself. He’s like... a defenseless baby bird. I’m going.”

Cohen did some mental calculus; his ability to order her to stand down versus time, running out. “We need to do this before whatever he’s on gets out of his system,” Cohen told them. “Go. Now. There’s a car en route to pick you up.”

Nathan: “Cohen--wait--this--” is a terrible idea.

Cohen: “Go.”

On the way down, taking the stairs to avoid the delay of his creaking, ancient elevator, “So you got ARK divorced?” Sam was in awe. How did I not know this!?

“He got him divorced,” Nathan said, pushing out into the winter. “... I just wrote the story that triggered it.”

“Oh, man, he is definitely gonna murder you!” Her eyes sparkled in the New York night, filled with wondrous possibilities.

###

“This is not complicated,” Abraham said when they arrived at his penthouse apartment on 57th street. “And don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt anyone.” He looked at Nathan with an intensity that suggested he might want to hurt him. “In the fullness of time,” Abraham said, "all insults will be repaid.”

“I’m Samantha Morley,” she stepped forward with her hand out.

“I know who you are,” Abraham said. Nathan thought she glowed slightly at the acknowledgement.

“I’m a fan of your work,” she held up her tickets; tactile proof.

He nodded but despite her best efforts she was not going to distract him. “Come, Mr. Bennet. Hang your coat. Pour yourself a drink. Sit.” he nodded to the expansive black leather sofa situated so it was back lit by the lights of southern Manhattan. “We have a long night ahead of us.”

Nathan moved carefully into the room. It was all gleaming polished black marble with dull gold inlays and shining glass offering a spectacular view of the city. Breathtaking. He had interviewed young women Abraham had lured up here and heard them described being overwhelmed by it; in person that was easy to understand.

“Really sorry about what happened,” Sam was saying. She was going to the bar to take him up on the drink offer. “Super disappointed about tomorrow night. I mean not as disappointed as you are! But super--”

“Are you going to make a statement, Mr. Kamotsky?” Nathan asked. “I was sent here to--”

ARK waved the question away as irrelevant. “We are going to discuss matters of much greater importance,” He assured Nathan. “We are going to discuss justice. Justice for me, for my creative vision. Justice for everyone whose work or speech has been exsanguinated at the hands of a baying mob.” With Winhurst conquered, the protestors had moved to the street in front of his apartment building. Even up here, Nathan could hear their distant, distorted chants--a victory lap. “I brought you here, because you will deliver my weapon.”

Nathan felt a very specific chill; one he had not felt in years. He knew instantly that Abraham had read it on his face. Shit.

Sam was making herself a cocktail. “Weapon? Nathan?” She was lost. Looking at Nathan over the bottles she’d selected and arranged. “What’s he talking about?”

Abraham laughed. “She doesn’t know?”

“There’s nothing to know,” Nathan said. Turn and leave, he ordered himself. Go. There’s nothing to discuss here.

“Name your price, Mr. Bennet.” Abraham invited. He was a big man. Tall, but also substantial, with long hair and a combination of muscle and fat that made him effortlessly intimidating. He was wearing a bathrobe of some exotic metallic-looking fabric over trunks; his chest was a thicket of gray old-man hair, but his body seemed younger. Steroids and obsessive gym work, Nathan understood. He wasn’t at all sure he could take him in a fight.

Samantha was staring at Nathan: what did he say?

“I paid eleven million to produce the Reich,” Abraham reminded him. “No one else would. No investors. All the risk? Mine. All the reward? The same. And now... a palace of ashes, not because my vision failed, not because I stumbled in the execution, not even because of some act of divine wrath! All those I could accept! But I failed because they -- those tiny, small-minded creatures down there--appointed themselves judge, jury, and executioner of what I--what all of us--are permitted to say. Permitted to think! It cannot be allowed, and it cannot go unanswered.”

“I think your beef is with your theater company,” Nathan said in a quiet, almost inaudible voice.

Samantha: “Wait. No. Roll back.” she stared at Nathan, “What’s he talking about? ‘Name your price?’”

Nathan: “Nothing. I don’t know. He’s not... he’s not making sense.”

Abraham, smiling as he explained it to her, showing teeth: “He knows I am making perfect sense, miss. He knows exactly what I am talking about--what I’m offering. Name a number, Mr. Bennet? A million? Two million? Why so small? Ten million? Almost what I spent and lost tonight? Double it! Twenty million dollars, Mr. Bennet! More money than you will ever see in a hundred of your lifetimes! Name it, and it’s yours. Tonight.” He walked forward. “Right now.”

Sam seemed frozen like a statue, aghast? Or was it agog? Nathan wasn’t sure. Both?

Abraham wasn’t stopping; he was rolling. Coming forward, each step, each word a great hammer driving the nail of his absolute certainty: “Nathan Bennet," he told her, "Your coworker--is in possession--”

Nathan: “No--” don’t.

Abraham: “Of a play--”

“Mr. Kamotsky--” Please!

Abraham: “that destroys men’s minds.”

Nathan closed his eyes, wincing in an annoyance so strong it might have been a migraine. There was no point in pretending. “And Then The Party Was Over. By Magellan Greene.” He opened them. He saw Abraham’s vicious, gleeful smile. “I don’t have it, Mr. Kamotsky. What you’ve heard--it’s not true.” He shrugged. “I was there at the showing. That’s true. I didn’t... stay for the end. That’s true. I went to see him in his office--yes. I probably was the last person to see him alive... But the last part? The story that I left with anything?” Nathan was shaking his head. “That’s a fabrication--the thing you’re looking for no longer exists.”

“Nathan,” Sam told him from across the room, “don’t ever play poker. Okay?” She had made her drink and now she emerged, fully armed for whatever might come. “Have to admit--” she addressed ARK, tried a sip of her drink. Grimaced. It was obviously disgusting. She drank a little more, “You already wrote a play that drives people batshit crazy--” she nodded at the window. “Why do you want to buy one?”

Abraham enjoyed the question, and he studied her, evaluating. Nathan felt pretty sure he could guess what the playwright was thinking--Sam was older than his usual conquests, but she was here. However, no. This was business. “The No-Fault Reich is nothing compared to And Then The Party--my work provokes. Infuriates! As art must. But And Then The Party...” He shook his head. “Can you explain it, Mr. Bennet?”

Nathan sat in the leather chair that offered to engulf him. The distant part of his brain screaming for him to leave seemed overwhelmed by the magnitude of the man’s offer, but also his presence. His blinding, gravitational charisma.

“It’s just a play, Mr. Kamotsky. Words on page.” He shook his head. “It’s... nothing. It’s not even a very good one.”

Abraham, fascinated: “You’ve... looked at it?”

Good-fucking-grief. Sam was staring at him too. As if he were the one spouting nonsense. “Some of it,” he admitted. He turned to Sam who was beyond fascinated.

“Magellan Greene,” he said. “Not a playwright. Not... an artist. I guess if he was anything, he was a philosopher.” Nathan tried to summarize the man’s life. “Mainly he was good at making enemies and holding grudges. He was fascinated with who we are, what makes us, us.”

Abraham: “The ‘hard’ question of consciousness.”

Yeah. “Not ‘are you awake?’ consciousness,” Nathan clarified. “‘I think therefore I am’ consciousness. The lived experience of being you. Of being aware of your existence. Of seeing color or hearing music.”

Sam: “Yeah?” So?

“He thought it was an illusion,” Nathan told her. “Like... a mirage. Greene believed we aren’t really conscious. We don’t really ‘experience’ being us. We’re all just squishy organic compounds and electrical discharges and we mistake that for being something... mysterious. We experience our ‘consciousness’ as our true self. We hope it’s eternal. We fear its end at death. All that. He thought believing that was the height of vanity and stupidity and the sooner we realized we’re just goo and sparks, the better.”

“Sounds like a lovely fellow,” Sam was going to smoke. She didn’t even ask for permission. She perched on the arm of ARK’s leather sofa and went through the sensual ritual of extraction, positioning, and lighting up.

“He routinely got thrown out of symposiums,” Nathan assured her. “Which is... hard to do. I mean these are all philosophers. It’s not like they have bouncers.” What more could he say to sketch Mr. Greene for them? “He self-published stuff like, ‘You’re Wrong About Having A Soul, You Moron,’ and ‘There is No ‘You.’ No one brought them.”

Sam inhaled deeply, held it and then blew a column of smoke up at the ceiling. “Hard to imagine. So?”

“He got cancer. He was dying. He hated the idea that all these people he had contempt for would go on being wrong about having their precious consciousness and thinking they were special, so he spent his remaining days writing...”

“A play,” ARK said. “All plays--all art--are acts of violence. But this one...”

Uh huh. “And Then The Party Was Over.” Nathan took a deep breath. He let it out. “He hosted one staging of it. Invited all his enemies--people in philosophy. Critics--he hated critics--”

“Parasites,” ARK agreed. He motioned to Sam to give him a cigarette and she held out the box from which he could select. Nathan watched him draw one out. “He invited you?” She lit it for him.

Nathan nodded. “He... hated me. I’m not sure why, honestly. But he... wanted me there.”

ARK shook his head slowly as if unable to grasp the awe. “What an honor,” he said, “to experience such a thing.”

Sam wasn’t as convinced. “Was it any good?”

“There’s a party,” Nathan told them. “In a room. Like someone’s 1970’s living room. There’s a family -- father, mother, child. There’s a dog.” He shrugged to capture how mundane this all was. “A young woman--a maiden. The grandfather. And a... shadow, lurking in the corner. Not like a scary shadow... just...” he shrugged. “A shadow. And they’re talking about this play they’ve just seen called And Then The Party Was Over--”

Sam, trying to blow a smoke ring. “Meta.”

“It was weird,” Nathan admitted. “They were discussing the end of the play, where everyone leaves, and as they go along, the clock on the wall chimes and every time it does, the host and hostess guide one of them to the doors...”

ARK: “Doors?”

“Yeah. There were a bunch of doors on the back wall--one for each guest. And they didn’t open to an outside--not even a stage version of outside--they went to these little... I guess, closets? One by one the host and hostess see the guests into their closet and each time someone leaves the lights get a little dimmer. There’s less... Less talking--obviously.” He shook his head. “Quieter. Darker. It was weird.” He looked around the room.

Sam was studying him; concerned. Maybe because of how he said the word ‘weird.’ “What’d it do? Did it destroy your mind?”

“I went and hid in the bathroom,” Nathan admitted. “Ten minutes before the end. I... it... I just felt like everything I was thinking and feeling and seeing was getting further and further away. Fading.” Now, he figured, it was time to drink. If ever a situation called for it. He got up from the chair. He felt them watch as he walked across the room. “It didn’t destroy anyone’s mind, Mr. Kamotsky. They’re all still out there. All those people he invited to play? They’re fine. You can call them if you want.”

ARK watched him move around behind the bar noting that Nathan had arranged to have his back turned as he said this. “Are they?” His question was a challenge for Nathan to be truthful.

“Dunforth is still critting plays. If I recall, he was looking forward to savaging yours.” Nathan was annoyed. “This professor guy, Tapalov or something--published a paper last year. They’re perfectly normal, Abraham. Whatever you think you know, you’re wrong. If you want to take revenge on anyone, I suggest you do what rich guys always do--get a lawyer.”

“If it’s harmless,” Abraham said, “then sell it to me for twenty million dollars tonight. You will have driven the best bargain since the Dutch bought Manhattan for glass beads.”

Crap.

This wasn’t lost on Sam, either. “What’d it do to them?” She asked with a flat demand.

Nathan studied Abraham’s expansive collection. There was everything he might want here. All the tools he needed to completely destroy himself. He selected whiskey and a tumbler and turned around. “I don’t know. Apparently nothing.”

“Apparently?” She wasn’t buying it--not for a minute--and neither was Abraham.

Nathan poured himself a little, and then a little more. He looked up. “They’re all completely normal—no different than they were before. They have lives, friends, careers...” But...There was something else, too. Something harder to put into words. “They can’t see magenta.”

Magenta? He could see their complete, bewildered confusion.

Sam: “Like... the color?” What the hell are you talking about, Nathan?

“Yeah. The color. It’s... kind of...” Nathan fumbled for the words. “Like... pink?”

Sam knew what magenta was. What she had was no idea what it had to do with anything.

Nathan understood; he’d get back to that. He tried some of the whiskey and it was outstanding. Let’s try a different tact. “These people—Greene’s audience. His enemies—they’re a diverse bunch. Philosophers. Critics. Editors...” Sip. “Jounralists.” He set the glass on the counter. “If there’s a thru-line to them, it’s that they were all passionate about something. And if you go talk to them now, that passion’s still there, same as it ever was but for people who knew them before and after...” He picked up the glass, put it to his lips; didn’t drink. Not this time. “It’s different. Blunted, I guess. Dimmer.”

“Gone,” ARK said. “What remains—a Potemkin facade. A counterfeit.” He was certain.

And Nathan... agreed. “It sounds like passion, it looks like passion... it...”

“They are empty inside,” ARK told them. His eyes full of gleeful vindication.

“I don’t understand,” Sam said.

Nathan nodded. “I didn’t either.” He drank the rest of the liquor and then poured more. “You know what a p-zombie is? A philosophical zombie? No?” He’d learned this, talking to Greene's peers -- the philosophers. “It's a person, physically normal in every way. Completely indistinguishable from anyone else, but they have no internal experience--of anything. They act completely normal. They laugh, they eat. They claim to ‘see’ color. They say they can ‘hear’ music... they’ll say, ‘I miss you,’ or even ‘I love you’ if the conditions are right but inside their head, where no one else can know what’s going on? Nothing. At all. They’re vacant.”

Sam understood. “I don’t... think. Therefore... I’m not?” She might have shivered very slightly.

“No one knows what it would be like to have no sense of your own existence. By definition, it wouldn’t feel like anything.” He shook his head. “The concept of p-zombies is a thought experiment,” he told them. “Like Schrodinger's Cat. Not a real thing. Everyone I talked to said that if there was a p-zombie we’d never know. They’d be completely normal, they wouldn’t... experience. They’d ‘see’ -- different wavelengths of light. Hear different wavelengths of sound. Their brains would decode those into images or noises they could react appropriately to. They would laugh. Cry. Whatever. Just like a computer might. But inside they’d be... desolate. They’d have the same interior life a toaster oven has.”

He put the empty glass back on the polished marble counter. “Magenta’s not a real color—I mean it’s a real color but it’s not a distinct wavelength of light. It’s created by our subjective experience.” He thought. He’d had this explained to him once, awhile ago. “One of Greene’s colleagues did a simple test. You show people cards with colors on them. Red. Yellow. Blue... like that? They name the color. Easy. Most people—who aren’t colorblind—no problem. It’s trivial. The people who saw And Then The Party? Mostly the same. They perform flawlessly until you show them the magenta card and then they just... see red. Or blue.” He shook his head. “None of them had color problems before. Their vision’s otherwise perfect...” do you get it now?

“They process color,” ARK was smiling and it was all predatory glory and gleaming teeth. “They can no longer experience it.”

Right. Exactly. Nathan grimaced. “I just kept thinking about those characters, locked forever in their black little closets. No light. No noise. Nothing. No way to ever come out. No release except death.” He shook his head. He looked up at Abraham. “I don’t care how much you offer me. I’m not giving it to you.”

“You could be rich, Nathan,” Abraham said. “And safe--and what does it matter to you if those squalling creatures down there who are incapable of experiencing art, simply... can’t? Surely it’s none of your affair. And I have cause. I was wronged. Justice demands punishment.”

No. Nathan shook his head. The money, in all its fantastic glory, had called to him briefly. He’d thought of what it might mean to his life. To the lives of the people he cared about. Transformative? Tens of millions of dollars... but he’d been there, that night, curious and unconvinced like everyone else, ready to engage intellectually with whatever he was shown, no idea that what was so precious and pervasive could be somehow so fragile. Why did he leave? He’d wondered about that. He’d felt the darkness inside him get blacker and blacker with each exit, with each light going out, but surely they had, too? Maybe it was his cowardice that saved him? Maybe his willingness to push aside the idea that what he was experiencing was categorically impossible and simply accept it and act?

He pushed the empty glass away from him. “Come on,” he told Sam, “we’re going.” He stopped at the doorway. “Doctor Greene didn’t give me the screenplay—I took it. Off his desk. Over his weak, failing objections. I could feel what it was doing to me—shutting me down inside, circuit by circuit. It was...” He didn’t have words for the terror he’d felt. “I thought about destroying it,” he told Abraham. “Several times. By the time I got home, I couldn’t completely convince myself it was real. By the next morning, Greene was dead and there was no one to give the pages back to. I just... kept them; I had no idea what to do with them. Until now. I’m going home and burning it. There’s nothing left for you. Find some other way to get your vengeance..”

Abraham watched with measured rage and disgust. “Once something’s been created, destroying it is impossible. If I don’t get it tonight, I’ll get it later. Manuscripts don’t burn, Mr. Bennet. You should know that. ”

“This one will.” Nathan held the door and Sam rode with him, wordless, all the way down.

###

They were ten minutes from Nathan’s apartment when Sam suddenly realized. “He never--ARRGH! He never signed my tickets! They’d have been worth a mint!”

“There was no way he was ever doing anything for either of us,” Nathan said. “And there was no ten, twenty million dollar payday for anyone, either. He was full of shit, top to bottom.”

She sat in sullen silence. “You’re such a killjoy. I can see why Jen left you.”

Irritated. “We’re on break.”

“You talk to her recently?” her inflection had changed slightly to something like sincere concern.

Nathan shook his head. “I keep... It's never the right time. You know?”

“Call her,” Sam said, “and let her know you miss her.”

Yeah. Precious things are fragile, Nathan thought. Small motions, like going to the toilets during the final act, or making a phone call to let someone dear know you miss them, can mean the difference between life and death.