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will live in both places. Inside … outside.” She suddenly saw it and jerked back from him.
    “Mimi …”
    She became calm, like the victim of an air disaster, sitting in stunned agony on a bloody runway, waiting for ambulances.
    “It’s a … monster,” she said. “He will bring tragedy.Murder. Pain.” Her heart flooded with psychotic impressions and Alan stood to go.
    “He’ll come out. He’ll find a way.”
    It was the last thing he heard as he left and ended up in the bar at Spago’s, drinking until it closed.

act one

the pitch
    S mog covered L.A. like thin, concentration camp smoke.
    “Andy, great to see you. I know this season’s been a circus with all the cancellations and strikes. How you been?”
    Alan could barely make eye contact with Andy Singer. All he kept seeing was Cleo’s imbecilic smile superimposed on Andy’s conceited face.
    Andy stretched, his iridescent Bijan shirt doing a trout shimmer. “Well, you know, ‘Cleo’ has been very good to us again this season.”
    Really? thought Alan. Got news for you, pal; if Cleo had been good to you, she would’ve cut your heart out and fed it to you.
    “Oh, yeah?” Alan smiled a little. But not enough togive it away. “Well, I’m not surprised. That show just really hits people.”
    Yeah, he thought. Like the bubonic stupids it hits people. Andy was delighted and giggled a bit. Alan stared at him, trying to imagine how so profound an injustice could’ve occurred.
    Andy was all of twenty-five years old and had been promoted to junior V.P. of programming for the network one year earlier. But regardless of whatever the hell it was he did for a living, he was fucking good at his job. Alan couldn’t deny it. No one could.
    The list went on and on.
    “Surgeons.” Forty-two share after the second week, up against the Super Bowl … there was no way, but Andy picked it.
    “A House for All.” Sweeps Week didn’t even make a dent. The other two networks threw-up
Lethal Weapon 3
and a two-hour, tear-jerk cabala with Barbara Walters interviewing seriously maimed celebrities to try and stop it. And the goddamn thing cleaned their clocks like fucking napalm. Stupid? Sure, it was stupid. Serious faces, talking over serious family “drama” and crying at every break. But incest cuts into the veins. Mel and Barbara didn’t even get a chance to pull their pants down.
    “Cleo.”
    Well … what could you say? What could you actually
call it?
It sure wasn’t no comedy, Jack. But try to tell that to the rating’s points that were hugging that sucker like a beam of golden light.
    There wasn’t a writer in town who could stand to even watch the teaser. But they all wanted to write for it. Resids, kids. That show was going to ride into the sunsetlike Mighty Mouse, with a hundred zeroes between his furry little legs. Even if some guy got cut off at story and the script got finished in-house, he knew he’d pull down endless checks from syndie bread; foreign, domestic. Eventually the fucking Solar System would be bouncing “Cleo” into black holes. Even subfungi life-forms would sit around eating Doritos, watching.
    And Andy with his Shirley Temple hair, lame jokes, and vapid taste was responsible. Some said he’d disfigured the cosmic order. After all, “Cleo” was his “baby.” His “concept.” His guiding hand was there, every excruciating inch of the way.
    It was hard to decide which made one ulcerate more, the part about a castrating hag and her defiant cat Mr. Pink Nose, or the part about how the two insinuated themselves into the life of her merry, brain-dead son-in-law who resembled a more masculine Pat Sajak.
    “Dad” was trying to raise two daughters after his wife left him for some gonk Richard Belzer somehow got talked into playing, to much publicized regret. That’s when “Dad’s” former mother-in-law, the sarcastic, festering horror, Cleo, had decided to drop in and help him get along, with her agonizing homilies