Spring 2010

The Television People

por René Georg Vasicek

Television makes me feel normal. That’s what Ziggy thinks as he turns on the portable television in the security kiosk. Ziggy works as a night watchman at a toothpaste factory. It is a “temporary” job that has somehow lasted for seventeen years. Ziggy’s “real” work is writing television scripts, none of which get produced. He’s had a few near misses (or hits), like a science-fiction show called The Secret Station, which is about a group of black teenagers who discover a forgotten metro station beneath Paris that is really a portal to an alternate universe. Studio executives pulled the plug when Ziggy refused to “Americanize” the show.

Ziggy also wrote a promising reality show called Sleeper, which has a very simple premise: to film people sleeping. Each week a comic-book artist is invited to “speculate” what the sleeper is dreaming about, recreating nightmare and bliss using still-frame drawings and digital animation. Again, Ziggy sabotaged the project by not allowing celebrities or famous actors to participate as “sleepers”.

Ziggy’s shift as night watchman begins precisely at midnight, which is perfect because at that hour the local television station broadcasts reruns of the original Star Trek followed by an episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s a good thing Ziggy isn’t a Cyclops or a Cylon...his job requires two eyeballs. One eye watches Lieutenant Uhura; the other eye is responsible for monitoring the feed from twenty-four security cameras: twelve high-resolution zooms inside the factory, and twelve infrared “nighthawks” outside. Each security zone is named after a letter in the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, etc. Only Ziggy Hrbaty has eyeballs fast enough to keep track of so many pixels.   

Tonight the local television station broadcasts “Charlie X”, one of Ziggy’s favorite Star Trek episodes. He roars with laughter when Captain Kirk tries to explain to the adolescent Charlie why it is inappropriate to slap a woman’s behind. And so perhaps Ziggy’s left eyeball is a little lazier than usual, perhaps it isn’t fast enough. Something happens in the Delta zone. Something Ziggy Hrbaty does not see.

The next day an FBI SWAT team raids Ziggy’s house. The front door is smashed open with a battering ram. The assault unit swarms into the living room with submachine guns at the ready, only to find Ziggy asleep on the couch...snoring away. The team leader removes her goggles and Kevlar helmet. She gives Ziggy a nudge with her machine pistol. “Ziggy Hrbaty, wake up. You’re under arrest.”

His wife Jada isn’t home. She is taking a pilates class at a nearby studio. Later when she pulls into the driveway, a black FBI helicopter is lifting off the front lawn. The rotor blast deflowers a magnolia tree. Neighbors stand on the street and watch in disbelief.

Ziggy’s memory of the next seventy-two hours is abstract. His interrogator was a “stunningly beautiful” woman dressed in a black leather jacket. She used the words “toothpaste” and “terrorism” in the same sentence. She asked him what he thought of “sex deprivation” as a tool of torture. Ziggy’s response: Please waterboard me instead. Later the agent wrote in her report: I’ve interrogated over a hundred enemy combatants...and there is something very strange about Ziggy Hrbaty.

Ziggy is sent to Camp Prometheus, a military prison on a small volcanic island in the Sulu Sea. He is locked inside a solitary cell. No windows. No sunlight. No television.

Ziggy spends twenty-three hours a day in the six-foot by eight-foot concrete cell. A male prison guard escorts Ziggy to an exercise yard for one hour each day, but Ziggy doesn’t know how to exercise. At first the prison guard offers suggestions: jumping jacks, squat thrusts, sit-ups...only to grow increasingly frustrated at Ziggy’s lack of physical education, ”Listen man, I’m not your personal trainer.”

 Ziggy pretends to watch television. Day and night he sits Indian-style on the floor and stares at the wall. Some of the prison guards think he is meditating. Others think Ziggy has “lost the plot”, sitting there motionless in his bright orange jumpsuit...eyes wide open, unblinking. What they do not know is that he is “watching” Star Trek. Far from losing the plot, he is re-creating all seventy-nine episodes from memory...the voyages of the U.S.S. Enterprise and its five-year mission.

The prison guards nickname Ziggy “The Toothpaste Terrorist”. Designated a high-risk detainee, he is isolated from the general prison population. Ziggy learns nothing more about his own “case”. A lawyer meets with him and says there is just one problem.

“What’s that?” Ziggy asks.

“I don’t have jurisdiction here.”

“Why not?”

“Because this place doesn’t exist.”

Other than the lawyer (who only agrees to meet Ziggy “out of curiosity”), visitors are forbidden. Nevertheless, Ziggy fully expects Jada to show up at any moment because he believes a man’s right to see his wife is natural and unalienable. But there are no human rights at Camp Prometheus. Only boredom.

The boredom is so intense that Ziggy sometimes bursts into tears. There is only so much television a man can “pretend” to watch. He suspects there is a hidden security camera inside his cell, so he decides to create a reality television show for the “audience”. Of course, he has no idea who is watching. Perhaps everyone. Perhaps no one. 

Ziggy presumes he is being watched round the clock (he is “high risk” after all), and that the prison guards work in regular shifts. His target audience is one viewer. There will be thirteen episodes. Every Friday at midnight. His first thought is to make a reality show so bad that his “captive” audience will feel “tortured.” But no, that isn’t Ziggy’s style...a television show is a seduction.

Television occupies Ziggy’s thoughts for the next thirteen months. He writes scripts inside his head. Thirteen episodes...each one has to be better, more profound than the previous one. As a teaser, Ziggy starts humming the show’s “theme song” three months before the premiere. It goes something like this:

HUMMMDADIZAROOMDA! DAMBYRADRUMZA! DA! DA! (REPEAT)

 

On the night of the premiere, Ziggy is nervous because he is still undecided about the show’s title. When the hour strikes twelve he looks straight into the camera (or at least where he thinks there is a camera) and blurts out, “Ziggy’s Notebook”.

Episode One of Ziggy’s Notebook begins with America’s loneliest prisoner seated on a metal-frame bed, staring into the camera: “My name is Ziggy Hrbaty and I am not like you. I never really understood America. I was never very good at baseball. I was skeptical of American football, the way players acted like soldiers in a standing army. But I loved television, especially science-fiction television. Of course I watched American shows like Battlestar Galactica with spectacular special effects thanks to absurd budgets. Yet I was intrigued by how British networks like the BBC and ITV could create weird, more subtle, peculiar shows with far less money...Dr. Who, UFO, The Tomorrow People, Blake’s 7, Children of the Stones, The Day of the Triffids, The Tripods.”

Episode Two of Ziggy’s Notebook is a disaster. Ziggy cries the entire hour. Episode Three is only slightly better: the brief life story of Ziggy’s first dog, Sputnik (run over by a car). Episode Four is about a parakeet. Episode Five is nothing short of a revolution in television:

Man writes, God laughs. That’s what Ziggy thinks as he presses the keys of an imaginary Olivetti typewriter inside his head. Bang! Bang! Bang! Kerbang! There’s nothing like real life, so why all this simulacra?

“I watch television. I read newspapers. I read novels. I have a wife. I have a son. I have a dog. Every now and then I drink a beer. I’m trying to stay alive. I mean, what else is there to do? My name is Ziggy Hrbaty and this is the story of my extraordinary life.”

The city is a vulture, waiting for the dead.

Ziggy waits for the train on the elevated subway platform at Astoria Boulevard. The sun rises behind him. To the pedestrians on the asphalt streets below Ziggy appears as a silhouette. A train pulls into the station. The man disappears.

The Triborough Bridge throbs with traffic like a sclerotic artery.

“It is early March, and March is always weird in Astoria, Queens. Take the weather. It’s 58 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday. On Thursday it’s 41 degrees Fahrenheit. What does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything. And that’s the thing.”

The death of Ziggy’s father was strange because it was so ordinary. The world didn’t stop. Ziggy still had to go to work at the toothpaste factory. A few people didn’t know what to say. They pretended Ziggy’s father wasn’t dead. Now Ziggy knows. There’s only one wrong thing to say when someone dies. Nothing.

Episodes Seven through Twelve could easily win Emmy Awards in at least twenty-seven categories including Outstanding Lead Actor in a Single-Camera Series. However, Ziggy Hrbaty saves his masterstroke for Episode Thirteen, the season finale:

Ziggy is a machinist at a factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Every morning Czesiek, the Polish forklift operator, drops a pallet of books next to the air compressor. Ziggy blows off years of dust with a pneumatic gun and sorts through the enormous pile of forgotten books by unknown writers. Ziggy Hrbaty is their last chance.

If Ziggy finds a book that is salvageable he secures it in the jaws of a machinist’s vise and bangs it a few times with a heavy mallet. If it seems structurally sound he brings it over to the welding machine and tries to ignite it with a blowtorch.

If a book burns too easily, then let it burn.

If the book survives, Ziggy places it on the bed of a milling machine and starts drilling quarter-inch holes to remove unnecessary adjectives. He then places the book into the chuck of a lathe and spins it at 3,000 RPM to see what happens. Sometimes he removes entire chapters with a carbide knife. When it’s finished he brings it to a reader in the Reading Room. So far Ziggy has refurbished more than 1,200 novels.

A few minutes after the conclusion of Episode Thirteen, Ziggy’s cell door is unlocked. A prison guard walks in and sits next to Ziggy on the foam mattress. She has tears in her eyes.

“My name is Amber and I’ve been watching you. Every Friday at midnight...that’s my shift. I have to say, you’re much smaller in person. On closed-circuit security television you look bigger. At first I thought your show was ridiculous. But the more I watched, the more I fell in love with Ziggy’s Notebook. It reminded me of my girlhood in Tom’s River, New Jersey. My brother Jesse and I used to watch television for six hours straight on Saturday mornings. Our living room felt like the safest place on the planet. We didn’t know how hard life would be once we stepped out the front door.” 

Ziggy listens. Amber talks.

“Sometimes I think the asteroid Apophis really will hit earth in 2029 or 2036. And if it does, maybe we deserve it. I mean, look how we treat each other.”

Her camouflage uniform and black combat boots make Ziggy nervous. She senses this and asks if he wants to see her bare feet. He says nothing. The silence is weird. Ziggy wants to trust her. There is something wrong here. This can’t be how it goes down. Not at Camp Prometheus. Ziggy can hear monkeys screaming in the rainforest.

The next morning Amber is gone. Ziggy examines every square inch of his mattress, but she has left no trace. Not even a lock of hair. He looks around the prison cell like a madman. What is real? he asks. The cell door is still unlocked. But he doesn’t dare peek outside.

Days and months and years pass. Sometimes Ziggy imagines that he is on a reality show called Crimes of the Future. And that at any moment the show’s host, actor William Shatner, will burst into his cell laughing and saying it was all a big joke. But no one comes. Ever.