The host, Craig Stevens, stared across the couch at the man who called himself Frankie Names. He was looking down at the show notes and glancing over the top of the page ever so often to get a good look at Craig Stevens. His name had been all over the papers for the past three weeks. That their show received the first live interview with him was a bit of a coup. He felt this was his opportunity to pull a Uri Geller, to show the world that this guy was a fraud in front of a national audience.

He truly did not pull out any hits in his dress. He must have hired a stylist to get the thirties look down. He looked comfortable sitting across the couch in his suit. Frankie Names did not look over to him. He sat staring into the camera as if he was on the air already. The camera men were setting up and the director was whispering into his microphone. As Frankie requested, they were airing this segment before the studio audience was allowed on to the set. He had asked for the names of all the people who would have access to the studio during the taping. It had been one of a hundred and thirty three conditions to be chosen as the show and network that got this scoop.

Seated in the front row of the audience were fifteen journalists from various newspapers and blogs who Frankie’s PR company had handpicked to witness the interview. Craig had been involved in many groundbreaking interviews, but he had never seen one go down as this one had.

Janice came over to put the final touches on his makeup before the broadcast began. After she powdered the sheen out of Craig’s forehead, she went over to Frankie to offer the same services. He turned his head toward her as she approached and he froze up for a second, looking nothing more than a cat caught in a dark alley by a flashlight. Craig would not have been surprised if he clawed at her. Craig could almost taste the fear off of him. He had no idea what he was getting himself into. Television was a big business, and it took big minds to understand it. He was just an amateur, and he was about to understand what happens when amateurs try to play in the big leagues.

As Craig imagined how the broadcast would take place in his head, he almost missed Frankie’s reaction. When he saw Janice holding the powder puff, he waved her away. Craig did not mind. The stranger and less telegenic he looked, the better the ratings this show will garner. Even now he could imagine the replays of the broadcast hitting the national news and making their way around the internet. This was his Nixon moment. Frankie Names had dominated the news for the past three weeks. It was time another name dominate the news. And if he traded off Frankie’s alleged popularity, a sort of anti-popularity measure, then so be it. His station and bid and won the rights to the interview. In an hour, all of that bidding, plotting, and research was going to pay off.

Craig had his hand under the desk playing through the clicker of the various popups he wanted to display during the show. He looked to the control booth, where he saw a few engineers and directors wave in his direction. He returned the wave and gave one of his patented smiles that he had practiced countless times in the mirror growing up. Even now, he knew without looking the exact placement of his lips on his teeth, and how much of his teeth were shown compared to gums. He glanced down at the mirror hanging out from under his desk to check that there were no food bits in his teeth. As perfect as always. He saw his smile grow a bit at that realization.

He looked up at Frankie, again finding himself drawn to studying his face. He looked so ordinary. He was not bad looking. He had good bone structure, and Craig could imagine that with a little training and perhaps some properly applied makeup, he could look passable. Perhaps not passable to be on this show—that was asking a bunch. But for being on cable television, he could probably pull it off. But this was what the public was asking for, and Craig Stevens knew he had to give the public what it wants. He was not too proud to sink a few steps down for ratings. He had long ago sacrificed his artistic integrity in this game.

He proudly admitted this fact to himself. In mainstream interviews, he tried to stay away from this point. But when he sat down honestly with students he was mentoring, he would tell them plainly: if you want to make good in whatever field you choose, you have two choices: you can cater to the mainstream, or you can set out your own path and hope that the mainstream ended up catering to you. Know that the number of successes for the latter crowd was very small, while if you give me a moron with a nice smile, I can teach him take on the former crowd.

Frankie Names had made himself a name as a freak. The first true alien ever found. Craig Stevens was going to be the guy that exposed him for the fraud he was. He was almost giddy as he thought about.

He saw the director spinning his fingers. They were getting ready to start. Craig placed his notes next to him on the couch and looked over to Frankie. It was time to turn on the charm and warm him up. The hotter he was now, the better the fireworks once he pulled out the evidence. He knew from experience that these guys hated evidence. They were talking point monsters. He knew all about talking points. He considered himself one big talking point. No more, and certainly no less.

“Are you almost ready, Frankie? Do you mind if I call you Frankie, by the way? Or do you prefer Frankie Names?” Craig added a slight chuckle to his question, trying to put Frankie at ease. He could choose either one. It did not make a difference. What they spoke about on air, and what words scrolled across the screen were two separate flows of information. Frankie could try to control one of them. Craig doubted he would be successful, however. Craig and his booth would certainly control the other.

Frankie looked over and gave him the same startled look he had given Janice when she had offered him makeup. The camera lights weren’t even red yet, and he was already fearful. This was going to be too easy.

“Don’t worry, Frankie will sound more personal. It’ll make you look better. Trust me, I’ve done this a bunch. The audience likes integrity, and two names sometimes sounds a bit forced. Not that your last name is bad or lack integrity, of course.” Craig found himself chuckling nervously. Frankie continued to give him the strained look. At first he had mistaken it for fear. Now that he looked closer, it almost looked like it was disgust. Craig knew better, of course. The disgust would come later. He knew his persona well enough that Frankie, like the rest of America, watched Craig on television, and couldn’t help but fall in love with him. It was masculine love, he corrected his internal script. But still, he was the everyman. It was as if the red neck in South Dakota and the sophisticate in New York City could be the same person, and that person was named Craig Stevens. They couldn’t, of course. But he was who he was, and he knew what people thought of him: they loved him. And soon Frankie would love him, and then he would fear and hate him. That fear and hate, Craig knew, would translate into even more love and respect from the viewers. Since this, like all of his interviews, were live, he knew Frankie Names would not understand this until after the show aired and his secrets exposed.

Frankie continued to stare at Craig, and Craig made more small talk while the director whispered into his headset and the camera men made their slow pace over to their camera to get everything ready. If there was anything Craig could not stand, it was all the blue collar workers that needed to be involved in this business. He looked forward to the day when they were all replaced by robots and computers. He just needed a camera to follow him around without a personality or the stink of overweight blue collarness. For now, he was lucky he was in a heavily air-conditioned studio where they were at least ten feet away from the talent. As long as they stayed there, Craig would not complain too loudly. At least not where he could be heard by them. He respected their size for what it meant, and he did not want to risk any physical confrontation without his bodyguards, who were themselves the kind of people Craig did not want to associate with. This problem hurt his head, and he returned his concentration to his conversation he was having with Frankie.

Craig knew his most amazing ability was that he was able to talk and think about two separate topics at the same time. He let his conscious mind catch up to his conversation with Frankie and took over control. It had been on automatic, working through weather and his usual shpeal about the strangeness of being on television and on this show in particular. He knew he was about to launch into a briefing into how the interview would run, a rehash of the script he was shown by the show’s producer a few hours ago when he first arrived on the set.

Before he could get into the technical details, Frankie finally spoke. Craig rewound the previous conversation and realized this was the first time he had said anything. While Craig was used to doing most of the speaking before the interview began, it was rare for a guest to have this much stage freight and not even join in with Craig on his usual small talk. Usually the guests who would not at least contribute to the small talk did not make such good guests, and the production team would have eliminated them from the seat on the couch way before they arrived. It occurred to Craig that maybe he had been so adamant about winning this guest that they had forgone this type of culling in his case. Craig thought about it for a moment, but decided he did not mind. There was enough footage of Frankie Names they had on file, that even if Frankie did not want to incriminate himself in his own fraud, they could play the snippets. Craig’s hands went under the table and felt the buttons that controlled the reels that would be shown. He went through each in his mind, going through the numbering and length of each video stream.

When he made it to the fourth reel, he realized he had missed the first half of what Frankie Names had said to him. He tried to rewind the conversation in his mind, but somehow he had not recorded it. He could not remember this having happened in the past.

“. . . and that’s how the conversation will end,” Frankie said. Frankie leaned back in the couch and clasped his hands behind his neck. The microphone wire got tangled in his arm, which ruined the casual motion. Craig figured that would fluster him, but he disengaged with the wire, and finished the motion, spreading his knees out in front of him. Craig was surprised he didn’t put his feet up on the coffee table that sat as a prop on the set. Had he done so, the table would have likely collapsed: like most of the set, it was for show. Everything was one-dimensional on a television set.

“Right, as you say,” Craig said to get the conversation moving again. He knew people tended to repeat themselves, and he put on his charm and the bright smile to get him talking again.

He looked over to the director and he saw him motioning through the glass to the control room. He looked up at the oversized clock sitting on the floor near the camera. They had fifteen minutes before they went live in the interview. Craig unconsciously fixed his tie, stretching out the knot and ensuring that it properly abutted up with the collar of his neck. He looked with a small bit of envy at Frankie’s tie. The old timers knew how to use a tie: there was no way to improperly tie those ties or have them look wrong. He wished the mainstream fashion would move away from these ties and back to those. He hated having to worry about how his tie looked each day. He looked at the large-screen monitor that stood off to the guest’s side and checked his tie. He gestured to the camera man that focused the camera at all times at him, and he zoomed in on his tie. He checked it in the monitor, and nodded in satisfaction. There was sometimes a difference at looking at the tie in the monitor and seeing it in a mirror. The mirror gave the real look; the monitor gave the look that the world would see. There was little question in Craig’s mind which was the more important look of the two.

The guest did not have a monitor. It was Craig’s idea to remove the monitor after the first season of interviews. Not all of his interviewees were experienced, and he found inexperienced victims—for that’s what he called many of his weekly interviews—were prone to look at themselves in the monitor when they got nervous, particularly after they were put on the spot by a particularly good job or knock-out punch. Some of them did not even realize it was coming until after the show had rolled. But the more sophisticated ones would try to interrupt and would look to their monitor to reassure themselves that they were still on television, that there was still someone looking back and ready to defend. By removing that defense mechanism—not to mention by removing the annoying sideways glances that took away from what made good television—Craig had improved the ratings of the show.

The clock ticked down slowly, and Craig gave up on trying to engage Frankie in small talk. He knew the big talk was coming, and he knew once the cameras were rolling, Frankie would have little chance to duck his questions. He gave his come-hither motion to the director.

“Give Frankie the technical pointers,” he said to the director. He watched as the director went over and squatted down in front of Frankie Names and began telling him about the ins and outs of the broadcast. He knew the director already had this conversation with Frankie. But Craig and the director knew from experience that right before the broadcast began, you had to engage the guest or risk them sitting in the spotlights like a cat in an alley.

As if it had been planned, the full spotlights were powered on at the moment Craig Stevens finished his thought. He looked to the clock, the red numbers had five minutes left on them before they went live in front of the world for the first interview with the notoriously immortal—and perhaps alien—Frankie Names.

Daily Word count: 2,635.

Words remaining: 37,840 (12,160).