The foam arrived on Wednesday in six white drums, each one labeled like a perfume.
I watched them come off the truck from the loading dock.
I was holding the batch book against my chest. Preston's lint roller was still clipped to the front of it, because I had not decided yet what to do with it. Throwing it away felt like a declaration of war. Giving it back felt like losing one.
"He put it on the book?" Petey said. "Like, on it?"
"Like a paperweight."
"That's cold." He considered the lint roller. "It's a nice one, though. It's got the swivel head."
For the record, I did try to be less sticky.
A network executive had given me a note, and in television you take the note. You take it, you turn it over, and you look for the part you can live with. Preston wanted less sticky.
Fine. I could make the gunge less sticky.
So on Tuesday night, after he banned me from testing his foam, I went back to the prop kitchen and tested my own.
The prop kitchen is a converted dressing room on the second floor of Stage 4. It has two industrial mixers, a walk-in fridge and a scale accurate to a tenth of a gram. Over the sink hangs a sign that says WHAT IS IN THE BUCKET STAYS IN THE BUCKET.
I did not put up the sign. I have never found out who did.
Batch 301 cut the thickener by a third. It came down fast and ran off the booth floor in a sheet. Rinse time was two minutes, twelve seconds. Petey called it a triumph.
"It's soup," I said. "It's green soup. Nobody doubles their money for soup."
Batch 302 was better. Batch 303 separated in the bucket and came down in two distinct layers, which Petey wrote up as "a tasting menu." Batch 304 was fine. Batch 305 was fine and smelled faintly of a pool.
"You're making faces," Petey said at eleven-forty, stopwatch in hand.
"I'm thinking."
"You're thinking with your whole face. You look like Monty during a tie-breaker."
I wiped my hands. "The problem isn't the recipe."
"Then what's the problem?"
"I don't know what he means by sticky."
I sat down on an overturned bucket. "Does he mean on the skin? On the set? On the brand?
"People say 'sticky' about a song when they can't get it out of their heads. That's a compliment."
"Ask him."
"I can't ask a vice president what a word means."
"Why not?"
I did not have an answer for that. I wrote Batch 305: fine. Pool. in the book and went home.
The Cumulus Effects rep was named Tobin Dalloway. He was thirty and wore white sneakers so spotless I suspected he carried them in and changed at the door. He spoke almost entirely in taglines.
"CloudBurst," he told the production office on Wednesday afternoon, "is the future of the finish."
"The finish," Preston said, nodding. He had a slide ready. He touched his tablet, and the word BUCKET on the screen dissolved. In its place, in the same thin gray font, appeared THE FINISH.
Monty, in the second row, put his hand on his heart. "The Finish! Like a nail polish!"
"Like a moment," Preston said. "The Bucket is a thing. The Finish is a moment."
"The Finish," Monty repeated, trying it in his host voice, like a man testing a melon. "And now, my friend. Are you ready. For The Finish."
He paused. "It sounds like a threat."
Edda typed something.
Tobin had brought a mannequin. It was a department-store mannequin in a polo shirt, and someone in the trivia department immediately named it Bernard. Tobin set Bernard up under a small rig in the middle of the office. He pulled a cord, and CloudBurst came down.
I'll give it this. It was beautiful.
It came down white and soft and slow, like a bakery collapsing politely. It landed on Bernard and sat there in clean peaks. Tobin lifted a small squeegee and wiped Bernard's polo shirt in one pass. The shirt was dry underneath.
People applauded. Bernard did not, but he looked dignified.
"Clean," said Tobin. "Weightless. Elevated."
"Rinse time?" I said.
Everyone turned. Tobin blinked. "There's no rinse. It wipes."
"How long does it sit before it wipes?"
"It's designed to hold its shape for the camera."
"How long?"
"Up to ninety seconds of peak visual presence." He said this as if it were also on a drum.
"And what does it do under heat?"
Preston's lint roller hand twitched, though the lint roller was still on my binder. "Ms. Ellsworth."
"I'm asking a technical question."
"The product is factory certified," Preston said. "It has a full lab sheet."
"Can I read the lab sheet?"
There was a pause. Tobin looked at Preston. Preston looked at Edda. Edda looked up from her laptop for the first time all afternoon.
"Standards," she said, slowly, for the record, "would also like to read the lab sheet."
The lab sheet was nine pages long. I read all nine at my desk while Petey ate a burrito over my shoulder and narrated.
Most of it was good news. CloudBurst was nontoxic. It was hypoallergenic, unscented, and safe on skin, which I believed, because a real lab had put its name on it. It was also rated for "indoor ambient conditions, sixty-five to seventy-eight degrees."
On page seven, in a table, there was a row labeled Thermal Expansion Index. At eighty-five degrees, CloudBurst expanded by twenty percent. At ninety-five, forty.
"What's the floor temperature at the podium?" Petey asked, with his mouth full.
"Under full lighting? Ninety-three. I measured it in season five."
"Why did you measure it in season five?"
"Batch 212," I said.
He waited. I did not elaborate. He wrote something on a napkin, which I assume was Lemon Incident, contd.
I took the sheet upstairs to Preston's office. The UNITY poster still faced the wall. He had added a small plant, which I suspect he had chosen because plants do not shed.
"Page seven," I said. "It grows under heat. Forty percent at podium temperature."
He read it. To his credit, he read the whole page. "It says up to forty percent."
"Up to means forty."
"Up to means a range." He set the sheet down.
"Ms. Ellsworth, I understand you have a process. But a contestant doesn't need you to stand under a bucket for them. They need a certified product, a waiver, and a producer who trusts the vendor."
"Let me test it once. Under the lights. Tonight."
"No."
"Why not?"
He picked up a pen and set it down again, parallel to the edge of his desk. "Because if the gunge producer has to be gunged before anything happens," he said, "then the show is about the gunge. I want the show to be about the moment."
"The Finish."
"The Finish."
I went back downstairs. Petey was waiting by the stairwell with a towel, which was not necessary, because nothing had happened to me. He just likes to be ready.
"Well?" he said.
"Take a sample," I said. "One gallon. Label it. Put it in the walk-in, behind the cucumber."
"Are we stealing foam?"
"We're keeping a reference sample. Standards would want one."
He thought about it. "Edda would want one," he agreed.
Thursday's taping started at six in the evening. Two hundred adults filled the studio audience, most of them in matching green T-shirts from the fan club. Monty did his warm-up, which is mostly him reading the audience's hometowns aloud like lottery numbers.
The last round came down to a 52-year-old school-bus mechanic named Opal Eckhart. She had answered a question about the Treaty of Ghent and a question about tire pressure in the same thirty seconds. The audience loved her, and so did I.
I had met her that afternoon and told her, honestly, that I had never stood under tonight's bucket.
She had shrugged. "First time for everybody."
Now she stood at the gold podium. Monty was behind the Monty Wall. Preston stood beside me in the control room, his tablet held to his chest. The new graphic on the screen said THE FINISH in thin gray letters.
"Opal," said Monty, "you have eleven thousand dollars. Eleven thousand! Bank it, or take it to The Finish?"
The audience counted down. Five, four, three.
Opal Eckhart pressed green.
The rig tipped, and CloudBurst came down, white and soft and slow, exactly as promised. It settled on her shoulders in clean peaks. It looked beautiful. Tobin, in the corner, mouthed elevated.
Then, under ninety-three degrees of stage light, it began to rise.
Up next: Peak Visual Presence
Continue to Part 3 →