“Fenster,” he’d assured me. “I put in for that months ago. But you know, the budget was completely fucked last year, so the network was like—” He mimed a jerking-off motion. “Your raise is literally the first thing I’m splurging on after the new fiscal—”
“It’s not just the raise, Rich. You know I want to direct.”
“Fenster Future. I’m all about it.” He put up his hands as if he had willed this into reality on the spot. “Let’s just chill for a beat, okay? It’s all happening. Everything will come.”
I chilled for several beats. But nothing happened. Nothing came. Not until three months later, when I went over Rich’s head and set up a meeting with HR. I made my case with hard evidence in the form of two years’ worth of performance reviews, script notes written, and budgets drawn up. Two weeks later, I got what I wanted. Or at least, it was a start. I was moved to the lowest rung in the writers’ room—and squeezed into a corner of permanent annoyance in Rich’s tiny mind.
Since then, he’s only gotten worse. Smarmier, shallower, and so open about his suspicion that I have “just never liked him.” It’s unusual for Rich to call me to his office first thing in the morning. It certainly doesn’t bode well. I try to prepare for a few unfortunate eventualities—is one of the cast members sick? In legal trouble? Is an advertiser nervous about something in an episode? Is CBS canceling us?
Hah. No way.
Still, the thought is unnerving. I can’t imagine not working onZombie Hospital. People love to hate our show because its melodrama can veer off the charts, but for me,Zombie Hospitalis really about what’s worth living—and dying—for. For me, this show is personal.
I don’t talk about it often, but when I was ten years old, I almost died. I glimpsed the other side…and then I made a choice to come back. A choice that forever changed me.
Edie and I had spent the first days of January that year on the ice of Barton Pond, near where we grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was on her skates, and I was testing out the new camcorder I’d gotten for my birthday. We were obsessed with our mom’s DVD ofBeaches, and Edie would skate circles around me, off-key belting out “Glory of Love” from Mayim Bialik’s audition scene.
We stayed out too long on a day too cold, and we both caught the flu. The illness glanced off Edie, and after a few days she was back at school. But I got bronchitis, and then pneumonia, and then on a rainy Wednesday morning, my mom couldn’t wake me.
An ambulance was called, paramedics deployed, an ER room burst into. And although I was unconscious, I saw it all.
I watched it from beyond myself. I was floating ten feet above my body, free from the flesh and bones that I had, until that moment, taken for grantedwasme. I had no idea there was more.
More not just to me, but to everything.
I could look out toward infinity, the cosmos, toward the overwhelming, indescribable beauty that I suddenly understood awaits us all…or I could look down at where I’d come from. At the doctors desperate to save my body. At my mother, sobbing against the door of the ER. At the nurse’s ashen face when my monitor flatlined.
And then I looked at Edie, sitting in a waiting room chair, holding my camcorder in her lap. Her eyes were closed. She hadchocolate on her shirt. Maybe she was praying, I don’t know. I couldn’t reach her, couldn’t make her see me, couldn’t let her know I was there.
Edie. Her pink gloves and blond pigtails and chewed nails. Her nose the same as mine. The camcorder in her lap, holding hours of our laughter. I looked down at my sister, and I suddenly knew more clearly than I’d ever known anything before: She needed me. Because Edie was two years older, I’d always thought it was the other way around. But no,sheneededme. I was being given a choice: eternity now, or my sister.
The clarity I felt in that moment was absolute. And in an instant, I was back, waking up inside a tired body, looking into Edie’s eyes. My sister and I had always been close, but that was the moment when I knew her on a cellular level. When I could feel how our cells are made of stars.
Edie put the camera in my hands. She turned it on. I held it to my eye and said, “Action.”
That’s how they found us, the doctors, nurses, and our parents: Edie with her head thrown back, eyes closed, finally nailing the notes of “Glory of Love,” and me, fresh from the afterlife, filming her from my hospital bed.
The power of that experience has stayed with me. Choosing love and connection in this life, not despite butbecausethere’s so much more awaiting us…I believe in that. No matter what the critics say aboutZombie Hospital, I get the sense that our viewers agree with me.
So whatever Rich’s problem is today, I’ll do well to keep the big picture in mind.
But when I step inside his office, the other six of the show’sproducers are leaning against various walls, like actors in a college play, and I know something is very wrong.
“Fenster!” Rich says, sitting at his desk, beaming a spotlight of white teeth at me. Having read all his emails in the years I was his assistant, I know he has hair plugs, but Dr. Goldman on Wilshire does extremely high-quality work, so I may be the only one in on the secret. Rich is handsome in that expensively preserved, shield-your-eyes-it’s-too-much kind of way. “How was Cabo?”
“I was in Two Harbors.”
“Where’s that again? Hey, I got those chocolate macaroon things you like from Erewhon.” He picks up a mason jar from his desk and rattles the cookies inside.
“Now I see why you sent the nine texts.”
He howls a laugh. “This is why I love talking to writers. You thought that up on the spot. Do you want to sit? Sit down.” Rich points to the empty chair across his desk. I glance at the six other people standing in the room—among them producers I like moderately to far more than Rich. Kelly, Ben, and Adele all nod for me to sit.
I do, and now I’m facing Rich. It’s not a good situation for my blood pressure, which thrums in the side of my neck. “So, what’s up?”
“Oh, you’ve got a little something…” Rich taps between his front teeth, leaning forward, squinting at me. “What is that? A raspberry seed? It’s huge. Hey, Jenny?” he shouts in the direction of his office door. “Jenny? Can you get Fenny some floss? That’s funny—Jenny, Fenny. All my assistants should rhyme.”
Before I can protest, Rich’s assistant rushes in bearing a translucent plastic box.
