Season Finale - Part III
In Part II of “Season Finale,” Zach and Morgan get coffee, and Zach tells Morgan that he’s going to die. The crew travels to the floodplains outside of Baltimore to shoot on location; Zach and Angela watch LawyerGuy on the plane. During the shoot, Morgan hits Chloe in the face, and he gets locked up.
I got a message from Drew the next morning telling me that they didn’t need me to come to set. I was only responsible for Morgan’s scenes at that point anyways, so there wasn’t really a point. At least, that’s what their excuse was. I didn’t want to be seen by the rest of the team anyway.
I called Edina and talked to her about this ad she was developing for Crime Circus. We watched an episode over the phone together. I tried bouncing ideas off her, but she mostly just laughed and told me what she was actually going to do with it. I debated asking if there was a way she could get me a job on it. I felt like a clown who murders people was a perfect fit for me.
After the episode ended with the clown evading capture and escaping into the Seattle underworld, I told Edina about what had happened the day before. I left out the part about me getting hard at the shot of Morgan’s eye, but I tried to stay close to the truth. I made sure to leave in the bit with the tongue and the vomit and the fact that Morgan still liked Brian more than me and that I outed myself as the one who probably ruined the season.
“You know what your problem is Zach?” Edina said.
“I watched too much TV as a kid?” I asked.
“No, you just wait around for things to happen to you and you just expect that it will work out for the best. We don’t all have the privilege of passivity. I don’t think you realize that there are things you can do to make things better.”
She breathed out a heavy sigh, and I laughed and tried to convince Edina that she was joking. She didn’t laugh. But she did tell me she loved me before she left to pick up her salmon burger from the generator.
We watched two more episodes of Crime Circus together. I realized that every episode involved the clown getting away with it all and hiding in a new city in the northwest. I still liked it though. There was a hidden romance between the ringleader of the circus and the detective hunting the clown, but the detective didn’t know that the ringleader was really the clown’s dad. I wondered what the clown baby was like in his downtime, if he was a method baby like Culling Man or if he had a softer side and the crew had one of those baby trauma therapists on set to guide him through nightmares of slain trapeze artists. I fell asleep midway through episode four. I woke up the next morning and saw that Edina had stayed on the line with me for an additional two hours. Sometimes she just liked to hear me snore.
I ventured outside of my motel exile to visit Morgan at his container home. I’m not sure if I was actually allowed to enter, but the guard recognized me from two days ago and felt bad that I’d gotten vomited on, so she let me in. Morgan was watching a show about dinosaurs on his screen. Apparently, The Culling Man gave it to him as a peace offering. It felt passive aggressive to me. I sat down and watched it with him for a while. Dinosaurs were one of the first things people tried to make babies of, but they always turned out just a little bit wrong. Moved weird. Sounded like drowning cats. Turns out you can’t really make a believable animal that you’ve never actually seen. Some things were just meant to be animated by a computer.
“How’ve you been?” I asked as the credits rolled. They always closed these with sweeping horn music.
“I’m going to die,” he said, like it was a fact, which it was.
“Yeah. Do you want to talk about the other day?” I asked. “Why you hit Chloe?”
“I like Chloe a lot,” Morgan said. He put down the screen and stepped over to the minifridge. It was stocked with seltzer water.
“Then why did you hit her?” I asked again.
“I was angry about everything. It just happened. She was mad at me for a thing that I did that you said I should do. I’ve been doing this a while now, and it just felt like this isn’t how it’s supposed to go,” Morgan said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He handed me a seltzer and drank his own. I wondered who in catering forgot that they were outlawed in most states.
“Do you want to talk to her?” I asked. “When my dad was dying, he said that he really wanted the chance to talk to his sister who he’d gotten in a real bad fight with when he was younger. Maybe it’ll help you get closure. Make you feel at peace.” My dad was an only child.
Morgan seemed to like that idea. I told him that it wouldn’t be until we got back into the LA islands because of how tense set was, but that I could probably pull some strings. I mentioned it to Angela on the flight home. She was hesitant at first, but after a bit of thinking said she figured that as long as I was there to monitor Morgan it wouldn’t be an issue. Chloe and Morgan had worked together for years without incident and the finale would require them to be in the same scenes anyways.
Apparently, there had been a secret writers’ room without me. The Culling Man was going to board The Scallion as planned. Morgan would be caught off guard because of the scarab dust and killed. Chloe and Christian would fight The Culling Man on their own, bringing him down together and shoving him into an oncoming blood vortex so Drew would finally get what he wanted. It was fine. I hated it.
When we were grabbing our bags from the carousel, I asked Brian if The Culling Man knew he was going to die.
“Fuck no,” he said. “I don’t plan on telling him. He’s gotta be menacing the whole time. We’re going to just throw him in the vortex and that’s that. Guy’s weird too. I think I went a little too hard on him.”
I called an autocab and waited for it to pick Brian and me up. He played with his phone. It was a game I think. There were exploding crabs on the screen.
“Why did you volunteer Morgan to get killed by The Culling Man?” I asked. “I thought you loved him or something.”
Brian kept playing his game. He exploded five crabs at once. The screen flashed.
“Because you ruined him, Zach. He’s dying because you wasted him and now that he knows he’s dying he’s not even the same baby,” Brian said. He closed his game and shoved the phone in his pocket.
“Look, I was excited for you to take him over. Really. I had seen what you’d done in the earlier seasons. I knew you had good ideas. I don’t know what happened to them or what you managed to do to fuck up this bad, but whatever Morgan is now, he’s not mine. He’s probably not even yours. He’s just a thing. A thing that’s going to die,” Brian said. I couldn’t tell if Brian had complimented me or not.
The autocab pulled in five minutes late. The AI had gotten lost somewhere at the wrong gate.
To be continued…
Nic Anstett, a writer from Baltimore, MD, loves the bizarre, spectacular, and queer. She is a graduate from the University of Oregon’s MFA program and has attended workshops through the Clarion Foundation, Lambda Literary, and Tin House, where she was a 2021 scholar. Her published and forthcoming fiction can be found in publications such as One Story, Witness Magazine, Passages North, Lightspeed Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.
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