— THE CUT
Matt Lauer Is Planning His Comeback
— VANITY FAIR
Louis CK’s Path to a Comeback Likely Runs
Through Comedy Clubs
— THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
PANTING WITH EXHAUSTION, she let the stake drop from her hands. It was done. She had made her Allegation public, spoken the Killing Words, and the Man’s Career was dead.
This, at least, is what everyone had said.
“Do you understand what you’re doing?” they had wondered, anxiously. They knew—centuries of lore, from those who had sought to destroy a Man’s Livelihood before, had warned them—that merely hinting at some sort of scandal would be enough to destroy a Promising Gentleman’s Career for good.
She had felt bad. If there were a way to punish only the Man. The Career had not been always and entirely bad, and she had been a little sad to be the agent of its destruction.
But it was done. She had killed it. The worst was over. She heaped dirt and garlic on it, bleeding and exhausted, and began the long trek back.
The first weeks were pleasant. She went out to coffee with people who told her of her bravery. They asked her how she was enjoying her new fame.
“What fame?” she asked. (She had gotten three emails that day, but none of them were from admirers; they had been disciples of the Career, and they swore vengeance.) Someone had knocked her mailbox off its post. She spent about half an hour reaffixing it, checking all the screws to see that they were secure. For a split second, as she closed the flap, she thought she heard the Career laughing.
She felt bad for the Career. It was not the Career’s fault, the things the Man had done. The Career had been a source of joy. It was like a delicious sausage of whose precise ingredients she had been unaware; she could not deny that it was tasty, and maybe there was nothing wrong even in the meat itself, but once you learned that the only person able to make it ate a baby’s arm each time, nothing about the taste changed, except your awareness of what it meant to be a person who liked that taste.
Sometimes, at night, she thought she heard the Career whisper that it was coming, but she was sure it was only the wind around the house. Only the wind.
They had said the Career was dead, but it wasn’t dead.
They had shunned her as a murderer. She saw her own Career wither and die. But at least the thing was gone and it would not trouble anyone else.
The first twitches were noted less than a month afterward. Someone in an interview had said he missed it, and for a moment she thought she had seen it twitch. But that was nothing, they assured her. She had murdered it (MURDERER!), and it was dead.
Only it wasn’t.
She came home and her child was drawing something. It emerged slowly in firm swipes of the crayon beneath her little girl’s stubby fingers. At first it looked like a monster with spaghetti for a head. There was something unshakably ominous about it. Something she almost recognized.
“What is that, sweetie?” she asked, her voice shaking a little.
“It’s an inevitable comeback tour,” her daughter said. “Do you like it, Mommy?”
She swallowed down the sickly sweet taste of bile in her mouth. “You did a very good job with the coloring,” she said. “What made you decide to draw that?”
Her daughter shrugged, starting on a new picture that appeared to show the spaghetti-headed monster being given an award of some kind by its peers. “It’s only a matter of time, Mommy.”
She was startled to see it on the cover of a magazine. She blinked and it was still there. The Career. Bloodied and grinning.
“Never,” they had said when she pronounced the fatal words. “Never again.”
She showed the magazine to a friend.
“What?” the friend asked.
She pointed at the Career in horror. “It’s winking,” she said. And the word next to it was not “never” but “when.” In precise and clinical terms the article explained exactly how it would come back and when you might expect to see it return. When.
“How?” she asked.
She got home late one night and her Doberman was choking. She could not tell what it was choking on. She grabbed her little girl and the dog, and they took him to the vet together.
The vet stared at them with horror and pulled a finger out of the Doberman’s mouth. Around the finger was wrapped a headline indicating that Charlie Rose planned to help kick-start the Man’s Career Resurgence. She screamed and screamed, but her daughter merely observed the images with a deadly calm.
“Everyone deserves a second chance,” her daughter said, “don’t you think, Mommy?”
She spoke the words again, but the words did nothing. The Career kept lurching closer and closer.
Her daughter’s teacher asked whether she had meant to put An Important Man’s Career on the designated pickup list at school.
“No,” she said, her stomach churning. She rushed to the school and grabbed her child. She could see it everywhere now, coming closer and closer. Whenever she looked behind her, it was there. Every time she blinked it came closer.
She approached a roadblock and a whole sea of undead Careers came lumbering out of the earth, toward her. They came crawling down off billboards and magazine covers, their jaws hanging cavernously open, the hideous skeletons visible. They shambled nearer and nearer. She took her daughter in her arms and began to run. Her lungs were raw, like a skinned knee. Her heel broke and she stumbled on, gasping, but the Careers continued. They could not move so fast, but they had all the time in the world, and they were undeterred by obstacles.
As she ran, her heel broken, stumbling in the dirt, she saw another young woman preparing to speak the Words that would end a Career.
“Think what you are about to do,” everyone
