Niko #2
He set up. It took him eleven minutes. The ring light went up on its stand. He placed a second small light behind the bench, pointing at the wall. When I asked what it did, he said “separation” and kept moving. He taped a cable flat to the floor so nobody would trip over it and die.
“Okay,” he said. “Where do you sit?”
“There’s the stool.”
“Don’t have me pick the stool. Where do you actually sit?”
I took three steps. “Here’s where I was standing to say no to you.”
“It’s where you say everything,” Max said. “Let’s seat you there.”
His eyes landed on a shop stool in the far corner. It had paint on one leg, and the seat was worn pale. “Let’s put you on that stool in this spot.”
I retrieved the stool and placed it as directed. He looked at me through the phone on its rig, moved the ring light four inches, and looked again.
“Good. Now watch me.”
He pulled a second stool into the frame, sat, rolled his shoulders once, and became the man his audience knows, with a slight amount sanded off. He looked into the lens and started talking without notes.
“Hi. It’s me. I want to tell you what actually happened, and I want to do it in one take, so this is going to be a little rough.
You can all live with that.” He laid it out flat and in order, talking about the call from the team’s people in January, the contract, and the walk-away clause either man could trigger with a text.
He told his viewers he’d said yes before Rafe had even been asked, because it was good for his business.
“Nobody was suckered,” Max said. “I’ve read every word written about me this month, and I need you to hear this from the alleged victim.
There is no victim. I co-wrote the contract.
The dinners were my idea. The restaurant was my pick.
” He took a breath. “Everything you’ve been told this month, and every sympathy click you’ve given, is built on a story that says I got tricked.
That story is wrong, and the man paying for it is the most honest man I’ve ever known. ”
He stopped. He looked at the lens for one more second, and then he reached out and tapped the phone, turning back into Max, my brother.
“Something like that,” he said. “I’ll trim the front. Okay, now it’s your turn.”
“That was one take.”
“That was one take because I’ve learned from eleven thousand takes.
” He walked around behind the rig. “Nobody’s first take is usable, Niko.
I need you to hear that before we start, because you’re a man who thinks everything is a pass-fail joint fit, and this is finish work.
We sneak up on it.” He checked the frame.
“Whenever you want, just tell them who he is.”
I looked into the lens and told them who Rafe was. It took maybe forty seconds. It felt direct and true, not like a confession. When I finished, Max was quiet for a moment behind the light.
“Okay,” he said. “Come and look at it.”
He played it back. The man on the screen sat in my shop, in my apron, with my hands, and glared into the camera.
Every sentence came out like a verdict being read to a defendant.
I knew the feeling under every word, and the feeling was nowhere on the screen.
What was on the screen was a stranger looking for someone to blame.
“I look like I’m about to sue somebody,” I said.
“You look like someone owes you money, and you’re bringing a knife.
” He took the phone back. “It’s not a flaw; it’s physics.
Your natural register is economy, and on camera economy reads as anger, because the camera can’t see any of the stuff around your words that a person in the room with you sees.
Body language has to be exaggerated for the camera to get it.
We’re ready for take two; it’s the same words, but warmer. Think warm.”
I did take two. I got three sentences in and watched Max’s face fall behind the light, and he waved both arms like a man stopping traffic.
“No. Nope. Never do that again. That’s the face you make when you’re holding a client’s baby.”
“You said warm.”
“I said warmly, and you performed the concept. You can’t perform it. You’re thinking it.” He dragged his stool around next to the rig and sat. For a second he looked stumped, but then he had an idea. “Take three. Forget every direction I’ve given you. Just say the first line.”
I looked into the lens. It died in my mouth two sentences early. I got as far as “The Gregory brother who—“ and stopped.
Max said nothing. He looked at me over the top of the rig for a long moment. My little brother was becoming my teacher for the first time in our lives.
He got up off his stool, walked around in front of the rig, crouched in front of me at the bench, and looked at me the way I look at a board while I’m figuring out what it wants to be.
“Okay,” he said. “Here’s what’s happening.
You’re talking to two million people, and you can’t, because nobody can talk to two million people at once.
I can’t. What I do is a trick, and the trick is this.
” He tapped the rig once. “There isn’t a crowd of people in there.
There’s one. You don’t give a speech to a crowd.
You say a true thing to one person, and the camera lets everybody else stand in for that person.
” He stood back up. “So put him there. Twenty years old, alone in his apartment at midnight. That’s who you are talking to.
He’s the entire audience. The lens is just standing where he’d stand. ”
Max went back behind the rig.
“Don’t tell the internet who Rafe is,” he said. “Tell Rafe what you know about him.”
I looked at the lens.
It wasn’t hard to put Rafe there. He was there, and I had something to say.
“My name is Niko Gregory,” I said. “I’m Max’s brother. I build furniture, and I’m going to be brief, because everything my brother just told you is true, and I only have one thing to add to it.”
The lens sat there, round and patient.
“The papers have spent weeks telling the wrong story. They keep asking whether the relationship between Max and Rafe was real, and they’ve got the wrong relationship.
So I’ll tell you once, plainly, and then I’m done.
” I kept my hands still on my knees. “The Gregory brother in love with Rafe Mikkelsen was never the one in the photos.”
The shop was so quiet I could hear the ring light’s small electric hum.
“Nobody’s asked him about me. He doesn’t know I’m saying this, and I’m not saying it to ask him for anything.
If you’re watching this to find out what happens next, I can’t help you because I don’t know.
” I looked into the lens, at the man on the far side of it.
“He came into my shop in January and asked me how a dovetail holds without a nail, and he wanted the truth. That’s who he is.
Everything the city fell for is who he really is, but it’s only a small part of him, and the man I know is better than the story you’ve heard. ”
I stopped.
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s the whole announcement.”
Max reached out and tapped the phone, and neither of us said anything for a moment.
“Niko.” His voice was soft. “That’s the take.”
“I know it is.”
Max edited it, standing at the bench with the phone in one hand, and I watched him work, thumbs quick, trimming the front of his statement and the dead air off mine.
He stitched the two takes into one piece.
It took him twenty minutes, and he didn’t narrate any of it.
When it was done, he played it through once, all the way, and then he stood there with his thumb over the button.
“Okay, now the professional truth,” he said.
“It’s almost midnight. Midnight’s the wrong time to post. Engagement’s garbage.
The East Coast is in bed, and the West Coast is out at dinner.
All of my rules say we sit on it and put it up at nine in the morning.
” He looked at me over the phone. “That would give you all night to think about it. So I’m asking once. Do you want to wait?”
“Do it now,” I said.