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Authors: Arthur Phillips
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and the broadcast, nearly convinced himself that the producers would avoid airing his disgrace to the nation. He even returned to trivia nights in bars from Harlem down through Brooklyn and onto Staten Island, where one Saturday he hustled well enough to finish four hundred dollars up and still leave the local quizzicists believing he’d just been lucky. That night, feeling almost himself again, he came home, turned on the television, and saw the ad he’d recorded months before, in the studio before taping his first game, “Hi, I’m Aidan Donahue of New York City. Watch me this Monday on
Jeopardy!
right here on WABC.” His victorious debut was forty-eight hours away; his foregone conclusion would follow seventy-two hours later.
Julian saw the same ten-second spot, surprised his brother hadn’t mentioned being on the show, and assumed Aidan had suffered an early defeat and so kept a minor embarrassment to himself. He was therefore puzzled to watch Aidan’s easy victory on Monday evening and yet be unable to contact his brother, leaving a congratulatory voice mail that Aidan listened to in tears. Tuesday’s still more impressive victory, Wednesday’s thoroughgoing destruction of his opponents, reminiscent of a Viking pillage of an undefended Kentish town, and Thursday’s Incident were watched by Aidan’s brother, his editors at various magazines and websites, the patrons at a dozen bars of his trivia-night circuit, the Jewish woman he had taken out twice in the interval, none of whom he had told, none of whom could reach him as he sat on the floor of his apartment, rocking, as the unmistakable theme music began.
Aidan’s Thursday afternoon had passed in rising hopes and ebbing confidence, flash sweats sweeping the pencil from his fingers as he tried to compose a crossword. It was coming, tonight, in an hour, in minutes—maybe they just skipped this episode and blamed a spoiled tape—no, there he was, “Space Travel,” “The Underworld,” any moment now, and now: “Who are the Jews?,” and then all of time screeched to a halt, and Aidan’s flesh burst into flame, and then the universe, having shrunken to a single dimensionless dot, exploded outward in poisonous ripples and scalding dust. The empirical fact (“no longer a matter of scholared disgreement”) of Jewish responsibility for the bubonic plague seeped onto Islamo-fascist and Holocaust-denial websites with intellectual pretensions, footnoting the scientifically unimpeachable work of biohistorian Dr. Aden Donald Hughes, Ph.D. Aidan’s income dried up for months, requiring a careful budgeting of the
Jeopardy!
winnings. He was blackballed from trivia bars and denied writing assignments, even those related to pubic grooming. He watched (as did millions of others) the late-night sketch-comedy routine in which an actor with a motorized, knee-length black beard and magnifying-lens spectacles plays
Jeopardy!
against a hooded Klansman and Elie Wiesel with the categories “Slurs,” “Jew Evil,” “Those Troublesome Darkies,” “Subhuman Races,” and “Justifiable Child Murder.” (Wiesel pulls off a stunning upset.) He duly and hourly Googled himself (an exercise that had previously returned very few and very accurate hits) and read the dozens of editorials from publications around the nation that shredded him to make a potpourri of points: “The Un-derwiring of the Freudian Slip”
(Psychology Today)
, “Burned in the Melting Pot”
(The New York Times)
, “Jews in Jeopardy”
(Commentary)
, “Good Question, That: Who, Indeed,
Are
the Jews?”
(American Jewish World)
, “Mistakes in Knowledge vs. Mistakes in Taste: Editing the High-Speed Trivia Show” ( Gameshows.com ), “Saul Fish: Our Prince”
(Temple Beth Israel Newsletter)
, and “The Year’s 10 Most Grotesque TV Moments”
(Entertainment Weekly—
Aidan’s grainy face, with his eyes malignantly shifted all the way to the right, filling the magazine’s cover). He received a single
Jeopardy!
right here on WABC.” His victorious debut was forty-eight hours away; his foregone conclusion would follow seventy-two hours later.
Julian saw the same ten-second spot, surprised his brother hadn’t mentioned being on the show, and assumed Aidan had suffered an early defeat and so kept a minor embarrassment to himself. He was therefore puzzled to watch Aidan’s easy victory on Monday evening and yet be unable to contact his brother, leaving a congratulatory voice mail that Aidan listened to in tears. Tuesday’s still more impressive victory, Wednesday’s thoroughgoing destruction of his opponents, reminiscent of a Viking pillage of an undefended Kentish town, and Thursday’s Incident were watched by Aidan’s brother, his editors at various magazines and websites, the patrons at a dozen bars of his trivia-night circuit, the Jewish woman he had taken out twice in the interval, none of whom he had told, none of whom could reach him as he sat on the floor of his apartment, rocking, as the unmistakable theme music began.
Aidan’s Thursday afternoon had passed in rising hopes and ebbing confidence, flash sweats sweeping the pencil from his fingers as he tried to compose a crossword. It was coming, tonight, in an hour, in minutes—maybe they just skipped this episode and blamed a spoiled tape—no, there he was, “Space Travel,” “The Underworld,” any moment now, and now: “Who are the Jews?,” and then all of time screeched to a halt, and Aidan’s flesh burst into flame, and then the universe, having shrunken to a single dimensionless dot, exploded outward in poisonous ripples and scalding dust. The empirical fact (“no longer a matter of scholared disgreement”) of Jewish responsibility for the bubonic plague seeped onto Islamo-fascist and Holocaust-denial websites with intellectual pretensions, footnoting the scientifically unimpeachable work of biohistorian Dr. Aden Donald Hughes, Ph.D. Aidan’s income dried up for months, requiring a careful budgeting of the
Jeopardy!
winnings. He was blackballed from trivia bars and denied writing assignments, even those related to pubic grooming. He watched (as did millions of others) the late-night sketch-comedy routine in which an actor with a motorized, knee-length black beard and magnifying-lens spectacles plays
Jeopardy!
against a hooded Klansman and Elie Wiesel with the categories “Slurs,” “Jew Evil,” “Those Troublesome Darkies,” “Subhuman Races,” and “Justifiable Child Murder.” (Wiesel pulls off a stunning upset.) He duly and hourly Googled himself (an exercise that had previously returned very few and very accurate hits) and read the dozens of editorials from publications around the nation that shredded him to make a potpourri of points: “The Un-derwiring of the Freudian Slip”
(Psychology Today)
, “Burned in the Melting Pot”
(The New York Times)
, “Jews in Jeopardy”
(Commentary)
, “Good Question, That: Who, Indeed,
Are
the Jews?”
(American Jewish World)
, “Mistakes in Knowledge vs. Mistakes in Taste: Editing the High-Speed Trivia Show” ( Gameshows.com ), “Saul Fish: Our Prince”
(Temple Beth Israel Newsletter)
, and “The Year’s 10 Most Grotesque TV Moments”
(Entertainment Weekly—
Aidan’s grainy face, with his eyes malignantly shifted all the way to the right, filling the magazine’s cover). He received a single
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