"Max?"
"Max."
"Max!"
"…Yes, Leo?"
"Something is very wrong here." There is a brief spatter of disgruntled rustling, and Max is lifting the newspaper away from his face, peering through sleepy eyes at the young accountant-cum-producer staring at an unorganized pile of submissions, looking pale, and worried, and more than a little moist. Leo meets his gaze from across the room, shakily removes his glasses, and proceeds to smear small drops of sweat across the lenses.
"We're still Broadway producers, right?" Max doesn't answer, just looks patiently and pointedly at the stack of presumed pending musicals that he hasn't bothered to read, not now that they've become wildly successful and the art's begun to bore him. "I mean, we still produce shows for Broadway, correct? Plays, musicals…that's what we do, yes?" Max can hear the note of panic underscoring Leo's words, though the man is doing an admirable job keeping his voice steady. "Because if that is, indeed, what we do, then I'm afraid there's a problem with some of these submissions."
Max could ask, but he knows the explanation is coming regardless, so he decides the effort is better spent on his part seeking coffee. Or better, alcohol. Anything to steel him for the impending breakdown.
"Now," Leo continues, warily hooking his glasses around his ears. "Now, one might expect Broadway producers, such as ourselves, to be somewhat musical in nature, and we have. To a small degree," he qualifies, tapping the butt of his pencil against a slim collection of Broadway-bound submissions. "However," and here he sweeps his pencil over to a much larger pile, "most of what we have been receiving lately is decidedly, well… decidedly not."
There's fuzzy coffee sludge growing in the pot, and nothing but empty bottles behind the couch, but there's a vial of Listerine hiding in the pocket of his robe. The drink kicks him in the nose and knocks him back a step or two, but it's just what he needs. He turns then, rubbing his tongue across the back of his teeth, and finally looks at Leo the way Leo needs to be looked at.
The man is practically glistening, and he's holding a green-papered script tightly between his fingers. If it weren't for the quiet but angry flap of pages moving against each other, he'd hardly know the man was trembling at all.
"It's –" Leo gulps, and licks his lips. "It's prose." He holds out the wrinkled piece to Max, who, after another swig from the Listerine bottle, takes it with little ceremony. Even still, he's a little surprised by what he finds inside. There are paragraphs And rhetoric. And literary conventions. But there are plot holes all over the first page, and the grammar is atrocious, and it's not particularly well-written, and most importantly, it's blatantly not theater.
He presses the Listerine bottle to his lips, engrossed in this terrible, terrible story about giant killer bugs from outer space, only vaguely away that Leo's still talking.
"Now, a manuscript I can sort of understand; it's at least a story. But some of these just…they just –" he waves his arms towards the unkempt pile of miscellany on the floor, floundering for words. "Some of these just don't make sense." Max makes what he hopes is an encouraging sound, and retreats to the couch with The Giant Killer Bugs from Outer Space. The giant bugs are quickly gaining ground against the humans, who are using any manner of new and exciting weaponry to stop them, which is impressive, even if it doesn't stop a number of soldiers from being thoroughly decapitated. Max flips back to the title page, seeking the author. Heinlein? Those Germans, he chuckles to himself. So crazy.
"Someone sent us a portfolio full of watercolors." Leo's close to hysteria now, he can feel it. "We got a draft of a new comic book yesterday. Here," he lifts up something from the floor, bound in shiny black leather, "here is someone's high school yearbook, which has already been published! And this one!" He snatches a much slimmer volume from under his chair, "this one doesn't even have words! Its just numbers! Twenty-three pages of numbers!" A loose paper dislodges and drifts into Max's lap, and he can tear his gaze away from the thrilling adventures of the Filipino bug-fighter long enough to see that, yes, the page is covered from top to bottom with ones and zeros. He looks up at Leo, who simply can't help but breath heavily. "I mean, honestly Max. How does this happen?"
"Maybe it was a mistake?"
"A mistake?!" And now Max has to pay attention, because Leo's voice has never reached that octave before. "Five accidental submissions coming to us is a mistake. Five hundred? That's something more than just a mistake. That defies Laws!"
"What 'Laws'?'
"Any Laws! Laws of Physics, Laws of Nature, Laws of Gravity. Someone sent us a thesaurus, Max! That defies the very constitution of our being!" Leo drops down beside Max on the couch, still flapping the pages of numbers, and makes a grab for the crinkled manuscript in Max's hands. The older man clutches it to his chest protectively and glares.
"Max. Listen. We are renowned Broadway producers. People have heard of us, they know about what we do. Our job is written in our address, Max. By God, it's painted on our door! 'Bialystock and Bloom: Producers.' Why would you send your college transcripts to 'Bialystock and Bloom: Producers?' Who would do such an asinine thing? TWICE?!?"
"Leo. Look." He pats the disturbed young man's knee comfortingly. "If they bother you that much, don't read them. Just throw them out."
Leo blinks once, twice, seven times, turning the words over in his head. "Throw them out," he says slowly, definitely. "That's a brilliant idea. I'll throw them out. I'll throw them out the window!"
Max smiles a tired smile, and leans back into the ratted cushions of the couch, smoothing out Heinlein's pages, and doesn't even look up at the thump of the balcony door against the wall and the furious crinkling of paper being thrown into the alley beneath them.
"Hey! Hey you!" Max doesn't have to look, but he can guess that Leo's dangerously close to loosing his glasses over the cast-iron railing.
"Wot?" wafts the ever so refined answer from below.
"What is that? Is that for me?"
"That depends. Are you Bialystock an' or Bloom?"
"Yes!"
"Then yeah. It's for you."
"Is it a play? A musical? I'll settle for a short monologue?"
"Actually, no. It's an academic dissertation on – "
"GO AWAYI! Leave! I'm a Broadway producer, damn you! Don't bring me dissertations- I'll kill you! I'll kill you many times, and deeply, with a thousand papers cuts! Yes, run. Run! Far, far away. If I catch you, I swear…what are you looking at, woman!"
The story is crap, Max decides, thumbing through the last few pages. The story is crap, and the title is crappier, but there's a market for anything nowadays, if you sell it right…
Barnum's Law: There's one born every minute. Bialy's corollary: Don't go to them, let them come to you. And by God, they were coming in droves…
"Leo," he calls, brightly, just loud enough to break the young man's tirade against a poodle, "I've been thinking about some new directions…"