File Note: The Silence

FILE NOTE — CORTEZ / POST-KURAMOTO / NO RESPONSE FROM OFFICE Personal working file. Do not circulate. ———————————————— Entry as of this evening. I am writing this down because I am going to need it later. Either as a record of what happened, or as a record of what I told him would happen and why he did it anyway. Both have occurred more than once with this client. Six days since the Kuramoto match. Five days since he stood in the cage and asked the federation a question on broadcast. Four days since I told him he should have asked it in my office instead of on a hot mic. Zero days since the federation responded. He is, in my professional assessment, beginning to come apart in private in a way he is not yet coming apart in public. The public Cortez is, if anything, sharper than usual. He has done two podcast appearances this week and produced quotes on both that the federation's marketing team will probably end up using whether they like it or not. He is on. He is fine. He is, the audience will tell you, fully in command of the situation. The audience is wrong. ———————————————— He called me at one in the morning last night. I want to record what was said because I want to remember it accurately when this is over. The call was from his suite. He had been drinking — not a lot, by his standards, but he was looser than he is when he's working. I had already been asleep. I answered because I always answer. He opened with: "Katrina. Has there been any communication." I said no. He said: "Anything from the office. Even informal. A scheduling note. A media coordinator. A janitor." I said no. I said the federation was building the Ignition card publicly, that the matches being announced did not include him, that I had reached out twice through my normal channels and received the kind of polite-deflection response that I have learned to read as institutional silence. He said: "How does it feel to want." I said: "Shawn." He said: "I am asking myself, Katrina. I am asking myself how it feels to want. I am asking because the answer is informative. The answer, it turns out, is that wanting feels normal. Wanting feels like a Tuesday. Wanting feels like exactly what it has always felt like, which is a state of mild dissatisfaction with the rate at which the world is providing the things I am owed. The wait is producing no new emotion. The federation appears to believe it is producing one. The federation is incorrect." I let him talk. I have learned that he talks himself into and then back out of most of his positions if I do not interrupt. The trick is to identify the thirty seconds where he is actually saying what he means, which usually happen between minutes four and five of any given monologue. He got to it eventually. He said: "I expected an answer within forty-eight hours. I expected it to be unsatisfactory. I prepared three responses to three categories of unsatisfactory answer. I have prepared no response to silence. The silence is — Katrina, the silence is the one thing I did not factor." I said: "I know." He said: "Why does the silence work." I told him the truth, which is that the silence works because his entire public construction depends on being the most interesting thing in any room, and the office has decided, by inaction, that the room currently contains other interesting things. The women's bracket. The New Wave triple. The World final. He is, in the office's framing, not currently the headline. He is, by the office's framing, not currently a headline at all. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said: "I want to draft a statement." I said: "No." He said: "An open letter to the office." I said: "Shawn." He said: "Katrina, the silence is being used against me." I said: "The silence is being used. Whether it is being used against you or whether you are using it against yourself is a separate question. I am not in a position to answer it tonight. Neither are you. Go to bed. Do not draft anything. If you draft anything, send it to me first. Do not, under any circumstance, send anything to the office. Are we clear." He said: "I have 'it.'" I said: "I know." He said: "I am as close as it gets." I said: "I know. Go to bed." He hung up. ———————————————— Notes for my own use: The pattern is consistent with prior episodes. He builds, he builds, he builds, and then at some point in the silence he takes an action that the audience will read as confidence and that I will read as the action of a man who could not tolerate one more day of being unanswered. The action will, in all likelihood, work in his favor — he is, infuriatingly, a fighter whose worst impulses produce his most quotable moments. But it will also commit him to a position the office may not have intended to put him in, and that he will then have to fight from. I do not know what the action will be. I know it is coming. I know the timeline is shorter than he thinks it is. I know I am not going to be able to talk him out of it once he decides what it is. I have, for what it is worth, done worse things for this man than write down a phone call. The fact that I am writing this one down anyway tells me something I am not yet ready to articulate about where this is going. I will check in with him in the morning. He will be fine. He will pretend the call did not happen. I will pretend with him. That is the work. — K. Randall