“Careful – don’t step on the peacocks.”

  The 15 tourists crammed into the elevator with me shuffled their feet, then laugh-groaned when they realized the entire carpeted floor was covered in six-inch-long NBC peacocks.

  It’s one of the jokes I would tell on every tour – so, about six times a day, six days a week. Most of the Pages had it in heavy rotation, which is why I used to tell it on the first elevator ride, before the other Page got the chance. Since there are about 60 Pages in the program at all times, it’s quite possible the joke has been in continuous use for decades, presumably going back to the year the first iteration of those tacky peacock carpets was put in. I remember hoping the joke’s creator somehow came to know the impact he or she had. I remember hoping they had a high-up job in some comedy show by then. I doubted it. 

But that was when I thought of the joke as hopelessly light, and not lightly hopeless; before the shining bulbs of showbiz caramelized and burned to ash the sugar in my soul. The elevator doors opened, and I led my 15 tourists onto the 6th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

There we joined up with Bree and the other 15. Every tour was led by two Pages, which allowed us to keep a better eye on the guests as we guided them in and out of the TV studios. I had toured with nearly everyone currently in the program, and Bree was one of my favorites. A very thin woman from New Orleans with long blonde hair, Bree had a remarkable way of speaking in a sort of double-talk that presented to tourists and NBC management as almost unbearably sincere, but which her fellow Pages read as ironic. “This is the very stage where MC Hammer hosted ‘Saturday Night Live’ – can you believe it?!” she might exclaim in Studio 8H.  

  Like me, Bree wore a grey Brooks Brothers suit bearing a magnetic nametag and the NBC Peacock pin. Mine was rumpled and slightly rank – and how else could it be, with its wearer doing huge loops of a skyscraper six days a week? – but Bree’s somehow remained as straight and shiny as a suit of armor. 

  “Welcome to the historic sixth floor!” Bree said to the group, gesturing expansively around the carpeted elevator bank. 

   “And now, ladies and gentlemen,” I cut in, “please wait right here – I’m just going to take a peek to make sure the studio is clear, and then Bree and I will usher you in.”

   Leaving the group with Bree, I stepped into Studio 6B. At the time it was used to film “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” which shot five days a week in the afternoons. Since this was the first tour in the morning, there was little risk of our interrupting any pre-production rituals, but we still had to make sure we weren’t barging in on anything.

I passed into the dark vestibule dividing the studio from the hallway, through the soundproof double doors, and up onto the top level of the studio itself. Below sat the 200 seats, and on the bottom was the stage itself. In the middle of the stage, visible to the bare eye but rarely noticeably on TV, is a small brass star that Jack Parr used for his mark back when he hosted “Texaco Star Theater,” and which Johnny Carson mimed teeing off from when he would open the show with his famous golf swing. The star served then as Jimmy’s mark for the monologue.

  I was preparing to head back to the group, help bring them into the studio, and tell them about that star when I noticed a form on the unlit stage. Something curled up between the star and Jimmy’s desk.

  Looking around and seeing that the studio was empty, I jogged down the steps toward the stage. Halfway down I was sure it was a man, dressed casually in jeans and a droopy T-shirt. 

When I got down to the black bars in front of the stage that protected the talent from the audience, I was no longer looking at him. At it. My neck had jolted my head away. Once my mind wrested my head back, there was no question about what my eyes were seeing. There was a corpse on the otherwise shining floor of Studio 6B. 

  I can’t remember the paces my mind was going through at that moment. But I’m sure of what my first clear thought was. It wasn’t “What should I do now?” or “Should I call for help?” or even simply “Is this is a safe place to be?” It was this: In the tens of thousands of hours of network television that have been taped in this room, footage that has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world, nothing has been as startling as what I was now seeing alone. And isn’t that, I thought as I noticed that the corpse’s head was nearly horizontal with its shoulders, kind of a shame? That America’s viewing public couldn’t share in this?

Then I did wonder whether I was safe. I leaned over to examine the dark bullpen between the cameras and the stage, where writers and guests would amble during the show. No one there. The band’s stage was empty too. I shot my head around to the area behind the seats where the lighting operators sit. I didn’t see anyone, though it was hard to tell in the darkness.

From somewhere down behind the stage I heard a loud clomping, like a metallic horse landing a jump. Then a single squeaky drag. I ran back up the steps and out of the studio, sweating hard and breathing heavy.

It was back in the hallway that I remembered I was in the middle of a tour. Thirty tourists and a blonde Page were looking at me with anticipation. 

“And right this… way…” Bree started to say, losing steam when she saw me shake my head and work my jaw. 

“Let’s… let’s…” I looked around helplessly. The guests – what to do with the guests? The tours started up every 20 minutes and mostly followed the same route, which meant you couldn’t just blaze on to your next stop if you were running ahead of schedule. 

Keeping my eyes down and away from the curious tourists, I walked over to Bree and whispered two words no Page wants to hear: “NBC trivia.” She clasped my shoulder dutifully and nodded.

“Okay!” she said loudly, clapping her hands together. “We have an exciting opportunity to play some NBC trivia!”

I saw a security guard sitting in the corner, a big man in a blue suit who spent his working hours in a delicate space between consciousness and sleep. “I need to show you something,” my voice told him. 

“Go ahead.”

“It’s this way, in the studio.”

“Yeah?” 

“I need to show you,” I hissed. I was trying to convey urgency without breaking some unspoken rule about not letting tourists get wind of the corpses in our studios.

“Yeah?” the guard said again as he got slowly onto his feet. His sarcastic exhaustion didn’t manage to mask his actual exhaustion. 

I loped ahead, stopped, saw him trailing behind, took a few more half-running steps, stopped again, loped forward again, stopped to see him making his slow way. A Page’s sense of urgency clearly meant little to this ex-cop. 

Eventually I succeeded in leading him through the double doors. Standing on the top landing of Studio 6B, I looked down and saw… nothing. I scrambled down to the bottom of the audience and looked down at the stage. On the buffed wooden floor the brass star shone alone.

“Yeah?” he called from the top of the studio.

“No, there was—” I ran back up to him. As I jogged, something in the back of my head warned me how crazy what I was about to say would sound. I ignored the insight. “There was a body,” I said. 

“There was a person here?”

“There was— it was a dead, a dead, you know—”

“A cadavah,” he said in his thick New York accent. 

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Not here now.”

“No.”

“Yeah.” He walked out of the studio with slightly more alacrity than he had entered it, back down the hallway, and back into his chair.

“In the show ‘ALF,’ what is ALF an acronym for?” I heard Bree ask in the elevator bank. The tourists stared at her with disinterest. “ALF, ladies and gentlemen. The puppet from outer space. It’s the late ’80s. Any guesses?” 

  I cut through the tour group, punched “5” on the elevator caller, flashed Bree a thumbs-up, and got in the elevator when it arrived. After ten more minutes of painful trivia, she’d have to go on to the next studio without me. 

Studio 6B takes up two floors of 30 Rock, stretching from the sixth down to the fifth. I always found remarkable how different the fifth floor was from the sterile sixth. Six is where the live studio audience was “loaded in” by Pages. But five is where the show’s guests came in, where the greenrooms were, and where the show was actually shot. It sounded like live music and smelled like whiskey and weed, paninis and sex. The difference between the fifth and sixth floors was the difference between hanging out with Matthew McConaughey and watching someone hang out with Matthew McConaughey. 

But now the studio was dark and the fifth floor quiet. The only person I saw was actually a fellow Page, a big blonde boy named Bennett. Nepotism had earned Bennett the plum assignment known as “Fallon Desk.” During tapings he was tasked with shepherding celebrities around and getting them things. The rest of the time he sat on the fifth floor and served as security-light, helping staffers and shooing away the unworthy.

Bennett looked at me skeptically as I approached from the elevator “Hey, what’s up?” It wasn’t a greeting. 

“There was— I saw—” I paused. “Bennett. Is everything ok?”

“Uh, yeah. What’s up?”

“Was there— Did you hear—” There was no way around it. “I saw a body in the studio. Then it was gone. What’s happening?” 

“A body?” His mouth curled into a smile. I could already hear how I would sound when he told this story to the other Pages. 

“Who was in the studio today?”

His head backed up a few inches on his neck. “There’s always stuff going on. Why do you want to know?”

“Because I saw a body in the studio. A corpse. A cadaver.”

“Must have been for a skit.”

The thought had not, in fact, occurred to me. I took a grateful breath in. “They were rehearsing a skit today?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. They were fixing the lights. I don’t know. Why are you asking? You’re not supposed to be on this floor.”

“So they were recording a skit?”

“No, but—”

“Listen, I just want to find out—”

“Talk to security.”

“I did, and—”

“And what?” Bennett asked. 

“Listen, can I just go into the studio from here?”

“No, of course not. Actually, no one can get in now. I even got it taken off the tour route.” He seemed proud of the power he wielded over his fellow Pages.

“No one can go in?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Why?”

The way he was staring at me convinced me that this was useless. Worse than useless. The more I talked, the more I argued, the crazier the version of me in the story Bennett would tell became. 

“Listen, I need to tell someone. Really. Where’s the EP?” 

“In his office, I guess.”

“What floor?”

“Seriously? You can’t just go to see him.”

“What floor?”

He shrugged and told me, then told me he hadn’t told me. My funeral, he must have figured. I headed back for the elevator.

When the doors opened again, it was onto a floor that looked strikingly normal from the elevator bank. But down the hall, a big suite of offices retained some of the studio’s planned zaniness. 

“Can I help you?” a freckled woman asked brightly. I clocked her age at about 24, and guessed she was two years out of the Page Program. Behind her desk at the entrance of the offices, she was perched ambitiously on the edge of her chair, about ready to make her next career move. 

“Alex Rosenberg, NBC Page,” I said. “I need to talk to someone about the studio.”

Her delicate features ruffled in a way that suggested discomfort. This question, and its asker, seemed so far beneath her that any continued interaction would verge on taboo. “Oh— that would be something for the Tour Desk, I think.” So she was a former Page.

“No.” I said it like I meant it. I had composed my opening lines in the elevator and managed to deliver them with conviction. It was time for someone to take me seriously. “I saw something that someone needs to know about. I need to talk to the person in charge of the studio. Or the executive producer.”

“The EP? Really?”

“He’ll want to hear this from me.”

She looked at me carefully. It was a tricky situation for her. One rule I’d learned from my worm’s eye view is that the bigger the ask, the less room for error. If it was true that I had to tell her boss’s boss’s boss something that he’d want to hear, and she didn’t give me the opportunity, she was in trouble. “What did you say your name was?”

“Alex Rosenberg. But the important thing is what I saw in the studio ten minutes ago. Somebody needs to know about it. Something needs to be done about it. Immediately.”

“One minute. Sit over there.”

I walked toward a chair next to the door but didn’t sit down. She picked up a phone and muttered into it. “…sound weird… says his name is… very busy… sure, but… really?”

She hung up and looked at me. Her face had softened – she was almost smiling. I knew what that meant. “I’ll walk you over to his office.”

“Th— thanks.” It was only when I got what I asked for that I realized I didn’t think I had any chance of it. Why would an EP, an EP of a show that actually mattered, bother with the nameless Page scratching at his front door? 

The assistant took me past a long row of memorabilia-clogged cubicles and to a desk where another assistant, probably about five years out of the Program, sat guarding a fogged glass door. 

The two women spoke briefly, and then the elder one knocked twice on the glass door. Without waiting for a reply, she pushed it open and motioned me in. 

I stepped into the office and let the glass door close behind me. One wall was lined with group photos taken with rock stars and presidents. Another held a corkboard covered in brightly colored cards bearing the names of guests, skits and packages. Behind the desk was an immense bookshelf clogged with award statuettes.

In front of that desk sat a wide-faced man in a bright white button-down, folding his arms and leaning far back in his chair. Let’s call him “Mike.”

“Listen, listen – come in, have a seat,” Mike instructed. “You want anything? Water? Cappuccino?”

I shook my head and sat on one of the two broad leather chairs that faced his desk. He closed his eyes and grabbed the bridge of his nose.

“So, listen. I heard you saw something in the studio?”

I nodded in agreement.

“Listen, I— think I know what you saw, okay? At least, I think I know what you think you saw. Okay?”

I nodded again.

“You think you saw something that, that—” Struggling to express himself, he formed his hands into loose fists and spun them in the air. “Something that you want to talk about, but you don’t want to talk about. Right?”

I nodded.

“You’re here to, to— you want to make sure I know about this thing you saw. Because you want to make sure that someone who can— who could— someone who could do something— is aware, I guess. Right?”

I nodded cautiously.

With a somber exhalation Mike got up, walked around his mahogany desk, and took the leather chair next to mine. “Listen. Alex. Let me assure you that I know. That I know. That I heard. Even though it just happened, but I heard all about it. About how he was trying to reset the lights manually. About how he and another guy dragged in a ladder. About how they ended up trading places. And how the guy on the ladder, the guy that fell off the ladder, one who you— well— the one you saw— how he didn’t necessarily have the union designation that maybe he should have. Didn’t have quite the right credentials. Insurance, paperwork, you know. Is this— is this making some sense to you?”

He leaned his chin on one of his fists and looked at me carefully. 

“Because I kind of need you to— to—” Mike leaned back into his chair. “I also heard about how maybe someone came into the studio between when they were moving the ladder and moving that person you saw. And now— well, so now I know that person was you. Which is great. I wouldn’t have wanted it to be anyone else. Because I know that we can keep this between us.”

I didn’t nod just then.

“No one knows but you, me, and the guy holding the ladder. The guy who was supposed to be on the ladder himself. So it’s really good that you did the same thing he did, and came to me about this directly. It shows good judgment. Very good judgement. I’m impressed.”

Mike waited for me to respond. I didn’t.

“The fact that he— that there was an accident— we’re dealing with that. It’s a tragedy, no question. Awful. And we’re talking to legal, and they’ll contact his family. But legal, they’re very— he can’t have been on the ladder in the studio, you understand? It’s like, maybe he fell off the ladder, but somewhere else. Even backstage. Even five feet backstage. That can be very different. It’s a tragedy either way. But when it comes to union codes, insurance, paperwork…” He shrugged theatrically. “It can be very different.”

My eyes must have been avoiding Mike’s face, since I distinctly remember staring at the dark blue buttons on his very white shirt.

“Listen, Alex. I’m not trying to— I’m telling you all this for a reason. Because I need you to understand, like, where I’m coming from. How I’m trying to protect the show, the network, Jimmy. I’m trying to— trying to— Why did you get into this business?”

I opened my mouth and heard my tongue clack dryly against the roof of my mouth.

“I got into this business to make people happy, okay?” Mike continued. “I liked watching TV, I wanted to make good TV, right?  But that’s not why I’m still here. That’s not what I believe in anymore. The people out there watching, they have plenty of ways to be happy. Average American watches 40 hours of TV a week, you know? They want to be happy, they should watch less, okay? So what do I care about now? My team. Protecting my team. Building my team. Making my team stronger. Protecting my team. You got it?”

He paused so long that I had to nod.

“You did the right thing,” he said. “You told someone about this. But that— that’s it, right? You don’t need to tell anyone else. Five years from now, you can tell your therapist. Ten years, you can write something about it, change some of the names. If you’re still thinking about it by then. But it was an accident, you know? It’s a dangerous business. It’s a very dangerous business. It’s a dangerous business still. Behind the camera, in front of the camera— there’s money, power. And a kid has to be careful. Has to be careful, but also has to know how to capitalize on the opportunities he sees. Right?”

I’m not proud to say that I nodded again. 

“Good man,” he said. “Good man. Can I get you anything? Coffee? Water? Picture with Jimmy? Autograph from a guest? We have Matthew McConaughey on tonight.”

I shook my head.

“Good man,” Mike said again. “Be well.” Then he stood and extended his hand. I clasped it, half for support, as I removed my sweating limbs from the leather. 

I was stepping shakily toward the door when he called over my shoulder: “Careful – don’t step on the peacocks.”