My mother was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee in her robe. She looked old and devastated, which pleased me.

I waited for her to look up, change her expression to fake-happy and ask me how I slept, darling, in that chirpy little morning voice of hers, but she didn’t.

I went over to the coffee maker and tried to bang everything just loud enough to annoy her, but not loud enough that it was obvious I was doing it.

She still didn’t say anything. I thought I heard her sniff.

I poured half and half into my mug very slowly, listening.

Sniff, sniff, sniff.

I turned around and stared at her.

“Are you like actually crying?”

She nodded but also shook her head at the same time. “I just can’t believe it,” she said, her voice rough. “It wasn’t even real. China was fucking with us this whole time.”

She had her laptop in front of her and looked back down at the screen. She sniffed again. Her eyes looked red and runny.
“What are you talking about?” I was actually kind of worried now. The pandemic, climate change. Everyone was dying or drowning or suffocating with smoke. Was China going to attack us now or something? I tried to remember if they had nuclear weapons.
“Ted Lasso,” she said, her voice breaking over that last o sound. She really began to sob.

“Ted Lasso?” Now I was just confused. Why was she crying over Ted Lasso, the stupid show she and dad always watched about this moronic white guy in England. And what about the China part?
“Uh huh.” She gulped.

“What? Did the actor die or something? Did China execute him?”
“It’s almost worse than that.”

“Mom! Would you just tell me what you are talking about?”
“The whole thing. The whole show, I mean. China was behind it. The communists you know?”

“What do you mean behind it?”

“Like they were the masterminds, the evil geniuses. They invented it and paid for it and got it made. But no one knew it. It was all totally hidden. No one even suspected.”

I leaned back against the counter and took a few sips of the hot coffee trying to figure out what she was talking about.
“Why would they do that, though?”

She gave a funny little laugh, sob, hiccup thing. “To bring down American civilization once and for all.”

For just a minute I wondered if she was making this all up in order to get my attention and stay in the kitchen with her. She always asked me if I wanted to drink my coffee with her, and I always said no and walked upstairs while she was still asking me some dumb question about my classes or something.

“Are you ok? Do you want me to call dad?”

She shook her head. “Let me just grieve by myself for a minute. He’s going to be completely gutted by this.”

She looked back down at the computer for a minute, then back up.
“But thank the lord that they did not get a chance to carry it off.”
I put the mug down and rubbed my eyes hard. “Ok. Just tell me. How were they going to bring down American civilization with Tedd Lasso.”

“Oh god, it’s just so awful I don’t even want to tell you. Thinking about it makes me ill. Physically ill. Oh god, poor Sam, and Jamie, even Jamie doesn’t deserve to die.”

“Mom! Will you just tell me what’s going on.”

“Sweetheart, I’m trying. They had this big plan. The last episode was going to be live. With a real soccer, I mean football game, match. And on a real… pitch. So you know, live, streaming kind of, with all the actors. And then they were going to have Ted…” She gave another sob. “Have Ted, go crazy you know, like he does, he has these anxiety attacks, but this time he would have a gun. and really loose his shit, I mean stuff, and actually, shoot the team. Just mow them down. I mean not really, everyone would be acting you know. But they would fall down and have all this fake blood and it would be like a slaughter. He was going to kill all of them.”

Now, I didn’t even like the stupid show. I mean I watched it sometimes, from the door frame, but it’s not like I really liked it. Ted with his stupid mustache. Roy Kent and all he did was grunt. But still, I could see it, all of them dead with Ted standing with a smoking gun, not smiling for once, but with an evil smirk and the fans screaming and red blood all over the green grass.

“Oh shit,” I said.

“You see?” she said. “Apparently China has been doing all these psychological studies of the American people. They think we are weak and vulnerable, that this was the perfect weapon. First, they would soften us all up, pull us all in, in this time of crisis. Make us all love him. The entire country. This happy American guy. The epitome of the American spirit. They thought it would break us. As a country. If he snapped. If he killed everyone, went beserk.”

She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her robe and added, “And precipitate an international crisis with the English who would be appalled that he did it on English soil. The whole thing,” she sighed. “The whole thing funded by the Chinese.”