Turn of the Century (12 page)

“My man! Macaroon!” It is, of course, Featherstone. He shoves aside the little built-in flat-screen TV on which he was watching
Up & At ’Em
, MBC’s “morning show with attitude,” and pops toward George and Lizzie. “Betty!” He kisses Lizzie on both cheeks. “Top of the morning, Mactier-Zimbalists. Happy leap day.”

Leap years are a subject Max has studied exhaustively. “This is only the second time ever,” he says, for approximately the tenth time this month, “that a hundred-year year has been a leap year.”

“Trippy,” Featherstone says, a little confused but, like lots of Angelenos, not uncomfortable being a little confused. “Your brainiac here reminds me of my pal Goldblum.” The movie star Jeff Goldblum, George assumes Featherstone means, not Goldbloom his college roommate or Goldbloom his accountant. Absent any clear contextual clues, George has learned that a name mentioned by Timothy is a name being dropped.

“Where’s the boss?” George asks.

“Harold is aft,” Saddler explains.

“The private office,” Featherstone says, nodding to the back of the plane as he returns to his seat. “Working the phones.”

A Cindy Crawford doppelgänger stows their two L. L. Bean tote bags and their five coats; the other flight attendant, a sort of black Pamela Anderson, guides the children to seats equipped with video-game joysticks and brings out a silver platter of hot croissants. Both women are like first-class stewardesses from the cha-cha-cha days, before
age discrimination and sexual harassment were crimes, when serving cocktails on jets passed for a glamorous profession. The piped-in instrumental music is New Agey, but just repetitious and somber enough to be tasteful; Brian Eno or School of. The cabinetry is bright yellow. Above the cockpit door is an LCD display that alternately flashes the current time, the ETA, and Mose Media Holdings’ stock price, delayed fifteen minutes.

“Sheesh,” Lizzie says softly once they’re seated. “Very glam.”

Before George can reply, Saddler is suddenly in front of them, crouching. “Ettore Sottsass,” he says, his voice verging on a whisper like a TV golf announcer. “The legendary Italian designer. It’s the only aircraft he’s done. Personal friend of Harold’s.”

“We really appreciate this, Hank,” Lizzie says. “It makes everything … so much easier. It’s fantastic.”

“Henry. At Mach 0.88 and FL 510—that’s fifty-one thousand feet,
completely
above the commercials—you’ll be at your mom’s home by brunchtime, George, God rest her soul.”

“Ordinarily you’d just fly all the way straight to Seattle?”

“Elizabeth,” Saddler says, smiling, “Harold and I flew back from Davos last week on half a tank of fuel.”

“Does Bombardier have you on commission, Hank?” Mose has appeared. Everything but his shirt is velvety, the blue-green Zegna suit, the purple tie, the black suede loafers. He leans down to kiss Lizzie, but remains standing. Saddler continues to crouch.

“They don’t have to—I just
adore
this aircraft. By the way, Harold, I found out that our cabin air actually
is
fresher, just like you were saying the other day at Stanstead.” Saddler flares his huge nostrils and takes a deep breath through his nose. “The fellas,” he says, meaning the pilots, “told me they keep the oxygen level at the equivalent of six thousand feet altitude, instead of the customary eight thousand.”

“Denver air instead of Mexico City air,” Mose says, winking at Lizzie and George, but mostly Lizzie. “That’s certainly worth forty million to the shareholders, don’t you think?” Saddler forces a big, anxious guffaw that sounds like a seal’s muffled bark.

Max has wandered into the cockpit, and is now returning to his seat. “It’s so awesome,” he says when he reaches his parents. “The pilots let me move their power handles back and forth.”

“Max,” Lizzie instructs, “can you say hello to Mr. Mose?”

Max makes momentary eye contact with Mose, and waves once at his wrist. “Hi.” George and Lizzie are aware of their children’s indifferent, inconsistent manners, which they attempt to improve. Somewhat indifferently and inconsistently.

“Hello! Did they show you their computer?” Mose glances at Lizzie. “It pilots the thing, as near as I can tell. Like HAL, in
2001
.”

“No, uh-uh,” Max says, now a little interested in Mose.

Saddler, still crouching, yanks on Max’s hair again and says, “The flight plan is digitized—the guys load it in on a disk. It can even be done wirelessly, from a remote location.”

Max is excited. “To take off, you just like slide the power levers to the words TAKE OFF. Then you slide them to where it says CLIMB, then CRUISE. I mean, it’s really like … on TV or in a cartoon or something. You know? It doesn’t seem real.”

“It
isn’t
real,” says Mose, smiling. “The throttle levers”
—lee
vers—“are vestigial. Completely unnecessary. They’re just a sop to the pilots. Pure nostalgia. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

“The twenty-first century doesn’t start until
next
year,” Max says seriously. “January first, two thousand
one
.”

As the jet begins to taxi, Louisa runs over and takes the seat across from her mother and father. George helps her fasten her seat belt.

“If we crash,” she asks cheerfully, “will I die because of burning or because of drowning or because of getting ripped up?”

“We won’t crash,” Lizzie answers.

“I have another question.”

“Shoot,” Lizzie says.

“If the plane blows up—”

“LuLu,
stop
,” George says.

“This is a
good
thing, Daddy. If the plane blows up in the air, we’ll be closer to heaven than if we just got murdered on the ground, right?”

Saddler turns his head, tilts it fifteen degrees, and smiles.
“Precious.”

“Do your puzzle, LuLu,” George tells her.

She stares hard at Saddler a couple of seconds, then says brightly, “Your hair is like my Mufasa’s mane.” She holds up her stuffed lion, a hand-me-down from Sarah. “Except less orange.”

For the same instant, Lizzie and George glance at Saddler’s red hairplugs,
then return quickly with studied obliviousness to their newspapers. Saddler struggles to remake his pastoral grin as he stands and slides into the seat across from Mose, whose eyes are closed.

“Mufasa dies. When the wildebeests stampede,” LuLu calls over to Saddler. “But Simba thinks
he
killed him.”

“Louisa,”
Lizzie says.

“What?”

Their happy youngest child has been fascinated by death and dying ever since the concept was explained to her. At the preschool she attended the first year they lived in the suburbs, LuLu one morning decided to play dead. The playrooms at the school (the Total Child Institute, chosen by default over Wee Winners and the Hudson River Christian Academy) were equipped with digital cameras that fed still images of the classroom to the TotalChild.com web site, so that parents could monitor their children from their offices and homes. Lizzie happened to be online the morning that LuLu lay perfectly still in a corner, face down, her head under a toy chest. A new picture was downloaded every thirty seconds. Lizzie noticed only the third or fourth LuLu-playing-dead image, and she instantly recognized the red-striped Hanna Andersson pants and Edith Hope sweater. As she stared at two adults trying to resuscitate her, and the dozen other Total Child children standing in a semicircle around their motionless classmate, Lizzie dialed the phone. As the next image Levolored onto her computer screen, she saw there were now three adults around the immobile LuLu, all clearly hysterical. By the time Total Child answered Lizzie’s phone call, LuLu had abandoned her game.

Why does George always feel safer flying on a private jet than on any commercial airliner? If not precisely safer, certainly less fretful. Is it the intimacy? Part of his dread of plane crashes is the prospect of mass hysteria, sitting among hundreds of screaming, incontinent strangers who all know they are about to die.

They are up through the clouds before George even has a chance to entertain morbid takeoff thoughts. As the plane banks steeply, parallel shafts of morning sun trace up the curved wall of the cabin, then down again as the plane levels off, heading west. George and Lizzie both look out his window. They are a little astonished, as always, by the way it looks at thirty or forty thousand feet, fifty degrees below zero, the impossibly
pure blue sky and perfect rippling pink-and-gray cumulus tops, a Maxfield Parrish mural in ultra-Imax 3D. Off to the left and below them, lightning flashes, diffused by a dull gray cloud wall.

“Whoa,” George says quietly. “Good effect.”

They watch as the center of a fat white cloud just ahead disintegrates, and the sun, now behind them, bursts through that hole, shining like a spotlight on a darker cloud beyond. And at the center of that bright spot they see the jet’s shadow.

“
Great
effect,” she says, still staring at the sky. “It’s funny, you know—if we saw a painting like this, this over the top, we’d absolutely hate it. So cheesy.”

George smiles, at her and himself. He had been thinking how much it looked like heaven.

“I’d put it in the red-flag category. Fourth quarter we had seventeen versus the previous fourth quarter, 1998, when we had …” Hank Saddler consults a multicolored graph. “Yup
—thirty-three
. And the line is definitely slightly trending down, Harold, even seasonally adjusted.”

“Didn’t the
NARCS
live show get us some vision points?” Mose asks.

“The MBC and MMH, yes. You personally, not really.” MMH is how Saddler refers to Mose Media Holdings.

“I’m the one who got Giuliani to get the cops to play along.”

“Which the press doesn’t know. So …”

“Ah. Correct. And so now you need to script me. Like Ronald Reagan.”

“This is just one piece of one strategy to preempt any further erosion in your numbers.”

“What have I done lately, eh? I guess I have to launch a new network every eighteen months to maintain credibility.”

Saddler nods.

“Where’s Rupert on your chart?”

Saddler turns a page on his printout. “Murdoch is steady at forty-two, give or take. He also has nine ‘genius’es last quarter.”

“How many of those were ‘
evil
genius’?” Mose asks.

“What we want to prevent, Harold, is a John Malone—type syndrome. In 1994, Malone was in first place by a huge margin—”

“Really? Ahead of Diller? Of Eisner?”

“Oh, absolutely. Far ahead. Michael Eisner scores consistently high on ‘brilliant,’ but never ‘visionary.’ But Malone, by 1997, was pretty deep in the tank.”

George opens his eyes.

“Not a single ‘visionary,’ ” Saddler says to Mose, “the whole darned calendar year. In any publication or broadcast. And except for some upticks in 1998 after the AT&T deal, he’s been in the single digits ever since. Barry Diller has stayed high on ‘visionary.’ And he’s currently number one on ‘legendary.’ Which correlates with age, of course. Particularly in TV news and the newsmagazines.”

George doesn’t think he’s dreaming, but as he awakes he is conflating this conversation with conversations from seventeen years ago about Bennett Gould’s Saturday cliché tally. Ben wrote for the business section at
Newsweek
. They had only recently started working on computers, and just for fun Ben created a program that, at the end of each week, searched every story in the magazine for clichés of the moment—phrases like
jet-setting powerbroker
and
street-savvy mogul
and
postmodern sleight-of-hand
—and ranked them by frequency of appearance. Then on Saturday he distributed the cliché tally to George and their friend Greg Dunn. One Saturday, because he had been up all night figuring out how to do it, Bennett programmed the system to
replace
each of the designated clichés in the live, computerized texts with the phrase
NEW CLICHÉ TO COME
. He assumed each of his little jokes would be caught and deleted by some responsible person poised along the assembly line—fact checker, writer, senior editor, lawyer, top editor,
top
top editor, copy editor, someone. And most were, but the first 150,000 issues of the magazine that week contained fifteen printed instances of
NEW CLICHÉ TO COME
, fourteen of them in a single article, and six of those in one sentence. (“Ronald Reagan, although accused by critics of both
NEW CLICHÉ TO COME
and an old-fashioned
NEW CLICHÉ TO COME
, was uncertain as he strode out to the dusty front porch of Rancho del Cielo, where the
NEW CLICHÉ TO COME
Stockman and
NEW CLICHÉ TO COME
Darman, both
NEW CLICHÉ TO COME
, waited to hear the president’s
NEW CLICHÉ TO COME
.”) Bennett quit before he could be fired, and became a stock trader.

Mose looks across the aisle and catches George staring.

“You’re the journalist,” Mose says. “Explain to us why your former colleagues no longer consider me a genius.”

“ ‘Visionary,’ ”
Saddler says, looking at George. “That and ‘brilliant’ are the key phrases.”