Turn of the Century (51 page)

Shouldn’t she be depressed by this place? Is she trying too hard to like it here because she should? In fact, as she drove her generic white Taurus east on I-90 through generic white Taurus land, she finds herself entertained—George-like—more than grossed out by the premium corporate strip in Bellevue, with its nice view of twenty-one traffic lanes; and by the town of Factoria, which consists exclusively of pet supply superstores, Dave’s Sugar-Fried Boneless Chicken outlets, and three-hour-old condominiums ripped into the virgin hillsides. It’s grotesque, sure, but isn’t that always the way on the frontier? San Francisco was raw and ugly in 1850. West L.A. was raw and ugly in 1920. Lizzie Zimbalist was raw and ugly in 1976, when she was twelve.

In fact, Lizzie thinks as she pulls into a parking space at One Microsoft Way, Seattle’s problem is that it’s not nearly raw enough. One Microsoft Way: is that not the address of a cult? Notwithstanding the soccer field and arcade games, the lack of suits and ties and regular hours, a 1950s corporate DNA showed itself in these boys’ blood strongly and immediately. What qualifies Nathan Myhrvold as the most flamboyant character in town? He’s an amateur paleontologist with his own jet! He owns
really
expensive kitchen appliances, and he sometimes spends hundreds of dollars on a single bottle of wine! Whoooo-eee! It’s the same with their immense bland houses in Hunts Point and Clyde Hill, and the Microsoft flag flying next to the Stars and Stripes, and the lame little fake waterfall trickling through the Red West campus—billionaires spending, not to transcend suburban backyard-patio boyhoods, but to reproduce them. It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile, but it sure is an Oldsmobile. Just inside one of the boxy buildings, at a reception desk, a young man instructs Lizzie to type her name on a keyboard.
So very DOS
, she thinks,
so autistically efficient, so ostentatiously techno, so “Hey! we’re a computer company!” circa about 1993
.

A young woman in green jeans and a linty cotton cardigan leads her to Scott Thernstrom’s office. Thernstrom, an assertively tidy young fellow, extends his hand. He is tan, has a decent Republican-boy haircut, and smiles brightly and looks her in the eye, from which Lizzie infers that he is not on the technical side of the business. “Hi, nice to meet you, I’m Scott.”

Hi, Scott, I’m Lizzie, what’s your major?
“Hello. Will Howard Moorhead be joining us … ?”

“He sure will, as soon as he’s through at Bill’s, and so will Gary Dumbrowski, to backstop us on any technical issues. He’s a very senior technical guy.”

Like the identically cramped and bland offices of everyone at Microsoft, Scott’s includes a display of packaging. Next to his whiteboard, propped up on two bookshelves, are boxes of each of the software products he’s worked on, like stuffed and mounted trophy animal heads.

“Those are my boxes,” Scott says gratuitously, as he and Lizzie both smile and stare at the empty boxes. “The seventeen products I shipped on.”

In a corner on the carpet Lizzie notices a pile of unwrapped baby
clothes and toys. “Congratulations,” she says, nodding toward the corner, “I see you’re about to become a father.”

“No, no, he’s not an alpha. He’ll be kid number four.”

His telephone tweets, and he picks it up and listens for a couple of seconds. “Okay.” He hangs up. “Have a seat,” he tells Lizzie as he comes out from behind his desk, “I’ll be just a minute,” and rushes out. Lizzie realizes she has spent the last ten minutes working herself into a snit—and just because these people want to give her and her investors 250,000 shares of Microsoft stock. As she waits for Scott to return, she inhales deeply; she exhales; she inhales again; and powerfully exhales. The breaths do not enable her to realize her eternal nature as pure awareness that transcends all duality and desire, but she is a little calmer by the time she hears a cluster of men’s voices outside. Looking left, through the half-open office door, she sees Thernstrom; a graying thirty-year-old in sandals; an older grownup wearing a bow tie; and in profile, a slouching middle-aged schlub—uncombed hair, huge steel-frame glasses, crewneck, black shoes halfway between sneakers and wing tips. As the schlub turns and disappears, she sees that it is Bill Gates. (She is reminded of her earliest memory, from age two and a half, visiting Disneyland and meeting Walt Disney himself. Beginning about two years later, after her father was fired from Disney Studios, Walt’s name in the Zimbalist household was changed to “the ungrateful anti-Semitic bastard.”)

Lizzie stands as Thernstrom and the other two men enter. Gary Dumbrowski, the man in sandals who’s also wearing a pullover with the
Slate
logo and carrying a fat and ragged manila envelope, apparently considers himself an intellectual; to Lizzie he looks like a Kinko’s assistant manager. Howard Moorhead obviously considers himself professorial, but to Lizzie he looks like the sad, pompous senior man behind the formalwear counter at Bergdorf Goodman. Lizzie tries hard not to judge books by their covers, but she never hesitates to judge the covers.

The handshakes and welcomes and small talk put her at ease, though. Faced with the actual human beings, friendly and solicitous, Lizzie relaxes, and feels the hesitance and mistrust melting and then evaporating, drifting off her like mist.
These
aren’t the men who put Virtual Fortress out of business—and if they were, so what? It was just
business. Here, face to face, she doesn’t find Moorhead’s improbable gentleman-from-Albemarle courtliness off-putting. Microsoft wants Fine Technologies—her company—not her soul, not her child; they want to own what she’s created; she should be flattered … she is flattered.

She doesn’t even mind so much when Thernstrom and Dumbrowski separately use “random” in the pejorative computer-industry sense, as a general synonym for
bad
.

She steels herself when Dumbrowski asks a question about her programmers “interfacing to the Any Channel core technology library,” and she answers, “I’m really not that deeply involved in the architecture of the technology.” But all three men seem to regard that answer as defensible and unembarrassing.

She steels herself again when Moorhead frowns and refers to “certain governance issues we need to hash out?” But she calms down when it turns out he only means which of her board members will be replaced by Microsoft people. When she says she needs ironclad guarantees that she’ll remain chairwoman, Moorhead tells her, “Lizzie? May I call you Lizzie? That’s a motherhood point if ever I’ve heard one.” Which she’s pretty sure is Seattle for
yes
.

George was a writer
. He is a writer. So it would make sense for him to prefer the creative jags and passionate give-and-take of
NARCS
story meetings (
Cowboy has this fantasy that he’s Jennie, but we play it with Lucas in drag
) to the banal order giving (
Yes, No, louder, broader, Yes, bright blue
) of
NARCS
production meetings. “It’s like a jazz group, jamming,” Phoebe Reiss has said to George about the long, headachy hours in the writers’ room, the Room, flattering him that he’s Miles. The meetings in the Room
are
more improvised, more emotional, more democratic than the meetings with the DP and prop woman and sound guy. But they’re not so pleasurable for the person in charge, for George. Being the loose menschy general giving reasonable orders to his officers and noncoms is preferable to being the Philistine suit in a room full of beatniks and artists.

The Room is nicked and greasy, like a storefront car service or a bail bondsman’s office—but scruffy by choice, since the lowest-paid person in the room makes $245,000 a year. Paul Hodgman, one of the story editors, keeps his amp and Gibson Les Paul in a corner. The deep bottom drawer of the heavily vandalized credenza contains nothing but candy, grosses of suckers and Kit Kats and Twizzlers. Phoebe stands at one of the two big
bulletin boards in the room, holding a notecard on which the writers’ assistant has written
GRANT, D.T.’S (FORMICATION) AT HAZELDEN
. She and everyone around the fake-wood–veneer table is looking up at the Magic Markered notecards tacked in columns under
ARCS, TEASERS, A-STORIES, B-STORIES, C-STORIES, RUNNERS
. Paul and the drama writers complained at first about
NARCS
bulletin board nomenclature being “too sitcom,” which was true, since Emily Kalman had only worked on comedies. (“No, Em and Mactier are perfect—sitcoms plus news
equals
fun, topical drama,” Featherstone said a year ago when one of his lieutenants, since fired, raised doubts about George and Emily’s experience.)

They have been at this for two hours, including lunch. “Then let’s just
bag
the teaser for this one, George,” Paul says. “I mean it.
Just start the fucking show
for once. Why do we even need to
see
Jennie’s brother in rehab, anyway? Just go for the quiet long chick shot of her waking up, with
Scooby-Doo
on TV and the kid already gone to school. Roll the title and cue the music over that. Like a movie. See if it hurts the ratings. We’re supposed to be pushing the edge, aren’t we?” Hodgman is one of
NARCS’
story editors, but despite the management title he’s just another writer, a writer who has written hour-long network TV dramas for nine years, eight years longer than his boss. And so as a practical matter, pushing the edge of the envelope means whining and pleading to see how far they can prod and guilt-trip George into flouting the network’s wishes. But George is too new at this to feel like a hack yet.

“
Every
edge does not need pushing in every show,” he says, trying to sound more good-natured than peevish. “This is already the leg-shaving episode, remember. And isn’t it edge-pushing enough to open the show with Grant writhing on the floor of his cell scratching his skin raw? Jennie comes in, sees him,
boom
, that’s the tease.”

MBC, like every network, wants every show to begin with a teaser or a cold open—a minute or two of show into which viewers are forcibly plunged as if by surprise,
right now
, the moment the previous show finishes, at 8:29:30 or even 8:28:45, in order to keep them watching. The traditional interruption of opening titles, credits, and theme music breaks the TV trance for too many people, demesmerizes them, dangerously liberates them to see what’s on the other seventy-eight channels, or to turn off the set.

“Okay,” says Lou Goldstein, one of the writers, just as George is about to say
We’ll come back to this, let’s move on
(which means
I’ll decide later, by myself
). “We do start with the Jennie-waking-up-in-bed scene, dust motes, light, desaturated color, almost black-and-white. She picks up the remote control, okay, she’s still sleepy, punches it to turn the cartoon off—but unbeknownst to her, okay, the remote’s been wired by the cartel to set off a bomb on the street downstairs, killing—sorry,
seriously injuring
—little Freddy and his dad. Maybe killing Dad. People at home won’t dare change the channel. The subtext is, ‘You push the remote, your kid dies.’ ”

People smile.

“Don’t tell the network that idea,” George says.

People chuckle.

“And the bomb,” Paul Hodgman says, “is programmed to explode only if Jennie switches to Channel 41 or 47.” Channels 41 and 47 are the Spanish channels.

“I like that, that’s cool, but I’m
serious
,” says Lou. Lou fancies himself the Quentin Tarantino of New York—based hour-long television drama. “The Kahuna-ites intend the bomb to be a demonstration of their power, okay, a don’t-fuck-with-us-bitch warning shot across Jennie’s bow.”

Everyone is silent, waiting politely for the idea to drift away on its own. Outside, a fire truck races down Seventh Avenue, sirens whanging and honking.

“Maybe,” Lou says, “it’s
her
car, and the bad guys thought
Freddy
would use the remote and blow his mom up?”

“It’s kind of
 … big
,” George says. “More like a finale event. That’s like a whole new arc for a season.” George worries that the “new arc for a season” comment will encourage Lou in his dreams of directing
NARCS
episodes, the first of which, he told George last fall, he intends to shoot “entirely overcranked, the whole forty-six minutes.”

“Let’s hang a lantern on that,” Phoebe Reiss says, pleasing George.
To hang a lantern
means to put aside an idea and, with luck, forget about it.

“So, what
about
no teaser?” Paul Hodgman proposes again. “Just start the act.”

“Look, Paul,” George says, “if we don’t give them teasers, we’re just asking to be one of the Seamlessness guinea pigs. Do you want to write
the scenes where Jennie is a talking head on
Freaky Shit!
and Cowboy is at home watching
The Great Big Nutty Wayne Newton and Robert Goulet Variety Hour?”
Next fall, the network has announced, all MBC shows on one designated night of the week will interact and interweave—the characters and fictional worlds of
You Go Girl
at 8:30
P.M
. on Wednesday, for instance, would contrive to refer to those of the
Subaru America Presents Mark Twain
series at 9:00
P.M
. on Wednesday. And no commercials will air from seven minutes before every hour until seven minutes after. If the experiment works, and the flow of viewers from MBC show to MBC show becomes more hermetic, Featherstone wants to extend the scheme to other nights and to other dayparts. For instance, the star of the afternoon soap opera
The Naked and the Damned
(formerly
Trailer Park
) would appear as a contestant on the game show
Quacks Like a Duck
, which airs right after
Naked
, and then the civilian winner at the end of that day’s
Quacks
would appear as a contestant on
American Jackpot!
fifteen seconds later. Hank Saddler’s office is calling this the Seamlessness Initiative.

Paul shakes his head, disgusted. George has effectively ended the discussion by seeming to commiserate, turning it into
NARCS
versus the network. In fact, Featherstone has promised George that
NARCS
will be “safe from Seamlessness at least through the end of ‘01.” George hasn’t gotten around to giving his staff the good news yet.