Turn of the Century (57 page)

On her way through the concourse toward the locker where she stowed her luggage, she thinks about throwing away her brand-new pack, but instead tosses out only Chas’s candy-colored half-English brochures touting the “strongly disciplined and semieducated electronics workforcefuls” of Malaysia and Vietnam. Chas Prieve does seem to know his stuff. (His most recent employer was a video-game company before it was sued for copyright infringement by the makers of the guns-and-ammo game Doom, and turned itself into a law-enforcement human-resources-training software company.) She didn’t tell him about this morning’s disintegration of the Microsoft deal, but he told her that Scott Thernstrom was a terrible boss at Microsoft, technologically in
over his head, and on his third marriage. And Chas said he would be willing to work for Fine Technologies half time for the first six months if she’ll pay to move him from Boston to Seattle
or
Silicon Valley. He did pressure her some, and annoy her by saying his “MT-BOO is getting very short.” (After leaving Chas, she called Alexi and asked him about MT-BOO. “Mean time between other offers,” he explained.)

She’s having trouble getting locker 324 open. She puts her purse down, and her heavy bag of magazines and newspapers, jams the key in again, and starts jiggling it. A woman depositing her tote bag full of Beanie Babies one locker-bank over, George’s age but matronly, offers to help.

“Thanks,” Lizzie says as the woman takes her key, sees that it says 224, not 324, and sticks it in the correct lock. Lizzie shakes her head. “Believe it or not, I do have a college degree.”

“You know,” her earnest Seattle volunteer says, “so many people here in Seattle do.”

A flight to Los Angeles, she sees on a
DEPARTURES
monitor, leaves in half an hour. She could make that one. She could make it.

Waiting at the gate, Lizzie forces herself to scan a front-page article in the paper entitled “Microsoft One Year Later: Rebuilding Trust After Antitrust.” All she reads that she doesn’t know are details of the company’s various new charity offensives, including something called the Virtual Home Project. This is a plan under which the company has offered to scan and digitize all the “two-dimensional possessions of any homeless American at no cost”—letters, snapshots, lists, doodles, food-can labels, filthy clippings, demented screeds, whatever. The homeless person gets a disk (up to a maximum of 100 megabytes) in “a rugged weatherproof plastic container,” and Microsoft will also keep an archive of the data “for backup as well as posterity and next-of-kin purposes.” The project will be coordinated in each of eighteen big cities by the company’s Sidewalk movie-and-restaurant-listing website staffs. “ ‘Since many of the Virtual Home clients actually live on the sidewalk, literally,’ says a company spokesperson, ‘it seems like a superfortuitous branding opportunity for Microsoft Sidewalk to give something back to the communities.’ ”

“Is this seat taken?”

A very white man is smiling down at her. He’s about her age, and
wears a tie and V-neck sweater under his windbreaker. The back of the windbreaker says
YOU KNOW THE SECRET ALREADY
. She sees that his computer has a label on it:
THE GLOBAL SECRET
.

After a minute, he says to Lizzie, “I’m glad this airport is getting so much more business these days. It’s a real neat facility.”

“Mmm,” she replies, staring down at her
Post-Intelligencer
. She worries he may be intending to hit on her, or worse, talk to her about Jesus or Dianetics.

“I see you’ve stocked up on computer mags,” he says. “Are you in the field?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Good to meet you,” he says, putting out his hand. “Rex Dinsmoor! I’m senior evangelist at a software company.”

She shakes his hand. Back in 1993, when Lizzie first heard someone who worked for a software company refer to herself as an “evangelist,” she thought it was literally a joke. After she got into the business and she encountered “technical evangelists” and “product evangelists” everywhere, she came to think of it first as a charming oddity, later as a tiresome affectation. Now she doesn’t even register its oddness.

“ControlQuest—that’s my company. We make the Global Secret? Specialized enterprise software for multinationals.”

Lizzie nods.

“You are … ?”

“Lizzie Zimbalist. I’m a consultant in New York. I consult for entertainment companies, help them figure out how to migrate over to the net.” As a child, Lizzie would sometimes spontaneously lie to strangers, about where she lived or what she wanted to be when she grew up, and to her mother. But she had grown out of it, forced herself out of it, really, when she started worrying in seventh grade that she might have inherited the casual, compulsive fibbing habit of her father.

That flight to L.A. leaves in fifteen minutes. But she has to go home.

“I advise TV shows who want to set up web sites, that kind of thing,” she continues. It’s not untrue.

“I don’t watch much television,” Rex Dinsmoor confesses. “A little MSNBC and the Chopper Channel is about all. I sometimes don’t get home from work until eleven, so I miss most of the entertainment shows.”

“My husband’s on
Charlie Rose
tonight.” This startles her a little too, the bragging and the chattiness. Maybe, she thinks, it is just a convenient excuse to say “my husband.”

“Who’s Charlie Rose?”

Lizzie explains, feeling like she’s in a foreign country.

“I’d love to send you a demo of the Secret. It has a next-generation plain-language translation engine.
Really
powerful. It takes global frictionlessness and transparency to the next stage. To a real tipping point.”

She nods.
Frictionless transparency
. Maybe he is trying to pick her up.

“I honestly think,” he says, “it’s going to change the way humans think about doing business in the twenty-first century.”

She nods again and examines a photo spread on the new Mrs. Leonardo DiCaprio. Out here, everyone sincerely does believe his own bullshit, believes it thoroughly. Rex Dinsmoor
knows
he’s helping to build some kind of late-capitalist utopia, a wired Cascadia, Oz. A few years ago, they all gushed about “push” technology transforming the web—but then it didn’t because it was fake, a hysterically overbilled replica of real bandwidth. Before that, they said ordering movies over cable TV was imminent, any movie you wanted. But the technology was a decade away at a price anybody could afford, so a big cable company faked video-on-demand, too. As the innocent Dorothys at home pushed buttons to order
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure
and
The Bonfire of the Vanities
, a kid on roller-skates in a room in Denver cued up each videocassette by hand, grabbing another tape, rolling to the next VCR, grabbing, rolling, madly trying to fulfill twenty-first-century dreams (frictionlessnessly!) in slapstick twentieth-century fashion.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain
. These people out here are the men behind the curtain—Rex Dinsmoor, truculent Buster Grinspoon, the smug Goat Rodeo boys, even Microsoft. But unlike the Wizard of Oz, they believe in their magic! It isn’t cynical bluster. These wizards have faith. And Lizzie knows she’s an agnostic.

They call her flight.

George was asleep
, almost, when Lizzie got home from Seattle the night before last, and pretended the rest. Before he left at six-thirty yesterday morning to make his
NARCS
call at seven, they exchanged goodbyes—just that, his “Goodbye” from the bedroom doorway and, from under the sheets, her “Bye.” Last night, the children were around as buffers and objects of affection, and George was asleep by quarter to ten. This morning, George and Lizzie are alone for the first time in a long while. She is eating her daily $2.49 cup of Old Chatham Sheep-Herding Company yogurt, with pecans and cinnamon, while she reads the
Times
. He is eating his daily strip of bacon and Grape-Nuts with skim milk as he turns the pages of the
Daily News
. The little kids are already at school, and Sarah is staying home her first two periods, rescoring her civil rights video upstairs.

Since Lizzie asked George, “Did LuLu take her umbrella?” and he answered without looking up from
Doonesbury
, “I didn’t notice,” neither of them has said a word for sixteen, going on seventeen, minutes.

He slides the
News
away and grabs the
Post
.

“You know,” he says, “I really hated finding out about Microsoft from Ben.”

“I called you. At the office. I even tried your cell.”

“It died,” he says, looking down at the front-page—
WILD-MAN RUDY!
“I told you it died last week.” He opens the paper. “You could’ve tried the car.”

“I didn’t know you’d driven. I’m sorry, George. Okay?”

“Whatever.”

“
I’m
the one who got fucked,” she says, standing, walking over to the Bose, turning it on. “I apologize that you weren’t the very first to find out I got fucked.” She pushes the channel button preset for 92.3.

“Sarah’s still here,” George says.

“I know. I think she’s old enough to hear Howard Stern and survive.” She sits down. “You still sneak it from the kids in the car?”

George doesn’t answer. In the
Post
he reads a story about a bipartisan pack of congressmen who have drafted a bill to outlaw “mind-reading microchips” and “mental modems” as a “threat to every American’s privacy and human dignity. ‘We stopped cloning and Ebonics,’ declared Representative Horace Wolfe (R-South Carolina), ‘and we’ll stop this.’ ” The story also quotes a Democratic congresswoman from Oregon on “the frightening animal-privacy-rights implications.”

“Hmmm,” George says.

“What?”

“Your friend Buster Grinspoon.” He holds up the paper.

“How completely stupid. Save that for me, okay? They’re not really going to pass a law, are they?”

“Nah. The story doesn’t actually mention Grinspoon.” He turns the page to “Page Six,” one of the four gossip columns in the paper—five, if you include the biweekly publishing column; six, if you include the column of items about TV; seven, if you include the new column summarizing the gossip reported the previous day on TV and in other newspapers. Eight, in fact, if you include the “
Hey
, Sport!” column in the sports section, but George doesn’t know that exists.

Like every
Times
reader who buys the
Post
, George subscribes mainly for “Page Six.” Yet he reads “Page Six” (which is on page eight) as quickly as he can, scanning the bold-faced names and then pausing over the stories about fashion models and musicians and unalloyed socialites only if they seem to involve grotesquely gothic misbehavior, glancing at the stories contrived simply to promote restaurants and
nightclubs, and of course, entirely skipping the stories about professional athletes. After twenty years, his scan-and-skip technique is now so deeply ingrained that when there’s a bold-faced name of a person George knows personally, his eye moves to it before he’s even registered the name consciously. It’s a kind of simulated half-second precognition.

And so he takes a quick hot dilated breath, aware that in a moment he’s going to read a “Page Six” item about himself. “Insiders on the hit MBC show
NARCS
say that costar Lucas ‘Cowboy’ Winton kept his cool the other day when producer George McTeer ripped into the politically conservative hunk in the West 57th Street studios in front of cast and crew. The dispute concerned a minor money matter, and network sources say McTeer ‘overreacted like an insane person.’ After screaming at Winton and dissing the actor’s pro bono anti-drug-abuse work, the producer suddenly pink-slipped his own longtime personal assistant. ‘He really lost it,’ says a witness to the confrontation. ‘But Lucas was a total class act. Everybody worries that George is stretched too thin, with personal problems, and trying to launch a new show and keep
NARCS
running at the same time.’ The superexpensive top-secret new show,
Real News
, which one MBC source calls ‘a totally fake-news soap opera’ and ‘a ticking time bomb for the network,’ is being coproduced with sexy Al Gore fund-raiser Emily Kalman.
Real News
is expected to premiere this summer on MBC. Stay tuned.”

Jesus Christ
. Lucas Winton; Barry Stengel; who else has become a lifelong enemy? He rereads the story. They didn’t even call him for a comment! Unless he didn’t get the message, since he has no assistant. And, of course, he couldn’t have denied the story, since their account of the incident is more or less correct. George takes a deep breath.

“Listen to this.” He reads the story out loud to his wife.

“What ‘personal problems’?”

George looks at her.

“That sucks,” Lizzie says, “but you said yourself that the new show will create a shitstorm. I guess this is the beginning of that. These are the shit flurries.” She sips her tea. “You changed the name to
Real News?
”

“
No!
And it isn’t superexpensive, or a ticking fucking time bomb, either. Jesus! Barry Stengel has to die.”

Lizzie cringes. “Don’t say that.”

“Your career hasn’t just been blown apart in the goddamn
New York Post
.”

“George, you’re overreacting.”

“Oh, fuck
you
, Miss Yoga Perfection. I live in a fishbowl, okay? You don’t.”

Lizzie gets up and walks to the other end of the kitchen, ostensibly rummaging for some half-and-half in the Sub-Zero.

It’s eight-thirty. When he gets to the office he’ll call Featherstone. He’ll call Emily. He’ll call Saddler. He’ll call Lucas, pretend to apologize, smooth things over, and pretend to believe him when he denies that he had anything to do with the
Post
story. He’ll call Stengel, and … what? No, he won’t; he’ll call back his friend at the
Journal
instead.

“I’m sorry I shouted, Lizzie,” George says, swigging his coffee, returning to “Page Six” to read the story a third time, and then a fourth, before moving on to the day’s blind items.