Turn of the Century (65 page)

“We just want the work seen,” Roger says, and then reminds his wife, “Cameron wanted you to call before bedtime, Nan. Since you’ll be on your way to London when she wakes up.” Cameron is their younger child. Lizzie can never remember if it’s a boy or a girl. Nancy takes the phone from Roger and punches the green button, since he has predialed their home number. That is, he has dialed the number for their live-in baby-sitter, Beth, famous Beth, who not only is white, but also graduated from Barnard and whom everyone in Nancy’s circle calls, with envy and awe, “Nancy’s Jewish nanny.” As she tucks in her daughter by remote control, Nancy holds the itty-bitty Motorola a couple of inches away from her ear, not because she worries about brain cancer (as Bruce imagines) but (as Lizzie and Roger know) to keep her hair perfect. Nancy once told Lizzie that she buys a new phone every four months “just on principle.” “What principle?” Lizzie asked. “Bestness,” Nancy said in all seriousness.

Downstairs, George says to Ben, “This is all a joke, isn’t it? You just got off so much on horrifying Sally Chatham about the Euro Quarter projects that now you’re just riffing, right? By making fun of my sister’s pathetic husband.” The two of them are sitting scrunched together on the old backyard stump. Between his legs, George has a lit votive candle—one of the gross of them Lizzie bought for the party. He’s staring at it and dipping his pinky finger into the molten wax. Three of the four musicians are taking a break, but the pianist is playing a minor-key arrangement of “How High the Moon.”

“No, I think we might actually make something happen.”

George looks up from the candle. “You are going to finance his idiotic cemetery theme parks? With the video gravestones? Ben.”

“They’d be regulatory and operational nightmares, but the idea isn’t stupid. But no, your brother-in-law and I have been working on something else. An amazing idea.”

“It’s not the organic sequins and recycled yarn thing? Eco-Krafts?”

“No. This is big. This is a whole new industry. Ten-figure revenues in ten years.”

“So?”

“Totally off the record, George?” “Fuck you.”

Ben tells him about the Guild, and the plans to install special-effects packages in five thousand churches and temples and mosques by 2005 at a median price of $300,000, literal smoke and mirrors and sub-woofers and lasers, all computer controlled, to make the glory of Jesus (or Jehovah or Allah or Ron Hubbard or … whomever) more palpable to the believers.

“And on his own,” Ben is saying, “Cubby’s already trademarked ‘Unbelievably Believable!’ ‘Too Good to Be Untrue,’ ‘Making Every Church a Cathedral,’ and ‘Push-Button Miracles for the New Millennium.’ The guy is some kind of weird genius.”

Now George is pushing his little finger to within millimeters of the flame itself. Ben’s explanation, excited as ever, is making George gloomy and apprehensive. (Gloomier and more apprehensive.) Not because it debases and degrades faith and ritual. Who cares? Not because he’s envious of Cubby Koplowitz getting rich or Ben getting richer. Who cares? George isn’t sure why it’s depressing him. It’s depressing him because it feeds this tumor of dread, his sense that beyond the cone of candlelight, inside, upstairs, on Fifty-nine, out in the Valley, everywhere just beyond view, outside his control, alliances and loyalties are shifting by means of whispers and nods, all shifting in a direction unfavorable to George Mactier.

He is slowly shaking his head.

“But, you know,” Ben says, “maybe recordings of humpback whales and Martian winds, all synched up with lighting effects. Tasteful. More abstract.”

“Unitarians really aren’t into spectacle, I don’t think,” George says. “They’re like Baptists and Moslems. Atheistic Baptists and Moslems.”

“And ‘theotainment’ and ‘sacredtainment,’ ” Ben asks him, “those both suck, don’t they? I mean, let the journalists invent the stupid catchphrases on their own. Right?”

“I guess.” George is staring blankly, past animated clusters of party guests, through the glass doors, into the kitchen filled with waiters and drinkers. He sees the most officious of the caterers suddenly leave her mates, head down the hall toward the front door and out of sight, then after a few seconds he sees Harold Mose, in a dinner jacket, accompanied by Gloria, stepping smartly into his house before they make the zigzag toward the stairs and disappear again. Harold has come. As George stands, he thinks of the LuLu question (
Is that a good thing, Daddy, or a bad thing?
) and rubs his waxy fingers on the tree stump before heading inside. As he makes the landing and sees the fringes of the crowd, he notices the pseudo-casual fuss being made over Mose, like iron filings moving in slow motion toward a magnet. He arrives in his living room just in time to see Harold retract from kissing Lizzie and hold both her hands at a distance, scrutinizing her for a moment like a superb new Milanese highboy.

Kissing Gloria Mose, George grazes his eye on the corner of her dark glasses as he swings over and heads in for the second cheek.

“We’ve just come from supper at Zero. You’re so right.
Brilliant
place.”

Every time he encounters Gloria, George feels clueless. “We haven’t been to Zero,” he says, willing himself to smile.

“Ah. It’s Harold’s new favorite, and he says Elizabeth introduced him to it. So I assumed.”

Struggling to maintain the smile, a smile that feels phonier than any he has ever faked, literally like a Halloween mask, George says, “I understand that your daughter took a job at Miramax.” What is her name? Has he been too addled even to remember the name of the girl he wanted (theoretically) to fuck and wouldn’t consider hiring? “That’s great. She actually—Caroline seemed more interested in making movies than American television, anyway.”
“American television”—George, you miserable panderer
.

“She’s working for their publishing bit, actually.”

A waiter and Nancy McNabb arrive simultaneously, both eager to please a Mose, any Mose, and interrupting George and Gloria’s conversation
about a restaurant he’s never been to and her daughter he didn’t hire. He uses the moment to move two furtive steps to his left, but by the time he’s there, Lizzie, jaunty Lizzie, is moving Harold away into the crowd, off to meet someone new. George is left literally in the lurch. And then he stands in his lurch, giving a quick nod and a smiled “Hello” toward the halogen torchère in the back corner of the room, in case anyone is watching.

Happy-looking nightmares are even scarier
, George finds himself thinking, startling himself; he regrets having drunk so much, and then remembers that he’s had nothing but plain soda all night. It’s Lizzie who’s been drinking like a flapper.
Drinking like a flapper
is a phrase that hasn’t occurred to him for decades; it’s something his mother learned from her mother, he recalls dimly, and used to say about his Aunt Nora (that is, “Perry’s divorced sister Nora”) and about his father’s blond strumpet secretary.

Outside, it’s gotten chilly, and some of the votives have burned out. The quartet is playing again (a Raymond Scott medley, its kooky
wah-wah
1939 gaiety not so much leavening George’s mood as tickling it, mocking it), and George is smoking somebody’s cigarette, his first in years, down here in the courtyard with all the odd people out, the people with no interest in discussing the new think tank Steven Rattner’s funding and whether he’ll hire Clinton, or the outrageous thing Howard Stringer said about PBS and the BBC, or the thirty-one-page pundits’ roundtable critique of pundit-on-pundit punditry that appeared in the final issue of
Brill’s Content
.

The discussion group huddled on the gravel in the corner by the pink Victorian playhouse, quiet but for the occasional gasp of antic laughter, consists of the cool-cat geeks, the computer youth—Fanny, her new German programmer pals, and Bruce, with Max and Sarah standing nearby as unaccredited observers. Next to them, splayed in Smith & Hawken teak chairs, are Ben Gould and Hank Saddler drinking port. Each is trying to worm information out of the other—Ben about Mose Media Holdings’ “internet acquisition spree” (as the business reporters are calling it), Saddler about two Vancouver Stock Exchange companies he’s interested in short-selling. During their pseudo-gentlemanly Sandeman-sipping pauses, both men eavesdrop on the conversation going on next to them.

“It’s not a virus,” Fanny is saying to Bruce and the Germans, “it’s a really nasty
applet
. With a nasty applet I could crash any machine with twenty lines of code.”

“A friend at home,” says Willibald, the cutest and most stylishly sallow of the sallow German programmers, “says he was informed that the explosion of that big American telecom rocket at Baikonur in Russia? Was a hack that went bad.”

“Globalstar,” says the other German, Humfried, who’s wearing a
TELETUBBIES
T-shirt. “The Globalstar Corporation,” he elaborates, pleased to repeat the company’s perfectly sinister name.

“Or maybe a hack that went right,” Bruce says, getting into the late-night James Bond spirit. “Globalstar’s value went down, I don’t know, about half a billion dollars five minutes after those satellites blew up.”

“So somebody who, like, hated the company did it?” Fanny asks.

“Well, somebody who wanted the stock of the company to go down, maybe,” Bruce says.

Before any of them can ask what he means, Max speaks. “Fanny,” he says, “what did you
do
, exactly? Why did they arrest you?”

“Max!”
his big sister says.

“That’s cool,” Fanny says. She enjoys explaining her life in crime. Since her arrival in New York a week ago she has bewitched Willi and Humfried with her hacker creds. As far as they are concerned, working alongside a seventeen-year-old American political prisoner is a job perk. “Two girlfriends and I hacked a federal computer and had it send money to some women’s shelters that they’d, like, cut off from funding or whatever? I think they were going to let us go, but the day before they busted us for that, we jacked into the local newspaper system and posted a thing about our principal, saying that he, like, had sex with the star of
Felicity
but then killed himself—just as a joke? But then our thing ran in the paper the next day, and that
really
pissed everyone off. So then they decided to prosecute.”

Willibald finishes his Sam Adams and says, “We should purport that Bill Gates is killed, in the same way. Hack the newspaper.”

There are chuckles and nods.

“Virtual assassination,” says Bruce, feeling like a kid again. “You’d be heroes.” He pauses. “Lizzie would certainly enjoy it.”

“Finish their anniversary celebrations with a … how do you call it,” says Humfried to Willibald, “a
wirklicher ein realer Knall?
”

“A real bang,” Willi tells him.

They talk about spoofing and pinging and sniffing and hacking for a while longer, about smurfs and smurf amplifiers, driving each other to more abstruse mischief-making extremes, Bruce mentioning November 29 (the day in 1975 when Gates first called his company “Micro-soft”), Willibald describing a new stealth-sniffer program a friend in Berlin told him about, Humfried recalling “Der
verrückte Belgier
who tossed the pie at Gates.” After Bruce wanders inside, Fanny and Humfried and Willibald get more raucous and comical, but more serious too, getting high off their own hypothetical power, confirming dates, declaring commitments, making oaths. Fanny mentions a hacker friend who once forced a core dump in a computer system of the “Rooters” news service.

“It’s R-e-u-t-e-r-s, but it’s pronounced
Roy-ters
,” Max says. “And this year November twenty-ninth is a Wednesday.”

“He can do that, with days and dates,” Sarah explains, slightly embarrassed.

Ben and Saddler have said nothing to each other for ten minutes. They’re both staring upward, pretending to be marveling at the unreasonably huge moon, just past full, rising over the house and the nine-story-tall stone anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge.

“It’s like some wonderful black-and-white picture of old New York, isn’t it?” Saddler says.

“Sure is,” Ben replies, looking at the sky. He shouts over to his friend. “You see the moon, George?”

Standing across the grass and the gravel patch, near the house, George glances up, and then inside his house, where he sees that guests are beginning to leave. Has he ever hated a party more in his life? For some reason, though, its imminent end unsettles him. Everything is unsettling him, thanks to this beast of a television show he’s dreaming up, and Lizzie. He should go in and say goodbye to people, since he never said hello to most of them. But instead he starts flirting a little harder with Zip’s date, finding that her right-temple tattoo helps him avoid staring at her left-temple birthmark, and wondering if that is the idea. He used to be able to gin up strong momentary interest in almost anyone’s profession, but tonight, after two minutes, he has run out of questions about Canada and musical comedy (she is executive director of something called the Canadian Experimental Musical Comedy
Archives). When she mentions that she grew up in Thailand, Pakistan, and Honduras, though, and her father’s twenty-six years of service in the CIA, his interest spikes.

“What was Bangkok like in 1975?”

“I don’t know. I was three. It smelled. We moved after my brother got addicted to opium.”

“When were you in Honduras?”

“In junior high. I’ll tell you everything I know about national security, but first you have to give me a cigarette.”

“This isn’t mine. And all they have over there,” George says, nodding toward the computer kids, “are menthols and cloves.”

“Blehhh. Zip is out too. I may have to leave.”

“My kingdom for a Marlboro. Hold on,” he says, ducks inside and turns left, trotting up the back stairs. (He loves excuses to use the back stairs, both because it’s the one part of the house that still smells like cocoa, and because it’s a secret passage.) Down the hall and into the cool, darkened bedroom, into the back closet, he reaches up and feels for Lizzie’s hidden stash, grabs the box, and trots back downstairs and out. A police helicopter is passing low and loud overhead, toward the river, its
thud-thud-thud
crescendo like airborne electronic timpani.