And I see now, I guess, that Dolores’s affections for me did not run deep enough that she would ever think lovingly of me. I know this, I know it in my heart, and it is only right. I am no more than some man whom Dolores happened to live with for a short time. Just some guy. A body. It could have been Jack Whitman, it could have been someone else just as easily. In the end, I was of little or no consequence to the heart of Dolores Salcines.
But knowing these things doesn’t settle it for me. Last night I found myself staring at the swell and stir of the curtain as the air came in my apartment window, and for a moment then I am thinking I see Dolores behind that veil. I hear Maria’s sweet little laugh. I love them, in that grieving, useless way. I test myself, to see if I remember their faces. Yes, I can. And then I think that they are somewhere here in the city, riding underground in the dark subways. Do they have a place to live, do they have any money? Such thoughts are sickening to me and I force them away.
So I keep moving. Or walking, rather. Just yesterday, I passed a big movieplex on the East Side, with eight or nine movies playing, a handful of them Corporation movies, one of them likely to gross nearly half a billion dollars worldwide this year, and I saw the crowds outside standing in line. They were excited by the prospect of being entertained, but there was also, it seemed, a fatigued, obligatory look in their eyes. If they wanted something else, I could not say what it was.
At lunch I remembered how much Liz loved french fries and so I stopped in a fast-food joint. Inside, a cardboard floor display explained that if you bought a hamburger or shake, you received a little rubber toy monkey, which happened to be a licensing spin-off from one of the Corporation’s cartoon properties. Everybody has seen this figure. Maria has seen it, I’m sure. The Corporation has the injection-molded toys manufactured by the hundred-thousand gross in China, where they’re produced cheaply by prison laborers. The monkey has very high product-recognition levels and goes back to the original celluloid film shorts produced by the Corporation in the 1940s. In fact, along with other of its cartoon characters and Hollywood memorabilia, the Corporation has opened up a national chain of stores—328 in all, mostly in suburban malls—where shoppers can also buy Corporation products: books, tapes, and clothes, movie posters, you name it. That little monkey now appears in Saturday morning cartoons on cable, in the classic full-length animation feature, in a child’s videocassette series, in the Corporation’s theme parks, and in other tie-ins, licensing agreements—watches, T-shirts, all kinds of stuff. Yearly gross is somewhere around forty million. The monkey is starting to appear in all the new entertainment technologies, too. He lives on as we the living do not. In the restaurant, a sign explained that you’d get one of the videocassettes if you spent above a certain amount on your food. A couple of burgers, maybe. Standing before me stood a little girl with blond hair and blue eyes and she beseeched her mother to buy her the videocassette. Such great desire, such passion. I’m not sure I understand it, really. But then again, I don’t feel that I understand much of anything these days, except that I quietly went bad after Liz died.
In front of me, the mother did what her daughter wanted. I was glad, too. I’ve seen these cartoons; they’re delightful and beguiling. But of course the Corporation, the new Corporation, has many delightful and beguiling products on the way, and with the merger now completed it’s completely global, well poised for the future; it will prosper as it lies astride the countries of the world, adept and canny, unkillable, offering even greater percentages of humanity the various entertainments. This is the magic of the Corporation. We live now to be entertained by arrangements of sound waves and light transmissions. And more is on the way, a tidal wave of new entertainments. It seems odd to me now that I ever would have cared so much about this. But always there will be the Corporation—already it has outlived nations. Some say the new Corporation is yet another harbinger of the twenty-first century, now nearly upon us.
I am sure that on the thirty-ninth floor that I was discussed and then forgotten. The Chairman is gone, too, and the new, expanded board quickly hired one of the big Hollywood studio heads to fill his position. The surface of things closed over like a gap on a calm lake, leaving no sign I had ever been there. The new management on the thirty-ninth floor has other things to worry about—the markets, the strategies, the numbers. That is the way of things in the Corporation, when you take the long view. Few are important for very long, almost no one in fact. Samantha is doing well, of course. And there is now a clever young guy who was quickly promoted to my place. His name is not known to me, but no doubt he is quite ambitious.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS KINDLY HELPED ME WITH CERtain points of information during the writing of this novel: my old and good friend, Jay Batley, executive assistant, U.S. Senate; Sidney K. Stein, M.D.; Leo Spellman at Steinway & Sons, Inc.; Jeffrey Turkelson at GE Americom; Steve Gelmis at Public Interest Telecom, Inc.; Timothy Sultan; Earl Shorris, a generous man and gifted writer who also gave wise counsel; in Brooklyn, Michael Daly, John Gallagher, Barry Paikoff, and Dorothy Chandler; Larry Slaughter at J. P. Morgan, Inc.; Jane Ross and Nathaniel Bohrer at Bear, Steams Co., Inc.; and, finally, two executives at one multinational media-entertainment corporation who preferred not to be acknowledged by name. Any and all errors should be attributed to the author, however.
The epigraph is taken from Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days, which appears in The Portable Walt Whitman (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1986), edited by Mark Van Doren. The Spanish prayer is taken directly from a small devotional packet I found in a botanica in Sunset Park, Brooklyn; its origin is unknown. The Spanish prayer is from Coleccion de Oraciones Escogidas, published by De Pablo International. The quote from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer can be found in The Will to Live: Selected Writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.) in Chapter XII, “On the Sufferings of the World.” I came across the quote in a brilliant story by Thorn Jones, “I Want to Live!”, which appeared in the August 1992 issue of Harper’s Magazine.
Much of this novel was first composed at the VG bar/restaurant at the corner of Broadway and Bleecker in Manhattan, and I wish to acknowledge the waitresses there, past and present, who were unfailingly patient with my sprawl of papers.
I am deeply indebted to Lewis H. Lapham, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, who understands the difficulty of balancing one’s responsibilities as a magazine editor with the compulsion to write one’s own books.
Kris Dahl, my agent, provided me with encouragement and smart guidance in this project.
David Groff, my editor at Crown, again amply demonstrated that there are still book editors in Manhattan who actually edit.
Last and most, I am immeasurably grateful to my wife, Kathryn Harrison, who read every draft with the shrewdness of the fellow novelist she is and with the sensitivity of a spouse. And it was she who held our crying newborn son while I completed this book.
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