Business Secrets from the Stars

by David Dvorkin

  With an effort, Malcolm kept smiling. “I wouldn’t say I’m a fan, exactly. But I am a friend of his. I’m a science-fiction writer, too. Hoff — Joe admires my work a lot.”

  The brief moment of friendliness fled from her face, replaced by a you-need-a-better-pickup-line look of scorn. “Yeah, right,” she said, and returned her attention to the astonishingly wonderful novel by the best science-fiction writer the world had ever known.

  Malcolm stared at her silky black hair for a while, longing to stroke it, and willing himself to neither grind nor clench his teeth.

  It’s okay, he told himself. Calm down. It’s all right. Your time will come. Very soon. This vision of desirability will see your book and your picture displayed prominently in some downtown bookstore, and she’ll remember this conversation, and she’ll be filled with bitter regret. And maybe some day after she sees that display, you’ll have reason to ride the bus with all these plebeians again. She’ll board that bus. She’ll sit down next to you again. She’ll apologize for her behavior today. She’ll...

  He closed his eyes.

  She sat down beside him. “Oh, it is you!” she breathed. “I was afraid to hope. I was sure I’d never see you again. You’re so wonderful! There never was a writer as wonderful as you. How can I apologize for my behavior last time? I’ll do anything.”

  So they continued together to his magnificent new house in one of the city’s ritziest neighborhoods — Redland Heights, perhaps — where the bus detoured in order to deliver them to Malcolm’s front door, and then they made sweet and passionate love all night, and the dusky-skinned, almond-eyed, black-haired former maiden pledged to love him and all his books for ever and ever and ever.

  And Malcolm opened his eyes, and lo! the seat was empty and she was gone and it was as if she had never been. Which in practical terms might as well have been the case.

  Sometimes he wondered where his fascination — almost obsession — with a certain physical type of woman had come from. He couldn’t trace it to anything. Just some genetic quirk, he supposed.

  Marlene had certainly caught on to it and used it against him. She had been quite aware of his reaction to her. He had assumed she felt something similar toward him, or at least — or perhaps even preferably — a powerful attraction to his deep soul and high intellect.

  If only someone had punched him in the gut for real at that moment of first meeting. Maybe that would have broken the spell in time. Now all he had left was silly fantasies about girls like the one on the bus. Would he ever touch such hair again? Would he ever touch a body like Marlene’s again?

  “Moan,” he moaned.

  Nonetheless, Malcolm felt better for the fantasy. For once, he thought, it wasn’t based entirely on dreamy, boyish sexual imaginings. For once, thanks to today’s telephone call, there was a chance that that fantasy or one much like it would come to pass.

  His improved mood sustained him while he paid the oil-stained bill at the garage and endured the snickering — to his face, for they didn’t even bother to do it behind his back any more — as he pored over the bill and tried to figure out what they had done to his car or claimed to have done to it.

  He handed over a distressingly large percentage of his checking account balance and then soothed his soul with a drive through Redland Heights.

  For once, when he finally reached home Malcolm didn’t see the smallness and shabbiness and general dreariness of his apartment. He accepted it as temporary and he thought about the future.

  Marlene had the house, and Malcolm was paying the mortgage on that. He was also required to make the payments on the car, but at least now he had possession of that. He suspected that Marlene was now earning more than he was, but he couldn’t prove it. Not that it mattered. The divorce settlement didn’t take her earnings into account at all.

  Malcolm had once read one of those silly books that advise married couples to argue in order to keep their marriages stable and secure, and he had taken the book seriously, concluding from it that his and Marlene’s marriage must be the exemplar of stability. The reality had so astonished him that he had not read the fine print in the divorce settlement — in particular, the lines which decreed that his financial obligations to his ex-wife were not dependent on any changes in her own financial situation. Under that legal agreement, Marlene could win the state lottery and become a multimillionaire, she could remarry, and this time to a vastly wealthy man, she could be elected President of the United States, and Malcolm would still have to keep making the monthly payments on what had been his house and would still have to provide her with a substantial amount of money every month to pay for utilities, groceries, clothes, and entertainment.

  Marlene, obviously, had not been so stunned as Malcolm at the unraveling of their marriage. But then, the unraveling had come as no surprise to Marlene.

  Fortunately, Marlene had never had any faith in his literary career, and so she had not bothered asking, in the divorce agreement, for some share of his future literary earnings. Once he’d paid off the house and car, all she had coming from him was that monthly stipend, and as his income increased from writing, that stipend would seem smaller with every royalty check.

  Tomorrow he would begin the search for a new place to live, something more suited to his new future.

  * * * * *

  CHAPTER SIX

  And so in the course of time, Business Secrets from the Stars appeared on the shelves.

  At first, the number of shelves and the number of bookstores were both disturbingly low.

  Malcolm began to get the sick feeling that once again his high hopes had been foolish and that once again a book of his would appear on the shelves and then disappear again soon after, leaving little trace of itself behind and leaving Malcolm’s miserable life fundamentally unchanged.

  At Mammon House, Jim Emich congratulated himself on having held Malcolm to such a low advance. Even so, Emich worried that his enthusiasm for the book, expressed in the quarterly marketing meetings, had been excessive and that its failure might tar or possibly even terminate his career. He began to rehearse excuses blaming Malcolm for the book’s failure.

  Then Malcolm had the brilliant idea of sending a copy by interoffice mail to Milo Grossbuck. On the blank page facing the title page, Malcolm wrote a long, effusive, exquisitely insincere message praising the Big Buck for his brilliant leadership, reminding him of their one meeting and telling BB that it had made an indelible impression on Malcolm, and thanking the Great Corporate Leader Guy for his years of inspiration, without which Malcolm could never have produced this small, humble, but he hoped somewhat useful manual for business success.

  Like all great corporate leaders, the Big Buck had as much of the sucker in him as the people he regularly gulled and beguiled.

  He read Malcolm’s book. First he was floored. Then he was lifted up.

  Far more important, he bought copies of it and sent it to every fellow corporate Big Guy he knew. Then he bought many more copies and distributed them to all of Western Bell’s uncountable horde of vice presidents. The other corporate Big Guys, also floored and then uplifted, did the same within their own kingdoms.

  Business Secrets from the Stars began to appear on business bestseller lists.

  Malcolm breathed a sigh of relief. It was also a sigh of surprise at his having for once displayed some kind of marketing cleverness.

  Jim Emich stood tall and set his sights higher. Before, he had hoped only to keep his inadequate paycheck coming in regularly. Now he began to think about his own imprint. A James Emich Book. He liked the sound of that.

  * * * * *

  Mammon House employed a publicist who tried hard to get Malcolm on the daytime television talk shows. The television networks seemed much less impressed by the possibilities of Malcolm’s book than Mammon House and the corporate Big Guys and displayed little interest in him. The best the publicist was able to do was book Malcolm on William Buckley’s show, where the normal focus was on issue
s of politics, religion, social policy, and vocabulary size.

  Malcolm tried to prepare by reading a dictionary. He soon found himself skimming. He gave up on that idea.

  Then he learned that he would not be given the opportunity to shine in isolated splendor but would be sharing the stage with some sort of religious figure. Malcolm decided to arm himself for what he was sure would be a confrontation by reading the Bible. He soon gave up on that, too.

  He had never been self-disciplined about research.

  The religious guest turned out to be the increasingly famous cleric Father Jerry O’Halloran (born Milton Goldberg, but later converted). He was a public theologian in the sense that he authored columns and books and hoped some day to be the host of his own weekly television show. He would call it “The O’Halloran Hour,” or possibly “Listen to Your Father Jerry,” and sure and it would be a corker, begorrah and alevei. For the moment, he was content to appear on the shows of other faithful sons of the Church.

  Like Buckley, Father Jerry had been given a copy of Business Secrets. Unlike Buckley and the networks, Father Jerry understood the book’s commercial potential. He also saw the potential it held for him. Destroying Malcolm Erskine, humiliating him, blasting him to smithereens just as Erskine was about to attain fame and success, would bring Father Jerry to the attention of the publishing industry, would increase the chances of his selling some kind of religious pap of his own, and would quite possibly bring “The O’Halloran Hour” closer to reality.

  As he sat in the studio awaiting the moment of epiphany when the red light on the camera went on, Malcolm looked at the host of the program, who was sliding further and further down in his swivel chair and reading his copious notes. Then Malcolm looked at his fellow guest, who was adjusting his sinister black suit and white collar and filing his long yellow-gray teeth to nicely sharpened points. Malcolm sensed a trap, a setup, a veritable yawning pit opening before his hasty feet. Vultures were circling. Jackals were gathering. His very own tender flesh was the anticipated feast.

  The red light turned on.

  Buckley began.

  First he licked his lips a few times with a whirling, circular motion of his tongue, then he adjusted himself in his chair and slid down a bit further, and finally he said, “One often hears that, ah-ah, culpam poena premit comes, as Horace so wisely said, putting it in Latin as was his wont. In this age of social displosion, it comes as no surprise to encounter a variety of protreptic that attracts numerous adherents with, yet, little — or perhaps even nothing — in the way of nidification. Such, I make so bold as to declare, is the case with the philosophy espoused by the lesser of my two guests, Mr. Malcolm Erskine.”

  Malcolm nodded, feeling and looking ill.

  A few ironic cheers arose from the small studio audience, followed by laughter.

  Father O’Halloran looked ever smugger. He could scarcely contain his glee. How his sainted mother would have kvelled, were she only still alive. Too bad she had suffered a fatal heart attack when he told her he was converting to Catholicism and joining the priesthood.

  “My far more eminent guest,” Buckley continued, “is Father Jerry O’Halloran, well known for his great work on behalf of the only true faith. In short, my landsmann. How they hanging, Jerry?”

  “Circumspectly, Bill.”

  The two Catholics — the born and the made — laughed comfortably together.

  Malcolm’s feeling of being in a trap increased. What made it worse — more galling, anyway — was the knowledge that he had walked into this trap of his own free will, even with eagerness. He gritted his teeth and tried to gather his courage. Gird thou thy loins, said he to himself. Peril awaits, and only the most charlatanish can hope to win through alive.

  Buckley returned to the feast. “Mr. Erskine’s, er, doctrines are so well saponified that I need scarcely deadle them to so pilocarpine an audience. Mr. Erskine, would you care to comment?”

  Malcolm frowned in deep thought for a few moments, then said, “I could of course simply gandopate, Mr. Buckley — but not, as you so wisely put it, before so pilocarpine an audience. Hence I’ll not be the one to suggest that you write a novel in which you kill your favorite protagonist and call the novel Blackford Croaks. However, I will philmonderize slightly, if I may — at least to the extent of actual maxmendorization — by suggesting that ‘social displosion’ is entirely too slemorous a term for the utterly enlogillobous processes to which I have addressed myself in my book.”

  “Hmm,” Buckley said, pausing to consider Malcolm’s response. “That’s certainly, ah-ah, a vagotropic view. But surely you can’t deny, Mr. Erskine, that, ah-ah, you have maginated on an innocent public a granophyre of truly rhadamanthine proportions?”

  “Nonsense!” Malcolm said, his face reddening. “Really, Mr. Buckley!”

  “If I may interject a fatuous word or two,” said Father O’Halloran soothingly, “I’d like to point out that Holy Scripture has something to say about this very subject. For example, in the book of Harold, chapter five, verses one through four, Jesus himself says, ‘Yea, verily, say no more, lest ye say more than a man should say. For I say unto you that my father says, Go and say more unto the gentiles and say less unto the Jews. Say, brethren, would ye gainsay the sayings of the Lord your God? So he said, and thus saying, said no more.’”

  Malcolm sneered. “Oh, sure, you can quote the New Testament all you want, but what about the Old, eh? What about Moishe 1:8, eh? ‘If what you’re doing makes you very happy, then you better stop doing it.’ Remember that one, Father O?”

  O’Halloran winced and grabbed his head with both hands. “Feh! You’re giving me such a headache, you mamser! Okay, okay. Here’s another one from the New Testament. I know this one’ll shut you up. Book of Millicent, chapter ninety-nine, verses thirteen through one hundred twenty-one: ‘Then the Lord spake unto Millicent, saying, Prove thou that thou lovest me, daughter. And Millicent spake unto the Lord saying, No, no, a thousand times no, and get your damned hands off me.’ Well?”

  “Hmph. Second book of Shecky, last verse: ‘Nu?’”

  “Oy, vey!” groaned the priest.

  Ding! First round awarded by the judges to Malcolm Erskine by a score of five to three.

  By fadeout, the audience was similarly divided. This was quite an improvement from their feelings when the hour had begun. Malcolm was holding his own.

  * * * * *

  This at least was how Malcolm remembered his appearance on the Buckley show. More accurately, this was how he told the story in the autobiography he published many decades later, that book, intended to be his second great bestseller, which almost no one read.

  Ah, fellow spawnspawn, truth is a slippery thing! We make our own realities. Who is to say what really happened during those endless minutes before the camera? Did Buckley really retreat from the field of verbal sparring when faced with Malcolm’s mighty vocabulary? Did Father Jerry really run away, have a sex-change operation, and enter a nunnery? In the great flux of oscillating quantum reality, in this cosmos in which the be-all becomes the end-all and then seemingly instantaneously switches back again, might it not be that Malcolm really did conquer the enemy and win the hearts of the television viewers? Is reality so solid and immutable that we can assert without any doubts that in fact the version of his appearance related by those who laughed at his bumbling incoherence was true then and will always be true? A thousand years from now — no, a mere hundred years from now — will it be their scornful account or Malcolm’s self-laudatory one that posterity reads and treasures?

  Probably neither.

  What history does record is that this one television appearance did not lead to any others. Those with the power to determine who will reap the benefits of being guests on television shows did not seem to feel, from having watched Malcolm’s battle with Jerry and Bill, that he would appeal to the viewers of the shows for which they handled the bookings.

  Nonetheless, Malcolm’s book continued to se
ll well enough and his fame to spread far enough that competitors appeared quickly.

  * * * * *

  “...The Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson and Johnny’s very special guest, Shirley MacLaine. And now, heeeere’s Johnny!”

  The monologue: topical jokes, varied audience reaction ranging from uncontrollable laughter to groans, the host watching the audience and staring half sideways into the camera with his self-deprecating, conspiratorial half-smile.

  The commercial.

  The guest.

  “Well, have you read this new book?” Johnny holds up a copy of Business Secrets from the Stars for the camera, then reads from the back cover copy. “‘An astonishing new revelation for our times. Learn from our long-dead cosmic cousins how to best manage your career or business. Channeling’s most important breakthrough, revealed to you by the greatest channeler in history and his stellar spirit guide.’ Sounds like big competition for you, Shirley.”

  The guest crosses her legs and her gown slides apart slightly at the slit, revealing a pleasing glimpse of her still attractive dancer’s gams.

  Not bad, thinks Malcolm Erskine, watching his new monster color television screen from his new monster water bed in his new monster condominium in one of downtown Piketon’s most monstrously expensive high-rises. Pull your dress up a bit and tell us all what you think about my book.

  “Yes, Johnny, I have read it, and no, I don’t see it as competition at all. You see, I think Mr. Erskine is working toward the same high goal that many of us are: the raising of human consciousness to a higher plane.”

  “Right,” Malcolm says to the screen, “the raising of my standard of living to a higher plane.”