Year Zero

by Rob Reid

  “Thanks for the warning,” I said, as my phone vibrated from a text message landing in its gullet. I slid it from my pocket. “I assume your info came from The Gretch?” Judy’s assistant Gretchen has a harmless crush on Randy, which he parlays into a steady stream of intelligence about the mighty boss’s calendar.

  “Of course.”

  I glanced at the inbound text.

  Take me to your leeeeeea-der, Earth boy!

  My hands turned to ice as my thoughts returned to my alien-addled Uncle Louie. I meanwhile noticed that my phone had matched the sender’s callback number to “Paulie Stardust”—which made zero sense, because that name wasn’t listed anywhere in my contacts.

  “I figure that if the partners are thinking of Omening you, they may give you a little trial by fire over the next couple of days,” Randy continued. “And forewarned is forearmed.”

  I forced my mind back to our conversation. “I know. I … really appreciate the heads-up.” Randy was in fact doing me a huge favor. If the partners are on the fence about someone, they’ll often stage an ambush at Omen time to see if the person can think creatively under acute, unexpected pressure. Last year, they gave a woman ten minutes to prepare an hour-long rebuttal to a Wall Street Journal editorial that denounced a growing tsunami of frivolous patent litigation for smothering the tech industry (no mean feat, as the piece was essentially correct on every point). The associate had to present her rebuttal to the full office, and did a great job.2 The next day, she received The Omen, and is now very much on track for partner.

  “I bet if they’re gonna mess with you, it’ll be at the weekly meeting with Judy tomorrow morning.” As Randy said this, my phone vibrated with another message from Paulie Stardust:

  All your base are belong to us!

  “I … I’ll bet you’re right,” I answered.

  Randy rose and opened the door. “So. You may want to brace yourself.”

  The phone vibrated one last time as he left:

  Come directly to Eatiary. All will be revealed.

  This was followed by an address I didn’t recognize. I looked it up on my phone’s map as Randy left. Eatiary, whatever it was, was on the Meatpacking District’s outer fringe. Spooked to the core, but determined to get to the bottom of this, I headed to the elevators.

  Soon I was down on the icy, bustling streets. New York in February is New York at its worst, unless you count those hundred-degree August weekends when everyone’s off at the Hamptons but you.3 The cheery buzz of the holidays is long gone, and the spring thaw is too distant to provide any solace. Add a three-inch layer of blackened slush, and it can feel like Moscow without the twelve-cent vodka. I started walking toward the Meatpacking District.

  Eight blocks on, I found a cab. The crosstown traffic turned out to be so bad that walking might have been faster. But it was nice to get my stricken sinuses out of the freezing rush-hour air. As I settled into the backseat, my phone started humming from a flurry of inbound texts.

  OMG, EATIARY? I’m sooooooo jealous.

  That came from a girl I faintly remembered from college. Next in the queue was this from the cousin of a long-ago roommate:

  You must must must have the Stuffed Marrow Rings with Aduki Bean reduction!!!

  And on it went—fifteen texts from distant acquaintances, as well as an actual friend or two. After wondering if everyone I knew was in on some ingenious belated birthday prank, I figured out what was happening.

  Phluttr.

  Phluttr is a smartphone app that lets you trumpet your every thought and action to an enraptured world by pushing out mini press releases via Facebook, Twitter, SMS, email, and, for all I know, telegrams and carrier pigeons. Being this fascinating can be taxing, even for clinical narcissists. So Phluttr makes it easy by infiltrating your phone and automatically publishing whatever it learns. In my first twenty minutes of experimenting with the service, every classmate and co-worker that I’d ever had was told that “NICK just arrived at 200 Park Avenue!” and, “NICK just called United Airlines!” and, most embarrassing, “NICK is listening to ‘Bye Bye Bye’ by ’N Sync!”4

  However awful this sounds, the reality is far worse, and I soon quit the service. I’d since uninstalled its diabolical software a dozen times, but somehow it kept reappearing. This time I thought I’d finally foiled it—by quite literally buying a new phone. But now, after a month’s sulk, Phluttr was baaaaaack. It had apparently matched the address that I’d looked up on my phone to Eatiary (a faddish restaurant, it seemed). And once my GPS signal indicated that I was actually heading there, it had informed my breathless public.

  When I got to the texted address, I found a cheap, bustling, overly lit restaurant. Outside was a gigantic mural of several figures raising a Greek flag in poses cribbed from the Iwo Jima Memorial. I faintly recognized them as the cast of an old sitcom set in a Nazi prison camp (isn’t it amazing what they used to get away with?). The sign above them said Hogan’s Gyros. No hint of anything called “Eatiary.” Inside, the restaurant was packed with pierced kids in ball caps ironically touting mideighties metal bands. As I puzzled over this, a six-foot goddess of the night strode through the front door. Dressed for Miami weather, she was barely of the same species as Hogan’s crowd, and made a beeline for an unmarked green door toward the back of the tiny dining area.

  Could it be …? I opened the door myself, and entered a darkened oasis of LED lighting, leggy models, and thirty-dollar appetizers. All the young dudes in the Twisted Sister caps stayed out with the short-order pita chefs—this side of the green door was for bosses, hotties, and investors. Years ago, my jaw would have dropped at the drastic shift in scenery. But these days, Manhattan is late into a romance with ironic speakeasy entrances from incongruous premises. I had entered a throbbing nightspot through a shabby taqueria’s kitchen closet, a high mixology temple via a phone booth in a hot dog hut, and even a boutique hotel through a unisex bathroom in a bowling alley.

  My path was blocked by a towering hipster whose ironic, midcentury math teacher glasses were thick enough to stop bullets. “And we are joining …?” he asked, with an arch mix of deference and disdain. Clearly a lowly suit like me was somebody else’s plus-one in this postmodern nightscape.

  “Paulie Stardust,” I said, feeling like a complete ass.

  He squinted at his list. “I see. The Stardust/Carter reservation. Walk this way.”

  He led me around an intricate series of waterways. Some rushed under Lucite beneath our feet, others along shoulder-high aqueducts hammered from distressed iron and brushed steel. The water flowed above, around, and under the diners, setting each table apart from its neighbors, and drowning every sweet nothing, deal term, and harsh ultimatum in its busy murmur. It was all just some Tiki wood and a barnacle-covered treasure chest short of god-awful tackiness. But the goth-industrial fixtures and the steampunk plumbing made for a masterful effect. Every table was full.

  “No music?” I asked. You’d think the place would be pulsing with smooth Euro-beats, but there was nothing but the sound of running water.

  The host shook his head. “The birds don’t like it.”

  As if on cue, a bright red parrot landed on a nearby railing. “I’m sustainable,” it chirped. Then, “Biodiesel!”

  Another free bird zipped by overhead, then another—and I got it. Eatiary was a dine-in aviary (I could barely see the soaring ceiling), and home to dozens of chattering birds of paradise. Several seemed to be entertaining diners with their stock phrases. And all of them were brilliantly trained—none were swiping any food, and their bowel control was a marvel.

  The host took on the air of a bored tour guide. “All of the winged fauna at Eatiary are rescues. None were bird-napped from the wild. Many were liberated from abusive domestic situations.” He gestured at a footbridge. “The timbers used in our interior were reclaimed from long-ago shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. No tree was harvested for the building’s renovation.” What a relief! Although the place must have had th
e carbon footprint of a small county. Arctic evening be damned, it was mai tai weather in here—sultry and humid, with fertile scents percolating from a tropical jungle of potted trees that ringed the dining area.

  A sky-blue parakeet landed on an aqueduct as we turned a corner. “Bikes, not bombs,” it urged. Moments later, we arrived at a spacious table with one other diner. And as I recognized him, I reeled from a strange mixture of ecstatic relief and moral outrage. “Paulie Stardust” was apparently Henry Pugwash—the youngest, smartest, and most obnoxious of my three smart, older, jackass cousins. No doubt he was behind everything that had happened that evening—including those awful thoughts about losing my mind. Muttering into his cellphone while skimming the news on his iPad, he nodded absently as I took my seat. “What’s up, Pugwash,” I murmured. No one calls him Henry (including his brothers and parents) because he just looks so … Pugwashy. All of five foot six, he’s always been chunky. And he has dark, narrow-set eyes under this dome of coal black hair that always manages to contort into something like a bowl cut, regardless of how it’s styled.

  The host unfurled my napkin for me as I took my seat. “Tonight’s special is a grass-fed, free-range Wagyu petite fillet. It’s sourced from an agrarian coöperative that’s run by differently abled ranch hands. Waitstaff will bring you some Hopi blue corn piki bread shortly. Meanwhile, you may wish to examine our butter list.” He handed us two heavy cards that were no doubt repurposed strike posters from a hemp factory. They listed twenty separate butters, broken down by region and species of “milk-giver.” “The beurre du jour is a clarified preparation derived from Tibetan yak milk,” he added.

  “I’ll just have the whale burger and panda ears again,” I said. I caught the host stifling a chuckle as he left, and savored the low-rent thrill of a tourist making a Buckingham guard smile.

  “Dude, that’s sick,” my cousin snapped, setting down his phone. “The most sustainable restaurant in town, and you’re making jokes about our ecological crisis.”

  I was tempted to ask him what was so ecological about sustaining a little patch of Singapore in wintry Manhattan—but I let it go. My cousin’s a master of progressive rhetoric and loves to lure moderates (fascists, as he calls us) into political debates. He invariably wins these with a deft mix of data, wordplay, and self-righteous sloganeering. At heart, though, he’s a true social Darwinist, and his other hobby is protecting his prodigious wealth from government attempts to tax and redistribute it. He’ll never admit it (above all to himself), but Pugwash really only dallies on the Left because he’s heard there’re some easy chicks there.

  “So, how’s business?” I asked. Although I was dying to learn about Carly and Frampton, I couldn’t let him know this, or he’d be sure not to mention them until dessert.

  Before he could answer, a smug cockatoo landed on the back of the empty chair next to him. “Go solar!” it demanded.

  An instant later, something swooped in low from the far side of the restaurant, grazing the hair of a waiter as it zeroed in on our table. It landed on the back of Pugwash’s chair, then swatted the cockatoo on the beak with a muscular wing. The smaller bird tumbled backward, and fell almost to the ground before fluttering off jaggedly, like a dazed housefly. The newcomer was twice the size of all the other birds. It was mostly yellow, with a stark white face and chest, and a black targetlike pattern around its left eye. “Pieces of EEEEEEIGHT!” it cawed.

  “Holy crap,” Pugwash yelped, pulling back reflexively.

  The parrot saw this and jumped right onto his shoulder. “Swab the mizzen-mast!” it commanded in a thick Scottish accent. “Scurvy me sextant! All hands to the Lido deck!” Clearly this one had been liberated from a marauding corsair, instead of an eco-boosting reëducation camp. Pugwash tried to slide away, but the parrot held on tight. So he brushed frantically at his shoulder. This irked the bird, who grudgingly hopped over to the back of the empty chair that he’d just evicted the cockatoo from. “Tree-lubber,” it snorted.

  “So … you were about to tell me how business is going,” I said.

  The parrot cocked an ear and struck an attentive pose.

  “Business? It’s awesome!” This conveyed zero information, since Pugwash would claim it from the very throes of bankruptcy. That said, business does tend to go rather awesomely for him. He graduated college three years before me, with so-so grades from a no-name school (smart as he is, he’s even more lazy). He moved back into his parents’ home with no discernible prospects. But just as he was starting to delight his sibling rivals by amounting to nothing, a Magoo-like stroke of random fortune swept him into a job at Google. It was 1999, and the company had about thirty employees. Within a few quick years it had over ten thousand. This happened through absolutely no fault of Pugwash’s. But his stock options became outlandishly valuable as a result, and he’ll coast forevermore.

  “So how’d you score this table?” he demanded, clearly as close to being impressed with me as his constitution would allow. “Eatiary’s tougher to get into than the Waverly these days.”

  “How did … I get this table?” Even as I said this, my spirits collapsed as I realized that my cousin hadn’t sent the chilling texts that had brought me here. He just saw that I was going to a hyperexclusive restaurant on Phluttr, and showed up to leach on to my reservation.

  “No, I’m talking to birdbrain here.” Pugwash jabbed a sarcastic finger at the chair next to him.

  The rowdy yellow parrot was still perched there—far enough back that my cousin couldn’t see his face. Apparently taking advantage of this privacy, the bird caught my eye, and winked conspiratorially. Entirely freaked out, I looked away, trying to write this off as a standard parrot trick, like saying hi or mimicking the ring of a telephone. I mean, all parrots can wink. Conspiratorially. In perfect sync with your conversation. Right?

  “By the way, you don’t have a cold, do you?” Pugwash instinctively cringed back in his chair—and he had good reason to be worried. Whenever any guy in our family got sick growing up, we’d all catch it within minutes. To this day, Pugwash and I can swap a cold back and forth just by passing through the same room.

  “Guilty as charged,” I confirmed. “You’ll be a sneezing wreck by midnight.” I chanced a second glance at the parrot. The little fucker gave me another wink.

  “Well, being a good cousin, I got you something other than a disease for your birthday.” Pugwash pulled an oddly shaped cigarette lighter from the pocket of his plush cashmere jacket. It was bulbous, almost spherical. “I picked it up last week, down in Pahrakhwai.” It sounded like he was gargling with marmalade when he hit that last word.

  “Paraguay,” I corrected. An obsessive traveler, my cousin’s always zipping off on quick, pricey journeys. No place is too random for him. But Paraguay? He must be running out of countries to visit.

  “Yes. Pahrakhwai,” he said, with an even harsher gargling sound. Pugwash can’t bear to mention any Latin American location without making some pathetic gringo stab at sounding native. He thinks it makes him sound worldly and liberal—like those NPR reporters who make pretentious gagging noises whenever they utter a faintly Hispanic name.

  “Well, thanks,” I said, looking at my fabulous gift. “But you … know I don’t smoke. Right?”

  “Of course. But this is no ordinary lighter.”

  I flicked it suspiciously. Your basic flame leapt up from its nozzle.

  “It’s the world’s first carbon negative lighter,” Pugwash continued proudly. “It’s shaped like a khwa-ra-NAAA seed. And it’s made by indigenous persons.”

  “So it … takes CO2 out of the air?”

  He shook his head. “For every one you buy, a tree in the rain forest is conserved. Carbon sequestration. Much more efficient. And I’m gonna make a fortune by investing in the tribe that’s making them.”

  I nodded politely, sliding the lighter into my jacket pocket. Pugwash left Google years ago, and these days he fights boredom by pumping his winnings into business
ideas. He’s had some surprising successes (e.g., Amish vs. Aliens—a maddeningly addictive Facebook game). He’s had some awful flops (e.g., Forever 29—a store for older women who liked to dress like trashy youngsters, and lie about their age). And he’s had one monstrous win (Phluttr, in which he was the first investor). Rather than launching businesses himself, he invests in start-ups, and trolls Union Square bars for entrepreneurs like a pederast cruising bus stations for runaways. He generally positions himself as a “tech guy.” But Internet fortune aside, he has no hard technical expertise. His Google job was in “business development.” From what I can tell, this is a worldwide backslapping society whose members jet off to conferences, discuss strategic partnerships among their companies, and then race home to ignore each other’s emails.

  Before I could ask how the Indigenous went about sequestering trees, Pugwash’s phone started vibrating so violently that it almost leapt from the table. He grabbed it and gazed at the screen. His eyes went saucer-wide, then platterwide. And then he took off at a trot, without a word.

  With that, the parrot hopped right onto the back of his vacant chair, regarding me at eye level. “So who invited dat guy?” he asked, the Scottish brogue suddenly replaced with Dodgers-era Brooklynese.

  Practically gagging from shock, I managed a blasé tone. “Phluttr.”