The Failure

by James Greer

  7. THE TIME GUY’S FATHER VISITED GUY IN LOS ANGELES AND TOOK HIM OUT TO DINNER AT THE PALM, ABOUT TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING FIASCO

  You don’t eat meat? She doesn’t eat meat?

  -A lot of people don’t eat meat, Dad.

  -Not where I come from.

  -You realize you don’t actually come from the ’50s. You just grew up then, said Guy.

  -Dayton, Ohio. Pine Club. Best goddamn restaurant in the free world.

  -That’s actually true, more or less, but only if you eat meat.

  -Lines out the door on the coldest day of the year. Can’t make a reservation. They don’t take ’em. One time, the President of the United States …

  -Heard this story only about half a million times, Dad.

  -Yeah, well, Violet hasn’t. Have you, Violet?

  -Nuh-uh.

  -President comes driving up, Secret Service guys get out, go in, manager says, Sorry, we don’t take reservations, President has to wait in line like everyone else. And he does. Two fucking hours. Of course, he waited out in his limo, but you get the point. If the Pine Club is worth two hours of the President of the United States’ time, must be pretty damn good.

  -Wow.

  -You bet your skinny vegetarian ass, wow.

  -Dad!

  -I was joking. She knows I was joking. You didn’t mind, did you, honey?

  -Of course not. Guy, please punch your father in the face to defend my ass’s honor.

  -Now that’s what I’m talking about! I like this one.

  -Good to know, Dad. Your endorsement means so little to me.

  -Respect for your elders. I tried to teach him, Violet, I really did. Never took.

  -In fairness, you never really tried to teach me. Anything.

  -If that’s how you want to remember it, I can’t stop you.

  -And respect is something earned, not granted automatically.

  -You know how I got where I am, said Robert, turning back to Violet. -Count every penny. Every goddamn one. Ask Guy. He remembers.

  Guy remembered. Sifting bags of filthy coins into the automatic counter, reading off the total to his mother, who scrupulously kept the books. You could never get that smell off your hands, your skin, out of your hair. The whole house aromatic with copper, nickel, and dirt—every pore in the wood, every crack in the linoleum. Human dirt passed from coin to coin, coins pressed into sweaty palms, coins jangling in lint-lined pockets, coins dug out from between couch cushions, swept from under the bed, picked from the gutter. Guy had developed an aversion early on to handling currency in any form other than paper, which held terrors of its own, so even then with some distaste.

  -What do you mean, Mr. Forget? asked Violet inevitably.

  -I had most of the juke box concession for the entire Midwest region, said Robert. His ruddy face and cratered nose betrayed him as a longtime heavy drinker, a trait Guy had inherited, along with the ability to hold his liquor.

  You don’t grow up in an environment like that without permanent scars. Foremost among these an embossed stamp of embarrassment on your cheek that only you can see, but you see it all the time, whether looking in the mirror or in the mind’s eye. This stamp, or emblem, this scarlet letter, B for Briar, is a thing you will go to great lengths to conceal or overcompensate to erase—unless or until it works to your advantage, which you’d be surprised how often that can happen in a place like Los Angeles, where anything out of the ordinary can work to your advantage.

  8. PROMPTED BY HIS FATHER’S CONVERSATION, GUY HAS A MENTAL FLASHBACK TO HIS CHILDHOOD IN DAYTON, OHIO, WHILE SITTING IN THE RESTAURANT PRETENDING TO LISTEN

  Pulling into the parking space in front of the bank in his father’s Cutlass, Guy Forget had the impression of berthing a small schooner. The rump of the car sagged almost to the ground under the weight of its trunk’s cargo; as a result the car’s nose lifted at a haughty angle, and imprecisely responded to the shift of its wheels, as if resenting an imposition it had borne without comment for too long. Guy parked the heavy Oldsmobile with practiced care, and withdrew from the backseat a hand truck which he dragged behind him with one hand, groping with the other for the keys he had stupidly shoved in his jeans pocket before unlocking the trunk.

  Heat. The keynote of the new day resounded dully in Guy’s brain as he fumbled with the car keys. Though much of Third Street still lay swathed in blue shadow, long fingers of sunlight groped the dingy crevices between the bank and the adjacent drugstore, pooling on the latter’s green-and-white-striped awning, leaving the sullen windows beneath to swelter darkly. The sun-swollen leaves of a young sycamore, trapped in a square of dirt in front of the bank, spackled the cracks in the sparsely peopled sidewalk with a paste of piebald shade. The air was moist and heavy. A gang of cicadas sawed the heavy, moist air.

  Bending to extract the first of a dozen or so hefty canvas bags filled with rolls of variously denominated coins from his trunk, Guy felt a rivulet of sweat snake from one armpit down toward his waist. His white T-shirt stuck in wet patches to his skin. He lifted the bag with two hands and plopped it on the hand truck, then another, and another, shifting and stacking them expertly so that in the end all fit. Guy was proud of his prowess at stacking the bags of coins. Saved time too—one trip instead of two. And safer. Wouldn’t have to leave any sitting in the trunk while he went into the bank.

  He exhaled gratefully as he entered the musty cool of the old bank, pushing his hand truck through the darkly tinted glass doors. An elderly customer with a red jowly face, wearing a faded straw hat, stood before one of the two tellers, staring bemusedly at his passbook. Guy wheeled across the floor to the unoccupied teller.

  It would be so easy, thought young Guy, to swivel the hand truck back out the door, repile the bags in the trunk, and jet out of town. Who would even miss me? Dad would miss the money before he missed me, but he’d get over it. Can’t be more than ten thousand bucks in here. That’s peanuts to him, but it’s a year of independence for me. Marcus would be glad to be rid of me, he considered, there can be little doubt about that. And Mom … it’s always difficult to know what’s going on in Mom’s head at any given time. Probably Mom’s where I learned to hide my true feelings. In any case, Mom would be the key to the whole plan. Because eventually I’d run out of money, and I’d have to come crawling back home, the prodigal son in his tattered rags, and while Dad wouldn’t want to take me back, and Marcus would act like I wasn’t there, I could probably count on Mom at least to feed and clothe and bathe me. I don’t know why I thought bathe. I didn’t mean physically bathe. Obviously. I meant allow me to bathe. Because I assume that, on the run as I would be, I wouldn’t have much time to bathe.

  Which, on second thought, is sufficient deterrent to prevent me from swiveling the hand truck and following my plan. Someday, though, thought Guy. Someday I will follow through. I just don’t know with what, exactly.

  9. GUY AND BILLY DISCUSS PANDEMONIUM, SITTING IN BILLY’S APARTMENT, FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING FIASCO

  The concept is good. We’re agreed that the concept is good.

  -If you say it’s good, then obviously I trust you.

  -I’m happy to hear that, but I’d be more happy if you understood what I’m trying to say. Who would not be attracted to this idea? I mean from a business standpoint. Advertising that’s not advertising. Data collection that’s invisible and untraceable.

  -I am totally on board with this concept and I get your vision, but in the pure consumery sense this is not my thing.

  -What is that? The pure consumery sense.

  -What do you mean “what is that?” It is what it says it is.

  -But you’ve invented a word. Which in itself would not be so bad, people invent words all the time, out of necessity, when there’s not an exact word available, but in your case you’ve invented a word that doesn’t need to exist. You’ve invented a word out of sheer laziness. Your brain for whatever reason couldn’t form the words “as a consumer,”
because—and here I’m just spit-balling—you were trying to make yourself sound more complex than you are.

  -I am more complex than I am.

  -I’m not sure you even listen to the things that come out of your mouth.

  -I’ve been told I’m a good listener.

  -You are. You’re a very good listener. You just should never talk.

  -I could really go for a cheeseburger.

  -For breakfast?

  -You’ve never had a cheeseburger for breakfast? It’s good.

  -I’ll take your word on that one.

  -Thanks, Guy. Means a lot to me.

  10. GUY PREPARES TO MEET HIS BROTHER MARCUS TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING FIASCO

  The concierge at the Chateau nodded his usual greeting, into which Guy read headlines of condescension followed by lengthy articles unmasking the sham of his existence. Pulitzer stuff, really well-researched, thorough, irrefutable.

  He continued walking through the lobby, sat at his usual table, and ordered a large pot of coffee, which he took strong and black. Hungover celebrities and their antic publicists, studio executives trading industry gossip, and the odd fraud or tourist. In Guy’s eyes, the tourist was lower than a fraud. The tourist, he considered, was someone who skimmed like a water spider on the surface of life. Even a fraud gets wet.

  Guy had two hours before his brother arrived. He’d offered to pick him up at the airport, but Marcus had insisted on taking a cab, which was typical of the subtle ways in which Marcus underlined his aversion to Guy’s company—half an hour less he’d have to spend trying to think up conversational topics that wouldn’t offend his younger brother’s sense of self—in Guy’s mind.

  Two hours, then, to work out the way, exactly, he would pretend to try to convince Marcus to lend him fifty thousand dollars to product-develop and implement a closed beta version of Pandemonium, the successful completion of which would help make Guy not just obscenely wealthy, but a player, a man with clout, powerful enough to park without fear in any other man’s reserved spot anywhere in town.

  Not that he expected Marcus to actually lend him the money. Through the lens Guy often used to view the future (cracked and varicolored, if you must know), he could see Marcus nodding sagely as Guy explained the superadvanced technology that he was “borrowing” from some dweeb at Caltech. In essence, this technology would enable companies to slip subsensory ads onto any kind of website, unnoticed by the unwitting net-surfer but nevertheless effective. Probably.

  It’s true that Guy himself did not fully understand the technology, but he knew Marcus would, because Marcus was a physicist and thus by definition able to understand anything that inhabited the physical world. Even the virtual physical world. Something in the sub-sub-code of the site—the Caltech guy had explained that it was in fact a reverse kind of HTML, he was inspired by reading about this French street slang called verlan, where the kids basically just reversed words so that grown-ups couldn’t understand, but it had evolved into an entire language, almost, so in fact you could call this code LMTH, because it functioned the same way, and was similarly unintelligible to even the hippest web programmers, which was about where Guy stopped listening, because the idea of a hip web programmer was too much, almost, to take.

  No one would be turned off by garish Flash-based ads or annoyingly obvious product placement or banner advertising or hyperlinks to Amazon.com or anything at all, and no pop-up blockers or anti-spyware or software of any sort could filter out the subsensory ads. A site using this technology would be self-supporting after week one and profitable by the end of the first month. Because imagine, advertisers: you’re pushing your products in an effective yet totally discrete way, and however you measure results, whether by page counts or click-throughs or actual sales, you will see results, and soon, and because you signed a nondisclosure agreement as part of the contract, you can’t talk about the subsensory ad placement technology, which means no one else can copy it for probably about six months, and six months in Internet time is forever, certainly long enough to establish this new technology, code-named Pandemonium, as the forerunner, forefathermother, motherfucking four-eyed godfather of what will eventually be seen as a Rubicon moment in webby history, which will probably require Jobs-Gates level canonization of the man behind the curtain, who is me, Guy Forget, the inventor of Web 3.0, the blood-drenched edge of the Internet.

  Marcus would then take a long sip from the glass of whiskey and soda that he had ordered from the solicitous Chateau waiter, and shake his head sagely, saying something like, “Sorry, Guy, I just don’t see it.”

  But the point, for Guy, was never about the money, as he well knew, and as Marcus well knew as well. Guy would find a way to get the money, with or without Marcus. Guy’s victory was that he had managed to get Marcus to divert precious time from his precious scientific conference on paper-clip theory or whatever, simply to force him to say no to his face, so that he might later derive years of unsportsmanlike pleasure from having been right. Not that he wouldn’t share the wealth, regardless: au contraire, for Guy that would be the sweetest revenge, doling out money freely to family and friends, the anti-Marcus, as foolish and fancy-free as his older brother was cautious and tight-fisted.

  Should Marcus unexpectedly agree to loan Guy the money, all the better, because then Guy wouldn’t have to go through with Plan Charlie, which after all, despite its incredibly low risk of failure, was not entirely foolproof.

  11. THE VILLAIN SVEN TRANSVOORT, STILL IN HIS UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, TALKS ABOUT GUY’S BACKGROUND, AND MAKES BROAD, MOSTLY NONSENSICAL GENERALIZATIONS ABOUT CULTURE

  Guy Forget claimed to have been born in Dayton, Ohio, a place so anonymous I believe it may not actually exist; it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Guy had simply made up the name of his hometown. Whether or not that’s true, Guy Forget was certainly American, in fact a little too American in some ways, because since he was young, Guy dreamed of getting rich quick, which I believe to be the heart of the American dream. For Americans who are born into the condition, the phrase “get rich quick” means exactly what it says: that they will suddenly and without much effort come into enough money to live without care in a luxurious manner. They can buy whatever car and in whatever quantity suits them. They can buy not only a very nice house but several of these, not less than two and not more than five, one for each of the varied topographies offered by our great country: a beach house, a house in the country, a ski chalet, an apartment in Manhattan, and a Primary Residence in the city or town where their ostentatious wealth will most impress those who knew them when they didn’t have any money.

  For Americans who come here from other countries, particularly from Latin America, by which I mean any country south of the United States’ porous border, “get rich quick” is a somewhat easier goal, as it means simply taking the most menial job on offer, which has the effect of immediately doubling or tripling the most money they’ve ever made in their lives, enabling them to immediately raise their standard of living, however humble, to new heights, and even allowing them to save enough money to send back home to less fortunate family members, in order that one day they, too, might be able to join them and share the dream.

  Guy Forget came from the former category, and though he was not uneducated, like many of his type he spent a lot of time using that education and whatever native intelligence he possessed trying to figure out ways to avoid work of any kind, which though he was not born to the leisure class he nevertheless regarded as beneath his dignity.

  I don’t know when Guy arrived in Los Angeles, but I’m certain he wasn’t born here. He had too much nervous energy, too much ambition, and far too much selfawareness to have grown up in a place where even those transplants who’ve lived here long enough assume the lazy, spaced-out air of oxygen-deprived mice who no longer recognize themselves, or their surroundings, or their purpose in life, and are not in any way bothered by this loss. Guy dodged and weaved among the inhabitants of Los Angeles imp
atiently, shaking his head in wonder at the wasted time on open, unembarrassed display, furious anytime he had to slow down or wait for anyone or anything, which was often and a lot. One of the main features of life in Los Angeles is slowing down and waiting. This applies not just where you’d imagine, as for instance in traffic, but in almost every aspect of daily life: in line at the coffee shop, in the aisles of the grocery store, at the gas station, in restaurants, at the movies, in a bar, at the mall, in parking lots and garages, and, most especially—and this was the thing Guy found most galling—in bed.