by David Shafer
“Yes, I am. My dad is sick now. His heart. And I’ve become a liability here anyway.”
“I do not know what a lie-a-bility is, but maybe that’s just what you are supposed to be,” said Dah Alice.
“No. It means I’m not helping. I’ll come back, though. When I can.”
“Oh, Leila, do not say this,” said Dah Alice. “But you keep learning your Burmese, yes? Maybe one day you can show me Hollywood?”
“I would love to, Alice. One day, yes.” She put the thumb drive into Alice’s papery hand. “Here is all the information I have on those women for the scholarships. I erased it everywhere else, I think. Can you keep it safe? Maybe tell the women that I will try to see that this still happens?”
When Leila got back, the two fat policemen were parked outside her apartment. She thought about giving them a little rub-it-in wave, but then thought better of it; she still had a few hours in the country. Just as well. Inside her apartment, a cigarette lay smoking in a tea saucer on the kitchen table. Creepsville.
She washed quickly and finished packing. Then she checked her e-mail again. Hello: mail from Ding-Dong.com. She opened it. Something strange happened: her laptop screen blinked blank for a second, then came back on, as if from a mini-reboot or a petit mal seizure. When it returned, the Ding-Dong e-mail was open.
Got your message. Can you meet us in Heathrow tomorrow morning.
Leila was going to be in Heathrow tomorrow morning. She had a seven-hour layover. She closed the e-mail without responding. But it didn’t close back down into her e-mail program. It shut itself into a little owl icon that appeared on her desktop.
Chapter 11
London
Mark woke from the clammy reaches of his skull into the gloom of the flat. He stirred the duvet around his legs, cast the lumpy feelers of his parched mind across the pillow and into this new day. The first task was to locate himself. Lately, determining where he was when he woke was a process. Blearily, he took in the room. Outside the window, a bit of leaking cast-iron gutter rat-a-tat-tatted drips onto the brick sill. Ah yes: the SineCo flat in East London, his current home base.
He had been writing last night. He remembered having strong feelings about something. He spidered half his body out of the bed and collected a legal pad from the floor. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and read what he’d written.
You have to try every day. Life is ten trillion decisions. Wouldn’t you like to notice that you’re making them?
And:
The loss you feel over and over again is the same (but from the other side).
There was also some stuff about how this, what we’re living, is just Middle Life, between Pre-Life and Afterlife. Plus some doodles that any teenager would call substandard, mainly heavily drawn arrows meant to stand in for logical leaps too beautiful and complex for words.
Fuck. It was all shit, all of it. And there wasn’t even enough of it. The trap he’d laid for himself with all of his dishonest behavior and vanity was going to spring on him.
Uh-oh. A morning like a cliff edge. Must endeavor not to think until poisonous slurry has finished slopping about my brain. Just make some coffee. Tomato juice in a cardboard box in the fridge. A worthy sort of muesli in the cupboard. You have to move forward, like a shark, even if you are a self-hating shark with a wicked hangover.
He tossed the legal pad aside, flung off the duvet, and tacked toward the bathroom.
On the toilet, he cast his mind into last night’s turbid little sea. He had dined with his agent, Marjorie Blinc, at an unmarked restaurant. After two tumblers of bourbon, he’d ordered what turned out to be Chicken Architecture—a torqued tower of stacked planes: chicken, skewed ellipses of latticed potato, chicken, red cabbage, chicken. It was a dumb thing to order when you were having what turned out to be a business dinner. His meal kept toppling beneath his knife, and he would end up with a shard of potato lattice stuck out of the corner of his chewing mouth, like a cow. Blinc ordered seared tuna that looked like five pretty matchboxes on a wide white plate.
He’d been nervous going into the dinner—that’s why he’d opened with the circus whiskies. In six weeks, he was supposed to deliver to Blinc his second book. Sadly, it was to be called Keep Your Promises, Not Your Secrets: Ten Steps to Committed Living. At dinner, he had tried to tell her that he might need a bit more time with it, and that maybe it would have to be a different kind of book than a straight-up, ten-step self-help book, and that he would like to revisit the issue of the title. At that, Blinc put down her last half matchbox of tuna and said, Oh, this is all in the contract.
That fucking contract. He couldn’t comprehend it; it was all in consideration whereofs and for a period not to exceeds. When he had shown the document to an attorney friend of a friend, the man had looked at him askance and said, “I don’t understand. You didn’t sign this, did you?”
Mark had laughed and said no, but his stomach had lurched straight down.
Mark was basically a sharp and levelheaded person. He didn’t come from money; he came from a scrabbling, single-parent home and his mom had taught him frugality, so he usually managed not to get screwed by the cable or the insurance company. He sometimes even remembered to redeem the mail-in rebate coupons that came with his juicer or his German dishwasher. But then he’d gone and signed a fat contract without really reading it. He hadn’t even correctly understood Blinc’s role. He had thought she was his agent. Her company was called Conch Shell Communications. But he had lately come to understand that she was his employer. Apparently, Blinc had been his agent, at first. And she had gotten him a big advance for the first book, and an even bigger one for the second. So big, in fact, that he had neglected to clarify some basic issues. Like: Blinc had sold the second book to Conch Shell Media. But Conch Shell Media was the publishing arm of Conch Shell Communications; Blinc was the CEO of both companies. What the fuck?
Blinc was, it had to be said, quite a conjurer. She was the one who’d shazammed his little essay into a book that had brought him fame and wealth. But the steep angle of his ascent turned out to be mirrored by a descent of similar slope. In the year since his appearance on Margo! (which he now recognized as the apex of the ride), Mark had watched, distraught and powerless, as his star faded swiftly. Blinc herself, who a year ago, Mark could have sworn, had looked at him with respect and desire in her eyes was now bored and possibly peeved with him.
He’d spent most of his Conch money already on his loft in Brooklyn and its unnecessary renovation, which had careened quickly over budget. Now he needed money in a way that he had never needed it before. Along with the loft renovation, there was his restaurant habit, his girlish love of a good shopping spree, his mom’s mortgage, her car, and her medical. Also the tax hit that he had had no idea that high earners took.
Thank the Lord, then, for James Straw and the money that the man shed like rain off a roof. How strange and wonderful it must be to possess that kind of wealth, thought Mark, emptying a hot thin broth of himself into the toilet. Straw’s wealth was the kind that grows like mold by the strange biosis of finance capitalism. The London flat belonged to Straw or to one of his companies or corporations, but the man probably didn’t know where it was. He’d lent it to Mark as casually as someone might lend a neighbor a flashlight from a kitchen drawer; Straw had poked a bony finger at his intercom and hollered at it: “Have Nils arrange for Mark to take one of the London flats.”
This whole beautiful mess, actually, was because of Straw.
“Motivation in an Unjust World” was published on Mark’s friend’s blog, way back when that sort of thing was avant-garde. The essay spread swiftly; its dissemination was now cited as an early example of viralism. Some wag called him the American Camus, because “Motivation” was high-minded yet populist; abstract but instructive. Another said he was the first public intellectual sprung from the Internet. The mainstream outlets, not wishing to be left behind by the blog thing, said he was the voice of Generati
on X at a time when that generation was putting aside its childish things.
Mark enjoyed it immensely. He gave interviews; was referenced by Letterman; addressed a graduating class. His employer, discovering that one of the in-house writers had become an Internet sensation, gave him a fat raise. But Mark knew that the attention would pass; he hoped only that he could write something that good again.
Then one morning his phone rang and a female voice said, “Please hold for Mr. Straw.” Straw came on and invited Mark to drop by, and within an hour, a black car was at his door, and he was whooshed to an unmarked part of Logan Airport, and then he was aloft, ensconced in leather and walnut. Two pilots and a cabin attendant and however much jet fuel it takes to cross the country so that he, Mark Deveraux, could be same-day-delivered to James Straw, founder of SineCo, the digital-search-and-storage conglomerate.
Then Mark was driven to a downtown arena, and led up through endless corridors and into Straw’s owner’s box. Straw thanked Mark for coming by, as if the Gulfstream V were a crosstown bus. Silent attendants delivered crab, cognac, profiteroles, cigars. Straw’s basketball team, the Seattle Search, was soundly beaten that night by the visiting Oakland Tribe; fans began leaking out of the stadium in the middle of the fourth quarter, their big foam cursor-shaped fingers pointed sadly at the floor. Only after the game did Straw come to the point of his summons. He wanted Mark to adapt “Motivation in an Unjust World” into management philosophy; he wanted Mark’s ideas to guide his company. He outlined his vision for SineCo as a company with ten times its current clout and his plan for a global, integrated information-and-services-delivering platform that would replace the Internet and personal computers.
“What is the Internet, anyway?” Straw posed the question to himself. “It’s a TV and a telephone, is all it is, really.” He made a little meh gesture to indicate how underwhelmed he was by the Internet. “I could build something that would in fact change the world.”
Mark could not immediately see any connection between his essay and Straw’s business plan. The cigar was making him wobbly. But it was true that “Motivation” contained the idea that you had to start from scratch. And after a couple of hours and some very old scotch, Mark saw that maybe it wouldn’t be that hard to reshape his essay into something less abstract, something that could help people get results in their work lives, their personal lives, whatever. Straw had definitely found useful advice in there, and he was a potentate executive world-bender.
“Just think about it,” said Straw as the two of them left the arena via its carpeted concrete arteries. Then there was the car-jet-car trip home, and when Mark got out of the black car in front of his dumpy apartment in Somerville, he could have told you something was afoot, that some ray of reward had finally found him.
Indeed, it was only three days later Straw called again. “There’s someone I want you to meet!” he bellowed down the blower.
Mark met Marjorie Blinc in a deep-cushioned booth of a hotel restaurant. She was hot, forty-four-year-old hot, and was flanked by a pretty young assistant. Her pitch was succinct: Right now he was valuable, she said. It was still within his power to leverage this essay of his into something more.
Mark was flattered, but he was no idiot. “You mean within your power, right?” he said. Then he told her that what was good about the essay was that it was finished. “I said what I wanted to say. I don’t have anything else to say about that right now.”
At that, she seemed ready to get up and leave. She leaned back and appraised him. “I may have been wrong about you. From ‘Motivation’ and from what James said, I figured you for ambitious.”
Mark understood only now, a couple of years later, that he had been too easily handled in that plush booth; all it took was an eighty-dollar bottle and a woman saying, Come on, or are you chicken?
“Oh, I’m ambitious,” he’d said to Blinc then, and that was the pivot. Right there.
“So why would you pass up this chance to make an impact on the world?”
Within a week he had signed her dense contract. Blinc cut him a check large enough to make the years of working at jobs beneath him seem like Karate Kid training, training he hadn’t seen the point of but which was suddenly paying off. He imagined now would come the part where his powerful agent would phone him daily and ask did he have a new draft.
But that’s not what happened at all. Instead, a team of Conch editors took his work away from him and “shaped” it. They didn’t even require much input from him.
When Mark received his pages to proof, he saw that they had made it into the same stuff that had been offered by self-helpers since forever. The book said that if you wanted to change yourself, all you really needed to do was shout orders loudly down your brain stem. There was the ridiculous concept of consciousclusions, and there was something called “synaptic toning,” which appeared to be, more or less, self-administered cognitive-behavioral therapy. There were some allegedly never-before-revealed tricks for accessing your vast, untapped stores of time, will, and attention. You could find hidden hours in every day; hidden seconds in every minute.
Soon enough, he realized that “Motivation in an Unjust World” was not going to survive intact its conversion from essay to mass-market paperback, that its form would have to change from question to answer, because people don’t pay money for questions. He figured that this was between him and his sense of artistic integrity. And artistic integrity is a fine thing, but so is financial security. And so is a twenty-three-hundred-square-foot loft on Water Street.
He did object when he heard that they intended to give his book the inane title Bringing the Inside Out, but on that point also he was ignored into submission. It was only when he learned that the book would have a subtitle “suggested” by James Straw—now it was to be called Bringing the Inside Out: Toward a New Operating System—that Mark discovered SineCo owned something called the Conch Group.
But Blinc wasn’t kidding around; when the book came out, it was everywhere. She had first-rate news outlets running copy about Mark that she had written. She got him in Seventeen and Esquire and the Observer in one week, so that even if you had no intention of ever buying or reading his book, you probably knew who he was. And then Blinc leveraged that name recognition into more exposure, and on it went, for about six months, until it didn’t anymore, until he could see his little blip leaving the screen.
This second book could be Mark’s second chance. Or his third, or his ninth, or his millionth—what man could say how many he’d been given? But the dense, drunken drivel he’d found on the pad this morning—that wasn’t going to do it.
Mark felt a little less wretched when he finished in the bathroom. He showered and shaved. He did his sit-ups and push-ups—half the usual, because he thought he might puke.
He had to get a grip on this hangover before it chewed up his whole day. Do what’s right—right in front of you. That was one of the lines he used at the executive-optimization workshops he led.
Mark was one of Conch Shell Media’s featured speakers. The fame that his book had brought him left a sort of residue that made him valuable in that line of work. And he was good at it. He had the gift. Maybe something from his father, who at birthday parties had been known to hold a den or patio in thrall, the children and the adults rapt, with his charm and tricks and eyebrows. Blinc had given Mark a message shaper and a room coach and voice teacher. He took all they had to give in a few days. He was no retired software CEO trying to make extra money amusing Republicans over rubber chicken; he was Mark Deveraux, and he liked being in front of a room.
But his star seemed to be fading in this arena as well. Blinc still booked him, but he was definitely getting down-venued. A year ago, it was Abu Dhabi and Basel; now it was Cleveland and Leeds. Once, he had been paid thirty-five thousand dollars for an hour-long talk. Now it was five grand, sometimes ten. And it wasn’t just talking; he had to lead workshops or be on panels.
Mark drank his scalding coff
ee like he was slapping himself across the face; he coaxed down some of the worthy muesli. He was due at Straw’s office at four. He had the rest of the day to write. You could do this blindfolded, he told himself. You just need to crank out some really good stuff about Increasing Agency through Self-Investigation; about the Excellent Self that lives within all of us; the steely hero of our souls, etc.
He sat down. He opened his computer.
Okay. Ten Steps to Committed Living. Let’s see.
One: Quit Being Such a Scattered, Drunk Loser.
No. That was putting rather too fine a point on it.
The cursor blinked at him like a satellite.
Oh, he was longing again for Try Again Tomorrow, the book he wanted to write, the one he had meant to write. That book would be himself laid bare. But not the vain, lonely, hollow, fraud version of himself he had somehow ended up selling. The himself laid bare in Try Again Tomorrow would be the brave, witty, wise Mark, the one who had always been able to see the truth and describe it more cleverly than others; the one who had stepped up when his dad split and had always helped his mom around the house and who had seen her one really bad boyfriend for the nasty snake that he was and run him off, at some physical risk to himself.
But that wasn’t the kind of book he was contractually obligated to deliver inside of six weeks. Try Again Tomorrow would spill out at all its edges, ragged and bloody and loud. Ten Steps to Committed Living was a book that would need to pretend to be about taking risks and failing better and all that but would in fact have every edge sewn up tight and every doubt banished before the start.
Step One, he made himself type, Take Risks and Do Not Be Afraid of Failure. But then he didn’t know what to type next, because most of the risks he’d taken had led to dead ends, and he was terribly, viscerally afraid of the failure that loomed before him now.