Fire in the Firefly

by Scott Gardiner

  The reporter shifts to probe a little deeper. “You of all people should be aware of how social media can impact an ad campaign.” She smiles showing how she can be ingratiating too. “Wasn’t it the amazing response you got for your fashion models with fishing lures that turned Ripreeler into a household name and launched your own brand too, incidentally? It’s still out there on YouTube.”

  Roebuck recognizes a rhetorical question when one comes whipping at his solar plexus; he nods modestly.

  “People study it in business school,” she says.

  Roebuck affects a bashful laugh. “You make it sound like ancient history.”

  “Yes! Now you’ve put your finger on exactly what this story’s about! How fast everything is getting old. Communication is evolving at lightning speed. How do you keep up?”

  The short answer, in all honesty, is that he doesn’t. But even in the state he’s in today, he is not about to fess up to that. It is a fact—a well-disguised fact, he hopes, but a fact nonetheless—that Roebuck is not the biggest fan of a digitized universe. It has always been the message, for him, not the medium, that’s at the heart of everything. He has not the slightest doubt that social media will only increase in significance, but so much of it annoys him. And all the extra back end stuff is just so … tedious. Roebuck has yet to see a banner ad that doesn’t make him think it was written by someone squeezing zits.

  “Look,” he says. “Here’s what I’m about to tell you …”

  This is good—or at least not bad—being forced like this to think in clear straight lines. “We know already that the television market is fragmenting and that digital platforms are picking up the traffic. True. My agency will spend more this year than it did last year contracting out the digital components of our work to companies who have the expertise we lack. Also true. Next year, our spend is likely to be greater still and, yes, sure, that is damaging my bottom line. Some people go so far as to say there’s a revolution underway, that old-fashioned advertising is dying. Bullshit.”

  Roebuck pauses because stagecraft requires a pause at this nexus; he looks at the reporter who returns the gaze benignly. He clears his throat.

  “Absolutely, changes are coming. And yes I’m hearing footsteps. But anyone who tells you advertising is dying is an idiot. Media may change, but the message never does and the message is and always will be the same: Choose me. That doesn’t change. That never changes. What has changed, and what will make my job easier going forward, not harder, is that the chooser is more and more certain to be a woman …”

  Now she reacts. “There you go with your fem-centric thing. Your file is full of articles on that. I read them. But the story today is digital …”

  Roebuck holds up his hand. “Kindly remember that the word digital, in primary definition, means fingers. Digits are fingers.” He wiggles his own. “In my business, we’re all about stimulation, that’s our medium; yours, too,” he says, and then regrets the phrasing. He has no wish at all to make her think he’s flirting. “Look, people are still under the impression that The Internet is male. False. The Net—like everything else—has feminized. We describe it as a place for the exchange of information, as if information is cold, hard, masculine data. What’s mostly trafficked on the Net is emotion—precisely what I deal in.”Throughout the first part of their conversation, she has been jotting notes. Now the notebook rests open on her lap, pen immobile in the crease. Roebuck has always had good relations with the press. “Go on,” she says.

  “You mentioned Facebook. Facebook started out as way for frat boys to rate the girls at Harvard, if I’m not mistaken. Then it evolved into a place for adults to reconnect with people they wish they’d had sex with back in high school. But what it’s morphing into now—above all else—is a venue for people to emote endlessly about themselves. That’s information, absolutely. Billions and trillion of bites of it. But it’s internal information. It’s information about feelings.” Roebuck waggles his digits again. “Which fits it perfectly to my field of expertise. The future holds no fear for me.”

  “This is interesting.”

  Roebuck nods. He could keep this up all day. A phone goes off.

  He snatches up his mobile, but there’s no one there. The reporter is embarrassed. “I’m so sorry!” She’s blushing. “We must have the same ring tone.” She mutters something about editors texting in the middle of interviews and fumbles in her purse. “Excuse me. I have to take this.”

  And now Roebuck grasps that fortune has forgiven him again. What a terrible mistake, answering if the caller had been Lily—with a tape recorder running and a journalist taking notes. She has opened up her iPhone. Roebuck uses the pause to check his mail. The reporter is scribbling in her notebook with the phone tucked into her shoulder. Her attitude has altered, but Roebuck isn’t watching. He scans the queue and there, near the bottom, finds an unread item from Yasmin. It has come through on his normal account, not Hushmail.

  Congratulations Big Boy! You rock!

  Never too soon to start planning. Call ASAP.

  Roebuck can’t quite seem to take his eyes off his computer screen. He is aware that the reporter is speaking to him from the far side of his desk. “Mr. Roebuck?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Sorry about that. This is not the way we usually do things.” She looks like she’s expecting him to say something, but Roebuck isn’t with her. “… Only my editor is telling me to ask if you had any comment about Daniel Greenwood?”

  It’s not that Roebuck is being cautious. It isn’t that he’s reacting to a question from left field with well-considered hesitation. It’s just that Roebuck hasn’t taken in the question. “What?” he says, then corrects himself. “Sorry, I beg your pardon?” Politeness is the habit of a lifetime.

  “We’ve just picked up an item saying Daniel Greenwood has been named creative director of a start-up shop in Sydney.” She’s squinting again at her phone. “It’s a digital agency, apparently. There’s a video with moose, or lions, or something, that’s getting tons of hits.” She has paused again to scroll. “I’ve never heard of this outfit. But they are announcing that they’ve landed Drogonie Claude. That would be a sizable account. Daniel Greenwood is quoted as saying they’re launching a campaign that focuses on sound, whatever that means. He says it’s going to revolutionize the business. Do you have any comment? The story is datelined Australia.”

  Roebuck has no answer.

  “Any comment, Mr. Roebuck?”

  “Daniel is in Australia,” he says. Roebuck’s brain has framed this as a question, but a question of such limited significance it arises with the profile of a statement.

  “So you knew! I knew you had to know. So then, what about the video?”

  The same feeling of enhanced detachment informs him that if ever there was time for disconnection, that time was now. “I’m sorry,” Roebuck says, eyes still glued to his screen. “I’ve just received an urgent message. I regret to say we have to wind this up.”

  “Daniel Greenwood?”

  Roebuck has to think. This is what is meant by “information overload.” “No, he says. “Daniel’s in Australia.”

  Carol walks the reporter to the elevator. Roebuck, minutes later, departs the office too.

  Gama-Care Laboratories has remodelled since the last time he was in. The walls are now a harsh and brilliant white. With that subjacent part of his awareness still functioning below the surface churn of panic, Roebuck records the change as positive. He plunks his sample jar smartly on the countertop. His hands, he sees, are shaking.

  “I need this analyzed. Immediately.”

  “Two week,” replies the woman, eyes still focused on whatever she is busy with behind her ledge.

  It’s the same person from the first time he was here. Roebuck has come prepared for this. “No,” he says pushing his jar directly into her line of vision. “I need a f
ertility test. ASAP.” Producing this sample was harrowing and very nearly unsuccessful; even now, with that part of it behind him, Roebuck is appalled at the things he was forced to imagine in a men’s room two blocks down the road at Taco Bell.

  “Two week,” says the woman.

  “I can’t wait two weeks.”

  He has seen this done on television. Roebuck takes out his wallet and begins counting out hundred-dollar bills, placing them one by one on the countertop beside his jar of specious semen. At five bills, he stops. The problem is a lack of specificity beyond this point. The woman is looking up now, but has not blinked. Roebuck adds more notes. When he has counted out one thousand dollars, he stops again. This is all the bank machine would let him have. If he had considered this more carefully, he would have used a teller and withdrawn a larger sum, but Roebuck is running on terror and terror alone.

  “Okay then,” he says, nearly weeping, gathering his cash. The woman places her hand over his. That’s also how it happens on TV. She glances over her shoulder at the sliding window, nods, and lowers her voice. “Possible something day after tomorrow.” She passes him a slip of paper and a pen. “Please leave telephone number.”

  Roebuck has a terrible two days.

  Still not a word from Lily: no reply to his emails; no answer to his calls. On the way back from Gama-Care, he stops at her house but she isn’t home—either that or she’s not opening the door. Roebuck considers sneaking around back and peeking through a window, but figures he’s exposed enough as is.

  For want of a better option, he retreats to the office, closes his door, and Googles “failed vasectomy”—then spends an electrifying hour browsing a series of case histories documenting one post-procedure pregnancy after another. Roebuck quietly digests the significance of non-clearance and recanalization. He internalizes the conclusions of various experts who argue that two months and twenty ejaculations is sometimes insufficient; that some men require much longer for their sperm to reliably clear. Roebuck is on the brink of howling when he remembers that he has been cleared. He leaps from his desk, dives through his files until he tracks down the certificate from Gama-Care.

  There it is in black and white: Clear-0-sperm.

  But that still leaves the possibility that his severed tubes have reconnected. Roebuck is not exactly certain what spermatic granuloma is, but now he knows that the severed ends of his vas deferens, like lost lovers, are capable of finding each other again and that such recanalization is most likely to happen in the months immediately following the procedure. Which in his case would be exactly now. Images appear to him in sequence: the sweating doctor; the problem with that second tube, the left one; the appearance of the no-scalpel scalpel; that nurse’s interruption—Oh God, the evil bitch Nurse Helen! What if …?

  Roebuck is not aware that he is pacing until he realizes that someone is knocking on his door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Carol.”

  “Carol?” Yes, of course, Carol. “Come in.”

  “Is it true?”

  “No! What?”

  “About Daniel. Everybody’s talking.”

  “Oh.” Roebuck has lost track of Daniel Greenwood. “Daniel is in Australia.”

  “So it’s true! Do the clients know?”

  “Yes … the clients.” It registers also that his clients definitely do not know and that he has to find some way of spinning this before it’s out as common knowledge …

  “Artemis especially,” Carol says. “Daniel’s the face of the franchise as far as Artemis is concerned.”

  “I’ll take care of the clients. Carol, have you seen Lily?”

  “Lily? I don’t think Lily’s in today.”

  “When is she expected?”

  “You’d have to ask Daniel.”

  When he checks his mail, he finds nothing from Lily, but a new one from Yasmin. “Julius, call. Take this as a friendly warning.”

  Someone is at the door again. “Sorry,” Carol says, “Forgot to give you this.” She is holding out a purple post-it note. “Kramarich, Beatty, and Mastropietro called. I’m assuming that’s a law firm. They said you should get back to them at your earliest convenience.” Roebuck makes no move to take the note so she walks over to his desk and sticks it to his phone. “Everything okay?”

  “Totally fine.”

  There are indeed several unread messages from Kramarich, Beatty, and Mastropietro in Roebuck’s inbox. The cellphone in his pocket vibrates; he has it out and open before the second ring.

  “Hello! Hello! Lily?”

  “Who’s Lily?”

  “Oh. Yasmin. Hello. How are you today?”

  “Who’s Lily?”

  “Oh, you know, just a freelancer. What can I do for you, Yasmin?”

  “Excellent question, Julius. Why aren’t you answering my emails?”

  “To be honest, it’s been a hectic day.”

  “Are you dodging your responsibilities already?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Society has zero tolerance for deadbeat dads.”

  “Yasmin, I’m … I don’t understand …” He really doesn’t. Roebuck’s cognitive functions have congealed into a state of barely operational paralysis.

  “What’s there to understand? The stick turned pink; my gynecologist confirmed. I’m pregnant. Finally. I’m having your baby, Julius, and you have obligations …”

  “But … How …?”

  “You’ve been fucking me, that’s how.”

  “Well, yes but …”

  “No buts, Julius. Time to get your act together! There’s a lot you’ll need to tee up: school fees, college fund …”

  “School fees?”

  “If it’s a girl, it’s Havergal. For a boy I’m still considering UCC.”

  “Yasmin, my kids don’t even go to private school!”

  “This is your kid. And if your other ones don’t, it’s only because their mother is an idiot. Speaking of which, if you want, we can leave Anne out of this for the time being. You and I can decide things on our own. Or would you prefer she be brought in at this stage?”

  “No! I mean … Yes. I understand what you’re saying. But can’t this wait until …?”

  “Until what?”

  “Yasmin, I’m having a horrible day! If you’re telling me that you’re … Even if you are, I mean, it can only be … There’s still months and months …”

  “My lawyer advises me that the sooner we finalize support mechanisms, et cetera, the smoother this will go for all parties concerned. I’m anticipating a difficult pregnancy, Julius. I could be confined to bed.”

  “Your lawyer?”

  “You think you were going to fuck me without me speaking to my lawyer?”

  “I don’t believe this!”

  “Julius. Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s you who’s fucked.”

  “But I’m only supposed to be the donor !”

  “A little more than that. But anyway, it doesn’t matter. Even if you were just a regular donor, it wouldn’t matter. You are the father and that’s all the courts will care about. The law of the land puts the benefit of the child above all else; everyone knows that. There’s no wiggle room, Julius. If I’m confined to bed, I won’t be able to work, which means you’ll have to start payments immediately—afterward goes without saying. These are details that we need to iron out. I’m willing to be reasonable. But my lawyer can play hardball too, if that’s what you want. I’ve made an appointment for us with her tomorrow, by the way. You can bring Anne. Your call.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “You want us to talk to her now?”

  “No! No. It’s just that … really, tomorrow is a very bad day. What about next week?”

  “Like I said, Julius, if you want to go down that road …”

  “No! No, I don’
t! Yasmin! Please! Just give me a day or two. I’ll do whatever is … required. I promise. I just need …” Roebuck feels as if his head is about to burst and pieces of it fly out the window.

  “You can have until the day after tomorrow.”

  “What day is that?”

  “It’s the day after tomorrow, Julius. Consult your calendar.”

  “I mean, what time of day, the day after tomorrow?”

  “I’ll get back to you with that information.”

  “Can we possibly make it late afternoon?”

  “Julius!”

  “Jesus, Yasmin. I have meetings! Give me a break! Honestly. This is all so …”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’ll get used to it, Julius. I know you will. Everything’s going to work out. And I want you to know that there are things about you that I … like. Who knows, once we come to an understanding … It all depends on how sensible you are. I’ve always admired your centrality.”

  “Goodbye, Yasmin.”

  “Always a pleasure, Julius. See you soon.”

  A stretch of time passes. He isn’t sure how long. Roebuck, cradling his head in his hands, perceives that Carol is again in his presence with another oversized envelope. “You all right?”

  “Carol! How goes it?”

  “Fine. Are you okay?”

  “Just a little headache.”

  “You were looking for Lily. Speak of the devil, here she is.”

  “Lily!”

  Carol places the envelope on the corner of his desk. “This seems to be another piece of correspondence from those lawyers. Lily is in the lobby. She says to say she doesn’t have an appointment, but she’s hoping you can spare a minute.”

  Before he knows how it has happened, Roebuck’s feet have moved him to the lobby where he finds Lily standing primly, heels together, a small purse clutched in both hands pressed against her skirt, dressed like she’s interviewing for a position with the revenue department. “Thank you for seeing me.”