Boomsday

by Christopher Buckley

  “A . . .what, Massimo?”

  “A bull of excommunication, against any American Catholic who supports such a bill. Or who even votes for any politician who supports such a bill.”

  “Excommunication. You mean, you get tossed out of the church?”

  “Yes. Forbidden from sacraments. Like I say, it’s very old-fashioned. To me, honestly, Geedeon, I think it’s too much. But they are very powerful, these cardinals. And I fear the holy father will listen to them. What will be the reaction of America in such an event?”

  Gideon drew a deep breath. It was exhilarating to hear this news, and from the lips of someone intimately familiar with the innermost thinking of Rome, but—great God . . .a papal bull? Didn’t that go out with the Borgia popes?

  “Massimo,” he said gravely, “I’m most grateful and honored that you have shared this confidence with me. But I must tell you, I am not certain that that is the way to proceed here. I’m sure you know your flock better than I do, but Americans don’t cotton to the idea of—”

  “Cotton?”

  “Sorry. Southern expression. Americans don’t like being told what to do by a—you’ll forgive me—foreigner.”

  Monsignor Montefeltro said, “Geedeon. The pope is not ‘foreign.’ He is the universal church.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand that. And I have only the highest respect. I’m only saying that if the pope issues some bull—and by the way, ‘bull’ is a pretty pungent term here; indeed, I fear for the puns that will result—but if the pope goes issuing bulls, it could upset things quite a bit.”

  “I would say, from the perspective of Rome, things are already very upset in America, Geedeon. But I understand what you are saying, and I will of course relay this to Rome.”

  “This Transitioning is going to be deader than a run-over raccoon. I’ll see to that. You tell your cardinals that Cardinal Gideon is on the case.” He winked. “Delicious wine, by the way.”

  “There is a case of it in your car.” Monsignor Montefeltro smiled.

  “Your generosity leaves me speechless.”

  Chapter 23

  What now? Frank Cohane thought, seeing his daughter’s name pop up on his Google news alert page yet again. She was the Terminator. He read aloud.

  Appointed to the Transitioning commission. For chrissakes. Her and her senator boyfriend Jepperson.

  In due course, Bucky Trumble called to give him a heads-up about the commission. He told Frank there was more to it than met the eye. He wouldn’t say any more, only that they’d put Gideon Payne on it, as a “firewall.” He hinted that they’d tricked Jepperson into serving on it so as to reduce his visibility as Mr. Transitioning Champion.

  Frank had complex views about Gideon Payne. Deep down, he couldn’t stand the man. He had no taste for southern Bible-thumpers. This one was always in the news, yammering about building some grotesque monument to fetuses—fetuses!—on the Mall in Washington or showing up at the bedside of people who’d been declared brain-dead twenty years ago, with a media posse in tow, calling down thunder and federal intervention.

  Which made it all the more strange that Frank Cohane found himself in business with Gideon Payne. The (highly confidential) negotiation with Elderheaven had gone through. Gideon’s string of old folks’ homes were RIP-ware’s first client. Every prospective resident at Elderheaven was required to submit to the RIP-ware questionnaire (DNA, family history, lifestyle). Elderheaven was quietly turning away anyone for whom RIP-ware was predicting longevity and accepting the ones who had only a few years left, while pocketing their entire life savings. In the six months since Elderheaven had begun using RIP-ware in its applications process, the mortality rate of Elderheaven had shot up 37 percent. Profits were up 50 percent!

  Frank, who was as canny a businessman as he was an engineer, had insisted on a 10 percent share of Elderheaven profits. Everyone was making a killing.

  For this reason, Frank Cohane kept his personal feelings about Gideon Payne to himself. As for Gideon, it had come as a bit of a shock to him when he realized that RIP-ware’s owner was the father of his archenemy, Cassandra Devine. But he was greatly mollified by Frank’s denunciation of her as morally repellent. He told Frank, “I’m sure she takes after her mother.”

  Frank had watched the famous episode of Greet the Press where Cass told Gideon she wasn’t about to be lectured by someone who’d run his own mother off a cliff. He’d had a good laugh at that. A scrapper, his little girl. He reflected, with mixed emotions, that he had no doubt played a role in that aspect of her development.

  Now he found himself thinking back to the call a few weeks ago from Bucky Trumble, asking him to denounce her publicly: The president would very much appreciate it if . . .Hell of a thing to ask a father to do.

  The White House drafted his talking points. Morally repellent? Jeez, Bucky, that’s a bit . . .harsh, isn’t it? Bucky said, Look, Frank, if you’re going to do it, do it. He gave in. But Frank had taped Bucky’s phone call. He taped all his calls. In life as in engineering, Frank Cohane believed in zero tolerance.

  A week later, his security people reported a hack into Applied Predictive Actuarial Technologies’ phone system. The weird part was that they’d traced it to a server in Winchester, Virginia, maintained by an obscure division of the U.S. Treasury Department. Why was the government suddenly interested in his company’s phone calls? Then he thought: Is it possible Bucky Trumble has something to do with it? Did he suspect that Frank had taped their phone call? Was he trying to send Frank a warning?

  Concentrate, Frank told himself. RIP-ware. RIP-ware. RIP-ware. It’s going to make you one of the richest people on the planet.

  His cell phone rang. The caller ID said: LISA. He hesitated before answering.

  “Yeah, Leese?” he said, trying to sound hurried so as to keep the conversation short. “What? . . .When? . . .Jesus, Lisa. What does he think college is? A four-year-long wet T-shirt contest, for chrissake? I told you it was crazy to send him to Yale. He couldn’t get into . . .I’m not being hard on him. I’m being realistic. I haven’t said one goddamn word to him. Not that he’d understand if I did. You’re right I’m pissed off. Cost me ten million dollars to get that nitwit into . . .I didn’t mean it that way. . ..?Lisa . . .Lisa . . .will you . . .Well, fuck you, too!” Frank Cohane hurled the cell phone across his office.

  In the distance, a sea lion surfeited on salmon bellowed.

  Randy and Cass were in bed. For all his flaws, it was good to be back there with him. Dear Randy. He was so obvious, but in men it can be a kind of saving grace. Transparency confers absolution.

  Cass lay next to him, head nestled against his shoulder, fingers idly twirling a strand of his sandy-colored hair. She was happy and at peace. She’d missed this more than she cared to admit.

  Randy said, “I heard some more from my guy Speck.” Odd choice of pillow talk, she thought.

  “Um?”

  “So guess who flunked out of Yale?”

  “George W. Bush?” she said, not terribly interested.

  “Your stepbrother. What’s-’is-name. Byrd. Boyd.”

  Cass wasn’t sure how to process the information. “I never thought of him as my stepbrother. I’ve never even met him.”

  “Quite the party animal, it would seem.”

  She felt a twinge of indecent curiosity. “Randy, why would your guy Speck be investigating my stepbrother?”

  “You know how it is. You point these guys in a direction and they keep going. They don’t stop. You do want to keep track of all the pieces.”

  “Why is Boyd a piece?”

  “Well,” Randy said, “your father more or less declared war on you. Calling you morally repellent. Know thy enemy, I always say. The Jepperson family motto is, ‘Don’t be caught with your pants down.’ Goes back to Baron Guy de Jepperson. Fourteenth century. Or was it thirteenth?”

  “I’m not sure I think of some seventeen-year-old college kid as my ‘enemy.’”

  “Eighteen
. And he’s an ex–college kid. His mother—your stepmother—now she’s a piece of work, I hear.”

  “Do we have to talk about this now?”

  “Former tennis pro,” Randy said. “What is it about tennis pros? You know the type.”

  “Not really,” Cass said, rolling over and staring up at the ceiling. “I never spent any time at country clubs. So, tell me, what kind of moral deficiency is implicit in the job description for ‘tennis pro’? Shoplifting? Serial murder? Terrorism?”

  “They’re rather keen at the networking. She’ll make a dandy ambassador’s wife.”

  Cass flumped a pillow and sat up. “You’re awfully informed about all this.”

  “It’s my business.”

  “Why is it your business?”

  “Darling girl. I’m trying to protect you. Don’t you want to be protected?”

  “Are you serious? In this relationship, who protects whom?”

  Randy shrugged. “Knowledge is power. These people are out to get you.”

  “Are you familiar with the word buzz kill?”

  “Military term?”

  “No, sweetheart. It’s what people my age say after they’ve made love to someone and they’re lying in their arms thinking soft, wonderful, dreamy, lilac-scented thoughts, and suddenly their lover announces that his private investigator and personal executioner has learned that some stepbrother they’ve never met and don’t even care to know has been kicked out of a college that they got into once without their asshole father donating ten million dollars to it and that the evil stepmother now wants the asshole dad to give huge amounts of money to a corrupt U.S. president so that she can become an ambassador’s wife. And suddenly she’s gone from warm and fuzzy to cold and trembling. Buzz kill. It’s in the dictionary, under B. You could look it up.”

  “Good word.” He rolled toward her. “Can we . . .”

  “What?”

  “Go back to the buzz?”

  “Yes,” Cass said, rolling back to him, “I like that part.”

  The first meeting of the Commission on Transitioning and Tax Alleviation was gaveled to order.

  There were several dozen commissioners, roughly the number required to satisfy every special interest group clamoring to have “input” into the question of whether Americans should be allowed to kill themselves in return for a tax break.

  ABBA was of course represented, as were various other Boomer advocate groups: the National Organization of Baby Boomers (NOBB); the Association for the Economic Enhancement of Persons Born Between 1946 and 1964 (AEEPBB46–64, one of the more unwieldy lobby acronyms, but still not an organization to be trifled with). Also present were representatives of the Mortuary Association of North America (MANA); the National Association of Lethal Injectionists (NALI); the Reverend Gideon Payne of SPERM; the Association of Floridian Assisted Living Facilities (AFALF); the American Association of Actuaries; the Botox Institute; the Organ Transplanters Network of North America (ONTNA); the National American Body Part Exchange Network (NABPEN); the American Golf Cart Manufacturers Association, which had formed a kind of alliance with the Segway Owners of America (also present); the American Association of Expensive Estate Attorneys; the Canadian Association of Providers of Cheap but Not Altogether Reliable Pharmaceuticals, an increasingly powerful voice in Washington, despite being based in Ottawa; Senator Randolph K. Jepperson; and Ms. Cassandra Devine, representing the eponymous CASSANDRA. The chairman had taken care to seat her at the opposite end of the semicircular dais from Gideon Payne.

  “Mr. Chairman,” Gideon said as soon as Randy had gaveled the first meeting to order, “may I be recognized?”

  “Yes, Reverend Payne.”

  “I move that we commence our deliberations with a prayer.”

  “Reverend Payne,” said the chair, “I’m sure that we are all in our own ways prayerful that we will conduct our hearing in a—”

  “That being the case, then may I proceed to ask Almighty God’s blessing upon our work?”

  Cass raised her hand. “Mr. Chairman?”

  “Yes, Ms. Devine?”

  “I second the motion.”

  “You do?” There were puzzled looks all around.

  “Yes. If the gentleman from SPERM is in need of spiritual assistance, who are we to deny it to him? If I’d done the things he’s done, I’d certainly want the Almighty’s forgiveness—”

  “Mr. Chairman!” Gideon, now the color of a canned Harvard beet, shouted, “I did not come here to be insulted by someone who advocates mass murdering to solve a budgetary problem!”

  The chair tapped his gavel wearily. “Reverend Payne, Ms. Devine. Please. We have a great deal to do.”

  “I demand an apology,” Gideon said.

  “I apologize,” Cassandra said. “It was insensitive of me to bring up Mr. Payne’s past in such an insensitive manner.”

  “Mr. Chairman! I will not be insulted!”

  Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. TAP.

  “Please.”

  SPARKS FLY AT OPENING SESSION

  OF TRANSITION COMMISSION HEARING

  Frank Cohane was in no good mood. His private jet couldn’t land at Tweed–New Haven Airport because the runway wasn’t long enough, so his pilot had to put down in Bridgeport, half an hour from Yale. With the upcoming roll-out of RIP-ware, he had a thousand better things to do. Make that a thousand and one.

  This was, needless to say, Lisa’s idea. Idea? More of an order. Go out there and tell them if they don’t take Boyd back, you’re taking your ten million dollars back!

  Frank Cohane, billionaire, wizard of technology, hotshot entrepreneur, yachtsman, friend of and adviser to the president of the United States, future secretary of the United States Treasury, did not enjoy being given commands by a former tennis pro, no matter how good the sex was.

  Why had he remarried? What possessed him? If he’d only waited a little longer, his dick would no longer have been in charge.

  The president of Yale greeted Frank in his office in Woodbridge Hall. He was a mild, pleasant man, an economist by training, amiable, polished, at ease in any situation. When two men at the top of their various professions meet, they don’t waste each other’s time inquiring about the other’s golf handicap.

  “Frank,” the president said, “this isn’t a question of blame. In the end, it probably wasn’t fair to Boyd to expect that he would—that it would work out for him here. He’d probably be much better off—much happier—at some other college.”

  Frank nodded. “He’d be happier smoking marijuana twenty-four hours a day, playing video games, and downloading porn. But that’s not why I’m here.”

  The president frowned. “Don’t sell him short. He’s a good kid. I think he’s just overwhelmed here.”

  “How much?”

  “How much . . .what, Frank?”

  “To reenroll him.”

  “I don’t think that’s”—the president sighed—“the right approach.”

  “Another ten. Done?”

  The president stared, mouth open.

  “Fifteen, then,” Frank said. He rose before the president could let out so much as a croak and gave him a California grin. He thrust out his hand. “It’ll be wired to you by noon. Great to see you. Keep up the terrific work. I like your office. Fabulous ceilings.” And with that he was out the door, leaving the president of Yale speechless and, really, helpless.

  Frank wanted to get back to the plane and wheels up without spending another minute there. He felt as though he had just pulled off some sort of crime and was eager to flee. But he knew Lisa would demand to know if he’d seen Boyd, and there would be a scene if he hadn’t. So he made his way to Boyd’s room in Jonathan Edwards College, one of the prettier residential colleges at Yale. He found Boyd putting things into cardboard boxes.

  “You can put that stuff back,” Frank said. “You’re reenrolled.”

  Boyd gave him a perplexed look. “But they—”

  “It’s done. You’re back in.�
��

  Boyd gave no indication as to whether this was good news to him. But then he was not a very expressive young man.

  “Boyd . . .,” Frank said, noticing a colorful tubular plastic object on the table, with a mouthpiece at one end and a bowlful of dark, impacted ash on the other. The center of the vessel contained a quantity of liquid that might have been—he guessed—crème de menthe, through which several hundred cubic feet of smoke had been filtered. “What is that?”

  “Science project?”

  “Really. Uh-huh. What is the name of the course that you’re doing this . . .project for?”

  “Fluid dynamics?”

  “Fluid dynamics. Terrific. So this would be to measure the effects of, say, Prandtl-Glauert condensation?”

  “Right,” Boyd said. “Definitely.”

  “Well, it’s wonderful that you’re buckling down. Boyd . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Nothing,” Frank said. “Call your mother, would you? Just tell her we had a good talk. Would you do that for me?”

  “Cool. No problemo.”

  “Do you need money?”

  “Yeah,” Boyd said, brightening. “Sure.”

  Frank stripped five hundred-dollar bills off his billfold.

  “Hey, thanks, Frank.”

  “Good to see you, Boyd.”

  Twenty-five million dollars. Twenty-five million five hundred dollars. But look at how seriously he was applying himself to . . .fluid dynamics. Learning all about Prandtl-Glauert condensation. What a wonderful addition he would someday make to the Cohane Aviation Division.

  Chapter 24

  The national situation continued to decline: plunging stock market, soaring prices, inflation running at 18 percent. This last factor, combined with six consecutive quarters of negative growth, officially signaled stagflation. The U.S. Treasury was furiously printing dollars, while the dollar itself had lost 40 percent of its value over the last six months. The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, had announced yet another hike in the prime rate, to 14 percent. Amid this calamitous economic news, the Congress adamantly—some said magnificently—refused to cut federal spending, with the result that the year’s deficit was now projected at $1.1 trillion.