“Mac the Knife!”
“Hi, Timothy. What’s up?”
“Just a great big gabfest up here in Geekopolis. Very strange place, man. It’s like a bunch of writers and DPs and grips took over the world. Is your smarter half around?”
“Lizzie?”
“Yeah, Harold has something he wants to run past her. A question on some streaming bandwidth thingamajig. If she wouldn’t mind. Before Harold and Bill G. talk this afternoon.”
“No. No, she’s—she’s at the event, the reception. For my mother. Harold wants to speak to Lizzie?”
“Just a quick hey-ho, ninety seconds—before four our time, six yours. Probably easiest to have her call my Iridium number. Okay? Thanks, Mackinac. Adiós.”
Mose has never called George for a quick hey-ho. He evidently thinks he can use Lizzie as some kind of free computer consultant just because he happens to be in business with her husband. Presumptuous bastard.
George considers calling Emily. In case she’s had any second thoughts about Real Time, or about back-end ownership. He should be abreast of any fresh tremors in the deal force field before Lizzie calls Harold back and sends the energies rippling off along some new vector.
He’s about to dial, but there’s a voice coming from the phone.
“—and, Faith? After I talk to Barry, I want you to get me Ng at her studio.”
George holds his breath. It’s Featherstone, speaking to one of his Los Angeles secretaries. They’re still patched through to George’s phone.
“No, she isn’t,” Featherstone says to someone else in the room with him. “I told him to have her ring us back after the service.”
George is “him,” and Lizzie is “her”; Featherstone must be with Mose. Can anyone tell he’s listening? Does a switchboard diode in L.A. flash a warning? Will he leave some kind of Caller ID fingerprint? But he stays on, guilty and a little frightened by what he might hear and too thrilled not to listen, the mouthpiece now at his forehead. (He hasn’t planned to eavesdrop. It’s serendipity.) Featherstone’s next call is ringing through.
“Hello?”
“Gooseberry! It’s Timothy Featherstone.”
“We’re not really calling the show Night of the Living Dead, Timothy. I don’t know how the putz at the Times got that, but it was just an internal joke—”
George recognizes the voice of Barry Stengel, the president of MBC News.
“I know, I know,” Featherstone says, “and on Five-Nine we thought it was pretty funny.” (One morning last winter, after some B-list celebrity’s murder by her children’s nanny dominated news coverage for half a week, George cracked to Featherstone, You ought to do a whole weekly prime-time show—nothing but the deaths and funerals of famous people. The obit series, which will also cover the illnesses and recoveries of celebrities, is now in preproduction, scheduled to go on the air next month.)
“Speaking of the obit show, Barry,” Featherstone says, “I think we may have figured out a way to get you all the staff you need for it. Shifting some heads around.”
“From where?” Stengel asks. “You know we don’t have bodies to spare in News. And we cannot use infotainment jokers on a real news program. Those banana-brains at Freaky, or from that game show—”
“One Heck of a Week.”
“Those people are not journalists. We’d be laughingstocks.”
“I’ll let you know. But Harold wants me to give you a heads-up right away about a show we’ve got going. It’s very edge-of-the-envelope. And we don’t want you to hear about it from some reporter.”
“I think I already have. Is this the fake news show George Mactier’s trying to sell you? Because if what I hear is true, then we’ve got a problem.”
Until this instant, George has felt, at worst, neutral toward Stengel, even inclined to like him. The pernicious fucker.
“Whoa! Hold on, Stingo.”
“I told the nigger he be sipping dialysis fluid,” shouts an old black woman coming through the glass door twenty feet from George to a young black woman following her. “But he say, ‘Hey! Cocktail’s a cocktail’!”
“Shiiiit!” the younger woman screams happily.
The women spot George and freeze.
“Barry?” he hears Featherstone saying on the phone, “what the hell is—” George punches the power button.
“My mother died,” he says to the women, who stare at the one-handed white stranger in the blue Brioni suit holding a cellular phone.
“Well, this is the shelter, you know,” the old woman finally says to him. “The women’s shelter?”
“Ah,” George says. “I’m here for my mother’s funeral.”
“Uh-huh,” the woman says.
George forces an awkward, cheerless smile, pockets his phone, and starts to leave. He feels like a jerk.
“Condolences,” the younger woman says.
“Thanks,” George says, turning back for a moment, blushing. “Thank you.”
The old woman is not, in fact, old. Doreen Wiggins graduated in the class of 1975 from Henry Wallace High School, a year behind George.
“Would you like some sangria, Dad?”
George smiles at his son, who he realizes has never before worn a necktie. “Yes, I will have some sangria, Sir, thanks.” George takes the plastic Dixie cup, pleased and amused by the outburst of etiquette.
George always loved coming to this room as a child, the smell of varnish and candles and (he realizes now) mildew, the fussy oak paneling and Tiffany lamps. It was for George an oasis of northeasternism, where men in cardigans smoked pipes and pronounced aunt “ahnt” instead of “ant.” One Sunday morning here, when he was eleven, the Sunday school class was divided randomly into teams for a four-way debate in front of all the parents. His big sister, Alice, was on the Christian side, and George, as the Buddhist team’s leader, humiliated her over the issue of transubstantiation.
“Hi,” Lizzie says. “That took a long time. What was the problem?”
“It was Featherstone, from Redmond. Harold Mose wants you to call him.” He sips some sangria, and instantly spits it back into his plastic Dixie cup. “What is this shit?”
“What? Why did he call? You’re dribbling, George. Sugar-free Hawaiian Punch and St. John’s wort. Why does Harold want to talk to me?”
“I guess he wants some advice about computers.” Maybe he wants you to fire his whole online staff personally.… Don’t. “Whatever it is, you’re supposed to call him back before six.”
“Huh.” Lizzie fights back a smile. “How odd.”
“Kind of sexist.”
“How do you mean?” Then, as George tries to work out what he does mean, Lizzie almost imperceptibly flicks her chin toward George’s right and says: “Cubby’s about to come over. He has a business idea he wants to run past you. I’m going to the bathroom. Watch the kids.” Cubby Koplowitz is Alice’s second husband, a man brimming with ideas. Cubby owns two big arts-and-crafts-and-collectibles stores, Cubby’s Holes. At his own wedding nine years ago, he asked George if Nightline might do a story about To Hell ‘n’ Back Booby Babies, his line of humanoid plush toys. The packaging calls them “fuzzy li’l devils who escaped Satan and now need your love!” To Hell ‘n’ Back Booby Babies were advertised on the Winter Channel and became a hit in the upper Midwest. When Beanie Babies appeared two years later, George and Lizzie decided that Cubby did indeed possess some kind of awful genius. Alice said last fall that they sold To Hell ‘n’ Back Booby Babies to some big company that was going to manufacture them offshore for a national relaunch this year, and George dreads that he’s about to be begged for help with a fresh round of motorized plush toy promotion.
“Harold Mose wants your advice. Cubby Koplowitz wants my advice.”
“George,” Cubby says, grabbing his brother-in-law with both arms, beard pressing George’s cheek, hugging harder, shaking him. “Geoooorrrge.” Heterosexual men have been bear-hugging heterosexual male acquaintances for a quarter century, but Ge
orge still can’t do it gracefully. George’s unhugginess, he knows, is essentially why he was an unconvincing hippie in the early seventies, his three years of long hair, intensive drug use, and Fabian socialism notwithstanding.
“Hi, Cubby.”
Cubby’s shirt cuffs are unbuttoned and rolled with his jacket sleeves up past his wrists. He’s wearing an M. C. Escher necktie, and his argyle V-neck sweater vest is tucked into his Dockers.
“I’m sorry you guys can’t stay over. We’d love to have the twins and your little ones interact.”
“No, I know, so would we, Cubby. But Lizzie really needs to get back.” They’re booked on a nine o’clock return flight. The desire to avoid a dinner with his sister and brother-in-law and their children is unspoken.
“I know you guys are crazy busy. Did Lizzie happen to mention Families Together Forever?”
George, figuring Families Together Forever is some religious group, smiles and shakes his head gently. Cubby was a Scientologist in the seventies. (In fact, he claimed to have invented a crucial technical innovation for the Scientologists’ “E-meter,” the device the church uses to measure adherents’ progress toward enlightenment. But his lawsuit against Scientology in the late eighties—in which he named John Travolta and Tom Cruise as codefendants—was dismissed.)
“Okay. Final resting locations. A totally fragmented, totally localized business, right? No economies of scale. No national marketing. And just no darned fun. Right? Okay, we acquire parcels of a hundred acres or more. That is, the franchisees acquire the acreage, mall-adjacent, which gives you visibility, which gives you convenience, which makes it easy and natural to visit Mom or Granddad frequently. Families. Together. Forever.” Cubby quickly looks around the room, nodding and making a sort of papal-blessing gesture with his hands.
“Huh.” George has no idea what Cubby is talking about.
“Right? You have a water feature, and a café facility—indoor-outdoor depending on season and climatic zone. You have a putting green, maybe even minigolf, we’re not sure—but you definitely use the grass motif, make it part of life. Tasteful minigolf, with traditional structures. Everything tasteful. The point is, we turn the cemetery experience into a park experience.”
“You’re starting a cemetery?”
“The business concept is cemeterial, but it’s really so much more than that, George. It’s location-based entertainment that’s nature-themed, spirit-themed, love-themed. And with a major personal video component. That’s my question for you, George.”
“What is?”
“Our memorial marker is a video concept. We’re developing a weatherproof monitor, polymer casing, approximate shape and size of a conventional headstone. Right? So instead of just a chunk of granite—‘Edith Hope Cranston Mactier, born 1918, died 2000, RIP,’ end of story—we’d have a loop of beautiful video scenes of your mom in life, dissolving, fading in, fading out—well, you know, George, better than I do, the show business possibilities. It’s mass customization. Right?”
In fact, George’s mother was cremated the night before. There will be no grave, no stone. “Every gravestone in the cemetery is a TV set?”
Cubby, nodding, gets to his point. “And what we need is a world-class anchor.”
“An anchor?” George is fascinated. He knows he ought to be appalled, and a year ago, before they sold NARCS to MBC, before he was running a business, when he was a journalist, he might have been. Journalists appall easily, for all their supposed impassivity.
“A host. Someone with real brand equity—serious, prestigious, likable, loving, caring. Someone who can be the Families Together Forever Colonel Sanders, okay? Billy Graham without the religious baggage. Who we’d use in the marketing, but also integrate into every single headstone video package. He’d welcome the visitor, and segue into scenes of the loved one.”
Lizzie has returned, which lets George relax.
“You are one brilliant man, Cubby Koplowitz,” he says, meaning it, but also, since Lizzie is back, being a little arch. Sincerity plus irony simultaneously equals … what? Nuance. Cosmopolitanism. Weaseliness. Cosmopolitan weaseliness.
“Do you think,” Cubby asks, “that you could put me together with your boys Phil Donahue and Bill Moyers? They’re both on our very short list for spokespeople. You’d be doing them a favor, George. I mean, when the IPO goes—look out, ladies! Speaking of which, I’d love to talk to your Wall Street friend Benjy Gold about possibly getting involved. He’s into start-ups, isn’t he? Venture capital kinds of … ventures?”
Lizzie feels sorry for George, and for Cubby. George has met Donahue twice, and talked once with Moyers, sixteen years ago about the PBS Central America show.
“I don’t know, Cubby. I could mention it to Bennett. But I don’t really know Donahue or Moyers. I can find out for you who their agents are.…”
“And I can use your name?”
“Well … I guess, sure. Okay.”
“Okay, super!” Cubby hugs George again. “Super. Now don’t sneak out of here without telling your brother-in-law goodbye. Bye-bye, Lizzie.”
George and Lizzie glance at each other, happy to be married, happy to live elsewhere, ready to leave.
“Hello, George Mactier.”
He turns. “Jodie Eliason.” He hasn’t seen her in twenty-five years, not since the disastrous Thanksgiving weekend she spent with him in his freshman room at Wesleyan, after taking the bus fourteen hundred miles from St. Paul. He leans in to kiss both cheeks, which startles Jodie, as it would most Minnesotans.
“I did love your mom a lot,” Jodie tells George, sandwiching his hand between hers. Releasing George, she turns to Lizzie, extending her right hand. “Hi. You must be Elizabeth. I’m Jodie Eliason Taft.” A skinny, pale teenage girl in tattered tights and a short denim skirt, with very short, very black hair and one blue eyebrow, lurks nearby. “And this,” Jodie says, “is my daughter Fanny.”
“Hi,” Fanny says, her eyes fixing on Lizzie. “Good to meet you.” Fanny looks uncannily like Jodie did as a teenager, except cool and angry, more like George wished Jodie had looked in 1973.
“Well, I just wanted to, like, stop by and say a quick hi,” Jodie says. “NARCS is just the best, by the way.” Not great, not her favorite on Saturday night, not the best new hour-long dramatic series in several seasons, but just “the best.” She still talks like she did in tenth grade, when she told George that “Thoreau is just the best.”
“Thanks a lot for coming. How’s …”
“Billy? We split up in ’97.”
“Ah,” George says, recalling the time Billy Taft slugged him in the face, without warning and for no apparent reason, at a church dance in the seventh grade.
“There’s a bug in Y2KRx,” Fanny abruptly announces to Lizzie. “It doesn’t recognize January first, 2001, at all. At least not running on Pentium III it doesn’t.”
Lizzie is dumbstruck. Jodie shakes her head, putting on a who-can-understand-these-kids-today smile. “Fanny is our computer genius. Loves the computers and the software and whatnot. When I told her I knew you, kind of, she was mighty impressed, let me tell you.”
God, she’s middle-aged, George thinks. Outside big cities, people seem to age faster, become fatter and balder sooner, even though they also tend to dress and talk and eat like adolescents at thirty and forty and fifty. They’re teenagers with mortgages and multiple marriages and forty extra pounds.
Fanny asks Lizzie, “Um … when does Range Daze ship?”
“You don’t work for Microsoft, do you?” Lizzie says, quietly thrilled by this encounter with a bona fide fan—her first fan, Fanny.
Shaking her head quickly and looking away, Fanny smiles despite herself, then giggles.
“End of the year, I hope,” Lizzie says. “You know, the bug in Yack-ety-rex was in the beta version only. We fixed it before it shipped.”
“Cool,” Fanny says, “but I have a question? About Range Daze?” Fanny asks. “In terms of multiplayer functi
onality? Are you going to optimize for copper wire fifty-six-six or SDL or cable modem or what?”
“We’re completely agnostic,” Lizzie says, oblivious to where she is.
Jodie, grinning, frowning, and shaking her head, turns to George and asks, “Do you understand all this crazy stuff, George? Or are you in the wrong generation, like me?”
He shrugs, just like his father used to do when he didn’t want to answer a question, and starts jollying his wife away. Lizzie notices that Fanny is wearing a ridged, purple plastic ankle bracelet a half inch wide. It looks cool, she thinks, and wonders if she could get away with wearing a plastic ankle bracelet. Probably not, she decides, at least not in New York.
Alice has just left, but Lizzie hears George still upstairs, wandering, inspecting. Max is in the living room watching a forty-year-old episode of The Twilight Zone in which a pioneer travels eighty years forward through time in a Conestoga, to 1960, to get medicine for his sick child back in the nineteenth century. Louisa has refused to watch (“Mom! Grandma has only a white-and-black TV! The commercials are white-and-black, too!”), even though Max explained to her that the show itself would be black-and-white on the TV at home, too. She finally got bored using Edith Hope’s Clapper to turn lamps on and off, and couldn’t understand the jokes in the old Reader’s Digests, so she consented to go with Aunt Alice to play with the twins. Sarah, wearing a T-shirt Lizzie has never seen (FORGET THE ALAMO. STOP THE WAR.), is in the kitchen, eating prepeeled baby carrots out of the bag, dipping them into a jar of Cheez Whiz the size of a beach bucket, and giggling at her mother.
“It wasn’t jewelry, Mom, it was a device. That’s so funny you thought it was jewelry. It’s so some police guy knows where she is all the time. Because of getting arrested for computer hacking. An arf ID, she said it was.”
“RFID,” Lizzie says. “A radio-frequency ID tag. We’ve fooled around with them at the office for the time-travel game.”
“Whatever. I think it’s kind of sick. She has to wear it for nine more months. I feel sorry for her.” Sarah sucks and licks off the synthetic cheese, orange on orange, and dips the same wet, uneaten carrot back in for more. Her mother frowns and starts to open her mouth, but then lets it go; it’s been a long day, and anyway, no one else is going to be eating Edith Hope’s Cheez Whiz.
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