Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “Bone-jaw-no, sir! Welcome to the Venetian! Will you require your vehicle again this afternoon, seen-yaw-ray?” asks the smiling black giant in a red-striped gondolier’s shirt to whom he hands his car keys. He’s waiting, plastic gondolier-oar-shaped stylus in hand, to note George’s response on a little electronic device.

  He stares at him, smiling, momentarily speechless.

  “Oh my God!” screams a man somewhere nearby. “I don’t believe it! Hey! You came! I love you!” By the time George turns his head to see what kind of Vegas asshole is screeching like a cartoon character, Bennett Gould is upon him, grabbing and shaking him with both hands. The asshole is Ben, George’s pal for twenty years, as overexcited as ever. George feels happy for the first time in two days. “This is monumental!” Ben shouts. “This is fantastic! This is sublime! Where’s the wife?” The original comic shading of that phrase as used by George and his friends—“the wife”—has grown so dim it’s now almost invisible, like a watermark. “I got a Lizzie Zimbalist message! ‘Semiurgent,’ she said. What’s going on?” People who don’t know Ben often assume he’s on drugs—cocaine or speed or, as a mutual acquaintance speculated seriously to George a few months ago, some sort of Hoffman-LaRoche synthetic adrenaline that won’t be available to consumers until 2004. Ben Gould operates at a high torque every waking moment, but he doesn’t take drugs, not even coffee. (“I promise you do not want to see me on espresso!” he said to George at the end of a long Italian lunch not long after they first met.)

  “Lizzie’s at home,” George tells him. “So you’re staying here too?”

  “Yeah! Sixteenth floor. Have you had lunch? We’ll have lunch if you don’t mind eating with a few Wall Street assholes.” Then abruptly, without a word or raised finger or even a pause, Ben reaches into his shirt pocket and has his StarTac 9900 out and open—George is reminded of Superman moving at lightning speed. “Yeah,” he says into the phone. Ben’s a stock trader but has also, over the last few years, invested a few million here and a few million there in new businesses—businesses such as BarbieWorld, the restaurant-hotel-entertainment complex opening tonight on the Strip. When people ask his occupation, he says, matter-of-factly, “Wall Street asshole.” For him, it has become the generic term, now almost entirely devoid of opprobrium or even mock opprobrium, something like how hippies started calling themselves freaks in the late sixties and homosexuals started calling themselves queer in the late eighties. More embedded irony.

  “Sorry,” Ben says as he snaps his phone shut and grabs George by the arm. “Let’s have lunch! Come on up!”

  “Great. Let me check in. I’ll meet you up there. What’s your room number? Sixteen-what?”

  Ben grins sheepishly, lowers his voice, and says slowly, “Sixteen.” George has never met anyone whose voice modulates so abruptly between extremes of volume and pitch, an octave and a half up and down, thirty decibels louder or softer without warning. “I took a floor. You need a suite?” As George smiles back, lips pursed, not quite shaking his head, Ben says, blasting away again full bore, “What? Excuse me! I’m in business with a lot of people who wanted to come to this event. I guess I’m too generous to people, I’m sorry, I guess I like to seize the day and enjoy life, mea culpa, carpe diem, mea culpa, punish me, you midwestern gentile cocksucker!”

  A few feet away, a group of four old women in shorts and tank tops stand in a little semicircle, happily staring. One has raised her camera to shoot a picture. They seem to think the manic man in threadbare blue jeans and dark glasses smiling and shouting obscenities is part of the entertainment. They almost certainly don’t imagine he’s worth $247 million.

  11

  “Bill Gates can’t bother himself to pick up the phone personally? What kind of relationship business is that? ‘Ms. Zimbalist, I think you’ve got a fantastic company, welcome to my family.’ Wouldn’t that be the right thing? It’s a thirty-second call. No wonder everyone wants to kill the prick.”

  “This is a tiny, tiny, tiny deal for them.”

  “It’s big for us. For you. Uh-oh, the nice Filipino boy is here with my baby food. I love you, Lizzie, my shaynala.”

  Uh-oh.

  “I do too.” She swallows, hard, and twists the phone away from her mouth as she gulps in a big sobby breath. “I love you, too.” The Yiddish endearment had undone her. Mike Zimbalist seems like the sort of man who would pepper his speech with Yiddish, but he rarely did, not even middle-American Jay Leno words like schlep or klutz. Once she overheard him on the phone telling the movie producer Jon Peters he was “an evil, illiterate little gonif motherfucker.” But her father had used Yiddish with Lizzie only twice that she recalls—on the phone from Cedars the night Serene Zimbalist finally died of lung cancer (“She’s gone, my shaynala”), and in the delivery room at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York the morning Sarah was born (“Bubbeleh, you’re a mom!”).

  She turns, grabs Bruce’s folders from Alexi, says “Thanks, bye,” and hustles out, down, out, three strides through icy downpour, and into the perfectly shiny blue Go! Now! Lincoln that Alexi had arranged.

  Lizzie hates the idea of turning into a limousine liberal, but she isn’t neurotic about hiring the occasional car and driver, either. She’s a neoliberal, anyway, and Town Cars aren’t really limousines—they’re neolimos. Besides, she’s headed for a block between Park and Madison in the Sixties, where a car and driver is the equivalent of a Yellow Cab anywhere else in the city. On a slushy, rotten night like this, a few minutes spent cozying into the clean, quiet, plump leather backseat of a late-model Town Car, with a precise puddle of halogen light illuminating her papers (making them a little more lucid and important), she feels like she’s having a cocktail or a massage. Every now and then, a platinum-card soft-focus arm’s-length version of urban life is fine.

  “You have Go! Now! VIP number?” the driver asks.

  “I do. Z four seven three.”

  “Z? Zed?”

  “As in Zimbalist.”

  In the five years she’s known him, Bruce has never done anything so businesslike. So seriously Town Car. An actual memo, with FROM: and TO: and RE: at the top and boldfaced subsections. A ten-year P&L projection—Bruce! so cute!—and supporting technical documents. Even a draft one-page contract between Buster Grinspoon and Fine Technologies, stipulating the patents they would co-own, already signed by Grinspoon.

  Bruce has attached a dozen journal articles, including the unpublished account of Grinspoon’s wired-cat experiments. (Eleven animals died, according to a footnote, in the course of the research.) There’s also an article on research in England on the neurobiological effects of video-game playing. Lizzie hasn’t known the details before. For the study, players’ brains were doused with radioactive dye and a drug called raclopride, then monitored by PET scans as they thumped and jerked their joysticks. The researchers found that the brain is flooded with dopamine, according to the article, “to a level commensurate with that produced by injections of amphetamine.” In other words, as Bruce has summarized, “playing video games is the same as mainlining speed.” In another experiment, women in particular enjoyed games that induced “serotonin cascades” in their brains. Bruce wants to run the tests on some Warps players as soon as they have a finished prototype.

  So much strange, witchy, tinkering science, and all of it described in such willfully flat, anodyne terms. There are the Japanese who attached a computer chip to the head of a live cockroach, then used a joystick to move the roach. There are the university researchers who put individual brain cells from a rat embryo into individual electrode-loaded wells on a silicon chip—like bits of batter in a tiny muffin tin. The rat neurons sprouted dendrites and axons—real, all-meat cerebral wiring—which rose and snaked their way up out of the microchip wells and over to other neurons, to which they spontaneously grafted. In other words, half rat, half computer. It sounds like the setup for a Microsoft joke, Lizzie thinks to herself, looking out at all the filthy slush covering the most expensive rea
l estate in America. Roaches and rats: heroic vermin, the unlovable creatures for whom animal rights activists can’t manage to whip up any sympathy.

  “Sixty-fifth Street runs east,” she says to Yuri, her driver, a Russian man listening to Schoenberg or Tippett or some other anxiously, un-likably mid-twentieth-century piece of music. “You’ll have to go up to Sixty-sixth and come around down Fifth.” He nods and reaches to nudge the stereo volume up a notch, then pulls the car over, stops, and gets out to squeegee the snow off his windows. Lizzie can’t imagine telling any driver to turn off classical music, no matter what it is, especially not an immigrant. She doesn’t want to discourage any flickerings of civilization. It is the same logic that inclines her to indulge the squeegee bums—the homeless men who used to try to clean windshields at stoplights until Mayor Giuliani had them eliminated. She always figures it’s rude and chaotic and they do a lousy job, but don’t we want to encourage the idea of work among the underclass? The suppression of the squeegee men, Lizzie remarked with a twinkle to Rupert Murdoch at a News Corporation cocktail party in 1994, was Giuliani’s Grenada invasion—his easy, unnecessary triumph over irritating brown-skinned men. “I think Rupert didn’t like me even before I said it,” she told George that night.

  Only two of Bruce’s articles concern human beings. In Lizzie’s favorite, a neurosurgeon provoked emotion mechanically, by shooting electricity into a particular spot in the brain. The surgeon got a wideawake sixteen-year-old girl to smile. When the electricity was turned up, she laughed—the doctors performing the experiment on her, the girl said, had become suddenly, inexplicably hilarious. Lizzie smiles as she reads the deadpan academic account of their “intracranial subdural electrode” probing the “supplemental motor area of the left cortex” of the laughing teenage girl. She thinks of Fanny Taft, her giggling fan in St. Paul. She thinks of the time Sarah giggled at George last summer when he was wearing socks with shorts and he asked her, “What? What are you laughing at?” She thinks of herself, years before, laughing when the Harvard policeman asked why she had walked back and forth across Mt. Auburn Street three times at four in the morning with a grin on her face.

  The work most similar to Buster Grinspoon’s is in Atlanta, where a human brain is in wireless communication with a computer. A tiny glass cone has been implanted in the brain of a paralyzed stroke victim. Surrounding neurons have attached themselves to the device, and with an antenna strapped to the top of his head, the mute patient is able to communicate basic commands to a computer.

  Dopamine, raclopride, joysticks, PET. Cerebral probes, electrical laughter, electronic rodent brains, wireless feline telephony, 400-megahertz stroke victims. A man getting a pig’s liver. God, Lizzie thinks, looking out at the old-fashioned snow drifting down on charming old upper Madison, maybe George is right—about life imitating A Clockwork Orange. It’s as if the grand, dreamy nineteenth-century research of Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Frankenstein has been spliced directly into the twenty-first. It’s postmodern science, she thinks, sounding silly to herself. But isn’t it?

  The research is all interesting, fantastically so. But interesting research is why government grants and Microsoft exist. What is Bruce thinking? Have all these computer boys read too many William Gibson novels? Or is it her fault? She likes telling people to always think outside the box, think outside the box, but in a small company maybe that’s vanity. By pursuing unconnected projects—the speech-recognition code has nothing to do with Y2KRx, Y2KRx has nothing to do with the graphics software or ShowNet, which has almost nothing to do with Warps—maybe Fine Technologies doesn’t have any box to think outside of. With each new product her strategy changes, and Fine Technologies turns into a different business. “The lightbulb and the phonograph and the movie projector were unrelated too,” she said to George one time last year, trying to reassure herself, and he was kind enough to let the Thomas Edison analogy pass. Is she strategically nimble, ideally evolved for the New Economy? Or is she someone with a short attention span who’s made a couple of lucky stumbles? As her youngest child perpetually asks, Is that a good thing or a bad thing, Mommy? As the car rounds Fifth and turns down Sixty-fifth, she checks her face in a backseat flip-down mirror. “Obviously,” Bruce has written in his memo, “this would be a long-term investment for us, since marketable human applications are probably five years away, at least.” Five years! Hell, why not ten? Why not fifty?

  She pops the mirror shut, shoves Bruce’s papers across the seat, and tells the driver as she slides out, “I’ll be about two hours.”

  In the anteroom, there is nothing but yards of gorgeous, rough yellow marble and lighting that gives the impression of candlelight—no art, no bar, no plants, no coat-check window, no podium, nothing. The more they can afford restaurants like this—conversation-piece restaurants, restaurants where couples spend as much for dinner as they pay a nanny in a week—the less George and Lizzie seem to go to them. She’s glad Pollyanna made the reservation.

  “Welcome to Zero this evening,” the meticulous little pig-nosed woman in short black hair and a blue Prada dress whispers enthusiastically, pronouncing Zero, and only Zero, with a French accent. This is no doubt a woman who has described herself as jolie laide.

  “I’m meeting Pollyanna Chang.”

  “Excellent,” the woman says, stepping aside, sweeping the air. She ushers Lizzie through a short hallway and down three stairs into a dining room, handing her off there to a skinny man with very short silvery brown hair (like George), who’s wearing an expensively baggy four-button brown suit (not like George), for the remainder of the journey. He oozes deference too, but his is evidently a nonspeaking role.

  The room is circular, sixty feet across, with a circular bed of dark blue delphiniums in the center and a domed ceiling twenty feet high. The floor and first ten feet of walls are pinkish white stone—antique limestone, she remembers reading out loud to George from the Times, imported from Corfu. There’s no art, no draperies, no decoration at all (unless you count the mottled silver leaf covering the interior of the hemisphere overhead), only lighting and stone and tables covered in linen—linen, she remembers reading in a different story about the restaurant, with thread counts approaching a thousand per inch. The tables are ten feet apart. The minimalism is breathtaking for such an expensive restaurant, particularly uptown, where, except for a few clothing stores, the public wealth displays are still nearly always old-fashioned and unabashed, luxe of the kind that wows children; conversely, Lizzie has never encountered such insanely high-priced austerity outside a museum. It is a splendid place, as Lizzie had expected, even though she still finds the name embarrassing to say, as she does the name of the new perfume she’s wearing, Too Intense.

  “Why is that man standing there?” Lizzie asks Pollyanna, moving her lips like a bad ventriloquist and nodding slightly in her friend’s direction. A young man with a shaved head and an expensively baggy four-button brown suit stands facing the room a few feet away, between Pollyanna and the wall.

  “He’s the bartender. There’s no actual, physical bar, but he’s the bartender, so he stands there. That’s because this is the smoking section. Or vice versa, I’m not sure. I ordered you a drink.” Pollyanna pulls three different brands of cigarettes from her jacket pocket—More, Now, and her own open pack of Camels. “Want one?”

  “You are sick. Yes, thanks,” she says, taking one of the Camels. Now that Lizzie is a pack-or-two-a-week connoisseur rather than a pack-or-two-a-day addict, she finds the act of pulling a cigarette from the pack—not the first too-tight couple or the last loosey-goosey ones, but cigarettes three through eleven, more or less—slightly but distinctly sexy. George, who has never smoked, didn’t get this at all when she confessed it and called her a fetishist, but said he found her sexy for finding it sexy. He has also been accusing her lately of seeing more and more of Pollyanna because Pollyanna smokes and Lizzie can bum cigarettes. She denies it, feeling hurt on Pollyanna’s behalf, and reminds him that Pollyanna Chang has
been her friend for seventeen years (a number that makes her feel old). But of course he’s a little bit right, just like her mother was right when she’d asked Lizzie in eighth grade if her new set of friends at Oakwood, the cool Hollywood private school, were drug abusers. Because Pollyanna works as a lawyer for R. J. Reynolds, cigarette smoking for her is halfway between a job requirement and a perk.

  The bartender is suddenly lighting Lizzie’s cigarette with a dull silver metal bar as thick as a finger and twice as long, which shoots a slender, highly concentrated flame—the most beautiful blowtorch ever made. Being lit she also finds a little sexy. “How’s Warren?” she asks. Pollyanna’s boyfriend is a psychiatrist who sees patients in his home office. George has known Warren slightly for a long time; they met for three fifty-minute sessions in 1984, after the accident in Nicaragua, in fulfillment of the “minimum mandatory posttrauma counseling” that George’s medical coverage required.

  “Mezzo mezzo. He quit. Smoking.”

  Lizzie smiles. “And? That’s a violation of corporate policy or something?”

  “Smoking was healthy for Warren. Mentally. Walking those three blocks to the newsstand and back every day was his connection to normalcy and reality. Now he doesn’t buy cigarettes and he has the newspapers delivered. He literally doesn’t leave his apartment for days at a time. Except for his two-year-old son and the au pair on weekends, all he sees are his crazy people and the takeout delivery guys.”