Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “I have Scott Thernstrom calling Lizzie Zimbalist.”

  “This is she.” A moment passes.

  “This isn’t going to be a pleasant call for either of us, Lizzie. We finished our next phase of due diligence last night, and I’m afraid we’re going to need to redraft.”

  You fucks. “Redraft how?”

  “The top line on the ShowNet system is considerably lower than we had been given to understand. We get a reduced royalty stream on the speech-recognition software in year two. You’re not going to ship your game until fourth quarter, and we already have real concerns about how late we are in this game-market cycle. And then there’s your legal problems, the Golliver suit and so on. It’s not any one issue. It’s the convergence of all of them.” He doesn’t mention Buster Grinspoon’s patents.

  You fucking bastards. Thernstrom is simply recapitulating the boilerplate caveats she gave them yesterday afternoon. Except that they looked up insane Vanessa Golliver’s name during the last twelve hours. You evil fucking bastards.

  “Now,” Thernstrom continues, more warmly, “the company still has the highest regard for you, and wants to proceed with an investment in Fine Technology, subject to further due diligence, but more along the lines of our earlier offer.”

  It’s Fine Technologies, asshole. Haircut boy. Golfer. Smug little prick. “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “A ten percent stake for two million dollars. And of course we wouldn’t expect more than one board seat.”

  “That’s pretty funny,” she says, actually chuckling. She’s surprised at her calm. Yes, she would like Thernstrom and Moorhead to die now. But the disappearance of the $31.5 million feels correct, like a return to common sense. As soon as she started running toward the stupendous mirage, it disappeared, as mirages do.

  “Excuse me?” Thernstrom says.

  “You’re not only offering a valuation two thirds less than what was on the table yesterday, you’re offering less than you talked about a month ago. That is some serious fucking gall.”

  “The earlier valuations were always subject to further due diligence.”

  “Are you reading that, Scott? Or are you just an animatron?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I guess we’re done. Bye.”

  She gave them the bullets to shoot her. She should be furious. She should feel humiliated, and scream about integrity and lawyers. She finishes her coffee. She smiles, and dials George to tell him the excellent news. But there’s no answer (right: no more Iris), and this is too large an event for voice mail, so she calls Ben Gould, the only other member of her board whom she loves and who isn’t in intensive care. She has to tell somebody.

  He used to think that when Lucas didn’t know his lines, it was because Lucas was lazy. But George has come to realize that it’s a stratagem. In a scene with Angela or Sylvester or one of the other actors, if Lucas throws his line back a second late, it not only screws up the other actor’s performance, it means that George will be forced in postproduction to cut back to Lucas. The screwups are devices to give himself more screen time, make himself more of a star. It’s only twelve-thirty and Lucas has done his little fake pauses three times, and George would have called him on it if not for the blowup about the expenses yesterday.

  “Cut!” Gordon says. “Doris.” The wardrobe woman appears from the crowd. “Fix Cowboy, please.”

  “What?” George asks him.

  “His marks from the fight scene are stuck to his ass.”

  George watches Doris kneeling behind Lucas, peeling two crosses of red tape from Lucas’s left buttock, then licking two fingers to wipe the adhesive residue off his pants.

  “Shall we go ahead and break for lunch?” George says to Gordon. “And please tell him to deliver the lines on time, will you? Lucas and I evidently aren’t speaking today.”

  “Lunchtime,” Gordon says to his first AD.

  “Lunch!” the first shouts to the room.

  George retreats with his script alone, to the Glass Booth, as Emily Kalman calls the glass-fronted module parked on a plinth in a corner of the soundstage. From there, Featherstone and other MBC executives (“the Men in the Glass Booth,” in Emily’s phrase) can eat and drink and carp while they’re watching shows being shot. George and the writers use it as a conference room during shoots. He dials, and Ben Gould himself answers.

  “George! Hey! You holding up? Man! I know how it feels to lose seven million dollars in one morning.”

  “What do you mean, Mose Media stock is still dropping?”

  “No, I’m talking about Microsoft! Fucking your wife. Brutal, man! I thought of calling Ballmer about it, just for the pleasure of telling him they’re pricks.”

  “What are you talking about? What happened?”

  “You don’t know? Microsoft lowballed the shit out of Lizzie’s deal an hour ago. She told them to forget it.”

  George says nothing. He’s angry that she didn’t discuss it with him before doing it, even angrier that she told Ben before she told him. And the mountain of money, what she’s called the mirage, has been looming pretty realistically for him.

  “She sounds kind of happy about it, actually,” Ben tells him. “So what were you calling about?”

  “You know, the securitization thing. For NARCS.”

  “Right, if the lawyers say okay, I’d do it. Worse comes to worse, Mose goes belly up and you’re in business with the bondholders.”

  “Ben, do you think Mose Media’s stock’s going down because of our new show? Is that possible?”

  “That was maybe a half point of it yesterday. But no, George, you aren’t personally destroying your company. The dipshit at Paine Webber downgraded this morning, that’s what’s pulled Mose down two—Jesus, two and an eighth. Which is five percent. One analyst burps and wipes out five hundred million dollars of shareholder value. They’re not shitting on you for this, are they? Tell me they’re not that stupid.”

  “No. No, in fact, Mose seems ecstatic about Real Time, full speed ahead. I just wondered how all this Wall Street stuff affects me. Or not.”

  “Let me call you.”

  They agree to get together soon, before George and Lizzie’s party, and George asks, by the way, did Lizzie happen to mention if she’s flying home from Seattle early, or what?

  “She didn’t say. I got a giant position to unload in the next fifteen minutes, George. See you.”

  Ben wants to liquidate his long position in USA Loves Toys, not because the company manufactures two of its hit products, Rainbow Mega-Mucus and Maggotty Rat Guts, in Chiapas (the market has already discounted for disruptions that the guerilla uprising might cause), but because he thinks the stock has gotten ridiculously expensive. The 1.1 million shares he bought last fall and winter for $9 million are now 2.2 million shares worth $31 million, a value that can’t be justified by the company’s prospects. In other words, USA Loves Toys has just made Ben too much money, so it is time to take his profits, turn them from hypothetical to actual gains, and ditch the company. USA Loves Toys will announce its first-quarter earnings in ten days. Ben is fairly sure the number is worse than Wall Street expects, so the stock price will drop sooner rather than later—sooner, since Ben’s belief in the imminent decline of stock will begin to become self-fulfilling in a few minutes, as soon as he unloads his two million shares, which amounts to about 1 percent of the company. He’s also selling because he lost trust in USA’s management after the company’s chief financial officer misguided him badly, maybe deliberately, about the company’s current earnings last month. Ben has no financial reason to sell out at one o’clock sharp, as opposed to ten-thirty or three. But he’s decided he wants to punish the CFO, and while he’s at it embarrass the CEO, whom he’s never met but never liked, since his foundation sponsors eugenics research and publishes antiabortion comic books.

  Ben looks over at Frank Melucci, who’s looking back at him, holding the phone to his belly, ready to push a button on his turret. Ben unmutes th
e Big Room TV and switches the channel from 24 to 82, CNBC More, the new CNBC sibling channel that broadcasts live feeds of bankers’ conventions, Commerce Department press briefings, communications satellite launches, oil and gas conferences, new product announcements, antitrust trials, the raw public domain of capitalism, twenty-four hours a day.

  USA Loves Toys’ annual shareholders meeting is on CNBC More right now, broadcast live from the Astrodome in Houston. The company declared a stock split yesterday, and the share price today has popped to its all-time high. On the giant digital screen above and behind the Astrodome stage, they’ve got a moving graph of the stock price over the last twenty-six weeks, a steep blue Everest face, and above the half mountain, a readout of USA Loves Toys’ share price at this instant. That magnificent price, 14⅛, is throbbing, and encircled by a penumbra of multicolored video fireworks. The company’s CEO is at a podium, talking about how “the lucrative Judeo-Christian toy tradition” is at the heart of “our sacred free-enterprise system itself.”

  “Frank?” Ben says quietly. “Offer 2.2 million ULUV at 14⅛.”

  “Just one broker, right?” Melucci confirms.

  “Shit, yeah! Ten-b-five, man! I’m no fomenter.” Under federal securities rule 10b-5, a stock trader breaks the law if he deliberately foments a market panic by, say, dumping large blocks of stock quickly through multiple brokerage houses.

  Ten minutes later, the number on the big Astrodome screen, twice as tall as the proud, dapper, amplified man speaking beneath it, has clicked down a half dozen times to 133/16. The CEO, still wading through history, is oblivious. In a mighty peroration he is equating USA Loves Toys with the United States itself, NAFTA with the Declaration of Independence, his factory in Chiapas with the Alamo, himself with Davy Crockett (“a victorious Davy Crockett, fighting to maximize shareholder value”), and armed nineteenth-century Mexicans with armed twenty-first-century Mexicans. Now the throbbing number above him is 12⅞. Watching TV from lower Broadway in Manhattan, Ben sees that a few yards to the CEO’s left, two young men in suits scuttle to within crouching distance of the CFO, who turns around and looks up at the screen, where the blue graph line is now crawling steeply downward from the summit. A few seconds after the price drops to 12⅛, the camera jerkily zooms in tighter on the CEO, but the Everest-descent graph line is still visible behind his head. At 1115/16, the real-time USA Loves Toys stadium-board stock-price spectacle is replaced by the simpler message, GO ASTROS!

  Finally, finally, Ben Gould brings his laughter under control, from a dog-whistle yip down through fire-alarm whoops to a machine-gun guffaw. “Holy baloney,” he says, “is that great entertainment or what? God. That was so fantastic.” He wipes his eyes and turns back toward his cockpit.

  This could be a stage set, Ionesco or Beckett, with a ghastly banality that would make a smart audience chuckle when the curtain rises, or a room in a modern penitentiary where the warden is sincere about running a “correctional facility” rather than a prison. The fluorescent lighting is bright and unmodulated. The several dozen plastic seats, the greenish blue of toothpaste and shaving gels, are bolted to a black steel bar running around three sides of the room. The fourth wall, looking out on the broad corridor at the disused end of a SeaTac concourse, is all glass. Two men are in the room with Lizzie, both at least twenty years her senior, both overweight, both smoking cigarettes. Lizzie just bought her first pack in two months. She is smoking, too. This is the SeaTac smoker’s lounge. There is no TV, and no piped-in music. The room is filled with an even thunder from the third of the ceiling that’s taken up by the sheet-metal casings and grilles of an air filtration system, so massive and powerful that the smoke from Lizzie’s Marlboro Light disappears the moment it leaves her fingers and mouth. The smokers, sealed away together, are fully protected from one another’s secondhand smoke. She has finished looking at the papers Chas gave her this afternoon, and sinks happily into her fresh copy of InStyle magazine, an impulse buy as delicious and toxic as the Marlboros. She hears muffled little squeals and laughter. She looks up. A half dozen children on identical yellow leashes, kindergartners probably, have stopped at the front window wall to look in at the woman and two men sitting alone, smoking. The children are scratching and knocking on the glass, pointing and giggling, screwing up their little faces and saying “Oooooh,” beckoning another squad of kids over to look. She returns to reading InStyle’s celebrity liposuction guide (she wonders if George knows that Angela lipo-sucked her ass), and continues smoking on principle, making a special show of Bette Davis imperturbability. Only when she sees that the children’s minders have finally pulled them along to the next stop on their field trip does Lizzie snuff out the cigarette and leave. She is reminded of the Atlanta airport, where they’ve started having children make all flight announcements because, a gate agent told her last time she was there, “it’s special, and cute as can be.”

  On her way through the concourse toward the locker where she stowed her luggage, she thinks about throwing away her brand-new pack, but instead tosses out only Chas’s candy-colored half-English brochures touting the “strongly disciplined and semieducated electronics workforcefuls” of Malaysia and Vietnam. Chas Prieve does seem to know his stuff. (His most recent employer was a video-game company before it was sued for copyright infringement by the makers of the guns-and-ammo game Doom, and turned itself into a law-enforcement human-resources-training software company.) She didn’t tell him about this morning’s disintegration of the Microsoft deal, but he told her that Scott Thernstrom was a terrible boss at Microsoft, technologically in over his head, and on his third marriage. And Chas said he would be willing to work for Fine Technologies half time for the first six months if she’ll pay to move him from Boston to Seattle or Silicon Valley. He did pressure her some, and annoy her by saying his “MT-BOO is getting very short.” (After leaving Chas, she called Alexi and asked him about MT-BOO. “Mean time between other offers,” he explained.)

  She’s having trouble getting locker 324 open. She puts her purse down, and her heavy bag of magazines and newspapers, jams the key in again, and starts jiggling it. A woman depositing her tote bag full of Beanie Babies one locker-bank over, George’s age but matronly, offers to help.

  “Thanks,” Lizzie says as the woman takes her key, sees that it says 224, not 324, and sticks it in the correct lock. Lizzie shakes her head. “Believe it or not, I do have a college degree.”

  “You know,” her earnest Seattle volunteer says, “so many people here in Seattle do.”

  A flight to Los Angeles, she sees on a DEPARTURES monitor, leaves in half an hour. She could make that one. She could make it.

  Waiting at the gate, Lizzie forces herself to scan a front-page article in the paper entitled “Microsoft One Year Later: Rebuilding Trust After Antitrust.” All she reads that she doesn’t know are details of the company’s various new charity offensives, including something called the Virtual Home Project. This is a plan under which the company has offered to scan and digitize all the “two-dimensional possessions of any homeless American at no cost”—letters, snapshots, lists, doodles, food-can labels, filthy clippings, demented screeds, whatever. The homeless person gets a disk (up to a maximum of 100 megabytes) in “a rugged weatherproof plastic container,” and Microsoft will also keep an archive of the data “for backup as well as posterity and next-of-kin purposes.” The project will be coordinated in each of eighteen big cities by the company’s Sidewalk movie-and-restaurant-listing website staffs. “ ‘Since many of the Virtual Home clients actually live on the sidewalk, literally,’ says a company spokesperson, ‘it seems like a superfortuitous branding opportunity for Microsoft Sidewalk to give something back to the communities.’ ”

  “Is this seat taken?”

  A very white man is smiling down at her. He’s about her age, and wears a tie and V-neck sweater under his windbreaker. The back of the windbreaker says YOU KNOW THE SECRET ALREADY. She sees that his computer has a label on it: THE GLOBAL SECRET
.

  After a minute, he says to Lizzie, “I’m glad this airport is getting so much more business these days. It’s a real neat facility.”

  “Mmm,” she replies, staring down at her Post-Intelligencer. She worries he may be intending to hit on her, or worse, talk to her about Jesus or Dianetics.

  “I see you’ve stocked up on computer mags,” he says. “Are you in the field?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Good to meet you,” he says, putting out his hand. “Rex Dinsmoor! I’m senior evangelist at a software company.”

  She shakes his hand. Back in 1993, when Lizzie first heard someone who worked for a software company refer to herself as an “evangelist,” she thought it was literally a joke. After she got into the business and she encountered “technical evangelists” and “product evangelists” everywhere, she came to think of it first as a charming oddity, later as a tiresome affectation. Now she doesn’t even register its oddness.

  “ControlQuest—that’s my company. We make the Global Secret? Specialized enterprise software for multinationals.”

  Lizzie nods.

  “You are … ?”

  “Lizzie Zimbalist. I’m a consultant in New York. I consult for entertainment companies, help them figure out how to migrate over to the net.” As a child, Lizzie would sometimes spontaneously lie to strangers, about where she lived or what she wanted to be when she grew up, and to her mother. But she had grown out of it, forced herself out of it, really, when she started worrying in seventh grade that she might have inherited the casual, compulsive fibbing habit of her father.

  That flight to L.A. leaves in fifteen minutes. But she has to go home.

  “I advise TV shows who want to set up web sites, that kind of thing,” she continues. It’s not untrue.