Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  Her office is on the Fifty-ninth Floor. During the only real conversation she had with George about selling her company and taking this job, he went suddenly mute when she said she thought she’d be working on Fifty-nine, and a minute later started yelling.

  It’s silent here, hermetic and still, unlike any place Lizzie has ever worked. The children’s foundation was always quiet, but the space was tight, with people crammed everywhere sharing desks, so that one was always aware of nice, polite, modestly paid people being quiet. Here on Fifty-nine the silence seems more religious or royal, less like a busy library than a sanctum where few mortals are permitted entrance. It reminds her of Myst. (She has yet to find a computer game that she loves playing, but Myst and Riven she found actively unpleasant, opaque and pretentious and dull.) Even Featherstone seems to subdue when he’s on Fifty-nine. She’s seen him just once, and he called her “Beth,” the most drab and desultory nickname of the twenty or thirty he’s called her in the year she’s known him.

  The intercom chimes. They use intercoms up here whenever possible, and the speakers in the phones on Fifty-nine are so high-end that every time a call comes, it sounds like a cymbal has been gonged by someone hiding under her desk.

  “Mr. Saddler is here.” It’s the voice of William, her secretary, a grave Mrs. Danvers—y man of about fifty. Lizzie has not yet transplanted Alexi north.

  “Okay,” she says.

  She is still thrown by the extended five- or six-second time delay between William’s announcement of visitors and their arrival in her office. It makes her self-conscious, the waiting. More of the imperial hush. She’s convinced that the physical distances up here reinforce the sense of executive self-seriousness, since everyone has so much time to prepare for each encounter, to put on a face.

  “Welcome, Lizzie,” Saddler says, a little whispery, pronouncing her nickname like a plaything. “I’m just back from the big island. Pardon my tizzy.” His tan is deep and dark. He was on vacation when she started work, although he’s sent several video e-mails from Hawaii to tell her “how thrilled Harold and I are about your joining the MMH team.”

  “Hello, Hank. Are we supposed to speak in rhyme?”

  “Funny! Are you in the swing? Anything you need from me? FYI, I’ve already got an MPI running on you personally, pre- and post-MMH.”

  “Nope, I’m fine. Already deep into it,” she says, waving at her stacks of papers. “I think I’ve almost finished repurposing and remastering myself.”

  “ ‘Repurposing and remastering myself,’ ” he says as though she were Noël Coward. “Oh! What a genius bite. I’m going to steal it for Harold. If I may?”

  “Sure.”

  “Magnificent haploxylon,” he says, looking over her shoulder. “I’m so glad.” He must mean the tree. Every Mose senior executive office has a live white pine tree in his or her office, and three framed vintage Eugène Atget photographs. Lizzie’s black-and-white photos are of a butcher’s window, a broken stone planter, and a grave. “Well, I’m here. And Harold and I feel so blessed that you’re here.”

  Blessed? “Me too, Hank. Thank you.”

  “Henry,” he says, and leaves.

  She returns to the profit-and-loss statements for MotorMind, one of the newly acquired internet companies she’s overseeing. She is to meet with the CEO today. MotorMind’s main product is Raging Id, a plain-speech search engine that is supposed to enable people anywhere in the vicinity of their computers to blurt out desires—I want a pound of pancetta overnighted from Umbria and a gift certificate for Pilates training in Sherman Oaks! I want to tell that Jess Burnham she’s a liberal cunt! I want to see the Hindenburg blowing up!—and have their wishes fulfilled instantly, invisibly. The MotorMind strategic plan calls Raging Id an example of EUI, or “extroverted user interfacing.” (It reminds Lizzie of the Clapper.) In its ten months of existence, according to its P&L, MotorMind has all L ($16.2 million), no P, and a total income, all in the “Interest & Misc.” category, of $174,383. Mose Media Holdings paid $137 million in stock for MotorMind—another price-earnings ratio on the high side of infinity, and a multiple-of-revenue valuation somewhere around 800. The MotorMind numbers make her think that the price they’re paying (we’re paying? he’s paying?) for Fine Technologies may be low. She knows a hundred million is absurdly high, but still, she wonders if it’s too low.

  The chime. “Mr. Mose’s office called,” Mr. Danvers says. “Mr. Mose is on his way.”

  Extra-early warning! Mose has not been in New York since she’s worked for him. She finds herself quietly freezing in place, papers still on her lap, pen clutched in her hand. She is making a point of doing absolutely nothing different from what she was doing, acting unnaturally natural.

  It isn’t Myst or Riven that Fifty-nine is like, she realizes, staring at her white pine. It’s Japanese Noh drama, just as she was taught in her freshman seminar. Scenery consisting of one painted pine tree. Stylized lines of verse spoken by characters in weird makeup or masks (Saddler), the colloquial kyôgen farce episodes (Featherstone), the insane characters (Mr. Danvers) and “festive spirit” characters (Mose, Featherstone). She’s pleased with herself. George would love this, if George could bear to listen to her talk about work.

  Then she remembers the other stock Noh character—the woman with a tragic destiny. But Noh performers are exclusively male, Lizzie tells herself, feeling silly and superstitious.

  Chime. “Mr. Mose is here,” announces the voice from the hidden sub-woofer.

  And so he is, ambling in, wearing a pinkish suit as fine and silky as carpaccio, and a loose white shirt buttoned at the top. He looks like the richest architect on earth.

  “And how is my digital president this fine, fetid morning? Christ! We might as well be in Bangkok.”

  “Hello, Harold.”

  “I trust you’re not already too disillusioned with the rampant incompetence and venality.” He comes closer. “Ah, MotorMind. Did we overpay less or more for them than we overpaid for WhamBam-dot-com?” WhamBam.com is a children’s web site that lets kids click on the names of toys and videos and other merchandise written into animated stories and games they can watch and play for free. By clicking on the names, the children receive e-mail advertising for the products—or, if their parents have provided a credit card number and a WhamBam.com “weekly allowance,” actually buy the stuff. “And TK Corporation—certainly we were fleeced more there than on Motor-Mind?” He sits.

  “About the same,” she says. She does enjoy Mose. In fact, she is enjoying this job for the first time right now.

  “But it does work, correct? Raging Id?”

  “It does. And I assume internally, in News, it can be useful right away. For clip research.”

  “Mmm. I wouldn’t predicate too much synergy on the MBC News division. MBC News is being … rethought.”

  How she would love to be able to tell that to George! She knows she shouldn’t. Given his mood, she knows she won’t. “My only question,” she says to Mose, “is how ready regular people are to verbalize everything. You know? ‘Send my mother tulips, but don’t spend more than thirty-five dollars.’ Do people want to say things like that, sitting alone in a room, talking to a machine? Or more embarrassing things. Typing and mouse clicking are discreet.”

  Mose shakes his head. “People will adapt. Modern people don’t need much encouragement to spill their guts. Ten years ago, who’d’ve thought we could put on a circus like No Offense, But … every morning.” No Offense, But … is an hour-long talk show–game show hybrid on MBC, hosted by Dr. Juanita. Guests compete for prizes by predicting the embarrassing facts that friends and family will reveal about them on the air—and then, in the “Di$ ’Em Back!” round, try to double their money by revealing embarrassing facts about their friends and family. For five minutes at the end of each show, Dr. Juanita counsels the guests.

  “But those people get to be on TV for an hour. That’s a big incentive to embarrass yourself.”

  �
�Correct,” he says. Then he twists his permanent wry smile up a notch. “But what about your sexual-revolution paradigm? The same squares who become accustomed to oral sex also get used to talking dirty when the bedroom door is closed, don’t they?”

  “I suppose.” She suddenly feels fastidious, mousy. “Yeah, that is analogous.”

  Before the bubble of awkwardness drifts away, out of control, Mose says, “For the record, this is not sexual harassment. Or a hostile sexual environment. And I want a notarized affidavit to that effect from you by noon.”

  She smiles. “Sure thing, boss. I’ll have my people negotiate the language with your people.”

  “You’ve already earned your salary this month, Elizabeth. That gadget you got Hank to borrow from your friend at Lucent? Impressed the hell out of everybody in L.A.”

  He’s talking about the Bell Labs panel, consisting of several hundred tiny microphones, that was mounted on the stage at the Mose Media shareholders meeting. Whenever a shareholder in the auditorium rose to make a comment or ask a question, it invisibly found the person and homed in from a hundred yards, amplifying the voice as if he or she were speaking directly into a mike a few inches away. The technology is unsuited to real democratic hurly-burly, since it can only pluck out one speaker at a time. In order to function properly, as Lizzie has told her Lucent friend, it requires extreme politeness, everyone waiting their turn to talk—or else a bully ready to take over, since the thing is programmed to zoom in on the loudest voice in the room. It can deal with orderly corporate meetings and legislative deliberations, or Germany in 1932, but nothing in between.

  “Half the audience comments were about the damn thing,” Mose says. “I’m afraid most of the people there thought we invented it. A misapprehension we made no special effort to correct. Timothy,” he says, grinning and shaking his head, “Timothy used it, after we adjourned, to eavesdrop on Hank gossiping with that stupid tart from CNBC, Maria what’s her name.”

  “So I heard. May I ask an impolitic question?”

  “Please. My favorite sort.”

  “What is the deal with Timothy? I mean, I like him, I enjoy him, but … That’s one guy with a very high noise-to-signal ratio.” “Meaning he’s a jabbering fool? And an embarrassment?”

  “ ‘Merry Chatterers’ is what George calls people like Timothy.”

  “Does he? What does George call me?”

  She smiles, and says nothing.

  “Timothy,” Mose says, “is perfectly suited to this business in many ways. As nearly as I can tell, the only one of the living TV legends who has a mind is Barry Diller. Barry is an intelligent adult. (And even Barry has his tantrums.) No, most of the genius executives seem a little … well, goofy. Not stupid, but childlike. Michael Eisner is a giant boy. That’s why he’s worth a billion dollars. Timothy Featherstone loves watching TV! He’s like a kid when he talks about inventing a show based on your game …”

  “Warps.”

  He shakes his head again softly. “When I hired Timothy two years ago, he knew more about this ridiculous business than almost anyone I’d ever met.” Mose puts his hands on his knees, preparing to go. “That was two years ago. And will this company even be in the network entertainment business two years from now?” He raises his eyebrows and cocks his head, a miniature shrug equivalent. “Maybe not, if you’re as successful as I know you’ll be.” He stands. “But enough doctrinal discussion! I’m boring myself. Mr. Mactier killing himself on Real Time, is he?”

  “Mmm,” Lizzie replies, nodding.

  She imagines the conversation at home. Oh, honey? By the way? I think Harold is going to close down News, can Timothy, and maybe get out of entertainment altogether. Just FYI. Pass the hummus? Ethics forbid her (don’t they?) from giving George any inkling of this conversation. If they were on better terms, she knows she would anyway—she’d at least give him “guidance,” as Ben calls it. So this breach has a silver lining: his rage makes her scruples easier. Maybe once Real Time is finally up and running and he snaps out of this psycho funk, she’ll violate the corporate confidences and begin to let George in on the truth.

  “Well,” Mose says, “I’m back to L.A. tonight. Over to Vietnam for the start of the galley championships, then Hong Kong. I’m back here a week from Tuesday for our Elizabeth Zimbalist celebratory dinner. And—only a month late—mirabile dictu, Real Time!”

  Lizzie thinks she hears a trace of derisive fake enthusiasm in the way he pronounces the name of the show.

  “Say,” he says, “we don’t want to be in the internet chat-room business in the Chinese ‘special economic zones,’ do we?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I thought not. Leave the People’s Republic to Rupert. Farewell, my dear.”

  “So when do you start fucking Harold?” George said in their one screaming fight about her Mose deal. “Or am I behind the curve on that, too?” Poor, silly, stupid George, she thinks, contemplating her magnificent haploxylon (and the trees of the park behind it like a painted theatrical scrim). But then Lizzie thinks: she’s talking more to Harold Mose these days than to George, and Mose doesn’t even live in New York. She thinks: the conversation with her boss just now was more civilized and relaxed, smarter and sexier, than any encounter she’s had with her husband in a month. As the next thought begins to form (Would Harold Mose, spotted anonymously at a party or a restaurant, make her How Many Guys list?), she bears down on Penn McNabb’s one-sentence mission statement justifying the $327 million Mose Media Holdings paid for his company: “Although the very name of TK Corporation proudly privileges the central wealth-creation fact of the New Economy—that the precise shape of the future as well as its component technologies are perpetually embryonic, perpetually ‘TK,’ or to come—there can be no question that our proprietary technology, Ultra-Streaming Video®, will be a mission-critical feature of that unfolding multimedia future.”

  33

  His brain aches. He feels sick. The air and the light are rotten and inescapable. He keeps a bottle of Visine and a green plastic pint of Mylanta in his briefcase. There is not enough time. There is never enough time, of course. But this is worse. This is the worst. The Postshakedown Breakdown, the staff is calling it. They mean it as a cocky, making-their-TV-bones joke, Postshakedown Breakdown, a password to snicker in the fluorescent buzz over take-out pizza and Dr Pepper. It’s all a crazy multimillion-dollar dorm party for them, a two-month all-nighter to finish the term papers and cram for exams. They’re young. It’s a job. They’re not responsible.

  The sixteen-hour days on Real Time mostly keep his mind off Lizzie, twenty-one floors above, but this compensation has not occurred to George. He does think, when he arrives alone at six-thirty or seven, before the regular guards are at work, that his elevator bank, for the thirtieth through the fifty-eighth floors, is different from hers. Until the sixth of June, he was oblivious to the Mose Media Holdings elevator-bank hierarchy. Now, even though he’s grateful for the lobby separation, for the thick, high, stone-and-wood bundling board between them, the sight each morning of the express elevator to Fifty-nine enrages him, but for just an instant, so quickly he doesn’t even register it as a distinct speck of anger.

  He’s angry at Molly Cramer, who somehow got a dub of the Friday shakedown show. Cramer accused George, “the millionaire pro-heroin producer,” of “apparently pulling the plug on his Deep Throat ‘exposé’ for fear of angering his liberal media buddies.” He’s angry at Time for calling Real Time, before the show has aired, before he’s even finished inventing it, “a highly worrisome new postmodern milestone in the helter-skelter morphing of fact into fiction and news into entertainment.” (If they only knew: he turned down a videotape of Michael Jackson swimming with Joey Heatherton and two dolphins in a pool of water dyed red, and not just because of Jackson’s stipulation that the on-air copy contain the words bizarre and kinky.) “Fucking Time magazine,” he ranted to Timothy Featherstone, “this from the company that publishes InStyle and puts pay-pe
r-view porno on my cable TV and owns professional wrestling.” He got angry when Featherstone replied that InStyle is his and Ng’s favorite magazine. He’s angry at Hank Saddler, for telling him “Harold and I found BetaWeek a little buggy,” and for coming down to his office on Monday to complain about George’s quoted claim in Time that “our Friday news segments will be the hardest news in prime time.” “I don’t need to tell you, George,” Saddler said, “that the perception of ‘hard news’ is ratings poison. And ‘hard’ can also strike people as meaning difficult to understand, or painful, which I know you don’t want. Especially given your own MPI trendline.” He’s angry at himself for giving Saddler the go-ahead to use “Postmodern milestone!” as a blurb in the newspaper ads for the show. In her e-mail about the Time story, Lizzie tried to laugh off his quote denigrating MBC News coverage of yoga and rock climbing and video games, but her ha-ha-ha magnanimity had also made him angry.

  It was easier when she was angry too, that first night. “You’re acting like a fucking child, George,” she said to him, “a pathetic, disturbed child. There’s no cabal plotting against George Mactier. It’s a new job. And it’s a business deal that makes sense for me. For us, for Christ’s sake. Period.” Okay, sell the company. Okay, go to work up on Fifty-nine. But why didn’t she let him know she was going to Mose’s apartment? (George has never been to the apartment. George has never been invited to a golf outing with the guys from Fifty-nine, either, an exclusion for which he’s been grateful until now.) What had made her tell Mose about Inscrutable Hardasses and Merry Chatterers? Featherstone claimed he wasn’t pissed off at George (“I’ve been called worse, believe me”), but he seemed upset. Probably what Featherstone overheard in Mose’s apartment that morning (“They were talking blowjobs, man, straight up”) was, as she insisted (with that patronizing chuckle), “a completely metaphorical discussion of bandwidth and interactivity.” But who chose the metaphor? And who deleted the files from the laptop? Who sneaked into his desk at home sometime in the last couple of months, dug out the PowerBook, and deleted HAROLD MEMO and BLAH-BLAH-BLAH NOTES? He has no evidence, but the files didn’t evaporate. And he never did read them. “You’re too honest, Mactier,” Ben has always said, and George has always taken it as a backhanded compliment, never as a warning.