Cory momentarily forgot whether the caller or answerer was supposed to speak first. “Hello,” they said at the same time.
“Hi, Dad, it’s me. Just checking in.”
“Well, that’s astonishing. And to think your mother isn’t around to witness this rarest of terrestrial phenomena. Years from now, I’ll remember I was sitting at my desk, October 3, 2007, when my firstborn daughter, Cordy . . .”
She hated that name. In high school her mom had vetoed Delia and Cory, insisting they were respectively “too similar to” and “not as pretty as” Deirdre, her sister’s name. She wished there were something worse to call him than Dad. “So yeah, how are things, Dad?”
“Fine, thank you. Okay then, how much money are we talking?”
“That is not fair, Dad.”
“So then this is a social call?”
“Whatever. Fine. You want me to get real? I do need money.”
“That’s more like it.”
“But not your money. I want to make money.”
“I thought you were allergic.”
“Dad, can I explain?”
She caught him up on Taren’s death and her promotion. She had no trouble admitting that Barr had the business mind, self-made in the heyday of deregulation. After graduating from Stanford, he’d sensed a bonanza in lifting things for wimpy undergrads and founded his moving company, Barr None. Six days a week he’d carried beds and bookcases, filling his palms with slivers of wood and metal under a half inch of craggy brown callus. He franchised across Northern California, adding all-Latino landscaping and all-female cleaning services, bolstered by a series of locally famous ads that featured Barr manually decimating fad items (Beanie Babies, Foreman grills, Pokémon cards) behind a blinking toll-free number. She knew the shady pragmatics of small business ownership had shaped his cynical realpolitik, but he really believed you could run a business without one moral fiber or protein of empathy, just know-how and can-do. How could he be so pro–manual labor and so anti-Labor? So nationalist and so antinationalization? Passionate about Latin but indifferent to Latinos? Cory, at least, had collective moral purpose; she had protein and fiber.
With hindsight, Cory’s sentence on Barr was What a weird Jew. Clearly he was out to prove something to the gentile establishment with his cash and triceps, his iron-rich Reaganism. He lived in a $1.8 million fortress in Palo Alto with a thirsty half-acre yard, but kept up the blue-collar pretenses, wearing undershirts to meetings, stretched over his hull of musclefat. His beard was the length and neatness of putting green, and he Brylcreemed his hair back from forehead to nape. In worldly matters he was amazingly, annoyingly capable, but his expertise was rote. To him the brain was another muscle.
“Now your business,” he said. “What’s the product? What’s your immediate revenue stream?”
“What does any of that mean? I just want advice.”
“What do you sell?”
Cory sucked in a big preamble of a breath and then recited the mission statement: Socialize designed, coordinated, promoted, and hosted recreational events whose proceeds went to progressive causes.
“I see,” Barr said, in his way-ahead-of-you way. “Commodifying liberal guilt. High elastic demand.”
“Dad.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of. Selling crap is how we support our base of crapmakers and crapmongers. Everyone profits when people crap.”
It was one of Barr’s great joys to see suckers getting screwed, and if you weren’t contributing to the production order, you were getting screwed. He was the kind of hypocrite who dismissed novels because they were “made up,” even though he still watched movies. He liked to stare into the windows of gyms and laugh, because he disdained both fat people and unpaid exertion.
Careful not to let actual flames escape her mouth, Cory said, “We promote culture, send business to local merchants and venues, and route disposable income to social causes.”
“All right, let’s hear the numbers. Numbers don’t get defensive.”
Against her background indignation, Cory was relieved that she was prepared. She recited slowly, with Barr chuckling and whistling after certain figures. “You’re in the proverbial truckload. Call a management consultant.”
“Well, that’s you. We can’t afford consulting. We can’t even afford Internet; we steal our neighbor’s Wi-Fi.”
Barr’s basso profundo put an itch deep in Cory’s ear. “Then find a moron to buy you out.”
A lariat of stress tightened around Cory’s ribs. “No way. I believe in my company. It’s my coworkers’ livelihoods.” (That was pure fudge: most were interns or part-timers. Yet the principle stood.)
“Nemo liber est qui corporati servit.”
Cory sputtered plosives, shoulder-gripping the phone and crossing her arms. She’d never fully understood Barr’s dead-languages thing, but it probably related to his idea that all conflicts were battles over the dictionary: marriage defined as one-man-one-woman, life as conception. He’d homeschooled Cory and Deedee in Latin, translating poems and orations each morning, clinking scansion on his coffee mug with a butter knife while his daughters chanted, “ARma viRUMque caNO.” It was his fault that Cory spontaneously generated puns and anagrams and portmanteaus and spoonerisms and mondegreens. It had started twelve years ago, at a Burmese restaurant in the Richmond; when Deedee offered Cory the rest of her platha bread, Cory said, I couldn’t plathably, and Barr had laughed so hard that Cory kept doing it to please him—Indian food had her naanplussed, the plural of lox was loxen, the superlative of toilet was toilest, Jane Doe was married to John Deere. To encourage her, Barr hung butcher paper on the fridge to swap riffs:
I’ve never read Virgil, do you think Aeneid to?
I used to read poetry Ovidly but now I think it’s Juvenal
Read orations instead, they’ll take Agrippa you
I love speeches, I recite them till I’m Horace
So Barr had raised her to be corny and annoying. And with respect to the genetic estate she’d inherited: big butt, chunky neck, and back fat. Her adipose complex.
Barr raggedly cleared the slime from his throat. “Well, I applaud your initiative. I’m glad to help. As to raising money, there remains the matter of our loan.”
Shit.
Back when Cory had been applying for schools, she and Barr had agreed, for opposite political reasons, that it would be best to avoid student loans, so she’d let Barr pay the $34,221-a-year tuition instead, vowing to repay him with side jobs. But her arrival at Stanford coincided with 9/11, turning everyone into an activist overnight: debating, learning Arabic, getting arrested, taking the Caltrain to SF to march in huge antiwar rallies with Jesse Jackson and Joan Baez. Over the summers she’d done Alternative Spring Break, Haiti relief, and documented the 2004 Summer of Love on a research grant. There wasn’t any time to work at fucking Jamba Juice.
Soon she’d joined the Stanford Labor Action Coalition and organized protests, road blockages, sit-ins on President Hennessy’s lawn, and finally her hunger strikes, starving out living wages for Stanford’s custodial staff and divestment from Israel. It was an elegant way to achieve something by doing nothing, which was the only thing she’d felt absolutely qualified to do, and it felt nice to hide her little problem out in the open. Her red tent was a common sight in the Main Quad, and the Stanford Daily ran a front-page feature, CORDELIA ROSEN ’05 SPEARHEADS HUNGER STRIKE PROTESTS, alongside a photo of her sloganeering into a bullhorn. The Daily named her one of the Cardinal Leaders of her class, along with the princess of Bhutan, Ben Savage, and a white novelty rapper with a big Internet following. Everyone was getting so interested in her, the message was getting out, and when after two weeks she collapsed and woke with an IV in her arm, she thought, good—everyone would know she meant business.
But when the campus humor mag ran an article in their annual fake Daily (SOPHOMORE SHOWS THIRD WORLD HOW AMERICA DOES STARVATION), she realized that she wasn’t winning the prayers of a silent majority, but their stifled
laughter. And worse, she needed to graduate. Convinced that activism should bridge disciplines, she’d taken PHIL 150 and withdrawn, taken CHEM 30 pass/fail and failed, taken LING 130 and emerged with a hair-chewing habit. By the time she earned her individually designed Liberal Studies in Classical Democracy degree, she’d borrowed just under $120,000 from Barr, not including prep school.
Barr had never pressed the issue before. “Dad,” Cory said, making a wobbling sigh into defeat. “I don’t know what to say. Someday, I’m serious, I’ll pay it down. But now I’m really asking for your help, not money. I’ll do whatever it takes, but it’ll take some time and lots of work, all right?”
“Cordy, I’m just teasing. I’m glad to help, but you’re going to have to be the boss. Hire, fire, get the sweat running. Hard work redeems mediocre intelligences, as Seneca says.”
A tear ran onto her hand and she covered the receiver. During her last breakup she’d broken her phone by crying into it for two hours. “I can sweat.”
“That’s gravy to my ears. I’ll email you info.”
“Okay.” Oh, just say it. “Thanks, Dad, I appreciate the help.”
“Take care, Cordy.”
Cory dropped the phone in its cradle. From her shelves she fetched her Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Barr’s high school graduation gift. It weighed sixteen pounds in its faux-leather hardcase—only Barr would prefer reading to be this strenuous. The dry glue in the spine crackled as she spread the lap-crushing volume open, flopping from B to E to C to Ca-, and she slid the magnifying planchette over care, from the Teutonic caru: trouble, grief. Derived from karo, to scream; from Old Norse kqr, sickbed. In Modern English: charge, oversight, protection, concern, anxiety. Yes, she would take care: of business.
She fell back, pinned under every English word. Barr would help her. All she had to do was look at an email. But incredibly—unthinkably—she didn’t know how to email.
CHAPTER 2
His Own Devices
Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.
And his trails do not fade.
—Vannevar Bush
I. Vanya Pitches
The automatic front door to Vanya’s apartment opened with a motor hum and hydraulic wheeze, and Vanya greeted Will with a cheeriness that perfected his dread. Her hair was wound in a compact auburn bun and draped with silky bangs, and her tight evening dress matched her grenadine lipstick. Will felt instantly second-rate: his gray sweater and black jeans might as well have been oven mitts and headgear. He should’ve worn the blazer, should’ve used shape cream and squeezed his pores. He stooped down, and she overrode his lackluster kiss with her livelier one. This meant amazing news. Last time the amazing news was her new job, and before that it’d been kittens. Amazing news never involved Will.
In any other apartment the accessible furnishings would’ve stood out, but Vanya’s read as chic and minimalist. The mid-century decor, executed in autumnal browns and greens, was arrayed in teakwood eloquence against the walls, with no impediments except for the squat coffee table with its stack of tortoiseshell coasters. Everything was reachable via lazy Susans and swiveling bookshelves on motorized wall runners, the curtains remote-controlled. The handrails in the bathroom were the apartment’s only conspicuous accessibility features. Everything was correct. Vanya didn’t make messes.
She called him into the kitchen, where her purple chrome wheelchair zizzed in K-turns between stove and table. The apartment was humid with a foody savor that made the windows drool. A single dish was laid out, bracketed by one fork and one knife, heaped with couscous and a slab of lemon chicken with olive oil fluorescing beneath it. Vanya sat across from Will and placed her laptop where her dish should’ve been. “So, amazing news . . .”
Yesterday her boss, Ellen Stokes, gave a talk on automated user presegmentation at a Women on the Web coffee klatch, and in the schmoozing hour afterward, Vanya caught Ellen’s ear and made a proposal. Among other duties, Vanya provided content for Wond.er, the flagship site of Ellen’s positivity-themed blog network, featuring the usual drop-shadows and rounded corners and nostalgia listicles and videos of stranger-kindness and animal friendships. Vanya proposed a disability-oriented affiliate site, which she would run. Ellen said there wasn’t room in Wond.er’s org chart for new flavors of content at present, but if she were Vanya, she’d just start her own company. “Then she offered to set up a pitch meeting with her venture capital firm in Manhattan to score seed funding.”
Will was interested in Vanya’s career. But his brain wasn’t—at least the part that needed to surpass a threshold of ego-relevance before it converted words into meaning. He caught something about a November meeting, the words prospectus and monetization plan, before wondering about the last time he’d washed his jeans, because his legs were itchy.
“—baby? Earth to baby?”
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“You look like you’re having a deep thought.”
Will looked down. His meal was gone. “Sorry, yeah.”
“So I’m tweaking my pitch and I want some feedback, okay? Let me set up.”
Will stared at Vanya staring at her laptop. She cleared her throat, and two minutes later she began. “The problem with disability,” she said, addressing the back row of some auditorium, “is that people have been trained to react to it with misplaced empathy. Whenever you see an amputee or a blind person or someone in a wheelchair, you think, ‘How sad.’ They’re always jokes or pity puppets. Even when they’re portrayed positively, you’re supposed to feel inspired in this cheesy way, like ‘Oh, I’m such a good person for seeing this paraplegic as human.’ You’d never want to be them. The negativity is alienating and undignified. So our business goal—”
“Our?”
“We. The company.”
“Oh.”
“Our goal is to overhaul disability’s mainstream image by offering a whole spectrum of premium lifestyle and entertainment content. Make disability exciting to watch. We call it Sable. Okay, hang on.”
Vanya typed corrections, her face cold with diode light. She was so noble, like a statue of some heroic dog, reflecting decades of trained poise—Vanya the child star, the Little Miss. She’d grown up in a congenial Texas suburb, the daughter of a snack-food sales rep and a mother-slash-manager. Vlad and Randi Andreeva weren’t personally ambitious, though Randi fully supported Vanya in succeeding at whatever she made Vanya do. She booked Vanya for local commercials and youth pageants and talent searches, which Vanya dominated with her huge eyes and major-league ringlets: Little Miss Border Belle, Little Miss American Cutie (Greater Houston), Little Miss Epilady™ Girls Make the Future. Randi designed a new talent routine for each competition: samisen, rhythmic gymnastics, mental arithmetic, cup stacking, celebrity impressions, and so on, later combining these routines into a tour de force. Vlad was less supportive, and shamed Vanya for the revealing competition attire that Randi made her wear.
The strictures of competition—road travel, queen duties, a ban on boys—rankled as Vanya hit high school. On weekend nights she shimmied down the drainpipe from her bedroom window and rode out to raves with friends, where she declined the little Buddha-stamped pills and looked on in wistful good-girl fascination, envying the fun that she’d quietly convinced herself she was better off for not having. This transition from Little Miss to Miss Teen had been the only lapse in Vanya’s life of relentless improvement.
So it came as a perverse blessing when, at fourteen, she finished third for Miss Teen Dixie Doll, behind identical twins who’d split the tiara. During the onstage group photo, the flashbulb caused one of the eliminees at the top of the bleachers to snap a kitten heel and crash forward onto the quarterfinalists, the semifinalists, then Vanya and the twin queens, all sixteen cascading down the steps in an anorexic avalanche. Under the scrum of Misses, Vanya broke her nose and fractured her pelvis and spine. A stray flake of bone had her in agony until after two days she awoke with n
o feeling below her navel. (She was luckier than the twins, who’d really split their tiaras and had to step down, not that they were in a position to care.)
After a year of determined physical therapy, she’d waded into the tiny pond of disability-oriented pageants (Miss Teen Enduring Spirit, Miss Teenspiration, Miss Teen Pray for a Cure), and her mom booked her as a parts model. Taking her homecoming crown and sash as an afterthought, she quit pageants for good, feeling lucky to have gotten out before hemorrhoid cream and duct tape became de rigueur. She’d realized she was “at the top of the wrong ladder,” and if not for her “reboot,” she wouldn’t have studied new media at Vassar, moved to San Francisco, or met Will, who’d lost track of what she was saying.
“Look at the current offerings,” Vanya said, diagramming her sentences with her hands. “Disability forums tend to devolve into group therapy. Sufferers bursting to swap sympathy and pain management tips. It’s not fun. It’s a conversation able-bodied people can’t participate in, and the biggest threat to mainstream penetration. Sable will fight negativity with automated content filtering, crowd moderation, and aggressive brand management.”
She looked up at Will, her long silver earrings counter-swinging. To prove he was listening, Will said, “That’s kinda harsh. You’ll ban people for complaining?”
Vanya was happiest when fielding objections. “It’s about driving expectations for community engagement. Sable will be a destination to share and have fun. Our target audience wants to participate, not mope and feel pitied.”
She advanced her notes. “There’s a tremendous built-in vertical: my market opportunity research shows that seventy-seven percent of all people with disabilities are frustrated with the lack of online community. There’s so much room for category innovation in the disability space, and these are tech-savvy power users. The tent is as big as it gets: The hearing and vision impaired. Little people. MD, MS, CP, CF. The whole autism spectrum. Wounded veterans, paraplegics, diabetics.
Private Citizens: A Novel Page 4