by Walter Kirn
The bottle overflows with orange tablets and a drawdown of twenty percent shouldn’t be noticeable. If Alex is such a junkie that she counts them, I won’t respect her opinion of me anyway. I gulp three tabs, stash seven in my pocket, and lay in a gorilla dose of Ambien for a sound night’s sleep before my talk. Two Vicodin in case I fall and break something and have to haul myself to the ER.
I douse Mr. Hugs in sterilizing scotch—why am I suddenly certain he has fleas?—and kick him behind the waste can under the sink, then pick up the phone that’s mounted beside the toilet. You never see this placement in private homes but it’s become de rigueur in nice hotels. I associate it with invalids’ cries for help, but I know that’s not why they do it. It’s a puzzle right up there with ice cubes in the urinal.
“Art Krusk’s room, please.” I need time with a man’s man. Someone who’s been slapped around a little.
“Bingham?”
“I’m going downstairs to play some cards.”
“I just went to bed from yesterday,” Art says.
“I’ve got stuff to fix that. I’m at Mount O.”
“That Marlowe kicked my everlasting butt. You didn’t tell me there’d be role playing. Thanks, though. I feel sharp. I’ve got my fangs back. He gave me this first one as a favor to you, but what’s it going to cost when he starts charging me?”
“All depends on how deep you want to go.”
“It’s exciting the way you say that. Things in store for me.”
“You’ve entered the dragon, Art. Blackjack pit in ten. Wear your medallions. Pour on the Vitalis.”
“You have a girl for tonight?”
“A teddy bear.”
“Right. Me, too. That dancer we saw in Reno doing the old guy. I flew her down, but I think she’s gone out freelancing. I guess she’s just part of the general hoo-ha now. She carries a beeper, but I can’t get through. Marlowe says let it go. I’m like his zombie now.”
Art’s a moron, pathetic, but we click. I should slip him a ticket to Schwarzkopf. He’d be wowed and the favor might win me some leeway in my next life. Don’t you think so, Mr. Hugs? He does. Whatever you feel, your squashable feels too.
There is so much they want from us here besides our money. Art disagrees. He thinks their greed is pure. I direct his attention to our dealer’s eyes, her flat black tiddlywink pupils, the scaly lids, then ask Art if he’s ever visited Disneyland, because if he has, then he knows we have before us an animatronic biomorphic puppet whose battery cells—they’re sewn into her scalp, and if we shaved her head we’d find round ridges—have been charging themselves off our body heat for an hour now, robbing us of the strength to leave a game in which we’re losing four of every five hands and try our luck at the flashing-dollar slots arranged in a horseshoe around that red Dodge Viper, which is actually an elaborate chocolate cake formed around earth’s most perfect natural emerald.
“Sorry, can’t keep up with you,” Art says. “Pills haven’t hit yet.”
“Just swing.”
“I need a six, Shawn.”
Art reads all their name tags, not realizing that they’re aliases, although the hometowns engraved on them are accurate. Whoever she is, this latex-sheathed destroyer, she was really built in Troy, New York, where they also make rototillers and small gas engines that I’m told are the best on the market. One hears this everywhere.
“You keep looking around,” Art says, “like you’re expecting someone.”
It must be Alex. I left her a note that was legible but cramped—there was so much information to squeeze in. My allergies, both proven and suspected. My turn-ons and turn-offs. My feelings about war. Oh, that first rush of Dexedrine on an empty stomach.
“Over there, Art. Check it out,” I say. “Hillary Clinton, trying for the Viper. It’s nothing but gods and legends in this place.”
“You know who actually is in town,” Art says. “Thatcher.”
“Former leader of the British Tories? She lives here, Art. This is her home now.”
“For a speech. I met a busboy smoking behind the Hard Rock who says he can get me in for fifty bucks. Might be worth it. I’m kicking it around.”
“You know what I want, Art? My family in one place. A place even farther away than they are now but where they won’t miss me, because they’ll have the ocean. Tomorrow night I’ll have a million miles, and though I’ve assumed I’d want most of them myself, they’re all, as of now, one-way tickets to coastal Ireland for anyone who can prove that they’re my kin.”
“You shouldn’t kid around about blood relatives.”
“For those twenty seconds, just those, I wasn’t kidding. I was daring myself to be a better man. Three hundred thousand, that’s all I’m going to keep.”
“You’re not a bad man. You’re just run ragged.”
“Alex!”
She turns. From the back she was Alex—from the front she’s what’s her face from TV. Who sleeps with senators. She says she wants loads of children, but it won’t happen. My ex talked that way too but didn’t get pregnant until she shut up and started screwing Mormons with no expectations whatsoever. None. Except that the men would worship her perfect toes.
“I’m feeling them now,” Art says. “You really sat with him?”
My Schwarzkopf fib; I knew he’d call me on it. “We discussed my future. Man’s an empath. Total empath. St. Francis with a side arm.”
“Ryan!”
It’s her. Not Alex—Linda. Morse’s operative. She has on an airline-issued orange turtleneck that she seems to believe can double as swank casino wear if it’s accessorized with a rhinestone pin.
Anyway, we kiss. So now that’s over with.
On to the next thing, whatever she suggests.
“Hi, I’m Art Krusk,” Art Krusk says. Know thyself. He offers Linda his broad right hand that’s as tanned on the palm as it is across the back.
“Nice to meet you,” Linda says.
“Same here.”
Boy, are these two on their game tonight.
“I’m so glad I found you, Ryan. This city’s a zoo. Guess who I’m pretty sure I saw at Bally’s stepping out of a roped-off elevator?”
One, two, three, four, five. A, B, C, D. She’ll crack eventually, and I can wait.
“Brando. He’s giving a speech, I guess.”
“They all are.”
“Could we maybe talk for a minute? Over there. Excuse us, Art.”
“Excuse us, Art,” I say. It’s a technique: Neurolinguistic Mirroring, they call it. Do as the greats do and you can be great, too. Copy their walk, their inflections, everything. Big in the seventies, came back in the nineties, faded some, but will surely rise again.
We move “over there,” which feels like the same place and wasn’t, to my mind, worth the whole upheaval, emotional and physical, of getting to. Linda seems happier, though, and I’m happy for her. I count the pills in my pocket between two fingers and am disappointed with the tally.
“I was right about those hackers, Ryan. We’re not supposed to tell customers, so don’t spread this, but someone in Spain got into our computers—just some young kid, the FBI is saying—and scooped up account information, credit card numbers—”
“Anonymous Spanish teenager. Strangely plausible.”
“He e-mailed the data to friends who e-mailed their friends and now it’s all over the world and it’s still going. We’re getting calls from China. I’m serious.”
“Our global globe.”
“I’m not kidding. Cancel everything.”
“I’ve been working up to it all week.”
“Ryan?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“You’re loaded. It hurts to look at you. Can I get something off your forehead that’s been bugging me?”
She goes right ahead. I’ll never know what it was.
“I was going to say we should eat. You probably need to. This isn’t you, though. This is not my friend. I’m going to my room to study my mater
ials for tomorrow’s seminar.”
“Don’t do it. Be kind, it’s that easy. Burn all workbooks. Erase all cassette tapes and dub them over with song.”
She kisses my cheek and it burns like the hot match heads my mother would use to make ticks release her children. “Goodbye, Ryan. I don’t think we’ll have more dates. This seminar has me thinking I’ll try nursing school, so I might not be at the club much longer, either. I think I always meant to be a nurse but veered a few degrees. Like you’ve said you did.”
“What did I tell you I set out to be?”
“A folk guitarist.”
I’m baffled. It’s so specific. “When was this, anyway?”
“June. Three months ago.”
“Wait here a minute, Linda. I’m coming down. Some ice water to dilute this and I’ll be me again. I want to reconstruct this folk guitar talk. Were we at your condo? Come back. Don’t wave. You know how we think we don’t have feelings for someone, but maybe it’s because they’re just too powerful? I love you. I have always loved you, Linda.”
Oh well, she had her chance. We’re all free agents now. Remember, it’s a lattice, a continuum, so it’s not like anything’s final. Nothing’s final. To the contrary. It’s win-win. It’s synergistic. Read Pinter on Quantum Granular Non-Hierarchies. Or hell, read between the lines of Winnie-the-Pooh, that cuddly avatar of Taoism. Milne knew it, he just couldn’t say it plainly then—the shadow of Victorianism or something. This is twenty-first-century Nevada, though. Scream it, feel free. Nothing’s final. It’s all a loop. We’ve been re-engineered. Like PepsiCo.
Back to Art and the tables. He’s behaving like I was, razzing a new dealer from Lima, Ohio, about the healed-over piercings in his eyebrows, discerning the face of the Virgin in his cards. He either lost everything while I was gone and bought back in with a mad five thousand bucks or he’s in the statistical slipstream, he’s supersonic. If you come in at the end of someone’s streak, the two conditions appear identical. If anything, it’s the big winners who look depressed, because grins are jinxes and it just can’t last, and the losers who smile, because they can go home soon.
I wander off into the crowd. GoalQuesters dominate. I get a fat wink from Dick Geertz at Andersen, who hit his United miles mark a year ago, but only because he commutes to Tokyo, so really there’s no comparison between us. I notice a drink in several colleagues’ hands of layered purples and violets and toothpicked melon chunks, so I flag down a waitress and order one by pointing. I ask what its name is and she says no one knows, that everybody else just pointed, too. When I tell her that someone had to start this thing, she flat doesn’t buy it. She’s a creationist. She’s also, I sense, much happier than I am.
“Hey, Bingham, I need you to meet someone. Get over here.”
It’s Craig Gregory calling. I hustle toward my punishment. The waitress will hunt me down. She’ll use her network.
“Bingham, this is Lisa Jeffries Kimmel. Lisa, Ryan.”
“Hi.”
“I’ve heard your name.”
“I’ve heard yours.” What satanic liars we are.
“Lisa is coming to ISM next month after an interesting stint in Omaha. I know you think they’re pursuing you, that bunch, so I’m guessing you’ll want to pick her pretty brain.”
Lisa looks down. She’s small and dark and beautiful and bizarrely shapely in the way of a bonsai tree compared to a full-size tree.
“Not that Omaha’s called him,” Craig Gregory tells her, “or written or faxed or anything like that. It’s just something he thinks. It gets him through the night.”
Someone squealed on me. My assistant, no doubt. Some agency sends them, you think they’re harmless drifters, be gone by winter, but really they’re your minders, briefed at a central location and later debriefed. It’s a business model, even if it’s not true.
“I’ll leave you two here. Full evening ahead of me at the convention center, followed by Streisand’s annual farewell gig at the MGM.”
I snag his elbow and step back from Lisa. “Someone sent me that bear you gave me, Craig. Mutilated. I’m pinning it on you. You’re who I gave him back to when he retired.”
Craig Gregory rubs his chin and opens a shaving cut that smears blood on his thumb tip, which he kisses dry. Tough little Lisa torches a cigarillo and hungers over the craps action all around us.
“That toy had two consecutive huge Christmases. I doubt you’re in possession of the original. By the way, your corporate AmEx? Confiscated. No more charging Hong Kong custom suits.”
“Computer crime. It wasn’t me,” I say. “If it goes in my file, I’ll sue.”
“Did you overhear that one, Lisa? Any thoughts?”
“Blameless. It’s happened twice this year to me.”
Craig Gregory folds his hands. He bows, comes back to me. “I’ll be there for your breakfast sermon tomorrow. The title has people concerned. I’m not one of them. I know how you pussy out. I’ll sit up front. Lisa, this is a man on his last legs, so give him much succor. We hear you give great succor.”
“Die in hell, you gonorrheal prick.”
“Hear that, Bingham? What this bitch just said? That’s how healthy people respond to me. Take note. You’re not too old to get it right.”
The purple drink is still out there looking for me when I sit at the bar with Lisa and order another by pointing at one just like it two spots down. The bartender, leaves in his hair, a loose white robe, asks Lisa if she’d like one, too—a mere formality—and she says no. It’s a startling negation, and it’s infectious. I cancel my order as though I never meant it. The craze will be extinct within ten minutes.
I want this Lisa. I excuse myself, swivel on my stool, sneak two more pills, and phone my room on the mobile. I have a plan. If she’s there, I’ll hang up. If she’s not, I’ll dare to hope that she’s joined Art’s girl out there in the cyclone. No answer. Will it be safe to go back up, though? What I should do is book another room and abandon my personal effects, which, by design, are not that personal but standard items available anywhere. I’ll miss my sleep machine, whose “prairie wind” track is unique as far as I can tell, but nothing else. The tapes of The Garage are best mislaid. That way there’s at least a possibility that in ten years or twenty, at a rummage sale, an intern at Business Week will pay a nickel for them, listen to them on a whim, and call his boss. The authorship of the scrolls will be disputed—Tarkenton? Salinger? Billy Graham the Younger?—and a stream of pretenders will come forward waving bogus polygraph results. Me, I’ll hang back in my Idaho retreat, content with my dogs, my Mormon faith, my wives.
Or, if this works with Lisa, my one true love.
“What’s MythTech like?” There’s no other way to start. “I thought no one quit there. I heard that if you’re fired they buy you out for life, or pretty close.”
She pinches the filter off a Marlboro. She’s out of little cigars and needs particulates.
“Of course people leave. They just don’t blab about it.”
“Scared?”
“I’d say cautious. Maybe still perplexed. It’s not like a regular consultancy. Take what I did: Market Ecology. The study of non-obvious interactions among diverse commercial entities.”
“Beautiful. And no CTC department, am I right?”
“No departments at all. The model’s plasma. Nuclear plasma fields. Pretentious.”
“Gorgeous. At play in the fields of the Lord. Just think, just float. And no travel, I hear, and just a bare-bones headquarters. You can work from home. From anywhere. It’s all electronic, humanistic, fractal.”
“What are you on? I want some. I’m fading here.”
Somehow I produce three pills for each of us. It’s like the loaves and fishes, my right front pocket. Or did I lie to myself about how many I stole?
“Anyway, Lisa. Me. The market ecologist. A project comes down one day from Spack and Sarrazin. It isn’t true that they’re lovers, by the way. Sarrazin is crazy for his wife and Spack
is a neuter. Born that way. He’ll tell you.”
“Haven’t heard one breath of any of this. A friend of mine who said he had a wife died this week and I hear now he was gay, so basically I’ve written off these topics. The people themselves don’t understand their leanings—that’s my conclusion. I’m growing wise by leaps.”
“The problem was tripartite,” Lisa says. “Fiber optics, red meat, and propane gas.”
I clutch her gesturing hand in mid-air. “My dad sold propane.”
“I started with the easy ones. Gas plus red meat equals grills and patios and heart problems and the insurance that covers them and all those ramifications. But fiber optics? Maybe a gas grill that’s somehow data-linked to a repair center whose low-wage workers only lunch at Wendy’s or McDonald’s not just because it’s a grunt job and they’re broke but because they’re on call to diagnose malfunctions and can’t leave their screens for more than fifteen minutes?”
“You’re asking a question?”
“Or maybe it’s like automated cattle ranches fed with real-time commodities reports that lead to higher profits per animal and thus increased contributions to co-op ad campaigns promoting beef versus chicken? I couldn’t think!”
“Who was the client? A supermarket chain?”
“I’m not even sure there was a client, Ray.”
“Ryan. That’s okay. It’s dark in here.”
“That’s a non sequitur,” Lisa says. “I know what you mean, though. I’m high myself, from earlier. What’s ‘blue bottle’? That’s what the kid kept calling it.”
“I’m not down on the street a lot. Don’t know.”
“It felt like pure R&D to me,” she says. “No timelines, no meetings, just live with this strange problem and send us your thoughts as you think them until they’ve stopped or you feel satisfied. Casual directives, and yet you feel this incredibly formidable potential wrath just waiting to sweep down and smash your life the moment you slack off or add some numbers wrong or make some other mistake you’re bound to miss because no one’s told you how to measure progress, they’ve only said something like ‘Give it your best shot’ or ‘We know you have this in you, Lisa. Just try it.’ ”