Look at Me

by Jennifer Egan

  “The meek shall inherit the earth,” I said.

  “Exactly,” she said, and seemed impressed.

  Victoria Knight was a person in miniature (five foot one, by my rough calculation), who managed her diminutive stance with such surpassing panache that I could only stand back in awe. In brazen defiance of the popular wisdom that one should dress to offset one’s defects, she wore a short skirt, a blazer with a cinched waist, patterned stockings and flats, all of which displayed a lovely bonsai physique. And I wasn’t the only one looking: in the lunchtime furor of Judson Grill, where the air smelled of arugula and money, I sensed many eyes upon her, teasing, wondering, with a mixture of anthropology and lust, what she might look like unclothed. Her oval face was not especially small, framed by lustrous brown hair in a blunt cut. She had sapphire-colored eyes (tinted contact lenses?) and a jazzy spray of freckles on her cheeks. Her upper lip rose into two delicate points. But her greatest strength, the thing I knew I would remember about Victoria Knight even now, having barely sat down with her to lunch, was her near-midgetry. In this sense, she was a walking advertisement for her own estimable skills as a surgeon of reality.

  Philippe, a tweedy, laconic Frenchman whose role at our lunch I had yet to ascertain, was taking furious notes. I’d thought at first that he was one of Victoria’s assistants, but he seemed too old, and insufficiently sleek. And a fourth person was expected shortly. “My friend Thomas Keene has a lunch, but he’s going to try and skip out early to meet you,” Victoria had said when she and Philippe first arrived. “He has a business venture that I thought you might … well, I’ll let Thomas explain it.”

  Venture smenture, I thought; this Thomas, whoever he was, was looking for an excuse to cozy up to Victoria (like everyone else at Judson Grill), to observe her extraordinary anatomy at close range.

  We ordered lunch—arugula for everyone, the power of suggestion being too potent to resist. I pondered the existence of a biological link between eating arugula and earning money; what else could explain its lasting influence?

  “Then there’s the informational story,” Victoria said. “For example, have any new surgical techniques been used on you? Any innovations in the healing or recovery process? Bottom line: Has any scientific ground been broken here? Because that’s the kind of thing we could pitch as a news feature, say to the Science Times.”

  “May be shooting a little high,” I demurred.

  Victoria narrowed her eyes; apparently I had insulted her. “Don’t be so sure.”

  Philippe raised a tentative finger. He was open-eared in the way a person can be open-armed, curved in his chair with a relaxed, almost sleepy mien that brought to mind a youthful Jean-Paul Belmondo. But I detected a whiff of desperation in his quick eyes, his uneven haircut; poverty, I guessed.

  “PR companies have very many powers in America,” he told me, in the jagged accent of someone who wrote in English more often than he spoke it. “This is the subject of my work.”

  “Philippe is studying us as we speak,” Victoria said briskly. “He’s getting a Ph.D. in Media Studies at NYU, and he’s writing his dissertation on … um …”

  “You,” Philippe said, and grinned, unleashing a mouthful of anarchic European teeth.

  Victoria blushed. I glimpsed her shadow self shrinking away from the press of Philippe’s fascination, clacketing sideways like a beach crab for whom attention can only be perilous. But the apparition was fleeting, sucked almost instantly back into the undertow of her mighty persona.

  “Anyway,” she went on, glancing into the fray of arugula the waiter had placed at our table. “So there’s the I Blew It and I’m Sorry story. There’s the Scientific Breakthrough story …”

  “I’m not sure either of those is exactly true,” I ventured.

  Victoria tilted her head as if it were striking her only now that I might have been brain damaged in the accident. “That’s completely up to you, Charlotte,” she said slowly, as if to a child. “Right now, as far as the world is concerned, you’re a tabula rasa. You don’t exist. But once you’re positioned, you’re going to have a hell of a time repositioning. I want you to pick a first move that’ll get you the most coverage possible, and the kind you want.”

  The thinnest sheen of gold sparkled above her sapphire eyes. She was tough, tough! In my years of tormenting mousy women (Irene Maitlock being only a recent example), scourging them for refusing to take charge, dye their hair, lose five pounds and get on with life, it was Victoria Knight, or someone very, very like her, whom I’d held in my mind as a paragon. And yet I couldn’t bear her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Go on.”

  “I was also thinking … oh, okay. A kind of Mental Breakdown story. This would be the inversion of I Blew It and I’m Sorry; this one would go, Up until this tragedy, life was peachy-keen, but now watch me fall to pieces day by day as I try to cope with this disaster. Again, drugs and alcohol could come into this one, as you fight to stay in control. But really, you aren’t in control, your life is totally unraveling, everyone knows it but you!”

  “Hmmm,” I said, relieved that I’d resisted the impulse to order a martini. I was trying desperately to cut back on booze while also clinging to my peace of mind and warding off Despair, whose resurrection I feared daily. It was a difficult balance to strike.

  Philippe scribbled madly into his notebook. Each scenario Victoria described I watched land in his catcher’s mitt face: first pity, then pity; now pity. I felt like kicking him.

  “And the style—this could be really nice—sort of a diary, day by day, like Diary of a Mad Housewife meets Go Ask Alice. Call it something like, ‘Faceless: My Journey into Madness.’ You give us an intimate, bird’s-eye view of your own disinteg—oh, look! Here’s Thomas!”

  A tall blond boyish person was wending his way through the fields of arugula in an olive-green Armani jacket, black jeans and scuffed white Converse basketball shoes, holding aloft a briefcase that appeared to be covered in crocodile. I sensed immediately that he’d once been overweight; he moved with a fat person’s tiptoey apology, although he was lanky—or at least, tall enough to appear so. Harvard, I thought. Grew up in Greenwich or the equivalent, but with no real money behind him. He was one of those rare individuals whose shadow self—a fat, anxious boy who wanted desperately to be powerful—was more pronounced than his surface (sleek, thinnish, and in the possession of a certain modicum of power—or at the very least, a crocodile briefcase). I’d been wrong, though, about his reasons for joining us. Thomas Keene wasn’t attracted to Victoria, he was afraid of her. But he needed her, too. We all needed Victoria.

  “I’m sorry to barge in,” he said, shaking my hand, “but Victoria started telling me about you, and I was kind of fascinated by your story.”

  “We’re hoping it’ll have that effect on everyone,” I said brightly.

  The waiter came, and Thomas ordered a San Pellegrino with lemon.

  “How do you two know each other?” I asked.

  “College,” Thomas said.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Harvard.”

  “Actually, Berkeley,” Victoria said.

  My expression must have lurched, because Thomas jumped in with, “Hey, Berkeley’s a great school,” and I had to assure them both that I had nothing against their alma mater.

  “I guessed you were from the East Coast,” I explained, though in truth, I’d had no read at all on Victoria’s matrix, she was that pure. You had to admire it.

  “We’re Berkeley brats,” Thomas said. “My mom works in Admissions, and Victoria’s dad is a professor.”

  “Logical Thinking,” Victoria said, and rolled her eyes as if the very idea were ludicrous. “Listen, I’m going to make a quick call to the office.” She rummaged in her purse for her cell phone and stood, bringing her an inch or two shy of Thomas’s height sitting down.

  Our main courses arrived, and as I tucked into my grilled salmon, Thomas shimmied his way into describing an In
ternet service he was creating called Ordinary People.

  “It’s not a magazine—it’s a database,” he said. “What I’m doing is, I’m optioning the rights to people’s stories, just ordinary Americans: an autoworker, a farmer, a deep-sea diver, a mother of six, a corrections officer, a pool shark … Each one of these folks will have their own home page—we call it a PersonalSpace™—devoted exclusively to their lives, internal and external.”

  My knowledge of the Internet was limited to a few tentative spins on Oscar’s computer at work, but I decided to bluff comprehension. “What will these … PersonalSpaces look like?” I asked.

  Each one would be different, he explained, to reflect the life of that individual, but certain categories would be standard: Photographs of the subject and his or her family. Childhood Memories. Dreams. Diary Entries—everyone was required to keep a weekly diary, and daily entries were encouraged. Future Plans/Fantasies. Regrets/Missed Opportunities. And people could add their own categories, too: Things That Make Me Angry. Political Views. Hobbies.

  “The idea is to give you, the subscriber”—Thomas swung around to Philippe, who was so flummoxed by this lash of attention that he dropped his pen and had to grub for it under the table, ass in the air (worn khakis), forcing Thomas to wait with mounting impatience to finish his sentence—“… access to every aspect of this person, all the things you wonder, say, when you read about coal miners in the Times and you think, Hey, what would it be like to be a coal miner? Well, my subscribers will be able to answer that question in a totally frictionless way—they don’t have to buy a book or pick up the phone or a newspaper or go to a library or download a lot of boring crap from Lexis—they can go straight inside a coal miner’s life: kids, house, childhood traumas, what he ate for dinner last night, health problems, dreams … Does a coal miner dream about coal? I’d like to know that!”

  There would be audio and video, too, Thomas assured me, so people could hear the miner speak in his own voice and watch him extracting coal from the mine.

  Victoria had resumed her place at the table, and the waiter brought her steak tartare. It was genius. I wished I had ordered one, too.

  “Now obviously, a slew of people are already doing this on their own,” Thomas said, the very presence of Victoria having introduced a whiff of defensiveness into his posture. “I don’t know if you’ve checked out any of these ‘personal’ Websites, but frankly, they’re a snore. It’s all the wrong people: youngish Webheads with too much free time on their hands, and who really cares? No coal miners, I can promise you.”

  “So why would … coal miners want to do this?” I asked.

  “Same reasons people do everything,” Victoria said. “Fame and fortune.”

  Philippe didn’t catch it. He cocked an open ear in Victoria’s direction. “Fame end …”

  “Fortune,” Victoria said, cracking the word like a nut and swallowing its soft inside.

  The “fortune,” Thomas explained, meant an option fee for developing a PersonalSpace, followed by a purchase price. Fame would result from the ensuing exposure. “And out of that exposure could come incredible opportunities,” he said. “Movie options, research contracts …”

  I must have looked incredulous. (I was incredulous.)

  “Okay. For example. Paramount is doing an updated Moby Dick. Screenwriter needs to know what it’s like to be a fisherman. He’s a subscriber, so that gives him access to whatever we’ve got: say, a tuna fisherman in Maine and a salmon guy in Alaska. He reads everything in their PersonalSpaces and he still wants more. So for a negotiated fee, he can actually spend time with an Ordinary Person, say the salmon guy, on his home turf—meet his friends, go out on the boat with him, learn the lingo, maybe do some actual fishing—really soak up the atmosphere of that subject’s life. Voilà! My salmon fisherman is now a film consultant. Who knows, maybe he winds up in the movie for authenticity, maybe they throw him a couple of lines—voilà! My fisherman is now movie talent. And that’s just one possible scenario out of dozens; book contracts, TV appearances, expert witnessing—come on, we’re the most litigious society in the world, and everyone’s an expert on something! And that’s not even getting into things like product placement. Believe me, Coca-Cola’s gonna pay a pretty penny to get its brand into these people’s homes. Now obviously we’ll have to go easy on that stuff, because authenticity is everything, here. We want to get people in their natural environments, doing exactly what they would normally do, but if companies are willing to pay them to use the products they’ve been using all their lives, I say, Why the hell not? I act as their talent agent, that’s part of the deal, and all contracts are split fifty-fifty.”

  I expected him to fall back exhausted (I was exhausted; too exhausted to finish my salmon, which now seemed unpleasantly linked to the fisherman-turned-movie-actor), but this sales pitch seemed to have persuaded Thomas afresh of the magnificence of his venture. His eyes glittered with a kind of madness behind his wire-rimmed glasses. Philippe, apparently having despaired of keeping up using the old-fashioned rudiments of pen and paper, had excavated a tape recorder from his floppy leather shoulder bag, and now was performing the delicate task of eating a softshell crab while holding the orange bulb of a microphone under Thomas’s chin.

  “But wait a minute,” I said, partly to give the Frenchman, who I’d noticed made less of an effort to capture my remarks, a chance to eat a bit of lunch. “Okay, a researcher needs some information—fine. But who else is going to give a damn about some fisherman’s dreams and family history? I mean, not to be rude, but that sounds like watching paint dry.”

  “Not at all,” Thomas said, leaning into this challenge with such relish that he actually shoved the table an inch in my direction, rattling our water glasses. “But with all due respect, Charlotte, I think you may be the exception, here. Most of us are desperate for raw experience. We work in offices, dealing with intangibles; we go to lunch and talk to other people surrounded by intangibles. No one actually makes anything anymore, and our so-called experiences are about climbing Mount Kilimanjaro on our two-week vacations or snapping a picture of the Dalai Lama in Central Park. But we’re so powerfully aware of all the stuff we’re missing! It creates this frustration, this craving to get out of ourselves. TV tries to satisfy that, books, movies—they try, but they’re all so lame—so mediated! They’re just not real enough.

  “Eventually, we’ll take this international—a Yanomamo warrior in Brazil, a rebel in Sierra Leone. A Hezbollah suicide bomber … imagine if there were a way for you to hear that guy’s last thoughts as he gets ready to die for his beliefs! And for him, the exposure—way beyond anything he could get from a day or two of headlines.”

  “It’s really quite revolutionary,” Philippe remarked, holding his tape recorder to his ear like a seashell, I guessed to ascertain that it was working. He cast a baleful glance at his unfinished softshell crabs as the waiter lifted them away. Victoria, who had been eating with meditational fervor, now mopped her plate with bread until it gleamed.

  “So how do I fit in?” I asked. “I don’t make anything, either. I’m just another New Yorker, surrounded by intangibles.”

  “True,” Thomas said. “True. Although to a farmer—and we’re hoping farmers will subscribe, too—to a farmer, a fashion model’s life would be pretty damn interesting.”

  To that end, he’d created an offshoot of Ordinary People that he likened to Premium Pay cable: “Extraordinary People,” meaning people who were undergoing unusual experiences. He’d recruited a woman on the verge of having a liver transplant, a man on Death Row, someone just elected to Congress. Like “Ordinaries,” these “Extraordinaries” would use the categories of Memories, Dreams and Diary, but the focus would be on a particular situation and its effects.

  “Which ties perfectly into my book idea for Charlotte!” Victoria cut in, reprising it briefly for Thomas. “Her internal struggle, day by day. Faceless: My Brush with Madness. Or something like that.”


  “Perfect,” Thomas said. “And see, if you were one of our Extraordinaries, that book could come about really naturally. We set up your PersonalSpace, let some excitement build, then we go to publishers with a proposal that includes how many hits you’ve had, and we say, Look, here’s a built-in readership of seventy thousand people, here’s a chunk of text, and we get you half a million instead of squat, which is what you’d get otherwise.”

  “A quarter of a million,” I said, “after your commission.”

  “Correct.”

  “Supposing I went on line and set up a PersonalSpace,” I said, feeling a fledging confidence in the use of these terms, “and after a few months I wanted to quit?”

  “No problem,” Thomas said. “We keep whatever materials you’ve created for five additional years, with an option to distribute them during that time and negotiate any deals that might come of it.”

  “Five years,” I said.

  “Well, remember,” Thomas said, eyeing the desert menu, then shoving it resolutely away, “it takes work to turn people into cottage industries—we wake them up to the possibilities and shape their material into a digestible form, and I think we deserve something for that. Otherwise it could be Wham, bam, thanks for helping me organize my story. Now sayonara.”

  “I see,” I said; he’d guessed the inclination of my thoughts. Victoria’s blue gaze abraded me with the texture of ground glass. She saw everything.