by Bruce Wagner
Chess had been online reading about useless surgical amphitheater interventions. Like the lady with bullet-proof pain whose bones kept crumbling; the drug she took cost $600,000 a year because her disease was so rare. Her joints broke like teenage hearts and they kept cutting her—the doctors were addicted—until she didn’t want to live. Every putz and putter on the golf course had had a knee or back torpedoed—the drill and scalpel were supposed to be the last resort but greedy Hippocrats could never get enough. One guy’s calcified endoskeleton was strangling a bundle of nerve-endings and the sonofabitch was still crawling to the bathroom 6 months after being carved. His blog said he was planning “death by cop”—get loaded, get naked, and run into traffic waving a gun. The Yahoo! watchdogs were probably gonna shut him down any day now. Could be too late.
When they called him in, the panic momentarily receded. The physician was a brawny, handsome guy of about 60 who looked like he could fix anything. They scheduled the MRI and Chess voiced some of his fears. “You have a very active imagination.” He told the new patient not to worry, he’d dealt with far worse. Chess asked if in the meantime it was OK to get acupuncture and the doc said, “Sure, if it helps.” What about a massage? “Nothing too vigorous.” He even made one of those “happy ending” jokes but somehow it didn’t grate. He gave him an Rx for sleeping pills, anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxants—and more painkillers. Percocet.
“And stay off the Internet,” the doctor cautioned, smiling again as he left the room. “Sometimes too much information is not a good thing.”
Chess put on his shirt.
XXIV.
Marjorie
SHE watched the DVD that Nigel, “the travel gal,” gave her—a very professional presentation, very theatrical, with the same high quality of those Mystery! shows on PBS. It starred a familiar-looking Indian actor (hosting). He was probably quite famous.
Marjorie was thrilled to see the hotel again. Sure, the interior had been modernized but plus ça change, as her daddy used to say; it seemed to have the exact same feeling. She remembered the name “Tata,” they were like the Trumps of India, or the Rockefellers, actually, and still very much entrenched. (The Tatas were Zoroastrians, which the Encyclopaedia Britannica said was one of the oldest religions.) The family owned the Taj chain and even manufactured cars and trucks that bore their name. How divine it would be to rattle around in one’s very own Tata! The film was interspersed with black-and-white stills showing how “the palace” looked in the 20s, 30s, and 40s—and how it looked in the early 50s, when she made her sojourn as a young girl.
Her mother had died of blood poisoning the year before and Dad thought it would be good to draw Marjorie out, salving the wound of premature loss. His idea, she thought in retrospect, was to draw them both out; such exodus being as essential to his emotional stability as to her own recovery and growth, a grandly dramatic gesture, the bold, father-daughter gesture of a lifetime, which she could never repay. (Revisiting their idyll was as close as she would come; sort of “interest” on the loan.) Marj knew he’d been to India twice before to buy fabric for the clothing and knickknack shop her parents owned in Massachusetts; the quality of Bombay silk was astonishingly good, the tailors like none others on Earth. In America, he could resell garments at a 10-fold markup. It was actually his wife who had the idea, and because he took Marj to places where the married couple had 1st shared so many intimate joys of discovery, the trip with his daughter was tinged with heartbreak. For Marj, though, it was the most romantic thing in the world. Now she knew better, but at the time, a widower’s frisson of pain and pleasure never crossed her mind: as they toured in private cars, he’d remark, “This is where your mother loved to people-watch,” “This is where Mom had her tea and watched the ships,” “This is the museum she adored,” “This is where your mother took her shoes off and prayed along with native worshipers.”
The trip had such a dreamy quality that she’d begun to think she had imagined it all, until she saw the marvelous little film. Bless dear Nigel for that! (She had lived with it in her head for so long.) Not only did the clangorous sounds and smells of India waft back to her but those of her father as well, the wind-chime laugh and the clearing of his throat, the cigar smoke that permeated his woolly, pleated three-piece, and clung like the most comforting cologne, the size of his hands and look of his fingers (a slight indentation on one of the nails), the kindness and almost mystical sadness in and around the eyes, the punctiliousness of his dress, his unadumbrated curiosity, and thirst for experience, his solicitous manner toward others—he never turned a beggar down, marveling in a most uncynical way at the ingenuity of their “coin extraction techniques”—but mostly, his tenderness toward her, his dearest child, green apple of his eye, sassy replica of departed wife, his sugarplum girl, his Marjorie Morningstar, one day to become Marjorie Rausch Herlihy née Donovan. From all the terrible things she heard on the news, she was beginning to think her dad was the best who’d ever lived, or that maybe fathers were just different now. She even remembered clutching him close when the driver took them to the section of town, high on a hill, where Parsis—Zoroastrians!—brought their dead to an open room to be devoured by vultures. (It was impossible to see anything though, but the very idea!) She thought of that poor boy, suddenly bereft of Riki, dear, innocent Riki, and the tears welled up. Soon she would have to go to the wretched store, that claptrap mausoleum with its soggy, decaying shrines and relics, to find him.
THE doorbell rang. It was a 30ish man in a stylish suit.
“Mrs Herlihy?”
She blanched.
Was it bad news about Joan or Chester?
“I’m Lucas Weyerhauser. Am I catching you at a bad time?”
“I don’t think so!” she said, slightly agitated.
“Good. This is something that’s a lot of fun for me—and I hope it’ll be fun for you! In fact, I know it will. May I come in?”
Instinctively, she closed the door a bit, narrowing the space between them, not to be rude, but to let the man know she was a savvy city dweller, despite her age.
“Well,” she said, with a small smile. “What is it?”
“I completely understand,” he said respectfully. “That’s fine. I can tell you from right here.”
He turned and curtly waved to a fellow in a chauffeur’s uniform who stood beside a dark sedan. On signal, the driver got back in the car.
“You play the lottery, don’t you?”
“Why, yes.”
“Now, how’d I know that?”
He winked. She was at a not-unpleasant-sort of loss.
“Because I work for Mega Millions, in New York, and it’s my business to know. May I?”
She thought the young man was asking to come in again but instead he handed her a vest-pocket card with LUCAS WEYERHAUSER in raised gold letters. Special Programs Division was inscribed below, with an elaborate blue-gold seal, also embossed—the official seal for the State of New York.
“I won’t take too much of your time, Mrs Herlihy. I know this is out of the blue but here’s how it works: the Los Angeles Super Lotto and New York lottery systems—New York’s is ‘Mega Millions’—are sister programs. Just like Cannes and Beverly Hills are sister cities. Not too many people know that Cannes and Beverly Hills are sister cities but it’s an official truth. Now, the joining of East and West Coast lottery systems is something that isn’t generally publicized but is of great and mutual benefit to the infrastructure of both states.” Marj smiled, uncomprehending. “I didn’t mean to make you dizzy! OK: let me put it simpler. For every hundred thousand Super Lotto tickets bought in LA, the state of New York buys, say, a hundred ‘sister’ or ‘mirror’ Mega Millions. What that means is, even if your ticket doesn’t show you to be a winner in Los Angeles, you might be a winner in New York. If you were to win in New York, part of those monies would be used for many, many things—school lunch programs, filling potholes, even buying computers for police and fire stations. The long and sh
ort of it is that you, Marjorie Herlihy, just became a hero.”
“Hero?”
“That’s right,” he said, grinning. (He reminded the old woman of a fresh-faced dancer from her favorite musical, Oklahoma!) “You are a hero because your Blind Sister ticket—that’s what we call them—from the pool automatically purchased by the State of New York, the ticket you bought…is a winner!”
“But they haven’t announced—”
“Nor will they. The Blind Sister lottos have ‘shadow drawings’—that’s exactly what they’re called—and the ‘heroes’ (such as you) are always named within 24 to 72 hours before home state winners. Blind Sisters cannot be publicized, Mrs Herlihy. That is actually federal law. And that’s why we ask you not to share this with the vendor of original purchase.”
“Riki?”
“That’s right. We’ve already been in touch—they are very happy campers—they’ll be compensated based on a formula not all that different from the one California currently has in place. Of course, they knew about the shadow program, all vendors and merchants do. Again, something mandated by federal law.”
Marj’s door was fully open.
“And now,” he said, with a deep sigh, “I have to disclose something that inevitably doesn’t thrill our winners, be they residents of the Big Apple or be they residents of Lala-land.” He leaned over to whisper. Marj felt strange and alive and discombobulated, as if all her senses were heightened. “Unfortunately, Mrs Herlihy, you won’t be getting the amount listed on the winning ticket. Let me tell you what your share is, after taxes.” He pulled out a small calculator. “Because you’re over 65—you look 45 if you’re a day!—the Blind Sister Superfund subsidizes half the IRS burden. Your piece of the pie is kind of a ‘finder’s fee,’ Mr Michael Bloomberg’s way of saying, ‘Thank you, Mrs Herlihy.’ All right now,” he said, focusing on the little machine as he punched its keys. “Let us now see. Let us now praise famous men and women. The formula is rather complex, but that’s why they give me the big bucks…as soon as you fill out the paperwork, you’ll be collecting approximately…Wow!” He playfully tapped the instrument, as if there was something wrong. “This looks like a Social Security number!”
He gazed into her eyes like a mesmerist.
“Mrs Herlihy, I have flown here on the governor’s jet to tell you that you have just won…$6,483,572.”
Marj felt as if she were falling. The young man rushed to her side, quick on his feet, the way Chester was around the time he was in college.
Mr Weyerhauser held her arm as they went in, turning a final time to the driver before closing the door.
XXV.
Joan
SHE sat at Starbucks, grouping people like an anthropologist. 2 subsets interested her this morning: the Nomadic Nesters and the Sidewalk Kings.
The Double Ns were spinsters who used the café like a personal drawing room. They spent little actual time à table, careful to bitchspray their territory with a clutter of computer, ceramic coffee cup, spiral diary notebooks, dog-eared New Age bestsellers, and peeled-off layers of outerwear. Nomadic Nesters were invariably female and may just as well have used the brackish blood of barren, precancerous wombs to delineate their turf. They hogged 2nd chairs for whatever overflow of detritus, even if the place were mobbed—a contradictory stratagem of the desperately gregarious—and in the rare moments they actually inhabited their space, waited like spiders for the victims who inevitably came along to ask if they might use said 2nd chair. The coquettish Double N would react to the request as if suddenly awakened from deep sleep, thinking her Marcel Marceau gape to be somehow attractive—the contrived and waifish acknowledgment of her own charming eccentricities, which she delusionally imagined others to revel in. Apologizing profusely for her absentmindedness, she would attempt to engage the poor soul who’d approached, with a flurry of cheery bullshit inanities before the seat got dragged to another table as she watched with an insanely intense grin and more marcelled tics, blinks, and twitters. Often the Double Ns begged a hapless neighbor to watch their things, batting Baby Jane lashes when the captive dupes reluctantly assented, rewarding them with a big-voltage desexed smile like a nun gone to rut. The Nomadic Nesters were so highly strung they could actually be seen examining thermoses and cups with Starbucks logos on shelves marked CLEARANCE. Joan feared that becoming N2 was her fate.
The Sidewalk Kings were men, usually in their 40s, who strutted in front of the coffeeshop, talking into Bluetoothed air. Sometimes they rather delicately placed an arm behind them—little Napoleons pacing a ship’s prow. They spoke just loud enough for practically everyone to hear; SK monologues were always about money. Joan had the idea of taking pictures with her Razr and leaving personalized Kinko’s-pixeled records of their peacocky boulevardier preening on Porsche windshields with notes that said, “You think you’re Warren Buffett but you’re just a dickless wonderboy.”
(Thom Mayne would never be on Bluetooth or BlackBerry or any colored toothfairy like that. At least that was Joan’s idea. The churlish beanstalk was a Luddite who only used the phone when he had to. Who cared if he blabbed about His Favorite Weekend? Who cared if Richard Meier went on and on about his “cherished” Viking Ultra-Premium grill in the New York Times? Or if Danny Libeskind let everyone know he kept the complete works of Shakespeare, “in miniature,” under his bed. Barbet cared.)
I shouldn’t have fucked him, she thought, on her way to the office, venti latte plashing from the tiny hole of its cheap plastic lid onto her Olivier Theyskens skirt. Never fuck a client. Never fuck where you hope to build. She had the spiky fantasy of Barbet waiting for her with a messengered note from Guerdon LLC, Lew’s holding company, stating that ARK was no longer in competition and thanking them for their “interest, energy, and enthusiasm.” Oh God. She literally shook the thought from her head and groaned. When she got to work, she would scrutinize her memorial file to wash it all away. She’d been thinking about what Lew said about the Mem; anyway, it was time to do what Barbet called an “intuitive run,” a mental jog through the labyrinthine realm of design possibility. She’d probably blown it sky-high by making wetspot Pratesi whoopee, but didn’t care, or at least was telling herself that. So what if they lost the gig? Let Brad Pitt have it. Wasn’t he part of Uncle Frank’s “dream team”? Give it to Hayden Christensen or Lenny Kravitz—who thinks Bauhaus is the bomb—the true Rock Starchitects of Tomorrow.
I’ll just give up my place and go live with Mom. Cave in to perimenopausal loserdom. She was becoming indifferent and dismissive about everything, and knew that was a sign of depression—the knowing of which made her care even less. She felt soul and spirit ebb like a sewage tide of N-squared nutrient-sucked wombdead blood, Joan was over, and over it, she was all over herself. It was cold comfort when Pradeep pulled glibly Googled factoids from his ass to cheer her up: Brunelleschi was 41 when he entered the Florence cathedral competition, and “the great Donato Bramante was precisely your age when he was called to rebuild St. Peter’s in Rome.”
There was no message from the holding company when she arrived and after an hour at her desk, Joan felt less paranoid. She flipped through the gigantic orange Hermès leather notebook Pradeep gave her on her last birthday and reexamined Andy Goldsworthy’s seraphic earthwork. How could she compete? For the 10,000th time, she looked at Donald Judd’s aluminum Marfan boxes and concrete bunkers in a neat desolate row but rejected any similar concept because of Freiberg’s grouping phobia. There was a xeroxed article about Michael Heizer’s awesome Earth Art “ruin” in the Nevada high desert—it all made her queasy. Déjà vu vu vu vu vu: newspapers, slick city magazines, and Sunday supplements carrying the same tired layouts on an eroto-Escherian loop: Marfa/getaways, Marfa/land boom, Marfa/Chinati (chinati meant “raven” in Aztec—she wanted to gag), Marfa/Prada storefront installation, Marfa/Giant, Marfa/eccentric 50something heiresses, Marfa/renovated rundown Deco buildings and adobe fixer-uppers, Marfa/ocotillos and prairie dogs, Marfa/Dan Flavin/Barrac
ks, Marfa/“Mystery Lights”…the monthly piece somewhere, anywhere, everywhere about culinary auctions of black truffles from the foothills of the Pyrenees, or Masa Takayama’s latest psycho-expensive sushi parlor, always “tucked behind an unmarked door”…the controversy over the use of “Kobe” vs “Kobe-style”…the Coppola family compound turned lodge-resort in Belize…the Spiral Jetty (aerial shot) and Andrea Zittel/A-Z Administrative Services/A-Z Raugh/A-Z Escape Vehicles and Michael Fucking Heizer. If she read one more thing about Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (aerial shot) or the Lightning Field or Andi Joshua Tree (Mojave as Marfa) Zittel’s schoolgirl uniforms and desert hiking trips or Heizer’s cranks and idiosycrasies or High Desert Test Sites or Center for Land Use Interpretation or Dia: Beacon or Lannon Foundation Earth Sculpture Installations or for that matter anything about William T Vollman (who even looked like Robert Smithson; oddly, both Smithson and Vollman looked like Donald Judd without beards) and the Inland Empire or Imperial Valley—she was certain she would disembowel herself at the Basel Art Fair and take a few with her. There were other, different loops: the UCLA Live spring brochure with its dumbass hypey look-at-me names: Chava Alberstein, Pappa Tarahumara, Tania Libertad, Astrid (Zaha!) Hadad; the New Literary Hoaxes; the people compelled to amputate their own limbs; the affluent Manhattanites who got monstrous diseases and wrote tender trenchant diaries of their own demise…the Brian Wilson Smile and Elvis Costello classical-crossover/Metropole Orkest loop; the Walter Benjamin/Eva Hesse/Guy Debord loop; the Proust translation wars; the what-does-Steve-
