Waxwings

by Unknown

  “Every retail site on the Web is transaction-based. We’re content-based. I like to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, and I don’t like the margin on retail. So we’re a content-based retail site, which sounds kind of screwy. Think of what Jeff does over at Amazon, then think the opposite. We’re the opposite.

  “Jeff liked books—low unit-cost, easy to package, small in size, and big multiplicity of choice, right?—but now he’s got people wrapping up lawnmowers in Atlanta. What I like about houses? You’ll never have to mail a house by UPS. So there goes your shipping and your warehousing. Plus, I don’t want to sell anyone a house. That’s a realtor’s job, and they can do the sweet-talking better than I can. And the paperwork.”

  He glanced down at her résumé. “You are not here to sell houses, Liz. Our revenue-stream derives from content, and what we sell is talk, attitude, customer interaction, and community. And we keep it very cool indeed, because cool sells.”

  At the end of the interview, at which Beth had barely spoken a word, Steve Litvinof said, “Okay, now you get to drink the Kool-Aid,” and gave her a brief, terminal smile across the desk.

  Her job title was Executive Editor (Neighborhoods). The company’s name was GetaShack.com, which sounded ridiculously clunky, but it had been market-researched and people remembered it. The techies liked to call it the Big G, a phrase that really set Beth’s teeth on edge. The site was up and running in Seattle, Portland, the Bay Area, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Dallas, and Denver, with Phoenix and Kansas City running close behind, as Litvinof pursued his policy of eastward expansion. He intended to cross the Mississippi in the first quarter of 2000, into what he called Indian Country.

  From her big corner cubicle, Beth commanded a tatterdemalion army of freelancers across the West, most of them writers for alternative weeklies. These foot-soldiers were paid a dollar a word to genially disparage their own neighborhoods in the offhand, knowing style that was the company’s hallmark. Her job was to keep the tone laid-back, to iron out displays of unseemly enthusiasm, likely grounds for libel suits, and all uses of the first-person singular.

  Visitors to the site clicked on a city for a general briefing, then on the neighborhood of their choice, where they were whisked off on a tour conducted by one of Beth’s cool young mercenaries. They could watch a video of their journey, in letter-box format, at the top of the screen. Below it, on the left-hand side, the accompanying text unscrolled, while to the right a tiny black convertible—a 1957 T-Bird, if you looked closely—motored along a large-scale street map. The visitor stopped the car to check out supermarkets, movie houses, clubs, delis, newsstands, flower shops, restaurants, and other businesses, each of which contributed to the site’s revenue stream. The tech staff on the tenth floor were still working on the problem of how to persuade the T-bird and video to make turns in sync: sometimes they did, and sometimes they didn’t. The standard response to customer complaints was “We are working hard to extend the technology platform.”

  Whenever the car passed a house that was on the market, a red FOR SALE logo would flash on the map. Click on it, and you’d get a video shot of the house in question, whether a “Roach-infested Victorian fixer-upper” or a “Gruesome 1950s Stepford Wives Rancher.” One more click led you to a realtor’s site, where the description of the property would be more conventionally fulsome. Each time a visitor clicked on the See More button, Getashack would automatically collect a flat fee of $12.50 from the realtor.

  Traffic on the site was heavy, and also exceptionally sticky. In the third quarter of 1999, the average visitor remained on the site for seventeen minutes—up by nearly two minutes from the previous quarter. What mostly kept them lingering, and why realtors clamored to get their listings on GetaShack, was the Virtual Starbucks in every neighborhood. Howard Schultz had invested heavily in the site from the beginning, seeing it as a useful test-bed for actual cafés. The virtual coffeehouses were crammed with prospective house-buyers, idle passersby, and bona-fide neighborhood residents, who hung around, often for hours at a stretch, swapping local knowledge. They gave out names and numbers of contractors, posted warnings of impending construction projects, rated the nearby schools and teachers. If a newly released sex-offender was moving into the neighborhood, you’d hear about it in the Virtual Starbucks, as you’d learn of deaths, divorces, break-ins, babysitters, hair stylists, potlucks, yard sales, problem kids, reading groups, and AA meetings. Actual dates were made in the virtual cafés, and sometimes actual fights erupted from them, as neighbors left their PC screens to confront each other angrily in “the physical venue,” as the real world was known inside the Klondike building.

  Beth, a journalist, was still a stranger to the online world. The inner workings of the site were as obscure to her as to a casual Netsurfer, and the techies were no help at all. Riding up in the elevator with a gang of slouching boys destined for the tenth floor, she was aware of how they looked straight through her, as if she didn’t exist. She felt too young to be made to feel so old and out of it. And when the techies did talk, it was literally in code, their speech sprinkled with impenetrable acronyms.

  Sandwiched between Tech on the floor above and Finance on the floors below, Editorial was regularly attacked from both the air and the ground. Beth and her colleagues had no arcane science of their own with which to defend themselves, and so the programmers and the numbercrunchers, incapable of making sense to each other, usually settled their differences by laying into the dopes on the ninth floor. For a while, they’d fire volleys that went clean over Beth’s head, about leveraging operational efficiencies or optimizing bandwidth utilization. Then, because everyone could read, they’d turn on Beth. Make it sexier, they said. Cooler. Or looser. Tighter, funnier, more serious. More ironic—or less. More like the kind of stuff they read in Architectural Digest, Rolling Stone, Wired, Islands, Salon, Gourmet, the National Enquirer, or whatever rag on which their eyes had last briefly paused. Or. Or. Or. Or. She emerged from these meetings feeling stoned, bruised from head to foot by these salvos of stupid ors.

  She opened her next e-mail, from Harriet Zimmerman, who sat on the other side of Robert’s cubicle.

  hi beth! this from rachel wu who pete said was great—i dont think its right for us but will you read please? Thanx. ;) harriet

  She clicked on the attached Mill Valley.doc, and scanned the file:

  Once the California capital of hot-tub parties and wife-swapping, Mill Valley is now the woodsy Bay Area enclave for white, college-educated liberals. Towering redwoods shade wood-and-glass homes that cling to winding canyons. Picture sneaking a post-dinner-party Davidoff on a redwood deck, walking the Dipsea Trail with the Bichon Frise, and Sunday cycling expeditions to Peet’s to compare gear, sip decaf, run a hand over the silvered Clooney cut, or bemoan deer-damage to the baby vegetable garden . . .

  Of course it wouldn’t do. Woodsy enclaves and homes that cling were not what anyone wanted to find on GetaShack, let alone that Bichon Frise. It sounded as if this Rachel person hadn’t even bothered to visit the site. Beth hit Reply.

  You’re right. It doesn’t make the cut. But she’s obviously tried. Get her a kill-fee and find someone else.—B.

  The INS did not, in fact, get everybody. When the others, starved of natural light for so long, scuttled across the open deck and tried to climb their way free, one went down, instinctively reaching for the dark. Practised at this, he could flatten himself into a shadow, knowing that in stillness and silence a man can disappear.

  Squeezing himself into the friendly gloaming behind a container, pressed close against the ribbed plates of the ship’s hull, he found a semicircle of pure darkness at his feet, and the handrails of a companionway dropping to the deck below. He didn’t immediately trust himself to the ladder, but waited for the next bout of yelling and stamping from the men on the far side of the container. When it came, he found the top rung with his foot and let himself down into the darkness, gingerly feeling for each toehold. Heights scared him, a
nd the ladder was greasy, the soles of his sneakers slipping on the iron rungs.

  The ladder went deeper down into the ship, but he stepped off at deck level, and took his chance among the containers, wriggling his bony shanks between them whenever he found space, losing himself in the labyrinth, thinking of the dogs. At the far side of the ship, he rested for a moment against the cold wall of the hull, panting thinly, shivering, in his T-shirt and New York Jets windbreaker. Then he set off again along the side of the ship, looking for the next ladder.

  The opening in the deck-plates was lighter than the last one, and light frightened him. Moving like a slug on a grass blade, he crawled on his stomach toward the hole until he could peer out. He’d guessed right: below him, Land Cruisers were lined up, dangerously distinct, on the car deck. He cursed the whining of the generators as he scrutinized the dark perimeter of the shadows for a movement or human silhouette.

  There was little of him left to disappear—sneakers, jeans, windbreaker, baseball cap worn back to front. There had been more to him once. When—so long ago that it was in another life—he had stepped into the container, clasping his airline holdall of belongings to his chest, he was definitely somebody. He was Jin Peng, from Lianjiang. He was twenty-four. Under interrogation, he could still have found these facts, but now they were dead husks, like discarded peanut shells that one might crunch underfoot in the street.

  Now he was only the wheedling, angry pain in his gut; his thumping heart; the fizz of excited blood in his veins. Lying by the opening in the near-dark, craning his neck to search for enemies on the deck below, his breath came back to him in a sudden rank gust—a sickly zephyr from a cesspool. This is me! He thought, I am this stink!

  He stood on the ladder above the opening, willing himself to go down. Like an abseiling spider on its thread of gum, he made his descent, feet pattering against the rungs, hands dry-burning on the rails. Ducking low, he scooted toward the closest vehicle, and crawled between its big wheels to take stock. No one came running. The puddles on the deck were deep enough to drown the rivets; he could smell the sea salt in the water. When certain of his solitude, he crept out and, treading carefully from puddle to puddle, so as to leave no scent, made his way between the cars, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the ladder on which he’d skinned his palms. He chose his vehicle for its appearance of looking lost in the crowd, and because it stood in a puddle as big as a pond. He looked quickly up and down the line—the same covert, split-second survey that he used to make in the streets of Fuzhou—then squatted behind the tailgate, unbuckling his sagging belt and pulling it free of his jeans. The pin on the buckle was filed blade-thin, for business. After wetting it with his fingers, he worked the pin inside the lock on the tailgate. It was a babyish lock: the wards sprang easily apart, and it clicked open. He made another quick reconnaissance, and was into the car and out of it in a short moment, having released the lock on the left-hand rear door. He closed the tailgate quietly, watched and waited, then scrambled back into the Land Cruiser, locking the door behind him.

  Inside, the car reeked of beeswax, machine oil, and perfumed leather—a rich-man smell. He shrank himself under the welcoming overhang of the backs of the front seats, and clung there, fearful, spectral, a long smear of dirt in the gloom of the lavish interior. He breathed meagerly through his nose, concerned by the foul odor that came out of him whenever he opened his mouth. He mustn’t smell-up the car.

  Before he entered the container, self-extinction had been his useful craft: now it was something that had happened to him, like catching a disease or being in a bus accident. He had the dim but terrifying sense that sometime during these last days he’d ceased to be a person.

  In the beginning, the men had talked, confided their stories, shown their family photos, argued, quarreled. There’d been two fights. Then the noise began: the shunting and booming, the groan of flexing metal, the crashes, like tall buildings toppling into rubble, the constant rippling thunder of the sea. The men were flung against one another like carcasses of meat. No one could stand. No one could talk. When someone shouted, it was always a curse. Sleep was a raging phantasmagoria, from which waking to exhaustion was a merciful release.

  Time had no meaning there. Some of the men had watches that told the date, and to begin with they watched the days stack up with building hope. The snakehead had promised a six-day voyage. On the fifth day, the men believed this must soon end, that they were close now to the USA. But it did not end. First one man died, then another. He thought he might die. He didn’t mind: all he wanted, if he could still want anything, was an ending.

  After the men died, the battery died. They hadn’t rationed their use of the fan, whose blade revolved slowly to a stop. The clip-on lamp they’d fixed above the door went dim and they were in darkness, although the filament inside the bulb continued to glow. First it burned like a firefly in the night, then it turned coppery, revealing itself as a wire, hair-fine, bent into an octagon with a missing side. Through the incessant crash and rumble, he watched the wire. Once, in delirium, he found himself praying to it—the last and only light in the world. Waking from a mad sleep, he saw it was gone, and was certain he was going, too.

  It was long after the wire went dark that the ship suddenly steadied and was quiet, and he heard the human noises. Every man was moaning, each after his own fashion. Nobody talked, nobody cried. One man’s moan was a twiggy crackling in his throat, like the wind in a dead thornbush. Another mewed like a starving cat. Another made a reedy nasal singing sound, like an old monk.

  He listened to his own noise—a painful, rasping awww! Each time he exhaled, his protesting breath burred and croaked in his dry larynx. Awwww! When he tried to speak to his neighbor, he felt his swollen tongue filling his mouth. “Caw!” he said, like a rook on a telephone pole.

  The men shared the last of the water. He drank, and stole enough to rinse his face and swab his reeking armpits. In the new quiet, he dozed, oscillating between moments of sleep and appalled wakefulness. When at last the Americans opened the container door, he was in better shape to make the break than the others, and waited for the first two escaping men to be caught before he sneaked out, under the cover of the running and shouting.

  He clung miserably to the underside of the car seats, the adrenaline leaking from his body, replaced by waves of nausea and exhaustion. He couldn’t even remember why he’d run. He wanted to be found. They’d give him food, surely? And let him sleep? They’ll be here soon, he thought: an ending. So he waited, taking a wan comfort in his own indifference.

  It was the dog he heard first, an echoing halloo that rang down the street-long deck from far up front, then the men moving slowly through the cars. He didn’t tighten his hold, but lay quietly—almost relaxed now—on the soft carpet. He was tempted to struggle to his knees and show himself, and only the habit of evasion stopped him. He wasn’t a man who helped soldiers, police, or officials to do their work. These were people to be dodged and hidden from, to be shown a face as blank and void of feeling as a shovel.

  This realization cheered him. He had habits—he was a person—and hadn’t lost himself entirely in the black container. With suddenly renewed assurance, he gripped the back of the driver’s seat. He knew what to do, and became a shadow. He heard a voice answered by a laugh—a loud, snorting, gweilo laugh, full of phlegm and spittle. Laughter was good, he thought. It meant the men weren’t searching for anyone in particular. They sauntered casually along the deck, and their dogs were quiet, though he could hear them moving, claws on steel. Quick as a minnow, moving in darts and jerks, the narrow beam of a flashlight made a cursory pass over the car’s interior, then the men passed on. He heard more laughter.

  Later, when the great hatch-door at the back of the ship was cranked open, a wash of sudden daylight flooded the deck, and more men came, to drive the cars off one by one. He readied himself for a journey, but the car stopped only a minute or two after it had started, and the driver—a h
eavy man, whose weight pressed against his face through the upholstery of the seat—left, slamming the door behind him.

  He listened to the hungry bubbles bursting from his belly. Not very long ago, when no one else could eat, he’d crammed his face with crackers, then chomped down the rotting core of an apple he’d thrown away some days before. Now all that was left in him was gas. Not yet daring to move, he lay low, farting painfully, and waited for nightfall.

  Fingers pattering quickly on the keyboard, Tom wrote:

  Every morning without fail, my wife—like so many people here in this virtual city—performs a tribal ritual. As soon as she’s put her coffee on to brew, she rescues the skinny national edition of the New York Times from our front deck, skims the headlines, then turns to Section C to read her fortune.

  Being the sort of paper that it is, the Times doesn’t have an astrologer on its staff. But it does carry the Nasdaq listings, which are the next best thing to Madam Sosostris or Gypsy Petulengro, and there in the fine print of numbers and fractions, my wife discovers her future.

  For Beth has options . . .

  The form of the NPR commentary was tight as a sonnet: Tom had four minutes, or 480 words, a tiny room into which he was always found trying to stuff far too much furniture.