The Deep Whatsis

by Peter Mattei

  the deep whatsis

  PETER MATTEI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  part one

  1.1

  1.2

  1.3

  1.4

  1.5

  1.6

  1.7

  1.8

  1.9

  1.10

  part two

  2.11

  2.12

  2.13

  2.14

  2.15

  2.16

  part three

  3.17

  3.18

  3.19

  3.20

  3.21

  3.22

  3.23

  3.24

  3.25

  3.26

  About the Author

  Praise for The Deep Whatsis

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  part one

  1.1

  The intern from the edit house is so drunk she is trying to take her skin off. At least that’s what it looks like. She is already half-naked and is grabbing at her flesh trying to find the edge of the Threadless T-shirt that she lost half an hour ago. I don’t remember her name.

  “What are you doing?” I ask her as she pulls at her body, but it is no use, she can’t hear me and if she can she doesn’t understand.

  Certain people when they drink too much they get an idea in their head and then it forms a kind of feedback loop in which the thought just repeats itself over and over, as if their brain is trying to grip on to something, anything, for dear life, because all of reality is slipping into the void. Megan? Morgan? Caitlin? Finally she speaks and her answer is she wants to take her T-shirt off because she likes to sleep naked, she’s going to sleep now, it’s one of the checkboxes of her still-forming self, sleeping in the nude, it’s who she is, she sleeps in the nude in her sleeping bag even in winter, that’s what she is saying to me over and over out of nowhere in the dark, so I just say good night and turn the lights off. She keeps babbling and looking at me with such a confused sense of joy that I want to laugh, so I do laugh.

  Then I go into the bedroom and get a pillow and go into the bathroom and get the little trash-biny thing. I slide the pillow under her head and I put the trash-biny thing next to her and I tap her shoulder and point to the thing and explain to her that if she needs to barf she should barf in that and not on the floor, if possible, especially not on the pillow—it’s Icelandic eiderdown.

  She looks up at me and smiles and then she passes out.

  1.2

  Intern is extremely cute, alright, granted, her face at least, no question, it’s like God smiling on sunshine, and she’s cool, she quote unquote gets it, but still I plan that after this morning’s pretend-awkward good-bye, which hopefully will happen in a mere couple of hours, to never see her again. For the moment however she is totally crashed and it’s around 6 AM and I’m not really tired, which may have something to do with the stimulants we were ingesting at the bar where we met.

  “What’s up?” she said as I turned around, spun really, why I’m not sure, sloshing a double Rittenhouse rocks in my right hand. I was meeting this friend of mine, Seth Krallman, playwright turned pot dealer turned yoga guru, but he was blowing me off, what a surprise.

  “Don’t I know you?” she said.

  “No,” I said, never having seen the girl in my life.

  “Yes, yes I do know you,” she said. “You got the tuna.” And then she told me it was she who brought the big sashimi platters into the editing session for us at lunchtime, the Viva Paper Towel editing session at the edit house where she worked, and she remembered me because I requested the Oma Blue Fin, rarest and most expensive of fish. It was like ninety dollars a roll and I barely touched the thing.

  “I thought it was pretty lame,” she said. “For the price.”

  “That’s cool,” I said. “Do you always eat people’s leftovers?”

  “Do you always waste really expensive food that is a) on the endangered list and b) caught by slave labor?” she asked, cocking her head to the earnest side and waiting for an answer.

  “Um, I’m looking for a friend of mine,” I said.

  “No you’re not,” she said.

  “No?”

  “No, you’re buying me a drink, aren’t you?”

  Maggie Mallory Margot is an intern at Unkindest Cuts, and I posted a slew of financial services commercials there two years ago so they owe me “big time.” I’m not saying they told her she had to go home with me—I think she did that for her own reasons and because she drank too much, thanks mostly to my largesse. Now, sleeping there, she looks a bit more fleshy than I remember, curled up on the floor, pale, motionless. But, I must say, she’s quite good looking: I make a mental note that she probably ranks in the upper third quadrant of girls I have ever had quasi-sexual relations with in terms of physical attractiveness; when you look at her in a certain light or from a certain angle, she’s feral, and her eyes cradle a syrupyness you can almost taste. What would Howard Roark say about her? He was no writer but would always do something, something bold and innovative, writing being the opposite of that. I tap a note into my phone: “idea for short film, what if Howard Roark gave a TED talk?” I think about wanking but I don’t.

  Then I decide not to go back into my bedroom, because I can’t sleep and because I want to make sure she doesn’t wake up and steal something from me. So I sit down at my desk in the living area and take a look at the latest draft of the screenplay I am writing, which is called either GAME THEORY or KILL SCREEN or MAD DECENT—I haven’t decided yet. I’ve been writing it for three years and I am still trying to figure out the inciting incident, which is the most important thing, at least according to some book I bought in LA when I lived there. Every guy in advertising is working on a screenplay they will never complete but I have more drive and discipline than most so maybe I will, although I am still on page two.

  For the name of my main character I chose my own name, which is Eric Nye, and my own age, which is thirty-three, and my own hometown, which is Canfield, Ohio. I think that is a good touch. I think they call it self-referential.

  I rewrite the opening sentence a few times and mostly I stare at the screen, adjusting my hard-on, which is perpetual for medicinal reasons, at least that is my theory, then I realize that the sun is coming up over the Williamsburg Bridge, which you can see outside my triple-pane window. Suddenly I can smell something funny and I go into the living area and sure enough she has upchucked—on my throw rug, believe it or not, which she managed to pull toward her and scrunch up to use as a pillow because she rolled off the nineteen-hundred-dollar St. Geneve one that I had provided for her.

  I wake her up and she’s a bit more cogent than before and so I walk her into the bathroom and turn the shower on and stick her head under it. Poor sad little girl, whatever will become of you? Then I dry her off and hand her the T-shirt and give her a bottle of Voss to wash her mouth out with. Her beauty has been fairly well line-itemed at this point, and I am not happy to report that she is even more sexy when 50 percent clothed. When she finally gets dressed and exits with a halfhearted wave of shame I jerk off, take my pills, and call a car service.

  1.3

  I fire people. It’s my job.

  But not only do I can them, in the process I help them, or should I say I wake them up, or I should say I take the time to write for them an honorable if not epic death, a death more dramatic and meaningful than the one they would otherwise be entitled to.

  See, I was hired to “clean house” here at Tate, the ad agency in New York City where I am the Chief Idea Officer. I was brought in to create a culture of innovation and creativity, meaning get rid of the dead wood, shitcan
the old and the slow and the weak, and that’s what I’m doing, because it’s my job.

  At first it was something I dreaded. I knew I was being paid handsomely to be the one to blame, the one who does the Dirty Deed, but still, it was distinctly not cool. Then I grew up. I read on page 334 of The Fountainhead where Howard Roark, say, cuts his own testicles off with a fork in front of his cousin or something, I don’t remember, not that exactly, but he does some extremely fucked-up shit that is totally ridiculous but in the end is worth it. That hit me when I read it. So after firing a handful of pathetic art directors and copywriters in their forties and fifties my attitude changed. I realized that my problem with this aspect of my job was purely in my head and that if I were to be totally honest with myself I would admit that there was something heroic about it. The thrill of the hunt, I guess. I had my prey cornered, I had the HR Lady watching me (I call her Lady but she wasn’t much older than me; tall, half-Korean—she lives on Diet Coke, coffee, and wine), and I had my sentence to speak, which thankfully she had written and rehearsed with me: “I’m very sorry to say this but we’re going to have to let you go.” That sentence was like a quiet little knife in my hands, a hand-painted bespoke artisanal elephant gun loaded and cocked and all I had to do was open my mouth and speak it, destiny would take its course, there was nothing anyone could do. The aftermoment would hang there in the air like steam, and the HR Lady would look at my now-finished and cold-sweating prey with fake sympathy but really I knew what she was thinking, she was thinking she was in the presence of a hard-boiled killer and it turned her on.

  Once I gave in to understanding the simple truth about human existence I began enjoying the primal beauty and manifest joy of the kill. I began to turn it into an elaborate ritual. The act wasn’t exactly the same thing as a hunt because the prey had no chance to escape, to run away and survive, as they do in the wild. A different metaphor comes to mind. Last year I was dating a woman, a model who lived in LA, and we went to Barcelona for a long weekend. On Sunday afternoon we went to the bullfight. She objected to this because sport bulls were on the PETA list and she spewed some line of rote nonsense about the cruelty of it and for the most part I bought into that. Of course I was also hoping to get blown one more time before we flew home.

  “Think of it as anthropology,” I said. “Think of it as a window into another world.” And I suppose it was another world, in the way that, well, consider the care and patience that a serial killer will take with the body of his victims, or a medical examiner with a corpse, there is something horrific about it and honorable at the same time, like a sky burial. And the bullfight is not at all a sport, it is a dance, a performance art piece that originated on Spanish ranches and farms, or so I read online although I might be making that up. The bull is going to die regardless because it is going to be slaughtered for food, and so the matador honors his meal by risking his life in the ring, finally terminating it while leaping in midair, his groin exposed to the bull’s horns. The whole thing was pretty gay but at the same time also undeniably deep I thought.

  So that’s how I began to think of my job. Sure, I could just follow my marching orders to the letter, call them into my office, shake my head, look at the floor, say my sentence, squeeze their hands, offer my help in finding them a new position somewhere, which we both knew was bullshit, let’s get a drink sometime, dude, we’ll miss you around here, the fucking bean counters up my ass we had no choice you’re not alone, and so on. I could kill them the way we kill chickens in slaughterhouses, in some kind of dehumanized way, and they have no idea what’s happening until the moment of their death, if at all, if a chicken even knows what death is, does she? Or I could send them out with the art and grace and dignity of a really good commedia, a good long bloody scene, replete with angels, demons, and clowns. They could be unwitting losers or they could be stars, and it was up to us, together, we were doing this as a team. But I was the one at the helm, with my year-long schedule of layoffs, my Outlook calendar entries, invites, and alerts. Outlook was my faena, my sword.

  One of the hallmarks of Western industrial society is death segregation, the separating of the dying and the dead away from the masses and into so-called professional circles: medical practitioners, police, undertakers, military contractors. Some philosophers think this has resulted in neurosis if not psychosis; the exploits of Nazi Germany come to mind if not all of the pornography industry. Where am I going with this? I am bringing death back from the over-anesthetized margins, that’s my mission, my purpose, and it is bigger than right-sizing the creative department on behalf of the shareholders of the holding company that owns the holding company that owns the company that employs me. I am exaggerating and ritualizing the methods of corporate termination for all humankind, for posterity; I have created a new art form.

  But mostly I’m just trying to get my bonus.

  That morning, after I called my building’s concierge service and had them clean up Intern’s puke and toss my eight-hundred-dollar Dalai Lama Edition Tibetan throw rug in the trash, the car service brings me to the office just before 8 AM. I sign the voucher and go inside, flashing my ID quickly as I pass the security cameras and monitors and the sign that says YOU ARE BEING VIDEOTAPED. I hadn’t slept that night more than thirty minutes but it doesn’t feel that way to me; I feel fine, in fact I feel great, of course I am still high as a kite. I know it will get uncomfortable at some point later in the day when I have to tell the editorial company where she works that we will be taking our business elsewhere because their work is “sub-standard,” but for the moment I don’t have to deal with it. I go into my office and shut the glass door and crank up my iTunes and listen to this Girl Talk remix of a Deadmau5 track produced by Pretty Lights and re-remixed by Devon Aoki: I’m lying but it’s something like that. I am sure my enjoyment of this so-called music comes from the fact that I know these tracks are bootlegs, sent to me by a music company (called Earwig) that is trying to get into business with us, and so I am one of a handful of people on the planet who have them, and that is flattering, it would be to anyone. Although this story about them being rare bootlegs is probably not true, it’s probably just the line of mierda the music house gave me to make me feel extremely good about myself, which would translate down the line into more money for them. Everything is seduction, everything is sexual in the end, even the passcode to an FTP download site. I put on my Beats-by-Dre headphones and listen to the track. It’s really boring.

  All forms of entertainment product have at their roots a base reason for being, a simple consumer benefit. If you ladder up to it, you see that certain things exist to make you frightened, for example, so that you can vicariously experience primal terror and survive it in the (relative) safety of a mall, endorphin rush as much a part of the experience as the popcorn. For millions of years Man lived with constant fear, in the wild, there were real monsters in the dark, things that would tear your head off and eat it while your eyes were still functioning, and we still need those neurons to fire now and then or they atrophy; this is a multibillion-dollar industry called movies and not to be confused with that other fear-based industry called politics. Or in the case of music, gangsta rap, the ultimate benefit is that it makes you feel empowered sexually when you listen to it, although if you are white and grew up in the suburbs like me fear is also a factor: again, I can experience this in the safety of my home or car, not on the actual Streets. And so it is a testosterone inducer, it has the same effect as the patch that ball-less guys are supposed to stick under their arms. The other chief benefits of entertainment properties are wish fulfillment and stress release (also known as comedy).

  My calendar isn’t particularly full today. A few boring meetings in which I will listen to some of our industry’s least-talented creatives attempt to impress me with their awful, so-called ideas, and I will nod, pretend to hate them all, and say things such as “Do you really think this is the best you can do?” or “Do you really believe that bringing me work like this
is going to help you keep your job?” They will always answer the same way, hemming and hawing and finally agreeing that there must be a better idea out there somewhere, and then I will just stare at them with feigned contempt for their vain struggle toward greatness which, deep down, none of us really cares about.

  “If this isn’t your very best work, why are you showing it to me?”

  “If you were me, what would you say to you?”

  There would never be a reply to that one. I don’t think they could tell that the contempt was there in me, really. And I don’t mean to say it was completely real, most of it was not, it was an act. I do have actual contempt for them but it has nothing to do with their advertising skills because I barely even registered what it was they were showing me. I couldn’t care less. I have contempt for them because I have contempt for this entire industry, myself included. Some business writers say that you don’t motivate people by putting them down but I wasn’t trying to motivate them, I was trying to de-motivate them. I was going to have to fire half of them anyway, so why would I want them to do a good job? Why would I want to meet their kids? On the other hand, if I were to motivate them and they did a better job and then I fired them, that would be even more confusing to them, which would provide some additional absurdity-enjoyment to me, and to the universe at large. I suppose I don’t bother to motivate them because I am just too lazy to care whether or not anyone’s pain or dramatic arc is fully maximized. After all, this isn’t about me, I’m not the center of the universe, I’m just a cog in a larger wheel.

  Around 1 PM I go to lunch by myself at Faco, which is a Mediterranean seafood restaurant specializing in Aegean shellfish prepared in wood-fired ovens. It is not far from the office. I sit at the bar, get the pan-seared octopus and the baked spinach and a $124 bottle of Sancerre. I have my laptop with me and look over the opening of my screenplay. It sucks. I stare at the octopus, but I don’t touch it for some reason, possibly because of how irritated I get by the waiters swarming around me, creating a vortex of ingratiating fantasy: hey, look, we’re all billionaires. The wine, the lack of sleep, and my thoughts wandering back to the night before contribute to making me feel unfocused, I can’t get any work done. I get up and leave a 44 percent tip. As I walk out my iPhone buzzes and I see there is an SMS from a 347 number I don’t recognize.