Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  The MTA seems to have taken down all the AVOID ARREST signs. When she first moved to the city, Lizzie remembers, in 1987, those signs, as ubiquitous underground as graffiti, struck her as strange and funny. An advertising campaign unabashedly targeting a particular New York City demographic—punks, fare beaters, criminals. With a message abdicating any assertion of moral authority in favor of simple, direct, cost-benefit advice that sympathetically presumes a desire to break the law—PLEASE DO NOT FORCE US TO APPREHEND YOU. (Lizzie had wondered why the authorities neglected bilingualism here, of all places. She never saw an EVITE SER ARRESTADO sign.) Maybe she is a Republican already. Maybe, it occurs to her, she could buy an AVOID ARREST sign at one of the antique stores on Lafayette Street.

  During just the past week, she sees, one of the three streetfront retail spaces in her office building has become a “tea bar and gourmet premium sandwich and ice cream emporium” called Ellipsis …—the word Ellipsis followed by dots of ellipsis. When Lizzie went home last Monday it was The Best Offense, a shop that sold bulletproof garments (“reinforced fashion,” they called their clothes) and never seemed to have customers. She becomes convinced of the new shop’s imminent failure, chokes up over this and all the other hopeful, hopeless immigrant dreams with which New York teems, and then, as the tiny old elevator ascends—we’ve all got businesses to run—turns her attention to Fine Technologies. The nonexistent Microsoft deal. The nonexistent West Coast office. The folly of staking so much on a fucking game that works best only with special fucking hardware. Wondering if and when she should bring the company public. Wondering why she’s consulting for Mose for free. Fretting, calculating, not quite panicking, almost enjoying the return to overload. She has gone from surprise to sadness to self-involvement, all in eleven seconds.

  “Mr. Wizard, hellllp!”

  “Good morning, Alexi.”

  He follows Lizzie into her office.

  “Your hair! You didn’t discuss it,” he says, circling around her to look, legal pad in hand. On Friday morning she and Sarah went to the Cristophe salon in L.A. Either Tina Louise or Jill St. John was getting her hair done in the next chair. “I’m like, ‘Whoa!’ It’s disorienting, it’s … nice, it is, very, you know …”

  “Don’t say Sigourney Weaver.”

  “I wasn’t about to.”

  “Don’t say Marlo Thomas.”

  “Natalie Wood.”

  “Okay.” Lizzie, eager to get started, doesn’t mention that she thinks she got her haircut three feet away from Natalie Wood’s widower’s wife, especially since she would also have to mention the Tina Louise possibility, which would take time and surely prompt Alexi to do his Mrs. Thurston Howell impersonation, which would in turn invite a discussion of Buddy (Li’l Gilligan) Ramo. “So,” she says. “What?”

  “Lance isn’t getting back until this afternoon, but he called from the airport to tell you he’s ‘not very encouraged on the Redmond project.’ I think ‘the Redmond project’ may just be Lance’s super-top-secret code for the Microsoft Corporation.”

  “He tries. What else?”

  “You’re being sued.”

  “For what? Who?”

  “The dreaded Vanessa.”

  “You’re joking.”

  Vanessa Golliver was a receptionist for four months. When she wasn’t given a full-time job as a “computer, like, programmer-in-training” last summer, a job that doesn’t exist at Fine Technologies, she quit, urinating on the floor of the reception area on her way out.

  “Sorry.” Alexi pulls out a federal district court filing that he’s tucked into his legal pad. “ ‘Vanessa Golliver v. Fine Technologies, Elizabeth Zimbalist, et al.’ You discriminated against her because of her disability.”

  “Exactly what is Vanessa’s disability? Some urinary disease?”

  Alexi turns two pages and reads, using a lawyerly lockjaw that sounds not unlike Thurston Howell. “ ‘A previous medical impairment, namely cocaine addiction, that restricted major life activities of plaintiff on an ongoing basis, namely, plaintiff’s ability to reason and to learn.’ ”

  “Her disability is having been a coke addict? Or flakiness and stupidity?”

  “All of the above, I guess. And remember when you were like, ‘Vanessa, you can’t only work three days a week’? Blah-blah-blah-blah, wait, here: ‘… including defendant’s repeated refusals to entertain plaintiff’s requests to restructure plaintiff’s work schedule to better accommodate medical treatment.’ ”

  “Hilarious. Fax it to Katherine.” A few years ago she would have been apoplectic. But running a business has inured her to annoyances like this. Instead of outraging her they amaze her. She regards them as freakish and a little worrisome, but also inevitable and fascinating, like hailstorms. Her first employee lawsuit was filed by an aggressively sweet pro-life young woman named Meryl Farah Doyle. She was a bookkeeper who one day refused to do any further work related to Fine Technologies’ voice-recognition software because it happened to be used by a confederation of abortion clinics. Since at the time the voice-recognition software was Fine Technologies’ only product, Lizzie had to fire Meryl Farah. According to her legal brief, she also could not abide that the software was used by “one or more UFO hot lines, which plaintiff regards as furthering the dangerous and unacceptable agenda[s] of Satan and satanism.” Lizzie joked to Katherine, the company’s lawyer, that they should ask Procter & Gamble to file a friend-of-the-court brief. But after Pat Robertson mentioned Doyle v. Fine Technologies approvingly on one of his Christian Broadcasting Network news programs, Lizzie received four letters threatening violence against her, one of them addressed only to “Computer Jewess, Fein Technology, Manhattan.”

  Alexi is looking over his message list. “Henry Saddler’s office just called. From Mose Media Holdings.” Mose must want the memo about online video. She’ll finish it tonight. But she’s having dinner with Pollyanna tonight. She’ll stay up.

  “George called at nine-ten. He said not to tell you that he was calling to smooth things over from last night, but that I should indicate—indicate!—that he misses you. It was six A.M. his time.”

  She reddens. “Any other calls?”

  “Some woman from Time magazine. A reporter. She’s working on ‘a possible cover,’ she said.”

  “About what? Another Microsoft story?”

  “Nope. About medical miracles. She wants to talk to you about your father.”

  “Fuck.”

  Bruce Helms pops his head in the doorway.

  “Welcome back,” he says.

  “And Bruce wants a couple of minutes with you as soon as you get in,” Alexi says, getting up. “Coffee?”

  “Please. Hi,” she says to Bruce. “How’s tricks?”

  “I talked to my friend Buster. At U-Dub? The ‘mental-modem’ guy.”

  “Right. Did he tell you it’s all a load of overhyped bullshit?”

  “No. No, he didn’t. He says he believes he’s actually had direct, wireless, microwave, brain-to-brain communication between mammals. He’s grafted chips onto cats’ neurons. Wired-up cat A in room X instructs cat B in a separate, soundproof room Y a hundred feet away that there’s tons of food available in room X, and wired-up cat B works his way through a maze and a chute to reach room X to eat. When there’s no food in room X, nothing happens. But apparently the university is not being entirely supportive of his research. Strictly speaking, the experiments are somewhat outside his grant guidelines.”

  “What is he supposed to be doing?”

  Bruce screws his face into an exaggerated pooh-pooh look. “Oh, some kind of biomechanical alarm, disposable, to stick inside tin cans that gets triggered when food spoils. But his real problem is politics. Cutting open cats’ heads and installing microchips strikes certain people in the academic community as cruel and unusual. In Seattle, PETA apparently has its own cable channel and its own city councilman.”

  “Bruce?”

  “What?”

  “This is
all very interesting. But why are you telling me about it? Why aren’t you telling me, for instance, how we’re doing on the game?”

  Again he assumes his pooh-pooh face. “Because we’re basically done.”

  Lizzie says nothing.

  “Done-ish,” Bruce says. “Way ahead of schedule. A few weeks from done. Really, we’re fine, don’t worry. It’s going great. I got your message about the name. I still like Range Daze better, and I like Matrix even more, but Warps is fine. Boogie’s okay with it, and the Germans love it.” He leans forward. “I’m telling you about Buster because U-Dub doesn’t control his patents, he does, and he wants to work with us.”

  Bruce has invested much of his inheritance in five tumbledown eighteenth-century houses in rural New York and Connecticut that he keeps empty, and he spends a weekend every month or two at some hang-gliding ashram in Maine, and once a year he goes to Quito, Mississippi, to visit the grave of his hero, Robert Johnson. Three summers ago, after he spent his summer vacation in Uppsala, Sweden, at a conference on “randomness and nonlinearity,” he said that a paper called “Continuous Control of Chaos” changed his life. And he does have a knowledge of computer-history trivia that Lizzie considers demented. (When she went to Albuquerque on Microsoft-related business last March, Bruce said to her, “That’s funny—Bill Gates addressed the World Altair Computer Convention in Albuquerque in 1976, I’m pretty sure in March.”) But he has never seemed prone to wild technomanias. As an employee, he’s been responsible and conscientious. Maybe now that the company is successful, more or less, and the ninety-hour weeks have ratcheted back to sixty-hour weeks, his lurking hacker madness has had the space to fester and grow.

  “You just don’t get it, do you?” Bruce says, shaking his head.

  Lizzie feels frightened and sick.

  “Cats are a huge consumer market for computing, for wireless, all of it,” he tells her, tensing up, talking faster. “Animals in general! It could be our emerging market! It’s absolutely wide open. But animals can’t use keyboards. And animals can’t use styluses. Styli. Can they? Can they?”

  Lizzie says nothing. Bruce stares at her, taking quick, shallow breaths. Then he grins.

  “I’m kidding, Lizzie.”

  “Very good.” She can breathe again. “Very good. You fucker.”

  “But I’m serious about Buster’s research. It sounds astounding. I have no idea what the product would be. Or when. But you’ll figure out something. PawPilot. This could be gigantic, Lizzie. Edisonian. Orville and Wilburvian.”

  Lizzie has never heard Bruce talk like this. She has never heard Bruce sound so excited about anything, not even hang gliding or the blues. His enthusiasm is infectious. She tries to resist the infection.

  “Don’t I recall your telling me that Buster had some kind of breakdown?”

  “Wow. Vanessa Golliver is right—you do discriminate against people with psychiatric disabilities, don’t you?” Lizzie flips him the bird. “Yes, Buster got overinvested in his code after his fiancée dumped him, but that was short-term. He’s been sane for years. Sane-ish. He’s fine. He says he only needs five hundred K a year to keep going.”

  Perfect! In a single stroke she can reduce Fine Technologies’ earnings to zero. Lizzie knows her MBA superego is wrestling—tangoing? making out?—with her naked entrepreneurial id. The scuffle excites her. “I’m supposed to start spending half a million dollars a year on R and D? Why doesn’t Buster just go to another university? Someone would love to fund him. Georgia or Texas or somewhere. I’ll bet in the South there’s no animal-wacko problem.”

  “Buster believes in capitalism.”

  “That’s beautiful, Bruce.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “There are lots of people who would make him lots richer lots quicker than we could. If we could, which is doubtful.”

  “No, no. He doesn’t care about making money personally. Last week, he told me, some venture capitalists flew him down to Mountain View for dinner, and when the appetizers were served he threw up, right on the table, all over a platter of steamed dumplings. He says being around too much money lust makes him sick, like taking too many vitamins. But he does believe that capitalism is our human destiny.”

  “It’s Ayn Rand, Scotty—beam me up!”

  “No, no, no—not like that. He’s not ideological. He just thinks humans are hardwired for capitalism, biochemically, evolutionarily. In the way that ants are natural communists, you know, like E. O. Wilson says. We’re capitalists. And spiders are feudal artisans and so on.”

  “Edward Wilson says that spiders are feudal artisans?”

  “I think that’s Buster’s embellishment. He’s decided it’s time for him to fall more in line with the human paradigm. ‘I’m not an insect, Bruce,’ he told me. ‘I just don’t do well in the hive.’ He’s also fallen in love with a woman who lives in Queens and plays in an alternative country-western band.”

  “You think this is the genuine article?” Lizzie asks.

  Bruce nods.

  “Why don’t I meet with Buster in Seattle next week?”

  “Cool. You’re going to Seattle? Is the deal done?”

  “Who knows?” she says, glancing at her computer to position her cursor and log on, which prompts Bruce to stand. “Lance seems to think not. But I can interview people for this stupid West Coast job.”

  “One thing? When you talk to Buster, I wouldn’t necessarily mention the Microsoft deal—”

  “I wouldn’t. Not until it’s real.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. They tried to hire him last year and really pissed him off.”

  Bruce lopes out of Lizzie’s office, and as she performs her first superficial reconnaissance of a week of accumulated budgets and memos and messages—including, she’s amused to see, two e-mails from MsTaft@fuckall.net—she wonders exactly what alternative country-western is. A Wall Street Journal writer last year called Y2KRx “the so-called alternative Year 2000 software,” which pleased her, even though she wasn’t sure she understood the compliment. She figured it meant Y2KRx was cheap and unique and a touch perverse, and unhysterical in its marketing. In reviews of Sauce, the new restaurant that just opened in a townhouse down West Sixteenth Street, she noticed that it was called “the alternative Lutèce” in the Times and “alterna-French” in Time Out. The young Belgian manager of Sauce wore three tiny earrings and a goatee, but his air of maître d’ contempt struck Lizzie as unusually complex—you are almost certainly too poor and too unattractive to get a good table, but I also doubt that you have ever chipped heroin or read Jean Baudrillard. When she was in college and just after, “postmodern” was the smartness-helper being sprinkled around like this. When somebody she worked with told her she was giving Sarah “a postmodern infancy,” she suspected it was an insult disguised as a compliment. And a Guggenheim fellow she dated right before she met George argued for anal sex on the ground that it was “erotic postmodernism.” But still, Lizzie finds the idea of alternative country music fetching. Is alternative country less or more self-pitying than regular country music? Or is it just self-conscious about its self-pity?

  Being the boss, Lizzie finds, consists of two main tasks. The first one is “finding the signal in the noise.” It means the same thing as “separating the wheat from the chaff.” She used to call it “torching through the bullshit” until Bruce provided her the more apt and felicitous metaphor she now uses. “Really high noise-to-signal ratio” is Bruce’s standard remark about certain frenzied days in the office or particularly chattery people. To be the boss also requires making snap decisions and making them confidently, big consequential snap decisions, tiny snap decisions that accrue into significance, dozens of all kinds every day. It is all improvisation.

  The two-color packaging for Range Daze is fine; I mean Warps. (As long as it doesn’t look too … alternative, or like we can’t afford four colors. The idea is to look elegant and semi-old-fashioned. Like eighties movies and nineties magazine covers.<
br />
  Ask Boogie; that’s his call.

  Ask Bruce, but Softimage is obviously the preference. Because Microsoft owns them. Owned them. Whatever.

  Yes, this year people can trade in Christmas Day for the day after Ramadan ends.

  Tell them we support—say we have nothing against Gore, the company just doesn’t make campaign contributions.

  Okay, two weeks paid, four unpaid. Because it’s a policy for paternity leave, Alexi, and they don’t have to nurse the fucking kid is why.

  We absolutely do too have NEC’s permission to use Power VR in advertising and packaging. Then double-check, but try not to let NEC know.

  Tell him Tony said a year ago—no, two years ago—that he’d pay for fireproofing the I beams.

  Yes, we will cross-promote with Diamond for the Monster 3D accelerator board, as long as Madeline says that doesn’t conflict contractually with the 3Dfx deal; no, not “component-exclusively.” And please don’t use that phrase again.

  Yes, we’ll have real-time deformation, but who wants to know how realistic our digital fur will be? (What digital fur?)

  Please ask Boogie to stop playing that Massive Attack CD all day, every day; I think it’s making people stupider.

  Yes, we’re optimized for MMX and 3Dfx, but we will work fine with the new Macs. I don’t know if that means we’re “dual-optimized.” Tell them yes.

  What’s with all the inquiries about fucking fur? Tell them state-of-the-art digital fur realism.

  No, Fox only has an option on the TV rights, nobody has novelization rights; as of this morning, you can safely assure them that they are still available. (Find out what Doom sold for.) A novel based on a video game! Lord. (No, that’s different—the novel is called Chocolate-Chip Cookie-Dough Häagen-Dazs, but Douglas Coupland didn’t base it on a brand of ice cream. I’m pretty sure.)