Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  EMILY KALMAN, NARCS! Stenciled in yellow on the asphalt! George is new enough to the business that these banal conventions still give him a gol-ly tingle. He also feels some envy seeing the empty EMILY KALMAN, NARCS space—stupid envy, since he has spent about ten days here in the past year and can always find a place to park. But of course, visible corporate perks like personal parking spaces and good seats at bad black-tie dinners have a value distinct from any desirability—they are advertising for one’s personal brand, George Mactier®, conveying the message of mojo to one’s colleagues. Having the perks but preserving (and conveying) a regular-guy indifference to them—that’s the trick.

  In the bullpen outside Featherstone’s office, which occupies half the top floor of the new glass tower, all three of his unsmiling assistants are softly and intently speaking into wireless headsets and watching animated icons and windows of data—the middle-aged black woman with straightened hair in a minidress; the sly young Asian man in a velour shirt; the older horse-faced white guy with close-cropped dark hair and bangs wearing a turtleneck. A woman with a blond Lucy Baines haircut and a tight-fitting blue cashmere pantsuit, evidently the receptionist, suddenly appears out of a sliding pocket door at the back of the reception area. George assumes that the uncanny resemblance of the office to the bridge of the Enterprise on the original Star Trek is coincidental, or at least unconscious.

  “Hello, Mr. Mactier,” she says. “Timothy will be just a few more minutes on the phone, but he’d love you to join him. May we get you a Perrier? Konappuccino? Osmanthus tea? A nectar?”

  George decides against asking for a complete list of the nectars available, or for a precise explanation of the difference between nectar and juice. “An espresso would be great. A big one.”

  She pulls her own tiny headset mouthpiece up and says softly, “Hector? Uno dopio.” She leads George back through the sliding door into Featherstone’s semicircular office. On the wall, to the right of a pristine black granite oval desk, is a very large whiteboard, virginally white except for the word HITS! written in blue marker as if by a professional sign painter. A cable connects the board to the computer, which has a flat monitor, larger than any George has ever seen, as big as a poster—in fact, Featherstone’s screen saver is a poster, a solarized Warhol portrait of Featherstone made in 1986. Built into the black plastic frame around the screen is a black glass eye, which George assumes is one of the digital cameras Timothy has raved about. On the side of the desk, by the window facing the foggy Hollywood Hills, is a four-foot-high black steel arch with a curved beige leather pad attached to its summit. The thing might be mistaken for sculpture if Featherstone were not now draped face up on the leather pad, his whole body bent in a backward curve. He holds what looks like a polished silver cannonball in each hand. He notices George, arches his brows, and enthusiastically waves one stockinged foot, apparently an invitation to sit in the plastic egg-shaped easy chair.

  A tiny microphone, attached to a miniature black boom, is suspended two feet above Featherstone’s mouth. Before the receptionist leaves, she stoops to press the purple rubber earpiece deeper into Featherstone’s ear. As George sits down, Featherstone continues his conversation, straight up, into the little mike.

  “Because, Jiminy Cricket, we don’t have gross talent. No gross actors. No gross anybody. Period. Yes, Steven is a de facto gross producer, but listen to yourself: de facto! De facto! De facto is not de real thing, my man! Bottom line, this is a net, net, net company. But our nets are real.” He pauses. “Touché, Jimbo. But we’re only eighteen months old. They will be real, down the line. The New Network for the New Century, man, isn’t just a slogan.” A dark young waiter in a nubbly umber suit and sandals brings George his espresso, and places a glass of pink liquid—nectar?—on the black granite oval. “Don’t go there, J! Do not go there! We’ll both be unhappy if you go there! This is not a daypart conversation. Okay. Okay. I love you, too, Jamie. Adiós.” He waits a moment. “End call,” he says in a different, calmer voice toward the microphone, enunciating very clearly.

  He drops each silver cannonball, with two muffled thuds, into the fur-lined leather cannonball canisters on the floor. “Ahhhhhh!” he moans as he hops off like a gymnast. Then, evidently in a state of rapture, he doesn’t speak.

  “Hi, Timothy.” Having spent twenty minutes the night before last listening to Emily talk about her Pilates machine, George has had his quota of exercise talk this week, and points toward the smaller of the two giant conversation pieces now in front of him. “Impressive whiteboard. Never seen one that fancy.”

  Featherstone opens his eyes and dives across the desk to grab his nectar. The video lens on the computer’s digital camera is programmed to respond to movement, to find the human and focus, but Featherstone is too quick, homing in on George with a little more vim than George is ready for. George stands.

  “Mr. Mactier is in the house! Yeah, my Smart Board.” They both stare at the board. “Connected to el PC, which recognizes the different colors of markers. Truly spine-boggling.”

  “What do you use it for?”

  “It’s brand-new. Brainstorming, you know, fiddling with the schedule and stuff. Ng wants to use it for an art piece. The monitor is a plasma, BTW.” He turns back to George. “Anyway, are you ready to take it to the hole, G-man?”

  “What?”

  “The presentations! I’m pumped! I want you pumped! You’re good to go, right? You got your decks?”

  “Absolutely. What’s the plan?”

  “The worst first. Twelve hundred hours with your friend Barry Stengel. And Jess.”

  Jess Burnham is the on-air star of MBC News, coanchor of NewsNight 2000, their thirty-three-year-old Tom Brokaw, their energetic Peter Jennings, their lesbian Dan Rather.

  “Timothy! Why is Jess Burnham part of this? Come on. This is no good.”

  “Jess is here anchoring the convention. Hey, sit. Sit. Caffeinate. Chill.”

  “It’s a primary.”

  “And she’s very interested in this project. You have some baggage with Jess?”

  “No, I barely know her. But we can bet that a Canadian who just spent a year in Cambridge as a Nieman fellow is going to think Real Time is some horrible, dangerous, Jerry Springer piece of shit. She’ll hate it, Timothy. She’ll hate the idea. She’ll freak.”

  “Give her your journalist’s secret handshake. Better Jess starts representing sooner rather than later. Gives us time to pull her back onto the reservation. George, Harold gets and loves the show. I love the show. The MBC is down with it.”

  “You know if she makes a big enough stink before we’re even up and running—”

  “Seduce the lady, Jorge! Hip her to your concept! Take it to the hole! Anyhoo, after Barry and Jess, we’ve got lunch with the whole sales and marketing and promotion posse. Get them jiggy for it. Where’s Emily? Or are you totally DH-ing this today?”

  “She’ll be here.… I talked to Lizzie about your mental-modem idea. I’m really not sure we can use it in NARCS. We’re a little too married to reality, I think, for it to work.”

  “So it’s, like, totally bogus?” says the fifty-year-old head of the network.

  “No, Lizzie thinks it may work. In a few years. The inventor, this guy Grinspoon, wants to come to work for her.”

  “So maybe using wired-up animals to smuggle dope—hey, mules, literally! Or freaking out the DEA dogs at the airport with scary dog thoughts. Work with me. Use it.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Cool! Lizzie really is our technogoddess, isn’t she?”

  Our? “I guess she and Harold have had some useful conversations.”

  “Yeah. He digs her.”

  Digs? “So what is it Harold wants to do online? Is there some secret MBC internet strategy I should know about?”

  “Should know about?” Featherstone says. He looks amused. “Those who know don’t say, those who say don’t know. You know? Harold wants the stock price to keep climbing up the no
rth face. That’s his internet strategy.”

  This is getting nowhere, except giving Featherstone the opportunity to act superior and knowing. “Didn’t Jess give you hell last fall for putting on Freaky Shit!?”

  “SFW, George. And her problem with Freaky was that it’s low-rent, not that it’s, you know, ‘wrong.’ Relax, man.”

  “Speaking of Freaky, a doctor I met told me that at some lab in Ukraine they’re attaching weasels’ heads onto badgers. It sounds like a piece for them.”

  “Hey, man, we’re way ahead of you! They’re doing a whole Frankenstein special. There’s some old guy right here in town who just got a liver transplant—from a frigging pig! Do you believe it? Barry says we may be able to get the TV exclusive. Oh! I forgot the zowiest part! The old guy is a rabbi or something! It’s like, he can’t eat pork but he needs it in him to live. Talk about dramedy. Talk about edge. It doesn’t get any more edgy and dramedial than that.”

  “Sorry!” Emily says as she rushes in. “Really sorry. I was on a call I couldn’t roll.” George is afraid he knows the excuse she’s about to give. “With the vice president.”

  “Hickory dickory dock!” Featherstone says, kissing in Emily’s direction as he rushes out in search of an assistant. “Faith?”

  “So,” George says to his partner as soon as they’re alone, “I guess the administration is just getting your input on whether they should use incendiaries or regular ordnance against the Zapatistas?”

  “Funny.”

  “I hate being stuck alone with Timothy,” George whispers.

  “Sorry. Timothy hates being alone with Timothy. So you have that in common.”

  “Does DH-ing mean being a designated hitter?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How about ‘taking it to the hole’? ” Whenever George fails to understand slang or recognize some obviously celebrated name, he infers the reference is to sports. Lizzie often says she married him because he’s “America’s only sports-oblivious heterosexual man.” Emily, on the other hand, even goes to Rams and Clippers and Ducks games.

  “The guy with the ball runs past guards to shoot.”

  “In basketball.”

  “You’re pathetic, George.”

  “Timothy just told me to ‘take it to the hole’ at the meeting with Stengel and Burnham. Did you know we’re meeting with Jess Burnham, too? I thought it might have been some sex thing.”

  “Even more pathetic.”

  “And SFW? That’s short-field … something? Baseball?”

  “SFW is ‘so fucking what.’ ”

  Featherstone bursts back in. “¡Vamanos, mis amigos! Our nooner awaits.”

  She mildly disapproved when Sarah wanted to buy the thing last fall. “If you won’t let me get a tattoo until I’m eighteen, Mom,” her daughter snarled, “then you have to let me get a pager!” Since Lizzie had no real antipager arguments (Drug dealers and prostitutes use those things, young lady! wouldn’t work) she gave in to the tattoo trade-off. And today she’s glad she did. Rafaela called in sick this morning—sick, or something: “Cannot work today, Missus, sorry, goodbye” was the message. Lizzie paged Sarah at school—CAN YOU BABY-SIT KIDS AT 3:30?—and ten minutes later Sarah responded by e-mail, SURE I‘LL BABY-SIT. (WHAT’S WRONG WITH RAFAELA?) This is exactly the sort of incident that makes George hum the Jetsons theme song or say they’re like the happy, efficient animatronic family of the future in the GE ride at Disney World.

  And here is the part of that future too boring and odd to depict at any Epcot exhibit: the high-tech executrix, sitting alone, staring at a plastic computer monitor, reading an unreadable internet article about changes in the law covering foreign workers’ visas, while eating her ten-minute lunch. Ordinarily, her lunches are standard, spartan, career-girl guiltless—fresh vegetables, shreds of protein, room temperature to cool, no carbohydrates, directly out of a brittle plastic container sold by South Koreans, washed down with some zero-nutrient beverage. (Her one somewhat bathetic concession to gentility is silverware, which she keeps in her desk drawer and which Alexi washes in the bathroom each afternoon.) But today she had Alexi order her a grilled cheese on challah and a giant vanilla shake from downstairs, and already she is reviving.

  Bruce has lurked near her office off and on all morning. She knows he wants to talk about going into business with Buster Grinspoon. And now she almost feels up to telling him no. She does find the science thrilling. And maybe she’ll be passing up a trillion-dollar jackpot in 2009—Sorry, Mr. Edison, I just don’t see how these electrified tungsten illumination devices of yours can ever be practical—but so be it. If she agrees to bring in Grinspoon, it would be to please Bruce, and to flatter herself that she is engaged in work more consequential than Y2K gim-crackery and movie-crew messaging and impeccable digital fur. She needs to focus the business, not pick one project from column A, a couple more from column C, no, that’s column D, and—whoa! cool!—a really risky new one from column Q. Brain-to-brain data transfer, indeed. Her conviction is too iffy, the odds too long. Ben Gould agreed with her that for Fine Technologies to invest in Grinspoon’s technology would be nuts, the equivalent of the baby-sitter squandering her entire savings on Lotto. (Lizzie was so upset the morning Rafaela matter-of-factly showed her the two hundred losing lottery tickets, she wrote her a check for two hundred dollars that same afternoon, after extracting a promise that she would never play the lottery again.) Still, she’ll meet with Buster Grinspoon in Seattle.

  “I spoke to your Minnesota girl,” Alexi says, standing in Lizzie’s doorway, “and she’s very excited. She was like, ‘I’m like stoked.’ And this?” He’s holding the printout of Lizzie’s memo. “Do you want me to messenger it up to MBC or what? The MBC, I mean.” Before she can swallow her bite of challah and cheddar and tell him to FedEx it to L.A. and e-mail it to hal@mosemedia.com, he adds, “Do you realize you always overindulge when you go out with Pollyanna? The last time was the day in December we split the entire box of Krispy Kremes and you drank the quart of milk straight out of the carton. And the time before that with Pollyanna was the day you were like—”

  “If you’re about to use the word coenable, get out. And if this is some kind of an intervention, Alexi, you’re fired.”

  Her telephone is doing its interoffice tweet. It must be Lance Haft. No one else in the office uses the intercom.

  “E-mail and overnight it, Alexi.” She reaches for the phone. “Please. Hello, Lance.” She sighs. “Yes, I have. We are not going to accept the Microsoft proposal. I am not. I am we. Yes. Yes. Of course I’m aware of all my fiduciary obligations, Lance. No, I’m not saying the door is closed, I’m saying that today, five-point-five million for fifteen percent of the company is unacceptable.”

  Barry Stengel and Jess Burnham have two monitors on, simultaneously watching MSNBC’s and CNN’s coverage of the California primary as Featherstone, Emily, and George sweep into the conference room. Hearing the CNN correspondent say that “our exit polling arguably has some potentially worrisome signs for the Gore camp” reminds George of how deeply uninteresting he finds most TV news, especially the bleating about politics. It never changes. There’s something Soviet in its unvarying tedium and one-note self-seriousness. You could take the tapes of the 1996 election coverage, dub in “Gore” instead of “Dole” and “Democrat” instead of “Republican,” and rerun them this year. Maybe on Real Time in November he’ll have them program a computer to write and deliver live election results with voice-synthesis hardware and a digitally animated newsreader: “Based on our exit polling, the MBC is declaring. Al Gore. The winner in the state of. Massachusetts. By a. Substantial. Margin of. Seven. Percent. If that result holds up, that will give Gore an additional. Twelve. Electoral votes.” Artificial semi-intelligence. Just to upset the Barry Stengels of the world.

  “Hey, Stinger! And my dear Ms. Burnham.” George has never before witnessed Featherstone addressing anyone except his own assistants and Harold Mose without a nickname—although,
when he thinks about it, “Ms.” probably counts as a nickname. Neither stands, but Jess Burnham turns toward them and blasts a smile. Stengel, with a remote control in each hand, presses the mute button for both TVs, and gives a glum nod.

  “Jess,” Featherstone says, “this is Emily Kalman, and—you must know George Mactier, don’t you? Couple of high-end journalistas like yourselves.”

  George leans in to shake her hand. They have met twice—in 1996 on a tour of the Titanic set in Baja California (they were both playing hooky from the Republican convention in San Diego), and last spring under a tent in Central Park during MBC’s presentation of its new shows and stars.

  “I don’t think I do,” she says, shaking his hand, “but I’m a big fan of your work.”

  “Thanks,” George says. “This is my partner, Emily Kalman.”

  “Timothy,” Stengel says without looking at George, “you know we need to be out of here by twelve-thirty. We’ve got a national security briefing at twelve forty-five with Ambassador Holbrooke, and Jess is locked into a one o’clock tape time with Senator Bradley.” We are serious. You are goofballs.

  “Hey, I’m mano a mano with the boss at twelve forty-five, post-nap,” says Featherstone, chuckling, as he sits down at one end of the table, “so we will definitely wrap on time.” Mose famously naps at noon every day, since he also famously sleeps only three and a half hours a night. Last Christmas, Hank Saddler mailed out five thousand copies of the pro-napping bestseller Always Rested and Rarin’ to Go: The Energizing Power of Just-In-Time Sleep Scheduling, in which Harold is mentioned prominently. “And George and Emily have a few things on their plate, too, Barry—like producing the MBC’s megahit.”

  George and Emily look at each other, each chagrined to be on Timothy Featherstone’s side in a shoving match, George thinking Stalin and Hitler, Emily thinking King Kong and Godzilla.