Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “Hello, darling,” he says, standing on tiptoe to kiss each cheek. “The sun’s terribly bright in here, huh?” It’s dark. “Or—oh, no, I’m so sorry, Gloria—I didn’t know you’ve gone blind! That’s it, isn’t it?” He laughs and then hugs Lizzie, who’s teary, she’s so happy to see him. Then he offers his hand to Harold. “Hello,” he says, “Zip Ingram, sir, and it’s a privilege finally to meet the man with the largest testicles in television!”

  Mose shakes his hand, chortling softly, smiling sheepishly.

  “I mean it, Mr. Mose. Canceling the most interesting new program in years after just a week on the air—that takes balls!”

  42

  Tuna is healthy. Fresh white tuna packed in water, eaten straight out of the can. Doesn’t tuna prevent all kinds of cancers? He doesn’t even mind it twice a day sometimes, lunch and dinner, with a side dish of walnut halves at night for fiber, each nut swirled individually in the butter tub. The sameness has a kind of monastic purity. Fish! Nuts! He’s eating healthily. Pink lemonade isn’t unhealthy. The Krispy Kremes every morning are an indulgence.

  Is he supposed to call Ned Wisdom back to tell him he doesn’t want to write a screenplay involving black psychopaths and anal rape? Or was Ned Wisdom going to call him? Maybe he should call the Ned Wisdom Productions receptionist. She was a fan.

  Lizzie has called him three times in the last ten days. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

  Thank goodness Lizzie will be back before LuLu and Max come home from camp. LuLu and Max alone might be too much to bear. For LuLu and Max.

  Dear Harold, he thinks. I just wanted to let you know that Timothy sent me a letter explaining everything before he killed himself. I guess I should be angry about what he revealed, but learning the whole truth has actually been good for me. And your own guilt, I’m sure, is punishment enough for you. George Mactier. But what if there actually is some plot against George? What if Mose really did cause Timothy to kill himself? And then, because of a hoax letter, dispatches a hitman to rub out George? Ho ho! Wouldn’t that be ironic? Dear Harold Mose, We know everything you told Timothy Featherstone, and exactly why he killed himself. Beware. Beware. That would work. It would seem to be a letter from an anonymous creep—either a delusional creep, or a creep who somehow possesses dangerous information. No downside. Nice upside. Win, win!

  But it would make George, who has neither delusions nor dangerous information, the creep. And anonymous creeps are the worst kind. There are limits.

  The phone rings, for the first time since sometime before lunch. (This morning it was a real estate broker, asking if George wanted to put their house on the market. He said yes, just to see how much the woman thought it would be worth.) He turns over in bed and answers the phone. He listens. “No, I’m afraid Ms. Zimbalist won’t be able to take advantage of your no-obligation gift of parabolic skis to switch for two years to MCI long distance. She died.… Yes. A skiing accident, in fact, just last weekend in Vermont. In fact, I think she was on old-fashioned, nonparabolic skis. You have a pleasant afternoon too.”

  The tuna cans and empty half-gallon pink lemonade jug on the bedside table are … what, depressing? Perfect? The cleaning lady comes tomorrow anyway, or the day after.

  This is how rich people live. Rich people probably put on pants during the day. But maybe not. This is how lottery winners live. Except they have powerboats.

  Each of his good friends has called once. Some (Emily, Ben) have called twice. His lawyer has called several times, once to tell George he really shouldn’t have signed a contract that gave MBC the out if he went over budget. He has persuaded George that litigation would be long and expensive and probably unsuccessful, but he thinks he can negotiate “a quick seven-figure settlement, low seven.” (“How low?” George asked. “One million,” the lawyer replied.) He thought there would be more phone calls. He doesn’t know from whom, but he thought there would be more. That’s why he bought the Caller ID contraption that plugs into the television, so he could screen calls while he was watching TV. Convergence, right here, right now. He saw the thing demonstrated on those two new fat women’s syndicated talk show, he called right then, and the FedEx man delivered it the next morning, twenty-four hours from impulse to satisfaction. And right after he hooked it up, the personal calls mostly stopped. It wasn’t cause and effect, but it seems like it.

  Now that he’s not making television anymore, he has time to watch it. That is cause and effect. This afternoon he watched the Cubs beat the Astros, their eighty-third win of the season. It is the first baseball game he’s watched since he was a kid. In the sixties, he forced himself to watch some games all the way through with his father, three or four, in order to make Perry Mactier happy. Staring at baseball for three hours made him feel stoned.

  Tonight, Freaky Shit! runs a story about a Swiss victim of a terrible train crash whom they call “the most bionic man on the planet.” He has an artificial heart, an artificial voice box, an artificial eye, artificial skin on one side of his face, a colostomy, false teeth, a hairpiece, two plastic hipbones, a prosthetic right leg below the knee, a below-the-elbow right arm (it looks to George like an Otto Bock model), and pins holding the left arm to his shoulder. The man happily tells the Freaky Shit! interviewer that he takes Viagra and Prozac, his wife has had silicon breast implants, and he communicates with the world almost exclusively via e-mail. The other main story on Freaky Shit! is about a hillbilly farmer in southern Missouri whose college-educated son has turned the family’s 160 acres into a tourist attraction called American Farm 2000. They’re growing potatoes that have been genetically manipulated to increase antibodies against E. coli bacteria; an antibacterial French-fry stand in the barn has done a booming business all summer. They’re also growing cotton from genetically manipulated seeds; it comes out of the ground dark pink and yellow and blue, and they’re feeding their sheep a protein called BioClip that makes the animals shed their fleece—sheep shearer, another doomed occupation. George wonders if they’ll stick with the name American Farm 2000 after this year, like Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 did after 1966.

  As soon as NARCS comes on (it is a rerun of the Russian mafia money-laundering show), George switches over to the NBC special on the upcoming Miss America 2001 pageant. They’re running profiles of five of the contestants. Miss Mississippi is blind, and will use her seeing-eye dog during the pageant. That will be good television, George thinks. Miss Oregon has one leg, and her talent is modern dance. Miss Nebraska has no apparent handicap herself, but says her “dream is to use ventriloquism to aid the deaf.” Miss California is the national student coordinator for Decent Entertainers Against Dope, Lucas Winton’s group. Her talent is “popera,” which she describes as “opera for regular Americans, Celine Dion—type singing that tells stories about the Lord Jesus or drug addiction.”

  At eleven, NewsChannel4 goes live to a shot of Savion Glover tap-dancing in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum for hundreds of smiling white people in gowns and dinner jackets. George is happy he didn’t go. The event is Cordman, Horton’s fortieth-anniversary celebration, which is also a fund-raiser for Martha’s Vineyard. (That’s all the NewsChannel4 reporter says—“a fund-raiser for Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.”) George wonders if Martha’s Vineyard is the only place on earth where the presence of blacks has actually increased white property values. He misses Daisy.

  Just as he’s falling asleep, he hears five notes on the piano downstairs, a very low register, bum, bummm-bum-bum, bummm. He is fully awake. He hears nothing. He hears nothing, and closes his eyes again. But then, even lower, growly notes that practically aren’t music: bum-bummm. He gets out of bed warily, grabs Lizzie’s new ice ax and goes quietly downstairs toward the room with the piano, the room without a name, off the living room. Bummm-bum-ding-clink—Johnny, the cat, leaps off the piano and makes a panicky run past him up the stairs. Of course it’s the cat, George thinks, just like the scene in every bad scary movie. On the way back
up to the bedroom, he accidentally corners Johnny in the hallway. That is, Johnny corners himself. George wonders if the cat is actually frightened of him at moments like this. Or is it frightening itself for fun, like Max and LuLu do when George pretends he’s a monster?

  Everybody says difficult experiences can produce positive personal outcomes. Embrace the new. Revel in change. “Make lemonade out of life’s lemons,” Cubby Koplowitz told him. Cubby sent him a book called Transitions: From Good to Bad to Better Than Ever! George took it out of the envelope and dropped it in the recycling bin in a single motion. But he is embracing change. He’s catching up with the rest of the world. He’s surfing the web. Until the last two weeks, he has surfed the web just enough to confirm that life is too short to surf the web. But here he is, surfing the web.

  Zip Ingram was the first to tell him, years ago, about all the video cameras that feed their live images to web pages. George has glanced at newspaper articles about the pathetic people who set up cams in their own bathrooms. Now, he finds himself uninterested in those individual nut-cams, where one loser tries to force the world’s gaze onto him or her. George doesn’t want to look at anyone who wants him to look.

  And he doesn’t want to watch women who are paid to pretend they don’t know he’s watching them.

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  © CHELSEA GIRLS, it says in six-point type at the bottom of the web page. George notices one night that Chelsea Girls is also the name of a web site that charges $9.95 an hour for its “hot hot hot college girls and doctors of PHILOSOPHY, the sluttiest, horniest eggheads locked in the Ivory Tower waiting for YOU to get inside their minds AND their dripping-wet fancy pants!”

  He isn’t interested.

  It’s the public cameras on ordinary street corners he finds entrancing. It’s sitting at home and watching the fully clothed world at large, the whole world unaware and unpaid, that feels like a breakthrough in human experience. We can each and all be the Wicked Witch of the West, looking down through our crystal balls into Munchkinland and the Emerald City. Although surely Glinda the Good had an all-seeing crystal ball too.

  Now he understands why Zip was so bewitched. Now he sees. This is chocolaty. He clicks to a web site connected to a camera mounted on top of one of the World Trade towers, and watches the sky over the Statue of Liberty for twenty minutes. He spends an hour watching traffic on Interstates 94, 494, and 694 around St. Paul and Minneapolis. The I-494 cam happens to be pointed at the spot where his mother was killed.

  He finds nine cameras mounted along Forty-second Street. He discovers that by timing his clicks from web site to web site, cutting from camera to camera like a director, he can follow the same person or the same car for blocks. He clicks to a camera pointed at Main Street in Disney World. He remembers the worst forty-five minutes of his life, the morning five-year-old Sarah disappeared during the Disney World twentieth-anniversary celebrations; the security men led George and Lizzie through secret doors into a big room with dozens of monitors to search through all the closed-circuit Epcot and Magic Kingdom surveillance images for her. “Don’t look for particular clothes or hair,” one of the Disney men told them. “They might have changed her clothes or cut her hair already. Look for your child’s shape.” (They found her alone and unharmed wandering around Frontierland.) He watches the Las Vegas Strip, and tries to pick out the hookers. He goes to a cam trained on the Managua cityscape and can just make out the hospital where they stitched his arm up.

  He thinks, My life is flashing before my eyes. Literally. The fuzziness and dumb angles give the images an extra spectral power—as if they are ad hoc and unmediated glimpses into a supernatural world, banality live from the beyond.

  First thing the next day, he can hardly wait to get back on the computer, going from cam to cam to cam to cam to cam. There are thousands. Almost all of them are deeply tedious. George finds every one of them interesting.

  He feels like he’s working again.

  He watches lions eating a large hoofed animal live from a water hole in a Kenyan game reserve. He watches a culvert outside Budapest: every ten or twenty minutes, someone appears and urinates; one out of every six or seven men, George calculates, salutes the camera after he finishes. He watches a cemetery near Polho, in Mexico, where twice or three times a day, it seems, they bury victims of the war. ZAPATISTA MARTYR-CAM, it says on the web page. He’s noticed they dig the graves between five-thirty and eight in the morning.

  Aside from telemarketers, there are two calls today. Ben calls, and denies he lied to George about buying up the rights to novels. He says he wasn’t going to make movies or TV shows, and he’s not. He didn’t tell George the full truth because it was still a secret, but he did not lie.

  That is Ben’s loophole.

  George asks if Bucky Lopez was involved somehow in getting Real Time canceled, and Ben tells him he’s crazy, crazy about Bucky just like he was crazy about Cubby. The last time Ben called, he said that he was underwriting the R & D for Cubby’s next big idea—turning any PC into an at-home ATM machine, by means of a device attached to a printer port like they do for postage metering. CubbyCash! Ben said then, “There’s no conspiracy against you, pal.” Until that moment, the word hadn’t occurred to George.

  And Lizzie calls. It is early again, eight-thirty. He’s beginning to think that she intends to catch him groggy and off guard, and maybe even intends to upset him by calling just when she’s about to run off to some grand dinner with Harold and Gloria, her voice full of impatience and precocktail cheer. She tells him they’re returning to New York a day late. “We can’t leave until Friday,” she says. We. “I cannot wait to be in my home, George.” My. “But I mean, I can’t very well just say sayonara and hop on a commercial flight. It’s Harold’s jet.”

  It’s Harold’s jet.

  That is Lizzie’s loophole.

  He thinks about moving to Paris. But Lizzie speaks French, not him. And she’s the one with all the money, not him. And the kids. She would presumably get the children. He couldn’t bear to leave the children. Which puts her in control.

  He doesn’t look forward to the kids blaming him for Johnny’s death. It happened on his watch. Lizzie always said, “One of those stupid tourist buses is going to run over him someday, out on the cobblestones.” She was exactly right. She’ll have that consolation. He thinks about burying him in the backyard. But they don’t own a spade, and after thirty seconds of digging up dirt by hand like a dog with its paws, he calls the ASPCA. A woman with a slight Spanish accent gives him another number to call.

  At the second number, a man with a much thicker Spanish accent asks, “Where do you live?” George tells him the Seaport. “You sure?” the man says, “people don’t live down there.” Yes, exactly! And that’s the irresistible, idiosyncratic charm of our lifestyle! “I’m sure,” George tells him. The man says, “Well, let’s see … okay, put the dead pet on the southwest corner of Fulton and Water streets. Somebody’ll be there.” Two hours ago, right before lunch (tuna from the can: tribute to Johnny), he puts the cat in a shopping bag. He seals it with gaffer’s tape, scribbles over PRADA and writes, DEAD CAT. He puts it out on the corner. When he goes out to check two hours later, the bag is already gone.

  The pharmacy calls and says they have some photos developed from film that was dropped off a year ago, and that they’ll be destroyed if he doesn’t pick them up. It is an excuse to leave the house. But now, walking back
down Water Street, he finds in among the snapshots from last summer at Lake Marten and the ninth-wedding-anniversary barbecue the kids cooked, a picture of a man he’s never seen before. The man is a youngish, good-looking Asian in a sharp suit, blowing a kiss toward the camera. It looks like he’s in Madison Square Park. George stops. The pharmacy must have given him somebody else’s photo accidentally. No, there he is on the negative strip between a frame of Sarah and one of the Land Cruiser. It’s from their roll. Lizzie took the picture.

  Late one night, after the first trucks have already pulled in to start unloading huge, whole, dead fish across South Street, he has a strong hunch that Lizzie is going to call him in a few hours, after he is asleep. He decides to call her for the first time, in Jakarta. There is no answer in her room. It is the middle of the afternoon in Indonesia. He awakes at noon. He waits until three and then dials again. He knows what’s going to happen. He knows. The phone in her room rings and rings. It’s three A.M. in Jakarta, and Lizzie isn’t in her room. He knew it. He sits, staring at Al & Monica with the sound off, for a full half hour. (She’s surprisingly good as a talk-show host. George wonders if they cast Al Roker in order to make her look slim by comparison.) He calls back at three-thirty—three-thirty in the morning, Jakarta time—and there’s still no answer. He knew it. Then he calls right back and asks the operator to leave a message for Miss Zimbalist. “Ahhh,” the operator says. He wonders what Ahhh means.

  She laughs. She says they drove directly from the U.S. embassy to stay overnight at the ambassador’s beach house. She says, “Honey, that’s absurd, I can’t tell you how absurd. You are being paranoid. But I guess it means you still love me.” She brought up 1988, and said that maybe he’s just working out “old, impacted guilt” over New Orleans. “You’ve got enough to worry about without being paranoid too,” she says. What does that mean—“enough to worry about”? “I am not having an affair with Harold Mose. Or Gloria Mose or Hank Saddler.” She is emphatic and extreme, volunteering unsolicited denials. It reminds George of Bill Clinton. It reminds George, now that he thinks about it, now that he’s thought about it for most of the night, of the ad for the Chelsea Girls’ ersatz-peephole web site. No fakes or setups. This is the real thing. We promise. And you can see it all for free. These girls are totally unaware that you’re watching them.