Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “What? You are fucking insane. And the SEC doesn’t indict. Get your facts straight.” He had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Two days ago I found a whole printout of stocks in the wastebasket—Mose, TK Corporation, all of my companies, bid prices on certain dates, sales prices—three thousand shares here, four thousand there. You’ve got a goddamn inside-trading portfolio, George! Do you want us both to go to jail? Are you trying to destroy this family every way you know how?”

  On the one hand, this accusation restored some of George’s composure, because it was entirely untrue. On the other hand, it made him nervous: what had she found?

  “Show me this list,” he said.

  “I burned it and flushed it down the toilet.”

  He stared at her. That very morning, he had called Warren Holcombe, Pollyanna’s Warren, the only shrink he knows, and asked if he could come by sometime. He remembers staring at Lizzie and at that moment thinking, You are crazier than I am.

  “I destroyed it as soon as I found it. To protect you, George. It scared me.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about. I have never bought or sold a share of stock in my life.”

  She just shook her head. Then she said quietly, “George, listen to me: I have never slept with Harold Mose. I am not sleeping with Harold Mose.”

  “Yes, you are. Don’t lie to me, Lizzie.”

  And that had been that.

  Every weekday since September fourteenth he has gone to the house at three-thirty to be with the kids. And every day by six-thirty he leaves, back to the Winnebago for the night, to avoid seeing Lizzie.

  That is, to avoid being in Lizzie’s physical presence. Back in the RV at the little table, he’s got his PowerBook. There’s a web-cam on lower Second Avenue not far from the Yoga Place. He looks for her there. There’s a web-cam over in the tourist blocks of the Seaport, and he checks in there. But except for that one time on Fifty-seventh Street, he hasn’t had a sighting.

  Zip has no TV in the Winnebago (“TV without cable, man, is the most depressing spectacle I can imagine”), and the newspapers aren’t delivered, so George has come to rely on the computer for his news. He’s been following the rumored Microsoft–Mose Digital deal. The latest wrinkle, according to a report today on TheIndustry.com, is that Microsoft will buy all the MBC shows that Mose owns or controls, to run exclusively on WebTV. Including, the story says, “the sophomore-slumping noir police series NARCS.” So if Mose and Lizzie have their way, he thinks, his successful creation will be shrunk into some pathetic internet novelty. And his only real asset, a half share in the syndication revenue that Emily might someday derive from her half ownership of NARCS, will wither away to nothing.

  If George happened to cross the highway right now, to walk three blocks east and two blocks south, he would pass a parked Mercedes S1000. If he happened to look inside the front window of Hirst Sensation, the new bar on Ninth Avenue with the artfully charred interior, he would have a whole month of fresh suspicions to sort out. He would see his best friend with his wife, sitting at a table drinking and talking. He would assume they were talking about him, and he’d be right.

  “Thanks for meeting me down here,” she says.

  “Hey! Up here! It’s practically my neighborhood! I thought you were working on Fifty-seventh Street full-time now.”

  “I am, but with all this talk about a Microsoft deal for Mose Digital—”

  “Is that more Henry Saddler bullshit or is that real?”

  She gives him a look.

  “Hey!” he protests. “I don’t own a single share of your dog company anymore!”

  “Yeah. You got out right at the top during the summer, didn’t you?”

  “Not quite,” he says, smiling. “Close.”

  In the last month, Mose stock has dropped from $45 to $34 a share—a graph line now tracing the Gulf Coast of Florida, currently around Tampa and still heading south.

  “How’d you know, Ben?”

  “It’s been obvious since last winter that Mose was doing a roll-up. Kind of a clumsy one, frankly.”

  “You mean by buying my companies?”

  “Yours to get Wall Street excited. (Which worked for a quarter.) And the weird, boring ones nobody cares about—that Indonesian printing company, the Canadian free weeklies, all those—to fake some earnings growth.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I assumed you knew. I guess I thought you were privy to the plan. So, is he selling you to Gates?”

  She shrugs. “Anyhow, because of the rumors, my people down on Eighteenth Street need some hand-holding. The prospect of becoming Microsoft employees has them a little unnerved.”

  “It wouldn’t affect their lives.”

  “They really hate Microsoft, Ben. I mean, it’s almost religious.” She looks around, then leans toward him. “You know that hack on Slate a couple of weeks ago? The fake sweepstakes about the presidential election and encryption law or whatever the fuck it was that stayed up for a whole day?”

  Ben nods, and listens very closely. He has wondered about that. He noticed a particular line in the Slate hack—“Grand prize: two perfectly dead Tamagotchi Frankensteins! Contest ends 11/29/00!”

  “Three of the kids who work for me did that,” she whispers. “They’re the Wacko Practical Jokerz. That’s what they called themselves in the communiqué the next day.”

  “So I read. Are you going to turn them in?”

  She shakes her head. “One of them is a very sweet, very smart girl—George grew up with her parents. You might have met her at our party last spring.” Lizzie whispers again. “She was already prosecuted for a hack last year out there, in Minneapolis. She’s a kid. She’d go to prison, Ben.”

  “She told you about the Slate thing?”

  “No, a German boy who works for me, one of her gang.”

  A waitress brings their drinks.

  “So tell Uncle Ben, Lizzie. I am not going to trade on it, I promise. I’m just interested. Mose Digital going to become Micromose?”

  She waits a couple of seconds to answer. “A couple of weeks ago in Aspen, at the Forstman Little thing, Harold told me probably yes. They’re certainly doing due diligence like they’re serious.”

  “You want to run it? Are you going to stay?”

  She finds herself smiling, a huge ungovernable smile, as she shakes her head no. “ ‘Change of control’ is my loophole,” she says.

  “Hey! This must make our boy George happy, right? His lost princess about to wrestle free from the clutches of both evil trolls? And take their chests of jewels with her!”

  Her smile disappears. “I haven’t talked to him in two weeks, Ben. I haven’t seen George since the night he left.”

  Fanny Taft has come east for a few days to interview at NYU, Cooper Union, Rensselaer, and MIT. When Lizzie tells her George moved out of Water Street, Fanny asks if it would be okay if she visits him on the pier. Lizzie tells her yes, of course, and gives her his cell-phone number.

  She knocks on the sheet-metal door. It sounds to George like the knock on the door of a poor person’s house. In his three weeks here, it is the first knock he’s expected. It’s the first one not from a cop, a tourist, a homeless person, or a delivery-truck driver. Fanny is wearing a professionally produced T-shirt with the silhouetted life-size heads of Bill Gates and his number two, Steve Ballmer. A red X, simulating paintbrush strokes, is imprinted over their faces. George smiles at the shirt, reminded once again of the glory of late capitalism, in which there is no consumer urge, not even an anticapitalist fashion urge, too odd or small-bore for the marketplace to satisfy.

  “Who’s the bald guy?” he asks.

  “Ballmer. He’s like Gates’s chief henchman.”

  After the briefest of small talk, George rather too emphatically poses a hypothetical question to her about a way he’s imagined to “hack into a certain company’s phone system” to keep precise tabs on one of its employees all day long a
s he—“he”—walks from office to office.

  Fanny says she doesn’t know much about phone phreaking.

  “Ah. Doesn’t matter. It’s just a brainstorm I had. For the same project I was working on over the summer. I was curious. I have another idea, for pagers, sort of like the prank you and Willi did. I just don’t know what to do with it yet.”

  “For your TV show?”

  “You know person X is going to be with person Y at a particular time, right? In some very intimate circumstance. You send a message to person X’s pager—either an actual message, with words, or a callback number that person Y would know. The idea would be to send a message to person X in the hope that person Y would see it and freak out, be angry at person X, conclude that person X has somehow betrayed him. You don’t understand, do you? I wasn’t clear. Okay, instead of person X, call her Mary. Mary is in bed with her coconspirator, literally in bed—”

  “George?”

  “What?”

  “Lizzie loves you. She wants to be married to you.”

  He does not say anything.

  “She loves you.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Yeah.”

  “She does. And she’s not having an affair with anyone. Trust me. She’s not. Trust her. We talked for a long time, and she was like, ‘If you can make him believe that, I’ll be in your debt forever.’ So, believe it.”

  “Fanny. I’m afraid you don’t understand.”

  “I know you think I’m just some punk kid, and I don’t mean to be mean, but you’re sitting in this fucking Winnebago, like disconnecting from reality and going loony.”

  They finish talking. She finishes her Snapple. He thanks her for stopping by and encourages her to apply to Wesleyan. He hugs her goodbye and tells her to stay out of trouble.

  “Say hi to Mom,” he tells her as she steps down and out.

  “My mom? I will. You mean my mom?”

  He meant Lizzie. He isn’t certain what he meant. After Fanny leaves, he sits on the metal step, and stays there very quietly for an hour, looking at the rubble out on the pier, the twisted steel tie-rods and chunks of concrete, pretty in the light of the low evening sun. A few yards to his left, he sees a monarch butterfly flitting in and out of the open Cyclone gate, flying in circles, up and down, a spiral. Between George and the gate, a breeze off the Hudson catches a few dried leaves and carries them off the ground in a tiny whirlwind. For five seconds, the swirling leaves and the butterfly are perfect simulations of one another, side by side. He goes back inside, shuts down the PowerBook, picks up the phone, and calls Warren Holcombe again.

  47

  “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you? Because I smoke.” Warren holds the edge of his apartment door in one hand and a burning True in the other.

  “I see. I don’t mind.”

  “I quit on New Year’s, but I started again. Increased, actually.”

  George’s obligatory three sessions with Warren in the eighties, about his hand, took place in a regular medical office building. Warren smoked Trues then, too. You could smoke inside office buildings then.

  “Follow me.”

  Warren is not fat, but Warren lumbers. He’s lumbering down a long hallway toward the amplified sound of dinging and high-pitched plinking. George has not realized until right now how huge Warren’s bald spot has gotten, probably big enough to exceed the strict definition of “spot.” He’s wearing slippers. Otherwise, he is dressed exactly as always—wide-wale brown corduroys, long-sleeved turtleneck.

  “You won’t mind the cage, will you?”

  George wonders if he should leave.

  “What? What cage?”

  “The music,” he says as they step into his office. “John Cage. It always seems like an insult to the randomness idea to turn off a Cage recording in the middle.”

  “I do mind, Warren. I hate music like that.”

  “Fine.” He flicks at the power button on the CD player like he’s shooting a marble. “Shall I assume we are not here this morning to pick up where we left off on December fourteenth, 1984, when you were telling me you thought the woman you were dating didn’t have any problem with the hand?” He directs George to an armchair, then sits down across from him, pulling an old-fashioned ashtray, a three-foot-by-ten-inch metal cylinder, closer to his own chair.

  No couch! Nor any cage or unpleasant recordings. George is relieved.

  “So I don’t know what the protocol is, in a case like this,” he says as Warren lights another cigarette.

  “What is this case?”

  “Because Pollyanna and Lizzie are such close friends. And I’m here to talk about Lizzie. About our relationship. God, I hate that word.”

  “Why do you hate the word relationship?”

  “Warren, I didn’t come here for that kind of thing. You know,” he says, “ ‘What were you feeling when you said just now, “Do you understand what I’m feeling?” ’ ”

  “What did you come here for?”

  “To find out if you think I’m cracking up, having some kind of breakdown.”

  “What are your symptoms?”

  Symptoms? He’s pissed off at his wife, who he thinks is having an affair with her boss, who canceled his TV show three months ago after one week on the air. “Well, for a week or so in August, my thoughts seemed to occur like non sequiturs.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Oh, I was watching some Miss America preview show, and then for a half hour I couldn’t stop thinking about Play Misty for Me, then I thought about this old Mickey Mouse cartoon where Mickey gets whipped. And then about how the ice cream in our freezer gets all soupy after a week and the repair guy said there’s no mechanical explanation, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about Superman. Each one was sort of obsessive. And none of them had anything to do with the other.”

  “It’s so interesting that they gave it to the blind girl, isn’t it? Miss America? When she stood up there with the dog and said to the guy, ‘I can see the new century and the new millennium as clear as anything, Bob, and they’re so beautiful it’s almost frightening.’ I got goose bumps watching her say that. Watching Miss Mississippi in the personality competition! I’ve got goose bumps again now.” He takes out a fresh True. “I apologize for the digression, George. I’m sorry. So, you’re worried you’ve got the clang.”

  “What’s ‘the clang’?”

  “Clang associations are when you move from one thought to another randomly. Or apparently randomly, based on the sounds of words more than the meanings. (In school, I wrote a paper on it called ‘The Modernist Disorder.’) See—Miss America, Play Misty, Mickey Mouse cartoon, carton of soupy ice cream in the freezer, freezer repairman, soupy, Superman. So this stopped? After August?”

  “Yeah. Yes, it did.”

  “Probably nothing. In fact, I’m probably the crazy one for making those links. Any other symptoms?”

  “I’m sort of depressed. I don’t know if clinically I’m depressed. But …” He sits up. “Warren, has Pollyanna told you about Lizzie and me? We’re separated.” It’s the first time he’s said the word. “Not ‘separated’ separated, but I haven’t lived at home in a month almost.” He blows some of Warren’s smoke away. “I think she’s having an affair with her boss, and she says I’m an insane stalker.”

  “Are you stalking her?”

  “No. Not physically. Not following her around or anything. But sort of. Yeah. I suppose. Yes.”

  “And the only reason you feel depressed, aside from your show getting canceled—I was so sorry about that, George; I loved it; it may have been my favorite show, network show, ever—but the single source of your depressed feelings and the focus of all your neurotic behaviors, as nearly as you can tell, is the fact that you believe your wife is sleeping with this other man?”

  George breathes in deeply, and out. “Yes. That’s right. Yes. And that she was complicit in killing the show.”

  Warren stares at him for a long time … three seconds, four, five, six. He s
tubs out his cigarette, stands, and lumbers toward the doorway. “Follow me,” he says.

  They walk back down the long corridor, but take a left before they reach the front hall. Warren flips on an overhead light with his thumb, marble-shot style, and punches the start button on a computer the same way. They are in an office, smaller than the one they were just in. The shelves are filled with loose-leaf binders and bound trial transcripts and legal books.

  “This is Pollyanna’s office?”

  Warren turns to him and nods as the computer boots up. Standing over the keyboard, Warren types and taps, clicks the mouse, then clicks some more. Documents bloom open. He stands aside, puts one hand in his pocket, and does a parody of a maître d’, grandly waving George into the desk chair.

  George starts reading. He turns and looks up at Warren, who frowns and nods and makes four little circles in the air with his hand. George continues reading. He clicks documents closed, reads, clicks, reads, clicks, reads, and then opens more. He reads for half an hour, and continues reading.

  They are e-mails, dozens of them, short and long, sent by Lizzie to Pollyanna beginning last spring. Lizzie thanking Polly for introducing her to Zero, then Lizzie describing George working so hard on Real Time he doesn’t have any idea what hell she’s going through with Microsoft, or with the animal rights nuts, or with the “left-wing assholes AND right-wing assholes.” Lizzie explaining in the longest e-mail George has ever read her acute ambivalence about whether to sell Fine Technologies and take the job with Mose. Lizzie saying how much she misses George, even though they haven’t made love in weeks, and with the Real Time premiere postponed, “chances for improvement are approximately zero.” Lizzie worrying about poor George’s health. Lizzie hoping desperately that the show works. Lizzie in a state of shock when the show is canceled, and asking Pollyanna whether she should quit. Lizzie starting to worry seriously about the mental health of “PG” (poor George), and his repeated, “savage” accusations of infidelity with Harold Mose, even though she has “never even seriously THOUGHT about being unfaithful, although I’m frankly just about horny enough now.” Lizzie full of deepening dread in hotel rooms all over Asia, despising Gloria and Hank Saddler and finally even Harold, feeling in over her head, feeling like she’s “in two rotting marriages at once, one with a psycho husband who hates me and the other with a slightly pathetic semicriminal who thinks I’ve got blue smoke and mirrors that are going to save his stupid company.” Lizzie plotting her escape from Mose Media Holdings before the end of the year. Lizzie frightened about “these crazy things George is involved in, criminal things, that you don’t even want to know about.” And Lizzie, in the weeks since he moved into “Zip Ingram’s fucking trailer,” growing even darker, fitfully resigning herself to the fact that “life can just suddenly derail for no reason,” and on October first, just a few days ago, that “PG may be really and truly mad” and “just lost to me forever. Which I cannot stand. Even though I may have to.”