The Mere Future

by Sarah Schulman

  “Attention, attention,” the red lights started flashing overhead. “All employees in the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Focus Group, fiftieth floor please.”

  Obediently, I left my chair.

  34. GETTING A TAN

  HARRISON, OUT ON bail, lay on the beach at Southampton, preparing for his trial. He was preparing by working out, socializing, and getting some sun. When you’re on trial, looks are all.

  He knew why he had killed Claire. He was under pressure to produce a second book as masterful as the first, and she was aggravating his anxiety. So he had a trauma and tore out her organs. Harrison knew that it was messy but ultimately okay. This would blow over. Look at the sculptor Carl Andre. When a judge acquitted him of murdering his wife, Ana Mendieta, his prices went up. In this town, they can hate you today, but if they use you tomorrow, they’ll love you. His tomorrow was just around the corner.

  The outpouring of love and support from other guys and their sympathetic wives was incredible. Harrison had never felt so loved. Even other writers who had previously competed with him were loving and tender. They bought him drinks, they invited him to their beach houses. Every woman wanted to suck his cock out back on the beach at night behind some sand dunes. This murder charge was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

  Harrison was so famous now. He was finally experiencing the cushion of fame that he had reached for all his life. He was now so famous that he was completely protected. No matter what he had ever done to anyone, he was beyond their reach. No matter what anyone knew about him, they were not famous enough to have a voice at the level of his. He never had to talk to or see anyone he didn’t want to see. He was more alive than others. He was more important. His importance carried him on a conveyor belt of parties and privilege. He didn’t have to live his own life. Fame was doing that for him.

  And what about Claire? He could barely remember her, and why would he want to? That was then, and this was now. Move on!

  That’s why the New Spiritualists loved him. He was so capable of moving on that he could even move on from having taken another person’s life. That was an amazing accomplishment, and they invited him to their parties, too. Veterans of the Iraqi War embraced his example. And former cabinet members of the Bush administration. Everyone wanted Harrison. Finally, he didn’t have to feel at all.

  The trial approached, but under the new LATS and PECS rules, it would be one of the greatest works of human display in the history of the very splayed American court system. It would create history. Harrison had already written a memoir about it and it hadn’t even happened yet. Even though he had technically killed her, no one had to know that. Because, spiritually, he was innocent. Those ethnic weirdos Jeff, Dom, and Freddy, now those freaks were the real anti-socials. And that would become eminently clear. Harrison knew that he would win and they would lose. They would be blamed and, indirectly, they were responsible. They were creepy, and that was a crime in and of itself. If they had been more functional, he wouldn’t have been under so much pressure to produce masterpieces for society, and what had happened wouldn’t have occurred. It was their fault, and the trial would show this.

  He’d written a novel about it, too, called I Died, told from the point of view of Claire’s corpse. She explains the ways she goaded him into killing her, and how he is not really responsible. His plan was to publish this five years after the trial, just as his visiting celebrity status and grants and awards and movie versions had ended. The publication of this book would open speculation all over again, creating a new round of parties.

  He had always won, and he would always win. Harrison knew he was the champion.

  35. ONE FOR ONE AND NONE FOR ALL

  I GOT TO THE conference room, and there were all the other queers from work. There was that couple from Banking, George and George Henderson-Smith. And the pair from Graphics, Laurie and Laurie Nussbaum-Glukowski. Then there was Carolyn Steu-banville-Woodson-Von Moschisker. (By the time she’d divorced Suzette Woodson, they’d already had four children: Waldo, Cornelius, Theodora, and Lucille. So shifting to Steubanville-Von Moschisker would have been awkward.) It had been years now since gay people were allowed to get married, the only hitch being the Monogamy Pledge. That was the compromise that The Human Universal Morality Battalion (THUMB), the gay lobbying group, had won in Congress. They attributed it all to the name change from The Human Universal Division. Throwing in the military image was crucial to winning in the southeast. Philip Morris, of which they were a department, suggested mandatory military service for all married gay couples to prove their loyalty. If they could go through basic training without telling anyone that they were married, the trust of their fellow Americans would be well deserved. That’s progress.

  Thank God for Democracy.

  I had proposed to Nadine the minute gay marriage became legal, but she laughed. A few weeks later I asked her why.

  “I’m old school,” she said. “I’d rather live in sin.”

  Back at work we all knew that this queer beckoning from higher up had something to do with the trial. It was the center of the culture right now, and all resources had to be summoned. But how could the homos help them make money out of Claire Sanchez’s ashes? There had to be a way.

  36. THE TRUTH WILL IN

  BACK IN THEIR cell, Jeff, Dom, and Fred knew they were doomed. I suppose that in some other kind of novel, they would use this opportunity to realize how much they had actually hurt each other, and would find a way toward the love. They would practice my own personal fantasy of redemption:

  1. communication

  2. negotiation

  3. reconciliation

  4. healing

  Unfortunately, this was real life, so they just sat there missing every opportunity as each of them always had. Jeff missed Claire so much his teeth sank into his wrist. The other two just stared.

  37. COKE IS IT

  I WAS ANNOYED that day to be summoned away from my ongoing project of placing poems on cigarette packs. Poems were not selling and someone had to do something about it. Originally, the plan had been to sell ad space in poems. If there was a Coke on the landscape, the writer got a little royalty. But that still didn’t solve the problem of no one wanting to buy the poem in the first place. So then we got the idea of slapping them on the packages right over the cancer warnings. Now, poems were part of daily life. All over the world, people sitting in bars were picking up their packs of Natural Slinkies or Big Bad Smokies and, in a moment of shyness or sudden quiet or any silence that revealed the profundity of human discomfort, any executive or logger or talent scout or drunk could look down on the table and see:

  Daddy, daddy you bastard, I’m through.

  Market research had selected that line as the most universal piece of poetry ever written. One that would translate into any culture and, at the same time, appear to be private and tender and touch a vulnerable spot. I was annoyed to be summoned away from my task because I also had to solve the problem of reintroducing products that had been developed for the homeless, which now had no one to buy them. Like body-sized Wash-n-Dri.

  This wasn’t the first time the gay subgroup had been beckoned by upstairs to solve a marketing dilemma. We had previously worked on the gay Gap campaign, developing two new divisions for virtual spinoff sites. There was ACT UP Gap and GMHC Gap. Each customer knew which one was for them. Then we came up with the “Audre Lorde Wore Khakis” campaign. But nothing was as successful as the “AIDS Is Over, So Live a Little” campaign for Brecht Pharmaceuticals. Riding on their notoriety for curing AIDS, the drug companies were now in the luxury vacation business, the beachwear business, and were running a national chain of No Fat restaurants and grocery stores. Of course, they still sold maintenance drugs to keep the formerly HIV positive in retroconversion. Sixteen pills, fourteen times a day, one hour after eating fat and two hours before eating sugar and two hours before eating no fat. If they ate fat when they weren’t supposed to, or didn’t eat fat when
they were supposed to, they farted uncontrollably, which was a public recognition that they were Bad Boys, and didn’t do everything their doctors told them. This had become a status symbol of rebellion, and there was now a chain of gay dance clubs called Farters where the Bad Boys would go.

  As for everyone else with AIDS? Like who? I mean, the drugs were counter-indicated for methadone, birth control pills, and melanin.

  Actually, that idea originated in my hub. It was thought of by Jay Friedman-Friedman, who’d died, suddenly, of a mysterious cause only a few months before. I wondered if it was suicide. He seemed so pale and skinny. He’d been depressed and had talked about quitting the business. But everyone tries to give up. There just is nothing else to do. People who can’t make it in software become doctors. It’s the lay of the land. That, or global investment. Go to Mexico and buy a duty-free family. I like copywriting. Replace words with words. An eye for an eye. That’s competition on a level plane.

  I sat and looked at the other gay marrieds, recalling the romance of visibility. It was so long ago, it couldn’t be conveyed. Like nostalgia for Dacron or Dayton. Inexpressible. It was hot because you saw it. But what good is passion for its own sake? It haunts, internally. But Reputation goes on and on. So watch out.

  The emotion of visibility was Corporate Downfall. Like what happened to Starbucks. Suddenly, there was a Starbucks where everything else used to be. It was too obvious. There was a Starbucks where the refrigerator store used to be, where the butcher, the florist, the Ukrainian/Italian restaurant, the wholesale grocer, the pierogi shop, the pawn shop, the stationary store, the hardware store, the thrift shop, the old bar, the prison, and three theaters used to be. The Korean delis were starting to seem eccentric and quaint. People resented the replacements and blamed all their problems on that fact. Visibility backfired.

  Now that the franchises are gone, we don’t have to see the Corporations bragging all over the streets. It’s subtler. We only get it at home. Go outside if you want some privacy. It’s public space, it belongs to you. Marketing only happens in the house.

  “I’ve got it,” Nadine said for the fourth time that day. “That’s why everyone has to have a home. It’s the law of the land. Homeless people don’t make good consumers.”

  There she had it.

  And for the first time I wondered if I shouldn’t be going along with it all. Doing my job. Were other people thinking the same thoughts?

  I’d gone out into public space that morning, on my way to work. I’d looked around to see if anyone else was worried.

  Outside was so attractive. Bright orange, cheesy park benches like the old shag carpets of yore. The legendary plastic orange of motel chains, of Howard Johnson’s. All kitsch classics, collectibles, and all for us. That’s the color they painted the subway last week. Orange. Orange equals public space.

  Orange = Public Space.

  “Nadine,” I’d asked, “from a design point of view, what does Orange mean?”

  “Well,” she sighed. “McDonald’s discovered that orange makes people not want to stay too long. It keeps the public in circulation.”

  On the subway I saw a female scholar studying. Big hair, white jeans, legs akimbo. An all-important book. Good. They’re back. It was an old-fashioned kind of tome. Some dead German. I saw two mothers on the subway. What were they discussing? Oh, yeah, how great their children are. An old man. An Albanian? He whispered to his daughter. Her skin was yellow with henna, just like the bleach job on the Italian lady across the aisle, the blonde black woman on the corner, and the Puerto Rican guy with a yellow watch that matched his hair. All blondes. In the orange. And it was all fine. Life went on.

  38. THE GHOST WRITHER

  “NOW YOU ALL know why you’re here,” the Big Cheese told us breezily. Smiling, sexy, lite. “I know that you are all familiar with the murder trial coming up this Tuesday at nine p.m. Eastern Standard Time. You’ve all seen the preview interview shows, the magazine exposés, the Internet ads, and the Pre-Pre-Pay Views. However, we need a tie-in slogan through which to market the trial accessories.” He was trim, white.

  “As every American knows, there are two teams to choose from. The public is being introduced to the new Freedom of Choice Legal System, where they can choose between competing defendants, as though they were shopping. It’s more familiar that way.”

  His shoes were made of Sphinx™.

  “Under the former system, choosing between innocent and guilty was a negative choice. It was like going shopping or not going shopping. We want people to go shopping no matter what, so we have devised a new system whereby choosing between defendants is like buying Tide or buying All. In the end, something is paid for. I mean, someone has to pay.”

  He laughed, jingled his change.

  “Now, according to our polls…”

  I looked at the Big Cheese carefully. I had never seen him in person before. He had a strange glow, like he was on TV. Then I realized that he was wearing pancake makeup. I looked up and saw that a tiny spotlight had been placed strategically over my shoulder so that it could help him glow. Whenever he made eye contact with any of us, a little light would shine our way. It made each of us feel special, one at a time.

  “Sixty-five percent of New Yorkers feel that the new legal system gives them more flexibility in their decision making. They feel more secure knowing that someone will be punished, and we know it creates double opportunities for product endorsement. Now, I think we’re all clear that the bright young literary star from a good family with a gym body will be acquitted, and that the drug-abusing sociopaths will be convicted. So, given the odds, we’ve decided to prepare a book/movie/TV/digital/web/Teach-shirt tie-in on Bond that can be in homes from coast to coast fifteen seconds after the verdict is announced. However, we know that the post-Bond market will be flooded, principally by Bond himself. That’s the problem with these artist types. They want to express themselves. So we need our end to have a unique focus.”

  Laurie Nussbaum-Glukowski raised her hand. She had long hair and pretended to be sexy. She pushed her breasts up so that her hook-word was stacked. She wore sexy midnight-blue silk pants. She flirted with all the men. Her clothes were more sexy than she was. I hated her instantly. But there is that thing about hate. If the hated would act a little bit differently, I would love them. It’s a personality pattern. Therefore I sit panting with the expectation of the slight shift in behavior that will make everything new again. In this case, if she had been personal with me and had a private talk, instead of running away every time a man left the room, then I would have been her friend. I longed, at that moment, for the old days of the Secret Society when Nadine and I first fell in love, when gay girls sussed each other out right away and always found private moments to talk about what was really on their minds. The things that no one else could ever guess.

  “Well, I think a homosexual angle on a case with no homosexual content would be fascinating,” Laurie said sweetly. Ass-kisser.

  “Just what I was thinking,” Cheese smiled.

  “A breakthrough that will call attention to the campaign itself, providing extra hyper-opportunities,” Laurie offered.

  “Well,” coughed George Henderson-Smith, one of the hundred Harvard-educated black men working for the company. He was always sick from overwork, being in the Ivy League, black, upwardly-mobile, of middle-class origins, gay, married, HIV-positive, child of proud parents, collector of slave memorabilia, and member of country music niche study groups. “Fear and homosexuality go together like love and heterosexual marriage. According to yesterday’s Home Poll, when forty-three percent of readers think of homosexuality, the first word they think of is “rich,” and the second is “fear.” Would it be too retro to recycle the homo-horror mode?”

  That was it, the race was on. I started furiously keying in, but Nussbaum-Glukowski beat me to it, of course.

  “I won!” she screamed, hitting the red bell. “Het Cemetery.”

  Of course.


  When heterosexuals kill each other, all the rest of them feel threatened. But to point out that they are heterosexuals—that was really threatening. They felt neutral, but now we said who they really are. It was a daring advertising tactic. Now they would be truly terrified to be targeted that way. Each of them would feel that they too, like Claire Sanchez, would have their organs sliced. And all because they’re straight, straight, straight. Like Claire. WOW!

  There was silence that came over the room. It was the kind of involuntary silence that accompanies the recognition of brilliance. A gift so profound that all petty competition is removed and you just gaze upon the other’s work with awe and gratitude. Even though I had never read Stephen King and I hated Laurie Nussbaum-Glukowski, I couldn’t hold back my admiration. And this would resonate broadly with our “AIDS Is Over, So Live a Little” campaign. Gay = Life. Straight = Death.

  “Het Cemetery,” she repeated, glowing. “Now, it’s your turn.”

  39. IN JUSTICE

  I WATCHED THE trial on my watch.

  What was at stake? Our entire class system.

  Nadine had seen through Sophinisba from the start. It didn’t keep her from working for the mayor, but at least she knew what was right, even if she didn’t do it. That put her ahead of most of the population.

  I had noticed nothing. I had missed entirely that our mayor had not made things better. She just rearranged Capitalism so that it was easier to take. She made it more aesthetically pleasing, less visually oppressive, and threw us some bones.

  But as the trial made clear, the same people were clearly in charge.