Turn of the Century (52 page)

“Runners?” Phoebe says to the room. “We’re not too brain-dead to come up with a few runners before we break, are we?” Runners are the conversational threads or bits of subsidiary character business that recur during an episode as amusing or humanizing filler. Up on the bulletin board under the
RUNNERS
heading are three cards—
COWBOY ARGUING ABOUT ERIK ESTRADA ON
CHIPS
, DAN EXPLAINING “NICKEL BAG,” ETC., TO ROOKIE
, and
ANTI-DRUG NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST KEPT IN DARK
.

“How about Cowboy browsing porno sites on the web with the DEA mainframe,” suggests Jared, one of the younger writers, one of the unmarried subset who essentially live at MBC, playing Meat-Eaters Deathmatch and Implosion CTF and Genocide and other video games all night long. “And then their screen freezes with some really disgusting image on it, and Jennie busts them.”

“Maybe,” George says.

“There’s a piece of software,” Jared adds, “from I think Sequel Technology, that lets employers monitor employees’ internet usage. It’s
a real thing.” Jared has asked George twice if he can be a beta tester on Lizzie’s video game.

“So?” Paul says. “This is fiction.”

Lou has a new idea. “How about we bring in the mayor, okay, and he’s like super–pro-business? And he keeps calling Jennie to convince her to rent out the
NARCS
squad as extras, okay, in some big shitty Michael Bay–type movie one of his campaign contributors is producing.”

George smiles, looks down, starts nodding. But then he realizes he is being teased only accidentally. No one here knows about Mose’s deal with City Hall for the New Year’s show.

“Implausible,” Phoebe says. “The mayor wouldn’t call her, he’d call the commissioner or the DA, and one of them would call Jennie.”

George has an idea. “How about in the show with the disasters and the, the—”

“The May thirteenth show?” Phoebe asks, turning to look at the other big bulletin board in the room. “Show nineteen.”

“Yeah,” George says, “the runner could be Buxton saying over and over, ‘Any publicity is good publicity.’ ” The District Attorney Buxton character is a shrewd, politically ambitious black conservative married to a white actress.

“And maybe at the end of the show, okay,” Lou says, “after the exposé comes out, okay, Jennie herself says the line. ‘Any publicity is good publicity.’ You know
—ruefully?
”

“Maybe,” George replies.

“I was
joking
,” Lou says. “I hate those kind of bullshit rueful Bochco buttons.”

Maybe George won’t renew Lou’s contract.

As they leave the Room, the permanently stuffy Room, Lucas Winton is lingering outside, holding two suit bags over his shoulder as he flirts with Iris. (He buys his entire wardrobe back from the production at cost, and much of the prop arsenal.)

“So tell your cheap boss,” Lucas suddenly says, still looking at Iris, “that if he doesn’t reimburse me pronto for the expense money I’m owed, I might just have to mention it at Elaine’s to my old pal from the
Daily News
.”

“You want your fucking money for your fucking aviation fuel for your fucking crackpot drug group, Lucas?
Okay!
” The writers, excited by this, continue shuffling past, toward their offices, but very, very
slowly:
overcranked
is precisely the word. George has dropped his yellow pad on the floor and dug out his wallet, which he now balances against his stomach. He takes out a personal check with two fingers, and stuffs the wallet back in his pocket.

“Do you have a pen, Iris?” he says, regretting the outburst but too far into it to turn back.

Iris is paralyzed, but Jared has an open Pilot V-Ball at George’s hand almost instantly. He scrawls and signs faster than he has ever written a check before, leaving the payee line blank, and hands it to Lucas.

“Don’t worry,” Iris says to Lucas, touching his wrist, “I’ll get that replaced with a real production company check ASAP.” She pronounces it “ay-sap.” Then she turns to George. “I know you’re totally stressed and whatnot, but you don’t want to put all your unrelated negative energy onto Lucas. It’s—what do you call it
?—undignified
, and also it’s unhealthy and unfair.” She looks around, then whispers loud enough for the story editors and writers to hear,
“Especially
in
public.”

“Iris?” George says.
When you have a minute I need to—I’m afraid I’m going to have to—You know when I asked you to—

Winton moves to leave. “What, George?” Iris says. “Lucas! Here’s your Cocker-Westie argyles! Don’t forget your socks.” Iris collects the brushings from her dogs and the dogs of everyone in her apartment building, and each winter takes bags of dog fur to a woman in rural New Jersey who cleans, cards, combs, and spins it into yarn, out of which Iris knits dog-fur baby booties and dog-fur men’s socks to give as gifts all year. “What do you need, George? Fresh coffee? An ibuprofen?
Yes
, I
did
reconfirm your dentist for four-thirty. The car’ll be here at four-fifteen.” Then, to Winton again, “
Your
car stays outside all day long on shooting days, doesn’t it? Maybe we should do that too.”

“Iris?” George repeats.

“What?”

“You’re fired,” he says.

“What?”

“You’re fired.”

“Calm down, George. One second and I’ll get you an ibuprofen. Although I think we’re out. Let me send a girl to check.”

“No, Iris, I don’t need Advil.” He does. “You didn’t get me the show files I needed in Las Vegas—”

“But—”

“Without asking, you invite someone I don’t even know to join me and my friend for a drink, you slip a goddamn confidential document to an
agent
. You’re supposed to make my life easier and better, Iris. And you don’t. I’m sorry.” He walks past her, hands the pen back to Jared, and takes the left toward his office, not looking back.

“I am not your wife, George,” Iris finally says to his back. “Your wife is supposed to make your life easier, not me. Don’t blame me.” Then, to herself and her rubbernecking coworkers: “I don’t believe this. It’s like he’s coming
unglued
or something. Did that just happen? This can’t be happening!”

They are practically wheelbarrowing in the stock certificates.
This is so easy
, Lizzie thinks.
This is really happening
. When Thernstrom mentions that “folks here” aren’t crazy about the title Range Daze for the new game, she says no problem, she’s already chucked it for Warps, and he says he’s thrilled they’re all plugged into the same port on this and suggests Real Time as another possible name.

“Just think about it.”

“Real Time is not a bad idea,” Lizzie says sincerely, thinking the title sounds so right and familiar because she and they
are
plugged into the same port.

“I’ve heard on the grapevine,” Howard Moorhead says, “that y’all are exploring some exciting new user interfaces and AI?”

She assumes he means the iZ device, and the new Yo! Friend! software that will allow players online to talk and shout to each other while they’re playing Warps. Or Real Time, or whatever they name it. But in fact, of course, he means Grinspoon’s patents.

“Uh-huh,” she says. “I was just downtown meeting with one of our partners in that area.” Goat Rodeo is in no sense a “partner” of Fine Technologies, but that is the expansive corporate term of art—like “friend” and “creative” in Los Angeles.

“Okay!” Moorhead says. “Great! We’ll have a draft deal document for you at the meeting tomorrow, won’t we, Scott? Is there anything else we need to know before we start dotting
i
’s and crossing
t
‘s?”

“Well,” Lizzie admits, “when we started these conversations six months ago, my revenue expectations for our ShowNet system were
more bullish than they are right now. And you know our royalty rate on Speak Memory cuts back at the end of the year. And I am still leaning on the game team for the deadline, but, well, you know, it could get pushed into the summer.”

“Doesn’t sound like anything fundamental,” Moorhead says.

Lizzie runs through her standing mental checklist of worries, trying to be scrupulously honest. It’s like at Newark this morning, when the Continental woman looked her in the eye and asked if she’d packed her bags herself, and Lizzie felt obliged to say that her six-year-old had packed and repacked the carry-on bag several times. “I’ve also got an insane former employee suing me. For discrimination against insane people.”

Everyone smiles sympathetically. Lizzie feels a little Republican. “If lawsuits by disgruntled staff were deal killers,” Moorhead says, “M and A would come to a screeching halt, wouldn’t it? Now, you’re planning to have an office out here?”

“I’ve been interviewing. My leading contender is someone who used to work for Microsoft. Charles Prieve?”

“Chas Prieve was my assistant!” Thernstrom says.

“I remember Chas,” Moorhead says. “He was that boy who loved the movies and gaming so much? Ambitious.”

“Very ambitious,” Thernstrom says. “He’d be perfect for you.”

Moorhead stands. “Well, I look forward to finishing this up tomorrow morning?” They begin making their way out. “Do you need directions anywhere?” he asks Lizzie. “Or if you don’t have dinner plans this evening, why don’t you come over to Madison Park and join my wife, Ping, and me for supper?”

“Actually,” Lizzie says, “I’m meeting one of your local bad boys for dinner. Buster Grinspoon, from the university? The mental-modem guy?”

“Oh, we know Grinspoon,” says Scott, exchanging a look with Moorhead. “Brilliant. And very hard-core.”

“Hard-core squared,” Gary adds. “The guy’s a real six sigma.”

“Well, that’s just
super!
” Moorhead says, more excited about someone else’s dinner, Lizzie thinks, than seems reasonable. “Now as far as Grinspoon or anyone else goes, your discussions with us, of course, are totally confidential? I don’t want a loose cannon like that knowing anything about this deal before it’s done.”

“No, no, don’t worry. My CTO told me that Buster has a little … history with the company. I don’t want him or anyone to know about this until we’re ready to announce.”

“So Mr. Grinspoon is going to be joining Fine Technologies?” Moorhead asks. “Bringing over his patents?”

Good guess
, Lizzie thinks. “He’d like to,” she says, smiling.

“Super! It’s been just super visiting with you, Lizzie.”

“Super,” Lizzie says as she shakes his hand. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
Super?
She cannot quite believe she said “super.”

He has come
late to gas. He once vaguely disapproved of it. Those winking baby-boomer endorsements,
Go for the nitrous, man
, put him off, like ponytails on middle-aged record executives. But in his forties, oral surgery has become a regular annual ritual, like getting a new car, and George has started saying yes to his periodontist’s offers of nitrous oxide. And so through the back door of middle age, he finds himself in one more way revisiting boyhood, when going to the dentist always had S&M undertones. Now, wallowing in the sweet stupor of nitrous on Central Park South, sprawled on a leather recliner under an arc light, he surrenders to the young woman in a tight, starched white dress pressing and re-pressing herself against him, latexed fingers in his mouth, Kenny G music (“noninvasive jazz, twenty-four-seven”) intermingling with his own slurping and spitting sounds. Is it some dirty-minded stretch, a fantasy of the kind indulged by forty-four-year-olds who wear ponytails, to feel that he has just spent an hour in a crypto-pornographic
tableau vivant
?

The chilly cocktail-hour air cuts away the last wisps of George’s groggy fuzz. Here he is at Madison Avenue, the street as well as the eponymous new bar where Zip Ingram proposed they meet to celebrate
Zip’s new job. George has read about the jukebox that plays nothing but advertising jingles, so as he enters the place, which is decorated like an art director’s idea of a 1963 first-class airport lounge, he’s not surprised to hear a male chorus belting out “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” And because he knows his friend was just named editor-in-chief of a mail-order “anti-fashion fashion and lifestyle magalogue” called Home Again, which Zip says “is going to pay half a fucking
mil
, George,” he’s not surprised to see him in a brand-new suit and waistcoat (Anderson & Sheppard, surely), paying for strangers’ drinks.

“George!” he says, and “George!” again, dropping a fifty on the bar and rushing over to hug with his personal cloud of Player’s smoke and kir royale fumes. It’s one hug George always enjoys, in part because of Zip’s height—when a five-foot-two-inch person wraps his arms around and squeezes, it feels more like a hug for Daddy from one’s child than from a fifty-one-year-old “alleged creative genius,” as Zip has always called himself. Zip would not be deterred in any case, and he is also George’s one male friend whose greetings and farewells always involve kisses. As his friend’s stubble scrapes each cheek in turn, George feels sympathy for women and gay men.