Turn of the Century Page 4

  “The transition vector is totally in the application heap!”

  “And quitting the first application but leaving the second running will cause a crash, big time!”

  “If the gestalt function was in detached classic 68K code, then the problem might not recur!”

  —Bruce will, for Lizzie’s benefit, put on a David Niven accent or start whistling the “Colonel Bogey March” from The Bridge on the River Kwai.

  Range Daze is to be Fine Technologies’ next major product, a gedanken time-travel video game. Lizzie really stumbled onto game making as a result of subcontracted work they did in 1997 on a piece of animation software. Range Daze also incorporates a version of Speak Memory, their speech-recognition software. It should have been finished months ago. Players can “range” at will from country to country and historical moment to historical moment by speaking travel commands out loud. Optional skin sensors (a kind of Velcro wristband Lizzie found last summer during a trip to Russia) make the game action less or more anxiety provoking according to the player’s real-time reactions. If you travel to 1792 Paris, for instance, you are designated a besotted peasant or a frightened aristocrat or an angry sansculotte according to your heart rate, blood pressure, and skin conductance; too many twitches, the wrong sort of palpitation, and you’re a marquess (or marchioness) headed for the guillotine.

  Lizzie first got the idea for the game a few Christmases ago watching It’s a Wonderful Life, and so she has insisted that anything players do to change the past should affect the future within the game. As a piece of programming, this has proven exceedingly difficult to accomplish. If a player manages to assassinate Hitler in 1944, then for the remainder of that game, the war ends sooner, there is no atom bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and the Soviets begin the Cold War at a disadvantage. But after days of debate, for example, it was deemed impossibly complicating to give “Nazi” players the option of making their 1923 putsch a success. The alternative histories in the game cannot be unlimited.

  Range Daze will come out simultaneously both as a CD for PCs and Macs and as a cartridge for the new Sega. People in the business are always asking Lizzie, “Which platform are you optimizing for?” and she always answers, dissembling a little, “We’re completely agnostic.” Lizzie, a yoga-practicing Jew married to a lapsed Unitarian, whose children attend a nonreligious Episcopal school, alternates between confidence that all her bets are covered and fear that she has no coherent strategy.

  The working title “Range Daze” is the staff’s, a play on Strange Days, a cybernovel that Lizzie hasn’t read; they sometimes call it “Matrix,” from Neuromancer, another cybernovel that Lizzie hasn’t read. Lizzie doesn’t love the puns and in-group references that pass for wit in the digital world, but she’s a thirty-six-year-old woman with two houses, a husband, and three children, not a twenty-two-year-old Beavis with an 800 math SAT, a Cooper Union degree, a goatee, and a pet ermine on his shoulder.

  A husband, three children, and a trip to Minnesota the next morning for her mother-in-law’s funeral. Lizzie stands and begins rebending a crudely straightened paper clip she has picked up from Bruce’s desk.

  “George’s mother died last night—”

  “Lizzie!” Alexi shouts from across the loft. “A call!”

  She drops the paper clip, which now looks like half a swastika.

  “Sorry,” Bruce says, picking up the silver half swastika and re-straightening it. “Tell George I’m sorry.”

  “Lizzie!” Alexi shouts again, this time as if to a headstrong child. He must think the call is important.

  “—so I’ll be gone tomorrow and probably Wednesday.” She is walking fast now, backward. “E-mail me,” she says.

  “It’s Moorhead, the business affairs guy at Microsoft,” Alexi says.

  “ ‘Business affairs’ is Hollywood.”

  “Whatever. The Microsoft talk- to guy.” Since Lizzie began her deal conversations with Microsoft six months ago, the company has undergone three corporate reorganizations, three that she knows about, and Moorhead is her fourth handler.

  Deep breath, and she kicks her door shut, the only door in the place, and grabs the phone. “Hello, this is Lizzie Zimbalist.”

  “Ms. Zimbalist, this is Howard Moorhead in Redmond, how are you today?”

  The carefully fondled Ms. and the stranger’s unction make Lizzie recoil. “Sorry I kept you waiting. I was just in a meeting about our speech-recognition and force-feedback software. The game.”

  “That’s super. I know our people down at WebTV are very anxious to hear about your deliverability issues on that? I’m sure we’ll all be excited to see the product?” Like many men raised in the South, Moorhead turns his sentences up at the end, transforming statements into acknowledgment-seeking quasi-questions. Growing up in Los Angeles in the seventies, Lizzie trained herself out of the same verbal tic in the sixth grade. “And your Mr. Haft seemed to think our proposed time frame on the warrant expirations is no problem?” Lance Haft is her controller. “Is 2005 acceptable to you?”

  Lizzie still cannot quite take years like 2005 seriously, even now, two months into the new year. Plans and deals involving dates in the aughts and the teens inflame her chronic, secret sense of work as a big make-believe game, dress-up Monopoly. Sure, Moorhead, she thinks, as long as you pay me in fresh, crisp twenty-million-dollar bills—the bright pink ones.

  “Sure,” she says, “2005 sounds fine.”

  “Ms. Zimbalist, I do want to let you know that based on the data you’ve supplied, we’ve done some new calculations? Of the projected earnings-multiples for your out years?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And we think right now we’re looking at a somewhat adjusted acquisition benchmark number for our investment?”

  A pause. “What are you saying?”

  “Well, we’re now prepared to offer two-point-nine million dollars for ten percent equity in the company.”

  Lizzie stares for an extra, calming beat at the photograph on her desk, all three kids laughing by the Neva River last summer in St. Petersburg, Max and Sarah holding hands with Louisa, airborne and blurry, between them. Sarah still had her long hair.

  “For ten percent of the company?”

  “Exactly,” Moorhead says, his smile audible, as if Lizzie had just agreed to the new terms. “Exactly right.”

  “Two-point-nine million dollars? You are fucking kidding me.”

  For three full seconds, Moorhead says nothing.

  “Ms. Zimbalist,” he finally manages, “I—I—that type of language—”

  “Two-point-nine implies a valuation for this company of twenty-nine million. In every discussion I’ve had with Microsoft, the valuation range has been thirty-five to forty million. Two-point-nine is bullshit.” Lizzie is almost screaming. She curses often, but she seldom screams.

  “I do not appreciate that type of language, Ms. Zimbalist.”

  This jerk, this geek—not even a geek, this oily lawyer—is upset! About a girl swearing! She needs to get off the phone before she’s overcome. Her … language!

  “I don’t appreciate the bait and switch,” she says, scribbling Bennett Gould’s initials, BG, and “2/28/00 BG—NO $!” on a Post-it. Ben Gould is a member of her board, and she needs to discuss this with him. “You and Lance Haft can try to resolve the numbers. Goodbye.” She bangs the phone down on its cradle. “Fuck.”

  Bruce pokes his head in, smiling, with Alexi hovering avidly just behind.

  She shoots to her feet, sending the Aeron chair wheeling into her CD tower, which totters. Three discs (Beth Orton, Morcheeba, and Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète) fall to the floor, and Lizzie steps on them, cracking the plastic cases—“Shit!”—as she comes out from behind her desk. “I do not believe those duplicitous shits. Two-point-nine million. Christ. And my ‘language.’ My language! Give me a fucking break.” She sighs so violently she roars.

  Alexi points to the phone. “It’s Louisa,” he says, enunciating extra
crisply, “on line three.”

  “Hello, my baby-duck!” Lizzie says, with her free hand pulling her curly hair, which is brown verging on red, behind her extremely red ears. Bruce and Alexi wander off. “Yes, it is Mommy, LuLu. I am not a robot mommy. It’s Mommy.” Her brain is still hot. “No, I am not an alien. Okay … Who’s there? Ahtch? Ahtch who?”

  3

  He hangs up the phone. Yes. A canceled lunch.

  When New Yorkers call friends or acquaintances at the office, it’s always for a particular reason—to get advice on how to handle this newspaper reporter or that magazine editor, to sell a pair of five-hundred-dollar tickets to a black-tie fund-raiser (“Pediatric Epstein-Barr is no joke, George”), to get credit for being the first to deliver news of a mutual friend’s firing, to make a lunch date for next month or to break one for today. The opening small talk is brief. And computer people have taken New York curtness one step further and sideways, with a technology that tends to screen out schmooze: e-mail is not a natural small-talk medium. Los Angelenos are still reluctant e-mailers, George has discovered, apparently because they love the telephone itself. They make phone calls without any agenda, just to check in, to say, Hi, great to hear your voice, how goes it, fantastic—no matter how tenuous the relationship. The first few times a Hollywood manager or studio executive phoned George with no particular purpose, George kept waiting for the point, and waiting. It still weirds him out a little, as do certain effusive L.A. forms of telephone farewell. “Perfect!” they say in response to closing statements about FedEx tracking numbers and brunch logistics. “Perfect! Thanks much! Take care!” Maybe show business people say yes so emphatically about banal matters because they hear no so often about consequential ones.

  Today’s lunch has just called to cancel, which delights George. It’s not because the young man, who wants work, is a director of jumpy black-and-white TV commercials and “some, like, Franz Werfel—type mixed-media pieces down at P.S. 122.” Lunches canceling at the last minute always please him. Because the allotted lunch period is a sunken cost, already written off as time when real work won’t get done, cancellations make George feel free to lose focus a little and screw off. An instant miniature vacation! Even when he spends canceled lunch hours working, the work feels sweeter. But today, because of his mother, he hasn’t been able to concentrate. And the sympathy from his colleagues is relentless. Each time Iris or Phoebe stares hard at him, for a beat, and asks, “Are you okay, George?” it depresses him, since until that instant he has been feeling fine.

  So he riffles through the mess of naked CDs on his desk, decides against Gershwin (An American in Paris, not Rhapsody in Blue, but still too themed), clicks Bix Beiderbecke into his antique Discman, and lights out, walking to walk, thrilled to wander pointlessly in the middle of a day that’s chockablock with points. He decides on a southerly zigzag down through Infotainment Zone. Infotainment Zone is what Sarah started calling midtown Manhattan last summer, intending to bug him a little with smart eighth-grader contempt. But instead he’s started using the phrase himself, just as he started borrowing her Jakob Dylan and They Might Be Giants CDs to play in the Land Cruiser. So now Sarah calls it midtown again.

  He turns down Broadway, thinking how little his mother liked the city.

  George himself isn’t particularly crazy about midtown. It has St. Patrick’s, the library, Times Square, and four great office buildings (the Chrysler, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Lever House, the Ford Foundation), but so much of the rest is mid- and late-twentieth-century scrub, a thicket of chain-store pharmacies (all operated by South Asians now), banks (Caribbeans), tchotchke shops (Israelis and Arabs), and espresso outlets (kids). Midtown, for all the crowds of women, is also pretty sexless. No; no; no; no; no; no; no; yes; no; no; maybe; no; no; no. As he does every month or two on a random stretch of Manhattan sidewalk, George is mentally conducting a census: With how many of the next one hundred women can I imagine having sex? On upper Madison and downtown, he regularly hits one in nine. One June Friday a few years ago in TriBeCa, he hit one in five, the all-time record, but with an asterisk—Lizzie had been out of town on business for a week and he had had two glasses of wine at lunch. In midtown, one in twelve is the highest ever. Today—yes; no; no; no; no; no; no—the tally is five or six out of a hundred, about average for the neighborhood.

  Midtown ought to be an astonishing place, given the irrational concentration of big newspapers, big magazines, big book publishers, big TV networks, big record companies, big art galleries, big theaters, and big advertising agencies in one tiny plot—the show-and-tell orgy. If it’s possible to feel the mad shiver and hum anywhere, the ecstasy of communication, it ought to be possible here. Here is an absolute majority of the big owner-operators of American culture, recruiting and promoting new regiments of good-looking twenty-seven-year-olds for prime time, confecting and promoting the hits and the bestsellers, tallying and promoting this year’s Men of the Year and the Sexiest Men Alive and the Biggest Corporations and the Most Powerful People, making lesbianism and monogamy, five-foot-tall digital TVs and Shaker austerity, fiscal conservatism and stock speculation simultaneously fashionable. And the executive confectioners of Infotainment Zone, including George and the other marketers and editors and publishers and designers and producers and creative directors, all practice their rarefied craft, sublime as well as ridiculous, on these jam-packed five hundred island acres, a piece of land—he can’t get over this, not even after twenty years—smaller than his grandparents’ alfalfa farm.

  In fact, everyone in Verve, South Dakota, his grandparents’ hometown, could fit on one floor of any one of these buildings. And although by reputation New York is smelly, midtown doesn’t have much of a scent. All of George’s favorite places possess a special, ripe stench: the warm, fulsome reek of dehydrating alfalfa in Verve; tobacco smoke and diesel fuel in Paris; the herbal-cream-rinse breezes of the Hollywood Hills; the animal rot of old Manhattan (fish entrails on South Street and beef fat on Washington Street at dawn, human urine everywhere in August).

  Out on the 20th Century Fox lot in Century City or even the Microsoft campuses in Redmond, one is aware, thrillingly and disconcertingly, of being on the reservation, an inhabitant of a particular dreamed-up place somewhere between Toontown and Alphaville. Infotainment Zone, however, to George’s regret, is mostly an abstraction. Midtown: so much power, so little fun.

  But then, for the first time ever—passing Forty-fifth Street, Forty-fourth Street, the Gershwin Theatre, Viacom, the Times, the new Reuters and Condé Nast towers—George thinks: Infotainment Zone is actual at last. It’s as if the neighborhood has just achieved full self-consciousness. The renovation of the Viacom headquarters was the tipping point. At the end of last year the building was entirely reclad in a new type of quarter-inch-thick video-screen polymer that can be programmed to display hundreds of different moving pictures or—what George and Lizzie and the kids adore—a single continuous image bending and wrapping around the whole building, a kinetic cubist wonder of the world. Sometimes Viacom’s “image administrators” display a single phrase on the tower, such as a sideways fifty-three-story-tall SOUTH PARK ON ICE AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN DOESN’T SUCK, with SUCK exploding into animated ice chips, or YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE THE NEW MTV, with BELIEVE morphing at high speed into dozens of different musicians’ eyes. At this moment, the building is covered by a moving image of Howard Stern, five hundred feet tall, walking in place against an impossibly meteoric Manhattan night sky, his head stretching from the forty-fourth to the fifty-third floors, his hair hanging down to the thirty-ninth, his boot tips almost touching the sidewalk. It’s only a billboard, a monstrosity, genius technical means applied to squalid, stupid ends; yeah, right, sure. But it is also quite beautiful. It is awesome the way new train stations and skyscrapers were a century ago.

  Where has all the porno gone? George wonders. Gone to online, every one, he figures. He had always enjoyed Times Square’s cluster of pornography shops and live-nude-ju
nkie nickelodeons. The Giuliani law limiting smut stores to one every two blocks is antithetical to the deepest commercial traditions of New York, of course. The city has always been about specialization run rampant, cuckoo geographical over-concentration—not just the flower and fur and theater districts but the electrical-pump district, the coffee-machine district, the feathers-and-velvet-trim district. Suddenly the pornography district is no more. George sees there’s a Steve Buscemi film festival playing this weekend at one of the old porno theaters.

  He walks east on the downtown side of Forty-second, looking across the street and up, casually searching for the drone video cameras his friend Zip Ingram told him are up there somewhere, aimed down at Bryant Park and feeding the images twenty-four hours a day to web sites—yet one more amusingly profitless, vaguely Dada internet project. He sees one of the new postmodern brushed-steel Bell Atlantic kiosks and notices that displayed in its glass sides are giant black-and-white photos from the 1950s of earnest, crew-cut, gray-flannel white men talking on the phone and looking silly—the telephone company thereby satirizing what was until the day before yesterday its very ethos. Past Grand Central, where midtown gets tired—all postwar warp and woof—the lesser UN missions, the lesser media, the crummy simulations of crummy Irish bars, the immigrant coffee shops and boutiques too glossed-up to be interesting yet not actually classy. He is in the forgettable Manhattan of his first years as a New Yorker, his time as a reporter for the Daily News. When he phoned his mother after he decided to drop out of Columbia architecture school, to tell her about his job, she was not effusive. “It’s one of those … vertical newspapers, is it, that you’ll be writing for?” she said. Edith Hope Cranston Mactier, whom everyone called Edith Hope, wouldn’t use the word tabloid, which in 1978 she thought was somehow vulgar, just as she wouldn’t use the word stink.

  Zigzagging uptown again, west on Forty-fifth, north up Madison, George looks up at the old Newsweek building—3:03, the Microsoft/Time Out New York/New York digital clock on top says; he should get back to the office—and experiences a moment of eighties nostalgia. The magazine was his second employer. (“Newsweek?” his mother said when he called to tell her he was leaving the Daily News. “That’s the one that imitates Time, is it?”) In his twenties, in the 1980s, Newsweek seemed glamorous—the year in Bonn at the twilight of the Cold War, Gary Hart up for coffee, the hipsters snorting lines of coke off art-department light boxes, a day trip to Washington to chat with Ronald Reagan about the ivy plant on his Oval Office mantelpiece, chauffeured Town Cars caravanning from Madison Avenue out the Long Island Expressway at four A.M. on summer Saturday mornings at $160 a commute. To a twenty-six-year-old, the expense account itself was a druglike thrill.