The Media Candidate (27 page)

The screen filled with a picture of their son,
Luke, and his SO, Marie. Luke winked and said, “Come on and see us,
Mom.” Marie smiled. A long pause occurred, during which Luke and
Marie continued their waving, winking, and smiling. Martha sat
motionless, a smile tattooed across her misty face. “InterCon’s
Suborbital Service can put you in Tokyo in just two hours.”

Joel interrupted the trance gently. “We can put
together a package of the two trips at about a forty percent saving
from our normal ‘terrific traveler’ fare. But this package is good
for only a short time this summer.” Joel picked up the pace until
he was pitching at full hype with Jugs and the Danglers pulsating
their usual background. “Let me know ASAP, Marty. We’re holding two
spots open for you and Ted. It would be a dream come true for
Luke!” As he concluded, an electronic paper composer silently spun
a colorful brochure highlighting the InterCon special that had just
been offered by Joel and the rest of his Madison Avenue family.

“Well, Marty, we’ve come to the end of another
…”

Elliott stood in the foyer and stared through
Jan, through the wall TV screen. His stare was fixed on infinity,
finally intercepted by some distant galaxy. That far-off galaxy was
his real home. It harmonized with Elliott and he with it. Whatever
the galaxy where his mind came to rest, it was less alien than his
earthly home. The heavens begot him for that distant home, and he
sought solace there. But the waves of earthly gravity forced him
back, no matter how many light-dreams away he’d strayed.

He shifted his stare to the kitchen and followed
it with dazed steps. Standing before the refrigerator, he gradually
awoke, as if being stirred from a dream by a distant bell.

His day emerged, a day filled with discovery and
no discovery, and with Guinda. COPE buzzed through him and
questions about murder and why they feared Halvorsen—and him.
Guinda returned. And there were Joel and Jan seated in his TV room,
and yet not there. Jugs and the Danglers danced in front of him. He
closed his eyes, but they still danced. Luke blossomed but seemed
like just another part of the invasion. Susie replaced Luke.

Finally, there was Martha, paying daily homage
to her holographic family’s trivial existence. But was Elliott
Townsend real, he wondered? He was real once, when they used to go
on Friday night dates to the super market and when they painted
every room in their first house together. But sometime he lost his
reality. Maybe when Martha discovered Joel and Jan. No, before
that. And it didn’t even happen in an instant. It happened like a
tide overcomes one rock, then another, and another. You don’t know
it’s happened until one day you look at a picture and then you look
in a mirror. How could Marty have been so efficiently kidnapped
that not even she knew she was being stolen?

The refrigerator once more began to bring him
back. He pulled the door open, picked up a Pete’s, and suddenly the
entire episode with Joel and Jan roared at him like a freight
train. He dropped the bottle, his eyes fixed on the two-liter
bottle of Fantasy Cola facing him. Jugs and the Danglers danced
across the label in an effort to kidnap him, to condemn him.

The sound of the bottle of ale crashing startled
Martha. “Ted, is that you? … Ted?”

Elliott did not hear her. He was not even aware
of the golden ale oozing around his feet, seeping under each shoe,
making unseen Rorschach patterns. Martha entered the room. “Ted, it
is you. Why didn’t you answer me? Elliott? … Look at the mess
you’ve made. You have beer all over the floor. … I just had the
nicest visit with Joel and Jan. We talked for nearly two hours.
They’re the nicest people. Do you know, they have one of those big
houses on the beach at Malibu that you see in all the magazines?
They said I can go there with them sometime. Wouldn’t that be nice?
… Ted? … Ted!”

“What?”

“Look at that mess! Why are you just standing
there? I was just visiting with Joel and—”

“They aren’t real, Martha.”

“Don’t you start on that again, Elliott. They’re
just as real as any of your friends. You try to belittle all my
friends. Well, they are real. They’re as real as you!”

“They aren’t real. They’re some computer in
Hollywood. They’re just silicon and wire and plastic, all stuffed
into boxes and plugged into the wall. They don’t have blood or
brains or bones. They don’t care about you. It’s all just
bullshit.”

“You think everything is bullshit if you don’t
agree with it. Well, you’re not as smart as you think, Dr.
Townsend. Where are your friends? Can you just call your friends
any time you want? Are your friends honest with you? I think you’re
jealous because you don’t have friends like mine. If I wanted to, I
could call Joel and Jan right now, and they would be back here in
an instant. Tell me about one friend of yours who would do that. Go
ahead, tell me. Who would care? If I got sick or something and
ended up in the hospital, they’d send me flowers and even visit me
if the hospital was properly equipped.”

“And they’d bill your account. All they want is
to get money out of you and get you to buy all the stupid stuff
they advertise,” Elliott responded as he began to clean up the
spill. “And you call them your friends. What a joke!”

“And how about all your friends at the lab? How
often do they come and visit you? All they ever cared about was
getting your help to solve their problems. And how many times have
they called you since you retired? Your best friends are those
equations you fiddle with and those particles you keep looking for
but can’t find. Talk about
my
fantasy world.”

“You know, Martha, I just don’t understand your
world. Everything is just hype and gimmicks, hype and gimmicks.
None of those singers and dancers has any more talent than I do.
Years ago their gimmick was to take their clothes off. Then
everybody did it. Now that Jugs woman has a chorus of synchronized
peckers behind her, and then she adds that last bit of gimmickry,
the kneepads. She’s just a hack, a billionaire hack. She can’t
dance, she can’t act, and she sure as hell can’t sing. She has a
great body, but so do millions of other women. So what does she
bring to entertainment that’s quality, that’s unique? Why does she
make a billion dollars just for taking off her clothes, singing
some obscene lyrics off key, and carrying a bottle of cola all over
the world? I guess the real question is, why do you keep buying
that crap and keep stuffing money in her pockets … if she had
pockets.

“Entertainment is all anybody cares about
anymore. If you’ve got a catchy gimmick and drown out everything
else with bouncing ponytails and tits and peckers, all synchronized
to that thumping they call music, you can become a billionaire. No
talent, just tits and peckers and thumps … and money, truckloads of
money pouring in every day from all those adoring fans who live
their lives in the entertainers, whose very existences are
personified by the rudeness of their idols, and their arrogance and
bad manners, and childish craving for attention, and most of all
their incredible wealth. They use that money to mock their fans, to
chastise them for their gullibility and for being such an easy
sting.”

“You’re just jealous, Elliott. That’s all you
are is jealous. They’ve got it, and you don’t, and it just eats at
you. Well, I don’t think you have anything to be jealous about.
You’ve been living off your fans your whole life, too. Your sting
has been an intellectual one, so in your community it’s been as
acceptable as the bouncing tits and peckers that you find so
repulsive. But it’s the same thing. What did you ever do that’s
done anybody any good. You sit in you fancy lab spending all that
stolen tax money. And what’s
your
product? Just paper and
promises and big words that nobody understands—and Nobel prizes.
What’s any of that ever done for anybody?

“And it’s not just high-energy physics. It’s
everybody in that whole intellectual, academic community. How about
those three queer ecology professors who got that grant to spend
two years at all those beaches observing birds and counting the
times they had to run away from people. And that was supposed to
tell us something about man’s impact on bird life. And those
results were so valuable, they got another grant to do the same
thing in the Southern Hemisphere. Remember, they said it was an
incomplete database? They had to see if the birds ran clockwise or
counterclockwise. Talk about bullshit!

“And most of the sociology department at the
University,” continued Martha, “has been on the dole for years
studying the relationship between cricket chirping and welfare
rates, and now they have a program to bring millions of crickets
into the inner city. They say the crickets will pay for themselves
in just one month if the welfare payments decline to what they are
out in the country. You know that kind of thing is rampant
throughout the colleges. At least the money going to Jugs and the
Danglers is freely contributed by their fans, not doled out by the
politicians like in your world.”

Elliott could not lift his eyes from the last
remains of his Pete’s. “I know. That’s one of the things I can’t
figure out. I can understand money being stolen from people and
them feeling powerless to stop it. But I can’t figure why they
would voluntarily line the pockets of so many worthless people. It
just doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Maybe we don’t consider
Jugs
and
The
Fungi
and
Hard-Ons
to be worthless. Maybe they bring us
something we need. Maybe our lives and their gimmicks are so
intertwined that we need them just as much as they need our bucks.
They represent reality for us in a world that seems to have lost
all reality. But they have as much value to us as your equations
have to you. Isn’t my TV family just like your science? It doesn’t
mean anything to anybody else, but that’s enough for me. Now you’ve
lost your fantasy world, but don’t blame me for that. It’s time you
grab onto what’s available and quit griping about it.”

Martha turned and walked back to the TV room
where she fumbled with controls and menus and icons to reestablish
her own reality. Elliott finished cleaning up Pete’s and paused for
a long time before the trash receptacle. How easy it was to discard
what you didn’t want. Pick it up, open the little door, throw it
in, and it’s gone. And if they wanted to, it could be even easier.
They could get one of those little handmaiden robots that follows
you up and takes care of all those details like spills and dirt.
Elliott looked at the trash door.
I wonder if COPE has a robot
to clean up little messes like Halvorsen or Townsend … or
Burns
.

Elliott and Martha sat in their breakfast room,
one reading, and the other just staring into the newspaper.

“Susie called yesterday while you were out,”
Martha said without raising her eyes. Elliott looked up at her
media-focused face. “She wanted to know if you’d be home this
morning.” Elliott continued to stare at Martha. She turned the page
and began reading a new article. “I told her I never knew what kind
of trouble you were out getting into, but I’d at least tell you
about it.”

“Is she going to call back this morning?”
Elliott said.

“She has some business at the University today.
Said she’d stop by this morning. Her flight gets in at ten.”
Elliott’s eyes wandered back to his unread front page. Martha
turned another page and scanned the headlines. “She’s going to rent
a car and come over.” Her eyes stopped. “Isn’t that interesting?
Junkie Gordon is suing NBC for a rematch. I wonder why? Lizzie won
the debate fair-and-square.”

“It’s good for prime time advertisers,” Elliott
said.

Martha looked up at Elliott and then back down
at her paper. “I suppose you’ll be pulling one of your disappearing
acts this morning.”

Two hours later, Elliott stood in the late
morning sun of their rear deck picking faded geranium leaves from a
flowerbox. The sound of a door behind him caused him to turn. A
slender woman stepped out onto the deck. Elliott faced Dr. Susan
Alvarez.

“Good morning, Dad,” she said as she stepped
toward him. After a brief hug, Elliott stepped back and looked into
his daughter’s eyes. She maintained a hold on one of his hands, but
he seemed not to need this restraint as his eyes rummaged through
her hair and her lips and then back to her eyes.

“I never appreciated before … just how beautiful
you are, Susan. Why do you suppose that is?”

“I don’t know.” She swallowed hard, biting her
upper lip. She stroked the back of his hand with her thumb.

He looked down at her hands and was startled at
how similar they looked to Guinda’s. His beautiful daughter was a
few years older than his exquisite lover. “Martha is watching TV.
She’ll be so glad you’re here.”

“Please don’t tell her just yet. I’ve got some
things I wanted to talk to you about first.”

They sat down on a pair of chairs beside a glass
table.

“You’re probably wondering what all this is
about. I don’t really have an appointment at the University this
afternoon like I told Mom. There are a couple things I had to tell
you in person … and one of them just can’t wait.”

Elliott took a deep breath and sat back, running
his fingers over his forehead.

“We haven’t had a very good relationship for a
long time,” she began. “I blamed you for turning away from me a
long time ago, but over the last few years, I’ve realized that I’m
the one who turned away from you.”

“No, no, Susie. It wasn’t your fault. I—”

“Wait a minute, Dad. Let’s not play this game of
each of us blaming ourselves until after you’ve heard me out. I’ve
thought a lot about this over the years, and I convinced myself I’d
forgiven you for abandoning Luke and me. Then I thought, who
abandoned who? I knew you were tortured by that day at the science
fair, and I could have helped you—but I didn’t.