Turn of the Century (48 page)

“Sound speed,” the sound man confirms.

“We have sound speed!” the first says, almost shouting. “Very quiet, we’re rolling.”

George watches the live video image of the actors, not the actors themselves. Doing this, he reminds himself of his father, who would take a big dry-cell-operated Zenith portable to Metropolitan Stadium so he could watch the Twins on TV outdoors at the game—which had
the effect of making an extremely boring experience extremely embarrassing as well, a kind of Minnesota childhood apotheosis.

“A marker,” says the assistant standing in front of one of the cameras as she claps her clapper.

“
B
marker,” says the assistant in front of the second camera.

Gordon is about to give the command. He never says “Action!” He has his own little directorial affectation. “And …” says Gordon, standing just in front of George, “
 … acting!
”

Cowboy Quesada springs up off the floor, and comes up behind Jennie O’Donnell, who is turned away, pretending to talk to Dan, her young uniformed sergeant.

“No, Jennie,” Cowboy says, “this isn’t about budgets, or about the DEA getting credit for the bust. Or about our personal BS. This is about doing the right thing. And your little creep here isn’t the gook we want. Not the one you
ought
to want.”

Jennie (Angela Janeway) ignores Cowboy (Lucas Winton), and walks stage left, pausing to glance with an insouciant wiseass smile at Dan (Sylvester Wayans).

She says, “Book
him
, Daniel.”

As he yells, “Cut,” Gordon looks at George, who has closed his eyes, and then at the AD.

“Doing it again!” the AD shouts.

It is officially
Harold Mose’s nap time, twelve to twelve-thirty, when he takes no calls and allows no interruptions. Sometimes he naps. Sometimes he thinks. Sometimes, like today, he fiddles around on the computer. As he uses his black stone mouse to grab the corner of the video image and yank it open, he glances at his little
ME
window: the analysts at Merrill and at Morgan have both lowered their earnings estimates by two cents a share, and in the last ten minutes the share price has fallen to 38⅞. Below 39! Just since noon! He should call down to Grace Carpenter and have her buy back some more shares, he thinks, and he pushes the yellow videocam button—that is, the picture of a yellow video camera that sits permanently on his screen. The picture of the camera pulsates when he clicks on it. No, he decides then, no: poker face, keep the poker face and don’t overplay the hand. He smiles, seeing these bets against the company—down again, 381
³
⁄
₁₆
—because the wise-guy analysts are all guessing, and Harold Mose
knows
. The end of a quarter can be very sweet, the sweetest, when you feel a little godlike (if God were smug), that moment just before you drop the poker face and show your three kings and jack pair. Lowball projections, upside surprise! Sometimes it is so easy. But now the new quarter
is starting and there’ll be a whole new hand to play. And Mose Media Holdings definitely needs to make its digital move in the second quarter.

This computer fiddling, then, counts as research. Three years ago, even two, Mose was a little embarrassed to use one himself. He was a conscientious upgrader, always state-of-the-art—386 to 486, 486 to Pentium, Pentium to Pentium Pro to Pentium II to Pentium III—and threw out four successive virgin machines in 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998. But now he is a virtuoso, a proselytizer, a man of the new age. Using a computer is no longer like mucking around with the coffee machine himself or making his own copies; it’s like flying his own jet. Seated six hundred feet over Fifty-seventh Street, blue sky at his back, Mose clicks with his little arrow on Lizzie’s memo, pricks it, makes it disappear.

Dragging open the video window is itself a pleasure, like pulling back a curtain in a dream, as the live image grows ten times, twenty times bigger in less than a second. The flashing red numerals above the picture, illegibly tiny before, are now an inch high: “$9.95! (
1ST 5 MINUTES
)” And the very pink human figure, tinier than a Cracker Jack trinket an instant ago, is now suddenly as big as a child’s doll, a jumbo-size doll with long blond hair, wearing only thigh-high white leather boots and holding her own breasts. “Hi! It’s me, Elizabeth!” she says, lisping, “would you like me to—?” before Mose mutes the sound on his computer by clicking on a tiny picture of a speaker with his right hand (his mouse hand, his free hand, the one not now rummaging through folds of charcoal-gray vicuna and white Sea Island cotton). And then with his right index finger he taps the F3 key, which sends a preprogrammed message to the Tenth Avenue loft where “Elizabeth” and two dozen other young women (and men) sit naked in front of two dozen digital cameras. Her mouth is still moving, but now her words appear in print across the bottom of the computer screen, like a stock ticker.
OKAY
, Elizabeth is saying, according to the live-text crawl,
YOU CAN JUST
WATCH
WHILE SOME OF MY OTHER HOT FRIENDS ASK ME TO PUT ON A NASTY SHOW FOR THEM
. She continues massaging her breasts as her face—lips slightly parted, eyes half closed—rather abruptly assumes the standard preecstatic expression.
OOOH!
flies across the screen, and then:
YOU WANT ME TO FINGER MY HOT JUICY CUNT?
But Harold Mose misses her response to the “other friends” as it races by, live, because he’s looking again at the corner of his screen, where the Mose Media stock price ticks down to 38⅝.
“Yes,”
he says, before returning his attentions to the naked woman.

Now he watches as she moves both hands down across her belly and between her thighs, and fakes a creditable little shiver.
SHOULD I DO IT LIKE THIS?
says the text running across her shins. Then, a little later, it reads:
MMMMMMMMM! YES, SIR!!
Then another long space, and whizzing from right to left across the screen all by itself: :) :) :) :) :). She’s punctuating, she’s punctuating,
she’s punctuating
.

On the opposite end of the global village, 9,582 miles away, another computer screen sits atop plastic beer crates stacked in a one-room cinder-block building half the size of Harold Mose’s private office. It’s late in Tamranti, Negri Sembilan, Malaysia, long after midnight, past everybody’s bedtime, but Radin, the local smart boy, has pleaded with his friends and friends’ fathers to stay just a little longer at the community center, which Radin is calling his
“cyber
–
kelab malam,”
his digital nightclub. He swears the call
will
go through this time, that it will be beyond amazing, unimaginably fine. Since Radin got laid off at the Samsung complex down in Seremban and came back to live in Tamranti, he has been the hamlet’s self-appointed entertainment mogul. He leases out his two Nintendo 64 machines by the week, rents videos of Madonna and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies for one ringgit a night, and sells Tiger beer on the side. Tonight eighteen teenage boys and men, half the males in town, sit cross-legged, chatting, by now mostly ignoring the computer screen, occasionally insulting Radin as he desperately taps at his keyboard.

Finally!
“Apa kabar!”
Radin shouts.
“Ya!”

The men of Tamranti fall silent, riveted and dumbfounded by the live picture that has appeared on Radin’s computer screen. After one young boy asks earnestly why on earth the American whore is wearing boots, the men laugh and relax. They begin shouting out which acts they want “Lee-zee-beet” to perform. Radin is working hard. He pecks at the keyboard, looks up to watch her follow the typed-in orders of her hot friends in Malaysia, simultaneously translates her words, joins in the resulting chorus of hoots and howls, then furiously types
the next command. “Okay … my other hot friends ask me to put on a nasty show for them … Oooh! … You want me to finger my hot juicy cunt? … Mmmmmmmmm! Yes, sir!!” Radin is happy, happy because of what this will do for his reputation, happy because he’ll collect forty ringgit for the computer show, happy because he’s recording Elizabeth’s performance on his hard drive—it’s one-of-a-kind porno, probably worth some money in Kuala Lumpur.

Again the men fall silent, this time aghast.
“Teedak! Teedak!”
two of the older ones shout. “No! No!” Suddenly, appended to the side of Elizabeth’s screen is its evil twin, a grainier video image of another American performing an obscene act—a man! A rich white man in a suit and tie with old skyscrapers behind him, handling his penis!
“Teedak, Radin!”
Radin’s uncle stands and carefully places two Tiger empties on the crate in front of the masturbating man, obscuring him. Well done. Their Minangkabau virtue and aesthetics no longer threatened, the male population of Tamranti returns to its friendly dialogue with the compliant girl in the loft in lower Manhattan.

“
Welcome
to SeaTac International,”
the Continental Airlines greeter says as each passenger, including Lizzie, shuffles past him. “Welcome to SeaTac
International … Welcome
to SeaTac International.” SeaTac is such a terrible name for an airport, so perfect for Seattle (and Tacoma), like U-Dub for the University of Washington, triple-dub for the World Wide Web, Comp Sci, DOS. This is a city where adults get an undergraduate kick out of speaking slangy abbreviations in lieu of real English words, all on the pretext of
quickness
. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the guy at the gate had actually said “Welcome to SeaTac
Intl
.” But Microsoft might find that objectionable—bundled promotion for Intel Corporation.

A
beeeep
sounds just as she walks past the unmanned metal detector toward the terminal, and her former seatmate looks back at her skeptically, but it’s a phone call, not a weapon.

“Lizzie Zimbalist, please. It’s Chas Prieve calling. She’ll know what it’s in reference to.”

The kid is officious but persistent. “This is Lizzie. Hi. Where are you?”

“K-L! Sepang International, just about to board! Have I caught you at a bad time?”

“No, I’m at the airport myself. In Seattle.” Malaysia to America, mobile phone to mobile phone, airport to airport: how
now
.

“Gosh!” Chas says, excited. “Airport wireless to airport wireless. Are you using Iridium? I am.” Lizzie thinks of Max: this is just the kind of thing that deeply pleases him, like when he spots a digital clock at 11:11. In a nine-year-old, the behavior is cute.

“So your guy in New York told me you might have a second, tomorrow, to let me brief you. Although actually it’s
already
tomorrow here.”

“The Sorrento at four o’clock?”

“I think there are some superexciting opportunities for Fine Technologies over here. And I now have a great relationship with one of the prime game jobbers in the region.”

“Great, see you tomorrow.”

Seattle is dumpy, despite the mountains and trees, like a gawky guy with a great body who stammers and wears ugly clothes. It’s a kind of urban dumpiness she tries not to despise. “You didn’t spend eighteen years living in St. Paul,” George snapped a few weeks ago after she suggested that if they lived in Seattle he might be able to produce
NARCS
in Vancouver.

But Lizzie realized again, during the weekend at Lake Marten, that the New York (and L.A.) contempt for Seattle (and for Silicon Valley) can’t be argued away. In the last few years, it has diminished some, and changed in texture—from dismissive and stupid, to alarmed and baffled, to supercilious and slightly less baffled. Her husband and her friends regard residents of Seattle (and Milpitas and Sunnyvale and all the rest) the way Americans think of Canadians—they
seem
like us, and their lives look clean and civil, but … who wants to hang out with earnest grad students full-time? Or as Ben Gould said about the titans of the digital coast at her last board meeting, “For such gigantic winners, they’re such losers.”

The main line of mutual contempt that used to flow between the coasts—New York versus L.A.—mostly devolved into Woody Allen and Johnny Carson punch lines by the time Lizzie left Brentwood for Cambridge and Manhattan. For all the civilization versus sun-and-sex schtick, and all of Lizzie’s own adolescent rants, her two hometowns seem similar. People in New York and L.A. fuss hysterically over nuances of style
and status that would be invisible elsewhere. People in both New York and L.A. are happiest in their souks, bartering and wheedling over the current value of houses and art and reputations. They care with equal and dazzling Bessemer passion about the monumentally unimportant—about living on the correct side of the correct street in the correct latitude of the correct neighborhood, about sitting at the best table at the best hour at the best restaurant, about wearing the right shade of indigo, thickness of sole, expression of sangfroid. Lizzie likes to think she has moved beyond automatic scorn or pity for this strain of bicoastal madness. She has begun to see all the Bel Air and Park Avenue
wanting
as a perverse romanticism, vanity and self-advancement pursued so monomaniacally that they turn inside out and become a kind of naïveté, the naïveté of children. And she also knows that to her painter and social worker friends in Williamsburg and Hoboken (and to George’s family in Verve and St. Paul) she and George are themselves kooky, dilettantish neo-Tory socialites devoted to the costly and the frivolous and the irrational.