Turn of the Century (70 page)

“Your lunch, Mr. Mactier,” Daisy says, handing him a paper bag as he passes by without stopping, and into his office.

“One of the writers said they’re all Quaked and Daikatana’d out. Video games? He asked me to ask you,” he hears her saying, “if in the interests of writer harmony and productivity you could possibly nick a prerelease copy of Warps for them to play.” He knocks the door shut with his foot.

“No,”
he says.

The only live music she ever hears these days is on sidewalks and subway platforms, thirty seconds of steel drums here, a snatch of cello or a capella gospel there. This guy, sitting right under one of the
14TH STREETS
spelled out in tiles, playing bluegrass on a slide guitar, is new to the station. He looks fifty, with the smooth, lightly roasted skin of a drunk (the kind of tan that once made tans unfashionable) but he’s probably younger than Lizzie is. He looks alert but stunned, as if he
was badly startled months or years ago, like a face in a Mathew Brady photograph. As she passes him, a dozen smiling white teenage girls and boys bound out of the turnstiles toward her, each one wearing a white T-shirt with the logo
MISSION
2000! As her train thunders into the station, she glances again at the teenagers (the backs of the T-shirts say
KNOXVILLE SAVING NEW YORK!)
, who now look a little startled themselves by the sight of a white derelict in New York City playing beautiful country music.

What does Harold Mose want now?
she thinks, sitting and staring at the cover of her
Business Week
(
HELLO:
THE GOLDEN AGE OF TELEPHONY
) on her way uptown.

Such a shitty day, and not just Monday shitty, either. The fax about Chas Prieve that came in over the weekend from the Malaysian Ministry of Energy, Telecommunications and Posts seemed amusing (“Informing you officially of seizure of pornographs allegedly distributed by your MR. PRIVE, who is under ministerial investigation for violation of national and provincial antipornography statutes”), but then she learned from a wholesaler in Hong Kong that the Southeast Asian distribution deal for Warps that Chas claimed to have closed before she fired him (“A 100 percent done deal, Lizzie”) has been undone, partly because of the Malaysian pornography problem. None of the morning’s papers mentioned the company or her personally, which is a good thing. But the front-page story in the
Journal
assessing last week’s collapse of the market for high-tech IPOs is a bad thing. (“Although the BeMyFriend.com pricing debacle may have no lasting impact on ‘blue chip’ internet stocks,” the article in the
Journal
said, “analysts agree that the 83% plunge in KillerWare’s share price within minutes of the open on its second trading day may be a paradigmatic event for the software sector.”) Nancy McNabb’s phone call to Lizzie at home was meant to be reassuring and upbeat. “Timing! Timing! Timing from hell!” Nancy cackled as soon as Lizzie said hello. “I
won’t
say that if we went out three months ago like I wanted, you know what—but, Elizabeth, just sit tight, and by first quarter ‘01 it’ll be like none of this ever happened.”

Lizzie’s staff, unfortunately, does not read
The Wall Street Journal
. They read the
Post
, which reported last Friday morning that she was about to get very rich at their expense. “Although her employees may
be left out in the cold,” the
Post
story said, “politically incorrect limousine liberal Lizzy Zimbalist will be laughing all the way to the investment bank after prestigious superfinanciers Cordman, Horton take her Silicon Alley software firm public this summer. A source close to the deal told the
Post
that the flamboyant Zimbalist stands to personally net $70 million.” Even Karen, worshipful Karen who defended Lizzie so passionately during the private-coffee-cache scandal in April, has gone over to the other side. “If you want people to stay c-c-c-c-c-committed, Lizzie,” Karen said too loudly at Bruce’s going-away party on Friday, waving her Dos Equis like a pike, or a villager’s torch, “then you need to start running the company open book. I mean, hello?
Transparency?
D-d-d-d-democracy?” In other words, let every employee know how much every other employee is paid. She told Karen and a half dozen bystanders that she’d have to think about going open book (no
fucking way
is what she was thinking), and assured them that she had not even decided whether to take Fine Technologies public, that some of the wealth would be shared if it did happen, and that she would get only a tiny fraction of $70 million in any event. “Kudos, my Mother Courage,” said Willibald, one of the German programmers, raising his beer in a toast. Aside from Bruce, who made her sob and laugh at the end of the party (by assuring her that she’s not “flamboyant” as he hugged her goodbye), only Alexi, Fanny, Willibald, and his pal Humfried still seem to trust her. She’s not sure if it’s actually resentment over the putative IPO money, or if the money is the trigger for latent hysteria about animal rights, or if what’s going on is some surge of post-Warps spring-fever Parisian-barricade sentiment. But it sucks. She loathes it.

“Excoose me, pliz, mees, one second, pliz?” A slightly lost-looking older man holds his big old-fashioned cellular phone toward Lizzie.

The Metropolitan Tower doorman has already opened the door for Lizzie to enter, and frowns, irritated on Lizzie’s behalf.

“Pliz, mees? I cannot be understand,” he says, handing her the phone. “You spik, pliz? I must spik to
him
,” he says, pointing with his thumb to a name and phone number written on an LOT Polish Airlines ticket folder. “Meester Vallayce Gonshaleez. Pliz?”

She puts the phone to her ear. “I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re saying,” a recorded female voice says, sounding a little stern, flaunting her own perfect, plummy, prerecorded American. “Please try
again. Speak in a normal voice. Otherwise, I’m afraid I won’t understand.”

Lizzie gets the problem. To the speech-recognition software at the other end of the line, this man’s Polish-accented English might as well be gibberish, all noise, no signal.

“Wallace Gonzalez,” she says into the phone slowly and firmly, a normal American voice, but not hers.

“
Thank
you!” the recording replies, now sounding like an old friend. “One moment and I’ll connect you.” She hands the phone back to the man, wondering if lines of Fine Technologies’ software code are buried somewhere inside the huffy computer.

She plunges from the unseasonably hot blare of Fifty-seventh Street into the quiet air-conditioned dim, wondering if the Golden Age of Telephony is a good thing or a bad thing. And wasn’t 1900 the true Golden Age of Telephony? Isn’t this more a Late Mannerist Age of Telephony?

The concierge is using three at once, one land line ringing through to Mose upstairs, another to a car service that has him on hold, and a third, his own wireless phone, to someone he knows. “
Momentito
, Cordelia,” he says into the wireless, and lays it on one of the stacks of five different Asian newspapers on his black marble desk.

What does Harold Mose want?
It’s urgent enough that his assistant, Dora (actually, Dora’s assistant, Lucy), called Daisy to get Lizzie’s wireless number after they couldn’t get through on any of the regular Fine Technologies voice and fax lines. Hundreds of friends of animals and people for the ethical treatment of animals have been calling since Friday as part of their organized “education and lobbying” campaign, keeping every line permanently busy with their sermons, their photographs of butchered puppies, and their death threats. In their single real conversation this week, after George reminded Lizzie that Charlie the caretaker had possibly murdered cats and definitely killed weasels on their land at Lake Marten, he added with an unfunny grin, “Don’t worry, honey, I won’t snitch on you to PETA.”

At Mose’s door, his Filipino manservant—that is the word—informs her that Mr. Mose will be just a few minutes, then takes Lizzie to a room that has no obvious function, a rarity in Manhattan. There is a single huge upholstered chair (or a very small love seat) and no TV set. Although there are a few shelves of books (
Like, Cold: An Oral History
of the Canadian Beatnik Movement, The Zen of Curling, Moderation Miracle, CanadaPop: From Anka to Alanis, Hail Salmon!
and
101 Rather Unusual Things to See in the New Province of Nunavut
), it is too small to be the library. On a red quilted-bubinga-wood table is an open laptop with a screen saver (a tiny MBC logo grows to fill up the screen, then tastefully disintegrates as
NEW
network for the
new
century
scrolls across, the two
NEW
’s alternately throbbing), but the table is too cramped to work as a real desk. Except for a Karsh portrait of Mose himself, and his framed 1997 U.S. citizenship certificate, the walls are hung with a dozen medieval maps of the heavens. Gloria Mose, she decides, calls this the sitting room.

She stands. Examining the computer, a limited edition Intel 1000 (only a thousand 1000-megahertz machines made, given as gifts last Christmas to a thousand “planetary leaders”), she idly taps a key. The screen saver blinks away, revealing the ticker symbol for Mose Media Holdings and the current price,
ME 51⅛
, and below that a graph charting the stock price since January second. The graph bears an uncanny resemblance to the southern border of Texas, Lizzie notices. (The
Times
has been running a lot of maps lately of the Mexican border). At the beginning of the year, Mose’s stock price was 47, around El Paso, then meandered south along the Rio Grande, jagged up some in March, then turned south again, hitting Brownsville, its bottom, in early April, before heading steeply north-northeast as it has done ever since. It snaked through Corpus Christi and then during the last few weeks flattened out and turned east near Houston. The price, Lizzie notices, just has ticked up a teeny to 51
³
⁄
₁₆
. A
teeny:
since the Stock Exchange sliced price fractions from eighths of a dollar down to sixteenths a few years ago, Lizzie has enjoyed imagining Ben Gould and the testosteroned louts on Wall Street shouting
teeny
all day long.

“I want that
up
.” Harold Mose has appeared, wearing a gray suit, pink shirt, no tie, and red velvet slippers covered with golden stars and crescent moons. If men still wore ascots, he would have one on. He has new glasses—the round red plastic frames have been replaced by rough black steel ovals.

“Hello!” Lizzie turns her cheek for the kiss.

“I can’t tell you grateful I am. For popping up here on such short notice. Your plate is full, I know, overflowing. But I’ve got to be at Teterboro at two, and we absolutely had to talk before I leave. Did Luis get
you whatever you wanted?” He directs her toward the living room, and a bright purple Sottsass couch with, of course, a view of the park.

“L.A., and then Tokyo, your assistant said?”

“Correct. And very quickly downhill from there—Singapore, Moscow, and Kiev, where they’re desperate to pay me to buy their television and telephone company. As if I could do anything with their boatloads of hryvnias. It may shock you,” he says, sitting down in an old Frank Gehry corrugated-cardboard armchair across from Lizzie, “but the Ukrainian hryvnia is a somewhat illiquid currency.” He can’t help glancing outside. A cloud shadow is drifting over the Time Warner—CBS construction site on Columbus Circle, about to darken acres of trees and grass on its way toward Fifth Avenue.

“Astounding view,” she says. Rich people spend a lot of time contemplating Central Park. Some of them half believe they own it:
my view, my park
. Or is it the unattainability—
someday all this will never be mine
—that makes the view such a luxurious fetish? No matter how many millions may drift into her possession, Lizzie believes, she will never be a rich person.

“Last week was a bit of a bummer for we digital revolutionaries, eh?”

“Well,” she says, “MyBestFriend-dot-com was dead from the start, because of the porno piece. I
know
their spin, the sex business is only part of it, it’s ‘a relationship community,’ all that. But ‘the market’ is still just a bunch of straight guys from Chappaqua and Evanston. Committing the firm’s and clients’ capital to live video feeds of anal inter-course—we’re not there yet. Quite. And the KillerWare pricing was just crazy.”

“So we’re not seeing the beginning of the end of the web? More of the bubble bursting?”

“Nah. Anyway, it’s not
a
bubble. It’s more like foam. In foam, individual little bubbles burst all the time, but new ones form, and the foam doesn’t go away. Some little bubbles shmoosh together into bigger bubbles. You know?”

He’s smiling.
What does Mose want?
Maybe he’s delivering a speech in Europe and wants to steal some ideas duty-free from her.

“The novelty of the web isn’t wearing off?”

“No, people your age, baby boomers—”