Turn of the Century (88 page)

As soon as
NARCS
comes on (it is a rerun of the Russian mafia money-laundering show), George switches over to the NBC special on the upcoming Miss America 2001 pageant. They’re running profiles
of five of the contestants. Miss Mississippi is blind, and will use her seeing-eye dog during the pageant.
That will be good television
, George thinks. Miss Oregon has one leg, and her talent is modern dance. Miss Nebraska has no apparent handicap herself, but says her “dream is to use ventriloquism to aid the deaf.” Miss California is the national student coordinator for Decent Entertainers Against Dope, Lucas Winton’s group. Her talent is “popera,” which she describes as “opera for regular Americans, Celine Dion—type singing that tells stories about the Lord Jesus or drug addiction.”

At eleven, NewsChannel4 goes live to a shot of Savion Glover tap-dancing in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum for hundreds of smiling white people in gowns and dinner jackets. George is happy he didn’t go. The event is Cordman, Horton’s fortieth-anniversary celebration, which is also a fund-raiser for Martha’s Vineyard. (That’s all the NewsChannel4 reporter says—“a fund-raiser for Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.”) George wonders if Martha’s Vineyard is the only place on earth where the presence of blacks has actually increased white property values. He misses Daisy.

Just as he’s falling asleep, he hears five notes on the piano downstairs, a very low register, bum,
bummm
-bum-bum,
bummm
. He is fully awake. He hears nothing. He hears nothing, and closes his eyes again. But then, even lower, growly notes that practically aren’t music: bum-
bummm
. He gets out of bed warily, grabs Lizzie’s new ice ax and goes quietly downstairs toward the room with the piano, the room without a name, off the living room.
Bummm
-bum-ding
-clink
—Johnny, the cat, leaps off the piano and makes a panicky run past him up the stairs.
Of course it’s the cat
, George thinks,
just like the scene in every bad scary movie
. On the way back up to the bedroom, he accidentally corners Johnny in the hallway. That is, Johnny corners himself. George wonders if the cat is actually frightened of him at moments like this. Or is it frightening itself for fun, like Max and LuLu do when George pretends he’s a monster?

Everybody says difficult experiences can produce positive personal outcomes. Embrace the new. Revel in change. “Make lemonade out of life’s lemons,” Cubby Koplowitz told him. Cubby sent him a book called
Transitions: From Good to Bad to Better Than Ever!
George took it
out of the envelope and dropped it in the recycling bin in a single motion. But he is embracing change. He’s catching up with the rest of the world. He’s surfing the web. Until the last two weeks, he has surfed the web just enough to confirm that life is too short to surf the web. But here he is, surfing the web.

Zip Ingram was the first to tell him, years ago, about all the video cameras that feed their live images to web pages. George has glanced at newspaper articles about the pathetic people who set up cams in their own bathrooms. Now, he finds himself uninterested in those individual nut-cams, where one loser tries to force the world’s gaze onto
him
or
her
. George doesn’t want to look at anyone who wants him to look.

And he doesn’t want to watch women who are paid to pretend they don’t know he’s watching them.

© CHELSEA GIRLS
, it says in six-point type at the bottom of the web page. George notices one night that Chelsea Girls is also the name of a web site that charges $9.95 an hour for its “hot hot hot college girls and doctors of PHILOSOPHY, the sluttiest, horniest eggheads locked in the Ivory Tower waiting for YOU to get inside their minds AND their dripping-wet fancy pants!”

He isn’t interested.

It’s the public cameras on ordinary street corners he finds entrancing. It’s sitting at home and watching the fully clothed world at large, the whole world unaware and unpaid, that feels like a breakthrough in
human experience. We can each and all be the Wicked Witch of the West, looking down through our crystal balls into Munchkinland and the Emerald City. Although surely Glinda the Good had an all-seeing crystal ball too.

Now he understands why Zip was so bewitched. Now he
sees
. This
is
chocolaty. He clicks to a web site connected to a camera mounted on top of one of the World Trade towers, and watches the sky over the Statue of Liberty for twenty minutes. He spends an hour watching traffic on Interstates 94, 494, and 694 around St. Paul and Minneapolis. The I-494 cam happens to be pointed at the spot where his mother was killed.

He finds nine cameras mounted along Forty-second Street. He discovers that by timing his clicks from web site to web site, cutting from camera to camera like a director, he can follow the same person or the same car for blocks. He clicks to a camera pointed at Main Street in Disney World. He remembers the worst forty-five minutes of his life, the morning five-year-old Sarah disappeared during the Disney World twentieth-anniversary celebrations; the security men led George and Lizzie through secret doors into a big room with dozens of monitors to search through all the closed-circuit Epcot and Magic Kingdom surveillance images for her. “Don’t look for particular clothes or hair,” one of the Disney men told them. “They might have changed her clothes or cut her hair already. Look for your child’s
shape
.” (They found her alone and unharmed wandering around Frontierland.) He watches the Las Vegas Strip, and tries to pick out the hookers. He goes to a cam trained on the Managua cityscape and can just make out the hospital where they stitched his arm up.

He thinks,
My life is flashing before my eyes. Literally
. The fuzziness and dumb angles give the images an extra spectral power—as if they are ad hoc and unmediated glimpses into a supernatural world, banality live from the beyond.

First thing the next day, he can hardly wait to get back on the computer, going from cam to cam to cam to cam to cam. There are thousands. Almost all of them are deeply tedious. George finds every one of them interesting.

He feels like he’s working again.

He watches lions eating a large hoofed animal live from a water hole in a Kenyan game reserve. He watches a culvert outside Budapest:
every ten or twenty minutes, someone appears and urinates; one out of every six or seven men, George calculates, salutes the camera after he finishes. He watches a cemetery near Polho, in Mexico, where twice or three times a day, it seems, they bury victims of the war.
ZAPATISTA MARTYR-CAM
, it says on the web page. He’s noticed they dig the graves between five-thirty and eight in the morning.

Aside from telemarketers, there are two calls today. Ben calls, and denies he lied to George about buying up the rights to novels. He says he wasn’t going to make movies or TV shows, and he’s not. He didn’t tell George the full truth because it was still a secret, but he did not lie.

That is Ben’s loophole.

George asks if Bucky Lopez was involved somehow in getting
Real Time
canceled, and Ben tells him he’s crazy, crazy about Bucky just like he was crazy about Cubby. The last time Ben called, he said that he was underwriting the R & D for Cubby’s next big idea—turning any PC into an at-home ATM machine, by means of a device attached to a printer port like they do for postage metering. CubbyCash! Ben said then, “There’s no conspiracy against you, pal.” Until that moment, the word hadn’t occurred to George.

And Lizzie calls. It is early again, eight-thirty. He’s beginning to think that she intends to catch him groggy and off guard, and maybe even intends to upset him by calling just when she’s about to run off to some grand dinner with Harold and Gloria, her voice full of impatience and precocktail cheer. She tells him they’re returning to New York a day late. “We can’t leave until Friday,” she says.
We
. “I cannot wait to be in my home, George.”
My
. “But I mean, I can’t very well just say
sayonara
and hop on a commercial flight. It’s Harold’s jet.”

It’s Harold’s jet
.

That is Lizzie’s loophole.

He thinks about moving to Paris. But Lizzie speaks French, not him. And she’s the one with all the money, not him. And the kids. She would presumably get the children. He couldn’t bear to leave the children. Which puts her in control.

He doesn’t look forward to the kids blaming him for Johnny’s death. It happened on his watch. Lizzie always said, “One of those stupid tourist buses is going to run over him someday, out on the cobblestones.” She
was exactly right. She’ll have that consolation. He thinks about burying him in the backyard. But they don’t own a spade, and after thirty seconds of digging up dirt by hand like a dog with its paws, he calls the ASPCA. A woman with a slight Spanish accent gives him another number to call.

At the second number, a man with a much thicker Spanish accent asks, “Where do you live?” George tells him the Seaport. “You sure?” the man says, “people don’t live down there.”
Yes, exactly! And that’s the irresistible, idiosyncratic charm of our lifestyle!
“I’m sure,” George tells him. The man says, “Well, let’s see … okay, put the dead pet on the southwest corner of Fulton and Water streets. Somebody’ll be there.” Two hours ago, right before lunch (tuna from the can: tribute to Johnny), he puts the cat in a shopping bag. He seals it with gaffer’s tape, scribbles over
PRADA
and writes,
DEAD CAT
. He puts it out on the corner. When he goes out to check two hours later, the bag is already gone.