Back To The Viper (13 page)

“I’ve noticed that when things start working well professionally for somebody, soon enough they succeed in personal life, as well,” Susan added thoughtfully. “Take Jenny, for example. Not only will she become The Screw’s new host but she’s also going out with Lewis.”

Emily poked Susan to make her shut up. “I told you not to mention Lewis!”

“What? I thought Julia had already gotten over him. After all, it’s been more than half a year since they broke up.”

“Good evening, ladies,” Scott, the Financial Contributor, greeted us and came closer to our table. “How’s it going? Em, is that a new haircut?”

“Not really. I only colored my highlights. It looks like your hair might need some coloring, too, though. I can see that the financial turmoil on Wall Street has given you quite a lot of grey hairs.”

Scott laughed.

“Being on Wall Street isn’t that stressful when you don’t have capital; I’m not complaining. Julia, and how are you? You look a little bit pale.” He turned to me.

“Yes, Scott, you’re right. I don’t feel very well and I think I should go home.” I took my jacket, paid for the beer hastily, and aimed for the door despite Susan's and Emily’s loud protests.

Before I went out, I heard Emily scolding Susan. “Is it so hard to be at least a little bit more considerate?”

The cool wind outside quickly dispelled my thoughts. I aimed for Central Park. I had often taken this way in the past. Once I entered the park, I felt much calmer. The green foliage, the cool weather and the stillness relaxed me. There were a lot of people, though it was a workday. There were couples in love, and mothers with kids or ordinary walkers passing me. While I was striding home intently, I started asking myself why I was putting so much effort into my work. I had come to New York eight years before, right after I had graduated from The University of Florida. What was the point, I thought, of trying so hard when in the end Jennifer or another ambitious fledgling would effortlessly get to the top? I was slogging away for twelve hours a day, five and sometimes even six days a week and to what end? To top it all, Jennifer was now going out with Lewis. Damn it! I interviewed people in a feature I’d named
Miracle – How I Did It
and yet the miracle was slipping away from me. I felt as if I was in a self-imposed prison. Suddenly I noticed I had my feet on Strawberry Field. I felt something peculiar.

“John, buddy, imagine… Imagine what it would be if I got what I wanted at least once in my life…” While I was muttering these words, I suddenly remembered the lyrics of “Imagine” and started singing about everything I wanted coming to me, about being a dreamer, and how I wasn’t the only one. While I was humming, a couple in love passed by. The woman looked at me curiously. I sighed and went my way further down the alley. It was shaping up to be another lonely evening at my small apartment in Midtown Manhattan. I was going to buy a bottle of white wine, some rice with vegetables, and a packet of chips from the nearest store. But suddenly something unusual happened. Something that completely changed my monotonous daily routine. As I was walking down West 54th Street in the darkening day, a stranger grabbed my attention. He had a little table in front of him with a sign saying “Wishing coins for sale.”

“Come closer, ma’am, take a look at my incredible magic coins and pick your own,” he said invitingly.

“Are these the advanced version of Bitcoins? Are they taxable?”

“Everything has a price, ma’am, and you know this very well.” The stranger paused. “But if you mean federal tax, no, these coins aren’t taxable. You’ve got nothing to declare.” He smiled widely.

I stopped in the middle of the street.

“Come, ma’am, and give them a try for free!”

Something about that vendor – it could have been his voice, the words he’d been using or his energy as a whole – aroused my curiosity and made me come closer to the table. According to the laws of logic, he matched all the characteristics of a crackpot.

“Do your coins really make wishes come true?”

“Sure, didn’t I attract you here? I had just wished that you would come closer and my wish did come true, didn’t it?”

I chuckled; the stranger had a good sense of humor. I glanced at the coins – some were white, others kind of yellowish and still others had the color of copper. There were some very old and other brand new ones among them.

“Is there any difference among them? What is each used for?”

“You’re quite observant! Yes, there’s a difference. The white ones you see fulfill all wishes related to health. The copper ones are for work and the golden – for love. Which kind would you like, madam?”

The stranger was so convincing that I was beginning to believe him. Wishing coins? I felt as if I was going back in time to when I was a kid and wanted to find something similar to Aladdin’s magic lamp.

“Can I buy all of them then? I have a wish that’s related to my work and another to love…”

“No, ma’am, these are very powerful objects and you can buy just one. I’m not allowed to sell anybody more than one.”

“But what I’d really like is a coin that will fulfill all my wishes. Don’t you have one like that?”

The stranger was staring at me intensely without uttering a word. I felt I couldn’t bear his silence any longer and decided to leave, but he stopped me.

“Miss, hold on!”

I turned back to him. He came closer to me as if he had to tell me something confidential.

“I do have one such coin. I don’t offer it to anybody because… because it really makes all wishes come true.”

“But that’s awesome!” I exclaimed, overexcited. “I mean… who wouldn’t want all their wishes to come true?! Where’s this coin? I am buying it immediately!”

The stranger smiled. He had nice white teeth. For a moment it crossed my mind that he might not have been just an ordinary vendor, but I was too excited to give it a second thought. Later on, when I was going back to this very moment I wondered if I would have taken the coin if I had known its real price.

“Miss, I can sell it to you, but I am not taking any responsibility for the consequences. Remember that what now looks like a gift may very soon turn into a curse.”

“I’m taking it!” I insisted. The more he was warning me, the more I wanted the coin. Marketing specialists could only watch and learn from him.

“All right, then,” the stranger resigned with a sigh and bent under the table. After a few seconds he took out a carefully folded cloth, unfolded it pedantically and revealed a small quite tarnished coin – a true relic. I reached for it but he stopped me.

“Don’t you ever take it with your right hand! Touch it only with the left one. Will you remember that?”

I reached out my left hand obediently and he dropped the coin in it quite unwillingly. As soon as it fell on my palm I got a strange feeling. There were some figures engraved on it and, tarnished as it was, I could identify something like a deity on its face.

“Where’s it from?”

“I’m not sure – either Nepal or Kashmir.”

“And this tiny piece of metal is my ticket to fulfilling all my desires?”

“Yes, ma’am, I warned you about it several times already.”

“Excellent. What do I owe you?”

“500 dollars.”

“500 bucks for this junky piece!” I couldn’t help but cry with astonishment. A walker turned his head towards me and eyed me with curiosity. His reaction sobered me. How had I even fallen for such a cheap trick like wishing coins? I should have hurried to the supermarket if I didn’t want to eat yesterday's leftovers for dinner.

“Thanks a lot, I intend to invest my money in something more reasonable.” I gave him the coin back immediately. I expected the vendor to object or at least to start talking me into buying the coin, but he was visibly relieved and I heard him mutter,

“Thank God she didn’t take it.”

Now, I am asking myself: if I hadn’t heard him, would I have just gone home and would the story have ended right then? Who knows? But I heard him and made a firm decision: I had to have this coin at all costs, even if I had to pay five thousand.

“Hey… um… What’s your name? I’m buying the coin!”

He turned back to me, flabbergasted, and handed it to me reluctantly.

“And remember, don’t you ever touch it with your right hand!”

“Yes, yes, all right.” I took out the money hastily and paid him. All I wanted was to go home as soon as possible and examine the coin undisturbed by anything. Perhaps all this was just a well-staged theater aiming at making me buy this useless piece of crap, but I could feel in my gut that there was something special about that coin.

I opened the door of my apartment and immediately rushed to the living room, where I took the coin and put it up under the lamplight. I could definitely discern something like a deity. On its back I identified some geometrical shapes blending into one another. I felt overexcited. “Could this be true? A wishing coin?” I spoke aloud and then laughed nervously. I glanced back at the little coin – it was now or never.

“I want…” I started but then stopped. Did I have the guts to try it? “I want to be the new host of The Screw,” I announced firmly. “If this works out, I will wish for Lewis and me to make up,” I was thinking on my way to the fridge. I took out a bottle of white wine.

“Namaste!” I raised a toast to the strange coin I had put in a prominent place in the kitchen.

Chapter 3

“How I spent five dollars on recording a hit song for YouTube that now has over 2 million views. See it yourself!” That was the message displayed in my GChat. I stopped to consider it with my hand on the mouse. The link was one click away. I hesitated because it had been awhile since I had last paid attention to such aggressive approaches.

It was past 10 o’clock and for an hour already I’d been checking my email and the latest tweets from AEC’s Twitter account. I was looking for a topic for some new material when this message got my attention. I got a lot of personal messages of this sort every day but usually they turned out to be ads or made up stories. People would do anything to get to their own piece of 15-minute fame. In the past I would’ve checked every link and every message, but eventually I’d given up. Looking at that message, I felt a compelling urge to click on it.

Was I curious or did I just want to see what the sender of the message had come up with? Anyway, I was going to find out after some seconds.

“Yo- yoo man, what’s up? Diggin’ in the dirt,

Girl, better take off your shirt

I’m a gangsta

Catch me if you can

I am the man

…”

Less than 15 seconds later I stopped the video. It was a cheap one, shot somewhere in the Bronx. Why had I wasted even a single minute from my working time to listen to that impostor’s gibberish? I wondered how many views this “masterpiece” had had. I expected not more than several hundred, so when I saw the number two million and three hundred thousand, I was dumbstruck. How was that possible? I stared at the paused video and refreshed the page.

“Yo-oo man,” the rapper began again. The number, however, didn’t care to change – it had remained two million and three hundred thousand. What the hell?

I then moved my eyes to the likes of the video – there were over half a million. The dislikes were a bit over three thousand. I clicked on the comments and was hit by a wave of praise. There were some negative ones among them but that was normal. An artist couldn’t appeal to everyone, after all. I was gaping with surprise.

“How the hell?” I spoke aloud when somebody tapped me on my shoulder. I turned around. It was Emily, the News Editor.

“How are you? How did you get to your place last night?” she asked me.

“Oh, it’s you. Well, it was okay. In fact, on my way home I met this curious guy and I even bought –”

“I’m sorry for yesterday but you know Susan, don’t you?” Em interrupted me impatiently. “Oh, gosh, I gotta go! Nick will kill me if I don’t bring him the reports immediately. Take care, Julia!” She ran down the corridor hurriedly. I focused my attention back to the YouTube video.

“But how has this piece of crap become so popular?” I was puzzling over it aloud when I heard a familiar voice again.

“I’ll tell you how. We are drawn by what sounds provocative and intriguing and we share it with friends on social networks. Artists aggressively use all kinds of methods to grab our attention, with the risk of making their messages look like shameless self-promotion or even spam.” Taylor Carey, the Technology Editor, came nearer. His desk was next to mine and we often popped into the Dead Poet after work.

“Okay, but two million?”

“It’s all about marketing. It’s wrong to draw a line between a product and the way it’s promoted. Making a good product or, in this case, a piece of art, is marketing in itself.”

“Do you mean Roscoe Ritch’s song is good art? God save us from such artists!”

“Why, don’t you like him?” Taylor winked at me. “My 13-year-old nephew is a huge fan of rap and of anyone who raps about hot chicks and violence.”

“The world’s surely going nuts!” I exclaimed while still trying to assimilate those two million views.