Love In The Time Of Apps (17 page)

“Then we received the email from Mr. Goodwin with his vicious death wish for me. I tried to ignore it, but couldn’t. His cruel message festered in my consciousness and my psyche began to unravel. That horrible email had a profound psychological impact on me and I finally reached the breaking point. I cracked. I did something absolutely uncharacteristic, something I never did before.”

“Sheila was sitting next to me knitting “Thank You For Not Joking” pillows for a future HH swap meet. I turned to Sheila and said, ‘Sheila, here’s a question for you. What did one pre-cancerous cell say to the other pre-cancerous cell?’ Sheila had no idea of what I was talking about and replied in all seriousness that she didn’t know cells could communicate and did not know the answer. I replied, ‘You’re an oxidant waiting to happen.’ Then I began to laugh at
my joke. I followed up with ‘Of course they can communicate with each other. They use cell phones. Get it?’ I could see that Sheila was horrified. My God! I was joking! I tried not to speak, but I couldn’t stop myself. An instant later and before Sheila could say anything, I said laughing in anticipation of my next joke, ‘Did you hear about the man who brought a homemade coffin to the funeral home to save money for his wife’s funeral? When the funeral home charged him extra and he asked why, they explained that they had a corkage policy.’

I could see that Sheila was horrified and disgusted. I know she felt betrayed in a way. She did not say a word, but merely turned and walked out of our living room, down the hall to our bedroom, and slammed the door. A few minutes later, she walked out with her garment bag. I tried to make amends and begged her to stay. I remember saying, ‘Look, I’m very sorry. I don’t what happened. I don’t even know where that came from. It was spontaneous.’ But, it was too late. She turned to me, and through a heavy veil of tears said, ‘I’m going back to Philip. If I’m going to live with someone who jokes, it might as well be him.’ With that, she walked out the door, looked back, and said: ‘My divorce is off.’”

A reporter interrupted. ‘You mean that Sheila was on the way back to Mr. Goodwin when she was struck by lightning.

“Absolutely. She just stopped off at Vogue en-route to her house.”

“And if Sheila comes out of her coma, do you think she will return to Mr. Goodwin?”

“No doubt about it. She’ll be home for good, forever and ever.”

The decibel level of Goodwin’s howling, “Noooooooooo!” could be heard well beyond his front lawn.

“Got that all,” a voice said behind Goodwin. Startled, Goodwin spun around towards the source of the statement. It was a cameraman and a reporter. They had placed the newest model of an iPhone flush against the window.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Goodwin demanded.

The reporter’s response was nonchalant, as if his actions were perfectly normal and acceptable. “Just picking up everything you said and
did with Apple’s new spyPhone. It’s amazing; we can probe inside your house without even entering. In a couple of years these phones will be able to read your mind. Isn’t technology great?”

“Hey, you can’t do that. This is my house. I have rights.” Goodwin’s plaintive, “No it’s not that way,” was ignored. “This is a nightmare. Can it get any worse?”

Goodwin answered his question with a mumbled, “Yes, and big time.” Goodwin’s television screen revealed a reporter standing in front of Goodwin’s house. “Breaking news. We have it on good authority that as soon as Mr. Goodwin came home, while his wife was clinging to life by a thread, he began corresponding immediately with an escort service and downloading porn from the web. Through the website, www.privacyisextinct.com which, like many other sites, tracks your very move on the web, we found that Mr. Goodwin was surfing that salacious website, www.commasutra.cum Within seconds Goodwin’s activities were broadcast all over the country. Immediately after this announcement, over 5000 men entered the site. That night there were more “commas” than in the Constitution.

Depicted on the television screen was a blurred, pixilated, photograph of someone watching pornography on a computer. While there was, for a half of a nano-second, an imprint on the screen of “file footage,” Goodwin realized that all who watched would think the person depicted was him. As if to confirm his conclusion, the continuously moving news tape at the bottom of the screen said: “An unidentified, but highly reliable source has said that “Philip Goodwin is now deeply into internet porn.” Goodwin pressed the off button on his now obsolete Super RX Digital 2 remote control.

It was Goodwin’s very bad luck that the Sheila Bolt and its immediate aftermath occurred during what media experts were calling a “news drought.” In order of importance, there were no celebrity trials, celebrity scandals, celebrity break ups, celebrity gossip, or to a lesser newsworthy extent, no wars, at least new wars, major hurricanes, pestilence, famine, conflicts or new weight loss products that really worked. To the great sorrow of the news media, all of the prior bad boys and girls of Hollywood were behaving themselves and living normal decent
lives. Sheila, by default, became the principal story and person of the moment. Not only could the public now root for a new comatose heroine, they could also root against a man who had the makings of a villain.

The following morning, Goodwin looked as his PPR and found that it had been temporarily removed. “Under Repair” was the notation next to his name. Two days later his PPR was restored:

Philip Goodwin, Age: 54

Married to Sheila Goodwin –Now separated.

Grace Harbor, New York

CEO: Threads Inc. New York City

There was no Aunt Hilly. She was a fraud, possibly a creation of the media. When Goodwin attempted to contact Pragat through email (phone calls were no longer accepted) to protest it was ignored. Hilly’s observation was never removed. On the contrary, she became a frequent contributor to Goodwin’s PPR and later a minor celebrity in her own right.

The Poster Girl For Green Technology

W
ithin 48 hours of the Sheila Bolt, nearly every television station in the world carried the news of the mysterious “Sheila” light. There were no less than 200 Sheila related web sites, including Sheilaslight.com, Shellascocoon.com, and Sheilalite.com which promoted a light beer for women. Sheila related blogs and Facebook entries filled the Internet. If someone had placed “Sheila Goodwin” in any Internet search engine prior to the Sheila Bolt it would have generated six hits and three of them would have been for a woman of the same name who lived in Pasadena. One week after the Sheila Bolt, her name generated over four million hits. Goodwin as the pilot fish on Sheila’s rise to stardom also had a growing number of Internet sites such as philipgoodwinsucks.com and Ihatephilipgoodwin.com. Soon to follow were various Sheila related Apps as well as a Sheila video game named “Lightning Dodger” where a Sheila-like person had to dodge lightning strikes of ever increasing frequency.

Two weeks after the Sheila Bolt, photography and lighting experts placed a special complex of light filters around Sheila. Cannon Camera generously donated expensive and ultra-sophisticated light filters on the proviso that they carried Cannon’s corporate name and logo in a conspicuous place. Once the filters were in place, they subdued most of the cocoon’s light and viewers were able to see Sheila more clearly. The filtered image people saw was that of a woman lying serenely in a coma and smiling. That image quickly made it to the cover of virtually every major magazine and soon became iconic. The filters, however,
distorted some of the light slightly giving the impression that there was a halo surrounding Sheila’s head. Her haloed appearance, seen on a daily basis by tens of millions of television viewers, coupled with unsubstantiated reports about the miraculous healing powers of the light comprising Sheila’s cocoon, referred to in the press as “Sheila’s Light,” began to support the growing view of Sheila in some quarters as a religious icon, the patron saint of the comatose or more accurately, “the smiling and sometimes laughing patron saint of the comatose,” or in Meditainment lingo, “the patron saint of the beyond Remites.”

All of the morning news programs opened the same way: a shot of Sheila within her cocoon of light and a corresponding line such as, “Day 24 of Sheila Goodwin’s Beyond Rem state and counting.” Self described Sheila experts, lightning experts, orb of light experts and anomaly experts opined daily for the vast television audience.

Even the evening quiz shows featured Sheila.
Jeopardy
, for example, contained the following colloquy:

“Modern icons for $2000.”

“Her present house is a cocoon of light.”

“Who is Sheila Goodwin?”

“Correct!”

“I’ll take sexual positions for $900 dollars.”

“This sexual position is also used to set off nonrestrictive clauses in a sentence.”

“What is a comma?”

“Correct!”

Sheila’s and Goodwin’s PPRs soon made it to the PPR “most active” list, with Sheila’s rating escalating to a 26 and Goodwin’s tumbling to a 16. What he found amazing was the close correlation between the drop in his ratings and the attitude towards him by most people. With the exception of his three close friends, Ricques, Kass and Graves, club members who just weeks before had admired Goodwin and sought his company now regarded him with a degree of askance. This shift in attitude, Goodwin correctly observed, had nothing to do with his email to Sheila or anything he did, or more accurately, things that he was alleged to have done. Rather, it was solely a reflection of his lowered
PPR. Goodwin thought that these people should judge him as they used to, by his own good and bad points. They should make their own assessment, rather than have a rating system developed by a corporate entity do it for them. He knew, however, that that this was just wishful thinking. It was just too easy to use a designated number as opposed to independent thinking.

A prime example of the influence of the PPRs related to Goodwin’s original rating of 29 in the Humor section. When he had this rating, virtually everything Goodwin said was thought to be witty, often things not said in jest. People would sometime giggle when he just said hello or good morning. Now that he had a 16 in the Humor section, his best jokes or repartees evoked some courteous smiles, at best, but more often than not blank stares or “I don’t get it.” It was as if, when it came to his jokes, the rest of the world had become HH. Goodwin also wondered if what was happening to him was a microcosm of what was happening to society as a whole. Were prejudices arising simply because of a person’s PPR? He knew that the answer was probably “yes” when he was excluded from a club soiree entitled “21 and over.” Everyone in the club had a PPR of 21 or over 21 except Goodwin.

About a month after the Sheila bolt, a young intern who was showing her colleagues the proper way to hit a forehand, gripped a large test-tube and moved her arm forward through Sheila’s cocoon of light. As her arm emerged from the light, she and the other interns noticed that the tube contained some of the self-sustaining rays. The rays quickly flew into the air and fell back into Sheila’s cocoon. The interns tried again, but this time quickly capped their test tubes. The light retained within the capped test tubes moved up and back within the tubes, with a liquid-like quality, in sync with the tilted angle of the tubes. The trapped light converted these vessels into extraordinarily bright light bulbs.

Believing that this was a way to remove the light from Sheila’s body, the interns and doctors began to move all sorts of receptacles through the cocoon. Each receptacle filled up with intense light, but the light surrounding Sheila, inexplicably, replenished itself. Some of the interns walked into other rooms and opened their test tubes.
When this happened, the light, traveling at the speed of light, sped back into Sheila’s cocoon. All of this activity was reported live as it happened from the television cameras in the Med-TV Room.

In view of the interesting and possible far-reaching scientific implications of Sheila’s situation, the directors of the Meditainment Center concluded that the most important thing they could do, “in the interest of science,” was to sell little ampoules of the light in their gift shop. Since these new light bulbs were self-sustaining and used no power source, they were considered the ultimate “Green Product,” a fact that was not overlooked by members of Congress. Seeking to demonstrate that both parties could work together, Congress unanimously passed a resolution praising Sheila as a role model for self-sustainable energy despite her comatose condition. Sheila had just become the poster girl for Green Technology. Her PPR edged up another point.

Eventually, the demand for the ampoules was so great that the Meditainment Center set up little kiosks in its parking lot to sell its new product line. Upon hearing about this, Schnell, through his fancy Park Avenue attorneys, immediately demanded and received a ten percent royalty for Sheila and Goodwin on all products associated with Sheila, his argument being that the cocoon of light was part of Sheila’s “Intellectual Property rights.” No one really understood what this meant, but it sounded plausible and impressive. More importantly, no one wanted to tangle Schnell’s law firm that happened to be named “Lockhart & Gardner,” which, by more than a coincidence, was the same name of the firm in the television series,
The Good Wife
. And, everyone knew how good that firm was including the partners of the failing Relgeb, Relgeb, and Relgeb law firm, who eschewed traditional methods of expanding their practice for a nice change of name.