“If I won’t do it,” Alex said, “then I can’t really be perfect.”
“I think you will.”
Alex was annoyed, intrigued. “How come?”
“A feeling,” Bennie said, rousing himself slightly from his deep recline. “That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.”
Alex had first heard Bennie Salazar’s name from a girl he’d dated once, when he was new to New York and Bennie was still famous. The girl had worked for him—Alex remembered this clearly—but it was practically all he could remember; her name, what she’d looked like, what exactly they’d done together—those details had been erased. The only impressions Alex retained of their date involved winter, darkness, and something about a
wallet
, of all things, but had it been lost? Found? Stolen? The girl’s wallet, or his own? The answers were maddeningly absent—it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back. The girl hovered just beyond reach, having left the wallet in Alex’s brain as a kind of calling card, to tease him. In the days leading up to this brunch with Bennie, Alex had found himself oddly fixated on her.
“Das mine!” protested Ava, Bennie’s daughter, affirming Alex’s recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, “Mine pot! Mine pot!” Alex jumped to his feet, then noticed that Bennie hadn’t stirred. He forced himself to sit back down.
“I know you’d rather mix,” Bennie said, somehow audible over the caterwauling without seeming to raise his voice. “You love music. You want to work with sound. You think I don’t know what that feels like?”
The girls fell on each other in a gladiatorial frenzy of yowling, scratching, and yanking wisps of fledgling hair. “Everything okay in there?” Alex’s wife, Rebecca, called from the kitchen.
“We’re good,” Alex called back. He marveled at Bennie’s calm; was this how it was when you started the kid thing all over again after a second marriage?
“The problem is,” Bennie went on, “it’s not about sound anymore. It’s not about
music
. It’s about reach. That’s the bitter fucking pill I had to swallow.”
“I know.”
Meaning: he knew (as did everyone in the industry) how Bennie had gotten canned from his own label, Sow’s Ear Records, many years ago, after serving his corporate controllers a boardroom lunch of cow pies (“and we’re talking
in the steam trays,”
wrote a secretary who’d narrated the melee in real time on Gawker). “You’re asking me to feed the people shit?” Bennie had allegedly roared at the appalled executives. “Try eating some yourselves and see how it tastes!” After that, Bennie had returned to producing music with a raspy, analog sound, none of which had really sold. Now, pushing sixty, he was seen as irrelevant; Alex usually heard him referred to in the past tense.
When Cara-Ann sank her freshly minted incisors into Ava’s shoulder, it was Rebecca who rushed in from the kitchen and pried her off, casting a mystified look at Alex, now suspended in Zen-like serenity upon the couch. Lupa came with her: the dark-eyed mother Alex had avoided in playgroup at first because she was beautiful, until he’d learned she was married to Bennie Salazar.
When wounds had been bandaged and order restored, Lupa kissed Bennie’s head (his trademark bushy hair now silver), and said, “I keep waiting for you to play Scotty.”
Bennie smiled up at his much younger wife. “I’ve been saving him,” he said. Then he worked his handset, untapping from the staggering sound system (which seemed to route the music straight through Alex’s pores) a baleful male vocalist accompanied by torqued, boinging slide guitar. “We released this a couple of months ago,” Bennie said. “You’ve heard of him, Scotty Hausmann? He’s doing well with the pointers.”
Alex glanced over at Rebecca, who scorned the term “pointer” and would politely but firmly correct anyone who used it to describe Cara-Ann. Luckily, his wife hadn’t heard. Now that Starfish, or kiddie handsets, were ubiquitous, any child who could point was able to download music—the youngest buyer on record being a three-month-old in Atlanta, who’d purchased a song by Nine Inch Nails called “Ga-ga.” Fifteen years of war had ended with a baby boom, and these babies had not only revived a dead industry but become the arbiters of musical success. Bands had no choice but to reinvent themselves for the preverbal; even Biggie had released yet another posthumous album whose title song was a remix of a Biggie standard, “Fuck You, Bitch,” to sound like “You’re Big, Chief!” with an accompanying picture of Biggie dandling a toddler in Native American headdress. Starfish had other features—finger drawing, GPS systems for babies just learning to walk, PicMail—but Cara-Ann had never touched one, and Rebecca and Alex had agreed that she would not until age five. They used their own handsets sparingly in front of her.
“Listen to this guy,” Bennie said. “Just listen.”
The mournful vibrato; the jangly quaver of slide guitar—to Alex it sounded dire. But this was Bennie Salazar, who’d discovered the Conduits all those years ago. “What do
you
hear?” Alex asked him.
Bennie shut his eyes, every part of him alive with the palpable act of listening. “He’s absolutely pure,” he said. “Untouched.”
Alex closed his own eyes. Immediately sounds thickened in his ears: choppers, church bells, a distant drill. The usual confetti of horns and sirens. The tingle of track lighting overhead, a dishwasher slop. Cara-Ann’s sleepy “No…” as Rebecca pulled on her sweater. They were about to go. Alex felt a spasm of dread, or something like it, at the thought of leaving this brunch with Bennie Salazar empty-handed.
He opened his eyes. Bennie’s were already open, his brown, tranquil gaze fixed on Alex’s face. “I think you hear what I hear, Alex,” he said. “Am I right?”
That night, when Rebecca and Cara-Ann were firmly asleep, Alex extracted himself from the porridgy warmth of their shared bed in its foam of mosquito netting and went to the living room/playroom/guest room/office. When he stood close to the middle window and looked straight up, he could see the top of the Empire State Building, lit tonight in red and gold. This wedge of view had been a selling point back when Rebecca’s parents had bought her the Garment District one-bedroom many years ago, right after the crash. Alex and Rebecca had planned to sell the apartment when she got pregnant, then learned that the squat building their own overlooked had been bought by a developer who planned to raze it and build a skyscraper that would seal off their air and light. The apartment became impossible to sell. And now, two years later, the skyscraper had at last begun to rise, a fact that filled Alex with dread and doom but also a vertiginous sweetness—every instant of warm sunlight through their three east-facing windows felt delicious, and this sliver of sparkling night, which for years he’d watched from a cushion propped against the sill, often while smoking a joint, now appeared agonizingly beautiful, a mirage.
Alex loved the dead of night. Without the rant of construction and omnipresent choppers, hidden portals of sound opened themselves to his ears: the teakettle whistle and sock-footed thump of Sandra, the single mother who lived in the apartment overhead; a hummingbird thrum that Alex presumed was her teenage son masturbating to his handset in the adjacent room. From the street, a single cough, errant conversational strands: “…you’re asking me to be a different person…” and “Believe it or not, drinking keeps me clean.”
Alex leaned against his cushion and lit up a joint. He’d spent the afternoon trying—and failing—to tell Rebecca what he’d agreed to do for Bennie Salazar. Bennie had never used the word “parrot;” since the Bloggescandals, the term had become an obscenity. Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn’t stemmed the suspicion that people’s opinions weren’t really their own. “Who’s paying you?” was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter—who would let themselves be bought? But Alex had promised Bennie fifty parrots to create “authentic” word of mouth for Scotty Hausmann’s first live concert, to be held in Lower Manhattan next month.
Using his handset, he began devising a system for selecting potential parrots from among his 15,896 friends. He used three variables: how much they needed money (“Need”), how connected and respected they were (“Reach”), and how open they might be to selling that influence (“Corruptibility”). He chose a few people at random and ranked them in each category on a scale from 10 to 0, then graphed the results on his handset in three dimensions, looking for a cluster of dots where the three lines intersected. But in every case, scoring well in two categories meant a terrible score in the third: poor and highly corruptible people—his friend Finn, for example, a failed actor and quasi–drug addict who’d posted a recipe for speedballs on his page and lived mostly off the goodwill of his former Wesleyan classmates (Need: 9; Corruptibility: 10) had no reach (1). Poor, influential people like Rose, a stripper/cellist whose hairstyle changes were instantly copied in certain parts of the East Village (Need: 9; Reach: 10) were incorruptible (0)—in fact, Rose kept a rumor sheet on her page that functioned as an informal police blotter, recording which friend’s boyfriend had given her a black eye, who had borrowed and trashed a drum set, whose dog had been left tied to a parking meter for hours in the rain. There were influential and corruptible people like his friend Max, onetime singer for the Pink Buttons, now a wind-power potentate who owned a Soho triplex and threw a caviar-strewn Christmas party each year that had people kissing his ass from August onward in hopes of being invited (Reach: 10; Corruptibility: 8). But Max was popular
because he was rich
(Need: 0) and had no incentive to sell.
Alex stared goggle-eyed at his handset screen. Would anyone agree to do this? And then it came to him that someone already had: himself. Alex graphed himself as he might appear to Rebecca: Need: 9; Reach: 6; Corruptibility: 0. Alex was a purist, like Bennie had said; he’d walked away from sleazy bosses (in the
music
business) just as he now routinely walked away from women who were drawn to the sight of a man caring for his baby daughter during business hours. Hell, he’d met Rebecca after trying to chase down a guy in a wolf mask who’d snatched her purse the day before Halloween. But Alex had caved to Bennie Salazar without a fight. Why? Because his apartment would soon be dark and airless? Because being with Cara-Ann while Rebecca worked full-time teaching and writing had made him restless? Because he never could quite forget that every byte of information he’d posted online (favorite color, vegetable, sexual position) was stored in the databases of multinationals who swore they would never, ever use it—that he was
owned
, in other words, having sold himself unthinkingly at the very point in his life when he’d felt most subversive? Or was it the odd symmetry of having first heard Bennie Salazar’s name from that lost girl he’d dated once, at the very beginning, and now meeting Bennie at last, a decade and a half later, through
playgroup?
Alex didn’t know. He didn’t need to know. What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.
“Physics is required. Three semesters. If you fail, you’re out of the program.”
“For a
marketing degree?”
Alex was dumbfounded.
“It used to be epidemiology,” Lulu said. “You know, when the viral model was still current.”
“Don’t people still say ‘viral’?” Alex was wishing he’d had a real cup of coffee, not the swill they were pouring at this Greek diner. Bennie’s assistant, Lulu, appeared to have had fifteen or twenty—unless this was her personality.
“No one says ‘viral’ anymore,” Lulu said. “I mean, maybe thoughtlessly, the way we still say ‘connect’ or ‘transmit’—those old mechanical metaphors that have nothing to do with how information travels. See, reach isn’t describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: it’s simultaneous. It’s faster than the speed of light, that’s actually been measured. So now we study particle physics.”
“What next? String theory?”
“That’s an elective.”
Lulu was in her early twenties, a graduate student at Barnard
and
Bennie’s full-time assistant: a living embodiment of the new “handset employee”: paperless, deskless, commuteless, and theoretically omnipresent, though Lulu appeared to be ignoring a constant chatter of handset beeps and burps. The photos on her page had not done justice to the arresting, wide-eyed symmetry of her face, the radiant shine of her hair. She was “clean”: no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?
Cara-Ann was asleep in her sling, her face wedged in the slot between Alex’s jaw and collarbone, her fruity, biscuity breath filling his nostrils. He had thirty minutes, maybe forty-five, before she would wake up wanting lunch. Yet Alex felt a perverse need to go backward, to understand Lulu, to pinpoint why exactly she disconcerted him.
“How did you find your way to Bennie?” he asked.
“His ex-wife used to work for my mom,” Lulu said, “years ago, when I was a little girl. I’ve known Bennie forever—and his son, Chris. He’s two years older than me.”
“Huh,” Alex said. “And what does your mom do?”
“She was a publicist, but she left the business,” Lulu said. “She lives upstate.”
“What’s her name?”
“Dolly.”
Alex was inclined to pursue this line of questioning back to the moment of Lulu’s conception, but stopped himself. A silence fell, punctuated by the arrival of their food. Alex had meant to order soup, but that had seemed spineless, so at the last minute he’d gone for a Reuben sandwich, forgetting that he couldn’t chew without waking Cara-Ann. Lulu had ordered lemon meringue pie; she ate the meringue in tiny flecks off the prongs of her fork.