Look at me: (26 page)

“Okay. For example. Paramount is doing an updated
Moby Dick.
Screenwriter needs to know what it’s like to be a fisherman. He’s a subscriber, so that gives him access to whatever we’ve got: say, a tuna fisherman in Maine and a salmon guy in Alaska. He reads everything in their PersonalSpaces and he still wants more. So for a negotiated fee, he can actually spend time with an Ordinary Person, say the salmon guy, on his home turf—meet his friends, go out on the boat with him, learn the lingo, maybe do some actual fishing—really soak up the atmosphere of that subject’s life.
Voilà!
My salmon fisherman is now a film consultant. Who knows, maybe he winds up in the movie for authenticity, maybe they throw him a couple of lines—
voilà!
My fisherman is now movie talent. And that’s just one possible scenario out of dozens; book contracts, TV appearances, expert witnessing—come on, we’re the most litigious society in the world, and everyone’s an expert on something! And that’s not even getting into things like product placement. Believe me, Coca-Cola’s gonna pay a pretty penny to get its brand into these people’s homes. Now obviously we’ll have to go easy on that stuff, because authenticity is everything, here. We want to get people in their natural environments, doing exactly what they would normally do, but if companies are willing to pay them to use the products they’ve been using all their lives, I say, Why the hell not? I act as their talent agent, that’s part of the deal, and all contracts are split fifty-fifty.”

I expected him to fall back exhausted (I was exhausted; too exhausted to finish my salmon, which now seemed unpleasantly linked to the fisherman-turned-movie-actor), but this sales pitch seemed to have persuaded Thomas afresh of the magnificence of his venture. His eyes glittered with a kind of madness behind his wire-rimmed glasses. Philippe, apparently having despaired of keeping up using the old-fashioned rudiments of pen and paper, had excavated a tape recorder from his floppy leather shoulder bag, and now was performing the delicate task of eating a softshell crab while holding the orange bulb of a microphone under Thomas’s chin.

“But wait a minute,” I said, partly to give the Frenchman, who I’d noticed made less of an effort to capture my remarks, a chance to eat a bit of lunch. “Okay, a researcher needs some information—fine. But who else is going to give a damn about some fisherman’s dreams and family history? I mean, not to be rude, but that sounds like watching paint dry.”

“Not at all,” Thomas said, leaning into this challenge with such relish that he actually shoved the table an inch in my direction, rattling our water glasses. “But with all due respect, Charlotte, I think you may be the exception, here. Most of us are desperate for raw experience. We work in offices, dealing with intangibles; we go to lunch and talk to other people surrounded by intangibles. No one actually
makes
anything anymore, and our so-called experiences are about climbing Mount Kilimanjaro on our two-week vacations or snapping a picture of the Dalai Lama in Central Park. But we’re so powerfully aware of all the stuff we’re missing! It creates this frustration, this craving to get out of ourselves. TV tries to satisfy that, books, movies—they try, but they’re all so lame—so mediated! They’re just not
real
enough.

“Eventually, we’ll take this international—a Yanomamo warrior in Brazil, a rebel in Sierra Leone. A Hezbollah suicide bomber … imagine if there were a way for you to hear that guy’s last thoughts as he gets ready to die for his beliefs! And for him, the exposure—way beyond anything he could get from a day or two of headlines.”

“It’s really quite revolutionary,” Philippe remarked, holding his tape recorder to his ear like a seashell, I guessed to ascertain that it was working. He cast a baleful glance at his unfinished softshell crabs as the waiter lifted them away. Victoria, who had been eating with meditational fervor, now mopped her plate with bread until it gleamed.

“So how do I fit in?” I asked. “I don’t make anything, either. I’m just another New Yorker, surrounded by intangibles.”

“True,” Thomas said. “True. Although to a farmer—and we’re hoping farmers will subscribe, too—to a farmer, a fashion model’s life would be pretty damn interesting.”

To that end, he’d created an offshoot of Ordinary People that he likened to Premium Pay cable: “Extraordinary People,” meaning people who were undergoing unusual experiences. He’d recruited a woman on the verge of having a liver transplant, a man on Death Row, someone just elected to Congress. Like “Ordinaries,” these “Extraordinaries” would use the categories of Memories, Dreams and Diary, but the focus would be on a particular situation and its effects.

“Which ties perfectly into my book idea for Charlotte!” Victoria cut in, reprising it briefly for Thomas. “Her internal struggle, day by day. Faceless: My Brush with Madness. Or something like that.”

“Perfect,” Thomas said. “And see, if you were one of our Extraordinaries, that book could come about really naturally. We set up your PersonalSpace, let some excitement build, then we go to publishers with a proposal that includes how many hits you’ve had, and we say, Look, here’s a built-in readership of seventy thousand people, here’s a chunk of text, and we get you half a million instead of squat, which is what you’d get otherwise.”

“A quarter of a million,” I said, “after your commission.”

“Correct.”

“Supposing I went on line and set up a PersonalSpace,” I said, feeling a fledging confidence in the use of these terms, “and after a few months I wanted to quit?”

“No problem,” Thomas said. “We keep whatever materials you’ve created for five additional years, with an option to distribute them during that time and negotiate any deals that might come of it.”

“Five years,” I said.

“Well, remember,” Thomas said, eyeing the desert menu, then shoving it resolutely away, “it takes work to turn people into cottage industries—we wake them up to the possibilities and shape their material into a digestible form, and I think we deserve something for that. Otherwise it could be Wham, bam, thanks for helping me organize my story. Now sayonara.”

“I see,” I said; he’d guessed the inclination of my thoughts. Victoria’s blue gaze abraded me with the texture of ground glass. She saw everything.

“But frankly, we don’t anticipate a lot of drop-off,” Thomas said. “Like I said, anyone can do a Website, and who cares? The whole cachet comes in being with our service. I’m not especially interested in Joe Shmoe’s take on life, but if Joe Shmoe is an Ordinary Person, that means we’ve decided his story is worthwhile and we’ve worked with him to give it some definition. That’s going to generate a lot more interest from subscribers and the media than he could possibly get on his own.”

“So Joe Shmoe gets rich from being Joe Shmoe,” I said, beginning finally to grasp not just Thomas’s words, but the strange new world they described. Strange, yet familiar, too. Eerily so.

“Well, I don’t know about rich,” he said. “But he makes some money—more than he’s making in the widget factory, that’s for sure, especially if he’s part-time with no benefits. But to me the beautiful part, the thing you really can’t put a price tag on, is how it’ll feel for Joe to know he has an audience, that people care, that they’re interested. I think guys like Joe feel they’re toiling away so far from the world of glamour and fame; they have no access to it except as consumers—they’re the grunts who pay the bills. I’d put money on the fact that Joe’s life will be enhanced in nonmaterial ways.”

Since Thomas had begun his pitch, virtually all of my mental horse-power had gone into the seemingly simple (yet surprisingly difficult) task of trying to understand what the hell he was saying. Now that the gist was upon me, I felt myself reacting with a visceral throb of recognition, as if I were hearing aloud parts of my own dreams. “So … what stage are you at with this project?” I asked.

“So far, we’ve signed option agreements with about fifty Ordinaries and twenty Extraordinaries,” he said, “meaning we’ll develop PersonalSpaces with all of them and pay them something for their efforts. Then, after they’ve created their material, that’s when we decide if we’ll purchase.”

“If they’re boring, no deal?”

“Well, it’s not really that simple,” Thomas said. “I mean, some people you’d expect to be boring—not boring, but you know what I mean: a brick layer doesn’t have to write sonnets, and if he does, no one expects him to be John Donne. We certainly wouldn’t penalize him for that. But you want variety. Maybe two Ordinaries will sound similar—same fantasies, same family configuration, it happens—and one will have to go. Also, we want to strike a balance, especially with Ordinaries, between having them describe their experiences in ways that’re interesting, but also keeping them representative of their type. That sounds terrible, but you know what I mean.”

“Sure,” I said, feeling a kind of queasiness. “Otherwise they’d be Extraordinary.”

“Exactly,” Thomas said. “Victoria’s our publicist, and I have a partner in L.A. with directing experience”—his voice hitched slightly; with yearning? Envy?—“who’s working with the film community. Hollywood’s drooling for real-life stories, so a subscription with us will be industry standard, no question.”

“It sounds expensive, all this,” I said. “Who pays for it?”

“Well,” he said, reluctantly. “Most of the start-up equity comes from Time Warner and Microsoft. But we’re completely independent, all that means is that they’ll have access to certain kinds of media options before anyone else.”

“I guess it makes sense,” I said. “Between the two of them, don’t they own just about everything?”

Now Thomas looked troubled; I’d hit upon the one aspect of his venture that shamed him. “But really, I see this product as being for people,” he said, a bit plaintively. “I can’t emphasize that enough. I see us contributing to people’s knowledge of one another and connectedness—wearing down that weird divide between folks like us, who deal in intangibles, and folks that’re out there in the trenches, getting their hands dirty.”

A part of me thrilled at Thomas’s proposal. How could I resist the offer of attention and money, the very polestars whose gleaming emanations had navigated my existence to this point? Yet some rogue part of me, some renegade element heretofore unknown, recoiled.
Who are you?
I queried the source of this rebellion.
Do I know you?
I felt a sudden need to get out of there, the eager part of me greedy for consummation, the other desperate to escape. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk money.”

I caught a glance between Victoria and Thomas, a tiny dart of elation, and congratulated myself on having managed to conceal the fact that my participation had never been in doubt.

I had nothing left to sell!

Thomas was excited again, and grateful, I think, that I’d seen the worst of it—his frightening sponsorship—and hung in there.

“For Extraordinaries—and you folks get a little more than Ordinaries, for obvious reasons—we offer a ten-thousand-dollar option against a purchase price to be negotiated after you produce your PersonalSpace,” he said. “Our offer will depend, quite frankly, on how excited we are by what you do, how much access you give us to your life.”

The least they had paid to purchase an Extraordinary was $80,000, he said; the most was in the $300,000 range. I would also receive an annual salary of $25,000 to maintain my PersonalSpace and keep it active to their standards. Any additional contracts—TV and film options, book deals, research consultancies, product endorsements—would be on top of that.

“Ten thousand up front?” I asked.

This quaint notion inspired a chuckle from Thomas. “Twenty-five hundred up front, another seventy-five when you deliver a completed first draft to our specifications.”

“I need all ten thousand now.”

“That’s impossible,” he said, the affable smile sitting a little less easily on his affable face. “Think about it—we could give you the ten grand and you could conceivably—not that I’m saying you’d do this—grab the money and head for Aruba.”

I widened my eyes and said nothing. There was a long silence. Thomas glanced at Victoria. Philippe delicately insinuated the microphone into our midst.

“Half up front,” Thomas said. “It’s my final offer.”

“Three-quarters,” I said. “Or you and Time Warner and Microsoft will have to find yourselves another model who’s had reconstructive surgery and is unrecognizable to anyone.”

He grimaced. “Done.”

We shook. Victoria waved for the check. Philippe shut off his tape recorder and stowed it away. One more business deal expelled its gamey essence into the atmosphere at Judson Grill.

“I’ll messenger you the contract tomorrow morning,” Thomas said. “Read it carefully, have your lawyer look it over. We’ll cut you a check on signing.”

A beautiful phrase,
cut you a check
.

It was Thomas who seized the bill when it came, thus confirming what I had already begun to suspect—that Victoria’s role had been purely to deliver me to him.

“The contract specifies exactly what materials we’ll need from you, and in what time frame,” he said. “I think you get two months to generate the first chunk of text, and if you choose to tape rather than write, we deduct the transcription and editing costs from your last payment. But that’s all in the contract!” Retrieving his credit card, Thomas frowned a moment over the tip. “And frankly,” he said, eking out a round, childish signature as if he were forging it, “I’d invest in a laptop and get on line, if you haven’t already. You’ll need to if we purchase, for your Diary and Dream entries, all the day-to-day stuff, and you’ll get a free subscription, too, so you can check out your fellow Extraordinaries and Ordinaries. We really encourage that. Our hope is that it’ll be a kind of family … I mean, that sounds corny, I know, but so few things really hold people together anymore. Why not this?”

I made a brief, meticulous study of Thomas Keene: his smooth self and his fat shadow self, his olive Armani, his sandy hair and small round eyes. I scrutinized him for one granule of cynicism, a scintilla of evidence that at bottom he didn’t believe a word he was saying. I found nothing. This ex—fat kid with a penchant for crocodile truly believed he was making the world a better place.