Look at me: (33 page)

“Sorry,” he said. “Habit from creative writing class. So anyway”—back to Irene—“I’m over the moon. You’ve got so much here, I love all the childhood stuff, I love what a little rebel she—whoops, you—were. The dreams are fantastic, I love how those geese come up again and again. But I was especially tickled by the Hopes/Aspirations category. ‘The mirrored room’—like, what is that? But we get it. We get it without getting it. And the dog stuff is absolutely priceless.”

Geese? Dog?

“Good,” Irene said cautiously. As a show of good faith, I added, “I begged Irene to put that in about the dog—I knew it would add something.”

“It does,” Thomas said. “It shows that she can care for another living creature, which I’m not sure we’d know otherwise. And that’s important, because we don’t have to love her, but we do have to like her, or at least be able to tolerate her. I mean,” he shifted in his chair, avoiding my eyes, “you.”

There was a pause.

“So. Here’s where we are,” Thomas said, like a newscaster switching from genocide to sports. “We’re absolutely going to buy this, it’s just a question of price.”

Irene and I exchanged sharp, hopeful glances.

“In fact,” he went on, “the plan right now is to launch in September with a handful of Ordinaries and Extraordinaries that we think have the best prospects, media-wise. I’d like you two—if you’re willing—to be part of that inaugural group.”

Irene and I mashed our feet together between our chicly utilitarian chairs.

“Now, what that means is, you’ll have to move quickly to finish up these materials. So to add a little incentive and buy some more of your time, I’m offering you a bonus of ten grand when you hand me a finished draft.”

“On top of our last option payment?” I asked.

“Correct, on top of that.” He surveyed our faces, taking in what surely were unmistakable signs of jubilation. “Now. What do I want.” Thomas swept to his feet and paced his poured-concrete floor (black and sparkling, like asphalt), as if the sheer intensity of his desires made them impossible to discuss while seated. “This background is great, like I said, but as an Extraordinary, the next phase is the most important for you: action. The accident itself and what happens next.” He was speaking to Irene.

“I’m—we’re—working on that,” she said.

“A few pointers. Number one: Drama. Excitement. I want fireballs rolling through the cornstalks. Lots of bright, rich color—find the beauty in it. Write it as one long narrative, and we’ll use what we need. Then for the hospital part, the facial reconstruction, lots of medical detail. Remember, authenticity is the beginning and the end of this product. Start with the ambulance, the siren, the rain, wheeling her in … ‘We don’t know if she’s going to make it, nurse.’ That kind of thing. I’m not saying make anything up”—he raised his hands, fending off any such suggestion—“I’m saying
find
the drama,
find
the beauty,
find
the tension and give it to us. You may feel like you’re making it more contrived, but it’s the opposite. Think about the Parthenon.”

Throughout this speech, Thomas’s eyes never left Irene. Why, I wondered, when I was the subject, the one whose life was supposedly so extraordinary? But I couldn’t think of a way to object, or even to question him, without sounding petulant. Instead I said, “The Parthenon?”

Thomas and Irene began speaking at once, then stopped. After a brief contest of demurrals, Irene explained to me that slight asymmetries in the Parthenon’s design actually gave it an illusion of perfection. “That’s what you meant, right?” she asked Thomas.

“Yes!” he said, surprised and a little touched, I thought. “That’s exactly what I meant. Okay … so. Two.” Then he seemed to founder. “How to put this? An accident’s an accident, shit happens and all that. But, see, we don’t want shit happens, we want shit happens for a reason. It sounds terrible when you put it into words …”

I had an inkling of what he was saying—it was the same thing Victoria had told me at lunch—and I was burning, for once, to be the person who knew something. “He’s saying her accident can’t happen by chance,” I told Irene. “Something in her life has to be the cause of it, so people can relate to her story and understand it.”

“Yes!” Thomas hollered, whirling around and lunging to the place where I sat. “Yes. Yes. Yes.” He gazed at me, astounded. “Beautifully said, Charlotte!”

“Thank you.” I flushed, already loathing myself for having pandered to Thomas, feeling as if I’d sold someone down the river in the process.

“Again. I’m not saying make it up—I’m saying find the connections. Show us the buried logic. What I don’t want is, I was bringing cookies to Aunt Susie and I got run over by a tractor. This is not a Raymond Carver story, if you’re familiar with his work.”

“It sounds more like Aeschylus,” Irene said tartly.

Thomas mused a moment over this. I sensed that Irene impressed him, that he relished the abrasion of her skepticism. I was proud to have discovered her, brought her there.

“Tragedy, okay. Yes,” he said. “But not Greek. Too cold. Has to be something warmer.”

“Nineteenth century.”

“Bingo. Hardy. The Brontës. Tolstoy. Sad things happen but they happen for a reason.”

“Zola.”

“Exactly. Stendhal. Or Dickens, for God’s sake.”

“George Eliot,” Irene said.
“Adam Bede.”

“That’s the one where he—”

“Gets her pregnant,” she said. “And then she tries to find him after his regiment is moved to Scotland.”

“Oh, my God, where she’s hitching rides on carts and sleeping in the fields? That was the saddest book …,” Thomas said, his whole face opening at the memory. “But only the second half. The first half was kind of—”

“That’s amazing!” Irene said, and she did look amazed. “I thought exactly the same thing.”

“—schmaltzy.”

I listened, my frustration at finding myself ignorant of these books offset by my wonder at the abrupt change in Irene; she was smiling, cheeks flushed. Books, I thought; she loved books. It made perfect sense.

“Edith Wharton,” she said.

“Yes! Wharton is perfect.
Age of Innocence. House of Mirth.
Or Flaubert,” he added, but then changed his mind. “Nah,
Madam B.’s
too dark, too modern.”

“Too ironic,” Irene said.

“Exactly, exactly. See, irony we don’t want—there’s too much of it out there! We just want the story without the built-in commentary.”

“Ah, the universal point of view,” Irene said. “Would that we still believed in it.”

I sat in silence. Several times I’d been on the verge of mentioning “The Eve of St. Agnes” or “The Rape of the Lock,” but I was afraid that Thomas and Irene would know these works better than I did (which was to say, know them even slightly), and I would be exposed.

As Irene scribbled into her notebook, I saw Thomas eyeing her with the faintest tinge of appraisal, and only then did it strike me that he’d won. He’d coaxed Irene out of her sulk and into formation in a matter of—I glanced at my watch—thirty-eight minutes.

“Okay,” Thomas said, taking a breath that seemed to portend still greater challenges ahead. Three.” Now he turned to me, aiming his attention so fully upon me that I felt my spine extend like a charmed snake. “Three, and this is kind of a new development, but like I said, things are moving fast and changing a little, Three, I’d like you to consider—you don’t have to decide yet—I’d like you to consider having a small video camera installed in your apartment.”

“For security?”

“Actually not. This would be to get some raw footage of you in your natural environment. See, people are already doing this on their individual Websites, so we basically have to give our subscribers that option. Now obviously MTV’s been doing it for years, but the fact of the matter is,
Real World
sucks and everyone knows it. Too fake. Too contrived! Too unlikely that these people would ever live together, much less be able to afford the kinds of apartments MTV sets them up in. But some raw footage from a real person’s life—an interesting person—that might be worth watching.”

“But I mean,” I said, “I live alone. Most of the time all I’m doing is smoking cigarettes and looking out my window. Or sleeping.”

“See, and you think that’s dull. But to the cannibal in New Guinea, eating human brains is pretty ho-hum, too. You’ve had this terrible accident, Charlotte! People are going to expect a sense of desolation, some anomie. That’s what makes it real!”

“So you’d shoot some footage and kind of … edit it down to the essence?” said Irene, whose literary joie de vivre had been supplanted by a look of seasickness.

“No, see, that’s another mistake
Real World
made. We’d do it as a raw feed. That’ll keep it from getting too constructed, too mediated. Whenever someone wants to see what you’re doing at that moment, they’ll click an icon—‘I Spy,’ I think we’re calling it—and there you’ll be. If you’re home.”

“Pardon me for pointing out the obvious,” Irene said, a vibrato of incredulity, or something like it, fibrillating her voice, “but isn’t this all just a wee bit Orwellian?”

Thomas’s jaw clenched, and a fleeting, nearly invisible current of anger jostled his features. “You know, I keep getting that from people? And I can’t for the life of me figure out why?” he said, almost joyfully. “This is the
exact opposite
of what Orwell was talking about: There, you had folks being spied on by a totalitarian government—they had no choice in the matter and no freedom. Whereas this is not only a hundred percent voluntary, obviously, but the whole thing is
about
freedom—freedom to communicate your experiences! Freedom to learn how other people live. If you ask me, it’s the ultimate expression of a democracy!” Despite his best efforts at joviality, blood had soaked his round, pleasant cheeks.

I didn’t even have to look at Irene to know that Thomas had blown it. It didn’t matter what he said now; the camera had pushed her too far.

“Suppose I decide no camera?” I said.

“Not a problem,” Thomas said, with edgy nonchalance. “I mean obviously it’ll affect your purchase price, because I’ve got people—frankly I think it’s nuts—they’re willing to have the video feed straight from their bedrooms. So obviously they’ll get more because they’re giving more. Oh, and endorsements’ll hit the roof if people can actually watch you consuming products in your own home.”

“I need to think about it,” I said, wanting him to feel just slightly redeemed, to restore some bonhomie to the room, now that (for once) it was within my power to do so. But even as I said it, I felt a part of me reconciling itself to the camera’s arrival, embracing it, awaiting it, preparing to foist its acceptance on the rest of me.

“I’d like to see this product of yours,” Irene said, in a tone of fragile neutrality. I sensed her regret at having been won over so easily by the mention of a few books.

“Absolutely. That was next on my list.” Thomas rose from his chair, anxiously scrutinizing our faces. Yet even now, with his pitch having clearly gone awry, his shadow self remained strangely recessed. Why? I wondered; what was protecting the fat, nervous boy from having to come out and face the jeering world? As Thomas ushered us into a shaded room adjacent to his office, a room containing a computer whose broad, iridescent screen appeared to hover in midair, I realized there could only be one answer: he didn’t need us.

“None of the domestic stuff is signed and sealed yet, so legally I can’t show you that,” he said, seating himself at the keyboard with Irene and me on either side of him. “But the rules are looser for the International Ordinaries, and it’s not like these folks are going to know the difference.”

He touched a few keys and the screen filled with the richly saturated image of a very black man standing by a yellow cow. Seeing him reminded me of Pluto. The man was draped in salmon-colored plaids that looked like tablecloths. He squinted in our direction, one hand extended to touch the velvety neck of the cow, whose horns twisted from its head like arms of a chandelier. The quality of the image was extraordinary; each yellow hair on the cow’s hide stood out in a kind of relief that suggested three dimensions. The man himself was beautiful, sharp slivers of muscle in his chest and torso flicking in the sunlight. He had one of those rich, symmetrical faces you could read anything into: love, humor, rage. His hair had been woven into long thin braids saturated with what looked like red clay. On his neck and arms were strands of multicolored beads. Irene and I both gaped at the image, whose urgent realism had the unlikely result of making it seem, finally, unreal—like a hologram.

“He’s a Samburu warrior,” Thomas said. “I don’t know if we’ll end up using him—we may want to go more exotic. But he’s basically a mockup, just to show our investors how the international stuff’ll work.” He pressed another button and the image slid into motion, the man’s shy expression breaking open into a white crescent smile, the cow shifting restlessly, rousing dilatory flies that soon refastened themselves to its yellow neck. The man began speaking rapidly, incomprehensibly, and as he did, a bar of text scrolled along one side of the screen:

Hi! My name is Kanja Joi [spelling???] and I’m a Samburu warrior living in the country of Kenya on the continent of Africa
…

“Translation needs some work,” Thomas mused.

I carry this short sword in the event that I should chance to meet any lions while grazing my cows on the grassy plains of my country. Here, perhaps you would like to hear me sing
…

The text lagged behind the warrior himself, who had already burst into song: a series of guttural, atonal sounds gouged from someplace well below his diaphragm. The sounds, like the visuals, had a heightened precision that made me feel not merely in the warrior’s presence, but inside his throat.

“Here, check this out,” Thomas said, moving the pointer to one of the warrior’s strands of beads and clicking there. Abruptly the warrior and his song evaporated, replaced by an image of a young girl arranging wires and dusty beads on a cloth. We heard her whispery voice, and the translation box scrolled,