“I’m glad you asked that, Suzanne,” he said, his voice barely audible.
I’M GLAD YOU ASKED THAT SUZANNE
The journalists chuckled. Even the chanters laughed a little. They quieted down.
“I’ll tell you, there’s a downside to living in this age of wonders: we are moving too fast and outstripping the ability of our institutions to keep pace with the changes in the world.”
Freddy leaned over her shoulder, blowing shit-breath in her ear. “Translation: you’re ass-fucked, the lot of you.”
TRANSLATION YOUR ASS FUCKED THE LOT OF YOU
Suzanne yelped as the words appeared on the wall and reflexively swung the pointer around, painting them on the ceiling, the opposite wall, and then, finally, in miniature, on her computer’s lid. She twisted the pointer off.
Freddy had the decency to look slightly embarrassed and he slunk away to the very end of the row of seats, scooting from chair to chair on his narrow butt. On stage, Kettlewell was pretending very hard that he hadn’t seen the profanity, and that he couldn’t hear the jeering from the protestors now, even though it had grown so loud that he could no longer be heard over it. He kept on talking, and the words scrolled over the far wall.
THERE IS NO WORLD IN WHICH KODAK AND DURACELL GO ON MAKING FILM AND BATTERIES
THE COMPANIES HAVE MONEY IN THE BANK BUT IT HEMORRHAGES OUT THE DOOR EVERY DAY
WE ARE MAKING THINGS THAT NO ONE WANTS TO BUY
THIS PLAN INCLUDES A GENEROUS SEVERANCE FOR THOSE STAFFERS WORKING IN THE PARTS OF THE BUSINESS THAT WILL CLOSE DOWN
—Suzanne admired the twisted, long-way-around way of saying, “the people we’re firing.” Pure CEO passive voice. She couldn’t type notes and read off the wall at the same time. She whipped out her little snapshot and monkeyed with it until it was in video mode and then started shooting the ticker.
BUT IF WE ARE TO MAKE GOOD ON THAT SEVERANCE WE NEED TO BE IN BUSINESS
WE NEED TO BE BRINGING IN A PROFIT SO THAT WE CAN MEET OUR OBLIGATIONS TO ALL OUR STAKEHOLDERS SHAREHOLDERS AND WORKFORCE ALIKE
WE CAN’T PAY A PENNY IN SEVERANCE IF WE’RE BANKRUPT
WE ARE HIRING 50000 NEW EMPLOYEES THIS YEAR AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT SAYS THAT THOSE NEW PEOPLE CAN’T COME FROM WITHIN
CURRENT EMPLOYEES WILL BE GIVEN CONSIDERATION BY OUR SCOUTS
ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS A DEEPLY AMERICAN PRACTICE AND OUR WORKERS ARE AS CAPABLE OF ENTREPRENEURIAL ACTION AS ANYONE
I AM CONFIDENT WE WILL FIND MANY OF OUR NEW HIRES FROM WITHIN OUR EXISTING WORKFORCE
I SAY THIS TO OUR EMPLOYEES IF YOU HAVE EVER DREAMED OF STRIKING OUT ON YOUR OWN EXECUTING ON SOME AMAZING IDEA AND NEVER FOUND THE MEANS TO DO IT NOW IS THE TIME AND WE ARE THE PEOPLE TO HELP
Suzanne couldn’t help but admire the pluck it took to keep speaking into the pointer, despite the howls and bangs.
“C’mon, I’m gonna grab some bagels before the protestors get to them,” Freddy said, plucking at her arm—apparently, this was his version of a charming pickup line. She shook him off authoritatively, with a whip-crack of her elbow.
Freddy stood there for a minute and then moved off. She waited to see if Kettlewell would say anything more, but he twisted the pointer off, shrugged, and waved at the hooting protestors and the analysts and the journalists and walked off-stage with the rest of the surfers in suits.
She got some comments from a few of the protestors, some details. Worked for Kodak or Duracell all their lives. Gave everything to the company. Took voluntary pay-cuts under the old management five times in ten years to keep the business afloat, now facing layoffs as a big fat thank-you-suckers. So many kids. Such and such a mortgage.
She knew these stories from Detroit: she’d filed enough copy with varying renditions of it to last a lifetime. Silicon Valley was supposed to be different. Growth and entrepreneurship—a failed company was just a stepping-stone to a successful one, can’t win them all, dust yourself off and get back to the garage and start inventing. There’s a whole world waiting out there!
Mother of three. Dad whose bright daughter’s university fund was raided to make ends meet during the “temporary” austerity measures. This one has a Down’s Syndrome kid and that one worked through three back surgeries to help meet production deadlines.
Half an hour before she’d been full of that old Silicon Valley optimism, the sense that there was a better world a-borning around her. Now she was back in that old rustbelt funk, with the feeling that she was witness not to a beginning, but to a perpetual ending, a cycle of destruction that would tear down everything solid and reliable in the world.
She packed up her laptop and stepped out into the parking lot. Across the freeway, she could make out the bones of the Great America fun-park roller-coasters whipping around and around in the warm California sun.
These little tech-hamlets down the 101 were deceptively utopian. All the homeless people were miles north on the streets of San Francisco, where pedestrian marks for panhandling could be had, where the crack was sold on corners instead of out of the trunks of fresh-faced, friendly coke-dealers’ cars. Down here it was giant malls, purpose-built dot-com buildings, and the occasional fun-park. Palo Alto was a university-town theme-park, provided you steered clear of the wrong side of the tracks, the East Palo Alto slums that were practically shanties.
Christ, she was getting melancholy. She didn’t want to go into the office—not today. Not when she was in this kind of mood. She would go home and put her blazer back in the closet and change into yoga togs and write her column and have some good coffee.
She nailed up the copy in an hour and emailed it to her editor and poured herself a glass of Napa red (the local vintages in Michigan likewise left something to be desired) and settled onto her porch, overlooking the big reservoir off 280 near San Mateo.
The house had been worth a small fortune at the start of the dot-boom, but now, in the resurgent property boom, it was worth a large fortune and then some. She could conceivably sell this badly built little shack with its leaky hot-tub for enough money to retire on, if she wanted to live out the rest of her days in Sri Lanka or Nebraska.
“You’ve got no business feeling poorly, young lady,” she said to herself. “You are as well set-up as you could have dreamed, and you are right in the thick of the weirdest and best time the world has yet seen. And Landon Kettlewell knows your name.”
She finished the wine and opened her computer. It was dark enough now with the sun set behind the hills that she could read the screen. The Web was full of interesting things, her email full of challenging notes from her readers, and her editor had already signed off on her column.
She was getting ready to shut the lid and head for bed, so she pulled her mail once more.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Embedded journalist?
Thanks for keeping me honest today, Suzanne. It’s the hardest question we’re facing today: what happens when all the things you’re good at are no good to anyone anymore? I hope we’re going to answer that with the new model.
You do good work, madam. I’d be honored if you’d consider joining one of our little teams for a couple months and chronicling what they do. I feel like we’re making history here and we need someone to chronicle it.
I don’t know if you can square this with the Merc, and I suppose that we should be doing this through my PR people and your editor, but there comes a time about this time every night when I’m just too goddamned hyper to bother with all that stuff and I want to just DO SOMETHING instead of ask someone else to start a process to investigate the possibility of someday possibly maybe doing something.
Will you do something with us, if we can make it work? 100 percent access, no oversight? Say you will. Please.
Your pal,
Kettlebelly
She stared at her screen. It was like a work of art; just look at that return address, “[email protected]”—for kodacell.com to be live and accepting mail, it had to have been registered the day before. She had a vision of Kettlewell checking his email at midnight before his big press-conference, catching Freddy’s column, and registering kodacell.com on the spot, then waking up some sysadmin to get a mail server answering at skunkworks.kodacell.com. Last she’d heard, Lockheed-Martin was threatening to sue anyone who used their trademarked term “Skunk Works” to describe a generic R&D department. That meant that Kettlewell had moved so fast that he hadn’t even run this project by legal. She was willing to bet that he’d already ordered new business-cards with the address on them.
There was a guy she knew, an editor at a mag who’d assigned himself a plum article that he’d run on his own cover. He’d gotten a book-deal out of it. A half-million dollar book-deal. If Kettlewell was right, then the exclusive book on the inside of the first year at Kodacell could easily make that advance. And the props would be mad, as the kids said.
Kettlebelly! It was such a stupid frat-boy nickname, but it made her smile. He wasn’t taking himself seriously, or maybe he was, but he wasn’t being a pompous ass about it. He was serious about changing the world and frivolous about everything else. She’d have a hard time being an objective reporter if she said yes to this.
She couldn’t possibly decide at this hour. She needed a night’s sleep and she had to talk this over with the Merc. If she had a boyfriend, she’d have to talk it over with him, but that wasn’t a problem in her life these days.
She spread on some expensive duty-free French wrinkle-cream and brushed her teeth and put on her nightie and double-checked the door locks and did all the normal things she did of an evening. Then she folded back her sheets, plumped her pillows and stared at them.
She turned on her heel and stalked back to her computer and thumped the spacebar until the thing woke from sleep.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?
Kettlebelly: that is one dumb nickname. I couldn’t possibly associate myself with a grown man who calls himself Kettlebelly.
So stop calling yourself Kettlebelly, immediately. If you can do that, we’ve got a deal.
Suzanne
There had come a day when her readers acquired email and the paper ran her address with her byline, and her readers had begun to write her and write her and write her. Some were amazing, informative, thoughtful notes. Some were the vilest, most bilious trolling. In order to deal with these notes, she had taught herself to pause, breathe, and re-read any email message before clicking send.
The reflex kicked in now and she re-read her note to Kettlebelly—Kettlewell!—and felt a crimp in her guts. Then she hit send.
She needed to pee, and apparently had done for some time, without realizing it. She was on the toilet when she heard the ping of new incoming mail.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Embedded journalist?
I will never call myself Kettlebelly again.
Your pal,
Kettledrum.
Oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit. She did a little two-step at her bed’s edge. Tomorrow she’d go see her editor about this, but it just felt right, and exciting, like she was on the brink of an event that would change her life forever.
It took her three hours of mindless Web-surfing, including a truly dreary Hot-Or-Not clicktrance and an hour’s worth of fiddling with tweets from the press-conference, before she was able to lull herself to sleep. As she nodded off, she thought that Kettlewell’s insomnia was as contagious as his excitement.
Hollywood, Florida’s biggest junkyard was situated in the rubble of a half-built ghost-mall off Taft Street. Suzanne’s Miami airport rental car came with a GPS, but the little box hadn’t ever heard of the mall; it was off the map. So she took a moment in the sweltering parking-lot of her coffin hotel to call her interview subject again and get better coordinates.
“Yeah, it’s ’cause they never finished building the mall, so the address hasn’t been included in the USGS maps. The open GPSes all have these better maps made by geohackers, but the rental car companies have got a real hard-on for official map-data. Morons. Hang on, lemme get my GPS out and I’ll get you some decent lat-long.”
His voice had a pleasant, youthful, midwestern sound, like a Canadian newscaster: friendly and enthusiastic as a puppy. His name was Perry Gibbons, and if Kettlewell was to be believed, he was the most promising prospect identified by Kodacell’s talent-scouts.
The ghost-mall was just one of many along Taft Street, ranging in size from little corner plazas to gigantic palaces with broken-in atria and cracked parking lots. A lot of the malls in California had crashed, but they’d been turned into flea-markets or day-cares, or, if they’d been abandoned, they hadn’t been abandoned like this, left to go to ruin. This reminded her of Detroit before she’d left, whole swaths of the inner city emptied of people, neighborhoods condemned and bulldozed and, in a couple of weird cases, actually farmed by enterprising city-dwellers who planted crops, kept livestock, and rode their mini tractors beneath the beam of the defunct white-elephant monorail.
The other commonality this stretch of road shared with Detroit was the obesity of the people she passed. She’d felt a little self-conscious that morning, dressing in a light short-sleeved blouse and a pair of shorts—nothing else would do, the weather was so hot and drippy that even closed-toe shoes would have been intolerable. At 45, her legs had slight cellulite saddlebags and her tummy wasn’t the washboard it had been when she was 25. But here, on this stretch of road populated by people so fat they could barely walk, so fat that they were de-sexed marshmallows with faces like inflatable toys, she felt like a toothpick.
The GPS queeped when she came up on the junkyard, a sprawling, half-built discount mall whose waist-high walls had been used to parcel out different kinds of sorted waste. The mall had been planned with wide indoor boulevards between the shops wide enough for two lanes of traffic, and she cruised those lanes now in the hertzmobile, looking for a human. Once she reached the center of the mall—a dry fountain filled with dusty Christmas-tree ornaments—she stopped and leaned on the horn.