| PART FIVE |
A BODY FOR EACH OF US
Summer 2011
1
“HELLO? Hello?”
“Yes? Hello?”
“Hello? Samuel? Can you hear me?”
“Barely. Where are you?”
“It’s me, Periwinkle! Are you there?”
“What’s that noise?”
“I’m in a parade!”
“Why are you calling me from a parade?”
“I’m not really in the parade! More like walking directly behind it! I’m calling about your e-mail! I read your e-mail!”
“Is there a tuba right next to your head?”
“What?”
“That noise!”
“So I wanted to call and say I read the—” Sudden silence on the line, a muffled indistinct digital gibberish, signal coming into and out of strength, a robotic garble, the sound all compressed and Dopplerized. Then: “—is what we expected, more or less. Can you do that for me?”
“I missed literally everything you said.”
“What?”
“You’re cutting out! I can’t hear you!”
“It’s Periwinkle, goddammit!”
“I know that. Where are you?”
“Disney World!”
“It sounds like you’re in the middle of a marching band.”
“One second!”
Seashell-like whooshing sounds, friction noises as a thumb or the wind passes over the microphone, abstract musical whooping, then a diminishment, as if Periwinkle were suddenly encased in a thick lead box.
“How’s that? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Cell coverage seems bad at the moment. Bandwidth problems, I’m guessing.”
“Why are you at Disney World?”
“For Molly Miller. We’re promoting her new video. Cross-promo’d with the reissue of a classic Disney animated film, now digitally remastered and in 3-D. I think it might be Bambi? All the parents are filming the parade with their phones and texting their friends. I think it’s jamming the cell towers. Have you ever been to Disney World?”
“No.”
“I’ve never seen a place so utterly committed to dead technology. Animatronics everywhere. Automatons with their wooden parts clacking together. I guess it’s quaint?”
“Is the parade over?”
“No, I ducked into a store. Ye Olde Soda Shoppe, it says. I’m in this facsimile of Main Street USA. This charming little street that multinationals like Disney helped annihilate in the real world. Nobody here seems to mind the irony, though.”
“I am having trouble imagining you enjoying things like roller coasters. Or children.”
“Every ride, it’s the same conceit: agonizingly slow boat trip through robot wonderland. Like that ride It’s a Small World, which by the way is just a horror of narcotized puppets doing the same rote tasks over and over in what I’m sure Disney totally did not intend to be an accurate and prescient vision of third world labor.”
“I believe that ride is supposed to be about international unity and global peace.”
“Uh-huh. The Norway ride at Epcot was like floating through a life-size pamphlet for the oil and natural gas industries. And there’s this one ride called the Carousel of Progress. Heard of it?”
“No.”
“Originally made for the 1964 World’s Fair. Animatronic theater. A guy and his family. The first act is in 1904 and the guy marvels at all the recent inventions: gas lamps, irons, washing cranks. The amazing stereoscope. The incredible gramophone. You get the idea? The wife says it now only takes her five hours to do the laundry and we all laugh.”
“They think they have it easy, but we know better.”
“Right. Between each act they sing this terrible song that is so catchy in a uniquely Disney way.”
“Sing it.”
“No. But the chorus goes like ‘It’s a great big beautiful tomorrooooooow.’?”
“Okay, don’t sing it.”
“Song about unending progress. Been stuck in my head nonstop and I think at this point I’d lobotomize myself to remove it. Anyway, they move on to the twenties in the second act. The age of electricity. Sewing machines. Toasters. Waffle irons. Icebox. Fan. Radio. Third act is in the forties. There’s a dishwasher now. And a big refrigerator. You see where this is going.”
“Technology keeps making everyone’s life better and easier. Unstoppable forward movement.”
“Yeah. What an adorable mid-sixties conceit that was, eh? Everything is going to improve. Hah. I swear to god, me being at Disney World is like Darwin being at Galápagos. And by the way, the employees of the soda fountain have been smiling at me like maniacs this entire time. There must be a rule, a smiling-at-the-customer rule. Even when I’m on the phone and”—yelling now—“OBVIOUSLY NOT INTERESTED IN A CREAM SODA!”
“You said you read my e-mail? I didn’t hear anything you said after that.”
“They are smiling like drunk children. Like gnomes on Ecstasy. It must take an enormous act of willpower to do that every day. And yes, I did read your e-mail, your description of the mother-in-high-school material. Read it on the plane.”
“And?”
“I couldn’t help but notice that there’s very little information about throwing fucking rocks at Governor fucking Packer.”
“I’m getting to that.”
“Zero information, in fact. Absolutely fucking nothing, would be my rough estimate.”
“That comes later. I have to set it up.”
“Set it up. How many hundreds of pages will that take, exactly?”
“I’m going where the story is.”
“You agreed to deliver a book that told your mother’s story while also ripping her to shreds, rhetorically.”
“Yes, I know.”
“It’s the ‘ripping her to shreds’ part I’m worried about right now. Because Son of Packer Attacker Defends His Mom might be persuasive in a few quarters, but Packer Attacker Gets Eviscerated by Own Flesh and Blood has serious appeal.”
“I’m trying to tell the truth.”
“Plus it’s a little coming-of-agey.”
“You didn’t like it much, did you.”
“Slipped into some familiar coming-of-age conventions, is all I’m saying. Also what’s the big message here? What’s the life lesson?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s no secret that most memoirs are really self-help books in disguise. So what’s your book going to help people do better? What is it going to teach?”
“I have not thought about that for even one second.”
“How about, for your life lesson: Vote Republican.”
“No. That is not at all what I’m writing about. Not in the same galaxy.”
“Listen to Mister Artist Guy all of a sudden. Look. In today’s market, most readers want books with accessible, linear narratives that rely on big concepts and easy life lessons. The life lessons in your mother’s story are, to put it kindly, diffused.”
“What’s the big life lesson in Molly Miller’s book?”
“Simple: Life Is Great!”
“Well, that’s pretty easy for her to say. Born into money. Prep schools on the Upper East Side. Billionaire at twenty-two.”
“You’d be amazed at the facts people are willing to set aside to believe that life is, indeed, great.”
“Life is hardly great.”
“And this is why we need Molly Miller. The country is falling apart around us. This is plain even to the pay-no-attention-at-all crowd, even to the low-information undecided-voter segment. It’s all crumbling right in front of our eyes. People lose their jobs, their pensions disappear overnight, they keep getting those quarterly statements showing their retirement funds are worth ten percent less for the sixth quarter in a row, and their houses are worth half what they paid for them, and their bosses can’t get a loan to make payroll, and Washington is a circus, and they have homes full of interesting technology and they look at their smartphones and wonder ‘How could a world that produces something as amazing as this be such a shitty world?’ This is what they wonder. We’ve done studies on this. What was my point?”
“About Molly Miller, life being great.”
“Here’s how desperate people are for good news. Rolling Stone wanted an interview with Molly. But because they were reporting on her writing and not her music, they said they wanted it more ‘real.’ A more real interview, to reflect the more real memoir, I guess? Setting aside for a moment that the memoir itself was focus-grouped and ghostwritten? And that the ‘more real’ Rolling Stone interview would be staged from the get-go? What they wanted wasn’t reality, per se, but a simulation that felt closer to reality than their usual simulations. But whatever. We brainstormed and spitballed and one of our junior publicists, this recent Yale grad who is going places let me tell you, he has this dazzling idea. He says let’s have them watch her make pasta at home. Brilliant, right?”
“I’m guessing there’s a special reason it was pasta.”
“It focus-tests better than meat. Steak and chicken have too much baggage these days. Was it free-range? Antibiotic-free? Cruelty-free? Organic? Kosher? Did the farmer wear silken gloves to caress it to sleep every night while singing gentle lullabies? You can’t order a fucking hamburger anymore without embracing some kind of political platform. Pasta is still pretty neutral, unobjectionable. And of course we’d never show anyone what she really actually eats.”
“Why? What does she eat?”
“Steamed cabbage and mushroom broth, mostly. A reporter sees that and it becomes a different kind of story altogether. How the poor teen idol is starving herself to death. Then we get dragged into the whole body-image debate, which no one ever scored any mass public points arguing either side of, ever.”
“I don’t think I really want to read about Molly Miller making pasta.”
“In the face of national calamity and utter annihilation of their personal prospects, people generally go in one of two directions. We have reams of paper showing this. They either get righteously indignant and hyperaware, in which case they’ll usually begin posting libertarian screeds on iFeel or something, or they’ll sink into a somewhat comfortable ignorance, in which case Molly Miller warming up marinara out of a jar is pleasantly and weirdly diverting.”
“You’re making it sound like a public service.”
“There is no creature more arrogant than a self-righteous libertarian on the web, am I right? Those folks are just intolerable. And yes, it is a public service. You want to know my secret hope for your book?”
“Sure.”
“That it’s the one to replace Molly’s on the best-seller list. You know why?”
“I find that wildly improbable.”
“Because there are very few products that appeal to those two groups of people: the angry and the ignorant. Very few products can make that jump.”
“But my mom’s story—”
“We’ve tested this. Your mom has huge crossover appeal. This is rare and usually unpredictable, the thing that pops out of culture and becomes universal. Everyone sees what they want to see in your mom, everyone gets to be offended in their own special way. Your mother’s story allows people of any political stripe to say ‘Shame on you,’ which is just delicious these days. It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.”
“I’ll be sure to work on that.”
“Remember, less empathy, more carnage. That’s advice, me to you. And by the way? Those ghostwriters we used for Molly’s book? They’re available. I have them on retainer, should you need assistance writing your book.”
“No thank you.”
“They are seriously professional and discreet.”
“I can write the book myself.”
“I’m sure you would like to write the book yourself, but your record is not what I might call promising, book-finishing-wise.”
“This time is different.”
“I’m not judging you, simply pointing out certain historical facts. Speaking of which? All these years, I have never asked: Why couldn’t you finish your first book?”
“It’s not that I couldn’t finish it—”
“I’m curious. What happened? Did I not send enough letters of encouragement and praise? Did you lose your inspiration? Did your ambition buckle under the weight of expectations? Were you—what do they call it—blocked?”
“None of those things, really. I just made a few bad decisions.”
“A few bad decisions. That’s how people explain a hangover.”
“There were some poor choices made, on my part.”
“That is a pretty blithe way of explaining your total failure to become a famous writer.”
“You know, I’d always wanted to be a famous writer. I thought being a famous writer would help me solve certain problems. And then suddenly I was a famous writer and the problems weren’t solved at all.”
“Certain problems?”
“Let’s just say there was a girl involved.”
“Oh lord, I’m sorry I asked.”
“A girl I very much wanted to make a big impression on.”
“Let me guess. You became a writer to impress a girl. And then you didn’t get the girl.”
“Yes.”
“This happens, not surprisingly, all the time.”
“I keep thinking I could have gotten it right. I could have gotten the girl. I just needed to do things a little differently. I just needed to make some better choices.”