“Jesus, Terry. Where do you find these clients? In Dante’s Inferno?”
He kept typing. “Huh?”
“The man’s…I’ve seen more sympathetic people on the E! Channel’s True Hollywood Stories.”
Terry’s fingers went on clickety-clicking. “This ‘war criminal,’ as you put it, is a client of Tucker Strategic Communications. Someday, if all the crap we learned in Sunday school is correct, he will answer to a higher authority. Higher even than a morally superior twenty-nine-year-old PR chick. In the meantime, our job as strategic communicators is to-”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just-couldn’t we find like maybe just one client who wasn’t…I don’t know…”
“Evil?”
“Well…yeah. Basically.”
Terry stopped typing, leaned back in his leather chair, massaged the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, exhaled pensively. Theatrically, the gesture was just shy of a sigh.
“Do you know what I’m working on right now? What I was working on, before you came in to do an existential download?”
“Let me guess. Raising money, pro bono, for juvenile diabetes?”
“The only time, young lady, you’ll hear the phrase pro bono around this office is if someone is expressing a favorable opinion of an Irish rock star. No, I was doing talking points. For our Brazilian client.”
“The one who wants to relocate the Indian tribe to make room for the gold mine?”
“Uh-hum. Were you aware that in 1913, this same tribe-I can’t pronounce the name-killed two Mormon missionaries?”
“Well, in that case, obviously they deserve whatever they get.”
Terry frowned at the screen. “I know, needs work. Maybe if they fed them to piranhas or something. I’ll massage it. Want to get a pop? Defaming indigenous people always makes me thirsty.”
Ordinarily, Cass loved going out for a drink with Terry. Listening to his war stories about defending the tobacco industry with Nick Naylor.
“Can’t tonight. Gotta go back and blog.”
“‘Gotta go back and blog.’” Terry shook his head. “I’m offering martinis and mentoring. But if you want to go home and blog…” He looked at Cass with his “kind uncle” expression. “Excuse me for asking, but do you by any chance have a life?”
“It’s important, what I do.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.” He reached out and typed. Onto the screen came the blog’s home page.
Concerned
Americans for
Social
Security
Amendment
Now,
Debt
Reduction and
Accountability
“How many hours did it take to come up with that acronym?”
“I know, bit of a mouthful.”
“She was a goddess of something.”
“Daughter of the king of Troy. She warned that the city would fall to the Greeks. They ignored her.”
“And? What happened?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Just educate me.”
“ Troy fell. It was on the news last night. Cassandra was raped. By Ajax the lesser.”
“Is that why they called the other one Ajax the major? He wasn’t a rapist.”
“Whatever. She was taken back to Greece by Agamemnon-you remember him, right?-as a concubine. They were both killed by his wife, Clytemnestra. In revenge for his sacrificing her daughter, Electra.”
“A heartwarming story. No wonder Greeks look unhappy.”
“Cassandra is sort of a metaphor for catastrophe prediction. This is me. It’s what I do. During my downtime. When I’m not media-training our wonderful clients.”
“It’s none of my business-”
“Whenever you say, ‘It’s none of my business,’ I know I’m in for a five-minute lecture.”
“Just listen. Your generation, you’re incapable of listening. It’s from growing up with iPods in your ears. I was going to say, Kid, you’re young, you’re attractive-you’re very attractive. You should be out, you know, getting…you know…”
“Laid? Thank you. That’s so nurturing.”
“You look so, I don’t know, oppressed. You work your butt off here-by the way, I’m giving you a bonus for the Japanese whaler account, good work, sales of whale meat in Tokyo are up six percent-and then you go home and stay up all night blogging with people who look like the Unabomber. It’s not healthy.”
“Finished?”
“No. Instead of staring at a computer screen all night and railing against the government and shrieking that the sky is falling, you should be out exchanging bodily fluids and viruses with the rest of your generation.”
“Earth to Terry. The sky is falling. You saw about the Bank of Tokyo?”
“No. I’ve been working on the Brazilian thing.”
“It led the news this morning. For the first time in history, the Bank of Tokyo declined to buy new-issue U.S. Treasury bills. Do you realize what that means?”
“They already have enough of our debt?”
“Precisely. Do you get the significance of that? The largest single purchaser of U.S. government debt just declined to finance any more of it. As in our debt. Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, the first of your generation have started to retire. You know what they’re calling it?”
“Happy Hour?”
“Boomsday.”
“Good word.”
“Mountainous debt, a deflating economy, and seventy-seven million people retiring. The perfect economic storm.” Not bad, Cass thought, making a mental note to file it away for the blog. “And what is the Congress doing? Raising taxes-on my generation-to pay for, among other things, a monorail system in Alaska.”
Cass realized suddenly that she was standing, leaning forward over his desk, and shouting at him. Terry, meanwhile, was looking up at her with something like alarm.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to…Long day.”
“Listen, kiddo,” Terry said, “that resort in the Bahamas where our client Albert Schweitzer threw the party with the ice sculptures…why don’t you go down there and check it out? We’ll call it research, make Albert pay. Least he could do. Take your time. Stay for a few days. Bring a bathing suit and a tube of tanning oil and a trashy paperback. Take a load off. Get…you know…” He waved his hands in the air.
“Laid?”
“Whatever.”
“You use that word more than I do. It’s my generation’s word, not yours.”
“It’s useful. It may actually be your generation’s major semantic contribution so far. It’s pure Teflon.”
“What’s Teflon?”
“They coat frying pans with it so stuff doesn’t stick. Spin-off of the space program. Like Tang.”
“Tang?”
“Never mind. Look, go home. Go to the Bahamas. Hang an ‘Out to Lunch’ on the blog or something.”
He was already back to typing by the time she reached the door. On her way out, he shouted, “If you get any brainstorms on how to make my Brazilian Indian tribe look like bloodthirsty savages, e-mail me.”
The computer screen was glowing at her in the dark of her apartment. A prior generation would have called it psychedelic; to hers it was just screen saving.
She showered, changed into comfy jammies, ate a peanut-butter PowerBar, and washed it down with Red Bull. She unscrewed the safety cap of her bottle of NoDoz, hesitated. If she took one, she wouldn’t get to sleep until at least four. Unless she popped a Tylenol PM at three. She wondered about the long-term effects of this pharmaceutical roller-coaster ride. Early Alzheimer’s, probably. Or one of those drop-dead-on-the-sidewalk heart attacks like Japanese salarymen have. She popped the NoDoz. She could sleep in tomorrow. Terry wasn’t expecting her in the office. She wanted a cigarette but had given them up (this morning). She chomped down on a piece of Nicorette gum and felt her capillaries surge and tingle. Shock and awe. She flexed her fingers. Showtime.
She logged on. There were 573 messages waiting for her. Her Google profile had searched for reports on the Senate vote and auto-sent them to her inbox. She read. They’d voted in favor of Social Security payroll tax “augmentation.” Jerks. Couldn’t bring themselves to call it a “tax increase.” She felt her blood heating up. (Either that or the effects of the pill.) Soon energy was surging in her veins in equal proportion to outrage. Her fingers were playing across the keyboard like Alicia de Larrocha conjuring a Bach partita.