Make Me Work (26 page)

Dwight Sr. is supposed to be here, too, but he was spirited away by Marco Tempesto, laser-light artist and star of
Commando Cuisine
, the weekly cooking program produced by Dwight and Anita for public-access cable TV. Tempesto is catering tonight's banquet at the Cambridge Marriott, where God knows what version of this video will be shown to an audience of space freaks and skeptical millionaires. Tempesto also created the computer animations in the tape itself. Actually, he got Paradise Productions this gig in the first place. He and our client, Vernon DeCloud, go way back.

Vein's video belongs to a sales sub-genre called, by Dwight, “Brie-TV” because such tapes are almost always shown during lavish cocktail parties. Brie-TV is basically expensive PR for luring investors to large business ventures. In these parlous times it has become a Paradise Productions specialty. The budgets are big, your client takes all the risk, and you get to do fun things like helicopter shots, computer animation, and hanging out with the blown-away-but-still-famous-enough actor you've hired to narrate it. Then your client stages a gala function, the guests graze and drink, you roll the tape. If the potential investors come away feeling they've just seen the client's venture on the nightly news, you're aces.

The problem this time… Well, there are many problems, but for starters the client's venture is not taking place on the planet Earth, so we're targeting a special breed of investor. Besides that, investment videos are, by their very nature, slick salesmanship, yet Vernon DeCloud instructed us that slick salesmanship was all wrong. “We're asking people to join the most monumental under taking of all time,” he declared when we began the project. “The greatest expedition ever conceived by humankind. We're going to make it sound like Boston Harborfront condominiums?”—a snide reference to a recent Paradise Productions success. But the ultimate problem is that Vern is Mr. Venture Capital—the financier who helped launch the computer companies that turned Boston into Silicon Valley East—and he can change his mind about anything any time he feels like it.

In retrospect, we should have seen it coming; clients often start out wanting the wild, chancy, ground-breaking presentation, only to chicken out later on. Vern told us of his long-standing interest in Zen Buddhism, so we decided our angle would be capitalism crossed with Zen. Except we didn't exactly know what Zen was. We brainstormed for a couple of weeks, watched time-shifted episodes of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, sent out for a lot of sashimi. Then Dwight and Anita flew around the country interviewing astronauts and scientists, while I stayed home writing mystical voice-over narration. Tempesto came up with some amazing computer-simulations of outer space. And though it's a Paradise Productions policy to avoid client input whenever possible, Vern was invited to see several cuts along the way. He pronounced each of them fine. Anita called him daily for approval of every little tweak, and Vern was that soul-soothing thing: the happy wealthy client.

But yesterday, with no warning, Vernon DeCloud lost his nerve, which partly, but not completely, explains why Dwight woke me up at 5:50 a.m. today with a phone call to my girlfriend's apartment.

“I just had a terrible dream about Walter!” he exclaimed when Rebecca grabbed the receiver. “Is he O.K.? He's not dead, is he?”

She flopped over in bed to look. I was sleeping with my mouth open because I have one of Dwight Jr.'s colds, and in the dim predawn light, with the suggestion of death in her groggy head, she took me for a corpse. She screamed. I sprang up at the waist like a zombie and she clobbered me with the phone.

“Walter, you're alive!” Dwight said when I got on. “I looked for you an hour ago and you weren't there.”

“That's because I'm here, Dwight.”

He was calling from the main editing suite at Paradise Productions, directly above the first-floor apartment I sublet from them. “Then I fell asleep and had this awful dream. I dreamed you died, Walter.”

Rebecca peeked out from under the comforter. “Dwight dreamed I died,” I told her. She put a pillow over her head and laughed, or at least her body quaked like a person laughing. “Dwight, I'm not dying. I'm just moving in with my girlfriend.”

“You're doing it?” Dwight said. “You've decided? You're leaving us, Walter?”

“Well, I mean, that's the issue at hand. No, I haven't decided. But you'd still see me every day. Unless I'm fired.” It was 6 a.m., the time Rebecca's clock radio goes off. The man in the helicopter came on. “Dwight, why were you looking for me at five in the morning?”

“So we could work on Vern's tape, what else? We got you big-time money to write this script, and now in the clutch you're not there. What if Watson had been shacked up when Alexander Graham Bell called him? We wouldn't even have the telephone today.”

“You haven't been to bed, have you?”

“I fell asleep with my head on the tape controller and I had that dream. My face has all these marks on it.”

“Why do you do this to yourself, Dwight? Why do you work this way? Is it because this is the only way the poetry happens?”

“It's because Vern has rejected our video, Walter.”

“Nonsense, Dwight. He loves it.”

“No, he called yesterday to say it's too weird for the big investors. They're not gonna get it. It has to be real straight and obvious, and no politics or philosophy. I couldn't talk him out of it. Didn't Anita tell you?”

“No.”

“We have to do something about our communication in this company,” Dwight said. “Walter! Come here! I need you!”

I met Vernon DeCloud several months ago during an Indian lunch in the town of Waltham—a topological oddity that seems to abut or actually contain every other town in the Boston area; whenever people give you directions to somewhere, they ask if you're coming from Waltham. Much of the unseen technological life of the Northeast takes place there, in long, low-lying buildings with black slits for windows or no windows at all. Vernon DeCloud's offices are somewhere in those miles of industrial park where asphalt seeks its own level like marshland. But for this meeting he'd summoned us to Taste of Calcutta—Dwight and Anita, their partner the Doctor, Tempesto, and me. Dwight likes the Doctor to attend all meetings, because his Harvard Ph.D. comforts clients. I'm never invited to meetings, or even told they've taken place. I had no idea what this project was about. But Vern had insisted that the proposed scriptwriter be there. All the magic begins with the writer, he told Anita. Obviously, he was no ordinary client.

“I've seen your demo reel,” Vern said after I'd shaken his hand and sat down. “Very competent, very professional.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don't call me ‘sir,' Walter. That was the problem with your reel. Respectful, safe, boring.”

“Oh.”

“But I sensed something more—some greatness within you that wasn't being expressed. I understand you're an actor. You've done Shakespeare.”

“Right.”

“The greatest dramatic mind of all time,” Vern said, jabbing at the air with a pappadum, “and you've strutted his words upon the stage! That's what we're looking for, Walter! The human soul in flight!”

“I see.”

“Don't say you see if you don't see.”

“I think I see.”

“All right. Now, you may not be aware of it, but there's a whole subculture of people, heavy scientists included, who are thoroughly disgusted with the way our government has botched space exploration.”

“We don't even
have
space exploration!” Tempesto exclaimed across the table. “Remember how you felt in the Mercury days? Remember Apollo? We were like gods! Now we just fly around in that glorified airplane. We could have been on Venus already!”

Fragrant, steaming dishes of food arrived. “My daughter's a sophomore in college,” Vern said, ripping open a plump poori, “and she doesn't believe men really walked on the moon. She thinks it was actors on a set.”

“We're not leaving our descendants any great mythic frontier,” said the Doctor.

“The point being,” I said, “that these alienated space people want to blast off on their own.”

“Right,” said Vern. “And they know how. They have a detailed ten-year plan, starting with a space station, and then a colony on the moon, and finally a city on Mars.”

“A Martian city in ten years, Walter!” the Doctor said.

“The government's gonna let you do all this?”

“Our government wants out of the space business,” said Vern. “They don't know how to run a business. They can't even deliver the mail right anymore. They'd like nothing better than to get NASA's budget back, but they don't know how to extricate themselves. Someone has to help them.”

“Isn't this the coolest thing you've ever heard?” Anita asked me.

“How about it, Walter?” Vern said. “Are you psyched? We only want people who are psyched.”

“He's psyched,” said Dwight, hefting the tandoori chicken. “His rate is three hundred a day.”

Mr. Venture Capital reached across the table to shake my hand, and then served himself some basmati rice.

I nudged Dwight in the ribs. “Thanks, pal!” I whispered.

“You get one-fifty,” he whispered back.

The lamb vindaloo came around to me, and its fumes cleared my head. “Stupid question,” I said. “How are you planning to get up there?”

“Hardly stupid, Walter,” said Vern. “Of the essence. Marco?”

“You know how they keep telling us the Cold War is over?” Tempesto said. “Well, thousands of missiles are sitting in silos, ready to go, and the most imagination our leaders can muster is to dismantle the things. After they bled us for the taxes to build them! This government kills me! There's your heavy lifting.”

“Those aren't for going into space, Tempesto. They fly sideways.”

“We change their trajectories, Walter.”

“They'll reach that far?”

“Far enough for the space station, which is our staging area for the lunar colony.”

I turned to Vern. “So what's the lure for these investors you're trying to round up? What do they get? The chance to send up their experiments? Find out if they can make their macaroni and cheese work in the weightlessness of space?”

“We'll put in some boring short-term stuff for them,” said Vern. “Most investors aren't philosophers, are they? But before money, there's existence. Before existence, survival. That's the other part of the picture.”

“The other part.”

“The exodus, Walter. Look around you, my friend. No, not the restaurant. The world. Don't you see what's going on? I know it's hard to contemplate, but let's face facts. Sooner or later, we must leave this planet.”

I glanced at my colleagues, busy spooning out saucy entrées. This wasn't news to them, apparently. “Everybody?”

Vern slapped the table. “Excellent! He pierces to the crux! No, not everybody. Everybody won't be able to, though I'm afraid in the end everybody will want to. I'm not surprised you haven't thought about it. Most people haven't. Most people have been brainwashed into a deadly lethargy. But let me assure you, you'll think about it soon enough. It's going to get pretty slimy down here before long.”

“Pollution?” I said.

“No, Walter,” said Vern. “Class warfare.”

I resigned in Dwight's Bonneville on the way back to Paradise Productions. That is, I tendered my resignation verbally. It was not accepted.

“
Now
what's the problem?” said Dwight, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

“This guy is one bizarre Republican and you know it, Dwight.”

“Vern's a great guy!” said Tempesto from the passenger seat.

“Yeah, a great guy who wants to privatize outer space for himself and his rich pals, and leave everybody else to rot on the doomed planet.”

“He never said that,” Anita said.

“He's a kook, Anita. He wants to fly into outer space with military-surplus war missiles.”

“Perfectly feasible,” said Tempesto. “Great idea.”

“What's next? Gaffer's tape? Parts from Radio Shack?”

“Never mind gaffer's tape!” said the Doctor. “What an epic moment in human history this is! Think of it, Walter! People leaving their birth planet! Extending human life into the heavens!”

“Without me.”

“But Vernon
wants
you,” said Anita. “You auditioned and got the job.”

“Vern's touchy about personalities,” said Tempesto. “He has mystical ideas about teams. A team is a very specific group of people.”

“A genius financier personally tapped you as scriptwriter,” Dwight said.

“Then why don't I get the three hundred?”

“All right, you can have two. That's good money, Walter. Twice your usual rate.”

“I want the whole three.”

“Walter, when an employer quotes a rate on a subcontractor, it includes all kinds of hidden expenses. We have to pay all your benefits—your health, unemployment, Social Security, pension and welfare.”

“You pay all that on me?”

“Starting now,” Anita said.

Back at Paradise Productions, Dwight and the Doctor sat me down in the coffee lounge. “Don't you watch
MacNeil/Lehrer?”
Dwight said. “We're in the middle of this very weird reversal. American capitalism is a pitiful retarded giant nobody wants to be seen with. Our businessmen want to be anything but who they are. They want to be like the witty Germans, the stylish Italians, the swashbuckling Aussies.”

“They'd be African,” said the Doctor, “if you told them that was the coming thing.”

“But more than anything else,” Dwight continued, “they want to be Japanese. They want to
think
Japanese, but they have no idea what that is. They talk about being hip and radical and cutting edge, but it sounds like something on a civil-service exam. It's bizarre, Walter, but we're to the point now where investors are actually
afraid
of ideas that make sense to them. If they understand a business deal, that's terrifying, because everything they understand is wrong. Right off the bat, they're not thinking Japanese. But if they don't understand it, that's terrifying, too, because maybe it's just freaky bullshit. How would you describe a situation like that?”