Make Me Work (28 page)

We sidle around the edges of the room, me clutching Dwight Jr.'s jersey so he won't disappear. “There's a society for this?” I ask the Doctor. “Nobody told me that. I thought we were showing a tape to a bunch of investors.”

“Yup. We're doing that.”

“These are all people who think they're personally going to outer space?”

“The investors are here, too. The society is a bunch of space-junkie anarchists who've been E-mailing each other for years and getting all charged up about the government. Vern just stepped in with the idea of organizing their first meeting and letting some money people see the talent and energy.”

I bump into a paunchy guy in his thirties with a plastic cup of beer in his hand. He has that rumpled software-engineer look. “Where are you on this space stuff?” I ask him. “The bleachers or the field?”

“I'm on the first rocket off this ball of dirt!” he says.

“The field.” I wink and give him the thumbs-up.

Soon we come to the entrance of the hotel cocktail lounge. “Karaoke!” says the Doctor, leading us inside. The dim bar is populated largely by men cheering one of their brothers onstage as he turns in a grisly rendition of “The Impossible Dream.” There's a smattering of women with the same crazed techie look in their eye as the guys, but if they're drunk on space exploration or anything else, at least they're not singing about it.

“Da!” says Dwight Jr.

“You have to love karaoke,” the Doctor says.

“No, I don't.”

“Men never used to be able to do things like this in public.”

“Those were the days.”

I leave him to his study of lounge behavior, and carry Dwight Jr. up another flight to the grand ballroom. The dinner program doesn't begin for a half hour yet, but most of the tables are occupied by people snarfing appetizers and arguing about outer space beneath massive chandeliers and three large mirrored disco balls that seem to be left over from the nineteen-seventies.

One nice thing about a big gig like this is that the video people get to bring a guest to the ball, and I see mine now at a table with Anita. When I get there, Dwight Jr. stops slapping my head and climbs down to root around in his mother's leather satchel. Rebecca rises to kiss me. “You reek of onions!” she says.

“It's bad, isn't it? I can't get it off. Make sure you try the onion tart. I was a human sacrifice to it.”

“Rebecca came over to Paradise to hang out with me,” Anita says. “We worked on the tape together!”

“I helped find stuff to fill the holes,” Rebecca says. “We had to lose a lot of your voice-over. Sorry.”

“I hate voice-over anyway,” Anita says.

“Then why do you always hire me to write it?” I ask.

“Oh, voice-over's important.”

I chew on the logic of this, but my brain spits it out. “What did you think?” I ask Rebecca.

“Reminded me of the condominium one. Condominiums in outer space. Why did they need a video in the first place? They've got all these loonies in the flesh.”

“Don't say that too loud,” Anita says.

Tempesto's helpers have changed into their serving clothes, black slacks and blousy white T-shirts that say
COMMANDO CUISINE
below a picture of a hungry-looking computer chip holding a knife and fork. They circulate with platters of spicy fried calamari, boiled Gulf shrimp, giant stuffed mushroom caps, baked Brie on baguette. The commando himself is working on the ballroom stage in a fresh white jumpsuit, hooking up his laser guns and racks of electronics gear.

Dwight materializes with a glass in his hand. “Cheers, Earthlings.”

“What are you drinking?” Anita asks. “Give it to me.”

“Vodka tonic. Nature's perfect beverage.”

“Remember when they used to say that about eggs?” Anita says, taking a sip. “That eggs were nature's perfect food? They don't say that anymore.”

“I think they might find out a few things about vodka tonics, too,” Rebecca says.

“I'm getting mine in before they do,” says Dwight.

I watch Vernon DeCloud schmooze around the ballroom, and in this way I figure out who some of the investors are. They're basically guys in expensive suits, human beings like you or me, except different. Vern arrives at our table and shakes everybody's hand.

“This is Rebecca!” Anita says. “Walter's moving in with her!”

“Well, I might be,” I say, putting my arm around Rebecca's shoulders. “We're talking about it.”

“Look before you leap,” Vern says.

“Who are you telling that to?” Rebecca asks.

“Everybody!” says Vern. He looks apprehensive. “There's a billion dollars here looking for a place to park,” he tells Dwight.

“They're gonna love it, Vern. Don't worry.”

“I realize this was an unusual assignment,” Vern says.

“No it wasn't,” Rebecca says. “They do all the outer-space people.”

To his everlasting credit, Vern has a snort with us over this.

“Trust us,” Dwight tells Vern. “We understand the mentality. We
are
the mentality.”

We join a line to have our plates filled with Tempesto's stuffed loin of pork and piquant trimmings. My onion tart—I think of it as mine—seems to be a big hit as well; I suspect we have quite a few vegetarians on hand. In the minute or two that Dwight and I are alone, back at the table, I say, “You really think we're looking at class warfare down here, Dwight? I've been trying to decide if I'd want to bring a kid into this world.”

“You see any haves giving their stuff to the have-nots?”

“Not exactly.”

“Me neither. On the other hand, there's always a chance our children will reject our rotten act and start living right. It's worth hoping for, I guess. If you had a kid, you'd probably move out, though.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“I'd say hold off, then.”

When most people are well into the food and wine, Vern introduces the keynote speaker, a famous scientist who appears in our tape. Vern says not one word about class warfare or planetary exodus. He sticks to the usual stuff about capitalism on a new frontier, the rock-solid investment of it all. The scientist is well known for his desire to leave this planet, and his speech is easy to understand—Mars or bust. I observe the reaction of a few investors: they don't look too impressed. Tempesto's staff serves coffee and dessert—zabaglione for a group this large! Tempesto!—and then the room lights go dim, a large silver screen scrolls down the wall above the stage, and our tape begins to roll.

The new cut of the video is as predictable and dull as I-80 through Nebraska. True, extolling the glories of boldly going where no one has gone before would be preaching to the converted here, but the converted would have enjoyed a little preaching, and the investors would have enjoyed seeing them hoot and holler about it. Instead, it's all about commercial applications and short-term yields, things the space people think are stupid and which must look, to the investors, like the hand-waving they see every day in their part of the world. All in all, we have succeeded in cryogenically freezing the whole audience by remote control. If I were in charge of this show, I'd say spoon out large second helpings of zabaglione to anybody wearing a good suit, but I'm not in charge, and the zabaglione's probably gone anyway. I look at Dwight. He holds up a finger to say
Wait
.

Suddenly the ballroom goes dark—the vast cavern of it absolutely black except for the red glow of the “Exit” lights at the edges. The whole room audibly draws a breath. Trance music starts to shimmer on the PA. Then just as suddenly it's light again, but not the way it was before. Three bright colored beams are shooting from Tempesto's laser guns, each of them hitting one of the now-spinning disco balls on the high ceiling. The open space between the balls goes luminous with the whirling, commingling refractions of the beams, and the resulting mishmash does look, at first, like the northern lights, a vague conglomeration of colored radiance suspended in the air. But soon shapes assert themselves in the welter of foggy colors, the shapes of a gigantic human face—an ear, a nose, a mouth with moving lips. The face has three-dimensional substance, but you can see through it, too. I hear startled cries from the tables around me, every conference-goer staring up in astonishment at the moving holographic visage. A disembodied woman's voice booms from the loudspeakers on the walls.
“Tell me how you feel about moving in with Rebecca
,” the voice says.

“I
feel it's an awfully big step
,” replies the gigantic face in the air, and the amazed ballroom begins to laugh. My table is the only non-laughing one.

“What the hell is he doing up there?” Dwight croaks to Anita.

I stand up and stumble backward among the tables to get some distance on the unholy spirit-head hanging in the air above us. Goddamn if it's not me. “I
might not do it,”
my giant face says. Then a humongous Dwight Jr. crawls into view and slides down the front of me, so palpably real that the audience cringes and covers its collective head.

“Da!” says Dwight Jr., pointing up at himself in the air.

This may sound odd coming from an actor, even one who scarcely acts anymore, but every time I see myself on tape, I wonder,
Is this a man anyone would care about? Is this a person someone could love?
And often I have my doubts. But not this time. This time I think I'm a knockout. Brando, DeNiro, and Pacino put together never had a gig this good.

Tempesto arrives. He's laughing like a person in shock. “Where's my moon animation!” he exclaims.

“This is supposed to be a low-altitude lunar fly-by!” Dwight says.

“I thought this was it!” says Anita. “Dwight Jr. was playing with the cassettes before I gave them to Tempesto. This is something I was doing as a wedding present!”

“What wedding?” I say.

“
I want a little girl,”
my monstrous mouth declares, a gleaming chandelier between my translucent teeth.
“If I had a girl, she'd worship me and love me forever.”

I look around and see that it scarcely matters what tape is playing. It could be anything up there. The audience is reeling with technique, the pure technique of an outlandish trick, for Tempesto has succeeded where all others have failed—he has somehow projected real-time full-motion video into a massive hologram floating in open air. He leaps onto the stage, his hands clasped in victory above his jumpsuited form. Here in the very birthplace of astounding hardware hacks, surrounded by the buildings of MIT, a ballroom's worth of technology junkies is giving him a standing ovation. “This is only a demo!” he screams to the convention. “I can do this in the sky! A whole continent at a time! All I need is some up-front capital!”

The investors are on their feet in ecstasy. If this isn't thinking Japanese, they don't know what is. They've got Sony by the short ones now. Vernon DeCloud appears onstage. “Let's hear it for Marco Tempesto!” he shouts into the microphone. “One minute of paid ads in the sky every night and we can go look for other solar systems!”

The crowd goes wild, and then a woman's voice says over the loudspeakers,
“What's the problem with men, anyway?”
When I look up, Rebecca's giant 3-D face has replaced mine in the air.
“What's the big deal about living together?.”
her hologram goes on. “He's
at my place every night anyway.”

It looks amazingly like her, and it's strangely enchanting to experience her features thirty feet tall. That's her smile exactly, big as a queen-sized bed. Her eyes are really pools. Those dark, curly cables are the hairs on her head. I've never seen her in detail like this.

Here on the ground, she's out of her chair and standing beside me, our mortal faces turned up to the numina we've become.

“It's them!” somebody exclaims. “They're here! The guy and the girl!”

The audience turns to look at us.

“Move in with her, you bum!” somebody shouts.

“He's not a bum!” Rebecca says.

“You're too good for him, sweetheart!” a man calls out.

“He doesn't look that bad to me,” a woman says.

Anita stands on her chair and cups her hands around her mouth. “Let's put it to a vote! Should they move in together?”

The ayes come in like Niagara Falls.

“I
can't help it,”
Rebecca's tremendous mouth is saying.
“I love the big dope. I know we'd be happy,”
and suddenly I realize that I'm nuts about this monumental woman. And another thing: with her face as big as it is, she looks a lot like my mom.

“Jah!” cries a little voice nearby. Dwight Jr. is jumping on his father's lap and waving at Rebecca's face above us.

I turn to my flesh-and-blood girlfriend. “I'm crazy about you, you big goddess! All right, I'll move in!”

“You will?” she exclaims, and then she leaps into my arms. I stagger around, trying to find my balance beneath her weight. The ovation from the ballroom is deafening. I have the idea that I'm a rocket shuddering with its payload on a pad, that the sound I'm hearing is my own incredible motor. In my eccentric circuit of the floor, I catch a blurry glimpse of Tempesto surrounded by men in expensive suits. The Doctor is flashing us with the strobe of his Nikon. We're going down in anthropology. Finally I stabilize and come to a teetering halt beneath the unearthly glow of the first-ever demonstration of celestial TV. “Now what do I do?” I gasp to Rebecca.

“Fly me to the moon.”

The Dzanc Books r
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The Dzanc Books r
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