A Visit From the Goon Squad (34 page)

“So,” she said, when Alex failed to speak up. “Bennie says we’re going to make a blind team, with you as the anonymous captain.”

“He used those terms?”

Lulu laughed. “No, those are marketing terms. From school.”

“Actually, they’re sports terms. From…sports,” Alex said. He’d been a team captain many times, though in the presence of someone so young it felt too long ago to really count.

“Sports metaphors still work,” Lulu reflected.

“So this is a known thing?” he asked. “The
blind team?”
Alex had thought it was his own brain wave: reduce the shame and guilt of parrothood by assembling a team that doesn’t know it’s a team—or that it has a captain. Each team member would deal individually with Lulu, with Alex orchestrating in secret from above.

“Oh, sure,” Lulu said. “BTs—blind teams—work especially well with older people. I mean”—she smiled—“people over thirty.”

“And why is that?”

“Older people are more resistant to…” She seemed to falter.

“Being bought?”

Lulu smiled. “See, that’s what we call a disingenuous metaphor,” she said. “DMs look like descriptions, but they’re really judgments. I mean, is a person who sells oranges
being bought?
Is the person who repairs appliances
selling out?”

“No, because what they do is up front,” Alex said, aware that he was condescending. “It’s out in the open.”

“And, see, those metaphors—‘up front’ and ‘out in the open’—are part of a system we call atavistic purism. AP implies the existence of an ethically perfect state, which not only doesn’t exist and never existed, but it’s usually used to shore up the prejudices of whoever’s making the judgments.”

Alex felt Cara-Ann stir against his neck, and let a long fatty piece of pastrami slide down his throat unchewed. How long had they been sitting here? Longer than he’d meant to, that was for sure, and yet Alex couldn’t resist the urge to brace himself against this girl and push. Her confidence seemed more drastic than the outcome of a happy childhood; it was cellular confidence, as if Lulu were a queen in disguise, without need or wish to be recognized.

“So,” he said. “You think there’s nothing inherently wrong with believing in something—or saying you do—for
money?”

“‘Inherently wrong,’” she said. “Gosh, that’s a great example of calcified morality. I have to remember that for my old modern ethics teacher, Mr. Bastie; he collects them. Look,” she said, straightening her spine and flicking her rather grave (despite the friendly antics of her face) gray eyes at Alex, “if I believe, I believe. Who are you to judge my reasons?”

“Because if your reasons are cash, that’s not belief. It’s bullshit.”

Lulu grimaced. Another thing about her generation: no one swore. Alex had actually heard teenagers say things like “shucks” and “golly,” without apparent irony. “This is something we see a lot,” Lulu mused, studying Alex. “Ethical ambivalence—we call it EA—in the face of a strong marketing action.”

“Don’t tell me: SMA.”

“Yes,” she said. “Which for you means picking the blind team. On the surface it looks like you might not even do it, you’re so ambivalent, but I think it’s the opposite: I think the EA is a kind of inoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually
want
to do. No offense,” she added.

“Kind of like saying ‘no offense’ when you’ve just said something offensive?”

Lulu underwent the most extreme blush Alex had ever witnessed: a vermilion heat encompassed her face so abruptly that the effect was of something violent taking place, as if she were choking or about to hemorrhage. Alex sat up reflexively and checked on Cara-Ann. He found her eyes wide open.

“You’re right,” Lulu said, taking a rickety breath. “I apologize.”

“No sweat,” Alex said. The blush had unsettled him more than Lulu’s confidence. He watched it drain from her face, leaving her skin a jarring white. “You okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine. I just get tired of talking.”

“Ditto,” Alex said. He felt exhausted.

“There are so many ways to go wrong,” Lulu said. “All we’ve got are metaphors, and they’re never exactly right. You can’t ever just
Say. The. Thing
.”

“Hoo dat?” Cara-Ann asked, her gaze fixed on Lulu.

“That’s Lulu.”

“Can I just T you?” Lulu asked.

“You mean—”

“Now. Can I T you now.” The question was a formality; she was already working her handset. An instant later Alex’s own vibrated in his pants pocket; he had to jostle Cara-Ann to remove it.

U hav sum nAms 4 me?
he read on the screen.

hEr thA r
, Alex typed, and flushed the list of fifty contacts, along with notes, tips on angles of approach, and individual no-nos, into Lulu’s handset.

GrAt. Il gt 2 wrk
.

They looked up at each other. “That was easy,” Alex said.

“I know,” Lulu said. She looked almost sleepy with relief. “It’s pure—no philosophy, no metaphors, no judgments.”

“Unt dat,” Cara-Ann said. She was pointing at Alex’s handset, which he’d been using, unthinkingly, mere inches from her face.

“No,” he said, suddenly anxious. “We—we have to go.”

“Wait,” Lulu said, seeming for the first time to notice Cara-Ann. “I’ll T her.”

“Uh, we don’t—” but Alex felt unable to explain to Lulu the beliefs he shared with Rebecca about children and handsets. And now his own was vibrating again; Cara-Ann shrieked with delight and speared the screen with her chubby pointer.
“I
do dat,” she informed him.

Litl grl, U hav a nyc dad
, Alex dutifully read aloud, a blush promptly staking a claim on his own face. Cara-Ann pounded keys with the hectic fervor of a starving dog unleashed in a meat locker. Now a blooper appeared, one of the stock images people sent to kids: a lion under a sparkling sun. Cara-Ann zoomed in on different parts of the lion as if she’d been doing this since birth. Lulu T’d:
Nvr met my dad. Dyd b4 I ws brn
. Alex read this one in silence.

“Wow. I’m sorry,” he said, looking up at Lulu, but his voice seemed too loud—a coarse intrusion. He dropped his eyes, and through the blender whir of Cara-Ann’s pointing fingers, he managed to T:
Sad
.

Ancnt hstry
, Lulu T’d back.

“Das
mine!”
Cara-Ann proclaimed with guttural indignation, stretching from her sling and stabbing her pointer at Alex’s pocket. Inside it, the handset was vibrating—had been almost constantly since he and Cara-Ann had left the diner hours before. Was it possible that his daughter could feel the vibrations through his body?

“Mine
lolli-pop!” Alex wasn’t sure how she’d arrived at this name for the handset, but he certainly wasn’t correcting her.

“What do you want, honeybunch?” Rebecca asked in the oversolicitous (Alex thought) way she often spoke to their daughter when she’d spent the day at work.

“Daddy lolli-pop.”

Rebecca looked quizzically at Alex. “Do you have a lollipop?”

“Of course not.”

They were hurrying west, trying to reach the river before sunset. The warming-related “adjustments” to Earth’s orbit had shortened the winter days, so that now, in January, sunset was taking place at 4:23.

“Can I take her?” Rebecca asked.

She lifted Cara-Ann out of the sling and placed her on the sooty sidewalk. The girl took a few of her stuttering, scarecrow steps. “We’ll miss it if she walks,” Alex said, and Rebecca picked her up and walked more quickly. Alex had surprised his wife outside the library, something he’d begun doing often to avoid the construction noise from their apartment. But today he had an extra reason: he needed to tell her about his arrangement with Bennie. Now, without further delays.

The sun had dropped behind the water wall by the time they reached the Hudson, but when they climbed the steps to the
WATERWALK!
as the wall’s boarded rampart was exuberantly branded, they found the sun still poised, ruby-orange and yolklike, just above Hoboken. “Down,” Cara-Ann commanded, and Rebecca released her. She ran toward the iron fence along the wall’s outer edge, always jammed at this hour with people who probably (like Alex) had barely noticed sunset before the wall went up. Now they craved it. As he followed Cara-Ann into the crowd, Alex took Rebecca’s hand. For as long as he’d known her, his wife had offset her sexy beauty with a pair of dorky glasses, sometimes leaning toward Dick Smart, other times Catwoman. Alex had loved the glasses for their inability to suppress Rebecca’s sexy beauty, but lately he wasn’t so sure; the glasses, along with Rebecca’s prematurely graying hair and the fact that she was often short on sleep, threatened to reify her disguise into an identity: a fragile, harried academic slaving to finish a book while teaching two courses and chairing several committees. It was Alex’s own role in this tableau that most depressed him: the aging music freak who couldn’t earn his keep, sapping the life (or at least the sexy beauty) from his wife.

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words—“friend” and “real” and “story” and “change”—words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like “identity,” “search,” and “cloud,” had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had “American” become an ironic term? How had “democracy” come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

As usual, a hush enclosed the crowd in the last few seconds before the sun slipped away. Even Cara-Ann, in Rebecca’s arms, went still. Alex felt the lees of sunlight on his face and closed his eyes, savoring its faint warmth, his ears full of the slosh of a passing ferry. The moment the sun had gone, everyone moved suddenly, as if a spell had broken. “Down,” said Cara-Ann, and took off along the Waterwalk. Rebecca ran after her, laughing. Alex swiftly checked his handset.

JD nEds 2 thnk

Yep frm Sancho

Cal: no f-way

At each response, he experienced an alloy of emotions that had become familiar in the course of one afternoon: triumph marbled with scorn at the yeses, disappointment with an updraft of admiration at the nos. He was just beginning to type a response when he heard stamping feet, then his daughter’s longing cry: “Lolllllllli-POP!” Alex flicked the handset away, but it was too late: Cara-Ann was tugging at his jeans. “Mine dat,” she said.

Rebecca sidled over. “So. That’s the lollipop.”

“Apparently.”

“You let her use it?”

“One time, okay?” But his heart was racing.

“You just changed the rules, all by yourself?”

“I didn’t change them, I slipped. Okay? Am I allowed to have one goddamn slip?”

Rebecca raised an eyebrow. Alex felt her studying him. “Why now?” she asked. “Today, after all this time—I don’t get it.”

“There’s nothing to get!” Alex barked, but he was thinking: How does she know? And then:
What
does she know?

They stood, eyeing each other in the expiring light. Cara-Ann waited quietly, the lollipop apparently forgotten. The Waterwalk was nearly empty. It was time to tell Rebecca about the deal with Bennie—now,
now
!—but Alex felt paralyzed, as if the disclosure had already been poisoned. He had a crazy wish to T Rebecca, even found himself mentally composing the message:
Nu job in th wrks—big $ pos. pls kEp opn mind
.

“Let’s go,” Rebecca said.

Alex lifted Cara-Ann back into the sling, and they descended the water wall into darkness. As they made their way through the gloomy streets, Alex found himself thinking of the day he and Rebecca had met. After trying and failing to run down the wolf-headed purse snatcher, Alex had coaxed her out for beers and burritos, then had sex with her on the roof of her building on Avenue D, to escape her three roommates. He hadn’t known Rebecca’s last name. And in that moment, without warning, Alex abruptly recalled the name of the girl who had worked for Bennie Salazar: Sasha. It came to him effortlessly, like a door falling open.
Sasha
. Alex held the name carefully in his mind, and sure enough, the first intimations of memory followed it skittishly into the light: a hotel lobby; a small, overwarm apartment. It was like trying to remember a dream. Had he fucked her? Alex figured he must have—nearly all those early dates had concluded with sex, hard as this was to fathom from his communal bed awash in the smell of baby flesh and a chemical tinge of biodegradable diaper. But Sasha refused to give ground on the question of sex; she seemed to wink at him (green eyes?) and slip away.
u herd th nUs?
Alex read on his handset late one night, as he sat in his usual spot by the window.

yup i herd

The “news” was that Bennie had moved the Scotty Hausmann concert outdoors, to the Footprint, a change that would require more outreach from Alex’s blind parrots (for no additional pay) so that any potential concertgoers would know where to go.

Bennie had told Alex about the venue change earlier, on the phone: “Scotty’s not wild about enclosed spaces. I’m thinking he might be happier out in the open.” It was the most recent in an onslaught of escalating demands and special needs. “He’s a solitary person” (Bennie, explaining Scotty’s need for a trailer). “He has a hard time with conversation” (why Scotty refused to do interviews). “He hasn’t spent much time with children” (why Scotty might be troubled by “pointer noise”). “He’s wary of technology” (why Scotty refused to narrate a stream or answer Ts sent to him by fans via the page Bennie had created for him). The guy pictured on that page—long-haired, jaunty, grinning a mouthful of porcelain and surrounded by a lot of big colorful balls—caused an itch of aggravation in Alex every time he looked at him.

wat nxt?
he T’d Lulu back.
oystrs?

only Ets chInEs

!

…

tel me hEs betr in prsn