Boomsday

Chapter 15

“Mr. President,” Senator Randolph K. Jepperson said, beginning his historic speech on the floor of the Senate, “I rise to introduce a bill of momentous importance and urgency.”

The president pro tem nodded sleepily in return and went back to his Sudoko puzzle.

The Washington and national press corps watched with one collective eye on C-SPAN, which had thankfully relieved them of having to be physically present when politicians rose to introduce bills of momentous importance and urgency.

“Together with my distinguished and learned colleague from the great state of Oregon, we are today introducing S.322, the Voluntary Transitioning bill. This bill is coming at a time of dire national economic crisis, as seventy-seven million…yes, Mr. Speaker, I said seventy-seven million members of the Baby Boom generation are beginning to retire, playing havoc with the Treasury and creating mayhem on Wall Street. Mr. President, under the provisions of the Voluntary Transitioning bill, which I believe will take its rightful place in the historic pantheon of legislation, along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the recent Alaska Monorail Transportation Act, elder Americans will be able to give something back to their country. And in the process, provide for their children, and their children’s children, to make a better world.

“Mr. President, I surely recognize that at first glance, this bill may appear to advocate a desperate remedy to our nation’s fiscal calamities. But it was a former member of this very body who, on assuming the leadership of this great nation at a time of great peril, said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you…’

“Mr. President, the generation that preceded my own has been called ‘the Greatest Generation.’ Born into the Depression, forged in the annealing fires of the furnace of World War Two, they made themselves great indeed. The generation that followed-my generation, and that of many of my distinguished colleagues-might be called ‘the Luckiest Generation.’ Why? Because of the sacrifices made by our fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers. Meanwhile, my generation has not been idle, exactly. Perhaps we did not fight in a great war or weather a depression. But in our own way, we have contributed. We have made advances in science, in the arts, in technology. And some of us did fight in wars-perhaps not great ones, but wars nonetheless. Others of us were wounded on foreign battlefields-”

“Gimme a break,” the correspondent for The Washington Post muttered to himself as he typed. “You drove into a minefield to get your rocks off.”

“-in wars very different from the great ones fought by our forebears. Still, war is war.

“Thanks to advances made by my generation, people around the world can now find decent coffee on practically every street corner. Can send e-mails. Participate in chat rooms. Type on laptop computers. No, Mr. President, we have not been idle. But these accomplishments pale in comparison with the ones of those who went before us. And so, Mr. President, it is-truly, surely, indeed, absolutely-time for us to make the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of our children and give back. Give back our own lives, so that those who come after us may not become enmired indeed, enmeshed in an endless swamp of debt and misery. This, Mr. President, is truly the least we can do for our country.”

Cass and Terry watched Randy’s speech on TV at the Tucker offices.

“Not bad,” Terry said. “A little Kennedyesque, but not bad.”

“Give the man credit,” Cass said. “He definitely put it on the table.”

“You know he’s gonna get crucified.”

“Yes,” Cass said, “but Randy has a tendency to rise again on the third day.”

Gideon Payne had also been listening. His minions had alerted him that a speech of keen interest to the pro-life lobby was being broadcast to the world. He watched impassively, stroking his neatly groomed beard. A smile spread across his face like an oil slick. Gideon thought, Truly the Lord is bountiful. Here is manna from heaven, and all covered in butterscotch sauce.

Had he merely dreamed a beautiful dream, or had a United States senator just gone on national television to advocate mass suicide as a means of dealing with the deficit?

He gave his chinny-chin-chin a little pinch to see if it was a dream. No, his beard felt real enough under his soft fingertips. This was no dream. It was the lowest-hanging fruit in the Garden of Eden. Gideon could scarcely believe his good fortune. He himself could not have devised a more succulent fund-raising opportunity. He folded his hands across his capacious belly. His gaze wandered to his phone. He counted silently. One, two, three…

He’d only reached fourteen when it began to ring-line one, then line two, then all ten lines, lovely little green lights full of sound and fury, signifying…money.

Bucky Trumble did not bother to knock on the door of the Oval Office.

He said a bit breathlessly, “Jepperson just introduced a bill on the floor of the Senate that would legalize suicide in return for tax breaks. It’s Devine’s Transitioning scheme repackaged as legislation. And he got Fundermunk to co-sponsor it.”

President Peacham barely looked up from his desk. “The ones committing suicide are Jepperson and Fundermunk. Hardly know how we’ll survive without ’em. Screwy fucking idea.”

“I’m not so sure, Mr. President.”

“Why aren’t you?”

“Because, sir, the White House is getting so many e-mails in support of their ‘screwy fucking idea’ that our servers are crashing. The switchboard’s flooded, too.”

President Peacham looked up. “What are you saying?”

“They’re from kids, mostly. The under-thirties. A lot of it may be generating from her blog. But they’re going for it, and they’re going for it big-time. We’ll know more. I’m monitoring.” Bucky walked in a circle as he talked excitedly. “We’ll know more. I’ve got Sid Fiddich working the Hill, see what he can-”

“Will you stand still, for chrissake. You’re making me dizzy. If you want to exercise, go to the goddamn gym.”

“This thing’s a can of worms. A big can. Our numbers are bad enough as is. We’re going to need the eighteen-to-thirties next November. Meanwhile, you can’t-there is no way we are going to support a legal suicide bill. I don’t care how bad the crisis is. Meanwhile, this is going to raise her profile big-time. Everyone knows this was her idea.”

“In other words…”

“In other words, Mr. President, it is now officially too late to re-arrest this chick.”

For that much, Bucky Trumble was in fact grateful. He had not been looking forward to bribing the nation’s top law enforcement official to commit breach of justice by dangling the promise of a Supreme Court appointment in a second term that at this point was looking elusive at best.

The president let out a lungful of disappointed air. “Well, we’ll just have to tough it out, won’t we? Blame it on Fred. If they come after us, you can just throw up your hands and say, ‘I had no idea she was Frank Cohane’s daughter. President sure as hell didn’t.’” He drummed the desk with his fingers. “What in the hell is Jepperson up to, anyway, sponsoring this piece-of-shit legislation?”

“He’s coming after us, is what he’s doing. It’s a way of making us look bad for not doing anything on Social Security reform.”

“Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. No one can do anything about Social Security reform! It can’t be done. Period.”

“Tell that to the under-thirties. Tell it to Jepperson. He’s playing it for all it’s worth. I think he’s going to challenge us for the nomination.”

“ Randolph Jepperson? I’ll kick his overbred ass back across the Charles River so fast his bow tie will spin.”

“I wouldn’t underrate him. He can sound like a rich boy, but he’s a mean son of a bitch. Look what he did to poor old BS Smithers. And he’s rich. Real rich.”

“I’m not afraid of that candy-ass. I’ll tear off his prosthetic leg and beat him to death with it. On national television.”

“That’ll get us the disabled vote. Look, Mr. President, we need to manage this. Let’s see how it plays out. You know who’d be good to have on our side? Gideon Payne.”

“Sweet Jesus. Don’t even-”

“Hear me out-”

“Damnit, Bucky. Last time that goateed butterball was in here, he lectured me-me-for a full fifteen minutes on why I needed to intervene in that vegetable case down in Georgia. Christ in a refrigerator, the woman’d been in a coma for fifteen years. She had a flatter brain scan than a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian mummy. And he wanted me to issue an executive order to plug her back in. Who appointed Gideon fucking Payne the conscience of the nation anyhow? Hell, he killed his own goddamn mother, didn’t he?”

“I don’t much personally care for him, either, Mr. President, but slice him or dice him, he is Mr. Pro-Life. I’m saying let’s make him an ally. Let’s at least not have him as an enemy. Remember the Godfather’s rule: Keep your friends close, your enemies-”

“Damnit, Bucky, every time you quote that at me, you’re about to drag some asshole in here and make me kiss his ass. I’m president of the U.S.! My ass is the one that oughta be kissed! What the hell’s the point of being president, anyway? Been so long since anyone kissed my butt, I wouldn’t know where to find it at this point.”

“Feeling better, sir?”

“Yes,” President Peacham barked. “I goddamn well do.”

“Shall we say three o’clock, then? Today?”

“Get the hell outta here.”

Bucky Trumble stood his ground.

“All right. All right. Bring the little turdball in. I’ll kiss his ass. Then I’ll go out on Pennsylvania Avenue and kiss all the tourists’ asses. Jesus Christ. Goddamn job isn’t worth a-”

“Thank you, sir,” Bucky Trumble said, leaving quickly.

Frank Cohane’s office at Applied Predictive Actuarial Technologies looked out over a coastal California vista redolent of eucalyptus and kelp.

Some days he could hear the contented bellowing of sea lions after they’d been gorging on schools of squid. But for the occasional great white shark, life for them was good; for himself, Frank mused, life was very, very good.

He was a tightly focused man, but he sometimes allowed himself to muse on that anxious time all those years ago, after he’d quit Electric Boat to work on the first start-up. Seemed like another century. Actually, it was another century-another millennium, for that matter.

For a time, Frank had regretted-even felt a bit guilty-about secretly taking out the second mortgage on the house to finance the start-up. But his motives had been pure: to support his family. It was Helen who stormed out of the house with the kids and filed for divorce. It was her decision. There he was, working himself to death, for her, for the kids, and she’d acted as if it were the end of the world.

He admitted now to a certain retaliatory pleasure in how the timing had worked out in the end. If Helen had waited a few months more before filing for divorce, she’d be a very wealthy woman now instead of teaching high school in New London and living on a monthly alimony of $1,500. The start-up took longer than planned-they all do-but after Frank and his two partners took it public, they’d split a handsome $540 million.

Shoulda hung in there a little longer, honey.

For a time, he had felt bad about Cass. Spending her Yale tuition money. That…did rub his conscience wrong. But he’d made it up to her. And then some. He calculated how many shares in the company her tuition money would have bought. That $33,000 was worth $27 million. He’d written out a check and sent it to her. Twenty-seven million dollars! And what had she done? Sent it back to him, ripped into little pieces. She had her mother’s Devine genes. And for good measure-just to let him know what a prick she thought he was-she’d changed her name legally to Helen’s maiden name. From that moment on, Frank Cohane decided, Okay, Cassie, we’re even. He wasn’t going to spend the rest of his very nice life wringing his hands over two pissed-off Irish women.

Now Frank had a second family-and frankly, it was an improvement over the previous one. A vast improvement. He had a new wife, Lisa, a hard-body former tennis pro, who, unlike lumpy soft-body wife version 1.0, liked to have sex so much and so often that he now routinely took one of those long-lasting erection pills. The only downside was that if an even mildly erotic thought crossed his mind any time during the day, the affected gland responded like an overwound jack-in-the-box. This was not ideal when, say, standing onstage at the annual shareholders meeting giving his pep talk. But the upside-rrrrrrrrowl.

Lisa did, he thought sighingly, come with an encumbrance in the form of a teenage son, Boyd, by the previous marriage to that moron restaurant manager. The kid was harmless, though not much in the conversation department. Lisa had the notion that the boy would be greatly improved by sending him east to college. In California, Frank noticed, “east” was synonymous with certain things, like “education” or, as Boyd put it, “learning shit.”

Frank was all in favor of sending him 2,500 miles away-in any compass direction, for that matter. Lisa announced that the only place to send him was Yale. He wondered: Had she gotten the notion because of Cass? When she told him this, he burst out laughing, a fit of spontaneous mirth that did not sit well with the second Mrs. Frank Cohane. He explained that with Boyd’s grades and SAT scores, his chances of getting into Yale were approximately those of launching a spitball to the moon.

Lisa had another approach in mind, so Frank Cohane found himself fulfilling his promise of building Yale a new football stadium, albeit for a different child. Yale’s cheer was “Boola boola” (whatever the hell that meant). To Frank, it rhymed suspiciously with “Moolah moolah.”

Meanwhile, Frank had made other improvements to his life. His company had a fleet of half a dozen jets, and he personally had just taken delivery of a nifty little toy called a Javelin, a civilian-version fighter jet with a top speed of Mach.9. On the ground, he drove a Ferrari Enzo. He owned a 275-foot motor yacht that had just appeared on the cover of Vulgar Yacht Quarterly and a new twelve-meter sailboat that he was skippering in the trials for the upcoming America ’s Cup race.

His previous twelve-meter, an experimental marvel of high technology, had proved a bit too high-tech. Its revolutionary carbon-, Kevlar-, and PVC-core-epoxy composite hull had, one day in five-foot seas and thirty-knot winds in the Tasman Sea, suddenly splintered into about five thousand pieces. Three crew members had drowned. Back on the dock, he had made an unwise comment to a reporter (“Now I’ve gotta break in three new winch monkeys”).

The quote went around the planet in about ten seconds, earning Frank a profile titled “Sportsman of the Year” in Time magazine. The Internet reveled in his disgrace. When he Googled his own name, the top ten thousand hits had to do with his ill-advised quote. But it spawned a brainstorm.

When he got home, he called in his top programmers and gave them their orders. Within a month, they’d developed something called Spider Repellent^TM software. It was so simple, he wondered why no one had thought of it before. You loaded the software and typed in the search words. Say you’d been arrested for drunk driving or soliciting a prostitute, or you’d been in a gossip page biting the ear of some pretty young thing in a nightclub. Or, for that matter, you had been charged by the SEC with swindling your shareholders. You typed in your name, along with “drunk driving” or “prostitute” or “ear” or “embezzling.” Spider Repellent^TM found all the references to you on the Web and-deleted them. Simple. Brilliant. Lucrative. Spider Repellent^TM was making Frank’s company jillions. His biggest customers were celebrities and rich people who behaved badly, and there were plenty of those.

Now Frank Googled his own name and “winch monkeys.” Google reported back, “No matches.”

Sure, people in the racing world remembered his gaffe, but it was a long time ago now. And in the brave new world of the Internet, if it wasn’t on Google, it didn’t exist. He had a new boat, and he was going to kick ass with it in the Capetown-to-Rio Rolex Challenge.

This pleasant California morning-they were all pleasant, California mornings-Frank was checking the news on the Internet.

A few paragraphs into the story about Senator Randolph K. Jepperson’s Voluntary Transitioning bill, he saw a reference to Cass Devine. It occurred to him that he should probably be grateful for the difference in their surnames. There was no advantage to being publicly known as the father of the poster girl for the burn down Boomer retirement communities movement. Frank wasn’t about to volunteer (to use her word) their consanguinity. Some people knew but didn’t bring it up around him-and never around Lisa.

She had never met Cass. Frank was just on the verge of asking her to become Mrs. Frank Cohane (version 2.0) when Cass got herself blown up in Bosnia with Congressman Jepperson. The incident caused Frank a mixture of guilt and alarm-guilt because she was there because of him, alarm because…was she really in a minefield screwing this guy? It wasn’t long before the guilt and alarm had congealed into annoyance at Cass. That should have been a happy time for him: new family, new fortune. Lisa confirmed his annoyance, and in time her feelings toward Cass were about the temperature of liquid nitrogen.

One day, not long after he and Lisa were married, Frank mentioned the fact that Cass had changed her name to Devine. Lisa said that Boyd would be proud to have the name Cohane.

Frank was frankly not overly fond of his stepson, but Lisa kept on him about it, so he eventually adopted Boyd legally-after instructing his lawyers to make certain changes in his will.

On this sparkling California morning, as Frank looked out on his peaceable kingdom and read about events back east, it crossed his mind that this screwball bill of Jepperson and Cass’s could somehow affect RIP-ware, his latest software brainstorm.

RIP-ware was the company nickname for a software program that, if all went according to plan, would make Frank Cohane one of the richest men on the planet. Its actual name was Bio-Actuarial Dyna-Metric Age Predicator (BADMAP), and because of its vast potential, few people outside the company knew about it. Frank had invested a huge chunk of his fortune in it.

It worked this way: A person’s DNA profile, family history, mental history, lifestyle profile, every variable-how many trips to the grocery per week, how many airplane flights, hobbies, food, booze, number of times per month you had sex and with whom, everything down to what color socks you put on in the morning-were all fed into the software. RIP-ware would then calculate and predict how and when you’d die. In the testing, they had programmed it retroactively with the DNA and lifestyle profile of thousands of people who had already died. RIP-ware predicted their deaths with an accuracy of 99.07 percent. In a simulation, it predicted the death of Elvis Presley-just four months from the actual date of his demise. The ultimate “killer app.”

Insurance companies had been working on similar programs. What a windfall it would be for them if they could sell life insurance to someone they knew was going to live another forty years-and conversely decline life insurance to someone the computer predicted would be pushing up daisies within two years.

Another field of vast potential were the old folks’ homes. Typically, these demanded that a prospective resident turn over his or her entire net worth in return for perpetual care. You could live two years or twenty years; that was their gamble. But if a nursing home knew, in advance, that John Q. Smith was going to have a fatal heart attack in 2.3 years while watching an ad for toenail fungus ointment on the evening news, they would much rather have his nest egg as advance payment than that of, say, Jane Q. Jones, who RIP-ware predicted would live another twenty-five years and die at the ripe old age of 105. Frank was already in negotiation with a huge national chain of nursing homes called Elderheaven. The majority shareholder was that fat little pro-life guy Gideon Payne. Cass had just gone after him on that Sunday morning TV show recently. Small world. Meanwhile, RIP-ware was being marketed to companies very discreetly. Its high accuracy was nowhere referred to in company documents. As far as the broader world knew, it was simply “acturial enhancement software that assists companies in certain market sectors with paperwork reduction and simplification.”

But now a United States senator had proposed on the floor of the Senate that Americans should be allowed to decide for themselves when they died-and, morever, be compensated for it by the government. Frank detected a blip on the radar.

He called up the video of Jepperson’s speech on his computer, listened for a few minutes. He studied the face on the screen. Good-looking. A bit effete, aristocratic. You could tell at one hundred yards the guy came from money. More than a little pompous-who did he think he was? Sounded like he was practicing giving his presidential inaugural speech.

And suddenly Frank found himself wondering: Is my daughter screwing this guy?

In one of the last good talks around the family kitchen table that he had with Cass, she had told him that she was still a virgin. She was just eighteen. Then she went off to the military, and then they had the falling-out-in absentia, when she found out about the mortgage-so the two of them had never had the father-daughter talk about…boys.

After the incident in Bosnia, there were hints in the media-more than hints, if you considered one of the tabloid headlines: DID THE EARTH MOVE FOR YOU, TOO, DEAR?-about what they were doing in the minefield in the first place. Then Cass went to work for the guy in Washington. And now here he was championing her national suicide scheme. She had to be sleeping with him.

He tried to shrug it off, but Frank Cohane found himself unaccountably curious.

Had to be.

He certainly had the means to find out. He had Washington connections. Hell, he had the town wired. He was an Owl-a major donor to the party. A big, snowy Owl. He and Lisa had spent a night in the Lincoln Bedroom-doing things that old Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln never dreamed of. They’d sat one row behind the president and Mrs. Peacham at the inaugural parade. They’d been in the presidential box at the Kennedy Center. And once a month, his private line or private cell phone would ring and he’d hear those sweet words: “This is the White House operator trying to reach Mr. Frank Cohane.” And on would come the voice of Bucky Trumble, chief political counselor to the president of the United States, his closest adviser.

The last time he called it was to say, “The president and I were talking about you in the Oval this morning.” The Oval. It was all bullshit, Frank knew. With these political guys, it was almost all bullshit. But high-level bullshit. And ear-pleasing bullshit all the same. And what Bucky had gone on to say was most definitely pleasant: “He’s got you in mind for a significant ambassadorial posting. Don’t let on I told you, okay? He’ll want it to be his surprise.”

Frank had run that one, too, through his bullshit meter. What exactly constituted a “significant” ambassadorial posting? London? Paris? Tokyo? Those were his definitions of significant. Moscow? Dreary. And without a cold war going on, somewhat pointless. You’d go broke trying to sell RIP-ware in a country where the average male died at fifty-seven-of either alcoholism, lung cancer, or a bullet. He did not particularly relish the idea of four years playing wet nurse to a parade of U.S. oil executives looking for preferential leases in the Novaya Zemlya trough.

Ireland? Pointless. Appealing in a way, since his great-grandfather had come over and spent his life working in a coal yard in South Boston. You probably didn’t have to spend too much actual time in Ireland. But then the Irish press would hate you.

He ran it by Lisa that night after some cosmic coitus. (She was working their way through the third edition of The Joy of Sex and had found a position called “la grande morte.”) Her only comment-about the ambassadorship-was, “I wouldn’t have to, like, learn a language or anything?”

That would be one advantage to London or Dublin, Frank considered. Then he thought of all the paperwork. His fellow Owl Steve Metcalf had been nominated to be ambassador to some utterly pointless country in Africa and had spent $150,000 on lawyers filling out the four-hundred-page financial disclosure form-“Please list all stock and securities traded in the last 40 years”-only to be humiliated in front of some grandstanding senator who asked Steve what countries his country shared borders with. Uh…well, Senator, I’m certain that the embassy has people who, uh, stay on top of issues of that, uh, nature. A bit embarrassing, considering that the country was an island. Steve never quite recovered socially.

Frank was in the process of mentally writing off an ambassadorship when his private phone rang. “This is the White House operator…”

“Frank? Bucky Trumble!”

They always managed to announce their names with a little trumpet blast, frank recognition of, and unbridled joy in, their own importance.

“The president and I were just talking about you. He asked me to give you a call, in fact.…”