Boomsday

Chapter 18

Cass had come up with the notion of a television and Internet advertising campaign to stigmatize old age. This would, theoretically, nudge voters toward greater acceptance of Voluntary Transitioning. Randy loved the idea and, in the spirit of the thing, volunteered to pay for it out of his own deep pockets. Terry was less enthusiastic, for practical reasons.

“Cass,” he said, “some of our best clients are CEOs in their sixties, some in their seventies. You really want to run public service announcements on TV telling them they’re selfish bastards and should kill themselves? Speaking as the founder of Tucker Strategic Communications-and incidentally as your employer-let me just say that this company is not out to commit suicide.”

“Terry,” Cass said, “we’re not urging our clients to Transition.”

Terry furrowed his brow and clicked on one of the storyboard slides in the PowerPoint presentation Cass had prepared. He read aloud:

“Spot number four. ‘Resource hogs’? Now we’re calling old people resource hogs?”

“Problem?” Cass said matter-of-factly.

“Well-it’s a little harsh, isn’t it? I never thought of Grandma and Grandpa as resource hogs. What happened to meta?”

“Terry, Terry, Terry, we’re simply making the point that nonproductive longevity only consumes resources that would be better spent on younger generations, who are currently being crippled with passed-along debt as a result of-”

“Thank you, Ayn Rand.”

“Okay.” She smiled. “So, no problem?”

“What about this one?” Terry punched up another slide: “‘Wrinklies’? We’re calling them Wrinklies?”

“I wasn’t going to put that on TV.”

“That’s a relief,” Terry snorted.

“I’m going to plant it,” she said brightly. “Have a third party send it into CASSANDRA and then make it our own. I think the kids’ll go for it in a big way. ‘Wrinklies. Ew, gross! So heinous.’”

“Was Einstein a Wrinkly? Eleanor Roosevelt…Helen Keller?”

“They gave something back. Einstein showed us how to blow ourselves up. Now that’s what I call transitioning.”

Terry gave her a worried look. But on she went. “This campaign is about self-indulgent aging Boomers who are wrecking the U.S. economy and economically enslaving the next generations. This is not about The Miracle Worker or Eleanor Roosevelt. Though she really was wrinkly. Will you please just chill?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Yes. For heaven’s sake.”

“I couldn’t tell. This one…” He clicked on another slide. Up came an image of a group of gaunt, hungry-looking youths staring hollow-eyed at a large empty bird’s nest. The caption read: “What kind of nest egg will you leave them?”

“I guess it works,” he said. “But kind of a downer, though.”

“It’s supposed to be. What’s eating you? It’s like you’re suddenly a double agent working for the American Association of Resource Hogs.”

Terry sighed. “I don’t know. This is starting to give me the creeps. Urging old people to kill themselves. Norman Rockwell it ain’t.”

“Omigod, Terry.”

“What?”

“That’s it! You are such a genius.” Cass hugged him. “You really are. It’s beyond brilliant. I can’t even discuss it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Norman Rockwell.” Cass snapped her laptop shut and dashed out of the conference room, leaving Terry to shake his head and go back to work.

Two days later, she burst into his office with the laptop, smiling like a cat that had just swallowed an entire cage of parakeets. He hadn’t seen her look this happy-ever.

She put the laptop in front of him, fired it up, and clicked on the “Start Slideshow” icon.

Terry watched.

Cass had hired a computer graphic artist to duplicate Norman Rockwell’s sliced-bread, rooster-crowing, soda-fountain, friendly-cop, Thanksgiving-turkey America -only on the theme of Voluntary Transitioning.

The first slide showed a man and wife in their seventies, holding hands, smiling as though they were embarking on an ocean cruise. They were walking into the doorway of a homey, gingerbread-style house whose address might be 15 Maple Street. Above the doorway was a bright yellow sign that read, VOLUNTARY TRANSITIONING CENTER-WELCOME, SENIORS!

The next illustration showed a pair of perfectly healthy-looking people in their mid-sixties thumbing their noses at a frustrated-looking Grim Reaper. The caption read, WE’LL DO IT ON OUR TIMETABLE, THANKS-NOT YOURS!

There were half a dozen illustrations. The last one showed an elderly man in a comfy, fluffy bed attended by an attractive and shapely nurse dressed in a traditional starched uniform. The man was smiling sleepily. The nurse was smiling back at him as she adjusted the valve of an IV drip running into his arm. The caption read, OFF TO A HEAVENLY REST!

Terry looked up at Cass, who was still beaming.

“Well?”

“I’m speechless.”

“Aren’t they fabulous?”

“Lethal injection never looked so warm and fuzzy. A happy occasion for the whole family. I’m sure the Rockwell estate will be thrilled.”

“You were so right. It needed to be uplifting. Randy loved them.”

“Did he? How is Randolph of Bosnia?”

“Ooh,” Cass said, “do I sense a note of-something? Hel-lo,” she said. “Who was it that kept telling me to get laid?”

“He’s a client. And what is Tucker’s first law?”

“No schtupping the clients. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I figured this is different.”

“How, exactly?”

“Among other things, I knew him before he was a client. Why are you being such a hard-ass about this?”

“Because I don’t like Randy.”

“Okay. So. Don’t sleep with him.”

“I think you’re getting way wound around the axle,” Terry said. “I’ve seen it happen before. Young, impressionable account execs-they go over to the client side. They drink the Kool-Aid. You end up having to deprogram them. I’ve seen it happen to the best minds of my generation.”

“Thank you, Allen Ginsberg. No one was focused on this before I came along. Now everyone’s talking about it. It’s my friggin’ Kool-Aid.”

“And you’re drunk on it. Resource hogs. Wrinklies. Norman Rockwell goes to Auschwitz?”

Cass looked down at the floor. She said quietly, “I’m just trying to get a debate going about the future of Social Security.”

“All right,” Terry said. “I don’t want you to get hurt. I’ve been around politicians way longer than you have. When push comes to shove, trust me-it’s you over the side first, not them. Wait a minute. Why am I even having to tell you this? He blew you up in a minefield!”

“Yeah, and he’s the one limping for the rest of his life. Give the man a break. If you don’t like my Norman Rockwell thing, I’m open to suggestions.”

Terry considered. “Why not celebrity endorsements? Like the milk ads, only they’re drinking poison. They’ve got little purple hemlock stains on their upper lips. ‘Got Transitioning?’”

Cass smiled. “You can’t help it, can you. Even when you’re being a total jerk, you’re brilliant.”

“Either you’ve had too much Red Bull,” Terry said, “or you’ve gone over to the dark side. Either way, you’re grounded. Lose Norman Rockwell.”

“This is no time for timidity.”

“That’s right,” Terry said. “Next Tuesday is the time for timidity.”

It was an old joke between them. On any given day on Capitol Hill, someone said, “Now is not the time for partisanship”-usually when he or she was about to be crushed by the opposition. Whenever Terry or Cass spotted the quote in the paper, one rushed to e-mail it to the other first. Whoever spotted it second had to pay for drinks that night.

“I’ve gotta go,” Cass said. “I’ve got a meeting on the Hill with Randy.”

“Tell Ahab I said hi.”

“That is so funny. I am, like, paralyzed with laughter.”

But in the elevator down to the lobby, Cass found herself wondering if she was, in fact, crossing some Rubicon of weirdness. She looked idly at her shoes. They looked dry.

She was disappointed, even quietly furious, over Terry’s reaction to the Norman Rockwell campaign. He might at least have said it was clever. Maybe it was a passion deficit on his part. Terry was a generation older than Cass. He could hardly be expected to muster the zest she was bringing to this issue. He’s also completely jealous, she told herself. “Ahab.” Honestly. Let’s all breathe into a bag and get on with it, shall we? One of the colonels in Bosnia used to say that.

As the elevator doors dinged open, she forced a shrug. Whatever. Thank God, she thought, for “Whatever.” “Whatever” could stop any unwelcome thought in its tracks. To be or not to be. Whatever. We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Whatever. Mission accomplished. Whatever. It was the philosophical equivalent of a Jersey barrier. Maybe she’d have it inscribed on her tombstone: Here lies Cassandra Devine. Whatever. So very meta. Like Transitioning.

Her BlackBerry began humming like an epileptic bumblebee. A news alert. She read: FATHER OF TRANSITIONING DIVA CASSANDRA DEVINE BLASTS OWN DAUGHTER.

She stopped. Took a deep breath. Stared at the display. Scrolled down:

Billionaire California hi-tech wizard Franklin Cohane says his daughter Cassandra Devine, originator of Senator Randolph Jepperson’s “Voluntary Transitioning” scheme to save Social Security, gives him “the willies.”

“She’s clearly dealing with some issues,” said Cohane. “It’s not pretty to watch.”

Cohane, who made his first fortune developing a package tracking technology which he sold to FedEx for $540 million, said he was taking the unusual step of criticizing his daughter because he found her proposal to offer seniors incentives to kill themselves “morally repellent.”

He is a member of President Peacham’s “Owl Nest” of major donors. To be an Owl, a person must donate at least $250,000 to the national party.

He said he had never discussed his daughter with the President or his staff, but wishes “the Attorney General had prosecuted her to the full extent of the law: Tearing up golf courses is a very serious crime, to say nothing of trying to overthrow the government.”

Cohane said he had not spoken with his daughter in nearly ten years, after a “family squabble,” and that she had rebuffed his several attempts at reconciliation, including a “mind-boggling” cash gift.

“She’s an angry kid,” he said. “I feel sorry for her. She’s all screwed up.”

He said he was coming forward because he was in the process of “increasing my visibility at the national level” and wanted to “publicly distance myself from someone I happen to be related to but am in no way associated with.”

Cass stood in the marble lobby listening to the sound of her heart. She didn’t know quite how long she’d been there, not moving, and then she heard a distant voice, ever so familiar to her. It was yelling insistently in her ear, shouting at her, screaming, bellowing: All right, girls-let’s put on our big-girl panties and move it!!!

It was the voice of her drill instructor at Fort Jackson. There’s something to be said for basic infantry training, Cass thought as she headed out the door onto the shimmering heat of K Street. Too bad they didn’t issue M-16s in civilian life. She’d have used it.

Gideon Payne, hat in hand, mopped his moist brow-Lord, it was warm-and pressed the doorbell to the attractive redbrick house on Dumbarton Street in Georgetown. A servant dressed in a white jacket opened the door almost immediately.

“Signor Payne! Buon giorno.”

“Buon giorno, and how are you today, Michelangelo?” Gideon loved calling a living human being Michelangelo, even if it was only a butler. The interior was blessedly cool.

“Monsignor is expecting you, signor.”

He led Gideon across the highly polished creaking floor that had in its day absorbed the footfalls of a Supreme Court justice, an ambassador, and various cabinet members of various administrations. It was over 150 years old and had high ceilings and a graceful curving staircase above an eighteenth-century Italian fountain that burbled softly. Lustrous oil paintings with religious themes hung on the walls. In a niche stood a minor but rather good Saint Sebastian by Donatello. Michelangelo opened the twin doors to the study.

Gideon’s host, seated behind a museum-piece rosewood desk, rose and smiled broadly. He was a handsome man in his early fifties, tall and dark, beautifully tanned, graying about the temples, with an athletic build. He was gorgeously accoutred in the raiment of a monsignor of the Roman Catholic Church. Around his neck hung an especially fine silver chain and crucifix that had once adorned the sternum of Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, future Pope Pius IX and promulgator of the doctrines of the immaculate conception and papal infallibility. A family keepsake.

“Geedeon.”

“Massimo.”

The two men embraced warmly. Gideon’s friendship with Monsignor Montefeltro went back years, but they had really bonded during the affair of the Stomach Madonna.

As a good Southern Baptist, Gideon had been brought up to despise papists and popery. But as a canny Washington operator, he knew the value of coalition building. From his earliest days at SPERM, he had reached out to the Roman Catholic Church to make common cause. They were natural allies in this war. Monsignor Montefeltro had been posted to Washington as its number two, a sort of shadow papal nuncio. The actual papal nuncio was Rudolfo Cardinal Moro-Lusardi, the pope’s ambassador. Massimo reported not to him, but directly to the Vatican. For his part, Massimo Montefeltro viewed American Baptists as (barely) more evolved than swamp creatures; but as a Jesuit-trained diplomat, he was acutely aware of the value of a man like Gideon Payne. The odd thing was that these two dissimilar men actually liked each other.

They recognized in each other a kindred risibility, ecclesiastical equivalents of the famous remark by the skeptic who said he didn’t understand why two psychiatrists, meeting each other on the street, didn’t burst out laughing. It wasn’t that Gideon and Monsignor Montefeltro believed they were part of a joke, but that they were mutually conscious of their own outrageousness: two splendid peacocks in the service of Christ.

They admired each other’s sartorial style. Gideon was fascinated by the Roman Catholic Church’s ecclesiastical garbs and vestments. He had in him a bit of Miniver Cheevy’s yearning for “the medieval grace of iron clothing.” He would listen to Monsignor Montefeltro for hours as he talked in detail about the finer points of stoles, soutanes, phelonions, and cinctures. After a particularly engrossing description of the holy father’s new Lenten chasuble, spun from Persian silkworms and woven with ground Badakshan lapis lazuli, Gideon sighed with wonder and declared, “How very drab by contrast are my own brethren!”

Monsignor Montefeltro smiled and rattled off the names of half a dozen Southern Baptist televangelists whose combined incomes were larger than the gross domestic product of Delaware and who dressed like archangelic pimps. Gideon’s own attire-floppy-rimmed Borsalino, silver-tipped cane, high starched collar, cravat, velvet vest, gold chain, and watch fob-itself suggested a Natchez riverboat gambler who was trying to maintain a low profile while visiting up north and not quite succeeding, on purpose. Both men wore rings on the pinky finger. Gideon was envious of the fact that by protocol, Monsignor Montefeltro was entitled to have his kissed. Gideon meanwhile could offer other portions of himself for the same office.

Monsignor Montefeltro had risen to prominence by courting wealthy American Catholic widows, persuading them that the path to sainthood lay in leaving their (husbands’) fortunes to the church. He had to date brought in a total of over $500 million for Mother Church. In recognition of this service, he received a living allowance that would certainly have given St. Francis of Assisi pause, if not an embolism, and for his base of operations, so to speak, the Georgetown town house, which could not by any means have been called monastic.

“I saw you on the television,” Monsignor Montefeltro said. “You were very good, Geedeon. But that woman! Dio mio.”

“Oh, Massimo, it was a catastrophe,” Gideon said. “An epic catastrophe.” There were few others to whom he would have made such a frank admission.

Montefeltro smiled. “Still, you were very good. At least you didn’t murder her for the cameras.” Montefeltro’s English was actually Oxford level-he was, in fact, fluent in seven languages-but he found it expedient, especially with the widows, to employ a slightly flawed syntax and accent and sometimes forgot to switch back to his normally impeccable English.

Both men laughed.

“Next time, I will. It is that woman that I have come to discuss.”

“Then you must stay for dinner,” said the monsignor, “for I have the feeling that you have very much to relate to me.”