Palladio

3

HOURS LATER, SORE and still a bit lightheaded from the impact of the fall, John sat apart from the others on Palladio’s broad front lawn and watched the firefighters pounce expertly on each last small stubborn flare-up of the great conflagration. The western end of the house was burned close to the ground; the columns at the entrance were blackened but apparently intact, and the east wing, though gutted to near-transparency on the bottom two floors, had not collapsed at any point. In just the past few minutes the whole ruined structure had seemed to take on, as the twilight smoothed it into silhouette, a more abstract wedge shape. During the lulls in all the shouting, John could still hear the fierce, diminishing hiss of water on embers, and an occasional ominous tick or crack. Smoke — dark at first, then whitening once it reached the heights still lit by the last of the sun as it dropped behind the mountains — rose straight as a chimney in the hot, motionless air.

He wondered if he might have a slight concussion. Red emergency vehicles of every description had torn a rough circle in the manicured grass around the mansion; they were idle now, though their engines had been left running and the flashing lights stuttered more vividly in the growing darkness. The Charlottesville police had set up a barricade at the driveway entrance, primarily to keep out the press. Of course, some of those guests still sitting on the lawn, or lying down or coughing or breathing through portable oxygen masks brought to them by the EMTs, were invited press themselves. John could make out several people talking into cell phones. Part of the general dreaminess that was overtaking him, as he sat on the grass with his arms around his knees, had to do with the knowledge that the whole thing had escaped his control once and for all.

Near his hip he felt an insistent pulsing, and he thought for a moment he might be bleeding; but in fact it was his own cell phone still clipped to his belt — he had set it on vibrate for Milo’s premiere. He knew who was trying to reach him. More than he could ever remember wanting anything, he wanted not to answer Mal’s call: but though the place was now gone from under him he still had a sense of stewardship about it, and so — after standing and walking a safer distance away from Fiona, who was being held upright under the arms by Jerry as she shrieked (that was the only word for it) into his chest — John answered.

“What’s going on?” Mal said angrily. “I call your office I get no answer, I call my office I get no answer. Where are you? What’s all that noise?”

John broke it all to him as gently as he could, which wasn’t so gently, considering that there were times when he had to shout into the phone just to be heard over all the engines and indecipherable radio calls on the lawn. He told his boss that the mansion had caught fire, a fire set by Jean-Claude, whose art of self-sacrifice had culminated in what was apparently a work incorporating his own suicide. Even when John had described everything as best he could, it was clear from Mal’s tone of businesslike optimism that the magnitude of what had happened would not sink in right away.

“Well, the important thing is that everyone’s okay,” he said.

John had to explain more carefully that everyone was not okay — that, while nothing was official yet, it seemed impossible not to conclude that Milo himself was dead. The fire was now almost out, but the house was beyond saving. And there was one other person still unaccounted for.

Mal fell silent. John then asked if by any chance he had spoken to Molly that day.

“Not since last night,” Mal said. “Oh no.”

“Now look, I actually think — it’s true no one seems to know where she is — but I actually have reason to think she wasn’t here at all when it happened. I … I went upstairs and looked all through your quarters. Every room. She wasn’t there.”

“Did you look for her car?”

John winced, and hit his head softly a few times with the heel of his hand. “No,” he said, starting to sprint across the lawn toward the house, “I didn’t think of it. God damn it! Hold on.”

But the firefighters had run another barricade across that end of the driveway and wouldn’t let him through. John pleaded, phone in hand, with the commander of the emergency rescue squad, telling him that the safety of one of the house’s residents was at stake. Too dangerous, he was told; what remained of the house on the eastern end was still being examined to determine the danger of collapse. As for whether or not anyone was still inside, they had people sweeping the place now.

“Ten, twenty minutes,” the commander said, his gray hair flattened with sweat. “Try to calm down.”

When John raised the phone to his ear again, Mal was already in the back of a taxi, speeding toward the Rome airport.

“I’m going to lose you,” he said. “Keep trying me.” Then the connection was broken.

John sat down in the grass beside one of the empty ambulances, between the house and the path to the orchard. Ten, twenty minutes. No one came over to console him or to see if he was all right. They sat and stood in little knots of shadow around the lawn. Maybe they were waiting for some official word about Jean-Claude; maybe they were unable to take their eyes off such an epic disaster and were waiting only for the fire department or someone else more thick-skinned in these matters to tell them when it would be seemly to leave. At the other end of the driveway, out by the road, John saw a portable arc light snap on in the dusk, beside the satellite trucks. He told himself that even if the red Sonata was still in the driveway, it didn’t mean anything for certain.

Finally the commander let loose with a startling whistle, as one would to a dog, and indicated to John with a nod that it was now permitted to walk around behind the house. Four or five ash-dusted cars, including his own, were there in the driveway behind the kitchen — one, an airport limo, had even had its hood smashed when one of the chimneys had fallen on it — but the red Sonata was not among them. Molly was gone.

John felt a huge spasm of relief, of physical relaxation, roll through him; in his weakened state, it all but knocked him down. With his hand on one of the dusty cars for support, he stared up at the intact balcony from which he had jumped. Just then one of the EMTs, a younger man, helmet in hand, walked up to him.

“The lieutenant says you’re in charge?” he said.

John nodded. “The owner of the house is out of the country,” he said.

“Right, okay. Well, we’ve been through the whole house. I’m sorry to have to tell you that we recovered one body from the western side of the building. But everybody else got out. The rest of the house is clear. We’ve been through all of it.”

“Thank you,” John said solemnly to him, and the EMT nodded curtly and backed away. A while later John got on his cell phone and called Mal, still on the ground in Rome, to tell him that the good news was that Molly was still alive.

* MESSAGE *

No Empire Lasts For ever.

*

IN A STATEMENT he handwrote in his airplane seat on the way back from Italy, Mal announced to the world that Palladio would rebuild, that its work would go forward despite the tragic and incalculable loss of life and historical property, not to mention the loss of the artwork hung, stored, or in progress in the mansion at the time of the fire, a loss estimated to go well into the millions. John typed it up himself — Tasha, angry and traumatized, had gone home to her parents in Richmond — and distributed it via the fax machine in his room in the Charlottesville Sheraton. He felt simultaneously proud and foolish. The Sheraton had given them two whole floors, that first disastrous night; but today he and Mal were the only ones there. The rest of them had flown up to Boston, where it turned out Milo’s parents lived, for his memorial service. As for Mal, Mr and Mrs Milo had tersely requested, through their lawyer, that he not attend. Mal chose to believe that this request was made out of the understandable desire for privacy, since his presence at the service would surely provoke the attention of the media. John suspected other motives, but he kept this to himself. Nor did he share with Mal his premonition — correct, as it turned out — that many of the artists, having taken advantage of this unimpeachably somber pretext for leaving, would not return to Charlottesville when it was over.

Return to what, after all? They couldn’t conduct business out of hotel rooms for long, if they expected potential clients to take them seriously. Two weeks went by before they moved their business operations to an office borrowed from their lawyer, a silver-haired Southern gentleman who looked at least a decade younger than his seventy-three years and who owned the two-story office building in which he practiced, in the commercial section of downtown Charlottesville. The move made sense, since most of what was left of Palladio was a matter for everybody’s lawyers to pick through anyway. In the flurry of local and then national interest in the half-sinister, half-absurd circumstances of Milo’s self-immolation, the Charlottesville DA had even announced he was opening a criminal investigation, but Shays laughed this off, both publicly and privately, and he was right. On the other hand, lawsuits filed by clients seeking refunds (even when the work they’d commissioned had already been completed and displayed — they claimed all the work that had ever emanated from Palladio, except for Milo’s, was tainted and devalued now), by a group of former employees claiming emotional distress, and by the Virginia State Historical Commission were all harder to ignore.

John sat at a desk six feet from Mal’s, without much to do, having been decorously told by Shays that the best help he could provide right now, in light of all the pending lawsuits, was not to say anything at any time to anybody. Still, he did have a particular responsibility. Several times a day Mal would ask him if there was any word yet from, or about, Molly. There was not. As far as taking a more active approach to finding her, the few things they could think to try had all been tried in the first day or two: the Virginia state police had no luck locating the car; and if she had any credit cards there was no record of her using them anywhere. Nervously, John had called Dex in New York, who affirmed that he had had no contact at all with Molly, though if he did he would welcome the opportunity to hang up on her or slam the door in her face, and by the way John and Mal deserved what they had gotten and should go fuck themselves. Later that same day, John dialed the number of Molly’s parents’ home in upstate New York. It rang and rang, but no one answered.

He couldn’t know whether Molly had taken his advice to heart and fled the place, coincidentally on the day it burned down; or whether she had simply been out on an errand that day, returned to find the house in flames, and taken this as some sort of opportunity or directive to move on; or, as seemed most likely to him, whether there was some other explanation entirely for her disappearance, one that he wasn’t equipped to imagine. John’s most persistent worry, though, was that it would occur to his boss, in a moment of idleness, to ask about what might have preceded that disappearance, if John had seen Molly, spoken to her, heard her say anything significant in the days just before the fire, when Mal was still in Italy. But he never asked. As with the lawsuits, which he made no effort at all to dispute but only to dispose of, Mal made a point of refusing to dwell on the recent past, because his current mindset was all about the future.

Bulldozers came and razed the walls of Palladio, and with them, so it seemed, went the general air of secrecy that had surrounded the place; anonymously sourced news accounts of its mysterious inner dynamics, of Milo and Mal Osbourne and the woman whose arrival in the mansion seemed to prefigure its destruction, went into their customary upward spiral. Milo’s ambiguous legacy proved suggestive to every sort of extreme opinion. To some, the whole episode only cemented Mal’s own genuinely messianic status. Then there were those who concluded Milo had been nothing but a sort of double agent all along, bent on destroying the house of Osbourne from within, all for the cause of integrity in art, even at the cost of his own life. And many, to be sure, did not consider Milo an artist at all, but simply a young man suffering from a mental illness, whose suicidal cries for help were turned to account in a Barnumesque fashion by cynics interested only in money.

And then in September, John, too, left Virginia, under sad circumstances. His mother died of a swift and unprecedented heart attack, on her knees in the flower garden behind her condo. Mal, who despite their physical proximity had lately seemed quite withdrawn, frowned at this news but remembered to offer John his condolences. John went out to the parking lot behind Shays’s office, put on his sunglasses, and drove to South Carolina to help his stepfather, Buzz, make arrangements.

* MESSAGE *

You have to appreciate authenticity in all its forms.

I will peer around corners.

I will see past clouds.

I will get to the source.

“Isn’t it good to believe in something?” he asks the crowd as he strides on to the stage after an introductory hymn from the choir, his eyes bugging, teeth gleaming, blond-tipped hair holding fast in its swept-up place. “Isn’t it bizarre to believe in something?”

But there’s a twist. The artist is not Garry Gross, who took the picture, but Richard Prince, who took a picture of the picture and then

THE RIGHT RELATIONSHIP IS EVERYTHING

*

THE NANNY CALLED in sick, which was a huge inconvenience; it would shorten Roman’s hours at work, and Jo’s, and certain things they had come to take for granted they didn’t need to know, like what time Little Bear was on, they would now have to figure out for themselves. But at least you could be sure, when the nanny said she was sick, that she wasn’t faking. This was only the third time, and she’d been with them five years. You couldn’t get too angry about it.

“Do we still have yesterday’s Times?” Roman asked his wife. They were back to back in the small kitchen, preparing the two different breakfasts for the kids.

“I took the papers down to the basement last night,” Jo said. “Sorry, I thought you were done with them. Why, was there something in there—”

“That’s okay. I didn’t … somebody emailed me about it just this morning. I’ll go look for them.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

After breakfast Roman took the baby on his shoulder and went down to the garbage room in the basement. There were roaches everywhere. This is no place to raise children, Roman thought. He felt Isaac’s tiny chin lift up off his shoulder blade and could picture his son’s goggle-eyed expression as he strained to look around. One new place was as amazing as another to him.

Roman looked through the pile of recyclable paper, vaguely disgusting even though it was only a day old, until he found the New York Times with the little “Joanna Gagliardi” sticker on it. He wiped it on his leg and went back upstairs.

They agreed to split the day — he’d go into the office in the morning while Jo, who had a fundraising job at Columbia University, stayed home with Isaac; Roman would then pick Evgenia up from school at one o’clock (it was Friday, a half day for her, just to make things even less convenient) and take over at home for the rest of the afternoon so Jo could get up to Columbia and at least maybe return a few phone calls. Tag-team, she called it, when these situations came up. Which was quite often: late nights in the office, weekends, school vacations, illnesses. Their marriage had evolved, over the years, into a series of these trivial, unacrimonious negotiations over time, like labor disputes really, between two old, old adversaries who knew each other so well that they weren’t really adversaries anymore.

He walked Evvie to school; she kept her hands stuffed in her pockets and her chin tilted up slightly, just like her father. She walked without seeming to feel the burden of the enormous yellow backpack she carried. It was as if she expected to be gone for days, sleeping outdoors. All her secrets were in there. The two of them didn’t exchange a word. They hadn’t argued, and Roman knew she loved him possessively; she was just getting to that age, that’s all, she had her own thoughts and didn’t need to have those thoughts validated for her by sharing them with an adult. That age came shockingly early, like everything else, for kids who grew up in New York. For just a moment the scene before his eyes was displaced by a premonition of the handful she would surely be when she was fifteen.

“Goodbye, sweetheart,” he said to her outside the classroom. She allowed him to help her get free of the backpack, in order to take her jacket off.

“Is Maria going to die?”

So that’s what all the silence had been about. “No, honey. Of course not. Maria is as healthy as a horse, believe me. She just has a cold, like everybody gets. I’m sure she’ll be back and feeling fine Monday morning. You can do a get-well picture for her if you want.”

On the subway he read yesterday’s Times article. There wasn’t too much in it he hadn’t learned yesterday, around the office, on the phone, on the Internet, in the Post. John Wheelwright, his old partner, had invited a group of corporate clients and art-world poobahs to watch one of his employees commit ritual suicide under the rubric of performance art. In taking himself out, this Milo character had taken out the whole storied antebellum building as well, though there was some question — some fierce debate, actually, among pundits, lawyers, and art critics — as to whether or not this had been a planned part of Milo’s “piece” or an unfortunate and unintended consequence of it. Mal Osbourne had been conveniently out of the country when it happened. At least one of his newly disenfranchised employees was trying to connect all this to Osbourne’s girlfriend, some younger woman he apparently kept stashed mysteriously in the attic like Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, and though this seemed even to Roman like a bit of a stretch, the tabloid press was howling in search of her — unsuccessfully thus far, for she seemed, on the very day of the tragedy no less, to have disappeared.

His old partner. Roman wasn’t at Canning & Leigh anymore either. Those places tended to grow fat on their own success, fat and conservative, and before long they were churning out junk every bit as revolting as the reactionary giants of Madison Avenue. Success brought money, and money always brought a specific kind of fear — the fear of having to do without the money again, Roman supposed — which manifested itself in a creeping dependence on focus groups, management reviews, probationary management reviews. When the atmosphere turned dark like that you just had to get out of there.

So Roman was now at a new shop on Mercer Street, called the Kollective. Ten people, no hierarchies, no office doors, which was the only aspect of the place, actually, that Roman found a little bit precious. The ten came from agencies all over the city, sensitive, disgruntled, highly creative artists who chafed against any sort of corporate restraint. People who rebelled even when they knew it wasn’t good for them, much like Roman himself.

The emergence of these little splinter groups, this rising and thinning and dividing like the branches of a tree, happened all the time in advertising. It was like the Communist Party: all these factional disputes, questioning each other’s ideological commitment, cadres spontaneously forming to protect the doctrine from impurities and compromise. It would probably happen at the Kollective someday, too, Roman knew. That was all right. The interesting question was when, or if, Roman himself would wind up becoming the conservative one, sick of moving on, proud enough of something he’d built to want to stay and wither into irrelevance along with it.

In the office they had all heard the story of the burning of Palladio; they’d spent much of the previous night emailing one another with rumors and jokes about it. No one was in the mood to work. They knew Roman used to work at Canning & Leigh back when Mal Osbourne had his name on the door there. But they weren’t aware that Roman and John Wheelwright had been partners. It didn’t take long to emerge. Roman certainly wasn’t going to lie about it.

“No!” yelled Douglas, a copywriter with a ponytail and a terrible beard; like many of them he was so young he made Roman feel like he was turning into his own father. “No! Partners? Get the fuck out of here!” They all sat forward in their sofas and club chairs. The place was decorated like a million-dollar fraternity.

“You and the guy were partners?” said Kathleen, the receptionist, ignoring a ringing phone. “For how long?”

“Two years,” Roman said softly. “We worked on Doucette, on Fiat, the National Beef Council, whole bunch of things. We did some good work.”

“So what was he like?”

Roman said nothing right away.

“Did he show sadistic tendencies?” Douglas asked helpfully. “Killing small animals in the office, anything like that? Did he ever chase Canning through the office with a cigarette lighter?”

“We were friends,” Roman said. The others were cowed momentarily by the evident feeling in this remark; and, feeling exposed, not wanting to appear too sentimental in front of his colleagues, Roman moved along. “I think he has to be telling the truth about it, that he didn’t have any idea, that no one did. I don’t know. He had this great girlfriend, a lawyer, who he dumped to go take this job with Osbourne. He was a very nice, very polite guy. From North Carolina. Hated to argue. Hated it. I almost always got my way with him because of it. Very kind, very meek almost, but meek in a good way. Naive. I never understood how naive until he was taken in by this whole Mal Osbourne thing.”

“Yeah, well, that’s in the toilet now,” Douglas said.

“I heard they got it on film,” Kathleen said. “A snuff film, basically. I heard MOMA’s already offered Osbourne a million bucks for it, but Osbourne can’t get it back from the cops.”

“Hey, who says irony is dead?” Douglas said.

No one accomplished much that day, which suited Roman fine. He kept one eye on the clock all morning long. He was nagged by the knowledge that he had left a lot out of his account: not so much about John, but about John and himself. The bitterness with which they fought at the end — well, with which Roman fought: John, he remembered, was mostly just taken aback. Too startled to defend himself against the force of Roman’s feelings of betrayal. And that was how it had all ended between them — the partnership, and there was a friendship there that ended, too.

Roman ate his lunch on the subway. Evgenia greeted him with a solemn look when she emerged from class into the cubby room, as if this were a gravely unusual occasion, having Daddy pick her up from school.

“Did you remember I was coming?” he said cheerfully, stroking her hair.

They didn’t even take their coats off at home; Jo, anxious to get going, already had the baby in the stroller and the diaper bag packed. She kissed them goodbye on the corner of Broadway and went off to work, and Roman and the kids walked to the playground.

Isaac was asleep in the stroller by the time they got there. Roman pulled the canopy down to keep the sun off his face. Evvie saw some friends from school and ran off to play. Roman sat on the bench, watched her for a while, watched all the kids enjoy their noisy sovereignty.

He was secretly thrilled, on a kind of secondary level, that this whole pretentious Palladio effort had failed so spectacularly. He felt he had known it all along, though certainly no one could have predicted the form in which this failure would come. But he was also self-aware enough to be unsettled by the depth, the intensity, of that thrill. It had a bitter quality, in fact. Palladio’s success, while it lasted, had eaten at him. Not just in the way of jealousy, either, nor in the sense that he felt a private humiliation at being proven wrong (for he never accepted that he had been wrong). It was more that it made him feel alienated, profoundly so, though from what, he wasn’t sure. He just didn’t want to live in a world that took people like Mal Osbourne seriously.

Still, there had to be something going on down there that nobody was talking about, something that had wrought such a change in everybody. What was it? Maybe it would all emerge in time.

It stirred him up, as he sat on the bench, hands in pockets, surrounded by the penned energy of a bunch of five- and six-year-olds at the start of their weekend. And all emotions, as they escalated, eventually converged in one place with Roman, and that place was anger. He was angry all over again that someone as thoughtful as John could have made such a stupid decision — by which he meant the decision to move to Charlottesville in the first place — and thrown away the promise of his life. He was angry all over again at John for lying to him. And there was Osbourne himself, and the woman, whoever she was, and the reporters who had already started to pick them apart for the sake of the common amusement until there was nothing left of them at all.

“Daddy,” Evvie said. She was suddenly standing right beside him. “Did you bring snacks?”

He looked through the diaper bag and found a bag of Wheat Thins Jo had tucked in there.

“Here you go,” he said.

She looked at him with that air of detachment, that air of taking his existence, as a parent, entirely for granted.

“Why are you mad?” she said.

Roman, startled, said, “I’m not mad, sweetie.”

Evvie lost interest; she took the bag of Wheat Thins from his hand and ran off. Roman saw her sharing them with some girls he didn’t recognize. Maybe Evvie had just met them. She formed these instant friendships all the time.

That was the hard part, he found, about spending any extended time with the kids. You had to be so careful not to show them what you were feeling. They could only understand it, at that age, as something either directed at or caused by themselves somehow; and so you had to hide it from them. And then maybe it wound up emerging, hours or days later, with your wife or a telemarketer who called during dinner or some idiot on the street who didn’t pick up after his dog; or in some other inappropriate way.

* MESSAGE *

As we enjoy today’s Super Bowl, let’s remember that Americans of all races and ethnic groups are on the same team. Working together we can win.

On Mr Olivo’s wish list are Elvis Presley, Dag Hammarskjold, Jimi Hendrix, “maybe Nelson Mandela”

Self-expression is everything.

In this, the season of giving, the gift of freedom is the

greatest gift of all.

Become unaffected;

Cherish sincerity;

Belittle the personal;

Reduce desires.

SELLING THE GOVERNMENT LIKE SOAP; IT

SEEMS TO WORK

A people who do not dream never attain to inner sincerity, for only in his dreams is a man really himself. Only for his dreams is a man responsible — his actions are what he must do. Actions are a bastard race to which a man has not given his full paternity.

*

JOHN STAYED IN South Carolina, in the spare bedroom of the condo by the golf course, for a month, seeing to the disposition of his mother’s effects, as well as, quite unexpectedly, the sale of her home; for Buzz, it turned out, with a lack of decorum that seemed all the more astonishing given his historically passive and unflappable manner, announced his engagement to a widow who lived in the same development. We only get one life, he told John with a sympathetic smile, and she and I are too old to lose any more time to appearances. The widow’s brother had a place on Boca Grande which he was too infirm now to use; and so John found himself standing in the driveway waving to them, his mother’s widower and a woman he had never met until a week ago, as they drove off to Florida to live out the rest of their lives.

The condo sold quickly (John, who had always found the place somewhat featureless and numbing, was surprised to learn that there was a waiting list of prospective residents), and when the buyers called him there one evening to ask politely if he would be willing to throw in his parents’ old furniture as well, he couldn’t think of any reason to say no. He hung up and looked around the place — the sectional sofa, the big glass coffee table, the gigantic armoire with the gigantic TV in it — feeling a strange and ambiguous sort of awe at the seamlessness with which his mother’s final home would pass into the hands of amiable strangers in about a month’s time.

He would have to be around then for the closing; time enough, certainly, to head back up to Charlottesville and see what required his help. But after putting it off for a day or two, John admitted to himself that he wasn’t all that anxious to get back, at least not right now. Things weren’t the same. Living in a hotel room; working all day in a tiny spare office that didn’t belong to them; and the work itself — there simply wasn’t much of it at this point. Long hours that summer had been passed sitting idly at his borrowed desk, trying only to be unobtrusive while Mal, with his fingers laced in his hair and a look of vengeful determination on his face, thought.

Finally John called Mal at Shays’s office. Mal was actually somewhat brusque on the phone, even before John got around to the subject of his call.

“How are things around there?” John said. “Pretty quiet?”

“Still pretty quiet, yes,” Mal said.

“Well, here’s the thing. I guess I didn’t really understand, until I got away, that this whole thing has taken kind of an emotional toll on me, and then with my mother’s passing away … If it’s okay with you, Mal, I need some more time.”

“That’s fine,” Mal said evenly.

“I mean, if there were anything pressing then of course I would come back. But, you know, in all fairness, I never once took any vacation time while—”

“It’s fine, John, really. I don’t need you for anything right now.”

John was brought up short. He couldn’t tell, over the phone, if there was any sort of bitterness in Mal’s tone or if he simply meant what he said.

“I have Colette here to answer the phone,” Mal went on. “And the rest of it, right now, is all pretty much inside my head anyway.”

John felt an unfamiliar surge of pity. He needed to say something just to shake it off.

“No word from her, then?” he said.

“No. So what will you do down there? Keep an eye on your stepfather?”

John didn’t feel like going into it. “I don’t know. Drive around a little bit, maybe. I haven’t been down this way, except to see my mother, in so long. So, maybe just a little motoring excursion through the South.”

There was a pause, before Mal said, “You’re not going off to look for her, are you?”

“No,” John said, startled, feeling his color rise. “No, nothing like that.”

* MESSAGE *

“We had already developed a brand plan that encompasses who I am,” Mr Woods said. “American Express isn’t going to branch off into areas where we’re in conflict. So I’m going to be promoted in the way I hope to be perceived.”

Is this a great time, or what?

Ever tuck your baby in from the airport? You will.

Ever send a fax from the beach? You will.

Advertising is not a new thing. We think of the stained-glass windows in Chartres Cathedral as art, but when they were made they were art only incidentally. They were put there to sell theology — they were billboards — and if the people who built the cathedral had had neon they would have gone crazy for it. There’s nothing new about any of this. The mosaics in Byzantine churches and early Christian churches are billboards selling Christianity. Tiepolo’s ceilings are Counter-Reformation propaganda. Selling is an old

CHANGE EVERYTHING

*

ALL THE WORK was in Los Angeles. But Dex knew — and his friends in the business loved to tease him by confirming — that though he might be capable of surviving a short visit to Los Angeles, there was no way he could ever live there. He was too quick, too belligerent, too much in need of stimulation. It was a moot point, since at this stage no one was offering him work anyway; but it got him thinking, in his many idle hours, that he really was a stranger in his own country, a kind of internal exile, because as far as he was concerned there was nowhere off the island of Manhattan that was adaptable for living. He was stuck there.

And so, while another man in his position — faced with the humiliation of having his live-in girlfriend stolen from him by the one man in all the world he most despises — might have considered leaving town and starting over, for Dex the only truly viable option was to lie about it. He told his friends who asked where Molly was that she had developed a drug habit and he had thrown her out. He felt no guilt about selling her out in this way — look what she’d done to him, after all — and, in terms of being exposed, was comforted by the thought that she had never really kept up a close friendship with anybody in the business. She knew them all through him.

When they had first returned to New York together, after Osbourne asked him to leave, Dex was more energized than ever, full of ideas for making the Palladio documentary even without Mal’s cooperation. But no one would finance any of those ideas. They all wanted to see the inside of the place on film; failing that, there had to be something damning, something to subvert the iconic status of Osbourne himself, and in that area Dex had nothing more concrete than his own deeply felt sense of injustice that the man was so popular in the first place. Dex was returning, in fact, from yet another of these disastrous meetings, trying to kowtow before unimaginative money men, on the very evening he came back to his apartment and found none other than Mal Osbourne standing right there in his living room, condescending and triumphant, with his arm around Molly.

Now Dex’s savings were just about gone. He tried to get back to work. Out of desperation he even accepted an offer to work as an AD on the third sequel to a teen sex comedy; he tortured himself for weeks over the shame of it, and then in the end the studio head was fired and the whole project went into turnaround before even one day of photography. Then one morning he picked up the paper and read about the burning of Palladio. His very first thought — before he got to the paragraphs that mentioned Osbourne’s missing girlfriend — was what a legendary ending this would have made to the film he had imagined shooting there. But his own less hypothetical connection to the events in Virginia had been made clear enough to him by the end of that day, by which time he had unplugged his phone rather than field another call from a reporter wanting to know about Molly, how it felt to have her stolen from him by a famous person, what it was about her that seemed to drive men to such extremes, if he had any idea where she might have gone.

His friends didn’t avoid him after that — many of them had half suspected him of lying about his breakup with Molly all along — but he avoided them, hypersensitive to any real or imagined condescension in their voices now that they knew he had been cuckolded and made a fool of. There was no sense in pretending he wasn’t humiliated, since he had taken the trouble to lie about it so elaborately in the first place. Fuck them anyway, went Dex’s reasoning.

Broke, he finally agreed to accept a gig his exasperated agent had secured for him, directing a commercial for deodorant, on the condition that he be allowed to do it under an assumed name. It only took a day, and by the middle of that day his distaste had been at least temporarily supplanted by the pleasure he took in getting a shot just right or in having a crew to order around. The agency that hired him was very pleased with the result and eager to work with him again. Dex could have as much work of that sort as he wants, in fact, but he only takes enough of it to get by; he doesn’t want it to define him. In between jobs he’s back to sitting in his kitchen and reading through the spec screenplays his agent’s office forwards to him, hundreds of them, looking for the one that doesn’t embarrass him, the one that comes anonymously from out of nowhere to bear out and ratify for him his own vision of the world.

* MESSAGE *

It will be a free literature, because it will serve not some satiated heroine, not the bored “upper ten thousand” suffering from obesity, but millions and tens of millions of workers, those people who make up the best part of our country, its strength and future.

YOUR COMFORT IS MY SILENCE.

YOU KILL TIME.

I am deeply troubled by the suggestion that the university has abandoned its historic commitment to freedom of expression in the process of developing the contractual agreement.

I SHOP THEREFORE I AM.

We Democrats need to speak frankly and often about personal responsibility, knowing right from wrong and being prepared to punish wrong, loving our country and the American ideal, hard work, and caring about those who need help.

Art or Advertising? Either Way, Seoul is Mesmerized

*

HER MOTHER USED to insist on accompanying her all the way on to the train, fussing over her, talking to the conductor, afraid Bethany would miss her stop, fall asleep and wake up in Manhattan. But then one time the train actually began pulling out of the station with Joyce Vincent still on board and she had had to pull the emergency cord. The police were there by the time that one was over. So that put a stop to the humiliation; now her mother just handed her her overnight bag in the parking lot, hugged her, and anxiously watched as she took the stairs to the platform.

It was always nighttime when Bethany rode the train — Friday night when she left, Sunday night when she returned — and she liked the insular, underpopulated, anonymous feel of the sixty-five-minute ride each way. She was fifteen and she did not welcome being looked at. The conductor took her ticket and after that she didn’t have to deal with another face, besides her own reflection in the darkened window, the whole rest of the way.

No one to make fun of how she looked, or to pretend to ignore it in a patronizing way, which was maybe worse; no one to judge her or exclude her; no eyes in which to see her own pitiable nature reflected. It was sweet to get away from her mother, too, not because she was unsympathetic to Bethany’s problems but because she was way too sympathetic. She secretly loved it when Bethany or her brother Kevin fucked up — because it confirmed her own view that the damage done by her ex-husband, the kids’ father, was insurmountable and continued to ramify. She wallowed in her children’s failures, as in her own. Still, she put them on the train to Rhinebeck every weekend to see him, because that’s what the court had ordered.

Kevin hadn’t been on one of these trips with her in about three months now. He just didn’t want to go. Nothing special against his father: it’s just that there was a lot of stuff going on most weekends at home, parties and such, and he didn’t want to miss it. What were they going to do, make him go? He was two years older than his sister and was starting to go bad in a serious way. Bethany knew about a lot of things, drugs and stupid petty crime, that her parents would fall over dead if they ever found out about. Mostly, though, he was just so nasty. No compassion for anyone. Boys were different, but Bethany wondered if this state of advanced bitterness was something she herself was about to grow into, considering all she and her brother had in common.

On the bright side, her dad had been a lot nicer to her since Kevin had stopped coming. He felt so guilty all the time anyway. He had this small house he was renting in Rhinebeck, which was kind of a wealthy town, and a job at a different branch of the same bank he had worked at in Ulster, back before everything blew apart. It was easy, in his chronic state of remorse, to get things out of him. Last month he had bought her these Doc Martens she liked, just because she saw them in a store window. Eighty bucks.

Outside, she knew, were trees, and scrub, and the highway, and the houses and cluttered yards of poor people, and from time to time the river. No loss, not being able to see any of it. She got out her Discman and put on the new Kid Rock.

Some of her pseudo-friends, hearing where she went on weekends, told her stories about getting stoned in the train-car bathrooms, which were huge on account of the wheelchair-access laws. Or hiding in them to beat the fare. Or having sex in there, on a bet. Bethany wasn’t interested. She was still a little scared of experiences like that. It was one reason she secretly didn’t mind missing the various parties on Saturday nights, the keggers in the woods, the gatherings at the elementary-school playground.

“Can’t,” she’d say. “I have to go visit my dad.”

“Oh, right,” they’d say. “Drag.”

They were pulling into the Rhinebeck station now, and there he was. He stood in the floodlit parking lot, hands jammed in his pockets, next to his car. He wore a big parka over his suit. Too vain to wear his glasses, he squinted at the train, trying to find her face in one of the bright windows. Bethany watched him search for her. The music blasted in her ears.

* MESSAGE *

MAYBE LUXURY DOESN’T MAKE YOU SOFT AFTER ALL

COMPROMISE IS JUST A POLITE WORD FOR

SURRENDER

“I make images and they make images, so why not put them together?” Mr Rodrigue said. “Would Andy Warhol have done this? Yes.”

THE WOMB IS OVERRATED

Self-appointed moral critics throughout the ages have warned of moral declines when what they should have hailed was moral change. Today is no different.

May Technology Bring Us Together

“Who wants to call themselves ‘Jew’?” Ms. Bleyer asked. “We’ve been called Jews for 4,000 years. It’s played out. Heeb just sounds so much cooler.”

In February 1994, Benetton began its campaign for peace.

*

THE FRANTIC, ESCALATING nature of publicity was such that people all over the country got sick of the story of Jean-Claude Milo within weeks, and forgot it in all but outline; still, even after it all seemed to have blown over, Palladio received no inquiries regarding new business of any kind, nor even any expressions of patient support from faithful clients wondering when and where they expected to reopen. If the connection between these two phenomena — Milo’s death and the obsolescence of Palladio — seemed at least instinctively obvious to the world at large, to Mal it remained frustratingly oblique. For whether one saw Milo as a martyr to his art or simply as an inadequately supervised lunatic, the fact was that he had never expressed any dissatisfaction with his life at the mansion, never made any attempt to dissociate himself from it. Indeed, the last two years had been indisputably the most productive of his life. Why should his death, even taking into account its violent circumstances, reflect on the larger concerns of the place, or on the nature and the quality of the work that was done there?

Mal couldn’t fathom it. With little else to do, he brooded on it with increasing bitterness until he gradually lost touch with the idea that the whole episode, to one way of thinking at least, had not been about him at all. In the popular fascination with the story he could see only a calculated, opportunistic effort to bring him down. He was an innovator, a visionary, and there are always people — hordes of people, in fact — who are interested in seeing such a person fail.

At some point he resigned himself to the idea that Molly, wherever the hell she had gone, was not going to come back; but the most alarming aspect of this realization was how little effort it took to resign himself to it. He had never felt as though he understood women anyway. Still, he wondered what had come over him — barely two months ago he had been ready to throw everything away for her, he had been fixing up a villa to surprise her with on their honeymoon. His ex-wife would never have recognized him.

The lawsuits were settled. The artists had dispersed, back to the lives they had forsworn in order to come to Virginia, though the blow was softened for most of them by their considerable savings. Mal let Colette go with a year’s severance, money that came out of his own pocket. Every morning he drove from his room in the Sheraton to his room in Shays’s office building, where he now sat by himself, answering the phone when it rang. One morning, as he tilted back in his chair with his hands folded on his stomach, staring up at the whorls on the stamped-tin ceiling, his cell phone went off in his pocket: it was his contractor, calling from Umbria. The marble bought at great expense for the small terrace facing the hillside had cracked in the first frost; the quarry was refusing to replace it, insisting that the problem could only be attributed to incompetent masonry. When Mal hung up fifteen minutes later he felt less depressed, his energies less scattered, than at any time in the last few months, and when he thought about it he realized that he had managed to forget that he did still have a home somewhere in the world after all, even if it was one he had never lived in. Then there was Italy itself, a country he had always loved, a country that understood the ancient verities, unlike America, which masked its cultural rootlessness with the constant exaltation of the new, which had, in place of a sense of eternity, perfected the art of forgetting so as to be able to learn the same things over and over again with undiminished enchantment.

Though his contractor assured him it wasn’t necessary, Mal flew overseas to settle the dispute over the marble; he told Shays not to expect him back anytime soon. His plan of action is simply to read, manage his estate, live in leisurely obscurity as an expatriate country gentleman. His sense of things is that if he disappears, people will forget him, and when that happens, it’s only a matter of time before they start asking for him again.

* MESSAGE *

THESE ARE REAL PEOPLE

NOT ACTORS

ABOUT TO FIND OUT IF THEY’RE HAVING A BABY

HUMANITY IS THE STONE

Entertainment is itself an ideology.

My goal is to destroy all my possessions. I have been making an inventory of everything I own, and it comes to 7,006 items, from televisions to reading material to records to old love letters to my Saab 900. These are the things I have accumulated in the 37 years of my life. Some of them are hard to part with, like my father’s sheepskin coat, which he gave to me many years ago. But I have made a conceptual decision as an artist to shred and granulate everything.

“You always have to consider that,” he said. “But you can’t exploit reality.”

*

A REPORTER CAME to see them in their cell. They tried not to get excited: they were under no illusions anymore about the intelligence or the political sophistication of most reporters. Still, it was an event. Part of the reason for going to jail was to serve as an example; in order to spread the word of that example, you needed help. And the guy was from the AP.

They were back in jail because the judge had tossed them in there for disrupting the trial again. No negotiations this time. Jack Gradison had lost it during one of the prosecutor’s objections, calling him a liar, shouting out statistics about wealth concentrated in the hands of a diminishing few. To Jack an argument was a fight, and he was not going to allow himself to be pilloried without responding just because they happened to be inside a government building. The judge had found Liebau in contempt too, even though he had said nothing, but Liebau had no problem with that. If you were a revolutionary then you should simply consider jail one of your addresses.

It was supposed to clarify the mind. A jail cell was existence stripped to its essentials, and so there were no distractions, nothing to cloud your thinking. Antonio Gramsci, one of Liebau’s heroes, had done his best thinking in jail, had written the invaluable Prison Notebooks there. Still, Liebau had to admit that this notion of existence stripped to its essentials wasn’t totally borne out by his own experience. Jail was, more surprisingly than anything else, an unbelievably noisy place. For hours at a stretch he found it hard to think at all.

The series of buzzers commenced, far away at first and then gradually louder, and by the time the last door was opened Gradison and Liebau, in spite of themselves, were standing expectantly behind the table. The guard watched them with a focus that looked like sleepiness, like an alligator’s.

The reporter’s name was Suarez. A good sign; minorities often were more receptive to the whole notion of concealed power. He asked them a few basic questions about their background, their court case, questions which, Liebau could see, Jack was a little miffed an AP reporter wouldn’t already know the answers to.

“So,” Suarez asked. “Let’s start then with your first meeting with John Wheelwright.”

The first meeting he was talking about was the first day of their first jury selection, many months ago now. Liebau smiled tightly and said that while their lawyer had subsequently told them that Wheelwright had been in the gallery that day, they hadn’t met him then. In fact, they had refused to meet him.

Suarez apologized and wrote hastily on his little notepad. But then, for some reason, the questions about this Wheelwright, this bagman, this insignificant lieutenant to the cultural fascist Osbourne, just went on and on. What did you say to him when he saw you. What did he say to you. How did he look. How did he act. Did he mention anything about … well, about anything. How did he strike you?

“He struck me as a worm,” Gradison said. “Listen, what the hell sort of interview is this?”

Then it all came out, how this insufferable gofer, who smiled at them all the time and offered them the moon if they would just agree to shut up, had flown back to his plantation and watched one of his underlings set fire to himself in the name of advertising. This guy was wound a lot tighter, apparently, than they had thought. Not that they had really spared a thought for him at all at the time, or even now.

“And apparently,” Suarez said excitedly, “there was a woman.”

Liebau was stunned and dispirited. This was what they had been steeling themselves for? They had gone to jail to await rebirth as minor players in some monumentally irrelevant soap opera about people they didn’t even know? It wouldn’t have surprised him a bit to learn that Osbourne had contrived this entire thing, to trump the growing public interest in Culture Trust and obscure the motives of these two men who couldn’t be bought, to keep them from getting famous for their dissent by making them famous for something else.

Contrived or not, that’s pretty much what happened. Search engines were becoming society’s short-term memory, and thus the names of the two cultural guerrillas were now bound forever to the name of the flunky who supervised the maniac who thought his own gruesome death would make a nifty Banana Republic ad. The galleries were full now for every day of their trial. Their judge seemed enraged by all the attention. She refused to grant any more mistrials; the defendants wouldn’t shut up, though, satirizing their captors, provoking their anger, refusing to legitimize the proceedings by sitting quietly through them. Her solution in the end was to put them back in their cell with a TV connected to a closed-circuit hookup. They sat on their bunks and watched their own trial on television, cursing at it, hurling unheard insults at all the participants, as if they were watching a beauty pageant or a football game.

They were found guilty and fined $500 each. When they refused to pay, the judge waived the fine and commuted their sentences to time served.

They were free, and undefeated; but it wasn’t the same without Osbourne on the scene. Their creative edge was lost. The thing they were fighting against seemed too diffuse now. There were ten thousand people doing something like what Osbourne had been doing, only not as provocatively, nor as well.

Six months later, broke, with nowhere else to go, Liebau convinced Gradison that their best option was to go back to the University of Eastern Washington and ask to be reinstated, at least as adjuncts. To their surprise, the petition was granted. Gradison taught English, Liebau anthropology, and Liebau had to admit to himself that he generally felt calmer — Kimiko, his wife, pointed out that his health had improved as well — as a result of this retreat into the world of artifacts, into the realm of dead culture. Still, a retreat was what it was. Like many college campuses these days, theirs sometimes seemed to him like a kind of retirement community for bitter or self-aggrandizing old radicals.

Gradison, though, had more trouble coping with his withdrawal from guerrilla life. The two men saw less of each other for a while. Then one night Jack drove out to Liebau’s remote A-frame, which, when they were younger and stronger, he had helped his old friend build, and announced — pacing up and down in front of the picture window, while Kimiko banged things around disapprovingly behind the door to the kitchen — that he had decided to turn himself in for a certain activity he had been a part of in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1971.

Liebau knew the activity to which he was referring.

“Are you crazy?” he said. “That’s not some five-hundred-dollar fine. That is the whole rest of your god damn life in federal prison.”

“I want to do it,” Gradison said sullenly.

“You can’t do it!”

“What’s the fucking difference!” Jack shouted. “Is there somewhere else I need to be?”

A door slammed, and moments later they listened to Kimiko driving off in the car. The two men wound up crying and getting very drunk. Through the wide picture window they saw the sun light up the forest, before they fell asleep.

A year later, Liebau’s tenure was restored. Gradison, according to the minutes of that fall’s English department meeting, had asked for and been granted a psychiatric leave.

* MESSAGE *

Have you met life today?

Rebel. Express yourself. Take your creativity to a whole new level. Express yourself.

Through the Ad and intent of the Advertiser we form our ideas and learn the myths that make us into what we are as a people. To Advertise is to Exist. To Exist is to Advertise. Our ultimate goal is nothing short of a personal and singular Billboard for each citizen. Until that day we will continue to do all in our power to encourage the masses to use any means possible to commandeer the existing media and to alter it to their own design.

In “A Tale of Two Rooms and a Blind Man,” the artist — who spent time in prison in China for making subversive art — invites us to feel, smell, or sense objects in a pitch-black room and then describe them — in a stark white room — to an elegant blind man, who then sculpts them from clay. Through 4/20.

*

FIRST JOHN DROVE up to Durham and stayed in a little bed-and-breakfast he found there, just reading, walking through the dignified campus and past the frat houses with the wading pools and legless couches in the front yard, feeling that particular pang one feels as an outsider in a community of the young. He was happy that way for almost a month, even as the gregarious curiosity of the old couple who ran the B&B turned into a more restrained suspiciousness at his ability to pay every week on time, in cash, without seeming to do anything for a living or to speak of any place he needed to get back to. When the semester ended and the town emptied out he drove — top down, wind roaring in his ears, the Porsche drawing admiring or challenging stares on the highways — to Savannah, where he hadn’t been since he was a boy, just to look around; and from there to New Orleans, where he thought he might stay to see Mardi Gras, just because it seemed like one of those things one ought to be able to say one had seen.

He wasn’t so naive as to expect he would run into Molly anywhere on the road. Ten years earlier he would have been looking around for her reflexively at every red light. Now, though, if anything he tried not to think about her, not out of regret or resentment but because he felt that his unchecked thoughts of her tended of their own accord to grow increasingly unfair. If you were too focused on yourself, then it could seem like it was Molly’s destiny to come into men’s lives, give them something to long for, and then withdraw again, with no residue but the longing. But then you started to turn her into a metaphor, which wasn’t right: which, in fact, couldn’t be done, because to equate her with anything else was to miss the point of her anyway. And meanwhile, she had to go on living her life.

In New Orleans he phoned Shays’s office, took a deep breath, and asked to speak to Mal. Shays got on the phone instead.

“John!” he said, his stagy courtroom drawl growing a little shaky with age. “Mal’s not here!”

John didn’t want to leave the number where he was, a French Quarter rooming house. “When will he be back?”

Shays laughed, entirely inappropriately, John thought. “Don’t know!” he said.

More questioning elicited the mystifying news that Mal had gone to Italy to settle some dispute regarding his house in Umbria. He hadn’t said when he would return, but John assumed that had to be an oversight on somebody’s part — maybe Shays’s, since he was, after all, a little deaf. Mal wouldn’t stay away for long. John still had his cell phone number; but in light of this news, he suddenly felt a bit hesitant about using it. He asked Shays to leave a message for Mal, saying only that he had called to check in, and would call again.

In the end, the town he was most charmed by was Oxford, Mississippi, and when he got tired of driving he went back there and rented a little two-story house near the university. To keep busy, and to meet people, he took a volunteer job as an illustrator for the Sewanee Baptist Church. Nothing too Bible-thumping, just illustrations to accompany Sunday-school texts, newsletter design, pamphlets for the troubled about alcohol abuse, marital difficulties, things like that. John hasn’t found religion himself; never in his life, in fact, has he felt a particular pull in that direction. But the work is pleasant and undemanding; John likes to draw; plus, he can’t help but be aware that there’s a certain integrity to it. He is putting his considerable talents — talents whose expensiveness his kind employers would never in a million years suspect — to good use, in support of certain strong, sincere, uncompromised beliefs, beliefs he respects, even if they aren’t necessarily his.

* MESSAGE *

Where do storytellers get their stories?

In some quintessentially Jeffersonian way, Puppy renders all who see it equal. With its coat of many colors, Puppy straddles a cosmic fault line separating the hilarious and the insidious, the architectural and the organic, the temporary and the timeless. In some Machiavellian way,

There’s No Future In Advertising.

In exchange for the $40,000 for the first academic year, they are expected to wear their First USA clothing whenever they make public appearances on their campus or others for the company. Each has to maintain at least a C average (Mr McCabe was a straight-A student in high school; Mr Barrett got A’s and B’s) and live up to the terms of amoral clause — if they misbehave, the deal is off. But Mr Filak said he fully expected to “re-sign” them for the full four years of college.

*

THE OCEAN SEETHED all day, low waves, too low to attract the surfers even if it had been warm enough for surfing, which it was not. That was the appealing thing about winter in the rambling beach house: the cold weather kept away the trespassers, the partyers, aimless scraggly young people not caring what they befouled on their rambling path to hell. The less appealing thing was that the cold inside the house had to be fought off via heating oil, which meant money, which they didn’t have. Lately they had been setting the thermostat at fifty-six degrees, and Richard had overheard some grumbling about it.

He watched the restless back-and-forth of the ocean — like an animal, he thought, like a tiger miserable in its cage — from behind the uncurtained picture windows. He would have opened the door to the porch, just to hear the surf for a moment, were the cold air not likely to antagonize the others even more. The beach house had been given to them, outright, by a former disciple. Gone now. And while the house itself had been his, all its contents, it turned out, had previously been granted to his ex-wife in their divorce. There was nothing in the five bright rooms now except about twenty sleeping bags, and in the dining room a portable altar from which Richard, every evening after dinner, sermonized.

Seven months ago there were twenty-eight of them there. Eleven had left, three new members from the local college had joined. Richard had to remind himself not to get too discouraged about that. When he thought about overall numbers, he worried, but when he thought about each of those eleven defectors as individuals, he couldn’t regret that any of them were gone. There was no room for weakness or hypocrisy, to say nothing of downright heresy. True, they were commanded to be fishers of men, but at the same time the purity of the group, the purity of their mission, couldn’t be diluted, or else he would ultimately lose them all. It was a delicate balance.

The sea snapped and unfurled. A soup made from lentils would be their dinner tonight, the fourth night in a row. Gratitude for this bounty would be a hard sell for his sermon afterwards, and anyway, he had taken that as his subject two nights ago. The important thing was fidelity to a cause, God’s cause: they should glory in their own severance from the wickedness and avarice of the world, glory in all evidence of it, even painful evidence. If you couldn’t move through even this brief life with a sense of purpose, then what were you? One of those surfers, maybe, looking for someone else’s property on which to build your small fire and get stoned.

Of course, words were hollow if Richard himself wasn’t willing to assume a leadership role.

He felt a kind of cramp, an actual hunger pang, under his rib. And in the next moment he decided he would begin a fast, something he hadn’t done for a long time, as a way of refocusing himself, and through himself all of them, on the unseen. He would invite, but not require, his followers to join him. It would be a way of separating the wheat from the chaff.

Not that fasting was without its spiritual challenges for him as well. For what he would have to keep secret from them, if the past was any guide, was that the whole experience excited him, in some private and vaguely shameful way. He was not afraid when that point came — the point at which you felt the touch of death. Once he had gone for nineteen days. The others had knelt in a rectangle around him and prayed, sobbing. It was glorious. He could probably match that now, or even do better. But was he really fasting just to purge his mind, or was there some subconscious wish underneath it, the wish to get it all over with, to put behind him the degradations of this life and arrive earlier than scheduled at the feet of a gratified Lord?

This was the sin for which he was constantly examining himself. Lust for death. He decided he would make it the topic of that night’s sermon.

* MESSAGE *

Nobody likes a group of angry do-gooders shouting SAVE THE WORLD. That’s not what this is about. This is a revolution, but it is a joyful revolution. It is a revolution based on a simple idea: Each of us has something inside that is making a noise. UNDERNEATH ALL OF THE LAYERS, theme-first layer and the get-out-of-my-way layer and the keep-your-hands-off-my-stuff layer, a halfway decent person is in there, waiting to be heard. That person isn’t angry. HE JUST WANTS OUT.

THERE IS A GREATNESS WAITING FOR YOU. We are busy, we are distracted, we are cynical, but this greatness waits. Through a speech by Dr King or the story of the Grinch or even a bumper sticker, THIS GREATNESS FINDS YOU IN A moment, unlikely or untimely, and suddenly you find yourself connected to humanity in away that shocks you. And this greatness will hold you up so high and strong that any previous version of YOURSELF SEEMS FLIMSY.

WE HAVE NO RIGHT to say anything about anything other than boots. We’re not ministers or gurus;we’re not philosophers or politicians. We are simply bootmakers who have found something to be true. THAT TRUTH IS SIMPLE: Every single one of us has a chance to do something big with our lives, something bigger than any coach or financial consultant or personal fitness trainer ever told us. And by waking up to this potential, and acting on it, amazing things happen: to other people, to ourselves. This has nothing and EVERYTHING TO DO WITH MAKING BOOTS.

*

WINTER WAS COMING again and nothing was going to stop it. Kay wasn’t sure what month it was, but in the nights lately she had definitely felt the cold. She couldn’t wait for Roger to do something about it. She had always been more sensitive to the elements. One good draft could put her on her back for a week. If he didn’t care about that by now, she wasn’t going to sit around and wait for him to start.

So she went up to the attic to bring down the storm windows; but while she was up there she found some other things, a box of Richard’s old record albums, an accordion file, its edges gnawed away, full of Molly’s old report cards from grade school and even her class pictures. Such a serious face! Her teachers all loved her, they knew that town couldn’t hold her, they knew she would make her mark. Kay sat on the attic floor and went through every piece of paper. This was an important find: something Molly’s own children might want to see. Molly would probably be embarrassed, of course; no mother can stand having her own kids see her as a child. By the time Kay closed the attic’s trapdoor behind her again, it was night. The storm windows were forgotten.

But she wrote a note about them in the diary that she kept in her bedside table drawer, so nothing was really lost. She’d only been keeping a diary for a few years. It started out as a kind of exercise in reminiscence, but before long it ceased reaching any further back into the past than the day on which each entry was written — a list of errands completed, mundane tasks performed, a way of accounting for her time. And each entry ended with a reminder to herself of all that was still left to do.

Of course, it was somewhat nebulous now, the whole idea of the end of the day. She wrote in the diary when she felt the need of it. She had no schedule for going to bed, or for getting up; no sense of finishing the day in the evening, nor of starting a new one in the morning. She would simply come to, with an awareness of some sort of gap in her consciousness, and would see by the sudden change outside the window that she must have fallen asleep for a while. Sometimes this would happen in her own bed, other times in Molly’s or in Richard’s. When she slept in Richard’s bed she tried to imagine what he was doing over in Germany. One thing for sure, though, she couldn’t fall asleep at all anymore if there was anyone else in the bed.

In her diary she had noted that a trip to the pharmacy would be necessary.

She never moved anything in the kids’ rooms, except to clean. It all looked just exactly as it had when they were teenagers. Posters, tapestries thumbtacked to the walls, small photos cut from magazines and stuck to the wallpaper above the desks with Scotch tape that she carefully replaced when it turned brown. It wasn’t for her sake. Maybe they would come back home looking for something in particular, something whose private significance she could never guess. Maybe Richard would come back from Berkeley, where he was a professor now, and his wife, hoping only for some hint, some relic, of the upbringing he had talked so much about, would be stunned to find instead everything kept perfectly intact, for her to see. She might start crying at the sight of it — the habitat of her beloved, when he was just a boy. They were expecting a baby of their own now.

It was night again, and she definitely felt the cold.

Molly too might be sitting somewhere, in her office with the incredible view, daydreaming about her childhood, about time lost; she might be recalling the way her room looked in the morning when she awoke, mourning all that as gone for ever. Imagine the rush of amazement and gratitude when she came home to find that nothing had been lost at all!

“Kay?”

Roger was calling. She sat on the bed in Molly’s room. “Kay?” She sat, calmly. The doorknob rattled and she realized that she must have locked it. After a while he went away. She could hear him leaving, even though his footsteps were always so soft.

She had no ill will left for him. For a long time they had just irritated one another, she remembered, but now something like the opposite was true, they moved through the house, which seemed plenty large enough for both of them now, in their independent orbits, natural, regular, where their paths might intersect once every few hundred years, as in an eclipse. The only habit of his that annoyed her anymore was the way he would turn off the radio. He’d go into a room, and when he’d leave it again she would enter to find the radio had been switched off. There were little radios in every room of the house, except the kids’ rooms. She kept them on the talk stations, all of them tuned to the same one, though she would change her station-allegiance every few weeks. Always talk, though. No music. Music got on her nerves; and there were so many things worth knowing about.

She didn’t know why he couldn’t just leave them alone. She wanted them on continuously — that’s why she’d gotten all electric ones. They weren’t turned up loud. True, sometimes she craved a little silence, but when she did she just went into one of the kids’ rooms and shut the door. She didn’t see why he couldn’t just do the same thing.

He had his work to do, and she had hers.

The children were never coming back. She didn’t even know where they were. Maybe they were dead. She imagined them dead, imagined the depth of her own agony, so vividly that she started to wonder if maybe someone had told her they were dead, told her that on the phone, and she had just forgotten it.

If you changed around their bedrooms, refurnished them, gave them over to some other use, then they were no longer shrines to the children’s having been there: instead they became shrines to the children’s having left. Besides, change them into what? If they weren’t Molly’s and Richard’s rooms, then what was that extra space doing there at all?

In the upstairs hall, she put her ear to the closed door of her own bedroom and heard the sound of Roger weeping. She listened for a while; discreet, unmodulated, the sound eventually gave way to silence. She went downstairs. It was morning again.

Time for the pharmacy. She hated to go, actually. She hated leaving the house, even for a short while; the forces of decay made too much headway while she was gone, so that when she did return, it could be overwhelming. And she hated driving the car. Especially now that she had to go all the way to Canajoharie just to get her prescription filled. The Rexall in town was still open but that witch who worked there had too many questions, questions about money, questions about the prescription and whether it hadn’t expired. Last time, the woman had put on those glasses chained across her flat chest and held the bottle itself up to the light, trying to insinuate that the label had been altered somehow. That was the end of that relationship; Kay took her business elsewhere, to Troy, to Middletown. She had found a place in Canajoharie that would be fine for a while.

She put on her scarf, her fur hat with the earflaps, her gloves, her long down coat. She got into the car and turned the heater up all the way. Something was agitating her, as was always the case on these trips. She knew they were unavoidable, but still, an hour or two spent in the car just seemed like such a waste of time. She couldn’t bear to waste time anymore. When she sat on the bed to write in her diary, she didn’t want to look back on the time and wonder where it had all gone. There were the storm windows to put in, for one thing.

And that was just the beginning. There was so much left to do. She could remember, it seemed like years before, talk about selling the house and moving somewhere else. Fine: once everything was finished. But if you started something, and then just abandoned it before it was completed, then what had the point of the time been at all?

* MESSAGE *

Do you keep the promises you make to yourself?

Wash Out Your Mind

Once you put something out there, people can interpret it anyway they like — nothing contains a specific meaning; nothing is degrading for anybody.

Communication Without Boundaries

BOOKS ARE OVERRATED.

Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar.

Bring Us Your Content

generally avoids such trivial speculation, suggesting instead that business in the new age will be transformed, the salvationary spirit of the entrepreneur will soar and the roving ambitions of individuals will find resonance in an incandescent web of knowledge. Freedom will grow, wisdom thrive and wealth spread. What more could a prophet of a “redemptive technology” possibly desire? Forget the mundane

The Voice of the People Can Topple a Despot.

While We May Fall Short, We Will Not Give Up,

Nor Will We Remain Silent.

In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion.

*

MOLLY, THOUGH SHE doubted anyone was looking for her anymore, traveled for a while in an indirect path, in the general direction of the center of the country. Mostly by bus; money was a problem, even after she’d sold the car. She stopped in a state she’d never been to before, in a city she had never heard of.

She’s been there a while now. She works for an insurance company, one of the larger ones, in their secretarial pool. She had no real secretarial skills when she went in to answer the ad for the job, apart from scoring 100 on their spelling test. But the woman who interviewed her, an overweight woman (but they were all overweight there) with a towering blond perm, kept looking hard at her.

“And you didn’t go to college,” she said, for the second time.

“No.”

“Where did you say you were from?”

“Virginia.”

The permed woman stared at her. Molly could see her weighing the possible effects of asking all the questions she wanted to ask.

“Okay, come here,” she said finally, standing up from her desk. Molly’s first thought was that the woman was going to hug her; but no, she was only waving Molly briskly into her own desk chair. When Molly was seated the woman spun her a quarter turn toward her computer terminal, and right then and there gave her her first typing lesson. QWERTYUIOP. After about five minutes they stopped.

“Okay, all right,” the woman said. “I can see you’re going to get it. I’ll give you a starting date of two weeks from now. That’ll give you time to practice at home, which you’d better do.”

“Yes, ma’am, I will, thank you,” Molly said, though she had no keyboard to practice on, and indeed, at that point, no home.

But that same day she found a place, a beautiful warped old clapboard house painted yellow whose two third-floor rooms had been converted to an apartment after the owner’s husband had run off, leaving her with two young children. The apartment had its own entrance, an outdoor wooden staircase which Molly was responsible for keeping free of snow and ice. When Caroline, the landlord, first saw Molly — an attractive single woman from out of town — she had her doubts, what with the kids sleeping right downstairs from her. But she’s proved to be an ideal tenant. Always pays right on time; hardly makes a sound.

Caroline’s children were a little shy with Molly at first — a little scared of her, in fact; a stranger, even a nice lady, creaking around upstairs as they lay in their beds in the dark was like a nightmare scenario come true for them — but nowadays, if they’re in the yard when she comes home from work, they’ll yell to her or even run up to tell her about some triumph at school. If Caroline is having a day where she’s particularly depressed, Molly will come downstairs and read to the kids before bed; then the two women sit on the porch glider and drink wine and talk in whispers until they’re sure the two children are asleep.

Molly’s little secretarial subdivision (“pod” is how they’re told to refer to it) contains five other employees, all women. Her supervisor is a woman too — Fern, the woman who hired her. In fact there are only five men in her entire department, only two who work on her floor. No one speaks to them. Molly lives in a virtual society of women, with the sole exception of her landlord’s son, Tucker, who is five. This wasn’t what she was after, in settling there, but in practice she feels it suits her fine.

There was one time, back in New York — around dawn, drunk, at home after a party at which some contemptibly suave TV actor whose name she didn’t even know had kissed her on the mouth in full view of everyone by way of saying goodbye — when Dex had hit her with his closed fist. It was in the chest, oddly, as if he’d changed his mind about it at the last instant. The next day she showed him the bruise and he apologized so long and hard that at one point he had started crying. He had always had a temper, and sometimes in the course of making a point he would grab her arm hard enough to leave a mark, but only that one time had it gone further over the line than that. The point was not to defend him but to remember how amazed, how genuinely compelled and shocked, she had been to learn that that was in him: the wild possessiveness, the terror of abandonment, the capacity to hurt. That seemed like a long time ago. Now she had no reason not to suppose that it was in all of them.

And there was something in her that seemed to bring it out. She knew she wasn’t supposed to think that way, that someone impartial might say she was only blaming herself for things that were not her fault: still, she thought and thought about it (little to keep her from turning over the past, in the evenings in her two-room apartment) and she could not conclude that she was wrong. They all wanted to make her talk, when all she wanted was to stay silent. Silence maddened them. They all wanted to make her belong to them, for no other reason than that they could see she did not want to belong to anybody.

There is a multiplex nearby, and when she needs to get out Molly takes the bus there. Some of the movies seem more promising to her than others, but usually she winds up seeing them all. Some more than once. This has gotten her into trouble on occasion — an unaccompanied young woman at the movies, in a city just large enough for people to lose themselves in. Once a man came and sat in the seat right next to her with just ten minutes left to go in Castaway.

The credits rolled. The man — he was her age, or maybe a few years younger — leaned toward her slightly, without taking his eyes off the screen, and said, “That Helen Hunt — what have I seen her in before?”

“As Good as it Gets, maybe?” Molly said.

“Oh, right, right.” The lights went up. “Hey, you know what?” he said, in a tone of playful conspiracy. “You’ve seen this movie before.”

Molly looked at him, alarmed.

“Yeah, I knew it,” he said. He had a kind of sallow, slack complexion, like someone who has lost a prodigious amount of weight. “I’ve seen you in here. In fact, I was thinking maybe you’ve seen me in here, too.”

Molly had lost a mitten, and looked around under her seat for it.

“I mean, come on,” the man said, laughing unconvincingly. “I mean, it’s not that good a movie.”

He followed her all the way to her bus stop, and by that time his banter had grown a little less ingratiating, a little more aggressive. But he didn’t get on to the bus. Molly next went back to the multiplex about two weeks later, and there was no sign of him.

Life alone, she understands, life without attachments, means that when she dies something will die along with her. But she doesn’t find any great cause there for regret — indeed on some nights, in some moods, there’s something grimly satisfying about it — and anyway, she still has a long, long expanse of time to get through, a life like a spy’s life, never disguised but essentially, retrospectively, unseen. At night sometimes she can hear, through the floorboards, the sound of Tucker and his sister Hannah crying in their beds. They are crying, Caroline has explained to her, for their lost father. Those moments only reinforce for Molly, actually, the wisdom of her own resolve not to become a mother herself. What comfort could she be to anyone.

* MESSAGE *

You are forgiven

A friend is someone you know about, someone you can trust. Abrand’s a bit like that. You met this friend through advertising … Without advertising, how would you recognize your friends?

You are forgiven

USEFULNESS OF TECHNOLOGY ALTERS ATTITUDES

You are forgiven

And if there is a gimmick in all of this, it is that there is no gimmick. For

You are forgiven

Let us, then, restore to the notion of commitment the only meaning it can have for us. Instead of being of a political nature, commitment is, for the writer, the full awareness of the present problems of his own language,

forgiven forgiven

forgiven forgiven

forgiven forgiven

forgiven forgiven

SKEPTICISM MAKES THE WORLD ACCOUNTABLE.

What’s On Your Mind?

THE REVOLUTION IS HERE.

YOU’RE ALL FORGIVEN!