The happy couples with their freshly cut lilies from the flower district; the pickup soccer players who never pass the ball; the weekend barbecue enthusiasts with their George Foreman barbecue products, their squeezable ketchup bottles, their chef’s hats; the park bench romancers, mashing their chapped lips together; the carp feeders in the botanical gardens, mallards clustering before them awaiting the stale white bread, Vanessa has contempt for them all. The life-loving weenie-roasting citizens of Saturdays. Likewise, all persons who would relentlessly display their knowledge of the chad. The plural of the word chad is actually chad. Must the chad be punched out in at least two corners? Two corners or three corners or four corners? Or perhaps one single corner alone? Must you be able to see light around a chad in order for that chad to indicate intention? This is Saturday, and somewhere in a county down near the Gulf of Mexico in humid weather, members of the county board of elections are toiling, as they have been toiling since Tuesday. There are three members of the board of elections in a school gymnasium, sports mascots painted on the walls, and they are observed in their efforts by a scoundrel from each of the political parties, likewise by scoundrels of the press. The party operatives are objecting yet again. Can light be seen around the chad? Is this chad a pregnant chad? Or is this a dimpled chad? Either way, the chad is not a legitimate chad, as a pregnant or dimpled chad does not indicate a legitimate vote. This is a nonvote or this is an undervote, depending on the point of view of the party operative making the argument. This is the news on Saturday. The light of the coastal resorts is visible around the indeterminate and partially punched-out chad, pastels of Floridian light, bleached and salt scoured. Yes, the chad exhibits intention, is perhaps pregnant with intention, and so the members of the board of elections in this county near to the Gulf of Mexico, in the tail end of hurricane season, are working furiously, their eyes itchy and red. Vanessa is not going to the farmers’ market to banter with the cheese ladies who hawk their excrescences, nor is she going to the dry cleaner’s to speak with the beautiful Korean girl who has changed the color of her hair for the fourth time in three weeks.
Vanessa means to work.
First, the cat must be fed. The cat comes howling to the bed where Vanessa is still lying, where she is plotting. At first she ignores the cat. She’s making plans, and she’s listening to news reports, and she is considering options relating specifically to the miniseries entitled The Diviners. Who knows if this mythology of diviners is legitimate? thinks Vanessa, lying in bed while Dade County performs its convulsions. The cat howls. The women of her office, her acquaintances in the business of independent film production wouldn’t believe that Vanessa Meandro is a worrier, but there are things that they don’t need to know; they don’t know about the telephone conversation with her mother last night, nor about her mother’s fevered whisperings. “I was just sitting . . . in the lounge and thinking, and I was hearing . . . things . . . about some kind of, I don’t know, sort of a musician . . . some kind of African American man, and he’s trying to get a part in the . . . in that thing . . . I heard all about it. I heard all about a man having a conversation with . . . what’s her name, in the office there . . . promising him that if he could help to arrange financing . . . well, I didn’t understand all of it . . . had to do with some money things, with financing . . . give him some consideration for a part . . .”
Vanessa said: “Are you kidding? You mean that guy, what’s his name? Mercurio? Right? The hip-hop guy? The guy with his own line of beauty products.”
“I don’t know anything about beauty products . . . might have said something . . . men’s jogging outfits.”
“Well, what else did he say?”
“That he wanted . . . that he felt that he . . . could really do right . . . needed to break into acting . . . getting in touch with the part of him that wanted to act . . . and he could definitely put Madison in touch with people; I don’t know . . . It gave me a headache.”
“Was there anything else?” Vanessa asked about the cellular telephone call that her mother imagined she had overheard in the adult psychiatric ward of the hospital in Park Slope while the other residents of the ward were watching reruns of situation comedies.
“Doughnuts.”
“What kind of doughnuts?”
“I think they were mentioning Krispy Kreme doughnuts.”
“Are you sure? Are you sure this telephone call had something to do with Krispy Kreme doughnuts? Mom, I need to know.”
“Telling you what I heard . . . and it was giving me a splitting headache . . . and if you don’t want to hear it . . . that’s your prerogative to believe that . . . You’re going to believe what you’re going to believe because you never had a tablespoon of respect. They were watching television in the lounge, and I was overhearing a telephone call between those . . . between Madison from the office and some black man . . . they were talking about financing . . . and then they were talking about doughnuts.”
“Were they talking about how I brought in doughnuts to the office the other day, Mom? Was that what they were saying?”
“They were talking about money . . . they were talking about getting money from the doughnut company. Somehow the future hinged on doughnuts.”
“You’re kidding me, Mom.”
The conversation stalled. After reminding her mother how much she was loved, Vanessa demanded that Rosa Elisabetta put her through to whichever official was attending on the ward at this hour. Was the doctor still on call? No, the doctor was gone and would not be back until Monday, because even the doctors had to have breaks from the delusions of the patients in the ward, which meant that there was no one in authority to whom Vanessa Meandro might speak. Still, Vanessa asked her mom if she could put the supervising nurse on the phone. Her mother pointed out that, unfortunately, the nurses would not speak into the pay phone on the ward. This was against ward policy. After all, how did they know if she was really the daughter of Rosa Elisabetta Meandro? She could just as easily be a drug dealer or other codependent person. Vanessa Meandro gently bade her mother farewell, after which she got the hospital information number from directory assistance.
So the first thing Vanessa does on this particular Saturday is to begin, from bed, berating various hospital operators with threats and abuses, allusions to how these people are all going to be brought up on a variety of malpractice charges, until at last she connects with the number for the ward in which her mother is warehoused. The nurse on duty answers. Vanessa has barely completed the recitation of biographical information before she moves into the argument phase.
“Do you guys realize that my mother believes that she’s receiving telephone calls inside her skull?”
The shades are drawn in Vanessa’s room, and the cat is batting at her with a request of some kind. Some eerie electronic music is playing because the clock radio is tuned to the Columbia University station. The sound is muffled behind the stacks of unread screenplays towering around it.
“I’m not allowed to give information relating to our patients over the phone.”
“You’d better rethink that policy, because last night I had a conversation with my mother that went on almost ten minutes in which she sounded lucid to me, except for the news about the telephone calls she’s receiving in her head. Or in her dental fillings. Or wherever they’re coming from. If you’re not talking to me about it, you should at least be talking to whoever the consulting physician is over there. I want it on record that my mother needs to be getting better care for her delusions. She wasn’t floridly psychotic when she checked herself in on Wednesday.”
“Sometimes patients —”
“She had a drinking problem. I can’t argue with you about that part. But she wasn’t hearing voices. And now she’s hearing the voices of people from my office talking to her. You’ve got to have some kind of medication for this stuff, right? I mean, haven’t there been big advances in these medications? Can’t you treat a complaint like this? I want to know first thing Monday —”
The nurse says something noncommittal about passing on the information. When the MD shows up on Monday, the information will be passed on. The nurse has become as silky in her delivery as a game show host hustling off a losing contestant. Requests for information need to be met with a rhetoric of delay. Requests for information are not the responsibility of this single party, a nurse-practitioner with two kids left behind at her sister’s house for the day. Et cetera.
Vanessa rises and pads into the kitchen in her robe, feeds the cat, and then she calls Madison because she knows that Madison will have been out until four. It is good to wake Madison to remind her of the importance of the chain of command. Madison should be attempting to stay one step ahead of Vanessa on all things. Madison should wake with a start, worrying about Vanessa. Madison should be able to leap tall buildings; Madison should be able to accept telephone calls on a Saturday, crack of dawn, despite three or four hours of sleep. So Vanessa dials the number, gets the machine, and while scooping the bonbons of cat shit out of the box, she says, “I heard you offered Mercurio a role in The Diviners without running it by me. Which is totally fucking unacceptable. And I understand you’re in conversation with Krispy Kreme for financing. And that’s not going to work yet, either. You’re supposed to keep me informed of this stuff. Call me as soon as you’re up.”
Having harassed Madison, she begins to feel a little better. She feels as though she might be able to raise the blinds or look in the mirror at her straw hair, her bad dye job, the rings around her eyes. But having come to this conclusion, she instead returns to the bedroom to locate her personal digital assistant, which lies on the far side of her queen-size mattress, as though she were in a long-term relationship with it. She starts at A with the stylus and she heads through the alphabet, looking for people she can call on business matters. When she gets to Annabel Duffy, she takes up the phone again and leaves a message with Annabel, who never answers. “Hi, I’m wondering why we haven’t solved this intern problem yet. I want to have an intern by next Friday because we’re getting behind. We need some people we can get working on these little tasks. Get some names. I don’t care where you get them from. Just get some people in. If we’re going to be in production on this miniseries, we need more people. We’re going to be flying back and forth to the coast, we’re going to be on location, and I don’t trust Madison to be looking after this issue, so get on it.”
Maximum friction between individuals. Instability between the players. Means of Production needs to have people competing in the same tasks. Fraternal rivalries. Catfights. The players need to be looking over their shoulders suspiciously, which is why it is so appropriate to have Thaddeus Griffin around, a black hole sucking in the radiant energy emanating from these talented women. They need to be able to fend him off; they need the skill, the power. Same thing with Ranjeet, although what Ranjeet also represents for Means of Production is an implied critique, he says, of Occidental meaning systems. The Occidental meaning system is looking toward equations, see, as though the equation is the perfect semantic unit for large organizations, he says, and this is true in the movies and it’s true in the business practices of an operation like Means of Production. On the other hand, maybe what Ranjeet stands for is an Asian system of meaning, which is more like non-euclidean geometry, where the parallel lines are actually circles; this is the theory of Ranjeet, this is the way in which Ranjeet is going to change what they’re doing, so that they are working on a variety of approaches to The Diviners, not just particular Occidental context-oriented approaches, but instead a variety of possible approaches to story and structure. As he says, this is more likely to yield fruit.
It’s her greatest moment, the moment of persuasion. It’s the thing she was born to do. She can feel it the way other people can feel they are ready to get into bed with someone. Other people feel desire and they go out into the dappled sunlight of the park and they compose sestinas using difficult-to-rhyme words like silvery, and they experience love, which is that feeling when you care more about the welfare of a person than you care about the sunlight. Maybe Vanessa has felt that or, lying in bed with the blinds drawn, maybe she thinks she has felt that for her mother, certain times when she carted her mother, passed out, from the floor of her living room to her bed. Maybe in that moment, she felt something like this epic love of poetry. Caritas. For example, there was the time that her mother was meant to show the top-floor apartment to this couple. She remembers this vividly. April, maybe, two or three years ago, a Saturday like this Saturday. Vanessa was trying to make use of the new stepping machine that she’d ordered from an infomercial, and she intended to spend half an hour on it every day. She’s on the stepping machine, weeping and pretending to ski. The bell rings downstairs, and she hopes this couple isn’t an interracial couple, because there was this one interracial couple, and her mother was so rude to them that she couldn’t believe it. She tried to talk to her mother about it once, and her mother shouted Vanessa down. The bell rings, and then the bell rings again, and the bell rings a third time. The third ringing of the bell is not good, and so she goes downstairs, wearing her stretchy gym clothes. She’s lost eight pounds, and yet she’s been weeping over the improbability of losing weight, and she goes downstairs, and here’s this nice interracial couple.
The girl is light skinned and maybe part Hispanic or something. Beautiful and tall and thin, and the guy is maybe Jewish. He has the charm of an advertising guy. They are standing on the stoop, and Vanessa says, “Let’s go have a look.” She’s on her best behavior. And she takes them up to the top floor, and they are amazed at the view. They really like the brick, they like the floors, they like the old gas lamp out front. And what they probably really like is that Vanessa does not give a shit what color they are as long as they don’t make too much noise and pay their rent in a timely fashion. But on the way back down the stairs, she says, “Let’s just take a quick look and see if my mother is home, because she likes to be a part of this process.”
She’s not sure why she did it. It was not a good sign when the doorbell tolled unanswered three times. The appointment had been agreed upon. Like many people with problems, Vanessa’s mother was fanatical about her few appointments. She worried about them for days in advance. It was not a good sign when the bell rang and Rosa Elisabetta did not answer it. Nevertheless, Vanessa unlocked the door on the ground floor, after explaining that they should feel free to use the garden in the backyard, and then, as the door swung in, she found her mother passed out on the floor of the living room, arms flung wide as if in preparation for some fervent embrace, one leg of her Kmart double-knit trousers scrunched up enough to reveal a pink sock. The cat was sitting on top of her mother’s stomach.
“Maybe we’d better come back,” Vanessa said, giggling madly.
“Is she okay?” the woman asked.
“Sure,” Vanessa said. “The only problem here is the socks.”
More nervous laughter. Then there was a pause in the banter between landlord and lessees in the stairwell. And then the adman said: “We still really like the apartment. We’d like to sign the agreement.”
She gave them the lease on the spot. They had probably seen much worse, in this challenging real estate environment. The lease was on top of the stack of papers on her mother’s kitchen table, along with every other legal piece of paper she had ever needed in her life, including her will, her divorce agreement, and a suit filed against the City of New York for restrictive ballot requirements for third-party candidates in local elections. The three of them stood in the kitchen, looking at the lease agreement, while her mother snored in the center of the living-room floor. The renters had the paperwork notarized and returned, with the check, before Rosa woke.
That was a kind of love. There is love, and there is persuasion, and these are two of the colors of the universe. There is the postmodern Orientalism of Vanessa’s strategy, via Ranjeet, which is a strategy of multiple fronts, all operating simultaneously. The flow chart. She’s going through the scrolling alphabetical entries of her personal digital assistant, through its trove of names, Katzenberg and Meyer and Case and Bronfman and Brokaw, the telephone numbers that she has pried loose over the years, as if these telephone numbers were some kind of secret code. She uses the numbers rarely; she just covets them, keeps them in reserve. But on this wasteland of a Saturday, she is feeling that perhaps the moment has finally come. She can feel it, it’s an automatic function, a reflex, and what is more true than the expression of a reflex?
She dials the cell phone number of Jeffrey Maiser, senior vice president of network programming at UBC, the fledgling network built of affiliates in the hinterlands. UBC, network of the kids, the network with lots of shows for teenagers featuring werewolves and invisible children, werewolves dealing with water-weight gain and male-pattern baldness, and, more recently, a rash of enhanced-reality programs, such as the very successful American Spy. Jeffrey Maiser has been linked, and this is always how they put it in the relevant publications, with a certain brainless, one-named strumpet called Lacey. A singer, if you can call her that. For whom he is now acting as Svengali, according to the relevant publications. Jeffrey Maiser is working on a deal for a half-hour enhanced-reality program in which the one-named strumpet is to lie around on casual furniture such as beanbag chairs and waterbeds with her friends, listening to songs and watching videos. They will also rate various boys, hosts of video programs, members of various bands, and so forth. Jeffrey Maiser is developing this, according to the relevant publications, and he is also attempting to secure dramatic roles for Lacey, and this will be the fulcrum of the pitch that is even now beginning to form, like a boil, in Vanessa. Vanessa needs to tell the story of The Diviners so badly that resistance to it is making her irritable. Yet waiting will sharpen its edges. She goes into the kitchen, where there are the makings of a particularly good egg sandwich.
She likes interior decorating that looks as though it has been shipped over from Tuscany stone by stone. And thus there are real tiles in her bathroom and her kitchen, and faux-marble counters, and she has up-to-date culinary machines in industrial sizes. Seltzer is delivered to the house. The cat, having eaten, is following her around the kitchen, making a figure eight around her ankles, just in case a saucer of milk should appear beside the seltzer bottles in the pantry. The phone is still clamped between Vanessa’s shoulder and ear. And before she can connect to Maiser’s line she is interrupted by the Morse code of call waiting.
“Oh, hi.” Particularly unhappy at the sound of Vic Freese’s voice. “Go away. Not you. The cat. I’m making an egg sandwich. Fresh basil. No, Vic, I haven’t done anything. Sorry you had to stumble on it in the way you did. The parties responsible have been terminated. No, Vic. No. I haven’t done much in the way of casting. Hang on a second, I have to beat the eggs.”
For the sake of the pause. She looks out the window. The day is sunny, she notices abruptly. There are mutable shadows on the flagstone behind the house.
“Yeah, I thought of her, too. Are you saying that she might be willing . . . ? But isn’t she . . . Yeah, that’s what I heard. Guy in the Diamond District? So she’s willing to come back for a big part? That’s of some interest. No, no, I’m happy to do the pitching myself. I don’t want to turn over the story to you. I don’t want to turn anything over to you, no. What about the guys . . . You what? You already, no, I’d really appreciate if we could keep this between us. We’re working on writers. Yeah, yeah. A-list all the way. A-list. Of course. You think we’d be having this conversation if I hadn’t? Yeah, we contacted the romance novelist lady. Okay, okay. How is your family? Well, yeah. That’s great. Glad to hear it. Yep. Bye.”
Vic Freese and his nervousness are like fuel. She can put it off no longer. Doesn’t matter if the egg sandwich is not yet done. Doesn’t matter if it’s not even eight o’clock on the West Coast; nothing matters except the pressure of language, the pressure to use language to create meaning where there was none before. Here is a void of meaning and potential that will be filled in the creation of art and value. As a producer, Vanessa Meandro was born to do this. The rest of the particulars of her job, line-producer responsibilities, casting consultant, location scout, these are of no interest to her. Seeing the film through the editing and the launch. She can do these things, but without enthusiasm. She has some of the lukewarm yolk in her mouth and some of it on her chin, and she holds an imperial blue cloth napkin, and she is ready to make the pitch. What she does is cram a big bite of the sandwich into her mouth, and she dials the cellular number of Jeffrey Maiser again, and she chokes on a mass of egg sandwich, and the phone connects, and never was there a longer silence than at the advent of Jeffrey Maiser, and in the silence, as in all such silences, Vanessa briefly regrets her ill humor with her family and friends, and thinks that if this deal works, she will attempt to calm down, she will attempt to find a way to do better, and she will begin to eat vegan entrées only, and she will look in on her mom more often, and she will invite friends out to dinner, and she will keep better track of money; if this deal will go through, she’ll do all those things, she swears —
“Mr. Maiser?”
A grunt of assent.
“Vanessa Meandro here. With Means of Production? We’re making the Otis Redding biopic with Wonderment? That the, uh, that the studio over there is . . . ? Right, that’s the one. I’m calling today, Mr. Maiser, about something else entirely. I’m calling today about thirst. That’s right. Thirst. I know it’s a broad topic, but it’s an urgent topic, whether you know it or not, a topic that is at the heart of American entertainment today. I’m a collector, Mr. Maiser, that’s the first thing I want to explain to you, and what I collect, Mr. Maiser, are Moroccan pitchers. That’s right. We at Means of Production are very serious about our Moroccan pitchers. They’re made from a certain kind of clay, an earthenware clay, which is high in iron oxide, higher than any other earthenware clay, a clay that matures best in bonfire temperatures. Interestingly, this clay is really only found in Casablanca, Mr. Maiser. They perfected the art of the pitcher in Casablanca and Tangiers in the eleventh century, at a time when Christian and Islamic and Jewish influences in the area were at their peak. All these sects, Mr. Maiser, coexisting under the reign of one Ibn Tachafine, the founder of Marrakech.
“What I’m saying is that at the center of this bygone landscape was the notion of thirst, Mr. Maiser, and therefore at the center of this meeting of these faiths I’ve mentioned is the idea of thirst. You see it in the eleventh-century mystical texts of Alp Aslan, who conquered Byzantium and united the sultanates of Islam, Mr. Maiser. He understood the centrality of the pitcher and of Moroccan clay to this history of the pitcher. Think about it. You have these three faiths in the desert, in the lone and level sands, Mr. Maiser, all coming out of the compact between Abraham and his god. Abraham in the desert, desperate and thirsty, attempting to be blameless in the eyes of his god. Abraham taking his son to the killing place, willing to die of thirst, willing to sacrifice his son. Each of these peoples, Mr. Maiser, Christian, Jew, and Muslim, comes from this sort of desert, the wilderness. Which reminds me, of course, of the line from the work of Bob Dylan, Where you want this killing done? Are you familiar with the recordings of Bob Dylan, Mr. Maiser?”
A noncommittal groan, but Vanessa will not admit it into the terms of the discussion —
“If you’re familiar with the recordings of Bob Dylan, then you are familiar with the Abrahamic faith and you are familiar with Moroccan pitchers, because in the deep space of that fish-eye photograph of Bob Dylan, next to the bellows by the fireplace, I’m speaking, of course, of Bringing It All Back Home here, you’ll see one of the very Moroccan pitchers I’m describing, painted white. It’s hard to see it in the image at first, a pitcher in which were poured many days of hard rain. The pitcher is the leitmotif in the project I’m proposing, Mr. Maiser, and what I’d like to argue is that the pitcher is the perfect narrative representation of the thirst of the mass television audience. And when I speak of thirst and a mass television audience, Mr. Maiser, I mean a mass television audience, I mean hundreds of millions, I mean the kind of audience that doesn’t know how thirsty it is until the pitcher full of meaning is presented to it. Just think how many kinds of thirst there are in America right now, Mr. Maiser. There is the thirst of the fundamentalists in the southern part of the nation. Tired of feeling like the government and the media elites of the Northeast and the West Coast are dictating to them the terms of their culture. There are voices rising up from this part of the world, the talk radio guys and their apologists, rising up thirsty for meaning. They want a sort of millennialist vision, they want a reconstituted Jesus strolling down Fifth Avenue, laying waste to readers of the New York Times. And the project I’m describing, Mr. Maiser, will not disappoint them because it deals with ancient times and the possibility for apocalypse. What about Mormon viewers, adherents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? They are out there in the Great Salt Lake, on the salt flats, they have journeyed a thousand miles and created mythologies about the American Indians, the twelve tribes of American Indians, and they are thirsty, regionally, topographically, and they desire a clearly prophetic voice, a chaste and honorable prophetic voice, and this project that I’m proposing does this exactly, Mr. Maiser, when it depicts the Mormon exodus and, later, the founding of Las Vegas. The project delivers a story that the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference can get behind, since there are no homosexuals in it and no abortion providers, and it delivers a story that the Mormon elders can get behind, and the yogis and Buddhists of California; what could be more appropriate for their thirst, Mr. Maiser, than a story of diviners?
“That’s right, Mr. Maiser, what we’re talking about today is a multigenerational saga, but not one that’s confined to a particular disenfranchised population, like Roots was or like Holocaust was back in 1978, a story that reaches out to every population and confers honorary disenfranchised status on it, the disenfranchised status of thirst, Mr. Maiser. Every group wants to be the group out of power, so that it can be restored to power through the capacity of the Moroccan pitcher to slake its metaphorical thirst, but with legitimacy and through acclamation, Mr. Maiser. The Jews, a people reviled in Europe, were driven out of Morocco, I can’t remember exactly when, but I know they were driven out of there at some point, because that’s history, am I right? And the one thing the Sephardim took with them, in addition to their sacred texts, was the knowledge of the manufacture of these sacred pitchers. Well, in fact, Mr. Maiser, they also took with them the kabalistic knowledge of divining, Mr. Maiser. You didn’t know this? Divining is a highly secretive skill still taught in some ultra-Orthodox sects, Mr. Maiser. Divining. You saw it going back to the reign of the Hun, Mr. Maiser, and the proposal I’m going to be e-mailing you directly, so that you can have it on the desks of your people in your department on Monday morning, Mr. Maiser, will deal with the first episode of a thirteen-part miniseries I’m proposing that will depict the ancient times, Mr. Maiser, when the Hun first descended from the plains and began to rout Western civilization. The Hun brought destruction to the eastern edge of the Roman Empire, the Hun brought rape, the Hun pillaged, Mr. Maiser, and the Hun also brought, as marauders do, magic, in the person of the diviner. So when the earth was scorched, and the Romans were driven out of their empire, what they received in compensation was the diviner, leading them over the hill to the place of water.”
“Uh —”
“So this is a proposal that confronts thirst on a historical basis, but it’s also a proposal that actually slakes thirst. What you’ll notice, Mr. Maiser, is that as you begin to contemplate the proposal, you’ll see greater and greater conjunctions in your own life. Things will begin to line up. For example, I know that when I began thinking about thirst, and about how I needed to place this call to you directly, Mr. Maiser, as I began to see that you and you alone needed to receive this call, to have this electrifying opportunity to finance a miniseries that could change television history, that could change the distribution system, that could give independent cinema the place it rightly deserves in the history of cinematic storytelling, at the moment it couldn’t escape my notice, Mr. Maiser, that a certain young performer was really born to play Nurit, the daughter of a Jewish shopkeeper and the love interest in this story. What is thirst, Mr. Maiser, but another name for erotic need? Am I right, Mr. Maiser? When we have the itch, we need it scratched. Why else, Mr. Maiser, are we so thirsty ourselves, here in this land rich with water? Where does this thirst come from? Why else those advanced embraces? Why do they leave us so in need of a good swim and a cool drink? I know you know, Mr. Maiser, and I know that you know how a certain young performer could bring in the teenage audience that so badly needs to slake this particular kind of thirst. We want young, charismatic performers, we need them, the perfect curve of a breast, that ephemeral thing that only lasts for a few years, the rippling muscles of a young buck striding across a high-definition screen, and this is the story that can really deliver to the network a teenage audience because every generation has an attractive thirsty teenager who finds the truth with a forked stick, do you hear what I’m describing, Mr. Maiser?”
“Listen, I —”
“The hydrophobia passage in, what was that movie, with the, To Kill a Mockingbird, right? The dog is mad? Right, it’s a hydrophobia passage, serving as a metaphor for exile, the exile that the African American characters feel from white society. The hatred of water? The recoiling from water, such that water creates a kind of madness in the person or animal until they go wild, trying to spread an illness, after which they themselves die. Did you know that it has two phases, Mr. Maiser? Hydrophobia? The dumb phase and the furious phase, exactly coincident with the two kinds of political disenfranchisement? Well, The Diviners, Mr. Maiser, is a story that does the opposite. It works a metaphor of inclusion, a metaphor of, well, I guess you’d call it spiritual renewal, like night swimming, Mr. Maiser, a spiritual renewal that fully recognizes the importance of carnal appetite. We’ll be getting a prominent A-list writer to bring to the screen the thirteen two-hour episodes we’re proposing for this miniseries, Mr. Maiser, and we know, because we have admired your accomplishments at UBC, that you are the man for the story, the man who recognizes thirst as a historically urgent theme and who knows how to bring this story, with modern music, a sound-track spin-off, maybe some divining-rod merchandising opportunities at some of the fast-food chains, like maybe we could have a McDonald’s promotion that would feature divining rods with the hamburgers, Mr. Maiser, or a Krispy Kreme divining rod, a little plastic divining rod that has some knots carved into it so it looks like a bough from a birch tree or a maple or something. What do you think, Mr. Maiser? Do you realize what an opportunity this would be for your company, especially since it would bring you close to the world of independent cinema, which has the critics and pundits on its side? Don’t you and your friends want to get involved with a project that will lend you indie credibility and a mass audience? Can’t you see a poster for a project like this, Mr. Maiser? Isn’t a poster for a project like this materializing in your mind right now, a poster that can be run on the crowded subway lines of New York City and on city buses across the nation? Can’t you see tie-ins, movie spin-offs, novelizations? Can’t you see magazine profiles, the front covers of weekly newsmagazines, Mr. Maiser, can’t you see third-world feature films, can’t you see spinning off The Diviners into a thirteen-part cinematic extravaganza to show in all the relevant countries, like Hungary, or perhaps in countries like Bulgaria that can’t afford the rental fees for new Hollywood releases? What about an edited, feature-length edition of The Diviners? With voice-over commentary for the DVD release? What about a director’s cut with nine hours of additional footage? Don’t you think, Mr. Maiser, that this is an opportunity that your company can’t afford to miss? Can’t you imagine that if you turn down this opportunity some other network will instantly jump on it, such that your job with the president of the network will be jeopardized and your stock will plunge and you will go down in history as the man who refused to sign up The Diviners when he might have, Mr. Maiser? Don’t you just want to say yes now, Mr. Maiser? Don’t you want to say yes now to this historic television narrative?”
“Stop!” Maiser cries out. There is approximate silence, cellular phone static standing in for silence, a stunned, faintly sublime silence. “I’ve got stuff to do. Just send me the damned proposal, for godsakes. I’ll get back to you on Monday.”
After which, Vanessa again takes to her bed.