The Dr. Science Show
“Other materials respond weakly …”
I HAD WRITTEN THAT SENTENCE a dozen times in a half hour in the margins of a legal pad before I realized I wasn’t even looking at the page. When I looked down, I saw that I had somehow doodled three or four drawings of the Earth’s magnetic field, and a side sketch of a horseshoe magnet with a horse’s head, mane, and tail coming out of the curve at the middle. The poles of my horse-magnet featured thick shoes, not horseshoes, but the kind of hobo shoes you see in a cartoon.
Elsewhere on the pad I’d written the following notes:
acts differently at a distance
1 tesla = 10,000 gauss
the force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between objects.
There was a drawing on another page showing a line of kids stretching off toward the horizon wearing T-shirts with the horse-magnet design on them. I indicated that each child should be holding a sign that says 1, 1/4, 1/9, 1/16, and so on. Why did I do this? Because kids have a hard time with concepts like “inverse proportionality.” In all reality, most adults have a hard time with science for all the reasons you’ve heard before.
Those few pages were all I had to take with me to the writer’s meeting for my television program, Dr. Science. Normally I’m literally overflowing with ideas, but I took a personal day because I had recently discovered my wife was having an affair with a man you’ve probably heard of. His name is Chuck Vogel. He’s also from television. Reality television, oxymoron that it is. Because of Vogel and my wife, I found I didn’t have much to say to children about anything. My discovery of their infidelity was the beginning of the end. The worm was turning. The phoenix would rise, and fear not, for the phoenix here is me, but not yet, not while I was still dozing at my notebook.
With this story meeting on the horizon, I tried to gather myself together, but came back obsessively to the phrase “other materials respond weakly.” I realized that during my reverie I’d been tracing over the letters until I had nearly cut through the sheet with my pen.
A day earlier, while I was still blessed with ignorance about my cuckoldry, I had what now seems like an ironically pathetic obsession with the phrase “opposites attract.” This can be true in so many different ways. I leafed further back in my notebook and found four or five intricately drafted pages devoted to that idea. One page was a dense list of attractive contraries: ice cream and hot fudge, mouth and ear, gun and elk, man and woman, et cetera. On another page, I drew a picture of some boys huddled together and a similar group of girls a distance from them. I captioned it: Middle School, Fall Mixer, then drew in magnetic lines of force passing through the heads of the girls and the groins of the boys.
I thought to myself after the Chuck Vogel news that it seems I got it the wrong way around.
A ping came from my computer, and thirty seconds later my secretary called me on the phone. “Did you get my email?” she asked. I wheeled around to the computer and woke it. Her message was sitting on top of three from Merilese, my wife’s personal assistant, and one from Asa Kirschbaum, my best friend.
My wife is Barbara Stein. I probably should mention that. Unless you’ve been in a coma for the last ten years, you know who she is. According to her marketing people, eight out of ten people have one or more of her books in their house, TiVo her shows, subscribe to her magazines, download her podcasts. I’d put even money on the fact that you’ve said her trademark phrase, “Ain’t life sweet,” at least once in your life, even if you didn’t want to. Maybe you did it ironically. Most people do these days.
Everyone in this little triangle of infidelity is famous, and that adds a surreal dimension to it. Anyway, my wife is so ridiculously busy that we communicate indirectly, through one of the three or four assistants she burns through in a year. Part of me thought that it wouldn’t be beneath Barb to farm off the affair to this Merilese person, the new meat. So much for wishful thinking.
The subject lines of Merilese’s emails read as follows:
FW: RE: TELL HER TO GO TO HELL!!!!!!!!!!!!
RE: TELL HER TO GO TO HELL!!!!!!!!!!!!
Meet BS for Lunch at TRIBECA BISTRO?
I didn’t really have the patience to reread any of these emails, so I choose the message that had come from my friend Asa instead.
Asa is a puppeteer. Strangely, he is both more and less of a celebrity than any of us. Though you wouldn’t know him from a hole in the ground, you are without a doubt acquainted with his alter ego, Milo, the purple monster from the Parents’ Choice Award–winning television show Milo’s Treehouse. Asa has made millions on the licensing, which (and here’s Asa in a nutshell) he used to build an avant-garde Hebrew puppet theater in the Bronx called Alef-Ayin.
The theater effectively turned Milo into Asa’s day job, and the networks knew it. People in the know said the quality of Milo’s Treehouse dropped a few years ago. I couldn’t tell you if it did or didn’t, but people in the know always say the quality of your show is dropping, no matter what kind of energy you’re putting into it. They worry you’ll end up coasting if you’re not afraid.
I had a meeting scheduled later in the week with some consultants the network brought on board to help us update my program, The Dr. Science Show, which I had run by myself nearly as long as Captain Koala and Mr. Plaid Pants had run theirs. Technically I was an executive producer, but I’d been told it was no longer up to me to run it alone. There are no auteurs in television, they said. PBS had a lot of stakeholders, and we could no longer expect the taxpayers to treat us like Amtrak. No one who actually makes children’s television ever uses a word like “stakeholder,” which is why I knew my time in the business was almost up.
Asa’s email had no subject line (his signature move). The message said, Wanna get a slice? I emailed him back and said, Writer’s meeting until noon. I’ll meet you at Ray’s around twelve thirty. The millennials we all worked with were dumbfounded that we still used email. We took a certain delight in the agitation. As I sent the mail, I heard my secretary sigh into the phone and ask if I was still there. I said yeah, and she told me Merilese had been terrorizing the phones since eight. I told her to hold all my calls unless it’s Asa.
“That’s what you always say.”
“Well, I must mean it, then,” I said, and then hung up the phone.
When I arrived at the meeting, the room was already bristling. It was located in the network building on the East Side, with a view of the Queensboro Bridge. There was glass on all sides and a long, kidney-shaped table full of Danishes, coffee, and clipboards. The producer, Devin Hamblin, was at one end of the table. She was wearing the women’s uniform: heap of hair, rectangular glasses, black turtleneck, gray tights, miniskirt. Pablo and Laura were kibitzing over some design magazine. The two of them were in the uniform that was in style two uniforms ago. Pablo wore his hair shaved close. He was goateed, wearing a bowling shirt with the name GLENN embroidered over the pocket in red. Laura’s clothes were too tight and the color of dime-store candy. On the other side of the table, Sage and Emily were sitting in isolation, Sage reading a comic book and Emily thumb-typing into an iPhone. There was an open chair opposite Devin’s—Asa would have asked, “Is this one saved for Elijah?” I tried that line once, and people just stared at me, so I said nothing, which was better for me in the long run.
“Oh, good,” Devin said, “You’re here … finally.” When Devin spoke, her lips moved but her teeth remained motionless. It could have been TMJ, but I think it was more likely an affectation she picked up in college. I apologized and told the room that I was working on the magnetism show and time got away from me.
Emily stopped typing and said, “Einstein said time is affected by gravity, not magnetism. We’ll need a complete unified field theory before that excuse will hold water,” then she chuckled to herself without looking up. Sage lowered his comic book and looked over at Emily then shook his head and turned the page. Pablo checked his phone, which apparently had nothing new to offer, so he set it on the table.
That’s how those meetings went. Ostensibly those people were the best and brightest in the field. We pulled Pablo away from The Spongeguy at the height of its success, lowered his salary, and told him he’d be making a difference, that The Dr. Science Show was one of the last things television does to keep kids out of jail. Turns out he’d been deeply influenced by our show as a kid and had erased all of his parents’ cassette tapes with an electromagnet I taught him how to build in one of my first programs. He was a super-fan, which we could manipulate.
The rest of them had the job because they like living in New York, except Emily, who had taken this job to keep herself from going back to graduate school for a second PhD.
I passed my sketches to Devin, who projected them on the back wall of the meeting room.
“What’s with the horses?” Pablo asked.
I shrugged. “Horseshoe-shaped magnets, I guess. I don’t know. It’s a metaphor.”
“I don’t know,” Laura said, “I don’t think it’s actually a metaphor.”
“Just tell me we’re not going to dump a bunch of iron filings on a card and rub a magnet around underneath it,” Devin said, flipping her pen around her thumb.
“Why not?” Sage asked without moving the comic. “That stuff is retro-cool.”
“It’s pretty Mr. Rogers-y if you ask me,” Laura said dismissively.
Sage’s eyes flared, and everyone knew at once to scoot away from him. “You leave Fred Rogers out of this. You are nothing compared to him. Nothing. Dust of the planet. Not stardust. Just human skin and dandruff,” he growled, his comic book down, and the skin around his sideburns looking as if it might burst into flames.
“Whatever you say, but we can’t do television that way anymore. He’s a dinosaur,” Laura said. “He’s got heart but no style.” At this point, Sage nearly leapt across the table, but he ended up flopping on it like a sea lion. Devin looked to me for leadership, but I just watched while Sage slunk embarrassed back to his chair. Pablo then told Laura that Mr. Rogers was dead and she’d probably better show some respect.
“We have to go into the studio on Monday,” Devin said. “And we’re going to need more than horse magnets. This isn’t 1974. What’s the hard science here, Emily?”
“Easy, except for there’s really no way to tell kids where magnetism comes from without sounding like Yoda.”
Sage threw his arms into the air and hissed, “What is wrong with Yoda?”
Before anyone could yell at him, I stepped in. At first it was to settle the squabbling around the table, but it fell apart quickly. “Let me tell you people a little something about magnetism. In 1600 William Gilbert published a book on lodestones. In it he lays out everything that anyone had written on the principle of magnetism since people started thinking about it. Most of what they had to say was nonsense, and Gilbert said as much. The man had a spine, the best information of the day, and style. There’s a chapter in that book about magnetic coition—you know what coition is, don’t you, Sage?” He shook his head. “It’s what you get when you put a scheming, malcontented, borderline-OCD harpy in the same room with a blackguard know-nothing ex–drywall contractor from Coral Gables, Florida, and let the positive pole attract the negative pole. That’s when you get coition, Sage. That’s when they have to start hauling in the towels because the old black art of magnetism is strongest when you’re right there with it, when one pole is hovering right there.”
I was shaking. The room was confounded by my outburst. Devin interrupted me, which saved me from descending even more. “Max, how are we going to involve the Junior Science Corps in the magnetic coition part of the show? Could be over their heads, right? Not without the basics, first.”
I looked her in the glasses and said, “They used to put magnets under the pillows of suspected adulteresses. If they were guilty, the power of the stone would drive them from their beds.”
I WAS STILL SEETHING WHEN I set my slice of pizza on the counter and climbed onto the stool next to Asa. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “You look like you’ve been run over by a garbage truck.” I motioned to the billboard sitting atop an electrical supply warehouse across the street. It was one of the newer ones that showed Barb in an embroidered shirt with feathered earrings. She was arranging flowers in a slender glass vase. Her hair was bright red and curly, and someone had airbrushed away most of her crow’s-feet. The billboard gave the new time of her show and her tag line: CHANNEL 6 AT 9:00—AIN’T LIFE SWEET.
“Oh,” Asa said. “There she is again.”
“She’s everywhere.”
“And yet, somehow, also nowhere …”
I gave Asa a look, to which he said, “Every time we see a picture of Barb, it reminds us that she is somewhere else. Reproductions do that. In so many ways we have to wonder if our senses give us reality or just another reproduction of it.”
I wasn’t going to argue with him. Those are the kinds of things he says. He’s not putting on a show for anyone, but I figured I could cut through his philosophizing with something a little more direct. “Barb has been screwing Vogel.”
“Sy Vogel with the deli in Queens?”
“No, the home show guy with endorsements.”
“Oh, man. I’m sorry, Max. What’s his name? Chuck?”
I nodded.
“Chuck,” he repeated, then he shook his head. “The rhyme is unfortunate—”
“Yeah, it is.”
Asa apologized. “You catch them at it or did you find some letters or something?”
“What kind of question is that?”
Asa wiped his mouth and turned to me. “A man can’t find peace by turning his head, Max.”
“It doesn’t matter how I know. I just know.”
“How you know matters. It really does.”
I looked down at my pizza and lifted it to my mouth. Outside in the street, a woman flung a shopping bag into the air. It sailed into traffic and landed on the roof of a taxi. Then she began pointing at the cab and screaming.
Asa shook his head. “You see that?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I told him. The woman had run into the street and was climbing on the hood of the taxi.
“If we could see the world as God does, that woman out there would make sense to us.”
“Which woman,” I asked? “The one who’s there or the one we might not be able to see?”
Asa didn’t answer.
WHILE I WAS NEW TO my rage, I didn’t want Barb to make sense to me. I wanted to invent new horrors I could unleash upon her. It was the first time I had felt truly violent, maybe ever. Those impulses kept me from being able to concentrate on any one thing for more than a couple of minutes. In public I would eat like a bird, but in private I was ravenous. I was reluctant to speak, and then suddenly I would spew forth diatribes and venomous streams of consciousness. For all of my adult life I despised Hamlet because I did not understand why he wouldn’t just walk up to his uncle and run a sword through his belly.
What I did not tell Asa during lunch that day was that I had, in fact, caught them, not in bed but on the kitchen floor, with one of Barb’s fancy stools knocked over and some red lentils scattered across the marble tiles.
When I came in, Vogel cursed and looked up at me with this gold cross slapping his shaggy chest. Barb was still wearing her garden clogs.
“How about some privacy,” Vogel said, as he settled against my wife’s body.
“Get yourself out of her,” I growled.
Barb covered her face, then her breasts.
“Classy way to talk, friend,” Vogel said, drying his face with his forearm.
“Friend? Nobody in here is friends,” I said.
“Max,” Barb said, “you’re not making any sense.”
“In Brazil,” I said, “I could bludgeon you both to death and walk out of the courthouse a free man.”
By this point I was looking away from them and up at the ceiling fan, but I couldn’t make myself leave. Vogel hoisted his pants and began gathering up his clothes. Barb pulled an apron from one of the lower drawers and put it on. Her bra was on the toaster. They kept saying my name, telling me it’s not what it looks like, that I’ve got to understand, that things got out of hand—they’d been working on a pitch for a new show that combined his world and hers. Oh, I couldn’t stand it. I had nothing more to say to them, but I kept thinking of Barb’s trademark, “Ain’t life sweet.” The more I thought of it, the more I raged, and the more I raged, the more focused I became, like an industrial laser.
“I think I should actually kill you both. It’s the best choice,” I said. “Yes, the best choice, definitely the best choice, but it wouldn’t actually be my choice because it would be caused by your choice, which was not the best choice. No, right? Because life is so sweet. Who cares? Max is a schmuck—he didn’t see this coming because he is always thinking about his fancy science projects.”
This outburst left them bewildered. I know it did. It left me bewildered, too. After that, I sort of blacked out. During my blackout, Vogel left, but after a couple seconds popped back into the kitchen for his phone. Barb left the kitchen and went to our room. As she left, I saw her eyeballing the spray of lentils, so I took a step and crushed them into the tile with my shoe. I watched my wife’s naked rear end, framed by the edges of the apron. It was like I’d never seen her before. She bolted from the room, and in the distance, I could hear her cursing as well. Cursing, not crying.
So, how would I tell Asa about that? How would I tell him that Merilese came over to the apartment that afternoon and hauled four of Barb’s suitcases out to the Range Rover and drove her to the airport, where she flew to the Charleston house, which she set up as her new HQ? I would not have known where she was if the neighbors in Charleston hadn’t called to ask when I was coming down to join her.
How could I tell him I spent three hours behind a power buffer trying to erase this memory from the tiles?
I WOULD HAVE STAYED CATATONIC like that, probably forever, if my brother hadn’t called. He’s ten years older than me, a Vietnam vet who smoked his larynx to smithereens. Now he talks with one of those robot voice wands.
“NO TIME FOR SMALL TALK,” Boyd said. “I’M GONNA LOSE MY HOUSE.”
“What is it this time?”
“YOU HEAR ME? THEY’RE GOING TO TAKE THE HOUSE … AWAY.”
The last time I got a call like this it is was Boyd’s gambling. Every time I get a call like this it’s his gambling, never something else. He’s gone bust three times in his life, had two wives leave him over it. The last one died of a heart attack. Asa said Boyd’s addiction must have broken her spirit, right in two. That’s how Asa’s mother died—his father’s drinking made her just up and quit living. She got too tired of worrying.
“Are you gambling again, Boyd?” I asked.
Silence.
“Dammit, Boyd,” I said. “I don’t have time for this anymore.”
“BANK GOONS ARE OUTSIDE RIGHT NOW,” he said. “GOT TO MAN THE STATIONS.”
“I can’t do this today, Boyd.”
“THEY’RE AT THE DOOR.”
“Boyd, Barb’s been sleeping with—”
“I NEED TWELVE GRAND, YESTERDAY. WIRE IT. SAME ACCOUNT AS BEFORE. THEY’RE COMING. WE’RE FAMILY. FAMILY IS EVERYTHING, MAX.” Next thing there was the sound of broken glass and shots. The phone hit the floor, and then there was nothing.
THEY SAY PROBLEMS COME IN threes, that the universe is fixated on that number and it wants, more than anything, to seek this trinity. Then again, three people in a photograph is bad luck. So, I gather, is three people in a marriage. Asa says that the whole thing with problems coming in flocks of three is God’s way of reminding us that He does not play at dice with the universe.
“These patterns are a kindness, Max,” he told me once on the phone. “Like the rainbow. He wants us to know where we stand in the world, what is within His command. The world seems random if we don’t look carefully at it, or if we look without faith. God did not wait for Moses to go to the mountain before He set the burning bush aflame.”
“He didn’t?” I asked.
“It was always burning. Moses was the first to notice. That was his calling.”
“You lost me.”
“Everything is spiritual, Max. People have it mixed up. They think God despises this world for being physical, which doesn’t make sense. Why would He labor to create this world only to hate it? He’s not a moody painter. He is God. Our perception of His creation comes between us, keeps us from understanding where He’s coming from. We separate the spiritual from the physical. That rift is our doing. If we learn to see what’s really there—the burning bush, love, Higgs boson particles, gravity waves—if we learn to take note of the order with which God acts and look past the chaos that we impose on His creation, then we will come to know Him. This is why He says, ‘Be still and know that I am God.’”
“I can’t be still. I’m pissed off.”
“You’ve got to release yourself from that. And you can.”
“Asa, my brother has declared bankruptcy three times. If I bail him out again, he’s just going to piss it away.”
“He might. But your job is not justice, it’s to forgive. How else will you find peace?”
“I’m not sure I want peace,” I said. “I want to make Barb and Vogel pay.”
At this point neither of us said anything for a very long time. It was late, and I knew Asa had to be in the studio early. He was good to put up with me. I think in some way it gave him a chance to put his faith into practice. I was a better crucible for his ideas than temple or prayer. Asa was in it already, living it, but I could be changed. I might come around and find enlightenment. But other materials respond weakly, right? I didn’t want the attraction. I just wanted to hear Asa talk about these things. And maybe I was “other materials.”
“God is testing your brother, Max,” he said finally, “but He is also testing you.”
“What if I fail?”
“You might. That’s why you must be careful.”
“Is God testing Barbara?”
“He’s been testing Barb her whole life.”
Another long pause. “I don’t really have to answer that, do I, Max?”
OVER THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, before the meeting and my lunch with Asa, and for the rest of the day afterward, the phone nearly rang off the hook. It was Merilese, Barb’s assistant, on damage control. The poor girl was a ventriloquist’s dummy. She wanted the mail, Barb’s letters. She was trying to be indirect and very nonchalant about it, but it quickly degenerated into begging and threats. She must have known that I understood how Barb’s mail went to her post office box, where it was handled by her squads of interns and assistants. It was fishy indeed that the mail should be of any concern to Barb, so fishy that I decided to take a look for myself.
It didn’t take long, but eventually I found, in the small bundle of letters and magazines, two envelopes from her stockbroker. They were addressed to Bitya Steinberg, Barb’s real name. Someone was striving to fly under the radar. A few people know Barb cleaned up her name in the eighties. She said it was to be more American. Nobody questioned it because we were in the middle of a recession and trying to wash off the stink of Desert Storm. That’s how my wife turned herself into a shiksa.
I held the stockbroker’s letters up to the window, and in that weak X-ray I could see the simple sheet of paper and nothing else. We were in the middle of a quarter, so it wasn’t likely a statement. I set the letters down, went to the kitchen, and got a beer, but I couldn’t stay there. I returned to the letters.
I know this sounds made up, but they were pulling me, or maybe it was that I was pulling myself to the letters or more accurately, in gravitational terms, that we were pulling each other. It sounds crazy, but that’s how it felt—weak at first, then stronger the closer I got to them. I turned the envelopes over. One was postmarked a week ago and the other only a couple of days.
Let me be the first to say that, under other circumstances, I would have sent the mail along to Merilese, but some quiet and persistent voice enticed me to pick up the older envelope. I also need to say that I am not predisposed to acknowledge voices. I have never entertained them in the past, and I don’t plan to open my thinking to them in the future. I am Dr. Science, after all, which is a secular attainment.
But this one envelope nearly leapt to my hand.
As I methodically opened it, I began to feel a confidence and clarity. The confusion of a few moments ago was gone. I withdrew the letter and opened it. It was handwritten and began with the words: For your eyes only, destroy after reading.
Even though it was unsigned, I could tell that it had come from Simon Barclay, Barb’s broker. It was not on letterhead. It looked in no way official, no connection to the firm, unsigned, and completely independent.
Simon’s message was simple.
SEC sniffing around your Econo-Mart divestiture.
Do not—I repeat—do not sign Bullseye Emporium licensing deal, or you will go to jail!!!
I reread the letter two or three times. This information was more shocking, more out of the blue than Barb’s affair. That licensing deal with Econo-Mart brought an unseemly amount of money into our lives. That deal paid for the Charleston house, and the boat, and the apartment in Rome, and my Maserati. I tried to take my brother for a ride in that car a few years ago, after his wife died, but he refused. He said it was poison, and it would make him weak.
If Barb was planning to move money over to Bullseye Emporium, the payout would be colossal, no doubt, but it would probably leave Econo-Mart with nothing. In the last year, I’ve read no less than a half-dozen articles in The Wall Street Journal about Econo-Mart’s hubris. While other retailers have diversified, Econo-Mart, out of a sense of duty or stupidity, has pushed Barb’s product line almost exclusively, to the point where it seems like Barb made the deal with them and not the other way around. If she left them, they would be finished, and she’d get what she always wanted: the appearance of upward mobility, the GM model of the American Dream, the trade up.
The only thing I know for sure about corporations is that they can’t stand being left with nothing, and when they get screwed like this, someone in the corporate structure will inevitably dream about or even suggest hiring an assassin, usually a classy one from Europe who has designed his own weapons. That would have solved a lot of my problems, but I could already hear Asa’s position on the matter. It halted my dreaming, and I realized there was another letter in my hands. I opened it. It was in the same format as the other:
You cannot outsmart them
They want to make an example of you
Stay away from Bullseye Emp.
For the love of God, Bitya, stay away from Bullseye
As I said, it was postmarked with a later date. The “Bitya” at the end of the note caused me to notice a tickle in my brain that had been bothering me for months. Was she screwing her broker, too? The potential chain reaction of my thoughts from that point, I knew, would have led to complete mental paralysis or insanity, so I set both letters on the counter and drank the other half of my beer.
Then I called Asa.
“Hey, you sound a little crazy today, friend.”
“I am a little bit crazy, Asa … Barb is …” I don’t know why I couldn’t tell him.
“Max?” he said. “Max, you told me already? Are you having a stroke?”
“Not a stroke. Not what I told you. Max, Barb’s in real big trouble …” It was hard for me to tell if I was being melodramatic or if I was actually overcome. Asa waited. “Asa, Barb’s in big, big, serious trouble, legal trouble. I went through her mail—”
“Max, that’s a federal offense.”
“Not if you’re married. But listen, I’m serious. I think the SEC is looking at her for trading violations.”
“Then we shouldn’t be talking on the phone,” Asa said, alarmed. “Hang up.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said, looking at the receiver to see if it looked like somebody had tampered with it. “So what do we do now. I mean, if they’re listening?”
“Hang up. I’m going to hang up.”
“Okay, but won’t that be suspicious? If we just hang up, I mean, then it’ll be obvious.”
“What’ll be obvious?”
“I don’t know—that we had a conversation. Don’t you think it’ll seem like we’re having a conversation?”
“We are having a conversation. If we’re cooked, we’re cooked.”
“Couldn’t we claim privilege? I saw a Law & Order once where they couldn’t use this guy’s confession because he gave it to his rabbi.”
“Max, I’m not a rabbi. I’m a puppeteer.”
“Well, you talk like a rabbi,” I said, ashamed now for what must have surely seemed like hysteria to Asa.
“Let’s talk about this later, my friend. You going to the office tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s get a slice.”
“That’ll be good. Probably no bugs at Ray’s.”
Asa rage-sighed. “There will be.”
“They don’t know which Ray’s is our Ray’s.”
“Max, it’s time for you to shut up. And if you’ve got a sleeping pill or something, you should take it. Get a good night’s sleep and we’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And don’t do anything. Please.”
I DIDN’T TAKE THE SLEEPING pill. Instead I scoured the place for files, paperwork, spreadsheets. I couldn’t find anything, nothing suspicious in our records. I wanted to call Barb but didn’t. Without a doubt, they were tapped in to her phones. While I was on the computer, I checked my email. Aside from the crap there was one message from Devin. The subject line was:
IMPORTANT: Network Consultants Tomorrow A.M.
The message read:
Okay, everybody … this is the moment we’ve been dreading. As you know, the network has scheduled an 8 a.m. meeting for us with some consultants, which means only one thing. Ratings are down, and they are trying to decide whether to redesign the show or drop us. Come ready to wow them with our cutting-edge ideas for children’s educational programming and be ready to run with any idea they give us. Even if we hate it. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT, take umbrage with anything they suggest, or we’ll all be auditioning for the next season of The Apprentice. I’m not kidding.
Don’t do anything rash. That’s what Asa said. Take a pill and don’t do anything rash. Of course, it’s very easy for Asa to hand out that kind of advice. He has not had to deal with this kind of indignity: being second-guessed. His show shot into the stratosphere like a Soyuz rocket. He never had time to adjust to the new world of becoming rich and famous. He hasn’t even gotten himself a new apartment, just channels all the money to the puppet theater or stashes it in the bank. Plus, he is spiritually grounded, and I am adrift.
Before I knew it, I’d finished off all six of the beers in my fridge. I was calmer but still agitated. I needed something else to drink. As I reached for a highball glass, I saw the stately rows of long-stemmed, ridiculously expensive wineglasses. My hand floated toward them. It felt drawn toward them. I took the wineglass and fumbled in a drawer in the bar for a corkscrew and went into the wine cellar, which we still called a cellar despite being twenty floors up.
The door hissed slightly when I opened it, and the lights came on serially like the ones in a bank vault. Every space in the racks was full, and a few cartons of wine bottles sat, stacked here and there, not randomly, but in the haphazard, art-directed way that everything in Barb’s empire was arranged. What I wanted was the most expensive bottle here. My motivation was absolute pettiness. I wanted Barb to see that empty bottle on the counter, sitting on top of Egg McMuffin wrappers, or maybe in the sink alongside a bag of bite-size Butterfingers.
The problem was that there was too much wine and no way for me to tell the value. So, being a good scientist, I gathered data. I headed back upstairs with a list of twenty-five names and vintages and got on the internet. In about ten minutes I had isolated the 1998 Cheval Blanc, a Cabernet Franc and Merlot with a dash of Malbec and Cabernet Sauvignon thrown in to give it a stunning nose with a cashew nut and dark fruit character with rounded mineral notes, a wine I knew would absolutely lend its terroir to milk chocolate and peanut butter crunch. And it went for two hundred and fifty a bottle. Maybe I’d haul out two of them.
I drank the wine, which saved me the need for sleeping pills and got me drunk fast enough so I didn’t have to mope around in agony over my wife’s infidelities to me and the laws of the United States of America. I slipped into delicious sleep, and I awoke to the chirping of my cell phone.
“Hello?”
“Oh my God, Max, where are you?”
It was Devin.
“I’m at home, why?”
“It’s eight thirty. The network consultan—”
“Oh, sugar,” I said.
“Sugar? Who says that?”
“Can you send me a car?”
“I already did?”
“Can you take them to breakfast?” I asked. “I could meet you there.”
“Max, they don’t want breakfast, besides there are Danishes in the conference room. It’ll seem like a ploy.”
“It is a ploy.”
“Listen—you get here as soon as you can.”
I shaved in the elevator and went to meet the car in the street. The doorman said good morning, and I stopped. I got out my wallet and took out a hundred-dollar bill. “You ever see my wife with Chuck Vogel, that guy from Revive Your Dive?”
His eyes sliced around the foyer and he tipped back the brim of his green cap. “You mean the house-fixing show?”
I nodded. He folded the bill in half and stuffed it in his pocket. “He’s been around.”
“A lot?”
His lower lip gathered slightly and he nodded, his eyes on the street.
“How about a weaselly-looking guy, shorter than her, with red hair. Looks like a cross between Robert Redford and Conan O’Brien?”
“You mean Mr. Barclay?”
“Yeah, that weasel.”
The guy dropped his shoulders a little and scrunched up one eye. “He used to come around a lot, but I haven’t seen him in months.”
A car outside honked aggressively.
I gestured to the cash in his pocket and said, “You tell me if my wife or any of these jokers come around. You call me on the phone.” I grabbed a pen and wrote my number. “You call me if you see any of them, all right?” Another set of honks. “You will be paid. Tell the guy on the second shift. Tell him to watch out. Tell him there’s money in this, for everyone.”
I left the building and got in the car. The driver—couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old—adjusted his mirror and said, “Hey, it’s Dr. Science. Man, I grew up on your show. You know, I actually built a replica of Mount Vesuvius in the fifth grade.”
“With lava?”
“Oh yeah, baby. When we put the Mentos in there it was, like, red gore all over the room. You know what I’m saying? My mother had a heart attack. Science is so freaking awesome.” He bro-shook my hand in a way I couldn’t follow.
“Thanks,” I said. I wish I could just bring him into the meeting with me, let him sell the show. He ran his mouth the whole way, said how he was going to be a scientist, study physics maybe or geology. But his grades were crap and college was a lot of money for his family. I asked him for some aspirin and he said he had something better, handed me a bottle of pills and told me to take one. The bottle said, HYDROCODONE/APAP. “It’s generic Lortabs, man. Swiss guy left them in my cab last night.” I shook one out into my hand. It had the number M358 stamped into it. You can check the numbers on the internet. I palmed one and handed him the bottle.
“Thanks,” I said.
He let me off in front of the building and told me he’d been inspired. He was going to call City College on his break and see about some classes. I told him thanks for the pill and then said, “Science is the art of understanding the world.” The kid smiled and said he hadn’t heard that line in a long time. I got coffee in the lobby and debated taking the pill. I’d have about a forty-five-minute window, then I’d be in Palookaville for the afternoon. Probably a good thing. Because I’m a lightweight, I settled on half the pill, swallowed it with a swig of coffee, and rode the elevator upstairs. When the doors opened, Devin was ready to pounce. She appeared to be composed, but her eyes were crazy.
“Max, this is it. This is make-or-break. They’re looking for a reason to cut the show. The burden of proof is ours. We have to make them want the show. Pablo’s been pitching ideas for the last twenty minutes, and they’re not biting. If we don’t get in there right away, Sage is going to start talking.”
“Maybe he should.”
“Sage? If it were up to Sage, we’d just fill the show with lightsabers.”
“That would probably sell.”
“Max,” she shrieked.
“I’m going to take care of things,” I said, then redirected my attention to the receptionist. “What’s your name?” I asked. She looked like she was twenty-three, her hair in a bun with a pencil stabbed through it.
“Elaine,” she said.
“Two things,” I said. “First, what do you think of my show?”
She looked down and then to the far corner of her desk.
“Max,” Devin said, “we don’t have time for this.”
I hushed her. “It’s okay, Elaine, I’ve taken opiates this morning. I’m bulletproof. You can say whatever you want.”
She lifted her eyes, and her face flexed apologetically. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t really watch television.”
“So, you’re not an actress,” I said.
She shook her head no. “I want to work in publishing. I like history.” She looked small and ashamed when she said it.
“That’s good, Elaine. That’s good. Do you think people like history? In general, I mean? Do you think history is marketable?” Devin hissed at me again.
Elaine took in a deep breath and let it out slowly through her nostrils. “I think people don’t know what they want, Mr. Condit. People don’t think they can like things on their own. They make their choices because they think it will help them fit in. Or maybe that it will keep them from standing out. I don’t know if that’s the same thing, but I think it is, or close anyway. I think people want to be told what to want and what to like. That way they won’t pick the wrong thing.” Her eyebrows knit together suddenly. “Is that what you want me to say?” she asked. “Because I don’t know what I’m really talking about.”
“It’s perfect,” I told her. “No, you are perfect. Thank you.”
“Max,” Devin said. “We have got to go in there.”
Elaine kept looking at me like there was one more thing she dare not say. I smiled at her and told her that she should finish her thought.
“I don’t know. It’s just that, well … telling people what to like, that’s what your wife does. And I don’t think she’s making the world any better, just more the same.”
“I thought you didn’t watch TV,” I said.
“She publishes magazines, too, you know. And cookbooks.”
“That’s true,” I said. Then I smiled and hoped it wasn’t creepy. “You have no idea what you have just done for me, Elaine. Really, you have no idea. Okay—second thing. I have an idea. I want Asa and Elaine to listen in.”
“How? This isn’t Mission: Impossible,” Devin complained.
“We can do it with our phones,” I said. “We’ll call Asa. He’ll send his comments straight to Devin as texts, and he can serve as our moral compass. Right now, Elaine, you call Mr. Kirschbaum and tell him everything you just said to me, then tell him I wanted him to hear you say it.”
“Max,” Devin said, “we can’t keep those people waiting. You are not that important.”
“I am calling in the reinforcements. Devin, do you have your phone?” I asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
“Asa is going to text you our instructions. I am all nonsense. You are too angry. Asa and Elaine will be the puppeteers.”
“He’s going to do this by texting?” Devin asked.
“Yes, indeed. We’ll use the enemy’s weapons against them.”
Devin asked Elaine if she had any idea what I was talking about. She shook her head, and when she saw me looking, she smiled.
“Call Asa,” I said. “Devin, let’s go in there and kick some butts.”
We walked into the conference room, me in front, Devin in the rear. I was emboldened by my encounter with the receptionist and the taxi driver and with the still-surging throbs of adrenaline coursing through my bloodstream. The consultants were sitting at the far end of the conference room with Sage, who was hunched over the table, sketching madly with one hand and gesturing with the other. The consultants shared a look that was one-third amusement and two-thirds confusion. “And those are the people of the Numericon Guild of Erdös, who forge the mathematical operations in their workshops and bring them above ground to—”
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” I said. “I was just wrapping up a couple of focus groups this morning. I like to keep a clear sense of what people are saying about The Dr. Science Show.” As I went to shake their hands, the phone rang. I pressed the speaker phone and said, “Please hold the calls.” But I didn’t hang up. That was our connection to Elaine, who would relay to Asa. I extended my hand again, “Max Condit—pleased to meet you.” We shook hands and exchanged names.
Sage tried to interrupt. “Hey, Max, the phone—”
“So you’ve met Sage? He’s our out-of-the-box thinker, a real envelope pusher,” I said. “How about Pablo and Laura?”
“Laura’s not here,” Sage said.
Sure enough she was not.
“Laura is spending a little time with some of the science educators at NASA,” Devin said, and then she checked her phone.
I pulled out a chair and sat grandly. I gestured for Devin and Pablo to sit as well. Pablo seemed to be fuming. His brow was furrowed and his eyes were so small you almost couldn’t see them through his little rectangular glasses.
“So,” I said, “you have some ideas about my show.”
The consultants glanced at each other, and the one on the left opened her leather notebook. “As you know,” she began, “the growth of streaming media has increased the struggle for audience share in all markets, but this competition has been particularly stiff for the producers of educational content. Direct-to-school networks, DVDs, and other media have taken away public broadcasting’s privileged position regarding this kind of content.”
The second consultant chimed in. “Which means broadcasters have had to get more aggressive. The PBS board has brought us in to analyze each offering in the children’s educational lineup, which we have done. Now we’re meeting with the producers to offer our suggestions for meeting the competition head-on.”
“Very interesting,” I said. “Tell me, who are your other clients?” The consultants looked at each other with some confusion. “What other shows and networks have you been working on? I mean surely you weren’t brought on because you were the low bidder. What I mean is, I have a PhD in physics from Stanford and I’ve produced the second-longest-running children’s program in the history of children’s television. What are your credentials?” I grabbed a Danish and sat back in my chair. The consultants whispered to each other, and the one without a pad said, “Well, Amy has an MBA from SUNY Albany.”
I told him I thought Albany was pretty good for a public school.
Amy glowered at me for a microsecond then said, “We’ve worked with Bob the Builder, Dora the Explorer, Carmen Sandiego—”
“Our competition,” I said. “How’s that supposed to work? If you’re telling all of us what to do to be more effective, isn’t that a little like you running around a poker table telling people what everybody else is holding? I don’t think that’s the kind of help we need, quite frankly.”
Devin looked down calmly at her lap and firmed her lips. “I think …” she said hesitantly, “we should hear some of … their ideas … um, for the show.” Then she looked at me and raised her little phone slightly and set it back in her lap.
Amy smiled and said that she and her associate, his name was Parker, recognized the history of the show and its long run. “But kids want to be empowered to become independent learners,” she said. “They don’t need or want to rely on adult authority figures for the answers. They want to work it out on their own. We need to help them learn to face unscripted problems.”
“It’s television. There’s always a script.”
“Yes, but with technology,” Parker interjected, “kids don’t have to rely on adults. It’s a much more democratic educational process.”
With her eyes back in her lap, Devin said, “You’re not really taking the adults away, with the computers. You’re just hiding them, because kids don’t build … or program the computers. They’re certainly not producing or editing the content of the shows either.”
“That’s right,” Parker continued. “But you need to give them a modicum of control, a sense that they are behind the learning. They don’t know what they want, but they know that they don’t want to have to go to adults to get it.”
Then Amy added, “We’d like to recommend that you reconfigure the show to focus on your Junior Science Corps group. Have them be the centerpiece of the program. Cast these roles permanently and have them work out the solution to scientific problems together, through a consensus-based group process. We’ve tested the idea, and kids like it.”
“Where does that leave old Dr. Science?” I chuckled. The question flew from my lips before I could contain it. Nevertheless, I had the sinking feeling that I was playing right into their hands. Parker lifted the lid of his laptop and clicked a button on a palm-sized remote, bringing an image to life on the screen.
“We wouldn’t suggest losing Dr. Science altogether. Parents have a lot of attachment to the brand, which brings viewers to the show, but we’d like to use the new configuration to hold them there,” Parker said. He clicked another button and a cartoon image of an owl in a space suit came on the screen. “That’s the new Dr. Science. He’s a cyber-owl.”
“A what?” I said.
“A cyber-owl,” Amy answered. “A kind of STEM muse for the kids. The cyber-owl lives in a computer. The kids can access him and ask him questions when they get stuck. He can send them on quests. We’d use your voice, of course, but the owl would be CGI.”
“Cool,” Sage said from his seat. “Maybe his programmer could be an old wizard from a thousand years in the future.”
“Shut up, Sage,” Pablo said through his teeth. “That’s probably the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”
“Why not a puppet?” Devin asked, then she glanced at her gizmo. “Computer animation is still pretty … expensive, isn’t it? A puppet would be cheaper, and you could keep the human quality. We can’t sacrifice the humanity of our work.”
Parker answered decisively, “Puppets are dead.”
Amy followed up, “Kids don’t buy into puppets anymore. Ever since Toy Story they’ve had insatiable appetites for CGI. Puppets are the new eight-track.”
Emily, who had been quiet for the whole meeting, pushed her glasses up and said, “You can cuddle with a puppet—I mean, kids could cuddle with one.”
“Puppets are dodos, carrier pigeons,” Parker said. “Time marches on, folks. Cuddle factor doesn’t sell anymore, look at Milo’s Treehouse. Licensing revenues have been down for six quarters.”
“TIME MARCHES ON,” ASA GROWLED, and then paid for his slice. “Puppets are dead? Are you kidding me?”
“That’s what they said,” I told him. But he knew. He’d been listening.
“And the network is actually listening to these people?”
“They said they’re going to be meeting with all the producers in the network.”
“We have a meeting with them early next month,” Asa said.
“You’re a goner, then,” I said.
We took our food and sat at the window facing the billboard of Barb. Asa asked if I wanted to sit somewhere else, and I told him I wasn’t going to let her win even the smallest victory. Besides, I was going to need to learn to ignore her smug face raining down on me. “She’s everywhere,” I said. “There’s no escape. I’m going to have to work on tuning her out.”
Asa nodded and took small bites of his pizza, chewing them carefully, arranging his napkin every little while. It looked like he was formulating a plan or comment or something, but he just kept eating. He was wisdomless.
Across the street, a cop was frisking a kid in a stocking cap and a huge winter coat. I still felt a little loopy from the pill, but mostly numb. Coming down off the adrenaline was worse. My mouth was dry; the rims of my eyes hurt.
“Everything’s upside down,” I said. I told him about Barb and the stock situation.
“You are having a terrible week,” Asa said. “Are you tied up in any of this? Do you know where the cash is?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean I’m sure she’s got money stashed all over the place.”
“You should start liquidating before they freeze her accounts.”
“I’ll have to,” I said.
We ate for a while in silence, then Asa set down his pizza and said, “You ever been to Israel?”
ASA WASN’T REALLY ASKING A question but delivering the preamble to a proposition. In the course of reconnecting to his Jewish faith, he had fallen in with some Zionists, people who planted in his head the idea that he would be happiest if he could leave the world of television and reconnect with the land, with physical labor, and perhaps experience direct contact with children through teaching or athletics. Their suggestion was that he could do this best by moving to a settlement in the West Bank, where the borders of Israel were imperiled.
Asa told me he’d been considering this option for a long time, praying every day for insight. Then, he said, this divine call came from our phone puppetry gambit. Once he had the chance to hear the network’s plan to strike down everything we’d all been dedicating our lives to, he’d had enough. God had spoken with a clarity that he felt did not require repeating. Asa suggested we both go to Israel. There, in a single stroke, I could escape Barb and my demotion to cyber-owl sidekick.
“Besides,” he said, “we don’t want what America is turning into, Max.”
He was right. I wanted out, out of every last part of it.
Asa had arranged to buy land that was part of a moshav located in the Golan Heights. He showed me beautiful pictures, said the moshavim are collectives, but your place belongs to you and you put your crops in with everyone else’s. He said the work can be difficult for some people, but the freedom it could bring would be worth it.
What he said made a lot of sense to me. If Barb was going to be swallowed up by an investigation and media frenzy, I would not be immune here. My money would be frozen as well, my movements suspect. I had very little in my name. Over the next few days Asa continued his pitch. He explained that most people farm in that area, but Asa was planning to open a school, a bilingual school, and who, he asked, would be a better teacher in the beautiful orchards of Mount Hebron than the world-famous Dr. Science?
I was still sitting on the fence until I stumbled upon some bank information I didn’t recognize. Deep in one of Barb’s files, I found a note card with an internet address, a log-in, and password. It was online access for a bank account in the Cayman Islands in the name of none other than Bitya Steinberg. The balance: fifteen-and-a-half million dollars. I was furious at first, but I came out of it quickly and saw this for the revelation it was.
You should know how difficult it is for me to use a word like that. As Dr. Science, I have lived a secular life, built on scientific training. This religious world of Asa’s has been a curiosity for me, something I would call psychology rather than spirituality. The events of the last few weeks make me second-guess that approach. Science doesn’t explain my rage at, or disgust with, my wife. In evolutionary terms, what purpose does cuckoldry serve? Wouldn’t the organisms who show a predisposition to ignore it be the ones most likely to survive and reproduce? Wouldn’t the moody, sad monkeys, the ones crushed by their mate’s affection for other monkeys, be the ones to mope themselves into a childless oblivion? How do creatures who can be hurt so deeply by the caprices of other creatures rise up on two legs and become the kings of all they survey? In purely evolutionary terms, we lack the emotional strength of the pit viper or barracuda, and that’s a strength we need sometimes.
So, as I stared at Barb’s secret account, a pathway for settling the score opened before me, and I moved the mouse without reservation. I searched the internet for another offshore bank. This one in Barbados. I opened an account. When the account was established, I transferred a third of the money into it. Cleaning her out would not give me the closure I wanted. My plan was this: leave most of the money in that account and then leak the information to the authorities, let them follow the money and seize the account. Barb’s stash would become a weapon against her in a very real way. I wouldn’t just be robbing her, I’d be sending her to prison. And I can’t tell you how the thought of that raced through my body like a house on fire.
WHEN THE MONEY CLEARED, I called my brother, Boyd, with the number he left me. It was a motel in Ventura. Even with his talk box, he sounded surprised to hear from me.
“You still need money for your house?” I asked.
“UP YOURS,” he answered.
“I’m serious, Boyd. I have some money, and I think I might be able to help you.”
“IT’S TOO LATE. I’M OUT FOR GOOD. THEY’VE GOT A FAMILY IN THERE NOW. YUPPIES. I’M HUMAN GARBAGE.”
“You’re not human garbage,” I said.
“YOU’RE NOT HERE. YOU DON’T KNOW.”
“What if I told you I had the money to get you a house, free and clear?”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, FREE AND CLEAR?”
“I mean I have enough money right now to buy you a house pretty much wherever you want one.”
“I WANT THE ONE THEY TOOK.”
“Well, that’s up to you. Do you still have a bank account, or have they closed it?”
“I GOT THE CHECKING ACCOUNT. THERE’S NOTHING IN IT. MAYBE A COUPLE OF BUCKS.”
I had him get a check and read me the account and routing number. Boyd was worried that I would use the numbers to steal from him. I assured him that I would only use them to make deposits. “Go to the bank tomorrow and check your balance. I think you’ll be surprised. And Boyd, I’m probably going away for a while, maybe forever.”
“TO PRISON?” he asked. “WHAT FOR? SCIENCE CRIMES?”
“No,” I said. “There’s no such thing as science crimes.”
“WHAT ABOUT THE NAZIS?”
“Except for the Nazis. You got me.”
“WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU? ARE YOU DYING?”
“No, nothing like that. I’m quitting the show and moving out of New York. I’ll drop you a line when I’ve figured it out.”
“YOU GETTING RID OF THAT SO-CALLED WIFE? SHE’S ON THE TV ALL THE TIME.”
I told him that we would not be staying together. Boyd said he was glad about that, told me that Barb used to make his wife cry. Once while they were preparing Thanksgiving dinner, she saw Barb dump one of her pies into the garbage and then walk over and set the tin on the dog’s bed. I told him I’d been hearing a lot of stories like that lately.
“Boyd,” I said. “Go check the bank, okay? And don’t …”
“DON’T WHAT, MAX?”
“Well, I want you to—Please just get a house with it. Promise me you’ll get a house.”
“I’M GOING TO GET WAY MORE THAN A HOUSE, MAXIE,” he said. “I’M GETTING JUSTICE.”
It was clear to me that Max thought he was going to get justice, but justice might not be the safety net he thought it would be. After I wired him the money, I also took a spare set of keys to the New York apartment and put them in an envelope with a note:
Boyd,
If you need to get away from California, you’re welcome to stay at my apartment in New York as long as you like. I’ve kept a bunch of Mom’s things there. It could be a good place to get centered. The alarm code is 1961, the year I was born.
Love,
Max
From this point on, things started moving really fast. I forwarded Barclay’s letters to Barb and began to sort through my things. I didn’t want much. Almost everything in the place was Barb’s. I wanted a laptop, my clothes, the camera, a box of photographs, a few books (Gleick’s biography of Richard Feynman, some essays by Albert Einstein, Gulliver’s Travels). It didn’t seem like I could start over with a truck full of my old stuff. Plus, the effect of my leaving would have more weight, I imagined, if I seemed to have vanished into thin air. Asa and I got our passports and visas in order and discussed the possibilities of our school, what we would teach, how we would meet with the parents. It felt energizing to imagine the change.
I was invulnerable to anything the network could do or say to me. During our preparations, Devin and Emily were fired. Pablo left before they could “get their claws into him.” He got a job at the Cartoon Network working on a program about the children of superheroes. They kept Sage and Laura and brought in a new producer.
Sage came to me and said, “Hey, dude, it was going to be epic, but you can stop working on the magnetism show.”
“Why?” I asked. I thought somehow he knew about my plans to leave.
“They don’t want it.” He reached into his back pocket and took out a piece of paper that had been folded into quarters. “They gave me a list.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“I don’t know. Them. The network. Here’s the list.”
The memo Sage unfolded said the show would need a conservation angle. They wanted programs on the rain forest, recycling, wind power, hybrid automobiles, and lots of STEM. I set the paper on my desk and told Sage to sit down.
“Sage, don’t worry about what’s going on around here,” I told him. “You should just go finish your screenplay.”
“Which one?” he said.
“The autobiographical one about the wizard who can see into the future.”
Sage wouldn’t look at me. “That one’s not autobiographical,” he said without much conviction.
“Your name is Sage, right?”
He nodded.
“Sage. Wizard. I guess your parents were thinking about the herb.”
Sage grinned uncomfortably. I told him I knew the days of Dr. Science were numbered. “Listen,” I said. “The future is always in motion. You’ve got to go catch it.”
Sage grinned. “Okay, that’s cool,” he said, “But you got it wrong.”
“What?”
“The Yoda line you just said. In the movie it went, Always in motion is the future.’ You know, because he’s got sensei grammar.”
I made a face that encouraged him to think I’d never seen The Empire Strikes Back. “Sorry,” I said.
“You’re okay, Dr. Science.” Doing the voice again, he said, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”
“More Yoda?” I asked.
He nodded and walked to the door. “You never once made me feel dumb.”
“May the Force be with you,” I said.
“No, dude, may the Force be with you. You’re going to need it, bad.”
BEFORE WE LEFT, BARB CALLED me herself. I don’t think she even had Merilese place the call. Caller ID showed her personal cell number. I let it ring for a long time before I picked up. She was distraught, and I took pleasure in that.
“Max,” she said. “We’ve both been working too hard, with our shows. It’s been a hard year, Max.”
“Yes, it has.”
“You know this thing with Chuck doesn’t mean anything.”
“Yes, it does. It means you’re a terrible person.”
“Max, why would you say something like that?”
“Because no one else will. I assume you got those letters from Simon Barclay.”
She didn’t answer right away. During the silence, I doodled a pillow and a horseshoe magnet and thought about magnetic coition.
“You read them, I presume?” she asked, eventually.
“Of course I did. Does Simon know about this thing with Chuck? I wonder how he’d feel about that. Doesn’t seem like you’d want him to be—what’s the right word here—discontented with you right now? A man with the knowledge he has might not like hearing that you’ve decided to cheat on your husband with someone other than himself.”
“I wasn’t sleeping with Simon.”
“Oh, what tangled webs we weave, Bitya.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Simon does.”
“Simon has the goods on you. I wouldn’t tick him off right now—do you think your phone is tapped?”
“How would I know?”
“Yeah, how would you? Anyway, Barb, I’m filing for divorce. Unless you want your books opened up to the courts, I’d suggest you sign the papers. It’ll be easier on everyone.”
At that point she hung up. I knew she would. The divorce was simple, I wanted the apartment, and that was it. I didn’t even want the Maserati. I only wanted something that would make it through whatever the SEC was going to put her through. It would also cut her to the quick. That apartment was her prestige, the way she bought herself out of her immigrant past. I also wanted someplace to come back to if this collective farming project fell through.
On the day before we were set to leave, Asa called. “I don’t have the shows,” he said. He was nearly hysterical. I asked him to calm down. “I don’t have the shows, Max. They screwed me with the contract.”
Asa’s contract, it seemed, gave him rights to control and distribute the image of Milo but not the Milo’s Treehouse program or the secondary characters. It hadn’t mattered, because the licensing money was so good. Asa didn’t think about it. But when Asa tried to arrange to take copies of his shows, he was told they were all being digitally remastered. The old videotape masters were being erased to make room in the archive for more digital servers.
“Anyway,” he said, “I can’t take Milo with me. They’re holding him hostage.”
I MET ASA FOR ONE last slice in town before we left. We sat at the window, eating in silence, our bodies filled with electricity. Asa got a second slice and refilled his Coke and sat back at the window and said, “If we were still in high school, I’d say we should do something to that sign of Barb across the street.”
I couldn’t bring myself to look at it.
“This girl from high school named Charlene Stavros—she was ridiculously hot,” Asa said. “Well, she once dumped a buddy of mine for a guy on the student senate, she told him it was nothing personal, but she wanted to run for student government and thought he could help her. My buddy was crushed, but he decided to get even. He had this photograph of Charlene from an old middle school yearbook. Man, it was terrible: braces, feathered hair, huge Coke-bottle glasses, cowl-neck sweater. He took that picture and photocopied it and made like two hundred posters that said: STAVROS FOR STUDENT SENATE. I USED TO BE A BIG GEEK, SO I KNOW WHAT GEEKS LIKE YOU NEED. He plastered those things everywhere.”
“She lose the race?”
“Completely. There was basically a geek riot. The physics club made a pneumatic catapult and shot a dummy dressed in a cowl-neck sweater across the football field. This kid named Marshall won her seat. She never knew what hit her.” Asa stared off into the distance, then said, “What if we did something to that sign before we leave?”
“Revenge of the Nerds–style?”
“That’s right.”
“I could get into that,” I said.
THAT AFTERNOON WE HATCHED TWO plans, one to avenge me and the other to avenge Asa. I was a little surprised that he would agree to something like this, since he was working so hard to become a man of peace. He said he needed something to help him break from New York psychologically. He wanted something that would make it hard or impossible for him to come back. He didn’t want to see the inside of a television studio again, but he knew he was weak.
“So you want to burn your bridges,” I asked him.
“That’s exactly what I want to do,” he said.
I’m not proud of what we did, but it was necessary, and it allowed me to return to the magnetism show I would never finish. It brought me back, in a way, to the beginning. During his interview Pablo told us how he had erased his parents’ videocassettes with an electromagnet he learned how to build from one of my first shows, a show in which we did move iron filings around on a card.
I’d go out the way I came in. It felt dizzy and delicious.
Asa, believing he had been robbed of his creation, wanted to make Milo unavailable to the network, which he knew was impossible—copies of the programs were surely vaulted away somewhere in Brooklyn or the Library of Congress—but he wanted to cause a little bit of what he called the “right kind of trouble.” He wanted their decision to have consequences they didn’t expect. So he suggested we try to erase the digital archive (without damaging the servers permanently, of course—Asa didn’t own the servers, but he felt like he owned the shows). The shows wouldn’t be gone, of course, but this plan meant the network would have to go back to the beginning of the digitization project. Asa wanted someone at the corporate office to be pissed off.
I wanted to rat out my wife in some public way, and I wanted it to hit suddenly with news coverage. I was entranced by Asa’s story of this Stavros girl and her public trouncing in the high school election, so I proposed this: we spray-paint Barb’s offshore account information on the billboard across the street from our lunch spot. Asa thought that would be a good idea, but we needed something catchy, not just the numbers. A signature, he called it. Something that would enrage Barb in public. The problem was, we couldn’t think of anything, and we needed to leave.
During lunch on our last day of work, we went down to the hardware store and bought a few simple items: a spool of copper wire, two wire nuts, and a lamp timer. The project was simple. We’d carry the wire in on a spool, hang it between two of the servers, pull enough of the wire to make it to an outlet, strip the ends, jam them in the timer, set it to go off later, and then walk out. The current running through the spool would, well, you’ve seen my show.
It would certainly rile all the people we wanted riled.
We set our magnet bomb at three in the morning on the day of our departure. With our luggage in the car, we left the network, the timer ticking, and we headed to the billboard across from Ray’s Pizzeria. We were working on what kind of stinging barb we could leave behind, and we were also nervous because our plane would be leaving in three hours. Asa suggested something like. “My husband is leaving me for a balebatisheh yiden.”
I shrugged.
“Respectable Jew,” Asa said.
“First off, no one in this part of town will get it. Second, let’s not let her know where I’m going,” I said.
“But it is funny, right?” Asa said.
“It’s shpasik.”
“You’re learning,” Asa said.
We pulled up to the billboard and parked, got out, and looked for a way onto the roof. Asa went to a dumpster and flipped the lid back against the wall and used it like a ladder to get onto the low roof. I threw our bag of spray cans up and followed. It was remarkably easy. We took a look at the street below. From that height we could see a number of blocks in each direction. We were completely clear. I gave one of the account numbers to Asa and kept one for myself. We mounted the sign and began rattling our cans, laughing, looking at our watches, waiting for the timer to click. We had another ten minutes for that mayhem to begin, so we painted away.
Asa wanted to be sure his numbers were big enough, so he suggested we make them as big as ourselves. Writing at that scale, stopping to shake the cans, was intoxicating (I’m sure it also had something to do with the butyrolactone or other volatiles in the paint). Just as I was finishing my part of the job, a spotlight clicked on us, and we heard an amplified voice saying, “HOLD IT RIGHT THERE, YOU MORONS!” It sounded like my brother, but the flashing blue and red lights told me it wasn’t. We both turned and put our hands up before they even asked us to. “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING UP THERE?”
Asa turned his head to me and said, “The truth will set you free. Maybe.”
“It could keep us from getting on that airplane,” I said.
“SHUT UP. I SAID, ‘WHAT. DO. YOU. THINK. YOU’RE DOING UP THERE?’”
“I’m serious,” Asa said. “Tell him the truth.” He glanced at his watch. “Three minutes and counting,” he said.
I told the cop that it wasn’t what it looked like. “We’re not in a gang or anything. I’m Max Condit. I have a show called Dr. Science.”
“Dr. Science? No way!” the cop said without amplification. “I love that show. I used to watch it with my kids.” The other cop seemed to agree.
“Thanks,” I shouted. “This is Asa Kirschbaum. He’s the man behind the puppet Milo.”
“FROM MILO’S TREEHOUSE?” the cop asked through the megaphone.
Asa shouted, “Yes.”
“HOW’D YOU GET ROBERT DE NIRO TO GO ON?”
Asa told him that De Niro called him.
I told the police that I recently discovered my wife, Barbara Stein, was having an affair with Chuck Vogel, and that the numbers we’d just painted on the sign would embarrass her immensely. The cop said that my wife’s shows and magazines had turned his wife into a certifiable nutcase. When we told him we couldn’t really hear, he went back to the megaphone. “SHE CAN’T JUST PUT FOOD ON THE TABLE ANYMORE. SHE’S GOT TO ARRANGE IT. WHEN I GET ON HER ABOUT IT, SHE KEEPS SAYING, ‘AIN’T LIFE SWEET, TONY.’ I JUST WANT MY CHICKEN SO I CAN WATCH THE KNICKS. THAT’S SWEET, HONEY. JUST GIVE ME MY DINNER AND SCULPT THE NAPKINS ON THANKSGIVING.”
I said, “Can you imagine living with her?”
The cop said he’d felt sorry for me. The second cop grabbed the megaphone from his partner and said, “THAT VOGEL HAS DESTROYED MY WEEKENDS. MY WIFE’S ALWAYS GOT ME TILING BATHROOMS AND PUTTING IN NEW FIXTURES. I’M READY TO PULL THE CABLE OUT OF THE WALL SO I CAN CATCH A BREAK.”
“That’s my whole life,” I said. The second cop told me I should be glad, said those two deserved each other. Of course the cops didn’t arrest us. They thought our project had wide-reaching importance. One of them even compared it to the Boston Tea Party, at least as far as he and a million other project-laden husbands were concerned. It was a strike against the tyranny of lifestyle porn.
They even suggested the icing on the cake, a simple grace note for the whole project. We crossed out “sweet” and added something crude.
Once we were done and down, they drove us to the airport and wished us well. It was easy to see that they were already savoring the story they’d be able to tell one day about the celebrities they helped jump from the tabloids to the mainstream news. Asa and I would hear only ricochets and echoing aftereffects.
THE MAGNET BOMB WORKED POORLY as a weapon of mass destruction. Everything was backed up in a separate server array on a different floor, and the bomb drew too much power and tripped the breaker. All the better, I’m sure, for our karma, or whatever it is called in Hebrew. Our message to the people of New York worked better. Barb is under indictment, and Vogel has been implicated. Simon Barclay turned state’s evidence, which likely carried more weight in court than our graffiti.
On the first leg of our flight to the Holy Land, Asa turned to me, removing his earbuds carefully. “Max, I think I know why God says that vengeance belongs to Him.”
“What brings this up?”
“You know, our escapades last night didn’t seem particularly holy.”
“But they felt good.”
“That’s what I’m saying. I think God wants us to keep away from vengeance because it’s addictive. For the last hour, I’ve been thinking of all the people who could use a little taste of spray paint or electromagnetism—you know, or people I think deserve it.”
“You thought about that for an hour?”
“Pretty much without stopping.”
The FASTEN SEATBELT sign came on, and the pilot announced some turbulence. The plane bucked almost imperceptibly. “How did it make you feel?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Asa said. “A little lost.”
I gestured to the overhead video console that showed our plane’s parabolic arc over the Atlantic. In the lower right-hand corner, I could read our latitude and longitude. The thought came to me that I’d never been so certain of where I was in my life. I was about to tell that to Asa, when I saw him wiping a tear from his cheek with the back of his wrist, and I understood exactly how much the both of us were leaving behind.