Джонатан Франзен – Strong Motion (страница 22)
He watched a new Lincoln Town Car with smoked side windows round the cul-de-sac and ease to a stop opposite the WSNE entrance to Building III. Its vanity plate read: PROLIFE 7. Libby Quinn debouched from the passenger side and hurried into the studios. The Lincoln’s engine surged like a powerful man sighing: PROLIFE 7. Louis shrugged and lay back on the warm new grass, letting the sun saturate his optic nerves with orangeness.
It can make a person dizzy to lie in hot sun. For several seconds he thought the funny thing happening to him was due to a loose wire in his nervous system, some spazzing synapse, and not, as the chorus of car alarms from the parking lot suddenly indicated was the case, to an earthquake.
He lost several seconds scrambling to his feet. By the time he was upright the event was ending, the ground now moving almost imperceptibly, like a diving board when a person stands motionless at the very end of it, above a swimming pool.
Traffic on 128 was unruffled. Louis looked challengingly at the air around him, as though daring the physical world to
Inside, as he approached Alec’s office, he heard the owner quarreling with Libby in the inner sanctum. Someone less attracted to fights might have retreated, but Louis stationed himself on the threshold of the outer office, which contained a ten-inch black-and-white Zenith and a sofa with folded bedding and unironed shirts on the armrest.
“I won’t return this man’s calls,” Alec said. “I refuse to know this man. But my station manager has breakfast with him? My station manager who I told, no, we don’t deal with this type person? I understand he’s a very goodlooking young man. Very moral, very char-is-ma-tic. It compromises you to have lunch, yes, or cocktails, or
“Closing your eyes won’t make him go away, Alec. Not unless you can also find a couple hundred thousand dollars to buy him off with. He’s already filed the challenge.”
“So? Last time we renewed—”
“The last time we renewed, nobody challenged it and the station wasn’t gutted.”
“They don’t take away licenses so easily.”
“Plus Philip Stites hadn’t paid Ford & Rothman to study our audience.”
“So—blackmail! A very moral sing!”
“Face it. He wants a station.”
“And you’re going to work for this man? You’re going to be his station manager?”
“When you won’t let me collect on dead accounts? When all you can broadcast during drive hours is Somalian war news and Phyllis Diller?”
“People love Phyllis Diller!”
“One point seven percent at 8 a.m. That’s the March figure. I think it speaks for itself.”
“OK, we do some local noose. We do the war on drugs. We do airplane crashes. OK. All-new programming, as of today. We tell FCC, new programming, very noose-oriented—”
“Alec, there’s nobody to
“Maybe we get Slidowsky back—”
“You know very well what I think of that girl.”
“I can do it. Louis can do it. We listen to the other stations and copy it down. We can hire a student, I can sell—”
“What can you sell?”
“I sell my car. When do I use this car? I don’t need this car.”
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“But sink about it. Libby. Sink about it. I sell my station to Philip Stites, against my principles. Do you respect me for this?”
“I respect a man who does the responsible thing. And I think the responsible thing to do here is sell the station while you still might come out in the black.”
Alec muttered something vaguely, something about sinking.
“Do you need me?” Libby said to Louis, coming through the outer office.
Louis assumed a preoccupied air. “You feel the earthquake?”
She patted her bun and smiled demurely. “I guess I didn’t.”
“Ersequake?” Alec wore the expression of metaphysical amusement that came from sucking a nicotine lozenge. “Just now?”
“Yes. You feel it?”
“No … I was busy.” He beckoned Louis into his sanctum, where two cigarettes of different lengths were burning in a heaping ashtray. His shortwave was set up by the window, and along the wall were piled packing cartons. It was beginning to appear that these rooms were the only place he had to live.
“Two things,” he said. “Sit please. First thing, I thought again—is maybe not so bad to do those collections. If they won’t pay immediately, say we settle for half if they pay right away. It must be right away.” He selected the shorter of the burning cigarettes, killed it, and drew on the longer one, still rotating the lozenge in his mouth. “Other thing: honest answer. Do employees respect a boss who smokes?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“They appear weak. Smokers.”
“Are you talking about me or about Libby?”
Alec did a foreign thing with his upper lip, curling it like a vampire about to bite, behind a veil of smoke. “Libby.”
“I’m sure she respects you. Why wouldn’t she?”
Alec nodded very slowly, lip still drawn, eyes on an odd corner of the room. “Do those collections,” he said.
Louis returned to his cubicle and reopened the files, but his first call was to the Harvard University switchboard. After one ring he was speaking to Howard Chun, who with an unpromising grunt went to try to find Renée Seitchek. When her voice came over the line she sounded neither surprised nor pleased.
“I felt the earthquake,” Louis said.
“Uh-huh. So did we.”
“Where was it? How big?”
“Outside Peabody, smaller than Sunday’s. This we get from the radio, incidentally.”
“The reason I’m calling is to see if you want to go to a party my sister is giving on the twenty-eighth. Not that this is an idea I personally endorse, but supposedly it’s an earthquake-oriented party. A costume party. Will it be fun, I have no idea. But that’s what I’m calling for.”
He bent his head and listened extra-closely to what came out of the receiver.
“The twenty-eighth.”
“Yes.”
“Well—OK. But I’m not going to wear any costume.”
He released his breath, which he’d been holding. “Let me suggest that you wear some token costume. Like maybe a Band-Aid. Not that I personally—”
“All right. I’ll wear a token costume. Where’s this party going to be?”
He arranged to pick her up in his car. It turned out that she lived in Somerville herself. She gave him her home telephone number and said it was better not to call her at work. He hung up with a bad taste in his mouth, feeling unwanted.
A week of uneasiness ensued. After a couple of lucky collections Louis had begun to run into stonewalling receptionists, dilatory assistants, and a few outright ogres. He was also having trouble finding funds for postage. Once he’d exhausted the little caches of one- and two- and five-cent stamps from various abandoned desks, he had to draw on petty cash, which was kept in the owner’s wallet.
More and more often Alec could be found watching the little Zenith in his office. At dinnertime, alone or not, he provided running oral glosses on TV news and advertising; otherwise he liked to watch Westerns and war films.
“TV noose and noosepapers,” he told Louis, “are the enemy. For eight years we had a U.S. President with subnormal intelligence. Every day he does horrible harm to language, the future, the truth. Every single sinking person in the country knows this, except not the networks and noosepapers. Is suspicious, no? Or is maybe Stupid People now also minority group we don’t say bad things about? Let’s go all the way, let’s have a retarded President. And noose conference, and President is bellowing and drooling, and his advisers say, he has interesting new program, and CBS says, the President drooled tonight, and we have five analysts here to talk about his interesting new program and also perhaps about is he drooling less than last time? And New York Times prints a transcript of noose conference, is all drool drool bellow bellow, also one coherent sentence,
“Still, OK, fine, is their prerogative. But isn’t it the responsibility also of every sinking person in the country to say to networks and noosepapers: You are my enemy now. You betrayed me. You are not really on my side. You are on side of money and I see through you now and is the end. No more! You are out! I’ll find a good magazine and radio station, sank you!
“But it’s a horrible venal world. Sinking people—artists and intellectuals, the good reporters—must write for Times and talk to CBS, otherwise their enemies will. And so with
“Now Mr. Pro-Life wants to buy my station because not enough people listen. Am I angry? Yes I am angry. But not politically angry. I wall not say,? disagree with these people’s politics.’ Because all politics is the same. Left, right, is the same! Exactly the same! But noosepapers must have readers and networks must have viewers, and without politics everyone could see this emperor of culture has no clothes on, so everything is politics! The far right gets nowhere if the media talk about what is beautiful and what is true and what is just, instead of what is politically feasible. The far right is not beautiful and not true and not just. Is their very good fortune only to be looked at politically …”