The Failure (5 page)
G
uy Forget claimed to have been born in Dayton, Ohio, a place so anonymous I believe it may not actually exist; it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Guy had simply made up the name of his hometown. Whether or not that’s true, Guy Forget was certainly American, in fact a little too American in some ways, because since he was young, Guy dreamed of getting rich quick, which I believe to be the heart of the American dream. For Americans who are born into the condition, the phrase “get rich quick” means exactly what it says: that they will suddenly and without much effort come into enough money to live without care in a luxurious manner. They can buy whatever car and in whatever quantity suits them. They can buy not only a very nice house but several of these, not less than two and not more than five, one for each of the varied topographies offered by our great country: a beach house, a house in the country, a ski chalet, an apartment in Manhattan, and a Primary Residence in the city or town where their ostentatious wealth will most impress those who knew them when they didn’t have any money.
For Americans who come here from other countries, particularly from Latin America, by which I mean any country south of the United States’ porous border, “get rich quick” is a somewhat easier goal, as it means simply taking the most menial job on offer, which has the effect of immediately doubling or tripling the most money they’ve ever made in their lives, enabling them to immediately raise their standard of living, however humble, to new heights, and even allowing them to save enough money to send back home to less fortunate family members, in order that one day they, too, might be able to join them and share the dream.
Guy Forget came from the former category, and though he was not uneducated, like many of his type he spent a lot of time using that education and whatever native intelligence he possessed trying to figure out ways to avoid work of any kind, which though he was not born to the leisure class he nevertheless regarded as beneath his dignity.
I don’t know when Guy arrived in Los Angeles, but I’m certain he wasn’t born here. He had too much nervous energy, too much ambition, and far too much selfawareness to have grown up in a place where even those transplants who’ve lived here long enough assume the lazy, spaced-out air of oxygen-deprived mice who no longer recognize themselves, or their surroundings, or their purpose in life, and are not in any way bothered by this loss. Guy dodged and weaved among the inhabitants of Los Angeles impatiently, shaking his head in wonder at the wasted time on open, unembarrassed display, furious anytime he had to slow down or wait for anyone or anything, which was often and a lot. One of the main features of life in Los Angeles is slowing down and waiting. This applies not just where you’d imagine, as for instance in traffic, but in almost every aspect of daily life: in line at the coffee shop, in the aisles of the grocery store, at the gas station, in restaurants, at the movies, in a bar, at the mall, in parking lots and garages, and, most especially—and this was the thing Guy found most galling—in bed.
Guy was still young, and good-looking, though not, granted, “good-looking” in the way that many young men are good-looking in Los Angeles, but most of these are obsessive about their good looks, which is the only really self-aware or more accurately self-conscious aspect of the general population in Los Angeles. The majority of these “good-looking” men are either a) actors or b) homosexuals or c) both, so in the end Guy’s less-than-perfect kind of looks (six feet tall, one hundred and sixty-five pounds, brown hair, narrow hazel eyes set back in a long oval face, thin, spidery fingers, thick lips) were sufficient, when combined with his disarming manner and insincerely insouciant approach, to provide him with more than his fair share of short-term bedmates. These were almost always procured in bars sometime between the hours of midnight and two a.m., which is closing time in Los Angeles, and the hour of decision in Guyville. Which is not to say that the decision was always or even ever in Guy’s hands, so to speak, nor that the decision, or verdict, if you will, was always favorable.
The reader cannot imagine the distaste with which I share these personal details about the object of my abject hatred, learned bit by bit as I nursed my animosity. I present these details in the spirit of entomology: so that you can see exactly what kind of bug I was prepared to exterminate, and to help understand why.
G
uy?
-Yeah.
-I gotta head out. Time to walk the dogs.
-Yeah.
-It’s not like I want to walk the dogs. I need the money.
-That’s fine. The issue is, you don’t walk the dogs. You tie them to the bumper of your car and drive very slowly.
-The dogs are walking. I don’t see the problem.
-People hire dog-walkers not just so that their dogs get exercise. It’s an important part of their socialization. They need to interact with other dogs, and with humans. Not to mention the purely excretory function of the walk.
-Hell, they piss and shit all over the place. I have to hose down my bumper every time.
-Thanks for that.
-What?
-That mental image. It goes well with breakfast.
-You don’t eat breakfast.
-Not now I don’t.
-Sorry.
-No need to apologize. I don’t eat breakfast.
-That’s what I just …
-Here’s the thing, Billy: in the future, the not-very-distant future, I believe that the literate rabble, meaning those who regularly read serious books, are going to want shorter and shorter sentences, paragraphs, and pages. No more than a few pithy lines per page. That’s the direction we’re headed. White space, my friend. The future belongs to white space.
-You mean like the phone book?
-Exactly not. We’ve been conditioned by our gigantic computer monitors and even bigger TV screens to acres and acres of canvas, much of which is admittedly cluttered with irrelevancies, but that’s not the audience for whom I’m mixing my metaphors. Especially in a time of recession, or depression, or whatever catastrophe lies in wait around the corner, like a kitten or a tiger, depending on your view of the relative stature of the world—especially now, minimalism will rule the day. In every sense, in every part of everyone’s life. We’re all going to become minimalists.
-You really shouldn’t drink so much coffee, said Billy.
-Coffee is the original smart drug. I believe it actually makes me smarter. For instance: I’ve totally flipped my position on your dog-walking. My caffeine-fueled brain squall has traced a lemniscate around my original repulsion. You, my friend, are a trendsetter. Your dog-walking method is revolutionary in its simplicity. Is it cruel? Is it lazy? Is it not entirely sane? Doesn’t matter. It cuts corners, and that’s what we do, Billy. That’s what Americans do. We cut corners. You don’t achieve minimalism without sacrifice, and if at all possible that sacrifice should be shouldered by other people, or in this case dogs. I salute you, sir! You are a true child of Pandemonium, which even though it doesn’t yet exist except in theory—and I admit it’s possible may never actually exist—is the inevitable result, the culmination, of our ineluctable shift from being to nothingness.
Billy stood for a moment, nonplussed, unsure whether Guy was making fun of him.
-Time to walk the dogs, he said after a few moments.
-Yes it is! replied Guy. -Go forth and subtract!
M
arcus took a long sip from his whiskey and soda.
-Still not getting it, Guy. Sorry.
-It’s also a sophisticated data mining system. Advertisers will pay for page views, right, but they’ll pay even more for detailed demographic info that enables them to target consumers with such specificity that everyone will think that the company is speaking to them.
-What makes you think people want companies to speak to them?
-They don’t. But they’d rather see stuff they’re actually interested in—like that machine that holds all your books and newspapers and magazines and displays them just like a paperback book …
-I’ve seen those. Not interested.
-Really? I want one. And Christmas is coming. Hint. Listen, Marcus, what we have in this country is an intel gap, and it’s nothing to do with terrorists. The pace at which technology is changing is too fast for companies to keep tabs on trends in their own businesses. Think of Pandemonium as an enormously customizable Kindle. You want a snapshot of what kind of shoes twenty-three-year-old Asian women who work for one of the Big 12 accounting firms are buying? Or will be buying six months from now? Pandemonium can give you that. So in this sense, yes, Marcus, it’s B2B, but it’s also potentially P2P because a site running Pandemonium could in theory offer users the ability to file-swap freely with both anonymity and legality. Because the evil record company monoliths that will be secretly advertising on the site will be able to direct the consumer’s filesharing preferences, and further, to collect highly specific personal data, or metadata, I’m not really sure what metadata is but I think it sounds better, don’t you? And buried deep down at the bottom of an unreadable EULA will be language giving them the right to do whatever they want with that information. With any information that they gather in any way at any time. But here’s the thing: no one will worry, no one will complain, because they won’t be getting spammed, they won’t be getting
If you liked that, you’ll like this
recommendations when they visit the site, they won’t be getting
Welcome back, User Name!
They’ll be getting targeted advertising, but they won’t even know it. We offer the fiction of what everyone always thought the Internet should be—open source, free, unclogged, unmarketed, anonymous, collective: it’s everything the twittering classes want but don’t know they want.
-How do you know it works?
-Irrelevant. Let me put it to you this way: there’s nothing viral about these new forms of communication, of social interaction, Marcus. The kids don’t need
better
, they need or at least want
new
. A virus mutates and adapts to survive, but most of these virtual mutations will not survive. Which is not Darwinian, because nobody really understands that you can’t apply the evolution of species to the evolution of ideas. Apples and pomegranates. Did you know there’s a networking site called Spacebook? It’s just for potheads. And Tracebook. That’s for stalkers. These networks will target groups more and more specific until everyone has his own network to which he alone belongs. It’s inevitable.
-I’m not sure …
-Thus, therefore, ergo, the chief virtue of Pandemonium—well, okay, one of its chief virtues—lies in its adaptability. Like any good parasite, we can shift from delivery service—IM, Skype, Twitter, Fluxus, Squeak, Trap Soul Door—to delivery service, ping-ponging all over the 3G spectrum. Undetectable as love, we go where you go. We follow the action. And in so doing, we
become
the action.
-Exactly how much coke did you do before meeting me?
-This is my brain not on drugs. Scary, right?
Marcus looked at Guy over the rim of his upraised glass. -What a waste of a mind.
-You stole that line from Dad.
-He said that?
-Right, because it doesn’t sound like anything he would say.
-Great minds …
-…come to the same facile and entirely flawed conclusions. Is, I believe, the phrase you’re groping for.
Marcus sighed, shook his head. -I say again: how do you know it works?
-How do you know anything works? I mean, there’s still people, and I’m on the fence about this one, who insist the moon landing was staged on a back lot here in Los Angeles, that there’s no proof. The beauty of any new concept is that proof is in the eye of the beholder. Remember when that electric two-wheeled thingy was supposed to revolutionize urban transportation, solve all our congestion problems, get rid of pollution, etcetera?
-Yes. The Segway.
-Yeah, well, there were a lot of very smart people who bought into that idea in the secret prototype phase. Very smart and very rich people, I might add. And not a single one of them stopped to think,
Yes, okay, it works, but won’t anyone on one of these things look incredibly gay?
-How is that applicable to your project?
-It’s like you’re not even listening. You want another one? Guy signaled to a passing waitress.
Marcus nodded yes and tipped back his glass, the halfmelted ice clacking against the rim.
-You’re not going to give me the money, are you?
-No. In the first place, I don’t even understand the name. Why Pandemonium? That’s not a name that says “safe investment” to me.
-Wrong. I mean right, but wrong. The VCs I’ll be talking to don’t want safe. They’re desperately afraid of missing out on the next big boat, and they don’t care if it’s the
Titanic
, because that was, let’s face it, a historic boat, a boat people will always remember, even before the movie. In any case, the name’s just a come-on. It doesn’t mean anything specific. It just gives a sense to potential investors that something new is going to happen.
-Why would I pay simply for novelty?
-You wouldn’t, Marcus. None of the Marcuses you’ve ever been your whole life would ever pay for that. Just like you’d never pay for sex.
-You don’t know that.
-Have you? Ever?
-Not yet. But just because something hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean …
-Stop playing really-annoying-grad-student for one damn minute.
-I’m not …
-I know. I was making a point. Jesus, it’s like you’ve never heard anyone but yourself talk.
-Sorry.
-There’s a lot of people, an awful lot, who
have
paid for sex. Who do pay for it. Who will continue to pay for it. It’s a multibillion-dollar business. Bigger than movies and music and every other form of entertainment on earth combined.
-I’m not sure that’s true.
-It doesn’t matter if it’s true. We’re not selling sex. I’m making an analogy. Our pitch is that Pandemonium is better than sex.
-Who’s “us”?
-See this? This is an imaginary stick. You’ve just grabbed hold of one end of the imaginary stick. You know which end? The
wrong one
.
-What’s the difference? It’s imaginary.
-Everything is imaginary, Marcus. Everything that’s worth anything. Pandemonium is worth more than you can imagine, precisely because it’s imaginary.
-I’m confused.
-Confusion is sex.
-What?
-Nothing. Obscure rock music reference. Couldn’t help myself.
-That’s the trouble with you, Guy. You have no selfdiscipline.
-And the trouble with you, Marcus, is that you have nothing
but
self-discipline. There’s no goal. No purpose. You keep at it and at it, you’re dogged and determined and all those dreary adjectives, but toward what end?
-Now who sounds like a grad student?
-Touché
, asshole. Last chance: you going to lend me the money or not?
-I’m leaning toward not.
-I’m leaning toward the floor. Buy me a drink.
-You have a drink.
-I mean
another
drink. Obviously. Cocksucker.