subtitle to
“No one owns ‘perpetual innovation.’ That’s like saying someone owns, I don’t know, ‘Get well.’ Morse put you onto this scavenger hunt?”
“Someone would have.”
“He’s my someone. Every single time.”
“How exactly do you know each other?”
“Distantly but intimately,” I say. “I’m tired of explaining how well I know people—no one respects my answers. I just know people. Hundreds. Thousands. From sea to shining sea. And no, I don’t think I coined that. See this napkin?”
“In detail.”
“I’m seeing the same napkin. You and me, both sane. The here and now.”
“Let me finish,” Dwight says. “I hadn’t quite lost faith yet. There’s a collective mind, it’s very real. I can’t name one, but I’m aware of major inventions that appeared only days apart on different continents. This was like that, I hoped. I knew you traveled, so you’re exposed to the ether more than most of us, the cultural cyclotron, the particles. Bombarded by particles. Then I called the author. At nine. This morning.”
“Pause, pause, pause. Cheap drama. Spit it out.”
“He knows you. You had a run-in once, he claims. He also distinctly recalls the conversation in which he announced his intention to write
I push back my plate and look over at a wall of injection-molded coats of arms. Made-up legacies, random heraldry. My father bought one once off the TV, the genuine Bingham family crest, authenticated. Stags and lions and eagles and battle-axes; we were dragon slayers from way, way back, and my father bought it all, poor man. He was living alone by then, stalked by private Rockefellers, but the crest put a bounce in his step, aligned his spine. He stowed his TV tray and started eating downtown. He detailed his Monte Carlo. All the crest. Two weeks of nobility that I’m glad he had, but then he went for a haircut with old Ike Schmidt and there it was, over the comb jar of blue Barbicide. A gentle being—he let Schmidt go on dreaming of Round Table banquets, ale from hollow horns. He kept his peace and let himself be shaved.
I’m not up to his level. I have to fuss and struggle. “The concept was both of ours. It was simultaneous.”
“Weak. Two objects can’t occupy one space.”
“Ideas aren’t objects. He went out and really wrote it? He left the strong impression that was my job.”
“What are they, then?”
“Ideas? Do we have to play these games right now? I just spent a year investing in my future, dictating notes from here to Amarillo and all points in between, and now you tell me this Ricks, this jobless loser, who scored in the lousy twentieth percentile for follow-through and reliability—facts I concealed from him because I’m decent— strolled back to his sad little house and scooped me blind. When was this rip-off published, anyway?”
“Four years ago.”
“He worked fast. Did this thing sell?”
“Hardly at all, but it wasn’t pushed correctly. Scattershot marketing. Hangdog author’s photo. A golf publisher that went out on a cute limb.”
“That’s good news, at least.”
“I’ll do much better. This is Advanta’s sweet spot. We’ll swat this ball.”
“Incredible. You’re one nervy little fatso. Is that a weave or plugs? Dyed beaver? Orlon?”
“Ricks says you had him fired.”
“Ricks distorts.”
“You fire people for a living. Now that’s a book. You’d have to strike the somber, reflective pose—the old recovery gambit—but that’s a memoir. Advanta has crack ghostwriters, real mind readers. You’ll think every comma is yours. Your natural hair.”
“Such thick skin on you reptiles. I’m gone. Cover this check. That iced tea was powdered, too.”
On my way out of the Carvery I sweep the crests off the wall, a dozen of them, and no one stops me because they know I’m serious, Bingham the dragon slayer. We go way back.
fourteen
a VIP commotion at the gate complicates and prolongs the boarding process. A convoy of electric carts sweeps in loaded with uniformed security and a couple of bison-shouldered civilian toughs talking like princesses on cute red radios. The pedestrian flow through the concourse snags and eddies and at the heart of the turbulence I spot him: the retired Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, General Norman Schwarzkopf, signing autographs for full-grown men who are lying if they say they want them for their kids. I’ve seen these mementos, and I know where they go: under plate glass on desktops, front and center, for a quick-hit morale boost during high-stakes conference calls. They’d pluck the last hairs from the general’s rhino head, but he’s probably already selling them through an untraceable chain of sub-sub-agents, encased in clear acrylic, as paperweights. The relics that come off these supermen—astonishing. I’ve seen every stick of gum Mantle ever chewed in some corner office or another, every last Zippo Patton ever lit.
Schwarzkopf is a motivational mainstay, right up there with Tarkenton, Robbins, Ditka, the pre-trial O. J. Simpson, and Famous Amos, so it’s no surprise to see him here, mobilizing for GoalQuest with us ants. I’ve heard him four times in six years, and he delivers. B vitamins straight to the heart muscle itself. You stand up afterwards ready to thump someone, just name the cause, and though this wears off and leaves a startling thirst that not even gallons of Vigorade could quench, a virtuous residue has been deposited that kicks back into the veins when you grow weak and jolts you straight when you nod off at the wheel. The magic works, almost all of it, to some degree, and that’s what the skeptics find so intolerable. Just peek at the gurus’ pay stubs. The market knows.
