That line brought some quiet laughter, and Adam felt obliged to look up and smile. No one in this family was any kind of monster, whatever they aspired to do to him. They just had their own particular views of his relationship with the old man—sharpened by the lure of a few million dollars, but they probably would have felt the same regardless.
Ryan kept his contribution short, but when Cynthia Navarro took his place Adam had to turn his face to the pew again. He doubted that she’d recognize him—she’d worked with the old man in the wrong era for that— but the warmth, and grief, in her voice made her anecdotes far harder to shut out than the automated mash-up of database entries and viral misquotes that had formed the obituary. She finished with the time they’d spent all night searching for a way to rescue a location shoot with six hundred extras after Gemma Freeman broke her leg and had to be stretchered out in a chopper.
As she spoke, Adam closed his eyes and pictured the wildly annotated pages of the script strewn across the table, and Cynthia gawping with incredulity at her friend’s increasingly desperate remedies.
“But it all worked out well enough,” she concluded. “The plot twist that no viewer saw coming, that lifted the third season to a whole new level, owed its existence to an oil slick from a generator that just happened to be situated between Ms. Freeman’s trailer and …”
Laughter rose up, cutting her off, and Adam felt compelled once more to raise his eyes. But before the sounds of mirth had faded, his neighbor moved closer and asked in a whisper, “Do you remember me?”
Adam turned, not quite facing the man. “Should I?” He spoke with an east-coast accent that was hard to place, and if it induced a certain sense of déjà vu, so did advertising voice-overs, and random conversations overheard in elevators.
“I don’t know,” the man replied. His tone was more amused than sarcastic; he meant the words literally. Adam hunted for something polite and noncommittal to say, but the audience was too quiet now for him to speak without being noticed and hushed, and his neighbor was already turning back toward the podium.
Cynthia was followed by a representative of the old man’s agents, though everyone who’d known him in the golden age was long gone. There were suits from Warner Bros., Netflix, and HBO, whose stories of the old man were clearly scripted by the same bots that wrote their new shows. As the proceedings became ever more wooden, Adam began suffering from a panic-inducing premonition that Ryan would invite anyone in the hall who wished to speak to step up, and in the awkward silence that followed everyone’s eyes would sweep the room and alight on him.
But when Ryan returned to the podium, he just thanked them for coming and wished them safe journeys home.
“No music?” Adam’s neighbor asked. “No poetry? I seem to recall something by Dylan Thomas that might have raised a laugh under the circumstances.”
“I think he stipulated no music,” Adam replied.
“Fair enough. Since The Big Chill, anything you could pick with a trace of wit to it would seem like a bad in-joke.”
“Excuse me, I have to …” People were starting to leave, and Adam wanted to get away before anyone else noticed him.
As he stood, his neighbor took out his phone and flicked his thumb across its surface. Adam’s phone pinged softly in acknowledgment. “In case you want to catch up sometime,” the man explained cheerfully.
“Thanks,” Adam replied, nodding an awkward goodbye, grateful that he didn’t seem to be expected to reciprocate.
There was already a small crowd lingering just inside the door, slowing his exit. When he made it out onto the forecourt, he walked straight to the roadside and summoned a car.
“Hey, you! Mr. Sixty Percent!”
Adam turned. A man in his thirties was marching toward him, scowling with such intense displeasure that his pillowy cheeks had turned red. “Can I help you with something?” Adam asked mildly. For all that he’d been dreading a confrontation, now that it was imminent he felt more invigorated than intimidated.
“What the fuck were you doing in there?”
“It was open to the public.”
“You’re not part of the public!”
Adam finally placed him: He was one of Ryan’s sons. He’d seen him from behind as he’d been entering the hall. “Unhappy with the will are you, Gerald?”
Gerald came closer. He was trembling slightly, but Adam couldn’t tell if it was from rage or from fear. “Live it up while you can, Sixty. You’re going to be out with the trash in no time.”
“What’s with this ‘sixty’?” As far as Adam knew, he’d been bequeathed a hundred percent of the estate, unless Gerald was already accounting for all the legal fees.
“Sixty percent: how much you resemble him.”
“Now that’s just cruel. I’m assured that by some metrics, it’s at least seventy.”
Gerald snickered triumphantly, as if that made his case. “I guess he was used to setting the bar low. If you grew up believing that Facebook could give you ‘news’ and Google could give you ‘information,’ your expectations for quality control would already be nonexistent.”
“I think you’re conflating his generation with your father’s.” Adam was quite sure that the old man had held the Bilge Barons in as much contempt as his great-nephew did. “And seventy percent of something real isn’t so bad. Getting a side-load that close to complete is orders of magnitude harder than anything those charlatans ever did.”
“Well, give your own scam artists a Nobel Prize, but you’d still need to be senile to think that was good enough.”
“He wasn’t senile. We spoke together at least
