It’s hard to gauge the sincerity of Lillian’s flirtations, whether she’s earnestly horny, or working an angle. Wendy doesn’t know what to make of Lucas, either. She doesn’t trust his caginess about the product or Communitiv.ly’s broad and shifting role in its launch. She pictures Lucas’s backers as the kind of men who sit in wing chairs and steeple their fingers. The kind who hold emeritus positions in Southern megachurches and kill coeds in speedboat accidents.
But there’s a magnetism too. He pays such close attention when she’s speaking, always nodding, providing confirmative okays. His gaze never strays over her shoulder. He never checks his phone or looks bored. He gives full focal attention to her mouth, as if it’s not even his ears that are hearing her words, but his eyes quite literally seeing them, parsing meaning from the subtle fluctuations of her face.
Back at her desk, Wendy scans the headshot, does light touch-up and color correction, and proceeds with the memorial page. The headshot is the cover image, and she uses her discretion, as instructed, to select a handful of other photos from Ricky’s Facebook: Ricky holding his diploma; Ricky on a ski trip in Aspen, suntanned and smiling; Ricky—and this one’s for Lillian—looking broad and buff in a formfitting golf shirt, standing on a balcony, waving down at last year’s Pride parade.
For text, she pastes the press release she drafted yesterday. The release includes quotes from Ricky’s mother (“A darling boy”), Edward Jin (“Brave”), and Theo MacIntyre, executor of an LGBT Small Business Grant that Ricky had apparently funded. Wendy doesn’t know where Lillian found this guy, but she’s glad she did; MacIntyre’s praise of Ricky’s “game-changing generosity” goes a long way toward the construction of Ricky 2.0, the beloved victim whose death leaves a hole in the great American tablecloth. In Wendy’s hands, Ricky has been transformed into an “energetic jester” who was “fun loving and full of life.” She posts the page and moves on to outreach.
The intuitive move might be to gather the right-wing media around this cause, but what good would it do to (a) have Republicans rally their red-state base re: #Occupy, and (b) unloose a possible shit-storm of homophobia from the alt-right? Instead, what Lucas wants is the center-left media to wave the flag of Ricky’s cause, publicly mourn, and call out #Occupy for going too far.
Unlike an ordinary PR firm, where Wendy would have to blast the media herself, mass-emailing the memorial page and press release to uninterested editors, Communitiv.ly has got a stable of journalists raring to sell their integrity for fifty cents a word. She’s guessing they’ll jump at the opportunity she’s offering, which is a hundred-dollar bonus for any anti-UBI piece they publish that mentions the riot and/or the murder, the hundred coming on top of whatever they’re paid by the publication itself. Lucas wanted to go with five hundred, but Wendy assured him that was unnecessary.
Quality, content, and forum are irrelevant. People don’t read articles anymore, but if they’re exposed to enough headlines and pull quotes, they develop a false sense of being comprehensively informed. This is terrifying for all variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the researched and considered narrative is drowned out by the mob with the most stick-to-itive chant, but it’s great for someone like Wendy who controls the volume knob. All she has to do is write a short bulletin with the offer, post it to the freelancers’ job board for paid members, and wait for the responses to roll in.
Her final task is the targeted outreach Lucas insisted she perform. She writes to GLAAD, and includes a tailored version of the press release that features a paragraph on Ricky’s invented support of the organization and years of patronage. She’s banking on GLAAD being so thrilled to claim the martyr that no one will bother to check the records. No mention of #Occupy, here. She’s got to be subtler than that. This is about painting a terse, sympathetic picture of Ricky, and letting its recipients take it from there. She sends a version of the same to It Gets Better, the Point Foundation, and GLLI. In fact, she emails every org that comes up on the first fifteen pages of her Google search. These letters include the press release in full and also link to Facebook where friends or concerned strangers are free to leave supportive comments, which will be moderated by Wendy.
By the time she’s done, the office is empty. Wendy fetches a beer from the mini-fridge and kills the overhead lights. There’s an envelope with her name on it sitting squarely in the center of her desk. She’s been eyeing it all day, but has restrained herself from opening it. Now she does, using her fingernail to detach the flap. She looks inside, just for a second, before placing the item in her purse.
15.
Kate’s talking to Devor, but he’s watching TV news with his laptop open, contemplating an email from Michael Mixner, who wants to buy him a matcha and quote unquote pick his brain. The email’s tone ranges from nineteenth-century austere (“Ricky’s memorial is this weekend. I expect it to be a sober affair . . .”) to faux academic (“. . . of which my thesis will be interwoven through an ekphrastic reading of Curtis Hanson’s 2002 film 8 Mile . . .”) to casually bromantic (“Dude, can’t wait hug it out!”), and includes Devor’s least favorite phrase—“pick your brain”—a mainstay of emails from junior colleagues and pestering strangers, which always raises the image of his skull as Chinese takeout carton, chopsticks stirring its contents.
Instead of writing back, Devor scans the draft of his third op-ed in as many days. The more he touts what he refuses to call a conspiracy theory—it’s not paranoia if it’s true—about a right-wing lobbying group masterminding what’s now being called the
