“With the media.”
“What media?”
“All of it.”
“I’m going to Europe. I don’t want to be stuck in some office.”
“This is the twenty-first century, so if you want-”
“I know what century it is. Why do people always tell me what century it is?”
“- so if you want to keep moving, you can. You’ll have a laptop, an assistant, a mobile. You can do it all on the road. Please, Jasper. I don’t trust anyone else. You’ve never seen so many people who want so much so openly. They all have their hands out, all my old friends included. And no one will give me an honest opinion. You’re the only one I can count on. And besides, I think your father was preparing you your whole life for something like this. Maybe for this exact thing. Maybe he knew all along. This feels like fate, don’t you think? You and me, we’re completely the wrong people to be in this position- that’s what’s so great about it.”
“Anouk, this is crazy. I don’t know anything about newspapers or television!”
“And I don’t know anything about being a media mogul, but here I am! How is it possible that I’m in this position? And why? I didn’t claw my way to get here. I fell into it. I feel I’m supposed to do something.”
“Like what?”
She made a very hard and serious face, the kind that makes your own face hard and serious just from looking at it.
“Jasper, I believe that life is based on love. And that orderly love is the fundamental law of the universe.”
“Which universe is that and where is it? I’d love to pop by and say hello.”
Anouk sat on the edge of an empty beer keg. She was radiating pure joy and enthusiasm. Yes, she might have been pretending to hate this strange turn of events which had transformed her into a rich and powerful woman, but I wasn’t buying it.
“I believe that a person’s thoughts often manifest into actual events- that we think things into existence. Right? Well, think about this: one of the illnesses that has become an epidemic in the Western world is an addiction to news. Newspapers, Internet news, twenty-four-hour news channels. And what is news? News is history in the making. So the addiction to news is the addiction to the outcome of history. Are you with me so far?”
“I get it. Go on.”
“In the past couple of decades, news has been produced as entertainment. So people’s addiction to news is the addiction to its function as entertainment. If you combine the power of thought with this addiction to entertaining news, then the part of the hundreds of millions of people, the viewing public, that wishes peace on earth is overshadowed by the part of them that wants the next chapter in the story. Every person who turns on the news and finds there’re no developments is disappointed. They’re checking the news two or three times a day- they want drama, and drama means not only death but death by the thousands, so in the secret parts of himself, every news-addicted person is hoping for greater calamity, more bodies, more spectacular wars, more hideous enemy attacks, and these wishes are going out every day into the world. Don’t you see? Right now, more than at any other time in history, the universal wish is a black one.”
The homeless man in the gutter had woken up and was moving his half-open eyes furtively from Anouk to me, a bored smile on his face, as if to say in response to Anouk’s theory that he’d heard it all before. Maybe he had.
“So what do you intend to do?”
“We have to wean people off their addiction, or else there’ll be hell to pay.”
“We.”
“Yes, Jasper.”
I looked at the drunk in the alley to make sure I wasn’t imagining all this. Did I want to help Anouk in her plan? Sure, I could take control of the newspapers and put in fun headlines like “This Newspaper Makes Independent Thinking Impossible” and pursue Anouk’s aim of combating this addiction to “news” by making news dry and boring- limiting broadcasts and reporting banal and positive events (grandmothers planting new gardens, football stars eating dinner with their families) and not allowing mass murderers their turn on the celebrity wonder wheel.
However, the last thing I wanted was to take on a public role doing anything. The general public was still apt to turn apoplectic with rage at the mention of my father, and thus people would hate me for whatever I did. All I wanted was to melt into vast crowds of non-English-speaking people and taste the many flavors of women filling tight-fitting T-shirts in all the cities of the globe. And Anouk wanted the news division to be under my control?
“Anouk, I’ll tell you what. You start without me. I’ll give you a call in six months, see how you’re getting along, and then maybe I’ll come and help you out. But it’s a big maybe.”
She made a weird sound in her throat and started breathing hard. Her eyes somehow got rounder. I almost weakened. It’s hard enough to go through life disappointing yourself every second day, but disappointing others takes it out of you too. That’s why you should never answer the phone or the door. So you don’t have to say no to whoever’s on the other side.
“OK, Jasper. But I want you to do one thing before you leave.”
“What’s that?”
“Write an obituary for your dad that I can print in the paper.”
“What for? People don’t care.”
“I care. And so do you. And I know you- you probably haven’t let yourself grieve in any way for your father. I know he was a pain in the arse, but he did love you and he made you what you are and you owe it to him and to yourself to write something about him. Doesn’t matter if what you write is flattering or insulting. As long as it’s true and it comes from the heart and not from the brain.”
“OK.”
We climbed back into the car, and the homeless man watched us with smiling eyes that said in no uncertain terms that he had just overheard a conversation between two people who took themselves too seriously.
The car pulled up outside my building and we sat in the backseat facing each other, with barely a blink between us, barely the slightest movement.
“Sure I can’t convince you to stay in Australia for a few months?”
It was obvious that what she needed more than anything was to have a friendly face around, and I felt bad because I was taking mine to Europe.
“Sorry, Anouk. This is something I have to do.”
She nodded, then wrote me a check for $25,000. I was eternally grateful, but not so grateful I didn’t wish it were more.
We kissed goodbye, and I almost fell to pieces watching the black Mercedes disappear from sight, but I pulled myself together, out of habit. I walked to the bank and put the check in my account. I would have to wait three days before I could access the money to buy myself a one-way ticket to somewhere else. Three days seemed too long.
When I got home, I lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about the fact that there were cat hairs on the couch that weren’t there yesterday. Not having a cat, I had no explanation for it. Just another of life’s inscrutable and pointless mysteries.
I tried to go to sleep, and when I couldn’t go there, I tried to get sleep to come to me. That didn’t work either. I got up and drank two beers and lay down on the couch again. My mind took over and dug up a few fragile images that seemed ready to crack if I thought about them hard enough. I decided to think about the future instead. In three days I would be on a plane to Europe, just as my father had once been, at roughly the same age, when almost everyone he knew was dead. Well, you have to follow in people’s footsteps sometimes. You can’t expect every cough, scratch, and sneeze to be your own.
Around midnight I started working on the obituary for my father that Anouk could print in the paper. After staring at a blank page for two days, I began.
Who was my father?
The offal of the universe.
The fatty rind.
An ulcer on the mouth of time.
He was sorry he never had a great historical name like Pope Innocent VIII or Lorenzo the Magnificent.