Ivan Slater had consolidated a lot of solid-state and semiconductor information and come up with a “portable secretary” brand-named “Miss X,” a laptop computer powered by batteries, the same size as the average briefcase. Miss X was complicated to use and complicated to describe in that her functions were so diverse — typing, dictation, filing, and more. Ivan Slater was an ingenious technician but a poor salesman, and dragging Joe by the sleeve through the trade shows of a dozen cities, Ivan made the same startling pitch time after time: “Miss X will do everything but suck you off back at the Ramada!” Ivan saw himself as one of the new “hands-on” industrialists, a growing class of powerful men led by the owners of Remington Shaver and Two Thousand Flushes Toilet Cleaner, who appeared in their own television commercials excitedly demanding your business; Ralph Lauren, casting himself as a cowboy in his own print ads; and the king of them all, Lee Iacocca of Chrysler with his immortal “I guarantee it.” These men were Ivan Slater’s heroes and he did not defer to them in forcefulness.
At a trade show in Atlanta, Joe had an opportunity to taste the resistance among some of his peers which Ivan Slater had generated. They were set up in a booth of their own at a convention center near Peachtree Plaza. The style of their industry was such that a curiously sedate atmosphere prevailed. At an automotive or homebuilders show, it would have been pandemonium. But these were the businesspeople of a new age; restraint and an ambiguously intellectual tone made it a ghostly crowd. Joe stood behind a table upon which rested a mock-up of the laptop secretary. He had a stack of brochures and, since he had not finished the instructional drawings, he was there to explain the machine in his own words. Ivan had long since driven himself into the middle of the crowd.
A man approaching sixty made his way toward the table. He was tall and dressed in a well-tailored gray pin-stripe suit. He stared at Miss X without taking a brochure. His left arm was wrapped around his waist and his right hand held his face as he thought.
At last, he spoke: “Is this the one that does everything but suck your dick?”
“Yes, but we’re working on it,” Joe said.
A week later, Joe was back in Florida. He called Ivan in New York and admitted that he didn’t think he could go on with Miss X.
“Miss X,” said Ivan, “is history.”
Joe believed that he had lost all control of his fate. He knew he couldn’t stand one more liaison with someone with irons in the fire. Whatever it was that had pushed him from one place to another was not going to push him any farther. He couldn’t understand why when he looked within as he had done for so long in his apprenticeship, he found nothing he could use.
Within a week, Ivan came to Florida. He took Joe and Astrid to lunch at a restaurant so heavily air conditioned the windows were fogged.
“It goes like this,” Ivan was saying. “Miss X was a classic example of not actually having an idea, of trying to synthesize what was already out there. And it was a good synthetic but its prospects were limited and, hey, I don’t blame you for being bored by it. At its center was a complete lack of originality. To invent Miss X, I had to turn myself into a committee and it showed.”
“I gather the reason you’re so cheerful is that you have a better idea,” Joe said.
“I looked out and asked myself, What is the one thing that most characterizes our world? What one thing? The answer is ‘distrust.’ ”
Astrid said, “That’s true.”
So Joe said, “It’s true.”
“I set myself the task of inventing a machine that addressed itself to distrust, that my Chinese friends could make with microcircuitry, and that I could sell grossly marked up by the carload. A man once told me that the perfect product costs a dime to make, sells for a dollar, and is addictive. This is along the same lines.”
“What is it?” Joe asked, annoyed by the long buildup.
Ivan lifted his glass. A smile played over his lips as his eyes shot back and forth between Joe and Astrid. “A home lie detector,” said Ivan.
“Have you brought it with you?” Astrid asked anxiously.
“Not to worry. It is only a twinkle in my eye. But the projected cash flow on this one looks like a pyramid scheme. It’s going to be as universal as television. It’s going to shrink white-collar crime. It’s going to drive cheating housewives into the streets by the millions. The President and the First Lady will be gangster-slapping each other on the White House lawn after an evening with the product. A worldwide defrocking of priests will stun believers. Fundamentalist preachers will be turned out of their Taj Mahals by the grinning hordes that placed them there. Four officials will remain in Congress, all truthful morons. It will be necessary to staff our hospitals with veterinarians. Farriers will pull teeth. Canned goods will be sold without labels by word of mouth. America will stand revealed.”
“Will this be difficult to operate?” Joe asked feebly. He felt disgraced as Ivan’s stooge.
Ivan massaged an imaginary ball in the air in front of him. His delight at Joe’s cooperation was boundless. “Difficult to operate! It’s only got two buttons: ‘true’ and ‘false’! It’s as simple as the cross they crucified Christ on. It’s got everything that’s been missing from modern life in two eloquent buttons. By the time this baby makes its third pass through the discount stores, it will have produced a cleansing fire. I mean, the little things! The waiter in Fort Lauderdale who hands you three-week-old cod you ordered as snapper and says ‘Enjoy.’ I mean, you follow the sonofabitch to the kitchen and strap this baby onto him—”
“Wait a minute,” said Astrid. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You can’t use this thing like a gun. You can’t hook a waiter up to a lie detector while you are ordering in a restaurant.”
“You will be able to once society has accepted it,” said Ivan with a wounded look.
It was at this point that Joe, and maybe Astrid too, realized Ivan had some problems, that the whole idea was not completely reasonable, any more than Miss X was reasonable, and that what they were seeing here was desperation. In fact, when Joe caught Astrid’s worried eye, they managed to communicate that some humoring was in order. And for a moment, they enjoyed the closeness that spotting Ivan’s disease implied. Then Joe thought, Maybe they’re humoring me. Ivan and Astrid had developed what was to Joe a cloying camaraderie, a nauseating chumminess that produced periodic bursts of advice, often directed at Joe.
Ivan felt the awkwardness. His volubility had vanished. “The air is so humid,” he said.
“You get used to it,” Astrid said, as though interpreting the situation, yet sitting back to watch him handle it.
“What do people do around here?” he asked.
“Oh gosh,” Joe said, “the usual things.”
“Barbecues?” Ivan asked. He was back in control.
“Oh, no. Much more than that. They have movies and their clubs,” Joe said, struggling with each of these replies.
“Clubs? Name a club.”
“The Moose.”
“The Moose? That’s a club?”
“Yes.”
“That they go to?”
“Yes.”
“Do you go to The Moose?”
“No.”
“But what do you do, Joe?”
“What do I do?”
“Am I putting too much pressure on you?”
“Not at all,” Joe said. “But that question is completely hypothetical.”
Astrid lit a cigarette. Now she was watching Joe.