Prager was struggling to keep his face straight. Merilee Finch and Daffy Anderson were sucking on smiles as if they, too, had guilty secrets or religion.
“Caveat B,” Prager said. “An inspirational video presentation is not a prospectus. Daffy’s representations here today, likewise Merilee’s representations, are impromptu and, again, not a prospectus …”
The waitstaff descended on Gary’s table and gave him salmon on a bed of lentils. Denise waved away her entrée.
“Aren’t you going to eat?” Gary whispered.
She shook her head.
“Denise. Really.” He felt inexplicably wounded. “You can surely have a couple of bites with me.”
Denise looked him square in the face with an unreadable expression. “I’m a little sick to my stomach.”
“Do you want to leave?”
“No. I just don’t want to eat.”
Denise at thirty-two was still beautiful, but long hours at the stove had begun to cook her youthful skin into a kind of terra-cotta mask that made Gary a little more anxious each time he saw her. She was his baby sister, after all. Her years of fertility and marriageability were passing with a swiftness to which he was attuned and she, he suspected, was not. Her career seemed to him an evil spell under the influence of which she worked sixteen-hour days and had no social life. Gary was afraid — he claimed, as her oldest brother, the right to be afraid — that by the time Denise awakened from this spell she would be too old to start a family.
He ate his salmon quickly while she drank her imported water.
On the dais the CEO of Axon, a fortyish blonde with the intelligent pugnacity of a college dean, was talking about side effects. “Apart from headaches and nausea, which are to be expected,” said Merilee Finch, “we haven’t tracked anything yet. Remember, too, that our platform technology has been widely used for several years now, with no significant deleterious effects reported.” Finch pointed into the ballroom. “Yes, gray Armani?”
“Isn’t Corecktall the name of a laxative?”
“Ah, well,” Finch said, nodding violently. “Different spelling, but yes. Curly and I considered approximately ten thousand different names before we realized that branding isn’t really an issue for the Alzheimer’s patient, or the Parkinson’s sufferer, or the massively depressed individual. We could call it Carcino-Asbesto, they’d still knock doors down to get it. Curly’s big vision here, though, and the reason he’s willing to risk the poopy jokes, and so forth, is that twenty years from now there’s not going to be a prison left standing in the United States, because of this process. I mean, realistically, we live in the age of medical breakthroughs. There’s no question we’ll have competing therapies for AD and PD. Some of these therapies will probably come on line before Corecktall. So, for most disorders of the brain, our product will be just one weapon in the arsenal. Clearly the best weapon, but still, just one among many. On the other hand, when it comes to social disease, the brain of the criminal, there’s no other option on the horizon. It’s Corecktall or prison. So it’s a forward-looking name. We’re laying claim to a whole new hemisphere. We’re planting the Spanish flag right on the beach here.”
There was a murmur at a distant table where a tweedy, homely contingent was seated, maybe union fund managers, maybe the endowment crowd from Penn or Temple. One stork-shaped woman stood up from this table and shouted, “So, what’s the idea, you reprogram the repeat offender to enjoy pushing a broom?”
“That is within the realm of the feasible, yes,” Finch said. “That is one potential fix, although possibly not the best.”
The heckler couldn’t believe it. “Not the best? It’s an ethical nightmare.”
“So, free country, go invest in alternative energy,” Finch said, for a laugh, because most of the guests were on her side. “Buy some geothermal penny stocks. Solar-electricity futures, very cheap, very righteous. Yes, next, please? Pink shirt?”
“You guys are dreaming,” the heckler persisted at a shout, “if you think the American people—”
“Honey,” Finch interrupted with the advantage of her lapel mike and amplification, “the American people support the death penalty. Do you think they’ll have a problem with a socially constructive alternative like this? Ten years from now we’ll see which of us is dreaming. Yes, pink shirt at Table Three, yes?”
“Excuse me,” the heckler persisted, “I’m trying to remind your potential investors of the Eighth Amendment—”
“Thank you. Thank you very much,” Finch said, her emcee’s smile tightening. “Since you bring up cruel and unusual punishment, let me suggest that you walk a few blocks north of here to Fairmount Avenue. Go take a look at the Eastern State Penitentiary. World’s first modern prison, opened in 1829, solitary confinement for up to twenty years, astonishing suicide rate, zero corrective benefit, and, just to keep this in mind, still the basic model for corrections in the United States today. Curly’s not talking about this on CNN, folks. He’s talking about the million Americans with Parkinson’s and the four million with Alzheimer’s. What I’m telling you now is not for general consumption. But the fact is, a one-hundred-percent voluntary alternative to incarceration is the opposite of cruel and unusual. Of all the potential applications of Corecktall, this is the most humane. This is the liberal vision: genuine, permanent, voluntary self-melioration.”
The heckler, shaking her head with the emphasis of the unconvinceable, was already exiting the ballroom. Mr. Twelve Thousand Shares of Exxon, at Gary’s left shoulder, cupped his hands to his mouth and booed her.
Young men at other tables followed suit, booing and smirking, having their sports-fan fun and lending support, Gary feared, to Denise’s disdain for the world he moved in. Denise had leaned forward and was staring at Twelve Thousand Shares of Exxon in open-mouthed amazement.
Daffy Anderson, a linebacker type with thick glossy sideburns and a texturally distinct stubblefield of hair higher up, had stepped forward to answer money questions. He spoke of being gratifyingly oversubscribed. He compared the heat of this IPO to Vindaloo curry and Dallas in July. He refused to divulge the price that Hevy & Hodapp planned to ask for a share of Axon. He spoke of pricing it fairly and — wink, wink—letting the market do its job.
Denise touched Gary’s shoulder and pointed to a table behind the dais, where Merilee Finch was standing by herself and putting salmon in her mouth. “Our prey is feeding. I say we pounce.”
“What for?” Gary said.
“To get Dad signed up for testing.”
Nothing about the idea of Alfred’s participation in a Phase II study appealed to Gary, but it occurred to him that by letting Denise broach the topic of Alfred’s affliction, by letting her create sympathy for the Lamberts and establish their moral claim on Axon’s favors, he could increase his chances of getting his five thousand shares.
“You do the talking,” he said, standing up. “Then I’ll have a question for her, too.”
As he and Denise moved toward the dais, heads turned to admire Denise’s legs.
“What part of ‘no comment’ didn’t you understand?” Daffy Anderson asked a questioner for a laugh.
The cheeks of Axon’s CEO were puffed out like a squirrel’s. Merilee Finch put a napkin to her mouth and regarded the accosting Lamberts warily. “I’m so starving,” she said. It was a thin woman’s apology for being corporeal. “We’ll be setting up some tables in a couple of minutes, if you don’t mind waiting.”