Rick Moody - The Diviners

“You are looking especially natty,” he says to his old friend.

“You’re hale as ever,” says the special chum. “I was expecting you’d look like you’d got no sleep in the last couple of weeks. But you look ready for combat!” Here the special chum smacks the distinguished jurist on the shoulder, as he might have done forty years ago. It feels only a little forced.

Then the special chum takes pause and gazes down the length of the corridor where they stand, which, because it is a Sunday, and because the special chum has entered from the back, looks like a public office building anywhere in the District of Columbia.

“They spend the redecorating budget upstairs,” the distinguished jurist offers, meaning the courtroom itself, with its opulent swags of drapery and its allegorical murals.

“But this is where it all happens,” says Naz Korngold.

The distinguished jurist prides himself on a spotless office. The piles of briefs and memos are tidied up and put in their particular areas, and at the end of each day the distinguished jurist insists that Mrs. Edith Wilbur should clear off his desk in its entirety, because he cannot think properly with his desk covered in papers. This is the condition of his desk when he enters with the special chum. Mrs. Edith Wilbur enters behind them, to make sure they have everything they need. The distinguished jurist sends her away. Next, the particularly sycophantic clerk also tries to stop in for an introduction, no doubt recognizing the special chum from photographs, but the distinguished jurist also sends the sycophantic clerk packing, telling him that there are some capital cases that must be dispatched. At last, the distinguished jurist points to the empty chair by the desk and then he indicates the table across the room, where there await two steaks, two salads, some French bread, and a bottle of vin ordinaire, procured especially for them.

“Pull up your chair,” the distinguished jurist says. “Lend me your troubles.”

The special chum says, “I’m grateful to you for taking the time when you have so much before you. And, of course, I don’t expect you to compromise the extraordinary sensitivity of your office.”

The distinguished jurist uncorks the bottle of wine with a flourish.

“The situation is this.” The special chum drinks from the proffered glass. “As you probably know, our stock is plummeting badly. Getting hammered, in fact. Since the beginning of the year. There’s dissent at the board level. Certain persons are attempting to infiltrate the board. People who are not loyal. I’ve tried doing what I can, cost-cutting, downsizing, diversifying. You may have heard about our new —”

“The Interstate —”

“First-rate product. My acquisitions are in the name of making the core business sturdy, as you know. So that we can weather the downturn in the near term. Perhaps we’ll be situated for a surprise in the second quarter of next year and going forward from there.”

The distinguished jurist asked for rare. This simply cannot be considered rare at all. This would have to be considered medium. By no properly considered assessment could this steak be rare. He is on the verge of calling in Mrs. Edith Wilbur.

“Never have I felt as irresolute as I feel now,” says the special chum. “I know what I want out of the business. I know what I want as a manager. But I feel irresolute, like I don’t know which way the weather is going to turn. Like I’m just killing time, without any sense at all. On the other hand, I do have an even more radical scheme that involves rolling a number of heads of departments.”

“How many heads, exactly?”

“One head in particular.”

“Whose name is —”

“I’m sure you don’t. . Look, you are performing a meaningful labor here, friend, whereas I’m out there in the trenches producing booze and movies with numbers after the titles. I’m embalming corpses, transporting them across state lines. Our experiences are really so different —”

Then the distinguished jurist says, as though he is some sort of fortune-teller, as though he does not already have an opinion on the subject, “Jeffrey Maiser.”

“Impressive. You’re reading the papers.”

“The clerks brief me on what I need. And the wife reads the occasional magazine.”

“A troublemaker, a man who has defaulted on. . a man who had the audacity to. . I don’t even know how to describe it to you. He actually proposed giving over massive expenditures to. . I don’t even want to talk about it. I have this fabulous movie in production, pal, a film that’s going to really require all our resources, a fabulous picture called Tempest in Sahara. Desert battles in WWII, the Bedouin, and so forth. This guy, knowing that this project is going to require a great deal of our promotional energy, or synergistic marketing, has the audacity to propose a miniseries on virtually the same subject and it’s —”

“A miniseries?”

“A miniseries. Do you have any idea what a stupid idea that is?”

“And,” the distinguished jurist says, “unless I am wrongly informed, has he not been frolicking with a certain —”

“Your facility with the contemporary moment is, uh, impressive.”

“When indisposed, I look at the periodicals.”

“I’m going to start over entirely in network programming. I mean to cancel everything that boob has in production, I mean to cancel every contract, and foreclose on his ridiculous miniseries, and I mean to make the network the venue for a twenty-first-century vision of programming. I can see the future, tantalizingly, before me, things like interactivity, synergies between television and the Internet, downloadable programming, video on demand, and especially enhanced-reality programming, cameras running twenty-four hours a day in the homes of Americans, where they’ll be able to watch cheats and thieves in the moment of their apprehension by the authorities, Americans catching terrorists, domestic and foreign, Americans rooting out sex offenders in their neighborhoods. Of course, I recognize that I have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, as I also have a duty to the medium in which we work. So it follows that I need a head of programming who sees these things the way I see them. I mean to make sure that the next head of programming can’t even relieve himself without my seeing him shake off, and in this way we will be leading rather than following. If that suggests a new model of programming that requires fewer employees and lower costs, so be it. I say yes to inexpensive programming that makes you, the viewer, the hero of the series, I say yes to the common man, and I say yes to the narrative of everyday life. I mean to drive up the stock price and I mean to make those analysts in New York take notice. So, buddy, there’s just the one thing I need to know. . ”

The distinguished jurist, maintaining a veneer of thoughtfulness and impartiality throughout the impassioned monologue of his special chum, has had the chance to work his way through the steak. The steak wasn’t as bad as he expected.

“What is it that you need to know?”

“I need to know the future, buddy.”

“Which future is it that you need to know?”

“Well, ideally, I need to know if the markets will stabilize going forward. With this decision you’re about to make, can you assure me that the markets are going to be stable, tomorrow and the day after. That’s all. It’s just a tiny little question.”

“Are you asking —” says the distinguished jurist.

“No, no, no, I wouldn’t ask that —”

“Then what are you asking?”

“Look, I’m about to embark on the biggest downsizing campaign in the history of one of the nation’s largest media conglomerates. I’m about to meet with lawyers. I’m about to lay off an extremely well-known —”