Rick Moody - The Diviners

Maiser kicks aside a few busted bricks while he watches. He wipes a slick of hundred-proof perspiration from his forehead. There’s only one purpose for a wall out here in the elements. There’s only one purpose for this wall on the day for which team-building exercises are called in the schedule. It’s the Obstacle Course.

He hails the poor sons of bitches from Mexico who are working hard and trying not to get shipped back across the border. “Muchachos? Hola!” A guy with a Padres cap on backward and a goatee dusts off his hands and comes over slowly, as though it’s a chore.

“It’s okay, sir. We speak English.”

“Sorry to bother you. Do you guys have any idea why you’re building this wall? Any idea at all?”

“We’re told to build a wall to certain specifications. We build a wall.” He gestures at it as if it’s a thing of beauty.

“That wall looks like it could easily hold a very large man or woman,” Maiser says, expecting no reply. The implications are there for anyone to see. Without taking leave of the laborers, he trudges back along the road to his casita. In the meantime, of course, the more ambitious corporate managers are coming in from the putting green in their smart little golf carts, looking tanned, rested, and self-satisfied.

Jeffrey Maiser should be happier about being right, about the wall, about the tragic course of the management off-site, about human nature in general. But he’s not happy about being right, insight and contentedness being on opposite ends of life’s superstructure. Within a half hour, he will be here, unbreakfasted, slouching in front of the wall, getting instructions from some management consultant bonehead. As usual, Maiser will not be listening carefully, precisely because the facts of daily life have a shocking tendency to be easily forecasted, and he still has not written the essay required by Naz Korngold, nor has he completely filled out the MMPI; I used to like to play hopscotch and jump rope, false or mostly false?

There is now a rope affixed to the wall and it is swaying gently. And Jeffrey Maiser is standing in front of the wall next to some of the most important people in the Universal Beverages Corporation family. Stew Ledbetter, the president of the beverages division, who looks and smells as if he has recently emptied the contents of his stomach; Leslie Aaronson, the thirty-one-year-old head of the UBC film studio, who will probably be out of a job in under a year, just like the last three studio heads; himself, Jeffery Maiser, one of the most driven, respected, and astute minds in television; and Len Wilkinson, the word guy.

Boy, does he fucking hate Len Wilkinson. If Ibn Al-Hassad had devoted a portion of yesterday’s speech, a mere bulleted point, a fancy software-enhanced graph, to the greatest enemy of Growing Quality, Maiser missed it, but he knows nonetheless that the greatest enemy to Growing Quality is “dissension in the ranks.” Naz Korngold, if he remembers correctly, mentioned it at dinner last night before Maiser’s brownout. Naz pointed out how it was the natural tendency of people during “times of crisis” to begin to “take it out on one another.” It was natural for there to be an upsurge of “dissension in the ranks.” And yet in truth, this was a time to “pull together,” according to Naz, a time to “keep our eyes on the prize.” The implication being, perhaps, that Maiser is himself one of the problems, a guy who trusts nobody, who keeps his own counsel, who is merciless and solitary, like a timber wolf.

There’s one good reason for trusting no one, and that reason is Len Wilkinson.

Wilkinson came up through corporate communications, straight out of some state school, University of Ohio, maybe, where he’d been a sportswriter. He had great dreams of a journalistic vocation ahead. And there he would have stayed if not for a moment of stunning creativity, the kind of breathtaking moment that can really launch a career. That moment was the composition of the expression “inspired by a true story.” Yes, somebody had to be the coiner and promoter of this piece of etymological flab, and that somebody was Len Wilkinson, who’d gotten his start in the mail room at UBC films. It was not long after that the studio was having a bad spell. Nothing was doing the kind of business it ought to have done. UBC had worked the market for sequels for a good five or six years, and still the public was less excited about the sequels than the superior original products. Wilkinson was given the task of writing a press release for a little-known telefilm, developed by the studio and cross-marketed to the network, based on the wartime career of a recent president of the United States, and in the midst of this press release, he had described the film as “inspired by a true story,” with all the religious nuances implied. He went on, of course, to argue in meetings that television had no mission to document but rather to “inspire.” Naturally, the press release was recast in a dozen major reviews for the film, so much so that “inspired by a true story” became an industrywide, if not global, standard.

He didn’t stop there. Wilkinson later repeated his theory of television in various offices in such a way as to bring down the head of television production, whose name Maiser can’t even remember, arguing that television was a medium of modest ambitions in the first place. People who watched television knew and accepted the origins of the form, vaudeville and old-time radio. They weren’t interested in the news division and its veracity, they were not interested in current events. And television news was inferior to news sources available elsewhere anyhow. The key to television was to develop mythologies that had some of the allure of news programming without the bitter aftertaste of factuality. Jeffery Maiser would have been impressed with the naked ambition of the man if he didn’t hate so much about Wilkinson, who loved televised golf, who didn’t drink, who had a comb-over, and who wore cardigan sweaters in the office.

Of course, once the “inspired by a true story” formula began to lose its PR luster, which it did inevitably, Wilkinson began to argue precisely the obverse, in yet another attempt to curry favor with Naz Korngold’s floor. The next Wilkinson coinage, the phrase of the new millennium, the phrase of the postmodern television ethos that had brought about such must-see events as the confirmation hearings of a certain Supreme Court justice, the murder trial of a certain football player, this week’s contested election, et cetera, was “enhanced reality.”

The other networks were developing the idea, too, like sows thundering toward a trough of rotting vegetable rinds. That game show about wanting to be a millionaire, the couples on the island where their commitments were tempted, the jungle Machiavellians, and so forth. It should have been called “enhanced avarice programming.” But no. Wilkinson had written the first press release in which “enhanced reality” was explicated as such. It was a way for Americans to see how Americans really behaved. It was edgy! It was enhanced! And even though Maiser had signed off on the first twelve episodes of American Spy, the UBC enhanced-reality product in which contestants competed to be the best possible espionage agents by spying on neighbors and associates, evaluated in their performance by retired military intelligence specialist Norm “Star” Spangler, he could feel intuitively that the “enhanced reality” programming model was really about eliminating programming. The long-term goal was the elimination of the mythologies that Wilkinson had prized earlier, the elimination of those nasty SAG employees, those players strutting and fretting upon the little screen and cobbling together a living in the process.