David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Blinc was, it had to be said, quite a conjurer. She was the one who’d shazammed his little essay into a book that had brought him fame and wealth. But the steep angle of his ascent turned out to be mirrored by a descent of similar slope. In the year since his appearance on Margo! (which he now recognized as the apex of the ride), Mark had watched, distraught and powerless, as his star faded swiftly. Blinc herself, who a year ago, Mark could have sworn, had looked at him with respect and desire in her eyes was now bored and possibly peeved with him.

He’d spent most of his Conch money already on his loft in Brooklyn and its unnecessary renovation, which had careened quickly over budget. Now he needed money in a way that he had never needed it before. Along with the loft renovation, there was his restaurant habit, his girlish love of a good shopping spree, his mom’s mortgage, her car, and her medical. Also the tax hit that he had had no idea that high earners took.

Thank the Lord, then, for James Straw and the money that the man shed like rain off a roof. How strange and wonderful it must be to possess that kind of wealth, thought Mark, emptying a hot thin broth of himself into the toilet. Straw’s wealth was the kind that grows like mold by the strange biosis of finance capitalism. The London flat belonged to Straw or to one of his companies or corporations, but the man probably didn’t know where it was. He’d lent it to Mark as casually as someone might lend a neighbor a flashlight from a kitchen drawer; Straw had poked a bony finger at his intercom and hollered at it: “Have Nils arrange for Mark to take one of the London flats.”

This whole beautiful mess, actually, was because of Straw.

“Motivation in an Unjust World” was published on Mark’s friend’s blog, way back when that sort of thing was avant-garde. The essay spread swiftly; its dissemination was now cited as an early example of viralism. Some wag called him the American Camus, because “Motivation” was high-minded yet populist; abstract but instructive. Another said he was the first public intellectual sprung from the Internet. The mainstream outlets, not wishing to be left behind by the blog thing, said he was the voice of Generation X at a time when that generation was putting aside its childish things.

Mark enjoyed it immensely. He gave interviews; was referenced by Letterman; addressed a graduating class. His employer, discovering that one of the in-house writers had become an Internet sensation, gave him a fat raise. But Mark knew that the attention would pass; he hoped only that he could write something that good again.

Then one morning his phone rang and a female voice said, “Please hold for Mr. Straw.” Straw came on and invited Mark to drop by, and within an hour, a black car was at his door, and he was whooshed to an unmarked part of Logan Airport, and then he was aloft, ensconced in leather and walnut. Two pilots and a cabin attendant and however much jet fuel it takes to cross the country so that he, Mark Deveraux, could be same-day-delivered to James Straw, founder of SineCo, the digital-search-and-storage conglomerate.

Then Mark was driven to a downtown arena, and led up through endless corridors and into Straw’s owner’s box. Straw thanked Mark for coming by, as if the Gulfstream V were a crosstown bus. Silent attendants delivered crab, cognac, profiteroles, cigars. Straw’s basketball team, the Seattle Search, was soundly beaten that night by the visiting Oakland Tribe; fans began leaking out of the stadium in the middle of the fourth quarter, their big foam cursor-shaped fingers pointed sadly at the floor. Only after the game did Straw come to the point of his summons. He wanted Mark to adapt “Motivation in an Unjust World” into management philosophy; he wanted Mark’s ideas to guide his company. He outlined his vision for SineCo as a company with ten times its current clout and his plan for a global, integrated information-and-services-delivering platform that would replace the Internet and personal computers.

“What is the Internet, anyway?” Straw posed the question to himself. “It’s a TV and a telephone, is all it is, really.” He made a little meh gesture to indicate how underwhelmed he was by the Internet. “I could build something that would in fact change the world.”

Mark could not immediately see any connection between his essay and Straw’s business plan. The cigar was making him wobbly. But it was true that “Motivation” contained the idea that you had to start from scratch. And after a couple of hours and some very old scotch, Mark saw that maybe it wouldn’t be that hard to reshape his essay into something less abstract, something that could help people get results in their work lives, their personal lives, whatever. Straw had definitely found useful advice in there, and he was a potentate executive world-bender.

“Just think about it,” said Straw as the two of them left the arena via its carpeted concrete arteries. Then there was the car-jet-car trip home, and when Mark got out of the black car in front of his dumpy apartment in Somerville, he could have told you something was afoot, that some ray of reward had finally found him.

Indeed, it was only three days later Straw called again. “There’s someone I want you to meet!” he bellowed down the blower.

Mark met Marjorie Blinc in a deep-cushioned booth of a hotel restaurant. She was hot, forty-four-year-old hot, and was flanked by a pretty young assistant. Her pitch was succinct: Right now he was valuable, she said. It was still within his power to leverage this essay of his into something more.

Mark was flattered, but he was no idiot. “You mean within your power, right?” he said. Then he told her that what was good about the essay was that it was finished. “I said what I wanted to say. I don’t have anything else to say about that right now.”

At that, she seemed ready to get up and leave. She leaned back and appraised him. “I may have been wrong about you. From ‘Motivation’ and from what James said, I figured you for ambitious.”

Mark understood only now, a couple of years later, that he had been too easily handled in that plush booth; all it took was an eighty-dollar bottle and a woman saying, Come on, or are you chicken?

“Oh, I’m ambitious,” he’d said to Blinc then, and that was the pivot. Right there.

“So why would you pass up this chance to make an impact on the world?”

Within a week he had signed her dense contract. Blinc cut him a check large enough to make the years of working at jobs beneath him seem like Karate Kid training, training he hadn’t seen the point of but which was suddenly paying off. He imagined now would come the part where his powerful agent would phone him daily and ask did he have a new draft.

But that’s not what happened at all. Instead, a team of Conch editors took his work away from him and “shaped” it. They didn’t even require much input from him.

When Mark received his pages to proof, he saw that they had made it into the same stuff that had been offered by self-helpers since forever. The book said that if you wanted to change yourself, all you really needed to do was shout orders loudly down your brain stem. There was the ridiculous concept of consciousclusions, and there was something called “synaptic toning,” which appeared to be, more or less, self-administered cognitive-behavioral therapy. There were some allegedly never-before-revealed tricks for accessing your vast, untapped stores of time, will, and attention. You could find hidden hours in every day; hidden seconds in every minute.

Soon enough, he realized that “Motivation in an Unjust World” was not going to survive intact its conversion from essay to mass-market paperback, that its form would have to change from question to answer, because people don’t pay money for questions. He figured that this was between him and his sense of artistic integrity. And artistic integrity is a fine thing, but so is financial security. And so is a twenty-three-hundred-square-foot loft on Water Street.