Christopher Buckley - Boomsday

Some days he could hear the contented bellowing of sea lions after they’d been gorging on schools of squid. But for the occasional great white shark, life for them was good; for himself, Frank mused, life was very, very good.

He was a tightly focused man, but he sometimes allowed himself to muse on that anxious time all those years ago, after he’d quit Electric Boat to work on the first start-up. Seemed like another century. Actually, it was another century-another millennium, for that matter.

For a time, Frank had regretted-even felt a bit guilty-about secretly taking out the second mortgage on the house to finance the start-up. But his motives had been pure: to support his family. It was Helen who stormed out of the house with the kids and filed for divorce. It was her decision. There he was, working himself to death, for her, for the kids, and she’d acted as if it were the end of the world.

He admitted now to a certain retaliatory pleasure in how the timing had worked out in the end. If Helen had waited a few months more before filing for divorce, she’d be a very wealthy woman now instead of teaching high school in New London and living on a monthly alimony of $1,500. The start-up took longer than planned-they all do-but after Frank and his two partners took it public, they’d split a handsome $540 million.

Shoulda hung in there a little longer, honey.

For a time, he had felt bad about Cass. Spending her Yale tuition money. That… did rub his conscience wrong. But he’d made it up to her. And then some. He calculated how many shares in the company her tuition money would have bought. That $33,000 was worth $27 million. He’d written out a check and sent it to her. Twenty-seven million dollars! And what had she done? Sent it back to him, ripped into little pieces. She had her mother’s Devine genes. And for good measure-just to let him know what a prick she thought he was-she’d changed her name legally to Helen’s maiden name. From that moment on, Frank Cohane decided, Okay, Cassie, we’re even. He wasn’t going to spend the rest of his very nice life wringing his hands over two pissed-off Irish women.

Now Frank had a second family-and frankly, it was an improvement over the previous one. A vast improvement. He had a new wife, Lisa, a hard-body former tennis pro, who, unlike lumpy soft-body wife version 1.0, liked to have sex so much and so often that he now routinely took one of those long-lasting erection pills. The only downside was that if an even mildly erotic thought crossed his mind any time during the day, the affected gland responded like an overwound jack-in-the-box. This was not ideal when, say, standing onstage at the annual shareholders meeting giving his pep talk. But the upside- rrrrrrrrowl.

Lisa did, he thought sighingly, come with an encumbrance in the form of a teenage son, Boyd, by the previous marriage to that moron restaurant manager. The kid was harmless, though not much in the conversation department. Lisa had the notion that the boy would be greatly improved by sending him east to college. In California, Frank noticed, “east” was synonymous with certain things, like “education” or, as Boyd put it, “learning shit.”

Frank was all in favor of sending him 2,500 miles away-in any compass direction, for that matter. Lisa announced that the only place to send him was Yale. He wondered: Had she gotten the notion because of Cass? When she told him this, he burst out laughing, a fit of spontaneous mirth that did not sit well with the second Mrs. Frank Cohane. He explained that with Boyd’s grades and SAT scores, his chances of getting into Yale were approximately those of launching a spitball to the moon.

Lisa had another approach in mind, so Frank Cohane found himself fulfilling his promise of building Yale a new football stadium, albeit for a different child. Yale’s cheer was “Boola boola” (whatever the hell that meant). To Frank, it rhymed suspiciously with “Moolah moolah.”

Meanwhile, Frank had made other improvements to his life. His company had a fleet of half a dozen jets, and he personally had just taken delivery of a nifty little toy called a Javelin, a civilian-version fighter jet with a top speed of Mach.9. On the ground, he drove a Ferrari Enzo. He owned a 275-foot motor yacht that had just appeared on the cover of Vulgar Yacht Quarterly and a new twelve-meter sailboat that he was skippering in the trials for the upcoming America ’s Cup race.

His previous twelve-meter, an experimental marvel of high technology, had proved a bit too high-tech. Its revolutionary carbon-, Kevlar-, and PVC-core-epoxy composite hull had, one day in five-foot seas and thirty-knot winds in the Tasman Sea, suddenly splintered into about five thousand pieces. Three crew members had drowned. Back on the dock, he had made an unwise comment to a reporter (“Now I’ve gotta break in three new winch monkeys”).

The quote went around the planet in about ten seconds, earning Frank a profile titled “Sportsman of the Year” in Time magazine. The Internet reveled in his disgrace. When he Googled his own name, the top ten thousand hits had to do with his ill-advised quote. But it spawned a brainstorm.

When he got home, he called in his top programmers and gave them their orders. Within a month, they’d developed something called Spider Repellent TMsoftware. It was so simple, he wondered why no one had thought of it before. You loaded the software and typed in the search words. Say you’d been arrested for drunk driving or soliciting a prostitute, or you’d been in a gossip page biting the ear of some pretty young thing in a nightclub. Or, for that matter, you had been charged by the SEC with swindling your shareholders. You typed in your name, along with “drunk driving” or “prostitute” or “ear” or “embezzling.” Spider Repellent TMfound all the references to you on the Web and- deleted them. Simple. Brilliant. Lucrative. Spider Repellent TMwas making Frank’s company jillions. His biggest customers were celebrities and rich people who behaved badly, and there were plenty of those.

Now Frank Googled his own name and “winch monkeys.” Google reported back, “No matches.”

Sure, people in the racing world remembered his gaffe, but it was a long time ago now. And in the brave new world of the Internet, if it wasn’t on Google, it didn’t exist. He had a new boat, and he was going to kick ass with it in the Capetown-to-Rio Rolex Challenge.

This pleasant California morning-they were all pleasant, California mornings-Frank was checking the news on the Internet.

A few paragraphs into the story about Senator Randolph K. Jepperson’s Voluntary Transitioning bill, he saw a reference to Cass Devine. It occurred to him that he should probably be grateful for the difference in their surnames. There was no advantage to being publicly known as the father of the poster girl for the burn down Boomer retirement communities movement. Frank wasn’t about to volunteer (to use her word) their consanguinity. Some people knew but didn’t bring it up around him-and never around Lisa.

She had never met Cass. Frank was just on the verge of asking her to become Mrs. Frank Cohane (version 2.0) when Cass got herself blown up in Bosnia with Congressman Jepperson. The incident caused Frank a mixture of guilt and alarm-guilt because she was there because of him, alarm because…was she really in a minefield screwing this guy? It wasn’t long before the guilt and alarm had congealed into annoyance at Cass. That should have been a happy time for him: new family, new fortune. Lisa confirmed his annoyance, and in time her feelings toward Cass were about the temperature of liquid nitrogen.

One day, not long after he and Lisa were married, Frank mentioned the fact that Cass had changed her name to Devine. Lisa said that Boyd would be proud to have the name Cohane.