Part 4 (1/2)

the girl in Brooklyn the other girl in Brooklyn

It went on in that vein a little longer. He smiled, remembering. Something of a poem, here. Some poetry in it. A little vulgar, sure, but why not? Hadn't Sam been polite long enough? Hadn't he lowered the toilet seat, alone in his home, only Sam and his tiny Google in that apartment, courteously lowering the seat, raising the seat, lowering it again like an idiot? So he had earned a little list, he thought, he had earned that right.

Yesterday's was not actually The List. That venerable doc.u.ment could be found earlier in the notebook. Since its composition a few weeks before in a moment of sheer quiet desperation, Sam had compiled a number of suggestive permutations. Women he'd seen naked. Jewish women. Women he'd kissed. By height. By age. Political affiliation.

He was profoundly influenced, in his list work, by the baseball stat revisionists. These were the men who'd thought up the slugging percentage and then went on to invent further and more elaborate indices. They secretly hoped thereby to demonstrate that Ted Williams was the greatest hitter of all time, and of course Sam wished them well. But no matter how much they fiddled with the numbers, a.s.serted that the most meaningful statistic in baseball, baseball's very essence, was slugging plus on-base percentage minus the average of the two hitters on either side of you divided by the league average-procedures that did in fact move the 1946 Williams ahead of Ty Cobb and Stan Musial and Barry Bonds-they could never, with any conceivable rearrangement of the statistical heavens, push Williams beyond Babe Ruth. It just wasn't possible. Sam found similarly that no matter how much he recalculated and recalibrated, took circ.u.mstances into account and multiplied by three, there simply was no avoiding the fact that he hadn't, in his life, received enough b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs.

He was also, he had to admit, influenced by the Holocaust revisionists. Had he really, in his excitement, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed uselessly onto Lori Miller's thigh that night at Miles Fishbach's house? Had he really really? And had he actually been so flaccid with Rachel Simkin that he never even penetrated? Says who-Rachel? Rachel was drunk, barely-human drunk, as was he. And Toby, to whom he'd confessed the next day? But Toby hadn't been there, and in any case witness testimony is culturally constructed, possibly a case of ma.s.s psychosis. Sam traced a thick, triumphant arrow from Rachel's name in the almost-slept list to the bottom of The List itself. Then he crossed it out.

What was it about this list-making? Was Sam a total degenerate, a s.e.xual accountant, an Excel-chart pervert? Or was it a crisis: did he think he'd never sleep with anyone ever again? Or almost-sleep? So may as well draw up the career totals, send them off to the Hall for consideration? And did he really think he would never kiss or fondle the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of another girl?-for there were those to explain as well.

No, no, that wasn't it, exactly. It was more as if life, the life he'd known, had begun to seem so slippery to him. Who could say what had happened and what it had meant? There'd been so much drinking! He had been close to people-but not quite close enough; and he had given himself to people, but not quite, ever, quite the full of him. So there was a consolation to be had in these lists, he now thought, when he thought about it. With Talia he had been kind, and with Arielle he'd been das.h.i.+ng, and with Lori he'd been eager, and with Rachel Simkin, that time, he'd been an utter failure. And if you put them on a list, was the idea, if you added them up: there he was, finally, a human being.

Sam boarded the Red Line train at Harvard Square. Some people woke up before noon, and what did it get them? A good seat on the inbound 8:45, maybe. Maybe it got them that seat. But at 3:30 every seat was good, and there were plenty to go around. Perhaps this is why Sam worked the late s.h.i.+ft at Fidelity. It also meant less interaction with the bankers themselves, some of whom were Sam's former cla.s.smates-some of whom, in that former life, he had asked out on dates. In certain parts of the temp world his mastery of Excel still held cachet, still commanded attention; but less so, increasingly less so, in the five-year alumni report he kept buried, but constantly updated, deep inside his heart.

The Google had helped, once. His poor little Google! Was there nothing to be done?

Arriving at work five minutes late, Sam ducked into the bathroom and changed into his work clothes, a pair of khakis and his tie, hopping around on one foot while he tried to keep from stepping on the bathroom floor with the other. The toilet with its scan-flusher kept flus.h.i.+ng and flus.h.i.+ng behind him as he hopped.

”Are you OK in there?” someone asked when he was almost done, causing him to trip into the door, the right side of his face momentarily keeping the rest of him from falling.

When Sam finally entered the cavernous main hall of Fidelity's Creative Services, where a thousand monkeys clacked away at a thousand PowerPoint presentations, he tried to keep his head up proudly. He had once quit this place so that he could write his epic, and when he returned, some of his coworkers . . . made fun of him. They resented his ambition, and even more they resented his failure. The Creative Services department at Fidelity was like a small town in an American movie from which everyone dreamed of escaping. It was the end of the line-and to return, at the end of the line, to the end of the line, was not what Sam had planned for himself.

He punched in at his workstation, stowing his backpack in the deep bottom drawer. His apartment was a horrific mess but at work he'd arranged things nicely. He still had, if he recalled correctly, half a roast beef sub in the mini-drawer fridge the company had installed at each quasi-cubicle-and he took it out now. The job queue was empty and so Sam checked his e-mail: nothing. Then his internal e-mail: nothing. Happily he clicked to Slip.com and read Katie's latest s.e.x advice column, on what to do if your girlfriend is a virgin. As always, very sensible. They had met when he was still an up-and-coming Zionist novelist and seriously dating Talia. Katie was a bright and pretty girl and working for the and read Katie's latest s.e.x advice column, on what to do if your girlfriend is a virgin. As always, very sensible. They had met when he was still an up-and-coming Zionist novelist and seriously dating Talia. Katie was a bright and pretty girl and working for the Phoenix, Phoenix, when the alt-weeklies were still a proud inst.i.tution, and they were at a party full of what few journalists and nonuniversity scholars could be mustered on a Cambridge weekend night. Talia wasn't there, for some reason, while Katie's boyfriend was. He was a management consultant, or a lawyer, tall and pasty, and Katie was visibly annoyed by him. That's what you got, Sam thought at the time, if you hung out in Boston. They had stayed intermittently in touch by e-mail-e-mail too was once a proud inst.i.tution-and now, at last, they were single, and were going on a date! Except Sam wasn't the man he'd been when they'd first met. He looked around briefly and Googled himself. Fifteen! when the alt-weeklies were still a proud inst.i.tution, and they were at a party full of what few journalists and nonuniversity scholars could be mustered on a Cambridge weekend night. Talia wasn't there, for some reason, while Katie's boyfriend was. He was a management consultant, or a lawyer, tall and pasty, and Katie was visibly annoyed by him. That's what you got, Sam thought at the time, if you hung out in Boston. They had stayed intermittently in touch by e-mail-e-mail too was once a proud inst.i.tution-and now, at last, they were single, and were going on a date! Except Sam wasn't the man he'd been when they'd first met. He looked around briefly and Googled himself. Fifteen!

On the screen, a job appeared-apparently they knew Sam's schedule, knew when to send down their Excel spreadsheets. This one was easy, almost offensively easy, but Sam took his time. He clicked, he dragged, he checked his e-mail again, then finally he dropped. He glanced at the request form-John Laizer. Sam recognized the name from college, though beyond the inexplicable (except statistically, except statistically) conviction that Laizer was a jerk, he couldn't remember him. He sped up production anyway, forestalling the possibility of Laizer hovering behind him, making nervous hurry-up noises and obnoxious cell phone calls. The resulting chart looked a little goofy, Sam would admit, but rules were rules and he was following them. Besides, he was the only Excel man at Fidelity. He sent the job off and decided to avail himself of the company's long-distance plan.

”h.e.l.lo,” a deliberately bored male voice answered on the other end. ”Google.”

”Hi,” said Sam. ”Could I speak with Max Sobel, please?”

”Who's calling?”

”My name is Sam. He might not know me. I'm a writer.”

”Whom do you write for?”

”Not anywhere in particular. I'm sort of freelance.”

”Well, Max is out today. Why don't I take your number and he'll call you.”

”I really need to talk to him,” said Sam. For all he knew this was was Max. It was a small operation, still, maybe just Max doing Google in different voices. Max. It was a small operation, still, maybe just Max doing Google in different voices.

”I said he'd call you.”

Sam checked the faces of the nearby PowerPoint hipsters. He really had freelanced a bit along the way, that much was true, and he'd interviewed people for his Zionist epic. But now he lowered his voice.

”Look,” he said. ”My Google is shrinking.”

”Excuse me?”

”My Google. I Google myself and every time it gets lower.”

”Right. Pages often go off-line and then they no longer show up on searches.”

”Yes, I understand that, but this is getting out of hand. I was in the mid-three hundreds before. Now I'm at, like, forty,” Sam lied.

”I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about that, sir. Maybe, if you don't mind my saying, you need to do something notable. Write something. Start a blog.”

”Look, I tried that, don't you think I tried that? I'm calling because I thought maybe you could s.h.i.+ft the algorithm a little.”

”Oh, no, we couldn't do that.”

”You couldn't just up my count a little until I get back on my feet?”

The man laughed an uneasy laugh. You couldn't do anything in this country anymore, thought Sam, without someone thinking you were a creep. When the man spoke again it was with a forbidding formality.

”Sir, there's nothing we can do. I can only suggest writing more. Distinguis.h.i.+ng yourself somehow. Google is a fair search engine.”

”It's a search engine run by Jews!” Sam suddenly cried, a little louder than he'd meant to.

Everyone turned to look, and though Sam raised his palm and curled down his mouth in an expression meant to a.s.sure them of his abiding control, the man had hung up.

He sent his next job over to technical services to print. He needed to speak with Toby.

Toby was a good friend to have, and Sam's only one. They were brother losers, kindred spirits-a computer genius, an animations specialist, Toby had refused to cash in on the Internet boom just as Sam had somehow refused to cash in on the post-9/11 fascination with the Middle East.

”I guess you don't want to be on Talk of the Nation Talk of the Nation” was how Jay, his former agent, had put it.

”Of course I do,” Sam had replied. ”More than anything in the world.”

”You got an advance for this book,” said Jay. ”You realize you'll have to give it back?”

”I realize,” said Sam. ”I realize.”

Toby was his only friend, and as Sam made his way over to tech services, he wondered about the others. It used to be, when Sam was still with Talia, that he couldn't get them to stop calling, he had to juggle and sort and combine visits, just to fit them all in. And then-well, would it be ba.n.a.l to admit that, when Sam's epic was going well, he'd traded them in for better friends? Friends like Jay, who lived in lofts, who lived in Brooklyn? And that when his epic collapsed he'd gradually felt this new company sour, himself out of place? That, unable to match them book party for book party, he began to decline their perfectly friendly invitations-so that eventually he was left with no one, or rather with Toby? Would this be ba.n.a.l, too much like a movie, would it be not quite the way life was? And yet it was exactly the way life was.

So therefore Toby, who had been working for several years on a novel about his hometown of Milwaukee. . . . At least, Sam realized as he raised his hand in greeting, that's what he a.s.sumed it was about. Toby had given him a printout of the first two hundred pages a few weeks ago, and Sam hadn't yet gotten around to looking at them.

”What brings you to the lair of the technically d.a.m.ned?” said Toby in greeting.

Sam winked. ”Accidentally sent my job over here.”

”Listen,” said Toby. ”I've been meaning to tell you. If you haven't looked at my ma.n.u.script yet, will you wait? I've made some changes.”

”OK,” Sam said, trying to sound disappointed. In fact he was relieved-and grateful to gentle Toby for his forbearance. Still, he had to tell him about his Google problem, and so he did.

”Look,” he concluded. ”Couldn't you make my name appear places, kind of invisibly?”