On most weekday mornings in One Fifth, Paul Rice was the earliest riser, waking at four A. M. to check the European markets, and to wheel and deal fish. His tank was completed and installed, running nearly the length of Mrs. Houghton’s ballroom, and the interior was a model maker’s dream, a replica of Atlantis half buried under the sea, complete with old Roman roads leading out of sandy caves. The acquisition of his coveted fish was a cutthroat business and required viewing videos of hatchlings and then engaging in bidding wars in which the best fish went for a hundred thousand dollars or more. But every successful man needed a hobby, especially when most of his day entailed either making money or losing it.
On an unusually warm morning on a Tuesday at the end of February, however, James Gooch was also up early. At four-thirty A. M., James got out of bed with a stomach full of nerves. After a night of tossing and turning in anticipation, he had finally fallen asleep only to awaken an hour later, exhausted and hating himself for being exhausted on the most important day of his life.
The pub date for his book had finally arrived. That morning, he had an appearance on the Today show, followed by several radio interviews, and then a book signing in the evening at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square. Meanwhile, two hundred thousand copies would be released in bookstores all over the country, and two hundred thousand copies would be placed in iStores, and on Sunday, his book would be featured on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. The publication was going exactly according to plan, and since nothing in his life had ever gone according to plan, James was seized with an irrational sense of doom.
He showered and made coffee, and then, although he’d promised himself he wouldn’t, he checked his Amazon rating. The number shocked him—twenty-two—and there were still five hours left until it was technically released. How did the world know about his book? he wondered, and decided it was a kind of mysterious miracle, proof that what happened in one’s life was absolutely out of one’s control.
Then, just for the hell of it, he Googled himself. On the bottom of the first page, he came across the following headline: GOOFY BOOMER HOPES TO PROVE LITERATURE IS ALIVE AND WELL. Clicking on it, he was taken to Snarker. Curious, he began reading Thayer Core’s item about him. As he read on, his jaw dropped, and the blood began pounding in his head. Thayer had written about James’s book and his marriage to Mindy, referring to her as “the navel-gazing schoolmarm,” followed by a cruel physical description of James as resembling an extinct species of bird.
Gaping at the item, James was filled with rage. Was this what people really thought of him? “James Gooch is a probable pedophile and word molester,” he read again. Wasn’t this kind of statement illegal? Could he sue?
“Mindy!” he shouted. There was no response, and he went into the bedroom to find Mindy awake but pretending to sleep with a pillow over her head.
/> “What time is it?” she asked wearily.
“Five.”
“Give me another hour.”
“I need you,” James said. “Now.”
Mindy got out of bed and, following James, stared sleepily at the blog entry on his computer. “Typical,” she said. “Just typical.”
“We have to do something about it,” James said.
“What?” she asked. “That’s life these days. You can’t do anything about anything. You just have to live with it.” She read through the item again. “How’d they find out this stuff about you, anyway?” she asked. “How do they know we live in One Fifth?”
“I have no idea,” James said nervously, realizing that the item could be traced back to him. If he hadn’t run into Lola that day when she was moving, he would have never met Thayer Core.
“Forget about it,” Mindy said. “Only ten thousand people read this stuff, anyway.”
“Only ten thousand?” James said. Then his phone bleeped.
“What is that?” Mindy demanded in annoyance. She stared up at him with her pale, mostly unlined face, the result of years of avoiding the sun. “Why are you getting text messages in the middle of the night?”
“What do you mean?” James asked defensively. “It’s probably the car service from the Today show.” When Mindy left the room, James grabbed his phone and checked the message. As he’d hoped, it was from Lola. “Good luck today,” she’d written. “I’ll be watching!” followed by a smiley-face emoticon.
James left the apartment at six-fifteen. Mindy, unable to help herself, reread the blog item on her and James, and her mood became increasingly foul. Nowadays, anyone who committed the crime of trying to do something with her life became a victim of Internet bullying, and there was no retribution, no control, nothing one could do. In this frame of mind, she sat down at her computer and began a new blog entry, listing all the things in her life over which she had no control and had made her bitterly disappointed: her inability to get pregnant, her inability to live in a proper apartment, her inability to lead a life that didn’t feel like she was always racing to catch up to an invisible finish line that moved farther away the closer she came. And now there was James’s impending success—which, instead of relieving these feelings, was only bringing them into sharper focus.
When she heard the elevator ding at seven A. M., signaling Paul Rice’s arrival in the lobby, she deliberately opened her door and let Skippy loose. Skippy, as usual, growled at Paul. Mindy, still in a lousy mood, didn’t snatch Skippy away as quickly as she normally did, and Skippy attacked Paul’s pant leg with a rabid viciousness that Mindy wished she herself could express. During the tussle, Skippy managed to rip a tiny hole in the fabric of Paul’s pants before he was able to shake Skippy off. He bent down and examined the tear. Then he stood up, making an odd thrusting motion of pushing his tongue into his cheek. “I will sue you for this,” he said coldly.
“Go ahead,” Mindy said. “Make my day. It can’t really get any worse.”
“Oh, but it can,” Paul said threateningly. “You’ll see.”
Paul went out, and upstairs, Lola Fabrikant got out of bed and turned on the TV. Eventually, James appeared on the screen. Perhaps it was the makeup, but James didn’t look so bad. True, he appeared unnecessarily formal, but James was a little stiff in general. It would be interesting to loosen him up, Lola thought. And he was on TV! Anyone could be on YouTube. But real TV, and network TV at that, was a whole different level. “I watched you!” she texted. “You were great! xLola.” Underneath, she included her new tagline, with which she signed off on all her e-mails and blog posts: “The body dies, but the spirit lives forever.”
Up at Thirty Rock, the publicist, a lanky young woman with long blond hair and a bland prettiness, smiled at James. “That was good,” she said.
“Was it?” James said. “I wasn’t sure. I’ve never done TV before.”
“No. You were good. Really,” the publicist said unconvincingly. “We’ve got to hurry if we’re going to make it to your interview at CBS radio.”
James got into the Town Car. He briefly wondered if he would be famous now, recognized by strangers after appearing on the Today show. He didn’t feel any different, and the driver took as little notice of him as he had before. Then he checked his e-mails and found the text from Lola. At least someone appreciated him. He opened his window, letting in a rush of damp air.
The day of Sam’s father’s book signing was strangely warm, leading to the inevitable discussion among his classmates about global warming. They agreed it was terrible to be born into a world where the adults had ruined the earth for their children, so that the children were forced to live under the shroud of impending Armageddon in which all living things might be wiped out. Sam knew his mother felt guilty about this—she was always telling him to recycle and turn off his light—but not every adult felt the same way. When he brought up the topic with Enid, she only laughed at him and said it had always been so: In the thirties, children had lived with food rationing and the threat of starvation (indeed, in the Great Depression, some people had starved); in the forties and fifties, it was air raids; and in the sixties and seventies, a nuclear bomb. And yet, she pointed out, people continued not only to survive but to flourish, given the fact that there were billions more people now than ever before. Sam didn’t find this reassuring. It was the billions of people, he argued, that were the problem.
Marching through the West Village with his friends, Sam talked about how the earth was already two degrees cooler than suspected due to the proliferation of airplanes, which caused cloud cover and the dimming of the canopy, mitigating 5 percent of all sunlight. It was a scientific fact, he said, that during the two days following 9/11, when there were no flights and therefore less cloud cover, the temperature on earth had registered two degrees higher. The exhaust from airplanes caused a smaller particulate in the air and a greater reflection of light away from the earth’s surface, he said.