Professional Amateurs
II
Ella and Bengt’s spot was everywhere, on every channel of the network. There was something about it that made everyone crazy for it. It became more important than Sonny Langland’s testimonial for lung-cleaning. More famous than Our Lady Spears’s dancing spot in the foot-bowl before the Great War. More moving, to many, than Saint Aloysius of Cleveland’s endorsement for the Universal PseudoAgnostic Church, an ad that had featured blood tears without the reality crime of special effects.
The magic was that Ella and Bengt had, during the course of the commercial, fallen deeply in love.
They played the couple angle, only doing collaboratives. They put out a rumor through the usual channels that dealcards below a certain amount would be waved off, that low offers might just provoke them to do spots for competing products.
Bengt became unreachable. His palmer was thick all the time with every pap in Europa buzzing him. I tried his phone sometimes but I didn’t even get the machine and when I decided to go by his old apartment I found five Koreans there from the Department of Fasteners who had no idea what had become of the former tenant. Baby says: gone.
Which is why I was floored when he called me on my birthday the next year. I was rather somber, having just broken up with an airline girl, and although it was a sunny day and the owls were very enthusiastic I just scowled and kept running them through the most difficult scale exercises I could find. As if to spite me, the egg-shaped birds remained cheerful and self satisfied, hooting every note.
“Arny,” he said and for a second I didn’t recognize his voice. “It’s been forever and another, but I haven’t forgotten you, old friend. Come to my place tonight.” And he gave me an address in Gamla Stan.
I dressed to the nines with my old tailcoat in shiny sharkskin and when I looked at myself in the mirror I felt like Mozart off to find rich patrons. Perhaps I could sell Bengt on the piece I was writing. Perhaps we could get the Nickrenz Quartet to do it whenever Bengt and Ella did their next spot. I shoved the score into my breast pocket just in case and I felt better about myself knowing it was there. Then I popped a confidence tablet.
Off of the train, my shoes made pickaxe noises on the cobblestone streets as the confidence climbed politely up my spine like a neutered kundalini. There was a group of Americans power puking in an alley, dressed identically in wolf-skin jackets—corporate teambuilding. I walked faster past them but calmed when I saw that everything else was lurid but normal—just artistocrats strolling on chopines in good-girl makeup and a few well-lit whores doing their stretches.
I was nearing the right part of town when a bony finger hit me twice in the shoulder. I stopped to see a coat. Actually, it was a coat and a hat and some shoes, all supported by some kind of small, hunched man standing in the shadow of a dumpster. If you make yourself feel small enough you can disappear and he was well on his way to mastering the skill.
“Hey buddy,” he said. “We know that you’re going to Bengt and Ella’s place. All I’m telling you is that if you have anything—and I mean anything—on them then you just tell me. Dial P-L-O-T on your palmer and get me. Anytime. I’m Mr. Plot, Department of Reality.”
In Bengt’s ballroom there was a party for me. I had never had a party with an ice sculpture before—a glisten crystal jellyfish with Perrier-Turbine bottles wrapped chill in its tentacles. The beautiful people slunk around in up-to-the-minute clothing.
“You know,” I was yaddy-hooing to Bengt over the roar of all the voices bouncing from amethyst floor to rose marble ceiling. “I’ve got a piece I was working on that maybe you’d be interested in. Maybe you could get the Nickrenz Quartet to…”
“Speaking of which,” he said and took my arm and pulled me across the ballroom floor. In the corner, a group of thin women perched like crows, and as we approached them three scattered and one stood.
