A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [98]
Alex didn’t know. He didn’t need to know. What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.
“Physics is required. Three semesters. If you fail, you’re out of the program.”
“For a marketing degree?” Alex was dumbfounded.
“It used to be epidemiology,” Lulu said. “You know, when the viral model was still current.”
“Don’t people still say ‘viral’?” Alex was wishing he’d had a real cup of coffee, not the swill they were pouring at this Greek diner. Bennie’s assistant, Lulu, appeared to have had fifteen or twenty—unless this was her personality.
“No one says ‘viral’ anymore,” Lulu said. “I mean, maybe thoughtlessly, the way we still say ‘connect’ or ‘transmit’—those old mechanical metaphors that have nothing to do with how information travels. See, reach isn’t describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: it’s simultaneous. It’s faster than the speed of light, that’s actually been measured. So now we study particle physics.”
“What next? String theory?”
“That’s an elective.”
Lulu was in her early twenties, a graduate student at Barnard and Bennie’s full-time assistant: a living embodiment of the new “handset employee”: paperless, deskless, commuteless, and theoretically omnipresent, though Lulu appeared to be ignoring a constant chatter of handset beeps and burps. The photos on her page had not done justice to the arresting, wide-eyed symmetry of her face, the radiant shine of her hair. She was “clean”: no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?
Cara-Ann was asleep in her sling, her face wedged in the slot between Alex’s jaw and collarbone, her fruity, biscuity breath filling his nostrils. He had thirty minutes, maybe forty-five, before she would wake up wanting lunch. Yet Alex felt a perverse need to go backward, to understand Lulu, to pinpoint why exactly she disconcerted him.
“How did you find your way to Bennie?” he asked.
“His ex-wife used to work for my mom,” Lulu said, “years ago, when I was a little girl. I’ve known Bennie forever—and his son, Chris. He’s two years older than me.”
“Huh,” Alex said. “And what does your mom do?”
“She was a publicist, but she left the business,” Lulu said. “She lives upstate.”
“What’s her name?”
“Dolly.”
Alex was inclined to pursue this line of questioning back to the moment of Lulu’s conception, but stopped himself. A silence fell, punctuated by the arrival of their food. Alex had meant to order soup, but that had seemed spineless, so at the last minute he’d gone for a Reuben sandwich, forgetting that he couldn’t chew without waking Cara-Ann. Lulu had ordered lemon meringue pie; she ate the meringue in tiny flecks off the prongs of her fork.
“So,” she said, when Alex failed to speak up. “Bennie says we’re going to make a blind team, with you as the anonymous captain.”
“He used those terms?”
Lulu laughed. “No, those are marketing terms. From school.”
“Actually, they’re sports terms. From…sports,” Alex said. He’d been a team captain many times, though in the presence of someone so young it felt too long ago to really count.
“Sports metaphors still work,” Lulu reflected.
“So this is a known thing?” he asked. “The blind team?” Alex had thought it was his own brain wave: reduce the shame and guilt of parrothood by assembling a team that doesn’t know it’s a team—or that it has a captain. Each team member would deal individually with Lulu, with Alex orchestrating in secret from above.
“Oh, sure,” Lulu said. “BTs—blind teams—work especially well with older people. I mean”—she smiled—“people over thirty.”
“And why is that?”
“Older people are more resistant to…” She seemed to falter.
“Being bought?”
Lulu smiled. “See, that’s what