Lost in arcadia a novel, p.21
Lost in Arcadia: A Novel, page 21
Conversely, Kate seemed always to be off for sick days and showed up late constantly, but she still managed to be the most popular recruit, especially when it got out that she was single. It didn’t even seem to bother their colleagues when she brought around her daughter, and men courted her favor by bringing little Nicole candy or pastries, which Kate ate herself or distributed to her friends, wondering what they were thinking buying a two-year-old those kinds of foods. Sometimes it seemed like the less she was in the office, the more she was doted upon when around.
“The force is keeping me in the projects,” said Kate, bitching in the women’s locker room. “The money’s great, but daycare means I don’t get to keep a cent of it.”
Mark explained how common moonlighting was to Teresa one day during a routine house call, when they found it had been called in by an officer barely older than Teresa, working as a nanny (or “au pair” as he called it) during his off time. “It’s no biggie,” Mark said. “A lot of people do two or three jobs their first few years on the force.”
“Can’t they just work overtime?”
“You’re shitting me, right? There’s so many officers. It’s hard enough to get full time.”
Teresa began listening for these second jobs when she was stuck in the office. Lorenzo said he used to drive a school bus during the day and then worked the nightshift, resting between the time that he dropped kids off and picked them up. This lasted for three years until he was fired for falling asleep at the wheel and almost slamming the bus’s thirty thousand pounds into a reinforced concrete wall near Rio Rancho. “Had I not been a cop, I probably would’ve been behind bars,” he said, laughing.
When he was young, Connor worked at a GameStop until he blew up at a client for trying to return a scratched disc the day after he’d purchased it. “I could tell that he bought the game, went home, loaded it into Arcadia and played for thirty hours straight, then drove back and tried to return it. If he hadn’t scratched it up, store policy said we had to accept it. But it looked like crap, so I said no, and he yelled at me, and I yelled at him, and I dunno, I was tired and couldn’t help myself, pulling a gun on the little fucker and hitting him a couple times across the face. Goddamn, those places are hellholes, no wonder physical media went the way of house phones.”
Everyone just assumed that Kate’s haggard appearance meant she was working a second job, not to mention raising her daughter without any help. Maybe she should’ve asked Kate about it, or maybe Rebecca, but despite their friendship, Teresa thought it would be rude and intrusive to ask what exactly it was. If Kate wanted to bitch about her other work, that was her choice, but if not, she was going to respect that, too. Rebecca once said that she worried about her friend burning both ends of the candle, and she gave Teresa a knowing look as if it was common knowledge what she was talking about, but Teresa just let it pass. So when they shined their floodlights down those pitch-black concrete corridors and found Kate there, dancing without any clothes on for a bunch of fucking kids, no one was more surprised than Teresa.
Teresa, Mark, and two vice officers crept down the tunnels as silently as possible, leaving their flashlights off in hope of not alerting their prey to their presence until it was too late to get away. The moment the lights went on, though, almost everyone scurried off like cockroaches and ran through back exits that seemed to lead in every direction. The vice men made halfhearted attempts to follow them, but returned almost immediately, shrugging.
The only one they grabbed was nearly passed out when they booked him and read him his rights, a moon-faced boy with short black hair. He seemed barely to register their presence, which the vice men said wasn’t a surprise considering the needle they’d found on the ground beneath him. They seemed thrilled about this discovery, said it would make their jobs a lot easier.
Teresa was barely listening, though. Soaked in sweat from the room’s strange heat, Kate stoically ignored what was happening and put her clothes on as if no one were there with her. No one even handcuffed her. Mark just walked behind her as they exited the tunnels the way they came. The vice officers in front of them talked and laughed, but the rest of the entourage was silent. Beneath the light of a bright crescent moon—with its massive Xfinity logo glaring down on them —Kate stepped into the back of their squad car without being asked, never turning away from their gazes or acknowledging that Teresa was even there. Teresa wanted to say something to her friend, to reassure her that this was all somehow a mistake, but that felt like such an obvious lie that she opted instead to say nothing.
Teresa waited with Mark on the side of the golf course, not ready yet to get into that car and do their job. She turned to Mark and asked him, “Did you know about this?”
Mark looked down at the ground. “No, of course not … well, yes, they told me earlier today.”
Teresa grabbed his uniform and pulled him toward her so that he had to look her in the face. This was, in fact, the first time she’d ever looked anyone besides her grandparents in the eyes since her accident, and the shock of seeing herself reflected in them was almost too much. “Then why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I wasn’t supposed to. She’s why they put you on this case, don’t you see that? We can’t just have police officers turning tricks on the side. I guess the brass wanted you along to send some sort of message.”
“The message that they’re motherfuckers?”
“The message that this is a serious job and not something you can play around with. Kate’s an embarrassment to the force. As soon as they found out about her, they wanted to put a stop to it, but they needed proof. Well, they got it, and they want you to know that you need to play by the rules, too, and be a full-time cop.”
“I’m not a whore.”
“And I’m not saying you are. Listen, I don’t know two shits about why they sent you. It could be that they want to fuck with you. It could be Lieutenant Davis hates you because you’re not white—you wouldn’t be the first. I don’t know, and you don’t know, so don’t try to lay the blame on me. I’m just doing my job, wasting my evening busting up these kids’ little get-together the same as you.”
Teresa turned around and went straight into the car’s passenger seat. She sat in silence as they drove back toward the police department. She wouldn’t let him, or anyone, see her cry.
“Hey, I know it feels like shit to arrest your friend like this, but it could be worse. They haze everyone, make sure that you know where you stand in the department, make it so you don’t forget that you’re just another peon for them to toss around. For me, a couple weeks in, they had me send my own mother back across the Wall.”
“You’re an immigrant?”
“No, my mom was. I was born here. I have people call me Mark, ’cause it makes my life easier, but my name’s Marcos.”
“I thought a mother could stay if she had a child born here?”
“No, she can stay as long as she’s the guardian. I was over eighteen. I guess they knew about it the whole time, let me get through the academy’s background search without a hitch, all the while planning that bullshit to keep me in line.”
“Why didn’t you quit? Fuck those shits.”
“Same as everyone else. I need the money.”
“And your mom?”
“It was tough on us, I won’t deny it, but she understands. She needs the money, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The New Yorker
Published online at 9:00 AM on September 27, 2037
Eric McTeague and the Art of Publicity
How Anonymous Propaganda Created an Empire While Convincing the World It Didn’t Exist
by Austin L. Murray
Eric McTeague is a workaholic. His friendly, almost too-symmetrical face may have adorned the cover of Businessweek and the front page of the Wall Street Journal, but it’s not on account of his looks that he got where he is today. According to McTeague, his success is even simpler than that: it’s a matter of work ethic. Born to a lower-class family in Philadelphia, he realized early on that he had to work harder than other children, and that drive to succeed, to push fiscal earnings higher every year, is why some have described him as the American Dream made flesh. Of course, nothing is quite that simple—or else we’d have a nation full of McTeagues rather than one lone, glittering morning star—but I’m not going to be the one to contradict him. If there’s one thing most industry professionals have learned about McTeague, it’s that he seems to be right about practically everything, time and time again. And sterling personality that he may have, his almost prophetic ability to predict trends is the real reason why clients keep returning to Anonymous Propaganda.
Despite the country’s lapse into permanent recession fifteen years ago, his company has shown profits every year since its founding. One of his secrets to success, according to McTeague, is that because his business doesn’t rest, neither does he. “I started adjusting to a daily three-hour sleep schedule when I was in middle school,” McTeague says, “and sometimes I have trouble figuring out how everyone else makes do with less than a twenty-hour day. How do they find time in their lives for, you know, living?”
I can tell that McTeague is kidding when he says this because of the broad grin on his face, but there’s certainly a modicum of truth to his sentiment. It’s hard to imagine how a person as young as thirty-five could have constructed an empire like McTeague’s if he hadn’t been gifted with extra time.
First amongst his accomplishments, and certainly most publicly known, remains the Great Wall of Freedom, to most outsiders the pinnacle of his empire, its crown jewel. The Wall could practically be Anonymous Propaganda’s logo. (Incidentally, the company doesn’t have one). Working with the young designer Gideon Reyes, he put together the edifice that President Haight called “the greatest single thing our nation has ever built, or probably ever will build.” It’s the only American structure that’s visible from space, and it would certainly be the apex of anyone else’s career. But McTeague and his company haven’t slowed down, and today it seems less like his greatest project than just another milestone.
“The Wall is impressive, no question about it,” says McTeague. “That being said, it’s big and kind of obvious. I mean, not to shortchange the idea or the execution or anything, but the GWoF is a teensy, tiny bit derivative, know what I mean? I like the ideas no one has come up with yet. Hell, my favorite projects are the ones that no one even knows exist.”
McTeague offered only vague hints about what these might be, but it was clear that his company’s most famous works, like the GWoF or ads on the moon were, if anything, slightly embarrassing to him. “Let’s be blunt: the best publicity, the best product of any sort, is one that you think you’re choosing yourself. Anyone can run a splashy PR firm. Marketing isn’t exactly one of the subtler sciences, right? But the real mavericks out there, the guys doing the work I want to compete with, are the ones you only hear whispers about. The ones whose ideas sound so crazy you dismiss them as unbelievable. Only, of course they’ve already been executed.”
Following McTeague through his work day is a confusing affair, and not just because he seems to have so many projects in motion at once that it’s easy to lose track of what’s going on moment to moment. Research into liminal and supraliminal advertising makes sense when I hear the words, but what exactly it means is difficult to fathom. Even less clear are AP’s links with biochemical engineering projects and research into something called subatomic particle conjoinment, which I decided to risk sounding like an idiot and ask about because the name sounded so intriguingly obtuse. “In layman’s terms,” he explicated, “I guess it’s a way of trying to harness the interconnectedness of everything in the universe in order to facilitate the … production, I guess you could say, of certain expensive base metals. Lithium, for example.” Who they’re working with on this, and why it needs marketing, is impossible to guess.
As fascinating as a lot of AP’s projects sound, most of McTeague’s days are spent in meetings. During the sixteen-hour work day when I shadowed him, McTeague had just one forty-five-minute block of time that wasn’t spent either speaking with employees, investors, or customers. (He had meetings with Warner Music, Halliburton, Burt’s Bees, and the lozenge division of Pfizer—consulting with AP about how to spin a rash of customers choking on its peppermint cough drops, a predicament McTeague described as “the trickiest problem I’ve worked on in months.”) He managed to keep a keen eye on the company’s disparate projects, sometimes offering small suggestions or advice and sometimes overturning a few metaphorical coffee tables. What impressed me most was his universal enthusiasm. He was as excited speaking with investors about a tax loophole in Turkmenistan as he was considering a bold new advertising campaign set to capitalize on the hormones released by Sanmuert water bottles.
“Whatever I’m doing, it’s making money. I’m not too concerned which side of the business it comes from, so long as we’re seeing dollar signs. Diversification isn’t just a theory here, it’s a way of life.”
I asked McTeague whether he missed being on the front lines, developing advertising campaigns himself, but he seemed nonplussed.
“You’re asking if I’d go back to being the little guy with no money, being told what to do, rather than the suit in the big office? Hell no. I like it up here. You might think I have less creative freedom now that we’re owned by investors, a public corporation in the eyes of God and the country, but it’s just the opposite. The way I learned it growing up, freedom in America means having the money to do what you want. Anyone can have an idea. Executing it takes resources.”
It would be simplistic to say that Eric McTeague’s addiction to work is in some sense driven by tragedy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not the conclusion many have drawn. McTeague married young, only a few months after dropping out of Harvard to start Anonymous Propaganda, a name that’s since become synonymous with the man who founded it. His wife still in school, McTeague felt an incredible amount of pressure to succeed, especially when he found out she was pregnant.
“I was actually working twenty-hour days, seven days a week,” says McTeague. “Even I know it was stupid, and I wasn’t doing my best work. But I didn’t know what I’d do if the company sank. I didn’t have any Plan B, so I just worked harder.”
McTeague continued with this schedule even after his daughter was born, at which point his wife, Blair, insisted that they take a trip, hoping finally to get her high-strung husband to relax. They’d never had a honeymoon, so it would be their first vacation together.
“It didn’t feel selfish because we had literally never had a vacation together, just us and no work. Never,” says Clara. I can see the tears welling up in her eyes, but she continues. “If we’d taken her with us, it wouldn’t have even been a vacation. Not that my justification makes any difference.”
The McTeagues hired a nanny to take care of their daughter for the two weeks they would be in Australia, but unfortunately, she was running late. The nanny called to tell them that she was on her way over to their house. Due to car trouble, she wouldn’t be there for another twenty minutes. The couple waited for as long as they could but decided to leave before the nanny arrived rather than risk missing their flight. When I ask McTeague about this, he tells me that he doesn’t want to talk about it, except to say that it was “the worst decision I’ve ever made. Sometimes I feel like it was the worst decision anyone has ever made. It was an accident.”
Upon arrival in Sydney thirty hours later, the couple became frantic when no one answered either their home phone or the nanny’s cell phone. Moments after the nanny had hung up, she merged onto the freeway and was sideswiped into a concrete barricade by a texting driver. According to the police report, their daughter was still in her jungle-themed-playpen when they found her, with evidence of seizures, severe cerebral hemorrhaging, and complete asphyxiation as a result of isotonic dehydration.
The report mentions nothing about wounds sustained from their pet dog, let alone limbs gnawed off and eaten as they were in some of the grislier versions of the story. According to Officer Jeff Hadley, who handled the case, all of that was added later.
“Still,” says Hadley. “People will believe what they want to believe.”
Needless to say, the McTeagues were devastated. Clara told me that following their daughter’s death, they’ve never tried to conceive again, and that having another child would “feel like we were trying to replace her.” But after several weeks of mourning, Eric began channeling his frustration into his work.
“Maybe some people just aren’t meant to have children, you know?” says Eric. “That’s one legacy you can leave to the world, but I’ve come to accept that it’s not the one for me. Just because I don’t want another child doesn’t mean I can’t leave a lasting effect and, as stupid as this may sound, make a difference in the world.”
McTeague’s first big project following the tragedy was creating what was eventually named the Center for Innovation, Testing, and Evaluation, or CIT-E as it’s most commonly known. McTeague refuses to acknowledge any direct influence his own life has had on any of his multitudinous projects, saying, “I’m just here to deliver on a contract with a client. My ego isn’t supposed to be involved.” Still, it’s hard not to see the specter of his daughter’s death in CIT-E’s unique emptiness—in essence, McTeague’s creation is the world’s first intentional ghost town.
The American Southwest has always been littered with ghost towns, cities that were once thriving communities but have since lost all, or nearly all, of their population. In CIT-E’s home state of New Mexico alone, there are nearly a thousand documented ghost towns in various states of decay. Some of them have almost completely disappeared from the face of the earth, mining communities forgotten a hundred years ago, while others have become kitschy tourist traps. But prior to CIT-E, what marked all of them was their inexplicable nature and their mystery: what happened to these boomtowns, what caused them to go bust? Conversely, while CIT-E was designed as vacant from the get-go, unlike every other ghost town, its clients at the Rand Corporation, Halliburton, and elsewhere would describe it as a glowing success.
