The Failure Read Online Free Page B

sufficient deterrent to prevent me from swiveling the hand truck and following my plan. Someday, though, thought Guy. Someday I will follow through. I just don’t know with what, exactly.

9. GUY AND BILLY DISCUSS PANDEMONIUM, SITTING IN BILLY’S APARTMENT, FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING FIASCO

    T he concept is good. We’re agreed that the concept is good.
    -If you say it’s good, then obviously I trust you.
    -I’m happy to hear that, but I’d be more happy if you understood what I’m trying to say. Who would not be attracted to this idea? I mean from a business standpoint. Advertising that’s not advertising. Data collection that’s invisible and untraceable.
    -I am totally on board with this concept and I get your vision, but in the pure consumery sense this is not my thing.
    -What is that? The pure consumery sense.
    -What do you mean “what is that?” It is what it says it is.
    -But you’ve invented a word. Which in itself would not be so bad, people invent words all the time, out of necessity, when there’s not an exact word available, but in your case you’ve invented a word that doesn’t need to exist. You’ve invented a word out of sheer laziness. Your brain for whatever reason couldn’t form the words “as a consumer,” because—and here I’m just spit-balling—you were trying to make yourself sound more complex than you are.
    -I am more complex than I am.
    -I’m not sure you even listen to the things that come out of your mouth.
    -I’ve been told I’m a good listener.
    -You are. You’re a very good listener. You just should never talk.
    -I could really go for a cheeseburger.
    -For breakfast?
    -You’ve never had a cheeseburger for breakfast? It’s good.
    -I’ll take your word on that one.
    -Thanks, Guy. Means a lot to me.

10. GUY PREPARES TO MEET HIS BROTHER MARCUS TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING FIASCO

    T he concierge at the Chateau nodded his usual greeting, into which Guy read headlines of condescension followed by lengthy articles unmasking the sham of his existence. Pulitzer stuff, really well-researched, thorough, irrefutable.
    He continued walking through the lobby, sat at his usual table, and ordered a large pot of coffee, which he took strong and black. Hungover celebrities and their antic publicists, studio executives trading industry gossip, and the odd fraud or tourist. In Guy’s eyes, the tourist was lower than a fraud. The tourist, he considered, was someone who skimmed like a water spider on the surface of life. Even a fraud gets wet.
    Guy had two hours before his brother arrived. He’d offered to pick him up at the airport, but Marcus had insisted on taking a cab, which was typical of the subtle ways in which Marcus underlined his aversion to Guy’s company—half an hour less he’d have to spend trying to think up conversational topics that wouldn’t offend his younger brother’s sense of self—in Guy’s mind.
    Two hours, then, to work out the way, exactly, he would pretend to try to convince Marcus to lend him fifty thousand dollars to product-develop and implement a closed beta version of Pandemonium, the successful completion of which would help make Guy not just obscenely wealthy, but a player, a man with clout, powerful enough to park without fear in any other man’s reserved spot anywhere in town.
    Not that he expected Marcus to actually lend him the money. Through the lens Guy often used to view the future (cracked and varicolored, if you must know), he could see Marcus nodding sagely as Guy explained the superadvanced technology that he was “borrowing” from some dweeb at Caltech. In essence, this technology would enable companies to slip subsensory ads onto any kind of website, unnoticed by the unwitting net-surfer but nevertheless effective. Probably.
    It’s true that Guy himself did not fully understand the technology, but he knew Marcus would, because Marcus was a physicist and thus by definition able to understand anything