THE DEAD ARE A TOUGH MARKET TO CRACK

By Richard Sanders

Good and evil do not come from others.

Pain and relief of pain

come of themselves.

Dying is nothing new.

We do not rejoice that life is sweet

nor in anger

call it bitter.

(from the Purananuru, translated by A.K. Ramanujan)

CHAPTER 1

ON THE EDGE OF HISTORY

DINNER WITH LEONARDO DA VINCI OR CHARLES MANSON?

No one who was there that day would ever forget it. Especially not the five executives—

or thought leaders, as they thought of themselves—from the Kepler Center for

Neurocognitive Marketing. They had to vote to decide which one of them would

volunteer for the demonstration, and by a majority of 4-1 they selected Brynn

Rosenbrink, in charge of affective activation. She wasn’t pleased. Then again Brynn, a

riveting person whose long, straight black hair and broomstick body made her look like a
Roman numeral brought to life, was rarely pleased by anything. She was forced to ask the

question we’ve all been asking since Job first lost his 401K. “Why me?”

Because she was the only woman they had, said Trip Hagen, senior leader of a

team whose other three members resembled Machiavellian middle-schoolers. Women are

better at making consumer choices, Trip said. Guys, we find a shampoo, a soap, a

deodorant we like, we’re pretty much set for life. Women can deal with change.

Brynn peered through the two-way mirror at the sadly matter-of-fact interview

room. Nothing but a table, two chairs and another two-way mirror on the other side. It

made her miserable the way fall made her miserable. Everything about this place they

were visiting was depressing. Happywide Analysis—how downmarket can a name be?

Headquartered in Corona, Queens? Zirconias were invented for towns like this. Brynn,

who acted like a widow even though she’d never been married, was not a happywide

woman.

“These people are outsiders,” she said. “They’re amateurs. Nobody’s ever heard

of them.”

“True,” said Trip, burping from his chronic acid reflux. “But if we’re looking for

an edgy approach, this is where we have to look.”

“They’re probably using frontal lobe correlates,” she said. “Very rudimentary.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe they’ve developed something big. If they have, then

their big is our big.”

Brynn tried to step away from the group, which was difficult because they were

all huddled together in a tiny observation room. “Well, I don’t like him. I don’t want to

be sitting at that table with him.”

 “Who, the guy? What’s his name, Sewanaka?”

“I don’t trust him. He creeps me out.”

Not hard to understand. If you stepped inside the observation booth on the other

side, you’d find a peculiar little freak staring through the two-way mirror at the empty

interview room. For starters, Sewanaka Wallace, the co-founder of Happywide Analysis,

was disturbingly thin. He had as much thickness to him as a peeled-off piece of tree bark,

indicative of someone who’d spent a long time following the Homeless Diet. But what

was most unsettling was how unsettled he looked. You couldn’t tell if Sewanaka was

young or old. Parts of him resembled a boyish chess hustler swindling the marks in

Washington Square Park. Parts of him resembled a 3,000-year-old mummy freshly

excavated from a tomb. He seemed caught between unfinished childhood and premature

senescence. Not that he was hideous or anything. He had a gentle, unspoiled expression

but it was frozen in place, like his face had been grown in crystals.

“Which one do you want?” said the woman with him in the booth.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“It does. Take the woman. She’s better. What’s her name?” She checked her

phone. “Brynn. Brynn Rosenbrink. She’ll work.”

“I don’t care.”

His booth mate was Pharis Scarcella, Happywide’s other co-founder, a bulky,

aggressively nervous individual.

“Just tell me you’re not using the MRD-3,” she said.

“I’m using the MRD-3.”

“You can’t. It’s radically untested. We haven’t built one reliable model.”
 “It’s completely agnostic, a completely unbiased program. It’s perfect for them.”

“Anything goes wrong, it’s your play, not mine.”

Sewanaka twisted around to her. “I’m not liking this tone. You have no right not

to trust me.”

“I don’t trust myself, why the fuck would I trust you?”

He laughed. She didn’t. Pharis, in fact, was pretty much incapable of laughing

without a lot of outside help.

“You never would’ve gotten where you are without me,” she said.

“You’re right. But now I’m here and you’re here and I’m going with the MRD-3.”

“Shove it up your algorithmic ass.”

>>>>>>

Pharis, phone ready in her hand, joined the Kepler boys in their observation booth.

“We’re set to jump off,” she said. In the interview room, Brynn was sitting at the table

and showing much white grating of her teeth. Sewanaka sat across from her with a tablet.

“Do you believe people can change?” he said.

“Are you asking me personally?” said Brynn. “Or is this part of the process?”

“The process.”

“I guess they can change, but who’s got the time to change them?”

Sewanaka made a note of her answer on his tablet. “Do you prefer old wine in

new bottles, or new wine in old bottles?”

“Old wine in new bottles.”

 “Who would you rather have dinner with, Leonardo da Vinci or Charles

Manson?”

“These are your questions? A little lunatic, aren’t they?”

He studied her face, the upper part, especially around the eyes. “Da Vinci or

Manson?”

“Manson.”

“If you had to pick a year to live through, would it be 1798, 1850 or 1946?”

“Ridiculous.”

“Which one?”

“I’d say 1946.”

Sewanaka pressed a buzzer. An assistant came in and placed three black sweaters

on the table. A Marc Jacobs, a Phillip Lim and an Akris Punto. “Which one would you

buy?”

“I know her taste,” Trip Hagen said in the booth. “She’ll take the Phillip Lim.”

Pharis checked her phone. “He says the Akris Punto.”

“Never.”

After a few moments hesitation, Brynn put her hand on the Akris Punto.

Trip exchanged looks with his team. Lucky guess?

“When you wake up at night,” said Sewanaka, “do you carefully rearrange the

pillows, or do you punch them back into shape?”

“Punch them.”

“When you come across something you don’t understand, do you think of it as a

mystery or an enigma?”
 “What’s the difference?”

“Which word comes to mind?”

“Mystery.”

“I see.”

Brynn was already bored bloodless, answering the questions with all the passion

of a disembodied voice making subway announcements. “You know, sometimes the best

way to find out what someone will do is to ask them.”

Buzzer. Three frozen pizzas were brought out—DiGiorno, Ristorante, Totino’s.

“Ristorante,” said Pharis, rolling her shoulders as she watched through the mirror,

as if she could astrally control Brynn’s hand.

She picked Ristorante.

Next up, three cameras—Canon, Nikon and Fujifilm. Sewanaka predicted Canon.

And Canon it was.

How about three chainsaws—a very unBrynnlike category? Craftsman,

Remington or Poulan. Sewanaka called Remington. He called right.

Trip and his team were starting to sense that a payload of significance was

building.

“Do you believe people are born in sin,” Sewanaka said, “or do they create it?”

“Born.”

Bottles of Bollinger, Krug and Veuve Clicquot were placed in front of her.

“I don’t drink champagne,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

“If you did, which one would you choose?”

 “Veuve Clicquot,” Pharis announced, but then she saw Brynn’s hand drifting

toward and lingering over the Bollinger. We’re fucked, she thought.

“This wh— No, this one.” She touched the Veuve Clicquot.

“I think I just came in my pants,” said Trip. “He’s actually reading her mind. He’s

hacking into her brain.”

>>>>>>

TAPPED OUT

No one who was watching that day would ever forget it. The traffic chopper from one of

the local New York stations was floating over East Elmhurst just after dawn, showing the

northbound tie-ups already forming on the BQE. The in-air reporter was estimating the

time of delay when he spotted something on the western edge of St. Michael’s Cemetery.

“Wait, what is that?” he said live. “Over there. Can we get a little closer?”

The camera crept in on some queasily unfamiliar object below. “It looks like

something dead. I think there’s something dead down there.”

Or someone, as the police discovered minutes later. It was the body of a

sparrowful woman with long, straight black hair. She’d been stabbed multiple times—38,

according to the coroner’s later count.

The victim was identified as Brynn Rosenbrink, an employee of the Kepler Center

for Neurocognitive Marketing. She’d last been seen at D’Aramitz, a bar-bistro on Laight

Street in Manhattan, and the friends who were with her couldn’t recall anything, as they

put it, really inappropriate. Brynn had been going to D’Aramitz a lot lately, they said,
because the place sold Veuve Clicquot on tap. Never much of a drinker of anything,

she’d developed a real craving for the bubbly over the last three months.

The sadly ironic thing, her friends said, was that Brynn had always believed the

world would end in cataclysmic destruction, and that the apocalypse was approaching

humanity at a fairly rapid clip. Her stated goal was to become president of the Kepler

Center before the catastrophe arrived.

Too late. Exactly 38 stab wounds too late.

>>>>>>

BOTTOMS UP

I’ll never forget the call I got from my ex-wife that day, though I wish I could. In all the

years I’ve known Gabriel as my former spouse, she’s never called with good news. If

she’d won the Nobel Prize, become a billionaire and been canonized as a saint all on the

same day, I’d never hear it from her. She only calls to relate tales of biblical misery and

to let me know that she’s suffered much, much more than her share and that I somehow

owe the balance due and I’d better get in touch with my lawyers at Rank & Seedy and get

this mess straightened out.

The calls are really bad when they begin, as this one did, with your daughter…

Not Millie. Not our daughter. Your daughter, as if I’d suddenly assumed sole

responsibility for her mortal existence. The your daughter openings always mean I’ll be

dealing with more shit than a plumber the day after Thanksgiving.

Your daughter has dropped out, she said.

 “Dropped out of what?”

Life. School. Society. She’s dropped out and joined a cult.

Let the record show that my first reaction was complete and utter disbelief. Then I

remembered that living most of her life in Scottsdale, Arizona with a whining, yelling,

fully mobile bitching bot like Gabriel would drive any intelligent girl into signing up with

the Hell’s Angels on her 18th birthday.

“How do you know it’s a cult?”

She told me it was.

“That’s the word she used? I’m joining a cult?”

She said she was dropping out and joining some group on Long Island. What else

could it be on Long Island but a cult?

Okay, something was falling into place. A week or so ago Millie had sent me a

text. In NY, will get in touch soon. I waited exactly 48 hours and texted her back. Still in

NY? How’s everything? I got a one-word reply: Wonderful. Which covers a multitude of

sins.

“So what happened? What did you say?”

Gabriel said she’d tried to apply her merciless maternal persuasion and brutal

common sense, but all Millie would say was that she was 18 and could do what she

wanted. Why did I go through the strain and struggle of getting her through school and

raising her right if she’s just going to drop out and join a cult? How does that make it

worthwhile?

I’ve never had an answer to those kinds of questions.

“Tell me about this group.”

 All I know is that they’re called Bottoms Up and they’re on Long Island.

“Bottoms Up? You sure?”

That’s what she said.

“What is it, a cult for alcoholics?”

I don’t think so, Quinn. Otherwise you’d be a charter member.

Oh that was low. Nice thing to say to a recovering drunk. I must’ve been young,

stoned and crazy to ever put my dick in that mouth, which I was.

The strange thing, though, is that even after all these years, every once in a while I

can still feel the ghost of the wedding ring on my finger.

>>>>>>

You never want to hear that your child has joined a cult, but if it’s true, you want to at

least make sure it’s a good cult. What types of programming are available? Is it a party

cult or a place for serious indoctrination? Do they use accredited brainwashing

techniques? Is financial aid available? Do they offer scholarships—or, in this case,

slaveships? Did it make the U.S. News list of Top Ten Cults in America?

I did a search for Bottoms Up. Gabriel was insane—it wasn’t a cult. It was an

entrepreneurial collective of data junkies located out near Stony Brook University. The

name had nothing to do with drinking. It was a little Happy Hour wordplay used to reflect

the belief of its founder, Sewanaka Wallace, that real knowledge doesn’t move from the

top down, but from the bottom up.

 Sewanaka Wallace—somehow I knew that name. It had the magical ring of

familiarity to it. I did a search on him.

Of course—the guy behind Happywide Analysis. The purchase predictor, the

neuromarketing rebel, the man who could hack into the minds of every consumer who

wasn’t on life support and even some who were. His Happywide software was employed

for everything from testing ads, movie trailers and TV shows to selling cars, candy bars,

energy drinks, phones, furniture, bikes, boots, toys, treadmills, over-the-counter drugs

and just about anything you could stock on a Wal-Mart shelf.

How could I not have…

The Sewanaka Wallace story was a great American narrative. Guy comes out of

left field to challenge the priestly elect of marketing. He’s regarded as an upstart, an

interloper, a dangerous renegade. But with his codes and algorithms he can decipher the

hieroglyphics of the hidden texts that the experts can’t even see.

His approach didn’t consist of merely trolling through, say, Facebook pages and

collecting and collating the likes and comments. He went deeper into the nuts and bolts of

unconscious thinking and unmapped associations. Billions of data clusters looped from

all parts of the brain were plugged into Happywide’s systems, then painstakingly decoded

and recoded into algorithms that could yield the Rosicrucian secrets of the mind.

As a result, Sewanaka knew that if your favorite movies include The Dark Knight,

Dr. Strangelove and Pulp Ficton and you’re partial to rye bread and walks on the beach

and you live in Oregon, you’ll probably buy a Dodge Charger. Or if you’re a fan of the

NBA, Hitchcock, the Beatles and Beyonce and you’re an atheist from a Jewish

background, you’re a candidate for Stove Top Stuffing. X-Men? Green Tea? Carrie
Underwood? Costa Rica? You’re a sucker for Kate Spade earrings. And not just you.

Anyone in the country who shared those tastes would be targeted by a selective—and

highly efficient—ad campaign.

You can see why the man was considered a master of marketing, why he inspired

a kind of, well, yeah, a cultlike following. There were hundreds of Sewanaka Wallace

blogs devoted to his theories, hundreds of Sewanaka Wallace study groups, hundreds of

Sewanaka Wallace courses taught in schools around the globe.

A couple of years ago he’d left Happywide Analysis and started the looser, more

informal Bottoms Up. Millie’s presence there made sense to me. She’d wanted to study

social psychology—the collective seemed like a good opportunity for her to work and

learn.

I was at peace with her decision.

I just wanted to know exactly what she was being taught.

>>>>>>

YOU ARE HERE, WHEREVER THAT IS

Drive a few miles past Stony Brook University and you come to the old Talbert estate.

Here’s where Ailsa Talbert, heir to the family mining fortune, decided to build an artists’

colony. This was back in the early decades of the 20th century, when artists’ colonies still

existed. Ailsa had adopted the conviction during those agnostic and questioning times
that art was the new religion. Building a community of small cottages—they looked like

luxury outhouses—would be her way of creating heaven on earth and saving the world.

Somewhere in the course of construction, however, she grew certain that she’d die

once the last cottage was finished. So the building never stopped. She kept adding new

bungalows, putting them up in whatever space was available, until the area around her

mansion looked like the jammed-in tombstones of an old, overcrowded cemetery. Her

family, alarmed by her obsession—and the money she was frittering away—finally found

a doctor who was willing to have Ailsa committed to a hospital. As soon as she was

carted off construction was halted and the workers dismissed. Ailsa contracted influenza

days after arriving at the hospital was dead within the week.

Told you so.

Today, under Sewanaka’s ownership, the estate resembled a mad Persian bazaar,

a hippie-techie commune, Woodstock with smartphones and tablets. Tech creators and

entrepreneurs worked in their cottages or sat outside on beach chairs, beanbags and

discarded couches talking about metaphysics and microchips, destiny and dealflows,

ethical stability and effective startups, free will and product-market fits. It was one big

bedizzling and debazzling revival meeting.

And a confusing one. A shirtless guy near the mansion gave me directions to

Millie’s hut, but no way could I find my way. I went wandering through this crazy warren

of structures, people and Buddha statues, this unorganized network of paths that twisted

back on themselves or lead to nowhere. The more I looked the less I found. I came to a

diagrammed sign: You are here. Right, but where’s here?

 Keep moving. She’s got to be somewhere in this scented mix of espresso, incense

and sweet hookah smoke. Eventually I stumbled into an open field—unbuilt, probably

not part of the original Talbert estate—where people were playing guitars and banging on

drums and an old man was using a T-shirt cannon to loft Bottoms Up shirts into a crowd

of laughing and screaming kids.

“Dad.” Millie’s voice. She was walking toward me, materializing out of the nest

of cottages like she’d been magically summoned to find me.

The first time I flew out to see her after prison, I took a picture of her right away.

The way things were going back then, anything bad could happen at any time, and I

wanted to make sure I had visual evidence that she really still existed.

We kissed and hugged, the blond down on her cheeks just barely lit by the sun.

She said someone had called, told her I was here looking for her.

Millie had been one of the most cynical teenagers I’d ever had the pleasure to

encounter. Last holiday season I asked her what she wanted for Christmas. Christmas?

she said. People still celebrate Christmas? Yeah, a few. She held the firm belief that the

more truthfully you looked at life, the more miserable it was.

Now she seemed, well, if not happier, then more at home. At least more at home

here. You look into those crystal green eyes and you know she’s thinking that all the

color and excitement of this circus world around her was created just for her.

I felt the same way about things when I was 18.

She moved us away from the field and the shouting children.

“This is a big step for you,” I said.

“I love it here. I love these people. Everything is just beautifully in place.”

 “Glad you’re all right. I thought I’d hear from you.”

“Sorry, I’ve been so busy. The work here, it’s really important. I really feel we’re

on the edge of history here. The door’s about to swing open and we’re right on the

hinge.”

“Exactly what’re you doing?”

“I’m on a paid internship. I help with different people’s projects as needed.

Mostly I’m working with this group, I’m doing research for their position paper. It’s

called Is This a New Era in Syntactical Orientation?”

“Can you explain that to me? Talk to me like I’m an idiot. It’s not a stretch.”

If you can imagine Stephen Hawking describing Euclidean quantum gravity to a

spare tire, you’ll get an idea of what the conversation was like. Millie rattled off

something about cognitive coefficients, cohesive functionality, puppet processing,

transmarginal computation and z-score perspectives, and at length. Keep in mind this is a

girl who once sent me a 42-page email analyzing The Little Mermaid.

“Well,” I said, “that sounds pretty good.”

“It’s huge. It’s revolutionary. You know I always wanted to take part in a

revolution.”

“Like when you were interested in post-Marxist psychology?”

“Yeah, but there was no revolution. Not socially. All society wants is flatscreen

TVs and sub-zero freezers.”

“Speaking of that, your mother told me you were here.”

Millie shook her head like I’d offered her a cockroach to eat. “I don’t want to hear

it.”
 “She’s worried.”

“She can go to hell and leave me alone.”

“She can’t. You wouldn’t either if you were a parent.”

“You’re right, I wouldn’t, if I were an angry, soulless, shrieking bitch of a

parent.”

“Okay, easy.”

“She’s insane. Do you know there are no more plants in the house? No more

flowers? Why bother? she says. All they do is die.”

“You don’t have to tell me about her.”

“Then you don’t have to ask. I don’t think I’ll live long enough to erase what

she’s done to me.”

Well, not all the cynicism was gone.

“Don’t talk about living long enough,” I said.

“You know what’s really sick? You know why I had to get out of there? They’re

all like that. Her and her friends. Petty, nasty, materialistic. Full of brainless bullshit. I’d

rather be dead than live like that.”

“Don’t fucking talk like that.”

“Personally I don’t hold much hope for the human race, except for these people

here. I think they can do just about anything, they can make life more real than reality. I

think they’re the only ones who can make a difference.”

“Like Sewanaka Wallace?”

“He’s amazing. He’s a real visionary. They all are in their own ways. I was pretty

lost before I came here. I think I’ve found something now.”

 Good words to hear, certainly. But as any competent pimp knows, it’s not hard to

persuade lost 18-year-olds that they’ve been found. I wanted to get a better sense of what

was going on.

“You think I can talk to Sewanaka Wallace some time?” I said. “Maybe you can

set it up.”

“You can probably talk to him right now. You passed him before. He’s shooting

T-shirts to the kids.”

Walking back to the field, Millie explained that this was Let Your Kids Hang Out

Day, a semi-regular event in which Sewanaka always took part. I realized now that the

crowd on the sideline wasn’t simply watching an old man pop shirts in the air. They were

looking at him with the indulgent, significant smiles of people seeing a holy man dance

the hokey-pokey.

The object of their affections was an odd little geek-freak. Sewanaka wore a

battered Panama hat and a once-white linen shirt that was now yellowed and too big for

his skinny neck. He dressed like a former bum who’d retired from the trade. Nothing

wrong with the old fellow’s strength. The way he pumped air into the pressure chamber

of the T-shirt launcher would earn him a job at any sports arena. His face, though,

showed age. Gaunt, severe, he looked like a man who’d come back from exile in the

desert to spread the word of God.

Millie walked right up to him and made introductions. “This is my father, Quinn

McShane.”

Sewanaka shook my hand and pronounced himself delighted. “We all like Millie

very much. She shows a lot of promise.”

 “That’s what they said about me, but I proved them wrong.”

He laughed at my joke. Obviously the man’s a fucking genius.

“Millie’s been telling me about you,” he said. “I think I’d like to talk to you. Just

let me finish up first.”

We backed away while the kids continued chasing after the Bottoms Up shirts and

laughing like they were being tickled to death. One of the adults in the crowd, a guy with

a blue bandana and a long paisley shirt, stepped out on the field. I don’t know why, but

my ears went temporarily silent as soon as I saw him, like I was shooting up in an express

elevator from the first to the 50th floor.

The guy was walking in Sewanaka’s direction, and at about the halfway point he

started laughing. Hysterically. It was not a happy sound.

The guitars and drums stopped. Sewanka saw the guy, dropped the shirt launcher

and began walking in the opposite direction. He was muttering loudly enough for us to

hear him. “No, no, no. Hell, no.”

The bandana man followed him, and never breaking his laugh as he pulled a

knife. The crowd, white-eyed, started yelling. The kids stopped laughing. I began running

on the field but I was far away from the action.

Meanwhile, Sewanaka just kept strolling away. It was like he was avoiding a

heckler, not a killer.

The guy closed in on him, raised his arm and lifted the knife over his head as a

rolled-up T-shirt caught him in the ribs at 500 pressurized pounds per square inch and

knocked him over.

 These pneumatic launchers are safe as long as you’re firing in the air and letting

the shirts drop in a parabola. But if you’re shooting shirts in a straight line, you’re

delivering a lot of punch.

I shoved another shirt in and pumped air into the pressure chamber. As the guy

was getting up I triggered the release valve. This shot caught him in the chest and sent

him flat back down again.

The second time he got up he stayed crouched low, making himself less of a

target but giving himself enough mobility to run into the woods on the opposite side of

the field and disappear.

Sewanaka was immediately surrounded by his tech supporters. He waved them

off, vastly unconcerned. “The gods,” he said, “have decided not to sacrifice me today.”

You call that an explanation?

He took me and Millie aside. “Thank you for interceding,” he said politely.

I asked what the fuck that was all about.

He shrugged. “I’m having some trouble with my former company. Apparently,

some people think it’s important. So, Millie’s been telling me about you. You’re an editor

at Real Story?”

“I am.”

“And before that you worked as an investigator?”

“Also true.”

“That’s interesting.”

Not, I thought, as interesting as getting stabbed in the middle of your own

compound, but that’s me.

 Sewanaka gazed around the field with curiously myopic eyes. He looked as if

he’d spent too much time poring over cognitive coefficients and z-score perspectives.

“I might need some help with this,” he said, “this dispute with Happywide

Analysis. They’re meaningless people but quite malignant in their way. I’m a militant

pacifist—I don’t indulge in violence. I could use some protection against them.”

“You want recommendations?” I said.

“No, I want you.”

“Me? Well, I don’t know about that. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.”

“He’ll do it,” said Millie.

“I will?”

“He’ll do it because he’s a decent man who always does the right thing.”

“I do?”

“Many wars are being waged in the industry,” said Sewanaka. “From what I

understand, this inconvenience with Happywide is the most intensely followed. I imagine

it carries some journalistic value. I’ll give you the inside story if you help me.”

“Done,” said Millie.

“I’ll have to check it with work.”

“Good. By the way, were you up at dawn today?”

“Dawn? No.”

“You missed a spectacular conjunction of Venus and Jupiter. Fantastic thing, and

rare. I’ve never seen one this close before, probably never will again. Try to look

tomorrow morning, eastern sky. You won’t be disappointed.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>