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“It’s kind of impressive. Most tribute performers in Vegas are one-trick ponies, right? They impersonate one person. Mick Jagger or Frank Sinatra or Diana Ross.”
“She’s very talented,” Betsy agreed. “But she’s only Diana. That’s the key. She sings songs by other performers because Diana didn’t sing. But she sings them as Diana. That’s who she sounds like. That’s who she is.”
“You know, the Sydney Bee Gees don’t sound like the real Bee Gees. I heard them when I was in Vegas last month with Damon and Rory.” Damon Ioannidis and Rory O’Hara were other executives at Futurium, but at the time they were still just names to her. Frankie had been to Nevada to meet with a congresswoman on that trip: the crazy woman who still insisted that the 2020 election had been stolen and tweeted photos of her and her children holding assault rifles. She had helped Futurium set up its operations in Nevada, though Betsy still didn’t understand why the representative had bothered. Even Betsy knew a crypto company didn’t create jobs.
“The real Bee Gees didn’t sound like the Bee Gees,” she said. “They sounded like the Chi-Lites.”
He laughed, a big, hearty guffaw. She liked it when he laughed like that. She liked making him laugh like that. Then he looked at her over the tablet, and she could see the approval in his eyes. She couldn’t decide whether it was because she knew who the Chi-Lites were or because she had said something snarky, and she knew he liked her more when she had an edge. “I’ve never heard you sing,” he said. “You know, other than along with a song in the car and that one time in the shower. Can you?”
“Yes. But that’s my sister’s thing. She was always the lead in the high school musicals, and I was always fine with the smaller parts. The way she remembers our childhood, I was this athletic superwoman and she was the actor. And, yes, I was a good athlete. I am a good athlete. But my voice is just fine.”
“Just fine?”
“Okay. More than just fine.”
He pressed Play on the trailer for Crissy’s show, and there was her sister’s beautiful voice belting out Petula Clark’s “Downtown.” He paused it. “Now you,” he said.
She shook her head. There was no way she was going to play that game.
And yet she did. Not that afternoon and not that night. But she did the next day. It was like a dare.
“You sound a lot like her,” he said, when they were ensconced in her bedroom in her apartment and Marisa was in school. She sang as soon as she had climbed back into her underwear, a bit of blissful, postcoital madness. He—her entire audience—was lying on his side in her bed.
“I actually think your voice is better than your sister’s. Imagine if you had some training. Imagine if you had a voice coach. If I’ve learned anything from my time in business, it’s this: we all have unbelievable potential. The world is a place you remake in whatever image you damn well want.”
She was standing before him. She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. “I appreciate that sort of faith in oneself,” she said. “But I don’t think the world is waiting for a thirty-four-year-old ex–social worker from Vermont to make it big on American Idol.”
“I understand,” he told her, nodding. But she could see that a scheme or a notion was gestating behind his eyes. He viewed himself as an “idea man,” using those exact words. If I don’t have an idea by seven in the morning, I’m done for the day and should probably just go play golf.
“Do you?”
“Sure,” he said, but it was half-hearted. Sometimes, it seemed he had limitless faith in her. She’d saved his son, in his eyes. Was there anything she couldn’t do?
“I’m really not a singer or an actor.”
He pulled her back onto the bed beside him and massaged her shoulders. “For now, anyway,” he said, but then added, “besides, you have to learn about Futurium.”
She did. She had only the vaguest idea of what it would mean to be an administrative assistant for the company in Las Vegas, but Frankie was confident there would be plenty for her to do. And he was positive they would both love the city and the surreal moonscape that surrounded it.
Positive, he had reassured her. Absolutely—and he used the word as an adjective often when he was excited—fucking positive.
Yeah, I was interested in crypto. I thought it was cool that Betsy’s boyfriend was into it. Miners solve problems. It’s all computers and math, so I learned all I could.
But I was even more fascinated that Betsy was going to work for Futurium. I mean, I wasn’t sure she could balance a paper checkbook.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Crissy
It’s easy to look back and say I should have seen this or that coming. All of you reading this are thinking precisely that: How did Crissy Dowling not know what was happening? I do. But when you’re living in the moment, it’s more difficult. When you yourself are in the midst of a hyperobject—the drip-drip-drip death of democracy, your fear of the searing heat from world-destroying mushroom clouds, cryptocurrency—you miss its mass. When you are living in history, you miss the obvious. Think back to February and March of 2020, the start of the pandemic. We had no idea what lay ahead. What was waiting. We were living with a normalcy bias. When we shuttered my show on March 13, 2020—yes, Friday the thirteenth—I thought it would be for two weeks.
Likewise, it’s fine to tell me, Crissy, why in holy hell did you listen to Artie Morley and agree to call Erika Schweiker? But you weren’t there. It was a phone call. I knew it wasn’t actually harmless; I’m not daft. I knew there was something slippery going on, I knew that the sinkhole into which I was diving was awash in slime. But I wanted desperately to protect my residency: people do far worse things daily to preserve their power or ensure their jobs are secure. I knew what John Aldred had told me about his peers in the Senate, and their utter hypocrisy when it came to how they voted in the Capitol versus what they honestly believed was the right thing to do. And, I told myself, I was looking out for John—a legitimate good guy—against a fascist bully.
In hindsight, would I have made that call? Those calls?
Yes. Even knowing what I know now, I would do it all—I would do everything—again.
* * *
