The Mere Future (12 page)

We stopped at the Chapstick Store, and then the Chaps Store, next to the Chopstick Spot, the Stick Stock, and the Chicken Stock Shop.

“It’s the lack of homogeneity,” Nadine surmised. “There won’t ever be too many shops selling paper clips, so we won’t get used to them and take them for granted. No assumptions. Every moment has to be thought through on its own terms.”

People who used to run Subway franchises had the toughest time adjusting because they weren’t used to thinking of anything for themselves. Now they had to think of it all. But when your whole society believes that you can do it, well … anything is possible.

“This is going to change my field forever,” Nadine gasped. And stood frozen on the sidewalk. “Reliable visual codes, built up over generations soaked in advertising, have simply disappeared. That shared global language of imperial banality. It’s gone. ”

“Graphic design,” I shrieked. “Where is it?”

We both looked up at the sky for some sign of conformist globalized control. But there was only a cloud.

“But, honey, you are still busy at THE MEDIA HUB, right?”

“Busier than before,” she said, confused.

“Well, what are you doing there all day?”

“I’m doing what I always did. I’m designing more web pages and cyber ads than ever.”

This dichotomy was becoming really mysterious.

We both looked twisted, as when both parties are thoroughly confused, and their two sets of eyes fly around in contrary directions.

“I’ve got it!” Nadine was so calm. All her wrinkles faded as her face profoundly relaxed. It was as though she had found the secret of Zen.

“What?”

She looked carefully around her.

“There are no more purchasing codes on the street.”

“What? What is it? Nadine? Nadine?”

She was twirling, twirling round and round. She was looking, looking, really seeing our grave new world.

“I know what Sophinisba is doing.” She was wide-eyed, now. Frantic. Amazed. It was like she had seen the Virgin Mary’s leaking blood on a venetian blind. “She hasn’t eliminated advertising, or chain stores, or brand names, or franchises.”

“She hasn’t?”

“No.”

“So, where are they?”

“They’re inside,” she said. “She moved all advertising so that it only takes place intimately. In our private space. Inside. It comes to us at home and at work and through the many, many shifts of mail. Sophinisba flipped it. She flipped it. She made marketing personal, and individuality the common ground. The whole thing has been turned around.”

Nadine was right. That was the deal that Sophinisba had ultimately cut with the Richies. No more advertising in public places. But in return she handed them the private sphere on a silver moon. Now we were all theirs.

WOW
.

Spending money was now what we did at home. When no one was looking. This stuff on the street was fluff. A diversion.

We were marketed to at work, where we felt employed.

But once we stepped outside of the office, there was none of it. Not a trace.

Sophinisba had realized that the most traumatic and marking things in a person’s life happen in secret, in private. They often involve cruelty from someone you love or at least know. All of us are used to this. We don’t like it, but it’s now familiar to suffer indignities, to be dehumanized and lied to at home. For many of us, life has been that way since childhood. Then we grow up, love someone, trust them, and they hurt us. Again, AT HOME. We know nothing else.

Given this very common but unacknowledged truth, the violation of marketing is just another slap in a very full face. Assimilable.

But public, that’s another story. That is a place of display, and trust.

Now, we go home to cry. And to shop.

“
WOW
,” I said filled with love. “My girlfriend is so smart and so wide.”

And I took Nadine home, to the marketplace, so that we could make love in private, where everyone was watching.

22. NEWDLE

H
ARRISON AND
C
LAIRE
walked around looking for a place to eat. They passed a couple of new schools that Sophinisba had constructed, seemingly overnight. These schools had everything: ten kids in a class, swimming pools, free books.

“YOU NAME IT.”

That was Sophinisba’s School ReThinking Slogan.

She had invited movie stars to each buy a school district. The place would be named after them and increase that old Benjaminian
AURA
—how we feel about a movie star when he is offscreen, and how much more that makes us feel about him when he is back on. Also, this was a whole lot easier than having to go to some African country and miss all the parties. Plus, if the star came from a normal background, they could buy the public school in their old neighborhood and really rub it in everyone’s face.

Being naturally vicious competitors, the movie stars tried to outdo each other with caring. The Helen Hunt School had free yoga classes, and The Philip Seymour Hoffman School had free bicycles and free glasses.

Then Sophinisba applied the idea to hospitals. She leased them out for brand underwriting to credit card companies.

People adapted quickly. The word on the street soon was that if you were shot, you should go directly to Visa. But, in case of a heart attack or the need for microsurgery, make sure the ambulance took you to Mastercard. A lingering illness was best treated at Discover. Different cards for different ailments. It helped differentiate them in the consumer’s mind. The brands could further distinguish themselves while raising the ante. And they saved money, because it was cheaper to provide quality medical care than it was to buy ad space. This was another revolutionary step in Life Marketing, a newly evolving field. If companies simply ran daily life, that was advertising enough. They didn’t need theme songs too.

Consumers didn’t have to shift their thinking very far. They had always used credit cards to feel better about not having enough money—and as a way to pretend that inflation wasn’t happening. Now, credit cards still made them
feel
better, but they also made them
be
better. Credit cards were healing. It was a brilliant social contract and fantastic psycho-sell.

The first restaurant that Claire and Harrison chose to explore was yellow, with tiny sparking crystal eyes pasted to the windows. Nothing about this decorative strategy conveyed that the place had only three tables and served three kinds of noodle soup. That was it. If you wanted a salad first, you had to go to the salad place, then wander back over here. It was cheap and good, and it was fun. The owner sat in the corner, reading her most recent mail shipment. Her daughter was sitting at the third table doing her homework. It was so humane. The girl’s Teach-Shirt said
Henry Louis Gates
Public School #4
. He had recently become a big movie star.

“I guess I’ll have the noodle soup,” Harrison said suavely.

“Oh, I got sick of that stuff.” The owner confessed like she was in group therapy. “I couldn’t look at another noodle without feeling trapped. Today we are only serving mashed potatoes. Hot, sweet, buttery, salty mashed potatoes.”

“Yum,” Claire said. “But how can your clients become acclimated to the predictability of your product?”

“Can’t,” the woman slouched. She was an old-fashioned type of waitress, like in the old movies when they were played by Shelley Winters and not Cameron Diaz. “But then again, unpredictability is the market hook these days. It makes people feel WILD and FREE. Besides, my quality of life improves if I can try new things on a whim. Potatoes?”

“Okay,” they said, persuaded, and feeling roguish and unkempt.

It was fun, Harrison realized, being together with Claire in New York, trying new little out-of-the-way places. It was fun being influenced by other people’s eccentricities, marginality, and concepts.

Product consistency was just one of Claire and Harrison’s many, many shared interests. Then there was an intimate, scary silence.

“Hey,” Harrison said, adolescently, his voice cracking. “Did you ever see Andy Warhol’s
Drizzle
?” (Andy Warhol never made a movie called
Drizzle
.)

“Yeah,” Claire said. “It was great. Isn’t that the one with Jon Voigt?” (She’s thinking of
Midnight Cowboy
, which was a John Schlesinger Hollywood flick that used Warhol superstars in a party scene.)

Dinner was served.

“Wait, I’m having an insight.” Harrison made fun of himself for the first time in years as he dug into his potatoes. (They were fingerling and purple.)

“Tell me,” Claire wrinkled her nose in a way that conveyed her cuteness.

“It’s about the word
new
. You know …” He looked at her for acknowledgement and she nodded.
YES! YES! SHE UNDERSTOOD WHAT HE MEANT!
Gleefully and with a full heart, Harrison continued. “No one ever says: ‘Oh, that book is written like Balzac, it’s not new.’ So why should a painting go out of date with the same speed as a car?”

“The art market?” Claire guessed. “I mean, everything is accelerated now, not just taste. Even emotions have speeded up.” She also loved the potatoes. “Too bad that there are not thousands of Glicks instead of thousands of people working on the global Twinkie market. But most paintings are made by one person, right?”

“Unless they are successful and have assistants.”

“Right, but most of them don’t, right?”

“Right.”

“So,” Claire said, “a thousand painters equals a thousand paintings. But a thousand marketers equals one Twinkie.”

“Emotionally…” Harrison’s mind was humping now. “I can look at a painting made even thirty years ago, and if I am not one of the five … oh … three thousand people who are totally up-to-date on the art world, I might actually love it BECAUSE I know nothing. It might be new to
me
.”

“Individual Exposure,” Claire recalled from an ad she had designed for sheer underpants. “What a concept: each person learning about things one at a time instead of the entire city finding out about the new Snapple flavor at the same minute. It creaks, but it could work.”

“What is the new Snapple flavor?” Harrison asked.

“Watercress.”

“I love you,” Harrison smiled. And regretted it the moment he said it.

23. HONEYBUNNY

I
COULD NO LONGER
deny that something profound was troubling Nadine.

Unfortunately, it seemed to be me.

I had to take stock. Firstly, there is no such word as “firstly.” Second, all my perceptions were turning out to be wrong. This had become abundantly clear. Nadine realized stuff and therefore I admired her. That, apparently, was not good enough.

This fact contributed to my ongoing revelation that I must be an asshole, because all day long at work, and at home, I read on the Cyberscam about other people who I had never met or heard of benefiting tremendously from
THE GREAT CHANGE
(the new name for what used to be known as the Big Change.) Somehow, because of my many inadequacies, I was unable to access any part of the group betterment for myself and my gal. I couldn’t even meet anyone who had managed to do it, even though they appeared to be everywhere.

Opportunity was passing before me.

Who could love a person who missed their historic moment? It was like being a nineteen-year-old college student at Berkeley in 1968 and majoring in Accounting. Or a lesbian in 1979 who decided to go into a convent. A total doofus.

But why? Why couldn’t I download my own slice of tolerance?

Ironically, and yet typically, as I resolved to surrender all hope, my true love Nadine was making a contrary decision. We were both on the right road, but I was going in the wrong direction, and she wasn’t coming along for the bum steer. No, no swamp for that bright star. Nadine had been making changes.

Her hands may have been callused from entering data, but her mind was on lines—thin pencil and paint. One day, late coming home from work, she announced that she had made a pilgrimage to Glick’s front door. She’d stared and stared, transfixed.

Then Glick opened.

Imprisoned in her own bewildered, lonely obscurity, Glick welcomed this kind of visitor. Nadine bragged like a swan about being in Glick’s presence, how she had tasted clay and poured cement. She’d used the rest of her body—not just fingers, wrists, and retinas, to make art.

As she regaled me with her triumph, I sat in the bathtub, self-critically, and soaked.

I was worried.

Was Nadine changing her values? And if so, would it be without mercy?

Would it be one of those meat cleaver transformations where anyone who knew the old self had to be destroyed? The kind that made no sense? You know, the cruel kind? Where one kills the other as a symbol of her newly disliked former self?

Or would Nadine come freshly to the table, newly happy with herself and therefore freshly accepting of the world, i.e., me?

“I want to be a painter,” she said. “I found a studio today.”

“Yay!” I said. “Jubilee!”

“I’m tired of just reading theory. Whee!”

She was smiling. Peace would prevail.

I was relieved. I had never understood why Nadine liked reading theory. It seemed like a substitute for action. How could reading about a painting make it okay not to paint one? I looked at theory once, and it seemed to be a kind of subtle but convoluted way for people to explain why they and their friends should be the ones in charge.

Once again our life grew and deepened out of a crisis, as Nadine expanded her personal vision, and, I hoped, her tolerant love for little old me. It wasn’t instability envy, just that not knowing what is going to happen makes people strange and frightened if they want something very, very much. Something very big. Bigger than the usual human allotment. So, as Nadine grew into her painterly role, I looked in the mirror constantly. Everybody else seemed to have an assignment from fate. But I had to create my own homework. Because the errors never ceased.

“You’re not going to quit your job, are you?” I squeaked in terror.

So much for my good intentions.