What Terry Schmidt sketched from memory for the all-male Focus Group was a small eddy or crosscurrent in the tide that demomarketers called an MCP — these were known as Antitrends, or sometimes Shadow Markets. In the area of corporate snacks, Schmidt pretended to explain, there were two basic ways a new product could position itself in a US market for which health, fitness, nutrition, and attendant indulgence-v.-discipline conflicts had achieved a metastatic status. A Shadow snack simply worked to define itself in opposition to the overall trend against HDL fats, refined carbs, transfatty acids, i.e. against the consumption of what some subgroups variously termed empty calories, sweets, junk food, or in other words the whole brilliantly orchestrated obsession with nutrition and exercise and stress-management that went under the demographic heading Healthy Lifestyles. Schmidt said he could tell from the Focus Group’s faces — whose expressions ranged from sullen distraction in the youngest to a kind of studious anxiety in the older men, faces tinged with the slight guilt-about-guilt that Schemm Halter/Deight’s legendary E. Peter Fish, the mind behind both shark cartilage and odor-free garlic supplements, had called at a high-priced seminar that both Scott Laleman and Darlene Lilley had attended ‘. . the knife edge that Healthy Lifestyles Marketing ha[d] to walk along,’ which unfortunate phrase was reproduced by a Hewlett Packard digital projector that cast Fish’s key points in bold-fonted outline form against one wall to facilitate effective note-taking (the whole industry seminar business was such bullshit, Terry Schmidt believed, with its leather binders and mission statements and wargame nomenclature, marketing truisms to marketers, who when all was said and done were probably the most plasticly gullible market around, although at the same time there was no disputing E. P. Fish’s importance or his statements’ weight) — Schmidt said he could tell from their faces that the men knew quite well what Antitrend was about, the Shadow Markets like Punk contra Disco and Cadillacs contra high-mileage compacts and Sun and Apple contra the MS juggernaut. He said they could if the men wished talk at some length about the stresses on individual consumers caught between their natural God-given herd instincts and their deep fear of sacrificing their natural God-given identities as individuals, and about the way these stresses were tweaked and-slash-or soothed by skillfully engineered trends, and that but then, by sort of the Third Law of Motion of marketing, the MCP trends spawned also their Antitrend Shadows, the spin inside and against the larger spin of in this instance Reduced-Calorie and Fat-Free foods, nutritional supplements, Lowcaf and Decaf, NutraSweet and Olestra, jazzercise and liposuction and kava kava, good v. bad cholesterol, free radicals v. antioxidants, time management and Quality Time and the really rather brilliantly managed stress that everyone was made to feel about staying fit and looking good and living long and squeezing the absolute maximum productivity and health and self-actuation out of every last vanishing second, Schmidt then backing off to acknowledge that but of course on the other hand he was aware that the men’s time was valuable and so he’d. . and here one or two of the older Focus Group members who had wristwatches glanced at them by reflex, and the overstylized UAF’s pager went off by prearrangement, which allowed Schmidt to gesture broadly and pretend to chuckle and to concede that yes yes see their time was valuable, that they all felt it, that they all knew what he was talking about because after all they all lived in it didn’t they, and to say that so in this case it would perhaps suffice just to simply for example utter the illustrative words Jolt Cola, Starbucks, Häagen-Dazs, Ericson’s All Butter Fudge, premium cigars, conspicuously low-mileage urban 4WDs, Hammacher Schlemmer’s all-silk boxers, whole Near North Side eateries given over to high-lipid desserts — enterprises in other words that rode the transverse Shadow, that said or sought to say to a consumer bludgeoned by herd-pressures to achieve, forbear, trim the fat, cut down, discipline, prioritize, be sensible, self-parent, that hey, you deserve it, reward yourself, brands that in essence said what’s the use of living longer and healthier if there aren’t those few precious moments in every day when you stopped, sat down, and took a few moments of hard-earned pleasure just for you? and various myriad other pitches that aimed to remind the consumer that he was at root an individual, one with individual tastes and preferences and freedom of individual choice, that he was not a mere herd animal who had no choice but to go go go on US life’s digital-calorie-readout treadmill, that there were still some rich and refined and harmless-if-judiciously-indulged-in pleasures out there to indulge in if the consumer’d snap out of his high- fiber hypnosis and realize that life was also to be enjoyed, that the unenjoyed life was not worth living, & c. & c. That, as one example, just as Hostess Inc. was coming out with low-fat Twinkies and cholesterol-free Ding Dongs, Jolt Cola’s own branders had hung its West Coast launch on the inverted All the Sugar Twice the Caffeine, and that meanwhile the stock of Ericson’s All Butter Fudge and individual bite-sized Fudgees’ parent company US Brands had split three times via D.D.B. Needham’s series of ads that featured people in workout clothes running into each other in dim closets where they’d gone to eat Ericson’s A.B.F. in secret, with all the ingenious and piquant taglines that played against the moment the characters’ mutual embarrassment turned to laughter and a convolved esprit de corps.(Schmidt knew full well that Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Adv. had lost the US Brands/Ericson account to D.D.B. Needham’s spectacular pitch for a full-out Shadow strategy, and thus that the videotape of his remarks here would raise at least three eyebrows among R.S.B.’s MROP team and would force Robert Awad to behave as though he believed Schmidt hadn’t known anything about the Ericson-D.D.B. Needham thing and to come lean pungently over the wall of Schmidt’s cubicle and try to quote unquote ‘fill in Terry’ on certain facts of life of interagency politics without unduly damaging Schmidt’s morale over the putative boner, and so on.)
Nor in fact was the high-altitude figure gazing down at them, the street’s keener onlookers saw — what he was actually doing was looking down at himself and gingerly removing a shiny packet of what appeared to be foil or Mylar from his mountaineer’s tool apron and giving it a delicate little towel-like snap to open it out and then reaching up with both hands and rolling it down over his head and hood and fixing it in place with small snaps or Velcro tabs at his shoulders and throat’s base. It was some sort of mask, the long-haired cyclist who always carried a small novelty-type spy telescope in his fannypack opined, though except for two holes for eyes and a large one for his forehead’s cup the whole thing appeared too wrinkled and detumesced- looking to be able to make out who or what the shapeless arrangement of microtextured lines on the Mylar was supposed to represent, but even at this distance the mask looked frightening, baggy and hydrocephalic and cartoonishly inhuman, and there were now some louder and less self-ironic shouts and cries, and several members of the watching crowd involuntarily stepped back into the street, fouling traffic and causing a brief discordance of horns as the figure placed both hands on his head’s white bag and with something like a wet kissing noise from his skull’s rear suction cup performed a lithe contra face that left him now facing the window with the sagged mask’s nose and lips and forehead’s very orange cup pressed tight against it — again provoking God only knows what reaction from the Playboy magazine corporate staff on the glass’s inside — whereupon he now reached around and removed from the backpack what appeared to be a small generator or perhaps scuba-style tank with a slender hoselike attachment that was either black or dark blue and ended in a strange sort of triangular or arrowhead- or D-shaped nozzle or attachment or mortise, which tank he connected with straps and a harness to the back of his GoreTex top and allowed the dark hose and nozzle to hang unfettered down over his concentricized rear and the leggings’ tops, so that when he resumed his practiced-looking opposite-leg and — arm climb up the eighth-floor window he now also wore what appeared to be a deflated cranial mask or balloon, dorsal airtank, and frankly demonic-looking tail, and presented an overall sight so complex and unlike anything from any member of the (now much larger and more diffuse, some still in the street and beginning to roil) crowd’s visual experience that there were several moments of dead silence as everyone’s individual neocortices worked to process the visual information and to scan their memories for any thing or combination of live or animated things the figure might resemble or suggest. A small child in the crowd began to cry because someone had stepped on its foot.