While I can’t tell the chef anything, I want to show him my appreciation. I rest my hand on his shoulder and am about to say how sorry I am that I can’t help, when he recoils under my touch. With a noise like a balloon animal being twisted into shape, he withdraws, disappearing behind a conversing group of The Hayrick executives and retail buyers.
In the shock of the moment, I find myself wondering about Stillwell. Would he have known that some people react like this to touch? Probably. He seems to have a better grip on the LipService mindset than I do. I attempt to scale its glossy heights but like a spider trying to escape a bath, I always slip back.
Wordini is laughing hard. It takes him a while to recover enough to speak. ‘Pseudies can’t ordeal with uncomplicated sensory input,’ he explains. ‘It’s like serving them plain, unsalted rice. If the grains haven’t been cajoled, poached in brand bouillon and given symbolic fluffings, they would rather starve than eat them.’ He starts laughing again. ‘You didn’t actually think being a foodie had anything to do with sensual experience?’
Wordini calls me into his office. ‘My trend patrol brings us good sidings from the front lines.’ He hands me photographs showing people wearing my beards and spoons as they walk through shopping malls, receive pedicures and draw money from ATMs. The pop-up restaurant closed two weeks ago, and a limited edition of The Hayrick hampers with the spoons and beards is available at selected stores.
‘But… none of them are eating,’ I say slowly, trying to train my confused ideas over this trellis of the obvious.
‘Yes, isn’t it a coo-coup – everyone cooing all cuckoo over your product coup? Now try and say that fast!’ he says, guffawing at his own wit.
The beards are starting to take on a life of their own. The trend patrol’s pictures show that, while some women continue to wear them as a sort of high-fashion yashmak, others drape them like triangular kerchiefs over their heads. Both sexes attach them to belts as suggestive loincloths over jeans, with the mouth hole rather obscenely positioned at crotch height.
While I’m looking at the pictures, I have to keep reminding myself that I made the beards. They are my creation. But I can tell myself that as often as I like, it’s not true. A realisation comes like that sense of falling that wakes you with a start. It’s as if a LipService of objects is at work. Some monstrous genetic modification occurs as my ideas reseed from me in distant soil. How could something that comes from me sprout strong and alien – true products of the consumerist dirt? I suspect your involvement; I suspect a side effect of the implants. My suspicion roves, it beats at the air but finds no perch to rest on.
After seeing my bespoiled beards, I left a message for Wordini before quitting the office, saying that I wasn’t well and wouldn’t be coming into work today. I just want to pick up my pieces. But now Wordini is yelling down the phone at me.
‘If you want your every boo-hoo pandered to, you should’ve survendored yourself to Dr Bromide. So unless you’re having a rupture, I own your fat farce and you’d better get over here.’
In my unpatched state, all I can do is make a small groan of assent.
When I arrive at the office, it becomes apparent that Wordini’s snooper troopers aren’t the only ones who’ve been watching the beards’ depurposing into status symbols. A number of corporate clients have contacted Wordini saying they also want what he refers to as ‘spoondoggles or some such parapheregalia’. I sit in my cubicle and think about starting all over again, knowing that no one – neither the corporations nor their customers – gives a discount coupon about what tasture really is. I can’t bear to watch what I feel being commercially abominmated again. My forehead sinks into the sour rye crust of the desk. The only way is to fake it. It won’t matter anyway. I’ve learnt from the pseudies – everyone just wants a slice of crispy half-bakery.
I develop a pitch for scent diffusers that release blasts of newly mowed grass in a DIY chain. My first choice was freshly sawn wood, but Wordini’s research indicates employees were considered ‘more fix-it fit’ when planted in a meadow of a grassy olfactor. For Nice Slice pizza, I design a scratch and sniff takeaway menu. That’s when Wordini comes to me, waving the mock-up and announcing his presence with a zephyr of anchovies and cheese.
‘Where are the fingerfoods? I gave you Nice Slice so that you could induce a Pavlovian product response,’ he snaps.
‘But this triggers salivatory pooling much faster than the drool-down effect of the beards. I’ve read papers from the database about the olfactory bulb’s location within the limbic system and direct access to the amygdala and hippocampus, which makes for more powerfully conditioned associations with mood and memory than other senses.’
He looks at me with narrowed eyes and I’m suddenly so nervous that, without even touching it, I taste the tension in the high thread-count of his suit as a metallic note. The release of pressure is sudden as he turns to leave my cubicle, saying, ‘Botch your step and I’ll have you scotched.’
The projects keep coming. My elevator concept for the Arcadian Group of hotels adds real vibrandcy to the chain’s signature experience. Even Wordini gave cred so. By selecting a floor, guests also engage an ambience. For the suite level, projections on the elevators’ walls make patrons feel as if they are travelling between the canopy and floor of a rainforest. Instead of music there are surround effects of dripping water, calling birds and the shrill of the katydid.
I feel the warm hug of smug as I produce these forged experiences. At the launches, unveilings and openings, I’ve even learned to make appropriately ambogus statements such as, ‘Yes, the rainforest ambience enhances a form of psychological levitation, of leaving behind the surly-burly world beyond the hotel doors.’ I tell myself I’m fooling everyone, that I can huff and puff and blow them all away. But the workdays just never end and my eyes are soon shackled in black rings. ‘It’s a form of psychological levitation,’ I repeat at product parties. And I’m too heavy to rise to anything else.
Everything – my words, my ideas – seem to come out of a price gun, the same little sticky labels. Today, the sell has run dry. I’m coming up blank on the Skidoo retail concept. I have nothing. Just nothing. They sell ski equipment. I watch the promotional videos. All I can think is that things would be better if I were on skis.
At lunch I go to a Skidoo outlet. I buy skis. I stand on a plastic slope. The gliding is nice but I still don’t feel it. Maybe it should be cold. It’s the only thing I can come up with. Make the whole store very cold – wintery.
‘That’s not a sham dunk! It’s so bleedious, I’m surprised I haven’t haemorrhaged,’ Wordini says in disgust. Failure, failure. I’ve failed even in fakery. I think of Lost Property – a box with my name on it. It’s empty. I’m empty and dead. To fill me up, Wordini prescribes a malling – I must ‘regain purchase on materialism’, he says. He expects certain ‘spend-swift ways’ of his staff. That means ‘presenting proof of investments with an appropriately high cost-to-status ratio’ in the form of receipts.
At the shopping arcades, I get comimmersed in dresses and scarves. I drape, swathe and cloak myself in cotton, linen, satin, silk, neoprene and grosgrain. Automatically my mind gets into the weave of catchpraises – wear the kindest cut of all, putting the neo in preening. I devour so much yoghurt, ricotta, sesame, cool mint, beeswax and drippings that I feel a bit sick. Still, I must stimulate the wardlobe of my brain. Keep going, I tell myself, clutching at handbags, grand bags, tanned bags – because life holds more with a designer bag. I know I’m spinning too fast and am losing words’ worth, but if I can’t brandstorm, fire off a stun-pun, they’ll take away my language. I even go back to Skidoo and buy a downy parka, snow boots and earmuffs. But the hot stuffiness of trying them on stifles any other ideas.