At this point I would have settled for a glimpse of the bald guy, even NASCAR Man or Future Woman. Hiding or fleeing would be better than standing around alone. Anything to give me a purpose.
Another tray went by, carrying something that looked like food, and I followed it.
The tray led me down a short hall toward the outer-space section of the museum. The planetarium rose up before me, a huge white globe on curved legs, as awe inspiring as an alien spaceship. Yet as so often happens in museums, I was thinking about food. I plowed after the tray, not catching the white-coated caterer until he was mobbed by a small and hungry crowd.
The tray was covered with sushi experiments gone awry, tiny towers of fish eggs and multicolored tentacles, something that nonmetaphorical penguins might eat. Not exactly what I'd been hunting for, but I grabbed a pair of what looked like plain rice balls and stuffed one into my mouth. Something inside it exploded into saltiness and fishiness, a sushi booby trap. I swallowed anyway, then inhaled the second.
My mouth was so full that I couldn't scream when a certain bald-headed man stepped up next to me.
Chapter 16
"MRRF," I SAID IN ALARM.
He muttered something incoherent, his eyes drifting past me.
I swallowed the rice ball in a solid, choking clump.
He kept muttering, and gradually I realized that he wasn't muttering at me. A thin black headset stretched in front of his mouth, and his eyes had the faraway look of the homeless and the wireless. He was on a hands-free phone, and his gaze went straight through me.
With my blond hair and penguin suit, I was invisible.
I turned and took a few steps away, the tight fist of nerves in my mostly empty stomach slowly unclenching, no longer threatening to squeeze the swallowed-whole sushi back up. I continued toward the planetarium, trying to take even steps, until a hanging beach-ball-sized model of Saturn presented itself.
I ducked behind the planet and counted to ten, waiting for his bald head to appear, another five goons behind him wearing headsets and predatory smiles.
But he didn't come, and I dared a glimpse.
He stood in the same spot, still talking on his headset. He was a non-penguin, dressed in the all black of security personnel and surveying the crowd, clearly on the lookout.
For me.
I smiled. Jen's disguise had worked. He hadn't connected the new non-Hunter with the skater kid he'd seen this morning.
Still, walking back past him seemed like pushing my luck. I looked ahead for another section of the party to explore. In front of me the planetarium was admitting a steady stream of partyers into its maw. A sign announced continuous showings of the new TV ad for Poo-Sham. Inside it would be dark, and I could recover my cool in a familiar focus-group-like setting. Watching advertisements was something I was good at.
I took a deep breath and stepped out from behind the hanging planet, striding purposefully toward the planetarium. On the way I snagged a glass of champagne, straightening my cuff links and feeling very secret agent.
Poo-Sham turned out to be some pretty trippy shampoo.
The lights dimmed in the planetarium. The chairs tipped back, and my body sank into the rumbling presence of a museum-class speaker system. Stars shimmered to life above our heads, as crystal clear as on some cold night on a high mountain.
Then a rectangle of light appeared, a giant television screen carving itself out from the universe.
The ad began in the usual shampoo-ad way—a model in the shower, lather covering her head. Then she was dressing, her hair dry and bouncing in slow motion, with the best highlights that special effects could produce. (Somewhere, lower-level Lexa types had acted as machines for turning coffee into highlights.)
Then the model's date arrived. Her Poo-Sham hair dazzled him, and he sputtered, "Did you just shake a tower?"
She smiled vacuously, flicking her hair.
Next they were arriving at the theater, and the usher, tongue-tied by the glamorous hair, babbled, "May I sew you to your sheets?"
Our heroine smiled vacuously, flicking her hair.
Then at dinner the still-bedazzled date ordered "lack of ram with keys and parrots."
Guess what? Smacuous viling, hicking of flair.
The ad ended with a close-up on the bottle and a voice-over:
"Poo-Sham—it horrifies your glare!"
The planetarium went dark, the audience buzzing for a moment in Poo-Sham bemusement and giggles. Then some sort of software freak-out seemed to take over the projector. The entire screen flickered rapidly back and forth from deep blue to blinding red, sending a needle of weirdness deep into my brain.
The flashing stopped as suddenly as it had started, and the stars came back, the lights came up, and people were clapping.
I stumbled out of the planetarium, blinking, having completely forgotten the bald guy, the anti-client, everything. The flashing screen had done something to me.
The champagne glass in my hand was empty, so I grabbed another orange juice from a tray. Half-formed thoughts flickered through me, as if somebody had hit the reboot switch for my brain.
This orange juice turned out to be even more spiked than the first one I'd had, but I needed its cold reality in my hand. So I kept drinking, trying to walk off the weirdness left over from the Poo-Sham experience.
Something was bothering the back of my mind, not allowing me to settle. Like everyone, I've watched a lot of TV, seen lots of advertisements. I've even been paid to critique them. But something was deeply wrong with the Poo-Sham ad. Not just the flickering screen at the end, but some even bigger affront to my sensibilities.
It hadn't looked real.
You know when you're watching a movie, and someone's watching TV in the movie, and it's showing some TV show that doesn't really exist, with some fake talk-show host they just invented for the movie? And it always looks wrong? That happens because you and I, like every other American, are partly machines for turning coffee into TV watching. And we're really, really good at it.
Two seconds after switching on a television show, we know whether it's from the late 1980s or last year and whether it's a cop show or a sitcom or a made-for-TV movie, major network or public broadcasting or the dog-walking channel, all this from subtle clues of lighting, camera angles, and the quality of the videotape. Instantly.
You can't get anything past us.
"Roo-Sham isn't peal," I said aloud.
A men's room door caught the corner of my eye, and I pushed my way in. Setting the empty glass on the sink, I rummaged through my gift bag and found the tiny complimentary bottle of Poo-Sham.
I squished a bit onto one finger. It was bright purple but otherwise looked and smelled like shampoo. Running the water, I rubbed it into a lather. It foamed up in a very shampoolike way.
In the mirror a wild-eyed, peroxided stranger who had clearly gone insane stared back at me.
I frowned. Maybe the day's paranoid proceedings had gone to my head, or maybe Jen's hair acid really had leached into my brain. Apparently Poo-Sham was real. They just had a goofy advertising campaign. I sighed and washed my hands.
For five minutes I washed my hands.
But they remained purple.
Poo-Sham was a sham. It was some sort of seriously strong dye. The entire party was a plot to turn rich people purple.
"This doesn't make any sense," I said to the peroxide stranger, drying my still-purple hands. I'd managed to say it right, so possibly the fluorescent lights were bringing me back to reality. But my hands were shaking from hunger, and I could feel the rum and champagne threatening to make my head spin.
Food was required.
I left the gift bag behind in case there were any more booby traps inside it, keeping only the magazine and the free digital camera. The camera was covered with Poo-Sham logos and therefore the most likely candidate for menace, but it was so little and cute. I mean, come on. Free digital camera!