The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [32]
“Innocence,” Ursula says.
“Eroticism and innocence.”
“Semen and mother’s milk,” she says. “The ideal ingredients.” The memory of eating it sends a coldness down her throat to the base of her chest. Chas looks at her askance. She keeps pushing the cart and doesn’t say anything more. She can hardly blame Ivy for reacting to Chas the way she did, for blowing up his theories into some totalizing system of delusions. Ursula herself is shivering with revelation. She feels like she’s getting a glimpse into the secret laws of reality. This must be the way the physicist who discovered quantum mechanics felt when he worked out the last decisive equation and realized that the basis of all the universe’s laws might very well be a set of fundamental flaws. Around her the supermarket has transformed into something rich and strange—a metaphysical playground, a fantastic space station at the bottom of a black hole where all the light and color goes. Light and color everywhere, and not a single shadow—the fluorescence is like some eye that sees every inch of you from every angle. She feels giddily powerful, nauseatingly vulnerable: the paradoxical sensation of vertigo.
“All right. Next lesson,” Chas says. “Listen. What do you hear?”
“Muzak,” she says, trying to concentrate. They are pushing their cart through yet another aisle. She wants to ask him about every product she sees. What’s the paradessence of a mayonnaise substitute? What’s the paradessence of pinto beans? But his demeanor doesn’t invite questions. He walks next to her tensely. He doesn’t seem to be comfortable here. When he’s not speaking, she can see his jaw working, grinding his molars to dust.
“Muzak.” He nods. “What’s it for?”
“To make people shop more?”
“Good guess. How?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of happy and upbeat. It probably makes people feel more at ease, not in such a rush, makes them look around more, count their pennies a bit less?”
“That’s the prevailing theory,” Chas says. “The dissenting opinion is that it makes people shop more because it makes them more anxious. Either way, it works—better than silence, better than any other kind of sound that’s been experimented with yet. I could show you a hundred studies.”
He pauses, his eyes moving uneasily along the shelves. Then he goes on, his voice rapid and terse:
“To really understand why it works, you’ve got to think about what Muzak is. Pop music is all about the time it’s composed in. It becomes a way we measure our decades here on Earth. A way we distinguish one era from another. Muzak, conversely, is all about timelessness. It takes pop tunes out of time. Cans them, pickles them, preserves them for eternity. This is the paradessence of Muzak: eternal transience. Different people react to this contradiction in different ways. Some find it comforting, because it reaffirms a fatuous hope that every insignificant event in their piddling little lives is actually important, is actually being recorded in some cosmic database somewhere. Muzak-likers are immortal souls traveling through a material wonderland, and so what the hell, why not buy anything pretty that catches their eye? Muzak-haters, on the other hand, are terrorized by the stuff, because it turns everything unique about every era into the same homogeneous mush, and moreover does so with ease, thus reinforcing their suspicions that there’s essentially nothing unique about their era or themselves; that their cherished individuality is nothing but a merchandised illusion begrudgingly maintained for them by marketers; that when you get right down to it, it’s all the same crapola.”
Chas stops talking, as though he’d lost his train of thought. Eventually it becomes clear he isn’t planning to add anything further.
“But how could that feeling make people want to shop more?” she asks.
He shrugs. “Nihilists make for fairly avid