The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [50]
The young Asian executive with the crooked tie and the nasty underbite blinks rapidly, almost psychotically. The spiky-haired woman leans back and frowns, tapping her nails against the tabletop. Chas pinches a centimeter of flesh at the bridge of his nose.
“The thing people are beginning to want more than anything else,” she continues, “is to be free of you. They want to not want you; they want to not want anything you have to offer.”
An uneasy murmur. She looks for Javier’s reaction, but he’s standing next to the projector and its light obscures his face. Chas, however, she can see, and he is glaring at her—she didn’t know those perpetually hooded eyes of his could open so wide. He has no idea what she’s doing. He’s actually nervous, a discovery that fills her with unexpected joy. For the first time since she met him, she feels completely in control.
“Of course, on the other hand,” she says, in a more casual tone, “those Indians and temple priests were quite happy with the deal. Those Indians loved wampum. It gave them a lot of prestige in their tribe, at least until the market was flooded. And as far as those temple priests were concerned, the shiny porcelain Buddhas lit up their temples like beams of divine sunlight.”
She pauses. All eyes watch her expectantly.
“Value, as we all know, is relative,” she says. “Right now people are nostalgic for simpler times, times when people felt pure and complete in their bodies, when their bodies were all the power they required to satisfy their needs. People today are sick of being consumers. And you have a product that can help. Your product will keep them pure. Your product will restore their innocence. Because your product is, in its very essence, the opposite of consumption. Consuming your product is like consuming nothing at all. Keep this in mind always when designing your campaign. Keep in mind how light this product is going to make buyers feel, how free it’s going to make them feel—free of people like you.”
She takes her seat to laughter and applause. When she sneaks a look over at Chas, he nods approval and gestures with his eyes toward Ed Cabaj, whose face remains slack as he stares, with unconcealed longing, at the picture of the savage girl.
Magic
At night, in bed, Javier’s body becomes a lunar landscape of concavities—the hollow of his chest, the widening valley down the middle of his rib cage, the twin gorges beneath his pelvic bones—and she presses up against him, filling the depressions with the length of her own, softer self. If she were very small she would choose the cave of his collarbone to make her home; she’d curl up there against the taut skin of his neck, which has the warm, smooth feel and slightly briny smell of those small flat stones one finds washed up on the beach, baking in the sun. She’s developed a theory about his body: On the one hand, all the parts of it he uses to reach out to and apprehend the world—his hands, eyes, nose, ears—are just a little larger and more overdeveloped than average. Even his height seems geared toward this purpose, as though his body were nothing but an ambulatory periscope to bring his head up over the surface of crowds. On the other hand, the rest of it is slimmed down to the barest level of functionality. His torso is just broad enough to contain his organs. His arms and legs are just wide enough around to bundle the muscles and nerves and bones that allow him to dodge and weave on rollerblades through traffic jams and slip through closing subway doors. The logic of his body holds true even for his penis, which is just a little longer than its leanness should allow.
Over the past few weeks this odd little theory of hers has taken root in her mind and grown into an all-embracing explanation of every aspect of Javier’s personality and every difference between him and her. If only she had a body like his, she reflects, she just might be able to see life the way he does. She can’t escape her body; its presence is too real,