The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [68]
I didn’t know it would be spelled that way was all Javier said, in a thin voice, when she walked up to him twenty minutes ago. He was sitting at one of the small metal tables in the Black Tower’s atrium, where more or less the same people can be seen every afternoon eating their lunches alone. There was no lunch on Javier’s table, just the book, and he sat there slumped and expressionless, gazing at the cover. He looked tired—worse than tired. There were deep black crevices under his eyes. His skin was pale, his hair matted and unwashed. She asked him what he thought of the little book he’d cowritten, and the question came out abrupt, sarcastic, and a bit more vindictive-sounding than she’d intended. She was trying to make him feel the full weight of what he’d lost, to make him see how he’d reaped what he’d sown, how his betrayal of her trust had borne karmic fruit in the form of Chas’s betrayal of his own. For as it happens, while the trendbook makes extensive use of Javier’s ideas, outlining a world to come in which people will be able to use consumerism to create their own ideal “realities,” Chas has turned Javier’s vision on its head, describing how this relativistic array of lifestyle choices will consist not of realities but of illusions, beneath which a far grimmer, absolute reality will remain. It is to the aim of helping marketers exploit these flexible “realities” in order to thrive in the fixed and far more unforgiving reality that the preponderance of The Lite Age is dedicated.
Jaded and invulnerable though Ursula thought she already was by this point, the book has affected her deeply, carrying her beyond even cynicism, into a strange new state of free-floating alienation and detachment that she feels powerless to understand or even question. She’s been walking around in this haze for the last few days, and so when she saw Javier and went over to him and asked him what he thought of the book, it was not only because she was seeking revenge but also because she genuinely did want to talk to him about it. Or rather she wanted him to talk to her about it. She wanted him to invite her to sit down with him so he could refute Chas’s argument for her point by point, rubbing the numbness from her mind with the heat of his convictions. But her question came off sounding too spiteful, or maybe it didn’t even matter. Javier didn’t refute anything. He didn’t look at her. He just made that one comment about the spelling and then reverted to silence, his head turned aside as though he’d been struck, his face drained of color, his normally expressive eyes gone dead, looking much as he’d looked the night of the blackout, three months ago, when she’d come home to find him waiting on her stoop, all prepared with a sales pitch of his own for making Ivy their savage girl, and she’d told him not to bother, told him Chas had already convinced her.
“He did?” Javier had said, his face flooding with relief. “Oh. That’s good. That’s great.” He’d let out a laugh and then asked, “How’d he do it?”
“He fucked me on the roof of our office building,” she’d replied.
And his lopsided smile had trembled slightly and fallen.
Since then Ursula has been working on her own. Chas has taken up the slack left by Javier in her training, meeting with her a couple of times a week, each time in a different location, each location evoking new little lessons and insights: how aftershaves must burn almost to the extent of hurting to make up for men’s shame over using what is essentially a perfume; how 84 percent of receptionists treat people in beige trenchcoats with more deference than they do people in blue trenchcoats; how department stores are designed to feel like cultural institutions, and purchases to feel like diplomas,