The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [7]
“Are you still feeling scared here?” Ursula asks.
“It keeps them away sometimes,” she answers in her wispy and whispery voice. She’s had this strange half a voice for as long as Ursula can remember. When she was a child it sounded merely frightened and tentative, but as she grew older it acquired an undertone of paradoxical assurance as well, a breathless theatricality befitting a movie starlet who knows that the whole world, craving any opportunity for intimacy with her, will always lean in just a bit closer to hear what she has to say. The voice has become especially appropriate of late, for Ivy now understands herself to be continually watched, photographed from without and surveilled from within. She is the golden goose at the center of the universe. Her menstrual cycles replenish the World Bank. Her breath commodifies the air. In her more communicative moments she has explained these things to Ursula. More often, maybe on the assumption that everything she thinks is already generally known, she speaks in a kind of shorthand that Ursula has to painstakingly unpack word by word.
“What keeps who away?”
Ivy shakes her head, looking down at the table.
“You can tell me,” Ursula says. “I won’t say anything.”
This is a formula that has worked before. Ivy won’t open up to anyone else, not even the psychiatrist.
“The smokescreen,” she says, taking in and releasing another quick puff. “It’s a subterfuge. Oldest trick in the book.”
She scrunches her eyebrows, peering down some branching inner path.
“Oldest dick in the nook,” she adds.
Ursula has talked with Ivy enough to know there is an elaborate mental process going on beneath everything she does. The smoking, too, she now sees, is connected to some complex internal ritual.
“The Imagineers can’t stand it,” Ivy says, waving the smoke around. “They turn away.”
“Why do they turn away?”
“It reflects badly. The image is tarnished. The tarnish mucketies the reflection. They turn away.”
The doctor has instructed her not to humor her sister. She’s supposed to talk Ivy out of her delusions immediately as they come up. But Ivy seems so isolated, so desperately lonely in her world, that sometimes Ursula can’t help but provide a sympathetic ear. Besides, she’s curious. Ivy’s world is an interesting place, a complicated place, and the only way to understand it is to draw her out whenever possible. So far she’s managed to piece together that Ivy believes herself to be a cavewoman high priestess kidnapped from her prehistoric time by people called the Imagineers. As far as Ursula can make out, these are not the actual Imagineers—the writers and theme park conceptualizers employed by Disney—but rather some kind of cabal of evil businessmen from the future. After snatching Ivy out of her idyllic time and steeping her in the nefarious ways of their own, the Imagineers then sent her to the hapless present to advertise their products. How exactly they sell products to people in other times is one of those nuts-and-bolts matters that don’t seem to interest Ivy. Perhaps, Ursula speculates, future corporations have shell subsidiaries in the present. In any event, the Imagineers are continually feeding her stage directions, telling her to cross or uncross her legs, to toss her hair, to keep her eyes focused on certain colors or shapes or parts of people’s anatomies. From what Ursula has put together so far, the products Ivy is made to promulgate don’t seem to be limited to physical objects but rather include all manner of less tangible things such as gestures, opinions, desires, locations in space, and times of day. Apparently Ivy can sell just about anything, and she’s a terribly influential force in the world. Her every action sends powerful messages and brings about massive shifts in worldwide patterns of production and consumption, and correspondingly in the patterns of people’s private thoughts, fantasies, needs.
Simultaneously in a low office building across the street and in a tall, thin one high up the