The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [73]
Through the fronds, the hanging vines, and the perfumed air, she watches calmly now as Chas opens his arms in front of him and goes on speaking in a mellower tone.
“Welcome, my friends, to the new age. Study the trendbook. Study chapter six and learn how tribalism and the concept of invented origins will lead us into a period of unprecedented alienation from mass society and a mystified relationship with technology, culminating in the disintegration of civic institutions and all forms of public life. Study chapter seven and learn how virtualism and the concept of elective affinities will lead to radical individualism, or the creation of multiple consumer identities within a single person. Learn how postirony will schizophrenize the cultural unconscious, leading to an explosion in delusion-maintenance industries, throwing imaginative space open to privatization and ushering in the era in which you marketers will come fully into your own, inheriting the mantle of influence from churches and states, becoming the spiritual guides of the masses, caretakers of a new, ahistorical, mystificatory mind-set, cultivators of a worldwide amusement park of fantasies and denial. And we here at Tomorrow will be right by your side, always available for private counseling sessions, always at the ready to help you develop strategies for maximizing the potential of this exciting historical moment. We at Tomorrow will show you how the new Dark Age may very well not be all that dark for your business. On the contrary: this Dark Age,” he says, “just might . . . be Lite.”
He smiles his harrowing smile. Somewhere a button is pressed, and the heavy velvet curtains move aside, leaving the marketers squinting in the piercing shafts of light. Ursula takes slow, measured breaths, thinking of her streams, her flowers, her majestic, life-giving trees, their millions of leaves sucking in all the toxins and giving back good, clean oxygen to the world.
Famous
The restaurant in the Pangloss Hotel is a five-star affair with five-star prices, but the theme is greasy-spoon-diner all the way. The booths are upholstered with leather dyed the particular reddish hue of vinyl dyed to resemble dyed leather, and the marble tabletops are rimmed with grooved stainless steel, just like the common faux-marble Formica tabletops they strive to imitate. Of course James T. Couch was the one who introduced Ivy to the place, and for the last couple of months it’s been her favorite restaurant, the one she insists on coming to time and again. Today, thank God, Couch has other things to do, so Ivy and Ursula are here alone. No sooner is her sister seated across from her in their regular booth than she torches the tip of a cigarette with a new gold lighter, takes a long drag, flips up the hinged lenses of her sunglasses, then turns over her uncannily plastic-looking frosted-crystal water glass and knocks some ash into it, like a cat marking its territory. By now the busboy knows neither to try filling Ivy’s ashing glass with water nor to bring her a fresh glass of water, which would inevitably get ashed in as well, and the waitstaff knows not to tell her that smoking isn’t permitted. When other patrons complain, the maître d’ passes on to them the same sob story James T. Couch passed off on him along with a hundred-dollar bill—that the smoker in the far corner booth happens to be none other than Ivy Van Urden, the renowned schizophrenic fashion model for whom a constant influx of nicotine is that sole and thinnest of threads from which her sanity dangles. For all Ursula knows, it may be true. The medication Ivy takes has been making her increasingly stiff, and the cigarettes, perhaps due partly to the nicotine stimulant and partly to the constant use of limbs, lips, and lungs required to manipulate them, seem to serve her in much the same way a can of oil did the Tin Man, keeping her just limber enough to clank along.
The ceremonial ashing-in-the-cup accomplished, Ivy moves on to her ritual appreciation of the view: the booths