The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [84]
“Not yet. Gap thing’s all we got right now.”
“So the rest of them aren’t convinced?”
“Postirony is visionary. It requires big adjustments in thinking, major shifts in strategy. They’re all just sitting on their hands, waiting for someone else to make the first move.”
“Couch thought the presentation might have been a bit dark,” she ventures.
He glares at her. “Of course it was dark! That was the whole goddamned point. Lightness alone won’t cut it anymore. In the postironic marketplace darkness will be just as necessary to move products off the shelves.”
He shakes his head.
“Our clients will come around. Some of them. The smarter ones.” He stares off through the bars. “Maybe.”
He makes a fist and socks it into an open hand. “And if they don’t, that’s fine, too. We’ve got other business opportunities now.”
“We do?”
He smiles faintly.
“You see Ivy today?” he asks.
“I did.”
“And?”
“ ‘And’ what?”
“She have anything to say?”
“You mean in response to your little notes?”
He turns and stares her down. “Well?”
Ursula sighs, giving in. “She wants you to make her famous. More famous.”
He nods. “Well, that’s the plan. Already in motion.”
“ ‘The plan’?”
“We don’t need clients, Ursula. We’ve got the future. We’ve got Ivy.”
Ursula scans his impenetrable face.
“ ‘The future’? Chas? What are you talking about?” she says. “You don’t think she’s really—”
“I’m talking about schizos, Ursula. Ivy’s going to be our spokesperson for postirony. I’m cooking up a website deal. One of those things where people can tune in to her whenever they want. All Ivy, all the time. She’s gonna live in the spotlight, just like she always wanted.”
He thinks for a moment, gives her a quizzical look.
“What are you talking about?” he asks.
“For a second there I thought you were crazy like Ivy,” she says. “But you’re just crazy like Chas.”
Chas cocks his head questioningly, and Ursula sees behind him that the invisigoths have vanished. Chas turns and looks as well. He goes on to check in every direction, and then, with a look of mischief in his eyes, he leans over the railing and lets loose a sparkling gob of spit at the crazily canted city below.
Shelter
The front door cracks, and a sliver of Javier appears behind it, bed-headed, unshaven, in a sleeveless undershirt and a pair of rumpled wool slacks. He’s come down to answer the buzzer without asking who it was, and when he sees it’s her, his face displays a mixture of confusion and embarrassment.
“Expecting someone else?” Ursula asks.
“Just a package,” he says. His eyes wander over her outfit before passing through her into some other dimension uncluttered by her presence. Seeing him in such disarray makes her feel self-conscious and a little guilty about her own carefully crafted appearance. She’s wearing a new designer skirt suit and has just had her bangs cut jaggedly in a way the stylist told her would look tough and sexy, though she suspects it makes her look merely dour and disoriented. Furthermore, she’s had her as-of-late unbitten nails done, her face professionally rejuvenated with the latest muds and scrubs and other assorted snake oils, and she’s signed up for, if not actually attended, a power yoga class. She took all these steps yesterday, more or less in preparation for this meeting. She wanted to make sure Javier would see the full extent of her newfound confidence, power, and success and realize that she could be more indifferent to him than he could ever be to her. But what she sees in him instead is something far beyond indifference, something of another order entirely. She never imagined he could look so utterly lifeless.
“Javier,” she says. “Can I come up?”
For a moment he doesn’t reply. “It’s a mess,” he finally says.
“I promise not to call the Board of Health.”
He doesn’t smile at the joke, but nor does he make any protest as she follows him up the stairs. He is barefoot. The soles of his feet are black with dirt. He shuffles into his apartment. She shuts the door behind her and continues