Oblivion

MISTER SQUISHY

The Focus Group was then reconvened in another of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising’s nineteenth-floor conference rooms. Each member returned his Individual Response Profile packets to the facilitator, who thanked each in turn. The long conference table was equipped with leather executive swivel chairs; there was no assigned seating. Bottled spring water and caffeinated beverages were made available to those who thought they might want them. The exterior wall of the conference room was a thick tinted window with a broad high-altitude view of points NE, creating a spacious, attractive, and more or less natural-lit environment that was welcome after the bland fluorescent enclosure of the testing cubicles. One or two members of the Targeted Focus Group unconsciously loosened their neckties as they settled into the comfortable chairs.

There were more samples of the product arranged on a tray at the conference table’s center.

This facilitator, just like the one who’d led the large Product Test and Initial Response assembly earlier that morning before all the members of the different Focus Groups had been separated into individual soundproof cubicles to complete their Individual Response Profiles, held degrees in both Descriptive Statistics and Behavioral Psychology and was employed by Team Δy, a cutting-edge market research firm that Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Adv. had begun using almost exclusively in recent years. This Focus Group’s facilitator was a stout, palely freckled man with an archaic haircut and a warm if somewhat nervous and complexly irreverent manner. On the wall next to the door behind him was a presentation whiteboard with several Dry Erase markers in its recessed aluminum sill.

The facilitator played idly with the edges of the IRPs forms in his folder until all the men had seated themselves and gotten comfortable. Then he said: ‘Right, so thanks again for your part in this, which as I’m pretty sure Mr. Mounce told you this morning is always an important part of deciding what new products get made available to consumers versus those that don’t.’ He had a graceful, practiced way of panning his gaze back and forth to make sure he addressed the entire table, a skill that was slightly at odds with the bashful, somewhat fidgety presentation of his body as he spoke before the assembled men. The fourteen members of the Focus Group, all male and several with beverages before them, engaged in the slight gestures and expressions of men around a conference table who are less than 100 % sure what is going to be expected of them. The conference room was very different in appearance and feel from the sterile, almost lablike auditorium in which the PT/IR had been held two hours earlier. The facilitator, who did have the customary pocket-protector with three different colored pens in it, wore a crisp striped dress shirt and wool tie and cocoa-brown slacks, but no jacket or sportcoat. His shirtsleeves were not rolled up. His smile had a slight wincing quality, several members observed, as of some vague diffuse apology. Attached to the breast pocket on the same side of his shirt as his nametag was also a large pin or button emblazoned with the familiar Mister Squishy brand icon, which was a plump and childlike cartoon face of indeterminate ethnicity with its eyes squeezed partly shut in an expression that somehow connoted delight, satiation, and rapacious desire all at the same time. The icon communicated the sort of innocuous facial affect that was almost impossible not to smile back at or feel positive about in some way, and it had been commissioned and introduced by one of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt’s senior creative people over a decade ago, when the regional Mister Squishy Company had come under national corporate ownership and rapidly expanded and diversified from extra-soft sandwich breads and buns into sweet rolls and flavored doughnuts and snack cakes and soft confections of nearly every conceivable kind; and without any particular messages or associations anyone in Demographics could ever produce data to quantify or get a handle on, the crude line-drawn face had become one of the most popular, recognizable, and demonstrably successful brand icons in American advertising.

Traffic was brisk on the street far below, and also trade.

It was, however, not the Mister Squishy brand icon that concerned the carefully chosen and vetted Focus Groups on this bright cold November day in 1995. Currently in third-phase Focus Testing was a new and high-concept chocolate-intensive Mister Squishy-brand snack cake designed primarily for individual sale in convenience stores, with twelve-pack boxes to be placed in up-market food retail outlets first in the Midwest and upper East Coast and then, if the test-market data bore out Mister Squishy’s parent company’s hopes, nationwide.

A total 27 of the snack cakes were piled in a pyramidal display on a large rotating silver tray in the center of the conference table. Each was wrapped in an airtight transpolymer material that looked like paper but tore like thin plastic, the same retail packaging that nearly all US confections had deployed since M&M Mars pioneered the composite and used it to help launch the innovative Milky Way Dark line in the late 1980s. This new product’s wrap had the familiar distinctive Mister Squishy navy-and-white design scheme, but here the Mister Squishy icon appeared with its eyes and mouth rounded in cartoon alarm behind a series of microtextured black lines that appeared to be the bars of a jail cell, around two of which lines or bars the icon’s plump and dough-colored fingers were curled in the universal position of inmates everywhere. The dark and exceptionally dense and moist-looking snack cakes inside the packaging were Felonies!^®—a risky and multivalent trade name meant both to connote and to parody the modern health-conscious consumer’s sense of vice/indulgence/transgression/sin vis à vis the consumption of a high-calorie corporate snack. The name’s association matrix included as well the suggestion of adulthood and adult autonomy: in its real-world rejection of the highly cute, cartoonish, n- and oo-intensive names of so many other snack cakes, the product tag ‘Felony!’ was designed and tested primarily for its appeal to the 18–39 Male demographic, the single most prized and fictile demotarget in high-end marketing. Only two of the present Focus Group’s members were over 40, and their profiles had been vetted not once but twice by Scott R. Laleman’s Technical Processing team during the intensive demographic/behavioral voir dire for which Team Δy Focus Group data was so justly prized.

Inspired, according to agency rumor, by an R.S.B. Creative Director’s epiphanic encounter with something billed as Death by Chocolate in a Near North café, Felonies! were all-chocolate, filling and icing and cake as well, and in fact all-real-or-fondant-chocolate instead of the usual hydrogenated cocoa and high-F corn syrup, Felonies! conceived thus less as a variant on rivals’ Zingers, Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, and Choco-Diles than as a radical upscaling and re-visioning of same. A domed cylinder of flourless maltilol-flavored sponge cake covered entirely in 2.4mm of a high-lecithin chocolate frosting manufactured with trace amounts of butter, cocoa butter, baker’s chocolate, chocolate liquor, vanilla extract, dextrose, and sorbitol (a relatively high-cost frosting, and one whose butter-redundancies alone required heroic innovations in production systems and engineering — an entire production line had had to be remachined and the lineworkers retrained and production and quality-assurance quotas recalculated more or less from scratch), which high-end frosting was then also injected by high-pressure confectionery needle into the 26 × 13mm hollow ellipse in each Felony!’s center (a center which in for example Hostess Inc.’s products was packed with what amounted to a sucrotic whipped lard), resulting in double doses of an ultrarich and near-restaurant- grade frosting whose central pocket — given that the thin coat of outer frosting’s exposure to the air caused it to assume traditional icing’s hard-yet-deliquescent marzipan character — seemed even richer, denser, sweeter, and more felonious than the exterior icing, icing that in most rivals’ Field tests’ IRPs and GRDS was declared consumers’ favorite part. (Hostess’s lead agency Chiat/Day I.B.’s 1991-2 double-blind Behavior series’ videotapes recorded over 45 % of younger consumers actually peeling off Ho Hos’ matte icing in great dry jagged flakes and eating it solo, leaving the low-end cake itself to sit ossifying on their tables’ Lazy Susans, film clips of which had reportedly been part of R.S.B.’s initial pitch to Mister Squishy’s parent company’s Subsidiary Product Development boys.)

In an unconventional move, some of this quote unquote Full-Access background information re ingredients, production innovations, and even demotargeting was being relayed to the Focus Group by the facilitator, who used a Dry Erase marker to sketch a diagram of Mister Squishy’s snack cake production sequence and the complex adjustments required by Felonies! at select points along the automated line. The relevant information was relayed in a skillfully orchestrated QA period, with many of the specified questions supplied by two ostensible members of the Targeted Focus Group who were in fact not civilian consumers at all but employees of Team Δy assigned to help orchestrate the unconventionally informative QA, and to observe the deliberations of the other twelve men once the facilitator left the room, taking care not to influence the Focus Group’s arguments or verdicts but later adding personal observations and impressions that would help round and flesh out the data provided by the Group Response Data Summary and the digital videotape supplied by what appeared to be a large smoke detector in the conference room’s northwest corner, whose lens and parabolic mike, while mobile and state-of-the-art, invariably failed to catch certain subtle nuances in individual affect as well as low-volume interchanges between adjoining members. One of the UAFs,^* a slim young man with waxy blond hair and a complexion whose redness appeared more irritated than ruddy or hale, had been allowed by Team Δy’s UAF Coordinator to cultivate an eccentric and (to most Focus Group members) irritating set of personal mannerisms whose very conspicuousness served to disguise his professional identity: he had small squeeze bottles of both contact lens lubricant and intranasal saline before him on the table, and not only took written notes on the facilitator’s presentation but did so with a Magic Marker that squeaked loudly and had ink you could smell, and whenever he asked one of his preassigned questions he did not tentatively raise his hand or clear his throat as other UAFs were wont but rather simply tersely barked out, ‘Question:’, as in: ‘Question: is it possible to be more specific about what “natural and artificial flavors” means, and is there any substantive difference between what it really means and what the average consumer is expected to understand it to mean,’ without any sort of interrogative lilt or expression, his brow furrowed and rimless glasses very askew.

As any decent small-set univariable probability distribution would predict, not all members of the Targeted Focus Group were attending closely to the facilitator’s explanation of what Mister Squishy and Team Δy hoped to achieve by leaving the Focus Group alone very shortly in camera to compare the results of their Individual Response Profiles and speak openly and without interference amongst themselves and attempt to come as close as possible to a unanimous univocal Group Response Data Summary of the product along sixteen different radial Preference and Satisfaction axes. A certain amount of this inattention was factored into the matrices of what the TFG’s facilitator had been informed was the actual test underway on today’s nineteenth floor. This secondary (or, ‘nested’) test sought quantifiable data on quote unquote Full-Access manufacturing and marketing information’s effects on Targeted Focus Groups’ perceptions of both the product and its corporate producer; it was a double-blind series, designed to be replicated along three different variable grids with random TFGs throughout the next two fiscal quarters, and sponsored by parties whose identities were being withheld from the facilitators as (apparently) part of the nested test’s conditions.

Three of the Targeted Focus Group’s members were staring absently out the large tinted window that gave on a delicately muted sepia view of the street’s north side’s skyscrapers and, beyond and between these, different bits of the northeast Loop and harbor and several feet of severely foreshortened lake. Two of these members were very young men at the extreme left of the demotarget’s x axis who sat slumped in their tilted swivels in attitudes of either reverie or stylized indifference; the third was feeling absently at his upper lip’s little dent.

The Focus Group facilitator, trained by the requirements of what seemed to have turned out to be his profession to behave as though he were interacting in a lively and spontaneous way while actually remaining inwardly detached and almost clinically observant, possessed also a natural eye for behavioral details that could often reveal tiny gems of statistical relevance amid the rough raw surfeit of random fact. Sometimes little things made a difference. The facilitator’s name was Terry Schmidt and he was 34 years old, a Virgo. Eleven of the Focus Group’s fourteen men wore wristwatches, of which roughly one-third were expensive and/or foreign. A twelfth, by far the TFG’s oldest member, had the platinum fob of a quality pocketwatch running diagonally left-right across his vest and a big pink face and the permanent benevolent look in his eyes of someone older who had many grandchildren and spent so much time looking warmly at them that the expression becomes almost ingrained. Schmidt’s own grandfather had lived in a north Florida retirement community where he sat with a plaid blanket on his lap and coughed constantly both times Schmidt had ever been in his presence, addressing him only as Boy. Precisely 50 % of the room’s men wore coats and ties or had suitcoats or blazers hanging from the back of their chairs, three of which coats were part of an actual three-piece business wardrobe; another three men wore combinations of knit shirts, slacks, and various crew- and turtleneck sweaters classifiable as Business Casual. Schmidt lived alone in a condominium he had recently refinanced. The remaining four men wore bluejeans and sweatshirts with the logo of either a university or the garment’s manufacturer; one was the Nike Swoosh icon that to Schmidt always looked somewhat Arabic. Three of the four men in conspicuously casual/sloppy attire were the Focus Group’s youngest members, two of whom were among the three making rather a show of not attending closely. Team Δy favored a loose demographic grid. Two of the three youngest men were under 21. All three of these youngest members sat back on their tailbones with their legs uncrossed and their hands spread out over their thighs and their faces arranged in the mildly sullen expressions of consumers who have never once questioned their entitlement to satisfaction or meaning. Schmidt’s initial undergraduate concentration had been in Statistical Chemistry; he still enjoyed the clinical precision of a lab. Less than 50 % of the room’s total footwear involved laces. One man in a knit shirt had small brass zippers up the sides of low-cut boots that were shined to a distracting gleam, another detail possessed of mnemonic associations for Schmidt. Unlike Terry Schmidt’s and Ron Mounce’s, Darlene Lilley’s own marketing background was in computer-aided design; she’d come into Research because she said she’d discovered she was really more of a people person at heart. There were four pairs of eyeglasses in the room, although one of these pairs were sunglasses and possibly not prescription, another with heavy black frames that gave their wearer’s face an earnest aspect above his dark turtleneck sweater. There were two mustaches and one probable goatee. A stocky man in his late twenties had a sort of sparse, mossy beard; it was indeterminable whether this man was just starting to grow a beard or whether he was the sort of person whose beard simply looked this way. Among the youngest men, it was obvious which were sincerely in need of a shave and which were just affecting an unshaved look. Two of the Focus Group’s members had the distinctive blink patterns of men wearing contact lenses in the conference room’s astringent air. Five of the men were more than 10 % overweight, Terry Schmidt himself excluded. His high-school PE teacher had once referred to Terry Schmidt in front of his peers as the Crisco Kid, which he had laughingly explained meant fat in the can. Schmidt’s own father, a decorated combat veteran, had recently retired from a company that sold seed, nitrogen fertilizer, and broad-spectrum herbicides in downstate Galesburg. The affectedly eccentric UAF was asking the men on either side of him, one of whom was Hispanic, whether they’d perhaps care for a chewable vitamin C tablet. The Mister Squishy icon also reappeared in the conference room as the stylized finials of two fine beige or tan ceramic lamps on side tables at either end of the windowless interior wall. There were two African-American males in the Targeted Focus Group, one over 30, the one under 30 with a shaved head. Three of the men had hair classifiable as brown, two gray or salt/pepper, another three black (excluding the African-Americans and the Focus Group’s lone oriental, whose nametag and overwhelming cheekbones suggested either Laos or the Socialist Republic of Vietnam — for complex but solid statistical reasons, Scott Laleman’s team’s Profile grids specified distributions for ethnicity but not national origin); three could be called blond or fair-haired. These distributions included the UAFs, and Schmidt felt he already had a good idea who this Group’s other UAF was. Rarely did R.S.B. Focus Groups include representatives of the very pale or freckled red-haired physical type, though Foote, Cone & Belding and D.D.B. Needham both made regular use of such types because of certain data suggesting meaningful connections between melanin quotients and continuous probability distributions of income and preference on the US East Coast, where over 70 % of upmarket products tested. Some of the trendy hypergeometric techniques on which these data were based had been called into question by more traditional demographic statisticians, however.

By industry-wide convention, Focus Group members received a per diem equal to exactly 300 % of what they would receive for jury duty in the state where they resided. The reasoning behind this equation was so old and tradition-bound that no one of Terry Schmidt’s generation knew its origin. It was, for senior test marketers, both an in-joke and a plausible extension of verified attitudes about civic duty and elective consumption, respectively. The Hispanic man to the off-blond UAF’s left, who did not wear a wristwatch, had evidence of large tattoos on his upper arms through the fabric of his dress shirt, which fabric the natural lighting’s tinted hue rendered partly translucent. He was also one of the men with mustaches, and his nametag identified him as NORBERTO, making this the first Norberto to appear in any of the over 845 Focus Groups that Schmidt had led so far in his career as a Statistical Field Researcher for Team Δy. Schmidt kept his own private records of correlations between product, Client agency, and certain variables in Focus Groups’ constituents and procedures. These were run through various discriminant-analysis programs on his Apple-brand computer at home and the results collected in three-ring binders which he labeled and stored on a set of home-assembled gray steel shelves in the utility room of his condominium. The whole problem and project of descriptive statistics was discriminating between what made a difference and what did not. The fact that Scott R. Laleman now both vetted Focus Groups and helped design them was just one more sign that his star was ascending at Team Δy. The other real comer was A. Ronald Mounce, whose background was also in Technical Processing. ‘Question:’ ‘Question:’ ‘Comment:’ One man with a kind of long chinless face wished to know what Felonies!’ retail price was going to be, and he either didn’t understand or disliked Terry Schmidt’s explanation that retail pricing lay outside the purview of the Group’s focus today and was in fact the responsibility of a whole different R.S.B. research vendor. The reasoning behind the separation of price from consumer-satisfaction grids was technical and parametric and was not included in the putative Full-Access information Schmidt was authorized to share with the Focus Group under the terms of the study. There was one obvious hairweave in the room, as well as two victims of untreated Male Pattern Baldness, both of whom — either interestingly or by mere random chance — were among the Group’s four blue-eyed members.

When Schmidt thought of Scott Laleman, with his all-season tan and sunglasses pushed musslessly up on his pale hair’s crown, it was as something with the mindless malevolence of a carnivorous eel or skate, something that hunted on autopilot at extreme depths. The African-American male whose head was unshaved sat with the rigidity of someone who had back problems and understood the dignity with which he bore them to be an essential part of his character. The other wore sunglasses indoors in such a way as to make some unknown type of statement about himself; there was also no way of knowing whether it was a general statement or one specific to this context. Scott Laleman was only 27 and had come on board at Team Δy three years after Darlene Lilley and two and one-half years after Schmidt himself, who had helped Darlene train Laleman to run chi-square and t distributions on raw phone-survey data and had taken surprising satisfaction in watching the boy’s eyes glaze and tan go sallow under the fluorescent banklights of Dy’s data room, until then one day Schmidt had needed to see Alan Britton personally about something and had knocked and come in and Laleman was sitting in the office’s recliner across the room and he and Britton were both smoking very large cigars and laughing.

The figure that began its free climb up the building’s steadily increscent north facet just before 11:00 AM was outfitted in tight windproof Lycra leggings and a snug hooded GoreTex sweatshirt w/fiber-lined hood up and tied tight and what appeared to be mountaineering or rock-climbing boots except that instead of crampons or spikes there were suction cups lining the instep of each boot. Attached to both palms and wrists’ insides were single suction cups the size of a plumber’s helper; the cups’ color was the same shrill orange as hunting jackets and road crews’ hardhats. The Lycra pants’ color scheme was one navy-blue leg and one white leg; the sweatshirt and hood were blue with white piping. The mountaineering boots were an emphatic black. The figure moved swiftly and with numerous moist popping suction-noises up the display window of the Gap, a large retail clothier. He then pulled himself up and over onto the narrow ledge at the base of the second-floor window, rose complexly to his feet, affixed his cups, and swarmed up the pane’s thick glass, which gave onto the Gap’s second floor but had no promotional items displayed within. The figure presented as lithe and expert. His manner of climbing appeared almost more reptilian than mammalian, you’d have to say. He was halfway up the window of a management consulting firm on the fifth floor when a small crowd of passersby began to gather on the sidewalk below. Winds at ground level were light to moderate.

In the conference room, the north window’s tint made the northeastern half-cloudy sky seem raw and the froth of the waves on the distant windblown lake look dark; it brindled the sides of the other tall buildings in view, as well, which were all partly in one another’s shadow. Fully seven of the Focus Group’s men had small remains of Felonies! either on their shirtfront or hanging from the hairs on one side of their mustache or lodged at the inner corner of their mouth or in the small crease between the fingernail of their dominant hand and that nail’s surrounding skin. Two of the men wore no socks; both these men’s shoes were laceless leather; only one pair had tassels. One of the youngest men’s denim bellbottoms were so terrifically oversized that even with his legs out splayed and both knees bent his sock-status was unknown. One of the older men wore black silk or rayon socks with tiny lozenges of dark rich red upon them. Another of the older men had a mean little slit of a mouth, another a face far too saggy and seamed for his demographic slot. As was often the case, the youngest men’s faces appeared not quite yet fully or humanly formed, with the clean generic quality of products just off the factory floor. Terry Schmidt sometimes sketched his own face’s outlines in caricature form as he spoke on the phone or waited for software programs to run. One of the group’s men had a pear-shaped head, another a diamond- or kite-shaped face; the room’s second-oldest consumer had cropped gray hair and an overdeveloped upper lip that lent him a simian aspect. The men’s demoprofiles and initial Systat scores were in Schmidt’s valise on the carpet next to the whiteboard; he also had an over-shoulder bag he kept in his cubicle. I was one of the men in this room, the only one wearing a wristwatch who never once glanced at it. What looked just like glasses were not. I was wired from stem to stern. A small LCD at the bottom of my right scope ran both Real Time and Mission Time. My brief script for the GRDS caucus had been memorized intoto but there was a backup copy on a laminated card just inside my sweater’s sleeve, held in place with small tabs I could release by depressing one of the buttons on my wristwatch, which was really not a watch at all. There was also the emetic prosthesis. The cakes, of which I had already made a show of eating three, were so sweet they hurt your teeth.

Terry Schmidt himself was hypoglycemic and could eat only confections prepared with fructose, aspartame, or very small amounts of C₆H₈(OH)₆, and sometimes he felt himself looking at trays of the product with the expression of an urchin at a toystore’s window.

Down the hall and past the MROP^* Division’s green room, in another R.S.B. conference room whose window faced NE, Darlene Lilley was leading twelve consumers and two UAFs into the GRDS phase of Focused Response without any structured QA or ersatz Full-Access background. Neither Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley had been told which of today’s TFGs represented the nested test’s control group, though it was pretty obvious. You had to work on the upper floors for some time before you noticed the very slight sway with which the building’s structural design accommodated winds off the lake. ‘Question: just what exactly is polysorbate 80?’ Schmidt was reasonably certain that none of the Focus Group felt the sway. It was not pronounced enough even to cause movement in the coffee in any of the iconized mugs on the table that Schmidt, standing and rotating the Dry Erase marker in his hand in an absent way that connoted both informality and a slight humanizing nervousness in front of groups, could see down into. The conference table was heavy pine with lemonwood inlays and a thick coat of polyurethane, and without the window’s sepia tint there would be blinding pockets of reflected sun that changed angle as one’s own angle with respect to the sun and table changed. Schmidt would also have had to watch dust and tiny clothing fibers swirl in columns of direct sunlight and fall very gently onto everyone’s heads and upper bodies, which occurred in even the cleanest conference rooms and was one of Schmidt’s least favorite things about the untinted interiors of certain other agencies’ conference rooms around the Loop and metro area. Sometimes when waiting or on Hold on the phone Schmidt would put his finger inside his mouth and hold it there for no good reason he could ever ascertain. Darlene Lilley, who was married and the mother of a large-headed toddler whose photograph adorned her desk and hutch at Team Δy, had, three fiscal quarters past, been subjected to unwelcome sexual advances by one of the four Senior Research Directors who liaisoned between the Field and Technical Processing teams and the upper echelons of Team Δy under Alan Britton, advances and duress more than sufficient for legal action in Schmidt’s and most of the rest of their Field Team’s opinions, which advances she had been able to deflect and defuse in an enormously skillful manner without raising any of the sort of hue and cry that could divide a firm along gender and/or political lines, and things had been allowed to cool down and blow over to such an extent that Darlene Lilley, Schmidt, and the three other members of their Field Team all now still enjoyed a productive working relationship with this dusky and pungent older Senior Research Director, who was now in fact overseeing Field research on the Mister Squishy-R.S.B. project, and Terry Schmidt was personally somewhat in awe of the self-possession and interpersonal savvy Darlene had displayed throughout the whole tense period, an awe tinged with an unwilled element of romantic attraction, and it is true that Schmidt at night in his condominium sometimes without feeling as if he could help himself masturbated to thoughts of having moist slapping intercourse with Darlene Lilley on one of the ponderous laminate conference tables of the firms they conducted statistical market research for, and this was a tertiary cause of what practicing social psychologists would call his MAM^* with the board’s marker as he used a modulated tone of off-the-record confidence to tell the Focus Group about some of the more dramatic travails Reesemeyer Shannon Belt had had with establishing the product’s brand-identity and coming up with the test name Felony! all the while envisioning in a more autonomic part of his brain Darlene delivering nothing but the standard minimal pre-GRDS instructions for her own Focus Group as she stood in her dark Hanes hosiery and the burgundy high heels she kept at work in the bottom-right cabinet of her hutch and changed out of her crosstrainers into every morning the moment she sat down and rolled her chair with small pretend whimpers of effort over to the hutch’s cabinets, sometimes (unlike Schmidt) pacing slightly in front of the whiteboard, sometimes planting one heel and rotating her foot slightly or crossing her sturdy ankles to lend her standing posture a carelessly demure aspect, sometimes taking her delicate oval eyeglasses off and not chewing on the arm but holding the glasses in such a way and in such proximity to her mouth that one got the idea she could, at any moment, put one of the frames’ arm’s plastic earguards just inside her mouth and nibble on it absently, an unconscious gesture of shyness and concentration at once.

The conference room’s carpeting was magenta pile in which wheels left symmetrically distended impressions when one or more of the men adjusted their executive swivel chairs slightly to reposition their legs or their bodies’ relation to the table itself. The ventilation system laid a pale hum over tiny distant street and city noises which the window’s thickness itself cut to almost nothing. Each of the Targeted Focus Group’s members wore a blue-and-white nametag with his first name inscribed thereon by hand. 42.8 % of these inscriptions were cursive or script; three of the remaining eight were block capitals, with all the block-cap first names, in a remarkable but statistically meaningless coincidence, beginning with H. Sometimes, too, Schmidt would as it were take a step back inside his head and view the Focus Group as a unit, a right-angled mass of fleshtone busts; he’d observe all the faces at once, qua group, so that nothing but the very broadest commonalities passed through his filter. The faces were well-nourished, mid- to upscale, neutral, provisionally attentive, the blood-fed minds behind them occupied with their own owners’ lives, jobs, problems, plans, desires, & c. None had been hungry a day in their lives — this was a core commonality, and for Schmidt this one did ramify. It was rare that the product ever truly penetrated a Focus Group’s consciousness. One of the first things a Field Researcher accepts is that the product is never going to have as important a place in a TFG’s minds as it did in the Client’s. Advertising is not voodoo. The Client could ultimately hope only to create the impression of a connection or resonance between the brand and what was important to consumers. And what was important to consumers was, always and invariably, themselves. What they conceived themselves to be. The Focus Groups made little difference in the long run — the only true test was real sales, in Schmidt’s personal opinion. Part of today’s design was to go past lunch and keep the members eating only confections. Assuming a normal breakfasttime prior to arrival, one could expect their blood sugar to start heading down sharply by 11:30. The ones who ate the most Felonies! would be hit the hardest. Among other symptoms, low blood sugar produces oscitance, irritability, lowered inhibitions — their game-faces would begin to slip a bit. Some of the TFG strategies could be extremely manipulative or even abusive in the name of data. A bleach-alternative detergent’s agency had once hired Team Δy to convene primipara mothers aged 29 to 34 whose TATs had indicated insecurities at three key loci and to administer questionnaires whose items were designed to provoke and/or heighten those insecurities — Do you ever have negative or hostile feelings towards your child? How often do you feel as if you must hide or deny the fact that your parenting skills are inadequate? Have teachers or other parents ever made remarks about your child which embarrassed you? How often do you feel as if your child looks shabby or unclean in comparison to other children? Have you ever neglected to launder, bleach, mend or iron your child’s clothes because of time constraints? Does your child ever seem sad or anxious for no reason you can understand? Can you think of a time when your child appeared to be frightened of you? Does your child’s behavior or appearance ever provoke negative feelings in you? Have you ever said or thought negative things about your child? & c. — which, over eleven hours and six separate rounds of carefully designed questionnaires, brought the women to such an emotional state that truly invaluable data on how to pitch Cheer Xtra in terms of very deep maternal anxieties and conflicts emerged. . data that so far as Schmidt had been able to see went wholly unexploited in the campaign the agency had finally sold P. & G. on. Darlene Lilley had later said she had felt like calling the Focus Group’s women and apologizing and letting them know that they’d been totally set up and manhandled, emotionally speaking.

Some of the other products and agencies whose branding campaigns Terry Schmidt and Darlene Lilley’s Field Team had also worked on for Team Δy were: Downyflake Waffles for D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, Diet Caffeine Free Coke for Ads Infinitum US, Eucalyptamint for Pringle Dixon, Citizens Business Insurance for Krauthammer-Jaynes/SMS, the G. Heileman Brewing Co.’s Special Export and Special Export Lite for Bayer Bess Vanderwarker, Winner International’s HelpMe Personal Sound Alarm for Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, Isotoner Comfort-Fit Gloves for PR Cogent Partners, Northern Bathroom Tissue for Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, and Rhône- Poulenc Rorer’s new Nasacort and Nasacort AQ Prescription Nasal Spray, also for R.S.B.

The only way for an observer to detect anything unusual or out of the ordinary about the two UAFs’ status would be to note that the facilitator never once looked fully or directly at them, whereas on the other hand Schmidt did look at each of the other twelve men at various intervals, making brief and candid eye-contact with first one man and then another at a different place around the conference table and so on, a subtle skill (there is no term for it) that often marks those who are practiced at speaking before small groups, Schmidt neither holding any man’s eye for so long as to discomfit nor simply panning automatonically back and forth and brushing only lightly against each man’s gaze in such a way that the men in the Focus Group might feel as though this representative of Mister Squishy and Felonies! were talking merely at them rather than to or with them; and it would have taken a practiced small-group observer indeed to notice that there were two men in the conference room — one being the terse eccentric member surrounded by personal-care products, the other a silent earnest-eyed bespectacled man who sat in blazer and turtleneck at the table’s far corner, which latter Schmidt had decided was the second UAF: something a tiny bit too composed about the man’s mien and blink-rate gave him up — on whose eyes the facilitator’s never quite did alight all the way. Schmidt’s lapse here was very subtle, and an observer would have to be both highly experienced and unusually attentive to extract any kind of meaning from it.

The exterior figure wore also a mountaineer’s tool apron and a large nylon or microfiber backpack. Visually, he was both conspicuous and complex. On each slim ledge he again appeared to use the suction cups on his right hand and wrist to pull himself lithely up from a supine position to a standing position, cruciform, facing inward, hugging the glass with his arms’ cups engaged in order to keep from falling backward as he raised his left leg and turned the shoe outward to align the instep’s cups with the pane’s reflective surface. The suction cups appeared to be the kind whose vacuum action could be activated and deactivated by slight rotary adjustments that probably took a great deal of practice to learn to perform as deftly as the figure made them look. The backpack and boots were the same color. Most of the passersby who looked up and stopped and accreted into a small watching crowd found their attention most fully involved and compelled by the free climb’s mechanics. The figure traversed each window by lifting his left leg and right arm and pulling himself smoothly up, then attaching his dangling right leg and left arm and activating their cups’ suction and leaving them to hold his weight while he deactivated the left leg’s and right arm’s suction and moved them up and reactivated their cups. There were high degrees of both precision and economy in the way the figure orchestrated his different extremities’ tasks. The day was very crisp and winds aloft were high; whatever clouds there were moved rapidly across the slim square of sky visible above the tall buildings that flanked the street. The autumn sky itself the sort of blue that seems to burn. People with hats tipped them back on their heads and people without hats shaded their eyes with their gloves as they craned to watch the figure’s progress. The clabbering skies over the lake were not visible from the buildings’ rifts or canyon’s base. Also there was one large additional suction cup affixed to the back of the hood with a white Velcro strap. When the figure cleared another ledge and for a moment lay on his side facing out into the chasm below, those onlookers far enough back on the sidewalk to have some visual perspective could see another large orange suction cup, the hood’s cup’s twin, attached to his forehead by what was presumably also Velcro although this Velcro band must have run beneath the hood. And — there was general assent among the watching group — either reflective goggles or very odd and frightening eyes indeed.

Schmidt was simply giving the Focus Group a little extra background, he said, on the product’s genesis and on some of the marketing challenges it had presented, but he said that in no way shape or form was he giving them anything like the whole story, that he wouldn’t want to pretend he was giving them anything more than little pieces here and there. Time was tight in the pre-GRDS orientation phase. One of the men sneezed loudly. Schmidt explained that this was because Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Adv. wanted to make sure to give the Focus Group a generous interval to convene together in camera and discuss their experiences and assessments of Felonies! as a group, to compare notes if you will, on their own, qua group, without any marketing researchers yammering at them or standing there observing as if they were psychological guinea pigs or something, which meant that Terry would soon be getting out of their hair and leaving them to perpend and converse in private amongst themselves, and that he wouldn’t be coming back until whatever foreman they elected pushed the large red button next to the room’s lights’ rheostat that in turn activated — the red button did — an amber light in the office down the hall, where Terry Schmidt said he would be twiddling his metaphorical thumbs waiting to come collect the hopefully univocal Group Response Data Summary packet, which the elected foreman here would be receiving ex post hasto. Eleven of the room’s men had now consumed at least one of the products on the table’s central tray; five of them had had more than one. Schmidt, who was no longer playing idly with the Dry Erase marker because some of the men’s eyes had begun to follow it in his hand and he sensed it was becoming a distraction, said he now also proposed to give them just a little of the standard spiel on why after all the solo time and effort they’d all already put in on their Individual Response Profiles he was going to ask them to start all over again and consider the GRDS packet’s various questions and scales as a collective. He had a trick for disposing of the Dry Erase marker where he very casually placed it in the slotted tray at the bottom of the whiteboard and gave the pen’s butt a hard flick with his finger, sending it the length of the tray to stop just short of shooting out off the other end altogether, with its cap’s tip almost precisely aligned with the tray’s end, which he performed with TFGs about 70 % of the time, and did perform now. The trick was even more impressively casual-looking if he performed it while he was speaking; it lent both what he was saying and the trick itself an air of nonchalance that heightened the impact. Robert Awad himself — this being the Team Δy Senior Research Director who would later harass and be so artfully defused by Darlene Lilley — had casually performed this little trick in one of his orientation presentations for new Field Team researchers 27 fiscal quarters past. This, Schmidt said, was because one of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising’s central tenets, one of the things that set them apart from other agencies in their bailiwick and so was of course something in which they took great pride and made much of in their pitches to clients like Mister Squishy and North American Soft Confections Inc., was that IRPs like the 20-page questionnaires the men had so kindly filled out in their separate airless cubicles were of definite but only partial research utility, since corporations whose products had national or even regional distribution depended on appealing not just to individual consumers but also of course it almost went without saying to very large groups of them, groups that were yes comprised of individuals but were nevertheless groups, larger entities or collectives. These groups as conceived and understood by market researchers were strange and protean entities, Schmidt told the Focus Group, whose tastes — referring to groups, or small-m markets as they were known around the industry — whose tastes and whims and predilections were not only as the men in the room were doubtless aware subtle and fickle and susceptible to influence from myriad tiny factors in each individual consumer’s appetitive makeup but were also, somewhat paradoxically, functions of the members of the group’s various influences upon one another, all in a set of interactions and recursively exponential responses-to-responses so complex and multifaceted that it drove statistical demographers half nuts and required a whole Sysplex series of enormously powerful low-temperature Cray-brand supercomputers even to try to model.

And if all that just sounded like a lot of marketing doubletalk, Terry Schmidt told the Focus Group with an air of someone loosening his tie after something public’s end, maybe the easiest example of what R.S.B. was talking about in terms of intramarket influences was probably say for instance teenage kids and the fashions and fads that swept like wildfire through markets comprised mostly of kids, meaning high-school and college kids and markets such as for instance popular music, clothing fashions, etcetera. If the members saw a lot of teenage kids these days wearing pants that looked way too big for them and rode low and had cuffs that dragged on the ground, for one obvious example, Schmidt said as if plucking an example at random out of the air, or if as was surely the case with some of the more senior men in the room (two, in fact) they themselves had kids who’d taken in the last couple years to suddenly wanting and wearing clothes that were far too big for them and made them look like urchins in Victorian novels even though as the men probably knew all too well, with a grim chuckle, the clothes cost a pretty penny indeed over at the Gap or Structure. And if you wondered why your kid was wearing them of course the majority of the answer was simply that other kids were wearing them, for of course kids as a demographic market today were notoriously herdlike and their individual choices in consumption were overwhelmingly influenced by other kids’ consumption-choices and so on in a fadlike pattern that spread like wildfire and usually then abruptly and mysteriously vanished or changed into something else. This was the most simple and obvious example of the sort of complex system of large groups’ intragroup preferences influencing one another and building exponentially on one another, much more like a nuclear chain reaction or an epidemiological transmission grid than a simple case of each individual consumer deciding privately for himself what he wanted and then going out and judiciously spending his disposable income on it. The wonks in Demographics’ buzzword for this phenomenon was Metastatic Consumption Pattern or MCP, Schmidt told the Focus Group, rolling his eyes in a way that invited those who were listening to laugh with him at the statisticians’ jargon. Granted, the facilitator went on, this model he was so rapidly sketching for them was overly simplistic — e.g., it left out advertising and the media, which in today’s hypercomplex business environment sought always to anticipate and fuel these sudden proliferating movements in group choice, aiming for a tipping point at which a product or brand achieved such ubiquitous popularity that it became like unto actual cultural news and-slash-or fodder for cultural critics and comedians, plus also a plausible placement-prop for mass entertainment that sought to look real and in-the-now, and so thereupon a product or style that got hot at a certain ideal apex of the MCP graph ceased to require much paid advertising at all, the hot brand becoming as it were a piece of cultural information or an element of the way the market wished to see itself, which — Schmidt gave them a wistful smile — was a rare and prized phenomenon and was considered in marketing to be something like winning the World Series.

Of the 67 % of the twelve true Focus Group members who were still concentrating on listening closely to Terry Schmidt, two now wore the expressions of men who were trying to decide whether to be slightly offended; both these men were over 40. Also, some of the individual adults across the conference table from one another began to exchange glances, and since (Schmidt believed) these men had no prior acquaintance or connection on which to base meaningful eye-contact, it seemed probable that the looks were in reaction to the facilitator’s analogy to teen fashion fads. One of the group’s members had classic peckerwood sideburns that came all the way down to his mandibles and ended in sharp points. Of the room’s three youngest men, none were attending closely, and two were still established in postures and facial configurations designed to make this apparent. The third had removed his fourth Felony! from the table’s display and was dismantling the wrapper as quietly as possible, looking furtively around to determine whether anyone cared that he’d exceeded his technical product-share. Schmidt, improvising slightly, was saying, ‘I’m talking here about juvenile fads, of course, only because it’s the simplest, most intuitive sort of example. The marketing people at Mister Squishy know full well that you gentlemen aren’t kids,’ with a small slight smile at the younger members, all three of whom could after all vote, purchase alcohol, and enlist in the armed forces; ‘or nor that there’s anything like a real herd mentality we’re trying to spark here by leaving you alone to confer amongst yourselves qua group. If nothing else, keep in mind that soft-confection marketing doesn’t work this way; it’s much more complicated, and the group dynamics of the market are much harder to really talk about without computer modeling and all sorts of ugly math up on the board that we wouldn’t even dream of trying to get you to sit still for.’

A single intrepid sporting boat was making its way right to left across the portion of the lake the large window gave out on, and once or twice an automobile horn far below on E. Huron sounded at such insistent length that it intruded on the attention of Terry Schmidt and some of the well-vetted consumers in this conference room, a couple of whom Schmidt had to admit to himself that he felt he might frankly dislike — both of them somewhat older, one the man with the hairweave, something hooded about their eyes, and the way they made little self-satisfied adjustments to parts of themselves and their wardrobes, sometimes in a very concentrated way, as if to communicate that they were men so important that their attention itself was highly prized, that they were old and experienced hands at sitting in rooms like this having earnest young men with easels and full-color charts make presentations and try to solicit favorable responses from them, and that they were well above whatever mass-consumer LCD Schmidt’s clumsy mime of candid spontaneity was pitched at, that they’d taken cellular phone calls during or in fact even walked out of far more nuanced, sophisticated, assuasive pitches than this. Schmidt had had several years of psychotherapy and was not without some perspective on himself, and he knew that a certain percentage of his reaction to the way these older men coolly inspected their cuticles or pinched at the crease in the trouser of the topmost leg as they sat back on their coccyx joggling the foot of their crossed leg was his own insecurity, that he felt somewhat sullied and implicated by the whole enterprise of contemporary marketing and that this sometimes manifested via projection as the feeling that people he was just trying to talk as candidly as possible to always believed he was making a sales pitch or trying to manipulate them in some way, as if merely being employed, however ephemerally, in the great grinding US marketing machine had somehow colored his whole being and that something essentially shifty or pleading in his expression now always seemed inherently false or manipulative and turned people off, and not just in his career — which was not his whole existence, unlike so many at Team Δy, or even all that terribly important to him; he had a vivid and complex inner life, and introspected a great deal — but in his personal affairs as well, and that somewhere along the line his professional marketing skills had metastasized throughout his whole character so that he was now the sort of man who, if he were to screw up his courage and ask a female colleague out for drinks and over drinks open his heart up to her and reveal that he respected her enormously, that his feelings for her involved elements of both professional and highly personal regard, and that he spent a great deal more time thinking about her than she probably had any idea he did, and that if there were anything at all he could ever do to make her life happier or easier or more satisfying or fulfilling he hoped she’d just say the word, for that is all she would have to do, say the word or snap her thick fingers or even just look at him in a meaningful way, and he’d be there, instantly and with no reservations at all, he would nevertheless in all probability be viewed as probably just wanting to sleep with her or fondle or harass her, or as having some creepy obsession with her, or as maybe even having a small creepy secretive kind of almost shrine to her in one corner of the unused second bedroom of his condominium, consisting of personal items fished out of her cubicle’s wastebasket or the occasional dry witty little notes she passed him during especially deadly or absurd Team Δy staff meetings, or that his home Apple PowerBook’s screensaver was an Adobe-brand 1440-dpi blowup of a digital snapshot of the two of them with his arm over her shoulder and just part of the arm and shoulder of another Team Δy Field-worker with his arm over her shoulder from the other side at a Fourth of July picnic that A.C. Romney-Jaswat & Assoc. had thrown for its research subcontractors at Navy Pier two years past, Darlene holding her cup and smiling in such a way as to show almost as much upper gum as teeth, the ale’s cup’s red digitally enhanced to match her lipstick and the small scarlet hairbow she often wore just right of center as a sort of personal signature or statement.

The crowd on the sidewalk’s growth was still inconstant. For every two or three passersby who joined the group of onlookers craning upward, someone else in the crowd suddenly looked at his watch and detached from the collective and hurried off either northward or across the street to keep some type of appointment. From a certain perspective the small crowd, then, looked like a living cell engaged in trade and exchange with the linear streetside flows that fed it. There was no evidence that the climbing figure saw the fluctuantly growing mass so far below. He certainly never made any of the motions or expressions people associate with someone at a great height looking down at them. No one in the sidewalk’s group of spectators pointed or yelled; for the most part they just watched. What children there were held their guardians’ hand. There were some remarks and small conversations between adjoining onlookers, but these took place out of the sides of their mouths as all parties looked up at what appeared to be a sheer and sky-high column of alternating glass and prestressed stone. The figure averaged roughly 230 seconds per story; a commuter timed him. Both his backpack and apron looked full of some kind of equipment that caused them to bulge. There were loops along his GoreTex top’s shoulders and also — unless it was a trick of the building’s windows’ refracted light — small strange almost nipplelike protuberances at the figure’s shoulders, on his knees’ backs, and in the center of the odd navy-and-white bullseye design at the figure’s seat. The crampons on mountaineering boots can be removed with a small square tool so that they can be sharpened or replaced, a long-haired man supporting an expensive bicycle against his hip told the people around him. He personally felt he knew what the protuberances were. New members of the crowd always asked the people around them what was going on, whether they knew anything. The costume was airtight, the guy was inflatable or designed to look that way, the long-haired man said. He appeared to be talking to his bicycle; no one acknowledged him. His pantcuffs were clipped for easy cycling. On every third or fourth floor, the figure paused for a time on his back on the narrow ledge with scrollwork at the cornices, resting. A man who had at one time driven an airport shuttlebus opined that the figure on the ledge looked to be purposely idling, timing out his ascent to conform to some schedule; the child attached to the hand of the woman he said this to looked briefly over at him with his face still upturned. Anyone looking straight down would have seen a shifting collection of several dozen watching faces with bodies so foreshortened as to be mere suggestions only.

‘Probably only up to a certain point,’ Terry Schmidt said then in response to a sort of confirmational question from the tall man with the kite-shaped face and a partly torn tag (two of the room’s six cursive nametags were ripped or sectional, the result of accidents during their removal from the adhesive backing) that read FORREST, a 40ish fellow with large and hirsute hands and a slightly frayed collar, whose air of rumpled integrity — along with two separate questions that had actually helped advance the presentation’s agendas — made this fellow Schmidt’s personal choice for foreman. ‘What it is is just that R.S.B. feels your Focus Group responses qua group instead of just as the sum of your personal individual responses is an equally important market research tool for a product like the Felony!. “GRDS as well as IRPs” as we say in the trade,’ with a breeziness he did not feel. One of the younger members — age 22 according to the tiny Charleston code worked into the scrollwork at his nametag’s lower border, and handsome in a generic way — wore a reversed baseball cap and a soft wool V-neck sweater with no shirt underneath, displaying a powerful upper chest and forearms (the sleeves of the sweater were carefully pushed up to reveal the forearms’ musculature in a way designed to look casual, as if the sweater’s arms had been thoughtlessly pushed up in the midst of his thinking hard about something other than himself), and had crossed his leg ankle-on-knee and slid so far down on his tailbone that his cocked leg was the same height as his chin, thereupon holding the salient knee with his fingers laced in such a way as to apply pressure and make his forearms bulge even more. It had occurred to Terry Schmidt that even though so many home products, from Centrum Multivitamins to Visine AC Soothing Antiallergenic Eye Drops to Nasacort AQ Prescription Nasal Spray, now came in conspicuous tamperproof packaging in the wake of the Tylenol poisonings of a decade past and Johnson & Johnson’s legendarily swift and conscientious response to the crisis — pulling every bottle of every variety of Tylenol off every retail shelf in America and spending millions on setting up overnight a smooth and hassle-free system for every Tylenol consumer to return his or her bottle for an immediate NQA refund plus an added sum for the gas and mileage or US postage involved in the return, writing off tens of millions in returns and operational costs and recouping untold exponents more in positive PR and consumer goodwill and thereby actually enhancing the brand Tylenol’s association with compassion and concern for consumer wellbeing, a strategy that had made J. & J.’s CEO and their PR vendors legends in a marketing field that Terry Schmidt had only just that year begun considering getting into as a practical and potentially creative and rewarding way to use his double major in Descriptive Statistics + Bv. Psych, the young Schmidt imagining himself in plush conference rooms not unlike this one, using the sheer force of his personality and command of the facts to persuade tablesful of hard-eyed corporate officers that legitimate concern for consumer wellbeing was both emotionally and economically Good Business, that if, e.g., R. J. Reynolds elected to be forthcoming about its products’ addictive qualities, and GM to be upfront in its national ads about the fact that vastly greater fuel efficiency was totally feasible if consumers would be willing to spend a couple hundred dollars more and settle for slightly fewer aesthetic amenities, and shampoo manufacturers to concede that the ‘Repeat’ in their product instructions was hygienically unnecessary, and Tums’ parent General Brands to spend a couple million to announce candidly that Tums-brand antacid tablets should not be used regularly for more than a couple weeks at a time because after that the stomach lining automatically started secreting more HCl to compensate for all the neutralization and made the original stomach trouble worse, that the consequent gains in corporate PR and associations of the brand with integrity and trust would more than outweigh the short-term costs and stock-price repercussions, that yes it was a risk but not a wild or dicelike risk, that it had on its side both precedent cases and demographic data as well as the solid reputation for both caginess and integrity of T. E. Schmidt & Associates, to concede that yes gentlemen he supposed he was in a way asking them to gamble some of their narrow short-term margins and equity on the humble sayso of Terence Eric Schmidt Jr., whose own character’s clear marriage of virtue, pragmatism, and oracular marketing savvy were his best and final argument; he was saying to these upper-management men in their vests and Cole Haans just what he proposed to have them say to a sorry and cynical US market: Trust Me You Will Not Be Sorry — which when he thinks of the starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade later, Schmidt experiences a kind of full-frame internal wince, that type of embarrassment-before-self that makes our most mortifying memories objects of fascination and repulsion at once, though in Terry Schmidt’s case a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy (the latter the origin of the self-caricature doodling during downtime in his beige cubicle) had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful — what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they’ve experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives? — and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence in it. .; and but so (Schmidt also still declaiming professionally to the TFG all this while) that even though so many upmarket consumer products now were tamperproof, Mister Squishy-brand snack cakes — as well as Hostess, Little Debbie, Dolly Madison, the whole soft-confection industry with its flimsy neopolymerized wrappers and cheap thin cardboard Economy Size containers — were decidedly not tamperproof at all, that it would take nothing more than one thin-gauge hypodermic and 24 infinitesimal doses of KCN, As₂O₃, ricin, C₂₁H₂₂O₂N₂, acincetilcholine, botulinus, or even merely Tl or some other aqueous base-metal compound to bring almost an entire industry down on one supplicatory knee; for even if the soft-confection manufacturers survived the initial horror and managed to recover some measure of consumer trust, the relevant products’ low price was an essential part of their established Market Appeal Matrix^*, and the costs of reinforcing the Economy packaging or rendering the individual snack cakes visibly invulnerable to a thin-gauge hypodermic would push the products out so far right on the demand curve that mass-market snacks would become economically and emotionally untenable, corporate soft confections going thus the way of hitchhiking, unsupervised trick-or-treating, door-to-door sales, & c.

At various intervals throughout the pre-GRDS presentation the limbic portions of Schmidt’s brain pursued this line of thinking — while in fact a whole other part of his mind surveyed these memories and fantasies and was simultaneously fascinated and repelled at the way in which all these thoughts and feelings could be entertained in total subjective private while Schmidt ran the Focus Group through its brief and supposedly Full-Access description of Mister Squishy’s place in the soft-confection industry and some of the travails of developing and marketing what these men were experiencing as Felonies! (referring offhandedly to nascent plans for bite-sized misdemeanors! [sic] if the original product established a foothold), at least half the room’s men listening with what’s called half an ear while pursuing their own private lines of thought, and Schmidt had a quick vision of them all in the conference room as like icebergs and/or floes, only the sharp caps showing, unknown and — knowable to one another, and he imagined that it was probably only in marriage (and a good marriage, not the decorous dance of loneliness he’d watched his mother and father do for seventeen years but rather true conjugal intimacy) that partners allowed each other to see below the berg’s cap’s public mask and consented to be truly known, maybe even to the extent of not only letting the partner see the repulsive nest of moles under their left arm or the way after any sort of cold or viral infection the toenails on both feet turned a weird deep yellow for several weeks but even perhaps every once in a while sobbing in each other’s arms late at night and pouring out the most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and terrible and thoroughgoing smallness within a grinding professional machine you can’t believe you once had the temerity to think you could help change or make a difference or ever be more than a tiny faceless cog in, the shame of being so hungry to make some sort of real impact on an industry that you’d fantasized over and over about finally deciding that making a dark difference with a hypo and eight cc’s of castor bean distillate was better, was somehow more true to your own inner centrality and importance, than being nothing but a faceless cog and doing a job that untold thousands of other bright young men and women could do at least as well as you, or rather now even better than you because at least the younger among them still believed deep inside that they were made for something larger and more central and relevant than shepherding preoccupied men through an abstracted sham-caucus and yet at the same time still believed that they could (= the bright young men could) begin to manifest their larger potential for impact and effectiveness by being the very best darn Targeted Focus Group facilitator that Team Δy and R.S.B. had ever seen, better than the nested-test data they’d seen so far had shown might even be possible, establishing via manifest candor and integrity and a smooth informal rhetoric that let their own very special qualities manifest themselves and shine forth such a level of connection and intimacy with a Focus Group that the TFG’s men or women felt, within the special high-voltage field of the relationship the extraordinary facilitator created, an interest in and enthusiasm for the product and for R.S.B.’s desire to bring the product out into the US market in the very most effective way that matched or even exceeded the agency’s own. Or maybe that even the mere possibility of expressing any of this childish heartbreak to someone else seemed impossible except in the context of the mystery of true marriage, meaning not just a ceremony and financial merger but a true communion of souls, and Schmidt now lately felt he was coming to understand why the Church all through his childhood catechism and pre-Con referred to it as the Holy Sacrament of Marriage, for it seemed every bit as miraculous and transrational and remote from the possibilities of actual lived life as the crucifixion and resurrection and transubstantiation did, which is to say it appeared not as a goal to expect ever to really reach or achieve but as a kind of navigational star, as in in the sky, something high and untouchable and miraculously beautiful in the sort of distant way that reminded you always of how ordinary and unbeautiful and incapable of miracles you your own self were, which was another reason why Schmidt had stopped looking at the sky or going out at night or even usually ever opening the lightproof curtains of his condominium’s picture window when he got home at night and instead sat with his satellite TV’s channel-changer in his left hand switching rapidly from channel to channel to channel out of fear that something better was going to come on suddenly on another of the cable provider’s 220 regular and premium channels and that he was about to miss it, spending three nightly hours this way before it was time to stare with drumming heart at the telephone that wholly unbeknownst to her had Darlene Lilley’s home number on Speed Dial so that it would take only one moment of the courage to risk looking prurient or creepy to use just one finger to push just one gray button to invite her for one cocktail or even just a soft drink over which he could take off his public mask and open his heart to her before quailing and deferring the call one more night and waddling into the bathroom and/or then the cream-and-tan bedroom to lay out the next day’s crisp shirt and tie and say his nightly dekate and then masturbate himself to sleep again once more. Schmidt was sensitive about the way his weight and body fat percentage increased with each passing year, and imagined that there was something about the way he walked that suggested a plump or prissy fat man’s waddle, when in fact his stride was 100 % average and unremarkable and nobody except Terry Schmidt had any opinions about his manner of walking one way or the other. Sometimes over this last quarter, when shaving in the morning with WLS News and Talk Radio on over the intercom, he stopped — Schmidt did — and would look at his face and at the faint lines and pouches that seemed to grow a little more pronounced each quarter and would call himself, directly to his mirrored face, Mister Squishy, the name would come unbidden into his mind, and despite his attempts to ignore or resist it the large subsidiary’s name and logo had become the dark part of him’s latest taunt, so that when he thought of himself now it was as something he called Mister Squishy, and his own face and the plump and wholly innocuous icon’s face tended to bleed in his mind into one face, crude and line-drawn and clever in a small way, a design that someone might find some small selfish use for but could never love or hate or ever care to truly even know.

Some of the shoppers inside the first-floor display window of the Gap observed the mass of people on the sidewalk craning upward and wondered, naturally, what was up. At the base of the eighth floor, the figure shifted himself carefully around so that he was seated on the ledge facing outward with his bicolored legs adangle. He was 238 feet up in the air. The square of sky directly above him a pilot-light blue. The growing crowd watching the figure’s climb could not discern that there was in turn a growing collection of shoppers inside looking out at them because the building’s glass, which appeared tinted on the inside, was reflective on the outside; it was One Way Glass. The figure now crossed his legs lotus-style on the ledge beneath him, paused, and then in one lithe movement drove himself upright, losing his balance slightly and windmilling his arms to keep from pitching forward off the ledge altogether. There was a brief group-exhalation from the sidewalk’s crowd as the figure now snapped its hooded head back and with a tiny distant wet noise affixed the suction cup at his head’s rear to the window. A couple young men in the crowd cried up at the eighth floor for the figure to jump, but their tone was self-ironic and it was plain that they were simply parodying the typical cry of jaded onlookers to a figure balanced on a slim ledge 240 feet up in a high wind and looking down at a crowd on the plaza’s sidewalk far below. Still, one or two much older people shot optical daggers at the youths who’d shouted; it was unclear whether they knew what self-parody even was. Inside the window of the building’s north facet’s eighth floor — which space happened to comprise the circulation and subscription departments of Playboy magazine — the employees’ reaction to the sight of the back of a lithe blue-and-white figure attached to the window by a large suction cup on its head can only be imagined. It was the Gap’s floor manager in Accessories who first called the police, and this merely because the press of customers at the window’s display clearly bespoke some kind of disturbance on the street outside; and because the nature of that disturbance was unknown, none of the roving television vans who monitored the city’s police frequencies were alerted, and the scene remained media-free for a good 1500 feet in every direction.

What Terry Schmidt sketched from memory for the all-male Focus Group was a small eddy or crosscurrent in the tide that demomarketers called an MCP — these were known as Antitrends, or sometimes Shadow Markets. In the area of corporate snacks, Schmidt pretended to explain, there were two basic ways a new product could position itself in a US market for which health, fitness, nutrition, and attendant indulgence-v.-discipline conflicts had achieved a metastatic status. A Shadow snack simply worked to define itself in opposition to the overall trend against HDL fats, refined carbs, transfatty acids, i.e. against the consumption of what some subgroups variously termed empty calories, sweets, junk food, or in other words the whole brilliantly orchestrated obsession with nutrition and exercise and stress-management that went under the demographic heading Healthy Lifestyles. Schmidt said he could tell from the Focus Group’s faces — whose expressions ranged from sullen distraction in the youngest to a kind of studious anxiety in the older men, faces tinged with the slight guilt-about-guilt that Schemm Halter/Deight’s legendary E. Peter Fish, the mind behind both shark cartilage and odor-free garlic supplements, had called at a high-priced seminar that both Scott Laleman and Darlene Lilley had attended ‘. . the knife edge that Healthy Lifestyles Marketing ha[d] to walk along,’ which unfortunate phrase was reproduced by a Hewlett Packard digital projector that cast Fish’s key points in bold-fonted outline form against one wall to facilitate effective note-taking (the whole industry seminar business was such bullshit, Terry Schmidt believed, with its leather binders and mission statements and wargame nomenclature, marketing truisms to marketers, who when all was said and done were probably the most plasticly gullible market around, although at the same time there was no disputing E. P. Fish’s importance or his statements’ weight) — Schmidt said he could tell from their faces that the men knew quite well what Antitrend was about, the Shadow Markets like Punk contra Disco and Cadillacs contra high-mileage compacts and Sun and Apple contra the MS juggernaut. He said they could if the men wished talk at some length about the stresses on individual consumers caught between their natural God-given herd instincts and their deep fear of sacrificing their natural God-given identities as individuals, and about the way these stresses were tweaked and-slash-or soothed by skillfully engineered trends, and that but then, by sort of the Third Law of Motion of marketing, the MCP trends spawned also their Antitrend Shadows, the spin inside and against the larger spin of in this instance Reduced-Calorie and Fat-Free foods, nutritional supplements, Lowcaf and Decaf, NutraSweet and Olestra, jazzercise and liposuction and kava kava, good v. bad cholesterol, free radicals v. antioxidants, time management and Quality Time and the really rather brilliantly managed stress that everyone was made to feel about staying fit and looking good and living long and squeezing the absolute maximum productivity and health and self-actuation out of every last vanishing second, Schmidt then backing off to acknowledge that but of course on the other hand he was aware that the men’s time was valuable and so he’d. . and here one or two of the older Focus Group members who had wristwatches glanced at them by reflex, and the overstylized UAF’s pager went off by prearrangement, which allowed Schmidt to gesture broadly and pretend to chuckle and to concede that yes yes see their time was valuable, that they all felt it, that they all knew what he was talking about because after all they all lived in it didn’t they, and to say that so in this case it would perhaps suffice just to simply for example utter the illustrative words Jolt Cola, Starbucks, Häagen-Dazs, Ericson’s All Butter Fudge, premium cigars, conspicuously low-mileage urban 4WDs, Hammacher Schlemmer’s all-silk boxers, whole Near North Side eateries given over to high-lipid desserts — enterprises in other words that rode the transverse Shadow, that said or sought to say to a consumer bludgeoned by herd-pressures to achieve, forbear, trim the fat, cut down, discipline, prioritize, be sensible, self-parent, that hey, you deserve it, reward yourself, brands that in essence said what’s the use of living longer and healthier if there aren’t those few precious moments in every day when you stopped, sat down, and took a few moments of hard-earned pleasure just for you? and various myriad other pitches that aimed to remind the consumer that he was at root an individual, one with individual tastes and preferences and freedom of individual choice, that he was not a mere herd animal who had no choice but to go go go on US life’s digital-calorie-readout treadmill, that there were still some rich and refined and harmless-if-judiciously-indulged-in pleasures out there to indulge in if the consumer’d snap out of his high- fiber hypnosis and realize that life was also to be enjoyed, that the unenjoyed life was not worth living, & c. & c. That, as one example, just as Hostess Inc. was coming out with low-fat Twinkies and cholesterol-free Ding Dongs, Jolt Cola’s own branders had hung its West Coast launch on the inverted All the Sugar Twice the Caffeine, and that meanwhile the stock of Ericson’s All Butter Fudge and individual bite-sized Fudgees’ parent company US Brands had split three times via D.D.B. Needham’s series of ads that featured people in workout clothes running into each other in dim closets where they’d gone to eat Ericson’s A.B.F. in secret, with all the ingenious and piquant taglines that played against the moment the characters’ mutual embarrassment turned to laughter and a convolved esprit de corps.(Schmidt knew full well that Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Adv. had lost the US Brands/Ericson account to D.D.B. Needham’s spectacular pitch for a full-out Shadow strategy, and thus that the videotape of his remarks here would raise at least three eyebrows among R.S.B.’s MROP team and would force Robert Awad to behave as though he believed Schmidt hadn’t known anything about the Ericson-D.D.B. Needham thing and to come lean pungently over the wall of Schmidt’s cubicle and try to quote unquote ‘fill in Terry’ on certain facts of life of interagency politics without unduly damaging Schmidt’s morale over the putative boner, and so on.)

Nor in fact was the high-altitude figure gazing down at them, the street’s keener onlookers saw — what he was actually doing was looking down at himself and gingerly removing a shiny packet of what appeared to be foil or Mylar from his mountaineer’s tool apron and giving it a delicate little towel-like snap to open it out and then reaching up with both hands and rolling it down over his head and hood and fixing it in place with small snaps or Velcro tabs at his shoulders and throat’s base. It was some sort of mask, the long-haired cyclist who always carried a small novelty-type spy telescope in his fannypack opined, though except for two holes for eyes and a large one for his forehead’s cup the whole thing appeared too wrinkled and detumesced- looking to be able to make out who or what the shapeless arrangement of microtextured lines on the Mylar was supposed to represent, but even at this distance the mask looked frightening, baggy and hydrocephalic and cartoonishly inhuman, and there were now some louder and less self-ironic shouts and cries, and several members of the watching crowd involuntarily stepped back into the street, fouling traffic and causing a brief discordance of horns as the figure placed both hands on his head’s white bag and with something like a wet kissing noise from his skull’s rear suction cup performed a lithe contra face that left him now facing the window with the sagged mask’s nose and lips and forehead’s very orange cup pressed tight against it — again provoking God only knows what reaction from the Playboy magazine corporate staff on the glass’s inside — whereupon he now reached around and removed from the backpack what appeared to be a small generator or perhaps scuba-style tank with a slender hoselike attachment that was either black or dark blue and ended in a strange sort of triangular or arrowhead- or D-shaped nozzle or attachment or mortise, which tank he connected with straps and a harness to the back of his GoreTex top and allowed the dark hose and nozzle to hang unfettered down over his concentricized rear and the leggings’ tops, so that when he resumed his practiced-looking opposite-leg and — arm climb up the eighth-floor window he now also wore what appeared to be a deflated cranial mask or balloon, dorsal airtank, and frankly demonic-looking tail, and presented an overall sight so complex and unlike anything from any member of the (now much larger and more diffuse, some still in the street and beginning to roil) crowd’s visual experience that there were several moments of dead silence as everyone’s individual neocortices worked to process the visual information and to scan their memories for any thing or combination of live or animated things the figure might resemble or suggest. A small child in the crowd began to cry because someone had stepped on its foot.

Now that he appeared less conventionally human, the way the figure climbed by moving his left arm/right leg and then right arm/left leg looked even more arachnoid or saurian; in any event he was still just lithe as hell. Some of the shoppers inside the display windows of the Gap had now come out and joined the sidewalk’s crowd. The figure scaled the eighth-twelfth floors with ease, then paused while attached to the thirteenth- (perhaps called the fourteenth-) floor window to apply some kind of adhesive or cleaner to his suction cups. The winds at 425 feet must have been very strong, because his caudal hose swung wildly this way and that.

It was also impossible for some people in the front portion of the street and sidewalk’s crowd to resist looking at their own and the whole collective’s reflection in the Gap’s display window. There were no more screams or cries of ‘Jump!’, but among some of the crowd’s younger and more media-savvy members there began to be speculation about whether this was a PR stunt for some product or service or whether perhaps the climbing figure was one of those renegade urban daredevils who scaled tall buildings and then parachuted to the ground below and submitted to arrest while blowing kisses to network news cameras. The well-known Sears Tower or even Hancock Center would have been a far better high-visibility site for a stunt like this if such a stunt it was, some of them opined. The first two squad cars arrived as the figure — by this time quite small, even through a novelty telescope, and obscured almost wholly from view when he negotiated ledges — was hanging attached by his forehead’s central cup to the fifteenth-floor window (or perhaps sixteenth, depending whether the building had a thirteenth floor; some do and some don’t) and appeared to be pulling more items from his nylon pack, fitting them together and using both hands to telescope something out to arm’s length and then attaching various other small things to it. It was probably the squad cars and their garish lights at the curb that caused so many other cars on Huron Ave. to slow down or even pull over to see if there’d been a death or an arrest, forcing one of the officers to spend his time trying to control traffic and keep cars moving so that the avenue remained passable. It was an older African-American woman who’d been one of the very first pedestrians to stop and look up and was now using broad motions of all four limbs to report or re-create for a policeman all she had witnessed up to the present who’d paused to ask whether to the officer’s knowledge the strangely costumed figure’s climb could possibly be a licensed stunt for a feature film or commercial television or cable program, and this was when it occurred to some of the other spectators that the lithe figure’s climb was conceivably being filmed from the upper stories of one of the other commercial skyscrapers on the street, and that there might in particular be cameras, film crews, and/or celebrities in the tall gray vertiginously flèched older building directly opposite 1101 E. Huron’s north facet; and a certain percentage of the crowd’s rear turned around and began craning and scanning windows on that building’s south side, none of which were open, although this signified nothing because by City Ordinance 920-1247(d) no commercially zoned structure could possess, nor authorize by terms of lease or contract any lessee to possess, operable windows above the third floor. It was not clear whether this older opposite building’s glass was One Way or not because the angle of the late-morning sun, now almost directly overhead in the street’s slot of sky, caused blinding reflections in that older spired building’s windows, some of which brilliant reflections the windows focused and cast almost like spotlights against the surface of the original building which even now the masked figure with the tank and tail and real or imitation semiautomatic weapon — for verily that is what the new item was, slung over the subject’s back at a slight transverse angle so that its unfolded stock rested atop the small blue-and-white tank for what might even conceivably be a miniaturized combat-grade gas mask or even maybe Jaysus help us all if it was a flamethrower or Clancy-grade biochemical aerosol nebulizer gizmo thing, the officer with the Dept.-issue high-× binoculars reported, using a radio that was somehow attached like an epaulette to his uniform’s shoulder so that he had only to cock his head and touch his left shoulder to be able to confer with other officers, whose blue-and-white bored-out Montegos’ sirens could be heard approaching from what sounded like Loyola U. — continued to scale, namely 1101 E. Huron, so that squares and small rectangles and parallelograms of high-intensity light swam around him and lit up the sixteenth- or seventeenth-floor window he was even then scaling with nerveless ease, the fully automatic-looking M16’s barrel and folded stock inserted through several presewn loops along the left shoulder of his GoreTex top so that he retained full use of his left arm and hand’s cup as he scaled the window and sat once again on the next story’s ledge, the long nozzle arranged beneath him and only a couple feet of it protruding from between his legs and wobbling stiffly in the wind. Reflected light aswim all around him. A group of pigeons or doves on the ledge of the adjoining window was disturbed and took flight across the street and reassembled on a ledge at the exact same height on the opposite building. The figure appeared now to have removed some sort of radio, cellular phone, or handheld recording device from his mountaineer’s apron and to be speaking into it. At no time did he look down or in any way acknowledge the sidewalk and street’s crowds, their shouts and cheers as each window was traversed, or the police cruisers which by this time were parked at several different angles on the street, all emitting complex light, with two more squad cars now blocking off E. Huron at the major intersections on either side.

A C.F.D. truck arrived and firefighters in heavy slickers exited and began to mill about for no discernible reason. There were also no evident media vans or rigs or mobile cameras at any time, which struck the savvier onlookers as further evidence that the whole thing could be some sort of licensed prearranged corporate promotion or stunt or ploy. A few arguments ensued, mostly good-natured and inhibited by the number of auditors nearby. A stiff new ground-level breeze carried the smell of fried foods. A foreign couple arrived and began to hawk T-shirts whose silkscreen designs had nothing to do with what was going on. A detachment of police and firefighters entered 1101’s north facet in order to establish a position on the building’s roof, the firemen’s axes and hats causing a small panic in the Gap and causing a jam-up at the building’s revolving door that left a man in Oakley sunglasses slumped and holding his chest or side. Several people in the crowd’s rear cried out and pointed at what they claimed had been movement and/or the flash of lenses on the roof of the opposite building. There was counterspeculation in the crowd that the whole thing was maybe designed to maybe only look like a media stunt and that the weapon the figure was now sitting uncomfortably back against was genuine and that the idea was for him to look as eccentric as possible and climb high enough to draw a large crowd and then to spray automatic fire indiscriminately down into the crowd. The driverless autos along the curb at both sides of the street now had tickets under their windshield wipers. A helicopter could be heard but not seen from the canyon or crevasse the commercial structures made of the street below. One or two fingers of cirrus were now in the sky overhead. Some people were eating vendors’ pretzels and brats, the wind whipping at the paper napkins tucked into their collars. One officer held a bullhorn but seemed unable to activate it. Someone had stepped backward onto the steep curb and injured his ankle or foot; a paramedic attended him as he lay on his topcoat and stared straight upward at the tiny figure, who by this time had gained his feet and was splayed beneath the seventeenth/eighteenth floor, appearing to just stay there, attached to the window and waiting.

Terry Schmidt’s father had served in the US armed forces and been awarded a field commission at the age of just 21 and received both the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star, and the decorated veteran’s favorite civilian activity in the whole world — you could tell by his face as he did it — was polishing his shoes and the buttons on his five sportcoats, which he did every Sunday afternoon, and the placid concentration on his face as he knelt on newspaper with his tins and shoes and chamois had formed a large unanalyzable part of the young Terry Schmidt’s determination to make a difference in the affairs of men someday in the future. Which was now: time had indeed slipped by, just as in popular songs, and revealed Schmidt fils to be neither special nor exempt.

In the last two years Team Δy had come to function as what the advertising industry called a Captured Shop: the firm occupied a contractual space somewhere between a subsidiary of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt and an outside vendor. Under Alan Britton’s stewardship, Team Δy had joined the industry’s trend toward Captured consolidation and reinvented itself as more or less the research arm of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising. Team Δy’s new status was designed both to limit R.S.B.’s paper overhead and to maximize the tax advantages of Focus Group research, which now could be both billed to Client and written off as an R&D subcontracting expense. There were substantial salary and benefit advantages to Team Δy (which was structured as an employee-owned S corporation under U.S.T.C. § 1361–1379) as well. The major disadvantage, from Terry Schmidt’s perspective, was that there were no mechanisms in place by which a Captured Shop employee could make the horizontal jump to Reesemeyer Shannon Belt itself, within whose MROP division the firm’s marketing research strategies were developed, thereby enabling someone like T. E. Schmidt to conceivably have at least some sort of impact on actual research design and analysis. Within Team Δy, Schmidt’s only possible advancement was to the Senior Research Director position now occupied by the same swarthy, slick, gladhanding émigré (with college-age children and a wife who always appeared about to ululate) who had made Darlene Lilley’s professional life so difficult over the past year; and of course even if the Team did vote in such a way as to pressure Alan Britton to ease Robert Awad out and then even if (as would be unlikely to say the least) the thunderingly unexceptional Terry Schmidt were picked and successfully pitched to the rest of Team Δy’s upper echelon as Awad’s replacement, the SRD position really involved nothing more meaningful than the supervision of sixteen coglike Field Researchers just like Schmidt himself, plus conducting desultory orientations for new hires, plus of course overseeing the compression of TFGs’ data into various statistically differentiated totals, all of which was done on commercially available software and entailed nothing more significant than adding four-color graphs and a great deal of acronym-heavy jargon designed to make a survey that any competent tenth-grader could have conducted appear sophisticated and meaningful. Although there were also of course the preliminary lunches and golf and gladhanding with R.S.B.’s MROPs, and the actual three-hour presentation of Field Research results in the larger and more expensively appointed conference room upstairs where Awad, his mute and spectrally thin A/V technician, and one chosen member of the relevant Field Team presented the numbers and graphs and helped facilitate R.S.B.’s MROPs and Creative and Marketing heads’ brainstorming on the research’s implications for an actual campaign that in truth R.S.B. was already at this stage far too heavily invested in to do anything more than modify some of the more ephemeral or decorative elements of. (Neither Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley had ever been selected to assist Bob Awad in these PCAs^*, for reasons that in Schmidt’s case seemed all too clear.) Meaning, in other words, without anyone once ever saying it outright, that Team Δy’s real function was to present to Reesemeyer Shannon Belt test data that R.S.B. could then turn around and present to Client as confirming the soundness of the very OCC^† that R.S.B. had already billed Client in the millions for and couldn’t turn back from even if the actual test data turned out to be resoundingly grim or unpromising, which it was Team Δy’s unspoken real job to make sure never happened, a job that Team Δy accomplished simply by targeting so many different Focus Groups and foci and by varying the format and context of the tests so baroquely and by facilitating the different TFGs in so many different modalities that in the end it was child’s play to selectively weight and rearrange the data in pretty much whatever way R.S.B.’s MROP division wanted, and so in reality Team Δy’s function was not to provide information or even a statistical approximation of information but rather its entropic converse, a cascade of random noise meant to so befuddle the firm and its Client that no one would feel anything but relief at the decision to proceed with an OCC which in the present case the Mister Squishy Company itself was already so heavily invested in that it couldn’t possibly turn away from and would in fact have fired R.S.B. if its testing had indicated any substantive problems with, because Mister Squishy’s parent company had very strict normative ratios for R&D marketing costs (= RDM) to production volume (= PV), ratios based on the Cobb-Douglas Function whereby RDM must, after all the pro forma hemming and hawing, be , a textbook formula which any first-term MBA student had to memorize in Management Stats, which was in fact where North American Soft Confections Inc.’s CEO had almost surely learned it, and nothing inside the man or at any of the four large US corporations he had helmed since taking his degree from Wharton in 1968 had changed; no no all that ever changed were the jargon and mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted, without anybody once ever saying stop a second or pointing out the absurdity of calling what they were doing collecting information or ever even saying aloud — not even Team Δy’s Field Researchers over drinks at Beyers’ Market Pub on E. Ohio together on Fridays before going home alone to stare at the phone — what was going on or what it meant or what the simple truth was. That it made no difference. None of it. One R.S.B. Senior Creative Director with his little gray ponytail had been at one upscale café someplace and had ordered one trendy dessert on the same day he was making notes for one Creative Directors’ brainstorming session on what to pitch to the Subsidiary PD boys over at North American Soft Confections, and had had one idea, and one or two dozen pistons and gears already machined and set in place in various craggy heads at R.S.B. and North American’s Mister Squishy had needed only this one single spark of C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁-inspired passion from an SCD whose whole inflated rep had been based on a concept equating toilet paper with clouds and helium-voiced teddy bears and all manner of things innocent of shit in some abstract Ur-consumer’s mind in order to set in movement a machine of which no one single person now — least of all the squishy Mr. T. E. Schmidt, forgetting himself enough almost to pace a little before the conference table’s men and toying dangerously with the idea of dropping the whole involved farce and simply telling them the truth — could be master.

Not surprisingly, the marketing of a conspicuously high-sugar, high-cholesterol, Shadow-class snack cake had presented substantially more challenges than the actual kitchenwork of development and production. As with most Antitrend products, the Felony! had to walk a fine line between a consumer’s resentment of the Healthy Lifestyles trend’s ascetic pressures and the guilt and unease any animal instinctively felt when it left the herd — or at least perceived itself as leaving the herd — and the successful Shadow product was one that managed to position and present itself in such a way as to resonate with both these inner drives at once, the facilitator told the Focus Group, using slight changes in intonation and facial expression to place scare quotes around herd. The perfectly proportioned mixture of shame, delight, and secret (literally: closeted) alliance in the Ericson-D.D.B.N. spots was a seminal example of this sort of multivalent pitch, Terry Schmidt said (tweaking Awad again and letting the small secret thrill of it almost make him throw a puckish wink at the smoke detector), as too was Jolt Cola’s brand name’s double entendre of a ‘jolt’ both to the individual nervous system and to the tyranny of dilute and innocuous soft drinks in an era of trendy self-denial, as well of course as Jolt’s well-packaged can’s iconic face with its bulging crossed eyes and electricized hair and ghastly fluorescent computer-room pallor — for Jolt had worked to position itself as a recreational beverage for digital-era phreaks and dweebs and had managed at once to acknowledge, parody, and evect the computer-dweeb as an avatar of individual rebellion.

Schmidt had also adopted one of Darlene Lilley’s signature physical MAMs when addressing TFGs, which was sometimes to put one foot forward with his or her weight on its heel and to lift the remainder of that foot slightly and rotate it idly back and forth along the x axis with the planted heel serving as pivot, which in Lilley’s case was slightly more effective and appealing because a burgundy high heel formed a better pivot than a cocoa-brown cordovan loafer. Sometimes Schmidt had dreams in which he was one of a Focus Group’s consumers being led by Darlene Lilley as she crossed her sturdy ankles or rotated her 9DD high heel back and forth along the floor’s x axis, and she had her eyeglasses off, which were small and oval with tortoiseshell-design frames, and was holding them in a MAM such that one of the glasses’ delicate arms was in very close proximity to her mouth, and the whole dream was Schmidt and the rest of the Focus Group for the nameless product hovering right on the edge of watching Darlene actually put the glasses’ arm inside her mouth, which she came incrementally closer and closer to doing without ever quite seeming to be aware of what she was doing or the effect it was having, and the feeling of the dream was that if she ever did actually put the plastic arm in her mouth something very important and/or dangerous would happen, and the ambient unspoken tension of the dream’s constant waiting often left Schmidt exhausted by the time he awoke and remembered again who and what he was, opening the lightproof curtains.

In the morning at the sink’s mirror shaving sometimes Schmidt as Mr. S. would examine the faint lines beginning to appear and to connect the various dots of pale freckle in meaningless ways on his face, and could envision in his mind’s eye the deeper lines and sags and bruised eye-circles of his face’s predictable future and imagine the slight changes required to shave his 44-year-old cheeks and chin as he stood in this exact spot ten years hence and checked his moles and nails and brushed his teeth and examined his face and did precisely the same series of things in preparation for the exact same job he had been doing now for eight years, sometimes carrying the vision further all the way and seeing his ravaged lineaments and bloblike body propped upright on wheels with a blanket on its lap against some sundrenched pastel backdrop, coughing. So that even if the almost vanishingly unlikely were to happen and Schmidt did somehow get tagged to replace Robert Awad or one of the other SRDs the only substantive difference would be that he would receive a larger share of Team Δy’s after-tax profits and so would be able to afford a nicer and better-appointed condominium to masturbate himself to sleep in and more of the props and surface pretenses of someone truly important but really he wouldn’t be important, he would make no more substantive difference in the larger scheme of things than he did now. The almost-35-year-old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left anymore of the delusion that he differed from the great herd of the common run of men, not even in his despair at not making a difference or in the great hunger to have an impact that in his late twenties he’d clung to as evidence that even though he was emerging as sort of a failure the grand ambitions against which he judged himself a failure were somehow exceptional and superior to the common run’s — not anymore, since now even the phrase Make a Difference had become a platitude so familiar that it was used as the mnemonic tag in low-budget Ad Council PSAs for Big Brothers/Big Sisters and the United Way, which used Make a Difference in a Child’s Life and Making a Difference in Your Community respectively, with B.B./B.S. even acquiring the telephonic equivalent of DIF-FER-ENCE to serve as their Volunteer Hotline number in the metro area. And Schmidt, then just at the cusp of 30, at first had rallied himself into what he knew was a classic consumer delusion, namely that the B.B./B.S. tagline and telephone number were a meaningful coincidence and directed somehow particularly at him, and had called and volunteered to act as Big Brother for a boy age 11–15 who lacked significant male mentors and/or positive role models, and had sat through the two three-hour trainings and testimonials with what was the psychological equivalent of a rigid grin, and the first boy he was assigned to as a Big Brother had worn a tiny black leather jacket with fringe hanging from the shoulders’ rear and a red handkerchief tied over his head and was on the tilted porch of his low-income home with two other boys also in expensive little jackets, and all three boys had without a word jumped into the back seat of Schmidt’s car, and the one whose photo and heartbreaking file identified him as Schmidt’s mentorless Little Brother had leaned forward and tersely uttered the name of a large shopping mall in Aurora some distance west of the city proper, and after Schmidt had driven them on the nightmarish I-88 tollway all the way to this mall and been directed to pull over at the curb outside the main entrance the three boys had all jumped out without a word and run inside, and after waiting at the curb for over three hours without their returning — and after two $40 tickets and a tow-warning from the Apex MegaMall Security officer, who was completely indifferent to Schmidt’s explanation that he was here in his capacity as a Big Brother and was afraid to move the car for fear that his Little Brother would come out expecting to see Schmidt’s car right where he and his friends had left it and would be traumatized if it appeared to have vanished just like so many of the other adult male figures in his case file’s history — Schmidt had driven home; and subsequent telephone calls to the Little Brother’s home were not returned. The second 11-15-year-old boy he was assigned to was not at home either of the times Schmidt had come for his appointment to mentor him, and the woman who answered the apartment door — who purported to be the boy’s mother although she was of a completely different race than the boy in the file’s photo, and who the second time had appeared intoxicated — claimed to have no knowledge of the appointment or the boy’s whereabouts or even the last time she’d seen him, after which Schmidt had finally acknowledged the delusory nature of the impact that the Ad Council’s PSAs had made on him and had — being now 30 and thus older, wiser, more indurate — given up and gone on about his business.

In his spare time Terry Schmidt read, watched satellite television, collected rare and uncirculated US coins, ran discriminant analyses of TFG statistics on his Apple PowerBook, worked in the small home laboratory he’d established in his condominium’s utility room, and power-walked on a treadmill in a line of eighteen identical treadmills on the mezzanine-level CardioDeck of a Bally Total Fitness franchise just east of the Prudential Center on Mies van der Rohe Way, where he sometimes also used the sauna. Favoring beige, rust, and cocoa-brown in his professional wardrobe, soft and round-faced and vestigially freckled, with a helmetish haircut and a smile that always looked pained no matter how real the cheer, Terry Schmidt had been described by one of Scott R. Laleman’s toadies in Technical Processing as looking like a ’70s yearbook photo come to life. Agency MROPs whom Terry’d worked with for years had trouble recalling his name, and always greeted him with an exaggerated bonhomie designed to obscure this fact. Ricin and botulinus were about equally easy to cultivate. Actually they were both quite easy indeed, assuming you were comfortable in a laboratory environment and exercised due care in your procedures. Schmidt himself had personally overheard some of the other young men in Technical Processing refer to Darlene Lilley as Lurch or Herman and make fun of her height and physical solidity, and had been outraged enough to have come very very close indeed to confronting them directly.

41.6 % of what Schmidt mistakenly believed were the TFG’s twelve true sample consumers were presenting with the classic dilated eyes and shiny pallor of low-grade insulin shock as Schmidt announced that he’d decided to ‘privately confide’ to the men that the product’s original proposed trade name had actually been Devils! a cognomen designed both to connote the snack cake’s chocolate-intensive composition and to simultaneously invoke and parody associations of sin, sinful indulgence, yielding to temptation, & c., and that considerable resources had been devoted to developing, refining, and target-testing the product inside various combinations of red-and-black individual wrappers with various cartoonishly demonic incarnations of the familiar Mister Squishy icon, presented here as rubicund and heavy-browed and grinning fiendishly instead of endearingly, before negative test data scrapped the whole strategy. Both Darlene Lilley and Trudi Keener had worked some of these early Focus Groups, which apparently some inträagency political enemy of the Creative Packaging Director at Reesemeyer Shannon Belt who’d pitched the trade name Devils! had used his (meaning the CPD’s enemy’s) influence with R.S.B.’s MROP coordinator to stock heavily with consumers from downstate IL — a region that as Terry Schmidt knew all too well tended to be Republican and Bible-Beltish — and without going into any of the Medicean intrigues and retaliations that had ended up costing three midlevel R.S.B. executives their jobs and resulted in at least one six-figure settlement to forestall WT^* litigation (which was the only truly interesting part of the story, Schmidt himself believed, jingling a pocket’s contents and watching his cordovan rotate slowly from 10:00 to 2:00 and back again as straticulate clouds in the lake’s upper atmosphere began to lend the sunlight a pearly cast that the conference room’s windows embrowned), the nub was that the stacked Groups’ responses to taglines that included Sinfully Delicious, Demonically Indulgent, and Why Do You Think It’s Called [in red] Temptation? as well as to video storyboards in which shadowed and voice-distorted figures in hoods supposedly confessed to being regular upstanding citizens and consumers who unbeknownst to anyone ‘worshipped the Devil’ in ‘secret orgies of indulgence,’ had been so uniformly extreme as to produce markedly different Taste and Overall Satisfaction aggregates for the snack cakes on IRPs and GRDSs completed before and after exposure to the lines and boards themselves, which after much midlevel headrolling and high-level caucuses had resulted in the present Felonies!^®, with its milder penal and thus renegade associations designed to offend absolutely no one except maybe anticrime wackos and prison-reform fringes. With the facilitator’s stated point being that please let none of those assembled here today doubt that their judgments and responses and the hard evaluative work they had already put in and would shortly plunge into again qua group in the vital GRDS phase were important or were taken very seriously indeed by the folks over at Mister Squishy.

Showing as yet no signs of polypeptide surfeit, a balding blue-eyed 30ish man whose tag’s block caps read HANK was staring, from his place at the corner of the conference table nearest Schmidt and the whiteboard, either absently or intently at Schmidt’s valise, which was made of a pebbled black synthetic leather material and happened to be markedly wider and squatter than your average-type briefcase or valise, resembling almost more a doctor’s bag or computer technician’s upscale toolcase. Among the periodicals to which Schmidt subscribed were US News & World Report, Numismatic News, Advertising Age, and the quarterly Journal of Applied Statistics, the last of which was divided into four stacks of three years each and as such supported the sanded pine plank and sodium worklamp that functioned as a laboratory table with various decanters, retorts, flasks, vacuum jars, filters, and Reese-Handey-brand alcohol burners in the small utility room that was separated from Schmidt’s condominium’s kitchen by a foldable door of louvered enamel composite. Ricin and its close relative abrin are powerful phytotoxins, respectively derived from castor and jequirity beans, whose attractive flowering plants can be purchased at most commercial nurseries and require just three months of cultivation to yield mature beans, which beans are lima-shaped and either scarlet or a lustrous brown and historically were, Schmidt had gotten that eerie Big Brothers/Big Sisters-like sensation again when he discovered during his careful researches, sometimes employed as rosary beads by medieval flagellants. Castor beans’ seed hulls must be removed by soaking 1–4 oz. of the beans in 12–36 oz. of distilled water with 4–6 tablespoons of NaOH or 6–8 ts. of commercial lye (the beans’ natural buoyancy requiring here that they be weighted down with marbles, sterilized gravel, or low-value coins combined and tied in an ordinary Trojan condom). After one hour of soaking, the beans can be taken out of solution and dried and the hulls carefully removed by anyone wearing quality surgical gloves. (NB: Ordinary rubber household gloves are too thick and unwieldy for removing castor hulls.) Schmidt had step-by-step instructions stored on both the hard drive and backup disks of his Apple home computer, which possessed a three-hour battery capacity and could itself be set up right there on the pine worktable in order to keep a very precise and time-indexed experimental log, which is one of the absolutely basic principles of proper lab procedure. A blender set on Purée is used to grind the hulled beans plus commercial acetone in a 1:4 ratio. Discard blender after use. Pour castor-and-acetone mixture into a covered sterile jar and let stand for 72–96 hours. Then attach a sturdy commercial coffee filter to an identical jar and pour mixture slowly and carefully through filter. You are not decanting; you’re after what is being filtered out. Wearing two pairs of surgical gloves and at least two standard commercial filtration masks, use manual pressure to squish as much acetone as possible out of the filter’s sediment. Bear down as hard as due caution permits. Weigh the remainder of the filter’s contents and place them in a third sterile jar along with × 4 their weight in fresh CH₃COCH₃. Repeat standing, filtering, and manual squishing process 3–5 times. The residue at the procedures’ terminus will be nearly pure ricin, of which 0.04 mg is lethal if injected directly (note that 9.5-12 times this dose is required for lethality through ingestion). Saline or distilled water can be used to load a 0.4 mg ricin solution in a standard fine-gauge hypodermic injector, available at better pharmacies everywhere under Diabetes Supplies. Ricin requires 24–36 hours to produce initial symptoms of severe nausea, vomiting, disorientation, and cyanosis. Terminal VF and circulatory collapse follow within twelve hours. Note that in situ concentrations under 1.5 mg are undetectable by standard forensic reagents.

More than a few among the crowds and police initially used the words sick, sickening, and/or nasty when the tank’s deltate nozzle was affixed to the protuberance at the center of the figure’s rear end’s white-and-navy bullseye design. All such expressions of distaste were silenced by the subsequent inflation. First the bottom and belly and thighs ballooned, forcing the figure out from the window and contorting him slightly to keep his forehead’s cup affixed. The airtight Lycra rounded and became shiny. The long-haired man on Dexedrine patted his bicycle’s slim rear tire and told the young lady he’d lent the field glasses to that he’d figured all along what they (presumably meaning the little protuberances) were. One shoulder’s valve inflated the left arm, the other the right arm, & c., until the figure’s entire costume had become large, bulbous, and doughily cartoonish. There was no coherent response from the crowd, however, until a nearly suicidal-looking series of nozzle-to-temple motions from the figure began to fill the head’s baggy mask, the crumpled white Mylar at first collapsing slightly to the left and then coming back up erect as it filled with gas, the face’s array of patternless lines rounding to resolve into something that produced from 400+ ground-level US adults loud cries of recognition and an almost childlike delight.

. . And that the time, Schmidt told the Focus Group, had — probably not at all to their disappointment, he said with a tiny pained smile — that the time had now arrived for them to elect a foreman and for Schmidt himself to withdraw and allow the Focus Group’s constituents to take counsel together here in the darkening conference room, to compare their individual responses and opinions of the Taste, Texture, and Overall Satisfaction of Felonies! and to try now together to come up with agreed-upon GRDS ratings for same. In some of the fantasies in which he and Darlene Lilley were having high-impact intercourse on the firms’ conference tables Schmidt kept finding himself saying Thank you, oh thank you in rhythm to the undulatory thrusting motions of the coitus, and was unable to stop himself, and couldn’t help seeing the confused and then distasteful expression that the rhythmic Oh God, thank yous produced on Darlene Lilley’s face even as her glasses fogged and her crosstrainers’ heels drummed thunderously on the table’s surface, and sometimes it almost wrecked the whole fantasy. If, after time and a reasonable amount of discussion, the Focus Group by chance for whatever reason found that they couldn’t get together on a certain specific number to express the whole group’s true feelings, Schmidt told them (by this time three of the men actually had their heads down on the table, including the overeccentric UAF, who was also emitting tiny low moans, and Schmidt had decided he was going to give this fellow a very low TFG Performance Rating indeed on the evaluations all Team Δy facilitators had to fill out on UAFs at the end of a research cycle), what he’d ask is that the Focus Group then just go ahead and submit two separate Group Response Data Summaries, one GRDS comprising each of the numbers on which the Focus Group’s two opposed camps had settled — there was no such thing as a hung jury in TFG testing, he said with a grin that he hoped wasn’t rigid or pained — and that if splitting into even two such subgroups proved unfeasible because one or more of the men at the table felt that neither subgroup’s number adequately captured their own individual feelings and preferences, why then if necessary three separate GRDSs should be completed, or four, and so on — but with the overall idea being please keep in mind that Team Δy, Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, and the Mister Squishy Co. were asking for the very lowest possible number of separate GRDS responses an intelligent group of discerning consumers could come up with today. Schmidt in fact had as many as thirteen separate GRDS packets in the manila folder he now held rather dramatically up as he mentioned the GRDS forms, though he removed only one packet from the folder, since there was no point in proactively doing anything to encourage the Focus Group to atomize and not unite. The fantasy would of course have been exponentially better if it were Darlene Lilley who gasped Thank you, thank you in rhythm to the damp lisping slapping sounds, and Schmidt was well aware of this, and of his apparent inability to enforce his preferences even in fantasy. It made him wonder if he even had what convention called a Free Will at all, deep down. Only two of the room’s fifteen total males noticed that there had been no hint of distant window-muffled exterior noise in the conference room for quite some time; neither of these two were actual test subjects. Schmidt knew also that by this time — the exordial presentation had so far taken 23 minutes, but it felt, as always, much longer, and even the more upright and insulin-tolerant members’ restive expressions indicated that they too were feeling hungry and tired and probably thinking this preliminary background was taking an oppressively long time (when in reality Robert Awad had explicitly told Schmidt that Alan Britton had authorized up to 32 minutes for the putatively experimental Full-Access TFG presentation, and had said that Terry’s reputation for relative conciseness and smooth preemption of digressive questions and ephemera was one of the reasons he [meaning R. Awad] had selected Schmidt to facilitate the quote unquote experimental TFG’s GRDS phase) — Schmidt also knew that by this time Darlene Lilley’s own Focus Group was in camera and deeply into its own GRDS caucus, and that Darlene was thus back in the R.S.B. Research green room making a brisk cup of Lipton tea in the microwave, what she liked to call her grownup shoes off and resting — one perhaps on its burgundy side — with her briefcase and purse beside one of the comfortable chairs opposite the green room’s four-part viewing screen, Darlene at this moment facing the microwave and with her great broad back to the door so that Schmidt would have to sigh loudly or cough or jingle his keys as he came down the hall to the green room in order to avoid making her jump and lay her palm against the flounces of her blouse’s front by ‘com[ing] up behind [her] like that,’ as she’d accused him of doing once during the six-month period when SRD Awad really had been coming up stealthily behind her all the time and her own and everyone else’s nerves were understandably strung out and on edge. Schmidt would shortly then pour a cup of R.S.B.’s strong sour coffee and join Darlene Lilley and today’s so-called experimental project’s other two Field Researchers and perhaps one or two silent and very intense young R.S.B. Market Research interns in the row of cushioned chairs before the screens, Schmidt next to Lilley and somewhat in the shadow of her very tall hair, and Ron Mounce would as always produce a pack of cigarettes, and Trudi Keener would laugh at the way Mounce always made a show of clawing a cigarette desperately out of the pack and lighting it with a tremorous hand, and the fact that neither Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley smoked (Darlene had grown up in a household with heavy smokers and was now allergic) would cause a slight alliance of posture as they both leaned slightly away from the smoke. Schmidt had once swallowed hard in his chair and mentioned the whole smoking issue to Mounce, gallantly claiming the allergy as his own, but since R.S.B. equipped its green room with both ashtrays and exhaust fans and it was eighteen floors down and 100 yards out the Gap’s rear service doors into a small cobbled area where people without private offices gathered on breaks to smoke, it wasn’t the sort of issue that could really be pressed without appearing either like a militant crank or like someone putting on a show of patronizing chivalry for Darlene, who often crossed her legs ankle-on-knee-style and massaged her instep with both hands as she watched her Focus Group’s private deliberations and Schmidt tried to focus on his own TFG. There was never much conversation; the four facilitators were still technically on, ready at any moment to return to their respective groups’ conference rooms if the screen showed their foreman moving to press the button that the Groups were told activated an amber signal light.

Team Δy chief Alan Britton, M.S. & J.D., of whom one sensed that no one had ever even once made fun, was an immense and physically imposing man, roughly 6'1" in every direction, with a large smooth shiny oval head in the precise center of which were extremely tiny close-set features arranged in the invulnerably cheerful expression of a man who had made a difference in all he’d ever tried.

In terms of administration there was, of course, the ramified problem of taste and/or texture. Ricin, like most phytotoxins, is exceedingly bitter, which meant that the requisite 0.4 mg must present for ingestion in a highly dilute form. But the dilution seemed even more unpalatable than the ricin itself: injected through the thin wrapper into the 26 × 13 mm ellipse of fondant at the Felony!’s hollow center, the distilled water formed a soggy caustic pocket whose contrast with the deliquescent high-lipid filling itself fairly shouted adulteration. Injection into the moist flourless surrounding cake itself turned an area the size of a 1916 Flowing Liberty Quarter into maltilol-flavored sludge. A promising early alternative was to administer six to eight very small injections in different areas of the Felony! and hope that the subject got all or most of the snack cake down (like Twinkies and Choco-Diles, the Felony! was designed to be a prototypical Three-Biter but also to be sufficiently light and saliva-soluble that an ambitious consumer could get the whole thing into his mouth at once, with predictably favorable consequences for IMPCs^* and concomitant sales volume) before noticing anything amiss. The problem here was that each injection, even with a fine-gauge hypodermic, produced a puncture of.012 mm diameter (median) in the flimsy transpolymer wrapper, and in home tests of individually packaged cakes at average Midwest-New England humidity levels these punctures produced topical staleness/desiccation within 48–72 hours of shelving. (As with all Mister Squishy products, Felonies! were engineered to be palpably moist and to react with salivary ptyalin in such a way as to literally ‘melt in the mouth,’ qualities established in very early Field tests to be associated with both freshness and a luxe, almost sensual indulgence.^†) The botulinus exotoxin, being tasteless as well as 97 % lethal at.00003 g, was thus rather more practical, though because its source is an anaerobe it must be injected into the direct center of the product’s interior filling, and even the microscopic air pocket produced by evacuation of the hypodermic will begin to attack the compound, requiring ingestion within one week for any predictable result. The anaerobic saprophyte Clostridium botulinum is simple to culture, requiring only an airtight home-canning jar in which are placed 2–3 ounces of puréed Aunt Nellie-brand beets, 1–2 oz. of common cube steak, two tablespoons of fresh topsoil from beneath the noisome pine chips under the lollipop hedges flanking the pretentiously gated front entrance to Briarhaven Condominiums, and enough ordinary tap water (chlorinated OK) to fill the jar to the absolute top. This being the only exacting part: the absolute top. If the water’s meniscus comes right to the absolute top of the jar’s threaded mouth and the jar’s lid is properly applied and screwed on very tightly w/ vise and wide-mouth Sears Craftsman pliers so as to allow 0.0 % trapped O₂ in the jar, ten days on the top shelf of a dark utility closet will produce a moderate bulge in the jar’s lid, and extremely careful double-gloved and — masked removal of the lid will reveal a small tan-to-brown colony of Clostridium awash in a green-to-tan penumbra of botulinus exotoxin, which is, to put it delicately, a byproduct of the mold’s digestive process, and can be removed in very small amounts with the same hypodermic used for administration. Botulinus had also the advantage of directing attention to defects in manufacturing and/or packaging rather than product tampering, which would of course heighten the overall industry impact.

The real principle behind running Field research in which some of the TFGs completed only IRPs and some were additionally convened in juridical groups to hammer out a GRDS was to allow Team Δy to provide Reesemeyer Shannon Belt with two distinct and statistically complete sets of market research data, thereby allowing R.S.B. to use and evince whichever data best reinforced the research results that they believed Mister Squishy and N.A.S.C. most wanted to see. Schmidt, Darlene Lilley, and Trudi Keener had all been given tacitly to understand that this same principle informed the experimental subdivision of today’s TFG juries into so-called No-Access and Full-Access groups, which latter were to be given what the members were told was special behind-the-scenes information on the genesis, production, and marketing goals of the product — meaning that, whether retroscenic access to marketing agendas created substantive differences in the Focus Groups’ mean GRDSs or not, Team Δy and R.S.B. clearly wanted access to different data fields from which they could pick and choose and use slippery hypergeometric statistical techniques to manipulate as they believed Client saw fit. In the green room, only A. Ronald Mounce, M.S. — who is Robert Awad’s personal mentee and probable heir apparent and is also his mole among the Field Researchers, whose water cooler chitchat Mounce distills and reports via special #0302 Field Concerns and Morale forms that Awad’s earnest young Administrative Asst. provides Mounce with in the same manila envelopes all the day’s IRP and GRDS packets are distributed to Field Teams in — only Mounce has been told privately that the unconventional Full- and No-Access Mister Squishy TFG design is in fact part of a larger field experiment that Alan Britton and Team Δy’s upper management’s secret inner executive circle (said circle incorporated by Britton as a § 543 Personal Holding Company under the dummy name Dy² Associates) is conducting for its own sub rosa research into TFGs’ probable role in the ever more complex and self-conscious marketing strategies of the future. The basic idea, as Robert Awad saw fit to explain to Mounce on Awad’s new catamaran one June day when they were becalmed and drifting four nautical miles off Montrose-Wilson Beach’s private jetties, was that as the ever-evolving US consumer became more savvy and discerning about media and marketing and tactics of product positioning — a sudden insight into today’s average individual consumer mind which Awad explained he had achieved in his health club’s sauna one day after handball when the intellectual property attorney he had just decisively trounced was praising an A.C. Romney-Jaswat campaign for the new carbonated beverage Surge whose tightly demotargeted advertisements everyone had been seeing all over the metro area that quarter, and remarked (the nude and perspiring intellectual property attorney^* had) that he probably found all these modern youth-targeted ads utilizing jagged guitar riffs and epithets like dude and the whole ideology of rebellion-via-consumption so fascinating and got such a hoot out of them because he himself was so far out of the demographic (using the actual word demographic) for a campaign like Surge’s that even as an amateur he found himself disinterestedly analyzing the ads’ strategies and pitches and appreciating them more like pieces of art or fine pastry than like mere ads, then had (meaning the attorney had, right there in the sauna, wearing only plastic thongs and a towel wrapped Sikh-style around his head, according to Awad) proceeded casually to deconstruct the strategies and probable objectives of the Surge campaign with such acuity that it was almost as if the fellow had somehow been right there in the room at A.C. Romney-Jaswat’s MROP team’s brainstorming and strategy confabs with Team Δy, who as Mounce was of course aware had done some first-stage Focus Group work for A.C.R.-J./Coke on Surge six quarters past before the firm’s gradual emigration to R.S.B. as a Captured Shop. Awad, whose knowledge of small craft operation came entirely from a manual he was now using as a paddle, told Mounce that the idea’s gist’s thrust here involved what was known in the industry as a Narrative (or, ‘Story’) Campaign and the concept of making some new product’s actual marketers’ strategies and travails themselves a part of that product’s essential Story — as in for historic examples that Chicago’s own Keebler Inc.’s hard confections were manufactured by elves in a hollow tree, or that Pillsbury’s Green Giant-brand canned and frozen vegetables were cultivated by an actual giant in his eponymous Valley — but with the added narrative twist or hook now of, say for instance, advertising Mister Squishy’s new Felony! line as a disastrously costly and labor-intensive ultra-gourmet snack cake which had to be marketed by beleaguered legions of nerdy admen under the thumb of, say, a tyrannical mullah-like CEO who was such a personal fiend for luxury-class chocolate that he was determined to push Felonies! into the US market no matter what the cost- or sales-projections, such that (in the proposed campaign’s Story) Mister Squishy’s advertisers had to force Team Δy to manipulate and cajole Focus Groups into producing just the sort of quote unquote ‘objective’ statistical data needed to greenlight the project and get Felonies! on the shelves, all in other words comprising just the sort of arch and tongue-in-cheek pseudo-behind-the-scenes Story designed to appeal to urban or younger consumers’ self-imagined savvy about marketing tactics and ‘objective’ data and to flatter their sense that in this age of metastatic spin and trend and the complete commercialization of every last thing in their world they were unprecedentedly ad-savvy and discerning and canny and well nigh impossible to manipulate by any sort of clever multimillion-dollar marketing campaign. This was, as of the second quarter of 1995, a fairly bold and unconventional ad concept, Awad conceded modestly over Ron Mounce’s cries of admiration and excitement, tossing (Mounce did) another cigarette over the catamaran’s side to hiss and bob forever instead of sinking; and Awad further conceded that obviously an enormous amount of very carefully controlled research would have to be done and analyzed in all sorts of hypergeometric ways before they could even conceive of possibly jumping ship and starting their own R. Awad & Subordinates agency and pitching the idea to various farsighted companies — certain of the US Internet’s new startups, with their young and self-perceivedly renegade top management, looked like a promising market — yes to various forward-looking companies that craved a fresh, edgy, cynicism-friendly corporate image, rather like Subaru’s in the previous decade, or also for example FedEx and Wendy’s in the era when Sedelmaier’s own local crew had come out of nowhere to rule the industry. Whereas in point of fact none of what Robert Awad had brought his mentee four miles out onto the lake to whisper in Mounce’s big pink ear was true or even in any sense real except as the agreed-upon cover narrative to be fed to select Team Δy SRDs and Field Researchers as part of the control conditions for the really true Field experiment, which Alan Britton and Scott R. Laleman (there was really no § 543-structured Dy² Associates; that little fiction was part of the cover narrative that Britton had fed to Bob Awad, who unbeknownst to him [= Awad] was already being gradually eased out in favor of Mrs. Lilley, who Laleman said was a whiz on both Systat and HTML, and on whom [= Darlene Lilley] Britton had had his eye ever since he’d sent Awad around with covert instructions to behave in such a way as to test for faultlines in Field Team morale and the girl’d shown such an extraordinary blend of personal stones and political aplomb in defusing Awad’s stressors) so but yes which field experiment Britton and his mentee Laleman had been told by no less a personage than T. Cordell (‘Ted’) Belt himself was designed to produce data on the way(s) certain received ideas of market research’s purposes affected the way Field Researchers facilitated their Targeted Focus Groups’ GRDS phase and thus influenced the material outcome of the TFGs’ in camera deliberations and GRDSs. This internal experiment was the second stage of a campaign, Britton had later told Laleman over near-zeppelin-sized cigars in his inner office, to finally after all this time start bringing US marketing research into line with the realities of modern hard science, which had proved long ago (science had) that the presence of an observer affects any process and thus by clear implication that even the tiniest, most ephemeral details of a Field test’s setup can impact the resultant data. The ultimate objective was to eliminate all unnecessary random variables in those Field tests, and of course by your most basic managerial Ockham’s Razorblade this meant doing away as much as possible with the human element, the most obvious of these elements being the TFG facilitators, namely Team Δy’s nerdy beleaguered Field Researchers, who now, with the coming digital era of abundant data on whole markets’ preferences and patterns available via cybercommerce links, were soon going to be obsolete (the Field Researchers were) anyway, Alan Britton said. A passionate and assuasive rhetor, Britton liked to draw invisible little illustrations in the air with his cigar’s glowing tip as he spoke. The mental image Scott Laleman associated with Alan Britton was of an enormous macadamia nut with a tiny little face painted on it. Laleman did unkind impersonations of Britton’s speech and gestures for some of the boys in Technical Processing when he was sure Mr. B. was nowhere around. Because the whole thing from soup to nuts could soon be done via computer network, as Britton said he was sure he didn’t have to sell Laleman on. Scott Laleman didn’t really even like cigars. Meaning the coming www-dot-slash-hypercybercommerce thing, which there’d already been countless professional seminars on and all of US marketing and advertising and related support industries were terribly excited about. But where most agencies still saw the coming www primarily as just a new, fifth venue^* for high-impact ads, part of your more forward-looking Reesemeyer Shannon Belt-type vision for the coming era involved finding ways to exploit cybercommerce’s staggering research potential as well. Undisplayed little tracking codes could be designed to tag and follow each consumer’s w³ interests and spending patterns — here Laleman once again told Alan Britton what these algorithms were commonly called and averred that he personally knew how to design them; he of course did not tell Britton that he had already secretly helped design some very special little tracking algorithms for A.C. Romney- Jaswat & Assoc.’s sirenic Chloe Jaswat and that two of these quote unquote Cookies were even at that moment nested deep within Team Δy’s SMTP/POP protocols. Britton said that Focus Groups and even n-sized test markets could be assembled abstractly via ANOVAs^† on consumers’ known patterns, that the TFG vetting was built right in — as in e.g. who showed an interest? who bought the product or related products and from which cybervendor via which link thing? — that not only would there be no voir dire and no archaic per diem expenses but even the unnecessary variable of consumers even knowing they were part of any sort of market test was excised, since a consumer’s subjective awareness of his identity as a test subject instead of as a true desire-driven consumer had always been one of the distortions that market research swept under the rug because they had no way of quantifying subjective-identity-awareness on any known ANOVA. Focus Groups would go the way of the dodo and bison and art deco. Alan Britton had already had versions of this conversation with Scott Laleman several times; it was part of Britton’s way of pumping himself up. Laleman had a vision of himself at a very large and expensive desk, Chloe Jaswat behind him kneading his trapezius muscles, while an enormous macadamia nut sat in a low chair before the desk and pleaded for a livable severance package. Sometimes, on the rare occasions when he masturbated, Laleman’s fantasy involved a view of himself, shirtless and adorned with warpaint, standing with his boot on the chest of various supine men and howling upward at what lay outside the fantasy’s frame but was probably the moon. That in other words, gesturing with the great red embrous tip, the exact same wonkish technology that Laleman’s boys in Technical Processing now used to run analyses on the TFG paperwork could replace the paperwork. No more small-sample testing; no more β-risks or variance-error probabilities or 1 — α confidence intervals or human elements or entropic noise. Once, in his junior year at Cornell U., Scott R. Laleman had been in an A.C.S. Dept. lab accident and had breathed halon gas, and for several days he went around campus with a rose clamped in his teeth, and tried to tango with anyone he saw, and insisted everybody all call him The Magnificent Enriqué, until several of his fraternity brothers finally all ganged up and knocked some sense back into him, but a lot of people thought he was still never quite the same after the halon thing. For now, in Belt and Britton’s forward-looking vision, the market becomes its own test. Terrain = Map. Everything encoded. And no more facilitators to muddy the waters by impacting the tests in all the infinite ephemeral unnoticeable infinite ways human beings always kept impacting each other and muddying the waters. Team Δy would become 100 % tech-driven, abstract, its own Captured Shop. All they needed was some hard study data showing unequivocally that human facilitators made a difference, that variable elements of their appearance and manner and syntax and/or even small personal tics of individual personality or attitude affected the Focus Groups’ findings. Something on paper, with all the Systat t’s crossed and i’s dotted and even maybe yes a high-impact full-color graph — for these were professional statisticians, after all, the Field Researchers; they knew the numbers didn’t lie; if they saw that the data entailed their own subtraction they’d go quietly, some probably even offering to resign, for the good of the Team. Plus then also Laleman pointed out that the study data’d also come in handy if some of them tried to fight it or squeeze Team Δy for a better severance by threatening some kind of bullshit WT suit. He could almost feel the texture of Mr. B.’s sternum under his heel. Not to mention (said Britton, who sometimes then held the cigar like a dart and jabbed it at the air when stipulating or refining a point) that not all would need to go. The Field men. That some could be kept. Transferred. Retrained to work the machines, to follow the Cookies and run the Systat codes and sit there while it all compiled. The rest would have to go. It was a rough business; Darwin’s tagline still fit. Britton sometimes addressed Scott Laleman as Laddie or Boyo, but of course never once as The Magnificent Enriqué. Mr. B. had absolutely 0 % knowledge of what and who Scott R. Laleman really was inside, as an individual, with a very special and above-average destiny, Laleman felt. He had practiced his smile a great deal, both with and w/o rose. Britton said that the sub rosa experiments’ stressors would, as always in nature and hard science, determine survival. Fitness. As in who fit the new pattern. Versus who made too much difference, see, and where, when push came to shove there in camera. This was all artful bullshit. Britton poked glowing holes in the air above the desk. To see, he said he meant, how the facilitators reacted to unplanned stimuli, how they responded to their Focus Groups’ own reactions. All they needed were the stressors. Nested, high-impact stimuli. Shake them up. Rattle the cage, he said, watch what fell out. This was all really what was known in the game as Giving Someone Enough Rope. The big man leaned back, his smile both warm and expectant. Inviting the Boyo he’d chosen to mentor to brainstorm with him on some possible stressors right here and now. As in with Britton himself, to flesh out the needed tests. No time like now. Scott Laleman felt a kind of vague latent dread as the big man made a show of putting out his Fuente. A chance to step up to the plate with the big dogs, get a taste of real frontlines creative action. Right here and now. A chance for Dy’s golden boy to strut his stuff. Impress the boss. Run something up the rampant pole. Anything at all. Spontaneous flow. To brainstorm. The trick was not to think or edit, just let it all fly.^* The big man counted down from five and put one hand to his ear and came down with the other hand to point at Scott Laleman as if to signal You’re On the Air, his eyes now two nailheads and tiny mouth turned down. The finger had something dark’s remains in the rim around its nail. Laleman sat there smiling at it, his mind a great flat blank white screen.