"No! I mean you're in a bar, having a drink, and someone beside you starts a conversation. Someone you might fancy the look of. All very pleasant, and then you're chatting along, and she, or he, we have men as well, mentions this great new streetwear label, or this brilliant little film they've just seen. Nothing like a pitch, you understand, just a brief favorable mention. And do you know what you do? This is what I can't bloody stand about it: Do you know what you do?"
"No," Cayce says.
"You say you like it too! You lie! At first I thought it was only men who'd do that, but women do it as well! They lie!"
Cayce has heard about this kind of advertising, in New York, but has never run across anyone who's actually been involved in it. "And then they take it away with them," she suggests, "this favorable mention, associated with an attractive member of the opposite sex. One who's shown some slight degree of interest in them, whom they've lied to in an attempt to favorably impress."
"But they buy jeans," Voytek demands, "see movie? No!"
"Exactly," Cayce says, "but that's why it works. They don't buy the product: They recycle the information. They use it to try to impress the next person they meet."
"Efficient way to disseminate information? I don't think."
"But it is," Cayce insists. "The model's viral. 'Deep niche.'The venues would be carefully selected—"
"Bloody brilliantly! That's the thing, I'm every night to these bleeding-edge places, cab fare, cash for drinks and food." She takes a long pull on her half pint. "But it's starting to do something to me. I'll be out on my own, with friends, say, not working, and I'll meet someone, and we'll be talking, and they'll mention something."
"And?"
"Something they like. A film. A designer. And something in me stops." She looks at Cayce. "Do you see what I mean?"
"I think so."
"I'm devaluing something. In others. In myself. And I'm starting to distrust the most casual exchange." Magda looks glum. "What sort of advertising do you do?"
"I consult on design." Then, because this is not exactly the stuff of interesting conversation: "And I hunt 'cool,' although I don't like to describe it that way. Manufacturers use me to keep track of street fashion."
Magda's eyebrows go up. "And you like my hats?"
"I really like your hats, Magda. I'd wear them, if I wore hats."
Magda nods, excited now.
"But the 'cool' part—and I don't know why that archaic usage has stuck, by the way—isn't an inherent quality. It's like a tree falling, in the forest."
"It cannot hear," declares Voytek, solemnly.
"What I mean is, no customers, no cool. It's about a group behavior pattern around a particular class of object. What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does."
"And then?"
"I point a commodifier at it."
"And?"
"It gets productized. Turned into units. Marketed." She takes a sip of lager. Looks around the pub. The crew in here aren't from the Children's Crusade. She guesses they are the folks who live nearby, probably back behind this side of the street, a neighborhood less gentrified than Damien's. The wood of the bar is worn the way old boats can be worn, virtually to splinters, held together by a thousand coats of coffin-colored varnish.
"So," Magda says, "I am being used to establish a pattern? To fake that? To bypass a part of the process."
"Yes," Cayce says.
"Then why are they trying to do it with bloody video clips from the Internet? This couple kissing in a doorway? Is it a product? They won't even tell us."
And Cayce can only stare.
"HELENA. It's Cayce. Thank you for dinner. It was lovely."
"How was Hubertus? Bernard thought he might have the hots for you, to put it bluntly."
"Bluntness appreciated, Helena, but I don't think that's the case. We had a drink. I'd never really had a one-on-one with him before."
"He's brilliant, isn't he?" Something in her tone. A sort of resignation?
"Yes. Is Bernard there, Helena? Hate to disturb him, but I have a question about work."
"Sorry, but he's out. Take a message?"
"Do you know if there's a branch, a subsidiary of some kind, of Blue Ant, called Trans? As in—lation? Or—gressive?"
Silence. "Yes. There is. Laura Dawes-Trumbull has it. Lives with a cousin of Bernard's, oddly. In lawn care."
"Pardon?" A place name?
"The cousin. Lawn care. Lawn products. But Laura heads Trans, I do know that. One of Hubertus's pet projects."
"Thanks, Helena. Have to run."
"Bye, dear."
"Bye."
Cayce removes her card from the pay phone and hangs up, the receiver being immediately taken by a dreadlocked Crusader waiting on the sidewalk behind her.
The sunlight seems not so pleasant now. She's made her excuses, come out here, bought a phone card, waited in line. And now it seems that Magda is indeed employed, by a sub-unit of Blue Ant, to encourage interest in the footage. What is Bigend doing?
