NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
I am looking for quick connectors and a soaker hose in the Garden section of Jake’s Snaz Super Store. Snaz has mounted electronic tablets on each shopping cart. Type in the product you want and its graphic display tells you where to find it, the cost, and then bombards you with ads for related products. I wave the bar code on my connectors in front of the tablet’s electric eye and it gives me the option to purchase by touching an outsize red purchase button on the screen or one of the small buttons to hold, or reject the item. Hoses are in the next aisle. There’s Lou Waymarsh walking towards me with a couple of GFIs in one hand and a pistol grip device in the other that serves the same purpose as a cart mounted tablet.
“Electrical problems Lou?”
“Not at my house. An outlet has burned out on Diddlie’s kitchen counter. I am going by her place after lunch to fix it.”
I hold up my quick connectors. “There is no more rain this Fall than there was over the Summer, and all my chrysanthemums are drooping.” My cart holds 50 feet of coiled black hose with ‘genuine brass fittings’. ‘Made with 100% recycled material’ says the yellow and green cardboard packaging with Snaz logo. Perhaps it’s the voice of the woman in the picture standing above a column of printed warnings and smiling as she points towards a bed of brilliantly colored dahlias. The image of colorful petals is cut off by a fold dividing the photo from a column of directions for use on the back of the package.
“So what you been doing lately Fred?”
“Reading back issues of Shrink Rap.”
“What’re you wasting your time on that for?”
“Keeps me out of the heat.”
The tablet on my shopping cart seems to be listening to us. Pictures of various beverages flash into a rectangle sharing the screen with a promotion requesting my email address and the possibility of winning a free weed whacker. Also a separate offer of a discount on ride on mowers if I apply today, ‘just touch the green happy face’!
“How about a coffee Lou?”
“Yeah, I see it on that screen too, opposite Isle 23.” We walk towards Isle 23 and find a spacious elevator waiting to take us up to the ‘Gallery and Gables Café’.
“Do you get a strange feeling Fred?”
“This elevator is gentle. I don’t feel as if my stomach was left down in Isle 23.”
“No I mean the way that we both responded to the suggestion pictured on that tablet.”
“Is it any different from seeing a conventional sign at the right moment?”
“Maybe not, but that was not a conventional sign though.”
“Are you thinking of subliminal suggestion?”
“Nothing subliminal about it Fred.”
The cafe is a long narrow area with huge round windows on one side looking out over the mall and a view across the interior expanse of Snaz with its numbered isles like a maze below. Heavy timbers cross above us as if we are under the gable of an old wooden building, or is it supposed to evoke an old ship with the round windows? The rest of the store looks as if it is built of steel and cinderblock.
A menu of snacks and drinks comes up on the tablet as we get off the elevator. We walk over to sit at one of the many vacant oval tables well spaced to accommodate shopping carts.
“ShrinkWrap? They must be years old … I mean where did you get them from anyway?”
“Lou, They are on loan from Diddlie. They turned up when rain soaked her attic in the big storm and she had to clear it out. I’ve been reading about the beginnings of Prestige U.”
“Surely you don’t believe that malarkey Lark Bunlush wrote!”
“It didn’t seem all that implausible Lou.”
We order coffees from a young waitress in stylized white bib overalls with navy blue work shirt. She taps our order into a phone and soon returns, the Snaz logo on her cufflinks shining as she serves the drinks.
“Armond Macadamia is a plutocrat and you don’t get that kind of money without cutting some corners. That I accept, but this idea that he was laundering drug money for the CIA is ridiculous.”
“You mean he isn’t in the drug business at all?”
“He may be implicated in it somehow. He may have had accounts at BCCI too, but he keeps his hands clean.”
“Well that doesn’t preclude his involvement in intelligence.”
“Well no, but I don’t find it credible.”
“I wonder how he weathered the recent bank melt down.”
“Not well. I believe he lost a bundle in that new fund of his.”
“I thought he got out of that.”
“No he’s started Amphibian Investments. Their slogan is ‘We take a cold blooded look at the market.’ I think it was the Toad Skin Fund that took the hit.”
“Is he in this with Jake?”
“Don’t know about Toad, but yes they are partners in some ventures. He helped Jake get started and now he is going to help him on this settlement Sherman Shroud has cooked up.”
“Liberty was skeptical about that.”
“That’s Sherman’s specialty. I wonder if he’d know what to do as a litigator. I’ll bet he hasn’t done a trial in twenty years. One aspect of it is that Prestige U. is going to get a fifteen million dollar endowment for a new chair in finance.”
“So Armond is going to bail Jake out!”
“Sort of … Jake is going to do Armond a favor too.”
“What can Jake do for a man with all Armond’s resources?”
“Armond is getting too old to get around. He needs an energetic young guy like Jake, whom he trusts to represent him and travel for him.”
“Good grief Lou, how did you get all this?”
“Oh I hear stuff here and there you know, and folks in the neighborhood such as Derwent.”
“Derwent?”
“Yeah he’s in a wheel chair now … had a long chat with him … that’s after he got through complaining. Derwent was on the founding Board of Regents for Prestige U.”
“I thought he was an obscure expert on little known arctic life forms.”
“He is an authority of some kind.”
“So how did he get from the ice pack to the board room?”
“That is a story in itself. Derwent married one of Macadamia’s relatives, a cousin or something. There was no money in it, but the connection helped him get tenure at Prestige U. after he published some important work. He was also having an affair with a secretary up in the admin office. Oh it was quite a scandal! That secretary had a lot of influence showing a little cleavage here and spending some couch time there. Come to think of it Diddlie was in the midst of that scene.”
“Diddlie has never mentioned it to me.”
“Oh well, maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Did she work at Prestige U. too?”
“No, no, no, it was a social scene … Diddlie her husband Stuart Dodgson, and Lark, Harper Nightingale, her ex, and a bunch of others. I better let her tell you, we never got into that swinging scene.”
“You mean the secretary was part of this too?”
“Yeah, she had been a scholarship student from Guatamala I think, or was it Chile? I forget. Somehow she ended up working in the front office. Derwent was only one of her sexual partners.”
“Sounds like trouble right there.”
“Yeah it was really something. My wife used to get a lot of gossip from Diddlie and pass it on to me. I found it pretty amusing in some respects, and kind of disgusting in others.”
“The promiscuity you mean?”
“Yes, the promiscuity. They called it ‘a liberation’ and I question that idea. I’ve got serious reservations about the liberating aspect of promiscuity. I get in trouble for it some times, but there it is.”
“It’s liberation from generations of repression and hypocrisy, from the demons their parents haunted them with, the demons that block expression of real feeling.”
“I know, I know, heard it all before Fred. It’s fine to get past hypocrisy about sex, and fear and all that chauvinistic stuff. Sure I am all for that, but promiscuity ‘ain’t it’ to me.”
“Well if you are mixed up, acting out is a way through it all.”
“That is understandable in some cases, maybe many. I don’t know how messed up these people were. God knows there’s plenty of trash talked on the street and on TV.”
“Yes I think TV is mimicking ‘the street’ and visa versa. It has proven to be an effective way of getting attention …”
“ … and attention is what it’s all about. You know that reminds me. Derwent’s affair never attracted any one’s attention at the time. He was apart from that scene, but she was into it. My wife and I used to discuss these goings on endlessly. At one point it became our evening’s entertainment after work.”
“Lark tells me that when she and Juanita were getting to know each other they ran into Rank Majors on the street and Juanita went into shock.”
“I have heard it from her too. Then one day I had a chance to talk to Juanita about it privately and she described seeing a big snake partly wound around a limb and partly looping down between branches with its head in the air immediately behind Rank. That’s what frightened her.”
“Oh well, Lark made no mention of a snake.”
“No, and I don’t want to get into it with her or all that stuff between Jake and Derwent.”
“I have heard Derwent rant about Jake Trip and saying he’s a drug dealer and Macadamia is in it too.”
“Yeah there was a big falling out there … a squabble over family documents I think … there’s probably more to it than that though. Well, that’s Jake’s take on it. Now Derwent is going off the deep end, saying all this crazy stuff about dope deals.”
“Jake did tell me he was in a jam, a ‘hell of a jam’ in fact’.”
“Lark tells me that when she and Juanita were getting to know each other they ran into Rank Majors on the street and Juanita went into shock.”
An alarm is going off by the exit as we walk towards it. Three security people with pistols on their hips converge on two Hispanic men with a cart full of paint, brushes, rollers and plastic drop cloths. They look frightened. A roll of masking tape bounces on the floor and rolls out the door as it opens, with a snake like hiss, for another exiting customer.
“Get back here, sir.”
The man is chasing his role of tape out the door. The larger older man is explaining in Spanish but the guards don’t show any sign of understanding. Lou walks over and offers to translate.
“Thank you sir, we have the situation under control.”
He translates the man’s explanation anyway but they ignore him. The
The two men in paint-splashed jeans are escorted behind a counter used for returned items. They stand there with their cart and the uniformed guards bar the way out. Lou leans over the counter and tries to talk to them.
“Sir, this is a restricted area.” A female guard flashes Lou a beautiful smile from under the countless fine braids arranged around her head with tiny gold charms interspersed. Putting her arm in his she guides him away as if she were a close friend about to have an intimate conversation.
I wait for several minutes while Lou huddles with the glamorous security woman. Then he comes to explain that they are following routine store procedure. “If this is routine, I think we are all in big trouble!”
“Those two think they have paid but don’t understand the system, so the alarm is going off. Maybe his purchase didn’t go through. His cell phone is now out of juice so he can’t produce any proof of purchase, now what?”
We exit the maze of Snaz knowing receipts for our goods and coffees have been transmitted to our phones and the price has been deducted from our credit accounts.
