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 f
reckled, 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.