The savage girl on the screen is both voluptuous and strong. Her thighs are soft, while her haunches are muscular. Her legs are long but not overly thin. Her Mohican stands up straight without looking stiff; on the contrary, it is silky and golden, adorned with downy blue feathers. Her hip juts boldly, though her eyes are down-turned, almost demure. Ursula has worked as hard on this airbrushed thing as she used to work on her art paintings, but this is nothing like her art paintings. This is magic. You can look and look and never see it, never as a whole; your eyes shift restlessly from paradox to paradox. High-heeled moccasins. A fur loincloth over waxed legs. A midriff-baring animal-hide top that looks as light and comfortable as rough-woven silk. A necklace of menacing incisors arranged in a floriated pattern. Warpaints of pastel pink and amber along her cheekbones. You can look and look and look and look, an endless whirligig of unsatiated desire.
Cabaj sits at the far end of the table. His in-house staff and his hired guns from the Mitchell and Chennault ad agency have arranged themselves around the table not by company but rather by job description—marketers to the left in skirt suits, hypererect postures, power ties, hair gel; creatives to the right in cotton and poly shirts, bangles and clips, canvas boat shoes. Chas, seated unobtrusively in the corner, settles back in his chair and nods at Ursula to begin. She gestures toward the screen.
“Call her the savage girl,” she says. “That’s what I call her, anyway. No one knows what she calls herself, because she doesn’t speak. Language is full of lies, and the savage girl wants nothing to do with lies. She’s sick of modernity, sick of all the cynicism in our culture that passes for sophistication. She tries to live authentically, honestly. She tries to live simply, in tune with the earth.”
The woman with the spiky hair in the charcoal dress suit knits her brows. The man in the black shirt with the gold stud in his ear nods agreement.
“You and I may find her glamorous, but she cares nothing for glamour. In this way she may be deeper than the rest of us. She may be superior. She doesn’t spend money. Rather, she makes things herself, using materials at hand. The experience of making things herself is valuable to her. It gives her power.”
The thin, gray-haired woman in pinstripes leans forward. Lucien, his curly hair pomaded flat against his temples, looks at his glittering watch. Ursula fights a moment of panic. She knows she’s reached the point of no return. She takes a breath, trying to flatten the tremor in her voice.
“So what do you have to offer her? The truth is, I’m not sure. Maybe nothing. She doesn’t trust you. Maybe she will never accept you, no matter what you offer. Maybe she will sense you’re the enemy, smell it on you, know you’re out to steal her secrets, to mine her resources. She knows your kind: you’re just one more emissary of the Imperium, trading wampum for sacred land, chintzy porcelain Buddhas for the treasures of ancient temples.”
The young Asian executive with the crooked tie and the nasty underbite blinks rapidly, almost psychotically. The spiky-haired woman leans back and frowns, tapping her nails against the tabletop. Chas pinches a centimeter of flesh at the bridge of his nose.
“The thing people are beginning to want more than anything else,” she continues, “is to be free of you. They want to not want you; they want to not want anything you have to offer.”
An uneasy murmur. She looks for Javier’s reaction, but he’s standing next to the projector and its light obscures his face. Chas, however, she can see, and he is glaring at her—she didn’t know those perpetually hooded eyes of his could open so wide. He has no idea what she’s doing. He’s actually nervous, a discovery that fills her with unexpected joy. For the first time since she met him, she feels completely in control.
“Of course, on the other hand,” she says, in a more casual tone, “those Indians and temple priests were quite happy with the deal. Those Indians loved wampum. It gave them a lot of prestige in their tribe, at least until the market was flooded. And as far as those temple priests were concerned, the shiny porcelain Buddhas lit up their temples like beams of divine sunlight.”
She pauses. All eyes watch her expectantly.
“Value, as we all know, is relative,” she says. “Right now people are nostalgic for simpler times, times when people felt pure and complete in their bodies, when their bodies were all the power they required to satisfy their needs. People today are sick of being consumers. And you have a product that can help. Your product will keep them pure. Your product will restore their innocence. Because your product is, in its very essence, the opposite of consumption. Consuming your product is like consuming nothing at all. Keep this in mind always when designing your campaign. Keep in mind how light this product is going to make buyers feel, how free it’s going to make them feel—free of people like you.”
She takes her seat to laughter and applause. When she sneaks a look over at Chas, he nods approval and gestures with his eyes toward Ed Cabaj, whose face remains slack as he stares, with unconcealed longing, at the picture of the savage girl.