LOW VOICES SIMMERED IN THE OAK-PANELED booths of the cigar lounge. Pete Lawler’s face reappeared from a cloud of smoke, lean, tanned and wrinkled before its time, which gave the Englishman the appearance of an aging rock star. His bright blue eyes twinkled as he smiled to a Thai girl at the next table. She smiled back and mouthed, “I’m okay.” As Pete got older, his girlfriends seemed to get younger. This one looked all of thirteen.
A few moments later, his gaze returned to the table, smile extinguished, all business again.
“So, what do you think?” Raymond asked.
The adman frowned thoughtfully. “Not what I was expecting. I usually get briefed to create ad campaigns for beer and shampoo. This is, how should I say … out of left field.”
“For a moment, I thought you were going to say crazy.” Raymond laughed.
“There’s a fine line between crazy and genius.”
“Which am I?”
“We’ll only know in hindsight. Your story about an afterlife economy sounds like complete bollocks. But then so does all the talk of pearly gates and seventy-two virgins. And that’s not stopped people believing in them, has it?”
“That’s exactly what I thought.” Raymond smiled with relief. Finally, someone on the same page.
Pete exhaled, twisting his mouth to blow smoke away from Raymond. “Perhaps we should start by asking the question, why do we believe in bollocks?”
Raymond shrugged. “Because we want to?”
“Precisely. And if there are a billion others believing in the same crap, then that gives us permission to leave our brains at the door. Now here’s the good news: we live in a money-driven world. If you’re telling me I can take it with me to my next life, I want to believe you.”
“Yet you say I need to have the numbers to make it believable. How can I get the numbers if people don’t believe me in the first place?”
“I know, catch-22.” Pete extinguished his cigar and leaned into the light.
“Here’s how it works. There are always people willing to try a new product: the innovators. You know, the type to line up around the block for the latest gadget. They’re going to try it because it’s new and exciting, gets them social currency. Then you have the early adopters, who take their cues from the innovators. These guys in turn inspire the next group in the chain. That’s how ideas spread. Scientists say we’ve descended from apes. They’re wrong. We’ve descended from sheep. Whether you’re selling beer or Afterlife Dollars, it’s the same principle. You need a critical mass to trigger herd behavior. It’s called the tipping point.”
Raymond nodded, envying how smoothly the words seemed to roll off Pete’s tongue. Raymond’s English, like everything else he knew, was self-taught. You could learn the vocabulary from books, but not fluency.
“So how do we get to the tipping point?” he asked.
“There’s no magic formula. Part strategy, part luck. In your case, the strategy is obvious. Do you know why churches are struggling to put bums in seats?”
“Because they’re not cool?”
Pete smiled. “I couldn’t have said it better. Going to church is like hanging out with your grandparents. That’s why we’d rather spend Sunday at the shopping mall, worshipping at the neon altar. Because brands are cool. They give us permission to indulge, have fun, live life. They don’t judge or preach. When you walk out of a mall in Causeway Bay, you don’t feel like crap because you failed to meet an impossible moral standard. If you’re to get anywhere with this, you have to take your cues from the likes of Coke and Nike. Credibility will come from how you present yourself. You’re not a fortune-teller on Temple Street, but the afterlife version of Citibank, selling the dream of every person on this planet: to live happily forever.”
“So, you think it’s possible?”
“Anything’s possible, Ray.” Pete grinned, revealing newly whitened teeth.
Raymond narrowed his eyes. He distrusted Pete’s disingenuous charm as much as he admired it, and wondered if the adman was merely saying what he wanted to hear. In the end, it didn’t matter, Raymond decided. This conversation had given him that little nudge of encouragement to take the first step. And that was what he sorely needed right now.
The meeting concluded with a firm handshake and an agreement to get together again in two weeks’ time to discuss the advertising campaign. Raymond watched Pete weave through the curtain of smoke, arm in arm with his barely legal girlfriend. Raymond remained still and upright in the leather chair, palms resting on his lap as if meditating. A few minutes later, he wrote in his diary:
“BANK OF ETERNITY.”
He leaned back and studied the name, picturing it in glowing neon, emblazoned on the top floors of a skyscraper in Hong Kong Central.
The business would have a unique cost structure, he realized. There’d be no production or manufacturing costs, but his biggest expense would be creating and sustaining a myth, everything from advertising to staff uniforms and the design of the premises. The margins were high, which meant he could potentially earn huge amounts of money in a short span of time. Maybe this madcap idea wasn’t so mad after all.
He raised his arm to get the waiter’s attention just as his phone vibrated on the table. Raymond dropped his hand. Like an animal attuned to danger, he knew who it was without looking at the caller ID. He also knew he couldn’t put it off any longer.