For two years, since my Eternal Flame folly, I’ve spent weekdays sitting behind the window at Lost Property. That’s the longest I have kept a job. My rubber-stamp responsibilities are so far removed from the gravitational pull of any corporate identity that no LipService brand is mandated for my working hours.
Sometimes, days pass without anyone approaching my window. Aside from your interruptions, I’m free to think my own thoughts away from the rapid fire of brand triggers. Plus, as I learned when Dad died here, hospital administration believes that people should be separated by sheets of sound-insulating glass like dead slices of brain between slides, all electric connections gone. Although I’m really the one inside the box, it’s the people on the outside who appear to flicker across a screen. They are remote, characters on a TV with the sound down. This is how it’s possible for the reception clerks at the hospital front line to remain as detached as a weather balloon. The world on mute, even with all the suffering, is faintly ridiculous. In here, it’s just You and me locked in our sullen sitcom.
Behind us, on the left, are cartons of clutter forgotten by visitors or patients. Separate containers are dedicated to mobile devices, spectacles, dentures, jewellery, logoed false nails, sweaters and keys. These are the things that the living leave behind as carelessly as hair on a pillow.
The boxes on the right, each labelled with a photo of the deceased and name, if known, are different. Really, these articles are not lost, it’s their owners who are lost, who were left behind. They died without a brand tribe, and relatives can’t be found. There’s seldom anyone who comes to claim these last bodily possessions, which are boxed anyway, just in case. Generally, they hold the same clutter as the other cartons – the same personalia that form the repeating pattern on the wallpaper of human life. Only now the human face, the oil painting that hung for so long in front of the identical drops, has been removed, and the motifs behind it of watch, wallet, hairpiece and jacket appear unnaturally vivid as they profile a negative space alive with absence.
You are compelled by the collection on the left with its artefacts that narrate a soap opera of brands getting in bed with one another, designs undergoing facelifts and flirtations with bright new things. As You like to remind me, ‘Our lives are really product stories.’ I want to tell You that You’re wrong just because it’s You. But I can’t deny that it’s the objects we carry with us that define whether we are rich, desirable and beautiful. And who would I be without the stack of books that I carry like an invisible totem pole in my head? Or the way that I taste objects?
I’ve heard rumours about personal history videos screened at CEOs’ and copywriters’ funerals. A series of shots depict a still life in which the deceased’s various mobile phones, smart devices and status purchases are successively faded in. These artfully directed videos of branded goods in their various iterations – the deceased’s significant others – can move mourners to uncontrollable weeping.
There were no such elaborate solemnities for Dad, not even a memorial service. Mother didn’t want his ‘final bra-burning moments’ advertised. One bleed is a glorious revolution; two is anarchy. I think of Dad a lot here in my cubicle because not much happens. And while it’s not the book repository, it is an archive of sorts. The cardboard of the boxed compendiums is plastic coated, and seeing it on the shelves always makes me think, they just had to do that to the pages and we could’ve still had books. Unless the point was not to have books. Or at least none of the ones from before.
For me, it’s the repository on the right that tugs at my sleeve. I imagine that the best cartons can teach me to listen for the nail-clipper noise of beetle jaws, the gnawing destruction at work beneath the triumphant clamour of the marching brands. Insects can fry sophisticated circuitry, paralyse organisational structures and topple our empires of worldly goods. I’m sure the only way to beat LipService is by scurrying along the skirting of corporatised society. The box owners were mostly as outdated as the clothes they wore and the paraphernalia they carried. And the old go unnoticed, as You derisively put it: ‘It’s planned obsolescence. Leaky creakies are cop-out consumers. We only want the young, the new, the now, the next.’ But it’s possible that some of them might even have remembered when the LipService code conventions were still being ironed out. If anyone can point me to the bugs in LipService, it must be them. That and the quiet is why I’ve stayed with this job.
Their things are all around me. I just need to learn to read the correspondences between the objects in a box when I lay them out like a spread of tarot cards on a table. But this personal baggage is cryptic. Take the labels inside the clothes. I sometimes wonder whether they are even brands. In a box with no name for the deceased, there’s a jacket with a label at the neck that reads ‘Thackwell’s, 24 Church Street’. That sounds more like the return address, should Mr Thackwell’s jacket go astray. I like to tell myself that this was a custom in an era when a jacket merely ‘became’ you, unlike now when you become the jacket – slipping on its brand personality with the sleeves. And there’s the heavy tweed cloth, worn at the elbows, that isn’t used much any more. I let the pink tongue of my finger rasp at the coarse wool streams of warp and weft, drinking in peat smoke and malted alcohol. There’s a sense of the man in the flavour of his garments. In the pocket is an old matchbox with a small dead iridescent beetle inside.
The first time I lifted the lid of such a carton, hearing the sound of cardboard clearing its throat before opening wide, was when I took out Dad’s shirt and spread it on my bed. There it lay, sunk into itself, withdrawn behind an agitation of creases. I wanted it to be at peace so I folded the arms, right over left across the chest like a dead Egyptian pharaoh, but the cloth only bunched more. Smoothing the worn corduroy pants in long licks of stewed guava, I skidded over pips in the pockets and withdrew a pair of earplugs. On the duvet, the earplugs spooned with a pair of white cotton manuscript gloves that I’d found in the other pocket. I moved his scratched horn-rimmed reading glasses and a small surgical face mask next to them. This collocation of objects portrayed my father as I’d never seen him before – a man who muffled his senses, who closed out the sensual excitement of the material world. Maybe I had misunderstood ‘touch dwells in lonely caves’. Maybe he didn’t have tastures, or spurned their advances. But having tried to repress them myself, I couldn’t believe it was even possible. My father lived between the lines and between the linings of his pockets.
The boxes don’t like having their sleep disturbed. When I bump up against the stacks, reaching for one high up, bells jangle in alarm. Each box contains a string of chimes that was hung off the limbs of the corpse for twelve hours in case the person revived. Brand champions and corporate chieftains get ‘jingle bells’ – electronic chimes with motion sensors that play the brand jingle to soothe the fright of awaking in a mortuary and alert staff to the reawakened.
Really, it’s the living who are afraid. Few families get to bury a body. Corpses are almost always awarded to medical science for further research or instruction – ‘as the best method to leverage human resources in repayment of debts to society’ (so goes the catechism) – especially after a second haemorrhage like Dad had. The bereaved murmur that if it’s doctors who are so eager to claim our raw materials, should we trust them to decide whether or not someone has truly died? Those declared dead simply vanish as completely as a fire breather’s exhalation, leaving nothing, not even ashes. The only remains are a tinkling string and box of folded clothes and oddments.
The tradition is to remove the chimes’ tongues – to hush them. With Dad’s bells it should’ve been Mother who com-muted the clappers, but she’d had her nails freshly manicured and logoed so she turned them over to me. I twisted and snapped, my mettle fatigued. Eventually it occurred to me that my mechanical movements were no different from the repetitive stresses of self-censorship. I left the last bell intact, the last tongue tinging.
More boxes arrive for storage. I always have to look inside, even if I face your jeers at my pursuit of cast-offs and hand-me-downs. Sometimes the collection inside is so unremittingly ordinary, I doubt if it even belonged to an individual and not a buyer persona. This brings on the playground chant of ‘poor, obscure, no allure’ from You. But the contents of one of the new arrivals is a curious miscegenation. Although barely worn – I catch that never-been-washed, new-fabric smell – the clothes are clearly by brands with virtually no share of mind. And yet, unfranchised consumers would never hack out labels as had been done here, leaving a hole in the fabric at the neck of the hoodie. All other identification is also missing. There’s no wallet, no bank or credit cards, only a cheap billfold with a couple of grubby notes. The box label says: ‘Male, age approx 37, cause of death: impact by tram.’
But any residue of the idea that this might be a member of the beetling class is utterly wiped away, into a handkerchief – a handkerchief of golden spider silk. Textiles made from the filament of Nephila madagascariensis fit only the pockets of the corporocrats – not polyester plebeians. Either this guy was a thief or he had counterfitted himself out as something he wasn’t. As I touch the handkerchief, I briefly forget all about male, age 37.
For a moment, You and I are planets in conjunction. The fabric tastes beatific – of honey, no, saffron-infused honey. We stand for a long time letting the gold enhalo us. It coos to us with your voice: ‘We know how to appreciate it. We should take it.’ No. This is a box that someone will come for. I don’t feel that he’s a thief. Not even thieves cut holes in their clothes – only someone who considers such wardrobe items purely disposable could be so careless. You howl with disappointment and I feel it.
Packing the things back into the carton, I notice that the Harrington jacket is heavier on one side. I check the pockets again – empty. I frisk the jacket. There’s something flat trapped in the right side. The lining has been torn away to create a pouch. Inside, the owner stowed a flexible tablet computer.
It takes me a while to switch it on because it’s so futuristic – probably a prototype. I’ve never seen one like it. A galaxy glow illuminates a document on screen headed Client brand: Smite-M insecticide. Below that, Project: LipService flanking materials – brand narrative; Copywriter: Declamartiste; and a date.
Copywriter codenames supposedly protect the programmers’ identities and limit the risk of corporate espionage, but are ultimately just another way to a put a brand face on their work. While I was still at school, the Great Dictator had name recognition that began to challenge even LipService itself – although no one knew who he or she really was. Over weekends, kids would beg their parents to buy and apply Disport patches, which shouted ‘Verbal stylings by the Great Dictator’ from a yellow starburst, so that on Monday they could dumbfound their friends by repeating snow sports LipService drift along the lines of ‘smoking the halfpipe’. Then GD just dropped out of speech, with only a vague mention in an uncharacteristically subdued press release: ‘The Great Dictator is heading off-piste onto fresh powder.’ Mother said the copywriter ‘had to be corseted. GD got too big for her brand, letting it disappear between the rolls of blabber. Control briefs were required.’ Mother is very canny about that kind of thing.
The name Declamartiste doesn’t mean anything to me, but then again no individual copywriters have generated anything like the chatter around Great Dictator. From what Mother said, I suppose there was probably an intervention to ensure it never happens again. Even if he was no GD, I think ‘male, age approx 37’ was Declamartiste – a real active copywriter, not just a burnt-out one turned headmaster, cut off from the supply of unprogrammed LipService.
I look at the clothing in the box, which recently rose and fell to the rhythm of free speech. I want that. And why can’t I have it – what copywriters have? And the more I want it, the more I despise them for denying it to me. Prying into the jacket’s polyester, I try to reprise the last traces of that language from the creases, only it’s not words that gush into my mouth. The camel’s-milk tasture neutralises the heartburning hate enough for me to wonder again what a copywriter was doing wearing abused polyester and without the identification that would’ve ensured his bodily possessions a more fitting afterlife than this box.
I start reading the document on the screen, hoping to find the answer there. It appears to be the copywriter’s notes on adapting Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis into a brand narrative for the insecticide Smite-M.
Purchasing message key points
Surprisingly, Declamartiste quotes passages from the original and details their place in his plans for the Smite-M version.
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.
A family tragedy – eldest son (Gregor Samsa) suddenly transformed into a horrible vermin. What has he done to deserve this fate? Well, as the very opposite of a fire-brand travelling salesman (boss says, ‘Your turnover has been very unsatisfactory of late’) for a textiles company, his lukewormery is truly contemptible:
‘If I didn’t have my parents to think about I’d have given in my notice a long time ago, I’d have gone up to the boss and told him just what I think, tell him everything I would, let him know just what I feel. He’d fall right off his desk!’ (thank our lucky brain scars there’s LipService to prevent such mewly pukey talk!)
Gregor literally becomes (allegory!) the brand parasite that he is. Story told from perspective of bleeding-heart li’l sis Grete who cares for creepy crawler through misguided sense of kinship, even though it nauseates her. Big mistake.
No sooner had she come in than she would quickly close the door as a precaution so that no one would have to suffer the view into Gregor’s room, then she would go straight to the window and pull it hurriedly open almost as if she were suffocating. Even if it was cold, she would stay at the window breathing deeply for a while.
She still found his appearance unbearable and would continue to do so, she … even had to overcome the urge to flee when she saw the little bit of him that protruded from under the couch.
Character arc – sis must learn that good consumers have zero in common with evil arthropods. We must guard our resources against them. Only the fittest survive (note how long it takes the bug to die, even without eating and with a festering apple in its back – months). Reason for instinctive gut churning is insects are sickening, cause disease. In final epiphany sis says to parents, ‘It’ll be the death of both of you, I can see it coming … it’s got to go.’ This is what vermin do – repulsive infiltrators. Terminate with extreme prejudice or they will force us from our homes, our food. Great speech by li’l sis:
You’ve got to get rid of the idea that it’s Gregor. We’ve only harmed ourselves by believing it for so long. How can that be Gregor? If it were Gregor he would’ve seen long ago that it’s not possible for human beings to live with an animal like that and he would’ve gone of his own free will. We wouldn’t have a brother any more, but then, we could carry on with our lives and remember him with respect. As it is this animal is persecuting us, it’s driven out our tenants, it obviously wants to take over the whole flat and force us to sleep on the streets.
Mother and father paralysed. They do nothing – irresponsible attitude that allows pest to spread misery. Ineffectual father attempts to repulse home invader with ridiculous foot stamping, newspaper waving and later pelting bug with apples.
Gregor’s father seized the chief clerk’s stick in his right hand … picked up a large newspaper from the table with his left, and used them to drive Gregor back into his room, stamping his foot at him as he went.
… lightly tossed, something flew down and rolled in front of him. It was an apple; then another one immediately flew at him … father had decided to bombard him. He had filled his pockets with fruit from the bowl on the sideboard and now, without even taking the time for careful aim, threw one apple after another.
Grete does only reasonable thing. Buys can of Smite-M. Bug dies gassed in chamber. Cloud lifts, family decides to have day out at mall together for the first time in months. Mr and Mrs Samsa realise daughter will haemorrhage soon. She’s become a consumer in her own right, brand empowered. A happy ending.
‘Wow, that’s adding value, morally incentivising the purchase of Smite-M.’ You’re breathless with admiration. ‘So transformational! Turning that mopey, sad-sack story into the coming of haemorrhage of Grete. And it works on so many levels – because brand perfunctionaries really are like bugs with their heads pushed low to the ground by their big hunched backs.’ I’m trying to shut out your frothy effusions, to tell myself not to let Declamartiste’s impresario performance stop my eyes adjusting to the shapes in its darkness. I must think. ‘And the chance to see how a copywriter’s mind works – even you’ve got to be excited about that, Frith,’ You jubilate.
Concentrate. Kafka’s Metamorphosis is one of the stories in the human book Dad gave me, but Declamartiste would’ve had to go to the book repository to get a copy of it. That means the silo shelves are probably still intact. It’s five years since I left them with Dad, and I feel a stupid kiss-planting gratitude to the copywriter for letting me know that they’re all still there waiting, the titles read and unread.
Once the realisation has settled and sedimented, I reread the copywriter’s notes. It isn’t just the gleeful savagery that keeps knifing me. I know that Smite-M also sponsors advergames where players build up arsenals of aerosol chemical weapons (nerve gas, antifeedants, growth regulators) of varying effectiveness on a range of monster mutant insects. Fire the right spray at the right bug and you get to watch it die in gory detail. So that was probably to be expected. But Declamartiste’s horror at poor Gregor’s ability to survive so long without consuming – I think that’s why he relishes Gregor’s death so much. Nothing is more horrible than a failure to consume. He expresses the same disgust when the parents do nothing (what he means is buy nothing) and the family is only rehabilitated by going to the mall. It’s also why You’re cheering. This is your credo, too.
I still don’t know why a copywriter died badly dressed, run over in a shabby neighbourhood. Swiping over to the next page, there is only a heading: ‘Covert market research observations: Fumigation of apartment block at 6 Tenth Street’.
I picture Declamartiste, his skin prickling inside the polyester jacket and pants, wondering whether he dares clutch the golden handkerchief to his nose. Has he caught a whiff of the chloropicrin released as a warning before the odourless fumigant, or is it just the rank file milling about? The tented building looks like a giant circus top. And outside it, he is surrounded by blue-collar true squalor. He notices that they gesture and grimace a lot when they talk, throwing themselves bodily into a farce of expression. He must study them like traffic patterns worn into the supermarket floor, marking the migratory movements of the herd.
‘Imagining the copywriter putting on perfumed airs, eh Frith? You’re always so sure they’re looking down their nose jobs at everyone else. But who creates equal optimism through LipService, so that all adults keep their spirits up with a cheery turn of brand praise?’
And who goes spying on us in our neighbourhoods because they can’t trust a word of our chipper chatter – having scripted it themselves?
‘“Spying”, that’s so passé. It’s observational market research – gaining a better understanding of target market behaviours and needs to improve products.’
Or to invent new jiggery-pokery to sell the same old stuff. I put the OLED panel back into the jacket and close the box. But Declamartiste has already escaped and is cutting a caper across my mental stage.
It’s about a week since I excavated Declamartiste’s carton, and I see a man approaching my window. He moves like an astronaut, as if trying to avoid contact with his cheap synthetic clothes. As he inserts a finger to scratch underneath his woollen beanie, I notice what is clearly the scabbing of a hair transplant. Immediately, I know who he is – one of them.
I want him to speak, to hear him use unbranded LipService and loop-the-loop language as only a copywriter can.
‘In-hale and hearty with Suck-o-Matic’s clean-air design.’
A vacuum cleaner greeting? Disappointing, but I probably should’ve expected it as part of the whole ‘average consumer’ act. I imagine him practising it in front of the bathroom mirror. When it’s not neurally programmed, LipService drift doesn’t come naturally. It didn’t to me before I haemorrhaged and I wonder whether he can sustain the brand suck-up. I smile but leave him to continue.
‘I’ve come to make a clean sweep of my brother’s remains.’
‘It leaves a gap in your smile when one of your set is suddenly pulled,’ I say because I’m patched into Big Grin’s toothpaste – not the best brand for condolences. I don’t know if Declamartiste really was his brother. I doubt it. He’s probably just had the paperwork forged so that he can claim the box as a family member and get back that high-tech panel and the Smite-M adaptation. Maybe he won’t have thought of preparing to make an emotive brand pitch.
‘Yes, we miss him terribly. So gifted.’ Brusque, like the short, sharp jerk of pulling legs off a spider. I had almost forgotten how cutting a statement without brand alerts could be, and the surprise shows on my face. He must’ve resented Declamartiste. Were they rivals? I had unintentionally antagonised him. Corporates don’t like copywriters to be outed in public – it distracts from the message and reminds shoppers of what they can’t buy into. Someone always has to pay for such indiscretions.
I try to recover my brand face. ‘You know the drill, there are holes to fill. Records, please.’
He pushes the documentation for the release of the box through the slot under the glass of my window. I check through it, rubber-stamping where appropriate, and slide the box out a door in the wall next to my window.
The copywriter turns and is gone before I can say anything else. I’ll miss having Declamartiste on the shelf.