Syrup

by Max Barry

  “Mr. Scat,” 6 says firmly. In the candlelight her eyes are very deep. “I’m twenty-one. Deal with it.”

  I can pretend to swallow the lesbian routine, but this is too much for me. “Hey, I’m sure it impresses them in your alumni, this young-marketing-genius-with-attitude deal. But I don’t buy it.”

  “You seem to think I should care,” 6 says.

  “Look, 6,” I say, trying to soothe, “I know where you’re coming from. It’s hard to get credibility without some sort of angle. But it is just an angle, right? You’re not twenty-one and you’re as homosexual as I am.”

  “It’s interesting, what you’re doing,” 6 tells me. She leans forward and rests her chin on one immaculately manicured hand as if she is genuinely intrigued. “You obviously have an esteem problem with your sexuality, and can’t accept that a beautiful woman isn’t attracted to you.” She sniffs. “I did some psych units.”

  “When?” I say scathingly. “Elementary school?”

  “I went to Stanford,” 6 says steadily. I curse silently, because I usually lie about having gone to Stanford and she’s beaten me to it. “I graduated from high school at fifteen, courtesy of an advanced learning program. I did four years at UCLA, an M.B.A. at Stanford, and now, after six weeks at Coca-Cola, I am twenty-one years of age.”

  I want to argue, but she gets to me. I know what she’s doing: that everything she tells me is to build this marketing image, but I can’t resist it. I know Coke is one part faintly repulsive black syrup, seven parts water and forty-two parts marketing, but I still drink it. Perception is reality.

  “Scat,” she says, “you’re a little screwed up, but I want to work with you.”

  I blink. A witty comment is called for here, but I don’t have one. “Boy,” I say.

  6 pulls a large black folder out from I have no idea where. I cannot conceive of 6 carrying anything large enough to contain this folder. 6 is saying, “We’re going to draw up a concept sketch here,” but I am transfixed by this folder. I try to think how she can possibly lug this thing around and still appear cool, and I fail completely. I miss Sneaky Pete, who is at his best with puzzles like this.

  “Scat?” 6 is staring at my napkin, and I look down to see that somehow I’ve managed to idly extract two feet of white string from the hem. I subtly push it and the two forks it has entangled into my lap. 6 clears her throat. “The concept sketch?”

  My mind races back to my college days in search of what a concept sketch is. I’m pretty sure I skipped that class. “Good idea,” I say heartily.

  “I can req some people,” 6 says. “We’ll work it through tomorrow and have a presentation ready for Friday.”

  Today is Tuesday. “So long?”

  6’s eyes shift. “Let’s allow some X-time.”

  I have no idea what X-time is, but it sounds like way too cool a concept to not know about. The part of my brain that got me through college quietly suggests that it may be time to allow for various screwups. “Good thinking.”

  “Thank you,” she says, looking for the waiter. She manages to catch his attention with a raised eyebrow, and he is immediately by her side, handing out menus. She doesn’t even need to look at them. “Six.”

  “Very good,” the waiter says. I look at the menu, and amazingly enough, there really are numbers beside the selections and it is possible to order a number six. I am immediately sure that 6 has searched the city for classy restaurants in which it is possible to do this, and I am stunned—again—by how cool 6 is. She is whipping my butt in the cool stakes. I need to execute a tremendously suave move to recover from here.

  I toss the menu aside. “How about some big tortellini? Can you do that? Not those little tortellini, but really big ones. I just want four giant tortellini on a plate.”

  I sneak a glance at 6, and she is looking so nonchalant at my ordering off the menu that I must have scored. The waiter is frowning a little, but not so much that I think I need to worry about my food. “Shall we make that veal?” he asks. “With a funghi sauce?”

  “Excellent,” I say, thinking that eating cute young animals can’t help but win me points here, too. The waiter nods and disappears.

  6 flicks open her folder to reveal massive sheets of thick paper. “I’m thinking of a staggered distribution across the country, rather than simultaneous release. I want to create two waves of release, from LA and New York, to ride the WOM dispersion. Assuming the CTs green out, of course.”

  WOM is word of mouth, and every ad exec’s worst nightmare. If it wasn’t so powerful, marketers would try to pretend it didn’t exist. See, the problem with advertising is that lots of people tend not to believe it. You might think that after a company spends several million dollars on an advertising campaign, the least the general public could do in return is swallow the thing whole, but, unfortunately, this is not true. Instead, most people tend to place more credibility in the opinions of their friends. Horrible truths like this keep marketers awake at night.

  CTs are Chicago Trials. Every major product released into the American market since the 1970s has been through a Chicago Trial. Basically, a CT is a scaled-down version of the planned national campaign, confined to the city of Chicago. Everyone does it, because in 1972 some guy released a research paper reporting that the population of Chicago was demographically very similar to that of the entire United States of America. It had almost the same percentages of people in each age bracket, same ethnic division, same income distribution, et cetera. So the guy strung up this theory that if a product works in Chicago, it will work throughout the nation. Sometime after 1972, but way, way before now, the demographic makeup of Chicago and the nation changed so they no longer resemble each other nearly as much as they used to, but CTs have become so ingrained in the marketing process that no one can get rid of them. Everyone does CTs.

  6 is scribbling on her pad. I crane my neck and see she is drawing arrows and boxes and circles and graphs. I silently approve: it’s much easier to be incomprehensible than intelligent, and most people can’t spot the difference. “Sounds great. And international?”

  “It will follow, of course,” she says, not looking up. She is now drawing a huge spiraling thing that looks like a tornado. I think she’s beginning to push it a bit far. “We have great design people. It’s critical to get the look of the can right.”

  “Essential,” I agree.

  “And the aeration. We had a bad experience in Massachusetts with aeration.”

  “Really?” I ask, interested.

  6 looks up at me uncertainly, obviously unsure if she should be telling me this, so I smile reassuringly at her. She looks even more nervous, so I immediately kill the smile. This seems to calm her and she goes back to her doodling. “The bottlers got it way too high. Three thousand people rang up to complain that their Cokes were tickling their noses.”

  “Wow,” I say, because she seems to expect it.

  6 nods and draws for another moment. She appears to be shading when she adds, “Then there was that exploding can fataliry.”

  She looks up quickly to see if I react badly to this. It’s important not to appear shocked, but I struggle for a moment and 6 realizes she’s gone too far. “I don’t want that comment interpreted to mean that any product of Coca-Cola has ever caused any personal injury to any of its customers,” she says stiffly.

  “I am under no impression whatsoever that your employer has ever caused any of its customers injury,” I respond quickly. I didn’t do business law for the fun of it.

  6 studies me for a further moment. “Good,” she says, going back to her shading.

  I breathe a small sigh of relief and slap my hand, which has begun seeking out the napkin again.

  “There,” she says, tearing a bedsheet-sized paper from the pad and offering it to me. I pretend I don’t understand she wants me to take it and instead slide my chair around the table to her. She looks momentarily disconcerted, but I hardly notice because suddenly her delicious, heady scent is tr
ying very hard to knock me to the floor. I close my eyes for a second to regain control. When I open them, 6 is regarding me warily.

  “Visualizing,” I explain.

  “Oh.” Relief spreads across her features. At this range they are astounding. “What’s your feedback?”

  It’s a real effort to tear my gaze away from her and down to the paper, but I manage it. I’m surprised to see that 6 has actually been doing something constructive, not doodling at all. What I mistook for a tornado is a soda can: deep black with the word Fukk impressively rendered in Matura MT Script. It looks amazingly cool. I would drink this.

  “Wow,” I say. “6, this is great. You’re very talented.”

  “Thank you,” she says, as if people say this to her all the time. I don’t doubt it. “I’m not in Design, but I have always liked to draw.”

  “Tell me about it,” I suggest quietly, sensing the potential for a childhood story here; perhaps the baring of a small portion of 6’s soul. I look deeply into her eyes.

  “About what?” she says, crossing her arms. “I just draw, that’s all.”

  “Oh,” I say, embarrassed. I change the subject fast. “So tell me, why 6? Why not, say, 5?”

  “What?” she says, looking puzzled.

  “Your name. Why did you pick 6?”

  When she answers, I almost kick myself for not expecting it. “I didn’t choose it. It’s my real name.”

  I look at her. She regards me coolly. “Oh, come on,” I say. “Your parents did not name you 6. No parents ever gave their kid an unusual but cool name. There are only parent-given normal names and parent-given embarrassing names.” I am thinking in particular about a boy I went to elementary school with named Petals.

  “You’ve obviously spent some time on this, so I hate to kill your theory,” 6 says, “but I was named 6 by my parents.”

  I search for a refutation but fail to come up with anything better than “Crap.” I wisely decide against using it.

  “Although,” she adds, “not at first.”

  My mind reels. “Not at ... ?”

  “When I was born, I was named 0. On my first birthday, I was renamed 1. It was especially meaningful, having my new name as well as my age in frosty blue icing on my birthday cake.”

  “Oh, please,” I say. 6’s fantasy world is threatening to overwhelm me. Her lies are so obvious that I can’t help but believe them a little. “Even if you could remember your first birthday, you’re telling me that you were renamed to a new number every year?”

  “That’s right,” she says.

  There’s an obvious flaw in this little story, and I wait for her to explain it. She doesn’t, choosing instead to sip at her wine. I sit for a moment to see if I can ride out the urge to quiz her further, and, as it turns out, I can’t. “Okay,” I say. “What happened to 7?”

  6 puts down her glass and looks at me. “My parents were killed in a plane crash. When I was six years old.”

  mktg case study #3: mktg shampoo

  PICK A RANDOM CHEMICAL IN YOUR PRODUCT AND HEAVILY PROMOTE ITS PRESENCE. WHEN YOUR CUSTOMERS SEE “NOW WITH BENZOETHYLHYDRATES!” THEY WILL ASSUME THAT THIS IS A GOOD THING.

  messages

  Despite everything, by the time I’m driving back to the Porsche dealership (Gee, you know, maybe I won’t buy this after all) I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself. 6 is very interested in my idea, and while she’s less interested in me, I have survived a first date without humiliating myself. My biggest mistake was just hoeing into those tortellini when they arrived, because as the plates were being cleared I realized that I never saw 6 take a single bite of her meal. She either exquisitely orchestrated it so that I missed it all or slipped the whole meal into her folder. Either way, I’m impressed.

  When I get home, there are four messages on my machine. The first three are from someone who likes calling answering machines and hanging up without saying anything and the fourth is from Cindy. Cindy is a friend of mine from high school, and she’s tall, cute and determined to marry Brad Pitt. I almost believe she can do it, too; when Cindy gets set on something, she’s pretty hard to dissuade.

  Cindy’s message is something about meeting up for lunch, and since the dinner with 6 has left me with enough adrenaline to lift a truck, I call her.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi there.”

  “Scat,” she says, pleased. “You just caught me. I’m off to Berlin tonight.”

  “Hey, great.” Cindy is a flight attendant. “Another international flight. You must be doing well.”

  “The job sucks,” she says. “On the last run from Paris, three guys tried to pinch my ass. I am so close to quitting, I swear. The second I catch a break with my modeling, I’m out of here.”

  “Well,” I say. “You go, girl.”

  She laughs. “So, do you want to do lunch sometime?”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll tell you about my get-rich-quick idea.”

  “Oh, Scat,” she says, bemused, “you’re such an upper in my life.”

  “Uh, thanks,” I say.

  “See ya.”

  “Ciao, ”I say, and hang up.

  prowlers

  I’m still awake when Sneaky Pete comes home around two. Lying in bed, I hear him go through his regular routine: percolating some coffee, zapping through a dozen TV channels, flicking through a magazine. Our apartment doesn’t have a hell of a lot of soundproofing and thus is no good for bringing home dates, but then it’s also so dilapidated that no girl would want to sleep with either of us after seeing it, anyway. Hot beachfront apartments are nice for the image, but way, way out of my league.

  I consider going out to him for some more advice but decide against it. Sneaky Pete has helped me enough. From here, I fight alone.

  what a wonderful company

  I call Wednesday morning and get 6’s personal assistant. “I’m afraid Ms. 6 is very busy,” the PA tells me. She sounds suspiciously like my mother, so much so that my mind spins with conspiracy theories. I am momentarily positive that my mother is sitting on a sofa with 6 and taking her through volumes of photos of me when I was four years old and much less inhibited.

  “I could pass on a message,” the PA offers, and now she doesn’t sound so much like my mother after all. I get down to business.

  “I need to talk to her. It’s Scat.”

  This gives her pause. With a name like that, I may just be important.

  “I’ll check for you,” the PA says. She can’t resist adding, “But I must warn you, she’s very busy.”

  “I’m warned.”

  Suddenly I’m listening to KPWR, which informs me that they are California’s hippest music depot. As KPWR launches a techno version of What a Wonderful World, I wonder when radio stations became music depots and feel a brief sadness for KPWR’s obvious self-deception about its musical prowess. The PA breaks in on them. “Ms. 6 will speak to you now,” she tells me. There is deep disapproval in her voice, as if she has cautioned 6 again and again about speaking to me, but 6 is recklessly going ahead anyway.

  “Grats,” I say.

  The PA turns into a click, a short but terrifying revisit to What a Wonderful World, then 6.

  “Scat.” She sounds thrilled to hear from me, as if she’s been hoping all day that I would call. I wish this so much it is almost true.

  “Hi,” I say cheerfully. I’m about to say something more when I suddenly realize I can hear 6 breathing softly into my ear. It’s so erotic that I just stand there in the kitchen and close my eyes.

  Finally 6 says, “Yes?”

  “Oh,” I say, recovering. “I just wanted a status on Fukk. Are we green for Friday?”

  “Yes,” 6 says. She sounds as if she is trying to hide a slight irritation, but not very hard. “My team started work this morning and we’re not going home tonight until it’s done.”

  “Great!” I say. “Need any help?”

  “No,” she says. “Your role will come at the presentation. On Friday.”

/>   “Ah. Right.”

  6 waits.

  “Well, I guess that’s it then,” I say.

  “Fine.”

  “Bear my child, you great goddess of a woman,” I say, although by then she has hung up.

  scat clicks

  There’s a late-night Elvis movie on KCOP, and since I’ve got nothing better to do, I stay up to catch it. Just as Elvis is about to give a few disrespecting rednecks what-for, Sneaky Pete arrives home, dressed in a sleek black suit and smelling vaguely of aftershave and cigarettes.

  “Hi,” I say. “Hey, I met 6.”

  Sneaky Pete opens the fridge and studies its contents.

  “She loved my idea. Pulled a team of people onto it straight-away. In fact”—I look at my watch—“they could still be working on it now. They weren’t going home until it was done.” I stretch, oh so casual. “We present to the board in a couple of days.”

  I risk a glance at Sneaky Pete to see if he’s impressed. He is staring at me.

  “What?” I say. “What’s the matter?” In the face of his blank shades, I suddenly get defensive. “You’re surprised 6 thought it was so good? Good enough to dedicate a team to working up a proposal the same day? Even though ...” I falter. “Even though the board meeting isn’t until ...”

  Sneaky Pete shakes his head slowly, almost sadly.

  “Oh, fuck,” I say.

  scat gets serious

  “I’m sorry,” the receptionist says, “but Ms. 6 is unavailable.”

  “Where’s the boardroom?” I demand aggressively. I am so aggressive I scare myself a little and step back. It’s seven in the morning and I’m not really used to operating at this hour.

  “What?”

  “The boardroom,” I say impatiently. “I know she’s there. Where is it?”

  The receptionist’s mouth hangs open for a second. It’s not particularly attractive, and I would gently tell her this if I wasn’t being so overbearing. “You can’t interrupt a board meeting,” she whispers, horrified.