Oblivion: Stories Read online

  By industry-wide convention, Focus Group members received a per diem equal to exactly 300% of what they would receive for jury duty in the state where they resided. The reasoning behind this equation was so old and tradition-bound that no one of Terry Schmidt’s generation knew its origin. It was, for senior test marketers, both an in-joke and a plausible extension of verified attitudes about civic duty and elective consumption, respectively. The Hispanic man to the off-blond UAF’s left, who did not wear a wristwatch, had evidence of large tattoos on his upper arms through the fabric of his dress shirt, which fabric the natural lighting’s tinted hue rendered partly translucent. He was also one of the men with mustaches, and his nametag identified him as NORBERTO, making this the first Norberto to appear in any of the over 845 Focus Groups that Schmidt had led so far in his career as a Statistical Field Researcher for Team Δy. Schmidt kept his own private records of correlations between product, Client agency, and certain variables in Focus Groups’ constituents and procedures. These were run through various discriminant-analysis programs on his Apple-brand computer at home and the results collected in three-ring binders which he labeled and stored on a set of home-assembled gray steel shelves in the utility room of his condominium. The whole problem and project of descriptive statistics was discriminating between what made a difference and what did not. The fact that Scott R. Laleman now both vetted Focus Groups and helped design them was just one more sign that his star was ascending at Team Δy. The other real comer was A. Ronald Mounce, whose background was also in Technical Processing. ‘Question:’ ‘Question:’ ‘Comment:’ One man with a kind of long chinless face wished to know what Felonies!’ retail price was going to be, and he either didn’t understand or disliked Terry Schmidt’s explanation that retail pricing lay outside the purview of the Group’s focus today and was in fact the responsibility of a whole different R.S.B. research vendor. The reasoning behind the separation of price from consumer-satisfaction grids was technical and parametric and was not included in the putative Full-Access information Schmidt was authorized to share with the Focus Group under the terms of the study. There was one obvious hairweave in the room, as well as two victims of untreated Male Pattern Baldness, both of whom—either interestingly or by mere random chance—were among the Group’s four blue-eyed members.

  When Schmidt thought of Scott Laleman, with his all-season tan and sunglasses pushed musslessly up on his pale hair’s crown, it was as something with the mindless malevolence of a carnivorous eel or skate, something that hunted on autopilot at extreme depths. The African-American male whose head was unshaved sat with the rigidity of someone who had back problems and understood the dignity with which he bore them to be an essential part of his character. The other wore sunglasses indoors in such a way as to make some unknown type of statement about himself; there was also no way of knowing whether it was a general statement or one specific to this context. Scott Laleman was only 27 and had come on board at Team Δy three years after Darlene Lilley and two and one-half years after Schmidt himself, who had helped Darlene train Laleman to run chi-square and t distributions on raw phone-survey data and had taken surprising satisfaction in watching the boy’s eyes glaze and tan go sallow under the fluorescent banklights of Dy’s data room, until then one day Schmidt had needed to see Alan Britton personally about something and had knocked and come in and Laleman was sitting in the office’s recliner across the room and he and Britton were both smoking very large cigars and laughing.

  The figure that began its free climb up the building’s steadily increscent north facet just before 11:00 AM was outfitted in tight windproof Lycra leggings and a snug hooded GoreTex sweatshirt w/fiber-lined hood up and tied tight and what appeared to be mountaineering or rock-climbing boots except that instead of crampons or spikes there were suction cups lining the instep of each boot. Attached to both palms and wrists’ insides were single suction cups the size of a plumber’s helper; the cups’ color was the same shrill orange as hunting jackets and road crews’ hardhats. The Lycra pants’ color scheme was one navy-blue leg and one white leg; the sweatshirt and hood were blue with white piping. The mountaineering boots were an emphatic black. The figure moved swiftly and with numerous moist popping suction-noises up the display window of the Gap, a large retail clothier. He then pulled himself up and over onto the narrow ledge at the base of the second-floor window, rose complexly to his feet, affixed his cups, and swarmed up the pane’s thick glass, which gave onto the Gap’s second floor but had no promotional items displayed within. The figure presented as lithe and expert. His manner of climbing appeared almost more reptilian than mammalian, you’d have to say. He was halfway up the window of a management consulting firm on the fifth floor when a small crowd of passersby began to gather on the sidewalk below. Winds at ground level were light to moderate.

  In the conference room, the north window’s tint made the northeastern half-cloudy sky seem raw and the froth of the waves on the distant windblown lake look dark; it brindled the sides of the other tall buildings in view, as well, which were all partly in one another’s shadow. Fully seven of the Focus Group’s men had small remains of Felonies! either on their shirtfront or hanging from the hairs on one side of their mustache or lodged at the inner corner of their mouth or in the small crease between the fingernail of their dominant hand and that nail’s surrounding skin. Two of the men wore no socks; both these men’s shoes were laceless leather; only one pair had tassels. One of the youngest men’s denim bellbottoms were so terrifically oversized that even with his legs out splayed and both knees bent his sock-status was unknown. One of the older men wore black silk or rayon socks with tiny lozenges of dark rich red upon them. Another of the older men had a mean little slit of a mouth, another a face far too saggy and seamed for his demographic slot. As was often the case, the youngest men’s faces appeared not quite yet fully or humanly formed, with the clean generic quality of products just off the factory floor. Terry Schmidt sometimes sketched his own face’s outlines in caricature form as he spoke on the phone or waited for software programs to run. One of the group’s men had a pear-shaped head, another a diamond- or kite-shaped face; the room’s second-oldest consumer had cropped gray hair and an overdeveloped upper lip that lent him a simian aspect. The men’s demoprofiles and initial Systat scores were in Schmidt’s valise on the carpet next to the whiteboard; he also had an over-shoulder bag he kept in his cubicle. I was one of the men in this room, the only one wearing a wristwatch who never once glanced at it. What looked just like glasses were not. I was wired from stem to stern. A small LCD at the bottom of my right scope ran both Real Time and Mission Time. My brief script for the GRDS caucus had been memorized intoto but there was a backup copy on a laminated card just inside my sweater’s sleeve, held in place with small tabs I could release by depressing one of the buttons on my wristwatch, which was really not a watch at all. There was also the emetic prosthesis. The cakes, of which I had already made a show of eating three, were so sweet they hurt your teeth.

  Terry Schmidt himself was hypoglycemic and could eat only confections prepared with fructose, aspartame, or very small amounts of C6H8(OH)6, and sometimes he felt himself looking at trays of the product with the expression of an urchin at a toystore’s window.

  Down the hall and past the MROP* Division’s green room, in another R.S.B. conference room whose window faced NE, Darlene Lilley was leading twelve consumers and two UAFs into the GRDS phase of Focused Response without any structured QA or ersatz Full-Access background. Neither Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley had been told which of today’s TFGs represented the nested test’s control group, though it was pretty obvious. You had to work on the upper floors for some time before you noticed the very slight sway with which the building’s structural design accommodated winds off the lake. ‘Question: just what exactly is polysorbate 80?’ Schmidt was reasonably certain that none of the Focus Group felt the sway. It was not pronounced enough even to cause movement in the coffee in any of the iconized mug
s on the table that Schmidt, standing and rotating the Dry Erase marker in his hand in an absent way that connoted both informality and a slight humanizing nervousness in front of groups, could see down into. The conference table was heavy pine with lemonwood inlays and a thick coat of polyurethane, and without the window’s sepia tint there would be blinding pockets of reflected sun that changed angle as one’s own angle with respect to the sun and table changed. Schmidt would also have had to watch dust and tiny clothing fibers swirl in columns of direct sunlight and fall very gently onto everyone’s heads and upper bodies, which occurred in even the cleanest conference rooms and was one of Schmidt’s least favorite things about the untinted interiors of certain other agencies’ conference rooms around the Loop and metro area. Sometimes when waiting or on Hold on the phone Schmidt would put his finger inside his mouth and hold it there for no good reason he could ever ascertain. Darlene Lilley, who was married and the mother of a large-headed toddler whose photograph adorned her desk and hutch at Team Δy, had, three fiscal quarters past, been subjected to unwelcome sexual advances by one of the four Senior Research Directors who liaisoned between the Field and Technical Processing teams and the upper echelons of Team Δy under Alan Britton, advances and duress more than sufficient for legal action in Schmidt’s and most of the rest of their Field Team’s opinions, which advances she had been able to deflect and defuse in an enormously skillful manner without raising any of the sort of hue and cry that could divide a firm along gender and/or political lines, and things had been allowed to cool down and blow over to such an extent that Darlene Lilley, Schmidt, and the three other members of their Field Team all now still enjoyed a productive working relationship with this dusky and pungent older Senior Research Director, who was now in fact overseeing Field research on the Mister Squishy-R.S.B. project, and Terry Schmidt was personally somewhat in awe of the self-possession and interpersonal savvy Darlene had displayed throughout the whole tense period, an awe tinged with an unwilled element of romantic attraction, and it is true that Schmidt at night in his condominium sometimes without feeling as if he could help himself masturbated to thoughts of having moist slapping intercourse with Darlene Lilley on one of the ponderous laminate conference tables of the firms they conducted statistical market research for, and this was a tertiary cause of what practicing social psychologists would call his MAM* with the board’s marker as he used a modulated tone of off-the-record confidence to tell the Focus Group about some of the more dramatic travails Reesemeyer Shannon Belt had had with establishing the product’s brand-identity and coming up with the test name Felony!, all the while envisioning in a more autonomic part of his brain Darlene delivering nothing but the standard minimal pre-GRDS instructions for her own Focus Group as she stood in her dark Hanes hosiery and the burgundy high heels she kept at work in the bottom-right cabinet of her hutch and changed out of her crosstrainers into every morning the moment she sat down and rolled her chair with small pretend whimpers of effort over to the hutch’s cabinets, sometimes (unlike Schmidt) pacing slightly in front of the whiteboard, sometimes planting one heel and rotating her foot slightly or crossing her sturdy ankles to lend her standing posture a carelessly demure aspect, sometimes taking her delicate oval eyeglasses off and not chewing on the arm but holding the glasses in such a way and in such proximity to her mouth that one got the idea she could, at any moment, put one of the frames’ arm’s plastic earguards just inside her mouth and nibble on it absently, an unconscious gesture of shyness and concentration at once.

  The conference room’s carpeting was magenta pile in which wheels left symmetrically distended impressions when one or more of the men adjusted their executive swivel chairs slightly to reposition their legs or their bodies’ relation to the table itself. The ventilation system laid a pale hum over tiny distant street and city noises which the window’s thickness itself cut to almost nothing. Each of the Targeted Focus Group’s members wore a blue-and-white nametag with his first name inscribed thereon by hand. 42.8% of these inscriptions were cursive or script; three of the remaining eight were block capitals, with all the block-cap first names, in a remarkable but statistically meaningless coincidence, beginning with H. Sometimes, too, Schmidt would as it were take a step back inside his head and view the Focus Group as a unit, a right-angled mass of fleshtone busts; he’d observe all the faces at once, qua group, so that nothing but the very broadest commonalities passed through his filter. The faces were well-nourished, mid- to upscale, neutral, provisionally attentive, the blood-fed minds behind them occupied with their own owners’ lives, jobs, problems, plans, desires, & c. None had been hungry a day in their lives—this was a core commonality, and for Schmidt this one did ramify. It was rare that the product ever truly penetrated a Focus Group’s consciousness. One of the first things a Field Researcher accepts is that the product is never going to have as important a place in a TFG’s minds as it did in the Client’s. Advertising is not voodoo. The Client could ultimately hope only to create the impression of a connection or resonance between the brand and what was important to consumers. And what was important to consumers was, always and invariably, themselves. What they conceived themselves to be. The Focus Groups made little difference in the long run—the only true test was real sales, in Schmidt’s personal opinion. Part of today’s design was to go past lunch and keep the members eating only confections. Assuming a normal breakfasttime prior to arrival, one could expect their blood sugar to start heading down sharply by 11:30. The ones who ate the most Felonies! would be hit the hardest. Among other symptoms, low blood sugar produces oscitance, irritability, lowered inhibitions—their game-faces would begin to slip a bit. Some of the TFG strategies could be extremely manipulative or even abusive in the name of data. A bleach-alternative detergent’s agency had once hired Team Δy to convene primipara mothers aged 29 to 34 whose TATs had indicated insecurities at three key loci and to administer questionnaires whose items were designed to provoke and/or heighten those insecurities—Do you ever have negative or hostile feelings towards your child? How often do you feel as if you must hide or deny the fact that your parenting skills are inadequate? Have teachers or other parents ever made remarks about your child which embarrassed you? How often do you feel as if your child looks shabby or unclean in comparison to other children? Have you ever neglected to launder, bleach, mend or iron your child’s clothes because of time constraints? Does your child ever seem sad or anxious for no reason you can understand? Can you think of a time when your child appeared to be frightened of you? Does your child’s behavior or appearance ever provoke negative feelings in you? Have you ever said or thought negative things about your child? & c.—which, over eleven hours and six separate rounds of carefully designed questionnaires, brought the women to such an emotional state that truly invaluable data on how to pitch Cheer Xtra in terms of very deep maternal anxieties and conflicts emerged . . . data that so far as Schmidt had been able to see went wholly unexploited in the campaign the agency had finally sold P. & G. on. Darlene Lilley had later said she had felt like calling the Focus Group’s women and apologizing and letting them know that they’d been totally set up and manhandled, emotionally speaking.

  Some of the other products and agencies whose branding campaigns Terry Schmidt and Darlene Lilley’s Field Team had also worked on for Team Δy were: Downyflake Waffles for D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, Diet Caffeine Free Coke for Ads Infinitum US, Eucalyptamint for Pringle Dixon, Citizens Business Insurance for Krauthammer-Jaynes/SMS, the G. Heileman Brewing Co.’s Special Export and Special Export Lite for Bayer Bess Vanderwarker, Winner International’s HelpMe Personal Sound Alarm for Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, Isotoner Comfort-Fit Gloves for PR Cogent Partners, Northern Bathroom Tissue for Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, and Rhône- Poulenc Rorer’s new Nasacort and Nasacort AQ Prescription Nasal Spray, also for R.S.B.

  The only way for an observer to detect anything unusual or out of the ordinary about the two UAFs’ status would be to note that the facilitator nev
er once looked fully or directly at them, whereas on the other hand Schmidt did look at each of the other twelve men at various intervals, making brief and candid eye-contact with first one man and then another at a different place around the conference table and so on, a subtle skill (there is no term for it) that often marks those who are practiced at speaking before small groups, Schmidt neither holding any man’s eye for so long as to discomfit nor simply panning automatonically back and forth and brushing only lightly against each man’s gaze in such a way that the men in the Focus Group might feel as though this representative of Mister Squishy and Felonies! were talking merely at them rather than to or with them; and it would have taken a practiced small-group observer indeed to notice that there were two men in the conference room—one being the terse eccentric member surrounded by personal-care products, the other a silent earnest-eyed bespectacled man who sat in blazer and turtleneck at the table’s far corner, which latter Schmidt had decided was the second UAF: something a tiny bit too composed about the man’s mien and blink-rate gave him up—on whose eyes the facilitator’s never quite did alight all the way. Schmidt’s lapse here was very subtle, and an observer would have to be both highly experienced and unusually attentive to extract any kind of meaning from it.