Selling LipService

by Tammy Baikie

  The wrist rotors got carried away with a kid called Ansgar and dislocated his finger. Somehow in my memory he seems connected to Poppy – like a cousin or a brother’s friend. But I think that’s just the vanity of guilt, the need for what came next to be a personal punishment and not just inevitable market forces. Poppy started selling words. Hers were cheaper. There was no secondary-user subscription and no enforcers, although she would’ve probably gotten there, too. What was hardest for me was that her words were good – like ‘frenvy’ for when a friend gets an iconic product that you desperately want, and the fact that they have it and you don’t makes it hard for you to continue liking them.

  Not all of the Wardsback customers disappeared straight away. But another one or two kids started peddling words not long after Poppy. Soon profits crashed and my social stock fell. The opera gloves and tights of the Wardsback ebrandgelists vanished from the school hallways. I looked around for direction but, as the Wardsback star faded, I lost my bearings. I had rewired my night sky as advertising hoardings.

  Faith said we would cut the competition down with our wrist rotors. I would need to start working on a series of tarnish words referring to speakers of other brands. They would see that only the business with a viable retention strategy survives. Ours was the superior brand. Only I didn’t feel very superior. My words didn’t seem better than Poppy’s. I was groping. Brands were slippery things – Selkie could become silk and my game of words a corporate crackdown. I missed the palpable pawing reality of my skin tastes, where things pressed up close and declared from my throat what they were. The order for the sear and smear campaign never went out.

  There were so many new words and so many kids using them that the teachers realised what was going on. An assembly was called and the headmistress announced, ‘Almost all of you without exception have been involved in the trafficking and proliferation of contrabranded language, which undermines the efforts of this institution to prepare you for life post-haemorrhage and brand-self integration, in particular. The faculty is forced to implement corrective measures. A two-week gag order will be implemented, with immediate effect. After that, a new batch of personality and brand matchmaking tests will be conducted.’

  As we filed out of the hall, a doctor and nurse were waiting at the door to administer vocal-inhibiting injections.

  This was exactly the kind of thing Faith was supposed to warn me about before I started Wardsback. She was supposed to keep me out of trouble. Instead I had caused all this. Teachers often threatened us with gag orders but I’d never heard of it actually happening – and to the whole school. How had we gotten it so wrong?

  Faith was sullen. ‘We didn’t. We did everything exactly the way they do it. That’s what they didn’t like. If you’d done what I told you and sent out the wrist rotors, we could’ve regulated the market and controlled use. You just couldn’t handle the business behind branding.’

  In fact, I wasn’t sure I liked Faith any more. I told her to leave me alone. We were no longer friends, and I wasn’t introducing her as my imaginary brand buddy at school. I never spoke to Faith again. But I was wrong to think that Faith would just go away. Faith has come back, only now instead of me speaking for her, she speaks for me. You are Faith.

  Ripping off opera gloves, kicking off tights, flinging off my dress, I climbed into the dressing-up box and cried for a long time. I cried for a whole school of kids who walked through hallways making only sad herd sounds – snufflings, scratchings, huffings. And I cried for myself because no matter how hard I tried to be good, I seemed to be bad. Now I had no voice and no choice. But the words were still there, small pale insects scuttling about. And just like Poppy and her clever words, it just popped into my head.

  ‘Tasture.’ That’s what skin tastes should be called. I had stopped crying, and the new word rustled around the alfalfa of Mother’s rich satin nightie and stirred again when sesame chiffon brushed my face. It wasn’t a word I planned on ever telling anyone, and, besides, no one would be making words any more. So what did it matter that I’d used Poppy’s word-making technique?

  I got out of the dressing-up box and found a pair of scissors. There might not be any paper any more, except in the repository, but I was going to make a book – a secret book. I cut Mother’s old lingerie into rectangles and stitched the pieces together along one side. I would write stories on the pages, about the pages.

  4

  I spent afternoons at the end of the school day at the book repository waiting for Dad to finish work. Almost no one went there except the vacuum-sealed vans carrying volumes that had been hidden in walls and floors, buried in containers of rice, sewn into furniture upholstery or taped to the owner’s body. It had been decades since the doctors discovered the deadly library mould and ordered the sequestration of all printed literature, but still the vans kept arriving with confiscated tomes. I couldn’t understand why people still sicked to death because of those things, when everyone knows books bring the wheezing, blue-veined end of breath. I only ever visited the exhibits in the reception area, staring at the stifled volumes set in blocks of resin and sealed in display cases together with magnified slides of microbes and photos of patients in the respiratory wards. I stared through glass and time at the dusty galaxies of green-black spores on the open pages, trying to read the words so different from any brand of LipService. Every day I stared and felt the air sucked out of the present.

  Dad found me one afternoon, trying not to breathe and fog the glass. ‘Ah, it’s an airtight case,’ he said with that wry expression he had when he used LipService in ways that felt like putting a shoe on the wrong foot. ‘We glazed over books, then eyes glazed over. Would you to like to see more?’

  ‘More books? Won’t they make me sick?’

  ‘No, no, we’ll put you in a nice dust jacket.’

  Then, for the first time, he took me in the lift down to the hermetic underground vaults. He showed me how to put on the hooded plastic suit and mask, which rustled up runny egg yolks in my mouth, and we stepped into the airlock. On the other side of the door was a former underground grain silo. I stood peering under the crinoline that covered society’s nether regions. Books lined the walls of the floodlit well, which was hooped with tiers of balconies rising eighty metres up. Freestanding shelves conferred in the centre of the shaft, casting deep shadows as they leaned into each other on their ladders. At the opposite end of the silo from the airlock door, a tunnel led to a succession of four more identical silos. Imagining the billions of letters spun into words, spun into sentences, felt like an enormous centrifugal force: I didn’t think I’d be able to make my way to the middle of such a vast swirl of minutiae.

  ‘How many are there?’ I whispered, staring up.

  ‘Books? About eleven and a half million.’

  ‘Why do we keep them if they’re poisonous?’

  ‘Copywriters used to come. Not so much any more.’

  ‘But all the books are digitised, we don’t need these.’

  ‘You keep referencing the case in reception.’

  My thoughts teetered on the edge of a bluff. He continued, ‘Come, let me explain the science of authority control.’

  On the second-tier balcony, Dad pulled out a slim picture book entitled The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen. ‘Read this, I’ll be back in a while.’ His footsteps on the steel stairs up to the higher decks sounded like the metallic shutout of gates barring storefronts at night. I didn’t want to be left alone. I was afraid of the books. The colours slapped me down; there was no commercial clowning. I was sure this was the place of no escape – not even for microbes. I opened the book with clumsy gloved fingers. The pages sprayed like the hair of a trampolinist.

  The paper was different from the glossily coated and laminated kinds that you sometimes still find in packaging. It looked breathing, like skin. There was no smudge of mould on any of the pages. I wanted to touch one, to know it at the base of my tongue, but I thought of the exhibit
above me and its photos of the sick, who I was sure had green cobwebs in their lungs.

  I found myself starey, facing the pictures of the emperor and the weavers. I couldn’t understand why they looked wrong. It wasn’t the funny clothes or that the pictures were neither cartoons nor photos. There was something about it, like the too-tight smile some grown-ups cracked at kids.

  When Dad returned, he asked if I recognised the story. I said no, because I hadn’t ever heard of the Hans Christian Andersen corporation or its brands. He had that sad face I remembered from when Mother trade-dressed the tree in our yard in Frisson Froufrou.

  ‘Hans Christian Andersen is the copywriter, Frith. So what is the brand?’

  I didn’t know. ‘Weavers,’ I said and felt stupid.

  ‘Are you sure there is one?’

  No brand. It was even more unimaginable than the upside-down, back-to-front world of the Freaker Sneakers advergame that lets your avatar walk on the ceiling. I didn’t believe anything was possible without brands – even the wildest fantasy.

  After a long pause, Dad said, ‘What if this book were indexed together with CEO Sindy’s Selkie Suit?’

  Almost every second night, Mother used to read to me about how Selkie was invented. The paper book was the same story as the BMG textile corporation’s brand narrative, except for the ending. Instead of the textile technologists teaching CEO Sindy and the management board about fabric quality so that Selkie is no longer invisible to them, the emperor is laughed at as he parades naked through the street. That wasn’t branding the bright side. The harder I tried to understand the differences, the more I was reminded of the day with Mrs Mondaine and the headmaster.

  Squirming in the biohazard suit made it twist and tighten around me. Sweat made the plastic cling, and egg yolks oozed slimily down my throat. I towed my attention back to my father, trying to listen, trying to hear sense.

  ‘In authority control, multiple writers, here Andersen and his sources, are reduced with controlled vocabulary into a single catalogue access point, the authorised file ‘CEO Sindy’s Selkie Suit, BMG corp. copyright’, which is the only version licensed for electronic publication.’

  Some of the LipService words he was using were difficult to understand. So I tried to explain it to myself out loud.

  ‘Other people never get to read the stories as they are down here.’

  ‘No.’

  I remembered a word from brand awareness: proprietorship. I don’t know if I understood even then that what the narrative lacked was a corporate context. For me, the story whirled away like water down the drain because there was no branded identity plugging its centre. How could I grasp it if I didn’t know which entity held it as property, had owned and trademarked it? While the underground silo and the book didn’t fit with our consumerism, I recognised exclusivity when I saw it. Mother had made sure of that. Only the very few can have the magical things that transform you.

  Above all, the language was a wild rushing in my ears.

  ‘Can I come back?’ I asked Dad.

  ‘Only if you make no citations or cross-references to the silos or books.’

  I could see he was smiling behind the mask.

  For the next six years, I went underground, spending almost every afternoon down in the silos. Sometimes, I would see Dad already in there. Sometimes, he left a book for me on the floor near the door. None of the books showed the green-black taint like the one in the display case. I became sloppy about the biohazard suit until I stopped wearing it completely.

  I inhaled mouldy words that grew into the breathy mycelium of story colonies. In the subterranean silos, they spread over my childhood brand narratives and decomposed them; at the slightest stirring, the downy must of language released puffs of sporious unbranded tellings.

  5

  The cover had the grain, colour and gloss of spilled flaxseed. It still answered with the animal heat of being hidden under my shirt. My fingers moved intently over the Brailleish bumps of its surface, imbibing its report of squid ink. No other old leather binding had ever painted my tongue paella black before. As I lifted the cover, which read, in gold lettering, Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy, it made the electric crackle of a loose connection. Inside, a bookplate marked ‘Ex Libris Dr Ungar Sever’ showed a brain under a bell jar. Anyone would recognise the name of the neuroscientist instrumental in the development of the LipService patch. But he couldn’t have been the first to own the book, as the date at the top of the frontispiece was 1869. Below was an inscription:

  This book is bound in the hide of an indigent, one Eda-Lyn, who died at the almshouse. On conducting the autopsy, I discovered Taenia solium – the same bladder worm recently proven by Dr Friedrich Küchenmeister to be the juvenile form of the pork tapeworm – encysted in the tissue. Having seen the patient devouring ham and bologna sausage brought by a visiting relative in a singularly undainty fashion, I theorised a connection between her intemperate consumption and her death, and presented my findings as my first humble contribution to the Journal of Medicine. Thus, at least in death the parasitic classes contribute to the improved health of society. I flayed and dressed the skin according to the tanner’s art before handing it to a bookbinder.

  Dr Emmet Skinner

  I wanted to drop it but I couldn’t just let the last book that my dad gave me – and the only book I’ve ever taken from the repository – fall. My fingernails clenched around it, like teeth holding it away from the tongue, until I could finally release it safely. Trying to wipe away the black staining taste, my hands grazed heavily at my thighs, soothing and satisfying myself on the warm chanterelle mounds of my skin. Across from me was Eda-Lyn – perfectly cured. Why was this afflicted textual body the last thing that Dad put into my hands?

  Five months were left before my eighteenth birthday and the rupture was coming some day soon. Even if it’s just a tiny rip in an artery wall, it might as well be one of those portholes – fistulas – they cut in the side of cows so they can keep shoving things in and pulling them out. Swivelling eyeball to the glass, the wearers of rubber gloves make sure the herd has a belly full of trademarked enzymes, which can digest the corporate message good and proper. The only difference is we cover our holes with patches.

  Lying on my back in bed at night, I groped for that bulging aneurysm in a cerebral artery. I wanted to probe it and have it answer back with sensation like wiggling a loose tooth. But I couldn’t grasp it. All I ended up with was an impossible-to-pinpoint headache. The rupture is the unspeakable divide – no one’s words live to tell the tale. Ask anyone who has come of haemorrh-age what the bleed is like, and the answer is always exactly the same: For our share of mind we receive brand equity – our place in and piece of the capital. We have our premises; finally, we belong. We can never again be misunderstood. So there is fulfilment in our every fleeting fad. It’s catechism – the social principles programmed into every patch irrespective of branding. Only it doesn’t answer the question. It says nothing about how it feels for the power grid to fail in a whole district of the brain, reducing it to candles and a Primus stove.

  I asked Dad about it. He started to rattle off the catechism, then stopped suddenly. Taking one of the copies of Great Expectations, he ripped out pages and randomly stuffed them back between the others before handing me the book. Holding the disordered sheets, a sickbed of incoherent narrative, I felt a cold intravenous drip of fear.

  My classmates were all really hyped about haemorrh-aging. Osric was the first to bleed. It happened during a lesson on a day I skipped school to read at the book repository. I would’ve done that more often if I hadn’t been afraid the teachers would notice and start investigating, but I was sorry to have missed Osric’s rupture. The other kids didn’t seem to have been paying attention to the stuff I was interested in. Most of their talk was about how he’d managed to be the first. Some said it was the weird neck stretches everyone saw him doing several times a day – right arm over the top of his head so the hand
covered his left ear and his head tilted to the right. Then he’d switch to the opposite side. Others said it was because he had built an affiliation to a non-consumer tech brand – something to do with plant automation – and the company had decided to fast-track him. None of it made much sense, but everyone was incentivised and neck stretches became a real signature move.

  It’s not that I didn’t know the signs of haemorrhage – every six-year-old knows those from the symptoms jingle.

  A little boy in brands unversed,

  wanted to be big so bad he burst,

  a vessel and blood dispersed.

  Limb’s gone dead,

  Lose the thread,

  Words unsaid,

  Reeling head.

  Now he’s brand endorsed.

  With all the words rehearsed.

  Little kids join hands in a circle to chant it and act out the symptoms – paralysis in the right arm, confusion, impaired speech and dizziness. They all fall down on the word ‘head’ and leap up again on ‘rehearsed’. The day I found Dad in the silo after school, the jingle was running through my head like the music of an ice-cream truck carried on a cold dark night. It was what made me feel sure that he’d had another brain haemorrhage. He had collapsed and I was afraid he wouldn’t be bouncing back up again like a kid.

  He was lying among a whole shelf of scattered books that he must have pulled with him as he fell. One volume was spread open under his chin. He pinned it to his ribs with his left hand pressing against the binding. He tried to speak but I couldn’t understand him. He was a small crumpled note among a grandeur of words. Next to the papery pallor of his face, the leather cover had the oiled, taut look of a wrestler sitting on his chest. When I tried to take it from him so I could help him up, he resisted, making strange noises and pushing the book at me, not letting me put it aside. Only when I opened my hazmat suit and slipped it under my shirt did he sink back into the editions around him.