Machine Of Death (37 page)

She tried not to look around the store as she marched toward the dairy case, conveniently located on the back wall past just about everything else imaginable. She averted her eyes from $4.99 DVDs and 3-for-$8 T-shirts. She was mostly successful at avoiding glances into the overflowing carts of people with poor impulse control, and felt guilty for the smug sense of superiority that crept in to reward the effort.

Halfway between Home Electronics and Furniture, she rounded a corner and was blindsided by Housewares. Brightly-colored boxes of the Fat-It-Out Advanced Nutritional System crowded an entire endcap. She’d only
just
pushed that ridiculous-looking skillet-with-a-spit-valve image out of her mind but
here it was again,
the packaging blasting Healthful Advantages™ at her in 100-point yellow type. She whirled away and hid by the food-storage bins to catch her breath. She felt chased by a monster.

She’d tried hard,
really
hard, to do a good job producing her first big campaign for
JBE
. And Fat-It-Out had repaid her by taking over every waking hour of her life.

Six months ago, when she was burning out working for Jack as an associate producer, she’d tried taking her portfolio to Rockefeller+King, the big ad agency—the one with the athletic shoe account and the soda account and the three competing insurance accounts. But they’d laughed her out of the office, and told her to take her weight-loss cream and her hair-removal spray and her leather-repair paste with her. (Well, they hadn’t said that
exactly,
but she’d gotten a distinct vibe of contempt from their trendy glasses and carefully tousled haircuts—and they hadn’t called back, so what did it matter what they’d actually said?)

And then Fat-It-Out had come along, and Jack had handed her the reins, and she’d buckled down and tried her best to do a good job—the only thing she knew
how
to do—and she’d knocked the ball out of the park.

So this was it, now. She was an infomercial producer.

She gathered herself. She straightened, and took a breath. She tried to picture the ProntoTester on the shelf here in six months, but stalled trying to imagine what the box copy could legally say: “Inaccurate drug test!” maybe, or perhaps “Random word generator!”

“Ooh, Dolores, have you seen this one?” The voice filtered from around the corner, back by the Fat-It-Out boxes— Kelly heard the squeak of shopping-cart wheels, the wheeze of labored breath, the rustle of hands on a cardboard box; the clank of pans shifting inside.  

Then, another woman’s voice: “Look, it’s got a valve for draining the oil out! Isn’t that clever? I’ll bet Lacey would love this for her new apartment. She needs to start eating healthier.”

“What a great idea!” came the chirping response. 

Kelly wanted to round the corner and scream,
No! It’s just cheap pans that one Chinese company couldn’t sell on their own married with cheap valves that another Chinese company couldn’t sell on their own.
As the unseen women read each other the hyperbolic statements from the back of the box—statements that Kelly herself had written and revised and erased and re-written and ultimately approved for the packaging—Kelly felt her cheeks begin to burn. She wanted to shout:
I wasn’t being
serious
when I implied it would change your life; it’s just something you
say
in marketing!

But instead, she said nothing.

“How’s it coming?” Jack asked, grabbing Kelly’s shoulders and squeezing. 

Kelly jumped in her plastic chair, startled—then shrugged his hands away. “Slow,” she said, standing and crossing the breakroom to retrieve a mug of hot water from the microwave, opening the door with ten seconds left to go. “But it’s coming along.” She didn’t mention that in the last two weeks, the only progress she’d made at all had been in her level of anxiety.

She’d stalled creatively. Without consistent results, she had no sales angle; without a sales angle, she had no campaign. The Pronto-Tester seemed to mock her; its
LED
, finger divot, and serrated mouth formed a leering face that watched her pace a furrow into the carpet. Periodically it stuck its tongue out to mock her—in the form of another cryptic slip of paper that raised more questions than it answered. As the slips began to accumulate into a terrible mountain of frustration, each new theory dashed by the next result, its blank expression seemed to her absurdly, maddeningly calm.

And other pressing matters had come up for her—health insurance paperwork, renewing magazine subscriptions, getting a new cell phone and transferring her whole phonebook. Days had rolled by unmarked, save by her nightly resolution that tomorrow would be more productive.

Still, she knew she’d get it done eventually. After all, she was the genius behind Fat-It-Out.

“I bet it’s gonna be great,” Jack grinned. He turned to retrieve a stack of papers from the printer, paging through them, throwing a few away. “I could get used to this whole hands-off kinda deal. I mean, don’t get me wrong, shipping out skillets takes up most the day. But I’m working on courting some new clients, drumming up some business. I even got a new slogan, check it out—’
J-B-E
is going up, up, up!’” He spread his hands like a presenter on one of his infomercials, his showman instincts kicking in. “Came to me in the shower! I’m thinking of having new cards printed. Orange is hot, right? You want an orange business card?”

“Absolutely,” Kelly said, fumbling with a tea bag, splashing it into the mug, spilling hot water on the counter. How long were you supposed to steep it? Did it get bitter if you left it in too long? She was bad at tea.

“I
knew
it! I
knew
you’d love it!” Jack rubbed his meaty hands together. “And here’s a little incentive for you. Let me take you
behind
the
scenes.
” He shuffled through the stack of printouts and produced what looked like an invoice, written entirely in Chinese. “Take a look at this!”

“I have no idea what that says.”

“Say hello to the proud new owner of two hundred thousand ProntoTesters,” Jack said smugly.

Kelly suddenly felt her vision swim. She tried to talk, but her mouth was dry. Reflexively she sipped her tea, nearly scalding her tongue. Through a haze of steam she choked, “You bought out the factory?”

“Every English one they made!” Jack beamed. “Did I tell you before? How those idiots tried to screw me on the Fat-It-Out? Cheap bastards quoted me three-eighteen American per unit, something like that—then, all of a sudden, when I have to fill ten thousand orders in a week, the price
mysteriously
jumps to five-oh-one! Trying to screw me over!”

“That’s a big difference,” she acknowledged.

“They blamed it on the exchange rate,” Jack said, tossing the invoice onto the counter atop the other printouts. “The dollar sucks, but not
that
bad
that
fast. In the end I paid the bill, I mean, I had to, or else that’s it for our sales—and
we
were charging thirty-nine-ninety-five-plus-S&H. But still.” Kelly cringed as he popped his knuckles, one after the other. “ProntoTester is gonna do
great
. I
know
it will. This”—he tapped the Chinese invoice—”this is me
believing
in you, Kel. Two hundred thousand now, two million tomorrow, twenty million next week! Who knows? This could real easily be our
careers.”

Kelly felt a knot settle in her stomach. The possibility of spending an entire career with Jack made her queasy. She took a cautious sip of the tea, and thought she felt the steam cloud up inside her skull.

“Oh, and one other thing, no big deal,” he said. Kelly noted a sudden change in his tone—forced casual, now. “In case you get a call from some lawyer. There’s some B.S. class-action out there building against Fat-It-Out. It’s nothing—gold-diggers, trying to get a piece. It’s always the way when you make it big.” He waved his hand dismissively, as if he were all too familiar with the trappings of success. Kelly watched a bead of sweat roll down the back of his neck. “They’re going after the non-stick coating. Toxic something-or-other. It’s totally baseless, but in case you hear from someone—which you shouldn’t, because I’ve been keeping your name away from this—I want to make sure we all know the story.” He began to tick off points on his fingers. Kelly suddenly had the odd feeling that he’d had to recite this particular list before. “
JBE
has no role in manufacturing our products, we are simply marketers and distributors.
JBE
makes no warranty claims as to the condition or durability of its products.
JBE
relies on its customers to make determinations of quality prior to purchase. Many thousands of customers have reported no complaints with
JBE
products in the past.” 

He jerked up to look her in the eye, his red-rimmed gaze belying a deep, sudden intensity that gave Kelly a chill. “You got all that?”

“Okay, show me this amazing idea of yours,” she told Julio, slumping into the uncomfortable chair behind his editing workstation. Four weeks now, and she was maddeningly no closer to a finished product than before—even though Julio always seemed to be working on something. He told her it was just how he filled his days, scrolling through the hours of useless footage they’d shot, looking for funny outtakes and re-cutting words and phrases into bizarre non sequiturs. He did this a lot, during downtime. He said it was how he kept his perspective.

She’d even seen glimpses of other projects on his monitor, stuff they’d shot for Fat-It-Out or even older material predating her tenure—raw footage from campaigns like HairGlo-5, the hair-sculpting wax made with “real bee proteins,” or the TradeCenter, a kids’ bank that had unfortunately hit the market in September 2001. 

And she had to admit that Julio had his fake-busy work down to a science. Jack could burst in the door at any given time, and Julio would look every bit as productive as his timecard claimed he was.

“Tell me what you think,” Julio said, tapping his spacebar to start the video playing.

Sappy music swelled. On the monitor, handsome parents played with beautiful children. (Kelly recognized shots from the “Contemporary Family” stock-footage collection.) Julio’s voice, lively and bright, rang from the speakers: “Do you suffer from anxiety about the future? Concerned about what tomorrow may bring? Are you
afraid of dying?”

“This is hilarious,” Kelly grinned.

The ProntoTester appeared on the screen with a flash. “Now, the solution to all of life’s uncertainty! 
The Machine of Death.”
 One of the phone-response kids stuck his finger into the device, then held it up with a cheesy smile. A close-up revealed that his test result was
SKYDIVING
ACCIDENT
. Julio’s voice continued: “It tells you exactly how you’ll leave this earth!” 

Kelly burst out laughing. “You sound so
serious!”

“We’re gonna run this on air, right?” Julio deadpanned, stopping the playback with a keystroke.

“Totally. You just made my job a lot easier,” Kelly said. “Oh, man. Early lunch for everyone!”

Julio spun in his chair. “Awesome! But I’m still billing the hours.”

“Go for it. It’s not my money.” Kelly motioned to the computer. “Keep playing! How long is it?”

“So far I’ve got, like, thirty-two minutes.” Julio laughed at Kelly’s gaping expression. “Been a slow couple of weeks!” 

He moved his mouse and cued footage on the video monitor. “See, here we’ve got outtakes from Fat-It-Out—these guys are dying from
CHOLESTEROL
. And check this out.” He pressed the spacebar, and they watched a woman in Spandex do a series of awkward crunches inside a spring-like contraption. A big red graphic slammed onto the footage:
SHODDY
EXERCISER
.

Kelly doubled over with laughter. The Ab-Mazing had certainly been the shoddiest exerciser she’d ever seen, though it hadn’t stopped
JBE
from peddling them in no less than three successive infomercials as Jack tried desperately to sell his back stock. “Jack’s brain would go nuclear if he saw this. You have no
idea
how much money he lost on that piece of crap.”

“Oh, I have an idea.” Julio half-twisted to glance back at Kelly. He seemed to consider adding something else—but a sharp rap on the door silenced him. He whirled back to the computer and cued footage of the ProntoTester onto the monitor.

Jack burst into the room officiously. “Kel, quick question—you haven’t heard from that lawyer I talked about, have you? About Fat-It-Out?”

Kelly shook her head. “No. Should I have?”

“No! No, it’s fine. But if you do get a call, don’t say anything, okay? Let me know right away.” He glanced at the monitor and beamed. “Looks great! Coming right along! When do I get to see a cut?”

Kelly swallowed. Luckily, Julio’s complicated timeline on the computer screen gave the impression of progress. “Soon,” she said. “Still tweaking.”

“That’s why you’re gonna go far,” Jack said, leaning his bulk on the creaking desk. “Never satisfied!” He thumped the desk twice for emphasis, clapped Kelly heavily on the shoulder, and slammed the door viciously behind him.

Kelly and Julio sat shell-shocked as the echoes of his presence faded. Julio was the first to speak: “I am so glad that guy is dumber than I am.”

Kelly drummed her fingers on the desk nervously. Suddenly she felt stupid, wasteful. “How soon do you think we could have a
real
cut?”

Julio’s new laugh was bitter. “You’re not serious. Give me a script! Shoot us some footage!” He looked at his watch. “When is this thing supposed to air? If I cared about that sort of thing, I would be freaking out right about now.”

Kelly nodded slowly. “Yeah. Unfortunately, I
do
care about that sort of thing. The airtime’s been bought for weeks.” She stood and paced in a tight circle, trying desperately to make all the problems go away by waving her hands around—after all, nothing
else
was working. “I just can’t wrap my head around this stupid thing! All Jack can say is, he thinks it’s a drug test. Well, guess what! It’s clearly
not.
I
can’t
sell it as a drug test because he’s going to get us sued and we’ll all be out of a job! Why the hell does he think it’s a drug test?” She blew loose hair from her face and slumped back into the chair. The whole thing was asinine. She’d even begged him to hire a translation firm and get the schematics translated from Chinese, but he was paranoid about information leaking to competitors. So she banged her head aginst the wall for four weeks, and the result was that they were nowhere.