Beat Space. Tommaso Pincio
associate it with anxieties he had long since put behind him.
An Asian girl in red coveralls had emerged from the truck and was unloading a crate of bottles. Jack watched her as she centered the crate on the dolly, trying to catch her eye. He was unsuccessful, and this added a touch of sadness was added to the unrest already gnawing at him. Suddenly, he felt a desire to get into the Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc. delivery truck and go deliver bottles of Space™ with the girl. He no longer wanted to be an orbital controller; he wanted to stay on Earth, he wanted to stay, sitting in that truck, he wanted to sleep there, in that truck, with the Asian girl in the red coveralls at the wheel, driving until night fell, leaving the city behind them and moving along mysterious dirt roads left unfinished, because it had been discovered such roads would take travelers far from their point of origin without leading them anywhere. Neal was saying, “Because there’s nothing more relentless and you gotta believe me, old boy, God only knows you gotta believe me. I’m not one of those guys you can fix up real easy and you know that’s the truth, and yet that’s exactly how it went. Can you believe it, Jack? Can you believe something like that, eh Jack? You with me? Relentless like you wouldn’t believe. I for one can’t do it, I couldn’t ever do it and believe me I’ve tried. When are they going to open this place?” The Asian girl in red coveralls had come out of the bar and was getting back into the Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc. delivery truck. Jack turned and looked down to the end of the street where the girl would disappear from his life forever. The truck pulled out, turned around and headed in the opposite direction. Another strange morning sign. Jack hit his heels on the pavement. It wasn’t exhaustion or the cold. It was anxiety.
10.
While Jack and Neal waited for the doors of Quantum to open, some miles away, in a curious international-style house built on the rocks of a waterfall, Norma Jeane Mortensen was sleeping in what her husband had defined as the doughnut position. Her insufferable husband and his idiotic definitions.
Norma Jeane Mortensen had entrusted her remaining hopes of finding that certain something to the Stars—and for a brief period of time she deceived herself into thinking she had found it in her present insufferable husband. At the end of the spring of 1956, however, she was living her life, not giving much thought to the fact that the Sun was about to enter Gemini. The horoscopes provided daily updates on the fluctuating movements of the humors and uneventful course of her existence, but Norma Jeane didn’t really associate the contents of those reports with the celestial vault advancing above her. She had a vague notion of the problem, she knew that the future was written in the Stars, but she didn’t connect the Stars to the sky. Stars was a word, nothing more, a beautiful word with a smooth sound that made things seem to flow better just by saying it. Norma knew perfectly well what a real Star was, but the Stars of her horoscope were, for her, the heavens of her dreams and the answer to all sadness, a heaven where the Stars moved like cartoon characters and the concept of the Spacial Void made no sense.
In fact, Norma Jeane hated Space. She hated it for many reasons, first among them being that her husband worked at the Orbital Control Command Center for Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc. The others were merely irrelevant and irrational variations of the first—that is, her protean hatred for her husband. Because her hatred for Space and for her husband were really just different sides of the same coin.
When she thought about her husband—thought because she now avoided looking him in the eyes—she thought him an awkward man with glasses, crooked teeth and an uncompilable list of other defects that at one time, not long ago, were collected in the “everything!” sigh with which she would answer the question: “What was it that made you fall in love with him?” This man, the last of the tricks by which life induced her to make the wrong choice, went by the name of Arthur Miller, and in Norma Jeane’s thoughts he was nothing more than the steady mirror of her tragedy, of her way of life that was essentially an ill-advised relationship with the male world, the world where men, those dazzlers, went fishing . . . first blinding her completely and then—only then—appearing to her as something they weren’t.
On that late spring morning Norma Jeane Mortensen doughnuted herself further and further in an attempt to escape the waking state that had now taken hold of her mind. She wanted to squeeze her lids shut and sink back into sleep. Her lips were slightly parted and her breath moved the fabric of the pillow imperceptibly. She was blonde and considered unanimously irresistible. With a nervous twitch of her body she squeezed the radius of the doughnut even tighter. She wanted nothing more than for sleep to take her with it, down to wherever dreams go at the moment of waking.
11.
It has not yet been proved legally that Coca-Cola is hazardous to one’s health. It is, on the other hand, historically undeniable, notwithstanding the dubious veracity of sources, that in the past its ingredients have been used to cure vertigo, colds, arthritis, cancer, stomach aches, dysentery, leprosy, malaria, migraines, rheumatism, sciatica, and hysteria. Some of these ingredients are moreover said to serve as aphrodisiacs, stimulants, antispasmodics, psychotropics, and narcotics.
12.
Quantum had developed a new sales strategy. Bookstores would no longer be places in which the only admissible sounds were old European compositions played by string quartets emanating from hidden speakers at a near-inaudible level. It was time to break away from this history of silence that born of the idea that a good bookstore should remind you of a library. Why on earth should you even compare the two? One goes to the library to read and study books, to a bookstore to buy books. To the executives at Quantum it therefore seemed like an inevitable conclusion to eliminate books from the bookstore.
Eliminating books had at least two advantages. The first being that, with no book to buy in front of him, the customer forgot to be a consumer. Not a bad advantage, insofar as people don’t appreciate being perceived as a blob of potential consumers. The second advantage was even more interesting. Motivational studies had shown that books, especially when displayed in great quantities, make potential consumers who are already little inclined to read uneasy. A bookstore conceived in the classic library model conveys the very anti-commercial idea that one buys a book to read it. Eliminating the books meant brushing away the stuffy atmosphere that alienated many consumers from bookstores, pushing them straight into the arms of casual dining, the technical term used by market players in the fast-food age. This second advantage might seem incompatible with the first. Yet the genius of the operation lay in creating a perfect harmony between the habitual consumer who refused to consider a book a product like any other—because a book, unlike all other products, “is something that lasts”—and other potential consumers who had never bought a book in their lives because they were terrified by the product’s cultural longevity or, in other words, its inconsumability.
Finding a solution that could work both for the regular consumer and the potential consumer seemed impossible, and yet nothing could be simpler. If a consumer wants something more than a simple product, then get rid of the product. If a consumer is afraid of purchasing a product, by getting rid of the product the consumer regains his courage. Let’s Get Rid of the Books, therefore, was the philosophy used by Quantum bookstore chain executives as the basis for the design of their retail outlets. Resolving the next step—what to put in place of the books—was no problem at all, thanks to the established market rules whereby a beautiful girl always appears on behalf of a product. The true crux of commerce has always been not so much what as where: you can sell anything, you just have to display it in the right place.
In the fifties, consumer tastes bent towards the famous unproper shops, improper retail outlets. A serious study has yet to be done on the actual motivations pushing people to spend their money in spaces that were mysteriously functional but somehow incongruous to the nature of the product for purchase. But when the consumer mood moves without a shadow of a doubt in a very clear direction, trying to understand why is essentially pointless, the important thing is to ride the wave. Those, at least, were the tendencies of the time. In the particular case of Quantum, the bookstores drew inspiration from space-port check-in desks and fast-food joints, with the intention of conveying two fundamental impressions: that a book costs the same amount as a hamburger and that, despite its modest