Sales Call

Millions of walls, very safely constructed, for your protection, and crafted most likely at the edge of a cliff overlooking a great ocean of infinite regress; this is the real estate I’d like to pitch to you today if you have a patient enough ear to hear. It’s a once in a lifetime deal, so don’t put down the phone. Good, no expiation of the static yet; I can hear your anticipatory breathing. This house was built for single individuals who view their lives as a kind of warfare and have a difficult diagnosis of, let’s put it bluntly, loneliness, which I’d like to describe to you in full right now: basically you crave human connection and all that community stuff but actual contact with another person turns you off from the notion of actually knowing and being known by one. It’s a tricky situation that I think shows a crying need of solution in the lives of so many people like yourself. So many of us seem to be stuck in this annoying interim of longing and distaste for friendship, probably because we can’t deny our humanness and at the same time can’t seem to align our biology out of the dominant reach of the amygdala, which if overused (and it usually is) tells the brain that we should be afraid of just about everything in the world, not least of all the aforementioned human connection. This house, I assert, is such a solution for you. I said the place has got millions of walls. This may seem very strange to you, so let me clarify. Each wall is actually a mirror of intrigue, and in each one you’ll see a different variation of your own reflection to the degree that most of them look like other people. Okay, you got me, they’re not really mirrors. They’re reactionary holograms. You put in your preferences into a coder and it gets connected to the whole network. You could beckon anything from a tomato to an even sexier rendition of your favorite actress from a mirror and have it walk you to bed. The catch is, and here’s the actual catch, there’s no vulnerability involved. No accountability, no honesty, no irritating need to explain yourself to anyone. You don’t have to say “I love you.” You can just say “I need you to love me” and the reflections are going to obey you no questions asked. That’s the magic of the mirror house on the edge of the cliff. (Great views, by the way. Away from the city smog). Everything about it is designed to make you really believe you are surrounded by an affectionate host of actual physical beings, and thank God we’ve developed such insane technology to succeed with this illusion. We suspect it takes our customers about a week to forget that it is really an illusion, and the stunning power of the human mind takes over completely, taking the confines of the house and its infinite number of communal members as its ultimate reality, its reference point, its only need. Its, let us say, perfect solution. I don’t know what else you need me to say as a convincer. If you’re worried about not getting physical touch, worry not. Our holograms can acquire any amount of preferred incarnation, so, to put if lightly, feel free to copulate to your heart’s content with the fashioned figure of your choice and in any disrobing method you choose. That’s right. This is how amazing the tech is. The final thing I should say is about the house. It’s actually not a house--it’s a manifested copy of your neural universe so basically you’ll be walking around in a brightly populated conscience, provided it really is so bright as you believe. But the house is real. And the water is real, and there’s a window upstairs in the attic to remind you of that if you ever want or need that reminder. Sounds good, I’ll put down a mortgage, payable over a lifetime. Perhaps an eternity, but then again what’s the difference? {Phone clicks, both go about their business) So this guy buys the house and like all the others we never see him again. The funny thing is we know they all want to leave, intensely want, but they can’t. They’d rather stay there in the cyclical misery of increasing in desire and diminishing in result. It’s a big joke. Free will you say? Sure, I guess so, but not in the house of mirrors. This place will so hijack your care for choice that you just have to have have to have have to have. It never ends. Put a cake and a carrot in front of a person and with some understandable submission to the taste of cake they will go for what’s sweeter, saying to themselves that it’s just this once, that diet usually does and should consist in carrots and apples and nice soup and all the rest. Put a thousand cakes in a room with barely any alternative except maybe some whimpering oranges in the corner and the diet will turn upside down. Cake for days. For months. For years. Forever. You see, when we limit the decision, when we advertise and entice people’s vulnerabilities for sweet things and sensational feelings and a constant intake of pleasure, then pretty soon they will forget there was any choice to make in the first place. There IS NO CARROT. This is all we know now. Of course there are still those folks who say no to TV or sugar or online pornography because if they had one/access to it they would spend every hour with the thing clamoring in the background, staring them in the face or implanting stimulus in their ears. That’s just it. With the excess of pleasure, without an off button, without the old King James “self control,” we will spend our whole lives trapped inside a house of mirrors. Why mirrors? Because this is all bent on the self. These are all bound for reflection. These are all essentially hopeless indulgences attempting to satiate an inner emptiness, an inner need. What do we need to fix the gap? Beats me. Not intercourse, and not infinite intercourse with infinite number of partners, not getting high on you name it, not religion, not marriage, not your perfect kids, not basketball, not yoga, not anything. {Looks at the ground and looks like he’s wincing so as to cause some genuine concern among his formerly nodding and grinning friends} No, it’s okay, I’m alright, don’t worry about me. What you think I’m having a spell of depression, here in front of you? Nonsense. Pass me another drink. Maybe a dozen more, come to think of it. Let’s forget every word I said tonight and then maybe we’ll be so hammered we won’t even remember we talked about it come tomorrow morning. No, really, pile on the jokes, Sam.