Finding Seth Haines: Part V
Let's Make a Deal
I didn’t expect to belch out a new Part to this series so soon. But it was thanksgiving, and maybe I was feeling grateful for you all.
You can find Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV by clicking the links. Like last week’s, though, this can be enjoyed as a standalone piece.
Enjoy. If you do, you can throw a tip in the virtual jar to help caffeinate this story. (I’ll leave video messages for anyone who throws a tip in the jar this week.)
V.
In 1984, the Shiny New Objects Division of the MTT—the SNOD—was run by a fat, cigar-smoking man whose skin tone was that of an underripe blueberry. Before he’d ascended to the position of Secretary of the SNOD, he’d been an Undersecretary for the Western Division. This meant he was responsible for both whetting the appetites of modern consumers and temporarily satiating those appetites with molded plastic, space-aged polymers, and fungible fashion.
He’d done an exceptional job. In 1984, spending was up nearly six-and-half percent. All that spending boosted the country’s real gross national product. The people at SNOD recognized he’d been responsible for much of that growth because his division was over Hollywood, and Hollywood—which is to say the SNOD—was over movie product placement. Superman featured Marlboro placement in 1978, then Heinz tomatoes made an appearance in The Shining in 1980, and in 1982, Reese’s sold boatloads of pieces because a little boy shared them with an alien in a real tear-jerker of a movie.
Before becoming the Undersecretary, he’d owned the largest car dealership in the San Fernando Valley. In the early 1900s, he’d been a real estate salesman who’d all but printed money in the California real estate boom. Before that, he’d sold pick axes and pans to the ravenous treasure hunters in Northern California. Before that, he’d been an early advocate for succession from England and a member of the Slave Trading Guild of the MTT. There were many before thats—a stint as an arms trader in Western Europe; the sole shareholder of a textile manufacturer in Vienna; a money collector and medicine salesman during the plague years (such lucrative times!). He’d sold and sold and sold, all the way back to the days of Cain.
By 1984, he’d given centuries of service to the MTT, and that’s when the coveted position of Secretary of SNOD opened up. The previous Secretary had grown a conscience—an unfathomable evolutionary phenomenon for men of that position—and the higher-ups at the MTT sacrificed him to Moloch. Both fire and stake were involved, and the directors of the various departments danced around the fire half-naked singing songs older than recorded history. Anyhow, the MTT deliberated less than a day before naming the sacrifice’s successor.
Oh, his name.
Throughout history, he’d gone by many names, including the Count of St. Germain. Some of his names are recorded in religious texts, ancient myths, and urban legends. By the 1970s, though, he went by Bud. Such a friendly name.
When Bud took the reigns as Secretary, the MTT’s hunger-stoking apparatus was churning forward like a belching steam engine. They’d developed newspaper advertisements with the advent of the printing press. Then came the Sears catalog, which stoked housewives’ hunger for toasters and their sons' hunger for women in underwear. Then came long-form radio advertisements. Then the television and the resulting Vitamix infomercial hosted by Papa Bernard, who was Bud’s first cousin on the Cain side of his family. They’d developed the gameshow, too, the pinnacle platform for parading shiny new objects in front of hungry humans who watched via syndication—a whole populous of moths gathering around the flickering candle.
On some shows, it was difficult to discern which was the product—the participants or the Brand New Car! And this was the show's genius: All those participants already had cars, but they didn’t have the Brand New Car! Humans were suckers for brand new things when their perfectly serviceable things were no longer brand new. This explains why so many marriages end in affairs. People, it turns out, see each other as products, too.
These gameshows only showcased objects created by guild members in good standing with the MTT, particularly those whose factories belched smog and pissed waste into the rivers. These factories were mostly in Detroit and Pittsburgh. As for good standing, it required only this: (a) pay the prevailing tax to the MTT; and, (b) ensure smog and toxic piss didn't exceed 101% of the previous year's numbers.
Among the gameshows Bud enjoyed the most was Let’s Make a Deal. The premise of the show: A charismatic host offered vacation packages, bedroom suits, and toaster ovens to grown-ass adults dressed in Halloween costumes. They’d play impossibly rigged games designed to short-circuit human psychology. The house odds for these games were better than those of the casinos in Las Vegas, which Bud also managed as part of the SNOD Secretariat.
It turns out that if you build a big enough candle, you can attract moths from all over the country, and this is exactly what happened. Television viewers went nuts over Let’s Make a Deal, and they bussed and flew into Glendale, California from Missoula, Little Rock, and Utica. Sometimes these moths won the great-big prizes. Most of the time, they earned a couple hundred bucks and a slap on the back for their willing participation in humiliation. And this was the odd part—they always smiled over their hundred-dollar humiliation. All these lifetimes later, Bud still found it puzzling that humans would do so much for a hundred spot and a two-minute blip on the television. He knew this, though: A two-minute blip was something they’d hold in their white-knuckled fists for the rest of their tiny lives. They’d show the clip to their children and their children’s children, and say Wasn’t that something? Humans loved to say Wasn’t that something? evenwhen the something was in service of nothing.
In 1984, Bud was at the pinnacle of his timeless search for pinnacles. This was years before he was displaced as the Secretary of the MTT. He didn't know a day would come when the MTT wouldn’t have to hand-pick department successors. How could he? How could he know that silly, unserious men would develop automated methods for stoking their own object-hunger? How could he know that even he would be replaced by intelligent algorithms?
Bud stood in the control room, watching the shiny new objects roll onto the floor of Let’s Make a Deal. The crew set these shiny new objects on spinning, oversized platters behind stage curtains. Saliva dripped down his teeth as he watched the cherry-red Chevette move into position. What wouldn’t lusty people do for a chance to own that shiny slab of metal? The car was full of numbers—two doors; 1.6 liter, two barrel engine; five speed transmission. The retail price was $6,543.00, a perfectly descending cascade of numerals. That wouldn’t do, though. It was too easy to remember.
He pushed the button on the intercom.
Monty?
A voice answered, Yes.
Let’s change the price. Maybe something a little more complicated? Let’s call the price $6,228.
All even numbers. No discernable pattern.
Yes, he thought. We’ll shotgun numbers at her tiny little brain, shortcircuit her wiring. We’ll flood her with adrenaline and hope before we pull the rug out from under the waitress’s feet. We’ll give her a couple hundred bucks and watch her ride all the way back to Utica, wondering how it’d feel to be driving a new car instead of riding a Greyhound leaking shit fumes from the lavatory. She'll dream of ways to buy that car. Maybe she'll even take out some loans, go to college, and get a shiny new degree.
The lights from the monitor flooded Bud’s eyes. I looked into those eyes and saw nothing but equations that all summed to zero.
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LOVING this series. You’ve got a brilliant way of putting that daydream time-travel experience into words.