by R.C. Savoie.
R.C. Savoie’s debut novel lost trademark is about by a young man who was named and raised by a multinational corporation. They use him for their official logo, printing a stylized version of his face on every product they produce. All of this makes him an uniquely famous person…
Later in bed, Celica and I watched a purple crayon streak warm the sky.
“What’s it like being famous?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You know. Celebrities are always asked this question, but everything printed feels, I don’t know. Printed. Scripted. Like a lion trainer taught them how to jump through the hoops. I want a real answer. How it feels. Really.”
“I’m not a real celebrity.”
“Stop talking to the microphone. You just ran your tongue over my body for two hours. Feel free to loosen up any time now.”
My head was in her lap. She was running her fingers through my hair.
“Why do you want to be a model?”
“I asked first.”
“Touché. Ok, ever go grocery shopping?”
“No. Never.”
“So you walk into the grocery store and right at the entrance is a big ceiling-mounted monitor showing an image of you walking through the automated doors, there telling you we are watching, we’re here, you’re on film, don’t try nothing.”
“So it’s like being filmed all the time.”
“Hold on.”
“Ok.”
“It’s there for the shoplifters, you know this, understand it implicitly and ignore the monitor because you are not a shoplifter. It isn’t speaking to you. So you go about your business, get a shopping cart and wander through the produce section with all these open piles of fruits and vegetables and pine barrels of various nuts. And you see some peanuts on sale, 80% off by the pound. But nobody gives anything away unless something’s wrong with it. So you suspect a rip-off and totally should because a company that kills its own profits is like a person shooting herself in the leg. Half of the nuts must be rotting or had fertilizer dumped on them or something equally terrible. So you pick up a peanut and look at it suspiciously, turning it over and over until you notice a small hole in the shell. Aha! You wedge your fingernails in to pry it open and pop out a nut. Then you hold it to your face and turn it over and over looking for flaws, but can’t find any. It looks like any other peanut. You hold it to your nostrils and inhale deeply. It smells like any other peanut. But you just know something’s up, so you hesitate a moment, then think screw it and pop it into your mouth.”
“And it’s fine.”
“Doesn’t matter. Because that’s when you remember the cameras.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“I don’t care, I’m telling you this is how it is. That oh shit! moment you realize you’re being filmed with a stolen peanut in your mouth. This is what fame is like. It’s about being like anyone else in a supermarket, walking around with hidden cameras filming your every move – except when you’re famous you’ve always eaten a stolen peanut and feel the camera eye on you and have the oh shits fluttering in your stomach. The camera is in your head. Sometimes you forget about it like the rest of the world, but you really can’t because that suspiciously flawed peanut is your humanity, and you always need to pick at it to figure out why it’s flawed. But when regular people do this no one cares. The film rolls on and is eventually recorded over with more bland footage of more regular people picking at their peanuts. But when celebrities do this the lenses zoom in, the film is filed away for sale to the worst sort of people, your peanut is always stolen. And you know this, most celebrities even accept it. But when you forget it it’s like sleepwalking toward a descending staircase: you’re just bound for a terrible fall. So you have to keep yourself constantly awake. You can never sleep. You must remember the cameras. And that’s your answer: fame is insomnia. But hey, some people like being caffeinated all the time. I’m not one of them. Then again though, I’m just a face on a toaster. I’m not really famous-famous.”
The sky added a layer of orange to the purple. When I looked up her head was bowed asleep.