“Do you have any advice? Like, what are the smartest cures loving the most these days?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said, “the Executioner’s Set has been selling like crazy, but ever since that second AOL video aired, we’ve been sold out of it. We do, however, have the deluxe Executioner’s Set in stock, and that one, in addition to the gallows and hood, comes with a guillotine, which I think is great, but it’s nearly twice as much as the regular set, and most people are more interested in using the gallows, so…The perennial favorite, of course, is the Chicago White Sox BullyKing set over here, which has, as you can see, an MLB-licensed batter’s helmet and jersey, plus a cute little stick of lampblack for the under-eye area, and, of course, a bat, but…I’m guessing by the way you’re not looking at where I’m pointing that you’re not a Sox fan, or maybe you have the set already? If you’re not a Sox fan, we have a Cubs set, a Reds set, a Cards set, a Tigers set, we might have a Yankees left, and maybe a Royals—I can go in back and check if—”
“I was thinking more about a toy or a game that doesn’t involve the cure hurting other cures or putting them to death.”
“I don’t…hmmm.”
“I remember, you guys used to sell yo-yos, for example. A matching set: one for the owner, one for the cure, you know? I think you sold a cure-size bumper-pool set, too. And a little juggling kit with beanbags and pins. Rings too, I think? Stuff like that, you know?”
“I didn’t know that,” said the clerk. “I mean we haven’t sold anything like that since I’ve been working here.”
“Well, it’s been a lot of years,” I said. “It was at the old location, actually.”
“Lemme think…We do have some dueling swords over here that you could, I guess, wrap up in something—electrical tape? or that blue putty stuff made for mounting posters? or even maybe just bubblegum maybe—which would make the swords a lot less wounding, and definitely unfatal, like I’m thinking they’d work more like those foam noodles kids like to hit each other with by the pool? I think? Or and then, let’s see…This stock-and-oubliette set here? It’s adjustable. So you could lower the posts on the stock, I guess, and use it as a whatsit—thing that runners jump in the Olymp—a hurdle. You could set the stock up like a hurdle for a race, maybe? But then you’d probably want at least three or four hurdles, and we might only have a couple sets lefts, and then I don’t even know what you’d do with all the oubliettes, so it would be kinda wasteful…You know, in my experience?—I know this is gonna sound a little new agey—but in my experience, best thing to do is to let the cure choose. Just open up your sleeve, set it on the case, and see what catches its eye. Like just let it walk along the case, and see where it pauses, you know? You might be surprised by what it’s drawn to.”
“Yeah, but that’ll ruin it,” I said. “I actually want what I buy here to be a surprise for the cure itself.”
“A surprise for the cure! That’s ador—”
“Shut up, shut up, fuck you, shut up,” boomed a man at the customer service desk clerk.
“You tell her!” said someone in line behind the man.
“Take it easy, fellas,” said someone else.
The booming man stormed off, shoulder-checking shelving. Pointing at the Hobbyist/Fetish clerk as he passed us, he said, “Fuck you, buddy. Fuck your whole shitty face.”
The Hobbyist/Fetish clerk was shaking his head.
“What a jerk,” I said.
“Yeah…” the clerk said. “I don’t know. I kinda understand his anger, actually. It’s our fault, in the end. The owner’s fault. The owner is an asshole, you know?”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“Well, like, did you see that giant sign on the front door that said, ‘Due to shipping delays, A(cute)rements continues to be out of Independence. Those customers who reserved their ampules in advance will receive a ten percent discount when the shipment arrives’?”
“I didn’t see it,” I said.
“Of course you didn’t,” the clerk said. “Because when my manager put that sign up this morning? The owner made him take it down. Said it was better for us to get the customers through the door. Said that even though they’d all be pissed as hell that the Independence shipment didn’t come in, a lot of them would still spend some money before they left—they wouldn’t want to have come all this way for nothing. Asshole was right, too. We’re doing, like, Christmas-level business this morning. But that customer? Probably the tenth person to curse me out.”
“I never would’ve thought people were so desperate for their cures not to need them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t that what Independence does?”
“Well, yeah. Right. I mean, that’s the prescribed usage. I guess probably some people are interested in that, but most of them want it for AOL, you know?”
“I don’t,” I said. “Tell me.”
“You didn’t see those Independence videos that P.A.L. made?”
“You know, I don’t really watch 20/20.”
“20/20 twenty-shmenty—I haven’t seen an hour of television where they haven’t managed to show at least one of those clips in…well not since before they first aired however many weeks ago. Three? I think three. Yeah. Maybe the first one was four weeks ago, but the second one—that was the big one—that was three.”
“I don’t watch that much TV in general, I guess.”
“I guess you must not! Anyway, wow. You gotta see that video, sir. Both of them, really, but especially the second one. It’s…inspiring. I mean, it’s causing a kind of revolution. People were coming in here just to—see, we were showing it on a loop on all our ‘Cure for Boredom’ checkout-line monitors til last Friday, and people were coming in just to watch it, over and over, but then someone must’ve narced because we got a cease-and-desist letter from ABC. A lot of shops did, I heard. They’re gonna do a home video release next week of P.A.L. AOLing a bunch of different cures using different setups, I guess, and they don’t want us to burn it out. ABC, I mean. So now—”
“I’m completely confused,” I said. “I still don’t even know what AOL is.”
“Right. Got ahead of myself. Auto-overload,” he said. “See, you overdose the cure with Independence, okay? You give it five full doses of Independence—just three if it’s a nascent—and then, once it kicks in? You give it a half dose of NeedyBuddy—a quarter dose if it’s a nascent—and then you put it in front of a mirror and it overloads. On itself.”