Heathern by Jack Womack

hate to think you were just humoring me."
    "After Friday afternoon I never suspected anything
would actually come of this," said Bernard. "I thought he'd
race back to his flock and that'd be the last we heard of
him."
    "Told you I made arrangements." Susie looked at her
husband; shook her head as if he'd told her he'd accidentally mowed down her flower beds.
    "That shouldn't have changed things. By all rights he
should've sprung up like a toadstool somewhere else. But
perhaps hearing our words issuing from a different mouth
decided the vote." Bernard turned to me, smiling with lips
so perfectly curved, so remarkably still, that they might
have been painted on his face.

    "She's learning," said Thatcher.
    "So if all's roses, what's the problem?" Susie asked,
taking no shelter from the world behind sunglasses or
newspaper this morning. Not even the residue of a smile
showed on her face.
    "The problem is that from here out I'll be working from
theory alone," said Bernard. "As I understand it, you want
to spread Macaffrey's cult of personality more thickly upon
the populace."
    "Without any public connection to us, just yet," said
Thatcher. "We'll backchannel him, meantime, when we
need him for company work."
    "But what's desired? You want the audience entertained
with sermons, blessings, the occasional odd miracle? You
want to see what ripples result from tossing him in the
pond?"
    "Sounds good to start," said Thatcher. "You're acting like
this is all something new to you, Bernard. You've just got to
figure out the best way to sell a new product-"
    "Apples and oranges," said Bernard. The gray world
curtained the room's great window; it rained, several
hundred feet beneath us.
    "I don't get you-"
    "How do you sell a messiah, Thatcher?" Bernard asked.
    "Above cost," said Thatcher, laughing. "In the fastest
way."
    "You'd use television to do that?"
    "How else?" Susie asked. "Weren't you referring to some
tests last week you could run?"
    "Tests, eventually. That's not the problem here. If the
audience first sees Macaffrey on television, they won't see
him."
    "Don't give me analysis bullshit, Bernard, that doesn't
make sense," said Thatcher. "What are you trying to say?"
    "Explicate and deconstruct," Susie added.
    Bernard rested his chin in his hand as if the weight of his head had proved too great for his neck. "A car needs gas,"
he said. "A messiah needs belief. Nobody believes anything
they see on television unless they've convinced themselves
they could see it in real life. His followers would tune in
every night, all twenty or thirty of them. Anyone else'll zap
right past."

    "We can put any damn foolishness we want to on TV and
people believe it-"
    "Apples and oranges," Bernard repeated. "When we put
most things on television it's not to make them believe, it's
to make what they're seeing their background. Assimilation
is what you aim for with television. Shooting your image
through the skull repeatedly that, eventually, enough of it
sticks that it seems to have always been there. That won't
work in the same way, this time."
    "Eye the tube any day of the week," said Susie. "New
faces show every hour. Hundreds megatime it once they get
their minute, why shouldn't he if that's what's wanted?"
Looking to her husband, she lowered her voice, speaking to
him as if they sat beneath moonlight. "If he's a wash, cut
losses all the sooner."
    Bernard gnawed the end of his thumb, drawing from the
cuticle a red droplet resembling a ladybug at rest. "Let's talk
image equivalency," he said. "People appear on television.
For a while someone might tune in specifically to see them.
Then a fresh distraction appears on a different channel.
Nobody knows what keeps people watching particular
things. A democracy of images is impossible to deliberately
subvert."
    "We need the right sales pitch, Bernard-" said Thatcher.
    "You're not pushing detergent. You want this fool to
show up one night after the