Connie Willis - Bellwether

“I saw her this morning,” she said. “She brought me Dr. Applegate’s mail.”

An antiangel, wandering through the world spreading gloom and destruction.

“Well, anyway,” Sarah said, “I’d better go see if I can find somebody in Management who can tell me what an expense gradation index is,” and left.

I went back to my hair-bobbing data. I ran a geographical distribution for 1923 and then for 1922. They showed clusters in New York City and Hollywood, which were no surprise, and St. Paul, Minnesota, and Marydale, Ohio, which were. On a hunch, I asked for a breakdown of Montgomery, Alabama. It showed a cluster too small to be statistically significant but enough to explain the St. Paul one. Montgomery was where F. Scott Fitzgerald had met Zelda, and St. Paul was his hometown. The locals obviously were trying to live up to “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” It didn’t explain Marydale, Ohio. I ran a geographical distribution for 1921. It was still there.

“Here,” Flip said, sticking my mail under my nose. Apparently nobody had told her po-mo pink was the in color for fall. She was wearing a brilliant bilious blue tunic and leggings and an assortment of duct tape.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said, grabbing a stack of clippings. “You owe me two-fifty for your caffè latte and I need you to copy these for me. Oh, and wait.” I went and got the personals I’d gone through Saturday, and two articles about angels. I handed them to Flip. “One copy of each.”

“I don’t believe in angels,” she said.

Right on the cutting edge, as usual.

“I used to believe in them,” she said, “but I don’t anymore, not since Brine. I mean, if you really had a guardian angel, she’d cheer you up when you were bummed and get you out of committee meetings and stuff.”

“What about fairies?” I asked.

“You mean like fairy godmothers?” she said. “Of course. Duh.”

Of course.

I went back to my hair-bobbing. Marydale, Ohio. What could it have had to make it a hot spot of hair-bobbing? Hot, I thought. How about unusually hot weather in Ohio during the summer of 1921? So hot long hair would have clung sweatily to the back of the neck, and women would have said, “I can’t take this anymore”?

I called up weather data for the state of Ohio for June through September and began looking for Marydale.

“Do you have a minute?” said a voice from the door. It was Elaine from Personnel. She was wearing a sweatband and a sour expression. “Do you have any idea what hiral implementation format rations are?” she asked.

“Not a clue. Did you try Management?”

“I’ve been up there twice and couldn’t get in. There’s a huge crowd.” She took a deep breath. “I’m getting totally stressed. Do you want to go work out?”

“Stair-climbing?” I said dubiously.

She shook her head firmly. “Stair-climbing doesn’t give a large-muscle workout. Wall-walking. Gym over on Twenty-eighth. They’ve got pitons and everything.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ve got walls here.”

She looked disapprovingly at them and went out, and I went back to my hair-bobbing. 1921 temps for Marydale had been slightly lower than normal, and it wasn’t the hometown of either Irene Castle or Isadora Duncan.

I abandoned it for the moment and did a Pareto chart and then ran some more regressions. There was a weak correlation between church attendance and bobs, a strong correlation between bobs and Hupmobile sales, but not Packards or Model T Fords, and a very strong correlation between bobs and women in nursing careers. I called up a list of American hospitals in 1921. There wasn’t one within a hundred miles of Marydale.

Gina came in, looking harassed.

“No, I don’t know how to fill out the funding form,” I said before she could ask, “and neither does anybody else.”

“Really?” she said vaguely. “I haven’t even looked at it yet. I’ve been spending all my time on the stupid search committee for Flip’s assistant. What do you consider the most important quality in an assistant?”

“Being the opposite of Flip,” I said, and then, when she didn’t laugh, “Competence, cheerfulness, willingness to work?”

“Exactly,” she said. “And if a person had those qualities, you’d hire them immediately, wouldn’t you? And if they were as overqualified for the job as she is, you’d snap them right up. You wouldn’t turn her down because of one little drawback and expect them to interview dozens of other people, especially when you’ve got other things to do. Fill out this ridiculous funding form, for one, and plan a birthday party. Do you know what Brittany picked, when I said she couldn’t have the Power Rangers? Barney. And it isn’t as if she isn’t competent and cheerful and willing to work. Right?”

I was unclear as to whether she was talking about Brittany or the assistant applicant. “Barney is pretty awful,” I said.

“Exactly,” Gina said, as if I’d proved her point, whatever it was. “I’m hiring her,” and she flounced out.

I went back and sat down in front of the computer. Cloche hats, Hupmobiles, and Marydale, Ohio. None of them seemed likely to be the trigger. What was? What had suddenly set the fad in motion?

Flip came in, carrying the stack of clippings and personals I’d just given her. “What did you want me to do with these again?”

Mesmerism [1778–84]

Scientific fad resulting from new discoveries about magnetism, speculation about its medical possibilities, and greed. Paris society flocked to Dr. Mesmer to have “animal magnetism” treatments involving tubs of “magnetized water,” iron rods, and Dr. Mesmer’s lavender-robed assistants, who massaged the patients and looked deep into their eyes. The patients screamed, sobbed, sank into a deep trance, and paid Dr. Mesmer on leaving. Actually hypnotism, animal magnetism claimed to cure everything from tumors to consumption. Died out when a scientific investigation headed by Ben Franklin proved it did no such thing.

Tuesday Management called another meeting. “To explain the simplified funding forms,” I said to Gina, walking down to the cafeteria. “I hope so,” she said, looking even more harassed than she had yesterday. “It would be nice to see somebody else on the defensive for a change.”

I was going to ask her what she meant by that, but just then I spotted Dr. O’Reilly on the far side of the room talking to Dr. Turnbull. She was wearing a po-mo pink suit (sans shoulder pads), and he had on one of those print polyester shirts from the seventies. By the time I’d taken all that in, Gina was at our table with Sarah, Elaine, and a bunch of other people.

I walked over, bracing myself for a discussion of intimacy issues and Power-walking, but they were apparently discussing Flip’s new assistant.

“I didn’t think it was possible to hire somebody worse than Flip,” Elaine was saying. “How could you, Gina?”

“But she’s very competent,” Gina said defensively. “She’s had experience with Windows and SPSS, and she knows how to repair a copy machine.”

“All that’s entirely irrelevant,” a woman from Physics said, though it didn’t sound irrelevant to me.

“Well, I’m not working with her,” a man from Product Development said. “And don’t tell me you didn’t know she was one. You can tell just by looking at her.”

Bigotry is one of the oldest and ugliest of trends, so persistent it only counts as a fad because the target keeps changing: Huguenots, Koreans, homosexuals, Muslims, Tutsis, Jews, Quakers, wolves, Serbs, Salem housewives. Nearly every group, so long as it’s small and different, has had a turn, and the pattern never changes—disapproval, isolation, demonization, persecution. Which was one of the reasons it’d be nice to find the switch that turned fads on. I’d like to turn that one off for good.