Hanging on the wall, just above her fingertips, is a two-foot tall image of a cosmopolitan-looking woman’s smiling head, printed on a thick, cardboardy paper that’s ragged and torn at the edges. Samantha suspects this image has been liberated, a bit crudely, from a Virginia Slims billboard. The woman has the exact sort of voracious smiling mouth that telegraphs the idea of oral consumption to the viewer; blazing away in her eyes is the exact sort of self-satisfied you’ve-come-a-long-way-babyness that Virginia Slims knows their target market craves in themselves. It’s a little unnerving, to Samantha, to have this image of pure appetite looming down over her.
Dmitrovitch has all kinds of advertisements and parts of advertisements hanging up around the inside of the converted warehouse: the visual equivalent of his sample-music, of his Blackmarketing. After the conversation at Virtual Mall had turned into going out for a cup of coffee, which turned into a maybe-you-should-come-back-and-see-my-place/ what-are-you-doing-right-now? type of conversation (but before it had turned into a bottle of wine on the rooftop), she’d walked in through the blistered door and been caught off guard by the ads: the first thing she saw when she entered the warehouse were these foot-high letters on a red background: “UD.” She knew that they’d been cut right out of a Budweiser billboard. It was immediately obvious. She knew without even having to think about it.
Dmitrovitch must have noticed her start a little at the sight of them, though, because by way of explanation, he’d said “I’m working on a consumer model of consciousness.” She’d waited for more but he hadn’t given more, and so she retorted a moment later with “Yeah, the Ud and the Super-Eggo?” at which he didn’t laugh or even smirk. He just said “Yeah,” and continued on his way into the warehouse, without looking to see if she was following him.