She has money—Laura just sent her her monthly hundred bucks—and she’s willing to spend it. It’s important that she get this gift right: since this will be the first time she’s seen Gregor since they kind of fell out two months ago, the gift will do double duty, serve as both housewarming and reconciliatory offering.
Her mind turns first to alcohol. Everybody needs a bottle of some kind of good liquor for around the house. She could go out and pick up a bottle of Absolut, she thinks, there’s something about Absolut that’s classy—and the image of a bottle of it materializes in her mind, front and center, sort of glowing from within, the bold blue serifless letters that spell out the brand name levitating over the finer cursive that spells out all the particulars, yeah, indeed, it’s classy—but God, she asks herself then, doesn’t it sort of freak you that you can see that bottle so clearly in your mind? It’s not like she doesn’t know that that image in her mind has been put there on purpose (and the infinite variants on it, because of course she has some of the variants on it indexed up there as well), it’s more that she’s not sure how concerned she should be about it: twenty-one years fills the great filing cabinet of the brain with a lot of stuff (the lyrics to terrible old songs, the names of boys she had crushes on in third grade, a fading, patchy list of ways in which an animal cell differs from a plant cell)—isn’t it natural and forgivable, she wonders, that some portion of that stuff should be created by advertisers? Isn’t it? Is it?
She doesn’t know. What she knows is that by perpending on that bottle, and all the characteristics of it that she’s inadvertently memorized—the gunmetally hockey puck of the cap, the seal that the faintly Leninish head broods forth from (his expression heavy with the weight of some unknown Swedish ideology)—she’s begun to make it seem a little sinister. That she can hold this vision of this bottle, that it is unshakable, luminous as radium in the mind, that it is mutable only in the multifarious ways that a phalanx of admen and artists and salespeople has designed it to be mutable, that she can polymorph it—from a photograph of a bottle into a painting of a bottle into a pile of butterflies or a bouffant hairdo in the shape of a bottle into a page of prose which takes a bottle as its subject—but that all of these visions have been preconfigured for her by an organization whose name she does not know—all of these facts interlock to form a realization: some quadrant of her mental territory that she has only mapping for the first time now has already been colonized by a force outside of her. A company.