Wet feet, sore neck. Sent to find the person responsible for starting up this proposed venture, he found himself ricocheting through a series of increasingly despondent state capitals in the north of the country, seemingly headed for the Bolivian border. Each time he stopped to rest, the hotel was little more self-loathing and the food was a little more — sometimes a lot more — overcooked, underseasoned, and so salty that he would wake up in the night with his tongue literally hanging out. One time he forgot where he was, staggered to the bathroom, and guzzled water from a hand held under the running tap. Two days later, when he could finally walk a few steps and keep his bowels closed at the same time, he vowed not to do that again.
Every few days, he would put himself through the serious ordeal of finding the local telephone service and call the office to find out what was happening in his absence. Mainly he was interested in tracking the progress of his scheme to undermine a competitor’s attempt to bring The Blavatskys to town. This scheme consisted of his assigning the staff of one of his overseas call centres, a centre which was facing a shutdown due to lack of work, to the task of focusing their attention (individual and collective) on the failure of this planned concert. This was motivated by more or less equal parts of personal spite and scientific curiosity, and resulted from a chance luncheon encounter one day, in which he had run into his competitor, who began to boast about his grandiose plans for the largest concert ever seen in this town, full light show, no expense spared, and something about how this whole endeavour was in the way of being a kind of bid for spiritual grace in the community of rock promoters and a shining example to all others that they likewise should eschew the vulgar and unserious and focus instead on good works. Or something like that; it was all so confused and murky and uninteresting. But when he dared to question the venue and certain of the planned technical arrangements, the competitor accused him of psychically undermining the whole operation. This piqued his interest. Was that even possible? Could one — through mental power alone — actually overturn someone else’s business plans? If so, this was the greatest thing since double-entry bookkeeping, and merited some experimentation.
So, for the past thirteen weeks, twenty-eight men and six women in some godforsaken outpost in Bangladesh or Biafra or Bhutan (instead of being at their usual work of trying to sell vinyl siding or sets of Betamax tapes of the 1984 Olympics) were devoting all of their time and energy to creating a powerful mental resonance field holding the image of a riot, fire, or some other disaster to befall the proposed concert. He assumed that it was best to aim for something truly catastrophic in case the effect was weaker than expected, in which case the failure might stem from food poisoning, a missed flight, or perhaps something on TV that night keeping the crowd at home. Something about Poe or table-tapping; that sort of thing.
