A Dirty Job Chapter 10

– Dag Hammarskjà ¶ld 10 DEATH TAKES A WALK Mornings, Charlie walked. At six, after an early breakfast, he would turn the care of Sophie over to Mrs. Korjev or Mrs. Ling (whoever’s turn it was) for the workday and walk – stroll really, pacing out the city with the sword-cane, which had become part of his daily regalia, wearing soft, black-leather walking shoes and an expensive, secondhand suit that had been retailored at his cleaner’s in Chinatown. Although he pretended to have a purpose, Charlie walked to give himself time to think, to try on the size of being Death, and to look at all the people out and about in the morning. He wondered if the girl at the flower stand, from whom he often bought a carnation for his lapel, had a soul, or would give hers up while he watched her die. He watched the guy in North Beach make cappuccinos with faces and fern leaves drawn in the foam, and wondered if a guy like that could actually function without a soul, or was his soul collecting dust in Charlie’s back ro om? There were a lot of people to see, and a lot of thinking to be done. Being out among the people of the city, when they were just starting to move, greeting the day, making ready, he started to feel not just the responsibility of his new role, but the power, and finally, the specialness. It didn’t matter that he had no idea what he was doing, or that he might have lost the love of his life for it to happen; he had been chosen. And realizing that, one day as he walked down California Street, down Nob Hill into the financial district, where he’d always felt inferior and out of touch with the world, as the brokers and bankers quickstepped around him, barking into their cell phones to Hong Kong or London or New York and never making eye contact, he started to not so much stroll, as strut. That day Charlie Asher climbed onto the California Street cable car for the first time since he was a kid, and hung off the bar, out over the street, holding out the sword-cane as if charging, with Hondas and Mercedes zooming along the street beside him, pas sing under his armpit just inches away. He got off at the end of the line, bought a Wall Street Journal from a machine, then walked to the nearest storm drain, spread out the Journal to protect his trousers against oil stains, then got down on his hands and knees and screamed into the drain grate, â€Å"I have been chosen, so don’t fuck with me!† When he stood up again, a dozen people were standing there, waiting for the light to change. Looking at him. â€Å"Had to be done,† Charlie said, not apologizing, just explaining. The bankers and the brokers, the executive assistants and the human-resource people and the woman on her way to serve up clam chowder in a sourdough bowl at the Boudin Bakery, all nodded, not sure exactly why, except that they worked in the financial district, and they all understood being fucked with, and in their souls if not in their minds, they knew that Charlie had been yelling in the right direction. He folded his paper, tucked it under his arm, then turned and crossed the street with them when the light changed. Sometimes Charlie walked whole blocks when he thought only of Rachel, and would become so engrossed in the memory of her eyes, her smile, her touch, that he ran straight into people. Other times people would bump into him, and not even lift his wallet or say â€Å"excuse me,† which might be a matter of course in New York, but in San Francisco meant that he was close to a soul vessel that needed to be retrieved. He found one, a bronze fireplace poker, set out by the curb with the trash on Russian Hill. Another time, he spotted a glowing vase displayed in the bay window of a Victorian in North Beach. He screwed up his courage and knocked on the door, and when a young woman answered, and came out on the porch to look for her visitor, and was bewildered because she didn’t see anyone there, Charlie slipped past her, grabbed the vase, and was out the side door before she came back in, his heart pounding like a war drum, adrenaline sizzling through his veins like a hormonal ti lt-a-whirl. As he headed back to the shop that particular morning, he realized, with no little sense of irony, that until he became Death, he’d never felt so alive. Every morning, Charlie tried to walk in a different direction. On Mondays he liked to go up into Chinatown just after dawn, when all the deliveries were being made – crates of produce, carrots, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, melons, and a dozen varieties of cabbage, tended by Latinos in the Central Valley and consumed by Chinese in Chinatown, having passed through Anglo hands just long enough to extract the nourishing money. On Mondays the fishing companies delivered their fresh catches – usually strong Italian men whose families had been in the business for five generations, handing off their catch to inscrutable Chinese merchants whose ancestors had bought fish from the Italians off horse-drawn wagons a hundred years before. All sorts of live and recently live fish were moved across the sidewalk: snapper and halibut and mackerel, sea bass and ling cod and yellowtail, clawless Pacific lobster, Dungeness crab, ghastly monkfish, with their long saberlike teeth and a sin gle spine that jutted from their head, bracing a luminous lure they used to draw in prey, so deep in the ocean that the sun never shone. Charlie was fascinated by the creatures from the very deep sea, the big-eyed squid, cuttlefish, the blind sharks that located prey with electromagnetic impulses – creatures who never saw light. They made him think of what might be facing him from the Underworld, because even as he fell into a rhythm of finding names at his bedside, and soul vessels in all manner of places, and the appearance of the ravens and the shades subsided, he could feel them under the street whenever he passed a storm sewer. Sometimes he could hear them whispering to one another, hushing quickly in the rare moments when the street went quiet. To walk through Chinatown at dawn was to become part of a dangerous dance, because there were no back doors or alleys for loading, and all the wares went across the sidewalk, and although Charlie had enjoyed neither danger nor dancing up till now, he enjoyed playing dance partner to the thousand tiny Chinese grandmothers in black slippers or jelly-colored plastic shoes who scampered from merchant to merchant, squeezing and smelling and thumping, looking for the freshest and the best for their families, twanging orders and questions to the merchants in Mandarin, all the while just a second or a slip away from being run over by sides of beef, great racks of fresh duck, or hand trucks stacked high with crates of live turtles. Charlie was yet to retrieve a soul vessel on one of his Chinatown walks, but he stayed ready, because the swirl of time and motion forecast that one foggy morning someone’s granny was going to get knocked out of her moo shoes. One Monday, just for sport, Charlie grabbed an eggplant that a spectacularly wizened granny was going for, but instead of twisting it out of his hand with some mystic kung fu move as he expected, she looked him in the eye and shook her head – just a jog, barely perceptible really – it might have been a tic, but it was the most eloquent of gestures. Charlie read it as saying: O White Devil, you do not want to purloin that purple fruit, for I have four thousand years of ancestors and civilization on you; my grandparents built the railroads and dug the silver mines, and my parents survived the earthquake, the fire, and a society that outlawed even being Chinese; I am mother to a dozen, grandmother to a hundred, and great-grandmother to a legion; I have birthed babies and washed the dead; I am history and suffering and wisdom; I am a Buddha and a dragon; so get your fucking hand off my eggplant before you lose it. And Charlie let go. And she grinned, just a little. Three teeth. And he wondered if it ever did fall to him to retrieve the soul vessel of one of these crones of Chronos, if he’d even be able to lift it. And he grinned back. And asked for her phone number, which he gave to Ray. â€Å"She seemed nice,† Charlie told him. â€Å"Mature.† Sometimes Charlie’s walks took him through Japantown, where he passed the most enigmatic shop in the city, Invisible Shoe Repair. He really intended to stop in one day, but he was still coming to terms with giant ravens, adversaries from the Underworld, and being a Merchant of Death, and he wasn’t sure he was ready for invisible shoes, let alone invisible shoes that needed repair! He often tried to look past the Japanese characters into the shop window as he passed, but saw nothing, which, of course, didn’t mean a thing. He just wasn’t ready. But there was a pet shop in Japantown (House of Pleasant Fish and Gerbil), where he had originally gone to buy Sophie’s fish, and where he returned to replace the TV attorneys with six TV detectives, who also simultaneously took the big Ambien a week later. Charlie had been distraught to find his baby daughter drooling away in front of a bowl floating more dead detectives than a film noir festival, and after fl ushing all six at once and having to use the plunger to dislodge Magnum and Mannix, he vowed that next time he would find more resilient pals for his little girl. He was coming out of House of PFG one afternoon, with a Habitrail pod containing a pair of sturdy hamsters, when he ran into Lily, who was making her way to a coffeehouse up on Van Ness, where she was planning to meet her friend Abby for some latte-fueled speed brooding. â€Å"Hey, Lily, how are you doing?† Charlie was trying to appear matter-of-fact, but he found that the awkwardness between him and Lily over the last few months was not mitigated by her seeing him on the street carrying a plastic box full of rodents. â€Å"Nice gerbils,† Lily said. She wore a Catholic schoolgirl’s plaid skirt over black tights and Doc Martens, with a tight black PVC bustier that was squishing pale Lily-bits out the top, like a can of biscuit dough that’s been smacked on the edge of the counter. The hair color du jour was fuchsia, over violet eye shadow, which matched her violet, elbow-length lace gloves. She looked up and down the street and, when she didn’t see anyone she knew, fell into step next to Charlie. â€Å"They’re not gerbils, they’re hamsters,† Charlie said. â€Å"Asher, do you have something you’ve been keeping from me?† She tilted her head a little, but didn’t look at him when she asked, just kept her eyes forward, scanning the street for someone who might recognize her walking next to Charlie, thus forcing her to commit seppuku. â€Å"Jeez, Lily, these are for Sophie!† Charlie said. â€Å"Her fish died, so I’m bringing her some new pets. Besides, that whole gerbil thing is an urban myth – â€Å" â€Å"I meant that you’re Death,† Lily said. Charlie nearly dropped his hamsters. â€Å"Huh?† â€Å"It’s so wrong – † Lily continued, walking on after Charlie had stopped in his tracks, so now he had to scurry to catch up to her. â€Å"Just so wrong, that you would be chosen. Of all of life’s many disappointments, I’d have to say that this is the crowning disappointment.† â€Å"You’re sixteen,† Charlie said, still stumbling a little at the matter-of-fact way she was discussing this. â€Å"Oh, throw that in my face, Asher. I’m only sixteen for two more months, then what? In the blink of an eye my beauty becomes but a feast for worms, and I, a forgotten sigh in a sea of nothingness.† â€Å"Your birthday is in two months? Well, we’ll have to get you a nice cake,† Charlie said. â€Å"Don’t change the subject, Asher. I know all about you, and your Death persona.† Charlie stopped again and turned to look at her. This time, she stopped as well. â€Å"Lily, I know I’ve been acting a little strangely since Rachel died, and I’m sorry you got in trouble at school because of me, but it’s just been trying to deal with it all, with the baby, with the business. The stress of it all has – â€Å" â€Å"I have The Great Big Book of Death,† Lily said. She steadied Charlie’s hamsters when he lost his grip. â€Å"I know about the soul vessels, about the dark forces rising if you fuck up, all that stuff – all of it. I’ve known longer than you have, I think.† Charlie didn’t know what to say. He was feeling panic and relief at the same time – panic because Lily knew, but relief because at least someone knew, and believed it, and had actually seen the book. The book! â€Å"Lily, do you still have the book?† â€Å"It’s in the store. I hid it in the back of the glass cabinet where you keep the valuable stuff that no one will ever buy.† â€Å"No one ever looks in that cabinet.† â€Å"No kidding? I thought if you ever found it, I’d say it had always been there.† â€Å"I have to go.† He turned and started walking the other direction, but then realized that they had already been heading toward his neighborhood and turned around again. â€Å"Where are you going?† â€Å"To get some coffee.† â€Å"I’ll walk with you.† â€Å"You will not.† Lily looked around again, wary that someone might see them. â€Å"But, Lily, I’m Death. That should at least have given me some level of cool.† â€Å"Yeah, you’d think, but it turns out that you have managed to suck the cool out of being Death.† â€Å"Wow, that’s harsh.† â€Å"Welcome to my world, Asher.† â€Å"You can’t tell anyone about this, you know that?† â€Å"Like anyone cares what you do with your gerbils.† â€Å"Hamsters! That’s not – â€Å" â€Å"Chill, Asher.† Lily giggled. â€Å"I know what you mean. I’m not going to tell anyone – except Abby knows – but she doesn’t care. She says she’s met some guy who’s her dark lord. She’s in that stage where she thinks a dick is some kind of mystical magic wand.† Charlie adjusted his hamster box uncomfortably. â€Å"Girls go through a stage like that?† Why was he just hearing about this now? Even the hamsters looked uncomfortable. Lily turned on a heel and started up the street. â€Å"I’m not having this conversation with you.† Charlie stood there, watching her go, balancing the hamsters and his completely useless sword-cane while trying to dig his cell phone out of his jacket pocket. He needed to see that book, and he needed to see it sooner than the hour it would take him to get home. â€Å"Lily, wait!† he called. â€Å"I’m calling a cab, I’ll give you a ride.† She waved him off without looking and kept walking. As he was waiting for the cab company to answer, he heard it, the voice, and he realized that he was standing right over a storm drain. It had been over a month since he’d heard them, and he thought maybe they’d gone. â€Å"We’ll have her, too, Meat. She’s ours now.† He felt the fear rise in his throat like bile. He snapped the phone shut and ran after Lily, cane rattling and hamsters bouncing as he went. â€Å"Lily, wait! Wait!† She spun around quickly and her fuchsia wig only did the quarter turn instead of the half, so her face was covered with hair when she said, â€Å"One of those ice-cream cakes from Thirty-one Flavors, okay? After that, despair and nothingness.† â€Å"We’ll put that on the cake,† Charlie said. A Dirty Job Chapter 10 – Dag Hammarskjà ¶ld 10 DEATH TAKES A WALK Mornings, Charlie walked. At six, after an early breakfast, he would turn the care of Sophie over to Mrs. Korjev or Mrs. Ling (whoever’s turn it was) for the workday and walk – stroll really, pacing out the city with the sword-cane, which had become part of his daily regalia, wearing soft, black-leather walking shoes and an expensive, secondhand suit that had been retailored at his cleaner’s in Chinatown. Although he pretended to have a purpose, Charlie walked to give himself time to think, to try on the size of being Death, and to look at all the people out and about in the morning. He wondered if the girl at the flower stand, from whom he often bought a carnation for his lapel, had a soul, or would give hers up while he watched her die. He watched the guy in North Beach make cappuccinos with faces and fern leaves drawn in the foam, and wondered if a guy like that could actually function without a soul, or was his soul collecting dust in Charlie’s back ro om? There were a lot of people to see, and a lot of thinking to be done. Being out among the people of the city, when they were just starting to move, greeting the day, making ready, he started to feel not just the responsibility of his new role, but the power, and finally, the specialness. It didn’t matter that he had no idea what he was doing, or that he might have lost the love of his life for it to happen; he had been chosen. And realizing that, one day as he walked down California Street, down Nob Hill into the financial district, where he’d always felt inferior and out of touch with the world, as the brokers and bankers quickstepped around him, barking into their cell phones to Hong Kong or London or New York and never making eye contact, he started to not so much stroll, as strut. That day Charlie Asher climbed onto the California Street cable car for the first time since he was a kid, and hung off the bar, out over the street, holding out the sword-cane as if charging, with Hondas and Mercedes zooming along the street beside him, pas sing under his armpit just inches away. He got off at the end of the line, bought a Wall Street Journal from a machine, then walked to the nearest storm drain, spread out the Journal to protect his trousers against oil stains, then got down on his hands and knees and screamed into the drain grate, â€Å"I have been chosen, so don’t fuck with me!† When he stood up again, a dozen people were standing there, waiting for the light to change. Looking at him. â€Å"Had to be done,† Charlie said, not apologizing, just explaining. The bankers and the brokers, the executive assistants and the human-resource people and the woman on her way to serve up clam chowder in a sourdough bowl at the Boudin Bakery, all nodded, not sure exactly why, except that they worked in the financial district, and they all understood being fucked with, and in their souls if not in their minds, they knew that Charlie had been yelling in the right direction. He folded his paper, tucked it under his arm, then turned and crossed the street with them when the light changed. Sometimes Charlie walked whole blocks when he thought only of Rachel, and would become so engrossed in the memory of her eyes, her smile, her touch, that he ran straight into people. Other times people would bump into him, and not even lift his wallet or say â€Å"excuse me,† which might be a matter of course in New York, but in San Francisco meant that he was close to a soul vessel that needed to be retrieved. He found one, a bronze fireplace poker, set out by the curb with the trash on Russian Hill. Another time, he spotted a glowing vase displayed in the bay window of a Victorian in North Beach. He screwed up his courage and knocked on the door, and when a young woman answered, and came out on the porch to look for her visitor, and was bewildered because she didn’t see anyone there, Charlie slipped past her, grabbed the vase, and was out the side door before she came back in, his heart pounding like a war drum, adrenaline sizzling through his veins like a hormonal ti lt-a-whirl. As he headed back to the shop that particular morning, he realized, with no little sense of irony, that until he became Death, he’d never felt so alive. Every morning, Charlie tried to walk in a different direction. On Mondays he liked to go up into Chinatown just after dawn, when all the deliveries were being made – crates of produce, carrots, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, melons, and a dozen varieties of cabbage, tended by Latinos in the Central Valley and consumed by Chinese in Chinatown, having passed through Anglo hands just long enough to extract the nourishing money. On Mondays the fishing companies delivered their fresh catches – usually strong Italian men whose families had been in the business for five generations, handing off their catch to inscrutable Chinese merchants whose ancestors had bought fish from the Italians off horse-drawn wagons a hundred years before. All sorts of live and recently live fish were moved across the sidewalk: snapper and halibut and mackerel, sea bass and ling cod and yellowtail, clawless Pacific lobster, Dungeness crab, ghastly monkfish, with their long saberlike teeth and a sin gle spine that jutted from their head, bracing a luminous lure they used to draw in prey, so deep in the ocean that the sun never shone. Charlie was fascinated by the creatures from the very deep sea, the big-eyed squid, cuttlefish, the blind sharks that located prey with electromagnetic impulses – creatures who never saw light. They made him think of what might be facing him from the Underworld, because even as he fell into a rhythm of finding names at his bedside, and soul vessels in all manner of places, and the appearance of the ravens and the shades subsided, he could feel them under the street whenever he passed a storm sewer. Sometimes he could hear them whispering to one another, hushing quickly in the rare moments when the street went quiet. To walk through Chinatown at dawn was to become part of a dangerous dance, because there were no back doors or alleys for loading, and all the wares went across the sidewalk, and although Charlie had enjoyed neither danger nor dancing up till now, he enjoyed playing dance partner to the thousand tiny Chinese grandmothers in black slippers or jelly-colored plastic shoes who scampered from merchant to merchant, squeezing and smelling and thumping, looking for the freshest and the best for their families, twanging orders and questions to the merchants in Mandarin, all the while just a second or a slip away from being run over by sides of beef, great racks of fresh duck, or hand trucks stacked high with crates of live turtles. Charlie was yet to retrieve a soul vessel on one of his Chinatown walks, but he stayed ready, because the swirl of time and motion forecast that one foggy morning someone’s granny was going to get knocked out of her moo shoes. One Monday, just for sport, Charlie grabbed an eggplant that a spectacularly wizened granny was going for, but instead of twisting it out of his hand with some mystic kung fu move as he expected, she looked him in the eye and shook her head – just a jog, barely perceptible really – it might have been a tic, but it was the most eloquent of gestures. Charlie read it as saying: O White Devil, you do not want to purloin that purple fruit, for I have four thousand years of ancestors and civilization on you; my grandparents built the railroads and dug the silver mines, and my parents survived the earthquake, the fire, and a society that outlawed even being Chinese; I am mother to a dozen, grandmother to a hundred, and great-grandmother to a legion; I have birthed babies and washed the dead; I am history and suffering and wisdom; I am a Buddha and a dragon; so get your fucking hand off my eggplant before you lose it. And Charlie let go. And she grinned, just a little. Three teeth. And he wondered if it ever did fall to him to retrieve the soul vessel of one of these crones of Chronos, if he’d even be able to lift it. And he grinned back. And asked for her phone number, which he gave to Ray. â€Å"She seemed nice,† Charlie told him. â€Å"Mature.† Sometimes Charlie’s walks took him through Japantown, where he passed the most enigmatic shop in the city, Invisible Shoe Repair. He really intended to stop in one day, but he was still coming to terms with giant ravens, adversaries from the Underworld, and being a Merchant of Death, and he wasn’t sure he was ready for invisible shoes, let alone invisible shoes that needed repair! He often tried to look past the Japanese characters into the shop window as he passed, but saw nothing, which, of course, didn’t mean a thing. He just wasn’t ready. But there was a pet shop in Japantown (House of Pleasant Fish and Gerbil), where he had originally gone to buy Sophie’s fish, and where he returned to replace the TV attorneys with six TV detectives, who also simultaneously took the big Ambien a week later. Charlie had been distraught to find his baby daughter drooling away in front of a bowl floating more dead detectives than a film noir festival, and after fl ushing all six at once and having to use the plunger to dislodge Magnum and Mannix, he vowed that next time he would find more resilient pals for his little girl. He was coming out of House of PFG one afternoon, with a Habitrail pod containing a pair of sturdy hamsters, when he ran into Lily, who was making her way to a coffeehouse up on Van Ness, where she was planning to meet her friend Abby for some latte-fueled speed brooding. â€Å"Hey, Lily, how are you doing?† Charlie was trying to appear matter-of-fact, but he found that the awkwardness between him and Lily over the last few months was not mitigated by her seeing him on the street carrying a plastic box full of rodents. â€Å"Nice gerbils,† Lily said. She wore a Catholic schoolgirl’s plaid skirt over black tights and Doc Martens, with a tight black PVC bustier that was squishing pale Lily-bits out the top, like a can of biscuit dough that’s been smacked on the edge of the counter. The hair color du jour was fuchsia, over violet eye shadow, which matched her violet, elbow-length lace gloves. She looked up and down the street and, when she didn’t see anyone she knew, fell into step next to Charlie. â€Å"They’re not gerbils, they’re hamsters,† Charlie said. â€Å"Asher, do you have something you’ve been keeping from me?† She tilted her head a little, but didn’t look at him when she asked, just kept her eyes forward, scanning the street for someone who might recognize her walking next to Charlie, thus forcing her to commit seppuku. â€Å"Jeez, Lily, these are for Sophie!† Charlie said. â€Å"Her fish died, so I’m bringing her some new pets. Besides, that whole gerbil thing is an urban myth – â€Å" â€Å"I meant that you’re Death,† Lily said. Charlie nearly dropped his hamsters. â€Å"Huh?† â€Å"It’s so wrong – † Lily continued, walking on after Charlie had stopped in his tracks, so now he had to scurry to catch up to her. â€Å"Just so wrong, that you would be chosen. Of all of life’s many disappointments, I’d have to say that this is the crowning disappointment.† â€Å"You’re sixteen,† Charlie said, still stumbling a little at the matter-of-fact way she was discussing this. â€Å"Oh, throw that in my face, Asher. I’m only sixteen for two more months, then what? In the blink of an eye my beauty becomes but a feast for worms, and I, a forgotten sigh in a sea of nothingness.† â€Å"Your birthday is in two months? Well, we’ll have to get you a nice cake,† Charlie said. â€Å"Don’t change the subject, Asher. I know all about you, and your Death persona.† Charlie stopped again and turned to look at her. This time, she stopped as well. â€Å"Lily, I know I’ve been acting a little strangely since Rachel died, and I’m sorry you got in trouble at school because of me, but it’s just been trying to deal with it all, with the baby, with the business. The stress of it all has – â€Å" â€Å"I have The Great Big Book of Death,† Lily said. She steadied Charlie’s hamsters when he lost his grip. â€Å"I know about the soul vessels, about the dark forces rising if you fuck up, all that stuff – all of it. I’ve known longer than you have, I think.† Charlie didn’t know what to say. He was feeling panic and relief at the same time – panic because Lily knew, but relief because at least someone knew, and believed it, and had actually seen the book. The book! â€Å"Lily, do you still have the book?† â€Å"It’s in the store. I hid it in the back of the glass cabinet where you keep the valuable stuff that no one will ever buy.† â€Å"No one ever looks in that cabinet.† â€Å"No kidding? I thought if you ever found it, I’d say it had always been there.† â€Å"I have to go.† He turned and started walking the other direction, but then realized that they had already been heading toward his neighborhood and turned around again. â€Å"Where are you going?† â€Å"To get some coffee.† â€Å"I’ll walk with you.† â€Å"You will not.† Lily looked around again, wary that someone might see them. â€Å"But, Lily, I’m Death. That should at least have given me some level of cool.† â€Å"Yeah, you’d think, but it turns out that you have managed to suck the cool out of being Death.† â€Å"Wow, that’s harsh.† â€Å"Welcome to my world, Asher.† â€Å"You can’t tell anyone about this, you know that?† â€Å"Like anyone cares what you do with your gerbils.† â€Å"Hamsters! That’s not – â€Å" â€Å"Chill, Asher.† Lily giggled. â€Å"I know what you mean. I’m not going to tell anyone – except Abby knows – but she doesn’t care. She says she’s met some guy who’s her dark lord. She’s in that stage where she thinks a dick is some kind of mystical magic wand.† Charlie adjusted his hamster box uncomfortably. â€Å"Girls go through a stage like that?† Why was he just hearing about this now? Even the hamsters looked uncomfortable. Lily turned on a heel and started up the street. â€Å"I’m not having this conversation with you.† Charlie stood there, watching her go, balancing the hamsters and his completely useless sword-cane while trying to dig his cell phone out of his jacket pocket. He needed to see that book, and he needed to see it sooner than the hour it would take him to get home. â€Å"Lily, wait!† he called. â€Å"I’m calling a cab, I’ll give you a ride.† She waved him off without looking and kept walking. As he was waiting for the cab company to answer, he heard it, the voice, and he realized that he was standing right over a storm drain. It had been over a month since he’d heard them, and he thought maybe they’d gone. â€Å"We’ll have her, too, Meat. She’s ours now.† He felt the fear rise in his throat like bile. He snapped the phone shut and ran after Lily, cane rattling and hamsters bouncing as he went. â€Å"Lily, wait! Wait!† She spun around quickly and her fuchsia wig only did the quarter turn instead of the half, so her face was covered with hair when she said, â€Å"One of those ice-cream cakes from Thirty-one Flavors, okay? After that, despair and nothingness.† â€Å"We’ll put that on the cake,† Charlie said.

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THE RETAIL GROCERY MARKET - Essay Example dominate the UK grocery market, accounting for around three quarters of total sales, which IGD values at  £88.2billion  in 2005.   However, this share of total grocery has fallen slightly in recent years as other sectors have grown more quickly. The Convenience sector continues to be a strong driving force behind the overall growth within the UK grocery market.  Ã‚   For every pound spent on food and grocery, consumers now spend 20p in convenience stores and IGD currently values the sector at  £23.9billion, up 4.9% on 2004, which now accounts for a 19.9% share of total grocery. So let’s try to identify the mission objectives and responsibilities of an organisation within its environment. To make our ideas more clear we’ll take a certain retailer, using for instance Tesco Company. Everybody can agree that the main aim of any business is profit earning. Even the relevant definition of â€Å"business† approves that any enterprise or company is created to earn money. Of course, shareholders of any business are its owners and want to get maximum profits. If a company stops producing profits it can be adjudicated a bankrupt. Everybody knows that retail is one of the most competitive economics sector. Shops, marketplaces, boutiques, super- and hypermarkets offer us great choice of different goods and foodstuffs. That’s why if any company has been taking the top positions for almost 10 years, - it is considered as a great success. Britain hypermarket net Tesco is one of such leaders. This company sails one third of all foodstuffs in the country. Tesco can firmly be named as a â€Å"national shop†. Rich, average and poor customers can find the foodstuffs according their wishes and financial abilities. Comfortable location, competitive prices, polite staff, great variety of goods and products, mainly, circumspect development strategy helped Tesco to become a really national shop. Let’s analyze the most important responsibilities, among which the main is

Legalization of marijuana Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Legalization of marijuana - Essay Example In the United Kingdom, there is a push to have marijuana as Class B drug, legalised. Conversely, there are others such as Steve Rolles who are arguing that Marijuana can be legalised without experiencing the drawbacks that would accompany that move, if the UK marijuana market is regulated with an aid of strict and feasible framework. Steve Rolles is the Transformation Drug Policy Foundation’s Senior Policy Analyst. However, presently, the UK law stands as an impediment to Rolles’ postulation, given that the law criminalises recreational use and possession of marijuana. It is for this reason that many cafes selling marijuana are open, run clandestinely and immediately closed. Indications that the United Kingdom, particularly Britain may review its legal stand on marijuana is underscored by the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg stating in February that the UK would explore viable alternatives to the wholesale proscription of drugs and that Britain was going to be the cen tre of the debate. There is a myriad of reasons being bandied as the reason for the legalisation of marijuana. First of all, there are those who argue that the legalisation of marijuana would help Britain save billions and this would therefore an economic value to the United Kingdom. Behind this argument is the rationale that decriminalising cannabis sativa will open up many marijuana-related businesses. These businesses would make profits which in turn would be taxable by the federal government. The rationale of this argument is upheld by the fact that the state of Colorado announced in March that it had collected more than one million pounds in taxes. This tax revenue was obtained by taxing marijuana businesses that were newly legalised and sold the drug for recreational purposes. According to Danovitch, political expedience also informs the push for the legislation of cannabis sativa. Legalisation of bhang has become a strong issue in Western Australia’s Senate

Finance and Banking Essay Example for Free

Finance and Banking Essay â€Å"Identify an experience in which you failed to communicate a message.† As mentioned in the communication process, communication has only succeeded when the information given by the sender has been received and understood by the recipient. If the recipient has not understood the information, then this may not necessarily be the recipients fault. Typically, ineffective communications can be attributed to one of three things: 1. A poor message;  * The message was too short; * The message was too long; * The message was ambiguous 2. Poor transmission; * That the message is being delivered in a wrong format that the recipient both does not expect and understands; * That the message is being delivered when the recipient does not need it, and where the recipient will not expect to find it. 3. Poor reception;  * A lack of awareness; * Obstructionism; * A lack of understanding; A striking example where I failed to communicate a message was my first day as an ‘A’-Level biology teacher at a certain private college. I was lost and found myself tutoring a form 4 class instead of a form 6 class. Some of the teaching staff read, â€Å"Human monocytes were cultured for 24 h in serum-free AIM-V medium, followed by 24-h maturation by polyriboinosinic polyribocytidylic acid (polyI:C). Short term cultured, polyI:C-maturated DC, far more than immature DC, showed typical mature DC markers and high allogeneic stimulatory capacity and had high autologous stimulatory capacity in an influenza model system using peptide-pulsed DC. Electroporation of mRNA as an Ag-loading strategy in these cells was optimized using mRNA encoding the enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP). Monocytes electroporated with EGFP mRNA, followed by short term, serum-free differentiation to mature DC, had a phenotype of DC, and all showed positive EGFP fluorescence. Influenza matrix protein mRNA-electroporated monocytes cultured serum-free and maturated with polyI:C showed high stimulatory capacity in autologous T cell activation experiments†. The text content was technically correct, but it was presented to the wrong audience, there was every chance that the students would not understand it. Such an example is a clear cut illustration of failure to communicate a message. â€Å"Investigate and discuss the possible forms of noise that can interfere with the communication process†. Communication noise refers to obstructions on effective communication that influence the interpretation of conveyed messages. While often looked over, communication noise can have a profound impact both on our perception of interactions with others and our analysis of our own communication proficiency. Forms of communication noise include psychological noise, physical noise, physiological and semantic noise. As postulated by (F. Teague, 2010), Nothing is so simple that it cannot be misunderstood hence all these forms of noise subtly, yet greatly influence our communication with others and are vitally important to anyone’s skills as a competent communicator. Psychological noise Psychological noise refers to qualities in us that affect how we communicate and interpret others. For instance, if you are preoccupied with a problem, you may be inattentive at a team meeting. Likewise, prejudice and defensive feelings can interfere with communication. Psychological noise results from preconceived notions we bring to conversations, such as racial stereotypes, reputations, biases, and assumptions. When we come into a conversation with ideas about what the other person is going to say and why, we can easily become blinded to their original message. Most of the time psychological noise is impossible to free ourselves from, and we must simply strive to recognize that it exists and take those distractions into account when we converse with others. Physical noise Physical noise is any external or environmental stimulus that distracts us from receiving the intended message sent by a communicator (Rothwell, 2011). Examples of physical noise include: others talking in the background, background music, overly dim or bright lights, spam and pop-up adverts, extreme temperatures, crowded conditions, a startling noise and acknowledging someone outside of the conversation. Semantic noise This is noise caused by the sender, that is, the encoder. This type of noise occurs when grammar or technical language is used that the receiver (the decoder) cannot understand, or cannot understand clearly. Semantic noise exists when words themselves are not mutually understood. Authors sometimes create semantic noise by using jargon or unnecessarily technical language. Physiological noise Physiological noise is distraction caused by hunger, fatigue, headaches, medication, and other factors that affect how we feel and think.

Product Placement Essay -- essays research papers

Introduction Product placement can be considered a new marketing tool when associated within motion pictures and television. It can result in a more positive brand attitude when the product is associated with a character or group of characters that are preserved to be positive in the eyes of their audience. It is the intention of this study to look at the effects of product placement and it’s use in combination with advertising and their effects on the target audience. This literature review is an attempt to view both sides of the controversial issue. Problem Statement The problem of this study is the effect of product placement, used as a marketing tool, in motion pictures, television, literature, Internet, and in games, and the effect that it has on particular product consumers. Summary of Articles Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in George magazine. She was summarized in saying that products don't tarnish a movie; sometimes they enhance it. She justifies this by saying â€Å"†¦these products give movies an indelible imprint of realism. In real life, we eat, drink, wear, and drive brand name products. It’s part of our typography.† (Govani, 1999) She went on to comment, â€Å"Some may disparage this product treasure-hunt mentality, but it's something nearly all of us respond to. Even during the Clinton-Lewinsky saga - the year's most popular movie, according to Neal Gabler, author of "Life: The Movie" - we chuckled at mention of Monica's blue Gap dress or at Clinton taking a swig from a Diet Coke can during his grand jury testimony.† (Govani, 1999) Was this planned, was this product placement†¦ no it’s real life. David Bauder reported on the controversy and was quoted in saying, â€Å"The new technology isn't likely to replace regular commercials†, he also reported that when it comes to television, â€Å"it's starting to get harder to tell when the ads end and the show begins†. (Bauder, 1999) Bauder interviewed several experts and officials in the industry such as Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, who said, "There is certainly a sense that the bleeding of the commercials into the programs is getting more extreme than it ever has been†. For many years, networks took pains to avoid product placement. The results often looked awkward: Actors would drink from a... ...p://www.businessweek.com/datedtoc /1998/ 980622.htm. Buss, Dale (1998, June 22). You Ought to be in Pictures. Business Week: On-line. Retrieved on October 8, 2001, from http://www.businessweek.com/datedtoc /1998/ 980622.htm. Hellen, Nicholas and Nuki, Paul(1999, April 25). Product Placement and politics of advertising. Retrieved from http://www.bilderberg.org/product.htm Rothenberg, Randall (2001). Marketing’s ‘borders’ blurred by product placement revival. Advertising Age, 72, 24. Sellers, Dennis (1999, November 4). Faous People: GQ, Stanley Mouse, and product placement. MacCentral On-line. Retrieved from http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/9911/04.famous.shtml Weaver, D.T., & Oliver, M.B. (2000, June). Television programs and advertising: Measuring the effects of product placement within Seinfeld. Paper presented to the Mass Communications Division at the 50th annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), Acapulco, Mexico. Weinberg, Larry. Product Placement. Retrieved from http://www.geocities.com/weinbergreport/brandinglarry.htm Wells, Melanie (2001, October 29). Who Really Needs Madison Avenue? Forbes 131.

Periodic Table Trends Essay

When you think of a periodic table, you think of elements like oxygen, neon, lead, and iron. You may even think of numbers, rows, and columns. You may not think about trends that are happening throughout a periodic table. There are many different trends that go on in a periodic table. The trends that I am going to be describing throughout this paper are atomic mass, atomic radius, first ionization energy, and electronegativity. When you study a normal/ordinary periodic table, the atomic mass will usually get bigger when going left to right and it will also get bigger when you go top to bottom. The atomic mass gets bigger left to right and top to bottom because the protons, electrons, and neutrons are increasing making the mass get bigger as you movie along the periodic table. When you look at the trends of the atomic radius, you will notice as you go left to right, the radius gets smaller and when you go top to bottom the radius gets bigger. The radius gets bigger going top to bottom because more energy levels are becoming occupied by electrons. The radius gets smaller going left to right because you are adding more protons which pulls the electrons and it makes it become unbalanced. If you look at the trends of the first ionization energy trends on a periodic table, you will notice that as you go left to right it gets bigger, and as you go top to bottom it gets smaller. This happens because as you go to the right, you gain more protons increasing the magnetic pull making it harder to lose electrons. As you go top to bottom it gets smaller because as you go down, the electrons are farther away from the nucleus, which requires less energy than an element that has electrons closer to the nucleus. For example, Li is smaller than Cs. So if you try to take an electron from Li it will require more energy because this atom is smaller and the electrons are closer to the nucleus. When you look at a periodic table you will notice the trends of electronegativity. As you go you left to right, the electronegativity gets bigger, but when you go top to bottom it gets smaller. This trend happens because as you move right the atoms have a tendency to gain electrons in order to become more stable. It gets smaller going top to bottom because you lose energy levels putting the protons out on the outer edge and making it easier to gain electrons. Personally, I think that the periodic table that we use daily is easier to use because it makes sense, and it is organized in a neat manner. It also makes sense to me when I look at it. But, when I look at the alternative periodic table, it seems to have a few things that I like, but the way that it is organized does not really make sense to me. One way that the alternative periodic table is superior to the normal periodic table that we use daily is that it has all the sublevels in an order that is easier to understand and it also shows the way that the elements bond in each different sublevel. It also has the period number which makes it easier to read and find each sublevel and period. Two ways that the alternative periodic table is worse than the normal periodic table is that the numbers aren’t in corresponding order, they are just scattered all over the place and it is harder to see the trends because the organization is not proper compared to the organization of the normal periodic table. Also, the alternative one does not show the atomic mass for each element.

Evolution of Business Presentation Essay

The Industrial Revolution Business has gone through several different stages of evolution from feudalism to the industrial revolution. In the following, each stage of business evolution will be examined and explained in detail. FeudalismThe business or economic system in which one class of people, aristocrats, control the property rights to all valuable resources, including people. The Hierarchy of English Aristocrats is indicated to the right of the description of Feudalism. The position in which an individual held was determined by the income they generated. The more income you made, the higher position you held in the hierarchy. The kings and Queens were the highest in rank who controlled everyone and everything that happens in their land. Hierarchy of authorityDating back in the Stone Age, the beginnings of Feudalism were starting to take place. Business has always been the stepping stone to a grand life, rather it be a great nation or corporation. During the time of the stone age, there was a chief who had authority over everyone. There were hunters who hunted wild animals for food to distribute to the tribe or clan. The food gatherers would gather and clean all the food the hunters would bring in. Craftspeople would make clothes and weapons out of the hides and bones of the animals hunted. The priests, shamans, and sages were responsible for providing â€Å"protection† and religious hope. MERCANTILISM Business or economic system in which merchants and bankers organize the trade of products across markets and countries until they are put to their most valued use. Mercantilism existed back in Egyptian times also. It was a huge part of Egypt and it’s economic existence. There was some papyrus records found that described boundless quantities of grain and olive oil being stored in warehouses that extended over several fields in Alexandria, Egypt. These  warehouses were meant for sale abroad. In the time of the Ptolemy dynasty, mercantilism was a godsend. This king of Egypt owed Alexander the Great an abundant amount of money for Egypt being a free country. Along with gold, King Ptolemy would send fields of grain as payment for their freedom. The price of TeaMerchants then and now still make huge amounts of profit by taking advantage of differences in the prices of products in different markets. In the 1600s, tea that was imported from India to Britain cost about $100 a pound in today’s money. It was so expensive that it had to be locked up and taken out with care. Because tea was so expensive, some British communities fought back by dressing up as Native Americans and forcing the tea that was being imported into the ocean. This was called the Boston Tea Party and it helped bring about eh American Revolution. CAPITALISM The economic, business, and political system that allows people to own resources and use them to engage in production, trade, and distribution of goods and services. Capital was and still is a huge part of business. If you didn’t have what you needed, trading and bartering was the way to get it. For example, $100 was your starting capital and you needed to buy ten sacks of corn to create your product. Once you create your product and sold it, you produced more capital to turn around and buy more product. If the business was good then you could have created profit as well. Capital is not just money, it could be anything that creates profit. A piece of land perhaps with the ability to grow corn, raise cattle, etc. When a person grows corn and raises livestock, they could sell it and make an abundance of profit. COMMERCE Commerce is a division of trade or production which deals with the exchange of goods and services from producer to final consumer. Commerce comprises the trading of something of economic value such as goods, services, information or money between two or more entities. It functions as the central mechanism which drives capitalism and certain other economic systems. Commerce can be traced to the very start of communication in prehistoric times. Trading became a principal of prehistoric people who bartered what they had for goods and services from each other. PROPERTY RIGHTS Property rights are the claims by people to own, use, and sell the rights to valuable resources. Unlike now, there were no laws to protect and provide people with a legitimate claim to own and use property. The claim for property rights were a matter of using harsh force to get obtain it. Once you claimed land, you owned everything on it. The diagram shows what property rights and resources are,Land: ownership of the rights to land and the buildings and structures upon it. Capital: Ownership of the rights to financial assets such as stock, bonds, and money. Enterprise: Ownership of the rights to the products of enterprise such as patents and copyrights to products. Labor: Ownership of the rights to ones own labor and the right to work freely. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION The Industrial Revolution was an era in the 1700 and 1800’s that marked improved production and trade brought about by advances in technology. The Industrial Revolution was a period in which fundamental changes occurred in agriculture, textile and metal manufacture, transportation, economic policies and the social structure in England. It spread through Europe and  the United States. This period is appropriately labeled â€Å"revolution† for its thoroughly destroyed the old manner of doing things. Advances in agricultural techniques and practices resulted in an increased supply of food and raw materials, changes in industrial organization and new technology which cased an increase in production, efficiency and profits, and the increase of commerce, foreign and domestic, were all conditions which promoted the advent of the Industrial Revolution. REFERENCES The McGraw-Hill Companies. (2007). The Evolution of Business. Retrieved August 22, 2008, from The McGraw-Hill Companies, Week Two, BUS210- Foundations of Business Web site. Halsall Paul, (1996). Internet Medieval Sourcebook. . Retrieved August 22, 2008, from http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook1i.html#FeudalismWikipedia. (). Feudalism, Mercantilism, Capitalism, Commerce, Property rights, The Industrial Revolution. Retrieved August 22, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_PageGoogle.com. (2008). Feudalism, Mercantilism, Capitalism, Commerce, Property rights, The Industrial Revolution. Retrieved August 22, 2008, from www.google.comAbout.com. (2008). Feudalism, Mercantilism, Capitalism, Commerce, Property rights, The Industrial Revolution.. Retrieved August 22, 2008, from www.about.comAsk. (2008). Feudalism, Mercantilism, Capitalism, Commerce, Property rights, The Industrial Revolution. Retrieved August 22, 2008, from www.ask.com