Kindling: Chapter R

Kindling
A novel
By
W.D. Haverstock



Part I



Chapter R

David could feel the eyes on his back and thought of the camera in the store.  Now it didn’t seem so far-fetched that he could feel the eye of a hidden camera just as he knew that you could feel the eyes of a human being without conscious knowledge of their presence.  He was no criminal, had committed no crime, and yet that is how he felt on this familiar street in this familiar part of town.  There was no reason other than this disconcerting feeling of being watched that he should feel this way.  He gripped the case firmly, put his head down to stare at the sidewalk in front of him, as though that were the most natural way to walk down Broadway on a warm Saturday evening, and unconsciously increased his stride.  

The day was not ending as he had anticipated.  He’d always looked forward to these early vacation visits with his old friend.  The casual trips to the north Bronx had always felt to David as though he were visiting his family, going home to a home that no longer existed or that existed now in the person of this old man who had somehow taken the place of the father who had died before David had had a chance to know him as an adult, as a peer.  The day had started out as another such day but there was nothing ordinary about it now as he crossed the trafficless 34th St.

Now he looked up.  The tables in the street were filled to capacity, the sidewalks crowded.  To his right the sidewalks in front of the last remaining retail store were thick with people trying to get a look at the famous window displays.  The old “Macy’s” signs looked as though they hadn’t changed in decades.  In truth they’d been replaced several times but always with the aim of maintaining the pretense that nothing had changed.  Nearly all shopping was done on line now with delivery of everything from clothing to fresh produce guaranteed to arrive in less than 30 minutes from the KiNWARES that now occupied many of the buildings that once housed the old-fashioned retail stores.  David glanced back over his shower, saw nothing suspicious, and pushed his way into the crowd in front of the store.

Mid-block toward 7th Ave. he stopped in front of the largest display window.  Beneath the bright stage lights inside the window was an old-fashioned automobile.  In the back seat of the automobile was a young a man and a young woman engaged in a passionate embrace.  Across the top of the window in old neon lights were the words: “Get your hands on it.”

“They used to use manikins for this,” David heard someone say.  In the reflection in the glass he saw that there was an elderly gentleman standing direction behind him.  At the older man’s side was a teenaged boy and girl.  They were holding hands and watching the display intently.

“Manikins were plastic people,” the elderly man went on.  “Imagine.  They didn’t use real people for display.  They used cheap, plastic replicas.”

“And people would look at that?” the girl asked.

“Well,” the man replied, “it was meant to display the clothing.”

“But couldn’t you just see it on line better?”

The man smiled at the child’s limited knowledge of history.

In the window the young man let go of the woman long enough to remove her sweater.  This he placed carefully over the windshield of the car, which was placed near to the window.  A spotlight shown down on the sweater as though it were a glittering jewel.  The man put his arms around the woman, dressed now in a bra and skirt, and continued the backseat embrace.

“You know, kids, they used to drive cars along here.”

At the voice David turned his attention to the street historian behind him.

“What?” the boy said incredulously.  “Where?”

“Righ out there,” the elderly man replied, indicating 34th St. behind them.  “Of course, they didn’t have tables in the street back then.  There was a line painted down the middle to separate the traffice and - very few people remember this now but there was a traffic signal in the middle of the block, right about where we are now.”

The boy and girl looked back with doubtful looks on their faces.

“When they first proposed the idea, there was great resistance.”

“What idea?”

Now the young woman in the car removed the young man’s t-shirt and placed it next to the sweater on the windshield of the car.

“That idea of turning the street into a pedestrian walkway where you didn’t have to worry about being hit by a car or run over by a truck.”

“But why would anyone object to that?”

The man nodded in the direction of the window display.  “People were once so in love with automobiles that it didn’t matter to them that the awful things killed thousands of people every year.  There was a time when they would race around the city in cars and every day some innocent person just standing on the street as we are right now would be killed.”

They watched as the young man in the car removed the woman’s bra and placed it over the sweater.  The female human manikin pressed her plump breasts into the chest of the male as they continued their embrace.

“They must have had to arrest a lot of people back then.”

“No, it wasn’t a crime to kill someone with a car.  Most of the time they would just issue a summons - do you know what that is?”

Both the boy and the girl shook their heads.

“Well, it was a kind of punishment where you had to go to a place called a court and pay a fine.”

“A fine?”

“Money.  It was a small amount, like having a few KiPence deducted from your account.”

“But what about the person who was killed?"

In front of them the 2 models let go of one another and stood up on the trunk of the car.  The woman stripped off the man’s jeans and tossed them casually over the windshield.  The man responded by loosening the woman’s skirt and doing the same.  The two stood beneath the bright window lights in nothing but scant underwear as the crowed outside began to grow restless.  The models fell against each other, the flesh glistening beneath the lights, a few drops of sweat appearing on the forehead of the woman.  David could feel the crowd surge forward, pressing the three behind him closer, pressing him against the glass.

“They used to call it ‘retail’,” the man said, now almost into David’s ear.  “See that sign up there?”  He indicated the flickering neon letters, ‘Get your hands on it’.  “People used to want to touch something before they bought it.”

“But why?” the boy asked.  “You can see it so much better in 3-D imaging.”

“And you can KiNDLE anything you want to know about it,” the girl added incredulously.

In the glass reflection David saw the man smile condescendingly.

The models stepped out of the car and came to the window.  The male model stood behind the female and reached around her to cup her firm breasts, one in each hand.  She reached back and drew her hands along the man’s hips, closing her eyes in imitation ecstasy.  The crowd began to cheer and surged even closer.

With his face nearly touching the glass, David could sense the sensation of light - sense it rather than see it.  It was close and yet he couldn’t tell where it was or where it was coming from - a dim, pulsating light that he could almost feel glinting off his own face.  Inches away the models writhed in feigned fornication.  The man moved his hands lovingly from her breasts down her stomach and slipped his fingers underneath her skimpy panties.  When he stepped around and to her side, the crowd lunged at the sight of his arousal and they did not disappoint.  Each stepped out of what remained of their attire, tossed their underwear into the air and stood stark naked for the crowed to admire and was close and yet he couldn’t tell where it was or where it was coming from - a dim, pulsating light that he could almost feel glinting off his own face.  Inches away the models writhed in feigned fornication.  The man moved his hands lovingly from her breasts down her stomach and slipped his fingers underneath her skimpy panties.  When he stepped around and to her side, the crowd lunged at the sight of his arousal and they did not disappoint.  Each stepped out of what remained of their attire, tossed their underwear into the air and stood stark naked for the crowed to admire and applaud.

With this strange sensation of light in his eyes or on his face or in his mind, David pressed his hands against the glass almost as though he were reaching for the female models breasts himself and pushed himself away from the window.  He stepped back against the throng, between the two teenagers, who had to let go of each other’s hands for him to pass between them, until he was  about ten feet from the window.  He could still sense the strange light and could feel now that it was blue.  At that moment with the crowd beginning to disperse, he felt another strange sensation, this one a slight tingling on the back of his neck.  He turned around and his eyes lighted on the street camera that hung over what was once 34th St.  This was a public camera with monitors near the intersection.  It could also be monitored at will on line.  There was nothing unusual in this.  There were such cameras now throughout the city.

But when he lowered his eyes, he saw it - a man standing just outside the crowed, just off the curb that separated the sidewalk from the tables and he knew that it was this man that had created the tingling sensation.  This was a man David had never seen before and yet it might have been the same man he had seen on the train that morning or crossing the street from Steve’s Bronx apartment.  He was wearing the same nondescript clothing, had the same nondescript expression, watched in the same casual way as though no one thing interested him more than any other.  But David thought of what James had said in the store, that he could sense the cameras, and David knew that that was what he had just experienced.  Yet he couldn’t explain it.  This was a man, not a camera that had caused the sensation.

When he turned away from this man, the crowd had mostly dispersed.  The nude models were gone from the window.  Their underwear along with the rest of their clothing was now neatly displayed on the windshield of the car with price tags, and band names prominent.  Again, staring through the glass, David got the same strange tingling sensation in the back of his neck.  He looked for the reflection of the man he had just seen but the man had disappeared.  As his eyes focused on the reflections in the glass, he saw it, the blue light, a real blue light that seemed to emanate from the glass itself.  It was invisible when staring through the glass.  It was invisible when not looking directly at the glass.  It became visible only when viewing the window and the objects behind it through unfocused eyes.  Now as his eyes adjusted to the automobile and the clothing behind the glass and to the neon lights that glittered seductively just above - ‘Get your hands on it’ - he lost sight of the light entirely.  But when he removed his concentration from his visual sense and his eyes again lost focus, the light reappeared and now he could see that it, too, was a sort of imitation neon, a sign, a message perhaps that before this moment had gone entirely unnoticed, must have gone unnoticed by the thousands of people who passed by here every hour of every day, by the thousands who stood gawking through the window at the inviting figures of the models, distracted by the most elemental forces of life from the reality that was there all around them.

David willfully separated his consciousness from his vision and saw it as clearly as if it were written in bold print on his tablet.  Flickering in a mesmerizing blue light in the clean, clear glass were the letters ‘KiNNETICS’.  But as soon as the word appeared to his consciousness, the word dissolved as his eyes focused involuntarily on the items behind the glass, on the sign above, on the reflections of people moving along the sidewalk behind him, on the memory of beautiful nude figures he had just witnessed.  It was as though the very realization of the existence of the blue light caused it to disappear from consciousness.  As the words disappeared the tingling sensation in the back of his neck returned.

David looked around.  The crowd behind had thinned.  There was no sign of the man who had been standing near the curb a moment before.  The word he had just discovered felt more like a figment of his imagination than something that  existed in the world.  David turned back to  the glass, unfocused his eyes again as if to reassure himself that it was all in his mind, but the tingling diminished as the soft blue light reappeared.  It were somehow embedded within the glass itself.  This time he was able to resist the natural inclination to focus on the objects in front of him for a moment but it was the enticing memory of what he had just seen - the slender, sensuous form of the female model’s body that jolted his eyes back into focus.  The image was so strong that he for a second he thought that she had returned and was again pressing her ample breasts against the glass in front of him.  Again he felt as though some wisp of air were brushing against the hairs on the back of his neck.

Beside him a woman remained.  She was looking through the window with a bemused expression as though she was remembering something funny.  Yet he glance seemed to fall on the scene inside the window as though she were more interested in the clothing that was still draped over the car window than in the romantic scene that had attracted the crowd.

“Excuse me,” David said.  “Can I ask you something?”

The woman turned to look at him.  “Are you speaking to me?”

“I just wanted to ask if you saw anything in the window.”

“Well,” she said, “a moment ago I saw two attractive young people acting as though they were at home in their bedroom rather than on display with an audience of ….”  She laughed.  “By now it must be circulating through the atmosphere to the far reaches of the earth.”  She waited for the tone of her voice or for the words or for the image they created to sink in.

David stared back at her, jarred by the unexpected reply.  He’d been thinking of the strange blue letters; she had pointed out the obvious.

“There used to be a word,” she continued when she saw that a slight grin was beginning to form around the corners of the mouth of the stranger who had obviously had something else in mind and had not thought of this before, “pornography.  Have you ever heard that word, young man?”

Only now did he try to imagine her age, only now when he realized that he had been thinking of himself as old.  He hadn’t realized it but it was true.  Maybe it was because after 8 years of teaching he had grown older each year but the students hadn’t.  His students never aged.  Maybe it was because he was four years older than Mary and every time they spoke, he felt as though he was somehow drifting away from her and it had something to do with getting old.  Maybe it was because, he thought, as he looked into the eyes of this woman and thought that she couldn’t have been more than 45 - not even 10 years older than he was - he hadn’t seen his mother in a long time, hadn’t seen her as much as he should have during the past few years, in fact.  But it felt good to be called young or it felt good to have his perception altered suddenly and from such an unexpected source.

“As a matter of fact,” he said and tried to mimic the woman’s mockery, “I have heard of that word and I even know what it means.”

“Well, then,” she replied, “you’re the exception to the rule these days.  Did you see how they all watched that display without thinking a thing of it.”

“Maybe they were thinking about buying some clothes.”

It was her turn to laugh.  “I’m sure that’s what they were thinking of.  You saw how they all rushed into the store when the performance ended, money in hand - I’m sorry,” she amended, “KiNIPE card in hand.”

“Well, who buys at retail stores nowadays?”

“And you even know that word - retail.  You’re an unusually erudite young man.”

He thought of confiding in her that he was a teacher but said nothing.  He knew that that had nothing to do with it.

“But you were going to ask me something different, I assume,” she said when he was silent, “something that had nothing to do with pornography.”

He’d forgotten himself.  “But pornography is only defined,” he couldn’t resist saying, “according to community standards.  Once that standard was somewhat higher.”

“You mean once there was a standard.  Now we’re surrounded at all times by people having sex.”

Try as he might he couldn’t detect anything other than amusement in her voice.  In spite of the words, there was no cynicism.

“But at least,” she added with a smile, “there always very attractive people.”

She seemed even younger when she said this and David could imagine that she had been very attractive herself when she was younger.  She was attractive now, he thought, knowing only that she was older than the models that she was talking about, most of whom were 25 years old or younger.  He realized that this was the more likely explanation for the way he felt about himself.  They were, as she said, surrounded by very attractive, very young people.  Somehow this had become the standard by which he was measuring himself and if he were doing it, others were as well.  This woman might have been 35, 45 or 55 but there was a youthful quality about her whatever her age that made her attractive in a way that David perceived although it was an attractiveness that had nothing to do with the physical body and therefore had nothing to do with the sort of scene they had just witnessed.

“And the most attractive of them all,” he found himself saying, “is Angie.”

“She’s gorgeous.  Doesn’t it make you wish we could all look like that?”

Yes, he thought, and realized that he was thinking of Angie and that it felt very good to think of her.

“Have you noticed, by the way,” the woman went on, “that Angie is gone?”

“What?”  He had not noticed.

“Yes, they’re not using her anymore except occasionally on the news.”

“”But ….”  He had just seen her that day on the train.  He had seen her every day, Angie, on the train, on his wallet, on his tablets, everywhere.

“The new girl looks almost just like her but I don’t think they’ll ever find another Angie.  She was perfect.”

She could see from the look on his face that he didn’t believe it.

“Don’t take my word for it,”  she said.  “Look for yourself  You don’t have to look far.”

She pulled her tablet out of her purse, touched the screen and there she was, the girl David had watched so intently on the train that morning, had watched with an intention that he had not noticed in himself.  She was standing nude outdoors under a spring thundershower of Coke-water as though it were soda that brought life to the earth.  The likeness was remarkable and yet now that she had pointed it out, he could see that this wasn’t Angie Almanzar.  The difference was so subtle that he couldn’t point to any single feature or expression or movement of the body and yet he knew that she was right.

“Here’s the real Angie,” the woman went on.  She switched to KiNNEWS.  “Or better yet, just look there across the street.”

Across the street was a gigantic screen where KiNNEWS was displayed 24 hours a day.  Framing the newsroom on the screen was the long, luscious body of the real Angie Almanzar.  She was wearing lingerie that morphed from one bra to another, from one panty to another, from one style and color to another as the two newscasters informed their audience of world events in between the two images of Angie.  Only briefly, almost imperceptibly, was her nude body seen in between each change of underclothing.

“See it,” the woman said.  “See the difference.

“Yes,” David responded almost unconsciously, “now that you say it, I do.”

“I think it happened about a year ago.  They must have done some sort of world-wide search to find a look-alike.  But no one can replace Angie.  I don’t know how long it took me to notice it.  One day I just saw it.”

David was thinking back now, thinking of all of the times he had seen “Angie” and of how it could be that he had not noticed the change himself.  Was it possible that he had been unable to see that which was right before his eyes?  This thought reminded him of the question he had wanted to ask.

“What I was asking you,” he said, “was if you saw anything in the window, I mean in the glass itself.   When you look through this window ….”  He turned their attention back to the display window.  Now there was a young woman inside collecting the garments that had been left on the automobile by the models.  “When you look through the glass, do you see anything?”

She looked back into the display room inside the window.  “Well,” she said, “I see another young woman but this one isn’t as beautiful as the two people we were watching a little while ago.  I suppose that’s why all she gets to do is pick up after them.”

“Do you see any signs or letters?”

She searched the room behind the glass.  “No.”

“Not inside the room,” he said.  “Inside the glass.”

She turned to face him.  “Inside the glass?”

“It’s like it’s in the glass, blue letters.  I only noticed it when I wasn’t looking at it.  Can you do that?”

“Do you mean take my mind off of what I’m looking at?”

“Something like that.”

She turned back to the window.  This time her eyes didn’t move around, didn’t follow the movements of the person inside.  This time she allowed her perception free reign.  This time she saw it.

“KiNNETICS,” she said with some surprise now in her voice.  “Yes, I see it now and They’ve spelled it with those same silly capital letters.”

When she said this, she smiled and he saw the letters in his mind more than he saw them in front of himself in the glass.  He saw the small case “i” as if it were chiseled in stone.  He saw the upper case letters as if for the first time noticing that they seemed out of place.

“I wonder what it means,” she was musing.

“So do I.”

“No doubt it has something to do with the latest form of technology they’re going to be shoving down our throats next.  God knows what that will be.”

They looked at each other.

“Make you wonder, doesn’t it?” she said.  “What else are we looking at that we don’t even see?”

David merely nodded.

“I’ve got to get going.  At least they’ve cleaned up the city and built a lot of nice, new buildings.  You can’t complain about that.  I’ll bet you helped with that during your national service, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.  How dd you guess?”

“You’re a young man.  35?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“So you were just about that age when they really started that work fifteen years ago.  It was a lot of work.  It’s been nice talking to you.”

She turned toward the east side.  As she walked away, he thought that she was no older than he.

He put his head down, clutched the suitcase more tightly, turned toward 7th Ave. and resumed walking, quickly this time though he had not decided on any particular course to follow.  He glanced around every few steps for a glimpse of the man he had seen behind him in the street a few minutes before, expecting to see not the same man but one who was the same in a way that he could not  yet articulate even through images.  He aw no such man between the store window and the corner of 7th Ave. and yet the sensation in the back of his neck now assured him that someone was watching.

But there was nothing unusual about being watched.  Everyone was watched all the time and everyone knew it.  They were watched in public; they were watched in private and that was how it should be.  It was one of the very foundations of modern society.  It was the single most important factor their security, the thing that had put an end to street crime, something now as unimaginable as the possibility of a blackout or a food shortage but something that had once terrified people to such an extent that there were people who had refused to set foot within the city or within any city like New York out of sheer fear.  This he knew mostly from his study of history also through memories he had, memories of stories his father had told him about the old days before it was agreed that security was more important than personal privacy.   This he had never doubted.

Being watched was something that he took for granted as did everyone else.  But being followed was something that he had never before imagined.  He looked over his shoulder, back toward 6th Ave. but not knowing exactly what he was looking for.  He thught of the man on the train that morning and thought he would not recognize him if he saw him again.  Yet he had made the association between the man on 34th a few minutes before and that man as though there some connection between the two and some connection that he recognized without knowing what it was.

He crossed 7th Ave. and took the escalator down into Penn Station, a place he often walked because of the food shops and, he thought now, maybe because there was still a link to that time in his childhood when this was the way to and from the city from the town in New Jersey where he’d grown up.  He could remember the time just before automobiles were banned from Manhattan when he had come into the city with his mother and father and had ridden in yellow cabs along these very streets.  He remembered dreaming about what his life might be like and if he would ever be able to make this place his home.  At that time it was very difficult to live in Manhattan.  Now there was space for everyone.  Now there was nothing easier.  Anyone could live wherever they wanted.

The underground concourse was now filled with restaurants.  Gone were the old newsstands that he vaguely remembered and that now reminded him of the look on Steve’s face as he had described his father’s life in the Bronx, working in a newsstand on a street corner that now bore little resemblance to anything outside the memory of an old person.  Gone, too, were the retail stores, now replaced by the KiNWARES that made everything so much simpler, so much easier, so much more convenient, as the teenager behind him had pointed out while staring at the obsolete display window.  Gone, too, were the novelty stores and the book stores.  Gone, in fact, were books.  It was unimaginable now that information had once been so tightly controlled that you had to buy it bit by bit and then attempt to put it together by means so crude that it made true synthesis and understanding of even the simplest facts virtually impossible.  Now all of history was right at their fingertips, right there in his pocket, accessible at any time of day or night.

But the restaurants, like the tables up and down the street were still there, separated by 24-hour medical offices that once had closed for the evening as though there were a time when medical emergencies didn’t happen.  There were now massage parlors, gymnasiums, and coffee shops - all of them with wallets and the recurring image of Angie Almanzar to remind them that this new world was here to stay.

David realized that he was tired from carrying the suitcase across town.  He went into a coffee shop and sat down.  He set the case on the floor at his feet and stared across the concourse at windows that opened into a gym. Inside he could see people running in place on exercise bikes and other machines behind them.  He rubbed his arm and thought that he ought to be using his time better and that the physical work he had done during National Service wouldn’t last him forever.  Eventually he would have to start taking care of himself.

A waitress took his order for a cup of coffee as he starred at the newscaster on the wallet.  As she turned away, he glanced at her back and felt again the ticklish sensation at the back of his neck.  This time he turned toward the windows across the concourse and unfocused his eyes but no blue lights appeared there.  But it was difficult not to watch the people on the exercise bicycles just inside.  At the center of the window was a young woman who leaned forward on the exercise bike with her head down so that her long, blonde pony tail fell over her shoulder and almost down to the peddles.  David watched and wished that she would raise her head so that he could see her face.

Above the entrance to the coffee shop he saw the camera in its usual location and knew that it was monitoring everything that wen ton inside the shop as well as everything that passed just outside the door in a 360 degree arc.  The thought was comforting and yet the strange sensation was disconcerting.

His attention was drawn to the back of a second waitress.  She was standing at the table next to his, talking to a man seated there.  As David’s eyes feell from the back of her head, where her hair was pulled back in a tight bun and held in place by a long hairpin, to the apron strings that were tied in a bow at the small of her back, to her shapely hips beneath the sheer uniform dress, to the clean, white sneakers that she wore with very short athletic socks, he could feel the sensation grow stronger, as though it were playing some sort of warm-cold game with him.  As his glance move back up, the sensation weakened and the disappeared as he saw what had caused it.  The sensation seemed to weaken the closer he came to perceiving its sourse.  There in the hairpin was the camera, almost invisible, no larger than the head of a pin.  It would have gone entirely unnoticed if not for this new extra sense that he attributed to James’ revelation earlier that day.

“Excuse me, Miss,” he said to the waitress.

When she turned around to face him, the sensation returned.  “Yes?”

“I was just wondering if that’s a camera in your hair pin.  I talked to a girl earlier today who said they were experimenting with cameras in buttons.”

“Yes,” she said and smiled, “that’s what they’re doing.  They gave us these pins to wear.  I don’t care about the camera but I love the pin.”  She turned back to the man she’d been talking to and the sensation disappeared.

When his coffee arrived, David noticed that his waitress, too, was wearing such a hairpin.  This time there was no sensation - he knew it was there but he wondered what the point was.  It was too random.  There was no predicting which way the women would stand or turn or how fast they would walk or what exactly could be monitored by these cameras.  They were different from the street cameras, which were positioned to surveil specified areas.  The fact that it was public knowledge was the thing that made them effective.  Since everyone knew that they were being watched, there was nothing to hide.  These tiny, hidden cameras placed in such inefficient positions didn’t make sense.

When his glanced turned back to the young woman on the exercise bicycle across the concourse, he saw him again and this time he recognized him.  It was the same man he had seen half an hour earlier on 34th St., the man who has been watching the Macy’s window and had sudden disappeared just before David had sensed the blue light in the glass.  The same familiarity was there, some ineffable link to the other men he had noticed that day.  It could not be coincidence.

He left his cup half full, grabbed the suitcase, and stepped back out into the concourse.  When he turned toward 8th Ave., he could feel without looking back that the man had fallen in step behind.  David walked briskly but hoping still not to arouse the suspicion that he was aware of the follower.  Near 8th Ave. he turned south on the lower level and then took the escalator up to the main level.  He turned 180 degrees beneath the gigantic wallet that now hung at the center of the main lobby, remembering that there was a bar to the north that had always been dark and crowded.  He glanced up at the public cameras that hung at both ends of this wide wallet and saw the familiar gleam of digital life within them.

He looked up as he neared the bar and saw that it was, indeed, dimly lit and very crowded.  There were people standing outside the entrance, pushing through the narrow doorway toward a bar that reached on the left side from the entrance to the back wall.  The camera above the door, too, was glinting with life.

David made his way through the crowd, into the room and finally within earshot of something that the loud murmur of the crowd had disguised from outside - the sound of a guitar and voice.  He followed this sound to the back of the room where he saw her again, the girl he had met almost 2 weeks before.  This time she was alone, sitting on a stool with nothing but a guitar and her own voice and with no one paying any attention.