Quality Takes the Time Tunnel (Week 1)

[serpentinejacaranda]

In her travels through space and time, Quality eventually learned that her modern media namesake was italicized in a boardroom in Chicago, Illinois. Specifically, the offices of Foote, Cone & Belding, advertising partners of Zenith Radio Corporation. By the time of her visit, unnoticed as usual, Zenith was no longer selling just radios. They were all selling televisions.

It made sense. But how did "the big Q" jump from advertising to design? In other words, how did the word "Quality" leap from a full-page spread in Life Magazine to stainless steel appliances and Airstream trailers? Quality sat, cross-legged, on the boardroom table and got out her notebook. She had once slipped into a midwestern Airstream conference in the middle of Sarasota. Sparkling trailers were lined up neatly, gleaming like aluminum bread loaves; she had watched a square dance and part of a Protestant sermon before the time stream took her back. This was like that. The men in this room reminded her of the men in Florida, all thick black frames and bald heads and crooked fingers.

As it turns out, Quality (the word) did not have a surprising etymological birth. In the modern media sense, anyway. Quality the person had known that before she slipped into this particular room. It was paneled, carpeted, and adorned with a driftwood clock and other midcentury markers. Even amidst the lacquered wood surfaces, polished cabinets, and little silver-plated handles on the drink tray, Quality found it anticlimactic. The conversation was almost perfunctory in how it filled itself into her intuition, like the smoke in the air.

Quality held her expectations lightly enough that the shocks from their discussion were small, like electrical arcs from a doorknob. Chicago it was. This was it. A discussion about "...the finest Quality." Murmurs of assent. A few mock-ups. Quality the word: barely detached from its American umbilical here in a room with as many cigars as pens! Still, it was a meager version of how it would be used one day. Hitler in the crib? Not exactly. Words were trickier. If not here, another room would set it free. Or change it.

Where to next, Quality?

An experienced time slipper, Quality the person still had no idea of the year unless she managed to catch it on a calendar or under an office letterhead or printed small at the top edge of a daily newspaper. Small slips were too short for these investigations.

She scribbled her observations, and many more, during her next long slip--one of the longest she'd had in a while. After a little walkabout, her back was up against a wall up on Telegraph. Occasionally she heard the blare of a foghorn. Her bag with its improvised sundries and time-traveler accoutrement was joined to her side by a tight strap so it wouldn't miss the slip. How did emergent material contact slip with her, but the subatomic did not? Why not the sidewalk? Why not the whole city? Questions always for another day. Now:

"The word Quality," she wrote, "italicized, and notably before its weaponization, began to walk across America, as if it had grown legs. I have stalked, invisible, through the walls of other advertising boardrooms, appliance showrooms, and living rooms, marking the word's post-industrial evolution. The slips took me where I needed to go.

"Shortly after, the word appeared on refrigerators and Airstream trailers, on toasters and Chevrolets, or its 'Q' sparkling, embossed with a smaller 'uality' under the florescent lights of an appliance showroom. Some days, wherever I found it, the word glimmered like an Alhambra truck under the noonday sun.

"Eventually, it appeared on cathode ray tubes. Sometimes it was etched into the border of the screen, and sometimes it flickered on the tube's projected image, maybe even in an advertisement for products like Zenith TVs!"

She grimaced at the exclamation point, then felt the hall of mirrors in her head. The dizziness was of course just prelude to another slip, so she raised her head to note the top of the Transamerica off in the distance, to take in its reality before all the other buildings huddled around it and she was gone.

Quality stood in a small, dusty family room, its rusty shag poking up through her toes. Fuck! She'd left her shoes beside her on the stoop at the top of Telegraph in 1987. No going back. But now, she found herself with two parents in two recliners and two kids cross-legged on the floor, mouths open... not at her, of course, but something on the TV. A rocket ship. 1960s, she guessed. Then she slipped again.

The final slip, for now, left her breathless. It dropped her at the base of some narrow wooden stairs that curled around a fire lookout tower. She climbed slowly, reached the top, saw it was empty, opened the unlocked door, and felt relief at the lack of an oncoming slip.

Before collapsing onto the mattress in the corner, she decided to write the following in her "Q" notebook: "From advertisement to assembly to the American workforce, honed and sharpened, the word 'Quality' was devastatingly politicized. To be Quality was to be wealthy, liberally educated, business-savvy, and light-skinned." The word politicized was underlined three times. She paused and underlined it a fourth time.

"As the word's weaponization commenced--in 1978, 1941, 1961, and 1958--the suits in finance began to draft internal memos that got delivered to the mailroom with increasing regularity: 'You have to hire more quality folks down there. This is the third time Ed missed a check.' Politicians used it as motivating fuel for the jackboots in Birmingham, Los Angeles, and New York.

"In the late 20th century, more than one person added an 'E' to the beginning of 'Quality,' attempting to wrest most of 'the big Q' away from the corpo-oligarchic state. Some folks compressed it to equity, which the conservatives called Communism, of course. It was like squashing a bug. From serious business to a delay tactic and back again, 'Quality' was at the center of this tug-of-war."

Sitting on her temporary mattress in the lookout, Quality breathed out and carefully placed the notebook in her pack. She looked up and out through the stained and warped window glass, out past where the wooden enclosure floated high above the canopy. She was surprised to see that the sun had gone down over the tips of the forest, but a glow remained. It was three or four miles away. The fire was in motion, coming straight for her.

It wouldn't reach her. Not tonight. She somehow knew she would slip before that happened. But in the meantime, satisfied with the etymological strands she had tied, Quality stretched out on the mattress, head resting on the striped down pillow, and pulled a wool blanket over her legs. She half-dreamed about her former days of chronological normalcy, far behind her now (or far ahead). Her nose tingled and she stirred. Firesmoke! Before the dizziness hit, she almost treasured the glowing warmth, the gathering of smoke into her intuition, the distant roaring... and then she was gone.