Nor in fact was the high-altitude figure gazing down at them, the street’s keener onlookers saw—what he was actually doing was looking down at himself and gingerly removing a shiny packet of what appeared to be foil or Mylar from his mountaineer’s tool apron and giving it a delicate little towel-like snap to open it out and then reaching up with both hands and rolling it down over his head and hood and fixing it in place with small snaps or Velcro tabs at his shoulders and throat’s base. It was some sort of mask, the long-haired cyclist who always carried a small novelty-type spy telescope in his fannypack opined, though except for two holes for eyes and a large one for his forehead’s cup the whole thing appeared too wrinkled and detumesced- looking to be able to make out who or what the shapeless arrangement of microtextured lines on the Mylar was supposed to represent, but even at this distance the mask looked frightening, baggy and hydrocephalic and cartoonishly inhuman, and there were now some louder and less self-ironic shouts and cries, and several members of the watching crowd involuntarily stepped back into the street, fouling traffic and causing a brief discordance of horns as the figure placed both hands on his head’s white bag and with something like a wet kissing noise from his skull’s rear suction cup performed a lithe contra face that left him now facing the window with the sagged mask’s nose and lips and forehead’s very orange cup pressed tight against it—again provoking God only knows what reaction from the Playboy magazine corporate staff on the glass’s inside—whereupon he now reached around and removed from the backpack what appeared to be a small generator or perhaps scuba-style tank with a slender hoselike attachment that was either black or dark blue and ended in a strange sort of triangular or arrowhead- or D-shaped nozzle or attachment or mortise, which tank he connected with straps and a harness to the back of his GoreTex top and allowed the dark hose and nozzle to hang unfettered down over his concentricized rear and the leggings’ tops, so that when he resumed his practiced-looking opposite-leg and -arm climb up the eighth-floor window he now also wore what appeared to be a deflated cranial mask or balloon, dorsal airtank, and frankly demonic-looking tail, and presented an overall sight so complex and unlike anything from any member of the (now much larger and more diffuse, some still in the street and beginning to roil) crowd’s visual experience that there were several moments of dead silence as everyone’s individual neocortices worked to process the visual information and to scan their memories for any thing or combination of live or animated things the figure might resemble or suggest. A small child in the crowd began to cry because someone had stepped on its foot.
Now that he appeared less conventionally human, the way the figure climbed by moving his left arm/right leg and then right arm/left leg looked even more arachnoid or saurian; in any event he was still just lithe as hell. Some of the shoppers inside the display windows of the Gap had now come out and joined the sidewalk’s crowd. The figure scaled the eighth-twelfth floors with ease, then paused while attached to the thirteenth- (perhaps called the fourteenth-) floor window to apply some kind of adhesive or cleaner to his suction cups. The winds at 425 feet must have been very strong, because his caudal hose swung wildly this way and that.
It was also impossible for some people in the front portion of the street and sidewalk’s crowd to resist looking at their own and the whole collective’s reflection in the Gap’s display window. There were no more screams or cries of ‘Jump!’, but among some of the crowd’s younger and more media-savvy members there began to be speculation about whether this was a PR stunt for some product or service or whether perhaps the climbing figure was one of those renegade urban daredevils who scaled tall buildings and then parachuted to the ground below and submitted to arrest while blowing kisses to network news cameras. The well-known Sears Tower or even Hancock Center would have been a far better high-visibility site for a stunt like this if such a stunt it was, some of them opined. The first two squad cars arrived as the figure—by this time quite small, even through a novelty telescope, and obscured almost wholly from view when he negotiated ledges—was hanging attached by his forehead’s central cup to the fifteenth-floor window (or perhaps sixteenth, depending whether the building had a thirteenth floor; some do and some don’t) and appeared to be pulling more items from his nylon pack, fitting them together and using both hands to telescope something out to arm’s length and then attaching various other small things to it. It was probably the squad cars and their garish lights at the curb that caused so many other cars on Huron Ave. to slow down or even pull over to see if there’d been a death or an arrest, forcing one of the officers to spend his time trying to control traffic and keep cars moving so that the avenue remained passable. It was an older African-American woman who’d been one of the very first pedestrians to stop and look up and was now using broad motions of all four limbs to report or re-create for a policeman all she had witnessed up to the present who’d paused to ask whether to the officer’s knowledge the strangely costumed figure’s climb could possibly be a licensed stunt for a feature film or commercial television or cable program, and this was when it occurred to some of the other spectators that the lithe figure’s climb was conceivably being filmed from the upper stories of one of the other commercial skyscrapers on the street, and that there might in particular be cameras, film crews, and/or celebrities in the tall gray vertiginously flèched older building directly opposite 1101 E. Huron’s north facet; and a certain percentage of the crowd’s rear turned around and began craning and scanning windows on that building’s south side, none of which were open, although this signified nothing because by City Ordinance 920-1247(d) no commercially zoned structure could possess, nor authorize by terms of lease or contract any lessee to possess, operable windows above the third floor. It was not clear whether this older opposite building’s glass was One Way or not because the angle of the late-morning sun, now almost directly overhead in the street’s slot of sky, caused blinding reflections in that older spired building’s windows, some of which brilliant reflections the windows focused and cast almost like spotlights against the surface of the original building which even now the masked figure with the tank and tail and real or imitation semiautomatic weapon—for verily that is what the new item was, slung over the subject’s back at a slight transverse angle so that its unfolded stock rested atop the small blue-and-white tank for what might even conceivably be a miniaturized combat-grade gas mask or even maybe Jaysus help us all if it was a flamethrower or Clancy-grade biochemical aerosol nebulizer gizmo thing, the officer with the Dept.-issue high-× binoculars reported, using a radio that was somehow attached like an epaulette to his uniform’s shoulder so that he had only to cock his head and touch his left shoulder to be able to confer with other officers, whose blue-and-white bored-out Montegos’ sirens could be heard approaching from what sounded like Loyola U.—continued to scale, namely 1101 E. Huron, so that squares and small rectangles and parallelograms of high-intensity light swam around him and lit up the sixteenth- or seventeenth-floor window he was even then scaling with nerveless ease, the fully automatic-looking M16’s barrel and folded stock inserted through several presewn loops along the left shoulder of his GoreTex top so that he retained full use of his left arm and hand’s cup as he scaled the window and sat once again on the next story’s ledge, the long nozzle arranged beneath him and only a couple feet of it protruding from between his legs and wobbling stiffly in the wind. Reflected light aswim all around him. A group of pigeons or doves on the ledge of the adjoining window was disturbed and took flight across the street and reassembled on a ledge at the exact same height on the opposite building. The figure appeared now to have removed some sort of radio, cellular phone, or handheld recording device from his mountaineer’s apron and to be speaking into it. At no time did he look down or in any way acknowledge the sidewalk and street’s crowds, their shouts and cheers as each window was traversed, or the police cruisers which by this time were parked at several different angles on the street, all emitting complex light, with two more
squad cars now blocking off E. Huron at the major intersections on either side.
A C.F.D. truck arrived and firefighters in heavy slickers exited and began to mill about for no discernible reason. There were also no evident media vans or rigs or mobile cameras at any time, which struck the savvier onlookers as further evidence that the whole thing could be some sort of licensed prearranged corporate promotion or stunt or ploy. A few arguments ensued, mostly good-natured and inhibited by the number of auditors nearby. A stiff new ground-level breeze carried the smell of fried foods. A foreign couple arrived and began to hawk T-shirts whose silkscreen designs had nothing to do with what was going on. A detachment of police and firefighters entered 1101’s north facet in order to establish a position on the building’s roof, the firemen’s axes and hats causing a small panic in the Gap and causing a jam-up at the building’s revolving door that left a man in Oakley sunglasses slumped and holding his chest or side. Several people in the crowd’s rear cried out and pointed at what they claimed had been movement and/or the flash of lenses on the roof of the opposite building. There was counterspeculation in the crowd that the whole thing was maybe designed to maybe only look like a media stunt and that the weapon the figure was now sitting uncomfortably back against was genuine and that the idea was for him to look as eccentric as possible and climb high enough to draw a large crowd and then to spray automatic fire indiscriminately down into the crowd. The driverless autos along the curb at both sides of the street now had tickets under their windshield wipers. A helicopter could be heard but not seen from the canyon or crevasse the commercial structures made of the street below. One or two fingers of cirrus were now in the sky overhead. Some people were eating vendors’ pretzels and brats, the wind whipping at the paper napkins tucked into their collars. One officer held a bullhorn but seemed unable to activate it. Someone had stepped backward onto the steep curb and injured his ankle or foot; a paramedic attended him as he lay on his topcoat and stared straight upward at the tiny figure, who by this time had gained his feet and was splayed beneath the seventeenth/eighteenth floor, appearing to just stay there, attached to the window and waiting.
Terry Schmidt’s father had served in the US armed forces and been awarded a field commission at the age of just 21 and received both the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star, and the decorated veteran’s favorite civilian activity in the whole world—you could tell by his face as he did it—was polishing his shoes and the buttons on his five sportcoats, which he did every Sunday afternoon, and the placid concentration on his face as he knelt on newspaper with his tins and shoes and chamois had formed a large unanalyzable part of the young Terry Schmidt’s determination to make a difference in the affairs of men someday in the future. Which was now: time had indeed slipped by, just as in popular songs, and revealed Schmidt fils to be neither special nor exempt.
In the last two years Team Δy had come to function as what the advertising industry called a Captured Shop: the firm occupied a contractual space somewhere between a subsidiary of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt and an outside vendor. Under Alan Britton’s stewardship, Team Δy had joined the industry’s trend toward Captured consolidation and reinvented itself as more or less the research arm of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising. Team Δy’s new status was designed both to limit R.S.B.’s paper overhead and to maximize the tax advantages of Focus Group research, which now could be both billed to Client and written off as an R&D subcontracting expense. There were substantial salary and benefit advantages to Team Δy (which was structured as an employee-owned S corporation under U.S.T.C. §1361-1379) as well. The major disadvantage, from Terry Schmidt’s perspective, was that there were no mechanisms in place by which a Captured Shop employee could make the horizontal jump to Reesemeyer Shannon Belt itself, within whose MROP division the firm’s marketing research strategies were developed, thereby enabling someone like T. E. Schmidt to conceivably have at least some sort of impact on actual research design and analysis. Within Team Δy, Schmidt’s only possible advancement was to the Senior Research Director position now occupied by the same swarthy, slick, gladhanding émigré (with college-age children and a wife who always appeared about to ululate) who had made Darlene Lilley’s professional life so difficult over the past year; and of course even if the Team did vote in such a way as to pressure Alan Britton to ease Robert Awad out and then even if (as would be unlikely to say the least) the thunderingly unexceptional Terry Schmidt were picked and successfully pitched to the rest of Team Δy’s upper echelon as Awad’s replacement, the SRD position really involved nothing more meaningful than the supervision of sixteen coglike Field Researchers just like Schmidt himself, plus conducting desultory orientations for new hires, plus of course overseeing the compression of TFGs’ data into various statistically differentiated totals, all of which was done on commercially available software and entailed nothing more significant than adding four-color graphs and a great deal of acronym-heavy jargon designed to make a survey that any competent tenth-grader could have conducted appear sophisticated and meaningful. Although there were also of course the preliminary lunches and golf and gladhanding with R.S.B.’s MROPs, and the actual three-hour presentation of Field Research results in the larger and more expensively appointed conference room upstairs where Awad, his mute and spectrally thin A/V technician, and one chosen member of the relevant Field Team presented the numbers and graphs and helped facilitate R.S.B.’s MROPs and Creative and Marketing heads’ brainstorming on the research’s implications for an actual campaign that in truth R.S.B. was already at this stage far too heavily invested in to do anything more than modify some of the more ephemeral or decorative elements of. (Neither Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley had ever been selected to assist Bob Awad in these PCAs*, for reasons that in Schmidt’s case seemed all too clear.) Meaning, in other words, without anyone once ever saying it outright, that Team Δy’s real function was to present to Reesemeyer Shannon Belt test data that R.S.B. could then turn around and present to Client as confirming the soundness of the very OCC† that R.S.B. had already billed Client in the millions for and couldn’t turn back from even if the actual test data turned out to be resoundingly grim or unpromising, which it was Team Δy’s unspoken real job to make sure never happened, a job that Team Δy accomplished simply by targeting so many different Focus Groups and foci and by varying the format and context of the tests so baroquely and by facilitating the different TFGs in so many different modalities that in the end it was child’s play to selectively weight and rearrange the data in pretty much whatever way R.S.B.’s MROP division wanted, and so in reality Team Δy’s function was not to provide information or even a statistical approximation of information but rather its entropic converse, a cascade of random noise meant to so befuddle the firm and its Client that no one would feel anything but relief at the decision to proceed with an OCC which in the present case the Mister Squishy Company itself was already so heavily invested in that it couldn’t possibly turn away from and would in fact have fired R.S.B. if its testing had indicated any substantive problems with, because Mister Squishy’s parent company had very strict normative ratios for R&D marketing costs (= RDM) to production volume (= PV), ratios based on the Cobb-Douglas Function whereby RDM must, after all the pro forma hemming and hawing, be , a textbook formula which any first-term MBA student had to memorize in Management Stats, which was in fact where North American Soft Confections Inc.’s CEO had almost surely learned it, and nothing inside the man or at any of the four large US corporations he had helmed since taking his degree from Wharton in 1968 had changed; no no all that ever changed were the jargon and mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted, without anybody once ever saying stop a second or pointing out the absurdity of calling what they were doing collecting information or ever even saying aloud—not even Team Δy’s Field Resear
chers over drinks at Beyers’ Market Pub on E. Ohio together on Fridays before going home alone to stare at the phone—what was going on or what it meant or what the simple truth was. That it made no difference. None of it. One R.S.B. Senior Creative Director with his little gray ponytail had been at one upscale café someplace and had ordered one trendy dessert on the same day he was making notes for one Creative Directors’ brainstorming session on what to pitch to the Subsidiary PD boys over at North American Soft Confections, and had had one idea, and one or two dozen pistons and gears already machined and set in place in various craggy heads at R.S.B. and North American’s Mister Squishy had needed only this one single spark of C12H22O11-inspired passion from an SCD whose whole inflated rep had been based on a concept equating toilet paper with clouds and helium-voiced teddy bears and all manner of things innocent of shit in some abstract Ur-consumer’s mind in order to set in movement a machine of which no one single person now—least of all the squishy Mr. T. E. Schmidt, forgetting himself enough almost to pace a little before the conference table’s men and toying dangerously with the idea of dropping the whole involved farce and simply telling them the truth—could be master.