Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (24 page)

"GREGORY. COME HERE AT ONCE."

I've never heard anyone else with pipes like his. His voice was suitable for one of the Seraphim or at the very least, a Galactic Emperor—deep, powerful, and so resonant that if you closed your eyes and listened to Joe, you couldn't tell if he was standing directly in front of you or behind. And his inflection could be
commanding
. Oh yes! No kid ever ignored or disobeyed the Cloudman when he was issuing direct orders.

And if someone
really
screwed up, they'd have to stand right beside the bizarre old geezer and hold his free hand for awhile as if crossing a dangerous street. Most of us found this experience to be downright sickening. Not because Joe smelled bad as you might expect from someone so old and who never seemed to take a shower or brush his teeth (the Cloudman always smelled faintly of fresh bread). But the man had ghastly hands, which felt like skin stuffed with unshelled walnuts.

It was different for me. Way different. When
I
screwed up, Joe always insisted on holding my
left
hand, the crippled one.

I'd stand to his right and he'd simply transfer his brush to his left hand and keep painting. It didn't seem to slow him down but I couldn't figure out why he never held my good hand. If he didn't want me on his left side for some reason he could have held my right hand while making me face the opposite way.

The first time I misbehaved, I found the consequences excruciatingly creepy although I was numb to the texture of his grip. But then, after a few minutes, my bad hand began to tingle and feel as if warm water was flowing through it. In those early days, it seldom felt anything, let alone
warm
. And when Joe finally let go, I could actually wiggle my useless fingers a whole sixteenth of an inch!

After that, of course, I was the perfect Problem Child at least once a day. I had no idea why, but the Claw kept improving . . .

I seldom thought about Uncle Joe after I went to New York City in 1992 to study at Pratt. That same fall, my parents moved to Connecticut ostensibly to be closer to my brother, Tim, and his newly pregnant wife, Dana, but really to lie in wait for their grandchild. So when I went home for school breaks, it was to an unfamiliar home.

Joe seemed distant and irrelevant when I finally got my first real job with a big ad agency in Manhattan. Maybe I didn't want to think about him; he just didn't fit into a world I understood. In the ten years it took me to work my way up to Graphics and Art Director, I only remembered the Cloudman when I was telling someone how I first got interested in art or on the rare days my left hand felt a bit cramped.

But you can't truly forget anyone who
shaped
you.

January 3, 2008, was the worst day of my life. The day of the car crash. I won't sicken you (or myself) by recounting the grosser details, but I was taking a cab to my office and my driver tried to beat out one red light too many. The driver wound up with a fatal injury you don't want to know is even possible, and I wound up pinned in a crushed taxi for two eternal hours.

According to my doctors and common sense, I should have died on the spot. Instead, I landed in Mount Sinai with real damages: legs whose bones had become 3D jigsaw puzzles, four badly broken ribs, and a collapsed lung. Also, internal bleeding so serious that my parents and my busy brother had to drive down from New England post- haste in the faint hope there would be a chance to say goodbye.

For several days, doctors were especially interested in my case because my first tests revealed the presence of some rather exotic bacteria floating around in my bloodstream. But when later tests showed my blood to be normal, everyone assumed the earlier evidence had been the result of a lab mistake, contamination of some obscure kind.

I didn't die, but it took some time before I was grateful about that. If you don't already know, I pray you never learn how much the human body can
hurt
.

After five operations, two months of recovery, and six months of physical therapy that Torquemada might have felt squeamish about, I was hobbling around like a hundred-year-old man in terrible shape for his age.

Don't get me wrong: hobbling was an
achievement
. I was thrilled to hobble. Initially, my prognosis hadn't included standing, let alone walking. But, despite New York's apparently sincere efforts to make life a joy for the . . . physically challenged, the city was no place for me until and unless I regained mobility. Or developed the attitude and altitude of a high-grade saint.

My brother, bless his heart, suggested I return to the old yellow house on the Cape and get some hired help including a part-time therapist. Every decade or so, like clockwork, Tim demonstrates why everyone calls him a genius. My parents had rented the family home when they moved to Mystic, Connecticut, but luckily the latest renters were eager to escape their lease.

So now, I've told you about the Cloudman and why I moved back to New England. I guess the next step is to explain how a dullard like me managed to figure out what Joe was really up to.

If it wasn't for the kind of work I do, I might never have seen it . . .

One nice thing about the Cable-Modem Age: it's quite practical to work more than a few blocks from the office. When things go wrong, however, you've got no one at hand to complain to.

If you've learned about the advertising world by watching, say,
Bewitched
on TV Land, you might have gotten the wrong idea. On TV, ad agencies are places where creative people sit around brainstorming all day—when they're not trying to harvest clients using raw ideas with, perhaps, a few sketches as visual aids.

Well, that's not how it works anymore (if it ever did). HDTV time is terrifyingly expensive, so our field is terrifyingly competitive. In the end, every penny we receive is dependent on customer satisfaction. In order to nail down a final contract, our agency has to produce
finished
products, broadcast-ready, and then sell them to suspicious clients who've been previously wined, dined, and flattered to a turn. There is, as the fellow jumping off the Empire State Building admitted, an element of risk. Finished ads cost real money; making them is essentially making a short but expensive movie. SAG actors don't come cheap, and the famous ones swallow the budget whole. Then there's the writers, the crew, the director . . .

And if you're thinking that computer-generated high-speed graphics must be cheaper, you ought to have a little talk with Tim Burton or Michael Eisner. They can explain in soft voices exactly how cheap it is to do state-of-the-art computer animation.

The harsh truth is that my agency loses money if the final agreement grosses us under two million dollars. The pressure is unbelievable and there is always a looming deadline.

On October 8, 2008, the very night "Team Champ" found the big artifact under Lake Champlain, I was under the gun again. I'd been tweaking this toothbrush commercial scheduled to be unveiled for our client the next day and had run into a problem I couldn't put my finger on. I suspected it had something to do with the voiceover; we'd originally hired David Hyde Pierce for the role, but he'd had to cancel at the last minute and his replacement lacked David's flawless timing.

I liked the ad's basic concept. The opening was set at ground level in a grand, but alien forest. Suddenly the point of view flies upwards into a pink sky. The "camera" pans downward. The forest is receding through perspective and shiny white patches appear around its edges. Our intention here was for the viewer, for an instant, to think the entire forest is growing in a vast crack in some gargantuan iceberg. But then, as the camera moves even higher, the truth is revealed: the impressive foliage is merely some salad remnants stuck in someone's molar. A dry voice asks, "Ever get the feeling your brush is leaving a little something behind?"

Clever, and creepy enough to grip the attention. Yet, as I said, something subtle was wrong. I put the first ten seconds of the thirty second piece on "autoloop" and watched and listened to it at least fifty times, feeling more and more uncomfortable and increasingly unsure why. This is the kind of thing that drives Art Directors nuts. Finally, I ignored the visuals and studied my editing program's virtual VU meters.

For no good reason, the Hyde Pierce sound-alike had put a tiny extra stress on the word "behind." Odd, but so what?

So I watched the ad again and froze the picture at the exact moment "behind" was uttered. And then I saw it. If you looked at it carefully, the damn molar looked very much like a stylized bare ass. Perhaps the hidden image would have worked if we were trying to sell liquor or lingerie or toilet paper, but in a toothbrush commercial?

I used my software's automated mixdown to soft-pedal "behind" and used the graphics editor to redact the tooth (luckily this section of the animation was a "cloned" sequence so that redrawing the tooth in one cell changed all three hundred twenty images). Then I watched the spot a few dozen more times before reluctantly e-mailing it to my agency.

The file was vast, over thirty gigabytes, and needed to be uploaded with redundant "shake" demands to confirm that no information was getting lost in transmission. You don't dare compress any file with so much visual detail. Despite the efficiency of broadband and my triple cable-modem it was going to take at least twenty minutes before the transfer was complete. And I couldn't go to sleep until the baby was safely in bed.

Immediate success wasn't a foregone conclusion. Even in the early days of the Internet, the simplest files were broken down into "packets" for transmission. Each packet would go by the most convenient route open at the exact moment it was sent. So one packet might travel from your home to Singapore and then France and eventually to a server right next door to your home, where the message originated. The next packet might go to New Guinea and then on to Bangkok, etc.

Today, of course, information is bounced around from trunk lines to satellites, and broadband modems have made the earlier phone modems all but extinct. But the principle is the same: files are torn into shreds and sent orbiting the Earth like the old-fashioned concept of electrons whirling around atoms. It's dizzying if you think of how many such shreds are in orbit at any given time.

But the bigger the file, the more it will be bounced around, and the bigger chance there is that something tiny will go wrong. Odds were about fifty-fifty that I was going to have to redo the upload several times.

With nothing to do for the moment but fret, I leaned back in my chair and caught up with how tense I'd become. My left hand was misbehaving, clenched tightly enough to break a pencil, and my legs were numb.

I forced myself to stand up and went for a long walk, all the way to the back door, partly to stretch and partly to find out how cold the night had gotten. But when I saw the clouds glowing faintly from the gibbous moon . . . I remembered Uncle Joe and wondered if he was watching the same clouds from his usual haunt at the beach.

The idea was ridiculous; it was ten past eleven and surely the man slept
sometime
. Assuming, that is, he was still alive—no one had mentioned Joe since I'd been back; but then, people tended to take him for granted . . .

It upset me that I hadn't bothered to ask about the Cloudman. Now, I couldn't stop thinking about him. And the more I thought, the more I wanted to go see if he was still down there. Could I make it the entire two and a half blocks without help? I hadn't walked that far in a single stretch since the accident.

I was lucky, the file went through on the first attempt, but I didn't do the sensible thing and go to bed. Instead, I put on a jacket and pulled the crutches from my closet. But then I remembered that my favorite physical therapist, Ms. Deborah Bloom, had suggested I stop using them. "You'll never fully recover, Mr. Burns," she had told me without a smile, "if you insist on using crutches as a crutch."

The hell with it, I thought. It's only a few stone-throws away, for God's sake. I could
crawl
there and back if I had to. So I obediently left the crutches behind and cautiously hobbled down my porch steps, determined to show the sidewalk who was boss.

The final half-block was terrible. It was all downhill, which was much harder for me than uphill. My legs and hips were killing me, and with every step, white-hot needles stabbed into my tailbone.

When I came to the parking lot directly behind the beach, I had to lean on the bike-rack and simply breathe for a few minutes. I felt like I was six again, recuperating from carrying Atlas's Sack. Looking toward the surf and shading my tired eyes against the weak glare of a distant street light, I grew an instant set of goose bumps. I hadn't really expected to see him but the Cloudman was there all right, facing the sea as always, and as usual, looking upwards.

His setup hadn't changed either. The same big easel was tethered to the ground by staked ropes—in my whole life, I'd only seen it blow over once. The narrow tray that Joe used in lieu of a palette was still clamped to the front of the easel and I wondered if he still rinsed it in brine and scrubbed it clean with wet sand . . .

Walking through dry sand in my condition was no picnic. By the time I reached Joe, my lower body was going into painful spasms.

"Good evening, young Gregory," he said warmly without glancing in my direction. He raised both arms in a gesture that took me back nearly thirty years and pointed at the sky with fingers and brush, his hands hanging in the air as if they were floating. "The Moon visits the House of Aquarius bringing—ah! There's one now!" His arms descended and he resumed painting. "Did you see it? That shooting star? How it streaked toward hidden Sagittarius like one of his own arrows in reverse?" The man still had that phenomenal voice and that rococo way of expressing himself.