Up and Down (4 page)

“God, I am such a bitch,” she whispered.

This little sliver of vulnerability caught me off guard.

“Umm, no you’re not,” I cut in. “You were justifiably upset at the new guy who, you know, had just shit on your plan from a very great altitude.” I smiled again and she stopped rocking and lifted her head.

“David, Diane likes to test new people by putting them on the spot. It’s her way of seeing if you can handle the heat. She did the same thing to me when I started. I didn’t fare much better. I might have warned you,” she conceded. “But I was a little stressed with Diane second-guessing me and gushing over you.”

“Look, Amanda, I’m just trying to survive my first day in a new job. I have no agency experience. I had to Google the word ‘brainer’ this morning. I don’t even know where the washroom is around here.”

Now she actually did smile.

“Okay, fine. I was just taking my paranoia out for a little run,” she replied. “But
NASA
is mine. You can work on it, but I’m running it. Clear?”

“It’s all yours,” I agreed. “By the way, can you show me how to record my time in
PROTTS
or whatever the hell it’s called?”

“How are you feeling?” I was sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed, exercising my gift for creative questions.

The twilight angled into the room through the west-facing window. It took her a minute to focus on who had spoken. Her face was still puffy – a remnant of the steroids she’d taken earlier in her treatment. A few wisps of hair still clung to her head. She’d long since abandoned the wig.

“Not quite myself.”

My mother has a way with understatement. I barely recognized her. She only faintly resembled my mother. Not only does cancer take so many lives, but it so often makes its victims seem like different people near the end, which is precisely when you want them to be just the same as they’ve always been.

“How is the new job?” she breathed in a voice I could hardly hear.

“Oh, my first day went very well. I managed to offend the woman I report to and alienate the entire team I’m supposed to work with
to make outer space cool again. The big boss, who is actually quite tiny, wears glasses that could be on display in the Museum of Modern Art and likes to toss grenades to the new kids to see how they’ll react. Oh, and my office, at least for now, is a tiny cubicle amidst a half-dozen web designers in an area they call ‘the pit.’ Other than that, I love it.”

“Good boy. And what did you do with
your
grenade?”

“Well, instead of playing the game and deftly reinserting the pin, I just kind of held it where it would inflict the most carnage and waited until it detonated,” I replied. “But afterwards, Amanda, you know, the woman I report to and offended, paid me an unexpected visit and we at least began to remove the bigger pieces of shrapnel.”

I waited for another “Good boy” before realizing she had drifted off to sleep. Lauren bustled in with a tray.

“Mom, I’ve got a boiled egg for you and …”

“She’s just fallen asleep,” I said, trying to keep my voice down.

“I know, David. But she really needs to eat to keep up her strength. She has to eat.”

I had blundered into a deeper topic than what my mother wanted for dinner. She surfaced again.

“Thank you, but I don’t think I can handle food right now.”

“Mom, I know. But you need your strength if we’re going to beat this thing,” Lauren persisted, handing me the tray to hold.

“Honey, please …” Mom began, but faltered.

Lauren leaned over her and began to rearrange the pillows to prop her up a bit. Mom allowed her to do this, but she didn’t seem eager to venture much off the horizontal.

“Umm, Mom, why don’t you just sit there and I’ll help you devour this egg.” I slid closer and picked up the spoon. Mom crossed her arms in slow motion as a final defence, but allowed me to feed her the egg.

“I promise not to make choo-choo train noises.”

Mom fell asleep almost immediately after swallowing the last mouthful. I took the tray and dishes downstairs. Lauren was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the wall, nursing a coffee.

“Was this a good day or a bad day?” I asked as I loaded the dishwasher and returned the tray to its spot on top of the fridge.

“They’re all pretty much the same now,” Lauren replied. “She hasn’t been downstairs in two weeks and I don’t think she’ll ever be back down here. She’ll never sit in this chair, or turn on that stove, or curse the toaster …” She stopped in mid-sentence and I saw that she was about to lose it.

“I know. But at least she doesn’t seem in any pain,” I offered. What a weak-assed response.

“Yeah, some consolation. What a bastard of a disease that the best we can say about it is that she wasn’t in much pain as it took her.”

Lauren lifted herself to her feet, dumped her coffee in the sink, and went upstairs to her room.

I don’t think I’d ever heard my sister use a word like “bastard.” I tidied up the kitchen, looked in once more on Mom, deep in sleep, and left.

I spent the next two days at the office thinking through my Citizen Astronaut contest idea and pulling together a few PowerPoint slides to bring it to life. Despite how much derision it attracts, I actually like PowerPoint, if it’s done well. I’d learned the hard way from a senior civil servant in Ottawa how to make the most of the ubiquitous presentation software after he’d pulled me aside following a briefing I’d given early in my tenure in Ottawa. I’d just learned how to animate PowerPoint slides, and I was smitten. When I’d learned that I could liberate, choreograph, and even provide a soundtrack for my bullet points, I seemed to lose any sense of judgment and restraint. In short, I suddenly felt like George Lucas and went hog-wild. Fortunately, the minister didn’t attend that particular briefing or my humiliation would have been complete.

It was a presentation on the Canadarm, the mechanical appendage that the Canadian Space Agency built for use on the space shuttle. I considered it an extraordinary achievement and wanted an appropriate measure of drama and gravitas in the presentation. So I developed a background template for the slides that featured a space shuttle along the side, its cargo bay doors open and the Canadarm extended, poised for duty. This left the
central zone of each slide free and clear for titles and bullet points. I thought it was masterfully balanced. Then, newly initiated into the glories of custom slide animation, I did my thing. It only took me about six hours to transform what had been five flat slides into a full-on cinematic assault on the senses. Throughout the process, the famous white Hollywood sign kept popping into my head.

When the lights had dimmed and my colleagues had settled around the boardroom table in the minister’s office, I stood with the remote control in my hand. I casually explained that I had just “thrown together a few slides” and hit the button to summon the first to the screen. The shuttle first slid into orbit on the edge of the slide. Then as the theme music from
2001: A Space Odyssey
, blared from my tiny and tinny laptop speakers, the Canadarm extended, reached into the shuttle’s cargo bay, pulled out the logo for the Canadian Space Agency, and slowly positioned it below the footer line in the bottom right-hand corner of the slide, before the arm retracted to its original position. It was awesome. It was brilliant.

In terms of informing my audience, it was a disaster of epic proportions. It wouldn’t have been so bad had I not programmed all five slides to do the same thing. After that opening, I doubt the audience even noticed that each bullet point “launched” from the bottom left-hand side like a text rocket, complete with blast-off sound effects, before settling into its rightful position in the middle of the slide.

Those enduring that first presentation so long ago were polite and said nothing about my special effects, except for that one senior civil servant who took pity on me. His first words after our colleagues had rushed from the boardroom were “Houston, we have a problem.” He proceeded to teach me a little about the principles of graphic design and slide composition. He concluded with advice on the restrained and strategic use of animation so that it actually enhanced the delivery of information, rather than distracted, confused, or even frightened the audience. After we’d gotten to know each other a little better, he thoughtfully suggested I donate my original Canadarm PowerPoint presentation to the
CIA
to assist with the interrogation of reticent prisoners. I saw the light and never again abused the power in PowerPoint.

I kept my contest slides simple, with few words, but solid visuals. I used shots of a shuttle launch, the interior of the International Space Station, a demographic cross-section of Canadians, a few mock headlines that I hoped we might see (e.g., “Citizen Astronaut Contest launched, Canadians get on board!”), as well as a photo of a recent news conference held in the same venue in which I was proposing we announce the contest, the Ontario Science Centre. Steadfastly static bullet points filled in the blanks so that all of the major elements of the program were duly explained. I liked it. Then again, at one time I’d liked my Canadarm presentation, too.

We all reconvened in the boardroom Thursday morning. I hadn’t had a chance to share my presentation with either Diane
or Amanda beforehand, but they didn’t seem too perturbed. I figured they considered my idea a long shot, likely to be cut early on anyway. A laptop was set up and plugged into the projector. Then we waited the compulsory ten minutes it took to fiddle with the laptop settings so the entire slide was visible on the screen. After several bad experiences with computers and projectors, I had revised the tech industry’s soothing promise from “plug and play” to “plug and plague.” It never seemed to work the first time.

Amanda walked us through a more traditional-looking slide deck with the standard communications program headings, including Background, Goals, Strategic Considerations, Strategy, Target Audiences, Key Messages, Tactics, Measurement, Timelines, Team, and Budget. My mind was drifting after the third slide. Sometimes a bit of “custom animation” would be welcome to keep you awake. As expected from the last meeting, this was strictly a media relations play with lots of solid and creative thinking to drive coverage. Beyond the ideas advanced in the earlier session, the creation of a travelling Canada in Space Museum exhibit that could tour the country was proposed. I liked the idea but still believed that at best, there was really only one media hit per outlet in each city. It seemed like a big investment for a few clippings.

Amanda went on to describe setting up a news bureau of sorts to develop and pitch story ideas on a sustained basis. This would be staffed, nearly full-time, by a team of four in our office, with others contributing potential stories as well. The social media
team proposed setting up a “
NASA
in Canada” blog, Facebook presence, YouTube channel, and Twitter feed. I tried to make up the ground I’d lost in the last meeting by adding a few thoughts and tweaks to some of the stories and commending my colleagues on the others. But I mostly kept my head down in the meeting. Finally, a junior account coordinator blurted out that we should create a
NASA
mascot, kind of like the San Diego Chicken, so we could tour him/her/it around the country visiting schools, hospitals, and malls. We hemmed and hawed, then killed the mascot idea after what I thought was a surprisingly long discussion.

Finally, at some unspoken signal, two hours in, the meeting just seemed to end. I still wasn’t that impressed with what we’d pulled together but I was keeping quiet. I was also still digesting the proposed budget for the Canadian program – just over one million dollars.

“Okay, folks, I think we’ve got our plan and I think it’s solid,” Amanda declared. “It may not push the leading edge of creativity, but it will get the job done for a very conservative client. I think it’s what they’re looking for. I’m going to revamp the deck to include the new ideas we’ve just discussed, and put it to bed. We owe it to the
D.C.
office by close of business today so it can be blended with theirs. Nice work, everyone.”

I was still fingering my keychain flash drive where I’d stored my contest slides. I wasn’t inclined to say anything given how I’d messed up my first meeting, so I didn’t. But Diane did.

“Just before we break up, David, will you present your contest idea now that you’ve fleshed it out a bit?”

I watched people sag back into their chairs.

“Um, sure, Diane.”

I really didn’t want to get into this, as the plan seemed to have been finalized already, and everyone was keen to get out of there. But I slid my flash drive into the laptop, dragged the file onto Amanda’s desktop, and a moment later had my first slide on the screen. I was more nervous presenting in front of my new colleagues than I thought I’d be. My start was shaky, but after zipping up my fly, things seemed to run more smoothly. I confess, I really liked this idea, even though I had just blurted it out at the previous meeting without the benefit of actually thinking it through. But even after a few days of kicking it around inside my head, I was more committed to it than before. Since Yuri Gagarin first left our atmosphere and found himself floating in the great black void, there has always been a mystique about astronauts. They aren’t like other humans, but exist on a higher plane. They went into space, while we stayed on Earth to cut the lawn and mind the kids. But the Citizen Astronaut contest finally broke down that barrier and allowed at least one mere mortal Canadian to fly with the elite astronauts. It stood historical convention on its head. And it was this unique shift that I hoped might mobilize a nation, if I could only mobilize a boardroom first.