I realized now there was no plan. At this point, Garrett was drawing only on instinct in piloting the campaign—if it even made sense to call it that any longer. Ultimately, it seemed, it came down to this: either the project we’d all been engaged in for months had nothing to do with commerce, and he’d never believed Duke and Daphne would help sell his products, or his ends, halfway through, had somehow turned almost entirely extra-financial, settling on the two principals themselves, and perhaps most of all his medium, his oracle, and the world I’d lassoed.
“Well, he does have that kind of wealth,” Karen said, squeezing my hand tenderly as we speeded through a subway tunnel, trying to assuage the pangs of confusion running through me as I tried to fathom our circumstances. Distressed as I was, I couldn’t help but note the irony of her observation, given the resources of her own family, which, if they weren’t quite Garrett-sized, were large enough to elide the ordinary concerns of life, all the strictures that kept us compromised, which is to say, human. Still, she raised a profound question, one I suspected even then might never receive an acceptable or anyway complete answer, the sort of answer I’d hoped for: if the project we were all engaged in wasn’t about money, what was it about? What would count as success? And how was it to be measured?
Daphne and I were on our way to Roosevelt Island, to see what we could learn about Theria and its future, and hence our future—especially my future. We’d managed, and only with difficulty, to nail down an audience with Garrett and Paul at Antral’s offices, to discuss the trajectory of the campaign and the integration of message and image, something Paul was equally keen to understand, given how firmly he, who was normally mild, had backed our request for a meeting once Garrett, perhaps sensing my other reasons for wanting to come to headquarters, tried to backtrack on the notion.
The project was patently fraught, but by now Karen had definitively thrown her lot in with me, which, among other consequences, made things difficult for Cosquer’s co-editor, Rick. He disapproved not only of the campaign, as John had kindly pointed out, but of me, for all sorts of reasons. Yet if Rick was upset with the direction my work had taken, if he saw me as some sort of pawn of market forces, I maintained a certain respect for him, our history, and his rather antiquarian notions of art. What’s more, the friction with him had ultimately done me some good: it had driven him to take a stand on Garrett’s project, which in turn forced Karen to do the same, even if she took an exactly opposite stance. And once she’d publicly aligned herself with me on the matter, her resistance to being with me more openly softened. She’d slept again at my place the night before, where I’d woken to find her examining my sketchpads—affectionately, though, and not with an editor’s eye. I had her twice then. I didn’t know exactly what to say to her about what had happened with Daphne, but I didn’t have to say anything just now. I was more interested in getting a second chance to visit headquarters, a place from which Garrett had studiously kept me away.
We gathered around an enormous rectangular stone table, in the place that I’d correctly imagined, the first time I was here, would be Garrett’s usual office: it was right at the top of the building, made of pure glass, and went by the name of the Greenhouse with staff. I’d not gotten a chance to visit it the last time, since Garrett was working out of a temporary room back then. No longer.
“Not bad, right?” said Garrett, slapping the imposing table proudly. “It’s a prototype.” It looked precisely like onyx, with the same crystalline shimmer; in fact it was a synthetic material they’d developed earlier in the year. Although Garrett hadn’t been anxious for us to come, he was in a grand mood from the time he walked in the door to greet us. We were already seated, with a member of staff he’d had attend us while we waited for him and Paul to arrive. The VIP treatment, Garrett called it, though it looked more like due diligence to me.
Paul came shooting in the door with a quick, measured step, fully rehearsed, all-business. He wasn’t smiling now, but he no longer looked demure. He wanted to move forward, that was obvious. Yet how long had it been since I’d heard him speak at any length? He’d said so little at the boxing match, he’d even been positioned on the other side of Garrett to discourage conversation. At least that’s how it had struck me. Nevertheless, that we were having today’s meeting at all meant that he had some pull yet.
“I think we all just need a little clarity now,” Paul said, speaking for himself, too, not just Daphne and me. “Jim and I have been talking this over—well, talking might be a euphemism—but we’ve come to some conclusions about the campaign’s course. I know you’ve both been asking about that, and we haven’t had very good answers for you.” He gave Garrett a glance laced with sternness, but his boss was looking out the window beatifically, seemingly happy for Paul to do all the talking. “I almost feel we shouldn’t call it a campaign anymore, given what we’ve decided, but...”
“Well, don’t put it like that, Paul,” Garrett chided. “Some of your own research—”
“What I really mean to say, though, is that James’ instincts, his hunches, have led him to where he is now—where we all are, in this room.” I’d never heard such controlled rage in Paul’s voice. Neither had Garrett, apparently. Paul looked around in grudging acknowledgment at what was indeed an exquisitely composed office, never mind that it was the size of a boardroom or even a mezzanine, and all glass but for the table. The Greenhouse surmounted the building, projecting from the roof like a skybound atrium. The biggest decisions must have been taken here. It was an extravagance, to be sure, the kind of thing for which I hadn’t thought Garrett had the patience.
“And James, you’re right,” Paul carried on, “there are findings, among the things Siglin has looked at, that seem to show, at least in an experimental setting, how apparently non-existent connections between logotypes or text and imagery can be forged by the consumer himself, through sheer ubiquity, and time. Association can work along peculiar paths. We should give those findings their due weight in all this. I especially. So... do you want to tell them, then?”
Satisfied by Paul’s acquiescence, Garrett leaned forward and folded his meaty hands on the table. He eyed both of us calmy, going from me to Daphne and back to me. “What we are going to do is this,” he declared. “We’re going to keep your two projects, the words, the images, as the two things that they are. That’s all—as far as physically, I mean. I want people in the street to make the mental jump, if they can. If we’ve done a good job, shouldn’t they be able to? And if they don’t, well, we’ll have to try harder. But I just can’t ruin what you both have done. Don’t you think that’s what it would be? Destruction?”
Although Paul had forced this meeting, the proposition just decreed couldn’t have pleased him—which is to say, Garrett, when pressed, had stood firm on his hunches. I had to feel sorry for the marketer. Yet I was also relieved by Garrett’s resolve, as the wedding of my work with Karen’s was something I’d been hoping would get called off, however much I was enjoying her, being with her, which had quickly seemed to suture our pasts together into one continuous fabric. We’d been seeing each other only a short while, but with so much history between us, we were rich beyond our time. I wasn’t sure, of course, how she’d feel about what Garrett had just said. For all I knew, she sought the very union of our work he’d just denied, and thought that any future for us, together, depended on it. It was possible, anyway.
“It’ll keep this thing singular,” Garrett pushed on, standing up and looking across the river toward Whent’s. “I’m not just trying to create suspense, you know? A moment of revelation. This isn’t a tease. This is, well, look at it all”—he was pointing back behind us, at Manhattan, the island he’d wrapped in my images and Karen’s words, along with the particular blue and gold of his drinks. “What we will do, still, is put up simple names of the brands, without a uniform font of any kind, in some of the places we’ve been putting the color panels or Karen’s text: Arête, of course, but also Theria, and Accomplice for the frames—good name, right?”
“Not Obscura?” I said.
“Accomplice is better. And, oh—I know we’re late on this, very late, and I thought a lot about just sticking with White’s, but no, we’re going to go with Field for the whiskey. My grandmother’s maiden name. My father would have liked that, I think, though I can’t say about my mom. Anyway, we won’t put up too many of these—nothing gauche. Paul here will figure out the numbers and locations, as he always does. Brilliantly.” The hat tip, however, didn’t seem to impress Paul, only because he knew Garrett’s fugitive imagination drove the deepest decisions at Antral, not sober research.
“Maybe we can do it as sign painting in places,” Karen offered. “We have some phenomenal people for that at Cosquer.”
Paul nodded collegially at his only ally, a partial one at that.
“And you won’t be doing any pictures of the stuff itself,” Garrett added, “or forcing them into the pictures. I want you to know that. That would be just so... I don’t even know. And there’s research on this, too.”
“Speculative stuff,” Paul reminded him. “It’ll take a lot more work to verify that.”
“Well, sure. But it’s always like that—you know that.”
It was true, what Garrett said. In the papers Paul had sent me, many alternative hypotheses appeared in passing, ones that very often contradicted the central theses. Garrett listened to his lieutenant a lot, I realized; he just didn’t listen in the way Paul preferred. But nobody had a right to be heard in just that way.
I recalled seeing in those papers precisely the notion Paul wanted now to discount: consumers were savants when it came to completing semiotic loops, even those built from bewilderingly disparate materials, whether images, copy, colors, bare names, or typefaces. They would unpredictably thread these bits together on strings of ideas pulled from their own Lebenswelt—always the most efficient way of convincing someone of anything. This kind of open-ended opacity, Garrett believed, could make the project more compelling to a certain kind of consumer, or even citizen. And it was this kind of citizen he was hoping to conjure. Maybe we both were.
Garrett paced beside the table while Paul recounted the relevant research like an insolent child, as the findings cut against the core conclusions of the psychologist’s latest research, which emphasized an almost Cro-Magnon, Jolly Green Giant bluntness of association: Burnett over Bernbach. The best advertising, for Paul, was the stuff you couldn’t miss for all your life—even a dog couldn’t: Apple, Coca Cola, Geico. What Garrett and I were up to was much subtler, though, in fairness, the operations we were playing with, the psychic forces we were shaping, weren’t ones we had a handle on exactly. What precise effect would all of it have on the people living among these images and texts and colors on the street? Paul’s earlier views were being used against him, seeing as he hadn’t exactly disproved them, merely backed away from their most speculative dimension. So now, with Garrett looking on, the boss’ right hand reluctantly explained to Karen and me what evidence there was for some psychological bonds’ being stronger, more persistent, even unbreakable, when you got the viewer-consumer to make them for himself. However, he emphasized, with a glare toward Garrett, there was just no way of knowing the exact nature of such bonds, or the conditions of their formation. The data didn’t exist, or if it did, it hadn’t been revealingly collated.
But—and this is where Garrett and I parted ways with Paul—we weren’t looking for verification. Over the months, we’d converged on an attitude, even if it remained unspoken, and it was this: we simply didn’t need to know the campaign’s commercial effects on the appeal of the products to know it was worth carrying out. There was, after all, something we did know more about already, and could know more still about as time went on: the effects of the drawings and text on Duke and Daphne, which seemed to mean more now to Garrett and perhaps to me, too, than anything having to do with revenues and profits.
Paul’s lecture wasn’t finishing so much as petering out. We needed no explanation, really. I’m not sure why Garrett even had Paul give this speech, other than to get him to voice the party line—Garrett’s line. Whatever it was, with Paul running out of things to say, statistics to cite, I knew that my moment had come.
“So, when do you think,” I interrupted, “we’ll have the new for mulation of Theria you’ve been telling us about?”
Paul’s eyes widened; Garrett’s did, too.
“What’s changed in it? It might help us dream things up, knowing that.”
“Oh, well, the two versions aren’t exactly unrelated. Right, Paul?”
“There’s no alcohol in it, I guess?” I said.
“It’s not a quack elixir, no,” Garrett shot back. “But some of its key ingredients are derived from wheat. The retrofitting you saw me doing at the old distillery, that was about Theria, actually, not whiskey. But the formula’s still being tinkered with.”
“So when should I expect—”
“You did throw out the old stuff, right?”
Paul seemed very interested in my answer.
“When will there be more?”
“But did you throw it out?” Paul joined Garrett’s questioning.
“I did.” (I hadn’t.) “But—”
“Well, the FDA is taking their time with us, aren’t they, Paul. It’s just what governments do. Inertia’s their specialty. They assume something must be amiss. How could this stuff be so good, so productive otherwise?”
“But is anything wrong with it?” I pressed. “Why are you changing the formula if there isn’t?”
Paul looked grave.
“What’s in it, exactly,” Karen said more gently, “besides wheat?”
“It’s a kind of herbal formulation, I suppose,” said Garrett.
“Is it purely natural?”
“In the sense that nothing is not natural, yeah.”
Paul blanched; Garrett stood up.
I pinched Karen’s leg then and she kicked me for my trouble. She didn’t continue with her prying, though, which was my aim. Clearly we weren’t going to get answers like that. Garrett began to wander around the periphery of his greenhouse while Paul stared ever deeper into his notes—through his notes, really—to something beyond them, something peaceful and assured, all while tapping his pen on the paper at a furious pace. A peroration was coming from his boss. We all sensed it, yet ten excruciating seconds passed before it began.
“Paul just hates it when I get philosophical, I know,” Garrett said. “But you have to understand, my entire company, my life, is predicated on one question: is it worthy? Whatever the thing is you’re considering, is it worthy? Now, if you didn’t have to do anything to it to make it that way, to get it to say yes, great. But, if you did, if you had to synthesize or distill it, as long as what comes out does something good, it’s fine by me. It’s the greatest magic anyone’s capable of. The only thing I stand against is inertia, in all its forms. If you can’t find movement in something, however natural or untouched by the human hand, I’m just not interested. I’m not a romantic that way. My dad was always telling us about the country, all the solitude and peace out there. And a lot of artists are like that, too, I know. The Impressionists out in the countryside, and so on. But that’s why I chose you to help me here—once I’d seen your drawings.”
Garrett pivoted toward Karen then and spoke with obvious sincerity. “I just love the way he sees. He may be a lot smarter about it than I am, I’m sure he is, but he sees things like me.”
He waited for us to respond, but we didn’t.
“You know, the government’s done it to me a million times, with each of my materials, telling me to slow down, look out. It’s just a different department making the complaint each time. And it always goes the same way: when they begin to understand what we’ve achieved, they’re glad we did it. So don’t worry. Just as soon as we’ve got the drink where we want it, you’ll have a lifetime supply.”
He laughed alone, and Paul, always the gent, even in distress, dabbed his head with a handkerchief of lustrous green.
I was in trouble, too. My temples were beginning to throb, listening to Garrett. My mouth had already dried up. And my thoughts were crashing into each other again. Garrett was smiling like the first time I’d seen him in this building, when I barely knew him and I’d come at his invitation. Paternally, I suppose you’d call it. Though my own father would never have looked at me like that.
I can no longer recall how long we sat there. Nor can I recount all the phases my mind passed through, all the half-thoughts that went ricocheting through me—that Garrett sent ricocheting through me. What I know for certain is that at that moment I faced a profound yet benighted fait accompli, unable as I was to say exactly what had become irreversible. I would have liked a word for that phenomenon, but no matter.
The four of us eventually went down a staircase to a circular floor, and right away I explained that I knew the way back to the lobby, that Karen and I would show ourselves out. But before we could escape our prosperous clients, Garrett asked me once more about my crumbling, squalid palace.
“When exactly are they going to use eminent domain on your building?” he said. “Because it’s coming. It’s just another thing governments do. You’ve got to move—right now, if you’re smart. I can get you space, you know, if space is the problem.”
I nearly darted away, openly fleeing, running off into the depths of Antral with only that sense of looming finality trailing me. But hadn’t Garrett more or less disclosed what I was wondering about? That this was all... experimental? That he wasn’t exactly a pro-regulation guy? His fear of me had fallen away, I realized. He took us to be firmly with him now, so that he could tell us just about anything and there’d be nothing we’d want to—or could—do about it. There wasn’t much more to hunt around for there, no answers to ferret out that Garrett hadn’t already intimated.
As Karen and I walked out of that great glass dome, my head swimming, there was really only one thing I knew: I would somehow have to accept, even if I could barely fathom the thought right now, that the stuff I needed to straighten me out again, to bring back the old self I’d lost, the one Rick and Lindy and I don’t know how many others seemed to think I was losing, too, including Karen, even though I’d dragged her over to my side, may never make it back into production. We’d never see another drop of it, and I’d never see myself again.