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.