The second level’s ice machine roared without cease in a large utility closet next to Atwater’s room. His tie reknotted but the left leg of his slacks still rolled way up, the journalist had the Holiday Inn’s distinctive lightweight ice bucket in his hand when he opened the door and stepped out into the ambient noise and chlorine smell of the balcony. His shoe nearly came down in the message before he saw it and stopped, one foot suspended in air, aware at the same time that chlorine was not the only scent in the balcony’s wind. The “ HELP ME” was ornate and calligraphic, quotation marks sic. In overall design, it was not unlike the cursive HAPPY BIRTHDAY VIRGIL AND ROB, YMSP2 ’00, and other phrases of decorative icing on certain parties’ cakes of his experience. But it was not made of icing. That much was immediately, emphatically clear.
Holding the bucket, his ears crimson and partly denuded leg still raised, the journalist was paralyzed by the twin urges to examine the message’s workmanship more closely and to get far away as quickly as possible, perhaps even to check out altogether. He knew that great force of will would be required to try to imagine the various postures and contractions involved in producing the phrase, its detached and plumb straight underscoring, the tiny and perfectly formed quotation marks. Part of him was aware that it had not yet occurred to him to consider what the phrase might actually mean or imply in this context. In a sense, the content of the message was obliterated by the overwhelming fact of its medium and implied mode of production. The phrase terminated neatly at the second E’s serif; there was no tailing off or spotting.
A faint human sound made Atwater look hard right — an older couple in golfing visors stood some yards off outside their door, looking at him and the balcony’s brown cri de coeur. The wife’s expression pretty much said it all.
All salarymen, staff, and upper level interns at Style had free corporate memberships to the large fitness center located on the second underground level of the WTC’s South Tower. The only expense was a monthly locker fee, which was well worth it if you didn’t want to schlep a separate set of exercise clothing along with you to the offices every day. Two of the facility’s walls were lined with mirrored plate. There were no windows, but the center’s cardio fitness area was replete with raised banks of television monitors whose high gain audios could be accessed with ordinary Walkman headphones, and the channels could be changed via touchpad controls that were right there on the consoles of all the machines except the stationary bicycles, which themselves were somewhat crude and used mainly for spinning classes, which were also offered gratis.
At midday on Tuesday 3 July, Ellen Bactrian and Mrs. Anger’s executive intern were on two of the elliptical training machines along the fitness center’s north wall. Ellen Bactrian wore a dark gray Fila unitard with Reebok crosstrainers. There was a neoprene brace on her right knee, but it was mostly prophylactic, the legacy of a soccer injury at Wellesley three seasons past. Multicolored fairy lights on the machines’ sides spelled out the brand name of the elliptical trainers. The executive intern, in the same ensemble she’d worn for biking in to the Style offices that morning, had programmed her machine to the same medium level of difficulty as Ellen Bactrian’s, as a kind of courtesy.
It being the lunch hour, the center’s cardio fitness area was almost fully occupied. Every elliptical trainer was in use, though only a few of the interns were using headsets. The nearby StairMasters were used almost exclusively by midlevel financial analysts, all of whom had bristly cybernetic haircuts. Not for over 40 years had the crewcut and variations upon it been so popular; a SURFACES item on the phenom was not long in the offing.
Certain parts of a four way internal email exchange Tuesday morning had concerned what specified type(s) of piece the magazine should require the Indianan to produce under tightly controlled circumstances in order to verify that his abilities were not a hoax or some tasteless case of idiot savantism. The fourth member of this exchange had been the photo intern whose mammoth engagement ring at Tutti Mangia had occasioned so much cattiness during yesterday’s SE2 closing. Some of the specs proposed for the authenticity test were: A 0.5 reproduction of the Academy Awards’ well known Oscar statuette, G. W. F. Hegel’s image of Napoleon as the world spirit on horseback, a WWII Pershing tank with rotating turret, any coherently identifiable detail from Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, a buck with a twelve point rack, either the upper or lower portion of the ancient Etruscan Mars of Todi, and the well known tableau of several US Marines planting the flag on an Iwo Jiman atoll. The idea of any sort of Crucifixion or Pietà type piece was flamed the moment it was proposed. Although Skip Atwater had not yet been given his specific marching orders, Mrs. Anger’s executive intern and Ellen Bactrian were both currently leaning toward a representation of the famous photograph in which Marilyn Monroe’s skirts are blown upward by some type of vent in the sidewalk and the expression on her face is, to say the least, intimately familiar to readers of Style.
Some of the internal email exchange’s topics and arguments had carried over into various different lunchtime colloquies and brainstorming sessions, including the present one in the World Trade Center’s corporate fitness facility, which proceeded more or less naturally because an axiom of elliptical cardio conditioning is that your target heartrate and respiration are to stay just at the upper limit of what allows for normal conversation.
‘But is the physical, so to speak handmade character of a piece of art part of the artwork’s overall quality?’
That is, in elliptical training you want your breathing to be deep and rapid but not labored — Ellen Bactrian’s rhetorical question took only a tiny bit longer to get out than a normal, at rest rhetorical question.
The executive intern responded: ‘Do we all really value a painting more than a photograph anymore?’
‘Let’s say we do.’
The executive intern laughed. ‘That’s almost a textbook petitio principii.’ She actually pronounced principii correctly, which almost no one can do.
‘A great painting certainly sells for more than a great photograph, doesn’t it?’
The executive intern was silent for several broad quadular movements of the elliptical trainer. Then she said: ‘Why not just say rather that Style’s readership would not have a problem with the assumption that a good painting or sculpture is intrinsically better, more human and meaningful, than a good photo.’
Often, editorial brainstorming sounds like an argument, but it isn’t — it’s two or more people thinking aloud in a directed way. Mrs. Anger herself sometimes referred to the brainstorming process as dilation, but this was a vestige of her Fleet Street background, and no one on her staff aped the phrase.
A woman about their mothers’ age was exhibiting near perfect technique on a rowing machine in the mirror, mouthing the words to what Ellen Bactrian thought she recognized as a Venetian bacarole. The other rowing machine was vacant. Ellen Bactrian said: ‘But now, if we agree the human element’s key, then does the physical process or processes by which the painting is produced, or any artwork, have anything to do with the artwork’s quality?’