Naturally, I said nothing of this to Sherman, who anyway only left off barking into his own phone to bark at me: ‘They checked your phone to see who you’d called recently, then rang a few people. I happened to have been in SF for the Web 2.0 thing, flew here from Miami, so I came out to get you, you dumb fuck.’
The outline of a Range Rover pulled up to the kerb, the outline of Baltie at the wheel.
‘Yeah, yeah, I know. I have to see some people at Stanford in the morning, then I’ll be with you at lunchtime—’ He broke off again: ‘Go on, get in the car willya?’
I got into the back seat and Sherman clambered into the front. Baltie’s shape said ‘Hi’, with that special tone people reserve for failed suicides, at once sympathetic and reassuringly annoyed, as if to say: See the trouble you’ve put us to!
Within minutes we were tooling back over the bridge, the tyres of the big car drumming the deck plates, the mighty lyre of the cables strumming past. At last, shorn of the encumbrance of any human scale whatsoever — no finicky aerials or watertank bobbins — the San Francisco skyline acquired, for me, the majesty others always claimed they found in it. Once we were down off the bridge and augering into the core of downtown, the sidewalks were as unthreatening as Hanna-Barbera backdrops, the homeless mere silhouettes, the traffic no longer steely but graphite — reduced to a few pencil marks on the fronts of the buildings.
I made a conscious decision to say nothing of this… nothingness to Sherman, while he treated my rescue as simply another chore to be completed with despatch. ‘What’ve you got on here?’ he rapped as the Range Rover pulled up beside the Prescott. I muttered something about a book reading at the City Lights in two days’ time. ‘Fine, then. You can come out to Stanford and the Google Campus with me tomorrow in the day — we’ll pick you up around ten. If you need me you’ve got the number, we’re staying in the Transamerica building, they rent out a penthouse suite.’
As I prepared to insert my stick body into the line drawing of my bed I pictured Sherman in his odd accommodation, at the very apex of the Transamerica’s 48-storey white granite-faced pyramid. With Baltie a hieroglyph on the marble wall, Sherman rollicked back and forth in this despotic bed and breakfast, stubbing out a Hoyo here, snatching up a glass of champagne over there, consulting a sale catalogue while he barked at Borzois in Kiev, or Pekineses in Beijing. I wondered if, in all that restless communication, he had taken the time to reassure my family, who might have been concerned by the phone call from the paramedics who had scooped me up from the Golden Gate Bridge. Wondered this — yet felt powerless to call them myself.
This latest episode in my relationship with Sherman had taken things to another level. I knew that my behaviour in the past had been shameful, yet this very Dickensian coincidence — of which I could’ve had no great expectation when I teetered atop the parapet — brought home to me quite how much psychic baggage I was carrying with me.
Perhaps I should’ve felt more disturbed by the excision of any sense of proportion that I had once had, and its replacement by a thick fog of mediocrity welling up from San Francisco Bay. I didn’t, though, for since having come to Marin County and listened to the pugnacious Sangha, I had been blissfully free of the multiplier and the divisor.
Lying in the darkness of the Prescott, I ran over the stats: the bridge was 8,981 feet long, the longest span was 4,200 feet. It was 746 feet high, and there were 80,000 miles of wire in its main cables, while approximately 1,200,000 rivets had been used in its construction. Between its completion in 1937 and 2005, more than 1,200 people had jumped the 245 feet to their death in the chill waters below. 1,200, not 120 nor yet 120,000, but 1,200 — these figures were incontrovertible: the facts on the ground.
5.5
The Last Nurdle
Watch it bigger day by day! Natural manhood enhancement! Easily to get male package… Demetrius Erectile Organ Cosmic. Gargantuan Penis Beau. Reach out and bone someone… I stood in the restroom at the Googleplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, and these came back to me: Fuck Stick Ample Floyd. Rosa Full-Size Fuck Stick. Body part enlarged shown. FannieMonumentalCock… Manglings of syntax and grammar that nonetheless got across the hollow promise that a credit card number could be exchanged for Viagra — and Cialis and Ambien, should you so choose.
I stood at the urinal and held on, remembering these emails spammed at me through the yielding tissue of virtual reality. It wasn’t that I thought any of Google’s 450,000 servers might be implicated in this huge trafficking of drugs intended to make the relatively little grow bigger; it was just that the laminated sheet of programming tips tacked above the urinal naturally tended one’s thoughts in that direction; this, and the fact that one was holding one’s LongPen.
‘Testing on the Toilet’, the sheet was headed; beside it were two light bulbs, one happy and shining, the other upside down, dim and sad. Below that the screed continued: ‘Normally people are only interested in the test data for coverage files…’ but I couldn’t read any further, it was all impenetrably technical to me — and besides, I’d pissed on my shoes.
Back past the niches containing the electric toothbrushes and facecloths of the never resting microserfs, back past the misaligned bookcases, the dangling model jet engines, the defunct servers piled up into statuary and the colossal novelty beanbags, I found Sherman and Baltie in the canteen noshing on piles of bean sprouts and slurping smoothies. ‘Get yourself a tray,’ Sherman commanded; ‘you need to build up your strength.’
I supposed I should’ve felt more grateful to Sherman than I did; after all, he had scooped me up in San Francisco and incorporated me into his whirlwind schedule. That morning we had already visited the Stanford Linear Accelerator, where he had discussed plans with the facility’s director to site a Sherman piece alongside the two-mile-long klystron gallery, which — as both men saw fit to inform me — was the longest building in the States.
‘The longest building — quite right!’ Sherman had crowed as we puttered through the campus in the Range Rover, past the great Romanesque halls of learning. ‘While the accelerator itself is the world’s straightest object! That’s why this body form will be so sinuous, with arms and legs cuddling the gallery, cheek pressed against it. I particularly like the fact,’ he continued as Baltie angled the Range Rover up the slip road on to Highway 280, ‘that the whole installation lies right across the San Andreas fault. The next time there’s a big one, my piece and the accelerator will go down together, erotically entwined, spurting electrons and positrons in a lava death fuck!’
I doubted that Stanford would’ve let Sherman anywhere near the collider if they’d heard him talk in these terms — but then I doubted this piece would ever get made; it seemed to be just another of the notions sprouting from the artist’s ever fertile mind as he revolved around the world. True, plenty of Shermans were getting made — a group of three mediumsized thirty-footers had been erected in Death Valley only the previous week — but the ratio of planned to enacted Shermans did seem to be shifting decisively.
After our veggie lunch at the Googleplex, Sherman lectured the employees for over an hour on ways in which their 450,000 servers might be adapted to serve his own ends. He proposed Sherman start pages, Sherman links and Sherman levies on advertisers. He quite seriously entertained the idea of a Shermanet (at least, disloyally, that’s how I thought of it), with each Google search contributing to the creation of a body form so large it could exist only in cyberspace. ‘Your servers process a petabyte of data every hour — fifty petabytes is roughly equal to the entire written works of humankind up until now…’ He looked significantly at me, scrunched up in the front row trying to hide the pee stains on my shoes.