HT paused for emphasis.
“I’ve got to give your wife a lot of credit, Sam. Most people who narrow our universe down to three choices for the benefit of their husband or their wife make a classic mistake: they end up with three candidates who, in the grand scheme of things, are virtually identical. In a way, they’ve already made the choice about the child they want to raise—they just haven’t gotten around to telling their spouse.”
HT gave Sam a wink.
“In retrospect, he’d had no idea what to expect from this meeting.”
“But Annie…” HT laid a hand on the file that was still sitting beside his untouched espresso. “She has chosen three very distinct profiles. I mean, these three are totally different people who would lead totally different lives, and yet would all be children whom you two would be proud to have raised. Now, at this point, I could hand you our detailed biographs to give you a sense of the three candidates, but we’ve found that it’s hard for most people to translate all the relevant data into a mental picture. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken the information in the biographs and translated it into three short films which will introduce you to the three different children who, with our assistance, you and Annie could have. We call them projections. The films are each just a few minutes long, but they should give you plenty to think about, so that you and Annie can make the best possible choice.”
HT slapped the table once. “What do you say, Sam? Are you ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“Then let’s do it!”
Grabbing the thick green file, HT leaped from his chair and led Sam down the hall, waving to colleagues as he went. Somewhere in the middle of the building, he opened a door and motioned for Sam to enter. Inside, there was a well-appointed screening room with sixteen upholstered viewing chairs in a four-by-four grid.
HT noticed Sam raising his eyebrows at the number of chairs.
“Sometimes our clients bring family or friends to the viewing,” he explained. “But between you and me, I’m not sure it’s a great idea. I mean, it’s hard enough debating with your family and friends what you’re going to name your kid, right? Never mind getting into nuances of personality and potential.”
A young man appeared dressed in the black pants and white shirt of a waiter at a catered affair. HT turned to Sam.
“You sure you don’t want something to drink? A cappuccino? Some water? A gin and tonic… ?”
At the words “gin and tonic,” Sam must have expressed surprise, because HT smiled a little slyly.
“That’s your drink, right?” By way of explanation, he raised the green file, then he shifted to a more serious tone. “I know it’s not quite five o’clock, but we find that having a drink can be very additive to the experience. It relaxes you a little, so you can sit back and enjoy the process—which is important. Because you should enjoy this process.”
“One gin and tonic,” said Sam.
“Make it two, James!”
James returned a moment later with two gin and tonics in crystal highball glasses—not unlike the ones that Annie and Sam had registered for when they were married. Sam wondered if that was in the file too.
For the third time in an hour, Sam was offered a seat and he took it. Just as in the conference room, the screening chairs swung and tilted, and, once again, HT made the most of their engineering.
“Cheers!” HT said.
“Cheers.”
The two clinked glasses, then HT tilted his head in the direction of the projection booth. “Okay, Harry. Let her rip.”
As the lights dimmed, Sam took a swig from his drink and leaned back in his chair, having to admit that it was surprisingly comfortable. As before, the Vitek logo filled the screen, but this time it began shrinking as if it were fading into the distance until it finally disappeared. After a suitable passage of time—just long enough to forget the logo but not long enough to become antsy—a single word appeared center screen: Daniel.
A little startled, Sam turned to HT, who smiled and nodded. Right from the beginning, Sam and Annie had decided they would have a boy, but there had been some debate over his name. Annie had wanted to name him after her father, Andy, and Sam had wanted to name him after his uncle, Daniel—both of whom had died in recent years. Sam was touched that Annie had settled on Daniel without saying anything.
The opening shot of the projection was a brand-new baby swaddled in a light-blue blanket. Though the person holding the baby was not in the frame, it was clear from the hands that it was a man, presumably the father. The baby was not crying. He wasn’t squinting or squirming. Rather, as the female narrator observed: From the day he was born, Daniel had a smile on his face.
As the narrator went on to describe young Daniel’s good nature and his positive outlook, there were clips of him at the age of eight giving a hand to a friend at the playground, at the age of fifteen setting the table for dinner, and at the age of twenty-two on the quad of an old New England college surrounded by friends, tossing his cap in the air as his parents looked proudly on.
Sam felt something of a jolt when he realized that the parents, whose backs were to the camera, looked like an older version of him and Annie. But of course they did. This was supposed to be their child. And the hands in the opening shot hadn’t simply been “the father’s” hands, they’d been his hands. The realization made Sam sit up a little in his chair.
Daniel is now behind the wheel of a beat-up station wagon with a pretty young blonde in the passenger seat and cardboard boxes in back. As they come over a bridge, the two lean forward and look up through the windshield at the skyscrapers of a metropolitan center. They pull up in front of a narrow six-story building, the sort of low-rent walk-up in which young urbanites begin their adult lives. With a box in his arms, Daniel holds the door open with his shoulder to let his girlfriend inside. Next, Daniel is standing before the entrance of a modern office building called Century Tower. After double-checking the address in his hand, Daniel gazes at the building’s gleaming facade, then gamely goes through the revolving door.
Despite knowing perfectly well that this entire production was a contrivance, Sam felt a certain sense of optimism, maybe even pride, when he saw Daniel looking through the windshield with his pretty girlfriend, when he held the door open for her, and when he entered his shiny new office building. These feelings harmonized with the warm buzzing that he had begun to feel in his head from the gin.
Upstairs, Daniel is shown by his boss to his cubicle, where he is introduced to a colleague—another young man in his early twenties who, you can just tell, is going to be Daniel’s first friend in the city. And as Daniel sits down, ready to get to work, the narrator confirms that Daniel is beginning his new life with the same good nature and positive outlook that had characterized him since the day he was born.
But even as the narrator completes this sentence, there is a shot of cumulus clouds rolling over Century Tower in accelerated motion, and the background music takes on a more ominous tone. Then the narrator qualifies her previous remark by observing: Not everyone in Daniel’s circle was as happy-go-lucky.