The Heart of Henry Quantum (3 page)

He returned to his contemplation of Denise's lubricious hands but had to ask himself: When did people truly take note of their own hands? For instance, you don't see monkeys wearing rings on their fingers. Not
Australopithecus
, either. Not even
Homo erectus
. No. It must have happened at the same time we started painting and making music and praying to gods. Just forty thousand short years ago. That's when we saw our hands not just as useful but as beautiful.

He thought about the cave paintings at Chauvet, and the film about them, and how art at the very beginning of its existence was so extraordinarily beautiful, and that the world in those days was filled with Rembrandts and Titians, only they didn't know it, they thought they were doing magic, not art, which maybe aren't so different after all, and he wondered what those first artists would think of the work Denise did, and this led him again to wonder at her tattoos. Modern primitive, they called it. But she wasn't primitive, was she?

When he entered the conference room he was pleased to notice that Denise had lots of rings on, including a very large one that covered two fingers.

How far we've come! he thought. One ring, two fingers!

He opened his computer and sat himself down next to her with a nonchalant smile. Meanwhile, Alan Schwartz, the associate creative director, came in, sat down on the other side of her, only much closer, and threw his arm around her chair and announced, “We're gonna rock 'em this morning, ain't we?” Alan was educated at Stanford, but he used bad grammar to prove he had street cred.

“It's da bomb!” Henry agreed. “We're gonna pimp that hustle, bro.”

“Jesus,” said Denise.

Laid out on the table were drawings of people using Protox. They represented the most impossible optimism Henry could imagine. The first was a cute spot with Jennifer Lawrence extolling the virtues of Protox. Next was Chris Froome, the winner of a couple of Tours de France, who counted Protox “team member number one!” Then Tom Brady of the New England Patriots explaining to his supermodel wife how Protox can turn beautiful skin “into
Perfect
with a capital
P
.” And the tour de force? Brad Pitt, who, according to Schwartz, has notoriously bad skin, taking the six-week “Beauty Really Is Skin Deep!” cleanse, on camera, 24-7. Together, these people would have to be paid around fifty million dollars. (Not counting the one in which Robert Downey Jr., in full Iron Man regalia, confesses that clearer skin gave him the confidence to get off cocaine and “back into saving the world again. Thank you, Protox!” and then does a tap dance with Gwyneth Paltrow.) Henry knew none of this could ever happen. The budget was six hundred thousand dollars including talent, shooting, editorial, music, special effects, graphics, travel, meals, and the agency's 18.5 percent profit.

“Boy, these look good,” he remarked, as Denise gathered up the storyboards and set them facedown upon the rail.

There were also, of course, more realistic approaches. Backup, they called them. But they weren't going to show them unless they absolutely had to.

“You know what?” Henry had said. “Might as well show everything. That way they can see how great the recommendation really is.”

When the time came, Henry made a brief introductory presentation and then got lost in his own head for most of the rest of it, having become obsessed with the varieties of fish you could no longer get in the market and the whole business about acid rain and tuna. Occasionally he awoke and jotted down some notes. Finally came the time for client feedback. He looked up from his computer, eyes bright with interest, and said, “So? What's the verdict?”

The clients had been laughing at the scripts in all the right places and had listened attentively to the rationale for each of the campaigns. They'd nodded at the appropriate times and took notes whenever a research fact was mentioned. But now it was their turn. Gretchen, the VP of marketing—the senior person at this particular meeting—looked to her right and her left, found the most junior person in the room, and said, “Albert, what are your opinions?” Albert said that the work was very creative and he really liked the spot where they were all singing, but he was disappointed that it didn't rhyme.

“It's a work in progress,” Denise chimed in.

“Even so,” he said.

And then, looking back and forth at Gretchen, he began to point out the deficiencies in each and every spot, always, however, counterbalanced with a nod to their strengths, because Albert apparently couldn't quite tell what Gretchen thought about them.

Next came Pat. Pat was feisty. There was always a feisty one, and in this case it was Pat. With the instinct of a cobra, she tore into the fifty-million-dollar campaign. Aside from being “a bit too expensive,” it was something she had seen before, at least a million times.

“You've seen a spot with Iron Man doing a tap dance with Gwyneth Paltrow?” Alan Schwartz asked.

“That's not what I mean. I mean the idea of it.”

Well, of course she was right, Henry thought. It
had
all been done before. But hasn't everything? They say there are only seven basic plots in literature—but so what?

Then Ralph, the second-in-command, began his spiel. He was soft-spoken and measured and had a way of making everyone fall asleep after two sentences. He went methodically through each commercial, at each step asking, rhetorically it turned out, “How does this realize the strategy? That's my benchmark. How does this realize the strategy? Does this realize the strategy? I look for the strategy in each part, in each line, and I ask myself, does this realize the strategy? And finally, does it, overall, communicate the strategy? In other words, is it strategic?” Of the Tour de France spot, he said, “Isn't the guy Italian or something? Is that strategic? Do Italian bike riders forward the strategic goal? I'm not sure. I'm just not sure.”

“He's British,” said Schwartz.

“Yes, but is that strategic? This is what I'm asking.”

Finally it was Gretchen's turn. She was about fifty years old, which was actually quite old for this job. By fifty she should have at least been an executive VP and not just a brand VP, but she was an idiot and there was nothing she could do about it.

“Well!” she said with a bright and somewhat off-putting smile. “I don't really have much to add. I guess we're not quite there yet. Why don't we take another stab at it? Excellent work, everyone!”

And just then, Frank Bigalow, Henry's boss, the one with his name on the door, popped his head in. “Anyone for Michael Mina?” he said, meaning the clients, not the staff. But then he added, “Quantum, you want to join us?”

“Can't,” said Henry, half truthfully. “I have an appointment. But enjoy yourselves!”

And off they went to spend about eight hundred dollars on lunch.

In the emptiness that followed, Henry Quantum announced that he would write up a meeting report and do a new creative brief, and with great enthusiasm told them the work was brilliant and the clients were just Philistines.

Alan Schwartz stood up. “Did you see the look on Gretchen's face? We might as well have been reciting
Finnegans Wake
.”

When he left, Denise gathered up the layouts. “Alan needs to feel his work means something.”

“What a shame,” quipped Henry, which to his surprise elicited a gay laugh from Denise. He had been serious.

In any event, Denise took off a minute or two later and Henry was left alone with his laptop. He looked at his watch. Eleven thirty. He would do a couple of little housekeeping things on his computer and then go get the perfume. The housekeeping had to do with the notes for Protox and how to make the client's idiotic comments cogent. He sighed.

Henry felt honor bound to do his best for Protox, as he would for any client, though as he sat there he had to ask himself why.

For instance, he always insisted creative make it clear that Protox was not a Botox rip-off but an entirely different product. You drank it, it cleansed your system and made your skin glow. That was the basic selling proposition:
Drink your way to younger-looking skin.
Did Protox live up to that claim? Well, if you looked at the before-and-after photos you would certainly think so. But what was rarely (never!) mentioned is that you would always be running to the bathroom. Especially during the three-day super cleanse. Basically, Protox was a laxative.

But you
had
to believe in your clients' products, didn't you?—believe with your whole being, like Billy Graham believed in Jesus: you had to give yourself up to it or you just couldn't get to the promised land. But Henry had been trained as a philosopher, and this was becoming more and more of a problem. Because anyone who has ever read Plato knows that Socrates taught that there are philosophers—and then there are sophists
.
A philosopher seeks truth. A sophist merely wants to convince you of his argument.

Henry sat looking at the notes he had been typing on his screen. “I am a sophist!” he cried aloud. It was like a blade inserted into his femoral artery and pushed all the way up to his heart. He clutched his stomach. I'm a fucking sophist! All my brainpower, all my persuasive talents, all of
me,
in the service of a laxative! The reason your skin glows is that you are totally dehydrated and feverish.

And what about the other crap I've worked on? Malcolm T. Farnsworth Trousers That Fit. Fit? They didn't fit! They were shit. And soup, he said to himself, I wrote reams and reams on the benefits of canned soup. Not even Campbell's. Some off-brand called Health Country. Should have been Death Country. Cans of salt and sugar is what they were. Cans of liquefied chicken from chicken concentration camps! But the worst was not even the soup or the Protox. It was the Samurai Brand Real Beef Chewing Jerky and Pinch of Beef. Grotesquely processed from the lowest-quality desiccated meat, it was shredded to look like chewing tobacco or powdered to look like snuff, and packaged that way for little kids. Not only was he selling children a food item that was grossly unhealthy, but he was glorifying chewing tobacco! And he had done it with pleasure, with passion, with the true belief of a convert. In fact, if you asked him even now, in this very second of self-flagellation, he would have told you the commercial they made was great. They got a CLIO for it!

It was a music video of a Samurai warrior rapping while flying through treetops and battling the demons of boring snacks. It had a million hits on YouTube in less than a week and the product flew off the shelves—until someone discovered the packaging was faulty and the stuff was sprouting a green halo of incredibly odiferous mold. He remembered the emergency meeting of the account group. “It could have killed someone!” he'd said. But Bigalow, the boss, laughed. “Don't worry about it, Henry,” he said. “I made sure they paid in advance.”

Now, sitting alone in the conference room, he sighed for the hundredth time that day.

Nobody did actually die, he reminded himself. Most mold is basically benign, isn't it? Penicillin, that's mold. And blue cheese.

He was heartened by the fact that advertisers don't actually lie about stuff. That would be illegal. We just don't tell the whole truth.

After all, the truth is always thick with complexity. Like gumbo. You kind of have to dig through it—and what do you find? Okra.

And then he thought: Why exactly
am
I buying Margaret a bottle of Chanel No. 5? Will that express my true feelings? Or is it just another sales pitch? Just making myself look good.
My true feelings
, he repeated, feeling some sort of door slam, some sort of door that said, “Don't go in there, buddy,” some sort of door he most likely always thought would be wide open. Margaret wasn't much on public affection, never was. But lately she'd been offering her cheek instead of her lips for their good-night kiss. Obviously, he was in the doghouse. He just didn't know why. And he'd been in there a long time. A very long time. When he thought about these things he got the strangest sensation in the back of his throat, as if he were coming down with something.

He made his way back to his office looking rather downcast. Here and there he heard a “Merry Christmas” but didn't respond. He sat down, plopped his head onto the desk, not cradled in his arms, just flat on the surface—a surface that wasn't even wood—and closed his eyes. Wood would have smelled nice, like a carpentry shop; it might have soothed him, comforted him—but this material, whatever it was, only alienated a person. No wonder we're so disconnected from ourselves, he thought.

Why had he waited so long to buy her a gift? he wondered. He could remember tons of Christmases—the excitement of planning and shopping, the thrill behind every bow and piece of tape on the wrapping, the joy of watching it all being torn apart—and then, inevitably, the muted, “Oh. Okay. Nice. Thank you.” And the gift, so lovingly chosen, never to be seen again. Had it always been that way? He tried to remember.

There was that first Christmas in San Francisco, wasn't there? When he had lain awake several nights trying to figure out the perfect present. Couldn't think of a thing, of course. Maybe a ring would be nice—but you don't get your new girlfriend a ring, for crying out loud. Could be totally misinterpreted! What about a blouse? Your
mother
buys you a blouse! Shoes? Way too weird, even though he liked shoes. Not to mention everything in Berkeley was so tie-dyed or fair-trade or Athleta or, well, just too head-shop-y for Margaret, which now made him realize that maybe the person he thought she was back then (soft, cuddly, easy to please, and left-wing) she already wasn't, because if she were he would have just bought a bottle of patchouli and been done with it. Instead, he felt compelled to hop on BART and tunnel into San Francisco. Much less tie-dye in Union Square, he reckoned.