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On the Head of a Pin

Crosstown to Oblivion

Tom Doherty Associates

I was working at Jennings-Tremont Enterprises (JTE) when Ana Fried and, I suppose, the rest of us, quite by accident, happened upon the most important discovery in the history of this world, or the next.

JTE's primary work was developing advanced animatronic editing techniques for film. It was our job, or at least the job of the scientists and programmers, to develop animation tools that would create high-end movies indistinguishable from live action.

Joseph Jennings's childhood dream was to make new movies with old-time stars. He wanted Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre side by side with Rudolph Valentino, Myrna Loy, Marlon Brando, and Natalie Portman. These new classics, he envisioned, could be made in small laboratories by purely technical means. Had we been successful, the stock in JTE would have been worth billions. Instead, we were secretly vilified, physically quarantined, and warned, under threat of death, not to create documents such as this one. Writing this memoir, my second act of true rebellion, is necessary in spite of the danger because there must be some record of what really transpired in case the government gets to me before the Alto arrive.

But I don't want to get ahead of myself.

My name is Joshua Winterland. I suppose you could call me a failed writer. Failed is a harsh word but valid in this case, because all my life I wanted to be a playwright. I've written thirty-seven plays that have each been rejected by every theater, playwriting competition, and creative writing school in the country.

I am thirty-nine years old and have been writing since the age of nine.

When I realized that I'd never be successful, or even produced, as a playwright I began work as a technical writer for a succession of various companies and institutions in California's Silicon Valley. I was the guy who wrote the manuals for new hard- and software. My day's work was to help consumers figure out what tab to hit and where to look up the serial number, how to register online or over the telephone, and what safety precautions to take before turning on a new system.

My fate was recast when the country went into a serious economic recession and, coincidentally, my girlfriend, Lena Berston, woke up one day to realize that she was in love with my childhood friend Ralph Tracer.

Lena told me one morning, before I was off to work at Interdyne, that Ralph had called because he was coming in from San Francisco that evening and she had offered to cook dinner for the three of us. I thought this was odd because Lena rarely cooked on weeknights, and she had always said that Ralph wasn't her kind of person.

"It's not that I don't like him," she'd said more than once, "but he just doesn't interest me."

I didn't give it any serious thought. Ralph was a good guy. I'd known him since junior high school in Oakland. He was from a different neighborhood but we made an early bond. We'd talked to each other at least once a week since I was thirteen years old, sharing our boyhood dreams. I planned to be a playwright and he wanted, in the worst way, to lose his virginity.

Our goals alone spoke volumes about the value of reduced expectations.

* * *

When I got home Ralph was already there sitting at the kitchen table. Lena was cooking. I felt proud that she was my girlfriend and that she was wearing her sexy, rainbow-colored, short skirt. Between the two of us Ralph had always been the ladies man. I had spent most of my life between girlfriends, and so being with Lena made me feel very, very good.

Don't get me wrong ... I really liked her as a person. If you had asked me at any time before that last dinner I would have told you that I loved her. But after what happened that love got lost and I can no longer speak for it.

"Lena and I have something that we need to talk to you about, buddy," Ralph said in the lull between the soup and the rack of lamb.

"What's that?" the fool asked.

When I glanced at Lena she turned away, but still I didn't get the message. It's amazing how human nature creates the feeling of security for itself, believing in a world that might cease to exist at any moment — might already be gone.

"I didn't mean for this to happen," Lena said, forcing herself to look me in the eye.

She had come back to the table without the meat. This I took as a bad sign.

"Lena was up in San Francisco," Ralph was saying. "I'd told her that I knew the curator of modern art at the Freierson Museum."

"Yeah. I remember."

"She came by the house and I offered her a drink. That's all."

"That was nine months ago," I said, thinking of all the nights in the last nine months when Lena had been too tired to make love.

"We tried to stop, Josh," Lena said. "Every time I went to see Ralphie I swore I'd never do it again. But ..."

Ralphie.

"We didn't mean to hurt you, buddy," my onetime friend said.

They both talked more. I can remember words but not the ideas or concepts they formed. I listened politely for maybe a dozen minutes before standing up. Ralph, I remember, got to his feet, too. Maybe he thought I was going to hit him. I don't know.

I took my jacket from the hook on the wall and walked out of the house. Lena, to her credit, followed and pleaded with me. I think she said that they would leave the house for me to live in. I'm not sure. I drove off and stayed at a motel that night. In the morning, nineteen minutes after I'd gotten to work, I was informed that Interdyne had gone out of business due to a dip in the stock market the night before.

The motel was called the Horseshoe Inn. It cost sixty-four dollars a night to stay there (plus tax and county fees). I went to thirty-six tech labs in the area over the next five business days; no one was hiring and many were laying people off.

That Wednesday I drove down to L.A., bought a newspaper in Beverly Hills, and applied for a job at JTE Labs in Redondo Beach. Being a California company, and therefore at least partially New Age, they wanted to hire a writer to record the progress of their research, a kind of Have Memoir Will Travel. I was to use video cameras, a computer journal, and even pen and paper in a pinch. Once every two weeks I interviewed all the nineteen employees, myself, and the boss — Joe Jennings.

That's really why I'm risking my life creating this document; just in case my plans fall short. It was my job, my only purpose, to record this story. And seeing that the content is of monumental importance I cannot allow special interests, government institutions, and/or religious bodies to stop the advancement of science.

* * *

I stopped writing for a while after the last word of the previous sentence because I can't vouch for its veracity. The idea that we're dealing with science was at best an assumption on our part. And not all of us at that. Cosmo Campobasso believed that the Sail (which is as much his creation as anyone else's) was a window to God. He wouldn't have used those words — he called the Sail the Blank Page and believed that he saw Mother Mary standing next to me on a Santa Monica rooftop.

Cosmo was an unschooled immigrant from the Sunnino Mountains of the Molise region of southern Italy. A craftsman, he wove the nine-by-twelve-foot fiber-optic tapestry that is the Blank Page, the Sail. The millions of spiderweb-thin strands were meticulously interlaced by the barely educated artisan over a six-year period.

Every morning when I got in, big, lumpy Cosmo had already been there for hours pulling the nearly invisible strands across the broad loom. The Page, as it grew, was a gossamer, semiopaque, and diaphanous fabric that rippled and flowed on its cherry wood, lead-fretted frame. The care that Cosmo exhibited was more than any man of the modern age would have been able to sustain. His assistant, Hampton Briggs of Watts, took the ends of each strand and connected them to one of the sixteen motherboards that were suspended around the growing tapestry. These millions of connective strands glistened in the space around the floating, nacreous Page.

The Page Room, as it was called by some, was an old airplane hangar from the 1930s set on property that JT Enterprises bought at auction when the previous owners, inept real estate speculators, went into bankruptcy. The Blank Page looked to me like the sail on a small schooner, picking up breezes that seemed to come from another dimension, hovering above the corroded concrete floor like a mortal's unconscious dream of divinity. I'm no scientist but I've been told that the places where the minute fiber-optic strands intersected cause an entry in the computer system that it was connected to. This entry is a bit of data that could be manipulated as far as hue, intensity, and texture. And even though very little energy passed through the Page, a strong light from behind was designed to bring out the images wrought by JTE's copyrighted software.

These tiny intersections were created not only by their proximity but also by Cosmo's impressing them with two tiny silver rollers that he created after being told by Ana Fried what was necessary for the computer system.

There was some speculation toward the end there that the frets of lead and silver rollers had an impact on the final outcome of the Sail. This conjecture reveals the underlying spiritual questions about the project and its miraculous output.

* * *

"What we are doing here," diminutive, sixty-one-year-old Ana Fried told my camera at an early stage of my position as Company Scribe, "is re-creating reality. Within ten years I will be able to generate a film of you at the battle of Appomattox, or among the onlookers at Caesar's assassination. No one will be able to tell the difference between reality and our images."

"What will be the applications of this new software?" I asked, sitting, as always, off camera.

"We will be one step down from the Creator," she said, her olive-hued face tightening into an expression that she considered dramatic. "Imagining a world and then making it."

* * *

Todd Pinkus said to my camera that "Everybody from schoolteachers to forensic investigators will be able to use these tools to enhance their jobs."

"What about criminals and propagandists?" I asked.

I didn't like Todd.

Pinkus frowned at the question. He was a thin, very white man with wire-rimmed glasses that were too big for his face. His walnut and gray hairline was receding and his lips had no thickness to them at all.

"Questions like that are designed to retard growth, not augment it, Josh. The question you should have asked was how would these tools benefit the policeman and the lecturer?"

"You're a programmer right?" I replied.

"I'm the senior programmer-analyst on this project."

"And I'm the project's memoirist. So I get to ask the questions."

Pinkus winced as he considered his reply. He didn't like me from the first day, didn't like the fact of my job. He was the kind of guy who thought he knew everything — and that the world orbited this knowledge. If he had been a heart doctor and you came to him with the early signs of cancer, he would have prescribed blood pressure medicine and suggested a bypass.

"The problem with your people, Josh," Pinkus replied, "is that you have never raised yourselves out of the nineteenth century. Slavery is over and all the possibility in the world waits outside your door."

By my people Pinkus was referring to those that are commonly called African American. I only mention that here because he believed that my dislike of him was a direct reflection of his feelings toward me. He believed that my aversion to him was about race when in actuality I was only disgusted by his arrogance and pomposity — leaving it to him to be offended by skin color.

"So you believe that I and my people are still living in slavery?" I asked.

"What does that have to do with the project?"

"My job is to record, for Posterity, the moods, characters, and jobs of the people that have created this revolutionary system. A hundred years from now you will be some of the most famous technicians in history. Imagine if we could know as much about the designers of the pyramids?"

"I refuse to participate," Todd Pinkus said. He made a motion as if he were going to stand and leave.

"You know that Joe Jennings views these tapes every month," I said, my tone just a wee bit threatening.

The hatred in Pinkus's eyes was a balm to my emotional wounds. For what I couldn't do to Ralph Tracer, Todd Pinkus would stand in effigy.

He settled back into the chair in my jury-rigged interview room.

"Can we go on?" he asked.

"Will you let me do my job?"

"Of course. I wasn't trying to take your job I was just ... never mind. Go on. Ask me whatever."

* * *

Documenting the blank page project was just what I needed to get over Lena and Ralph and the impact the recession was having on most Americans. I worked sometimes as much as twelve hours a day, six days a week ... and JTE paid time and a half overtime.

My hours were so long because people worked nearly round the clock on the Blank Page project. I could walk in at almost any time of the day or night and have someone to interview. That's how I, at least in the Band-Aid sense, overcame the last emotional hurdle of Lena's betrayal.

Doreen Howard was Todd Pinkus's boss. She was the systems analyst who envisioned the underlying symphony of the animation project. Doreen was a wasp-waisted, bottle-blond, forty-something bombshell. Her lips were too red and her breasts impossible. There was something coarse about her beauty. You would expect to see her slinging pancakes at an IHOP rather than designing the Lifelike Imaging Process at JTE. Regardless, Doreen was some kind of genius. She'd never been to college but she'd worked in computer animation since the age of seventeen.

"I took to hexadecimal like crap to the sewer," she told me on our first interview.

All of our interviews were colorful like that. I think she could tell how grateful I was for her candid and lively talks.

One evening we were discussing the amount of work she orchestrated using Pinkus and a dozen Indian programmers in Mumbai. She explained how boxes of infinitely reiterated logic appeared in her mind and were then assigned to the appropriate drone.

"I think of my programmers as drones," she said. "They're like the boxes of logic and pages of design. And I see myself as queen bee organizing the material into an infinity of images."

Doreen was looking into my eyes as she spoke. It wasn't until I felt a bead of sweat rolling down my back that I understood the effect her words were having on me.

Just at that moment of awareness she said, "Turn off the camera, Josh."

I did so.

"That's how I see the world," she said, sitting back in the red lacquer chair I used for my subjects. Her dress was wide and light blue, the hem, when she was standing, came down to mid-calf. It was the classic farm girl's dress, but it wasn't dowdy on her.

"How's that?" I asked, trying to keep myself from choking.

"Drones."

"Uh," I articulated.

"Would you like to follow me home so I could show you?"

* * *

Sex with Doreen Howard was the simplest and most gratifying physical experience I'd ever had. She brought me in, wrung me out, and sent me packing in three hours flat. When I got home I fell asleep without a thought in my head, and the next day, when Doreen and I ran into each other in the small company cafeteria, we smiled and said hello as if there was no last night ... or tomorrow.

Doreen, as she said, was queen and so I never initiated with her. Now and again, every few weeks or so, she'd ask me what I was doing that night. If I had plans I canceled them, but usually I didn't have much to do outside of work. I lived in a two-room bungalow behind a big yellow house at the base of the Hollywood Hills. There I watched TV and slept — never dreaming that I was on the cusp of the enlightenment of the ages.

* * *

Don't get me wrong, Doreen wasn't cold or heartless. She just saw most of the world as building blocks in her playroom. The operant word there is most. Doreen had a heart. And that heart could be pierced.

Langly Banner, lead singer in a Hollywood rock band called Bad Intentions Inc., took Doreen home one night and kept her there for three months. He had long black hair and a thin but powerful frame. He sang full out when he was on stage at the Whiskey or House of Blues. Doreen went to his performances every night and gave her notice when the band decided to take their show on the road.

* * *

"I don't know what she can be thinking," Joseph Jennings, senior partner of JTE, said to my camera the day Doreen announced her departure. "Doreen is one of the pillars of our work here. With stock options she stands to make millions if we're successful. But if she leaves now she'll get nothing."

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Excerpted from On the Head of a Pin by Walter Mosley. Copyright © 2012 Walter Mosley. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
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