All that being said, I would never deny that my father's death was instrumental. His death set the course for my entire life; that much is obvious.
It's Stalin, I think, who said the death of one guy is a tragedy, while the death of millions is a statistic. In that sense, if only in that sense, Dad's death wasn't a tragedy.
I was seven years old on 8/23. Like thousands of kids — tens of thousands, maybe hundreds — I watched my father die in real time, on live TV. Watched the buildings melt, run together — those unearthly swirls of color, the greens and vibrant blues. All that life and death, bleeding together, pooling and spreading, hardening into a marbled brick that, to my eyes, looked just like candy. It was a kind of murder — and who knew such things existed? — that totally erased its victims' individuality. Bodies and birds and plants and rock and metal, all disintegrating and reforming into this elastic, anonymous whole.
When I was younger, you know, I shared in my mother's outrage at this additional taking, the blotting out of identity, which made it impossible for the survivors to bury their dead. As I've grown older, though, I've come to find a poignancy in the way the Gel Attack melted down and mixed the human remains with the remains of the city. On August 23rd, it was impossible, for once, if only briefly, to ignore the ways in which all of us are one, and the ways in which we're one, also, with the physical world. And then too, as I grew up, I started to appreciate the parallels between this epic act of destruction and the equally epic acts of creation that were, and are, my father's legacy.
Dad was an artist. He would never have called himself an artist — he always insisted, a little impishly, I think, that he wasn't one, he called himself an ad-man — but of course he was an artist, and a great one at that.
By the end of his career — the ending that should have been the apex — he was chief communications sculptor at CFG. He'd been at CFG his whole career, and anyone who knows will tell you Dad was personally responsible for most of the firm's growth. And everything he did, he did with no graduate education, no formal artistic training: joined CFG straight out of MIT.
His work, if you believe the job title, was to create "public points of attraction" — uncanny images, shapes, and spaces. In reality, his job was to bring the impossible into physical life, usually with startling beauty.
Examples — I could give you a bunch. One you've heard of — they only took it down last year — was the metamorphic installation on Times Square. My father created that. The only credited designer. Today, there are duplicates in every shopping mall from Juneau to Dubai. At the time of the Times Square unveiling, though — this is eight years before I was born — there was nothing like it anywhere. A miniaturized red-rock formation, hovering fifty feet above the ground. This massive, solid, seemingly organic mini-mountain range, just hovering, as if by magic. Perfect facsimile of plant and animal life. Fully animated, fully responsive deer and mountain lions. Trees and bushes that swayed and rustled with the actual wind on the Square. Pigeons, when they landed on those tiny pines, they'd bend, even snap from the weight. And all those breathtaking details — here's maybe the most amazing thing — were generated with the Imitation of Life engine that Dad had patented, at the age of nineteen, when he was still a college student.
In the first years after that installation went up, back when my parents still lived in New York, Dad used to sneak down to Times Square at lunchtime to watch the faces of the tourists as his mountains changed. Many years later, I stood on Times Square for the same reason: to watch the ways in which strangers were moved by my father's creation. To see Dad's mountains on a monitor is not to see them at all. That's the beauty of his work — of all of it: the immediacy and physicality. The Times Square piece morphed twice a day: first at 12:30 and again at sunset. In the first stage, trickles of red, like a red paint, would run, almost imperceptibly at first, along the slopes of those little mountains — like some gentle volcanic eruption. Then the trickle became a steady flow. And as people stood and gaped, they'd start to understand that it was the mountains themselves that were pouring down their own rock faces — melting from the peaks down. Instead of dripping to the ground, the rockmelt collected on the flat base of the mountain range, collected and hardened and oozed into a new shape, which only at the final moment of the transformation became identifiable as the Nike swoosh. The piece retained that "down" form for only a few seconds before defying gravity and the laws of physics to melt and flow upwards, back into the shape of the mountains. From the wet, claylike mountains, little animals and treelike protrusions would poke out and writhe free, until, in the space of a few seconds, the range was fully animated, fully alive, swarming with tiny birds and elk and covered in those trees that rocked and danced with the wind on the Square.
Events, Dad called his installations. Visual events, auditory events. They were events — and they were also, as his job description had it, public points of attraction — but they were also the fruits of a brave artistic imagination: father's imagination, his dreams, brought into this improbable and tangible life.
I was six when Dad put the finishing touches on his Gobi Apple. He would have finished it years before, if not for all the problems Apple had negotiating for the thousand-year lease of the desert.
The Apple was meant, from the beginning, to be his lasting mark: a replica, in colorshifting SuperLight, of the Apple logo. Four hundred square miles in dimension. More money was spent, if you can believe it, on that Apple than was spent on the entire Egypt War. You can look that up. Father made it with the thickest, most expensive light: hyper-radiant, non-dispersable — a light that, in spite of its soft appearance, pierced though the clouds and was visible from space. In initial testing, his main concern was, would the Apple be able to survive a total continental submergence. And he wouldn't build until he got it how he wanted it. Even if the icecaps melt completely — even in the event, fantastic event, that humans abandon the earth completely for some other home — father's Apple will persist, burning bright as ever from the bottom of the ocean.
My fondest memory of childhood was the trip I took, with Mom and Dad, to see the Apple in person. The whole way there, Dad was like a little boy — a side of him I never saw before. We first flew over in a glass-bottomed helicopter, at night. And it was like we were gliding over the clouds of heaven. The next night — all night — we wandered a stretch of the desert on camelback, guided by Mongolian goatherds who looked on my father — my small, soft-spoken, gentle father — as my Alis would later look on me: as a kind of God. My own opinion of my Dad wasn't too far off from that. I wouldn't have said God; what I would have said was superhero. I would have told you, if you'd asked, that there was nothing Dad couldn't do. And all of this was a little more than a year before the day when two illiterate fourteen-year-old Syrian boys, armed with Jansport backpacks full of I-9 self-perpetuating gel component, destroyed my father along with much of the city of Boston.
Some have said — cruelly, I think — that Dad, by virtue of working for a global marketing firm, was more responsible than others for the events of 8/23: that CFG's sky banners, in particular, invigorated The extremists — invigorated, the word they use — as if the invasion and occupation of Egypt were of secondary importance. According to the post facto logic of the extremists, the posting of sky banners visible from Mecca was an quote-unquote act of imperialist sacrilege equal to a ground invasion of the holy city — a sacrilege that justified any savagery, any cruelty, that could be dreamt up. By the same tortured logic, America's use of gels and evaporators in Egypt justified the 8/23 terrorists' use of gel weaponry to decimate Boston's civilian population. For the record, my father never worked on sky banners. He did design the first-ever colorstorm — drenched the whole earth in this gorgeous kaleidoscopic light — but that was long after banners had become ubiquitous in the Middle East and Central Asia.