A single intrepid sporting boat was making its way right to left across the portion of the lake the large window gave out on, and once or twice an automobile horn far below on E. Huron sounded at such insistent length that it intruded on the attention of Terry Schmidt and some of the well-vetted consumers in this conference room, a couple of whom Schmidt had to admit to himself that he felt he might frankly dislike — both of them somewhat older, one the man with the hairweave, something hooded about their eyes, and the way they made little self-satisfied adjustments to parts of themselves and their wardrobes, sometimes in a very concentrated way, as if to communicate that they were men so important that their attention itself was highly prized, that they were old and experienced hands at sitting in rooms like this having earnest young men with easels and full-color charts make presentations and try to solicit favorable responses from them, and that they were well above whatever mass-consumer LCD Schmidt’s clumsy mime of candid spontaneity was pitched at, that they’d taken cellular phone calls during or in fact even walked out of far more nuanced, sophisticated, assuasive pitches than this. Schmidt had had several years of psychotherapy and was not without some perspective on himself, and he knew that a certain percentage of his reaction to the way these older men coolly inspected their cuticles or pinched at the crease in the trouser of the topmost leg as they sat back on their coccyx joggling the foot of their crossed leg was his own insecurity, that he felt somewhat sullied and implicated by the whole enterprise of contemporary marketing and that this sometimes manifested via projection as the feeling that people he was just trying to talk as candidly as possible to always believed he was making a sales pitch or trying to manipulate them in some way, as if merely being employed, however ephemerally, in the great grinding US marketing machine had somehow colored his whole being and that something essentially shifty or pleading in his expression now always seemed inherently false or manipulative and turned people off, and not just in his career — which was not his whole existence, unlike so many at Team Δy, or even all that terribly important to him; he had a vivid and complex inner life, and introspected a great deal — but in his personal affairs as well, and that somewhere along the line his professional marketing skills had metastasized throughout his whole character so that he was now the sort of man who, if he were to screw up his courage and ask a female colleague out for drinks and over drinks open his heart up to her and reveal that he respected her enormously, that his feelings for her involved elements of both professional and highly personal regard, and that he spent a great deal more time thinking about her than she probably had any idea he did, and that if there were anything at all he could ever do to make her life happier or easier or more satisfying or fulfilling he hoped she’d just say the word, for that is all she would have to do, say the word or snap her thick fingers or even just look at him in a meaningful way, and he’d be there, instantly and with no reservations at all, he would nevertheless in all probability be viewed as probably just wanting to sleep with her or fondle or harass her, or as having some creepy obsession with her, or as maybe even having a small creepy secretive kind of almost shrine to her in one corner of the unused second bedroom of his condominium, consisting of personal items fished out of her cubicle’s wastebasket or the occasional dry witty little notes she passed him during especially deadly or absurd Team Δy staff meetings, or that his home Apple PowerBook’s screensaver was an Adobe-brand 1440-dpi blowup of a digital snapshot of the two of them with his arm over her shoulder and just part of the arm and shoulder of another Team Δy Field-worker with his arm over her shoulder from the other side at a Fourth of July picnic that A.C. Romney-Jaswat & Assoc. had thrown for its research subcontractors at Navy Pier two years past, Darlene holding her cup and smiling in such a way as to show almost as much upper gum as teeth, the ale’s cup’s red digitally enhanced to match her lipstick and the small scarlet hairbow she often wore just right of center as a sort of personal signature or statement.
The crowd on the sidewalk’s growth was still inconstant. For every two or three passersby who joined the group of onlookers craning upward, someone else in the crowd suddenly looked at his watch and detached from the collective and hurried off either northward or across the street to keep some type of appointment. From a certain perspective the small crowd, then, looked like a living cell engaged in trade and exchange with the linear streetside flows that fed it. There was no evidence that the climbing figure saw the fluctuantly growing mass so far below. He certainly never made any of the motions or expressions people associate with someone at a great height looking down at them. No one in the sidewalk’s group of spectators pointed or yelled; for the most part they just watched. What children there were held their guardians’ hand. There were some remarks and small conversations between adjoining onlookers, but these took place out of the sides of their mouths as all parties looked up at what appeared to be a sheer and sky-high column of alternating glass and prestressed stone. The figure averaged roughly 230 seconds per story; a commuter timed him. Both his backpack and apron looked full of some kind of equipment that caused them to bulge. There were loops along his GoreTex top’s shoulders and also — unless it was a trick of the building’s windows’ refracted light — small strange almost nipplelike protuberances at the figure’s shoulders, on his knees’ backs, and in the center of the odd navy-and-white bullseye design at the figure’s seat. The crampons on mountaineering boots can be removed with a small square tool so that they can be sharpened or replaced, a long-haired man supporting an expensive bicycle against his hip told the people around him. He personally felt he knew what the protuberances were. New members of the crowd always asked the people around them what was going on, whether they knew anything. The costume was airtight, the guy was inflatable or designed to look that way, the long-haired man said. He appeared to be talking to his bicycle; no one acknowledged him. His pantcuffs were clipped for easy cycling. On every third or fourth floor, the figure paused for a time on his back on the narrow ledge with scrollwork at the cornices, resting. A man who had at one time driven an airport shuttlebus opined that the figure on the ledge looked to be purposely idling, timing out his ascent to conform to some schedule; the child attached to the hand of the woman he said this to looked briefly over at him with his face still upturned. Anyone looking straight down would have seen a shifting collection of several dozen watching faces with bodies so foreshortened as to be mere suggestions only.