He moved the mouse, and more phantom letters filled the screen. Brendan recognized the printout Tony had brought to the Childe Roland a few weeks ago.
BROADCAST HISTORY
PHOTOGRAPHS
ARTICLES & OBITUARIES (NEW)
THEME SONG
THE GREAT FIRE OF 1966
CHIP CROCKETT'S CHRISTMAS SPECIAL
Without thinking, he reached over and took the mouse from Tony's grasp. "Oops—sorry—but you, would you mind if I—"
Tony smiled. "Go for it."
Brendan clicked on THEME SONG. The screen shifted, blue sky fading to a grainy black-and-white backdrop, much enlarged, showing a cheap soundstage. Long white drapes covered the back wall. There was a painted plywood table, and strewn on top of it were a number of puppets. By today's standards, they were slightly intimidating, more crackbrained Punch and Judy than benign Muppet. One looked like a pirate, with a patch on his eye and a gold hoop earring and a cigarette; another was a little guy with white fuzzy hair and a scholar's mortar. There were more—a spaceman, a beatnik, a dog—but the only puppet that was upright was a figure with small beady eyes and an enormous nose, his mouth cracked in a huge, slightly demonic grin, his tiny cloth longyears clapped together as though he were about to witness—or perform—something wonderful.
"Ooga Booga," whispered Brendan. "Holy cow. I totally forgot what he looked like -- I'd even forgotten his name, till you showed me that obituary."
He drew a long breath and leaned forward, clicked on an icon. A moment when all was still. Then the song began: a jouncy chorus of horns and strings, those unshakably chipper background voices you heard on records in the early '60s. Elevator music, but this was an elevator that only went up.
"Bum bum bum bum," sang Tony happily. "Bum bum bum bum!"
Brendan started to cry. Knowing it was stupid, knowing it was the sort of thing you did on a jag, when you'd lost it completely, when you were so far gone you'd sit around all day long surfing the Net for the names of girls you'd had a crush on in the second grade, or listening to Muzak and commercial jingles.
Didn't matter, didn't matter, didn't matter. He squeezed his eyes shut, eyelids burning as he willed himself to stop: another Irish Catholic trick that Teri hated. Back when they'd first started trying to understand what was wrong with Peter, back when they barely even knew there was something wrong—back then, it was one of the first things Teri had accused him of—
"This fucking Irish Catholic thing, you guys can never cry, you can never show anything, any emotion at all—and now, now—look at him—"
Pointing at the silent toddler crawling across the floor, but crawling in that awful horror-show way he had, dragging himself on his elbows and knees, head canted sideways so he could stare at the ceiling but not at what was in front of him; and never, ever, at his parents.
"—look at him, look at him—"
Her voice rising to a shriek, her fists pounding against her thighs as she stood there screaming. And Peter never looked, never even noticed at all, and Brendan—
Brendan walked away. Only into the next room, saying nothing, feeling rage and grief and sorrow swelling in his head until he thought blood would seep from his eyes; blood, maybe, but never tears. His entire body shook, but he wouldn't cry; just stood there like a human Roman candle waiting to ignite; waiting for the house to grow silent once more.
"Wanna hear something else?"
Brendan blinked. The theme song was over. Before he could say anything, Tony clicked on another icon, and the faint oozy strains of Chip Crockett's closing theme began to play.
"… danke schoen …"
"Jeez …" Brendan shuddered. "I forgot about that."
"Yeah. Maybe we better not. Here, listen to this one."
Tony clicked on OGDEN ORFF. A faint voice echoed from the speaker, declaiming proudly.
"That's my boy—Ogden Orff!"
"Let me!" Brendan poked Tony's arm. "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, To-neee—"
Tony laughed. "Be my guest."
Brendan looked at the pictures, black-and-white publicity stills of Chip Crockett as his most notorious character: the weirdly Edwardian Ogden Orff, a man dressed as a boy in black jacket and trousers, with a long floppy tie and his hair slicked down. Ogden never spoke; only listened as Chip Crockett's sonorous off-screen voice offered him advice and the inevitable admonition—
"No, Ogden, noooo!"
—but always ending with the same triumphant announcement—
"That's my boy—Ogden Orff!"
There were other characters, too. Ratnik, the beady-eyed beatnik puppet who carried around a copy of No Exit and ended each of his scenes by failing to find his way off the set. There was Captain Dingbat, navigating the Sloop John B through New York Harbor and calling the Statue of Liberty a Hotsy-Totsy. There was the Old Professor, quoting Groucho Marx instead of Karl; and Mister Knickerbocker lip-synching "Mr. Bassman." And last of all there was Chip Crockett himself again, sitting with a copy of Millions of Cats on his knees and reading to a studio audience of a dozen entranced children.
Only of course these were only pictures. No voiceovers, no soundtrack, no living color, except in Brendan's head. Just pictures. And there were only nine of them.
"That's it?" Brendan tried to keep his voice from breaking. "What about, you said something about some video clips?"
"Yeah. Well, sort of. There's nothing from the actual show, just a couple of outtakes. But they're not very long. Everything was lost." Tony sighed. "Just—lost. I mean, can you believe it? They just taped over all of it. That's like taping over the moon landing, or Nixon's resignation or something."
"Not really," said Brendan, and he grabbed back the mouse.
The videoclips were about the size of Brendan's thumbprint, framed within a little grey TV screen. COCOA MARSH COMMERCIAL. FUNORAMA BLOOPER. CHIP'S THEME.
"Wow," said Brendan. A timer underneath the little screen indicated how long each clip was. Sixteen seconds. Twenty-seven seconds. Thirty-two seconds. "There's not a lot of him left, is there?"
"Nope. But you know, I was thinking—like, maybe there could be like a hologram or something, you know? Like cloning someone. You have a tiny piece of their DNA and you can make a whole person. So, like, you'd only need a tiny piece of Chip Crockett, and you could bring back a whole episode."
"Tony." Brendan stopped himself before giving his automatic answer of thirty-odd years: Tony, you're an idiot. "Tony, you're the Steve Wozniak of Massachusetts Avenue. Do I just click on this?"
Tony nodded. Brendan clicked. A swirl of black-and-white-and-grey dots filled the tiny screen, danced around jerkily while a hollow voice intoned something Brendan could barely understand, though the words "Cocoa Marsh" seemed prominent. It took nearly sixteen seconds for Brendan's eyes to force the pixels into an image that resembled a man's face and a puppet. By then the clip was over.
"That's it?"
"That's it."
Brendan played it again. This time he could make out the image more easily, a closeup of Chip Crockett and Ooga Booga, the puppet holding a glass and trying to drink from it while Chip encouraged him.
"That's right, Ooga Booga! Drink your Cocoa Marsh—"
Bam: the image froze, the screen went blank. Brendan ran it six more times, trying to fix it in his mind's eye, see if it stirred any memory at all of the original commercial. It didn't; but just that tiny clip was enough to bring rushing back the wonderful sound of Chip's voice, the deep and deeply humorous tones that were the echo of some great benign Everydad. You could imagine him telling knock-knock jokes over the barbecue grill of your dreams, holding Ooga Booga as he tucked you into bed at night, taking sips from a can of Rheingold between verses of "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha!" You could imagine all of this, you could live all of this, and sometimes it seemed that you had.