Brave New Worlds

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.