Brave New Worlds

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.
    There's always seemed to me to be something morbid about the fetishization—by extremists, even by some Western pacifists—of the natural world in its mythic virgin state. Not to get philosophical, but man's always been a creature apart from, and above, the other life of the earth, a creature destined to remake the world in his own image just as God made man in His own image—and thus a creature destined to remake the world in God's image. Whatever we imagine, God's imagined first. If you don't believe that, you don't believe in God. That man would repaint the sky, that he'd fill it with his own colors, his own designs, was inevitable from the moment he discovered SuperLight. But apart from questions of man's destiny, the fact is, everything's got to change, or die, or become new. Before the banners—and Dad's colorstorms—the skies, at least in the cities, were just ceilings of smog. To prefer that featureless, shit-brown, smothering pollution to my father's electric palette is simply to prefer deadness and decay to the possibility of life.
    In a similar way, I think, to reduce Dad's art to "marketing"—as he himself was willing to do, but impishly, as I said—is to be willfully obtuse. What were Michelangelo and Raphael, if not marketers? Marketers in the employ of the Pope. People forget that after Dad had finalized his patent on the Imitation of Life engine, there was no need for him to work again; his wealth was fixed for life. What he did for CFG—the swooshes and colorstorms and robotic eyes—he did only because of his obsessive need to create, to commune and converse with the world, celebrate and enrich the life around him. If he tethered his work to Prudential Investments and Fuck Body Spray, it was only because without those sponsorships, his achievements