Other Copenhagens

by Edmund Jorgensen

  “If I’m pitching,” said Mr. Pope, “wouldn’t that be three balls against me?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your honesty is refreshing, Mr. Bradley, and I appreciate it, as I appreciate the limits of your schedule and attention. And luckily here is Dr. Novak joining us, just in time. Dr. Novak, do you have the envelope?”

  Dr. Novak had just burst through the door at something approximating a sprint–a speed he managed with a grace unusual for a pasty 40 year old in a lab coat, until he caught sight of Janine Smalls tossing her hair, at which point he slammed into the conference table.

  “I’m sorry,” said Dr. Novak, to the table first, then to the assembly, except Miss Smalls, whose eyes he had trouble meeting, “I’m sorry. The printer was, uh, low on the tungsten ink.”

  He handed a manila envelope to Mr. Pope and sat down next to him, springing up once briefly to close the door he had left open and mismanaging the chair upon his return.

  “Our Dr. Novak may lack grace navigating furniture,” Mr. Pope said, “but I assure you that on the mental plane he is a Baryshnikov.”

  “Is that guy …” Mr. Bradley caught himself and turned from Miss Smalls to address Dr. Novak directly. “Are you a marketer in a lab coat?”

  “Dr. Novak is a scientist,” said Mr. Pope. “Our chief scientist, in fact, and his research is what makes everything we do here at Future Perfect Branding possible. We are more than just marketers here, Mr. Bradley–the science is what makes us different. And now,” he continued, unwrapping a string that had been wound three times around the cardboard clasp of the manila envelope, “perhaps you’d like to leave the matter of Dr. Novak’s fashion behind and take a look at what I like to call the ‘future perfect’ of the Upkeeper brand.”

  He slid a single sheet of paper across the conference table, and, at Miss Smalls’s urging, Mr. Bradley picked it up.

  “It looks like some kind of page from a comic book,” he said.

  “It is a page from a comic book. Or rather, it will be. Or rather,” said Mr. Pope with a significant look at Dr. Novak, “it will have been.”

  “You’ve lost me,” Mr. Bradley said.

  “Don’t put it down–look more carefully. Do you recognize the superheroine in the center panel? The one standing akimbo and triumphant over the heap of crumpled villains?”

  “Looks like, what’s her name … Stupenda.”

  “Very good, Mr. Bradley. What you are holding in your hand is Stupenda’s first appearance, in fact, in the now extremely valuable Thrilling Tales #24, before the public’s response made the editors conclude that she merited her own title. But do you notice anything different about her?”

  Mr. Bradley peered at the page for a moment, squinting and muttering, and handed it to Miss Smalls.

  “Janine, comics aren’t really my thing. You see what he’s getting at?”

  “They’ve adjusted her costume to look like the Upkeeper,” she said.

  “Exactly!” Mr. Pope struck the air with his finger as if ringing a bell. “The subtle crenelations along the top of her breast line, you see them? The uptick along the bottom into the breastbone. Exactly as if she were wearing an Upkeeper bra.” He sat back and folded his small red hands on his belly, as if to say “And there you have it.”

  There was silence in the conference room for a moment, during which Mr. Bradley sought Miss Smalls’s eyes, which were otherwise occupied drilling holes in Mr. Pope.

  “But explain to him about …” said Miss Smalls.

  “I have to tell you,” broke in Mr. Bradley, looking at Mr. Pope but speaking as if to Miss Smalls, “I’m underwhelmed on a couple fronts here. I don’t see how co-opting Stupenda is going to get us the 18 to 25 year olds–and that’s even if we could afford the licensing, which is, heh, out of the question. But beyond that, for us to fly all the way out here and be presented with a single page of comic book art, that’s–I mean, it’s not even finished comic book art. There’s no color, the speech balloons aren’t even filled in …”

  “Ah, Mr. Bradley,” said Mr. Pope, “in fact this page is very much finished, and at considerable expense. These might appear like ordinary ink and paper to you, but they are not–both are our own proprietary formula, infused with tungsten and other rare earth elements …”

  Dr. Novak pursed his lips.

  “… to help them survive the rigors of their journey.”

  “Journey? What are you going to do with them?” said Mr. Bradley. “Throw them from moving vans? Crop dust cities?”

  “Think bigger.”

  “I know, you’re going to put them on the moon. That would be just about perfect. How on Earth did you get mixed up with these people, Janine?”

  “Have you ever read Ray Bradbury’s classic story ‘A Sound of Thunder?’” asked Mr. Pope. “It’s something of a seminal text for us here at Future Perfect Brands. In fact, we take our logo–the butterfly–from that very story. Imagine: a hunter traveling back through time with the goal of killing a dinosaur, the fiercest prey of all–a Tyrannosaurus Rex. But it is a very specific Tyrannosaurus Rex that he must kill–one that is already on the edge of death. If he were to kill a healthy animal, who might have lived longer without his intervention, the hunter runs the risk of disturbing the course of history, with who knows what paradoxical results back in the present. All goes to plan until suddenly, in his haste, the hunter steps off his carefully laid path and crushes a Jurassic butterfly. But it’s just a butterfly–just a single, tiny butterfly–how much could its death matter? Quite a bit, as the hunter discovers upon returning to the present. The effect of that one butterfly’s death, seemingly so trivial, has cascaded and amplified through time–altering the course of history and changing entirely the world he used to know.”

  “I’m not following you …”

  “We send the paper into the past,” said Dr. Novak. “That’s the journey that Mr. Pope means. So far we’ve only managed to send paper and ink reliably, and only after treating it to withstand what we call ‘temporal dis …’”

  “To a very particular point in the past,” said Mr. Pope, talking over him. “June 3rd, 1941, to be exact, when issue #24 of Thrilling Tales had just left the inker and was waiting on the colorist’s desk. From there our subtly altered Stupenda will be decked out in her trademark fire-engine reds and school-bus yellows, and when she goes to press she will be wearing what appears to be an Upkeeper bra. As she charms her way into readers’ hearts, becoming a fan favorite and commanding her own book, our altered design will go with her, as part of her iconic appearance. And like the butterfly’s death in Bradbury’s story, this one tiny change will ripple out, compound, and snowball–into a great swell of present demand for the Upkeeper.”

  Mr. Pope slapped his open palm on the table, as if announcing gin.

  Mr. Bradley opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out.

  “Imagine,” Mr. Pope continued before he could recover, “that you are a 20 year old girl walking into a clothing store. You’re still humming the Lay-Z song you were listening to in your car, the one that contains the lyric ‘If you diss me I’ll upend yuh, I got guns like Stupenda.’ You aren’t thinking of Stupenda consciously, or how she has become a feminist icon, more powerful than the men she battles precisely because of the erotic femininity that her suit makes no attempt to disguise. But somewhere in the back of your mind a golden and fire-engine red archetype is billowing about, and when you see the Upkeeper hanging on the rack–those distinctive lines–a connection arcs in your brain, and you think ‘Yes, yes, this is a bra that understands that there’s nothing contradictory about a woman being powerful and feminine at the same time, that understands how needing a man and wanting to attract one aren’t the same thing at all.’ What other brand would you possibly buy?”

  “Just so I’m sure I’ve got this,” said Mr. Bradley, “you’re telling me that you’ll send that piece of paper back in time and change the past, and then all of a sudden, magically,
hordes of 18 to 25 year old women will be buying the Upkeeper here, now–today. Is there a hidden camera in here? Am I on television?”

  “No,” said Dr. Novak, despite Mr. Pope’s ostentatious waving off, “that’s not how it works. We can’t change the past of this world-line. It’s already happened. When we send something back, a whole new world-line splits off–a new universe. Like–like a new fork in a river. We won’t experience it, but it will exist. So if we send this page back, everything that Mr. Pope described will happen in a parallel world–or more precisely what we call an alternate retrograde timeline. Alternate, because it’s not ours, and retrograde, because …”

  “You mean,” said Mr. Bradley, “that after all the hogwash and sci-fi snake oil, you’re not even pretending to offer me sales?”

  “You’ll have sales, just not in this world-line.”

  “Sales in another dimension? ROI in the Twilight Zone? I got to hand it to you gentlemen, I have heard some pitches in my day, but this takes the cake. Fellas, thank you for your time, this conversation is over. I’m going to catch the early flight.”

  As he stood up, Miss Smalls put her hand on his forearm, and at her touch Mr. Bradley jumped and twisted as if her fingers coursed with fire. She took the hand away and ran it through her hair, as if putting the entire situation into some semblance of arrangement, and Mr. Bradley fell back into his chair, flustered.

  “Just hear him out, Ryan” said Miss Smalls to Mr. Bradley, “for my sake. Give him two more minutes.”

  Mr. Bradley, his cheeks still red and eyes still squarely on his shoes, nodded, and Mr. Pope, sensing profit in confusion, sprang from his chair like a musician about to solo.

  “What are the truly great discoveries of the modern age?” he asked the room. “The low-hanging fruit of science has been picked. Today’s scientists are grinders, mining nature’s secrets by the sweat of their brow instead of the dynamite of their intellect, and the discoveries they do manage–present company excluded of course, Dr. Novak–are decidedly stones of the semi-precious variety.

  “The plastic arts? Never has ‘plastic’ been an apter term. Throw a can of paint at a canvas or urinate on an Alsatian husky, and you too can be a plastic artist.

  “Meanwhile those who work in literature and film seem to be the only ones on the planet who practice recycling with deadly seriousness.

  “And as for music, may I remind you that not five minutes ago I quoted from a popular artist of the day who saw fit to rhyme ‘upend yuh’ with ‘Stupenda.’”

  “He also rhymed it with ‘unfriend yuh’ in the same song,” said Dr. Novak.

  “In the same song,” said Mr. Pope, shaking his head. “But despite all our crimes and mediocrities, I believe that future ages will look back on us kindly for one reason and one reason only–because it was in our lifetimes that humankind discovered the Brand.”

  Mr. Pope paused to gauge Mr. Bradley’s reaction, but it seemed that he was still recovering from the touch of Janine Smalls.

  “And it was a discovery, not an invention,” Mr. Pope continued. “It has been there for some time now, the next step in evolution, quietly waiting for us to notice it, as we might have waited for the apes to notice us. It waited as we fumbled about, speaking of a ‘brand of this’ or a ‘brand of that,’ as one might talk about ‘freedom to speak’ or ‘love of horses’–without realizing that one is missing the big idea. Freedom with a capital F. Love with a capital L. Brand,” here he paused, as if inviting any member of the audience to fill in for him, “with a capital B.

  “And that is what we’re offering you today. The instant we send this page back in time, a whole other universe comes into being, one which owes its entire inception to the Upkeeper Brand. And as we continue to work together, finding creative and unique branding opportunities like Stupenda, this universe is just the first of many–a whole constellation of universes built on the Upkeeper brand.

  “Any CEO can track sales and ROI, but today I invite you to think bigger than that. Can you believe in the Upkeeper brand–can you believe that it is a Brand with a capital ‘B’–something bigger than a single world, a force that spans and spawns whole universes? Or would you rather take the early flight, return home, take out a half page ad in the latest teen magazine–even a full page, perhaps!–scraping and scrapping to move a few more units in Target and Wal-Mart this quarter? The choice is yours.”

  For a second it appeared that Mr. Pope was going to add something, but then–perhaps in response to the subtle shake of Miss Smalls’s head–he stopped.

  “I rest my case,” he said, and sat down.

  “Janine,” said Mr. Bradley, who had managed to look up from his shoes somewhere around love with a capital L, “did you know this was the pitch before we came out here?”

  Now it was her gaze that fell.

  “I expected better from you, Janine.”

  “Can we talk about this?” she said.

  “What’s there to talk about? You had us fly out here on our own dime, when you knew this was what they were putting on the table?”

  “Should we step out and give them a moment?” Dr. Novak asked Mr. Pope. The latter shook his head and put a finger to his lips.

  “Ryan, you don’t understand,” said Miss Smalls.

  “You’re damn right I don’t understand.”

  “I know how much this company means to you.”

  “I don’t think you do know–my brother and I built this whole business from the ground up, and yes, we’ve hit some tough times, I’m the first to admit that–but I am at a loss for how …”

  “I understand that, and I understand how you think you’re honoring your brother’s memory, but you’re not going to survive in this market without adaptation–real, fundamental change–and you won’t change anything. The name? No, we can’t change that, Jack came up with it. The design? No, we can’t change that, that was Jack’s, it’s perfect as it is. How about a new model? No, Jack envisioned the Upkeeper as the only bra you’ll ever need–we can’t reconcile that message with an expanded line. I want to help you save the Upkeeper–I really do–but I can’t if you take away all my options.”

  “The models that Jack designed were perfect when he designed them, and they’re perfect now. Women’s breasts haven’t changed. He was the designer, you’re the marketer. Your job is not to change the design–it’s to make the world understand that the design is perfect.”

  “You see what I mean?” It seemed she was appealing to Mr. Pope and Dr. Novak as much as to Mr. Bradley now. “You think about this business with your heart, not your head, and because of that the Upkeeper isn’t going to exist at all in a year or two. So when Mr. Pope pitched me I thought, yes, it sounded crazy–but frankly, not too much crazier than changing nothing and just expecting the world to adapt to us. I thought that maybe–just maybe–you would see this as a way to let the Upkeeper survive, unchanged, exactly as Jack envisioned it. Not here–but somewhere. And I hoped that, since your head wasn’t really involved too much in running the business these days, this might be enough for–for your heart.”

  Mr. Bradley stood up and buttoned his sports coat.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “best of luck to you–you’ll need it. Janine, it seems we no longer have anything to offer you at Upkeeper Inc. I’ll arrange your last paycheck and any other details when I get back. Now please excuse me.”

  * * *

  “Why are the machines running?” asked Mr. Pope.

  Dr. Novak, still drying his hands, started and nearly hit his head on the low doorway of the lab’s once-closet-now-restroom.

  “What do you want? We agreed that the lab is off limits to you.”

  “Yes, our famous ‘agreement.’ In fact, I was just stopping by on my way out to remind you, precisely, about our agreement–about how we had agreed that you would leave the sales to me, and that, when you were invited into the sales room, you were there for very specific purposes: to wear your lab coat and stutter charmingly, t
o lend an air of scientific respectability to the proceedings, and to answer any specific technical questions that might come up, about–for example–the manufacture of the tungsten ink and paper, or the other rare earth elements. But now I find myself with a more pressing question: why are the machines running? What are you sending back?”

  “It’s nothing. Something for a client.”

  “We don’t have any clients.”

  “I was just trying to help, you know,” said Dr. Novak. “Mr. Bradley seemed confused and insulted, so I thought I would explain.”

  “Of course he was confused and insulted–he was meant to be. I was combining two powerful and counterintuitive sales techniques: the vision play and the negative sell. You are not expected to understand this. You are expected to play your role. When you don’t, you cost us sales–like today’s. Now, stop changing the subject: why are the machines running?”

  Dr. Novak checked a gauge and sighed.

  “I thought that if he’d read it, things might have gone differently today.”

  “If who had read what?”

  “If Mr. Bradley had read ‘A Sound of Thunder’–then he might have understood what we do. So I printed up a tungsten copy of the June 1952 issue of Collier’s and I’m sending it back to his room, when he’s twelve. He’ll read the story, grow up with it in the back of his mind, and then maybe your pitch will make more sense to him.”

  “How can you possibly justify this insane waste of resources?”