Higher Mythology

by Jody Lynn Nye

  “I’m sure you are,” Paul said, standing up. “Thanks for coming to me.”

  Brendan left the office at a quick trot. He was halfway down the hall before he gave vent to his joy. Ms. Gilbreth was going to be so pleased with him. The job was absolutely his, in the bag, signed, sealed, and delivered. He bent, fist clenched, into a convulsive gesture of glee. “Yes!”

  The executives and employees passing him by in the corridor shot half-curious looks at him, and kept going.

  Meier caught up with Keith, as the red-headed student was carrying a veiled storyboard from a conference room down to the art department.

  “How’s it going, Keith?” Meier asked, falling into step beside him.

  “Great,” Keith said. He was cheerful. “The vice president for the Dunbar account just pitched “The Brain,” and the client loves it.”

  “That’s not your slogan,” Meier said. “It’s Sean’s.”

  “Nope, but Sean is part of our group,” Keith explained. “Every time one of us succeeds, there’s less resistance among the account executives for listening to student-generated ideas.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” Meier shook his head. “Remember the delicate balance between someone being overjoyed at getting ideas he didn’t pay for and someone preserving his job. But I’m glad you’re an optimist. Keith, it’s come to my attention that you and Ms. Gilbreth didn’t exactly hit it off. Now, she’s not PDQ’s biggest client, but she’s important to us. We don’t want to lose her. Is there something going on between you that I don’t know about?”

  “Nothing to do with me, Paul,” Keith said, picking his words carefully. “It turns out she knows one of my cousins. They don’t get along. They have … different views.”

  “On politics?”

  “Yeah, among other things. They’ve had a couple of run-ins recently, and I’m just catching the flak.”

  Meier was mollified but not fully convinced. “Well, all right, but get some work done, huh? I’ve got another new product that needs some hot ideas, and you’re my idea man. Fairy Footwear, kids’ wear from America’s Shoe. Fantasy stuff for little girls on up to teenagers, but orthopedically correct.”

  “Hmmm,” Keith said. “‘The most comfortable thing on two feet’? ‘The lightest thing on two feet’?”

  “Keep going,” Meier said, pushing the door of the art department open for him. “I think you’re on to something there. By the way, are you and Brendan having problems? I caught him stuffing papers into your file drawer Tuesday morning. He said they all fell out.”

  “Fairy Footwear,” Keith mused, sitting in the students’ borrowed conference room with a pen and legal pad. He tapped his upper lip. “What do fairies and shoes have in common?” He started doodling. “Shoemakers? No way. Little girls aren’t interested in making shoes. Dancing?”

  Dorothy came in. “Hey, sketching is my act.”

  Keith grinned up at her. “Sorry.”

  “What’s that?” Dorothy asked, pointing a red-tipped finger at his drawing.

  “They’re dancers,” he said. Keith hastily covered up an illusion of a real dancer he had cast on the edge of the pad to give him the pose he wanted, and let her look at the rough sketch. By their postures, his stick figures seemed to be afflicted by fleas, nervous tics, or live fish down their shorts. They were ranged in a circle around a hemispherical lump covered with jagged lines that were meant to indicate grass and flowers. Dorothy shook her head and clicked her tongue at them. Keith flushed.

  “Come on, I know drawing isn’t my long suit. I’m working on something for Fairy Footwear. This is a fairy ring,” he said. He started to explain about fairy mounds, rings, and the associations in olden times people had with certain kinds of geological and biological features. In a few minutes, his explanation had developed into a full-scale lecture.

  Dorothy found herself getting interested, and settled in at the table with her elbows propped up. “You know a lot about this legendary stuff, don’t you?”

  “My life’s work,” Keith threw off lightly. “I’m a research mythologist when I’m not coming up with hit slogans and ad layouts.” He drew stick figures of creatures with wings. Without intending to, he started filling in the features of the air sprites, then changed his mind. Sprites didn’t have feet to wear shoes on. “The old storytellers used to say that fairies danced in these rings, and where they stepped, things like mushrooms grew up. They’re really caused by the natural outward progression of a multi-generation fungus colony.”

  Dorothy wrinkled her nose. “Ugh. I didn’t need to know that.” His hand had slipped away from the edge of the pad. She grabbed his fingers and moved them to see what was under them.

  “How come you draw your roughs in stick figures when you can do drawings like that?” she asked, pointing to the beautifully realized image of a dancer.

  Keith hastily covered the illusion again, and scrubbed at it with the eraser to make it look like he was wiping it out as he dispelled it. “I think better in stick figures, I guess,” he said. “The fancy stuff takes too long.”

  Dorothy flung back the cover of her sketchpad. “So you’re thinking of fairies dancing, huh? What do your fairies look like? Besides white, I mean. That much I can guess.”

  Keith thought about what fairies did look like. He thought of the last time he had seen Dola, and had a sudden, overpowering inspiration.

  “You know, I know a little girl who would be perfect for a commercial like this,” he said. “Dancing in the moonlight, with little wings on her shoulders. She looks like one of the, uh,” he searched his memory for the name of the artist, “Kate Greenaway watercolors of fairies.”

  “Oh, I know those. I know the style. Describe her,” Dorothy said, her pencil poised. “Sounds like you’ve got an idea. You tell me, and I’ll draw it. You’re not gonna get the executive excited about a lot of stick figures.”

  Keith pictured Dola as best he could. “Well, she’s about three feet tall, with long blond hair. Her eyes are blue. Her nose is little, and tilts up at the tip, yeah,” he said, watching Dorothy draw. “Like that. And she has a pointed chin, but it’s not a sharp point, more like a little ball. Her face is thin in the jaw, but it gets wide over her cheekbones, and there’s a shadow underneath them that goes up to meet the line of her ears.”

  “Which are pointed, right?”

  “Yeah,” Keith said, surprised.

  Dorothy sighed. “I should have guessed.”

  At length, Dorothy had a gorgeous representation of one small winged girl dancing in a moonlit glade, holding hands with other beings whose features were only suggested by shadows.

  “That is absolutely fabulous,” Keith said. He stood up. “It gives me all sorts of great ideas. I’ve got to go tell Paul.” He tore the drawing from the pad and made for the door. “Thank you!” he called over his shoulder.

  “No problem,” Dorothy said, shaking her head.

  “It’s pretty,” Paul said, after listening to Keith’s enthusiastic ravings about the drawing, “but really, I don’t quite see it.”

  “A spokeswoman,” Keith said. “A … a mascot for Fairy Footwear. They could have the Fairy Footwear Fairy. Kids would learn to recognize her, like grown women look for Paulina Porizkova or Cindy Crawford. We could have a whole search to find The Fairy Footwear Fairy. Statewide!”

  “Well, yeah,” Paul said, starting to look more interested. “Yes, good. You need more realization for this. Why don’t you get Dorothy to do a whole storyboard for you? You’ve got to really sell this to the customer. I think it’s great, but I’m only the VP I don’t buy campaigns for the customer.”

  “Okay,” Keith said, rolling the drawing into a tube. “Tomorrow I’ll have something that’ll knock their eyes out!”

  “It’ll get the ball rolling,” Keith expostulated into the phone, waving one hand in the air as he paced up and back in the family kitchen. “If I can get PDQ to cooperate, they’ll have a casting call to find the right little girl to fill
Fairy Shoes. That’ll be Dola. It’ll be a way for us to get Ms. Gilbreth to bring Dola up here to Chicago.”

  “All very well to speculate,” Holl said, trying to get Keith to calm down, “but how do you convince them to spend the time and money seeking all the way down here for their model?”

  “The illustration in the ad is going to look just like her,” Keith said. “By the time I get through with them, they won’t be satisfied with any other model. They’ll want her. All we need to do is get the brass to agree to put out a casting call right away. As Paul said, I’ve got to sell it to them, and I don’t think any old storyboard will do the job. But if we can get Gilbreth to bring her up here, pow! We’ve got her!”

  “The best of luck to you, Keith Doyle,” Holl said. “We’ll be ready to go whenever you say.”

  Making sure Jeff wasn’t in the house, Keith pushed both beds in their room as far against the walls as they would go. In the space, he set up a card table and draped it with a white sheet. Using Dorothy’s illustration as a model, Keith started to work on his sample commercial.

  “If you can see an illusion,” he reasoned out loud, “you can film an illusion.”

  From a locked suitcase hidden under his bed, he unearthed a wooden “magic lantern” given to him by the Little Folk. Its particular virtue was that it was able to record about a minute’s worth of sight and sound of anything it was pointed at. He peered at it, and blew dust off its gauze “screen.” It hadn’t been used in a couple of years. He tested it, making faces into the screen, then directed it to play back. His face, shrunk down to an inch across, confronted him, grimacing horribly. Keith grinned, and began to construct his illusion.

  On a cassette tape recorder, he excerpted about a minute of the celestina and flute portion of the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies,” and played it over and over, listening to the rhythm. In the center of the table, he raised an image of the fairy mound he had seen in Scotland.

  It was easier to draw an illusory ring above it and affix more illusions to it, carousel style, than to try and make independent figures dance in a circle. He didn’t think it was necessary to really define the others with more detail than cartoons of fairies, but the figure of Dola had to be absolutely exact. He dug out photographs he had of her, and even played back the videotape of Holl’s wedding to make sure he got the image right. The child had been wearing a wreath in her hair that day. Keith fashioned his Dola wearing the simple green tunic he’d last seen her in, and the flower circlet. With an indulgent hand, he added lacy wings, and made her smile. It was almost as if she was really there. He wished he could touch her.

  “We’ll spring you, I promise,” Keith told the simulacrum.

  From Paul’s product photos, he added shoes to Dola’s feet of an incredible lime green with purple, pink, and teal accents. Maybe it was because the combination of colors blunted the senses, but they looked good against the green grass of the mound.

  “Now, come on. Let’s dance.”

  It was exhausting work getting the figures to move and caper the way he wanted them to. He was grateful the magic lantern worked by itself. He felt it was very appropriate, using illusions to help free Dola, whose special talent was making illusions.

  On the twentieth try, he got the movements to correspond to the beat of the music, and was looking forward to calling it a wrap when Jeff barged in.

  Keith looked up in horror. The little figures froze in place. Keith fought to hold on to his concentration. There was no way he’d be able to conjure them back the way he wanted them before morning, but he cursed his brother’s timing.

  “Hi,” he said weakly.

  Jeff stared down at the table. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Computer holographs,” Keith said desperately. “You know. Puppet figures, entered into computer memory banks. Then we shoot them through a special split lens, and when you project it, it makes a holographic image. See? Pretty good?”

  “Bull,” Jeff pronounced. “There’s no computer, no projector, and I don’t see any strings.” He shook his head, showing the first respect he had had for Keith since they were kids, and it was tainted with a modicum of fear. “Is it … magic?”

  Keith said nothing. Jeff dropped down on the bed across from him.

  “There’s been weird stuff going on with you ever since you went away to college, and Mom and Dad won’t talk about it,” Jeff said warily. “You aren’t in one of those cults, are you?”

  “No. Honest to God,” Keith said. “I swear. All natural. One hundred percent organic.”

  “Well,” Jeff said after a long pause, “then can I watch?”

  ***

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The “holograph” session went on a lot longer than Keith had originally envisioned. Having broken the ice, Jeff demanded further demonstrations. He wanted to know everything about magic, the Little Folk, and all of Keith’s studies, and kept him talking almost to dawn. He weaseled a loan of some of Keith’s most precious books on mythology, but the upshot was that by morning, they were friends again.

  “I don’t get it,” Keith told his father privately after breakfast. “I thought he’d be scared into freaking out, but instead he spent the night asking questions.”

  “What’s so strange about that?” Mr. Doyle asked, his grin a twin of his elder son’s. He patted Keith on the back. “He is a Doyle, after all.”

  In the conference room that morning, Keith ran the commercial for Paul and the others. Hiding the magic lantern against the back of the videotape recorder under the television, he pretended to roll a tape cassette. The interns and their supervisor watched spellbound, and broke into loud applause at the end.

  “Again!” Paul called from the head of the table. “Run it again! This is absolutely amazing. You did this in one night?”

  “Yup,” Keith said. “You know you only gave me the assignment yesterday.”

  “Colossal! God, you must be exhausted.”

  “Computer animation?” Sean asked.

  “Something like that,” Keith admitted.

  “The setup must have cost a fortune,” Brendan said in a sour voice. He was jealous of the admiration Keith was getting.

  No one paid attention to him. “This is just great,” Paul said, watching the circle of cartoon fairies whisking the figure of Dola around and around to the tinkling music. The close-ups cut in, first of Dola’s twinkling feet, clad in the gaudy sneakers, followed by one of her glowing face. The America’s Shoe logo appeared over the next long shot. “You know, this is close enough to pro quality that they might just air it like it is.”

  “Oh, no! Uh, they can’t!” Keith said, frantic.

  “Why not?”

  Keith swallowed. If they did take his perfect images, where was the need for searching for the right performer that would thereby rescue a little girl who’d been kidnapped? But he couldn’t say that. “Uh, I’m not union,” he choked out. It was lame, but effective. Paul snapped his fingers.

  “Damn, you’re right. That would skunk us for sure with the networks. Come on. We’ll take it to Scott in America’s Shoe right now. This is brilliant! He’s got to see it. He’ll wet his pants.”

  The media director for the America’s Shoe account, a man with a broad and silky mustache, agreed that Keith’s commercial was everything that the shoe company was looking for.

  “It’s got legs, pardon the pun,” the director said with an apologetic grin. “Just like this it could run—last a long time. Years. Search for the Fairy Footwear girl? We’ll have to. A great idea. Good publicity, too. I’ll put it up to the company this afternoon. You’ve saved me a ton of work, making a sample ad to show. The idea is always to leave as little to the client’s imagination as possible, and this more than does the job. We could have a cattle call by the end of this week. The search for the Footwear Fairy.” He drew a banner in the air.

  “The end of this week?” Keith asked excitedly. “Tomorrow?”

  “Sure, why not?” Scott
said, showing his teeth under his mustache. “Things happen fast in the advertising business. Hot stuff, Paul. They’ll love us. We’ve only had the product two days, and we’re already in production. This could be worth a million.”

  “They might not take it,” Paul said.

  “Oh, they’ll take it,” Scott said.

  His prediction was correct. By afternoon, Keith was asked to join the meeting with the representatives from America’s Shoe. He showed the ad over and over again to the growing delight of the executives.

  “God, it’s perfect,” said the director of public relations, a slender and balding man in his forties. “I hated the name when the designers came up with it, but you’ve made me love it. I’m behind you a hundred percent.”

  “It’s a go,” the finance director said. “I cannot believe how fast you came through, Paul, Scott. Absolutely cannot believe it.” He chuckled.

  “Brilliant,” said the vice president from America’s Shoe. She beamed at all of them. “I knew we were right to hire PDQ.”

  Keith sat beside the video ensemble, happy as a clam who had just won the Irish Sweepstakes. At the end of the meeting he reclaimed his magic lantern and stuck it into his briefcase. The executives drifted out toward the lobby, escorted by Paul, still talking about market share, frequency, and the search for just the right model.

  “Uh, Scott?” he said, “Can I take the press release down to the P.R. department?”

  “Take it down?” Scott said. “You can write it if you want, Keith.” He looked at his watch. “If you get your butt in gear and turn it in in the next half hour, we’ll make the Saturday morning papers with time to spare.” He sighed. “Even short notice like this will mean we’ll be mobbed,” he said sadly. “Every stage mother in the city will have her kid here before we open in the morning.”

  “How about statewide?” Keith suggested. “You only want to do this once, right?”

  “You are a glutton for punishment. Sure. Statewide. Alert the troops. You’d better take the rest of the day off after you turn out the P.R. release. You’ll need your strength tomorrow.”