by Jim Nelson
EVERYWHERE MAN
Jim Nelson
Portions of Everywhere Man were originally published as "Taylor & Redding" in We Still Like.
Contents and cover copyright
© 2011, 2014 Jim Nelson
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-0-9904802-1-1
For Isabel, Beatrice, Emma, and Pennelope
Four little girls whose faces shine bright and clear
in every photo taken of them
Contents
Part One We Discover Him
"My cable car"
He Is Everywhere
Erasing the Invisible
Part Two We Become Tourists in Our Own Town
"I won't lose my heart to this city"
We Give Chase
Part Three We Return to the Work at Hand
More Real Than Perfection
Hallidie's Folly
1.0
Part Four We Hear the Engines
We Ring the Bell
We See the Invisible
About the author
It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.
– Oscar Wilde,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Part One
We Discover Him
It was a year ago today we discovered the Everywhere Man. We located him by accident well into our project's schedule. We were developing a virtual interactive cable car ride that could be experienced across the Internet. Our software resided on a server farm that knitted together in real-time a collage of photographs, creating a lifelike San Francisco seen from a cable car. Our servers produced a quilt of visual scraps that rolled past the user at a gentle nine-and-a-half miles per hour. When we were finished, anyone in the world would be able to ride a cable car and see San Francisco without leaving his or her home or office.
We produced this ride by processing every photograph on the Internet taken of San Francisco. Tourists and residents have been posting digital photos on the Internet for a decade and a half now. With the Digital Fair Use Act of 2012 passed into law, we could now utilize them freely in our ride. The photos were often tagged with the geographic location of the exposure or with keywords that could be parsed into approximate locations. Early on we considered using video as well, but we learned that even the most crooked amateur photograph can be corrected more easily than the blurry, shaky videos tourists produce. And with 200 million photographs of San Francisco available to us, we had plenty of source material.
We spotted him in an early test. At that point our cable car was nothing more than a neon green wireframe box hovering between Union Square's department stores and boutiques. A headless man stood on the corner of Geary and Powell, not far from Macy's. He was headless because, although eighteen people on the cable car had snapped their cameras in roughly the same direction, none of them had captured him fully.
Our servers stitched those eighteen photos together with twenty-five hundred more taken at that intersection over the past fifteen years. No matter the angle of those eighteen distinct photographs, the man was always partially hidden. In one, he was obscured by the crook of a woman's arm. In another, the cable car's handrail hid most of his face. His rounded shoulders were slumped forward and his spine was curved in a question mark, as though he'd been worn down by millennia of gravity and erosion. His hands dangled at his sides like plumb bobs seeking true. Nobody had captured his face.
What struck us the most was that none of the photographs were taken on the same day. He stood on the corner of Geary and Powell eighteen times over fifteen years, wearing nearly the same clothes and bearing the same slump in his form, as though he'd made a hobby out of posing for the riders. How weird, we agreed. At least he could wave. We chuckled at him until it dawned on us that his face was the only unrendered portion of the scene. Every other aspect of Union Square was depicted in full detail. We could zoom in on the Apple billboard and see the Levi's store across the square and even make out the array of gold necklaces under light in a jewelry store box window. Yet this odd man's hidden face gouged a hole in our ornately constructed perfection. This would not do. We would debug this man from our world.
"My cable car"
Our company's founder and CEO was William Arbeit. When he visited the engineering lab he always beamed big and had a snap in his gait—a furnace of positive energy. He marched to each of us in turn to shake our hands. Pistoning hard, Arbeit asked how we were doing and, boy, we're looking good these days, and so on. His neck was already craning away when we gave him our answers. Then he marched over to the next one of us to lock his grip upon and press the same questions.
Only after he'd caught up with all of us would he ask, "When can I ride my cable car?" He had a voice that filled the room, like dispensed shaving cream inflating on your palm. He always spoke of the project with that phrase, "my cable car." It was his cable car, in a way. He was the company's majority stakeholder, funding it with the millions he'd made during the Dot Com boom. Everyone remembers the mania and the busts of that era. Everyone remembers the stock options printed with ink made of smoke on paper made of mirrors. Few know of the real success stories. Those belonged to the people who built the stuff those web sites needed and madly bought in bulk: routers and transaction servers and virtual hosting farms. William Arbeit made his fortune not by panning for Internet gold but by selling computer equipment to the miners, and they gave him every last dime in their pockets. Three-point-five billion dimes, more or less.
William Arbeit liked to tell a story to every potential investor and every journalist who interviewed him. It went something like this:
After the Dot Com Gold Rush, William Arbeit had a bank account to rival some countries' GDP. He was bored. He didn't know what to do next. He wanted to start another company. Would he go back to selling commodities to other businesses? Or would he start a company that would make a difference? Maybe even change the world?
"In other words," he would tell his audience, "did I keep selling fan belts and gaskets or did I build the next car—one that ran on solar power, never broke down, and could fly?" He would smile at this point and raise a finger. "I decided to fly."
And fly is what he did. He hopped on a jetliner and began a year-long first-class voyage around the world. He vowed to identify one problem he could attack and to devise at least one solution for it before he returned.
"I met a lot of people," he explained. "Some wanted great things, like equality and social justice. Some wanted security for their families and a safer future. But all of them wanted one thing. When they learned I was from San Francisco, they told me how much they wanted to ride the cable cars.
"When I got back, the first thing I did was ride one. I had lived in San Francisco for eight years, never rode one once. They're for tourists, I thought. They're for the kind of plain people I left behind in Indiana, not for people who live in The City. But I loved it. I admit it, I loved every moment aboard the cable car. Riding a cable car is like seeing the city for the first time all over again. It's the clatter of the wheels beneath your feet and the ratchet of the grip as it takes hold of the cable. You're connected to San Francisco when you ride a cable car. The cable is the spine of the city."
Then Arbeit lowered his voice as though discussing a terminal illness.
"That's when I thought of the world's population all coming to San Francisco to ride the cable cars. How do you get seven billion people to one point on the planet without destroying the planet in the process? That's the problem I wanted to solve."
Arbeit now had his audience in his hand. At this point they could not help but keep listening. He would hold out a fist and begin count
ing with fingers.
"Alcatraz. The Empire State Building. The Coliseum. The Great Wall of China. Tourism is not sustainable. Hotel towels and bed sheets must be washed. Tons of jet fuel burned and the exhaust spewed into the atmosphere. All to support millions of people each year who are shipped like cattle to gaze at the same buildings, to eat the same food, and to take the same bad photos as everyone else. Meanwhile the planet grows hotter and hotter."
He would then open his fist as though revealing the winning poker hand. "The answer is virtual tourism. We don't need to move people to the places they want to see. We will bring those places to them, across the Internet, without burning an ounce of fossil fuel.
"The virtual cable car is the first project, a trial run. When it's perfected, we'll branch out. There will be no tourist sight on this planet you can't visit from the comfort of your office, your easy chair, or even your phone."
That's when he told his audience our company's motto. "More Real Than Perfection," he would tell them. "We settle for nothing less."
And with that, William Arbeit was no longer bored. He had his problem, and his solution lay in the modest cable car.
He Is Everywhere
With a furious intensity we scrambled to make our first milestone. We scheduled a trial run of our program for William Arbeit's benefit, a trial run of his cable car.
When Arbeit arrived at the engineering lab he shook all our hands and announced his persistent question in that shaving-cream voice of his: "When can I ride my cable car?"
We ushered him to a widescreen monitor more appropriate for spectating the Super Bowl and started the program. The servers churned as our cable car climbed Nob Hill and approached its apex. They selected photos that showed off the best of San Francisco. We programmed them to discard photos with a lot of graffiti or of people sleeping on the sidewalk. Arbeit wanted his virtual San Francisco to be pristine.
"Is the volume off?" he said. "I don't hear anything."
We assured him that we would soon add sound. Our virtual tourists would hear the clatter of the undercarriage and the grinding of the brakes bearing down on the axles.
"They've got to hear the cable car's bell," he said to us. "Every morning I ride the cable car to work. Every ride is a little different. Different passengers, a new gripman, maybe the conductor has on a funny hat. But every morning I have to hear that bell. It's how I greet the day."
Then he saw it. We all saw it. Arbeit paused the ride. He tapped the screen with a clipped fingernail as clean and hard as a cut diamond. "Just who is that?" he said.
We felt a collective sinking in our guts, as though the cable car had lost its brakes and plummeted at high speeds into the bay waters below.
It's nothing, we said. A minor bug we're working on.
Arbeit moved his sharp eyes over the screen. "I don't see anyone else like him."
It's not even a bug, we said. It's a glitch.
"Everyone else, you can see their face," Arbeit observed. "But not his."
A corner case, we said. An anomaly. Easily fixed.
Arbeit moved the virtual camera searching for a good angle. "Why is there a question mark over his face?" he asked.
Like wearing a lampshade at an office holiday party, the mysterious man's face was replaced by a flat white square with a Times New Roman question mark dead in its center. It was the icon we used for missing data.
We should have it eliminated by next Friday, we said.
"Have what eliminated? The man?"
The bug, we said. The corner case.
After Arbeit left we ordered the servers to isolate the mysterious man. He stood among a clutch of eager tourists waiting to board the cable car. The servers reported more than sixty photos patching him together. As before, none of them were taken on the same day, and he always stood in about the same spot. Not one of the photos captured his face. We had the outline of his head now, and his hair as well, a thin grayish-brown splay as though a spoiled egg had been cracked on his crown. Again his two plumb-bob hands weighed down his shoulders and spine. Those sixty photos gave us near-complete visuals of the tourists, right down to the fluid sheen of a mint chocolate-chip ice cream cone melting over one curly-haired girl's sticky little fingers. All that detail and yet the man's face was nothing but a Times New Roman question mark.
We reconfigured the servers to search broadly for the mystery man. They found the man and his question-mark face up and down the Powell Street lines, his splay of hair palming his skull like a stern hand from above. The head of a parking meter blocked his face in one photo. A teenage girl's hand raised in a peace sign blocked it in another. In one, the camera phone captured him perfectly save for his damned face, which was obscured by the last leaf on a gingko tree braving the oncoming winter.
Valuable days evaporated in frantic hacking sessions as we tried to remove him from the program. The more effort we put into removing him, the more his presence would increase. Like breathing on a mirror to reveal a secret message, our simulator brought the mysterious man to the fore.
We extended our search beyond the cable cars. We found him in North Beach standing at the end of the line at cafés and among the stacks in City Lights. We found him in Chinatown alleyways and at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. Smiling husbands, smiling wives, smiling sons and daughters were foreground, front and center. The man sagged off to one side or another, his face out of focus or cropped off or supplanted by the question mark our servers provided for him. He was not a bug nor a glitch nor a corner case. He was everywhere.
Erasing the Invisible
Like the celebrity stills checkerboarding the lobby of a storied Chinese restaurant, pictures of William Arbeit's face covered every wall in his office. He was on magazine covers and photographed for interviews and at charity fundraisers. A hundred William Arbeits smiled at us from all angles. One very grim William Arbeit stared at us from the seat of his ergonomic desk chair. We were weeks behind schedule.
It's the Everywhere Man, we said.
"That headless guy I saw? You've given him a name?"
What else can we call him? we said.
Arbeit waved his hand as though shooing a fly. "I don't care what his name is. What I want to know is why this is even an issue. The program discards photos with graffiti and bad weather, why can't it just discard him?"
There's too many of him, we said. He's in over 35 percent of the usable photos. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. We throw out a photograph with him in it but its replacement is shaped differently. So we have to throw out the neighboring pieces and replace them as well. Soon we run out of candidates and have to start reusing old photos.
"No," Arbeit said. "I want people to ride my cable car over and over. They can never experience the same ride twice. Can't we replace the question mark with someone's face?"
The pasted-on head always appears distorted and discolored, we said.
"Nothing can seem distorted. I want perfection."
We'd devised a plan before meeting with Arbeit. We laid out all the details for him. Then we waited for his response.
"Tell me what you need," was all he said.
Cameras. Batteries. Notebook computers. A week to prepare and a full day off of work.
"A day off? Where will you be?"
We would ride the cable car to Fisherman's Wharf. Take in the sights. Snap pictures. And we would capture on digital film the face—the identity—of the Everywhere Man.
Part Two
We Become Tourists in Our Own Town
We stepped down from the cable car a tad disoriented from the ride. It was the first ride for all of us. We agreed that the shaky, creaky tinderbox was not so much a tourist attraction as it was a hazardous artifact of the Steam Age. And somehow it transported more than fifteen thousand people each day.
Once we found our feet and surveyed our landing point, we began the next stage of our plan. We double-checked our cameras' batteries and adjusted them for wide-angle crowd scenes. And it was crowded in Fisher
man's Wharf that day, with tourists mobbing gift shops and food stalls like amoeba swarming and dividing in a Petri dish.
The plan was to meet the Everywhere Man and make an offer. If he agreed, we would take him to our offices and photograph him from head to toe and from all angles. He would receive a generous lump payment in return for perpetual rights to use those images as we saw fit. Our servers would fill in the gaps with these pristine photos of him matted into the background.
We proceeded down Jefferson Street, the most trafficked thoroughfare in Fisherman's Wharf. Statistical tests proved that this stretch of road was his favorite location in San Francisco. As we walked among the crowds of tourists we snapped pictures left and right, indiscriminately, like gardeners spraying bug killer.
Why do the tourists come here, of all places? we asked ourselves. Is this what they travel thousands of miles to see? Street musicians and Irish coffee and sourdough bowls?
In one open-air souvenir stall we spotted a wall rack of toy cable cars. There were no passengers on them, no gripman or conductor, only an empty car. Each toy had a slot on one side to hold a photograph. The sample photo was an exuberant woman leaning off the cable car's handrail, beaming and waving brightly.
Look, we whispered. Behind her, blocked by her exultant and manicured hand, was the Everywhere Man.
"I won't lose my heart to this city"
Off of Jefferson Street we came across an enterprising photographer with a going concern. Mounted atop a professional tripod was a full-featured digital camera with a lens like a bullhorn. An impressive line of tourists each waited their turn to be photographed before Alcatraz in the distance. An assistant off to the side took their money and printed each photo from a computer with a color printer. It was a tidy and efficient operation.
