Andrew Joseph Kane

The Message

Andrew Joseph Kane

On the northbound side of the highway that becomes our main street, at mile marker 6.1, there’s a billboard for F Benner HVAC. On the left side of the billboard is a blown-up photo of F himself: middleaged, white button-down, hand extended, smiling. On the right is all the pertinent contact info. Here’s the fun part: with every season, something gets added to F’s likeness. Summer (the long season): a beach ball seeming to bounce from his hand, sunglasses. Halloween: a pumpkin, vampire teeth, no blood. Thanksgiving: a turkey and carving implements, pilgrim hat. Christmas: Santa hat, you’d think. But no. Reindeer antlers, red nose. And so on: champagne for New Year’s, cupid wings, shamrock, umbrella (for April showers), the American flag from Memorial Day to July 4th, then back to the long season. This is the sequence we have come to know, come to love. Alterations are subtle and intended to keep folks guessing: instead of vampire teeth, neck bolts; instead of Rudolph, a candy cane, a present in green and gold.

Last fall, things changed. No pumpkin, no monster costume, no turkey feast. No Santa hat, no beard, no reindeer, nothing. F bounced a beach ball from the second week of July to the end of December. Then, the summer stuff disappeared, and a single additional eye showed up on the middle of his forehead. Like you’d see on some Eastern mystic. We thought, this is vandalism. Some smart alec teen climbed the billboard and spray painted poor F. But why would the vandals reset the beach ball, the sunglasses? Maybe the advertising company goofed and put up Halloween late? Or maybe F missed a payment? This was a busy time of year. It would get sorted soon. We waited.

February came and the third eye left. A great black beard covered F’s face. A wooden cane curled in his hand. A blue cape concealed his usual business-casual attire. At first we wondered if F was meant to appear like one of the founding fathers. But was Ulysses S. Grant usually lumped into the Presidents’ Day bunch? Didn’t he die an alcoholic, in penury? Was it some unsung general then (Sherman, perhaps, that barbarian)? Before we could determine the focus of F’s unusual tribute, someone pointed out that his cane was upside down. Then one of the early music professors from the local community college reported that F wasn’t holding a cane at all. He was playing the crumhorn. Indeed, if you stopped at the billboard at dawn or dusk you could hear a faint kazoo-like buzzing in the wilderness. A quick stroll would reveal seven wireless speakers zip tied to the trees. At the time, we didn’t think to stop and determine their bluetooth pairing capabilities. With a melody neither colonial nor Top 40, we couldn’t fathom what they had to do with either St. Valentine or the framers of our nation.

By the start of spring, F was naked from the waist. His chest was tattooed with multicolored concentric circles. He held a scimitar engulfed in real flames. Some of us began to complain at our local borough council meetings. The seasonal stuff was cute, but what message was F trying to send now? Maps were consulted, and it was determined that the billboard was outside the borough limits, and besides, as some of the more socially conscious attendees pointed out, this latest iteration was likely a nod to Holi, the Hindu festival of love. While not all of us could agree on whether or not our distaste for F’s half-naked fire sword could be interpreted as close-mindedness, we were concerned about safety. We studied the scimitar’s

pyrotechnical mechanism: a small tank with a properly mounted line on the opposite surface, insulated (phenolic foam, we suspected). The jets that fed the flames seemed unimpeded and cleverly shielded with a newly installed overhang (stainless steel, what else?). Satisfied, however begrudgingly, and moderately impressed, we watched the glow from F’s sword as the last of the snow melted.

The pattern continued. Roughly every sixty days, a new bizarre image appeared: F riding a Pegasus with feathered wings flapping mechanically; F with sixteen arms, some extending off the billboard in wild, snaking undulations; F, but his head was an octopus monster that jetted inky water onto the highway’s shoulder at regular intervals; an upside-down F. No other difference we could discern, just his usual self turned upside down, hand out like always. We studied their assemblies, wondered at the customizations, sulked.

After the borough council meetings, we held our own meetings. When the janitor asked us to leave the large group instruction room of city hall, we gathered in a nearby basement. We tracked each version of F on a calendar, printed out research from the internet, photographs of the various special effects machines and their possible origins (the ink blaster, a repurposed statuary pump?; the Pegasus wings, a windshield wiper motor?). We built a wall display like we were hunting a serial killer. Our committee assembled experts in various fields: history buffs, an amateur genealogist, a professional mortician, tax preparers and tax collectors, housewives who majored in art history, a dentist, two doctors, a retired army colonel, a mildly wealthy restaurateur, and a horse euthanizer who recently gave up his independent veterinary practice.

We contacted media outlets. The local paper ran a small photo spread more as a curiosity piece than a call-to-action. We investigated legal options, solicited a lawyer who would work pro bono, filed right-toknow paperwork requests from government offices serviced by F’s company. The contracts seemed above suspicion. The work appeared satisfactory. His client base was diverse. His execution, consistent.

Our social media presence deepened. We reached out to Yelp reviewers who had assessed F’s business in the last 36 months. Subcommittees assembled data into tables and graphs, copied photos from the F Benner HVAC Facebook page. These too went on the wall. We ran colored yarn from photos of the billboard devices (sixteen arms, octopus head, fire sword) to F’s HVAC handiwork (rafter-mounted air handlers with custom racks, programmable pump timers, modified burner nozzles). We were indignant but incited. Was F himself designing these unsightly machines?

We set sentries to mark the changing of the billboard. But it wasn’t F Benner HVAC who pulled up. The box truck said PRO-Live Advertising. Two guys came bumbling out, ready to unpack whatever latest abomination (as though they were selling hamburgers, tree limb removal).

When questioned, they said they were just doing a job like anybody.

Like anybody? They obviously didn’t have to drive by and look at it every day.

And they didn’t, they said. PRO-Live was run out of the suburbs. Fifty miles south. A different world.

What could we do? Let them hang up the latest eyesore: a giant hamster wheel encompassing F. The wheel was built from chrome wire and never stopped turning. The motor was patched into a separate power supply. Golf cart battery. Simple.

Next time, they found us waiting again.

Were we upset, or were we worried?

Couldn’t we be both? No one knew F himself. His business was actually located one town over. But for a guy who had established a schedule of predictable promotion, something had to be wrong.

Had it though?

Yes!

They told us to call his number. As if we hadn’t done that. As if we hadn’t ordered heating and air conditioning maintenance at one of our member’s remote homes, hoping to confront F once and for all. The guy who showed up was in a plain white van. F’s name and logo nowhere to be seen.

Was he F?

No. He didn’t look like F, so ok.

Did he work for F?

Sure he did. Isn’t that why we called?

Where was F?

F didn’t do service runs anymore. Mostly retired. A real nice guy though, F, family guy. Used to work a dairy farm in upstate New York. Industry started drying up, no pun intended hahaha. So he went into HVAC because he knew a thing or two about refrigeration. Took out the weather maps and found part of the country that got real hot in the summer and real cold in the winter. Figured they’d need service most of the year, so down he came.

What about the hamster wheel? we asked. What about the flames? What did the octopus head mean?

He acted like he didn’t even know the billboard existed.

The PRO-Live guys just looked at us when we told them this. Hung their big open mouths and looked at us. Then they put up a slightly larger version of F’s head on top of his normal head. As though F were wearing a big mask of his own face, eyeholes cut out, velcro straps, everything.

We returned to the basement, consulted the wall, hired the high school computer science teacher to write a learning machine algorithm to determine a pattern. Apart from the time between new advertisements (which varied only by a day or two), the results were inconclusive. The teacher did admit he was only using the school edition of the software. We asked if it made a big difference. He said he wasn’t sure.

F became a fur-covered yeti, a bat-winged terror, a giant peapod with a green F peaface; his billboard gained a mirror hung to reflect his likeness, a cannon that fired a little flag that said YUM! REAL ICE CREAM! seven minutes after every hour, a word bubble filled with runes that changed depending on which angle you looked at it. The cannon used non-siphon CO2 as propellant. The runic word bubble was a basic variable equilateral triangular prism not unlike the periaktoi used by ancient Greeks dramatists to quickly change scenery. The mirror was just a mirror.

Our members kept sleep journals for billboard-related dreams. We sought counseling, conferred with life coaches, had our tarot cards read. Some of us separated from our spouses, took out home equity loans to fund surveillance equipment, vehicle repairs, cloud computing services. We enrolled in community college courses on psychology, cryptology, ethical decision-making in business. Our resolve continued to be tested, but never more than our next phase of investigation.

We were ready to abandon the hunt for F’s location. His business address was a P.O. box. His shop was nonexistent. We had followed the service guy’s white van after our interview. He returned not to an industrial mall, but to his own home. We tailed him for six additional days while he performed seventeen

separate HVAC-related visits. All legitimate as far as we could determine (although we consulted every client, five refused to speak to us). Then someone said, What about geodata? Cell phone tower pings? Cloning his router?

Forget F, said another. He’s a deadend. A patsy. A red herring. (Can he be all three?) F’s probably been in Florida for years, sipping Mai Tais. Let’s follow the advertising guys. Who’s to say this isn’t just some marketing study they’re running? Let’s track them, picket them, devise our own billboards that they have to see every day. Give them a taste of their own medicine!

We had the schematics, the resources, the manpower. We could reconstruct the eyesores, part for part. If we couldn’t find promotion space near their office, maybe we could rent a lot, raise our own billboard. Make them see what we were made to see. Disfigure their daily drive. Put this wall, these hours to a purpose.

*

On the west side of the corporate center where PRO-Live Advertising is headquartered, at the intersection of Technology Parkway and Commerce Drive, there’s a billboard for F Benner HVAC. On the left side of the billboard is a blown up photo of F himself. On the right is all the pertinent contact info for our committee. Here’s the fun part: every sixty days something gets added to F’s likeness. Indian Summer: a broadsword dripping green blood, viking horns. Back-to-School: a scrolling LED sign of Kierkegaard’s Repetition translated into Urdu, football helmet. Samhain: a candy windmill that attracts crows, hot sauce bottle. Alterations are intended to keep folks guessing: instead of a string of sausage links strangulating F, the disembodied hands of three 15th century monarchs; instead of a door that opens to a prefabricated room filled with porcelain doll parts, a working waffle iron.

Each new billboard on our highway was replicated and installed at the corporate center within three days. We forewent all analysis, canvassing, and reconnaissance, and saved our energies for the changing of the F image. We had installed cameras in the marsh beside our town’s billboard in anticipation of this new phase. When the PRO-Live box truck arrived, we recorded the load-out and assembly and immediately began drafting our reproduction. Then we performed parts collection (along with any custom milling or cuts), welding and fabrication, paint (or print), and transfer to the corporate center billboard. We got phone calls immediately.

Approximately 1 out of every 20 calls was negative; the rest thought it was absolutely hilarious. Men in polos and khakis took photos in front of the billboard on their way from the office to lunch, on coffee runs. They launched fan accounts. Sign unveiling parties were held both onsite and remotely. Of the negative feedback, 80% were complaints that the sign didn’t change frequently enough. Our following grew. Memes emerged. We continued duplicating. They continued raving. No one realized that only an hour away we waited with the same anticipation for our own town’s new billboard to arrive.

Throughout, we continued to refine. Our turnaround time tightened as our model shifted. We sold off telecommunication equipment, cancelled server subscriptions, and transferred our entire operation from the basement to a new workshop in the alley between Birch and Main. We opened special accounts at the printer, machinist’s, and hardware store. Rush delivery from theatrical suppliers and props storage Still, we received requests from our corporate center enthusiasts to design advertisements. They wanted novelty billboards for galas, soirees, bar mitzvahs, garden parties, high school graduations. They sent inquiries

and asked for estimates. Gave down payment offers. We tabulated our personal and collective debt; any revenue would help if we hoped to continue our work. But what exactly could we make?

At the wall, we sought inspiration. The reams of paper, the skeins of yarn. Our journey from the third eye on. Photos from when we suspected F as mastermind. Transcripts of our interviews with the PRO-Live guys, F’s technician, former customers. Color-coded pushpins linking to pie charts and bar graphs. Maps with sticky notes; specs on wire gauge, sealant strength, paint chips. Research on trauma related guilt inventory. Woodcuts of Old Norse balladry. Footnotes from an out-of-print series on cosmogonic myth. The sight of it humbled us. Our attempts and failures. Both mosaic and monument. Still no closer to an understanding, with a weightier task now at hand: the charge of creation.

What about a knight? With a knight helmet.

What about--he’s a boy scout and he wears a boy scout sash. Merit badges and all that.

What if he’s a girl scout and he’s got those cookies. You could come eat a cookie even.

Maybe like a movie director? With a bullhorn and one of those chairs?

A farmer on a haybale!

We continued to offer mundane stereotypes, stock characters. Each suggestion more vanilla than the last. Nevertheless, our brainstorming generated a list of F iterations we could easily (and cheaply) craft. It read like a Halloween costume catalog. Shallow, flat, uninspired. We were stymied. Neutered by the menagerie that came before us, the madness of the billboard’s origins. What mind could devise such stuff? And what minds could derive such joy from it? Still, these corporate center fanatics kept calling. At last, we offered them the list, and they scoffed. Asked for something off the menu. Something exclusive. Upped their payment figures. We agonized.

Finally, we braved a booking. The one that seemed least risky. A party. A birthday party at a house we would call a mansion. In our town, we could’ve bought a home twice its size with a dozen level acres to spare. This one was packed onto a hillside, its mansion neighbors likewise teetering across the grade. We arrived the night before to install and sent a small crew on the day to oversee the reveal and operation. An eleven-year-old boy had become a fan of F Benner thanks to his UX designer father who could see our billboard from his company’s office. An assembly of tweens paraded up from the finished basement to the small yard carved out of the hill, and waited for the special moment. Thirty minutes after the announced start time, we pulled the rope to release the drape. F Benner greeted them in full clown regalia. His wig was an actual rainbow wig and bounced in the breeze. In his extended hand was a nozzle rigged to release enough helium to fill a tying balloon every half minute. Ready to shape them into a sword, a crown, or a dog, we stood with our bag of balloons eager to delight the bunch. No one cheered.

Seven of the children took balloons. Only three asked for them to be made into swords. The rest accepted the unmodeled tubes and batted at each other half-heartedly. Two snapped a selfie in front of the billboard. One pretended the balloon was a penis and waggled it provocatively. Within ten minutes they had shifted off to play video games and eat coconut chips and chocolate hummus. The father wondered if our work wasn’t a little on the nose and asked if he could Venmo us the balance. We had asked for a check, but when he too disappeared into the basement, we set to disassembling. *

At the corporate center, we burned the billboard with five thirty-two ounce cans of white gasoline.

When the fire department arrived, we were gone, and the blaze extinguished (they no doubt discovered traces of a basic foam containing vinegar, dish soap, and baking soda). We’d accepted that our retaliatory endeavors were not only a distraction, but most likely a distraction designed by the architect of this entire scheme, the mastermind behind F’s horrible metamorphoses whom we still had yet to identify. And so having abandoned aspirations of profit or personal restoration, we returned to the workshop to contemplate our future. But the next day, at the billboard on mile marker 6.1, F Benner had disappeared.

Of course, we could not help but wonder at the timing, consider if we had anything at all to do with the change or if it was some kind of impossible coincidence. After all, the chance of shuffling a deck of cards into perfect order including suit arrangement is 1 in 1068. A member of our committee said that number was the reason she believed in God. It seemed much more likely, however, that we had been the target of a grand experiment, and, understandably, this displeased us.

We watched the new billboard for change. It was now a plain white background with red block text that said ADVERTISE HERE and the phone number for PRO-Live. Sixty days passed, and nothing new arrived. Six months, and the same. When reviewing surveillance footage, though, there was something about the way the birds congregated--several times a day, small groups of swamp sparrows gathered on the eastern edge of the billboard. We searched for some seed distributing device, perhaps even a well placed caterpillar nest, but no, nothing. We also noticed that at least once a month the lights of the town would halo the woods behind the billboard in an unnatural hue. We determined this could be executed with several fog machines using altered fluid, but our search could not locate any such machines. The image would often flicker on our screens. Whether it was solar radiant interference or shadows cast by turkey vultures, we were forced to watch and re-watch regularly to assess the inconsistencies.

Now we keep a watchman posted twenty-four hours in case someone would attempt to meddle with our cameras. Petroleum jelly the lenses, disrupt the feed with signal jammers, and yes, we worry about deep fakes. We anticipate the next phase of changes will be subtle in an attempt to sway us from vigilance. But we will not be deterred. We measure the milkweed’s growth at the western pillar’s base, note the days the deer emerge to inspect the hum of the electric meter, trace the geometry between the branches’ weaving, count the constellations that cross the billboard’s apex, their correspondence with the phases of the moon, sounds that shrill and lull from the darkness, itself shifting minutely. Our words cannot describe it, any of it, why anyone would make such stuff thus unpredictable, wondrous, terrible, obscure. But through our efforts, we will try.