by Kevin Shay
“So, Randall,” Aunt Lela says, “tell us what you’ve been up to. You’re not teaching, obviously?”
“Nope. Decided to sort of see the country. I’ve been playing a bunch of shows at different schools all over the place.”
“That’s neat,” Marcie says.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” Derek says. “Being your own man? Not having to punch the clock? I know it feels awesome for me.”
“Definitely.” Although I’m not sure how moving back in with your parents might fit into that self-portrait.
“So is this what you want to do for a while?” Derek asks. “I mean, where do you see yourself in five years?”
“Alive, maybe, with a lot of luck.”
Derek chuckles.
“No, I’m sort of serious,” I say.
“Derek,” his mother says. “I thought we talked about this. Didn’t we agree we don’t need to show Randall the plan?” Is that what he was doing? I guess the five-years question was a giveaway, a standard opening gambit.
“Mom, all I was thinking is, what Randall’s doing sounds great, but it’s not necessarily steady work, right? So if he wanted to supplement—”
“Son,” Frank says.
“OK, OK. All I’ll say is this. Randall, if you decide—no pressure, right?—but if you ever decide you’re interested in potentially getting some financial independence, maybe you’d like to see the plan, all you have to do is ask.”
“Fair enough,” I say. This might be an opportune moment to bring up Y2K, but I decide against it, hoping tomorrow will find the family a little less overwrought.
Once we’ve ordered, Derek excuses himself to talk to Jake the bartender. He comes back ten minutes later, scowling, his face red.
“What happened, babe?” Marcie says.
Derek sits down. “Apparently Jake hasn’t been happy with his progress in the business. He wants to quit.”
“Oh, no.” She grabs his bicep. “Really?”
“You know what this is? I’ll tell you what this is, it’s that woman Heather he’s been seeing. She comes into the picture, he’s suddenly full of questions about points and percentages and statistics. Serious case of detailitis. But wait till you hear the best part. He says he has a ton of inventory he needs to return. Perfectly good products! Wants to sell back all his tools, too.”
“What about his legs?” Lela asks.
“He doesn’t have much of a downline. But those returns are really gonna cut into our BV.”
“Well, maybe we can convince him not to go inactive,” Marcie says.
“I hope so. I want to have him counsel with Lucy.”
That’s funny, weren’t we speaking English a few minutes ago? Derek takes a deep breath, blows it out. “All right, we’ll worry about it tomorrow. Here come our apps. Randall, you need another pint?”
And somehow, for the duration of the meal, everyone acts normal. Frank and Lela talk about their jobs, without pointing out that they’re the only ones here still employed. Derek and Marcie talk about her pregnancy, never mentioning that the wee arrival might spend its first days of life in its grandparents’ spare bedroom. I talk about the places I’ve been, leaving out the reason for my trip. We say nothing at all about the future, either their end-of-the-rainbow one or my end-of-the-world one. To listen to us rehash old family stories, review classic movies, and denigrate the New York Yankees, you’d never guess we were four Amway drones and an apocalyptic. It makes me a little sad when the check comes.
We decide it doesn’t pay for everyone to trek back to the car, so Derek and I will get it. When we reach 16th Street, a shuttle is just pulling away from the stop. We dash and yell and get the driver to reopen the doors. On the bus, I start to walk toward the empty seats in the back, but Derek lingers in front. “Hey, thanks, man,” he says to the driver, not the same one we had before. “Getting cold out there.”
“Yep.”
I look at my cousin, knowing exactly what’s coming, thinking, I used to want to be just like you.
“Pretty busy for a Sunday night,” Derek says.
chapter 4
446
Days
Awake at dawn, some combination of the morning Y2K jitters and the flimsy five-inch mattress preventing me from getting back to sleep, I decide to do something I’ve studiously avoided all these years: read one of my father’s books. Or maybe I should get back on the computer, see if there’s anything new. But I was already online last night until one o’clock. And Frank and Lela have only one phone line, which I don’t want to tie up in case they’re expecting any bright-and-early calls from their upline or downline or breadline. So instead I go to the bookcase and take down the suddenly controversial Calvin Coolidge: A Life, by Howard Knight.
There’s Dad on the back jacket flap, big-haired, tweedy, very late-seventies. I have a couple of vivid memories surrounding the publication of this book. One, a party at the home of Dad’s department chair. Where my father, the newly minted author, acted strange (drunk, I figured out years later) and I was allowed to watch TV in an upstairs room with the chair’s disaffected teenage son and daughter. Two, resenting that the biography led us to name our new cat Silent Cal, when I had other names in mind. And not Cal for short, either, but Sy, a syllable I didn’t even recognize as a name. Sy ran away the next year. The book was well received, as biographies of B-list presidents go. But when I used to look for Dad’s books in the library, check the withdrawal cards to gauge their popularity, I never found more than a date or two stamped on the card for Coolidge. It depresses me to think the alleged copying went unnoticed for so long only because nobody ever read the thing.
Mom broke the news to me in March about the pending scandal. She’s kept in touch with a few people at my father’s college, friends of theirs from before the divorce, who passed the rumors along. A historian assigned to review my father’s latest book for a journal decided to familiarize himself with the author’s early work. A few paragraphs rang a bell and sent him digging through his personal library. Wherein he unearthed a handful of strikingly similar passages in an obscure 1968 political history of the Jazz Age. The sleuth blew the whistle, the journal’s editor made some phone calls, and Dad was up the creek.
“Scandal” makes the situation sound grander and juicier than it deserves, and my father and his book were too smalltime to warrant much attention beyond his little corner of academia. But by the time I got wind of it, the American Historical Association had opened an inquiry, and a wave of whispers trailed Dad around the quadrangle, or at least his department building. I called him to get the story firsthand and couldn’t tell how he was taking it. He sounded pretty down-in-the-mouth, but that was his default tone since Anita left him. Long time ago, he said. Finished writing that book in a hurry, sloppy note-taking, some things got written down without quotation marks. Not the end of the world. Overblown, he said, but my sister had gotten hold of the 1968 book and read some of the troublesome passages to me over the phone, along with our father’s alleged appropriations, and damned if it wasn’t plagiarism, pure and simple. An isolated incident, Dad said, even as his colleagues set out to prove otherwise. In parallel with the AHA’s formal investigation came the informal one, conducted in their spare time by backbiting colleagues who smelled blood in the water. So basically since February a handful of my father’s peers have been poring over each word he’s ever published, hoping to stumble upon a phrase that raises a red flag of déjà vu. He claims they won’t find anything else. I think I believe him. But what must it have been like to go through all those years knowing that if the wrong person picked up a copy of the book, he was sunk? As if this Coolidge biography were a little time bomb ticking away, set to detonate his professional life after an unknown interval. That’d have to be nerve-wracking.
He was a mess when I went to see him in April, speaking in an uncertain mumble, fidgeting incessantly with any small object at hand. Fifteen minutes of watching him peel wax drippings off a candlestick had
me wanting to go out and get him a pack of cigarettes (he hadn’t smoked since before I was born, but just to give him something to do with his hands). He started repeating small-talk questions I’d already answered, and clumsily changed the subject when I asked about the investigation. Finally I extracted an update. He didn’t expect to lose his job, and while one or two people had dropped his classes, the student body at large didn’t much care. You don’t get a lot of activism at a school with so many commuter and resumed-education students. The damage was done in other ways, though. The university press that was about to put out his new book suspended publication indefinitely, and he could forget about the department chairmanship he’d been in line for. And he didn’t stand much chance of making a move to a higher-prestige school, either. So all in all, he was screwed. For want of a couple of quotation marks.
I make myself as comfortable as possible on the nominal bed and open the book. Dedicated to my sister and me—how nice. But after five pages I realize not a word has penetrated and I’m once again replaying our fight in my head. Still makes me seethe, more than two months later. He was the first person I tried to tell about Y2K, the first time I spoke of it out loud. At that point I had no idea what I should do and truly wanted his advice. Dad’s a smart guy, I figured, he’ll see the light as soon as I show him all the incontrovertible evidence. Then we can come up with a plan together. I invited him to visit me and spent the better part of a day cleaning my apartment, housekeeping having fallen by the wayside during my weeks of research. Got rid of liquor bottles and soda cans, shoved clothes and papers into drawers, swept the floor, Dustbusted the crumbs out of the crease in the futon couch he’d sleep on. It’s not much over an hour from Fitchburg to Somerville, but he somehow arrived three hours late and offered no explanation. I made coffee and we sat in amiable silence as he looked around the apartment with his usual expression, bemused, judgmental, like he’s noticing all sorts of flaws that aren’t worth pointing out. He wore less depression on his sleeve than in April but seemed sluggish, half elsewhere, Prozac-y. But even through whatever mood-smoothers he was on, he sensed I was preoccupied with something and asked what was on my mind.
I forced myself to look up from my shoelaces to meet his eye. “The thing is, I’ve been doing a lot of research on this year 2000 computer bug. It looks like it’ll be a much bigger deal than anyone admits.”
For a few seconds he didn’t speak, just gave me a look I can only describe as terminal disappointment. “Where did you get this idea?” he asked finally. “Who’s saying this?”
“Well, a lot of people on the Internet.”
He burst out laughing, a long derisive guffaw. It struck me that I hadn’t heard him laugh in a while. The laughter went out when the shrugging came in.
“I’m glad you think it’s funny.”
“People on the Internet. Son. Listen to me. Don’t worry about this. You know what I think? I think you have too much time on your hands during the summer. When you have nothing else to do but sit around and surf the web, you’re bound to come across some ominous theories.”
“This isn’t some crackpot thing, Dad. The people who are predicting—Don’t you even want to hear why I think it’s such a serious situation?”
“Frankly? No.”
“So you’re just refusing to look at any information? I have a huge amount of data. Huge.”
“You want my advice, Randall? Find something to occupy yourself with for the rest of August. Stay off the damn computer. Then when school starts again, trust me, you’ll forget all about this.”
“School won’t start again. I quit last week.”
“You what? Because of this…bug?”
“Yes, Dad. That’s how big a deal I think it is. If you’d only look at some of the facts, you’d probably agree.”
He paused, then slapped his palm against the countertop, what passed for fury in his pharmaceutically blunted range of affect. “Son, why do you do this to yourself?”
“Do what?”
“Derail yourself! You know. Whenever you’re on a path toward a goal, you find a way to jump off it. Back when you were so good at baseball, you wake up one morning and say you’re not going out for it again. You were a genius at math, but you suddenly decide to take only the minimum requirements in math. You were great on the piano, and bang! You drop it and switch to guitar. So now you’re teaching, you have a good job, and you quit because you saw some nonsense on the Internet? I mean, son! What in the world is it with you and this self-defeating tendency?”
It took me a minute to formulate a reaction to this stunningly off-the-mark speech. “That is really bizarre, Dad. I mean, you make it sound like I’ve had all these different careers. Like I was, what, a mathematician and then a concert pianist. Everything you just mentioned happened before puberty, for Christ’s sake. You know when I stopped playing piano? Eight years old, Dad!”
“All I’m saying is, I wish you were a little more grounded. Like your sister.”
“Like my—Dad, do you not realize Nicole is a fucking head case? Have you not noticed the OCD, the antibacterial hand wipes, the way your grandson can barely leave the house? If that’s what you mean by grounded, no thanks.”
“No, but it’s about having a support structure…” He shook his head, oozing superiority. “You know, I never understood why you had to break up with Hannah.”
I’d already worked myself into a decent lather, but that put me over the top. “Hannah! Oh, now it comes out. Well, I’m sorry if you’re disappointed in my love life. I’m a little skeptical of yours at this point!” I was shouting into his face by now, but he remained relatively calm, maybe because of his medication. Which made me even madder. “And I didn’t break up with her! She broke up with me!”
“But are you sure it wasn’t something you did to drive her away? Was it this millennium thing?”
“No! That was before—Jesus. Unbelievable. You’re taking her side? You met Hannah, what, three times, and you’re taking her side? Can you ever take my side? Just once, that’d be nice, Dad.”
“So you want me to pretend you’re right when I think you’re wrong, is that it?”
“You’re my father! Some parents, Dad, this may shock you to hear, they overestimate their sons! It might not kill you to give your own child the benefit of the doubt!”
“That’s hard to do, Randall, when my own child comes to me and says he quit his job because he’s afraid of some computer virus.”
“It’s not a virus, you idiot!”
“Did you just call me an idiot?”
“You know what? Forget it. I’m not gonna waste my breath trying to explain it to someone who’s not capable of understanding it. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough. Good fucking luck when it all goes down.” And for one shameful instant I wanted it all to go down, and him to go down with it, just so he’d know how wrong he’d been. At that moment I truly relished the prospect of civilization collapsing, as long as it meant I could place an I-told-you-so call to Dad from the safety of a bunker somewhere, before the phones went dead.
Then I got up, grabbed Dad’s overnight bag, opened the apartment door, and stood there waiting.
He raised an incredulous eyebrow. “You’re throwing me out?”
And so I was. He took the bag from me and left without looking me in the eye. Through the curtains I saw him sitting in his car outside, probably waiting for me to come to my senses, but I stopped looking out after a few minutes, and when I looked again a little while later he was gone.
And that was that.
I turn back to the first page and try to focus on Calvin Coolidge.
I wake up two hours later, my father’s book on my chest. Jesus, Dad, couldn’t you have found some more stimulating prose to plagiarize? Silent Cal goes back on the shelf.
The five of us sit down to a breakfast of omelets and sullenness. The excitement of their weekend event has worn off, leaving the family subdued and bristly. Recusing himself from chitchat, D
erek takes out a Walkman and jots notes on a yellow legal pad between bites of egg as he listens to rich men talking, a hair of the dog to fend off the postfunction hangover, another shot of the network-marketing Kool-Aid.
Aunt Lela tops up my coffee. “Randall, you said you need to get on the road pretty early this afternoon?”
“Unfortunately, yeah. I’m playing a show Wednesday morning in Silicon Valley. So I want to make at least six or seven hours driving today.”
“Well, let us know if you’re headed through Denver on your way back,” Frank says. “You know you’re always welcome.”
“Thank you.”
Sufficiently motivated for the time being, Derek stops his tape and takes off his headphones.
“Welcome back,” Frank says.
Derek stands up. “Can I toast anyone another English muffin?”
When he comes back from the kitchen, I make my move.
“So, Lela and Frank, I’ve been meaning to ask you guys. At the hospital, do you know what they’re doing about the Y2K problem? As far as all the computer systems and the equipment?”
“You know, I don’t,” Lela says.
“Well, the IT department put a big line item for that into their budget for next year.”
“Oh, Frank, didn’t we read that article, some machine, what was that? It would think the patient was two years old instead of ninety-eight and give the wrong dose of medicine? Can you imagine?” She says this with no particular concern, a zany anecdote unconnected to her actual hospital or patients.
“I’m pretty sure the boys in the basement have it under control,” Frank says.
“Actually, I wouldn’t be so sure,” I say. “Because here’s the thing.”