by Mary Pilon
An even more significant sign came when Kevin asked a friend if she knew of a writing coach who could help him finally get in motion a dystopian science fiction book idea that he had. The writing coach his friend recommended turned out to be the former manager of Akiva Goldsman’s production company, the man who had written the script for the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind.110 The film was an adaptation of Sylvia Nasar’s biography of the same name of John Nash, a Nobel laureate in economics who had lived with paranoid schizophrenia. The film and the book had long been triggers for Kevin, and this real-life intersection seemed like yet another uncanny coincidence.
In the book, there’s a moment when someone asks Nash how he, a mathematician, could believe that extraterrestrials were sending him messages. Nash’s response was swift. “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”111 Similarly for Kevin, moments from the crash flickered through his brain and with them, suspicions that it was all a conspiracy of some sort. There might have been a mass cover-up, and he himself might have been somehow implicated in the tragedy, and he had questions about the wind limit rules. There were things that even he, Simpson’s friend and teammate, didn’t know, but his thoughts of such things at a certain point were as untethered as Nash’s.112
A family vacation sounded like just the antidote for everyone to decompress and get their minds off the last few weeks. They decided to go to Legoland, a theme park in Carlsbad, California, devoted to the playful bricks. Gordon, Susanne, Kristina, Bud, and their son would meet them there.
With his Google Glass in hand, Kevin had what he thought was a great idea, and he made sure the gadget was fully charged. Maybe this time, he thought, his entire family could join him and the Director.
It could be the greatest episode of The Show ever.
PART IV
FINALE
I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, “Intimate Journals”
Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE, “Letters to a Young Poet”
True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.
—DAVID FOSTER WALLACE (as reposted by Kevin Hall on Facebook, September 18, 2013)
AMANDA
Amanda took control of the rental SUV’s wheel, towing Kevin and the three kids, all still under the age of ten, and their luggage, along. The drive to Legoland from Los Angeles International Airport takes about ninety minutes, if there’s no traffic, which is seldom the case. They barreled south on the slate-colored snakes of concrete, past Long Beach, where Kevin had crashed his grandfather’s car years earlier. For much of the drive, the ocean wasn’t visible, but occasionally the twinkling blue of the Pacific beckoned from their right side, a mirror of what they had seen while living in New Zealand.1 However, scenery wasn’t much on Amanda’s mind at the moment.
Maybe, she thought, Legoland would provide the family time that could help calm Kevin’s, and her, anxiety. In recent weeks, Kevin had turned a bit prickly, even the slightest comments being mistaken as criticisms or personal attacks. At the same time, Amanda was worried, thinking about her husband’s stressors, and about the conversations that hadn’t taken place just as much as the ones that had, particularly about Kevin’s father, who would meet them at Legoland. The proverbial eggshells she and others felt they sometimes had to walk on around Kevin now felt like landmines.
At one point during their journey, Amanda took a photo of Kevin wearing a fedora and his Google Glass and posted it on Instagram with a caption: “midlife crisis.” Kevin saw it and expressed his disapproval, so she took it down, but she was surprised that Kevin, usually easygoing, couldn’t take what she had thought was a silly joke. Maybe it hit too close to home, she thought.
In the car, Kevin fiddled with his phone and read an email saying that his purchase of the rare, collectible Salvador Dalí Alice book online for $9,0002 had gone through. Lushly illustrated, it represented an intersection of two fanciful minds that had long spoken to Kevin in their magical explorations of the psyche. Usually he and Amanda talked before making large purchases, yet this was the first she was hearing of it. They also avoided arguing in front of their children, but this news was too much for her. Kevin had spent a ludicrous sum on something nonessential, just after he had quit his job with nothing else lined up. What’s more, he cut her completely out of the decision-making process.
In the car, time felt as though it was melting like a clock in a Dalí painting, and an argument erupted between the two of them, the children looking on. Amanda could feel her emergency doctor instincts kicking in, breaking the daunting, overwhelming tasks into a series of smaller procedures. If they could just make it through a couple of days at Legoland, she thought. If they could just make it through the first day. If they could just make it out of the car and into the Econo Lodge. If they could just make it to the theme park.
KRISTINA
Perched facing a cacophonous highway, the Econo Lodge in Carlsbad, California, fused the aesthetics of a 1970s ski chalet, roadside motel, family vacation spot, and the theme parks in the area. The two-story complex was L-shaped, with rooms facing a parking lot that was typically filled with rental cars and vans, a stream of families coming and going. An oxidized red sign to the left of the lobby door read NIGHT WINDOW: RING BELL FOR SERVICE.
Amanda, Kevin, and their three children checked in to their hotel room, beige abodes with tightly made beds. From outward appearances, they could easily have been mistaken for any other vacationing family, in T-shirts and shorts, cameras out, luggage in hand. But the minute Kristina walked into her brother’s hotel room and saw him, she knew that Kevin the dad, husband, and brother wasn’t there. Perhaps more frightening, she felt that she was the only one who recognized that Kevin was manic, worse than she could ever remember seeing him.3
In fact, the more she thought about it, the more she realized that while she had seen Kevin many times after The Show, she had never actually seen him during an episode. Looking at him now, the highs of his mania seemed far away. Kevin seemed angry, spitting venomous words through clenched teeth, not himself even on his worst day.
With their parents also due to arrive soon, she wondered if the missiles of blame would start to fly. She was really more concerned about how they could possibly handle Kevin while also taking care of four young children in an amusement park. Whenever she and Kevin had vacationed with their parents when they were children, their mom had drafted a Plan A, B, and C for various situations—flight delays, sour weather, closures, and any other contingency. Within seconds of arriving, it was clear to Kristina that no one even had a Plan A for Kevin’s script flipping.
Kristina didn’t think of herself as a pessimist, but her assessment of the current situation seemed on point. Legoland was going to be a disaster.
AMANDA
As the Halls packed into their rental car and made their way from the hotel toward the sprawling parking lot of the theme park, large block letters spelled out WELCOME and a bright, crayon-colored edifice beckoned. They turned off Legoland Drive and parked, the children skipping ahead in excitement, Gordon and Susanne excited to see them.
Similar in spirit to other amusement parks in Southern California, Legoland bills itself as a fun attraction for families, its own fantasyland built of brick and plastic.4 At the center of its round 128-acre grounds5 is a pastoral lake surrounded by awe-inspiring Lego displays, including a large multicolored dragon and replicas of the Taj Mahal and the Sydney Opera House. Groups of tourists putter around in small boats, oohing and aahing as they pass by the intricate c
reations. Elsewhere in the park are Lego recreations of Egyptian tombs, chunky gray-brick knights, pirates with peg legs, stunning scale models of U.S. cities, and water parks with slides, among other things. Upbeat music blares from unseen speakers and brightly colored signs direct visitors down smoothly paved paths, past landscapes populated with Lego rabbits and Lego deer.
As Amanda tried to funnel the excitement of their children, she wondered if the day might be better managed if the group split up. More specifically, it might be a good idea to let Kevin wander off on his own so that his sour mood wouldn’t temper that of the children. Amanda reasoned that within the confines of the theme park, Kevin couldn’t stray too far.
He agreed to the plan and they arranged a meeting time and place. The park was also sure to be loaded with security cameras and staff, hopefully ensuring that Kevin couldn’t do too much harm to himself or others. He had his cell phone and Google Glass with him, too, if they needed to get in touch.
Amanda also wanted to protect her children from seeing their father so unhinged. She stoically smiled for snapshots as she and the children explored the park with Gordon, Susanne, Kristina, and Bud. Amanda couldn’t remember the last time she had tried so hard to achieve a smile.
Kevin set off on his own, armed with his Google Glass and a brand-new, bigger-than-ever mission from the Director.
KEVIN
Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful. The Lego models were beautiful.6 The uniforms of the Legoland staff were beautiful.7 The trash they picked up was beautiful. The trashcans that held the trash were beautiful.
As Kevin explored the park wearing his Google Glass, it only made sense that people stopped him and commented on his new gear and asked him questions about it, as they were still rare. He was on The Show, after all, so the attention he was getting from the extras and supporting cast felt perfectly logical. In response, he told the questioners an assortment of things, among them that he was wearing the spectacles because he was working on “a project,” and invited strangers to talk about it with him. They nodded, enforcing the idea in Kevin’s mind that this was a worldwide show. Of course they were interested. They were part of the narrative, too, all souls linked together at Legoland by destiny, meant to be there as part of the new world order.
The Director wanted Kevin to keep the Google Glass on and go to the bathroom. Sure, the sight might arouse suspicion and privacy concerns from others, but Kevin complied. Thankfully, no other patrons were inside to object. He stood in front of several mirrors. Because he had been toying with the Glass for a couple of months, he now understood why this episode was important. It was pivotal in the history of The Show. For once, he would be allowed to do some of the directing, and that level of control made him feel tremendous. He could weave in the recent advancements in social media and mobile technology, as more and more, Kevin had heard about how people were streaming their lives using services like Twitch and video blogs. All the previous episodes were part of a historical narrative leading to this one, which made Kevin a trailblazer on that front with The Show.
It was all making some sense and now, in 2013, it was all coming together. Once again, Kevin had an overwhelming sense of sureness. This was precisely what he was supposed to be doing.
He left the bathroom and made his way to a part of the park that was a winding, paved road lined with Lego busts; LEGOLAND BLOCK OF FAME, a red and blue sign read. Shaded and serene, the road felt more fitting for an English garden than a theme park. He walked past columns topped with chest-level Lego renditions of famous heads: Winston Churchill grimacing with a cigar, the Queen of England with pursed red lips, Shakespeare with a thin mustache, Einstein with thick gray Lego eyebrows. There was also a suited Lego Arnold Schwarzenegger, the action star turned governor of California, and a Lego Marilyn Monroe with stylish waves of yellow hair fashioned of bricks.
Then Kevin spotted a Lego Salvador Dalí. That had to be a sign that he was on the right track. Not only did he love Dalí, he had trained for the Olympic trials by the Salvador Dalí museum in Florida with Morgan. And, of course, it was a reference to the argument he and Amanda had had just the day before in the car over his book purchase. Kevin stood in front of the bust in awe.
Lego Salvador Dalí
Next, Kevin made his way to an exhibit about the history of music told through Legos. This also seemed like too great a coincidence to be just random chance. The Director must have put it there, knowing that Kevin loved music and singing, and for years had found clues and meaning in song lyrics.
With the Google Glass, Kevin could be on the other side of what he now thought of as the rabbit hole (from Alice, of course) and share with the audience the things he was seeing even as he himself was being filmed. Depending on what the Director wanted to do, Kevin’s view could be transmitted on screen as a thumbnail within a larger screen, or the screen could be split to show multiple perspectives at the same time. What Kevin did with the Google Glass was performance art, evocative in his mind of William Gibson, the speculative science fiction writer whose work Kevin had seen recently at the bookstore and who was credited with helping pioneer the subgenre of cyberpunk.
Google Glass photo at Legoland (Kevin Hall, November 2013)
From an art creation standpoint, the mirrors of Legoland fascinated Kevin, and he delighted in seeking them out, creating one pseudo-selfie after another, feeling as if he was in an artificial metaparadise, or, even more profoundly, HOME. Whenever a song he liked came over the theme park speakers or on his Spotify playlist, it seemed like a sign that he was on track with The Show. He sang along to some of the tunes as he roamed the park and noticed a few fellow patrons staring at him. Unlike the other extras, they didn’t get it, he thought.
Kevin turned down a winding path and there it was: a Lego replica of the Golden Gate bridge stretched across the pond, its bright red bricks shining in the California sun. That had to be another sign, especially since on the water was a boat, and not just any boat, but what appeared to be a J-class yacht, a type associated with the America’s Cup. Kevin felt spooked. What was it doing there? The boats used in the competition must have been packed up by now—the Director was off if he was trying to make a scene. Or, was it a callout to the crash and Simpson’s death? Kevin’s future in the sport? This episode was laced with even more meaning than Kevin could have predicted and he struggled to take it all in.
Every now and then Kevin thought he caught glimpses of his father in the park, usually grimacing or frowning at him. He didn’t understand why his dad was being such a bummer. Couldn’t he see that Kevin, for once, was just trying to be himself?
KRISTINA
After Kevin parted from the others, Kristina turned to Amanda and asked what they should do. They both agreed that Kevin needed to take his meds, but they feared an explosion of anger if they broached the subject with him.
Maybe they could crush his pills up and sneak them into his food somehow? It was a long shot and the very idea that they were talking about it made them both feel as if they, too, were going crazy.8
KEVIN
That night at the Econo Lodge, Kevin walked into the bathroom, flicked on the light, and hopped into the empty bathtub, fully clothed, with a copy of D. T. Max’s acclaimed biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story.9 His son Rainer was asleep in his bed with his arms outstretched in what Kevin perceived as a “Jesus-like” pose—something he had never done before. Strange, Kevin thought, recalling reading the Bible in the bathtub at the motel near Logan Airport with Amanda more than a decade earlier. With the whole family in the cast, now the stakes for this episode10 suddenly felt greater than ever.
Reading the Wallace biography made Kevin feel again as though he had a friend with him in the episode who understood it all. He took out a pen and underlined copious passages, making notes in the margins, the words and ideas bouncing around his head rapidly as he tore through the pages into the quietest hours of the night. Underlining the text seemed like an ef
fective way to signal to viewers that certain parts of the book were really resonating with him. They could follow along at home.
Kevin’s copy of Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story (courtesy Kevin Hall)
Margin notes (courtesy Kevin Hall)
The mathematician in Kevin was astounded by Wallace’s ability to organize, communicate, teach, and make thrilling abstract concepts like infinity sing. Wallace didn’t just understand those concepts deeply, he could translate them, be a bridge from one world to the rest of us, Kevin thought.
Inside the front cover Kevin scrawled some of the lyrics from Jack Johnson’s song “Brushfire Fairytales” along with some musings of his own. Been there, done that, Kevin scrawled at the bottom of a page detailing Wallace’s four-week stay at McLean. Max wrote that Wallace’s stay there changed his life, not because it was his first or most serious crisis, but because “he felt now as if he had hit a new bottom or a different kind of bottom.”11
Curled up along the margins, Kevin added stray sentences:
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away
1. What is real? 2. What is human?
Kevin also underlined a line from The Velveteen Rabbit that Max cited: “Real isn’t how you are made,” the Skin Horse tells the Velveteen Rabbit,12 “it’s a thing that happens to you.” It had echoes to Kevin, too, of Dick’s work about “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” all of his literary heroes coming together as one.
The next day, things only got worse.