Come With Me
Page 2
Donny and his roommate, Adnan, had been pivoting around several ideas at once when they came up with Invisible E-nk. With Invisible E-nk, emails and texts were timed to disappear after they were read straight through once and therefore the messages were both unsaveable and unforwardable, even with a screenshot. Now it was possible to have cybersex without a career-ending trail! No potential sex offender status when flirting with your underage crush! Invisible E-nk had raised enough seed money for the office off California Avenue. But, of course, there was Snapchat. So, the stakes were higher, and/or it was all really fucking stupid. The E-nkers could beat Snapchat at the same game with their superior coding and bespoke blah-blah or give up and try another option. “We are exploring all the possibilities,” Adnan told the film studies students who were trailing him for a senior thesis documentary project.
One thing Amy learned in her brief tenure at a start-up was that failure was endemic to the enterprise; the businesses that succeeded in the Valley were bouncy and regenerative. “Investors like to see you roll with the punches,” wise-man Adnan said before the cameras. When he’d uttered that phrase, he had done a long soft aikido roll to illustrate the point. (Naturally he was a black belt.) “As long as the computer science is good—and these kids are the best”—Adnan pointed to Kenneth Cheng, seventeen, their youngest employee, still in braces, playing Candy Crush on his cell phone—“and the ideas keep coming, one of the objectives is bound to be a hit and stick.”
Hit and stick: like a wide-shouldered, small-hipped, broad-chested puberty-delayed female Russian gymnast doing a triple vault over a horse, or the ramen noodles Donny twirled and tossed up to the linoleum tiles on the ceiling when he was bored—his only hobby.
i.e., as the E-nkers called themselves, was located on a side street, in the back of a small suite, on the second floor, up a flight of outdoor stairs. (Make Actual Memories was another moniker they’d toyed with, but it sounded too much like “Ma’am,” the least sexy word in the English language; Amy had put her foot down. And for a while, Donny had been partial to “As If (IRL),” in real life, which as logos go was far too noisy. Some cute but artsy girl in Donny’s “Failure and the American Writer” class had lent him a Raymond Carver book he’d never read, but it gave him a taste for longish titles. Amy had been surprised to hear that he’d even bothered to take a lit course, but he was looking for ideas, Donny said. He had the technology. He thought maybe some writers somewhere could supply him with conceptual objectives for what to do with it.)
It took Amy forever to realize that it was the sitar music that wafted up the staircase from the yoga studio on the ground floor that made her so often crave Indian food at lunch. Some of the student programmers she worked with took class midday as a stress dump, and when they returned, the middle-school stink in the office intensified. Very few techies appeared to use adequate toxic-chemical deodorant; no one—not Amy, not her running buddies from the comp sci department—seemed to know exactly why, writ in the cool bible of High Domes, it was Tom’s Natural Deodorant or nada.
The company office was in a very good location. For Amy, walkable. She lived over in College Terrace, once a modest community of young faculty and grad student housing, now the home of $2.5 million teardowns and people like Amy and Dan, who were still holding on by their fingernails. Theirs was a two-story vanilla box on Cornell Street, Dan’s alma mater, parallel to Columbia, ironically Amy’s first choice back in the day, though she’d never gotten off the waitlist. She’d stayed in state, and gone to Cal. The i.e. office was just across the main thoroughfare, El Camino, and off California Avenue with its casual restaurants and coffee houses and Geek Fitness store. Fleeces and sweats and fuzzy boots, Asian street food, veggie burgers, and guacamole. “What’s not to like?” said Dan. But Donny, an Eeyore and a classicist, had wanted a garage.
Even this morning’s stroll was a borrowed Steve Jobsian tic—go for a walk with a coworker or competitor, coax what you want out of him. Donny was an avid student of tech stardom. Oh, he’d just pretended he stalked Amy for free breakfast and some family time, but sure as the sun doth shine he was picking her brain for something. Lauren had warned Amy when Donny had first hired her: “He always has an ulterior motive, even if he himself doesn’t know yet what it is.” He’d inhaled the Isaacson biography as a kid. Donny and Adnan had each seen the film The Social Network at least a dozen times on Netflix when they were still in middle school. Ironically, the movie, which Dan, the over-the-hill, out-of-work editor-of-content, had interpreted as a cautionary tale about loneliness and assholicism, had become a generational call to arms. It was what the Watergate film All the President’s Men had meant to Dan, when some teacher screened it in sixth grade, and set into motion his life’s course.
After interrupting Amy’s run, and then eating the last of the twins’ Puffins with rice milk at her breakfast bar, Donny checked his Twitter feed patiently as he waited for her while she scrambled: getting the Things up and dressed, cajoling Dan into walking them to school, breaking Jack’s directive—“Don’t talk, Mom, text”—by bellowing at him to get the lead out! Squidward arrived panting at the back door just as she and Donny finally were leaving the house, a dead rat in his open, salivating mouth. A love gift. Today’s first. But the frightened dog took off again when Amy lost it and shrieked at him.
After the rat grave was dug—Amy dug it, in the side yard by the manzanitas, while Donny drank the remains of Jack’s peanut butter/honey/yogurt/banana smoothie, “a sandwich in a glass,” Jack liked to say—Amy and Donny walked to work. Already, she was pretty much exhausted. A couple of blocks down El Camino, Donny picked a persimmon off a tree, and Amy almost scolded, but so much low-hanging fruit lay rotting wasted in the yard and on the sidewalk, she figured it would be hard to call this stealing. More like an act of salvation. As Dan would say, “a mitzvah.” Better Donny slurped the deep orange pudding away from the satiny skin and stained his T-shirt than let the persimmon continue growing solely to molder away in organic compost.
Even after hoovering all that breakfast food, Donny was still hungry. When he’d spat out the seeds—three long, smooth metallic hard hearts, lifted, it seemed, straight out of the rib cage of a Giacometti—he asked if she remembered his grandma. “A sweet woman,” Amy murmured. At the end, Lauren’s mother’s hair had been so white it appeared blue; it glowed eerily in the casket like a nimbus cloud, but Amy left that detail out.
After crossing over to California Avenue, they stopped at Printer’s Ink, once a bookstore/café; now only the lattes survived. Amy wasn’t ready to brave the rock ’n’ roll depths of Philz Coffee, and Donny hadn’t even whined about it. Instead, he thumbed quietly through a copy of The Daily while she paid. She handed him his soy mochaccino and he looked up from his paper. His hazel eyes were round. Usually they were hooded, like a lizard’s.
“The problem with out here is that someone is already working on anything you can imagine,” he said, “so to fucking break stuff we need to stay ahead of the unimaginable all the time.”
He sighed loudly. He was one world-weary kid.
Amy patted his shoulder. She wanted to slug him. She felt sorry for him and he annoyed her, both. The Donny Paradox. It was a tie at times, between him and her darling impossible-to-mother little Theo, as to who might be the bigger chore.
* * *
“Must save Blossom,” muttered Theo, “must save Blossom.” It was lunch recess at Escondido Elementary School, he and his best friend, Blossom Hernandez, were in the thick of a freeze tag game, and she was frozen and he was King of the Playground—although he was a sovereign without an army, with Blossom cruelly held prisoner in need of rescue in the schoolyard, and his twin brother, Miles, trading Magic cards by the picnic tables, and therefore useless to him.
Theo looked over at Miles, steadily working Thomas Hannahan, one Nike’d foot up on a redwood stump, cards laid bare across a table. He was not “twinning”; Miles almost never twinned, never felt Theo’s ache in his o
wn ear when it was time for antibiotics but Theo was too oddly numb to notice until his eardrum burst and the goo dripped out; Miles was never startled awake at night when Theo was lost in the time-warping labyrinth of one of his hideous dreams and in dire need of someone to rouse him; and right now Miles didn’t sense how much Theo wanted Miles by his side, to prevail in freeze tag, sure, but also to calm him down. Instead Miles coolly continued to do his own thing, always at home in the home of himself, immune to the heat rays Theo sent from his identical brown eyes.
Theo also played Magic: The Gathering, and frequently he and Miles played together; Miles liked winning, which he did often; what Theo liked was that the game had so much awesome replayability. With skill and imagination, the very same cards could produce totally different outcomes, which Theo thought was cool.
If Miles was on Theo’s team in freeze tag and not at the picnic table, he would be King of the Playground, because Miles could run faster, and could jump far and leap and stuff—he could make his body do what he wanted, plus most kids liked him, or were scared of him in the way kids are scared of kids other kids like. Theo’s power was that he could go from zero to ten in a nanosecond, and also he didn’t mind bodily harm; he kind of craved being thrown in the dirt with a thousand second-graders piling up on top of him. He liked to wrestle and he liked to be pounded.
Blossom needed rescuing and rescuing Blossom was Theo’s pleasure—he heard his mom say that whenever Blossom came over. “It’s my pleasure to have her here,” his mom said over and over to Blossom’s mom, whose name was Begonia, like the plant, and she let him call her that, not Mrs. Hernandez, the way his mom had introduced her. Begonia had said, “Call me Begonia, sweetheart. Blossom is my little flower, so I named her after me,” when Begonia came to pick her up that first time. As soon as his mom said having Blossom in the house was her pleasure, Theo could tell his mom really meant it, because (a) Blossom was a girl and Mom only had boys, and (b) Blossom was his mom’s kind of kid, full of heart, Mom said, just like Theo.
“Theo!” screamed Blossom. “Help!!!!!” Her reddish-brown curls flew around so much they seemed more mane than hair, and he couldn’t see her eyes or cheeks, just her little flat nose sometimes, sort of. She was frozen in the worst spot to be frozen in, inside a tire swing, Maximus, that jerkass bully, spinning her cruelly in one direction. Maximus sometimes played Magic: the Gathering, too, and even liked to call himself Greven il-Vec, the Gathering wizard. “I will flay the skin from your flesh and the flesh from your bones and scrape your bones dry. And still you will not have suffered enough,” Maximus screamed, quoting Greven’s flavor text on the Oracle Hatred’s card. Then he cackled maniacally as the chain untwisted rapidly in the other direction, spinning poor Blossom now like a top magic UFO gyroscope, the kind with music and LED lights.
“I’m gonna throw up! Theo, help!”
Blossom’s shrieks hurt his ears. He could feel them like pointy needles inside his teeth and at the bottom of his feet, so he wanted to run screaming to the other side of the schoolyard, but he knew Blossom, and she threw up a lot. Begonia always sent her with two plastic bags to throw up in when they went on class trips on the school bus, one for the way there and one for the way back. Those were the only times Theo didn’t want to be near her. They liked all the same things, baseball and trains and running games, and neither of them could read, but his fear of the stench of her potential throw-up kept him sitting up ahead in the bus with his brother as a buddy. That was a good thing about Miles; he knew Theo needed the wind on his face to settle down, so he always let him have the open window. He knew it from experience, not twinning. If the bus window wouldn’t open, Miles would agreeably slap Theo’s cheeks for him until he could sit still.
Maximus was a bully, big for his age, with black hair and blue eyes, he was “Silicon Valley royalty,” Theo heard his mom whisper to his dad once. Maximus liked to torture Blossom; he made fun of her red hair and red skin. He called Theo Ronald, for Ronald McDonald, on account of his hair, only who cared? But he called Blossom Tomato and Tomatillo, even though everyone knew tomatillos were green, on account of hers. That made her so mad, sometimes she would chase him all over the playground and then end up with a time-out.
Maximus loved getting under Blossom’s skin and driving her crazy, he teased her mercilessly over the fact that she couldn’t read. In class during “Drop Everything And Read” Ms. Hiraga would go around the circle and have each kid tackle a small section from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, although she recited the bulk of it herself out loud.
That very morning, she’d asked Blossom to read from the page: “‘Well, sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time.’ ‘Are they?’ said the Professor; and Peter did not quite know what to say.”
Blossom got as far as the word things and said: “Tings.”
“See this letter, Blossom?” Ms. Hiraga pointed to the letter T up on the whiteboard, using her patient voice, and Blossom nodded. “The letter T can have a hard sound, like tah,” she said, “like in toy or treat or turtle.”
Blossom smiled because who didn’t like toys or treats or turtles? And who didn’t like Ms. Hiraga, who was so very beautiful and taught so sweetly?
Then Ms. Hiraga added the letter H to the T and said, “But if you add an H to a T the sound gets softer, thuh, like in theater or throw or thought. So, can you try and sound out this word one more time?” And she pointed to the word thing again.
Blossom smiled too wide and her eyes got shiny and then she’d said, “Tah hing?”
Ms. Hiraga shook her head softly, and said: “It’s thing, Blossom. We can work on the sound some more together later.” She called on someone else to continue.
“Retard,” said Maximus in a whisper, so Ms. Hiraga couldn’t hear. He liked it when Blossom or Theo couldn’t find the answer. And he liked the way Begonia said good-bye to Blossom every morning, while blowing her kisses, “Adios, Mami.”
“You got kids already, Mami?” he said every day like it was a new and funny joke.
Maximus was a big fucker, and Blossom’s head was now drooping, like her neck was a wilting stalk and all those red curls were falling petals, which meant the throw-up was coming, so Theo charged at him ninety-five miles an hour. Theo’s head went straight into Maximus’s pelvis, and that’s how Maximus ended up in the Urgent Care center and his mother threatened to sue at first, and Theo himself saw stars. Maximus’s pelvis might even have given Theo’s head a concussion. It definitely had knocked the wind out of him. Eventually Mrs. Maximus—that’s what his dad called her—calmed down over the phone when the doctors pronounced everything fine at Urgent Care, and Theo ended up on a bench outside the principal’s office, and Theo’s dad ended up behind the door inside.
“Sometimes I don’t know how to be your dad,” Theo’s dad said as they held hands walking home together, subsequent to Theo being suspended for the rest of the day. But when they were in the hallway, after Theo and the principal, Ms. Zhang, had talked and then Dad and Ms. Zhang had talked, when Ms. Zhang’s office door had opened and both adults had stepped outside to talk with Theo again, Dad had said: “Ms. Zhang and I both agree you’ve had enough excitement for one day. We’re going to go home now, Theo,” which sounded like something someone who knew how to be a dad might say. It was confusing.
Ms. Zhang had said, “Remember what we spoke about in my office, Theo, you need to stop and breathe when your engine overheats like that.” She held up a paper STOP sign she had conveniently taken out of her office with her when she was walking his dad out. “Take this home with you and practice with your father. When he holds up the sign I want you to take deep belly breaths and count to ten. The deep belly breaths will cool down your engine. If it is too hard to stand still while you’re breathing, I want you to jump ten times, with great big juicy knee bends, can you do that?”
Theo nodded. He took a great big jump and landed in a great big juicy knee bend.
“Good, Theo,” she sa
id, but she was looking at Theo’s dad when she said this.
Theo was crying at this point. He didn’t mean to hurt Maximus, just dominate and obliterate him. He hadn’t wanted to send him to the hospital or anything; he never even thought that far.
“I know you didn’t mean to hurt Maximus,” said Ms. Zhang, “but if you run into anyone full steam you will hurt them. You know that, right, Theo?”
Theo just stared at her. Did he know it or not? Sometimes he felt pain and sometimes he didn’t.
“Theo,” said Dad.
He looked at Dad then, what did he want?
“Tell Ms. Zhang you know not to run full steam into other people.”
“I know,” said Theo.
“Okay then,” Ms. Zhang said. “Because you also could have really hurt yourself, Theo.”
She spoke to his dad again like Theo was and wasn’t there. “I’m going to arrange for more O.T. for Theo, to help him keep regulated. I’m also going to consult with our learning specialist . . . Maybe lunch recess is too stimulating for him.”
She’d turned her gaze to Theo. She was a petite woman with short black shiny hair and she wore tightly buttoned suits with pants or skirts that made her seem even smaller, and she wasn’t that much taller than he was, so their eyes sort of kind of met: “Your dad and I were talking and we might arrange for some quiet time for you, Theo, instead. Library or a lunch club.”