Beth and I used to gag at the fake holidays the greeting card companies invented to get people to buy cards. Our favorite—even more than “International Hug Day”—was “Play Hooky from Work to Go Holiday Shopping Day.” Every December 5 for years, we goofed on such a ridiculous, manufactured event. Last year, a few months after my pseudocide, I couldn’t help but call her from a pay phone on the road in Nashville. I realized she might be at Brown, but given it was a Saturday, I took a chance.18
Beth’s hello made me hang up the phone quicker than if it had been on fire. I jumped on the next bus out of town, scared but empowered by the sound of her voice.
This year, I used another pay phone and a pre-paid calling card that couldn’t be traced.
I slipped off my Nike jacket before I dialed, as if Beth’s spirit could see me through the telephone wires. I ignored the part of me that felt like I was cheating on Janine.
“Hello?”
Beth’s voice shot through me like a wayward rocket; I hung up quickly, willing the words “Happy Hooky Day” to the familiar red wall phone hanging in Beth’s kitchen back in Boston.
Hearing Beth again brought back a flood of memories. The tabloid stories and crush of reporters outside my door after betagold outed me.19 These thoughts always led to a low-grade panic that bloomed into a full-fledged paranoia I’d grown to recognize. I’d check out other kids in class, wondering if any of them were working for betagold or the National Enquirer. And what about Janine—could the shopping trips be a trap? During these bouts of fear, I’d start talking to myself or fall asleep at the bakery’s kneading table.
I told myself things couldn’t get any worse.
Then I got my first credit card bill.
$847.24?!
Are you kidding me?
I did the math: If you charged $2,000 on one credit card and faithfully made the minimum payment every month, it would take you eleven years to pay it off. Eleven years! You would have paid more than $4,000 on those original purchases, even if you never used the card again. The only thing that made sense was for me to take this invoice and pay off the $847.24 in full.
But I didn’t have the money.
Between making minimum wage, taxes, and the cost of living, I could barely scrape together the monthly payment. I had to take on a second job in a video store just to pay off all this STUFF.
I complained to Janine on our way back from the movies.
“You get used to the bills,” she said. “It’s like this for everybody.”
“No, it’s not. I know plenty of people our age who aren’t slaves to debt.” Of course, the person I was thinking of was Beth.
Janine shrugged. “Life is short—you should enjoy it.”
“Yeah, paying off credit cards—that’s my idea of fun.”
“You’re such a spoilsport. It’s the holidays, Mark, come on!”
But the credit card and the debt only increased my anxiety. From the back room of the bakery, I checked out who was in line at the counter up front. I began to delete any sites I visited on the Web, using the latest software to cover my e-tracks. I wondered if betagold had ever gotten down off the Larry Conspiracy soapbox.20
I even stole an old trick from the movies and stuck a match between the door and the jamb in case anyone tried to break into my room while I was out. It became habit to check it each morning and afternoon.
“You’re insane,” Janine said. “Completely adorable.”
I didn’t want to be adorable; I wanted to be safe.
Six days later, after coming back from hiking, I stared at my door in disbelief. The match was on the floor, bent in half.
I backed away from the door and hurried over to Janine’s.
One thing about Janine—she never could keep a straight face.
“Mark, relax! It was me! You were being so ridiculous, I had to.”
A few months ago, I would have thought this was funny. But I was not amused.
“You’ve been acting crazy lately,” she said. “Worried about having a credit card, about someone breaking into your room. What’s next—a secret identity?”
I headed back to Mount Sanitas and broke my own record on the ascent.
As I sat on the ledge overlooking Boulder, I wondered how I could have become so distant from my own life, barely the Josh/Larry/Mark who had moved here months ago. I did a mental Ben Franklin list: on the plus side, I had a girlfriend. I liked having someone imaginative and smart in my life; it had been something I’d daydreamed about all those years I’d been staring at my computer screen back home. And my new field of study was challenging and rewarding.
On the minus side, I was living a life diametrically opposed to my belief system—or was I? Maybe all those theories I’d been spouting on my old Web site weren’t the real me at all. Maybe I was a consumer zombie all along, pretending I wasn’t. No matter which way I analyzed it, I felt like a giant fake.
The sweater I was wearing, a present from Janine on one of her preppy days, had POLO emblazoned across the chest in giant blue letters. I felt like a cow—branded, letters burned into my skin—telling the world who my owner was. I tore the sweater off, left it on the rock, and headed back down the mountain.
On my descent, I almost bumped into a guy my age on his way up. He was wrapped in several layers to ward off the evening winds. He eyed me in my T-shirt.
“Dude, aren’t you cold?”
I shook my head, in no mood to talk. By the time I got back to my bike, I was shivering, but not from the weather.
I hoped I had the courage to change my own life—again.
I had given up the match trick after Janine’s little prank, but I hadn’t given up the vigilance. That night, I peeked through the blinds and checked up and down the street for any strange cars. I made sure I was the last one to sleep in the house and locked the front door.
It didn’t do any good.
I woke up the second the door to my room clicked open. I jumped out of bed but was quickly knocked over by someone in the room. He21 pushed me back down on the bed and quickly tied my hands behind my back. When I screamed for my housemates, he pulled out a roll of duct tape, snapped off a length, and covered my mouth. I shouted NO! as the tape closed around me. Another masked intruder looked through my closet and drawers, throwing my stuff into a box—laptop, books, backpack, a few clothes.
Okay, I thought. It’s just a robbery; there are burglaries around campus all the time. It’s not because you’re Larry; it’s not. Let them take what they want and leave. I tried to let the dangerous thoughts—betagold, betagold—simmer down in another part of my mind.
The intruder lifted me to my feet—my attempt at making myself dead weight was obviously not working—and shoved me toward the door. Visions of tabloid headlines filled my head in twenty-point font: HOAX! GURU LARRY ALIVE. I fought him every step of the way.
The two people worked quickly and efficiently, one carrying my shoulders, the other my legs. Outside in the darkness, they shoved me into the backseat of a car parked across the street. One jumped behind the wheel; the other climbed in next to me. When the big one pulled off his mask to drive, I studied his face: beard, my age, focused. I hoped his face wasn’t the last thing I’d see on this earth.
Then the kidnapper sitting next to me reached for his hood. Of all the faces that had flashed before me in the three minutes since they had burst into my room, this one was not on the list.
It was Beth.
“Nautica pajamas. Really, Josh.” She barked out driving directions to the guy behind the wheel. “Take a right, Simon—70 East.”
I tried to talk through the tape, a jumble of grunts and noise.
“Forget it,” Beth said. “It’s your turn to listen.”
I wondered if she could tell I was grinning underneath the tape. Beth! God, I missed her.
“I apologize for the drama—it was Simon’s idea. He didn’t think you’d come willingly. Plus, he thought it might be fun.”
“A bit
of the old fraternity hazing, hey, old friend?” His accent was high-end British, maybe Cambridge or Oxford. I wanted to rip the tape off but couldn’t.
Beth looked at me kindly, then belted me in the arm. Hard.
“You let me think you were dead! I cried every night for months!”
Now this was worth listening to.
“You were selfish and cruel and I hate you. What do you have to say for yourself?”
I arched my eyebrows in an attempt to illustrate the obvious. She ripped off the duct tape in the same way my mother used to rip off a Band-Aid: no coaxing, just fast, sharp pain.
“Beth,” I said after the sting wore off. “I’m so sorry.”
“You should be.” She reminded me of her stubborn and gorgeous grade-school self.
“When did you figure it out?” I asked.
“I was home for the weekend last year, totally thinking of you on Blow Off Work and Shop Day when the phone rang. No one was there, and I just knew.”
“I didn’t stay on the phone long enough for a trace. Besides that was last year, and I was in Tennessee!”
“Then The Gospel According to Larry came out and I was sure of it. So I put together a plan and waited.”
“A year?!”
She looked pretty pleased with herself. “I took this semester off for independent study, then hired a security company to put a trap line on my parents’ phone December 5. It records every call that comes in—blocked calls, pay phones, cells. It cost me a hundred dollars an hour, but I knew you’d call again. I got a printout the next day with all the numbers that had come in, and there was one from Colorado no one recognized. I flew out to Denver, hired an investigator, gave her your photo—it didn’t take long after that. Simon’s at Harvard this year, so he drove out to meet me.”
Of course Beth would be the one to find me. It only made sense that she’d put our platonic telepathy to good use. My love for Beth had been my Achilles heel my whole life. Why should things be any different while I was underground? And here she was in the flesh.
“I never thought I’d see you again.” Then I made the mistake of reaching over to kiss her.
Simon swerved into the breakdown lane so quickly, three cars behind us almost collided. He lunged into the backseat. “What the hell is going on?” he asked.
“Simon, you’re acting like a caveman,” Beth said. “Knock it off.”
I looked at Beth, not caring what Simon was feeling. “You two?”
“We’ve been together almost a year,” she said. “Simon was one of the keynotes at the Global Debt Conference.” She reached for his arm reassuringly. “Duckie, there’s nothing to worry about.”22
He put his blinker on to re-enter the lane. “You okay, little rabbit?”
“Are you talking to me?” I asked.
Beth elbowed me again.
“If you two don’t knock off the baby talk, I’ll jump out of the car, I swear.”
Simon ignored me and began driving again.
Well, I guess some things never change. Beth told Simon I was “nothing to worry about.” That pretty much summed up my relationship with her in a nutshell. And Simon—good looking, at Harvard, and with an impossible-to-compete-with British accent.
Duckie? Please let this be a nightmare and I wake up back in Boulder. But when I looked at Beth again, I knew I’d rather be in an absurd nightmare with her than in any kind of reality without her.
She pulled a three-ring binder from her bag. “Simon and I have done a lot of amazing things together.” She tallied up their accomplishments—candidates getting elected, workers’ rights, legislation passed. I could feel myself shrink into the seat; while Janine and I had been circling the outlet stores for parking spaces, Beth and Simon had actually made a difference in the world. I saw myself through her eyes and thought about how silly and superficial I must seem. Larry had been the impetus to open the doors of activism for her,23 and now she had left me in the dust. And as much as I felt like I’d let the world down by not contributing, a small piece of my mind fixated on something else. Something personal.
Beth had a boyfriend.
And it still wasn’t me.
I called Janine that afternoon from a truck stop in Kansas and told her I’d gotten an emergency phone call from home that my grandmother was dying and I’d be in touch when I could. I asked her to call the bakery and video store and apologize for my lack of notice. She volunteered to fly out and meet me. She was so concerned, I felt bad about lying.
But not that bad.
Being with Beth again was like a shot of epinephrine plunged straight into the heart. The Whoa! I felt at her proximity was physical and exhilarating. Behind her blue eyes you could still see the wheels of her sharp mind clicking like tumblers in a safe. She threw away more ideas in an hour than most people got in a week.
If only she wasn’t spending every spare minute making out with Simon.
This is what you get, I thought. You left without saying goodbye, you hurt her, she grieved for you, then moved on. Yet another voice emerged inside me, a more forceful one. You’re here now. So is she. Go for it.
As the two of them continued to call each other pet names, however, the possibility of hooking up with Beth grew more and more unlikely.24
But you know me; I love a long shot.
“We’re going back to Boston.” Beth drove as Simon sat beside her reading.
“I can’t go home,” I said.
“What are you talking about? Look at the state of the world. We need you.”
“You can count me out of public life,” I answered. “Been there, done that.”
“There’s a little more at stake now, don’t you think?” Beth said. “We’ve had a war! The economy is in shambles! Besides, if I didn’t think we needed you, I would have left you in Boulder contemplating the differences between relaxed and loose-fit jeans.”
“That’s not fair. I was at every peace rally in Boulder this year. I helped a congresswoman get elected. I got nine thousand names on a petition for better workers’ rights.” I thought I heard a snicker coming from Simon in the front seat.
“No, you’re right—we just need to turn up the volume, that’s all.” Beth adjusted the rearview mirror and shot me what I hoped was an encouraging look.
How could Simon and his James Bond charm possibly compete with all the years of history Beth and I shared?25 I leaned across the seat toward her.
“I hope you’re not thinking I’m going to come out and say it was all a hoax, that I never really died. If I did it for anyone, Beth, I’d do it for you. But I can’t.”
“Josh, give it a rest. You’re being totally melodramatic.”
“You give it a rest,” I said. “You weren’t the one being followed into the bathroom by paparazzi. You weren’t the subject of a million tabloid stories.”
“That’s still no excuse for faking your own death,” she said. “You were a coward, plain and simple.”
She wasn’t telling me anything I hadn’t thought a thousand times already. But coming from her, the words felt like flaming cannonballs.
“Then let me out now.” I was suddenly overcome by an avalanche of mistakes and missed opportunities. “I don’t need to be kidnapped by someone who just wants to give me grief.”
She sounded surprised. “Is that what you think? We’re bringing you back because we need you.”
“To do what?”
The way Simon coughed, I knew he was setting up for a sales pitch. “There’s a state representative seat open in your district back home. We thought Larry might be a good candidate to run.”
“Larry’s dead.” I turned to Beth. “That’s your district too. Why don’t you run?”
“If you say no, I will. But let’s face it, Josh—we could never get as much press as we could with Larry. People all over the country are trying to break into politics on a grassroots level. You could really help.”
“You have to be eighteen to run for state rep,” I said. “My
birthday’s not till next September.”
“Exactly. You’d be eighteen before the election. You should think about it, Josh.”
“Absolutely not. Forget it.”
“I’ll run then. It’s no big deal.” She slipped her arm across the car to play with Simon’s hair. If she was trying to torture me, she was succeeding.
After we stopped at a rest area to refuel, I lassoed Beth into the backseat with me. I imagined we were in a limousine where I could push the button that raised the dark glass between the front and back seats, eliminating Simon from our periphery. Instead, I mentally blocked him out and focused on Beth. I spotted her tattoo peeking out from the bottom of her pants—a dollar sign with a slash through it. She caught me looking at her.
“It’s faded in the past few years.” She seemed tired and restless. “I’ve been working non-stop forever. I feel like I’ve faded a little too.”
I put my arm around her, ignoring Simon in the front seat.
“The changing-the-world business is tough,” Beth said. “But I thought you might want to jump back in.”
Those were the magic words, and Beth knew it. How many times had I uttered that phrase to Ms. Phillips in guidance, the standard answer for what I wanted to do with my life? Change the world. Did I still have the strength and determination to get it together and try to make a difference?
Was it my destiny, my vocation?
Or was I just trying to impress a girl?
As I looked at Beth, I wondered if the reason why even mattered.
Vote for Larry Page 2