What Lies Beyond the Stars

by Micael Goorjian

  “Totally.”

  “As I mentioned before, Adam is quite intelligent. He has a unique mind. Games, virtual reality, it all seems to be a perfectly safe place for Adam to focus his . . . attention.”

  Adam was sitting on a hard, blue couch by the window when he heard Blake enter the visiting room. As Blake came over and sat down next to him, Adam kept his gaze focused on the sunlight reflecting off the polished linoleum floor in front of him. His shoulders were slumped, the shame of his illness and his failure to keep it hidden from Blake weighed heavily. For a long while they sat in silence.

  “Well, here we are . . .” Blake finally got out.

  Assuming this was leading to something like “And I never want to see you again . . . You’re fired . . . I can’t trust someone like you,” Adam continued to push all of his attention into that glaring slice of sunlight on the floor, hoping that he might dissolve into it.

  “You’re my best friend, Adam.”

  For a moment Adam didn’t know if Blake had spoken or if he’d imagined it. But then Blake gently patted Adam’s leg and repeated, “You’re my best friend.”

  Adam felt a walnut-size lump in his throat. “I’m so sorry.”

  Blake shook his head. “Everything’s cool. Everything’s going to work out. I promise to look out for you from now on. I got your back, brother, and that’s a promise.”

  From that day on, everything did seem to work out. Despite a delayed release, Lust 4 Blood ended up being a major success, and Blake kept his promise and did everything he could to help Adam stay even-keeled. He bought Adam new clothing and a new car (although Adam didn’t even have a license), and he hired a maid who came twice a week to clean his stepmother’s back house, from which Adam refused to move. When Pixilate expanded to office space in Burlingame, Adam was given his own office next door to Blake’s. Like a big brother, Blake did his best to keep a watchful eye on Adam and to make sure he could work without undue pressure.

  For several years everything went smoothly. But after a grueling push to deliver Lust 4 Blood 2 to their hungry fans, Blake’s ability to be there for Adam had become increasingly difficult. Fortunately, right around this time, Blake reconnected with an old high school friend named Jane Duffy. Jane, a nutritionist and yoga fanatic, had recently hit hard times. Her abusive boyfriend had left her with two babies, no child support, and no idea what she was going to do. Blake gave her the keys to an old apartment, to use until she figured things out, and on occasion treated her and her kids to a nice meal. And on one such occasion, Blake decided to bring Adam along.

  Jane was immediately intrigued by Adam, with his shy demeanor, his off-kilter but well-intentioned sense of humor, and his natural way with her children. He was far from being the kind of guy she was usually attracted to, and yet, as she often said about that first encounter, “there was just something so tender about Adam.”

  Adam was also taken with Jane. She was tall, blonde, and athletic—far more attractive than any of the girls Blake had previously set him up with. She was smart too, aware of all the big social issues that Adam knew nothing about, like AIDS in Africa and global warming.

  The two began dating. Adam was very generous with Jane and the kids, and Jane responded by making him healthy, home-cooked meals and by encouraging him to exercise, to buy decent clothes, and to take his medication. Unlike the alpha males Jane had previously dated, Adam seemed perfectly happy to let her take charge. She knew exactly how to care for him, and he willingly let her.

  Within months Adam was hard to recognize. He not only was passably fit and healthy but also looked happy. And that made Jane happy. And of course, it didn’t hurt that Adam was now making piles of money with no idea how to spend it. Jane, after her many years of deprivation, had lots of good, responsible ideas for how to spend it. “We fit together,” Jane told Adam on the day they decided to get married.

  As Blake had promised Adam that day in the hospital, everything worked out just fine. With a house in the suburbs, a beautiful wife, two kids who were learning to call him Dad, and a job making video games for the world’s hippest company, Adam knew he had nothing to complain about. He was a lucky man.

  CHAPTER 5

  NAVIGATIONS OF THE HIDDEN DOMAIN

  Adam jolted upright.

  He didn’t know where he was or how he had gotten there. His body was shaking. Actually, everything was shaking. Confused, he saw darkness rushing by, pulsing with streaks of neon light. In his ears was a deafening roar, accompanied by pressure, as if he was on an airplane. Packed all around him, people were swaying, bouncing, and shaking, their faces expressionless, all in their own worlds—earbuds in, faces staring into the pale blue glow of smart-phones and laptops.

  BART, Adam realized. He was on a train heading home, traveling under the San Francisco Bay on his way to the Walnut Creek station, where Jane and the kids would be waiting to pick him up.

  The panic began to dissipate as Adam reconnected to the present. The last thing he recalled clearly was sitting down early that morning to start work on the Zombies demo. He saw himself turning on his monitors, logging in, opening the project, and the next thing he knew, here he was on BART. In between hours had passed, the entire day had passed, without him, as if some other Adam Sheppard had taken over while he slipped off to . . . somewhere else.

  Looking around at his fellow commuters, Adam wondered if they had all slipped off somewhere else too. Maybe he was the only person on the train right now who was fully aware of being on it—aware of the incredible fact that they were shooting through a tube 100 feet underwater.

  Adam tried to make eye contact, but no one’s eyes met his. Everyone was immersed in e-mails, texts, video games, reading about who’s dating who or how the world will soon end. A terrible sense of dread began to well in Adam’s gut as he recognized his own itching desire to follow the crowd and slip off to somewhere else. But then he remembered what was in his shoulder bag. Not another screen to get lost in, but something that lately had given him a sense of hope, a feeling that he was not alone.

  He opened his bag and carefully removed the book. It was faded, charcoal gray with a burgundy spine. If it had ever had a dust jacket, that was long since gone. The book’s hard cover was embossed with a small, gold nautical symbol, a compass rose with a sea horse at its center.

  On the spine the title read Navigations of the Hidden Domain.

  From the time Adam was a teenager, he had developed a curious obsession with books on philosophy. Whenever he happened upon a bookstore, he would impulsively rush in, find the philosophy section, pick out the densest, most incomprehensible tome, and buy it. Plato, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein—Adam gobbled them all up. He was searching for something, answers to certain questions he wasn’t even sure how to articulate. He explored other aisles in the bookstore as well—religion, science, psychology, metaphysics—and often found ideas that would temporarily scratch his itch for understanding. But nothing lasted, nothing stuck. Nothing resonated with that internal longing the way Virgil Coates’s Navigations of the Hidden Domain did.

  Almost as extraordinary as the book itself were the peculiar circumstances in which Adam came to possess it. It happened a few months after Pixilate had moved into the Virtual Skies Tower. They were having issues networking the computers in the Cave, so one afternoon while the system was down, Adam took the opportunity to go outside to eat his lunch. Instead of opting for the meticulously landscaped park out front, he sought out a concrete ledge he had noticed just outside the back entrance on Fremont Street. From his perch he had a great view of the traffic, the zombielike masses of pedestrians, and the long row of out-of-use newspaper machines across the sidewalk.

  While finishing his lunch, Adam decided to see if he could pick out the Pixilate offices up on the 33rd floor. He looked up at the Tower behind him and started counting floors. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. He hopped off the ledge to get a better view. 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 . . .

  “You see what they got up there, d
on’t you, brother?”

  Startled, Adam turned to discover a homeless man in a wheelchair. Adam hadn’t noticed the man earlier; all he had seen over there was that long row of defunct newspaper stands. But he now saw that it was actually two shorter rows with a four-foot-wide gap in the middle, which this man’s wheelchair filled almost perfectly. He was African-American, in his late 60s, and maybe a little nuts. On the ground in front of him a green Army blanket had been laid out with various items for sale: a few cheap watches, some toxic-smelling incense sticks wrapped in tinfoil, old magazines, and several stacks of used books.

  “Sorry. I didn’t see you there.”

  “Wait a minute, brother, I got something special for you.” After a violent neck twitch, the man leaned over and picked up a book. “Have you read this shit?” The man gave a wide-eyed smile, and even though he was missing several teeth, it was one of the warmest smiles Adam had ever seen. “This is some serious shit, brother.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Gonna open up your mind. I think you need to read this.” As he extended the book to Adam, the countless round buttons pinned to the man’s jacket made a gentle clattering sound. Adam recalled Blake once had pins like these on the lapels of his faded denim jacket when they first met at college: Duran Duran, Chewbacca, “Say yes to drugs!” But the homeless man’s buttons weren’t promoting slogans or pop idols, they all depicted butterflies. Giant ones, tiny ones, monarchs, swallowtails, green, red, pink, purple, and rainbow-colored butterflies. Definitely nuts, Adam thought. A vet maybe or a hippie who took one too many hits of acid in Golden Gate Park.

  Adam changed his mind and bought the book without even looking at it. It turned out to be a Hardy Boys mystery called The Secret Warning.

  After that first meeting, whenever Adam noticed the wheelchair-bound butterfly man in his spot between the newspaper stands, he paid him a visit. The man’s name was Michael. Normally Adam avoided homeless people in San Francisco; they all seemed so angry and demanding. But Michael was different. For one thing, that smile could melt a glacier. But there was also something about the way he looked at Adam with eyes that seemed to see through the triviality of everyday life to something bigger, to something Adam longed to see.

  On one occasion, more to be friendly than anything else, Adam asked Michael if he might have any philosophy books. After a confusing exchange, Adam ended up with another Hardy Boys mystery. But the next time Adam saw Michael in his spot, the homeless man beckoned him over. “Hey, brother, I got something real special for you.” And this time he did. From his bag Michael produced a big gray book with a tattered burgundy spine.

  The book’s title, Navigations of the Hidden Domain, was as unfamiliar to Adam as the author, Virgil Coates. It wasn’t clear when exactly the book had been written, but the copyright page showed that it was published in 1974 in Berkeley, California, by a company Adam had never heard of.

  For a month the book sat untouched on Adam’s desk. Then, after an intense day of coding, Adam noticed it there and decided to crack it open. The first chapter was about the celestial laws that govern the ocean. It was as intriguing as it was difficult to get through, so Adam decided to take the book home for the weekend. Jane was away on a yoga retreat, and the kids were staying with Jane’s parents, so Adam had the house to himself and no obligations. He began reading Friday evening, and by the time Sunday came around, he realized he had barely eaten or slept. And yet, he wasn’t tired or hungry afterward. If anything his mind felt lighter and clearer after reading the book than it had in years.

  On the surface Navigations of the Hidden Domain was an allegory about a man lost at sea. But unlike anything he had read before, this particular book penetrated right to the very heart of Adam’s big questions. Its ideas were expressed in ways that seemed to effortlessly match with all of the longings, fears, and uncertainties Adam kept locked up inside. It was as if the book had been written just for him. Or perhaps about him. Buried at different levels within the text, he found ideas that were both completely alien, yet achingly familiar.

  In some places the author dropped the allegorical device, laying out his ideas in plain prose. In other sections, especially the man-at-sea’s journal entries concerning his dreams, the writing was so abstract that it was virtually impenetrable. Some passages made assertions about reality as outlandish as a fantasy novel, while others were constructed with the precise logic of a scientific treatise. What Adam found most remarkable was that at no point did the book seem to give him any direct answers to his big questions, at least not in words. Rather it was how he felt while reading the book that he came to realize was more important than any answers. The book seemed to be questioning life’s meaning right alongside him, which created a sensation, a sort of light vibration in his body that grew stronger every time he picked up the book.

  The next time Adam spotted homeless Michael outside the Virtual Skies Tower, he bombarded him with questions. But all of his attempts to find out anything else about this extraordinary book or its author never yielded anything more than another Hardy Boys mystery. So Adam read Navigations of the Hidden Domain over and over, each time feeling something different, each time dogearing and underlining new passages. The only negative effect of this strange book was the growing sense that something was drastically wrong with Adam’s own life. He had taken a wrong turn long ago, forgotten some essential something-or-other, and now the fog of habit and conformity had grown so thick around him, he might not ever remember what it was.

  As the BART train slipped from beneath the Bay and into West Oakland, Adam opened up Navigations of the Hidden Domain. The way the book smelled was another aspect of its charm. Musty like the old comic books Adam’s dad had given him, but with a hint of incense, as if it had been sitting for a few centuries in an ashram.

  Flipping through the dog-eared pages, Adam found the underlined passage he had been thinking of.

  As terrifying and inescapable the trajectory of Man’s mortal dilemma may appear, there does exist with proven certainty a wholly different current of life. For the man willing to stand unflinching before his own nonexistence, a fissure between worlds can appear. A doorway, revealing itself not to the “man” but to something deep within the man that for years has cried out unheard. Occasionally he will catch the whispers of this abandoned voice, in the afterglow of certain dreams with that lingering sense of a paradise lost, reminding him of another kind of life, the life he was always meant to live, but for whatever reason, he did not.1

  ____________

  1 Underlining by Adam Sheppard

  CHAPTER 6

  WHAT’S BEHIND THE SCHOOLHOUSE

  After taking off the wrapping paper, Adam examined the new book in his hands. He glanced up at the couple sitting across the table and managed a smile.

  “Okay, wow,” was the best he could do. Thankfully Jane was there to rescue him. Taking the book from Adam, in her effervescent voice she read aloud the title for everyone at the table to hear.

  “Tweets from the Soul: An Inspiring Collection of Life-Affirming Tweets.”

  “It’s just a fun little something we found,” said Stefan, the male half of the couple. “Jane told us how much you like philosophical sorts of things—”

  “And since you’re part of the tech industry,” Annie, the female half added, “we just thought it was perfect!”

  Stefan and Annie Thompson had recently relocated to the Bay Area from San Diego to be closer to Stefan’s new job, and had bought a home in Blackhawk, the private community where Adam and Jane lived. Having learned that the Thompsons were interested in yoga, Jane had insisted on introducing them to all her favorite studios and instructors around Contra Costa County. This had led to the two families “doing things together,” which led to Jane inviting the Thompsons to Adam’s birthday dinner.

  “Thank you very much. It’s very thoughtful,” Adam finally got out. He knew he should at least try to like the Thompsons; they meant well, after all.

&n
bsp; “My God, thank you, Adam,” Annie said with fierce sincerity.

  “And Jane,” Stefan added, “for inviting us. This restaurant is just so cool.”

  “And fun, really fun.” Annie threw in. “And to know it’s so close to Blackhawk.”

  The Silver Oak Grill and Chophouse was an upscale chain restaurant that landed somewhere between a Ruth’s Chris Steak House and a Cheesecake Factory. This latest link in the Silver Oak chain had popped up between the Blackhawk Plastic Surgery Center and a Starbucks, and it was here that Adam had been feted on the date of his birth for the past five years. Adam didn’t actually like the place, but everyone else seemed to love it, so he kept his thoughts to himself. It was convenient and quasi-fancy, kid friendly while also being a hit with the blue-haired set.

  This reminded Adam that tonight marked the third birthday dinner without Gloria, his stepmother, anchored in a wheelchair at the end of the table. However, Jane’s parents were still in attendance. Jane’s mother, Cassandra, who claimed to be 59 years old and was a frequent client at the establishment next to Blackhawk’s Silver Oak Grill (not the one serving coffee), was by far the best-dressed person at the table. Cassandra jumped at any excuse to sport her latest Dolce & Gabbana ensemble.

  Howard, Cassandra’s husband (her fourth), was 25 years her senior, in amazing shape for his age, an avid golfer, car collector, Scotch drinker, and die-hard Republican. He was also in the later stages of dementia, and so was accompanied tonight by Malee, his caregiver. Malee was from Thailand, which irritated Howard, who had served during World War II and the Korean War and did not much like Asians of any variety. Luckily Howard had recently stopped expressing his embarrassingly racist convictions out loud, but the old man was still a ticking time bomb, especially in public.