The Unknowns

by Gabriel Roth

  She’s unbuttoning my shirt. This is a crucial bit of data. I start unbuttoning hers, and then her bra is off, and I run my hand over her breasts, which are small and pretty, and all I can see is her father doing the same thing, and he’s so much bigger than her, and he probably loves her, but he loves her the wrong way. And she’s kicking off her jeans with this gorgeous little writhe of her hips. She’s beautiful. I want to keep her safe. Our chests are pressed up against each other and the contact feels strange and intense, the way it always does the first time and then never does again. She’s reaching down and undoing my pants, and everything’s starting to speed up, and now we’re fucking, and in my head I am me and her dad and her nine-year-old self all at once. It’s awful. Fortunately, she can’t tell, and she seems to enjoy it.

  I’m roused by the throbbing and rattling of my cell phone on the nightstand. Maya doesn’t move, but I don’t know if she’s a deep sleeper or if she’s strategically pretending. The phone’s screen says MOM. The words I love you, Mom did not enter my head once last night. I answer the phone and slip out into the living room in my underwear. When I get there, my mom is already talking.

  “Come home for my birthday, Eric,” she says. “I need you here. I’m lonely, and it isn’t working out with Wade.” The sound carries in here, so my end of the conversation consists largely of murmured Mmms and Uh-huhs. “It’s not like my standards are so unrealistically high. I’ve given up on looks entirely at this point. I’ll go on a date with the ones who don’t put a photo up on the website, that’s how ready I am to settle. But Wade—in his first email he said he runs his own business, doing digital photo printing or something. Turns out he makes fake IDs for the kids at the high school. A real prize, I’ll tell you. It’s going to take me forever to get my profile back up there again! You remember, we spent hours on that profile, making sure all the descriptions of me were good.”

  I do remember this project, as you’d remember a severe bout of food poisoning. “You didn’t just deactivate it?” I say, leaping, as I so often do with my mom, to the single least important point. “You actually deleted it?”

  “Eric, I’m forty-nine years old,” she says. “I don’t know the difference. And plus, yes, I deleted it. That was the arrangement Wade and I had, to take down our profiles. And now my birthday is coming up, and he’s not going to be there, so it’s going to be just Stacey and Victoria from work, and I told Stacey you were coming.”

  I do something that is either stalling or acquiescing and get off the phone. Maya, sprawled like a starfish across the center left of the bed, doesn’t stir. I slide in next to her and lie awake for a long time, until eventually I find myself at a party whose guest list comprises me and two dozen naked women. The room is small, and we are dancing in close proximity, and while dancing the women rub against me and against one another.

  We cut to a businessman in a limousine. The businessman is hungry: he requests some hamburgers, which appear on his lap in a McDonald’s bag. A disembodied voice sings the McDonald’s jingle, “You Deserve a Break Today.” I am annoyed that the party has been interrupted by advertising, but even asleep I am aware that the dream’s lavish production values—all those naked women!—have to be subsidized somehow.

  6

  What makes a good hack is the observation that you can do without something that everybody else thinks you need.

  —Joel Spolsky, interview in Founders at Work

  MR. NAYLOR HELD UP a test tube containing a vivid blue solution of copper sulfate. I leaned toward Danny Keach, sitting to my right, and in a low parody of Naylor’s orotund Southern voice said, “I’ve filled this test tube with a sample of my urine.” Halfway through the sentence I became terrified that Danny would think I meant that it was my urine. But he laughed hard enough to cause a small disturbance—he was an enthusiastic laugher—and I had my first experience of social triumph since Tara Pulowski confessed her woes to me two years earlier.

  I wouldn’t have had the courage to attempt such a joke until recently. By the middle of junior year a self-conscious maturity had begun to settle on the class of 1996, and my classmates had begun to treat me with neglect rather than contempt. We aspired to adulthood now, and outright cruelty usually sounded juvenile. My ninth-grade notebook was mentioned rarely, almost nostalgically, as though anything that had happened a full two years ago was the work of a younger self for whom I couldn’t be held accountable. Who knows by what social contagion, what hormonal surge or slump, these transformations happen?

  At the end of class I wandered alongside Danny as he met his friends Cindy and Paul at a water fountain on the second floor. As far as I could tell they hadn’t expressly planned to meet, but their habits had grown entwined around one another’s, and they tended to intersect at certain interstitial points in the day. We all continued down the hall to the student lounge, and I waited for one of them to say, Uh, are you going somewhere, or are you just following us? but it didn’t happen. Cindy even interrupted a story about her English teacher’s idiocy to fill in the background for me, an accommodation for which I was pathetically grateful.

  The student lounge comprised some beat-up furniture in the stump of a hallway, as though someone had said, Let’s just dump it all there and call it the student lounge. By custom it was reserved for juniors and seniors, but the seniors had off-campus privileges and hung out at Carl’s Jr. Danny and Cindy and Paul took the couch, Cindy on Danny’s lap. I was perched on one arm of the armchair, trying to look comfortable. The three of them were in the broad middle of MLK’s social hierarchy, neither popular nor picked on, and the idea of spending a free period with them would not long ago have seemed as realistic as playing professional basketball.

  “The platypus is the coolest animal in the world,” Paul was saying. “Because it doesn’t fit into all the, you know, the categories.” Paul had a long, narrow face on which he wore wire-rimmed glasses that made him look prematurely serious.

  “What are you talking about?” Cindy asked him.

  “You know, it’s like, it’s not a mammal—” Paul began.

  “There’s a million things that aren’t mammals,” Danny said. “Birds aren’t mammals. You’re not talking about how birds are so rad.” I wasn’t sure if Danny was being serious or if he just couldn’t be bothered to sit through an explanation.

  “I know what you mean,” I said to Paul. Everyone ignored me.

  “I’m not a mammal,” Danny said. “Am I the coolest of all the animals?”

  “Are too a mammal,” said Cindy, reaching up to tweak his nipple through his T-shirt, making him cry out. Cindy was Danny’s girlfriend. She was less pretty than he was—her smiley features seemed lost in her chubby face—but she wore jeans and sneakers every day, and she never wanted to do anything besides hang out with Danny and his best friend. I had noted these qualities abstractly: having a girlfriend of my own seemed a ludicrous ambition. You need friends to get a girlfriend, especially in high school, where everyone’s social life is on display.

  “Cindy loves to pinch my nipples,” Danny said a bit too loudly, grabbing her wrists to prevent her from doing it again.

  “Ow!” Cindy said happily. “Let me go!”

  And then I heard a deep voice call my name, and Bill Fleig walked up to me—to us—and said, as if it were a point of general interest, “We’re getting the Amiga that used to be in the principal’s secretary’s office.”

  I’d known he would wonder why I wasn’t in the computer room, but I hadn’t expected him to come looking for me, in violation of the implicit parameters of our relationship. But here he was, talking about the computer from the secretary’s office, which was apparently going to be moved into the basement lab as the secretary upgraded. This was good news, but it could have waited.

  “That’s cool,” I said, trying to sound polite rather than interested.

  “It should be set up this week,” Bill said, “if her new Deskpro arrives on time.”

  Danny and the o
thers were watching blankly from the couch. I wanted to send Bill some kind of signal, something that would convey Can we please not geek out in public?, but Bill was deaf to signals. I considered saying What’s it like to be such a loser, Bill? but that would have been counterproductive as well as cruel: being a jerk was out of fashion. What I needed was a tone of polite, dismissive condescension. It might be the only time in my life when I’ve consciously looked to my father as a role model.

  “Hey, great!” I said vaguely, as though unsure what I was responding to. “That’s real exciting for you, huh?”

  Bill looked confused. “I told you it might be happening, remember?” he said.

  “Sure!” I said. It was what my dad said to enact a general mood of agreement without actually agreeing to anything. “I’ll have to come down and check it out.”

  Bill looked at me for a long time without any particular expression. Then he gave me a little nod that meant goodbye, turned, and walked away, and I felt seasick from the mixture of guilt and triumph.

  I was filling out the Stanford application at my dad’s kitchen table, wondering what I could list as extracurricular interests besides computer programming and getting a girlfriend. It was hard to concentrate with Dad yelling into the phone. “I don’t give a crap about the controller chip!” he shouted. “You said the prototype would be done in March, and now it’s practically June, and you’re coming to me with this garbage about a controller chip!”

  He put down the phone and looked over at me. “This guy told me he knew what he was doing,” he said in his familiar wounded tone. Then his voice firmed up. “Sometimes you have to let people know who’s boss, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure, Dad,” I said.

  “It looks like we’re going to have to postpone the launch,” he said. It had already been pushed back twice. “There’s some snags on the road, you come to expect that in business. Especially when you’re doing something nobody’s ever done before.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “It’s really going to be something,” he said. “The problem we’re running into here is, well, it’s the design of the machines. You’ve got to have six flavors in each machine, right, to give people the choice.” He counted them off on his fingers: “Cola, diet, lemon-lime, orange, root beer, and prune. That’s like Dr Pepper, but ours is going to be called Mr. Popper. So you’ve got to put in a computer chip, where you push a button and tell it what flavor you want and the chip controls which flavor syrup gets pumped in. How about that? A computer in a soda machine!” I indicated that I had heard of such things. “So the guy who’s building the machine, he said he could get it done in about six weeks. But now there’s some kind of shortage of these chips, and he’s telling me there’s no way to get any more until the end of the summer, and so we’re stuck with this great idea, and cases and cases of syrup and carbon, just sitting in this guy’s warehouse, and there’s no way to get the machines into the stores until the fall. This could be a very nice payday for everyone if these guys weren’t so incompetent!”

  “Yeah,” I said. Spread out in front of me on the table were my mom’s last few tax returns. She’d given them to me so that I could copy the figures onto the financial-disclosure form. Looking at the documents felt a bit too intimate, like seeing her undressed. I copied the numbers carefully with a fountain pen, and then moved on to the next section of the form.

  “Dad, how much money did you make in fiscal ’91–’92?” I said.

  He craned his neck to see the forms. “What do they need to know that for?” he asked.

  “They need to know, Dad,” I said. “It’s for, like, financial aid and whatever.”

  “See, the thing is,” he said, “your income changes from year to year.” He went over to the stove and began filling a pot with water. “That’s how it is with entrepreneurialism—one year you might not make anything, and then the next year you’re going to make a whole lot, to make up for it.”

  I said, “I have to send the forms in a couple weeks if I want to apply early decision.”

  “Why don’t you call them?” he said, striking a match to turn on the burner. “Call the admissions office and say you don’t think it’s fair that your parents should have to disclose their whole financial lives. Start a consumer protest! If enough people complain, they’ll have to change the policy.”

  “But no one is complaining, Dad,” I said. “The only person who’s complaining is you.”

  “Well, and I’m the one who’s going to be footing the bills, aren’t I?” he said, turning to face me. “Look, Eric, it’s like this: Right now I don’t have any money apart from my salary from the college. Of course, there’s going to be a bunch of money soon, when we get the machines into the stores. But when you apply to these schools, they’re going to think, OK, teaches college, makes a good salary—let’s touch him for everything he’s got. Look, it’s not that I’m not willing to pay for your education—nothing’s more important than education, I’ve always said that—but if they make me pay for it right now, there won’t be enough left for the business.” He lifted the lid off the pot, but the water wasn’t boiling yet. “So just leave my name off entirely. Where they have a space for father, write N/A. That stands for not applicable. Just write that.” He reached into the cabinet for the spaghetti.

  Cindy was at home with a cold, and Paul was in class, and Danny was in an expansive mood. “Do you have a free period?” he said when I ran into him in the hall. I told him I did, although this was not true. “Because I want to get out of here,” he said. “I can’t deal with being cooped up in this place, you know?”

  “Where can we go?” I asked. It was a freezing Thursday afternoon.

  “Anywhere, dude,” he said, sweeping his arm to take in the great world around us. “Let’s hit the road!”

  “Yeah, man!” he said as we left the school building. “We’re out of there! Later, losers!” He was carefully looking straight ahead, and his breath was visible in the air. “We spend all our lives in these boxes, right? They want us to fuckin’ stay in that box until we’re eighteen so we can graduate and go straight into another box and spend the rest of our lives there!” He said this with no malice, only excitement at the break we’d made.

  There was no one in Carl’s Jr. except four senior girls who ignored us and an old guy with a cup of coffee and packets of sugar all over the table. We ordered combo meals and piled our puffy coats and wool hats next to us on the plastic seats.

  “It’s like, they’re just training us for some stupid office job anyway,” he said. He was the only one of us with even a slight claim to coolness, deriving from his wide, satisfied face and a voice that always gave the impression of minimal effort. “I mean, what do they teach us? They should be teaching us to be, like, poets or something. If the schools taught everyone to be a poet or a musician or something instead of, like, an accountant, the world would be a whole different place.” I nodded dumbly. “But maybe not everyone’s got it in them to be a poet,” he said, retreating a little.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but they should at least have the opportunity.”

  “That’s right!” Danny said, raising his Coke as if to toast me. “It should be like, OK, it turns out you can’t be a poet, you can’t be a painter, you can’t be a, a whatever—you’re going to have to drop out and be an accountant. And the poets should get paid ten times as much as the accountants, instead of the other way around.”

  I was getting it now. “And if your kid said he wanted to be an accountant, you’d say, Where did your mother and I go wrong?”

  “Exactly!” Danny said, slamming his drink down on the table. “That’s exactly right.”

  I met Hannah Pronovost two days before her father died, which was a huge stroke of luck. She and Cindy had been at school together until ninth grade, when Hannah had started at Danville Academy and Cindy had come to MLK. Now Hannah’s father was fighting a hopeless battle with a vindictive tumor, and Cindy was going over to their hou
se every night to keep Hannah company. She had started carrying herself with the special dignified glamour that teenagers acquire when they make contact with something important and grown-up. We didn’t see her much outside of school anymore.

  “This is so stupid,” Danny said. We were sitting in his bedroom waiting for Saturday Night Live. “It’s like, we could be in the country, communing with nature or whatever, or we could be in the city where there’s things going on—but no, either of those are too dangerous, so we live in fucking Aurora.” It was only he and Paul who lived in Aurora, but I wasn’t going to point that out.

  “But your kids can play outside because it’s safe,” Paul said contemptuously.

  “Yeah, OK, but in exchange for safety you’re stopping them from having any kind of real experience!” Danny said. “It’s like, if you’re really going to live, you can’t just be safe every minute of your life.”

  “No, right, I know,” Paul said, embarrassed that Danny had missed his sarcasm.

  “I’d be happy if I could see my girlfriend occasionally,” Danny said. “It sounds really bad over there.”

  “Bad like how?” I asked.

  “Well, he’s dying,” Danny said. “I mean, imagine if, like, any time you saw your dad, that might be the last time you were ever going to talk to him.”

  “Wow,” Paul said. He was sitting in a beanbag chair on the floor, and he tipped his head all the way back onto the carpet and looked up at the ceiling. “When you think about it, death is, like, the worst thing out there.”

  “Maybe I should call her,” Danny said at last. Calling Cindy at Hannah’s house was discouraged—it risked intruding on the family’s grief. But he found the number in his wallet, then picked up the phone—he had his own line—and dialed. Paul and I heard the tiny ringing sound from the receiver’s earpiece.