by Gabriel Roth
Donald decided not to hire an investigator in San Francisco. He was remarried eighteen months ago, to a woman who supports him and believes him and has encouraged him to think of the period when he had a daughter as something that’s over.
“You keep sending the letters, though,” I say.
“I will keep sending them until I die,” he says. “I still send her a gift on her birthday, too. I send her a check every year. She never cashes it. I started increasing the amount. I wanted to see if there was anything she’d consent to take from me. By last year it was up to fifteen thousand dollars.”
“I don’t think she wants your money.”
“Apparently not,” he says. He looks down at his hands, folded across his stomach, and gives a little grunt, some kind of communication with himself. “Thank you for listening to all that,” he says. “I’ve had to give up my daughter to this madness. But this awful image of me that she plants—it’s not something I can tolerate. There are people who hear my name and think, Yes, that’s the man who molested his little girl. I want to go up to each one, to explain, to clear my name. Honestly, you have no idea what your name is, what it means, until something like this happens.”
I would like to be able to say what he wants to hear, which is You couldn’t possibly be a child molester—you’re a civilized man! But how can I say that?
“I’m sorry,” I say, pushing myself up from the chair.
When he stands I remember how tall he is. He wears a terrifying expression of disappointment, a look I’m sure Maya has seen plenty of. “Will you tell her I love her,” he says. He knows I can’t; he’s just handing me a shard of his pain to carry around.
The outside world is bathed in sunshine. I start to drive back to the airport, but when I reach the freeway I follow the signs for north, toward home. California’s interior is vacant and demoralized, and keeping my foot on the accelerator takes an effort of will. I drive for hours without stopping, until my throat is dry from the air conditioning and the fuel indicator dips into the red. Fuel indicators are calibrated so that actual emptiness is somewhere below the E mark. Everyone knows this and calculates accordingly, and so the real function of the interface is to ensure that you can’t tell exactly how much fuel is left. There is some value to this. I keep driving.
9
Success is also easy to handle: You’ve solved the wrong problem.
—Alan J. Perlis, “Epigrams on Programming”
I WAKE THE NEXT morning with the aura of something bodily amiss that foretells a cold. The chaos in my head seems more urgent. For three hours I stifle it by playing Metroid Prime. I am frozen on the couch, my thumbs animated like dancing insects, when the phone starts jumping with what seems like unusual force. I am in that state of meditative bliss and frustration that characterizes progress up a video game’s learning curve: useful new gestures and strategies are moving from my conscious mind into my repertoire of automatic reflexes, freeing up the forebrain to tackle the next set of challenges. It’s a hypnotic process, and hard to withdraw from. I pause the game and answer the phone with a feeling of distracted hyperreality. I am in my apartment, I am on Tallon IV, I am in phonespace with my father.
“Eric, I need to ask you for something,” he says in a voice that I’ve never heard him use before. “I know you’re not interested in my business. It would have been great to have you on board, but that’s OK. But we’ve run into a little trouble, and we could really use your help. Not a job, I’m not trying to offer you a job again. I’m just—I’m in a tough situation, and I need your help, OK?”
Maya’s past is a mystery, but mine calls me on the phone to ask for things. “What kind of trouble?” I ask. Metroid Prime, with its elaborately playable 3D environment and its carefully modeled physics, seems realer than this conversation.
“Thanks, Eric,” he says. “It’s all the venture firms’ fault. I did everything right: I had a real good idea, a real winner, and I put together a great team, with tech people and office people and everything you’d need. And I wrote this business plan, which really went into a ton of detail, with charts and everything, showing exactly what we were going to do. You know what a business plan is, right?”
“So what happened with the VCs?” I say.
“They wouldn’t give us any money!” he says. “Most of them wouldn’t even meet with us, wouldn’t even hear our pitch. I don’t know how these guys make a living, honestly, if they’re not going to hear people’s ideas. The whole thing’s rigged. There’s no way for the startup, the small business, to compete.” For my dad to lose his faith in the marketplace is tantamount to a religious crisis.
“Wow, I’m sorry,” I say, although in fact I feel vindicated. “So what are you going to do?”
“Well, I’m all out of options!” he says, his voice ascending the scale of indignation. “I mean, I’ve got this lease on the offices, and the server space—you have no idea how much it costs to rent this server space! And meanwhile there’s the staff people waiting to get paid, and the contractors who designed the site, and we had to pay out the ass for the domain name.”
“Oh Jesus, Dad,” I say. “You staffed up before you had any funding?”
“I couldn’t exactly go into Kleiner Perkins and tell them they should be funding us if we’re not even a real company, could I?” he says, as though losing patience with a slow student. “You’ve got to spend money to make money. That’s how it works.”
“What money did you spend?”
“My money, Eric, money that I made. Plus I borrowed some from your grandfather. And I took out a second mortgage.”
Oh my God. “And now what have you got left?”
“I’m all out, aren’t I? I’m dry. And if I shut the whole operation down now, number one I’ll never get any of it back, and number two I’ve got all these debts that there’s no way for me to repay. I’m looking at Chapter Seven here. I know you didn’t want to come on board, and that’s fine, you’ve got other irons in the fire, I can understand that. But you don’t want to see the whole enterprise fold, do you?”
I am tired of this old man. “So what are you asking for?” I say.
There is a long pause, which I suspect is his attempt to convey how difficult this is for him, and then, in a rush, he says, “I need one point two million dollars.” The word million comes out miyon. “That’s what it’ll take to get this off the ground. We can’t count on a bunch of suits to give us the opportunity, I can see that now. We’re going to have to take it ourselves.”
After the events of this week, it’s a relief to feel unambivalent about something. “I’m not going to fund your business, Dad,” I tell him. “It’s not a good business. That’s why the VCs aren’t going to give you money either.” A blue bolt of pleasure travels up my spine. Does telling difficult truths always feel this good?
There is another silence, less deliberate this time. When he speaks again, his voice is quiet and somehow younger.
“That’s all right,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting you to say yes, I was just trying everything I could think of. Let me ask you something else. I’ll give up on the company, I’ll shut it down. The staff will be disappointed, but it’s OK. But I want to pay off these debts. The back pay for the employees, and the contractors’ bills, and the rest of the month’s rent. If I can pay that stuff off, then I won’t have to declare bankruptcy. And the mortgage, a couple months, just until I can pick up some teaching work again.”
“How much are we talking about now?”
“I can do it for two hundred thousand dollars,” he says. He’d worked out the figure before calling.
“I don’t know, Dad,” I say. “I’ll think about it.” Something strange is happening, some reversal of the natural order, in which the inheritance passes from the son to the father, and resources flow upward through the generations. I hang up the phone and return to the game, but my eyes keep slipping down to the clock on the cable box where the hours and minutes are piling up. Maya is
leaving the office in her overcoat, walking the seven blocks to my house, past the yard with the pit bull and the empty lot where the mysterious planks of wood stand like soldiers in the earth. I should put down the controller, shower, hide the evidence of the wasted day, prepare myself to deceive her about where I’ve been. But when she lets herself in I am under attack by a swarm of birdlike ghosts. She comes up behind me and musses the back of my hair, then goes into the bedroom, where the console’s shots and explosions are muffled. Of course, her departure makes me anxious and I sacrifice the game and go to her.
We sit at the kitchen counter and eat Indian food. Not telling her that I met her father yesterday is surprisingly easy; I can see how people have affairs. I don’t tell her about my dad’s phone call either—maybe because, the first time he called, she asked me if he wanted money, and I’m not happy she turned out to be right. Other than deal with our fathers, all I’ve done since I saw her last is play Xbox.
“I think I’m pretty close to the end,” I say. “Finishing a game always gives me a weird fake-accomplishment feeling. It’s a lot like disappointment.” She’s bored: she doesn’t play with her fingernails or say uh-huh in a distracted way, but the spark of her interest is gone. Bored, she’s not magic anymore. For some reason I remember the imaginary dog she might have killed.
We finish eating and move to the bedroom in a state that combines vacant lust and a disinclination to keep talking. As I start to go down on her, I remember that I began that way last time; tonight I should have taken a more concupiscent approach, to demonstrate creativity and to flatter her with the suggestion of passionate desire. Ten minutes later, engaged in coitus a posteriori, I find myself watching as if from the side of the room. The perspective is cold and arousing, and I am handling the physiomechanics of the act with unusual confidence, until she says, “I need it rougher.”
So what is this? An artifact of childhood trauma? A vestigial need to revisit that dark nexus of sex and coercion, to touch some wound inside herself? Or is it the other way around: the memories of abuse at her father’s hands are masochistic fantasies, an ordinary kink misunderstood? I am not watching from the side anymore. I put my hand on the back of her head and push her face down. She makes an enthusiastic sound, or perhaps just a reflexive grunt. I am Donald now, and I give it to her, punish her for betraying me, for lying, for pretending to be a victim when she’s just a slut. And then I ejaculate, much too soon. She wants to kiss afterward, which is almost more than I can stand.
Cynthia is one of those children who, lacking some gene for adolescence, have not once worried or disappointed their parents. Her grades were never less than adequate, her demeanor never hostile, her behavior never self-destructive. Every friend was presented to Doug and Rose Gerney over the family dinner table. (They adored Danny Keach, who recognized that charming them was a station on the path into Cynthia’s heart and jeans.) She graduated college in four years and proceeded to obtain a skilled job. She flies home for major holidays and helps with the cooking. So it was a new experience for the Gerney family when Cynthia told her parents she’d decided that men just weren’t her thing.
She calls to give me the news. “I need to tell you about it,” she says. “Can I come after work?”
I make preliminary noises of regret: I’m speaking at this conference tomorrow and I’d like to go over some notes, take a bath, get an early night. But there’s an uncharacteristic insistence in Cynthia’s tone that makes me relent.
Sitting on my couch she describes the phone call, with her parents on separate extensions. Here’s what I’m afraid of: she called and said, Get Dad on the line, I need to tell you guys something, and her mother leapt willfully to the conclusion that Cynthia was getting married.
“So how did they react?” I say. Doug is a bearish, mustachioed man who writes nonfiction books on manly topics: gambling, the rural life, the history of tobacco. I picture him standing in the bedroom of their house in Denver, holding the receiver to his ear, until I remember that they’ve moved into a smaller house, one I’ve never seen. Did he take Cynthia’s homosexuality as a personal rejection? A lapse in his daughter’s love? What the hell is fatherhood about, anyway?
They didn’t disown her. Doug kept saying, It’s just such a surprise. Rose said, But don’t you want children? Cynthia explained that lesbianism doesn’t preclude children, but Rose wasn’t satisfied and Doug went to the kitchen to hold her while she sobbed into the phone.
I murmur sympathetically, but Cynthia sweeps my condolences away with the back of her hand.
“She just couldn’t get over the grandchildren thing,” she says. “I told her I could go to a sperm bank or something, and that didn’t help.” She blows the steam off her tea. “So I said you’d probably give me some if I asked.” I can’t think of anything to say to this except Ha! “And the thing is, she totally stopped crying. She made me promise to ask you about it.”
“I’m flattered that your mom holds my DNA in such high esteem.”
“No, she always liked you. And she was really impressed when you sold the company.” This remark triggers a wave of disgust, but I can’t tell where it’s directed. To feel disgusted is to feel implicated.
“It’ll never happen, obviously,” Cynthia says. “I just wanted you to be prepared if she ever says anything weird about it.”
“Color me prepared,” I say, getting up from the couch to fetch some snacks and relieve the interpersonal intensity. “No, it’s fine. Tell her whatever.” In one of the infinite possible futures that branch from every instant, Cynthia is raising twins, a boy and a girl, with her chubby face and my inability to relate to people. On the way to the pantry I pass my laptop, which is sitting on the kitchen island, and of course I glance at the screen in case Maya has emailed to say how much she loves me. Instead there’s a message from Donald Marcom with the subject Checking in.
I return to the couch with a box of chocolate marshmallow Pinwheels, but Cynthia knows something’s not right.
“What just happened?” she says.
So I have to explain everything, even though I understand so little. Cynthia has heard me say that Maya was abused, and it never occurred to her to treat that statement as anything other than a fact. She wants to see Donald’s email, so I fetch the computer from the island and set it down on the table in front of us. It reads:
Eric,
Your disinterested pursuit of the truth does you credit. Thanks to you I find myself more hopeful than at any time since this ordeal began. I hope you will keep me informed about your discussions with Maya—both for my own information and to allow me to respond to any further distortions.
DBM
This is one of those times when you have managed to be true to yourself, have obeyed unusually clear impulses, and then find yourself at the bottom of a pit, unable to explain how you got there. How did Donald Marcom and I wind up on the same side?
“He thinks you’re working for him?” Cynthia says. I shrug.
“He’s irrelevant,” I say. “But… I need to figure this out.”
“No, you don’t,” she says. She gestures at the computer as though Donald were a mischievous goblin living inside. “If he’s an innocent guy and he lost his daughter, that’s very sad and everything, but why is that your problem? You’re her boyfriend. Just be her boyfriend.”
By some unlikely chance, Maya Marcom is prepared to spend time with me. This astonishing person will be here at my apartment, of her own volition, in one hour. When she was picking her outfit earlier today, she might have momentarily wondered what I’d find attractive. And I’m going to get stuck on whether this story she believes is accurate?
“You’re right,” I say. I lean forward to the laptop and delete Donald’s email, a gesture that gives me a little kick of satisfaction.
“There you go,” Cynthia says.
“I feel good about this,” I say. I stand up and look around the apartment. I feel a sudden urge to tidy the place up, although it’s not
messy.
“Jeez, you went all the way to LA,” Cynthia says.
“Yeah, that’s really weird,” I say. “I can never tell her about that, right?” Cynthia frowns—she has a native distaste for secrecy. “I went to see him, behind her back.”
“Right,” she says. “Yeah, don’t tell her.” She smiles nervously, as though we’re in a children’s conspiracy, and once again I feel thankful that she’s on my side. We order Thai food and eat it in front of the TV.
Maya and I ride to the Digital Future Conference in a cab. I don’t usually take cabs with her because I have the idea that she’d rather not date a guy who takes cabs everywhere. I tried to dissuade her from coming—I don’t know that I want her to see me in this context—but she insisted.
“Are you nervous?” Maya asks me.
“Nah,” I say reflexively. “Not really. A little.”
She smiles. “Is it all going to be super technical? Like, give me an estimate of how much I’m going to understand.” This self-deprecating reminder of my expertise is reassuring, as she intends it to be.
“Oh, no, it’ll be general-audience stuff,” I say. “Whether you find it interesting or not is a different question.”
She rolls her eyes—This again—but affectionately, which is the best I can hope for.
My goal with the cab was for us to arrive within five minutes of the 10 a.m. start time of my first panel, “Privacy in the Internet Age.” I don’t want Maya to see too many hallway interactions—men in pleated khakis pitching me on their startup or framework. Construction on Folsom Street slows the cab down, and then we have to collect our badges (mine has my name in big letters; Maya’s just says GUEST), so we end up rushing through the hallway, past the programmers and MBAs in separate clusters.