“The challenge of stale scone and a perpetually dry mouth may be insurmountable without it.”
Dreyfuss put the bag of scones on his diminished but still convex belly and reached into it. Pip set the plastic bottle on the coffee table. “Yesterday was the use-by date, just so you know. Have you heard anything more from the bank?”
“Even Relentless Pursuit rests on the Sabbath.”
“It’s going to be fine. They can’t do anything until you’ve had your hearing.”
“Nothing I’ve learned about Judge Costa inclines me toward optimism. He appears to have an eighth-grade education and slavish respect for the rights of corporations. I’ve edited my presentation to the bone, but there are still a hundred twenty-two discrete narrative elements. I suspect that the judge’s attention will wander after three or four of them.”
Pip wasn’t so afraid of Dreyfuss anymore, and unfortunately his bank wasn’t either. She patted one of his heavy and nearly hairless hands. She didn’t expect him to respond in any way, and he didn’t.
Upstairs, in her old room, she changed into shorts and a T-shirt. Half the room was piled with Stephen’s belongings and scavenged crap, which she’d rearranged in more vertical form to make room for her mattress and suitcase. Two weeks ago, from her friend Samantha’s apartment, after emerging from the haze into which she’d put herself with Samantha’s Ativan, she’d called Dreyfuss to say hi and tell him he’d been right about those Germans. Dreyfuss told her that Stephen was adventuring in Central America with a twenty-year-old girl who had parental money. Currently Garth and Erik were Dreyfuss’s only housemates; she was welcome to her old room if she wanted it. The male filth of the house was even more disgusting than she’d imagined, but cleaning it had given her some direction for a while.
In Stephen’s pile of junk she’d found an old Pro Kennex tennis racquet. Dreyfuss’s garage door was loose in its frame and weakened by dry rot. Even the hardest-hit balls hopped back from it with a puppyish lack of aggression. Behind the garage was a wall of broadleaf evergreens that served as a backstop. Balls she bombed over it were easily replaced by searching the bushes in Mosswood Park. The deader the ball, the better it suited her purpose, which was to whack the shit out of it until she was physically exhausted. She thought this was quite possibly the most satisfying thing she’d ever done.
From some weeks of tennis in her high-school gym class, she knew she needed to keep her eye on the ball and address it sideways. Her backhand was still a flail, but the forehand—oh, the forehand. Her natural stroke was topspin, a ripping upswing. She could pound forehands for fifteen minutes, scurrying around the return caroms, repositioning herself like a cat with her mouseball, before she had to catch her breath. Each whack was another small bite taken out of a too-long late afternoon.
She’d still been in Denver, having crashed for some nights with her former share-mates in Lakewood, when the email headed le1o9n8a0rd came in. She’d sensed right away that the document attached to it was from Tom’s computer, which she’d promised never to violate. But later the same day, after a punishing bus ride to the Denver airport, there had followed two short emails from Tom himself.
Andreas dead. Suicide. I’m in physical shock but thought you should know.
PS: I’m in Bolivia, I saw him go. If he sent you something, please shred it without reading it. He was mentally ill.
More than shock, or dread, or pain, what punched her in the stomach and sickened her was guilt. And this was strange: why guilt? But she knew what she knew. The sick feeling was definitely guilt. Mechanically, because her group number had been called, she went ahead and boarded her cheap Frontier Airlines flight to San Francisco. There were soldiers on the plane. They’d been invited to board early, and her seat was next to one of them.
He was mentally ill. She’d both known this and not known it. Had seen it but also had done what he’d asked her not to do: had projected. Projected her own sanity onto him. If he really was dead now, she must have had it in her power to save him. This idea was obviously a form of self-flattery, but when she examined her memories of their times alone, it seemed to her that he’d been asking her to save him. She’d thought she was doing the morally right thing by rejecting him, but what if it had been morally the wrong thing? A failure of compassion? She scrunched herself down in her narrow airline seat and cried as inconspicuously as she could, keeping her eyes shut, as if this could make her invisible to the soldier in fatigues beside her.
By the time she got to Samantha’s, she was aware of a conflict of loyalties. On one side was her promise to respect Tom’s privacy, along with the pointedness of his warning that Andreas had been mentally ill; Tom seemed to have been implying that there was sickness in her very possession of a document. And yet: emailing her had been one of Andreas’s last acts on earth. Only a few hours had elapsed between his email and Tom’s. However sick he’d been, he’d been thinking of her. To imagine that this mattered was obviously another form of self-flattery—a failure of compassion for a suicidally tormented person, a failure to respect how little anything mattered to him but the pain he was in. And yet: it had to mean something that he’d sent her the email. She was afraid that it meant she was part of why he’d killed himself. If she was somehow responsible for his death, the least she could do to accept her guilt was to read the message he’d taken the trouble to send her. She reasoned that she could look at the document and still honor her promise to Tom by never telling him. It seemed like a thing she owed Andreas.
But the document was like a box she couldn’t put the lid back on; like the secret of nuclear fission, the so-called Pandora’s box. When she came to Tom’s description of his ex-wife’s forehead scar and reconstructed front teeth, the most terrible chill came over her. The chill had to do with Andreas and consisted of strange gratitude and redoubled guilt: in his last hour of life, he’d given her the thing she’d most wanted, the answer to her question. But now that she had it, she didn’t want it. She saw that she’d done a very bad thing to both her mother and Tom by getting it. Both of them had known, and neither of them had wanted her to know.
Without reading farther, she lay down on Samantha’s foldout bed. She wished that Andreas would appear and tell her what to do. The most deranged command of his would have been better than no command at all. She wondered if Tom might conceivably be mistaken about his death. She couldn’t stand his being dead; she missed him unbearably. She pawed at her phone and saw that Denver Independent, not normally known for spot reporting, had already broken the story.
jumped from a height of at least five hundred feet
She turned off the phone and sobbed until upwelling anxiety overwhelmed her grief and she had to go and wake Samantha and beg for Ativan. She told Samantha that Andreas had killed himself. Samantha, who had difficulty making sense of anything that didn’t refer to herself in some way, replied that she’d had a friend in high school who’d hanged himself, and that she hadn’t gotten over it until she’d understood that suicide was the greatest of mysteries.
“It’s not a mystery,” Pip said.
“Yes it is,” Samantha said. “I kept struggling to get over it. I kept thinking I could have prevented it, I could have saved him—”
“I could have saved him.”
“I thought that too, but I was wrong. I had to learn to see it had nothing to do with me. I didn’t need to feel guilty about something that had nothing to do with me. It pissed me off, knowing that. I wasn’t anything to him. I couldn’t have saved him because I didn’t matter to him. I realized it’s actually much healthier to be angry…”
Samantha went on like this, a fountain of declarative sentences about herself, until the Ativan kicked in and Pip had to lie down. In the morning, alone in Samantha’s apartment, she slowly read the rest of Tom’s document. She wanted the basic information, but she had to do a lot of skimming and backtracking to obtain it without reading too much about her parents’ sex life. It wasn’t that she was squeamish about
sex per se; the problem, indeed, was that her parents’ weirdness about sex was so foreign to her, so old-fashioned, so intolerably sad.
There were plenty of other things in the document to be disturbed by, but by the time she’d reached the end of it she could sense that the biggest problem was the money. Certainly it was interesting to imagine having Tom and Leila as second parents. But she couldn’t call up Tom and say “Hey, Dad” without admitting that she’d broken her promise and read his document and betrayed him yet again. Realistically, unless her mother spontaneously volunteered his identity, there was going to be no Tom and Leila in her life. And she was willing to live with this, at least for now. But a billion-dollar trust fund? How many times had her mother said she loved nothing in the world more than Pip? If nobody and nothing was more important to her, how could she have so much money and still be letting Pip suffer with her student debt and her limited opportunities? Tom’s document was a testimonial of frustration with her mother, and she was feeling infected by it. She saw why her mother had been afraid that Tom would take her away and turn her against her. She could feel herself turning against her right now.
She swallowed another Ativan and emailed Colleen once more. This time, in less than an hour, after eight months of silence, she got a reply.
Fooled again. I’d thought there were no more ways for him to hurt me.
The reply had come through a 408 phone number, which Pip immediately called. Colleen turned out to be living in California, across the bay, in Cupertino, and working as chief legal officer for a newish tech company. She didn’t hang up on Pip but simply resumed her complaint with the world’s crappiness where she’d left off eight months ago.
“His women are all tweeting up a storm,” she said. “Toni Field says he was the most honest human being to ever walk the earth—in other words, ‘I got to fuck him, nyah, nyah, nyah.’ Sheila Taber says the Hegelian spirit of world history was alive in him—in other words, ‘I fucked him before Toni did, and for longer.’ You might want to get tweeting yourself. Stake your claim to the sainted hero.”
“I didn’t fuck him.”
“Sorry, I forgot. Your broken tooth.”
“Don’t be mean to me. I’m really upset about this. I need to talk to someone who gets it.”
“I’m afraid I’m pretty much a flaming ball of hurt and anger at the moment.”
“Maybe you should stop reading tweets.”
“I’m flying to Shenzhen tomorrow, that should help. The Chinese never understood what all the fuss was about, God bless them.”
“Can we get together when you’re back?”
“I think you’ve always had the wrong idea about me. It kind of hurts, but it’s also sweet. We can get together if you want.”
Pip knew she should call her mother and tell her she was back in Oakland. She now saw why her mother had been suspicious of her motives in going to Denver: one glance at the DI website, on her neighbor Linda’s computer, would have revealed her ex-husband’s head shot and weekly commentary at the top of the page. It must have tortured her to think of Pip there with him. It explained her silences and recalcitrance since then: she believed that Pip had found her father and was lying about it. If nothing else, Pip wanted to reassure her that she hadn’t lied about that. But she didn’t see how she could do it without revealing what she’d learned in the meantime and how she’d learned it. Her mother would die of shame, might literally die of being too visible, if she knew what Pip had read about her. Pip could simply keep lying, of course; keep pretending that her job in Denver had just been a job. But the thought of having to lie forever, and never mention the money, and deprive herself of Tom and Leila, and generally indulge her mother’s phobias and irrational prohibitions, made her angry. Although Andreas obviously wasn’t the most honest person who’d ever walked the earth, she thought her mother might be the most difficult. Pip didn’t know what to do about her, and so, for a while, she’d done Ativan.
Whacking a tennis ball was her poor-man’s Ativan. The Sunday sun had sunk behind the elevated freeway in a sky still fogless. California had been in a drought emergency for months, but only now, after the solstice (she’d sent her mother a not-birthday card saying nothing more than “Love always, Pip”), was the weather feeling properly droughty. If the fog had come back, she might have felt safe to stop whacking and go inside, but it hadn’t. She tried working on her backhand, sent two balls over the arboreal backstop and into the next yard, and reverted to her forehand. Could a more perfect manufactured object than a tennis ball be imagined? Fuzzy and spherical, squeezable and bouncy, its stitching a pair of matching tongues, its voice on impact a pock in the most pleasing of registers. Dogs knew a good thing, dogs loved tennis balls, and so did she.
When she finally went inside, all sweaty, Garth and Erik were at the kitchen table with two quarts of beer that a good Samaritan had bought them on their long walk home after bail had been made.
“Crowdfunding rocks,” Garth said.
“Especially when it’s effectively a loan,” Erik said.
“Are they still pressing charges?” Pip said.
“For now,” Garth said. “If Dreyfuss prevails at his hearing, the realtor becomes a trespasser that it was legitimate for us to repel.”
“I don’t think he’s going to prevail.” Pip picked up one of the half-empty bottles. “May I?” Garth and Erik hesitated just enough that she set down the bottle. “I can go buy some more.”
“That would be great,” Erik said.
“I’ll come back with lots and lots.”
“That would be great.”
On her way out to get beer, she looked for Dreyfuss and found him sitting on his bed with his face in his hands. His situation was legitimately dire. He’d managed to revive his old mortgage, but tech-driven market pressure had pushed the value of his property up by thirty percent or more in the year Pip had been away. This had triggered a new round of shenanigans with his modified mortgage payments. He’d been given differing figures for these payments and had naturally chosen the lowest one, provided by a bank employee who then disappeared and who the bank claimed to have no record of, despite his having taken down her name and location. But without Marie’s paychecks and Ramón’s disability checks, he couldn’t pay even the lowest figure every month. All he had going for him legally was his meticulous litany of the bank’s noxious and probably felonious behavior. Pip had tried to read this litany, but it was nearly 300,000 words long.
“Hey, listen,” she said, crouching at his feet. “I have a friend who’s a lawyer for a tech company. She might know some firms that do pro bono work. Do you want me to ask her?”
“I appreciate your concern,” Dreyfuss said. “But I’ve witnessed the effect that my case has on pro bono lawyers. At first there’s an agreeable atmosphere of bonhomie, of this-is-an-injustice-and-we-will-definitely-fix-it, of why-didn’t-you-come-to-us-sooner. A week later, they have their hands and faces pressed to the window. They’re screaming, Let me out of here! I suppose—oh, never mind.”
“What?”
“It occurred to me that if we could find a mentally ill lawyer, an already premedicated individual … It’s a silly thought. Forget I mentioned it.”
“It’s actually not a bad idea.”
“No. Better to pray that Judge Costa falls down a flight of stairs between now and a week from Tuesday. Do you believe in the efficacy of prayer, Pip?”
“Not really.”
“Try to,” Dreyfuss said.
* * *
The following Sunday, Jason was among the customers waiting when she unlocked the front door of Peet’s. Knowing that he had a girlfriend, Pip resisted overinterpreting his early arrival, but he did seem to have hoped to talk to her. Lingering at the counter, he updated her on the progress of his new statistics textbook and the presentations he’d been giving to professors who refused to believe that a method could be so simple and intuitive. “They say, ‘OK, the geometry works in that one special case.
’ So I show them other examples. I ask them to give me their own incredibly complicated examples. The method always works, and they still won’t believe it. It’s like their entire careers are invested in statistics being an impossibly nonintuitive subject.”
“That’s what I always heard,” Pip said. “Do Not Take This Course.”
“And what about you? You didn’t tell me what you were doing in Bolivia.”
“Oh, well. I was interning with the Sunlight Project. You know—Andreas Wolf.”
It was amusing to see Jason’s eyes widen. The deification of Andreas was in full swing now, with candlelight memorials in Berlin and Austin, in Prague and Melbourne, and online memorial sites stretching to terabytes with messages of gratitude and sorrow; it was like the Aaron Swartz phenomenon, only a hundred times larger.
“Are you kidding me?” Jason said.
“Um, no. I was there. Not when he died—I left at the end of January.”
“That’s incredible.”
“I know—weird, right?”
“Did you actually spend time with him?”
“Sure. Everyone there did. He was always around.”
“That’s incredible.”
“Don’t say that too many times or you’ll make me feel bad.”
“That’s not what I meant. I know you’re really smart. I just didn’t know you were interested in Web stuff.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t. Then I was. Then I wasn’t again.”
Although it would have disappointed her, by showing Jason to be as starstruck as most of the world seemed to be, she expected him not to let the subject drop. But he did. He asked her what her plans were now. She confessed that she couldn’t see much farther than going home after work and whacking a tennis ball. He said he’d recently taken up tennis himself. He remarked that they should hit together sometime, but it was a vague remark, deflated by the known fact of his having a girlfriend, and he retreated to his favored table with his Sunday Times.
Whatever chemistry she and Jason had had was still there, if only in the form of regret about never really having acted on it. She realized, with additional regret, that he was probably the sweetest good-looking boy who’d ever shown strong interest in her. She felt chagrined that she’d failed to appreciate this when it might have mattered. She hoped that he was feeling some additional regret of his own, now that he knew that Andreas Wolf had esteemed her.
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