City of Sand

by Robert Kroese

  Instead, he found himself thanking the crowd for their kind welcome and rambling about how much he appreciated the outpouring of support from the Glazier Semiconductor family. Having stepped out on a limb, he went on to talk about how much Jessica loved working at Glazier Semiconductor, and how meaningful the retrospective project had been to her. “I remember one night we were talking on the phone,” Benjamin found himself saying, “and Jessica said, ‘Dad, I just feel like I belong here.’” He paused and looked out at the audience, who were listening with rapt attention. The eyes of several women near him were glassy with tears. “I know that Jessica is in a better place now,” he went on, “but I’m so glad she was able to experience the Glazier Semiconductor family before she passed on. God bless you all.”

  Benjamin stepped away from the podium and made his way to the exit, as the crowded erupted in thunderous applause. As he pushed open the exit door, they were giving him a standing ovation. Benjamin exited into the dark parking lot, walked behind a Ford Explorer, and vomited his chicken marsala onto the asphalt.

  Chapter Seven

  There was a rapping at the car window and Benjamin realized he’d been sleeping. He tried to roll down the window, but the car wasn’t on, so nothing happened. Someone was standing just outside but the way the parking lot lights refracted on the glass, he couldn’t make out who it was.

  He opened the door and stepped out, finding himself face to face with William Glazier’s housekeeper, Lucia. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Benjamin nodded. “Yes,” he said. How long had he been sitting there? The parking lot was still full, so the event must still be going on.

  “I thought that was terrible,” Lucia said. “Making you go up there and talk like that. Did he even tell you he was going to do that?”

  Benjamin shook his head. “No, but it’s okay. I didn’t mind.”

  “It’s not okay,” said Lucia sternly. “Hijo de puta. He had no right to make you do that.”

  “Were you at the party?” Benjamin asked. “I didn’t see you there.”

  Lucia glared at him. “I served you your dinner,” she said.

  “Oh my god,” said Benjamin. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t—”

  Lucia broke into laughter. “I was in the kitchen,” she said.

  Benjamin wanted to be angry, but something about the way Lucia’s dimples quivered as she laughed made it impossible. He found himself laughing too. “Okay,” he said. “You got me.”

  “Lo siento,” Lucia said, putting her hand on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry. I’m as bad as Mr. Glazier.”

  “Not even close,” said Benjamin. “You were just having fun. Glazier was—I don’t know what Glazier was doing.”

  “He does that when he feels threatened,” Lucia said. “Puts people on the spot. I’m not sure he even knows he’s doing it. He’s very polite, usually, but sometimes he gets that way. He’s been drinking tonight.”

  “You think he feels threatened by me?”

  “I don’t know. He’s been acting strangely lately. I mean, he’s always been eccentric, and people put up with him because he’s William Glazier, but lately he’s been different. Anxious.”

  “Your name is Lucia, right?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Stone.”

  “Call me Benjamin.”

  “Okay.”

  “So you work all day at Mr. Glazier’s house, and then he makes you work at company events too?”

  “He doesn’t make me. It’s a chance to make some extra money.”

  “Are you done for the night?”

  “No,” Lucia said. “I’ll be here for another couple of hours, at least. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  Benjamin smiled. “I’m okay,” he said.

  After a pause, Lucia said, “May I ask, Benjamin, why you were talking to Mr. Glazier? Are you investigating your daughter’s death?”

  “Not officially,” said Benjamin. “But I don’t know what else to do.”

  “You could go home.”

  “I’ve got to wait until the medical examiner’s office releases the body.”

  “How long will that be?”

  “Another two days.”

  “You should be at home.”

  “There’s nothing for me at home.” His candor with Lucia surprised him. Why was he confessing so much to William Glazier’s housekeeper?

  “I’m sorry,” Lucia said. “You don’t know anyone in Sunnyview?”

  “Not anymore. I grew up here, but everyone I knew is gone.”

  Lucia nodded. “Alright,” she said, as if accepting the inevitability of the situation. “You’ll come over for dinner tomorrow.”

  “To Glazier’s house? I’m not sure that’s—”

  “No, silly. I don’t live with Mr. Glazier. To my house. It will be late, though, after I get off work.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” said Benjamin. “I’ll be fine, really.”

  “Where will you eat?”

  “They have these places called restaurants.”

  Lucia shook her head. “No. You’ll come over to my house. Four thirty-five Walnut Street. Six o’clock.”

  Benjamin laughed. In Lucia’s mind, the matter had clearly been decided. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you. Should I bring anything?”

  “Just your charming personality,” Lucia said. “I need to get back to work. You have a good night, Benjamin.”

  “Goodnight,” said Benjamin, and watched Lucia walk back to the social hall. When she was safely inside, he got in the Buick and started the engine. For the first time since returning to Sunnyview—and for a long time before that, if he was honest with himself—he didn’t feel alone.

  Chapter Eight

  The boy ran toward the creek, and Benjamin followed, making sure to keep him in view. Benjamin’s chest burned, but he pressed on. The boy splashed through the creek and continued to the other side. Benjamin ran to the creek edge and leaped over it, landing awkwardly on the uneven ground and falling to his knees.

  Benjamin got to his feet and continued in pursuit. He winced as his weight landed on his ankle; he’d apparently twisted it in the fall. He forced himself to keep on, knowing that following the boy was his only chance of escaping the orchard, but he couldn’t keep pace. The boy was getting farther and farther away. Soon Benjamin would be alone in the orchard—a thought that inexplicably terrified him.

  “Stop!” cried Benjamin after the boy. The boy stopped for a moment and turned to look at Benjamin. Benjamin halted as well, leaning against a tree and gasping for breath. Benjamin squinted in the bright light breaking through the canopy of leaves, and he realized that the sun was no longer directly overhead. Time had passed, and the sun had moved to the west. Benjamin’s relief that he was no longer lost in an endless sea of trees was tempered by a realization of the inevitability of that western pull. For behind the boy was something Benjamin hadn’t noticed before: a dark edifice, its twin parapets framing the dying sun.

  The boy turned away from him and continued running toward the castle. Dread gripped Benjamin at the thought of the boy reaching the castle. Even being stranded in the infinite orchard was preferable to that. Benjamin limped toward the castle. “No!” he shouted, but his voice was oddly muted. “Stop!” he cried again, but it came out as a hoarse whisper. Benjamin blinked in the blinding sun, blinking away tears. The boy’s frame had been swallowed by the black silhouette of stones.

  Benjamin spent most of the day at the library, trying to learn more about XKredits.com, Cameron Payne and Farscope Capital, but discovered little of interest. There was a lot of gee-whiz speculation, but very little in the way of hard facts. By the early afternoon, his eyes had completely glazed over. When he realized he’d read the same paragraph about “vertical market integration” six times without comprehending anything, he decided to take a break to get some coffee. His head wasn’t bothering him as much today, but he still felt a little hazy, as if he were running low on sleep. The coffee perked him
up a bit and he returned to the library to continue his research.

  He decided that the XKredits.com/Farscope Capital angle was a dead end. If there was anything there, he wasn’t going to find it at the library or on the Internet. It was time to spread the net a little wider.

  As he considered what angle to pursue next, he found himself thinking again about Glazier’s strange homage to Dominick Spiegel the night before. Was it truly guilt that Benjamin had sensed? And if so, what had triggered that guilt after it had apparently lay dormant for fifty years?

  The Sunnyview Library had a fairly extensive collection of books about the history of Sunnyview, Glazier Semiconductor, and Silicon Valley in general. Benjamin gathered a stack of these and began poring through them. He found a book on the early days of Silicon Valley particularly interesting. The seeds for the modern information age, he found, were sown in the 1940s, when Glazier, Spiegel, and a handful of other scientists gathered in the shadow of Stanford University as part of a government-funded initiative to develop Allied countermeasures against enemy radar. After the war, many of the scientists remained in the area, and several of them, including Dominick Spiegel, went to work for William Glazier. The company eventually came to be known as Glazier Semiconductor. Over the next few years, many of the men left to start other companies, some of them blaming Glazier’s overbearing personality and eccentric management style. Several of these companies prospered, and they—along with Glazier Semiconductor itself—became the backbone of modern day Silicon Valley.

  Benjamin was a bit embarrassed to realize just how little he actually knew about William Glazier, despite his personal connection with the man and the city of Sunnyview. He hadn’t understood that Glazier was, as much as any one man could be, the father of Silicon Valley. Nor was he aware of Glazier’s less noble pursuits.

  For example, in July 1945, the War Department had asked Glazier to prepare a report on the question of probable casualties from an invasion of the Japanese mainland. Glazier concluded:

  If the study shows that the behavior of nations in all historical cases comparable to Japan’s has in fact been invariably consistent with the behavior of the troops in battle, then it means that the Japanese dead and ineffectives at the time of the defeat will exceed the corresponding number for the Germans. In other words, we shall probably have to kill at least 5 to 10 million Japanese. This might cost us between 1.7 and 4 million casualties including 400,000 to 800,000 killed.

  If Glazier was the man who started the Information Age, he was also, to some extent, the man who started the Nuclear Age. Were it not for his recommendation, Truman might not have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. If Benjamin were looking for reasons behind Glazier’s guilt, the deaths of seventy thousand civilians in Hiroshima might be a good start. But why would the guilt suddenly strike now, after fifty-five years?

  And Hiroshima wasn’t the only sin for which Glazier might seek atonement. In the 1970s, Glazier became intensely interested in questions of race, intelligence, and eugenics. He believed this study was important to the genetic future of the human species, and one point even described it as “the most important work of his career.” Glazier argued that the higher rate of reproduction among the less intelligent was having a dysgenic effect, and that a drop in average intelligence would ultimately lead to a decline in civilization. Glazier advocated sterilization for those below a minimum threshold of intelligence, and even donated sperm to a sperm bank in the interest of increasing the quality of the human gene pool.

  Glazier’s controversial opinions had eventually led to him stepping down as the CEO of Glazier Semiconductor, although he retained a controlling interest in the company. Over the past twenty years he had largely stayed quiet about social policy questions, and the public seemed content to forgive these aberrations in light of Glazier’s genius and overall societal contribution as the product of a less enlightened age.

  All of Glazier’s seemingly unrelated obsessions seemed to stem from one particular aspect of his personality: an obsession with foreseeing—and influencing—the future. Glazier had established himself early on as an uncanny prognosticator of future societal trends based on limited data, which was presumably why the government had come to him with their request for a report on the likely consequence of an Allied invasion of Japan.

  But Benjamin found himself continually wanting to go back to the beginning, to find some sort of starting point for the story of William Glazier. He found several biographical sketches, but he wasn’t interested in Glazier’s birth and schooling in Palo Alto. He was looking for something, a crux of some kind, but he didn’t know what it was.

  Until he found it.

  The government funded-project that Glazier and Spiegel had been a part of during World War II was generally referred to simply as “the Sunnyview Labs,” but it had another name in the beginning, one which Glazier himself had come up with: the Glazier Lab for the Research of Electronics, also known as GLARE.

  Chapter Nine

  Benjamin stayed at the library, reading about GLARE, until it was time to leave for dinner at Lucia’s. From what he could gather, GLARE hadn’t had a significant impact on the course of the war—it wasn’t founded until January of 1945, less than four months before the German surrender. But its impact on what was to become Silicon Valley was profound and lasting. The research done at GLARE, and the contributions made by its members over the next two decades, made the South Bay area the global center of information technology.

  Was this the “glare” of which Jessica had spoken? And was the homeless man’s mention of “the glare” somehow related? The obvious interpretation of the phrase “blinded by the glare,” given the organization’s purpose, was that it was a reference to the Axis intelligence services being stymied by GLARE’s anti-radar technology. But what possible reason could Jessica have to be talking about an obscure and long-defunct World War II counter-intelligence organization? None that Benjamin could think of.

  As far as Benjamin could tell, there had been no formal dissolution of GLARE. It had lived on for a few years after the war, but seemed to have disbanded after Dominick Spiegel’s death in 1952. There was little information about Spiegel’s death; the most comprehensive source of information about the car accident that had taken Spiegel’s life was an article in the Sunnyview Herald. According to the article, a drunk had run the stop sign at Fremont and Olive, slamming into Spiegel’s car and killing him instantly. The accident made the front page of the Herald, and Benjamin supposed it had been a pretty big deal at the time. He didn’t remember it happening, though; he had only been ten years old at the time.

  “Fremont and Olive,” Benjamin said to himself as he drove the Buick across town to Lucia’s house. It bothered him that he couldn’t picture the intersection. Checking his watch, he saw that he had a few minutes to spare, so he made a detour down Fremont Street. As he neared Olive, he pulled to the side of the street, finding an open parking space next to a meter. He got out and walked to the intersection. Benjamin tried to imagine the intersection with narrower streets and stop signs instead of traffic lights, but he couldn’t make the image match anything in his memories. He couldn’t ever remember being to this intersection before. How was that possible? He’d lived in this town for years. How could he have a blind spot for this particular intersection?

  Shaking his head, he walked back to the Buick. He got in and drove to Lucia’s house.

  Lucia lived in the Sand Hill Creek area, not far from where his daughter’s body had been found. The neighborhood was pretty rough, but Lucia’s house was well maintained, from what he could see. The sun was setting, so it was hard to get a good look. Benjamin parked the Buick on the street, walked to the front door and rang the doorbell. After a moment, a young, brown-haired girl opened the door. She looked like she was around eight years old.

  “Hello,” said the girl, looking brightly up at Benjamin. “Are you Mr. Stone?”

  “That’s me,” said Benjamin with a smile. “Is you
r mom home?”

  The girl turned back inside the house. “Mamá!” she cried. “Mr. Stone is here!”

  A short while later, Lucia appeared behind the girl. “Come in, Benjamin,” she said. “I see you’ve met Sofia already. Sofia, go wash up for dinner.”

  “Nice to meet you, Sofia,” said Benjamin, as the girl ran off. Lucia let him into the house. It was small and somewhat cluttered, with toys lying strewn about the floor, but it was clean and cheery. Lucia led Benjamin into the living room, where a man not much older than Benjamin sat in a dilapidated armchair watching Leave it to Beaver on television.

  “Papá!” shouted Lucia at the man. “Our guest is here.”

  After a moment, the man looked up at Benjamin, blinking as if he’d just woken up.

  “Papá, this is Mr. Stone,” said Lucia.

  “Call me Benjamin,” said Benjamin.

  “This is my father, Benjamin. You can call him Vicente.”

  The man muttered something in Spanish and turned back to the television.

  Lucia snapped at him, also in Spanish, and he waved his hand at her. Benjamin noticed an irregular patch of discolored skin on the back of Vicente’s hand and forearm where no hair grew. It reminded him of the scars borne by the old man who had spoken at Glazier’s party the night before.

  She shook her head. “Papá has gotten… how do you say it? Cocky?”

  “Crotchety,” said Benjamin with a smile.

  “Crotchety!” said Lucia, loudly. She turned to her father. “Eres un viejo crotchety!”

  Her father continued to ignore her.

  Lucia led Benjamin into the kitchen, where she was working on dinner.

  “He’s been working long hours at the plant,” she said apologetically. “They had some problems getting the machines ready to make the new chips, and now they’re trying to catch up.”