First, Michael bounced through the sliding doors around noon in a shiny happy mood, and invited us all out to see our (game show tone of voice) . . . new office! Ethan sold his Ferrari to do the lease. "Farewell 1980s!" he said. (He drives a 1987 Honda Civic now. "I feel like I'm in high school.")
Uncharacteristically brash, he yelled, "Convoy! Everybody . . . down to our new office. You, too, Mrs. Underwood . . . we've been liberated from the Habitrail."
We stuffed ourselves into two cars and drove through the vine-covered suburbs and carefully mowed, Frisbee-free lawns of Palo Alto's tech parks, to Hamilton Street, a block south of University Street downtown. And it was there that we learned what Dad has actually been doing all this time.
As Michael opened a second-floor oak door, he said to me, in a voice intended to be heard by everybody, "I figured your father's talents as a model railroader might have translatable applications into our world here . . ."
The wet paint smelled like cucumbers and sour cream and made me a bit pukey, but the feeling passed as I saw what lay before us ... the most sculptured environment I've ever seen-an entire world of Lego- hundreds of 50 x 50-stud gray pads on the floors and on the walls, all held in place with tiny brass screws. Onto these pads were built skyscrapers and animals and mazes and Lego railroads, sticking out of the walls, rounding corners, passing through holes. The colors were shocking; Lego-pure. A skeleton lay down beside a platoon of robots; cubic flowers grew beside boxcars loaded with nickels that rounded the blue railroad bends. There was a Palo Alto City Hall-a '70s Wilshire modernist box-and there was a 747 and a smoking pipe . . . and . . . everything in the world! Pylons and towers of color, and dogs and chalets . . .
"I think your father should take a bow, don't you, Daniel?"
Dad, who was in the back tinkering with a castle, looked flustered but proud, and fidgeted with a stack of two-stud yellow bricks. This universe he had built was a Guggenheim and a Toys-R-Us squished into one. We were having seizures, all of us. Susan was livid. She said, "You spent my vested stock money on ... Lego?" She was purple.
Ethan looked at me: "Michael's addiction."
I, too, was flubbered. In the magic of the moment I looked up into the corner-and I caught Mom looking, too-at a small white house in the far back corner, sprouting from a wall, with a little white picket fence around it, the occupant inside no doubt surveying all that transpired beneath its windows, and I said, "Oh, Dad, this is-the most real thing I've ever seen."
And I wondered then, how do we ever know what beauty lies inside of people, and the strange ways this world works to lure that beauty outward?
What follows I will write only because it's what happened, and I'm sick, and I don't want to lose it-I might accidentally erase the memory. I want a backup.
What happened was that while everyone was oohing and ahhing over the Lego sculptures (and staking out their new work spaces) the colors in front of my eyes began to swim, and everybody's words stopped connecting in my head, and I had to go down to the street for fresh air, and I wobbled out
the door.
It was a hot sunny day-oh California!-and I walked at random and ended up standing on the blazing piazza of the Palo Alto City Hall, baked in white light from the suntanning cement, the civil servants around me buzzing in all directions, efficiently heading off to lunch. I heard cars go by.
My body was losing its ability to regulate its temperature and I was going cold and hot, and I wasn't sure if I was hungry or whether the virus had deactivated my stomach, and I felt like my system was getting ready to shut down.
I sat in this heat and light on the low-slung steps of the hall, feeling dizzy, and not quite knowing where I was, and then I realized there was somebody sitting next to me, and it was Dad. And he said, "You're not feeling very well, are you, son."
And I said, "Nnn . . . no."
And he said, "I was following you down the streets. I was right behind you the whole time. It's the flu, isn't it? But it's more than just the flu."
I was silent.
"Right?" he asked.
"Yeah."
"I'm a young man, Daniel, but I'm stuck inside this old sack of bones. I can't help it."
"Dad . . ."
"Let me finish. And so you think I'm old. You think that I don't understand things. That I never notice what goes on around me-but I do notice. And I've noticed that I'm maybe too distant with you-and that maybe I don't spend enough time with you."
"FaceTime," I said, regretting my bad joke as the words slipped out.
"Yes. FaceTime."
Two secretaries walked by laughing at some joke they were telling, and a yuppie guy with a stack of documents walked past us.
The inside of my head did a dip, like on a ride at Knott's Berry Farm. I found myself saying, "Michael's not Jed, Dad. He just isn't. And neither am I. And I just can't keep trying to keep up with him. Because no matter how hard I run, I'm never going to catch up."
"Oh, my boy . . ."
My head was between my legs at this point, and I had to keep my eyes closed, because the light from the piazza was hurting me, and I wondered if this was how Ethan's eyes felt on his antidepressant chemicals, and then I started thinking of a small plastic swimming pool led and I used to play in when we were babies, and I think my mind was misfiring. And then I felt my father's arms around my shoulders, and I shivered, and he pulled me close to him.
I was too sick, and Dad's words weren't registering. "You and your Friends helped me once when I was lost. The whole crew of you-your casual love and help-saved me at a time when no one else could save me.
And now I can help you. I was lost, Daniel. If it weren't for you and your friends, I would never have found the green spaces or the still waters. My mind would not now be calm . . ."
But I don't remember what I said next. I have faint memories-my arms touching the warm cement-of a stop sign-of a sago palm branch brushing my cheek; my father's worried face looking forward right above my own; the clouds above his head; birds in the trees; my father's arms beneath me; depositing me within the Lego garden; my mother saying, "Dear?" and my father's voice saying, "It's okay, honey. He just needs to sleep for a long, long time."
5. TrekPolitiks
MONDAY January 17,1994
An earthquake hit Los Angeles at 4:31 this morning and the images began arriving via CNN right away. Karla and I stayed home to watch, and when Ethan, a Simi Valley boy, heard about it on the radio driving in from San Carlos, he ran right through our front yard's sprinkler to watch our TV. (His own Cablevision bill remains unpaid.) Damage seemed to be localized but extreme-the San Fernando Valley, Northridge, Van Nuys, and parts of Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades.
"The freeways!" moaned Ethan. "My beloved freeways-Antelope Valley, ripped and torn, the 405, rubble-the Santa Monica freeway at La Cienega-all collapsed."
We'd never seen Ethan cry. At the sight of some particularly devastated overpass, he told me, "I kissed my first date beside that off-ramp-we'd sit on the embankments and watch the cars go by."
Anyway, it really did make us sad to see all of this glorious infrastructure in ruins, like a crippled giant. We ate breakfast, leafed through the Handbook of Highway Engineering (1975), and watched all the collapsed structures.
Mom made us hot chocolate before she went to the library and then dropped us off at the office on her way. Ethan was a mess all day.
Dad quit his night course in C++ because all of the kids in his class were seventeen and they just stared at him and didn't think he could be a student because he was too old. The students were saying things to each other like, "If he conies too close to you shout, 'You're not my father!' as loud as you can." Kids are so cruel.
So we're going to teach Dad C++ instead.
Random moment: This afternoon I was in the McDonald's on El Camino Real near California Street and they had this Lucite box with a slot on top where people put their business cards. It was stuffed with cards. Really stuffed.