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.
But the weird thing was, I couldn't locate anything on the box saying what the cards were to be used for. So I guess it's just this human instinct to stick your business card in a slot. Like you're going to win . . . what-a free orange drink machine for your birthday party? I saw a woman's card from Hewlett-Packard and a card from some guy in Mexico saying "Graduate from Stanford Graduate School of Business." Here's this Stanford graduate at McDonald's putting his card in a box at random. I just don't understand people sometimes. Didn't he learn anything at Stanford?
Geek party tonight. Relief! Without geek parties, we'd never see anybody but OURSELVES, day in, day out. And the big news of the day was that Karla and I found a place to house-sit-it belongs to a woman who got the layoff package from Apple. We move in this weekend (yayyy!), and the move comes as some relief as the Karla/Mom not communicating thing is oddly wearing on all of us.
The party: It was in San Francisco (the "sit-tay," as now cooler-than-us-by-virtue-of-living-there Bug and Susan call it), in Noe Valley at Ann and Jorge's, Anatole's friends. Jorge's with Sun Microsystems and Ann's with 3DO. There were LARGE quantities of delicious, snobby San Francisco food, great liquor, industry gossip, and TVs displaying earthquake damage all over the apartment. Since us Oop!sters are all broke, we saved pots of money by not eating all day before the party. We never eat before geek parties.
In the moneyed world of Silicon Valley, nothing is uncooler than being broke. Karla and I were both curious to see how Ann and Jorge live. When
we arrived, I was overwhelmed by the hipness factor. And where are the GEEKS? Everyone was dressed. . . . like real people. Where were the ironic fridge magnets? The futons? The IKEA furniture? The Nerf products? The house looked as though it had been made over by Martha Stewart. There were REAL couches, obviously purchased NEW, in red velvet with gold and silver silk throw pillows; Matisse-derived area rugs; little candles everywhere; a REAL dining table with SIX chairs around it in its OWN ROOM with vases and bowls full of pine cones on the mantel. These people were like ADULTS . . . seamless!
Susan said they've merely disguised their evidence of not having a life: "I mean, it's like you go to somebody's house for Thanksgiving and they've spent eighteen hours covering the rooms with little orange squashes and quinces and crepe paper, and the meal is like Henry the Eighth, and you can't eat because you get this creepy sick feeling that the person who did the dinner has nothing else to do with their life. It's the dark side of Martha Stewart's Living."