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.
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.”