Ed King (22 page)

“What are you talking about?” said Ed.

“You should see someone else. I could recommend another person. I’m sorry. It just isn’t what’s going to happen—you coming here for therapy.”

Ed rolled his eyes. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Are you telling me to leave?”

“No. You can stay. At no charge. If you want to. But not after today. I’m sorry.”

“And sit here with someone who thinks she can’t help me? Why would I do that? What would be the point? This is really weird,” said Ed. “I didn’t think I was going to get blown off when I came in here.”

Pierce didn’t answer, so Ed went further. “How am I supposed to feel?” he said. “I’ve been rejected. Kicked out for not being—what? I don’t know. I’m a loser here. But you’re the wizard and I’m the nobody. You call the shots, I take them in the chest. This is just really
wrong
.”

“I understand,” said Pierce.

“No, you don’t.”

For the first time since he’d walked into her garret, Pierce rearranged herself in her chair. She sat up straighter. It made her seem larger; she
expanded to fill her corner. “What I do,” she said, “is look at the parts so I can understand the whole. And I’ve been sitting here with you, looking at your parts, and, frankly, I don’t think I can go any further. I don’t think it’s wise for us to go any further. I think you’re better off not going further, Ed. Some people are just better off.”

“Well, I’m not ‘some people,’ ” Ed shot back. “That’s where you’re wrong. Because, me, if there’s something I need to know, I
always
want to know it,
always
, okay? That’s me. That’s who’s here. That’s who’s sitting in front of you right now. How could you know me after, what, twenty minutes? I don’t see where you get off dismissing me like I’m scum, like I’m nobody. Who do you think you are, doing that to
me
? I’m not listening to you about
anything
. You don’t know the
first
thing about me.”

“Look,” Theresa said. “I think you should find someone willing to prescribe, get on a drug, and enjoy your life for as long as you can.”

“There’s something wrong with you,” said Ed, and walked out.

But in the end, he’d gotten a second opinion. The drug—imipramine—erased his depression in six weeks, after which Ed felt back to his old self and ready, again, to meet his future.

Alice begged for mercy from a friend on the board, and soon Ed was installed in the eleventh grade at University Prep, the first-rate private school Simon attended. Once settled there, he had to give his younger brother credit for carving out a niche at their highly stratified academy, despite being—or because he was—younger than everyone else. Si was the interesting and eccentric nerd who’d skipped a grade and was possibly a genius; Si was the brilliant, gangly goofball who would be a billionaire one day; Si was, embarrassingly, Ed’s classmate, another junior. He had friends, even close friends—even female friends. He was wedded to a group of nerds that included two average-looking girls. They ran in a pack, played Dungeons and Dragons, and met late at night in a Jack in the Box. Ed was sure that Si was a virgin, though he also knew there were girls out there who would sleep with a guy who chewed his nails, drank chocolate milk, kept a pet turtle, and was proud of his ability with a Rubik’s Cube. Yet as much as girls might like Si for being bright, he was also too flighty, too easily discombobulated, and too geeky to get inside their pants.

Si was also a night owl. His bedroom featured half-empty Coke cans and smelled as if the window had never been opened. He had dozens of video games, hundreds of comic books, and a shelf of programming manuals. Slowed in February of his sophomore year by an emergency operation to remove a gangrenous appendix, Si had come back in earnest that spring when it came to late-night video-game coding. He talked about coding constantly. He disseminated demos on floppy disks in labeled sleeves. With input from friends—and critiques from Ed—Si made progress on an Apple II effort, which was to code a game called
Martian Mangler
for paid magazine publication. Ed, exploring progressive demos of
Martian Mangler
, had to admit that Si was good with graphics and had assembly language pretty much down pat, but as for creativity, that was nil.
Martian Mangler
was thinly realized, and worse, derivative. It looked like a cross between
Asteroids
and
Ultima
, but with neither the exhilaration of the former nor the depth of the latter, it played like electronic checkers. Though Ed tried to tell Si all of this, Si refused to hear it. He kept insisting he’d invented a pot of gold when what he really had was a flop. Or so Ed thought until
inCider
paid Simon $100 for
Martian Mangler
. After that, it was $150 for
Arcturan Attack
and $200 for
Venus SkyTrap
. Si entered a game called
Moon Buggy Blaster
in
UpTime
’s design competition and won $500 in prize money. On letterhead he started calling himself Programmer-in-Chief at King Software, Inc. By the time his junior year started, his late-night friends had to compete with friends he made on bulletin boards, and his Dungeons and Dragons habit was addressed not at Jack in the Box but in MUDs. Simon even had a digital girlfriend who called herself HackAttack, but Katie for their one-to-one chats. Ostensibly she lived in Saratoga Springs, went to Skidmore, and was the cousin of the drummer for the Misfits. But who knew? She might be fifty and a perv with sideburns.

On Dan’s fiftieth birthday, Ed and Si withdrew to Simon’s lair for a round of
Heavyweight Boxing
. For an uncoordinated guy, Si had dexterous thumbs, which translated into fancy footwork in the ring and effective punch combinations. He liked to give Ed advice before he knocked him out, such as “Use Super Punch” and “Down and right for the head.” Si was high-speed instructional and “helpful” while pummeling Ed or inducing his submission. Ed gave him these small victories as part of a program of long-term guilt assuagement. They’d both gotten too old for
the old forms of hostility and, in an exploratory vein, were creating new ones.

After three knockouts, Alice called them to the table for a bouillabaisse, a Caesar salad with anchovies, and a carrot cake—Dan’s favorites. During dinner, the Kings listened to
Traditional Music of Madagascar
in tribute to Dan’s interlude as a UN doctor, and after dinner, Dan’s brother and sister each called to rib him for having arrived at fifty and to have conversations about offspring, niggling health concerns, and the endgame afflictions their father was enduring in an assisted-living facility in Pasadena. “Ed’s first choice is math at Stanford.… Simon’s number-one choice is Caltech.… Alice is busy but giving a lot of thought to what she wants to be doing now that the nest is nearly empty.…” Simon gave Dan a sloppily handwritten certificate for five free car-washes, Ed gave him a book by a Jewish doctor, and Alice gave him a dachshund, bringing it up from the garage on a leash with a red ribbon around its neck. Dan had reservations. “This is very nice and thoughtful,” he said, “but I don’t think I really want a dog.”

“Daniel,” Alice answered, while the new dachshund slobbered, “the boys are off to college before long. My thought is that we substitute this dog. I got him at the pound. He’s eighteen months. He’s smart, he’s neutered, he’s house-trained, he doesn’t bark. He’s not too big and he’s not too small. And I’ll be frank. You don’t get exercise. You say you’ll take a walk, but it’s just talk, you don’t do it. This way, you won’t have excuses, darling. You’ll be one of those guys you see on the street, walking the dog every morning and evening.”

“Thanks,” said Dan. “Thanks a lot.”

“Come on,” said Alice, stroking the dog’s head. “I didn’t name him—I thought you could name him. You have to admit, you like him, right?”

“He’s so ugly,” said Dan. “If you have to buy a dog, at least buy one with some dignity or something. That thing looks like a frankfurter on legs. Besides, dachshunds are
deutsch
, didn’t you know that? I hope you did a little homework.”

“Let’s name him Adolf,” suggested Simon.

The dachshund circumambulated, sniffing crotches. With regard to his slobbering, heavy breathing, and whining, Alice pointed out that his circumstances were unfamiliar and that such signs of distress should be expected. Dan held the leash while Alice lit the candles. In makeup mode,
he reported, after one bite of cake, “I’m going to get porky with this in the house,” to which Alice replied, “High cholesterol.”

“Actually, only my bad cholesterol is high. My good cholesterol is low.”

“Your father’s going to start walking more.”

“Alice!” said Dan. “They don’t want to hear this.”

“They love you,” said Alice. “They’re darling, loving boys. They want to listen to whatever you have to say. They’ll even make the sacrifice of eating my carrot cake so you don’t have to get … corpulent, Daniel. Look at them, just look how they’re helping. Does anyone want more ice cream at the moment, or should I put the carton away?”

Adolf stayed. Alice walked him, at first every day, then every other day, then once in a while. Adolf scratched the front door, even the doorknob, trying to get out of the house. They had to put him in the bathroom when guests came, because of his tendency to growl. In short, Adolf was an opportunity for Dan to chastise Alice. He wanted to take Adolf back to the pound, but Alice wouldn’t let him. Adolf, eventually, had to live in the garage with a bark-stopping apparatus strapped around his muzzle. Three times a day, Alice opened the garage door with the remote-control device on the visor in her Peugeot so Adolf could relieve himself. Each time, she tricked him into returning to his cave by tossing beef jerky in and shutting the door behind him as he tried to eat despite the barkstopper. Taking pity on Adolf, she’d remove it for ten minutes, during which he ate the beef jerky and lapped water while she read a magazine in the car.

In the realm of math, Ed played catch-up. He bought himself a good graphing calculator and, after rolling through Algebra III, joined Simon in Advanced Calculus and Statistics. They competed for high scores on standardized tests. They noted, and remembered, each other’s missed problems. One would go to the blackboard, when called, to race through a difficult equation or proof; the other would sit on the edge of his seat, waiting, and hoping, for a hesitation or an error, so he could chime in forcefully with a corrective. The King brothers battled over differential calculus and went head to head on information theory. How many times do you have to cut and interleave a deck of cards in order to arrive at a perfect shuffle? What are the relative probabilities of spaces and letters in an English text? You have a balance and nine coins; eight of the coins are
equal in weight, but the ninth is defective and weighs less or more than the others; find a way to determine, using the balance three times, which is the defective coin, and whether it’s heavier or lighter than the others. Ed and Simon treated these problems the way athletes treat sporting events. There were plenty of ties—and 4.0’s and A-pluses—but trends emerged, and strengths and weaknesses. Ed could never convincingly defeat Simon in the spatial world of advanced geometry and felt lost in the vortex of the non-Euclidean; Simon was markedly dominant, too, when it came to complex data analysis, and more supple in his work on number theory. Where Ed excelled was in information theory and in the creative realm of the algorithm. Ed had an affinity for algorithms the way the double-jointed have an affinity for contortions, or in the manner of an autistic savant who memorizes phone books at a glance. Supposing you needed to distribute 20,000 newspapers to 1,000 locations in 100 towns using 50 trucks—Ed could give you the algorithm in two minutes. Assume you’re confronted with
N
sleeping tigers and that to avoid being eaten when one or more wake up you are going to construct a fence around them—what’s the smallest polygon that will surround them? Again, Ed could give you the algorithm in the time it took others to understand the problem. Simon had no chance to beat him at algorithms. There, Ed was ascendant.

Not that Ed spent all of his time grappling with Simon. He spent a lot of it grappling with U Prep’s females. One, like him, was a page for a state senator over spring break in 1980; another was a member of a student group Ed joined for a summer tour of European capitals. Then there was the Math Club team, where Ed and Simon both excelled, and where Ed met Yael Anon, an Israeli transplant who, even in winter, looked so fresh from the beach at Haifa that she might still have sand in her hair. The math team traveled by van across the state for competitions with other clubs, and on these excursions Ed and Yael disported themselves in Holiday Inns and Best Westerns.

Ed looked forward to these Math Club weekends. The club’s young adviser, Darlene Klein, was popular with students because of her beauty, and widely referred to as “
De
cline,” since on her syllabi she gave her name as “D. Klein.” Privately, though, a lot of boys called her
Re
cline, because they wanted to tilt her to that position and—their going term was—plank her. Ed was among these adolescent salivators. Like many boys at U
Prep, he ogled Ms. Klein with an ever-humming erotic interest. He liked her style. He liked the way she made the Math Club van feel like a rolling excuse for levity and indulgence. Usually, the team lit out on Fridays after school, Ms. Klein at the van’s helm with a student riding shotgun, two more in rotating middle thrones, and three on the cramped rear bench. Ms. Klein was still hip enough to be part of things. She ate convenience-store candy like the rest of them, swigged pop from a large plastic bottle, fussed with the radio, gossiped about teachers and student romances, and commented on movies and music. Reaction to her in the van was mixed: Emily Sussman engaged Ms. Klein as if she was part of her inner circle; Vanessa Tate adored her, too, but more obsequiously and slavishly; Simon seemed nerdishly and frequently dubious, as if Ms. Klein was unethical and unbecoming; Linda Dorman, as always, held her cards close; and Yael Anon, with her blue eyes, Persian skin, and wild mass of tangled red hair, made sure Ms. Klein caught the gist of her commentary, which was acerbic and judgmental. That left Ed to moderate and nudge, delicately keeping Yael satisfied with affirmations, elbows, and pinches, while still reserving access to Recline and staying on her good side.