Ed King (24 page)

On Saturday evening, Ed knocked on Ms. Klein’s door. Again she was wearing the mary janes; she’d been reading something, a magazine, and had come to the door with it rolled in her hand. “My calculator,” Ed said. “I still can’t find it.”

“No,” said Ms. Klein. “Go away.”

By Sunday at two, U Prep had taken the Spokane Math Extravaganza First Place trophy. The club members celebrated with ice cream and left town. What a relief it was for all of them now to head for home at the advent of a two-week winter break, with very little homework and no looming competitions. The atmosphere in the van, on this return trip, was festive; they ate hamburgers, drank pop, cranked up the radio, and made lewd jokes. In Snoqualmie Pass, they pulled off the road and for ten minutes threw snowballs at each other. It was during this mêlée that Ms. Klein found Ed and asked him, quietly, if he would join her the next day for a visit to a Japanese garden.

He went. They strolled side by side in a prelude to carnality. The difference was that she seemed authentically interested in the lanterns, bridges, ponds, and bonsai plants, whereas he found it all inexplicable and dull, and privately scoffed at the other people present—a grave couple in their fifties—because they acted as if they were Zen monks-in-training. But should he or shouldn’t he utter his sentiments, were they or weren’t they the right ones to have, did he or didn’t he fake interest in the gardens? Or did he just silently stick to his guns, the guns of a guy who was his own guy no matter what, because that was what women really wanted? What would happen if he “liked” the weeping willow? What would happen if he didn’t?

They came to certain irises she liked—rare water irises, she said—that bloomed briefly in spring, but that were also right now poignant in their waiting and in the way they shivered in the breeze. Ed, gambling, said, “I’ll be honest—I don’t get it. I mean, yeah, okay, plants, but what’s the enormous, big deal?”

She led him to a nearby bench, not so much to look at the irises as to take them in as a case in point as she explained the enormous, big deal: how you shouldn’t just
look
at irises but instead dwell in their exquisite presence in the hope of capturing, without ever clinging to, something universal and poetic. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Sure.”

“I knew you would,” Ms. Klein said.

Ms. Klein lived in Wallingford, near a shop funded by Planned Parenthood that sold condoms and lubricants. Wallingford still had hippie vestiges: a granola café, a run-down independent theater, a used-record/head shop, a nursery peddling Gro-Lux lights, and broadsides dispensed by badgering idealists in front of a smelly co-op. Ed hadn’t thought of it this way before, but Ms. Klein had come of age in the sixties, so maybe she was part of that era’s free-sex scene—
Hair
, Woodstock, hot tub orgies, and those communes where everybody fucked everybody. Sure enough, in her bed that afternoon—also Reed’s bed, she reminded him, laughing—Ms. Klein began by explaining Tantra: no wanting anything beyond the here and now, was what he took her to be getting at, because that would make the here and now more exquisite. She wanted sensation, on the premise that there was nothing else, but to Ed it seemed harder to live in the moment when you were constantly battling to ratchet up the tension. He had the feeling she rated her orgasms, all three, that afternoon.

Still, he felt great afterward, well served by her skillful means, a guy who’d given but who’d also taken from a woman who was older and living with somebody. The satisfaction now tucked in his underpants also suffused his thoughts about himself: how excellent it was to be eighteen and planking someone else’s woman—a woman, not a girl, that was the main thing, that was, for Ed, as they say, a revelation. When she warned him, “Reed will be home in an hour,” he took it to mean that she wanted more, that she couldn’t get enough of a guy in his prime, and that his brief refractory periods made him perfect for Tantra. They did make him perfect for it. He soon became what Tantrists call “a consort.” He learned to do it for long stints, while barely moving, in the lotus position. One day in May, they were joined in the lotus position when Reed came home. He was supposed to be sanding a houseboat for painting, but instead here he was. Ms. Klein told Ed to get dressed and go away. He could hear their anguished acrimony as he fled.

Reed, wielding the moral wrath of the cuckold, made sure Darlene lost her job at U Prep for the crime of sleeping with a student. Since Ed was the victim, his identity was not revealed, but Recline left the school in full-fledged disgrace. Her name was published in two newspapers, alongside her photo from the previous year’s annual. Briefly, she was notorious
for her beauty and Eros. Ed was, too, but only among his classmates, who all seemed to know who’d been planking Recline.

Sexual congress with his Math Club adviser ultimately did Ed no good at school, despite protestations from the administration that he was absolutely not to blame. In May he was skipped over as a valedictorian and had to watch while Si and three other accomplished classmates were tapped to speak at graduation. With family and friends gathered in the football grandstands underneath a cantilevered roof, Si took the podium in garish sunlight, toyed with his tassel, led with a giggle, and quoted the Ramones from “I Wanna Be Sedated.” He connected the soccer team’s unexpectedly strong season with
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
, and recalled what a hassle it had been in ’79 for kids in the class of ’81 to have new driver’s licenses “but no gas, because of OPEC.” Later, there were family pictures on the field, during which Si said repeatedly, “Hurry up.” “Try a little patience,” Alice shot back. Dan said, “Simon,
cooperate
.”

Ed was a summer lifeguard at a Lake Washington beach where great-looking girls sunned in groups on large towels. Many of them, Ed noted from his perch, were seriously dedicated to roasting themselves evenly, and rotated and turned in accordance with the sun’s arc, and unfastened their tops during facedown sessions. Ed’s job, of course, was to keep an eye on swimmers and to yell at them through a megaphone for infractions, but at least half the time he earned money for girl-watching. Then, one day, along came Darlene Klein in a black bikini. She wore sunglasses, carried a beach bag, and had a hairstyle he hadn’t seen on her before—cornrows. “Ed,” she said, stopping where he had a fabulously steep view of her cleavage. “Ed King.”

“Hey.”

“I live nearby now. In a studio. By myself.”

He went there after work. He went most days after work. And then it was time to go to Stanford.

At Stanford, Ed had an eighteen-year-old’s epiphany: that he wanted to be not only rich and famous, but a historical figure with a huge role on the world stage—like Gutenberg, say, or Galileo. Was that too much to ask? As a guiding dream? Privately? Wasn’t it normal to want immortality—normal, that is, for a freshman at a good college? Everything on
campus seemed designed, after all, to encourage Ed to have a big ambition, maybe not one as grandiose as his, but nevertheless a major project of some kind, something to propel him into his future, where, as a grad, he’d be its master. But what was it? Already, during his first week as a freshman, Ed was feverishly sorting through the possibilities fomented by professors who had things to say like “Math is the key to the otherwise unimaginable,” and “Math is the arena of humanity’s great quest to finally understand the universe.” Reeling, even giddy, after a lecture in this key, Ed floated across campus to Hoover Tower. On its observation deck, gazing over tessellating red-tiled roofs and beyond the far edge of the Stanford city-state to where the peninsula merged, in smog, with San Francisco Bay, he thought, “This is the beginning for me. I’m going to do something great.”

But what? The screamingly obvious choices were math and computer science, because Stanford grads in math and computer science were right now making notoriously large fortunes, and names for themselves, developing—as it said in Ed’s glossy welcome packet—“world-changing software on a par, in its impact, with the printing press and the television.” Stanford’s message was that the paradoxes and conundrums of math were on the verge, at last, of human penetration, with an assist from a new and vast computing power that would revolutionize life as we know it. There were engineers at Stanford using phone lines to transmit prodigiously large amounts of data, programmers working on ways for computers to “talk” to other computers, and an off-campus research institute, SRI, with Department of Defense contracts. All around Ed, on the campus paths, in the dorms, classrooms, libraries, and lecture halls, was the heady feel of history being made, of people who were in the right place at the right time and who didn’t want to miss the opportunity. The campus computers had waiting lists, the seminars given by entrepreneurs were thronged, the job-interview fairs were feeding frenzies, and the professors nurtured acolytes and fans. And just down the road were a hundred companies poised not only to hire Stanford grads but to pay them previously unheard-of salaries.

Ed declared his major—math—and settled into the dorm room he shared with a kid from Mamaroneck who openly disliked him. They both had new Apple II computers, and they both wrote code late into the night while listening to music through headphones. Within a month,
Ed’s notable facility in writing algorithms got him an invite to work at SAIL, Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. Settled into a nest of student drones, he worked on an algorithm that would allow for more command options without a keyboard expansion, then on modifying a typesetting system dependent on hyphenation. At SAIL, late at night, for fun, he hacked wire-service dispatches. It wasn’t the news itself but getting it this way that kept him at it. When light flashes were seen on Io, a moon of Jupiter, Ed knew about it right away, and when summer temperatures in Holland broke a record for the century, he knew that immediately, too. Nevertheless, in January he left behind SAIL’s ample mainframe and went to work at SRI because his adviser, Doug Elarth, asked him to.

Elarth, who Ed thought must be fifty-five or sixty, talked a lot. Tall, narrow-shouldered, bespectacled, and cotton-headed, he narrated his life in hallways and elevators. Unsolicited reports often issued from his mouth, such as “I forgot to feed my daughter’s gerbil this morning, so I’ll stop by the house on my way to Menlo Park,” and “My wife went to a doctor because she thinks she has shingles.” Once, he displayed the stub of his missing left ring finger for Ed and reported, “Lost it when I was seventeen, working in the slim space between a threshing drum and a grain sieve.” Another time, while one hand held down an eyelid and the other, nearby, poised a dropper of artificial tears, he told Ed that he had “blepharitis, which if you didn’t know this associates with rosacea.” “I have to go to the hardware store to pick up a garden-hose repair kit.” “I just listened to Mongo Santamaría in the car.” “There was a report on NPR last night on recent improvements in seismology meters.” “My neighbor saw John McEnroe on an airplane.”

There was an upside to Elarth. Meeting Ed in a stairwell one day while futzing with an umbrella, he said, “Mechanism’s stuck,” then added, “There used to be a guy here named Carl Sunshine who carried an umbrella wherever. The Carl Sunshine whose name is on
RFC 675
.” When Ed expressed polite interest in
RFC 675
, Elarth insisted on giving him a beat-up copy that had been blurrily mimeographed in 1975. It described, prosaically and in diagrams, how a global computing network might work. In other words, it described an “Internet.”

Elarth was a dreamer. His beginning- and end-of-semester lectures were fabulist bookends. He wrote the sort of papers nobody could read,
but he also wrote accessible if discursive essays that fancifully extrapolated from advances in technology to happy changes in human existence. He was a utopian, a NASA consultant, and an underwater photographer with a theory about the mathematical basis for coral reefs. Since the National Science Foundation was in Washington, Elarth spent a lot of time there, lobbying for Stanford as a supercomputer site. He had contacts everywhere. Terrible at delegating, he oversaw the incidental. Once, Ed helped Elarth haul data boxes to his car—a Dodge Aries with a memo pad Velcroed to its steering wheel—and it was clear from what was underfoot that, while driving, Elarth ate a lot of barbecue potato chips. They went back to Elarth’s office in an air-conditioned elevator. The day was hot and Elarth was tired, so they took a break on folding chairs before beginning a second round of box hauling.

“Today is sort of a metaphor,” reflected Elarth. “We put a few million computations in boxes, take them to the car, drive them to UPS, and ship them off to the people at Princeton, when they could all be available on CSNET and nobody would have to do anything.”

They took more boxes down the stairs and out the door, Elarth still complaining about physical reality: “Absolutely no point. This is archaic. Boxes of data—it should be a joke. None of this has to weigh anything.”

He dropped his box in the car trunk. Ed nestled his beside it. “Neanderthal,” concluded Elarth. He shook his head so as to indicate that humanity was pathetic. “You heard of Murray Leinster? I’ll loan you Murray Leinster.” They went back in, and Elarth dug around in files until he found a pulp monthly called
Astounding Science Fiction
dated March 1946. “This guy saw down the pipeline,” said Elarth. “I read it when I was a farm kid.”

Ed took the magazine and read Leinster’s short story, which was called, oddly, “A Logic Named Joe,” and which began, “It was on the third day of August that Joe come off the assembly line, and on the fifth Laurine come into town, an’ that afternoon I saved civilization.” Ed wanted to quit after a first sentence like that one, but because Elarth claimed its author “saw down the pipeline,” he read: