The Unknowns (24 page)

“It’s the therapists,” he says. “It is criminal, absolutely criminal,
what these people are doing.” His voice becomes firmer and more rehearsed. “You walk into their office and say,
I’ve been feeling a bit down lately
. Perhaps you’re having difficulties in your life, perhaps you’re feeling anxious or depressed, and you go looking for help. And they say,
I can tell just from looking at you that you were abused as a child
. They go down a checklist and say,
Which of these fit you
? and they read you a list of statements that could apply to anyone:
I feel different from other people, I feel uncomfortable about sex
. And when you say,
No, I was never abused
, they say,
Ah! The abuse was so awful that you’ve blocked it out
. They say,
It must have been someone you were very close to
. Sometimes they hypnotize you; they tell you hypnosis can bring these ‘repressed’ memories to the surface, when all it does is make you suggestible, so you produce whatever ‘memories’ they’re looking for. Other times they say you won’t get better until you can recover your memories, and they insist that you imagine being abused, write stories about being abused, until you start dreaming about being abused, and then they say,
Aha, the memories are coming back
!

“If you’d asked me before all this began, I would have told you that Maya was too smart and confident to fall for that kind of thing. But she was away from home for the first time, and vulnerable, and they took advantage of that. This therapist, she worked for the school, do you believe it? Ward College, to which I sent twenty thousand dollars a year, employs therapists who tear children away from their parents, who plant delusions in their minds, who warp their reality until they can’t trust anyone.”

Donald has had no direct contact with Maya since the letter. The registrar’s office stopped sending him her grades. For want of other ideas, he hired a New Hampshire private investigator named Lucas Moore, a skinny man with a ponytail who could blend in on a college campus. Lucas shadowed Maya twelve hours a day for a week, watched her go to class, to the library, to parties, to cafés, back
to her dorm. It was clear that daily observation wasn’t going to reveal anything, so Donald and Lucas switched to a long-term arrangement in which, once a month, Lucas sent a photograph of Maya in some public location, along with the date, time, and place the photo was taken. Lucas watched Maya graduate and sent one last picture before she left Concord: in cap and gown, surrounded by friends.

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.

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.”

“How much are we talking about now?”

“I can do it for two hundred thousand dollars,” he says. He’d worked out the figure before calling.

“I don’t know, Dad,” I say. “I’ll think about it.” Something
strange is happening, some reversal of the natural order, in which the inheritance passes from the son to the father, and resources flow upward through the generations. I hang up the phone and return to the game, but my eyes keep slipping down to the clock on the cable box where the hours and minutes are piling up. Maya is leaving the office in her overcoat, walking the seven blocks to my house, past the yard with the pit bull and the empty lot where the mysterious planks of wood stand like soldiers in the earth. I should put down the controller, shower, hide the evidence of the wasted day, prepare myself to deceive her about where I’ve been. But when she lets herself in I am under attack by a swarm of birdlike ghosts. She comes up behind me and musses the back of my hair, then goes into the bedroom, where the console’s shots and explosions are muffled. Of course, her departure makes me anxious and I sacrifice the game and go to her.

We sit at the kitchen counter and eat Indian food. Not telling her that I met her father yesterday is surprisingly easy; I can see how people have affairs. I don’t tell her about my dad’s phone call either—maybe because, the first time he called, she asked me if he wanted money, and I’m not happy she turned out to be right. Other than deal with our fathers, all I’ve done since I saw her last is play Xbox.

“I think I’m pretty close to the end,” I say. “Finishing a game always gives me a weird fake-accomplishment feeling. It’s a lot like disappointment.” She’s bored: she doesn’t play with her fingernails or say
uh-huh
in a distracted way, but the spark of her interest is gone. Bored, she’s not magic anymore. For some reason I remember the imaginary dog she might have killed.

We finish eating and move to the bedroom in a state that combines vacant lust and a disinclination to keep talking. As I start to go down on her, I remember that I began that way last time; tonight I should have taken a more concupiscent approach, to demonstrate creativity and to flatter her with the suggestion of passionate desire. Ten minutes later, engaged in coitus a posteriori, I find myself
watching as if from the side of the room. The perspective is cold and arousing, and I am handling the physiomechanics of the act with unusual confidence, until she says, “I need it rougher.”

So what is this? An artifact of childhood trauma? A vestigial need to revisit that dark nexus of sex and coercion, to touch some wound inside herself? Or is it the other way around: the memories of abuse at her father’s hands are masochistic fantasies, an ordinary kink misunderstood? I am not watching from the side anymore. I put my hand on the back of her head and push her face down. She makes an enthusiastic sound, or perhaps just a reflexive grunt. I am Donald now, and I give it to her, punish her for betraying me, for lying, for pretending to be a victim when she’s just a slut. And then I ejaculate, much too soon. She wants to kiss afterward, which is almost more than I can stand.

Cynthia is one of those children who, lacking some gene for adolescence, have not once worried or disappointed their parents. Her grades were never less than adequate, her demeanor never hostile, her behavior never self-destructive. Every friend was presented to Doug and Rose Gerney over the family dinner table. (They adored Danny Keach, who recognized that charming them was a station on the path into Cynthia’s heart and jeans.) She graduated college in four years and proceeded to obtain a skilled job. She flies home for major holidays and helps with the cooking. So it was a new experience for the Gerney family when Cynthia told her parents she’d decided that men just weren’t her thing.

She calls to give me the news. “I need to tell you about it,” she says. “Can I come after work?”

I make preliminary noises of regret: I’m speaking at this conference tomorrow and I’d like to go over some notes, take a bath, get an early night. But there’s an uncharacteristic insistence in Cynthia’s tone that makes me relent.