Blueprints of the afterl.., p.16
Blueprints of the Afterlife, page 16
Skinner lay supine on the guest bed while Carl peeled off his pants.
“If I could move,” Skinner said.
“I need towels,” Carl said and left the room. A bit later he returned with a wet, soapy washcloth and a bath towel.
“Wait, let me do it,” Skinner said.
“Your wife could show up any minute and I don’t want her to find you marinating in your own whiz. You gotta lay still so the system can map your current physical self.”
Carl swabbed Skinner’s naked lower half with the washcloth, dried him off, then helped his friend’s legs into underwear retrieved from the RV.
“I’m sorry I dragged you into that memory,” Skinner said.
“Yeah, it pretty much ruined my day,” Carl said.
“I’m sorry.” Skinner stretched his face. Still felt weird, mapped to his memory face.
“You saw the Last Dude again,” Carl said.
“Same as always,” Skinner said.
“Did he still have that extra-deluxe fridge?”
“Yeah. Stocked in the desert.”
“Did you get a look at the book titles this time?”
“No. I’ve never been able to. It’s always the same progression. There’s no variation to it. Same mesa. Same crows. Same beer.”
“Who do you think he is?”
“Maybe he’s the final judge of humanity. Building some massive message out of stones in the desert. ‘THE W.’”
“You let me know when you figure that shit out,” Carl said.
“Carl, man, what am I going to do about Roon?”
“You’re going to go up there and give her a hug and a kiss and meet your new grandson.”
“I’ve been a pig.”
“Not the first time.”
“I was hoping you’d disagree.”
“I never understood your falling out with her in the first place, so your being a complete asshole is the only logical explanation to me.”
“She hates what I stand for. She thinks of me as the enemy.”
“You’ve got political differences.”
“We’re repugnant to her. Says American Christians like us caused the FUS. She blames me for Waitimu’s… The last thing she said was she never wanted to talk to me again. I don’t know how everything went south so quickly between us.”
“She wants you to be her dad again, man. She’s trying to fix things. You’ve got to meet her halfway. What else are you going to do? Stew in your bad memories?”
“That sounds about right.”
“Well it isn’t. You need to get your ass to Seattle and see that grandson.”
“She said I killed Waitimu.”
“You wouldn’t be so hung up on that point if part of you didn’t agree.”
Skinner blinked at the ceiling. “Oh God.”
“You can’t fix what happened to your boy. But you can fix what happened with Roon.”
“Fuck, Carl.”
Carl consulted a Bionet monitor. “You’ve napped enough to move a little. Don’t even tell me you’re not hungry. Come on. I’ll feed you.”
After the great fire of 1889, when Seattle laid new streets atop the ruins of Pioneer Square, the ground levels of hotels, brothels, and dry-goods merchants became the underground. Post-FUS, a third layer arose, preserving Pioneer Square under a dome. In this district it was always night, lit with yellowish streetlights, real trees supplanted by facsimile trees of concrete and latex. Far overhead snaked the pipes of new water systems and bundled cables bearing energy and data. Walking the cobbles of Jackson Street, Chiho sensed that the neighborhood had been stashed in a vast warehouse, preserved for later extraction or to be simply forgotten. A few Seattleites chose to live down here away from the sun and rain, lured by cheap rents in charming, renovated brick buildings, tolerant of the bachelorette parties drunkenly boob-flashing their way through a dozen bars. It made Skinner claustrophobic. Chiho said she’d never live in a place that hid from what little sun shone weakly in the sky. Add this to the list of the many things they didn’t understand about Roon.
Roon and Dot’s condo took up half a floor of a building at First and Main. Roon claimed it was an easy commute to Bainbridge, and good for Dot, who had skin-related issues with UV rays. They’d lived here together for fifteen years. Approaching the building Skinner struggled to recall the few Christmases they’d spent here, when artificial snow issued from nozzles overhead, covering the streets in fluffy, nucleating proteins while Dickensian carolers roamed about singing pre-FUS hymns of charity and brotherhood. He’d stood at a window of the condo, watching the holiday display with a cup of nog, finding the whole experience a poignant simulation of a holiday spirit he’d never actually felt.
The elevator took them to Roon and Dot’s place, opening onto their foyer. Through the frosted glass door came soft bumps of music.
“Be nice,” Chiho said.
“Don’t immediately start crying,” Skinner said.
“Deal.”
“Deal.”
Dot let them in, grinning, hugging. Hard to tell how much of it was a pantomime of a greeting and how much was real. She stood barefoot, in a tank top and jeans, tattoos of Gustave Doré’s woodcuts from Purgatorio wrapped around her forearms. She wore chunky black-framed glasses and her hair was in pigtails.
“Come, come,” Dot said. “Roon is putting the little one down for his nap.”
“Shoes on? Off?” Chiho asked.
“Off?” Dot shrugged.
They removed their shoes. Inside was like a glossy spread in a magazine. Skinner didn’t recognize a single author on the spines of the books on the cases that wrapped the walls. He thought maybe he should sit, but didn’t know which piece of sitting-related furniture to select. Chiho effusively complimented the place as if she’d never set foot in here before. Dot gestured to a couch and rattled off a list of five beverages. Skinner didn’t catch any of them. “Water?” he asked.
Dot asked about their trip. “How was the coast? Did you stop to see the aircraft carrier? How were Hiroko and Carl? Tell me all about it.”
Now having a few places to start a conversation, Chiho focused on their visit to Hearst Castle, describing in great detail the decor and amenities. Dot nodded and interjected questions at the right intervals, keeping her mother-in-law going. They drank their waters and Skinner said, “The aircraft carrier is still beached. Craziest-looking thing.” And that was the end of that anecdote.
Just as the conversation came to a bloated moment of silence, their daughter emerged from the baby’s bedroom, uneasily smiled, then said, “Mom? Dad?”
“Come here, you,” Skinner said, embracing his daughter. “Come here, my sweet.”
Chiho kept her promise to not immediately start in with the waterworks. Instead she beamed and said, “Well, look at you. Look at you.”
“Little Waitimu just went down for a nap but he’s a light napper and should be up again soon,” Roon said.
“I’m sorry, who?” Skinner said.
“We named him after Waitimu,” Roon said.
“Oh, your son,” Skinner said. “That’s good. A good name.”
“Well!” Chiho said. “You two must have your hands full—”
“Which one of you carried him?” Skinner asked.
Roon said, “I did. I was the pregnant one.”
Here Chiho steeled herself and came close to breaking her deal with her husband. She’d spent the whole drive from Portland worrying about this. To not have been with her daughter when she was carrying a child, oh, God. She swallowed and forced her lips into a quivering smile. “That’s so wonderful, Roon.”
“How’s work?” Skinner asked, the question both wildly off-topic and providing some relief.
“Work is beyond crazy,” Dot said. “We’re both on the island most days.”
“We’ve been working with the newmans on Wall Street,” Roon said. “There’s an on-site day care Waitimu goes to and I can get down there a couple times a day to feed him. You should come over with us and see how it’s coming. I can get you visitor passes.”
“Sorry, I can’t get over that you named him Waitimu. I’m cool with it, it’s—I just didn’t expect it,” Skinner said.
Dot and Roon exchanged an uneasy expression. Skinner mistook it for having made them uncomfortable. “I don’t mean I think it’s bad you did it, not at all. It honors your brother, obviously.” He looked around the room for something to divert his attention. “Say, are those blueprints?”
On a drafting table lay several bound volumes of plans for New York Alki. Roon preferred to work with actual paper; the task of re-creating a city as it appeared in the distant past would seem to require such an affectation. They pulled open the first volume. “Yeah, they’re facsimiles of the Marc Fedderly blueprints. Amazingly, he did these all by hand.”
Skinner leaned in to get a better look. A map of Bainbridge Island on the left page, a map of Manhattan on the right.
“So even though Bainbridge and Manhattan are roughly the same size, there are some major geographical differences they’ve had to contend with. First is the coastline. While the landmass is roughly the same, the surface area of the coasts are wildly different, right? Owing to the irregularity of Bainbridge’s coast. But no one has ever figured out a way to accurately measure how long a coast is. Do you measure at high tide? Low tide? A coast is constantly in flux, expanding, contracting. The water’s edge never stays in one place. And topographically it’s wildly different, too. All those hills. So regrading and reshaping the coast were the major challenges during phase one.”
Skinner listened, nodded, reflected on the fact that this wasn’t really a conversation about civil-engineering challenges so much as Roon’s courting his approval.
“…to build the seawall, see? So the reshaping could happen without having to contend with wakes and tides… They surrounded the whole island. It’s thirty feet thick, reinforced concrete, has a system of locks for letting the barges through…”
A toddler appeared in the bedroom doorway, rubbing his eyes, his hair a brilliant fountain of blond ringlets. He wore a shirt with a brontosaurus on it. Seeing the visitors, he shyly smiled and hunched up his shoulders, as if he’d been caught doing something.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” Roon said. “Come meet Grandpa and Grandma.”
Skinner steadied himself.
“We thought we should tell you in person,” Roon said, her voice trembling, as she scooped up her son. “We wanted you to see him when you found out.”
Chiho fell to her knees, pulled herself up, and reached for the boy. Here, miraculously, was her dead son again, not as she last remembered him, but as she first remembered him, identical to the painfully beautiful child she’d lost. Everything she remembered about her Waitimu filled her chest to bursting. Roon’s Waitimu looked the same, smelled the same, he was the same. “It’s you. Oh, my dear heart, let me hold you.”
Skinner’s palms went cold. “You cloned your dead brother?”
Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 3
[unintelligible] I mean, it’s flattering to imagine that you’re so important that secret brotherhoods struggle over your fate. But what if it’s just the opposite? What if we’re too insignificant for anyone to really give a shit about what happens to us? The only way you become of interest to shady cabals is if you have some piece of incriminating information or you can make someone fabulously wealthy.
Anyway, so after Nick returned to San Jose I kept running it through my head. It didn’t add up. I knew Nick was a genius, but come on. He got whisked away to some superexclusive club on the basis of a lousy science fair project? Had these guys been watching him secretly for years? What did they know about the shed full of schematic drawings of New York City? I’d grown up with a couple skeptical academic parents who’d installed a pretty resilient bullshit detector in my head. There were gaps in Nick’s story. If I hadn’t been so knocked back on my heels by his reaction to my sleeping with his mom, I might have noticed that his stories about the academy were thin. They had an almost rehearsed quality. He avoided direct questions about the academy, his professors, who this Kirkpatrick guy was. When he left after Thanksgiving break I rolled everything around in my head and found that my curiosity was pushing me toward making a set of decisions. I had to find out what was going on at the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential. Then Nick wrote us that he wasn’t going to make it back for Christmas. He had things he needed to “sort out.” He was “really busy.” I decided to head down to San Jose and surprise him.
Did Star want to go?
She did, but she was trapped. She hadn’t stepped off the island in fifteen years. Not even a ferry ride to Seattle. Severe agoraphobia. The week before Christmas I gassed up the van, rotated the tires, kissed Star good-bye, and hit the road. By this time I looked like a dope-smoking hippie. I had beads in my beard and dreadlocks, wasn’t wearing shoes most of the time. As I drove to California I reflected a lot on what had happened in the past year, and it struck me for the first time that maybe sleeping with Star hadn’t been such a good idea. I thought, Oh, my God, I’m fucking his mom.
[Interviewer laughs]
I don’t know what kind of investigative plan I had in mind. I thought I could just show up in San Jose and drop in on him. Surprise! I had no idea. I didn’t even have an address.
How did you find the place?
Well, I rolled into San Jose in the afternoon and just sort of drove around, ending up at this tourist attraction, the Winchester Mystery House. I used a pay phone outside the gift shop and called information. Of course, there was no listing for the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential. It was getting late and I found a public library that was just closing. I parked in front, slept in the van that night, then went in the next day when they opened. I asked a librarian about the academy. She hadn’t heard of it. Remember, this was still a few years before the Web. We depended on librarians and reference books. I spent the better part of that day scouring resources, calling all the Kirkpatricks in the San Jose phone book. Nothing. I’d thought it wouldn’t be hard to find the place. I’d spent the whole drive south imagining my conversation with Nick when I showed up. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t find the place. Then I thought that maybe people in academia would have a better idea where the academy might be so I went to San Jose State and checked the library there. Nothing. I spent a couple hours walking around campus randomly asking people. Nothing. No one had heard of it. The only way I could contact Star would be through the mail, so I couldn’t really ask her for help. We’d sent Nick letters, I remembered, to a post office box here. I momentarily thought the post office would be the place to get this sorted out but they hadn’t heard of it either. I wondered if I was in the wrong San Jose. I had no idea what I was doing. I slept in the van for the better part of a week. Drove around reading the directories of office parks. I had an old letter Nick had sent with a San Jose postmark and no return address. That was really the only indication that he’d been here, besides the fact that he had told me this was where the academy was located. I even went to the police and the fire department, but they were of no help. They said the place didn’t exist.
Then I’m lying there one night in the back of the van, probably reading Carlos Castaneda or Herman Hesse by flashlight, when I spotted that brochure under the passenger seat. The one Nick has showed me. Of course! I had totally forgotten! The next day I took the brochure back to the library and showed the librarian. He didn’t recognize the Spanish-style building or the horse pasture in the pictures. Or the smiling kids hunched over their books. I showed it around at the college, no luck. Same for the police station. I hit every bookstore in town and no one recognized it. It seemed I’d exhausted every possible avenue. I thought about heading home. I felt terribly alone. At one point I parked in the middle of some mall’s parking lot after midnight and cried. I looked at the brochure for the hundredth time and noticed the name of the print company in tiny type on the back. It was some place called Vision Reprographics in San Francisco. That was my only lead. So the next morning I headed out.
The company wasn’t hard to find. They occupied a big industrial building in the Mission District. I showed up with the brochure and asked the woman at the front counter if she knew anything about it. They appeared to print lots of stuff—booklets, concert posters, ad circulars—so I wasn’t surprised when she said she didn’t know. Was there someone who would know? She introduced me to a young guy named Wyatt Gross. What shocked me about him was that he looked how I would have looked had I shaved and cut my hair. He seemed to be about my age, my height and build, wearing a tight pair of jeans with a flannel shirt tucked in. Hair combed and parted on one side, leather shoes. I imagined for a second that he really was me, living in a reality in which my parents hadn’t died. He introduced himself as a project manager, shook my hand, and asked me what he could do to help.
I showed Wyatt the brochure. He studied it intently, turning it over, thumbing the edges. They’d definitely printed it, he told me, but he didn’t remember the job. Maybe there were records he could look up to find out who placed the order? Sure, they could do that, but they printed so much stuff and that could take weeks, plus they didn’t just give out client information. I was trying to be polite but I was visibly frustrated. He had no reason to be helpful to me. I was just some dirty freak who looked like he’d stumbled out of an R. Crumb comic. Finally I threw up my hands, thanked him for his time, and left. Outside I sat in the van pondering my next move. I had no next move. I looked at the building and wondered if I could break in when they closed. Then a side door opened and Wyatt came out, waved at me, and jogged across the street to where I was parked. He gestured for me to unlock the passenger door and got in.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t know who you are. And I shouldn’t be talking to you. But I want to help. The only way you’re going to get the information you need is to show up tomorrow at eleven and ask to speak to Mr. Nixon. He’s a warehouse manager who happens to need an extra hand. You look like you can move boxes, right? Tell him you saw the ad in the Chronicle and are interested in the job. You’ll be doing yourself a favor if you take a shower. It pays shit, but don’t complain. And don’t mention you met me or that we had this conversation. By the way, are you local?”
