indulge these lost evenings, these nights in which I was potted, canned, screwed, smashed, soaked, bottled, and blitzed; instead I'll skip to the last night of this long hot binge, when I was summarily thrown out of the Triangle Pub for standing on a stool and asking for help measuring the bar's hypotenuse.
After I was led outside I promptly fell over on the sidewalk, looked up into the drizzle, and saw a girl's thin face staring down at me. She was young and lithe in her Deadhead sundress, her braided red hair and worn backpack. I immediately recognized her as one of the girls I'd slept with during my bohemian days.
'Tamira,' I said.
'No,' she said. 'Kayla.'
'Oh. Kayla. You look like a Tamira.'
'Yeah. I just came out to tell you, it doesn't have a hypotenuse.'
'What?'
'The bar. It's an isosceles triangle. Doesn't have any right angles. So you can't measure the hypotenuse.' She peered into my eyes. 'What's wrong with you?'
I asked her to marry me. We went instead to a late-night breakfast joint where I told her the whole sordid story while she ate ginger french toast and tofu sausage with one of her turquoise-ringed hands and smoked Lucky Strikes with the other.
'So you're saying you spent the last three years trying to be like the guy that this Dana woman married?' she asked.
I thought about it. 'Yes,' I said. 'I guess I did.'
Kayla took a drag of a Lucky Strike. 'Well, there's your mistake. The last thing some married chick wants is a guy like her husband. You should go back to yourself.'
In a flash of understanding I saw that Kayla was right. Go back to myself. The problem was this: which self?
Two days later I was back in Spokane, at a cemetery downriver from the city. I crouched down in front of a small stone, set flush into the ground. I ran my finger over the letters, BENJAMIN T. MASON, and those cruel dates, NOVEMBER 12, 1966-NOVEMBER 19, 1985. I know there are people who go to such places to talk to the person who has died, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. (I also refuse to say that a person has 'passed,' as if he has simply processed a rich meal.)
Mom had left plastic flowers on Ben's grave, and a wooden hummingbird whose wings windmilled frantically in the wind. I straightened the flowers, wiped the grass clippings from the headstone, and wished that Ben could tell me what to do now. I remembered his saying that I really only lived in the perceptions of others, and suddenly it seemed painfully true. I couldn't think of a time when I'd acted on my own, when I wasn't driven by my grief for Ben or my love for Dana or my desire to show up Michael Langford – or, for that matter, the tyranny of Pete Decker or the suggestive looks of girls in high school. I wondered if I even had a self.
'I miss you,' I said aloud. Surprised at myself, I looked around to see if anyone had heard, but no one was near.
I left the cemetery and drove into Spokane, to the northeast end of downtown, to a brick storefront that had been an antique and junk shop until six months ago, when it became the offices of Empire Interactive.
This was at the beginning of Eli's compulsion about security, and he'd recently installed an elaborate key card system on the door. In addition, the windows were tinted so no one could see in. I pounded on a window, unsure if anyone inside could see me.
Finally the door opened and out came Louis Carver, beaming. 'Clark! What are you doing here?'
'I came to check on my investment.'
Louis patted me on the small of my back. 'Come in.'
I followed him through the door into a narrow anteroom, where a security camera monitored our progress, then through another key-carded door into what looked like a cafeteria: tile floor, long tables where a half-dozen people sat working intently on computer terminals. At the far end of this room were three small offices, one for Bryan the tech guy, one for Louis, and one for Eli.
He came out of his office wearing wrinkled slacks and a striped shirt with a salsa stain near the collar, his glasses slightly askew. 'Clark!' he said, and then his piggy little eyes shifted around the room, as if embarrassed by the excitement in his voice.
'Hey, Eli.' I reached out and he took my hand reluctantly, gave it a soft, fleshy shake, and then turned back toward his office.
Louis gave me a lingering stare and then went back to work.
I followed Eli into his office, a simple, white-walled room, with a long computer table and the old Empire binders stacked on bookshelves along the walls. He looked out the window at the people in the office. 'I don't trust them,' he said. 'I don't like the way they look at me. They're ingratiating. They smell money. They pretend to hang on every word I say. They pretend to like me.'
'Maybe they do like you,' I said.
He turned to me, one eyebrow raised, as if I'd just suggested that he become a male model or an exotic dancer. Then he turned back to stare into what they called the Game Room. 'I just don't know why we had to hire so many,' he said.
'We've got to get this thing off the ground, Eli,' I said. 'If we don't start earning money pretty soon, the investors are going to get antsy.'
'I don't care,' Eli said. 'I'll pay them out of my own pocket.'
I had to beg him to show me what they were working on, including an e-mail component that would allow characters (Eli still wouldn't call them players) to contact each other away from the instant messaging of the game – to allow more backstabbing and double-dealing. 'That's the key,' Eli said: 'treachery.' I hadn't been by the office in more than three months, so he showed me the newest graphics, which were – as our team of young testers assured him – 'killer.' He was especially excited about a prison for miscreant and broken characters – a rocky island covered with catacombs, tunnels, and torture chambers, straight out of
But he was leery of showing me much else, including the game engine that he and Bryan were constantly tinkering with, the 'brains,' the basic system that ran the shadow world, took the information and the actions of the characters and translated them into the movements of people on the computer screen.
'It's not that I don't trust you, Clark,' he said, 'but you come in contact with a lot of other companies. I'd hate for something to end up in the wrong hands.'
It was late in the afternoon. Eli had recently moved into the house on Cliff Drive (that place of horrors, now) and he invited me over. I said we could take my rental car – I knew Eli hated to drive – but he smiled wryly and pulled a single, plastic-coated, black key from his pocket. I followed him out back, and there it was: a new, dark gray Mercedes-Benz convertible, and the only extravagant thing I ever knew Eli to buy.
I followed him up the South Hill to his house, but after we parked he led me away from the main house to the small carriage house in back, where he was living. There was very little furniture in the carriage house, and his clothes were still in his suitcase. Apparently he only ate pizza; the boxes were stacked against one wall. 'You want a beer?' he asked.
I explained that I'd been drinking too much lately, and that I'd recently had a kind of pre-midlife crisis. Yet after what had happened at the prom, I didn't figure he'd sympathize with my attempts to steal Dana from another guy, so I spoke generally about my desire to find some part of myself that I'd forgotten. 'I just can't help feeling,' I said, thinking of Dana, 'that there are things from my past I need to confront.'
Eli stared at me for a long moment. 'Come here,' he said finally. 'I want to show you something.' I followed him into the kitchen. He opened a drawer. Inside was a bulging folder with the word DONTES written across the top. Eli reached in the Dontes folder and pulled out a thin file, then slid it across the counter to me.
A name was typed on the file: Pete Decker.
'Open it,' Eli said.
There were three black-and-white glossy surveillance photos, taken through a car window, each showing a thin and tired-looking Pete Decker coming out of a downtown apartment building in jeans and a T-shirt and a dishwasher's apron. The last picture showed him climbing in a beat-up Chevy Nova. He'd aged considerably, and not very gracefully, in the twenty years since I'd seen him.
Eli stood over my shoulder as I looked at the picture. 'I hired an investigator to find him. He's been in and out
