He and Randy are enduring some kind of a forced march up the beach in Pacifica; Randy's not sure why. Over and over again, Randy is surprised by Avi's physical vigor. Avi looks like he is wasting away from some vague disease invented as a plot device by a screenwriter. He is kind of tall, but this just makes him seem more perilously drawn out. His slender body is a tenuous link between huge feet and a huge head; he has the profile of a lump of silly putty that has been drawn apart until the middle part is just a tendril. But he can stomp up a beach like a Marine. It is January, after all, and according to the Weather Channel there is this flume of water vapor originating in a tropical storm about halfway between Nippon and New Guinea and jetting directly across the Pacific and taking a violent left turn just about here. The waves thrashing the beach, not that far away, are so big that Randy has to look slightly upwards to see their crests.
He has been telling Avi all about Chester, and Avi has (Randy thinks) used this as a segue into reminiscing about the old days back in Seattle. It is somewhat unusual for Avi to do this; he tends to be very disciplined about having any given conversation be either business or personal, but never both at once. 'I'll never forget,' Randy says, 'going up to the roof of Andrew's building to talk to him about the software, thinking to myself 'gosh, this is kind of fun,' and watching him just slowly and gradually go berserk before my eyes. It could almost make you believe in demonic possession.'
'Well, his dad apparently believed in it,' Avi says. 'It was his dad, right?'
'It's been a long time. Yeah, I think it was his mom who was the hippie, who had him in this commune, and then his dad was the one who extracted him from there, forcibly-he brought in these paramilitary guys from Northern Idaho to actually do the job-they literally took Andrew out in a bag-and then put him through all kinds of repressed-memory therapy to prove that he'd been Satanically ritually abused.'
This tweaks Avi's interest. 'Do you think his dad was into the militia thing?'
'I only met him once. During the lawsuit. He took my deposition. He was just this Orange County white- shoe lawyer, in a big practice with a bunch of Asians and Jews and Armenians. So I assumed he was just using the Aryan Nations guys because they were convenient, and for sale.'
Avi nods, apparently finding that a satisfactory hypothesis. 'So he was probably not a Nazi. Did he believe in the Satanic ritual abuse?'
'I doubt it,' Randy says. 'Though after spending some time with Andrew I found it highly plausible. Do we have to talk about this? Gives me the creeps,' Randy says. 'Depresses me.
'I recently learned what became of Andrew,' Avi says.
'I saw his web site a while ago.'
'I'm speaking of very recent developments.'
'Let me guess. Suicide?'
'Nope.'
'Serial killer?'
'Nope.'
'Thrown into prison for stalking someone?'
'He is not dead or in prison,' Avi says.
'Hmmm. Is this anything to do with his hive mind?'
'Nope. Are you aware that he went to law school?'
'Yeah. Is this something to do with his legal career?'
'It is.'
'Well, if Andrew Loeb is practicing law, it must be some really annoying and socially nonconstructive form of it. Probably something to do with suing people on light pretexts.'
'Excellent,' Avi says. 'You're getting warm now.'
'Okay, don't tell me, let me think,' Randy says. 'Is he practicing in California?'
'Yes.'
'Oh, well, I've got it, then.'
'You do?'
'Yes. Andrew Loeb would be one of these guys who gins up minority-shareholder lawsuits against high- tech companies.'
Avi smiles with his lips pressed tightly together, and nods.
'He'd be perfect,' Randy continues, 'because he would be a true believer. He wouldn't think that he was just out there being an asshole. He would really, truly, sincerely believe that he was representing this class of shareholders who had been Satanically ritually abused by the people running the company. He would work thirty-six hours at a stretch digging up dirt on them. Corporate memories that had been repressed. No trick would be too dirty, because he would be on the side of righteousness. He would only sleep or eat under medical orders.'
'I can see that you got to know him incredibly well,' Avi says.
'Wow! So, whom is he suing at the moment?'
'Us,' Avi says.
There is now this five-minute stoppage in the conversation, and in the hike, and possibly in some of Randy's neurological processes. The color map of his vision goes out of whack: everything's in extremely washed- out shades of yellow and purple. Like someone's clammy fingers are around his neck, modulating the flow in his carotids to the bare minimum needed to sustain life. When Randy finally returns to full consciousness, the first thing he does is to look down at his shoes, because he is convinced for some reason that he has sunk into the wet sand to his knees. But his shoes are barely making an impression on the firmly packed sand.
A big wave collapses into a sheet of foam that skims up the beach and divides around his feet.
'Gollum,' Randy says.
'Was that an utterance, or some kind of physiological transient?' Avi says.
'Gollum. Andrew is Gollum.'
'Well, Gollum is suing us.'
'Us, as in you and me?' he asks. It takes Randy about a full minute of time to get these words around his tongue. 'He's suing us over the game company?'
Avi laughs.
'It's possible!' Randy says. 'Chester told me that the game company is now like the size of Microsoft or something.'
'Andrew Loeb has filed a minority-shareholder lawsuit against the board of directors of Epiphyte(2) Corporation,' Avi says.
Randy's body has now finally had time to deploy a full-on fight-or-flight reaction-part of his genetic legacy as a stupendous badass. This must have been very useful when saber-toothed tigers tried to claw their way into his ancestors' caves but is doing him absolutely no good in these circumstances.
'On behalf of whom?'
'Oh, come on, Randy. There aren't that many candidates.'
'Springboard Capital?'
'You told me yourself that Andrew's dad was a white-shoe Orange County lawyer. Now, archetypally, where would a guy like that put his retirement money?'
'Oh, shit.'
'That's right. Bob Loeb, Andrew's dad, got in on AVCLA very early. He and the Dentist have been sending each other Christmas cards for like twenty years. And so when Bob Loeb's idiot son graduated from law school, Bob Loeb, knowing full well that the kid was too much of a head case to be employable anywhere else, paid a call on Dr. Hubert Kepler, and Andrew's been working for him ever since.
'Fuck. Fuck!' Randy says. 'All these years. Treading water.'
'How's that?'
'That time in Seattle-during the lawsuit-was a fucking nightmare. I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX.'
'Well, that's something,' Avi says. 'Normally those two are mutually exclusive.'
'Shut up,' Randy says, 'I'm trying to agonize.'
'Well, I think that agonizing is so fundamentally pathetic that it borders on funny,' Avi says. 'But please go ahead.'
'Now, after all those years-all that fucking work-I'm back where I started. A net worth of zero. Except this
