Blueprints of the Afterlife

scratch. It was a chocolate cake with frosting, all made to look like E.T. The movie alien, remember? It took me a minute to realize this was the party. Star was relaxed and comfortable in her own house and made pleasant conversation with my mom. Questions like, “I understand you teach librarians?” It struck me that Nick had gleaned all these little pieces of information from me and formulated a comprehensive portrait of who my family was. Now, hearing about all the things Nick and I had talked about, I could tell that he admired me. His admiration didn’t ever come out when it was just the two of us together, but hearing his mom talk about what he’d told her about me confirmed our friendship. When we finished the cake, Nick opened the present. I’d never seen such gratitude. It was as though I was witnessing the first act of altruism in human history, a pivotal moment in the development of the species. Nick’s mother actually got teary-eyed. Nick was beside himself with happiness. We played with that pop-up book for over an hour, acting out scenes from the movies I’d seen a half dozen times and Nick hadn’t seen at all. Nick added little addendums and characters, which at first bugged me because I wanted to stay true to the original version but then I kind of gave up and went with it. I remember his favorite character was Chewbacca, he kept wanting to be Chewbacca, while I, of course, was Luke, when really I should have been Han Solo. Anyway, while our moms talked we took our game outside, into the woods, and it was then that I noticed there was another building on the property. A small shed. I think maybe I tried to take a look inside but Nick stopped me, real serious, and told me it was off-limits. After a while our moms came outside, standing there chatting like they’d been friends forever, and it was time to go. No birthday party I ever attended ever matched what I felt that day.

What was in the shed?

Nick’s dad’s shop. They hadn’t opened it since he died.

What did your peers make of your friendship with Nick?

My answer to that is going to sound like a lot of bragging but the fact is, my primary talent in life has always been my likability. When you’re someone everybody likes you can get away with befriending people who aren’t liked. My peers always looked to me as a leader, came to me for my approval or blessing, wanted my opinions on stuff. Kids questioned my friendship with Nick. “Why are you hanging out with that freak?” they’d ask me, and I’d tell them they were idiots who didn’t realize Nick was a genius. The things that should have marked Nick as an outcast became, thanks to my psychological campaign, examples of his edginess. His clothes, the piercings he got before anyone else in high school. In a way I think I achieved the impossible by making poverty cool.

You mentioned his fixing your bike. Were there other times when Nick’s mechanical inclinations became apparent?

He was always taking things apart to see how they worked, putting them back together about half the time. My parents, the most technologically inept people I knew, were amazed by this. My dad could barely get the lawn mower to turn over. Sometimes Nick came over and helped my dad in the garage, or fixed things around our house, like our water heater.

He fixed your water heater?

Yeah, when he must have been about twelve years old. He was coming over to our house a lot around that age. Our home was one of the rare places where Nick could find praise. He certainly wasn’t getting any at school. School bored the hell out of him. And even though I had succeeded in making him sort of acceptable to our classmates, he really didn’t take much initiative to make any friends other than me. He didn’t like to play with me when I was with other kids. He’d wait to get me alone and then we’d enter our world of codes and secret passageways, our games of trap doors and monsters. He bonded with my parents and asked them lots of questions about history and science. Sometimes my sister and I would just end up playing together by default when Nick was over, since he was so wrapped up in learning about the Luddite movement and the invention of radio with my mom and dad.

Your sister. Tell me about her.

Man. She was incredible. She would have grown up to become a beautiful and talented woman. Claudine. I miss her every day. She loved music. Always twisting my arm to sing songs with her. She considered all the heavy thinking in our household sort of comical. She could defuse a deep conversation with a perfectly timed joke. If my family was the Beatles, she would have been Ringo.

And you would have been—

Paul.

Let’s talk about high school.

Sure. I was your typical debate nerd, specializing in Lincoln–Douglas, also did a pretty decent job as a fullback on the football team, elected to student council, founder and president of the Photography Club, never at a loss for a girlfriend. Again, I floated by on charm and all the things I learned through osmosis from my parents. Kept a 4.0 GPA, volunteered at a retirement home teaching senior citizens how to use computers. My high school career was an unmitigated success from start to finish. I was miserable. [Laughs].

And Nick?

He started smoking. Hanging out with the poorer kids, making out in public with these skanky chicks. Spent a lot of time in the vocational-tech departments. Those teachers, the wood-shop, metal-shop guys, sports coaches mostly, they loved him. He did really well in math and science, lousy in Spanish and English. Hated art.

And you guys remained friends?

Strangely enough, yeah. We had a real Goofus and Gallant thing going on. We orbited each other, admired each other as opposites. Nick started smoking pot as a freshman and one night convinced me to try it. We stayed up watching Pink Floyd’s The Wall and talking about philosophy. He told me he looked up to me for how I could get anyone to do anything I wanted them to. I told him I admired him for his genius. But there were whole weeks that went by when we didn’t talk to each other. Just pass in the hallway with not so much as a nod. I still defended him when friends of mine talked shit about him but we started to have a lot less contact than we used to. Then the science fair happened.

The science fair at Bainbridge High was kind of a big deal. Sometime in the late eighties scouts from tech companies started coming over to check out the budding talent. The idea was to identify the innovators really young and give them scholarships. Of course this poisoned the spirit of the thing and after a while everyone was writing unoriginal programs in DOS. It turned into more of a computer fair than a science fair. So junior year, the first year Nick qualified, he shows up with these boxes of crap. Gears and wires and hammered-out panels and screws and stuff. Little pieces of wood and coils of string. It looked like the contents of a junk drawer. I sat there with my display on Puget Sound pollution watching Nick set up his project. He refused to say anything about it. The pieces appeared to fit together in random configurations but Nick worked on it with such a sense of purpose that I had to believe the machine he was building actually did something. Kids and parents wandered around, smirking about the bizarre contraption Nick was building. If Nick heard them he didn’t show it. He was absorbed. After about an hour, his project was built. It was a battered metal cube, about a foot and a half square. He put up a sign that said, “The Machine” and sat behind his table, stone-faced, his black hair hanging in front of his eyes. I was convinced he was putting everyone on. Then the judges stopped by with their clipboards and frowns and asked Nick what the machine did.

Nick took a key from his pocket, like the kind used to wind up an antique toy. He inserted it into a hole in the top of the box and twisted it a few times. We waited. At first nothing happened. By now a crowd had gathered, curious to see what the hell this thing did. Then a panel popped off and landed on the floor. Inside were gears and screws, little pistons, whirling things. The machine shuddered and then appeared to dismantle itself. Screws and rivets shot out in all these directions. People stepped back. Somebody made a crack that it was a bomb. No one could take their eyes off the thing. Within a minute the entire machine was dismantled, lying in pieces all over the table and floor. There was a moment of quiet. Then, one by one, everyone realized this was the end of the show, and started to laugh. Nick didn’t move. Just sat in the same position he’d been sitting in, quiet, while everyone roared. Once the crowd was tired of this they moved on to look at someone’s model of a double helix.

One man lingered. He wore slacks and a black sport coat over a white shirt. Young guy, maybe twenty-five years old. Handsome, short haircut. He slowly bent down and picked up a gear from the floor and turned it over in his hand. He cleared his throat and told Nick he liked his invention. At this, Nick looked up, sort of wary and angry, prepared for a punch line. But there was no punch line. The man handed Nick a business card. The card just had a name and phone number on it. Dirk Bickle. He said he was a scout for an organization that was always on the lookout for innovative young minds, then nodded and said good-bye.

I helped Nick pick up the pieces of his machine. As I was putting the pieces back in their boxes I realized that