Blueprints of the Afterlife

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?”