I told him I’d just gotten here a couple hours before. He shook his head. That wouldn’t do. I’d need an address. He told me there were cheap places available in the Tenderloin. I thanked him and he left without another word. That afternoon I rented a room in a purgatorial apartment building, a bathroom-down-the-hall kind of dump. Old alcoholics, prostitutes, everyone a few dollars away from homelessness. I thought it was super, just the kind of texture I needed in my life. The next day I showed up at Vision Reprographics and got the job. The other guys in the warehouse didn’t give me a second look. They’d seen so many temporary-type employees come through here and they just figured I’d be gone in a few weeks. Moving boxes of paper around all day. I kept my head down for a month, worked hard, didn’t ask too many questions, and figured out the organizational structure of the place.
Yeah. As soon as I knew I’d be in San Francisco a while I sent a letter to Star telling her not to worry, I was just doing some work and would return soon. Told her I loved her and all that. But I felt sick writing it. Part of me knew we’d never be lovers again but I wasn’t really admitting it to myself at that point.
I found out later, but then, per our arrangement, I kept my distance. He worked in a different part of the building, we ate lunch at different times, we left each other alone. I figured out that every print job got its own file, with the invoice, payment record, and a proof of the finished work. These documents were kept in the basement in banker’s boxes. The only reason anyone had to go down there was to add another box to the pile. The only organizational rubric they had was by date. I had no way of knowing when the brochure had been printed. It could have been done years before Nick showed it to me. While I was pushing around the hand truck upstairs, the record I needed was just sitting in one of those boxes. I had to figure out not only an excuse for getting down there, but a method for finding one stupid file in thousands of boxes. Every night I went back to my shitty apartment, tried to tune out the guy loudly vomiting next door, and devised a way to deal with these vast, poorly organized archives. I could be down there for years, I realized. That is, if I was able to gain access and not raise anyone’s suspicion in the first place. I considered just getting in the van and heading back to Bainbridge. But at the same time, I had settled into a work routine. The money wasn’t great but at least I didn’t have to dip into the inheritance anymore. Then one night when I was clocking out Wyatt clapped me on the back. “Luke Piper,” he said, like we were old buds. “You got plans for the weekend?” When it became clear a guy like me would have no plans, he invited me to dinner at his and his girlfriend’s place.
They lived in a nicer part of town. Nicer in relation to my hellhole, anyway. When I knocked on the door I could hear them on the other side. His girlfriend said, “He’s here?” In that moment her voice seemed to suggest a history of secret conversations. Her name was Erika Vaux and she was a struggling writer, writing science fiction novels under the name Blanche Ravenwood. Tall woman, bony thin, wearing all black with dangly earrings, one of those jet-black pageboy hairdos. The two of them didn’t look like a couple. For one, Erika was several years older than Wyatt. (And who was I to talk?) They were one of those couples where the woman is strikingly less attractive than the man, leading you to imagine that their sex life must be really exotic and fulfilling. She was a woman whose awkward looks are thrown off by an absolutely killer body. You look at that kind of woman and imagine she suffered horribly in middle school, then experienced an epic period of carnal revenge in college. They uncorked some red wine and I almost started crying at how cool it was to sit on a couch and have a conversation with people who were so smart and friendly. Their most benign creature comforts seemed to me extravagant luxuries. Like their full-sized refrigerator. I realized I’d been locked away in my loneliness, enduring brainless work and living in a place where I had to occasionally step over hypodermic syringes. This felt like civilization.
That first night we just sort of got down our biographical basics. I told them the whole sad story about the mud slide, told them I’d been living with my friend’s mom, but initially I left out the sex part. Wyatt gave me a lecture on vitamins. He was one of those guys who talked openly about his colonic flora and based his diet on his blood type. Turns out he had ambitions beyond printing menus and brochures. He was taking classes to become a naturopath, though he was quick to say he wasn’t really interested in becoming a practitioner. He was more interested in comparing different medical traditions like homeopathy, Ayurvedic medicine, Chinese medicine. Erika, she’d grown up in Bellingham. In our first conversation it came out that she’d experienced extraterrestrial visitations as a kid. The first one was in a field behind her house. She was nine or ten years old. A cluster of green lights hovered above the field beyond her open window. After a few seconds staring at it, the lights seemed to realize they were being watched and whooshed away. She revealed this about halfway through my first glass of wine. I’d never met this woman before and she was saying, Hey, have some crackers and Gorgonzola, I was anally probed by an extraterrestrial. Why she was with a guy as seemingly square as Wyatt I couldn’t really fathom. And to say that a guy who tried to convince me to give the Paleolithic diet a shot was square really tells you what kind of person
“Okay, Luke,” he said, “I thought you should see this.”
He turned the painting around. It was an exact oil depiction of the picture of the Kirkpatrick Academy from the brochure.
No. The day I stopped by and showed him the brochure, he’d recognized the image but couldn’t remember where he’d seen it before. While I’d been moving boxes around for a month he’d been racking his brain trying to figure it out. Then one day he was visiting a coffee shop he hadn’t been to in a while and there it was, hanging on the wall in the men’s room. He’d looked at this boring painting dozens of times while peeing. The painting clearly wasn’t for sale, so impulsively he stole it, sneaking out the back into the alley. When he got it home and explained the whole thing to Erika he realized he’d made a big mistake. Now he couldn’t ask the owner of the cafe where it had come from. The only clue we had was the signature, which just said “Squid.”
As in tentacles, yeah. This would be easy, I told them, all we had to do was call all the art galleries in town and ask if they knew any artists named Squid. Wyatt and Erika shook their heads. They’d already done that. No one had heard of this Squid person. There was no way around it. We had to find the record of that brochure. I told them I doubted the academy even existed but this only stoked our desire to find out why they’d gone through the trouble of printing a fake brochure. By the end of the evening our two systems of curiosity had begun to merge. I finally had some help, some people I could trust. We laid out all the knowns. We had to find Dirk Bickle, locate the record of the brochure, and track down Squid. Erika suggested we use the Internet. “The what?” I remember saying. We had to ask the cafe owner what she knew about the painting. I came up with the idea of bringing the painting back to the cafe and turning it in. I’d make up a story, tell them I’d seen it next to a Dumpster and remembered that it belonged to the cafe. I also needed to get in touch with Star again to see if Nick had written. I wrote to her and set up a time for her to call me from the Bainbridge Thriftway pay phone. During the day I’d go to work as usual, load and unload trucks, pile pallets of paper with the forklift. Wyatt and I kept our distance at the warehouse but every night I’d be at his place for dinner and we’d hash out the case.
