engineers like me, guys in blazers and ties, and you had your surveyors—old farts with crew cuts and rain gear coated in mud. The draftsmen were somewhere in between, each and every one of them a character. Whenever someone pulled an office prank, the draftsmen were the prime suspects. I knew a lot of them smoked dope at home but if you were to start instituting drug tests, well, then, no drainage systems or parking lots would ever get built. As long as they kept doing their jobs, I didn’t care what they did in their recreational time. And I liked Marc a heck of a lot. He showed up early, got his work done fast, was always at my desk asking for more. In fact, Sandy and I had invited him and Star and their kid over to our house for dinner a couple times. Good people. I would have forgotten that comment, with me being drunk and it being just one of those things the draftsmen always said. But one night my wife and I went out to dinner or to a Mariners game or something, and I’d forgotten something at the office. Friday night, about eleven o’clock and I walk in and there’s Marc, working at his drafting table, drinking coffee. Those days, nobody worked long hours. Everyone was out of there by five on the dot. My first thought was that he’d messed up something real bad and was busting tail to fix it. When I asked him what the deal was he sort of shrugged sheepishly, stepped away from the table, and told me to take a look.
“He said it was a little side project of his and he apologized for using company paper and pens. I waved him off. Because what I was looking at looked more like art than any sort of drafting I’d ever seen. He had all the sewer and communications worked out, all the tunnels and streets. I didn’t know whether I should get mad or what. It seemed like a weird thing to do but he was on his own time and he was my best draftsman, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. And now you’ve got the blueprints.”
I asked him how Marc had died.
Don said, “He fell, working on that new house of his. There’s a right way to fall and a wrong way. I guess Marc fell the wrong way.”
We were quiet again, then Don asked me if I’d bought the Fedderly property. I told him no, I was just staying there a while. He said he felt bad for Star and how he hoped “she’s finally getting the help she needs.” I took this to mean that she had been institutionalized somewhere, and I got this deadly pang of remorse. Here I was trying to dig up the scoop on Marc’s blueprints but I hadn’t stopped to figure out where Star was. I was a real shit. Don must’ve seen me looking upset because he asked what was wrong. I told him I’d been close to Star and Nick when I was younger and was sad to hear that things had gone so badly for her.
Don asked me my name again. I told him and he mumbled over my last name a bit then sort of went white. Real abruptly he looked at his watch and said he had to make it back to the office for a meeting or something. He couldn’t have gotten out of there any faster. I was still thinking about Star, otherwise I would have been more suspicious about his sudden departure. That day I went to the library and got online and started compiling a list of mental hospitals in the area.
Of course not. And having no claim to kinship I didn’t have much ground to stand on when I asked these places if she was in residence. It was like searching for the Kirkpatrick Academy all over again. I knew I didn’t have much time. I took the ferry into Seattle, I don’t remember what for, but I do remember looking at people on the streets and thinking how sad it was that they weren’t aware everything was about to end. Still, I envied their ignorance. I wished I’d ended up the guy Nick had told me to be years before, the guy with the career and the wife and the children. It was the children I felt most sad about. I passed a group of them out on a day-care field trip, these toddlers strapped into a big wagon thing, and I had to duck into an alley to cry. I’m sure I looked insane. I was sitting on a bank balance of about three million dollars but I was filthy, a guy who talked to himself in the street. During this time I thought about killing myself a lot, but it never moved from an abstraction into a plan. Because I knew I was meant to be a witness. I woke up in the woods and didn’t know how I’d gotten there. I walked long enough to reach a road and found my way back to Star’s house. I crawled into bed and wept, terrified of what was to come.
It must have been a month.
Then a little reality intruded, I guess. I was in the shed one morning when a Suburban rolled up. It was Don Nagamitsu. He asked if I had a minute to talk. When we sat down in the living room he sighed and rubbed his forehead and said, “I’ll just come out with it. I’m responsible for the death of your family.” He’d been the engineer who’d done the plans for the lot my family home had sat on. He’d had concerns that the lot was too close to an unstable embankment but he’d been under pressure from the developer. He explained it to me in technical terms but essentially he looked the other way when he should have said something about the location of our house. He started crying. According to him, the investigation after the mud slide had been a joke. Agencies sort of waved the whole thing along. He felt at fault for not saying something. He pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket with the name and phone number of his lawyer on it and said I’d probably want to get in touch with the guy. We were quiet in that room. Then I slowly tore the paper in half. I decided to forgive him. He looked at me as if he was unable to comprehend the moment, like he’d been prepared for this encounter to go another way.
Yeah. And after he left I slept a deep, uninterrupted sleep. A nap that stretched into the night. And in the deepness of that night I was back at the encampment where Nick had shot me. It was dawn and an ancient man encrusted with dirt stood beside me. We faced the vast plain below the mesa. The man pointed toward the horizon and as the sun rose I began to make it out, a vast message, in capital letters made of piles of stones. It was a sentence, the letters as long as buildings, laid flat on the desert floor as if intended to be read from space. It was easily ten miles long. And I understood that this was the reason for the encampment, that this message to the heavens was the work of the last man alive.
“The world was full of precious garbage.”
That’s when I woke up and found Nick sitting on the couch, reading a celebrity tabloid magazine. My first thought was that he looked
“You shot me,” I said.
“You fucked my mom,” he said.
“That’s not a good enough reason to shoot me,” I said.
“I shot you for other reasons.”
I must have looked incredulous.
“It wasn’t a bullet I shot into you,” he went on. “Well, yeah, it was a bullet, too. But it was also a delivery system.”
I had no idea how to respond to this crazy bullshit. Nick pulled out an iPhone and tapped the screen a while. He said, “The Bionet concept you and Wyatt came up with? It’s already in development. Is it cold in here or is it just me?” He tapped something on the screen and a frigid blast ripped through me like I’d just stepped into a walk-in freezer. Then he said, “Or maybe it’s too hot, what do you think?” and suddenly I was sweating, burning up.
I asked him what he was doing and he said, “I’m giving you a hard-on. Check it out.” Sure enough, as he tapped in another code, my cock got painfully stiff, one of those erections that totally hurts rubbing against the inside of your jeans. I thought my skin was going to split open. I demanded that he tell me what was going on.
“You tell me,” he said. “You’re the one who came up with the proposal. The Bionet is a nanotech-enabled system that allows users to monitor, dispense antigens, and remotely control the vital functions of the human body. Just like you said. We’ve got big plans for this thing, Luke. Think about it—once you’ve mastered the erection, you pretty much own the biomedical industry.”
I told him he’d betrayed Mr. Kirkpatrick.
“We came to a new understanding with Mr. Kirkpatrick. He’s waiting for us on the island,” he said. “And so is my mother.”
