The Unknowns (17 page)

“Cindy loves to pinch my nipples,” Danny said a bit too loudly, grabbing her wrists to prevent her from doing it again.

“Ow!” Cindy said happily. “Let me go!”

And then I heard a deep voice call my name, and Bill Fleig walked up to me—to us—and said, as if it were a point of general interest, “We’re getting the Amiga that used to be in the principal’s secretary’s office.”

I’d known he would wonder why I wasn’t in the computer room, but I hadn’t expected him to come looking for me, in violation of the implicit parameters of our relationship. But here he was, talking about the computer from the secretary’s office, which was apparently going to be moved into the basement lab as the secretary upgraded. This was good news, but it could have waited.

“That’s cool,” I said, trying to sound polite rather than interested.

“It should be set up this week,” Bill said, “if her new Deskpro arrives on time.”

Danny and the others were watching blankly from the couch. I wanted to send Bill some kind of signal, something that would convey
Can we please not geek out in public
?, but Bill was deaf to signals. I considered saying
What’s it like to be such a loser, Bill
? but that would have been counterproductive as well as cruel: being a jerk was out of fashion. What I needed was a tone of polite, dismissive condescension. It might be the only time in my life when I’ve consciously looked to my father as a role model.

“Hey, great!” I said vaguely, as though unsure what I was responding to. “That’s real exciting for you, huh?”

Bill looked confused. “I told you it might be happening, remember?” he said.

“Sure!” I said. It was what my dad said to enact a general mood of agreement without actually agreeing to anything. “I’ll have to come down and check it out.”

Bill looked at me for a long time without any particular expression. Then he gave me a little nod that meant goodbye, turned, and walked away, and I felt seasick from the mixture of guilt and triumph.

I was filling out the Stanford application at my dad’s kitchen table, wondering what I could list as extracurricular interests besides computer programming and getting a girlfriend. It was hard to concentrate with Dad yelling into the phone. “I don’t give a crap about the controller chip!” he shouted. “You said the prototype would be done in March, and now it’s practically June, and you’re coming to me with this garbage about a controller chip!”

He put down the phone and looked over at me. “This guy told me he knew what he was doing,” he said in his familiar wounded tone. Then his voice firmed up. “Sometimes you have to let people know who’s boss, you know what I mean?”

“Sure, Dad,” I said.

“It looks like we’re going to have to postpone the launch,” he said. It had already been pushed back twice. “There’s some snags on the road, you come to expect that in business. Especially when you’re doing something nobody’s ever done before.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“It’s really going to be something,” he said. “The problem we’re running into here is, well, it’s the design of the machines. You’ve got to have six flavors in each machine, right, to give people the choice.”
He counted them off on his fingers: “Cola, diet, lemon-lime, orange, root beer, and prune. That’s like Dr Pepper, but ours is going to be called Mr. Popper. So you’ve got to put in a computer chip, where you push a button and tell it what flavor you want and the chip controls which flavor syrup gets pumped in. How about that? A computer in a soda machine!” I indicated that I had heard of such things. “So the guy who’s building the machine, he said he could get it done in about six weeks. But now there’s some kind of shortage of these chips, and he’s telling me there’s no way to get any more until the end of the summer, and so we’re stuck with this great idea, and cases and cases of syrup and carbon, just sitting in this guy’s warehouse, and there’s no way to get the machines into the stores until the fall. This could be a very nice payday for everyone if these guys weren’t so incompetent!”

“Yeah,” I said. Spread out in front of me on the table were my mom’s last few tax returns. She’d given them to me so that I could copy the figures onto the financial-disclosure form. Looking at the documents felt a bit too intimate, like seeing her undressed. I copied the numbers carefully with a fountain pen, and then moved on to the next section of the form.

“Dad, how much money did you make in fiscal ’91–’92?” I said.

He craned his neck to see the forms. “What do they need to know that for?” he asked.

“They need to know, Dad,” I said. “It’s for, like, financial aid and whatever.”

“See, the thing is,” he said, “your income changes from year to year.” He went over to the stove and began filling a pot with water. “That’s how it is with entrepreneurialism—one year you might not make anything, and then the next year you’re going to make a whole lot, to make up for it.”

I said, “I have to send the forms in a couple weeks if I want to apply early decision.”

“Why don’t you call them?” he said, striking a match to turn on the burner. “Call the admissions office and say you don’t think it’s fair that your parents should have to disclose their whole financial lives. Start a consumer protest! If enough people complain, they’ll have to change the policy.”

“But no one is complaining, Dad,” I said. “The only person who’s complaining is you.”

“Well, and I’m the one who’s going to be footing the bills, aren’t I?” he said, turning to face me. “Look, Eric, it’s like this: Right now I don’t have any money apart from my salary from the college. Of course, there’s going to be a bunch of money soon, when we get the machines into the stores. But when you apply to these schools, they’re going to think,
OK, teaches college, makes a good salary—let’s touch him for everything he’s got
. Look, it’s not that I’m not willing to pay for your education—nothing’s more important than education, I’ve always said that—but if they make me pay for it right now, there won’t be enough left for the business.” He lifted the lid off the pot, but the water wasn’t boiling yet. “So just leave my name off entirely. Where they have a space for
father
, write
N/A
. That stands for
not applicable
. Just write that.” He reached into the cabinet for the spaghetti.

Cindy was at home with a cold, and Paul was in class, and Danny was in an expansive mood. “Do you have a free period?” he said when I ran into him in the hall. I told him I did, although this was not true. “Because I want to get out of here,” he said. “I can’t deal with being cooped up in this place, you know?”

“Where can we go?” I asked. It was a freezing Thursday afternoon.

“Anywhere, dude,” he said, sweeping his arm to take in the great world around us. “Let’s hit the road!”

“Yeah, man!” he said as we left the school building. “We’re out
of there! Later, losers!” He was carefully looking straight ahead, and his breath was visible in the air. “We spend all our lives in these boxes, right? They want us to fuckin’ stay in that box until we’re eighteen so we can graduate and go straight into another box and spend the rest of our lives there!” He said this with no malice, only excitement at the break we’d made.

There was no one in Carl’s Jr. except four senior girls who ignored us and an old guy with a cup of coffee and packets of sugar all over the table. We ordered combo meals and piled our puffy coats and wool hats next to us on the plastic seats.

“It’s like, they’re just training us for some stupid office job anyway,” he said. He was the only one of us with even a slight claim to coolness, deriving from his wide, satisfied face and a voice that always gave the impression of minimal effort. “I mean, what do they teach us? They should be teaching us to be, like,
poets
or something. If the schools taught everyone to be a poet or a musician or something instead of, like, an
accountant
, the world would be a whole different place.” I nodded dumbly. “But maybe not everyone’s got it in them to be a poet,” he said, retreating a little.

“Yeah,” I said, “but they should at least have the opportunity.”

“That’s right!” Danny said, raising his Coke as if to toast me. “It should be like,
OK, it turns out you can’t be a poet, you can’t be a painter, you can’t be a, a whatever—you’re going to have to drop out and be an accountant
. And the poets should get paid ten times as much as the accountants, instead of the other way around.”

I was getting it now. “And if your kid said he wanted to be an accountant, you’d say,
Where did your mother and I go wrong
?”

“Exactly!” Danny said, slamming his drink down on the table. “That’s exactly right.”

I met Hannah Pronovost two days before her father died, which was a huge stroke of luck. She and Cindy had been at school together until
ninth grade, when Hannah had started at Danville Academy and Cindy had come to MLK. Now Hannah’s father was fighting a hopeless battle with a vindictive tumor, and Cindy was going over to their house every night to keep Hannah company. She had started carrying herself with the special dignified glamour that teenagers acquire when they make contact with something important and grown-up. We didn’t see her much outside of school anymore.

“This is so stupid,” Danny said. We were sitting in his bedroom waiting for
Saturday Night Live
. “It’s like, we could be in the country, communing with nature or whatever, or we could be in the city where there’s things going on—but no, either of those are too dangerous, so we live in fucking Aurora.” It was only he and Paul who lived in Aurora, but I wasn’t going to point that out.

“But your kids can play outside because it’s
safe
,” Paul said contemptuously.

“Yeah, OK, but in exchange for safety you’re stopping them from having any kind of real experience!” Danny said. “It’s like, if you’re really going to live, you can’t just be safe every minute of your life.”

“No, right, I know,” Paul said, embarrassed that Danny had missed his sarcasm.

“I’d be happy if I could see my girlfriend occasionally,” Danny said. “It sounds really bad over there.”

“Bad like how?” I asked.

“Well, he’s
dying
,” Danny said. “I mean, imagine if, like, any time you saw your dad, that might be the last time you were ever going to talk to him.”

“Wow,” Paul said. He was sitting in a beanbag chair on the floor, and he tipped his head all the way back onto the carpet and looked up at the ceiling. “When you think about it, death is, like, the worst thing out there.”

“Maybe I should call her,” Danny said at last. Calling Cindy at Hannah’s house was discouraged—it risked intruding on the
family’s grief. But he found the number in his wallet, then picked up the phone—he had his own line—and dialed. Paul and I heard the tiny ringing sound from the receiver’s earpiece.

“Um, hi,” he said. “Is Cindy Gerney there?” He sounded embarrassed. I had expected him to say something to acknowledge the situation, some kind of condolence, but I wasn’t sure how you’d do that with people you didn’t know.

When Cindy came on, Danny spoke gently, as though it was she who was sick. “Do you guys want, like, cheering up or whatever?” he said. “I thought we could come over, bring a movie or some KFC or something. To take her mind off it.”

After a minute more he put down the phone and said, “So we’re going over there,” like a platoon commander announcing a dangerous sortie.

Paul had a driver’s license and a Honda Civic that seemed too small for his long frame. The back seat was shallow and cramped, but I didn’t mind. There are few ways to feel more fully included than getting into a car at night, bound for an unfamiliar destination, charged with purpose.

On the way we talked about how to respond if Hannah’s mother answered the door. “Don’t mention it,” Danny advised. “Be serious and everything, don’t be all joking around, but don’t be like,
Oh, I’m sorry your husband is about to die
. Nobody wants to hear that.”

“Fuck,” said Paul with a thrilled shudder.

But it was Cindy and Hannah who let us in. Danny embraced Cindy, then adjusted his features into a somber expression and said, “Hi, Hannah,” in a doleful voice.

“We’ve got to be quiet up here!” she said in a whisper. She was short and had buggy eyes and a ponytail.

The front hall was huge and unlit, although it wasn’t even ten. The girls led us through the dark kitchen and down into the basement, which was bright and carpeted and which gave the impression
of having once been a playroom for an adult male. There was a wet bar and a pool table and a big TV, plus cases on the wall that might have held rifles, but upon this manly foundation there had accumulated a decade’s worth of aerobics videos and
Sweet Valley High
novels and Strawberry Shortcake paraphernalia, and now the room felt like an archaeological dig, with the stratified remains of multiple civilizations piled on top of one another.

“Sorry,” said Hannah, shifting from foot to foot. She didn’t have shoes on, just white tube socks. “We can’t make too much noise upstairs.”

“This is an awesome basement,” I said.

She smiled nervously. “We’ve got a pinball machine,” she said. She opened a door to reveal the laundry room, where a machine with a Flash Gordon theme stood alongside the washer and dryer.

“Does Danny still have the high score?” Cindy asked.

“I think my cousin beat it,” Hannah said apologetically.

“That’s going to change this evening,” Danny said, making Hannah smile. I admired the way he could use his narcissism to reassure her.

Danny turned on MTV and cranked the volume until Cindy made him turn it down. Then Paul set up the balls on the pool table while Danny took the first turn on the pinball machine. In the fridge by the wet bar there was 7 Up and that Hansen’s fruit soda that no one ever drinks. We wandered around the room picking things up and putting them down again, looking for subjects to distract us from the dying man upstairs.

“So is this where you guys used to play Princess Land?” Danny asked. Cindy laughed.

“What’s this?” I said.