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Peninsula
By Dicletian
© 2009 by Alyssus Publishing Group
Text © 2007 by Dicletian.
All rights reserved.
ISBN 061534268X
EAN-13 9780615342689
SAN FRANCISCO
SUPERIOR COURT
SWORN AFFIDAVIT
2007
I. Atherton
II. Stanford by Night
III. San Francisco
IV. Pacific Ocean
V. Stanford by Day
VI. Wine Country
1
All summer I hounded across Italy with the liquidity
to brandish Veuve and the libido to pour it. The French
I consorted with in Milan slept nightly in its red houses,
boasting full-cheeked of their conquests and slapping
each other’s derrières, and one night, very drunk on ret-
sina, we barged through the Navigli towards a straw-
lined palace: they all had wives, they said, and if I ever
wanted to call myself a man I must quench my youth in
the embrace of a whore.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. This milk-
haired Bianca took me in her arms and bathed me, re-
leasing me burning into the night, and I was changed
forever. Ruby eyes called me back under the next
moon, and back again, and I found I could not stop.
I became Lothario to Florentines like Francesca,
queen of the red light, who in scarlet silks murmured of
Borgia as she sucked ecstasy pills; and the grateful
PETA activist Mary, nineteen, of Chartres, a multiracial
milkmaid; and the clicking Nigerian weed-wench from
Leidseplein, Amsterdam, whom in new century zeit-
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2
All of us in Atherton got wealth early on, so we were
struck blind from the beginning – we hungered of the
grain and chased it as we saw our fathers do, through
the temples of our homes out onto the shady streets and
into the schools. The wealth we chased like atheists,
and those who could not get wealth went after its dis-
play, and those who could not pretend became good
nice bookreading children and died to our rising. Our
family got new money but it wasn’t real money, mean-
ing we still remembered where it came from and still
wondered where it might go. My father got it before
the bubble, buying up land in Silicon Valley with Mi-
chael Medine, groom-to-be.
Soon they got more of it financing the companies
that leased the land – with electric eyes they stuffed
gold into the most lucrative balance sheets of a thou-
sand years: they earned 1000x returns: they donned
stonewashed jeans and black polo shirts: they jogged
marathons in the hills: they ate organic, grass-fed or-
anges and avoided veal: they had become venture
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capitalists.
Our families were entangled from the beginning and
this was not to cease. The land around Stanford Uni-
versity sprouted offices like teeth and feasted on the
students’ ideas, while a long residential tract of Ather-
ton spat out a cold billion to house them. Miles south
in the Peninsula’s armpit, thousands of homes sold and
resold and appreciated: my father generated this wealth
and my family tested its velocity and then my father
died along with the market, killed ostensibly by his
heart but really, mentally, by what I would only later
discover. I entered Stanford all but an orphan, given
the incredulity of my mother and her sudden, conven-
ient disease.
They reared us south of San Francisco, on the Penin-
sula, in plush streets under banks of fog fallow in the
shade of oaks which mined the golden foothills, not in
suburbs but towns: the towns enriched our blood with
money and discharged the passports necessary to be-
come leaders, magnates, captains, valedictorians,
advanced placement entrants to Ivydom, heirs both to a
mandate to improve the planet and direct orders to
spend wealth upon it.
We are not San Franciscans and that city lies north,
urban, dirty, and degenerate: robbery, needles, mug-
gers, and fog felch in that subtopia good only for field
trips and the vicarious fantasies of our parents – an al-
ien culture hackneyed by poverty from which good new
families flee south, into Atherton, or north into Marin.
We are not New Yorkers and no one cares about
New York: that city lies repugnant east, as unnatural as
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take our hands off the wheel and close our eyes.
“Can she still see?”
“I think so,” she whispered. Then she smiled. “Oh,
the little anxiety before the brunch, I understand! The
look on your face, sir! No, not to worry, she’s good as
always and blessed by the Holy Father. Tita is off to a
clinic in Ca-na-da in a couple of days. Her health is
better, yes. Do not worry any more. But there so much
to do for the brunch – we have to get back. It is im-
portant that you are there, is what she says. Sir Ryan he
is coming. Sir Michael he is coming.”
I slid across the leather and ran a hand over my eyes.
We spun hard over the onramp and south onto the
highway.
“I remember now,” said the housekeeper. “The little
scare. But we couldn’t reach you, sir. No! Not worry,
be happy.”
“At least her hypochondria is unchanged,” I sighed.
“Her health has gotten better, yes. She has stopped
coming to church. Sir Michael he takes her to the doc-
tor once a week.” These typical misunderstandings.
With both hands she navigated a labyrinth of ramps
sorting us onto a perpendicular highway, ears twitching
from the ashy bramble of her hair.
“You said Ryan is coming,” I said. “Well all right.
How did Mom organize a brunch on a Monday? It isn’t
even the weekend.”
“It is politics,” she said.
As I would soon discover, Michael had chosen this
moment to call upon Atherton to back his campaign for
House Representative of San Mateo County, a ridicu-
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ty.”
She gave a little tenor mm and we fell into an algo-
rithmic conversation about Europe, the garden, the
speeches, about the Gentry Gala that night – halting,
strenuous sentences, each a struggle to comprehend.
The sudden society sucked the zing from my bones, and
we trailed off into silence. I dozed to the drizzling eu-
calypts tumbling past the highway towards home.
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3
On the drive, Mother’s gold sedan puckered by the
palisade, draped in a sediment of cherry blossoms: al-
ready some seven cars lounged across the stones, two
hybrids, Ryan’s jeep, a periwinkle seven series, and,
leading them all, the familiar, snarling, silver Maserati,
the Gina company car. Most bore the red shield of the
Circus Club tacked to their grills, access cards to para-
dise, and the rest belonged to Jews who could not
become members.
Slate shadows fell from the poplars as the morning
sun, passing behind a spit of cloud, grew ashy over the
coastal range. The housekeeper clicked off the engine
and with a slam darted across the pebbles, up the steps
towards front doors, flung open between casements
alive with bustle and hollered Spanish.
I passed through my gardens. All the lawngrass had
been aerated by Mexicans wielding forks, stumbling
hunchbacked each morning across the green – their
works were manifold, resplendent. As I passed, they
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–If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
–Health isn’t better than wealth.
–It’s no crime to steal from a thief.
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4
Splashing freshly toweled from the bathroom, I
called to arrange a companion for the night. It had been
a while, and my roost felt unfeathered. As the phone
rang I pulled cedar shoeracks from my closet chest and
appraised my most precious possessions. Stretched
with brassnailed hobtrees, they glowed glossy brown
and velvet, a formation of calfskin and nubuck welt,
cordovan and studded ostrich. The racks roamed in
hue, chocolate monkstraps with gold flanges, wingtip
oxfords with crimson insoles, hammered walking shoes
from Chile, among them black clasps of manolo chuk-
kas and cap toes, all supple around the talus and
cuneiforms, ensuring my fubulo massaged, my heel ca-
ressed: all well oiled, all lathered with sandalwood shoe
cream, all chariots par excellence.
From the trees I pulled and debuckled a winged pair
of evanders, swinging them onto my bed pillow to rest
their slick soles on the starch.
“I’m home,” I said into the phone.
“Well oh my god. I’ve heard already from Megan
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who heard from Adi, which is, I guess, all the warning I
should expect–”
Chewing gum slopped through the line.
“I want to see you. We can have champagne. And
then,” I told her, “we can have sex.”
“I’m on my period,” she complained, so I hung up.
But the next girl said all right, and I said all right I’ll
call you later then, but she started talking and wouldn’t
shut up, so I held the phone away from me like a snake.
Light came from all directions, from the windows
and the floor and the ceiling, periwinkle pink light, so-
ciety streaming in voices leavened by the sun and air. I
recalled the function that was about to begin.
Across the leather plane of my desk my computer
switched itself on and bwooped out its welcome.
“Later,” I whispered to it.
“Call me after your party,” chirped the girl from
arm’s length. “We have to go out tonight. It’s the first
night everyone’s back. We have to go out.”
“All right,” I was saying, “I don’t care.”
All of a sudden, someone began to hammer on the
door.
“Don’t come in!” I shouted, and hung up, stumbling
back naked onto the marble and grabbing up my
breeches.
“Oh herro! Stop jacking off,” bellowed Ryan Bonn,
pounding with both his fists.
“Faggotus maximus! All right, all right!” I called,
and stepped over to clack back the lock. All at once he
swung in charging and dove across my bed, hands
flexed to his temples, the springs creaking and snapping
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skirted the heavens, above the cherry trees and the ter-
raced home that was possibly partly mine.
“You win,” Ryan said. He took a long pull of scotch
just as the lawn under our feet began to shake, as a
great mountain of flesh snuck up behind us and burst
moley into our conversation: she had much to trade in
the gelatinous arms she wrapped about us both, joining
us to the sacks of her breasts.
“Oh you boys you absolutely must call me sometime
soon,” the woman babbled from above her teats, her
copper hair roiling upon us lambs. “It's shameful you
haven't called me Jake we need to fix you up before you
spoil.”
“I'm accounted for, happily married,” I mumbled.
“Didn't mother say I had three girlfriends. I collect
them and when I am done they go away.”
“Do you know what I do for a living now, who is
this your friend, I haven't met him I don't think, for
shame, oh you've grown up handsome you both, you've
turned out so finely.”
She released us from her great sacklike paps, jig-
gling beneath a lavender sweater. Her trotting legs
autoclaved in the sun and emitted great trails of sweat
down to her tied ankles. Staggering back, Ryan set
down his drink and wiped his hands over his khakis, his
eyes wide in alarm.
“Ryan Bonn, Lulu Fermott. Ryan is lustful and
alone. You have my permission to help him.”
“Especially pleased to meet you,” he told the wom-
an.
“Jake you must tell him I'm a life coach,” she en-
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5
In the sleeping hours that followed, mother and Me-
dine roared off with the crowd for lattes, shopping,
hiking, bird-watching, and chardonnay, leaving me to
do what I do every afternoon, online with the door
locked, with my effects in one hand and a glass of gin
in the other. I was making time for the women of the
Internet.
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6
Outside, beneath a giant umbrella spread like a ra-
ven’s wing, I called a Stanford girl to me. I had fled –
it was madness to remain with my mother in such a
niggardly mood. The storm swept in, hailing sheets
through the blue oaks, the pavilion a dim constellation
over the club. The dark street shook in rain that
whipped it in passing and returned to whip it again.
“I'm timing you,” I told the girl. She was half white
and half brown, so we called her the hybrid. She was
obsessed with sex because she knew how valuable it
made her.
Setting my controls for the heart of the sun, from my
breast pocket I took my bullet, a silver device I keep for
such waits. With a tap, a powdery bump of cocaine fell
from the supply into the chamber, and I huffed it up as
the spray tore me sideways, and, with three more pow-
erful snorts in the vortex of the rain, the cocaine ran like
electricity, igniting memories, moments, and time flew
speeding silver white and black.
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flecked off like a scab torn away, the world bloats, sug-
ar spends to fatten slaves, and I –
“I think I’m breaking up with you,” said the hybrid.
“Again? Is it even possible? I saw you broke up
with me on Facebook. Or someone did. Well all right,
fantabulous. Fan-fucking-tastic.” I was chewing my
tongue and my lips, rolling the flesh between my fangs.
“No, I am serious this time.”
“Hokay. Ho-kay. Ha.” My eyes rolled – not sarcas-
tically, spastically. “It doesn’t change anything.”
She fell silent. God, she had to admit it felt good to
bite your lip, to taste the blood in you.
“I’m sleeping with someone else,” she said.
“Me too. Well, more than one person. You have to,
to categorize them, don’t you. It’s the only way. I
know.”
The car drove on. Well.
“Uh,” she said. “Let’s start this conversation over.”
“Whatever you want,” I cackled. “If it’s not going
as you expected.”
In my mind bloomed animal shapes, white and pow-
dery, blustering as through snowdrifts: the animals
paused, spines and stalagmites sprouting from their
ridge-backs, and drifted on, pageant-like. Slowly they
came apart in wisps, emitting stuffing that shimmered
and disappeared in rings of smoke. My tongue chawed
and I made a happy gurgle.
“I can’t believe you lost all your stuff,” the hybrid
whined, her mind flapping on like every woman-mind,
unanchored and preening. “I thought you would disap-
pear.”
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out a powdery rim with his finger and rubbed it over his
gums, slurping and licking.
“Don’t the priests and – the others come back here?”
“It’s a church dude,” he told me, blinking as the
glow overcame his eyes.
I gave him the money that the Gina lawyer had given
me. He spread the bills out and folded them and
slipped them into his pocket. He wanted to do a line off
a crucifix.
“No,” I told him.
“I have a question,” he continued, glaring at the
cross. “Would you rather get teabagged by a man or a
woman? Things to consider: getting teabagged by a
woman means putting her bloody tampon in your
mouth.”
“I really don’t know,” I said. And I left through the
side door into the night. The wind hungering over the
coast had driven back the rain. I walked fast across the
quad towards the car, metallic residue beneath my
tongue, my heart subsiding a little now.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, and felt the ball in my pocket.
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Oh you are here.” Yes, yes. “He thinks I hate him, but
I don’t Where am I? Who am I?”
“You’re inside the party, and you’re drunk,” I told
her. “It’s a historic piece.”
She leaned against me, light and bruised, spilling out
of her dress. The music thumped, and all of her lay in
my hands.
“I’m not that drunk,” she snorted. “Do you want to
dance?”
“You can’t dance; you can’t even stand up. They’re
kicking everyone out.”
“No they’re not. It’s only eleven.”
“No, there was a fight and someone said the cops are
coming,” I lied. “We have to go – the brutal pigs and
their batons! They don’t respect our rights!”
“Unless we’re minorities they don’t,” she wailed. “I
have to find my friends. I love my friends.”
“You didn’t come with any friends. But it’s irrele-
vant – you can find them online when we get home.
Now let’s get out of here.”
“But you’re an awful person and I can’t trust you.”
“You can, I’m your boyfriend for the night,” I
smiled. “I’m your personal taxi service.” No it doesn’t
matter. So she slipped her smooth arm in mine and I
took her out past where the line was still churning and
charging and consuming itself (“Record time,” intoned
the gatekeeper), and we went deep into the night down
the dark central artery of campus, holding hands.
A helmet of cloud sat on the sky and the pillar-
lamps cast halos into the mist that had settled on the
campus from the hills. In that light she was soft and
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small and red, pressed near to me, and her vulpine eyes
swirled and darted. I had started to come down myself,
lucid in the cold air, so I struck up on the lamp glow,
asking why she thought she had any friends in the
world at all.
“Facebook keeps count,” she said. “There’s Mikey,
and Adam, Ted, and British Pat, and Jimmy, and Kurt.
Even though you don’t know them they’re all my
friends.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a
remarkable cell phone. The golden frontplate bore the
brand of a New York luxury house, and rubies sparkled
along its length.
“That’s a lie,” I said. “Those are just the guys you
slept with before you met me, and whom you will sleep
with again after I graduate.”
“Well, that’s not fair it’s just complicated–” We
stumbled on. “It’s just–”
“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” I told
her. “I know exactly.”
“The past doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “I rarely
think of it. I’m over it now. It’s all just a big game, a
part I play for fun because we’re in college, and we
have to, we’re in college.”
“With all these admirable human beings,” I said.
“They are Stanford students, like you!”
“Servants of the devouring sword. But I’m less ide-
alistic,” I went on. “Those people can’t be my friends.”
Trees mashed in the night, whirling fog among the
lamps and sleeping dormitories.
“Your only friends are your childhood friends.” Her
tan paw stroked my hand, growing firm and insistent,
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mumble.
“Listen, you piece of shit pledge,” she mumbled,
“remove your tramp ass from my presence.” We stum-
bled the stairs to the inner hall. “Go watch some BET,
you fucking nigger,” she giggled. “Oops, I can’t say
that. Sorry.” She kept giggling.
In her loft, she caught her legs around me face-to-
face, done and done, her gold form indented with soft
light streaking from the Japanese lamps and her wide
eyes declensing as she pressed them shut into the pil-
lows. Our heat rose and our breath denuded us in the
night aromatic with rain that did not impede her calling
and her calls went out into the layered air and sang re-
played in the mist.
She had pert pink nipples and downy breasts kept in
red lace which peeled away to release them. They
bulged and cleaved and pressed between my hands.
She had gleaming blonde ropes that she whipped to and
fro. She had a roan spot that she liked to offer bent
over as she moaned into the pillow, that would make
you drunk if you cared to drink. In this position she
would slip a hand down herself and let her fingers play
backwards over her behind and down between her legs.
And when satisfied she would place the same pillow
under her hips to advance your angle of entry, and
when so levered and entered at last her eyes glittered
like red gems and she sometimes cried, and she would
call out sighing into the night like she did and like she
still must do.
Afterwards we lay together. Past an expanse of
crimson quilt, the window emitted shadows and trailed
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der and out the door without saying a word and without
grace, her tear-stained face turned away. So I tried to
sleep as she had asked, and the crickets chirped in the
misty summer night. I lay back but could not die – my
heart thundered on.
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7
YOUR FACEBOOK WALL ANNOUNCES: Happy
birthday! I’m SO sad I can’t come to the party. I will
come next year. I already came. I’m here for you. I
am your best friend. I don’t think solo liquid lunching
is the proper way to spend your birthday, but I’m abso-
lutely sure you’ll fix that in about half an hour, so
happy birthday! I miss you so much and I so wish I was
there to celebrate with you, but don’t worry – I’ll be
visiting you soon. Have an awesome birthday and take
a few shots in my honor. Hehe.
Hootie hoo! New year, new crush. Grey Goose got
you feeling loose? Let’s play a game called “I miss you
and want you back in my life.” It’s official: I love you
so much you don’t even know. I bought you a Peruvian
present today – get pumped. It will go well with your
campus golf cart, Larroque style. Remember that one
time when we weren’t friends? Wow – but I’m officially
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makeup.
The windows smoldered quietly with city clouds,
passing sweeps of light along the walls. Our apartment
building crowned the hill on Hyde Street, a parapet
seated among plane trees and cablecar tracks with a
good view of the bay. South, the financial district rose
in misty relief around the Transamerica Pyramid.
“It’s a morgue in here,” condemned the girl as we
entered, “thine eyes shalt ruin.”
“Clearly I heard you fall,” said she still reading.
“Roman, thou art still in love with me.”
The girl augered backwards onto the mattress, send-
ing a comber of featherbed flapping the magazine’s
pages. “It’s all raw,” she complained, probing her fin-
gers around her kneecap, now sticky with lymph. Then
she let out a frustrated moan and rolled around onto her
breasts, kicking her calves like a flea to inch across the
bed. Then she turned me her eyes, green and pleading,
and asked, “Jake would you come rub my shoulders
please please pretty please?” A steel ring glistened in
her lip.
The bitch’s hooded eyes swung off the page to re-
gard her sister’s knee. “Would you not get your flesh
everywhere,” she said. She had been reading about
people who believed they could change their facial
structure by concentrating on photographs. By keeping
an ideal facial structure fixed in their minds, they be-
lieved they could slowly alter their countenance
towards the ideal. An intelligence test stuck out of the
pages, a folded card.
“Tell me your IQ,” I told her as I began the massage.
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The girl curled under the blanket, preening her legs like
a cricket. Smoothing my hands over her back, I ran the
cords of tension down and out, and she purred and
closed her eyes, wrinkling the linen with her paw.
“It’s high I got into Stanford what more do you want
to know,” the bitch said defensively, not looking up. A
butterfly tattooed on her ankle showed that she came
from some inferior Californian zone.
“What are your thoughts on NAFTA?” I inquired.
“Do you agree with the war or should we just nuke all
the rugheads and be done with it?”
“Stop speaking weird. Racist.”
“He thinks he’s a therapist,” sighed the other girl.
“He tries to provoke you. He needs therapy himself
don’t you baby.” Her back joints popped staccato un-
der my palms.
“Therapy is to the masses what drugs are to me,” I
informed them. “In this I’m almost Buddhist.”
Blindly the girl clawed across the bed and wrapped
her arms around the tan leg of her sister, laying down
her warm head in the proffered lap. I pushed off, leav-
ing her purring, and went to watch the jets as they spun
across the sky. The penthouse windows were set
obliquely, peering at the sun, and one had to approach
to view the city sprawl and the hill below.
I looked. Across the bay a brocade of cream clouds
prickled with thunder: the sea blew them in over the
cruisers and the sun leavened them – the clusters of
ships rocked in the dark morning water, and the jets
cleared off as the biplanes began their tricks. A red
one, maroon in the cloud cover, shot straight up over
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working.
The birds squawked that morning, a mother jay fret-
ting in the knobby plane on the corner at Hyde, in full
career of ten young demanding feed. Around them
blew green saplings and leaves that died, fell, and died
some more. Her hatchlings spun their legs and spread
from their belly-fuzz their wings; they had grown larger
than their mother, urgently calling for what she could
provide. Her oblong head spat between them the white
slime of the tree's insects, and in repletion they twit-
tered, bashed each other, then collapsed.
I descended through Victorians onto pastel Colum-
bus, past the piazzas and cafés to where the glass
battlements of skyscrapers linked up overhead, the
beep-roar of morning traffic deflecting through their
canyons, and crowds of fast-moving weekend troops
descended with me – bankers, consultants, paralegals,
prides of analysts darkly clad, chattering on phones,
hurrying on, some younger than me, inexperienced re-
cruits from obsolete cities who had never beheld wealth
and who aged now in its proximity, for it is a function
of wealth to age. At the base of Columbus the financial
district raised its cape of silver glass and blocked out
the sun, delimiting the white sky into a grid. We ig-
nored the morning tourists, the strolling invalids, the
lunatics and beggars, their laziness a disease on this
earth.
Where Montgomery runs its steel through the tow-
ers, strafed by the taxis and streetcars and the ironwork
of the banks, the carved lions yawn from the arches
above all the crenellations of exchange, open accounts
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is my money.”
“But the fund is your problem as well as mine,” he
said, turning in his chair so that our knees brushed, his
head a red and blunt knot without features or eyes.
“Not mine.”
“Oh yes, and that’s what’s so fun about this ar-
rangement. I'm embarrassed to say I partly agree with
you, that without a grand slam this fund's going under-
water. But not everyone knows that! And no one wants
that to happen.”
I slid back to the other side of the table and took the
sepals of a vase flower between my thumb and forefin-
ger, a swamp dock, cold and undernourished. I could
feel the fluids circulating in it. “I guess,” I said.
“In short, I presume you want your allowance. And
I presume that you know the majority of your trust’s
assets remain invested in the Gina funds, where they
were transferred at your father's behest.”
“Those assets have already paid out in cash. The old
partnership is winding down. I don't see how that af-
fects me today–”
“What affects you is the rate your mother and I de-
cide to give you money, and the rapidly dwindling
liquidity of the Bessemer estate. I know you don't want
to work, but given this situation you may have to.”
The lawyer pulled at the plate binder his analyst had
left and clacked open its metal fangs. He flipped out a
blue sheet printed with the date and a short triplicate of
columns, our family’s accounts.
“I have tried to speak with your mother about this,
but she, like you, made up her mind long ago to spend
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maybe ten million dollars over the next four years. But
if we hit one out of the park–”
“Which is impossible these days in venture capital
because Kleiner and Sequoia are sucking up all the best
deals and it isn’t the bubble any more–”
“It’s possible.”
“That’s great to know. It’s great that you’re doing
your job. I don’t see why we don’t just sell our stock
on the private market. And I don't see how any of this
affects me.”
“It affects your mother more – her decision making
at least.” He ruffled up his snout. “I’d like to say
someone would take on a Gina interest up for auction,
but no one is going to buy the Bessemer stake as a sec-
ondary. It’s tail-end private equity. No one likes to
buy tail-end, not such a small position.”
“You said my mother knows about this?”
“Does mother know – mother doesn’t know the dif-
ference between a sheet of stock and a bond. Your
mother, however, knows the feeling of money.” Sweat
had appeared on the lawyer’s freckle-crowned pate,
where the hairs swam back like insect legs from his
crown. He was still smiling.
“The point is, without a big injection of cash into
your trust you will have to work in an investment bank
for thirty years if you want to continue any semblance
of your current lifestyle, because your mother isn’t go-
ing to let go of the cash. She has her own needs.
Hundred hour weeks–” He grinned, capitalist. Then he
leaned in earnestly. “Which is why it’s so fortunate
that Mr. Medine has offered to buy your trust’s Gina
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interests.”
“He has? For how much?”
“Three hundred thousand, today.”
My eyes bulged. “Show me the upside!”
“It’s cold cash here, in your hand, rather than paper
that may or may not be worth anything. Examine the
files yourself, you’ll see what’s in there – just a bunch
of patents and common stock in companies about to go
under. You said it yourself. You should take the mon-
ey; it’s a sizeable nest egg. Your mother wants you to
work too, after what you spent in Europe. It isn't the
nineties any more, Jake, and you've got to learn we all
worked for what we got, and you must too–”
The wings of his hair went floating around his ears
and his eyes revolved magnified in the glass lenses,
large rosaceous eyes which stared upon me a moment
and continued their roaming around the forms of the
tower. “You've got to get out there and invest yourself
in the world. I think you'll find it's boring without
something to do. Work holds everything together. It's
not such a bad thing, believe me, once you get used to
it.”
He continued: “You believe me, your father knew
the value of work. Hardest worker I’d ever seen, but he
didn't show it. Never condescended, taught even Mr.
Medine a thing or two. I respected him very much.”
And this disgusting Ragged Dick took to sliding his
thumb along the slicks on the glass, picking up a rim of
water that overflowed his palm to his wrist, which he
wiped at with a napkin.
“My idea is to move to Hawaii and never speak to
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Outside, the sun scorched the city and the sky let
down its tresses in the streets. Beneath the banisters
and the marble orbs, the blocks filled with suited sol-
diers out for coffee and money on their Saturday
breaks. I walked back among them along the boulevard,
the package under my arm. It was time to see Lily.
“Now minster,” a bald shoeblack called from the
sidewalk, “those some fine but funked up shoes.”
And he sat me upon his throne, whirling the saddle
soap and flicking from between his teeth an excrescent
red tongue.
“You needs this soap,” he muttered. From the hills
around us plunged cablecars on sinuous wires, and the
district clanged out a hundred thousand conversations,
confined by its high towers into the fiber running be-
neath the streets. The shoeblack pulled gobs of parade
polish from the tin and spread them across my shoe-
caps with a rag. The evanders shined in the sun and a
passing banker turned his head in admiration.
“You got a dollar?” the black asked, eyes quivering.
But I was not listening. I had taken the pack of papers
from the folder and flipped through them, where, nes-
tled between the reams of gibberish, I found a small
typed letter:
Jake, this note is for you, and it’s hidden here where I
know you’ll look since you love money. There is some-
thing important you should know about our family and
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8
Sensations, sensations, San Francisco, its jelly of
sensations! I hiked all the way up Columbus to where
the parapets of Sts. Peter and Paul overlook Washing-
ton Square, a grand toy towering over the poplar
branches and their scales. One hundred Chinese made
ranks under those dancing trees, formed in silent exer-
cise around their leader, moving liquidly, and I walked
watching them down the path. Yes the square opened a
hole in the city and its supplicants crawled forth to
drink the light: they sat upon benches brown-faced and
reeked and never lived. Witnesseth! Across the lawn a
bum in black crawled before blast sprinklers that
knocked him to and fro, and he sprawled to wash his
buttocks, pulling the pants down with one hand and
wiping away as I walked through the sharpsmelling
grass.
But the breeze of the sea found these heights as well,
and blew off the cooksmells of the morning, the aroma
of motor oil on asphalt, bread baking, noodles frying in
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Her knees bent and her back flexed – the slip went pull-
ing around her, half tearing off. Of course she liked to
be choked. Beyond her shoulders the houses descended
and the sea abandoned the coast, tilting and pitching as
we struggled. It flared into a bent coin around the hori-
zon and the view swung dizzily. On the hard street
below, a car door slammed and a man clopped around
the bend and still I gripped her. I bent her like that to
his eyes, if he could see. Her pale hair swung down,
my fist tearing at her neck.
Far below, the crest of the oak shuddered in the
wind, its circle of leaves darkening the pavement. Her
gasps quickened and I moved her slowly forwards to
die, tilting her shoulders, her waist nearly over, tipping,
tipping. Down the sweep of the heights and towards
the harbor she stared and began to cry out in fear.
“Casting your sin to die on the rocks,” I told her.
With a shove I gave her off. But as she rose back flow-
erlike she bent her wrist and hit me in the jaw. My
fangs snapped blood into my mouth. Tearing, I began
to laugh, and I let her kiss me. Her lips, soft and shak-
ing, stuck again like petals.
“Lily, you stink of lust and adultery.”
Turning away, she fixed her hair and clasped it in.
She was smiling and still panting, and the slip she wore
glimmered and showed.
“You should rinse to get the smell off,” I told her,
shaking my head. “If it will come off.”
“Oh but I like it. How else am I going to hint to
your girlfriends?”
“With a baseball bat.”
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9
The whole night lived. With her I dined atop the
city and sank into nepenthe: night winds, cold noble
cherry trees, stone pillars, blades of air in the twilight,
the stars supine between ozone expanses, and not a soul
but us in those heights. The mansions glowed, the
planes glowed with the boats, all the night folding ebon.
The outlines of the houses huddled on the skyline
and the restaurant opened like a star among them. The
storm glinted in tatters over the bay, reflecting the Pen-
insula’s cities, and off to the west boomed the ardent
Pacific.
Sommat crooned the portly maitre d’, taking the
necks of our coats, and away into a maze of tables Lily
drifted beside me with the brazen, half-grateful gaze of
a new lover. Zagat-rated 26 here; Yelp four-and-a-half
stars here; excellent Cotes du Rhone here; excellent
Crevettes Bordelaise; excellent views; expedient ser-
vice; a yummy birthday dinnerplace. Yet filled with the
old sitting gray, emitting plumes of dust, and a few fag-
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“Do this!”
“Do this!”
We slammed our chests and writhed against each
other, then bound from the door back into the party,
wiping the dust from our faces.
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as the bass beat, held it as the song moved them and the
smoke rose around whom.
Down stared the great oil paintings of harlots ham-
mered high on the walls. There was a lambent Japanese
geisha facing a samurai who awaited her kneeling; she
held in her hand the red ribbons of her hair. There was
a filthy Victorian courtesan splayed on a Louis sofa,
hair tied up in ribbons. There was a naked and virulent
redheaded whore hanging over the bar who stood legs
splayed, striding her wasteland forward. There was an
ardent black whore keeping the dance, a leopard who
rose flexing her buttocks and glancing back over one
mahogany shoulder as she pared the whip she held. All
these and others stared down upon the crowd, breathing
in smoke and the dissipation of wealth.
When I saw them, Ryan had the princess plopped on
his lap and she giggled into his ear. He had both of
their drinks and kept them from her, teasing, and her
limp wrist dangled after the glasses as she traded him
the moon of her smile. He pinched her waist and she
swatted him, straddled him, twisting over, her jaw re-
volving in pleasure. Around them peered a harem of
blondes whose hair blazed white, ultraviolet – they sat
straight and soft and silent at the table, their heads loll-
ing in revelations of sound, their firefly eyes neon.
Around them swirled the soft breath of the club, the
dark night that was inside and outside and which no one
could escape.
Without any control I imagined the birthday girl be-
ing seduced by him, not by even Ryan, but by any
taller, stronger man, who speaks confidently and makes
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Beyond the breathing cave and over the red rope, the
haphazard night wind dispersed sea cloud among the
city’s towers and the reek of vomit rose from the gut-
ters. Outside all the couples from the club were
fighting. Girls were slapping boys and boys stood
hands hanging and pacing and yelling. There were five
or six couples fighting and five or six girls crying.
With Bonn I pitched forwards into the black city.
Because we had become drunk enough to lumber home
we would not deign to hail a cab. We were immortals.
With cancer sticks aglow, insolently swaying, inveigh-
ing against all who had crossed us in our lives, we
began on our way.
Phantoms rose up from our cloven wallets, and our
slick arms, necks, and armpits steamed. We had before
us two miles up Telegraph Hill to the apartment, though
by our estimate it would take only ten minutes.
Beneath the towers Bonn lamented. “This is good-
bye from me to me.” He had been trembling about his
job.
“What are you wailing about?” I snapped. “If you
don’t like it why do it?”
“Will you make it that simple,” sputtered Bonn.
“It’s not like everything else.” Then he began to moan.
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dusty and red in the night that contained its lights, and
through those old blocks of concrete and stone I
marched in the freezing air, through the Stockton Tun-
nel which bellowed out its insides, up the hill to what I
called home. Splashing back through overflowing gut-
ters, tenderloin streams, ramps of mist, back to the
apartment where two thirds of the tenants were dying
lavishly, lucratively: silk-headed spindles perishing in
chambers tended by silent Mexicans, spirits departing
into the air of large rooms, beige hallways permanently
empty, full of ghosts, a community patrolled by death,
people too old to use the Internet to escape their pris-
ons. The outstanding age of this city! San Francisco
has more dogs than children.
I walked with my memories as alive as ghosts, faster
and faster through the streets. I seemed to accelerate
and lost myself again, and time ran silver and black on
its rails. In the cabinet in the big room of the apartment
sat the whiskey I needed. I needed it and I shambled
like a yeti across the carpet, licking the bottle and
chugging back half, turning, panting, my gaze on the
big Buddha smiling on the wall. The room swept in
dizzy spinning and another figure stirred far across
from me. It was myself, draped on the couch. I had
been watching me, and I had not noticed me there. I
took off my shoes and rose to my feet. I walked slowly
towards me, watching my eyes and my rocking gait.
And I took me by the arm and put me to bed.
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10
Dream fell softly – an old rummy savannah of red
and yellow sawgrass, swirled and toothy to the satisfac-
tion of safari and trundling elephant alike. I was seated
at a clean little tea table with an old friend of mine.
Atop the tablecloth had appeared, with a strange twin-
kle, a carafe of red wine, and overhead stretched a great
sleepy tree, promising shade and peace in its blue
leaves, a Eucalyptus, improbable so far inland. And as
if in friendly answer, a berry popped down on the table
and bounced away into the grass, and the leaves waved
lazily away. My dear friend had poured me a glass of
red wine and looked at me, purring. I sipped the wine
and bubbled it between my teeth and my friend said,
“Well, Jacob, it will really be quite a year. You’ve ac-
complished so much already, and I’m very proud of
you. You’re nearly halfway. After all–”
And I nodded and took my wine and felt comforted,
and the chair felt taller, more supple, cushioning my
back. The sky domed and spanned, swimming over-
head with pearls of cloud, and I announced, “It has been
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brunette flag.
“What do you think she gets?” Lily asked, her voice
shrill.
“Lily you shut your dirty mouth,” snapped Medine.
His great left hand had snapped the can that he held,
and suddenly its copper shell sparkled with light that
mixed with the red light of his watch. I inhaled. Look-
ing down, Lily pulled the shawl close and twisted to
face the water.
Medine set the can down, crossed his legs, folded his
hands upon them, and sneered. His woolen pants
flapped, the pleats rippling and purling over the rocking
of the waves. He turned to me.
“Jacob, your house has been in disorder for some
time,” he said.
“I don’t see how it connects,” I protested. “It hasn’t.
It’s not appropriate to–”
“It connects,” he went on, “because your mother has
beheld wealth and it has become an aspect of her. And
she cannot continue without it.” He looked down into
the sea. “She has certain obligations. Money creates
obligations, you know that. Do not think I have any
idealistic beliefs about my person. I simply understand
hers.”
“I don’t believe you really understand her.”
“Let’s be clear. Your father’s estate is nearly gone,
due in no small part to your rearing, to certain habits of
yours and your mother’s. You might not believe it, but
it’s true.” Again he cast me his agate eyes, and drew
them to Lily. He paused. Then – a second short smile,
around his canines. “The fact is we should enjoy our-
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the sun.
“The slaughter of innocents,” I coughed, paddling.
“We could release them?”
“Into flesh and ash and stone and ash and dust and
shellfish.”
Suddenly she smiled, lips dripping salty water, and
twisted the bag shut. Laughing the same metal laugh as
her sister, she began towards me. The black water
snarled and clapped, and, treading, I swept around to
face the open sea, and near swam for my life.
“Is there really a yacht out here?” I tried, spluttering
water. She was bobbing behind, near now.
“The biggest yacht in the world.”
“And I’m being fed to the sharks.”
“They don’t come past the kelp wall. Not any time
when I was little and not today. Oh I love it here! We
could go surfing on the beach if we brought boards.
The abalone is still fun. Do you want to try?” She
passed me the hook around my chest and passed her
slender palm down my thigh. There was a moment of
warm pressure. Looping her hands around my neck she
kissed me behind the ear, then, clawing my face, forced
her young tongue over my lips as I struggled off.
“Stop!” I coughed, grappling her wrists, nearly claw-
ing her with the hook.
“Yes!” Emma cried. “Do your part to harm the envi-
ronment. He will be so proud of us–” She kicked back
and off, eyes smoking, and I fled into a dive.
A careening, sudden flash startled me, and I nearly
dropped the hook – a sinuous fish barreling from the
rocks, heading for deep water. The ocean lifted me as I
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198
11
Moored in the haze smoothed by heaven over the
sea, an armory drifted before the Farallon Islands. We
could no longer see land for the clinging haze: every-
thing had faded to white. Medine grasped the
speedboat’s wheel with thick pleated hands of tendon
and hair and his white smile went blowing behind him
as we sped towards the largest yacht in the world.
“Practically her maiden voyage!” he bellowed. His
swim had filled him with energy. “Tom’s little pro-
ject!”
Polygonal, then triangular in the haze, the grand
barge rose moored by ivory ropes to the seabed, like a
great white wurm weltering among the island spars.
On deck fifty healthy couples in bright cotton par-
took of the afternoon, terraced onto the floors of the
boat, among them racing crewmen who attended to all
functions and all desires, caviar champagne and cellu-
lite. In the surrounding surf fifteen other speedboats
dandled in spume, a concordance of hulls that pitched
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black falcon. She was the finest boat in the world and
in this rich surf she spent well.
Off her bow a blond boy flew a Chinese kite, hold-
ing on as the sea winds took the serpent and blazed its
ribbons in recursions of color on the rocks. Mexicans
crawled the decks and crawled the ropes and cooked
and chattered and cleaned.
“It has taken three hundred laborers more than five
years to build,” the owner drawled, resting a fuzzy el-
bow on the bar. Medine had gone off with the sisters to
find my mother, and we were drinking champagne like
good tycoons. “It has taken history's largest single or-
der of carbon fiber for her masts; there's more of it in
the Maltese Falcon than in a stealth bomber.”
“You must be very proud,” I told him. “Congratula-
tions on this fantabulous maiden voyage.”
“For Jesus’s sake I am,” the old man growled. “So,
you’re Russ Bessemer’s son.”
“It was nice of him to make me.”
“Do you know that these sails are controlled elec-
tronically, by the push of a button? Doesn’t even
require a crew. Do you know who I am?”
“Appearances attest a deity of high finance. T.
Boone Pickens? Kleiner? Warner Chilcott? Henry
Kravis? No.”
“I am Tom Perkins. I did some work with your fa-
ther. We built the valley into what is is. My companies
built it!” He barked the same seal laughter they all
shared, rocking back on his heels. “I suppose you’ve
heard of Google. Do you see him there, that’s Sergey
Brin, one of the founders. Do you see what kind of
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12
Beauty, that indifferent gargoyle, flees Stanford
campus until the first day of spring. Then the snap re-
leases the sun over the crimson hills and warm breezes
skirt the fountains brimming with winter rain, and sun
inflates the mood. Students lounge on lawns with red
beer cups, weekends add to themselves at least another
day, girls tan and exercise, and forgiveness becomes
possible. Stray trumpets in Braun announce evenings
on the peaceful lakeshore, laptop and lover in hand.
But this would come later, and the cruel winter faced
us.
October came, October passed, the penumbra of the
year. Lily and I grew close. We never spoke in public
or even mentioned one another, but the silent bond per-
sisted. We would meet sometimes in the streets or
parks, or she would slip away from the dinners Medine
held – we would talk for hours where no one could dis-
cover us. We maintained this masque for those weeks,
permitting ourselves only whispers and kisses stolen
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and few words spoken, and I did not even defile her,
more from protectiveness than anything, protecting her
ideal.
She was a form of purity, but I could not announce
her to anyone, I felt I could not, and soon I went free
against her will to deliver to those whores and
nonwhores I enumerated to you, and I went also with
Lily whenever I desired. I did not sleep with her; she
would not let me.
“Do you think they will ever know about us?” she
asked, twining her hair as she lay on my chest in the
back of my car.
“I don’t care. They don’t care. We don’t care.”
“Well, it makes me very tired,” she said, and fell
asleep.
We slipped out of Atherton to be alone, escaped
coastward to oyster shacks on Point Reyes and Mexican
eurekas hidden in the San Francisco Mission – we ate
the bounty of the golden land in the glorious new centu-
ry, explored the horse country in Bodega and the dusky,
autumn reaches of Napa Valley.
She told me that her uncle sometimes hit her, but she
would not fault him for it; the violence came from the
stress of his position. She would not say whether his
reach extended to her sister, and my questions went
nowhere – it was a topic she clearly wished to avoid.
Storms descended on that autumn and would not lift,
flying down like bats on the Alaskan winds, so we
spent long weekends in Tahoe and drove down High-
way One along the twists of the coast. I was happy to
see the expression on her face when she felt the iron
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to read, and which you really should read too, the best
tips on organization I’ve seen. It all involves lists. It’s
prioritized, synergized. I’ve been microblogging all
morning. Have you tried? You’ve got to get on Twit-
ter.”
“I can’t be seen with you.”
“Be a fountain, not a drain,” he stammered. “How
was Europe?”
“Full of gypsies, and England was full of gays.”
“Sounds like San Francisco.”
“I was robbed.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, but I’m still rich.”
“Well, of course,” his eyes flickered. His speed tri-
pled a normal human’s. “Maybe you can help – my
brother can’t decide what to major in at USC.”
“He likes English, right? He told me that once. The
world needs English majors.” English: larger and larg-
er words spun around worries kicked up by Joyce and
Nabokov and all the others centuries back, a massive
cocoon that gets more irrelevant each year.
“He'd go nuts. And anyone could do it – not chal-
lenging,” Zilker affirmed.
“Psych?” We psych majors regard your words with
a little smirk, as if we know what you are feeling. Even
if you’ve just bumped into us with an “Excuse me,” the
little smirk registers – there is something we know. We
inevitably produce demonic and overstimulated chil-
dren.
“Only evil people take psych,” he said, grinning
through white needle-teeth and clapping me on the
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back.
“Econ? Lots of jobs, not too hard.” Usually a pleas-
ant group, since few of them learn enough to talk about
economics.
“Hates charts.”
“He could study business.”
“That is what he is talking about. But I don't want
him to get stupid,” he said.
“He’s at USC, how can he get any stupider?”
In a flurry of clear sunshine we walked across the
court to the café. The line forced us out the door, and a
band of undead old white men had started playing jazz
on the patio, clearing the tables three deep on all sides.
They were dancing and stepping and fiddling the brass.
That is Silicon Valley and Stanford: blaring trumpets
at eleven on a drizzling Tuesday in premature winter,
and everyone too sleep-deprived, too ambitious to com-
plain. Vengeful geezers with saxophones hooked up to
speakers, getting in your face, getting a piece of you
with their bad Coltrane and floppy hats and tip jar, their
resurrected New Orleans. And a bunch of self-
obsessed, stressed out techies crouched over laptops
sipping fifty cents of coffee under three dollars of foam,
trying to look like they’ve got the next great underage
idea.
He knows Guy Kawasaki, someone in line says.
Really? I hear he throws great parties. He’s such a
guru. Someone else is on first name basis with Larry
and Sergey. Someone else has got a sweet company, a
great new site – they’re going to IPO for sure – I hear
just closed a serious up round, they gotten into
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IPO?”
“Fifty percent of the company,” he quavered, leaning
back on his chair legs. “It's almost unbelievable at
twenty three. It would change my life. And to think of
what he has! To think of how much he has!” He
sucked in breath and his tongue went playing over his
thin, grain-eating lips.
“He doesn’t have it yet.”
I placed a grape on my tongue and snapped it into a
cold jewel of nectar. I looked past Cyan into the gaze
of a girl sitting on the other side of the fountain. She
felt her napkin and stared past the little girl sitting with
her, at the people in the café. She had a swimmer’s
body and a golden face and straight blonde hair, and I
watched her and something triggered in memory did I
own her but Cyan's chattering distracted me. A big
grey dog, a mastiff, strode in across the patio stones,
dragging its master, and she turned with a wan smile
and gazed after it for a while, and the band stopped
their racket to change instruments and she looked down
and reached for her water glass, and sounds and sights
and thoughts went into her in rhythms and colors and
words, and joined synesthetically in her mind and her
environment dominated her because she could find
nothing inside to hold onto: her mind was blown down
and around by the sensations of the café and I saw it.
“Hold on,” Cyan said. He removed a buzzing panel
from his pocket and unfolded it. The sound it shrieked
was neither music nor noise, and dampened in the air.
Around us, people at the tables rooted in their pockets
to confirm whether their phones were ringing, but only
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234
13
Since I had delayed him, and delay drove him mad,
Cyan drove as fast as possible, which due to his flap-
ping vagina was not fast at all. I told him to take me to
the oval even though it would make me late for lecture.
I wanted to stretch my legs with a stroll.
Stuck behind a moving truck on Campus Drive, I
saw his eyes tighten – his mind immediately consumed
itself finding ways around the problem, to regain the
two or three miles per hour disparity in the aggregate
speed of the journey, to ensure that the destination was
not reached ten or fifteen seconds late, to be prudently
aware of other obstacles and hazards, the damn pedes-
trians about to cross the crosswalk up by Wilbur Field,
the joggers edging impudently from the bike lane, the
van pulling out sluggishly fifty yards ahead, the gigan-
tic puddle concealing a pothole. In his frantic eyes
glowed terrific cowardice.
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investor’s time.”
“I think–”
“Think different. He’ll be here this afternoon and it
would be an honor to meet the Zuck. The wunderchild,
he will lead us all from the valley of steel.”
“I don't know what you mean,” he said, and stopped
the car.
“You need some drugs.”
“No thanks.”
“Really because I think it would be a mind-opening
experience for you–”
“No, I'll see you right after class. Come get me at
Blyth at eleven. And thanks.”
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14
Annenberg Auditorium, one of the largest halls on
campus, teemed with hopeful spectators. No classes
should be held on the day of pillory. Every fraternity
pledge had been planted there to watch and film us, and
they hollered with their girls. Students pushed into the
aisles – afraid of being trapped in a middle seat, they
preferred to squat on the floor – and in the window of
the swinging doors we could see the professor far off on
his stage, and it was a stage, bellowing his thoughts
about self-efficacy and social norms, and we were
ready to go in, dressed as Mexicans. Cyan hefted a
large cardboard sign crayoned with “WORK ORDER.”
I toted a hammer and wore blast glasses. Sorority girls
had coiffed us in black hairspray and masks of makeup:
we looked vaguely ethnic, that is all: we looked insane.
I wore giant plaid overalls and some fool artist’s spat-
tered jacket. As a pledge patted me on the back, I said,
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his pants.
“Sure. I’ll buy you some beers inside.”
“I’m not drinking,” I said, then realized I was still
holding a red cup. “Any more than this. I’ve got to
drive.”
“That’s never stopped you. Fine. It’s not important
– I’ll pay you back.”
Down the side of the arena packs of people streamed
from the parking field towards the gates. The stadium
resembles a coliseum, a red steel plateau scalloped out
and pierced around the rim by a loop of beer stands and
bathrooms – the Stanford Indian played here before the
harmlessness movement tore that mascot down and in-
terposed the nebulous ‘Cardinal’. In reality, the
Stanford Indian had been played by a local Apache
chief who dressed up in a real headdress and buckskin
and galloped out on a brilliant stallion for every game –
many Native Americans viewed the mascot as a bond
between the university and the state’s heritage. But we
forget these ties. These days, everyone claims it was a
racist white kid dressed up with an axe and red body
paint, like they do in Cleveland. In Silicon Valley,
even tolerance is tinged with prejudice.
As we climbed the enormous flight of stairs that led
to the rim, packs of aging alumni pressed by us, kids in
tow, rushing up after the memories of their glory days.
Their sun had merely set over the horizon of the stadi-
um wall. “In nineteen seventy our fraternity–” one
belted out as he passed, his little girl panting up the
stairs behind him two at a time. In nineteen seventy our
fraternity drove a firetruck into the lake and got busted
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15
Halloween toppled over the hills, the sun kicking
copper into the air and smoldering fog among the pines,
and Lily came home. That sun was an autumn hound
and we went into the hills to meet him. The hill forests
remembered my childhood treading deertrail and bram-
ble through their ancient pines, building troves of rocks
and feathers in the tree hollows and streambeds, and
under hanging mists raising forts of mud and shale,
great dams and high cities peopled with berries and
twigs and centipedes, in those silent high reaches. Lily
said she would not stay another night in her house and
wanted to be with me.
“Silence,” I told her at the trailhead I wanted her to
see. The blond dog kicked in its leash. I held her hand,
and we began across the skyline with all the valley and
all the sea arrayed on either side. Stanford sat far be-
low, a red gem surrounded by suburbs, and out west the
Pacific extended its plane.
Californian wind traversed the hills, brushing their
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fake.”
“Because if we do it–” she preened into my ear.
“You might go crazy.”
“Crazier than I am?”
She looked at me, and there we somehow balanced.
“Tell me then.” She took my cold hand.
The sun followed us into the meadow, but even then
I did not defile her. The bay groves waved and rustled
and the old oaks overhung, while I told her my secret.
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from the table and sucking his teeth with his tongue.
“It's fine, Jessica. Let’s get a breath of air.”
She turned her eyes towards him and raised her hand
off the table, a silvery tendril – and Medine, with a
frank smile, stepped by me into the hall, smelling of our
shampoo. She followed him, looking back at me.
Incredulous, I stared around the room. On the coun-
ter lay the various implements of our kitchen – the
huge, stained cedar cutting block and the gleaming
cleaver that the housekeeper always used to hack the
heads off of fish, oilcloth, yellow-slimed eggbeaters, a
bowl of breadcrumbs and batter, and a blackened oven
mitt standing vertically against a pinkish mound of
chicken skin. Michael’s glass gave a wet click as the
ice in it splintered.
Appalling – but, stupid as everything was, I wouldn't
be blinded by anger. I swung through the hall and
around the corner, gripping the oak banister and storm-
ing up the thick-shod stairs onto the cooler second
floor. I heard Michael call for the woman outside, and
he gave a priggish exultation I couldn't catch. By the
trot-and-halt of his footsteps he almost certainly em-
braced her and laid a curry-soaked, lapping smooch
somewhere on her withered face. At least everyone
would soon be wearing masks.
I'd kill them both, I thought. I'd leave and be gone
for good; I'd get someone to beat me with a rod until I
got some mean-looking scars, and sue for abuse.
Above the stairs opened an expansive, airy chamber
with a white carpet and gray-shuttered windows, open
to the evening – my playroom when I was a child.
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and slid it shut. Then she walked over and stood quiet-
ly behind me as I searched, waiting. For ten minutes I
sifted through the junk with my fingers – rings, coins,
toenail clippers, silky Bloomingdales receipts – and fi-
nally leaped up, exasperated, the blood pounding in my
temples, and turned around, my fists balled.
The housekeeper held out a tiny silver key in her
brown palm, and looked at me with clear eyes.
"In the pockets," she said.
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Halloween night, a pageant in hell. Blood sprayed
across my face and my starched white shirt, and I drew
a stainless steel meat cleaver from our kitchen block,
tucked it into my suit pocket, then roared into the night.
I chewed blood pills as I drove through the dark, drool-
ing sugary ichor.
The Medine house faces the Circus Club fields,
winding three stories around two spiral stairs, an adobe-
walled compound defended by two rangy dogs and a
flotilla of border-hopping Mexicans. The red Spanish
walls immure camphor trees straight from Van Gogh,
scraggly junipers in the front yard overgrowing the
swingsets.
The night glowed with festal light. In the drive
lolled SUVs with the old, yellow high-school water po-
lo stickers, obscene behemoths belching enough yearly
nitrous oxide to brown Lake Tahoe three shades; a
womanly Lexus hybrid, pink-tinted and gold, sprawl-
ing, oil-spattered garage; and up around the side of the
house where the drive continued, a small fleet of bat-
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17
When I awoke I knew that I was deathly sick. Only
alcohol, I thought, could so swiftly derange body from
mind – and for me hangovers were so common and so
withering that I did not suspect anything else. But Lily
had drugged me, I would learn. Consciousness drifted
back, tingling with pinpricks, in an unholy draught of
pain, and beneath the worst hangover of my life I felt a
virus suppurating in the harsh tissues of my chest. I
shook with fever. Coughing, I came awake, propped
upright in the back of a car. A limousine? Three blurry
figures comported around me, tinkling with conversa-
tion.
Morning, breeding season, ancient oaks thrummed
past, and as we rose into the coastal hills everyone be-
gan the social chant. In the back of the limousine,
Emma dandled out the first flutes of white wine, staring
into Cyan’s eyes so fixedly that the syrup dripped unno-
ticed to his knuckles, and Lily waved for the bottle to
slosh us two glasses of chard.
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had tumbled forth – that's terrible, how can this be, tell
me what's going on, is there any way I can, do you need
to go to, holy Jesus – but in the end I did not know how
to respond. I recalled it now. She had only smiled
blankly and kept kissing me. Last May she’d sliced
open her abdomen with a knife, she said, burned the
skin around it, then sewed it back up with a needle and
thread. She said her skin was far more sensitive than a
sighted person’s. I remembered telling her that if she
ever cut herself again it would be over between us, but
at this she smiled, laughed, then began to cry.
Oh Salinas, and three bottles already. Salinas, Mon-
terey, I tried to refuse drink but could not: they would
not let me refuse it and the pink white draughts flowed
into me and filled me with apathy. As the drive length-
ened I began to feel more and more sick – the fever
brought terrifying shivers, and I lay back with my eyes
closed, letting Lily’s silver fingertips play over my
temples while her other hand pinched a crystal flute.
She drank and laughed and drank, and we drank with
her.
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18
In the little earthquake the power had gone out. “We
have to go up the cliffs,” Lily stated. “And feel the air.
We have to go. Jake, take me up there.” But I wanted
only to think, to be alone. They would not let me stop
drinking. What did any of it matter? It was pointless,
facetious. But it was how I lived.
“Let’s go on the cliffs,” she repeated. “I want to feel
the sea. You’ve showed me your childhood haunt, now
it’s my turn.” I wanted to sleep but no – so we took the
dog Callie, which a Mexican brought by her lime leash,
and went out by ourselves. As we walked I stuck my
hands in my pockets, but Lily’s twined around my arm.
The noon lingered in metallic shades, and the light fell
on the sandy rocks and went over the sea.
Up we went, where trails crawled through the heath:
up towards higher rocks that looked out over the green
surf booming the beams of sand. It was not a long
walk, but the sun burned behind us. A dire wind came
through the palms on the cliff and Lily held to me and
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loose, her leash free in the sedge. The dog went rooting
and snuffling around. Off the coast bobbed a massive
tanker like a deck of rusted cards, and the faroff light-
house revolved blindly.
“Isn’t there?”
“Jake, I am going back to Hong Kong tomorrow,”
she said, pursing her lips and facing the sea. “Califor-
nia is nice, but it’s provincial.” She turned her head
and brushed through her platinum hair with one hand
and held it there like a comb as she went on. “It isn’t for
me. I thought it would restore me, but I’ve never felt so
exhausted by other people. All these people, striving so
hard to work and make money! It’s pointless, more
pointless than anything. But you do affect me a little.
Don’t think it’s that.” She took my hand.
“Okay,” I said.
“So you come too if you like, but I can’t stay here.”
“We can talk about this,” I told her. “But give me
the password, let me take care of it.”
The sea wind took her hair in a mane and white birds
passed up over the bluff. “I won’t.”
“What?” I balked.
She reached into her purse and removed a book.
“Remember this? It’s the poetry I was reading you.”
Gallehault was the book: she had closed it and the
spiders in the sedge advanced before the wave of dead
sun that was the afternoon. She put her palm on the
face of the Braille and paused, and somewhere a spi-
derweb spit through the air onto a joint of grass, and a
fat body dragged without sound through the golden air
into shadow. Dust covered us, and the spiders paused
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and looked.
Down the golden fingers of the cliffs clutched
through the brush, earthquake stone enlaced in grass
and the eyelets of poppies, like giant fossils. For some
reason, at that moment I could not stop thinking about
the land. Tall deer chopping down the stone shells to-
wards reams of fodder.
“I remember,” I said. “Your stupid Italian legend.
Well, you do what you like. I don’t want a fucking
book from you. Where’s the password?” Now I
grabbed her wrist, but the fire in my eyes had gone out,
and I let her go.
Gallehault was the book and that day we read no
more: she did not remove her hand from the scar on her
palm on the face of the book, and, at this point so bur-
dened, so encumbered by thought, I felt defeat. My
shoulders slumped. The spiders clicked in their nests
and wove and wove, and dripped their fluids, and what
their pasty eyes saw they moved towards over the open
earth.
“Jake I really do like you,” she said. “And I hate my
uncle. I want you to know that I hate him.”
“Where is it?”
“Can you acknowledge that?”
“Give it to me.”
“But I can’t do that to him. I can’t do that to our
family.”
I stared at her.
“I suppose you think he’d make a fine father,” I said.
“He wouldn’t, he won’t. You just have to let me
talk to him first, please–”
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peared.
I could not sleep, snoring in a fuming cloak, shiver-
ing, thinking, above all, and the moon pressing upon the
windows. Viridian bottles slumbered on the dresser,
their injections muddying my veins; the drugs which
had delivered me all my life from madness rested there,
cold isolate and poisonous. I couldn’t take them. Even
when I shuttered the blinds the moon peered around the
corners, so that it seemed I slept within a shadow box
inturned from the day.
No in all this I could not sleep and I tore the blankets
and moaned, my mind ablaze. A shadow is the mole-
cules of the earth darkening, yearning for the sky.
Whether the shadow travels like a nether wave, as a
state or property of energy, the molecules themselves
only rolling, or whether the shadow is encumbered by
the burden of actually being a thing-in-itself, the dis-
tinction does not matter, implies the existence of a
human mind observing and defining the shadow and
obscuring its yearning to live! My idiot thoughts drove
me up, suffocating me! By all that I had ever suffered I
had to find out where Lily was, and show her. I sat up,
full of rage.
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19
No lights shined in the midnight mansion and the ut-
ter silence restricted any motion but thought. A person
is three cats in a bag called the bag, and two of my cats
called me to sleep but the third it said find her and
would that I had ignored it but I raged ahead.
Beneath the main staircase, the vestry flooded with
silken light, laying eggplant shades to crawl like spiders
along the floor. The night stilled in the storm's eye, and
space enclosed the mansion. By then it was two
o'clock, and I cannot stress the stillness of that hour. If
an insect moved in the house you would have heard it,
but I could hear nothing above my roaring mind. And
the Mexicans had gone, or were lurking outside, lurking
in shacks and around their campfires. I could leave!
Breathing deeply, I passed through Medine’s star
room and paused, staring into the telescope, watching a
space station pass over. A small blaze the intensity of
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Her sister shook and turned her face to the floor, bound
by a leash. Only Michael did not move: only he who
lay sprawled like a statue on the sheets, whose lame
granite priapus lolled from his form, he did not lift his
head to regard me: he stayed fast in apathetic sleep.
Pale as a ghost, Lily swept off the bed, hands wet and
clawed. She stared beyond. Then, crying out, she
rushed and bounded into the darkness of the hall, arms
outstretched madly, and I caught her hot wrist but she
tore off, drawing me with her and calling her name.
And the darkness enveloped our passage and all was
fever in the night as, her feet hammering the cold
twined hair of the carpet, she fled before me, a white
shape internal external giving off comet-trails of light.
Twice she banged into the walls, shattering a vase in an
alcove, falling to a knee but tearing on.
Across the dark foyer the corridor to the star room
lay trespassed, its door ajar. I heard something slump
to the ground. I halted, then went ahead, creeping open
the door. In the purple shades a pale small form crum-
pled beneath the windowsill.
And in the awful night I seemed to see within her
mind.
Steak caked under my fingernails, I grip the carpet,
not thinking of him – I’m turned, hunched, thinking
about werewolves, and he says something, acting sur-
prised. How maudlin, dramatic, how human. I'm
wearing only my body. I'm totally naked. Can he un-
derstand how sensitive my body is? Can he see that,
the faggot. Inside me is Him and He is inside me. Still.
Always. I don’t hear him. Something is flitting, vibrat-
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I hold him by the cheeks and kiss him again, and feel
with my fingers his eyes shutting: he is believing, I
know, believing in my Potential For Salvation. His
masculinity demands it. His mind reels. I can never
close my eyes when I kiss, and He tells me how black
they look that close. Well good because black is all I
know. I give this faggot more, feel his tongue squirm
desperately, and then I am back playing with my hair,
my shoulders turned. He can have nothing and it is
probably better for him. He cannot understand me. All
my life the years wore on, and I trudged quieter and
quieter. My legs broke, I had outwalked them both. I
had not eaten, except for ashes, and I had drank noth-
ing but vomit. I fell exhausted amidst a savage grove,
alone except for the moon’s reflection in the slime of
that place, disconsolate, my youth beaten, my self-love
replaced with something sallow and crawling, some-
thing as much hate as love. And my brain somehow
saw itself, saw a body twisted by loathing, hunched ter-
ribly thin and set with luminous eyes, in love with itself,
the last thing it could see. And He came. He came and
took me in His terrible arms.
“Lily,” the fag moans, poor boy, and I slap him an-
grily and sink my teeth into his flank. We are done and
done and I could not be more bored. Have we ever
fucked? We have not. I don’t remember. I hate him
for ruining me. I hit him once more and try to recall
where I was going. Yes. Yes. Now I turn and run.
She spun from me and took the lamp off the desk,
and as I stepped forwards flung it through the window,
where she had been feeling with her fingers, and went
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