Ed King (34 page)

Simon added, “Right now Rodney’s developing a game we’re calling—and I’m just about there with it—
DeathDreamer
.”

“But usually it’s like the worst metal I can find,” said Rodney.

Ed and Simon went back to the armchairs. Simon collapsed. “You can see why I had my office soundproofed,” he said. “Madhouse. I don’t even want to know about it. I work at night if I need to get focused.”

“Plus that way you don’t have to hear about P. Glass being excellent for what’s-his-name’s head at the moment.”

Simon laughed. “Rod Ball,” he said. “I love Rodney. Rodney’s great.”

Ed dropped his head and massaged his neck so he could roll his eyes surreptitiously. “This is … wow,” he said.

Simon reached across and tapped Ed’s shoulder. “I know,” he said. “I have to pinch myself. It’s totally … I’m living the dream.”

Ed covered his mouth. He was aware of wanting to say the wrong thing, then of quelling it. He had in mind inventing, off the cuff, a game called
GeekKing
. But what would be the point of fraternal aggression? Why start something now? No, a new volley in the Dark Tower wasn’t worth the emotional strain. “I’m happy for you,” Ed said innocuously. “Things have really gone your way.”

They went out for dinner—expensive Bento boxes at a place in Bellevue where his brother was accorded an obsequious reception. The servers were done up like medieval geishas, minus the whiteface but otherwise authentic. Si wasn’t bad with chopsticks and knew his
sake
s. He held up something with eel in it, smiling, and spoke in Japanese to the hovering floor manager. Ed couldn’t help himself. He wanted to kill Si. The little bastard had gained the upper hand. What could he do? How to react? Two months later, Ed graduated from Stanford (summa cum laude, with distinction), in math. The day after that, he flew home to Seattle, where within a week he’d found an attorney, and within a month filed articles of incorporation for a company, called Pythia, dedicated to research and development in the nascent field of search.

With money borrowed from Dan and Alice on the argument that owning was smarter than renting, Ed bought a modest house in Bellevue. He told them he was on a five-year plan to get a tech business up and running, and they gave him the benefit of the doubt. Before long, though, his home office was no longer big enough for his equipment, so he hired a contractor to convert his garage into a clean and capacious workspace. The garage stayed relatively cool year-round, which was good for a person banking hard drives. Ed hired an electrician to wire in surge protection, bought an air filter and an antistatic pad, and spent all his
time there. “Isn’t this sort of mad-scientist?” asked Dan, when he saw how Ed had turned his garage into something that looked as if it ought to be at NASA. Hard drives were stacked on cheap plastic racks, and cables, in all colors, bulged from plastic ties. “I have to do it this way,” said Ed. “I don’t own a supercomputer.”

“What’s the goal?” Dan wanted to know. “What are you doing out here?”

“I’m trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

“What about forcing a few thousand peasants to very carefully sort through the straw?”

“That’s a good idea,” said Ed.

Simon, visiting, had a different take. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much RAM in one place,” he said. “This is classic, this is stupendous, didn’t I see this at the Museum of Computing?” They sat on rolling desk chairs amid the general noise—the aquarium-pump humming of case and CPU fans, the whirring of drives, and the droning of the dust filter—and took turns typing at a command-line interface until Simon began to understand what Pythia was about. “It’s a pretty decent information retriever,” Ed told his brother. “Right now it rips through a shitload of bandwidth. I need to go broader and drill down.”

“You what?”

“Actually,” said Ed, “I have an idea for something that’s going to be a lot more effective than what anybody else has got going at the moment. The key to information retrieval is, believe it or not, probability theory. You’ve got to have algorithms with coin tosses built into them when you’re dealing with huge amounts of raw information. The challenge is to arrive at—”

“You win,” said Si, waving an invisible white flag. “You’re way over my head. You’re flying at warp speed and I don’t get it. But let me tell you something, bro. Right now I have a guy working for me who was a total search freak before I hired him. Guy is excellent on texture mapping but learned all his programming chops going after search. Bet his life on search. Like seven figures, all of it borrowed—and all of it lost. We took him in at a low point, and he’s so good at getting us speed we had to pay or lose him. I—”

“Don’t plan on me losing my shirt,” said Ed. “My plan is to go all the way.”

“Yeah?”

“My plan is to claw all the way to the top. My plan is to be the king of search.”

In the fourth year of Ed’s five-year plan, Dan had chest pains that led to a 911 call. Ed and Simon both dropped what they were doing and converged on Harborview right away. Si, who now sported a goatee, negotiated the hospital halls with his hands in his pockets, ambling under a nimbus of preoccupation, while Ed did the mundane work of finding the waiting room. “My boys,” said Alice, when they met her there, “my two wonderful and loving boys,” and she hugged them both before they all sat down to watch CNN during Dan’s procedure. Finally, the surgeon came with a stellar report—he’d performed a perfect balloon angioplasty and put in a stent without complications. Someone would talk to Dan before he left the hospital about diet, exercise, stress, a blood thinner, and cholesterol-lowering medications, but Dan could now lead a normal life.

When they went to see Dan, he told them, among other things, that he couldn’t remember where he’d left his glasses, and that, even with a catheter inserted, he felt like he needed to pee. “But basically you’re okay,” said Alice. “Thank God, it’s not serious—you’re okay.”

He wasn’t. Dan’s angioplasty yielded, before long, to restenosis. Some tinkering with his medication ensued, and then he went back to have a second stent inserted inside the first. In a surprising transformation, Dan now resembled his father—the hairy shoulders, the slack skin, the bruises, the hulking posture, the dry, shiny shins. “Bruises?” he said. “Bruises are from blood thinners. But, no, I don’t want to talk about bruises. What I want to do is sit here with the
Times
. I’ve got an appointment Monday, but I’m not backing off my anti-coag, because, all things considered, I’d rather have the bruises, which look terrible. I know, you don’t have to tell me. I know what I look like—old.”

Alice, it turned out, wasn’t built for travail. “He’s too young,” she complained to Ed. “This kind of thing is not what we expected. Your father’s only fifty-seven. The poor guy, I feel so terrible for him I can’t sleep at night, I’m going through a lot of anxiety, the whole thing is really testing me now—being strong isn’t just some words, you know. What it takes is a lot of support from family. I’m sorry to lay such a guilt trip on you and
to make you take so much responsibility, but what your mother needs is emotional support, because all of this is terrible and it’s breaking my heart, to see your father like this.”

Dan had a bypass, but by now there was so much arteriosclerosis that his heart was suffering the consequences. It couldn’t get the blood it needed to keep on beating in the way it had once beaten. His myocardium—Dan didn’t bother to explain terms—was suffering from ischemia and, little by little, dying. He had episodes of angina, he carried nitroglycerin, he stopped in stairwells, and he couldn’t play tennis for fear that competition might kick off a spasm in an artery and send him over the edge into dysrhythmia. “I was a Type A,” he said. “My parents wanted me to do well in school, letting them down was out of the question, I had to be a doctor, a doctor or a lawyer, nothing else was going to be acceptable, but how come I wanted to please them so much, why did I let myself live like that anyway? My parents were immigrants, what choice did I have? They didn’t know better and neither did I. Now here I am, take a look at me, Ed. This is where the Type A business ends you if you don’t take care of yourself.”

They had to give Dan a pacemaker, because, as he said—with an oxygen tube clipped to his nostrils in the hospital—“the sinoatrial node won’t keep the beat.” Alice, who could only take so much, got in-home care for Dan so she could “decompress regularly.” Dan had edema, his legs and feet were swollen, his eyes bulged, his nose was blue—“Clearly,” he said, “my pump is failing.” Finally, the King family held a summit in the living room, where Dan sat wheezing, his nostrils flaring, while Alice wept and held his hand. “Here we are,” rasped Dan. “The time has come. The time comes for everyone, and now it comes for me. I’m grateful you’re here, I’m here with my loved ones, what more can a guy ask for, really, in the end? Okay, don’t say it, he could ask to live forever.” Dan stopped to catch his breath, coughed, and went on. “You know how I feel about this,” he said. “All sorts of things go haywire at this point. My lungs, probably, statistically, yes, but there’s also the kidneys and the liver shutting down, terrible uremia, tons of anemia, pneumonia for some people, look, none of it’s good, which is why they start hitting you so hard with the morphine, then you’re really a mess. So why did Alice ask you to come? Alice asked because PRNH, PRNH is the choice I’m making, which is Patient Refusal of Nutrition and Hydration. I don’t take food, I
don’t take drink, within ten days, two weeks, it’s over, and, supposedly, there’s not so much pain.”

“You’re gonna want ice cream,” said Alice, in tears.

“I’m gonna want ice cream,” Dan agreed. “Maybe, once more, I’m gonna have ice cream, one more scotch, but then it’s over.
Alice
,” he said, and started crying.

Alice set up a rotation of family and friends. Dan had company around the clock, people to talk to and to do things for him. On the fifth day of PRNH, he couldn’t swallow his morphine, so they went to sublinguals, and then to injections. There were nursing aides in the house every morning for the complications of bathing and sheet changing. Dan had to wear lamb’s-wool booties because of sores. Still, he talked, and even made jokes: “Jackie Mason. You know Jackie Mason? I’m like Jackie Mason, with all this hired help: I have enough money for the rest of my life—unless I buy something!”

They played cassettes, his favorites from plays—“The Street Where You Live,” “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” “What Do the Simple Folk Do?”—plus Frank Sinatra and Mel Tormé, Dinah Shore, and Judy Garland, whom, said Dan, “nobody sings like anymore.” His friends—other doctors and longtime patients—came one by one out of kindness and concern, and to recall a few things about the old days with him, and to joke around, because Dan joked around—“All those meetings! You remember Milton Berle on meetings? ‘A committee is a group that keeps minutes and loses hours.’ That was us, my friend—that was us, in spades!”

Then the joking was over. He was lucid when he wasn’t asleep, but he’d lost all interest in laughter and jokes and wanted to talk about serious things—his will, not wasting money on an “out-of-grief expensive coffin,” where files could be found with information on investments, Alice’s future life without him (“Of course you should remarry”). When Ed saw him next, he was apparently hallucinating. He’d sporadically let go with some medical jargon, then a lull, then more in the vein of prognosis or diagnosis, then a long silence that became a coma. “Maybe he can hear you, maybe not,” said Alice. “If there’s something you want to say to your father, Ed, you might as well say it, just in case.”

But he didn’t know what to say. And the next day, he witnessed Dan’s death, which came with a cry so unearthly and demonic that Ed stepped
back and nearly fled. Was that it, then? Was that how it went? What sort of liberation was this, that begins with such a dark, shattering howl? Ed left the hospital, wandered around town, and found a woman who let him bury his face between her legs. After all, what better place than the epicenter of beginning, now that he’d been made to face the end?

At 3 a.m., post–Club’s betrayal, Diane was still taking stock of things. Club’s brilliant rip-off had her in a tailspin. She was down to the thirty-two dollars in her purse. And she would have to face Ron Dominick alone, if it turned out Ron decided to accost her. Talk about low, to leave her this way, penniless and in danger—what a bastard Club was! And with all his treacly blather. His Boddingtons and canasta. His snubnose .38, as if it made a difference. His “birds of a feather” and “jolly couch potato” lines. And shrewdest of all, keeping track of her bathroom visits. Her “brother” had turned out to be the worst sort of wanker, a confidence man, and because she was lonely—which he’d seen and exploited—she’d gone for it hook, line, and sinker.

Before it got light, taking no chances, Diane knocked on Emily’s door and told her—Emily in ridiculous pajamas—that she was being stalked by a creep. Emily made two cups of chamomile tea. They talked until eight. Then, while Emily went for coffee, to the gym, for a run, and out to brunch—all with two other girls from Microsoft who did these things together every Sunday—Diane sat in Emily’s TV chair, watching at the window. Sure enough, Ron Dominick appeared, taking the stairs in long
sets of three before rapping on Diane’s door. He looked through the seam where her curtains met. He peered into her peephole. He knocked again, then sat on the stairs with his elbows on his knees, looking steeled to wait.

She hid all day at Emily’s, watching. Emily returned with a consolation sticky bun for Diane, a bottle of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and good coffee. Now, openly, the tables were turned. Diane was cowed, anxious, and glum, while Emily had life and money to burn—so much money that, when Ron gave up at dusk, she took Diane to dinner in Belltown. They were led to their table by a girl half Diane’s age whose sequined dress fit like a mermaid’s skin. The glass-menagerie kitchen was packed with line cooks who had to avert their eyes like English servants. Was this her fate, the service sector? Her meal came—halibut in lemon-plum sauce—prompting recollection of a dinner date with Jim Long. Old Jim had believed, rather solidly, in restaurants. One of the rewards of life, for him, was an evening in a restaurant. Well, she’d mishandled that, too, hadn’t she, because now she’d lost her in-card for privileges. If only she were still Mrs. Long.