The God Patent (2 page)

D
riving away from everything you love is hard. Driving away in a Ford Probe with over two hundred thousand miles on it is almost impossible. A tire blew fifteen miles from Oklahoma City. It was hot and dirty on the side of the interstate but a good place to stop and think. When he got to Interstate 40, he’d have a decision to make.

The two relevant things to keep in mind when you run away are, first, you have to choose a direction and, second, since you can’t run away from your problems, you might as well run toward their solutions.

Ryan had enough gas money to get to the coast, either coast, but not enough for a deposit and first and last months’ rent on an apartment. It was autumn of 2003, and unemployment in high tech was over 25 percent nationwide, higher back in Dallas and with more layoffs being announced every day.

He could go back east to Andover, the Boston suburb where he grew up. They all still lived there—Mom, his sisters, and the huge marginally functional network that is every Catholic kid’s birthright. He wouldn’t have to pay rent for a while, and Andover was sort of a mini Silicon Valley. He could probably land some contract work hacking software and build from that when things turned around. It wasn’t a bad idea. Mom would be happy to see him too. But he’d have to tell her what happened, and she’d get
that look. Her chin would crumple, her eyes would sink, and her hands would reach out and shake—the same look that had burned into his memory when he was ten years old and she’d told him his father was dead.

After installing the donut spare tire, he stood off the highway in the shade of an oak tree and fidgeted with an acorn. He pictured himself driving into his hometown. When he got in trouble as a boy, he used to run to his grandma’s house. If she were still alive, he’d go there now. He tugged the acorn from the branch, and a funny thing happened—a simple, obvious thing, but it startled Ryan. He knew exactly what Grandma would say. He could even hear her light Irish brogue, “What sort of man would you be then?”

Grandma always made these decisions easy. He smiled up to the sky and winked at her.

In Oklahoma City he sent a postcard to Mom: “I love you. Try not to worry, I’m healthy and strong. Sean and I will visit after I fix things.” As he wrote it, he even believed that last sentence, could almost picture Sean smiling up in admiration the way he’d done before it all went to hell.

He went west on I-40—headed for Silicon Valley, the electrical engineer’s mecca.

Two days after leaving Texas, Ryan emerged from the fertile valleys of central California to the San Francisco Bay Area. He landed in a semipermanent traffic jam at the junction of four different freeways. A new VW Beetle whose license plate read “
D BUGGED
” sat in the next lane. The driver, a man in his early thirties, about the same age as Ryan, glared back.

Ryan knew the look of a software jock whose code was crashing. The familiarity was comforting.

Ryan couldn’t know it, but that little distraction would change everything.

He had been to Silicon Valley for conferences and customer meetings. He thought he knew his way around, but he went north when he should have gone south, and an hour later, instead of arriving in mecca, he was stuck in a traffic jam in Oakland.

The sun was setting across the bay beyond the Golden Gate Bridge. It really was gold, and it really did look like a gate—a gate to a better place.

Before everything collapsed, Ryan had a buddy named Foster Reed. Foster always insisted that everything happens for a reason. Ryan wasn’t sure whether it was born of stupid hope or divine revelation, but he now believed that the little quirks in life are more like guideposts than accidents. The version of Ryan McNear who had visited Silicon Valley on business would have cussed and turned around. The revised version smiled inside and followed the signs to the Golden Gate.

By the time he pulled onto the Golden Gate Bridge, a cool blanket of fog covered the great suspension cables rising up to the towers. When he got to the other side of the bridge, he just kept going. The highway narrowed through rolling hills and, as the distance between each town grew, Ryan started to wonder about the “reason” for that wrong turn. Before the guy in the Beetle glared at him, his destination had at least been vague, but now it was a total mystery, and he was also on his last tank of gas. After a long stretch between off-ramps, he pulled onto a dark, rough road and parked between two big rigs. Lights in the distance reflected from a river flowing parallel to the road.

Ryan reclined in the front seat, the only hotel he could afford.

R
ays of sunlight pushed Ryan’s eyes open. The big rigs were gone, the muddy river rolled south, and the sun was rising over a mountain ridge clothed in a plaid of vineyards. With fingers crossed, he turned the key—it started on the first try. A steady stream of cars drifted in the opposite direction: a few expensive sedans, lots of minivans and SUVs, but mostly Japanese imports driven by sleepy white people—it looked like the California version of his commute back in Dallas.

The street curled under the freeway along the river. He passed a sign: “Petaluma City Limits, Pop. 55,900.” The density of buildings increased, old Victorians on the left and warehouses on the right. He drove up to a park with public restrooms. The feeling that everything was arranged came back—the wrong turn that led him to the Golden Gate was one thing, but having the fuel light come on just as he pulled up to “McNear Park” clinched it.

He ducked into the restroom with a change of clothes and his shaving kit and emerged ten minutes later looking and smelling civilized.

He found a coffee shop among the mid-nineteenth-century buildings, got a cup of black tea, and sat at a table near a boulevard-facing window. A man sat at the table next to him reading a newspaper. He had long gray hair tied in a ponytail and was wearing
sandals with socks and a purple T-shirt that read “Keep Sonoma Grapes Monsanto Free.” Ryan looked out the window, then back at the man. He fidgeted with the teaspoon, tapping it against his thumb and then against his chin. When he started tapping the table, the man grunted and handed Ryan the sports section and classifieds.

He looked at a small map in the apartment rental section. Most apartments were within three blocks of town. Most of the jobs were across the river. There were a handful of engineering jobs farther north in Santa Rosa, a few back south in San Francisco, but of course most were down in Silicon Valley.

With the paper tucked under his arm, Ryan headed out to find an apartment. He passed McNear’s Restaurant and Saloon and walked up McNear Avenue toward McNear Landing. That tenuous hint that he had been drawn here for a reason was getting out of hand. God might as well have put up a billboard: “Ryan McNear! Rebuild Your Life in Petaluma.”

Filled with confidence he hadn’t felt in years, he walked the tree-lined streets. A woman with long dark hair on an old bicycle that had shiny chrome fenders waited next to him at a stoplight, muttering to herself. The darkness of her ankle-length black skirt was amplified by her pale skin. When she pedaled away, her hair and skirt swirled behind her.

At an apartment manager’s office, Ryan discovered that his lack of immediate cash would be a greater impediment to getting housing than he’d hoped. Plus, rents were twice what they’d been in Texas. Finding a hole in that soft blanket of arranged destiny was strangely comforting. Ryan didn’t want the solutions to be handed to him.

An “apartment for rent” sign hanging from an expansive but drooping porch on one of the old craftsman-style mansions directed Ryan to an elderly lady sitting at an iron table. He filled
out a rental application and licked his lips into that disarming smile. She was apologetic but wouldn’t take a renter without the standard deposit plus first and last months’ rent. Instead, she offered a suggestion. “Go up Liberty Street to the black-and-red Victorian. Dodge Nutter might rent you something.”

R
yan walked up a short, steep hill to a Victorian with fire-engine-red siding and twin black turrets topped with conic spires. The carpenter’s lace trim sparkled in gold with tiny but screaming slivers of lime green.

Most of the other Victorians at the top of the hill were partitioned into apartments too, but they had multiple entrances and tasteful paint. The red-and-black monstrosity at the corner towered over them and had just the one entrance, ten-foot-high double doors. An “apartment for rent” sign was duct-taped to the porch’s iron railing. As he climbed the stairs, Ryan decided that the place must be haunted, and, by the time he reached the porch, he could picture Grandpa Munster resurrecting Herman in the basement.

Four mailboxes were mounted on the wall. Instead of a doorbell, under a little window, the sort of window you’d expect in the door of an abbey, was a huge goat-head knocker. He let it fall an inch, and the iron-on-iron clap shook the porch and echoed around the neighborhood.

After a couple of minutes, Ryan peeked through the little window. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust, and, just as he could make out some details inside, he heard scuffling behind him.

A girl with long dark hair combed to one side so that it hung over her left eye dragged a huge skateboard up the stairs. “Scammin’ the crib?”

It cracked the seriousness right out of Ryan. “I am scammin’ the crib. Lookin’ for diamonds, a major stash. You got any diamonds in there?”

In addition to the skateboard, the girl was struggling under a full knapsack.

Ryan said, “You need a hand with that?”

She cast Ryan a quick glare and scampered the rest of the way up to the porch. She was wearing black sneakers with striped socks and a black skirt that hung down to her scratched-up knees. Graffiti was scrawled along the hem in white paint, and her tank top was closer to gray than white. She looked a little younger than his son, at least one year on the child side of adolescence.

“I’m looking for an apartment to rent,” Ryan said.

She set her skateboard under a bench and let her backpack fall off her shoulders onto the porch. She knelt down and dug through it. “Deal with Dodge, then.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was told,” Ryan said.

“Sucks to be you.” She pulled out a key.

“Do you know where he is?”

“He’ll waddle out of his cave eventually.”

The way she talked was refreshing, no child-to-adult pretense. Ryan said, “I have a kid about your age.”

“Six billion people on this planet—I’m thinking that’s not such a coinkydink.”

“I suppose.” He held out his hand. “Ryan McNear…”

She opened the door, dashed through the foyer, and bolted up an oak staircase without returning his look or saying another word. Ryan followed as far as the base of the stairs. A door
slammed above, and a few seconds later, loud music vibrated the walls.

Another odd thing about this Victorian-turned-apartment-complex: the foyer opened to someone’s living room. An antique couch, diamond-tuck red velvet with sloping arms and lion feet, was set in the center of the room on a matching Persian rug. Ryan leaned against the wall and stared across the room out a picture window at the rolling hills across the valley. The reverberation of the girl’s music reminded him of his sisters at that age, and the smell of the well-oiled hardwood floor was just like his grandma’s house. Home had never been exactly comfortable, but it was home, and this wasn’t too far off.

After about ten minutes, the bass line of whatever music the girl was playing had faded into the background, and Ryan heard a voice that sounded like an a.m. disc jockey who’d mixed black coffee, scotch, and cigarettes until his tone could define the word
gruff
.

“You got a job, McNear?”

Ryan looked up the stairs and around the living room but couldn’t tell where the voice came from. “Sir?” Surprised that whoever was behind that voice knew his name, he forced himself to relax against the wall.

A man walked in and sat at the edge of the couch. He was several inches shorter than Ryan, about fifty, bald but with curly hair over his ears and thin glasses perched at the end of a long pointy nose. He set a thick stack of paper on the table in front of the couch, looked over his glasses at Ryan, and patted the velvet upholstery next to him.