A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (70 page)

San Francisco was getting small, and everyone is dying. The summers are getting colder, and the falls aren
’
t what they used to be. The kids in the Haight are younger all the time, more of them than before, sitting all day, all night at Haight and Masonic, with the sticks, the hacky sacks, nowhere to go in those stupid floppy reggae hats. And the drive to work was getting unbearable, the repetition too sad, especially at night, when after putting Toph to bed, locking the door, I would go back to the office—the drive just harrowing, the routine—I had even changed routes, had started driving down Geary, all the way down, past the prostitutes, a change of pace, and
it
was diverting for a week or so, all the cars slowing down, stopping, the cops hunting, laughing—but then even that was a routine, and so we have to leave, because the people are pissing on the streets, during the day now, anyplace, all the time people are pissing on the streets, defecating on Market Street at noon, and I
’
m getting sick of the hills, always the hills, the turning of wheels to park, and the street cleaning, and those fucking buses attached to the ropes or wires or whatever, always breaking down, those motherfucking drivers getting out and yanking on
that rope, the stupid buses just sitting there, in the way, everything just sitting there, stuck, in the way—

Everything weirder, the extremes more pronounced, the contrasts too strong.

Toph and I keep going up the hill because you have to go up to
get
to Black Sands, first straight up the hill, the road winding in and out, past all the tourists stopped for the view, looking down on the Golden Gate, and every time we double back toward the bridge, the view, biblical, presents itself, the view where one sees Treasure Island, and Alcatraz, then (1-r) all of Richmond, El Cerrito, Berkeley, and Oakland and then the Bay Bridge, then the white jagged seashells of downtown, the Golden Gate, blood red, then the rest of the city, the Presidio, the avenues—

But we keep going, and as the road continues, winding up, the cars thin out, and at the very top of the hill/mountain, there are only a few sightseers left, and they are turning around to go back down, three-point turning right at that WWII-era tunnel at the top, because it certainly seems like the road ends, right there, at the top of that hill—

But then the road continues, and there is a gate, a flimsy metal gate, right there, and it is open, it
’
s probably always open. We keep going, not slowing, and as Toph and I continue through the parking area and descend through the gate, two young tourists, Dutch fellows with the customary dark socks and shorts, are gawking, not knowing what we
’
re doing—we are some kind of fantastic superhero team in a space-age vehicle, not bound by laws of country or physics.

The road, now a one-way, heads straight for the water, and it looks for about twenty yards like we
’
re going to go straight over, it really does for a few seconds there—and if we did we would be ready, of course, would do the thing where we get out of the car at
the same time, one door each, then the timed perfect dives—so we go slow, then the road starts bending right, and then down, and in a second we
’
re driving parallel to the water, a few hundred feet up of course, for a while without even a visible cliffside to the left, just a sheer drop—and then suddenly we see the Headlands whole, green and mohair hills, ocher velour, the sleeping lions, the lighthouse far to the left, unbelievable given we
’
re ten minutes from the city, this vast bumpy land, could be Ireland or Scotland or the Falklands or wherever, and we snake down, with the road bending back and forth along the cliffside, and Toph, as always, keeping his eyes away from the edge, understandable, not appreciating when I drive no-handed, using only my knees, for a little while, lookee here, ha ha, look at this!

“
Don
’
t, asshole.
”

“
What?
”

“
Use your hands.
”

“
You can
’
t call me that.
”

“
Fine. A-hole.
”

And as distressing as this, his first curse, is—the first I
’
ve heard, at least—it
’
s also kind of thrilling. Wonderfully so. To hear anger from him is a great relief. I had worried about his lack of anger, had worried that he and I had been too harmonious, that I hadn
’
t given him enough friction. He needed friction, I had begun insisting to myself. After all the years of normalcy and coddling, it was time to give the boy something to be pissed about. How else would he succeed? Where would he find his motivation, if not from the desire to tread over me? Always there had been just mutual devotion, and compliance, and his kind eyes and young pure wisdom— But now this! I
’
m an
asshole.
Such a relief. A breakthrough, the truth finally clear and unavoidable! I should have noticed the signs earlier. While wrestling lately, on the floor, and that one time on the tennis court, when I gave him the wedgie, did he not fight back with more conviction than ever
before? Did he not achieve a nice, effective sort of headlock and hold it, with startling tenacity, for much longer than comfortable? Did his body not tense up, his grip tighten, his eyes have in them a certain abandon, betray some rage from some distant place? Yes, yes! Now we are omnipotent.

Finally!

“
You can
’
t say A-hole, either.
”

“
Okay.
”

“
A-hole
’
s even worse.
”

“
Fine. Dickhead.
”

“
Dickhead
’
s fine.
”

At
Might
there had been an endless succession of fruitless lunches with various people who Lance had found, people with money who expressed some interest in helping us. It was always someone in their early thirties who for whatever reason had come into enough wealth to spread it around.
“
All right,
”
Lance would say, his hands as parentheses,
“
this girl is heir to the double-stick masking tape fortune, and she...
”
or
“
Okay, this guy cashed out of Microsoft and has about three hundred mil he
’
s putting into progressive media...
”
We would meet them for drinks or lunch, in the back of Infusion 555, or at a picnic table in South Park, and we would talk, explaining our plans, vaguely conveying our hopes, doing the best we could to articulate the fact that we wanted to be successful without being seen as successful-successful, wanted to keep doing what we were doing, with the option of opting out if we ever got bored, wanted to conquer the world in a way that no one would be able to tell that that
’
s what we wanted, trying not to let on how tired we all were, how unsure we were that we really wanted to do any of this anymore, actually—

And midway through the meetings the prospective benefactor would, as she or he pushed the ice around with their straw,
explain how they
’
d have to talk anything over with their parents, or their lawyers and advisors and—

It was just as well. We hated the meetings, hated each other half the time, hated coming in every day, wondered why we were still doing this stuff—

We had been given a month
’
s notice on our lease. We had already been extending our stay, every month begging for one more, asserting that we were so close to getting some kind of funding, that we needed some money so we could arrange for a place to move to, first, or maybe we
’
d move in with whatever company agreed to help us out— So Lance went to New York as a last-ditch thing, meeting with people much too small and much too big to help. He called back every day, with news of no news. He was staying with Skye, just as we all did when we were all in New York. We had had a big party out there, and Skye organized the whole thing, free drinks, a DJ, and had slept at her boyfriend
’
s so we could all stay on her floor, four of us in her bedroom, sleeping bags and throw pillows, and at the party, when the police had come to shut it down, it was Skye, and her mom of all people, in town from Nebraska, who had begged the police to let us go on, because, her mom said,
“
These are just good kids, and they
’
ve worked so hard for this,
”
something to that effect, Skye sad-eyed, batting her lashes, and the police let us go on.

Lance called from Skye
’
s the day he was supposed to come back because he was staying an extra day. Skye was sick, was in the hospital with a fever, food poisoning maybe.

“
A viral thing,
”
he said.

Moodie and I met with the founders of
Wired,
went in to pitch the notion of their taking us under their wing, the perfectness of us with them despite how many times we had made fun of their magazine, we expected the meeting to be casual, easy, short on details and long on broad strokes. And of course we were wrong. We were woefully unprepared. What we wanted was just enough money to
get this next one out, and some kind of office arrangement, a corner of their floor maybe, we had a few weeks to get out of our place, anywhere would do, really—

They wanted numbers and plans. Sitting around their gleaming black table, we fumbled and joked and did our best to sound confident, ambitious still, disguising our exhaustion, gesturing to each other—

No you go ahead, finish—

No you were saying—

and we said that yes, of course there will be a new design team and better proofreading, and yes, we would stop making fun of advertisers and that yes, we are in it for the duration, that our projections this and our plans that and TV shows and a Web site of course, of course, and some concessions on the covers, some familiar faces maybe, celebrities even, if they
’
re the right kind, done the right way, sure, some profiles, we
’
ll tinker to make the thing available to a broader audience, operate with a small staff, same as always, we
’
ll stay here, move in with you guys, or move to New York, whichever, it
’
ll be so great—

After handshakes we walked out, past all the workstations, the rows and rows, the heat of all the computers operating at once, the tangles of wires, past the kitchenette and the reception area painted neon orange, the girl at the desk dressed just so, and in the elevator down to Third Street we recapped—

You think it went well?

Yeah, yeah, they love us—

but we both knew it was over, and the great, oddly wonderful thing was that neither of us really cared anymore—oh we cared, yes, but we were ready. I wanted it to be over and Moodie did even more so, and Marny was more than tired of it all, Paul, too. Zev and Lance were still pushing to continue, still felt there was reason, but they also knew—we had long prepared them—that the floor could give out any day, that the floor had been built to give
way. And so there we were, knowing that three, four years, all these hundreds of thousands of hours, were going to end without our having saved anyone—

What was conquered?

Who was changed?

with no spot on the Space Shuttle, that all this—what had it all been? It had been something to do, some small, small point to make, and the point was made, in a small way, and so fine— Moodie and I walked through South Park on a flawless July day, the park full of new people, all of them beautiful and brilliant and young, and we were tired and walked through them and back to the office. It was fine. Finally, the strange comfort of knowing the end, its parameters and terms. We had two weeks to finish the now-final issue before we had to be out of the office, so we took the stuff we had already planned—cover story:
“
Are Black People Cooler Than White People?
”
—and added, throughout, countless references to the end of the magazine, to death, to defeat.

The first-page essay:

Death, like so many great movies, is sad.

The young fancy themselves immune to death. And why shouldn
’
t they? At times life can seem endless, filled with belly laughs and butterflies, passion and joy, and good, cold beer.

Of course, with age comes the solemn understanding that forever is but a word. Seasons change, love withers, the good die young. These are hard truths, painful truths—inescapable but, we are told, necessary. Winter begets spring, night ushers in the dawn, and loss sows the seeds of renewal. It is, of course, easy to say these things, just as it is easy to, say, watch a lot of television.