Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 2

"If I was dead, would you be able to tell what was wrong with me?"

"Certainly, but I don't advise that you die just to find out."

"I keep having ennui attacks."

"That's the layman's term for it. Though ennui really means 'boredom.' From what I understand your attacks are related to the part of your brain that manages your empathetic response. Are you familiar with Abraham Lincoln?"

"The guy from the penny."

"A great American president. He grew up in Illinois, very poor. His family had nothing and lived in a little log house. But young Abe learned to read and taught himself about literature and law and became one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known. One day when Abe was a boy he was walking down a dirt road and pa.s.sed a turtle that had rolled over onto its back and was helpless. It troubled him to see the creature suffering but he walked on anyway. The farther he walked, though, the more troubled he became, until the thought of that turtle lying helpless was more than he could bear. So he walked back nearly two miles just to flip the turtle over."

"Lucky turtle," Woo-jin said.

"I'm telling you this because Abe Lincoln was born with a cognitive tendency similar to your own, an abundance of empathy. And this tendency to feel the suffering of others was one of the reasons he became such a great leader."

"I'm not a leader. Just an official delegate."

At this they arrived at the lot of Woo-jin's former home, now nothing but a ring of cinder blocks. Dr. Farmer yanked the parking brake and leaned over. "Say, I couldn't trouble you to suck my wiener, could I?"

"That would trouble me a lot," Woo-jin said.

Dr. Farmer shrugged. "To each his own."

With Woo-jin deposited at the dusty trailer site, the coroner departed in a cloud of sedan-generated dust. Woo-jin walked to the place where the front door used to be and stepped over a cinder block. Here's where the living room would have been, overflowing with Patsy screaming for takeout. The TV would have been over here, broadcasting compet.i.tive defecation championships. Woo-jin turned in a circle and imagined what used to be in his line of vision, the bric-a-brac that had ascended to the heavens. Around this time he would have typically gone to sleep, pulling down the shades and curling fetally in his hammock. But there were no shades to pull or hammock to swing from so Woo-jin found the place where his hammock would have been and lay down in the dirt next to a newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nt that had blown under the double-wide long ago.

The ad was for women's hosiery, specifically the kinds that reduce varicose veins and provide a more shapely figure. An old ad, from when people used to care about those kinds of things. All the models pictured were probably dead now, maybe even in Dr. Farmer's morgue, waiting for someone to slice them open and formulate an opinion about them. Look at them, yearning to be thought attractive. The gutters of Woo-jin's eyelids filled with tears. Oh, so this was going to be the trigger. He bit down on his mouth guard and closed his eyes, letting the attack f.u.c.k him over. He twitched on the bare ground like a fish about to get clubbed. The steady drumbeat. It smelled like mushrooms and old socks down here, dryer lint and cobwebs. The ground took on the appearance of being illuminated by the moon. He turned over and got blasted with the vibrant rippling flames of the campfire. It was the mesa again, the high windy desolation. The ring of objects around the flame: a refrigerator, a tire, three stuffed animals, a pile of books, a full-length mirror. Woo-jin pulled himself up on his elbows. The wood smoke burned his eyes and may not have been wood smoke at all; it smelled of petroleum and dead creatures. He rose and looked around. The world below the mesa was nothing but bluish desert darkness in every direction. In the distance he made out something constructed, a gigantic letter T formed from white rocks lying on the desert floor. He approached the mirror and held out his hand, which appeared to be his own, and in the mirror confirmed the dumb reality of his own face. Next he considered the refrigerator. It was a model with a combo ice and water dispenser, one door for the freezer, the other for the fridge. He pulled open the fridge door and found it fully stocked with food. It hummed a bit as the fan got going. He located a pile of wrapped sandwiches, an apple, a bag of cookies, some bottled water, and took these over to the tire, where he sat and began to eat. Was that refrigerator even plugged in? It didn't appear to be. The power cord snaked behind it like a tail.

Woo-jin ate. The sandwiches were a perfect harmonization of condiments, cheeses, vegetables, and meats. One of them had this incredible pesto aioli. After finishing three sandwiches Woo-jin bit into the snappy apple. Dang! That was one fine piece of fruit. Finally, the cookies. Just the right chewiness, with chunks of chocolate, raisins, and cashews. At the end of his meal, Woo-jin stuffed his trash into the cookie bag and tossed it on the fire. While he'd been eating he'd forgotten about his troubles but now, under the cosmos, on what seemed like a vast soundstage, he wondered about the dead girl and if he was somehow responsible for her turning up dead twice. He was beginning to miss Patsy. And where was he supposed to live?

Woo-jin turned to the pile of books. He knew how to read well enough, how to get trapped in sentences and scratch out some words when needed, thanks to the various foster parents who'd made sure he didn't die and made him learn to read so they could keep collecting the foster-care checks. From time to time an older kid, somebody smarter, had read him a book and he recalled the rea.s.suring process of blobs of ink turning into flapping lips and tongues. The book on top of the stack was a paperback without a cover, its pages yellow and blunted at the corners, eroded by sandy wind. He kicked it aside and looked at the book beneath it. He read the t.i.tle once and read it again.

How to Love People by Woo-jin Kan Funny there'd be a book by another Woo-jin Kan. He picked it up and turned it over and looked at the picture of the author, a guy who looked kind of like himself but older, spiky hair gray-flecked, slightly smiling, a peaceful expression. He looked like the kind of guy who had his s.h.i.t together, clue number one that this was a different Woo-jin.

He turned the book back over and opened it to the first page.

Dear Woo-jin, This is your future brain sending a message to your past brain. For serious. Here's what you have to do to get Patsy back. You have to write this book you're now holding. It's one of the only books the Last Dude has to read, so make it really good. He needs to read your book so that he can make the messages about why we got extinct. He's writing them out in the rocks down there in the desert. You have to quit your dishwashing job and write this book. What's the book supposed to be about? Who knows, you haven't written it yet, but at least you have a t.i.tle ha ha ha.

You think I'm joking? Since I'm your future brain I know what's about to happen to you. You're going to find that dead girl again. What I say is true and you really have to follow these directions. Seriously, bro.

Signed, Your (Woo-jin's) Future Brain P.S.: For serious. You have to quit Il Italian Joint and become a full-time writer.

As Woo-jin's eyes turned from the page to the sky, his mind got sucked back through some sorta tube, flailing, a squeal of astral velocity, as if he were recoiling from the strange fact of reading something yet to be. His head went smack against the ground as the day began anew in Georgetown, Seattle. There was the women's hosiery advertis.e.m.e.nt again, now drained of emotional oomph. Woo-jin's tracksuit was filthy. He stood, twisting the kinks from his joints, mouth painfully dry, hair flat on one side of his head and cantilevered in perpendicular spikes on the other and sort of fuzzed-up on top. He stepped over the cinder block where the door used to be and shuffled in a direction that seemed to have been chosen for him. His legs snapped back and forth and walked him through a playground nestled between an off-ramp and some train tracks. A cargo plane sc.r.a.ped the wind.

Woo-jin spoke a sentence through streams of spittle. "I want to figure out what's going on here." Speaking aloud surprised him. Like a thought had escaped his brain through a hole in a fence, scampering out into the open where ears could pick it up. If he had a celestial head like the Amba.s.sador, that certainly would have been convenient. He would just ask his celestial head, "Hey, fill me in on what the deal is with the dead girl and this dusty place with the campfire with the refrigerator, books, stuffed animals, and a mirror. Oh, and the tire. And Patsy being yanked up into the sky. And my future brain, who says I'm supposed to be an author." His celestial head-he imagined him as a gap-toothed black man with an afro-would say, "Thanks for asking. Here's exactly what those things mean, my brother," and proceed to untangle the knot in Woo-jin's brain that seemed only to grow tighter the more he picked at it.

Now beyond the playground and its ghost children frolicking on dirty equipment, Woo-jin came to a concentration of warehouses, inside of which were squirts and clanks and whatnot, noises supposedly connected to purposes. Coming to the corner of 12th and Vale he found the Amba.s.sador sitting on a milk crate with his toilet brush scepter.

Woo-jin said, "You ever heard of a book called How to Love People, by Woo-jin Kan?"

"I don't have time for books like that when I'm always consuming economics and political science texts," said the Amba.s.sador. "Unless this love book of yours is an economics book. In that case, yes, yes, I've most definitely read it."

"Maybe it is about economics."

"I thought you said you wrote it."

"Another Woo-jin Kan wrote it. Or maybe it isn't a real book at all."

"In that case," said the Amba.s.sador, "you might try getting it published."

"That's a really good idea."

Was it afternoon already? Looked like it. Soon it would be time for work again, the nightly river of flatware and crockery. A metro bus pulled up smelling of french fries, biodiesel. The Amba.s.sador gently touched Woo-jin's shoulder with his toilet brush scepter and said, "Someday soon you'll witness the most epic peace talks in human history," then boarded the bus and asked the driver if it stopped near Rite Aid.

Woo-jin walked to the lot just north of Boeing Field where the body had appeared and appeared again. His legs carried him beyond the field, through South Park and up the road to Il Italian Joint. When he came to the back entrance he found piles of dishes literally spilling out the doorway into the parking lot. Thousands of them, encrusted from lunch rush. At first he stepped over them but the closer he got to the kitchen the harder it became to not break anything. He quickly found that the best way to navigate the dishes was to get p.r.o.ne and sort of swim through them. In the kitchen, the dishes reached a little higher than head level. With a modified b.r.e.a.s.t.stroke Woo-jin was able to keep his head above the line and edge closer to where the wash station was supposed to be.

"Bahn Kan? Ben O'Winn? Pontoon?" he called. "Sandford?"

Apart from some indeterminate hydraulic hissing, the kitchen was empty of noise. Sandford Deane's head popped up beside him from under a platter, wearing a colander for a hat.

"Thank G.o.d you're here, Woo-jin. Pontoon, Bahn Kan, and Ben O'Winn didn't show up. It's up to you to turn this place around," Sandford said, wiping a soggy crust of bread off his forehead. "I even got you some diamond-encrusted platinum wool."

Woo-jin paddled over to the Hobart and got down to business. As he shoved dishes through the machine the dish level slowly began to drop. Midway through his shift the dishes were only up to his calves. Tirelessly, he converted dirty dishes into clean ones, an act of prestidigitation as much as sanitization. Dinner rush came and went and by the end of the night the wash station was empty. Woo-jin dunked his ap.r.o.n into the laundry and grabbed his card to punch out. Sandford clapped him on the back, congratulating him on another evening for the record books.

"Thanks, Sandford. But I won't be back tomorrow. I'm quitting right now."

Woo-jin's boss looked aghast. "But you're the best dishwasher in Seattle. In the world, even. What will you do instead?"

"I'm going to write a book," said Woo-jin. "A book about how to love people."

Sandford shook his head and retrieved the gold medal from the Restaurant and Hotel Management Olympics then solemnly placed it around Woo-jin's neck. It looked good with the tracksuit even though the tracksuit looked like s.h.i.t. Woo-jin stood a moment imagining a national anthem, not the new one, but the old one, the one with the terrorists getting castrated in front of their weeping children. How many hours had he spent in this kitchen, blasting caked-on food off porcelain surfaces? It had been his first and only job, started almost two-thirds of his life ago. He imagined a montage to go along with the national anthem, a series of slow-motion shots of him scouring pots and sc.r.a.ping baking sheets, drinking soda, punching his time card. All those good times seemed a prelude to this, the decision to write a book, which apparently he was going to have to figure out how to do. On the way out past the Dumpsters, Sally the waitress hugged him and said, "Good luck, Mike. We'll say we knew you when."

Woo-jin had no idea what she was talking about but he didn't let on. He walked into the backdrop of New York Alki rising amid northwestern cedars, helicopters swooping and jets crisscrossing the clouds, past trembling warehouses, across the sludgy Duwamish, into the only neighborhood he had ever loved, Georgetown, coming to the field where he had twice discovered a girl's body. He was going to write a book! He almost skipped at the thought.

Up ahead was the big unknown machine's silhouette in the dark waves of gra.s.ses, like a sea-tossed dinghy weather-

ing a storm. Woo-jin came to the indeterminate and aban-

doned technology and looked to the place where he'd found the body.

There she was again.

The same girl, in the same place, in the same position. Same black hair, white shirt, black pants. Woo-jin leaned over and puked, witnessing the remnants of the sandwiches, apple, and cookies he had devoured on the wind-battered mesa the night before, introduced into this particular plane of reality. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked again.

The girl grabbed his arm and screamed, "Help me! Help me! Help me!"

Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 1.

the tape roll a bit here before we get . . . Luke? You need anything, Luke?

No, I'm fine.

I thought we could first talk about Nick Fedderly. About when he was a kid.

Sure. I first met Nick in kindergarten. Everyone knew he was poor. When he came to birthday parties n.o.body expected him to bring a present. When he came to one of mine he gave me a used Mad magazine, which was a big deal. The money he saved up to buy it. He lived with his mom-her name was Star-in what was basically a shack out in the woods on Bainbridge, in a place we all called Hippie Hill. This was before the real estate boom of the eighties and nineties. The island was back-to-the-landers, some berry farmers, very simple living. You got to Nick's house on a narrow road through the trees. It was almost like there was no ditch, just enough room for one car. And no gravel, just rutted mud. Steep. If it was raining, forget it. But at the top of the hill the drive opened into a little meadow with the shack. Smoke coming out of a stovepipe. At the edge of the property was the frame of a house that Nick's father had started building but died before finishing. In the shack they didn't have any electricity or gas heat and they cooked all their meals on a woodstove. His mom always looked exhausted. She would have been in her twenties but looked twenty years older. She wore stained housedresses and Holly Hobbie bonnets, her hair in thick, flower-child braid pigtails. It was just the two of them.

How did Nick's father die?

He died trying to build that house. Apparently he was working on it one day and fell. There's a right way and a wrong way to land. Apparently he landed in precisely the wrong way. This tragedy was pretty fresh when I first met Nick. I think I sat behind him the first day of cla.s.s.

Did you two become friends immediately, or . . . ?

Not really. Friendships are fickle at that age, or at least they were for me. Part of it I think is that I wasn't ready for him yet. I hadn't grown in the ways I needed to in order to really get to know him.

Star. What did she do exactly?

Odds and ends. She sometimes sold chicks and ducklings at the feed store. Split lumber. Janitorial stuff. Nothing too noteworthy or dignified. Poor Star. I think she tried to get jobs at restaurants as a waitress but she was always so wrecked-looking. I remember grown-ups talking in low voices about her fitness as a parent. They'd see Nick show up at school without shoes. I think they mostly lived off the insurance payout they got after Nick's dad died. They kept living that same life up there in the woods in the shack with no electricity, an honest-to-G.o.d outhouse out back, the rain coming down hard turning everything to mud. Naturally everyone thought she was completely insane.

Did you ever go over to Nick's house?

Sure, once we started playing together. This would be second grade. I rode my bike to school and one morning my chain blew out, so I had to walk it the last half mile. When some of the bigger kids saw me they laughed and made fun of me and I guess Nick heard about it. I parked my bike in the rack behind the gym thinking I'd have to have my mom come pick me up. But that afternoon I found that my bike had been fixed. Another kid told me he'd seen Nick messing with it at recess. The next day I confronted him about it, asked if he'd been the one who fixed the bike. He wouldn't look me in the eyes, just sort of sank down into himself and stared at hopscotch markings. I finally got him to admit that he'd repaired it and I gave him a Superman trading card as thanks. He just pocketed it and ran away.

A while later I was a.s.signed to be his reading buddy. We were supposed to read the same book and talk about it together in front of the cla.s.s. We read some kind of science fiction story, I don't remember what it was, but I remember he started to open up a bit. He didn't get to see many movies, so I'd tell him the plots and highlights of the ones I'd seen. He didn't have a TV or a telephone at home, which amazed me. Not having a phone, more than not having clothes, equaled abject poverty to me.

What about your family? Tell me about your parents.

[sighs] My folks were college professors. They jokingly referred to themselves as the Doctors Piper. My dad, Gordon, taught English, and my mom, Gail, taught Library Science. Her dad had owned a shipping company and died when she was in her twenties, leaving her a sizable inheritance. Our house was on the north end of the island with a view of Seattle, a hundred feet of beachfront all to ourselves, right up against a steep embankment. We had a boat. A dog. The house was full of books and had big bay windows looking out on Puget Sound. My younger sister and I spent a lot of time exploring the beach and the woods, making up stories and games, on our own for hours at a time. My mom bolted a big ship bell to the side of the house that she rang when it was time for dinner. We took lots of vacations, to Canada and the San Juans mostly, but a couple times to Costa Rica, the Caribbean, Hawaii. My parents had lots of friends, brilliant colleagues from the university. One thing I noticed right away was how being smart usually meant also having a unique sense of humor. We stayed up late watching Monty Python, eating homemade ice cream, or we'd drive out to Suquamish to see a movie at the drive-in. You could say my childhood was an embarra.s.sment of riches. I had toys, sure, but never an obscene amount. Mostly we amused ourselves with our own minds, the last generation to really do so, in my opinion. Nothing scheduled, no overload of after-school activities, just constant conversations with our parents about anything and everything. Their interests were all over the map. At dinner we'd talk about politics, economics, art, s.e.x, history, war, astronomy. You could throw any obscure topic at my mother and she'd tell you the three seminal works in that particular field, what the best editions were, and who published them. My dad liked to recite what he called his "Poem of the Week," something he'd committed to memory. My parents and Nick's mom were like two evolutionary branches from a common ancestor. My folks had grown outward, embracing the world, while Star had grown inward, into places the rest of us couldn't fathom.

What do you mean by "places"?

Well let me back up. You can understand how our community considered her a pathetic creature, someone who'd started off weird, probably fried her mind on acid then suffered the horrible loss of her husband. You could be forgiven for making that kind of judgment. That's how I felt about her when Nick started inviting me to his house. I kept on making up excuses as to why I couldn't go, then finally one day I came home from school and my mother told me I'd received a birthday party invitation in the mail. That Nick had wrangled up enough money for a card, envelope, and stamp was a small miracle. I tried to get out of it but my mom was adamant that I attend. So I bought him a Star Wars pop-up book and one spring afternoon my mother drove me to his house, bottoming out the Saab on that h.e.l.lish driveway. She must have known about Star's reputation but she was an open-minded, Marxist liberal intent on exposing me to different social strata. Even so, I think she was a little shocked by the condition of their house. There was all this c.r.a.p surrounding the shack, rusted and moldy junk that looked puked out of a garbage truck. I got out of the car wearing my ridiculous khaki slacks and polo shirt, the wrapped present under my arm, and walked up the muddy path to their front door. Star greeted us there, with Nick standing behind her. She reached out and took my mother's hand and said some things that made me want to cry. She said, "Thank you so much, Mrs. Piper. Luke is the only kid at school who is nice to Nick. It means so much to us that you came." She invited us in and we ducked into this little s.p.a.ce almost entirely devoid of anything you could call a creature comfort. Table, two chairs, two beds in an adjoining room. Outside the shack was a disaster but inside was clean and well-kept. And it smelled nice, too, like incense. We sat on pillows in what would have been the living room but it could very well have been considered the dining room. Star served tea, and cake made from scratch. It was a chocolate cake with frosting, all made to look like E.T. The movie alien, remember? It took me a minute to realize this was the party. Star was relaxed and comfortable in her own house and made pleasant conversation with my mom. Questions like, "I understand you teach librarians?" It struck me that Nick had gleaned all these little pieces of information from me and formulated a comprehensive portrait of who my family was. Now, hearing about all the things Nick and I had talked about, I could tell that he admired me. His admiration didn't ever come out when it was just the two of us together, but hearing his mom talk about what he'd told her about me confirmed our friendship. When we finished the cake, Nick opened the present. I'd never seen such grat.i.tude. It was as though I was witnessing the first act of altruism in human history, a pivotal moment in the development of the species. Nick's mother actually got teary-eyed. Nick was beside himself with happiness. We played with that pop-up book for over an hour, acting out scenes from the movies I'd seen a half dozen times and Nick hadn't seen at all. Nick added little addendums and characters, which at first bugged me because I wanted to stay true to the original version but then I kind of gave up and went with it. I remember his favorite character was Chewbacca, he kept wanting to be Chewbacca, while I, of course, was Luke, when really I should have been Han Solo. Anyway, while our moms talked we took our game outside, into the woods, and it was then that I noticed there was another building on the property. A small shed. I think maybe I tried to take a look inside but Nick stopped me, real serious, and told me it was off-limits. After a while our moms came outside, standing there chatting like they'd been friends forever, and it was time to go. No birthday party I ever attended ever matched what I felt that day.

What was in the shed?

Nick's dad's shop. They hadn't opened it since he died.

What did your peers make of your friendship with Nick?

My answer to that is going to sound like a lot of bragging but the fact is, my primary talent in life has always been my likability. When you're someone everybody likes you can get away with befriending people who aren't liked. My peers always looked to me as a leader, came to me for my approval or blessing, wanted my opinions on stuff. Kids questioned my friendship with Nick. "Why are you hanging out with that freak?" they'd ask me, and I'd tell them they were idiots who didn't realize Nick was a genius. The things that should have marked Nick as an outcast became, thanks to my psychological campaign, examples of his edginess. His clothes, the piercings he got before anyone else in high school. In a way I think I achieved the impossible by making poverty cool.

You mentioned his fixing your bike. Were there other times when Nick's mechanical inclinations became apparent?

He was always taking things apart to see how they worked, putting them back together about half the time. My parents, the most technologically inept people I knew, were amazed by this. My dad could barely get the lawn mower to turn over. Sometimes Nick came over and helped my dad in the garage, or fixed things around our house, like our water heater.

He fixed your water heater?

Yeah, when he must have been about twelve years old. He was coming over to our house a lot around that age. Our home was one of the rare places where Nick could find praise. He certainly wasn't getting any at school. School bored the h.e.l.l out of him. And even though I had succeeded in making him sort of acceptable to our cla.s.smates, he really didn't take much initiative to make any friends other than me. He didn't like to play with me when I was with other kids. He'd wait to get me alone and then we'd enter our world of codes and secret pa.s.sageways, our games of trap doors and monsters. He bonded with my parents and asked them lots of questions about history and science. Sometimes my sister and I would just end up playing together by default when Nick was over, since he was so wrapped up in learning about the Luddite movement and the invention of radio with my mom and dad.

Your sister. Tell me about her.

Man. She was incredible. She would have grown up to become a beautiful and talented woman. Claudine. I miss her every day. She loved music. Always twisting my arm to sing songs with her. She considered all the heavy thinking in our household sort of comical. She could defuse a deep conversation with a perfectly timed joke. If my family was the Beatles, she would have been Ringo.

And you would have been- Paul.

Let's talk about high school.

Sure. I was your typical debate nerd, specializing in LincolnDouglas, also did a pretty decent job as a fullback on the football team, elected to student council, founder and president of the Photography Club, never at a loss for a girlfriend. Again, I floated by on charm and all the things I learned through osmosis from my parents. Kept a 4.0 GPA, volunteered at a retirement home teaching senior citizens how to use computers. My high school career was an unmitigated success from start to finish. I was miserable. [Laughs].

And Nick?

He started smoking. Hanging out with the poorer kids, making out in public with these s.k.a.n.ky chicks. Spent a lot of time in the vocational-tech departments. Those teachers, the wood-shop, metal-shop guys, sports coaches mostly, they loved him. He did really well in math and science, lousy in Spanish and English. Hated art.

And you guys remained friends?

Strangely enough, yeah. We had a real Goofus and Gallant thing going on. We orbited each other, admired each other as opposites. Nick started smoking pot as a freshman and one night convinced me to try it. We stayed up watching Pink Floyd's The Wall and talking about philosophy. He told me he looked up to me for how I could get anyone to do anything I wanted them to. I told him I admired him for his genius. But there were whole weeks that went by when we didn't talk to each other. Just pa.s.s in the hallway with not so much as a nod. I still defended him when friends of mine talked s.h.i.t about him but we started to have a lot less contact than we used to. Then the science fair happened.

The science fair at Bainbridge High was kind of a big deal. Sometime in the late eighties scouts from tech companies started coming over to check out the budding talent. The idea was to identify the innovators really young and give them scholarships. Of course this poisoned the spirit of the thing and after a while everyone was writing unoriginal programs in DOS. It turned into more of a computer fair than a science fair. So junior year, the first year Nick qualified, he shows up with these boxes of c.r.a.p. Gears and wires and hammered-out panels and screws and stuff. Little pieces of wood and coils of string. It looked like the contents of a junk drawer. I sat there with my display on Puget Sound pollution watching Nick set up his project. He refused to say anything about it. The pieces appeared to fit together in random configurations but Nick worked on it with such a sense of purpose that I had to believe the machine he was building actually did something. Kids and parents wandered around, smirking about the bizarre contraption Nick was building. If Nick heard them he didn't show it. He was absorbed. After about an hour, his project was built. It was a battered metal cube, about a foot and a half square. He put up a sign that said, "The Machine" and sat behind his table, stone-faced, his black hair hanging in front of his eyes. I was convinced he was putting everyone on. Then the judges stopped by with their clipboards and frowns and asked Nick what the machine did.

Nick took a key from his pocket, like the kind used to wind up an antique toy. He inserted it into a hole in the top of the box and twisted it a few times. We waited. At first nothing happened. By now a crowd had gathered, curious to see what the h.e.l.l this thing did. Then a panel popped off and landed on the floor. Inside were gears and screws, little pistons, whirling things. The machine shuddered and then appeared to dismantle itself. Screws and rivets shot out in all these directions. People stepped back. Somebody made a crack that it was a bomb. No one could take their eyes off the thing. Within a minute the entire machine was dismantled, lying in pieces all over the table and floor. There was a moment of quiet. Then, one by one, everyone realized

this was the end of the show, and started to laugh. Nick didn't move. Just sat in the same position he'd been sitting in, quiet, while everyone roared. Once the crowd was tired of this they moved on to look at someone's model of a double helix.

One man lingered. He wore slacks and a black sport coat over a white shirt. Young guy, maybe twenty-five years old. Handsome, short haircut. He slowly bent down and picked up a gear from the floor and turned it over in his hand. He cleared his throat and told Nick he liked his invention. At this, Nick looked up, sort of wary and angry, prepared for a punch line. But there was no punch line. The man handed Nick a business card. The card just had a name and phone number on it. Dirk Bickle. He said he was a scout for an organization that was always on the lookout for innovative young minds, then nodded and said good-bye.

I helped Nick pick up the pieces of his machine. As I was putting the pieces back in their boxes I realized that Nick's machine hadn't just fallen apart. It had dismantled itself so thoroughly that every moving part had been detached from every other part. Not a single screw or gear was connected to anything else. When I pointed this out to Nick, he smiled for the first time that afternoon and said, "You figured it out."

What about this Dirk Bickle character?

Nick stashed the card. They didn't speak until a year or so later.