White Man's Problems Part 4

John and Maria walked to the driveway and lit up Marlboro Lights b.u.mmed from Donny.

"Look at this place," said John.

"Never changes," said Maria.

"Thanks for coming. I know it's tough."

"Oh please. Knock it off. What? Because I might hear Carmen or some other guy say 'n.i.g.g.e.r'? I grew up with these guys, too."

"Where's Kenny?"

"He's talking to Donny and all Mike's friends. He sees those guys all the time. He had Carmen and Peter do our bathroom."

They were sitting on the b.u.mper of a pickup truck. "Can you believe they still smoke like that?" said John. "He died of lung cancer. Lung cancer."

"We're smoking."

"True." He looked at Maria. He could tell she had something on her mind. "What?" he said. "What is it?"

"Judge not least thee be judged, John."

"C'mon."

"No, seriously. Sure, I sit there and think, 'Carmen D'Ign.a.z.io, ugh. "n.i.g.g.e.r" this, "n.i.g.g.e.r" that. Since third grade-always been like that. These guys are pigs. Nothing around here will ever change.' But then I think, 'Who am I kidding?' I don't know. Who's so different? I don't get on a f.u.c.king elevator in a parking lot if I have to ride alone with a black guy. Where's that leave me?"

"Yeah, but that's different."

"Oh yeah? How? How is that different?"

"Do I really have to explain the difference between you and Carmen?"

"No. I'm talking about the difference between you and Carmen," said Maria. "And you and Mike. And you and everybody."

The became silent. After a while he said, "You know what I say? I say, 'Here's to Mike.'"

"Ok. Here's to Mike," she said. They clinked her plastic wine cup against his Budweiser.

"I'm glad he gave up. I'm glad it's over. He was miserable."

"Don't say that."

"C'mon. We've been talking about this all our lives. The entire circus with the candles and the martyrs and the prophets. All that c.r.a.p. And then I have to listen the priest say Mike was a 'fighter for the Lord, an archangel to protect us all from Satan.' What horses.h.i.t."

"He's a priest, jacka.s.s. Of course that's what he said."

"Oh really?" Something went off in John. "No, Maria." His voice cracked. "Don't you tell me that. Mike did not win any battle against evil. He was my big brother. When he was a kid, girls loved him, and boys wanted to be him. Old men got up on Sat.u.r.day morning and went out in the snow to see him play basketball in gyms with no bathrooms. When people saw him play, they thought he would be the president. And you know what happened? He got drafted. And then our mom died. No matter how many novenas she said or we said, she died. And my brother went downhill from then on. He was part of a grim f.u.c.king mathematical f.u.c.king universe."

"Ok, calm down," she said.

"He came back, and we were scared of him." He started to cry. "He smoked pot and took reds and whites and went to bars and came home and slept in his army jacket. He ended up in a trailer park in Florida, Maria. That's what happened. He would call me collect for money for the doctor for his baby. He got in a fight in a bar in Jersey and broke a guy's jaw so bad they sued him. And then he gets cancer like my mother, and where is he now? He is dead. Just like we will all be. Dead. He didn't protect us from anything. He is not a good story. He's a sad f.u.c.king story. I don't care about Vietnam; it's not about that. It was good, it was bad, who knows...that's for other people to decide. I don't care. I don't give a f.u.c.k. I just know he came back and Mom was dead and he was all f.u.c.ked up. He had two kids who he couldn't pay child support for and aren't even here today to say good-bye." He was yelling at her. "'He's a priest.' Don't tell me that."

"Ok," she said, "ok."

"Look at this bulls.h.i.t," he said. He pulled the piece of notebook paper with nine names from his wallet. "He was saying novenas just like my mother. Pathetic."

Maria looked at it. "Aw," she said. "It's all his girls."

Mary Meehan poked her head out the door and found them. "You guys come talk to me," she said. "Maria, I haven't seen you in forever. Get a drink and come sit down."

They found a place on the sofa and set their drinks on the coffee table atop coasters with the Donegan coat of arms, something Annemarie had brought back from her honeymoon to Ireland.

John picked up one of the ma.s.s cards for Mike that were sitting on the coffee table. He felt drained. "Mike would have liked the laser beams. Did he design this with you?" He looked at Maria. "Mike and Mary hung out a lot the last few years, especially after he got sick."

"It's true," said Mary. "He even started coming to Ma.s.s with me a couple years ago. He didn't want anybody to know, really."

"I guess that's pretty common," said Maria. "I mean, when you get sick."

"What, when you know you're going to die soon?" John said. Immediately he felt bad. He was getting too drunk. He tried to lighten up. "Maybe. But when I was little, they could never get him to go to church. He said he couldn't take it."

"How's your mother, Mrs. Meehan?" said Maria.

"She's fine, hon," said Mary, but she wouldn't be blown off track. She pointed at John. "You know, Jackie, I want you to know something. Michael changed in the end. I don't know how much any of you kids saw it or how much he'd let you see."

"Well, I tried to talk to him a couple times a week," said John. "But he went s.p.a.cey on me. I a.s.sumed it was the meds, you know, and the chemo. That's what I told myself, at least."

Mary sensed John's guilt and looked into his eyes. "Oh, honey, your brother loved you so much. He was so proud of you." She touched his knee.

"What did you guys talk about toward the end?" John said. "How was he, really?"

"Well, don't take this the wrong way, but we talked about going slow." Then she looked at Maria. "The thing is, Rosemary, your mother, Jackie, G.o.d rest her soul-you know she was my friend-anyway, she was always so active. 'Say a Hail Mary' or 'light a candle for this one and for that one' or 'for the earthquake in Timbuktu' or whatever. Saying the Rosary and the novenas. Now, you have to understand, I got over that a long time ago. I haven't said the G.o.dd.a.m.n Rosary in twenty-five years." She took a sip of wine and thought for a moment. "I just try to let things go. And I think Mike liked that-you know what I mean? I think he related to it."

"Sure," said John.

"But that brings me to the interesting part. I want you to hear this story," said Mary. "It started when the pope died. You know, the one who pa.s.sed away, Pope John Paul II, the famous one, the one that Arab tried to kill." Maria smiled. "Well, we were watching the funeral right here on this couch; Michael had stopped by-he was already sick-and he sat with me."

"You're kidding," said John. "Mike watched that?"

"So did I," said Maria. "I watched it with my mom."

"Michael sat right here with me," Mary continued, "and the cardinal was giving the eulogy. It was a huge ceremony-so many colors. It was lovely."

"It was beautiful," said Maria. "I remember."

"And there was a wonderful part of the eulogy about the old pope losing his own mother at a very young age. And they said what he did was transfer his sadness and loss to love to the Virgin Mary. And that sustained him for the rest of his life. That giving over of himself to something beyond is what opened his channel to such deep faith."

"That's right," said Maria.

"I really think Mike changed at that moment," said Mary Meehan. "I felt it. And from then on, it was like he was hooked."

Maria smiled. John said nothing.

"And I will never forget being at Ma.s.s a few weeks later. I look next to me, you know, out to the side, quieting myself down the way you do before the priest comes out." She paused, and waived to indicate her left side. Then she let out a laugh. "Here comes Mike, down the aisle. He sits right next to me in the pew. He says, 'Mary, tell me when to kneel. I think I remember everything else.'" She laughed to herself, lost in the memory and the wine.

The three sat on the couch for a while without speaking.

Mary opened her pocketbook and pulled out a little laminated card. "I cut the pope's eulogy out of the newspaper and gave it to Mike. He cut out this section with an exacto knife and had this card made, and he kept it with him. He gave it to me in the hospital before he pa.s.sed. Here, read it."

John looked at it and read, "'He, who at an early age had lost his own mother, loved his divine mother all the more. He heard the words of the crucified Lord as addressed personally to him: "Behold your Mother." And so he did as the beloved disciple did: he took her into his own home.'"

After finishing, John said, "At the end, there's some Latin: Totus Tuus."

"Now here's the best part," said Mary. "About six months ago, Mike shows me, right here"-she lifted up her forearm and turned it inward-"he's got a tattoo. And it says: Totus Tuus. Big green letters, you know...a tattoo like your father's, like all the kids get these days. You couldn't see it at the viewing because the undertaker dressed him. But it's there. Totus Tuus."

Maria was looking at her hands. After a minute, without looking up, she said, "Totally yours."

"That's right," said Mary, nodding. "Totally yours."

John got up to look for Donnie to b.u.m another smoke. As he moved toward the center of the house, where the crowd was dying down, he wished for a cold, cold night from long ago, when basketball was holy and he could sleep in Annemarie's bed.

Mulligan's Travels.

Jim Mulligan stood in boxers and a T-shirt in the refrigerator light, beer bottle in hand, in the same spot as countless American men before and since, at once living the whiteness and watching it, a picture within a picture, hoping for a miracle snack. He was somewhat medicated, overtired, and experiencing the conflation of his three more or less permanent worries: work, money, and what to eat. Nothing moved him.

Mulligan had learned to accept such times of doubt and pain, but at the moment he was caught up in something else, something careless he had done. When he had walked into his house in Brentwood two hours before at midnight, he realized he had left a brand-new shirt in the hotel room in New York. The lapse ate at him. He loved that G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing, with its small logo of intertwined dollar signs in distressed ink on the back collar. It was roomy and chocolate colored and made from thermal underwear material, a cool shirt from a cool store, the kind of effortlessly hip clothing it was so hard to find. At fifty, with an undefeatable gut, he faced the attendant problem of finding clothes that struck the right balance between young and old, thick and thin.

It was not supposed to be this way. This was not supposed to be his life. He had started for the UCLA football team for three seasons, and his self-image was still that of a free safety, lean and stalking, ready to pounce. He could change the game by making plays. Now he just watched and obsessed along with any other fan, gradually losing his battle to stay fit, which meant losing the battle to stay sharp and distinct, which meant wending his way to old age and dying.

Tight shirts from Maxfield and Fred Segal were ridiculous. Sports jerseys didn't work anymore. Everything was a brand from a chain bought in a mall. His solution was devolving, the way the solution to a bad day was getting drunk. Any time he was not in a suit, he reached for the same things: the same jeans, the same blank XL dark-blue T-shirt, the same sneakers. The new brown shirt had represented a welcome opportunity to revive his vanishing style. It was nondescript enough to satisfy his dislike for clothing that shouted its brand name, branded enough not to be plain, and comfortable enough that he didn't feel like a sausage in its casing. It was miraculously lightweight, wearable without a jacket in the fall in Los Angeles. It was a step in the right direction. It showed he wasn't giving in.

He went to the bed where Rita was sleeping with their daughter, Isabella, and their snoring English bulldog, Henry. There was no room for three humans plus Henry, so he carried the big, dumb, lovable, brown-and-white-brindled dog into Bella's room. The task was growing increasingly difficult. When Mulligan returned and climbed under the covers, he noticed that, even after extracting old ninety-pound King Henry, neither wife nor daughter woke up. He wished one of the girls had at least opened an eye, asked, G.o.d, what time is it? and, comforted by his arrival, had fallen back to sleep. They didn't stir, leaving him in his own company, to return to his troubles.

Again with the shirt. It had been a birthday present from their longtime housekeeper, Mariana, of all people, and he thought back to how Bella had said "aww" when he opened it. He had been nonplussed and skeptical of how it would look, only noting later-and only to himself-that it was kind of great.

He checked his BlackBerry for new messages-he was expecting messages. Finding none, he plugged the device into its charger and set it on top of his iPad. The New York trip had not gone well. The MexiCloud deal he had been trying to put together for two years was in danger. The pressure was s...o...b..lling: the firm's fee was to be paid when the transaction closed, and his salary had been cut by 25 percent until he got it finished. All his eggs were in the MexiCloud basket-dangerous in light of his big monthly nut. There were six mortgages on four properties: the Brentwood house they had lived in for two years, the Brentwood house they had moved from but not sold because it would not sell, the place in Park City, and the place in the desert. Piled on top were various other obligations: cars, household employees, private schools, charitable pledges, and a troubled closed-end technology fund that had been making unexpected capital calls. Like most of his peers-he knew this because they talked about it-Mulligan calculated his net worth daily. Depending on his mood, the mood of the newspapers, and his mood after gauging the mood of the papers, he was worth somewhere between four and ten million bucks.

The MexiCloud deal, which involved buying ten thousand new automated teller machines and supporting enterprise software and data-storage infrastructure for the Mexico-based operations of his client, HNBC-Bering-Bloodworth, should not have been so complicated. It should have been like calisthenics. Mulligan's career had tracked the rise of the cash machine. He realized very early-it didn't take a rocket scientist-that the ATM was the future of money, and he ascended smoothly through the ranks of his first job at Harriman Hartman as an investment banker (or advisor) for transactions between the manufacturing companies that made ATMs and the commercial banks, otherwise known as "regular" banks, which in the past twenty years had deployed the machines in every branch and on every street corner in America. While Rita quit practicing law and reinvented herself as a mom and private-sector productivity consultant who worked from home, he worked like a fire ant, spending all-nighters with bankers from Drexel and missing Bella's fall graduations and most softball games. He earned promotions, played golf, had season tickets, went to lunch, went to Vegas, went to New York, went to Hawaii, and got Bella into Harvard-Westlake.

On the run up in the nineties and into the new century, Mulligan's ATM niche was a way to make easy money from the public's desire for easy money. He and his LA-based team became the go-to bankers for integrating new third-party data-storage methods, beginning with server farms and then, in recent years, leading the charge into the use of cloud computing to handle the infinite on-the-spot daily transactions. Mulligan specialized in keeping it simple: he had no clue how the millions of little machines he placed kept track of the bazillions of dollars that blazed around each day, but he did know how to put together all the people who made all of the stuff, and he had faith that he could conceive of and deliver the most profitable strategies. He pioneered debt-financed purchasing, the use of sale-leasebacks, Bahamian joint ventures, and the issuance of special securities to maximize the value of ATMs. This made him, he explained to Bella when she asked, an investment banker for companies, and sometimes those companies were banks. So, yes, he told her, you could call him a banker for banks. This became more complicated, of course, once Citibank, which everyone called simply "the Bank," bought Hartman Harriman. Thereafter, he became a banker for banks inside the Bank, until his division got spun off in the wake of Lehman-which he called "the Mess"-creating the new yet old-sounding firm Harriman Hartman Citi, at which point Mulligan returned to being a plain old banker for banks.

Now the boom was over, and everyone lived in post-Mess times. It was harder to hit the numbers so easily yielded in years gone by, and there was less room to be creative and less of the casino feeling of endless opportunity. Congress was closing in on the bulls.h.i.t fees banks could charge consumers for the privilege of rubbing the ATM genie. Harriman's banking bankers, of whom he was in charge, looked abroad for a second chance, which meant looking south, for the easy money, or so they thought. Having taken what turned out to be the anfractuous a.s.signment of Latin America, he was trying to help a current client (HNBC Bering-Bloodworth) leapfrog the current generation of ATMs in Mexico, almost every one of which he had helped place five years earlier in a killer deal he had middled on behalf of a former client (Banco Popular de Oaxaca), the current leader, which, through its current investment bank, Mulligan's biggest compet.i.tor, argued that in these uncertain times-with the coming of the cloud, in other words-all that was needed was an upgrade of the former deal, an argument that could potentially scotch the current deal, which he needed desperately in order to remain among the very rich and not just the rich, which required, according to Barron's, a person to have ten million bucks.

Mulligan interlaced his fingers and hit his ducked forehead three times quickly: he had sworn he would never get in this spot, that he would never be one of the guys about whom other guys said, That's too bad; he just kind of blew it. He had been one of the smart ones, nowhere near the wreckage of the Mess. If anything, as Bob Rubin said on more than one conference call, guys like Jim Mulligan saved the day because it was the regular banks with the deposits-which were only bolstered by the easy money at the ATM-that possessed the balance sheets strong enough to pull all the other idiots through the Mess. Jim Mulligan had been one of the ones doing the clucking as the Masters of the Universe scrambled to save their a.s.ses. If it had not been for the people like him outside New York, plying away in the provinces, a.s.sisting the boring old regular banking business, and staying out of the ridiculous derivatives and CDO swaps, the whole ship could have gone down. But now, just a few years later, here he was in trouble, trying to squeeze margin out of impossible new markets, debts rising, salary decreasing, nuts in a wringer, while the p.r.i.c.ks who caused the Mess were making money again.

Sleep did not come, so he grabbed the iPad, which sat on his bureau glowing in the dark. He still didn't have any new e-mail, but the always-encouraging moving circle went round at the bottom. It said, Searching... and he hit his favorite app, Check Mate! trying not to think about the lost shirt or the almost-lost deal. Instead he wondered whether the app came through the Internet and thus would not now show up because the Wi-Fi wasn't working due to spotty reception in the bedroom, or whether, since Check Mate! had been downloaded, it was always there, permanently embedded on the hard drive or-he guessed that this was the way they did it now-the device's virtual replica of the hard drive in the cloud. It was one of those moments of technological helplessness that weaved in and out of his life, like not knowing when an attachment would open on a BlackBerry or, during his brief flirtation with a MacBook, how he could get on the Internet without knowing the answer to that old Mac question of whether his Ethernet connection was via a DCPH1 or ANDN protocol.

Then lo, his unfinished game from the plane filled the screen. Crazy as it was given the nature of his job, Mulligan didn't understand much of what made any of these things work. Truth was he was a salesman: salesmen sell, and the best salesmen in the world traveled around the business of money. He could have just as well sold shovels, and he would have happily put together Bahamian joint ventures for shovel companies if shovels were in the right place at the right time, like ATMs. Secretly he was clueless most of the time about the fundamentals of connectivity and information technology. He wondered if his weakness was related to his lifelong lack of knack for the everyday. He could not fix anything-couldn't change a tire, couldn't hang a picture, and could barely replace batteries. Still, just because he wasn't handy by nature didn't mean he had to be digitally dumb. Logic would dictate that he should be better with technology because he was numbers oriented-after heading west to play football, he went to Stanford Business School, where he focused on finance and did well enough to land an impressive job at Harriman in LA, which, in fine Mulligan form, he started right after graduation. As a result, by now he knew just about everything he needed about the intricacies of banking and investments. Shouldn't a more educated type understand techy stuff better than a tradesman? It wasn't the same as mechanical, all this computer c.r.a.p. Or was it? Maybe he was wrong. Maybe not knowing if an attachment would open was exactly the same shortcoming as not having a clue as to how to change a fuse or fix a hot-water heater.

When practical problems arose throughout his life, he paid people to fix things, just as he had promised his brother, Dennis, when they were teenagers, upon being challenged as to exactly what the f.u.c.k he was going to do when the electricity went out in his house or when one of his kids needed a Pinewood Derby car: Simple. I'm going to pay some guy to do it for me. It may have been forgivable that he said such a thing, because of their station in life then, when he and his brother were using his mother's portion of his father's support payment of food stamps to buy dinner in an exurb of Hartford. It certainly did not seem likely when that now-famous line was spoken that either of them would one day be paying anyone to do anything. But Mulligan managed to climb out through football and hard work in school and the desire not to worry about money ever again. He figured out quickly that the poor were poor because they didn't acquire anything. So, as his salary grew, he concentrated on acc.u.mulating a.s.sets at all turns, buying stocks, munic.i.p.al bonds, and-perhaps foolishly-the real estate upon which the mortgages currently eating him had been taken.

The problem these days was not all the new technology. New technology in and of itself was great. He had made a fortune from it. Nor was the problem too much technology. The pundits who opined about the negative effects of information overload, of overconnectedness and too much choice, of a society being entertained and digitized to death, did not have it quite right. The thing that was killing people-the problem-was that the s.h.i.t did not work. Nothing ever worked. He popped himself in the head with his interlaced fingers again. There was human error, sure. He was the first to admit that he himself sometimes did not, in fact, know how to execute things. But, more often, it was the product that did not do its job. The ability to get money out of a machine or watch a 1977 Creedence Clearwater Revival video anytime and anywhere or get into the movie theater with a piece of paper you printed at home was great. But once the possibility of getting cash or watching a Creedence video or getting into the movies with a plain old dips.h.i.t piece of paper existed, an expectation was created. The monster was out of the box. And one did not need to be the Unabomber to see that the monster did not always show up when needed. That was the problem. People ended up spending most of their time trying to find out when and how the cash machine would give money or whether the video would buffer. People stopped their cars in cul-de-sacs or walked out on the porch to get cell reception or set their laptops by the espresso maker facing the pantry shelves in the kitchen or were told almost there while they waited a few more seconds for the G.o.dd.a.m.n basketball game to come on. People wondered why the car phone worked less on foggy days and whether that could really be the reason, like whether turning your beach chair to face the sun really worked. Everywhere, promised connections were not being made, and the humans who had bought a solution were left trying to solve a problem. People went down depressions into hollows to survive. So much so that the hollows became comfortable-preferable to the constant exposure to mistakes, malfunctions, and unmet expectations. Taken with the diminishing nature of a finite lifetime, choices became more important, multiplying daily, requiring constant double downs of the just-to-break-even variety, until there were no choices left other than to find a hollow.

He rose to go to the bathroom, where he took an Ambien, making it two that night-a no-no, but he had to get to sleep. He picked up the iPad one more time as he lay back down to see if the a.n.a.lyst in New York had redone the numbers. There was still no service. His inbox was unchanged. The last message was still the one from his wife that he had read on the plane. He had missed Bella's fourth-grade cla.s.s' party, having stayed in the city for one more meeting, and Rita had e-mailed him this: It went great. Really cute. She had a ball. They were in the pool most of the time, but it broke into a whiffle-ball game around four...boys v. girls of course. Monica and I both said how fun it was to c the girls all in their little bikinis running around not self-conscious. Probably last time for that soon there will be body worries. Fly safe. We ate but Mariana left something in there for you. XX He listened to the girls sleep. Bella was a miniature version of Rita, like the same doc.u.ment zoomed down to 60 percent. He was proud of their shared jokes, their love of dogs and horses and guinea pigs, and their obsession with Say Yes to the Dress. And he was lucky for his daughter: Bella worked hard to keep him happy. She was always up for a visit to the office, and when they were alone in the car, she asked about his life. She complained when he went away and told him not to smoke cigars. But lately she could vanish in a cascade of tears from an innocuous conversation. Before he knew it, Rita would be standing hands on hips in the doorway asking him what the h.e.l.l he'd said, like when Bella admitted to liking a boy and he asked, perfectly harmlessly, if any of her friends were into the same guy. Or when he told her not to worry about being ugly because her braces would be off soon, thinking they were in the teasing s.p.a.ce of buddies, misjudging that, though Bella often wore the X chromosome, it was really just to be nice to him and didn't give him the right to treat her like a golf buddy. Back at the iPad, he made one wrong move, and the black queen came roaring across screen. His king was cornered. He started another game.

When Rita and Bell awoke, they did not wake him, or at least not enough for him to acknowledge consciousness. He thought he felt Bella kiss his cheek. Rita wrote a note that he found on the bed stand: Went to the Barn. Let Sondra in and ask her to please get the cushions on pool chairs. meet us for lunch, Bye.

Underneath, Bella's handwriting read: Yo dawg, where you been? LU xo B.

Mulligan rose and went through his ablutions. Helpless as to breakfast, he considered going to Starbucks but remembered his one-man boycott of its bulls.h.i.t. The weird thing about the Northwesternization of the culture was its false patina of hipsterism and liberal politics: it was all so green, healthy, smug, and egalitarian. But no one was greedier than the geeky tech trillionaires up there on stages, endless stages, walking around like stand-up comedians with concealed microphones, introducing products to beaming crowds of devotees in San Jose, Palo Alto, and Redmond-or Cupertino, a name that said it all. How could it all be so f.u.c.king great? Weren't eight people killed every day texting while driving? Could he be the only one confused by how the crunchy, organic, artisan, environmentalist, pro-third-world, and anti-child-labor ethos found room to embrace the iPad with 4G? Starbucks sold coffee, for G.o.d's sake, and widow makers like apple fritters and iced cinnamon rolls. Software programs stole all the world's music. And the parents of every fourth grader did not know what to do in the face of their kid's desire to join Facebook. He longed for a day when Boeing meant jobs and it was weird for Seattle to even have a football team.

Mulligan took the iPad and his BlackBerry and went across the lawn, past the pool, to his home office in the guesthouse, where he turned on his desktop. It did not boot up correctly, which he theorized was related to Bella's going on illegal music sites. He had sixteen new e-mails on his BlackBerry but none on his iPad. Fourteen of the sixteen e-mails were from the bank's a.n.a.lyst in New York. Each had important attachments-complicated accounting spreadsheets on special proprietary enterprise software-that were impossible to view on the BlackBerry. That meant, with the iPad not updating due to the Wi-Fi connection issue and the desktop not working at all, Mulligan found himself with three devices turned on and no spreadsheets. He picked up the phone, which was cordless, to dial the bank's twenty-four-hour IT service. After three rings, a two-tone noise preceded a recording: To complete this call, you must first dial nine...Please hang up and dial again. He felt sweat over his brow. The voice was not telling him that what he had wrong was the usual unknowable difference between dialing one before the area code or not dialing one before the area code. No, he had forgotten to dial nine-nine!-before the number, something which struck him as insane, since it was a call from home, and, for the entirety of his professional life, dialing nine had been the exclusive province of the business phone, something you did from the office. Dialing nine was something that never-never-applied to the home phone. What meant anything if that was not the way it was anymore? The interlaced fingers met forehead once more.

He heard the doorbell-another interruption. It was Sondra, the housekeeper. She was more like an a.s.sistant housekeeper who worked on the weekends because Mariana was off. Sondra was illegal, but Mariana had convinced him to hire her on the altogether fair but altogether unspoken premise that Mariana was getting too old to clean the entire house every day. He was (truly) happy to do it, and it made each of the three women-Rita, Bella, and Mariana-happy, which made his life easier. Plus, Sondra was a devout, demure, diminutive, and decorous girl who was thrilled to get four hundred bucks a week, which he paid via personal check because he never had enough cash, even though it was certain to f.u.c.k him up one day taxwise. The moral, ethical, and legal ramifications of failing to withhold from someone who was illegal but had a Social Security number and a California driver's license was one of the few mental wormholes of his quotidian life Mulligan had left unexplored. He didn't know what she did about health insurance.

Sondra spoke no English, so he used what Spanish he had garnered from trips to Cabo San Lucas and UEFA Cup games on Univision. This meant he knew only the elementals-for example, that limpio meant clean.

"Oh, Sondra, por favor, necesito limpio," he said, making a wax-on motion with his hands. "Rita said for me to ask you if you could 'please limpio'?"

Sondra nodded vigorously and said, "S, disculpa, pero limpia que? Afuera?"

He realized she was asking him just exactly what she should clean. Giving in to his inability to communicate in words, Mulligan pointed to the pool chairs. She told him, also in gestures, that first she would walk Henry. He nodded. Before he turned away, she said, "Tambien, senor, necesito ir a comprar las cosas por casa," and pantomimed pushing a shopping cart. He remembered that Mariana had delegated the weekly grocery run to Sondra on top of the other grunt work. Mulligan momentarily marveled that he lived in a world where Sondra thought he might be concerned about her workflow plan. He thanked her in Spanish, she thanked him in English, and he beat a retreat back to the technological windmills of the guesthouse.

With all the confusion over attachments, he was late for lunch. The girls wanted him at Rosti on San Vicente at quarter past noon, and he was already more than fifteen minutes late. He closed his eyes in frustration. When would he break through his preoccupation with work? He'd been in New York for a week, hadn't spoken to his wife or daughter in three days, and was a no-show at yet another event that would never come again. It didn't matter that yesterday's party was billed as just another entirely missable school thing; it had turned out to yield a golden moment, a parent's keepsake to be clutched when looking back, when inevitably he would think, Man, did that go fast. It was a memory, like so many others, that he would now have to access through the prism of his wife. He looked for his BlackBerry. Not wanting to let the girls down again, he texted Rita: I'm coming. I will be there. Sorry.

Mulligan went to his closet and put on the jeans, the blue T, and sneakers. The brown shirt would have been the perfect thing. No response came from Rita, and he knew that meant she was angry, because she-like everyone everywhere-read all texts within five seconds of receipt. In moments like this, no answer from Rita was bad news, her way of leaving him alone to feel rotten about being absent. He raced to the other side of the house and jumped in the car, hitting the b.u.t.ton to open the closest of the doors on the four-door garage. His moves combined the precision that comes with having done something a thousand times with the kind of corner cutting you did only when you were in a rush, like not snapping in your seat belt, which he could get to once he backed out of the Kenter Canyon driveway. The car's roof narrowly pa.s.sed underneath the still-upward-moving garage door. He reached for his sungla.s.ses with his right hand and began rolling the wheel counterclockwise with his left.

Before he could get the gla.s.ses to his face, Mulligan heard a muscular and garbled noise, almost like the workings of a trash compactor. He slammed the brakes. The sound had been strange-like something being rolled, very low and dense. He sat silent, hoping the coast was clear. He hoped it might have come from across the street. Maybe the gardeners were mulching something. Or maybe he had run over a branch or Bella's skateboard or something. He shifted back into drive and started forward.

The same low noise shot out, this time punctuated by a higher-pitched yelp. He closed his eyes and lifted his hands off the steering wheel as though it were suddenly ten thousand degrees. He had run over something. It was bad-m.u.f.fled, crunching, and violent. He knew the sound of a body getting hit. He threw open the car door and dove to the ground. There was Henry, wedged under the rear axle, staring at him, a purplish mark on his brindled brow.

Heartbreak slammed into Mulligan's chest. He tried to be calm. "Hey, Henry. Hey, buddy," he said. "C'mon, big boy. Can you come here?" Henry moved his front legs and shoulders, trying to obey, but he got nowhere. Mulligan reached and burned his hand on the exhaust pipe, and when he pulled back in pain, he smashed it against the inside of the wheel housing. He shimmied as far as he could and stretched again but barely touched the hair of the dog's back. He spun over on his back, and tried to reach with his legs but got the same result. He went to the side to try to get at Henry from a different position, but he could only flex his toe thinly against the dog's big shoulders, a pitiful drip of pressure-no match for the crush of the axle.

Sondra was off to the market by now, which left him alone. He felt the sickening rise of panic. He played out the scenes to follow: Henry slowly dying, Sondra crying, Bella shrieking, Rita stunned, and Bella and Rita both staring at him in judgment, forgiving him slowly over years but never, ever, ever forgetting. He stood up and looked for anything-he thought about running next door to the Stanhope's house. He had to do something. He dropped down to the ground again. "Hey...Ok, buddy...Hi, boy...You're a good boy...a good king boy...Yeah, that's right. Relax, big boy..." With the next wave of desperation, the defensive back part of his brain took over. He put his shoulder under the b.u.mper and, with a furious groan, tried to lift the car up. It didn't work.

Mulligan came to a knee and tried to collect himself. He thought about hitting the car's OnStar Service b.u.t.ton but decided there would not be enough time for whomever they get to come to the rescue to get there. Henry's eyes had that dumb, lovable, low-brain-wave stare, although it was plainly fading. He was crying a little. Mulligan considered dialing 911, but that seemed like it would be even slower than OnStar. He jumped to his feet and started running down the driveway to look for help. A few steps later, it hit him: The jack! Of course! The f.u.c.king jack! Racing to the driver's-side window, he hit the trunk icon, sending the lid on its automated rise. He threw the golf clubs and the rest of the compartment's contents to the side, pulled out the carpeted trunk floor, and began uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the wing nut holding the jack in place. It came out in two pieces, and an instruction sheet was buried below. Mulligan stared at the directions for a few seconds, grasping what he could. He put the stand into the risers and placed the combined unit in front of the right rear tire.

It was then that he realized he was missing the small tool needed to ratchet the thing up. Where is the f.u.c.king crank? Under the car, Henry struggled and groaned and wore the same heartbreaking stare of confusion. Mulligan peered again at the image of a small elbow-like piece of iron. He tore through a brown paper bag full of hangers and old CDs. Not finding anything, he ripped out the spare tire, hoping the missing crank had fallen into the nether regions of the trunk. He went back to the littered driveway and dumped the contents of his golf bag. Out came his oversize driver, his irons, his putter, half a dozen t.i.tleist twos-which bounced down toward the mailbox-dried-up Cohibas, a cigar cutter, lighters, ball marks, and divot fixers.

He sat on the blacktop amid the array of s.h.i.t he carried around in his car every day. It was all his fault-twice over. Not only had he run the dog over, he also could not save him. This is it, Mulligan said to himself. This is where I come apart. This is the kind of thing that happens in real life. The bad thing. He tried to take it in, to taste it like the second week of prison food, like the flesh and the blood. Sometimes the bad thing happens. He felt the unwelcome guest of sense memory, a panicky flashback to when three kids from his high school were killed by a drunk driver-the petrified feeling that accompanies abrupt confrontation with a horrible accident. There is no safety net. Sometimes it is just all bad. He made a decision to settle into the pain and, in this purgatorial time between the lightning bolt and the crack, to sit and watch Henry die.

Then he had an idea. He ran into the garage and pushed a stepladder up against the large wall cabinets. At the top, he found what he was looking for: a red toolbox, barely touched since Christmas five years ago when Dennis had given it to him as a half joke. The elevated resting place showed how little Mulligan thought of it, and, pulling it down, he was reminded of how heavy it was. He managed himself off the ladder, ran out to the car, and threw the toolbox down-more anxious metal clangs pressed into the silence, more diaspora flowed to the ground. He looked for a set of Allen wrenches, the small tools used to drive hexagonal bolts and screws. He only knew such things existed from a distant but suddenly vivid memory from a high-school cla.s.s. Having seen that the jack required a hexagonal lever, he got the sense that a large Allen wrench might work on it, and this was what he visualized. He rifled through the toolbox, found the Allen wrenches b.u.t.toned up one by one in a clear plastic casing in escalating size, like fifes inside pencil packets. He removed the biggest wrench and dropped to the ground. He inserted the tool and turned it.