How you feeling this morning, Luke?
I’m okay. Ready.
When we last spoke we ended with your discovery of Nick’s father’s shop.
That was the summer after I graduated from high school. I was supposed to go to college in the fall but decided against it. I was still living in the VW van in the muddy yard outside Star and Nick’s shack. I used a little camp stove to make oatmeal and boil water for ramen. After I discovered the contents of the shed, I spent hours in there looking over the blueprints Nick’s dad left behind. And I decided to start cleaning the place up. I took the seats out of the van and made trips to the dump, hauling away all the garbage that had accumulated around the property. I cleared brush, swept out the shed, and cleaned the tools. With some of my life insurance money I bought a few tons of gravel and had it poured down the driveway and on the muddy ground outside the house. It became a full-time job, maintaining that place.
What was Nick doing when you—
He decided to call Dirk Bickle. He’d saved the card from the science fair. Since they didn’t have a phone, Nick walked to a gas station one day and called the guy on a pay phone. Apparently Bickle told him a car would show up for him the following week and they’d put him on a plane to the Bay Area. He’d live on a campus, get all meals and expenses paid, and pull in a salary of $30,000 a year. This blew our minds. It was a lot of money at the time. All Nick had to do was come up with new inventions.
What was the organization called?
We didn’t know at that point. They said Nick had to commit before they really told him anything of substance. That afternoon after the call Nick walked up the driveway in a daze. I was chopping wood and I stopped and asked what had happened. He told me about the conversation and looked at me sort of embarrassed. Of course I was happy for him, we celebrated with a bottle of wine, but part of me couldn’t help noting how much our fortunes had reversed. Just a few months before I had been the kid bound for college and success and he’d been the one with no future. Nick made up his mind, he had to see where these shadows and secrets led. And I think, too—this is just my theory—that he looked at what his old man had been trying to accomplish—some kind of crazy speculative civil-engineering project—and realized that his dad had never had the chance to develop it to the fullest. Now Nick could pick up where he had left off. What were Nick’s prospects? He could have stuck around Bainbridge and worked at McDonald’s. He could have moved to Seattle and become a street punk. He hadn’t even bothered applying to colleges. He left himself with the options of a life of poverty or plunging into something cool and mysterious. Who wouldn’t have made the same decision?
So a week passed and sure enough here came a taxi, rolling up to that little shack. Bickle climbed out, walked across the yard, knocked on the door. Star asked that she speak to him and Nick together, alone, so I went out to my van and probably buried my nose in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. About an hour and a half later, they came out. Star had been crying. Nick carried a duffel bag, that was it. I hugged him for a long time. He pulled me in tight and said I was a brother to him. Then he got in the cab and left.
Star didn’t cope well with Nick leaving?
Not at all. She was a serious mess. I had to convince her to eat. I kept telling her Nick would visit soon, that he was going to become really successful, etc. Nothing consoled her. I spent the next couple weeks getting the place in order. I mowed, weeded the garden, rented a high-pressure sprayer and blasted the moss off the exterior of the shack, then repainted it. Mostly, though, I spent time on the beach where my house used to be. Sometimes I found things that had belonged to us, burped up from Puget Sound. One of my mom’s shoes washed up with the tide, a spatula, the kind of guitar pick my dad used. This slow distribution of broken objects teased me in little bursts almost too painful to bear. I found a Strawberry Shortcake doll with my sister’s initials on it, wedged between two pieces of driftwood. Shards of a bowl I remembered from our kitchen. I went there every day sifting through whatever the tide brought, collecting what used to belong to my family in plastic milk crates I stole from behind Safeway. Worse, on the spot where my house once stood a new house was rising. I’d gotten the proceeds from the sale of the land, sure, but the sudden appearance of new construction offended me. Within a few months the place was finished and a new family with three kids moved in. Around that time the tides stopped bringing tokens of my family’s existence. Winter was on its way.
We received letters from Nick every couple weeks. He wrote to us about all the things he was learning—chemistry, physics, heady theoretical stuff. We thought he sounded upbeat. He was surrounded by freakishly gifted people like himself for the first time in his life. One time he sent a picture of himself with some new friends at the Grand Canyon. Three geeks wearing glasses and Nick looking all goth with his jet-black hair in his face, but smiling. I missed him.
So when did—
I know what you’re going to ask. Coming here this morning I knew we’d be talking about it. Here’s what happened. I had managed to clean the place up pretty well and this made Star happier. She joined a dance group for hippie women in town, started studying reflexology. And for the first time she talked to me about her husband, Marc, and about the construction accident that killed him, how she had discovered him with his head bent back at an impossible angle. On her birthday I surprised her with a cake and bought her a new dress. We were sitting in the shack, eating the cake, laughing about something, I don’t know what, and I convinced her she should try the dress on. A few minutes later she came out of the bedroom wearing it. I told her she looked beautiful. It just came out, I wasn’t even thinking. We stood there and felt this heavy, horny moment and both of us seemed to get the same thought at the same time: Why not? Then we were kissing. My mouth behind her ear. I lifted her up, carried her into the bedroom. I’d never touched skin this old with lust before and the strangeness and beauty of it pulled me inward, into this sexual place I’d been unaware of. All the girls I’d slept with up to that point, all those fucks were about surface sensation. This was a longing that passed through me like twine through a bead, tethered to some distant point in my past. I sucked her long nipples thinking, Nick fed from these and almost came. She smelled ripe, sweaty. She had hair under her arms and unshaved legs. I knew I could have as much of her as I wanted, that I’d be able to live here with her and fuck and fuck and fuck. She lay naked on the bed and opened her legs. Her labia were larger than any I had ever seen, like something you’d find at a butcher shop. She spread them against her thighs like she was opening the covers of a book. I was in her, no protection, straining against a river of images in my head: the mud slide, blueprints, objects washing up on the shore. When she came the first time she asked me to call her mommy. Everything about this was so wrong, it was precisely the worst thing to say but it was like she dragged a heavy, rusted chain out of my entangled guts. Grief so unbearable I thought I was being electrocuted. I unloaded in her, six or seven shotgun blasts of come.
How old was Star?
She would have been thirty-seven. Thirty-eight maybe.
So this became a regular thing.
Constantly. Sometimes four, five times a day. We did it in the woods a lot. On the roof of my van. In the shed with the blueprints. We lived in our own little erotic bubble. She turned me on to psilocybin mushrooms and we spent days tripping, naked, running around the property. I had unlimited money in the bank and all we really spent it on was groceries. Our own personal rabbit hole.
Did you ever talk about what Nick would think if he found out?
Yeah, but we were so naive about it. At least I was. We thought Nick would come home for Thanksgiving dinner and we’d inform him we’d become lovers. And that’s basically how it went. I picked him up from SeaTac and it was as if we’d both expanded these weird corners of our personalities. He struck me as preppy, an Izod-shirt-wearing nerd with his hair cut short. No more Butthole Surfers concert Ts for him. And since he’d left I’d grown a big, gnarly beard. I was probably wearing Birkenstocks and Guatemalan-print shorts. When we saw each other at the gate, we both burst out laughing. On the way home he just blabbed about how cool the academy was, how he was learning about chaos theory and neural networks. I could tell he wanted to impress me. I kept having this uncomfortable thought that my parents would have been more proud of what Nick was doing than what I was doing. But I was cool with everything, asked a lot of questions, said “wow” a lot.
We’d had this plan, Star and I, to reveal our love to Nick during our Thanksgiving feast. Nick showed up the day before, so we had a whole day where we were going to supposedly keep it cool. So Nick comes home and his mom is crying, she’s so happy to see him, and he gives her some chocolates he got in San Francisco, and we’re all laughing and having a good time. Remember, the shack was small, one bedroom, and Nick had grown up sleeping on a futon they’d dragged out from behind the couch every night. So there’s this awkward moment where Nick is standing with his luggage, looking around, trying to figure out where to put it, and Star blurts out, “You can sleep in our bed.”
At first this sort of sails right over Nick’s head and he says, no, no, the living room’s cool, but his mom is grabbing his luggage and putting it in the bedroom. Since the place is so small, you can pretty much stand in the living room and see the entire bedroom. Nick is looking into the bedroom and he gets this weird expression. Meanwhile, I’m trying to get him to retell some story he told me on the way over. When I notice his face I follow his gaze and see that there’s a pair of my underwear sitting on Star’s bed. They’re obviously my tighty-whiteys. Plus, uh, there’s a big bottle of olive oil on the bedside table. And okay, this is ridiculous, I know, but a copy of the Kama Sutra. We’re all quiet a second—Nick, his mom, me, underpants, lubricant, Indian sex manual. Then Nick looks at me and says, “What the fuck is going on here?”
So Star, true to her flower-child roots, says something like, “We were going to tell you tomorrow during our feast—Luke and I have become lovers.” And she goes on and on about how the age of a soul is different than the age of a body, like how our souls would be in the same grade if they went to school together, and Nick is standing there, looking aghast at my stained underwear, then at me, and he yells pretty much the only thing a guy in his position is capable of yelling at such a moment. “You’re fucking my mom?”
Then it’s my turn to get into the lovey-dovey-peace-brother talk and Nick isn’t having any of it. There really isn’t room to pace, so he sort of bounces between two walls. He keeps saying, “Dude! You’re fucking my mom!” It doesn’t help matters when Star says, “Please, Nick, call it lovemaking.”
After that we went out to dinner. None of us spoke on the way to the restaurant. Mexican food. I tried to keep the conversation on Nick and what he was doing in his teenage think tank. He kept his answers short. Clearly he didn’t know how to handle this development. Then he said it again, this time not so angry, just bewildered, “Dude, you’re fucking my mom?”
You have to understand something about islands. The social psychology is different. And on Bainbridge there was this whole cadre of moms who were constantly up in everyone’s business, formulating opinions about you all the time. So I can’t overstate how devastating it was for Nick to say this in a busy, public place. You could almost visualize the whispered lines of communication flowing from table to table. And Nick wouldn’t fucking shut up. He just kept saying it, emphasizing different words. “You are fucking my mom?” or “You are fucking my mom?” Imagine what it’s like to be in the middle of a room of people pretending not to stare at you in silent, shocked judgment. And remember what I looked like and where I’d come from. Only a few months prior I’d been college-bound, lusted after by the female half of my class. An impeccable academic record and a solid reputation on the playing field. Now I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant wearing hippie clothes that hadn’t been laundered in a month, attempting to grow dreadlocks, sporting a Jesus beard, having my sexual relationship with the town’s potentially mentally disturbed woman made very public. Within a week this cadre of in-everyone’s-business moms had formed a narrative about what was going on between Star and me. It went like this: Luke Piper lost his family in a tragic accident and the unstable mother of his best friend took advantage of his grief by entering into a borderline-statutory-rape-type situation that wouldn’t have been so borderline if he hadn’t just turned eighteen. How sick was it that this unhinged woman was probably giving herpes to this poor, grieving boy who used to be Ivy League material? Keep in mind that these were the same women having affairs with members of the local clergy. The same ones who were drinking at 10 a.m. and downing pills but who had nonetheless been granted the supernatural ability to determine how other people should raise their children and live their lives.
Did anyone in the community confront you directly?
Of course not. Are you kidding? Someone wrote CRADDLE ROBBER on Star’s mailbox. Classic Bainbridge passive-aggressive bullshit. They communicated their disgust through glares in the supermarket checkout line. It was a pretty miserable Thanksgiving. It rained real bad and the shack’s roof got a nasty leak. It was the first Thanksgiving I hadn’t spent with my family and you could have dropped me into an abandoned mine shaft and I would have felt about the same. Not to mention Star and I momentarily nixed the fucking. Nick and I barely spoke. Miserable.
I want to change the subject a minute and talk about this academy that Nick went to.
Sure. Turns out it did have a name—the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential. Founded in the eighties in Silicon Valley with the first wave of software wealth. Supposedly headquartered in San Jose, more like an estate than a campus. Nick showed me a brochure. The place looked nice. They had about a dozen buildings, play fields, woods, a small organic farm. Only about a hundred students in attendance at a time, every one of them courted heavily by the Fortune 500 upon graduation. The place was supposedly an incubator for ideas and innovations that entered mainstream culture ten, twenty years later.
I was jealous. Doesn’t every high school nerd wish that someone will discover his hidden genius? Nick was especially susceptible to this kind of thinking. But the more I thought about the academy the more it seemed like bullshit. So Nick builds some kind of contraption for a science fair and some guy in a business suit sees it and gives him a business card? That’s all it takes? The place sounded too good to be true.