[unintelligible] I mean, it’s flattering to imagine that you’re so important that secret brotherhoods struggle over your fate. But what if it’s just the opposite? What if we’re too insignificant for anyone to really give a shit about what happens to us? The only way you become of interest to shady cabals is if you have some piece of incriminating information or you can make someone fabulously wealthy.
Anyway, so after Nick returned to San Jose I kept running it through my head. It didn’t add up. I knew Nick was a genius, but come on. He got whisked away to some superexclusive club on the basis of a lousy science fair project? Had these guys been watching him secretly for years? What did they know about the shed full of schematic drawings of New York City? I’d grown up with a couple skeptical academic parents who’d installed a pretty resilient bullshit detector in my head. There were gaps in Nick’s story. If I hadn’t been so knocked back on my heels by his reaction to my sleeping with his mom, I might have noticed that his stories about the academy were thin. They had an almost rehearsed quality. He avoided direct questions about the academy, his professors, who this Kirkpatrick guy was. When he left after Thanksgiving break I rolled everything around in my head and found that my curiosity was pushing me toward making a set of decisions. I had to find out what was going on at the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential. Then Nick wrote us that he wasn’t going to make it back for Christmas. He had things he needed to “sort out.” He was “really busy.” I decided to head down to San Jose and surprise him.
Did Star want to go?
She did, but she was trapped. She hadn’t stepped off the island in fifteen years. Not even a ferry ride to Seattle. Severe agoraphobia. The week before Christmas I gassed up the van, rotated the tires, kissed Star good-bye, and hit the road. By this time I looked like a dope-smoking hippie. I had beads in my beard and dreadlocks, wasn’t wearing shoes most of the time. As I drove to California I reflected a lot on what had happened in the past year, and it struck me for the first time that maybe sleeping with Star hadn’t been such a good idea. I thought, Oh, my God, I’m fucking his mom.
[Interviewer laughs]
I don’t know what kind of investigative plan I had in mind. I thought I could just show up in San Jose and drop in on him. Surprise! I had no idea. I didn’t even have an address.
How did you find the place?
Well, I rolled into San Jose in the afternoon and just sort of drove around, ending up at this tourist attraction, the Winchester Mystery House. I used a pay phone outside the gift shop and called information. Of course, there was no listing for the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential. It was getting late and I found a public library that was just closing. I parked in front, slept in the van that night, then went in the next day when they opened. I asked a librarian about the academy. She hadn’t heard of it. Remember, this was still a few years before the Web. We depended on librarians and reference books. I spent the better part of that day scouring resources, calling all the Kirkpatricks in the San Jose phone book. Nothing. I’d thought it wouldn’t be hard to find the place. I’d spent the whole drive south imagining my conversation with Nick when I showed up. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t find the place. Then I thought that maybe people in academia would have a better idea where the academy might be so I went to San Jose State and checked the library there. Nothing. I spent a couple hours walking around campus randomly asking people. Nothing. No one had heard of it. The only way I could contact Star would be through the mail, so I couldn’t really ask her for help. We’d sent Nick letters, I remembered, to a post office box here. I momentarily thought the post office would be the place to get this sorted out but they hadn’t heard of it either. I wondered if I was in the wrong San Jose. I had no idea what I was doing. I slept in the van for the better part of a week. Drove around reading the directories of office parks. I had an old letter Nick had sent with a San Jose postmark and no return address. That was really the only indication that he’d been here, besides the fact that he had told me this was where the academy was located. I even went to the police and the fire department, but they were of no help. They said the place didn’t exist.
Then I’m lying there one night in the back of the van, probably reading Carlos Castaneda or Herman Hesse by flashlight, when I spotted that brochure under the passenger seat. The one Nick has showed me. Of course! I had totally forgotten! The next day I took the brochure back to the library and showed the librarian. He didn’t recognize the Spanish-style building or the horse pasture in the pictures. Or the smiling kids hunched over their books. I showed it around at the college, no luck. Same for the police station. I hit every bookstore in town and no one recognized it. It seemed I’d exhausted every possible avenue. I thought about heading home. I felt terribly alone. At one point I parked in the middle of some mall’s parking lot after midnight and cried. I looked at the brochure for the hundredth time and noticed the name of the print company in tiny type on the back. It was some place called Vision Reprographics in San Francisco. That was my only lead. So the next morning I headed out.
The company wasn’t hard to find. They occupied a big industrial building in the Mission District. I showed up with the brochure and asked the woman at the front counter if she knew anything about it. They appeared to print lots of stuff—booklets, concert posters, ad circulars—so I wasn’t surprised when she said she didn’t know. Was there someone who would know? She introduced me to a young guy named Wyatt Gross. What shocked me about him was that he looked how I would have looked had I shaved and cut my hair. He seemed to be about my age, my height and build, wearing a tight pair of jeans with a flannel shirt tucked in. Hair combed and parted on one side, leather shoes. I imagined for a second that he really was me, living in a reality in which my parents hadn’t died. He introduced himself as a project manager, shook my hand, and asked me what he could do to help.
I showed Wyatt the brochure. He studied it intently, turning it over, thumbing the edges. They’d definitely printed it, he told me, but he didn’t remember the job. Maybe there were records he could look up to find out who placed the order? Sure, they could do that, but they printed so much stuff and that could take weeks, plus they didn’t just give out client information. I was trying to be polite but I was visibly frustrated. He had no reason to be helpful to me. I was just some dirty freak who looked like he’d stumbled out of an R. Crumb comic. Finally I threw up my hands, thanked him for his time, and left. Outside I sat in the van pondering my next move. I had no next move. I looked at the building and wondered if I could break in when they closed. Then a side door opened and Wyatt came out, waved at me, and jogged across the street to where I was parked. He gestured for me to unlock the passenger door and got in.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t know who you are. And I shouldn’t be talking to you. But I want to help. The only way you’re going to get the information you need is to show up tomorrow at eleven and ask to speak to Mr. Nixon. He’s a warehouse manager who happens to need an extra hand. You look like you can move boxes, right? Tell him you saw the ad in the Chronicle and are interested in the job. You’ll be doing yourself a favor if you take a shower. It pays shit, but don’t complain. And don’t mention you met me or that we had this conversation. By the way, are you local?”
I told him I’d just gotten here a couple hours before. He shook his head. That wouldn’t do. I’d need an address. He told me there were cheap places available in the Tenderloin. I thanked him and he left without another word. That afternoon I rented a room in a purgatorial apartment building, a bathroom-down-the-hall kind of dump. Old alcoholics, prostitutes, everyone a few dollars away from homelessness. I thought it was super, just the kind of texture I needed in my life. The next day I showed up at Vision Reprographics and got the job. The other guys in the warehouse didn’t give me a second look. They’d seen so many temporary-type employees come through here and they just figured I’d be gone in a few weeks. Moving boxes of paper around all day. I kept my head down for a month, worked hard, didn’t ask too many questions, and figured out the organizational structure of the place.
A month?
Yeah. As soon as I knew I’d be in San Francisco a while I sent a letter to Star telling her not to worry, I was just doing some work and would return soon. Told her I loved her and all that. But I felt sick writing it. Part of me knew we’d never be lovers again but I wasn’t really admitting it to myself at that point.
What about Wyatt—did you find out why he wanted to help you?
I found out later, but then, per our arrangement, I kept my distance. He worked in a different part of the building, we ate lunch at different times, we left each other alone. I figured out that every print job got its own file, with the invoice, payment record, and a proof of the finished work. These documents were kept in the basement in banker’s boxes. The only reason anyone had to go down there was to add another box to the pile. The only organizational rubric they had was by date. I had no way of knowing when the brochure had been printed. It could have been done years before Nick showed it to me. While I was pushing around the hand truck upstairs, the record I needed was just sitting in one of those boxes. I had to figure out not only an excuse for getting down there, but a method for finding one stupid file in thousands of boxes. Every night I went back to my shitty apartment, tried to tune out the guy loudly vomiting next door, and devised a way to deal with these vast, poorly organized archives. I could be down there for years, I realized. That is, if I was able to gain access and not raise anyone’s suspicion in the first place. I considered just getting in the van and heading back to Bainbridge. But at the same time, I had settled into a work routine. The money wasn’t great but at least I didn’t have to dip into the inheritance anymore. Then one night when I was clocking out Wyatt clapped me on the back. “Luke Piper,” he said, like we were old buds. “You got plans for the weekend?” When it became clear a guy like me would have no plans, he invited me to dinner at his and his girlfriend’s place.
They lived in a nicer part of town. Nicer in relation to my hellhole, anyway. When I knocked on the door I could hear them on the other side. His girlfriend said, “He’s here?” In that moment her voice seemed to suggest a history of secret conversations. Her name was Erika Vaux and she was a struggling writer, writing science fiction novels under the name Blanche Ravenwood. Tall woman, bony thin, wearing all black with dangly earrings, one of those jet-black pageboy hairdos. The two of them didn’t look like a couple. For one, Erika was several years older than Wyatt. (And who was I to talk?) They were one of those couples where the woman is strikingly less attractive than the man, leading you to imagine that their sex life must be really exotic and fulfilling. She was a woman whose awkward looks are thrown off by an absolutely killer body. You look at that kind of woman and imagine she suffered horribly in middle school, then experienced an epic period of carnal revenge in college. They uncorked some red wine and I almost started crying at how cool it was to sit on a couch and have a conversation with people who were so smart and friendly. Their most benign creature comforts seemed to me extravagant luxuries. Like their full-sized refrigerator. I realized I’d been locked away in my loneliness, enduring brainless work and living in a place where I had to occasionally step over hypodermic syringes. This felt like civilization.
What did you guys talk about?
That first night we just sort of got down our biographical basics. I told them the whole sad story about the mud slide, told them I’d been living with my friend’s mom, but initially I left out the sex part. Wyatt gave me a lecture on vitamins. He was one of those guys who talked openly about his colonic flora and based his diet on his blood type. Turns out he had ambitions beyond printing menus and brochures. He was taking classes to become a naturopath, though he was quick to say he wasn’t really interested in becoming a practitioner. He was more interested in comparing different medical traditions like homeopathy, Ayurvedic medicine, Chinese medicine. Erika, she’d grown up in Bellingham. In our first conversation it came out that she’d experienced extraterrestrial visitations as a kid. The first one was in a field behind her house. She was nine or ten years old. A cluster of green lights hovered above the field beyond her open window. After a few seconds staring at it, the lights seemed to realize they were being watched and whooshed away. She revealed this about halfway through my first glass of wine. I’d never met this woman before and she was saying, Hey, have some crackers and Gorgonzola, I was anally probed by an extraterrestrial. Why she was with a guy as seemingly square as Wyatt I couldn’t really fathom. And to say that a guy who tried to convince me to give the Paleolithic diet a shot was square really tells you what kind of person I was in those days. I drank another glass of wine. Wyatt put on a Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy album. I was feeling good, laughing for the first time in what felt like years. This couple’s kindness sort of enveloped me. Their sympathy about my family situation struck me as genuine. I think we ate a Middle Eastern meal—falafel, hummus, baba ghanoush. I was so grateful for their hospitality. They uncorked another bottle of wine, slipped a Consolidated CD into the player. I perused the half dozen paperbacks Erika had written, asked questions about her writing career. There came a lull in the conversation and Wyatt and Erika looked at each other, then nodded. I was pretty drunk at this point and wasn’t going to be getting up from the couch anytime soon. Wyatt disappeared into the bedroom and came out a few seconds later with a small oil painting, holding the painted side against his body.
“Okay, Luke,” he said, “I thought you should see this.”
He turned the painting around. It was an exact oil depiction of the picture of the Kirkpatrick Academy from the brochure.
What, he’d painted it?
No. The day I stopped by and showed him the brochure, he’d recognized the image but couldn’t remember where he’d seen it before. While I’d been moving boxes around for a month he’d been racking his brain trying to figure it out. Then one day he was visiting a coffee shop he hadn’t been to in a while and there it was, hanging on the wall in the men’s room. He’d looked at this boring painting dozens of times while peeing. The painting clearly wasn’t for sale, so impulsively he stole it, sneaking out the back into the alley. When he got it home and explained the whole thing to Erika he realized he’d made a big mistake. Now he couldn’t ask the owner of the café where it had come from. The only clue we had was the signature, which just said “Squid.”
Squid?
As in tentacles, yeah. This would be easy, I told them, all we had to do was call all the art galleries in town and ask if they knew any artists named Squid. Wyatt and Erika shook their heads. They’d already done that. No one had heard of this Squid person. There was no way around it. We had to find the record of that brochure. I told them I doubted the academy even existed but this only stoked our desire to find out why they’d gone through the trouble of printing a fake brochure. By the end of the evening our two systems of curiosity had begun to merge. I finally had some help, some people I could trust. We laid out all the knowns. We had to find Dirk Bickle, locate the record of the brochure, and track down Squid. Erika suggested we use the Internet. “The what?” I remember saying. We had to ask the café owner what she knew about the painting. I came up with the idea of bringing the painting back to the café and turning it in. I’d make up a story, tell them I’d seen it next to a Dumpster and remembered that it belonged to the café. I also needed to get in touch with Star again to see if Nick had written. I wrote to her and set up a time for her to call me from the Bainbridge Thriftway pay phone. During the day I’d go to work as usual, load and unload trucks, pile pallets of paper with the forklift. Wyatt and I kept our distance at the warehouse but every night I’d be at his place for dinner and we’d hash out the case.
You referred to it as a “case”?
[chuckles] Yeah, like a couple of kid detectives. The first thing I did was attempt to get in touch with the café. Wyatt gave me the address and I showed up one afternoon with the painting under my arm, only to find the place being remodeled. The café had gone out of business and was being converted into an Irish pub called McGillicutty’s or Shamrock O’Flannigan’s or something. The workers referred me to the foreman, who referred me to the owner of the pub, a jittery little guy smoking two cigarettes at once who thought I was looking for a job. I don’t think I explained myself too well. I must have made a bad impression, pointing emphatically at a painting of a building and talking about squids and human potential. Finally, just to get rid of me, he gave me the name of the former café owner, Shelley Wiggins. I found the nearest phone book and tracked her down. I called, but no answer, so I drove to the address, arriving just in time to see an ambulance out front, with—I shit you not—a couple paramedics coming down the steps carrying a sheet-covered body on a stretcher.
Shelley Wiggins?
Yep. She lived by herself in one of those thin little San Francisco town houses. They found her dangling from a rafter by an extension cord. I figured out where the funeral service was going to be, thinking café employees would show up who I might ask about the painting. When I got to the cemetery, no one was there, and after asking around at the main office I found I’d gotten the day wrong. It had been the day before.
Meanwhile, Erika was unable to track down any Dirk Bickles on the Internet. Actually, she did find one, but he was a ten-year-old kid living in East Bay. Wyatt, meanwhile, was starting to comb through the Vision Reprographics archives. He had more legitimate reasons for being down there than I did, and kept inventing excuses. He started flipping through ten years of boxes, one box at a time. A week went by. No luck.
After some missed connections I got the call from Star and we had a chilly conversation. She was clearly upset I’d been gone so long, didn’t understand why I needed to be down there. Besides—and she just sort of dropped this one near the end of the conversation—Nick was home now. In fact, he was standing beside her. He got on the phone and said, “What’s up, Luke?” I must’ve stammered for a while. He said, “Why do you keep looking for me, Luke? What are you hoping to find, Luke?” He kept saying my name, which really creeped me out. I had no good answer. Why did I want to find him? He said, “Your search really isn’t about me. It’s about getting off on the unknown. You want to be part of something. You suspect there’s some big secret you’re not in on and it kills you. You’re not part of anything. You’re not one of the selected. You’re just some crazy dirt-head being an idiot in the Bay Area. You have no idea how much of an ass you’re making of yourself. You have no idea how many people are watching you, laughing their heads off. Quit being stupid, Luke. Apply to college and get a good job. Get married and have kids. Die surrounded by loved ones. That’s your fate.”
“What are they doing to you, Nick?” I asked him.
“There is no ‘they,’” he said. “There is only ‘we.’ What we are doing is bigger and more important than anything you will ever get involved in. I don’t mean to taunt you. There’s still time for you to go off and have a successful life.”
“You’re not being yourself,” I told him.
“I’m more myself than I’ve ever been,” he said. “I am so thoroughly myself it isn’t even funny.”
“Who’s Squid?” I asked.
“How do you know about Squid?” There was a little edge of panic in his voice.
I told him we were going to find him.
He laughed and said, “And then what, man?”
I told him I didn’t know yet, but I could tell whatever he was doing was dangerous. The conversation went in circles like this for a while, like some junior-high-level film noir project. Through it all I had this suspicion that he was right. I was never going to be in on what he was doing. And you know what? Part of me really didn’t care anymore. Almost accidentally I had started to build a life for myself in San Francisco. I had a job, I had friends. The place I lived in wasn’t much to speak of, but I knew I could go in on a house with some roommates if I wanted to. The thought of going back to Bainbridge made me sick to my stomach. So I said good-bye to Nick, seemingly for good. I looked around my studio apartment with the bare mattress on the floor with no fitted sheet, my dirty clothes piled in a corner, paperbacks everywhere, and saw that I had been presented with a choice. The first thing I did was visit the nearest drugstore and buy a hair clipper. Back at my place I shaved off the beard and clipped my hair down to about a half-inch fuzz. If I was really going to find out what Nick and Bickle and Kirkpatrick were doing, I needed to change my whole life. I needed discipline, routine, and patience. Most of all, I needed lots of money. Lucky for me, I was living in San Francisco and it was the middle of the 1990s.