One benefit of an RV was that I was able to evade most news media just by driving to another neighborhood. The police, of course, could track me easily and impound my home, so I drove south, into Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood. The OPD and BPD tend to cooperate when their own asses are on the line — protests and riots — but when it’s just some missing kid, or another piece-of-shit mobile home parked under an overpass, Oakland will let Berkeley hang 100 percent of the time.
I moved my class to the little greenway behind the Claremont DMV and practiced alone for one morning and afternoon, squeezing out sweat and anxiety. Then I headed back to Berkeley. All of Telegraph Avenue was flyered, and the storefronts along College Avenue, which were usually far too tony to allow a mere missing child to interfere with trade, featured Pan’s face. It just made sense — an impressionable kid deciding to do what his neglectful mother wanted him to do, so long as it sounded like an adventure.
That night, the moon was new and I walked back into Berkeley, and saw dozens of small lights dotting the dark hills. Real flashlights, lanterns, and of course, given the town, endless numbers of lights from smartphones. They were looking for him, ten thousand twinkling fireflies. No, fireflies are a Long Island thing — there hasn’t been one in Berkeley for forty million years. They were all tiny stars.
Lindsey found me on the third day, and joined class in silence, as she had been trained to. But perhaps I wasn’t so good a yogi after all, because when we stood upon one leg in the third posture, the ibis, she started talking.
“Your forefinger is supposed to be on your lips,” I said. “To remind you.”
“I just feel so bad about your kid, up there, alone. Pan-pan-panna...” she said.
“Panagiotis,” I responded. “But people call him Pan for the obvious reason.”
“What does it mean?”
If I didn’t talk, she would think something was seriously wrong with me, and perhaps even go to the police. I kept my position, and spoke though my finger was pressed to my lips. “Panagiotis means all-sainted. Having to do with Mary, the Mother of God. And Pan, well Pan is the goat god. The lord of wild spaces, cliffs, and, you know, panic. The name suggests companionship.”
“Huh.” Lindsey wobbled on the one leg on which she was standing.
“Pan was the only god who died,” I told her.
Then she was quiet, as she was supposed to be.
“A sailor, passing the island of Paxoi, heard a voice calling out to him, that said, When you reach Palodes, take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead.”
She was silent still, and quivering.
“Palodes cannot be found on any map,” I continued. “Probably it has since been consumed by the sea. But the sailor arrived there, and the port city fell to grief. The old gods were dying, a new one was born. It was terrifying, worse than any panic the goat man had stirred up when he yet lived.” Another temblor passed under us, an aftershock from the quake of earlier in the week, but we stayed erect, one foot up, for a long time, and our muscles burned. Without her even knowing it, Lindsey got what she wanted — an example of real magic.
Finally, I had earned Riley’s attention. Sending Pan to search the hills alone, and having him “get lost,” did it. A black Mercedes had parked itself behind my RV, and I do mean parked itself, as it was a self-driving car, with the legally mandated warning stripes and signage across the doors and bumpers. The doors were unlocked, so I slipped inside and waited. I hadn’t really driven more than a few blocks since Long Island. Prison, a few weeks begging for couch space, then a couple years in Greece, then California, staying on the couches or in the beds of comrades with a squalling infant. The windows were tinted, the trip fairly long, and the radio disabled, but the car still the nicest thing I’d been in for a very long time.
We stopped at what I guessed was either a quickly purchased or a quickly built home — it was all windows, and jutted out of the side of the hill on stilts — north of Berkeley, near Tilden Park. The car must have made some lazy spiral through town, or had sketched a magic circle with its route, or perhaps Riley’s techno-familiars weren’t as good as all that after all. He was waiting for me at the end of a long driveway, and greeted me with a smile and a wave, as if I had his dinner order in my lap.
Riley didn’t say hello to me, but instead shared one of his bromides: “There are no political solutions, only technological ones. All the rest is propaganda.”
“Solutions to what?” I asked.
“Come inside,” he said.
Riley was an old man now. I guess my father would have been nearly eighty as well. Riley had managed to stay slim, and held himself with the casually erect posture of a tai chi master. His right arm, which had been struck by a car right after my last conversation with him in 1989, was still withered and bent. Despite the weather, he wore a turtleneck. I’d marked his neck during that same conversation, with a punch from my trusty punk rock — girl spiked ring. In the popular imagination, Riley’s interest in voice-commanded objects and household artificial intelligence had stemmed from his disability, but I knew that wasn’t the case.
In the kitchen, the refrigerator crushed some fruit and poured a pair of drinks, but we had to fetch the glasses ourselves and bring them to the table.
“I found your son,” he said.
“What’s your big project?” I asked.
“Don’t you care about your son?”
“Of course I do.”
“Don’t you care whether he’s alive?” Riley said. It wasn’t really a question. “Did prison harden you, or were you always truly the psychopath that hack author of Love Is the Law made you out to be?”
“Pan’s alive,” I said. “I would know if he wasn’t. Did he find you?”
“Yes...” Riley’s lips tried to twist into a snicker, but he straightened them. “He found the project anyway, and the crew.”
“He’s a good boy,” I said. “He knows every inch of those hiking trails, and isn’t afraid to leave them. He’s half mountain goat, I swear. What are you doing up there?”
“It’s a solution to the Bay Area’s housing crisis,” Riley answered.
I laughed. “What, an earthquake machine atop the Hayward Fault or something? The first house that would collapse would be this one!” I stomped on the floor for emphasis. The place really had been slapped together out of ticky-tacky, like the old song says.
Riley just peered at me. His eyes were... friendly. “Your son is alive, but he’s not well.”
“You hurt him.” That wasn’t a question.
“I wasn’t even there,” Riley said. “He got injured. My contractors found him. He had a certain book with him, and the on-site medic got his blood type, so I got a call. I’m a libertarian. I don’t believe in aggression. No force, no fraud. I would never personally hurt a child.”
“You’re building an earthquake machine, so spare me the rhetoric about who you’d hurt,” I said. “Where is Pan?”
“It’s not an earthquake machine.” Riley’s voice was tinted with sudden impatience. “It’s an earthquake futures machine.”
“You’re going to predict earthquakes, months in advance.”
“In order to make strategic real estate purchases, and investments in publicly held insurance companies, yes,” Riley said. “Once we solve this problem, we can broadcast the real risks of continuing to live in the Bay Area, and that should bring down prices, except for black-swan events — quakes eight and over, which of course will reduce supply and thus raise the prices. But now we’ll be able to predict such events far in advance. Real estate can be a hedge, not a speculative investment.”