Nice to meet you, Abby. My name is Dirk Bickle and have I got an opportunity for you. To Victoria! Posthaste! To recover a bunch of archives and jazz like that!
Dirk hustled Abby onto a cardboard boat that glided along behind rolling, saw-toothed stage waves. A couple of anthropomorphized clouds with Dizzy Gillespie cheeks descended from the rafters while offstage a Foley artist faked the sounds of waves, wind, and thunder with sheets of metal and hand-cranked barrels of rice.
ABBY
Wait! What am I actually supposed to do?
The boat came to rest, stage right, in front of the art director’s baroque vision of the Seaside Love Palace. Abby belted a couplet.
The front doors popped open and out pranced two younger Federicos playing the older Federicos who’d greeted Abby upon her arrival a few days prior. They hurriedly dressed the stage Abby in the bunny outfit as stage elements rolled into new configurations, forming a mirror-image version of the auditorium they now occupied. Her back to the real audience, the Abby onstage addressed a painted backdrop of faces as a staticky, poorly recorded laugh track guffawed.
You’ve got me mistaken for someone else! I’m here to see the archives!
After which she collapsed, was dragged stage left by a Federico, and dumped on a bed on rollers. Ominous music! From the rafters, on wires, descended a Federico made up corpse-like, costumed in billowing white organza.
Hey, baby. Show me a little skin.
Stage Abby woke with a start.
Who are you? What is this place?
I’ll tell you all the secrets of the Seaside Love Palace if you flash me a nip.
There followed an industrial-metal number in which the ghost of Isaac Pope, joined by the ghosts of other dot-com CEOs, sang about rounds of financing, server farms, and the importance of accepting cookies and clearing one’s cache when encountering a technical problem. Then, with barely a transition, stage Abby sang a duet with a Federico costumed as Kylee, to the great amusement of the audience. There was a death scene with the suicidal Federico, who took his life via this house’s preferred method of Red Bull/Mountain Dew OD. There were several Kylee costume changes. It seemed to the spectator Abby, shocked at watching events of her own recent experiences poorly dramatized, that the dramaturge had run out of time and lost control of the mise-en-scène, resorting to cramming scenes together with little transitional tissue. Unpracticed players blew lines and missed cues. The orgy sequence erupted in a chaotic whirl of puppetry and full-body nude-colored suits. There was the arrival of the baby Federico—all of it hurried, half-assed, blurry with a score that couldn’t figure out what time signature it wanted to be in. Then came the scene that had happened little more than an hour before, with a Federico playing the wheelchair-confined archive whispering the transcript into a microphone. Federico-as-Kylee appeared and summoned her to the theater. A chaotic reshuffling of scenery later, Abby now watched her avatar watching a puppet version of the performance she had just seen. The same meeting with Bickle, the boat ride, the dressing up as a bunny, ghostly visitations, dance numbers, etc., except at half the previous scale. In this iteration even more lines were blown, even more cues missed, even more dramatic corners cut, the action sped up to an amphetamine hum as the Federicos in the orchestra pit sawed madly at their stringed instruments, everything faster, miniaturized, coming to the point in the story again when the puppet version of Kylee summoned Abby to the theater, upon which an even smaller puppet theater appeared within the first puppet theater. Abby could barely make out the little figures dancing within. Finally, the spectator version of Abby, overcome with nausea, turned to Kylee and asked, “How do I make it stop?”
“It’s easy, young thing,” Kylee smiled, snapping her fingers. “You wake up in a field.”
Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 2
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.