“When do we start?” I asked my new boss.

“Week or two. Need to get some people back in town, need to get some things sorted out, then we hit it hard.” He puffed his cheeks with air, thinking. “Did Mary talk to you?” he asked.

“Yeah, she said she’d have an assignment for me first thing tomorrow morning, said she’d tell me then what it’d be.”

“Don’t fuck it up,” he said with a smile.

I laughed. Then I realized he was only half joking, before realizing he wasn’t joking at all.

“I’ll do what I can,” I said, getting up to leave his office.

“Oh, don’t do that, mate,” he said with a deeper smile. Then he turned back to his computer and I walked back upstairs to my little cube.

There I found Doug. “Lunch?” he asked.

(If you started reading from the beginning, you may remember a story about a guy who’d been picketing in front of the Scientology headquarters in Silicon Valley. If this were, for example, a book, I would move that story here. I’ve already removed it from its place among the earliest posts. But instead, of simply slipping it in here for the online readers, I’m going to bring it back in as the following post, as a sidebar. If you’ve already read it, you can safely skip it.)

On the other side of a late lunch, there wasn’t much to do. I felt the slight pressure of the money I was being paid, a fantastic sum to me at the time and to many people still today, and wanted to be productive enough to feel I was earning it.

“What can I do?” I asked Doug.

“Well, there’s not a lot going on right now. We have a number of consultants in New York right now — that’s where the corporate office is.” He took a sharp breath through his nostrils. “Have you heard about what’s going on with the company at large?”

I hadn’t.

The company’s full name was Kroll-O’Gara, formed by two companies which had only recently gotten married. Their individual businesses were booming, and there had never been a single, massive, well-rounded security company. Kroll was an old-school detective agency and O’Gara was an old-school armored car company, and between them they bought up some of the major players in other security industries. They purchased Background America to do the basic background checks, they bought a major corporate drug-testing lab, and a couple of other smaller joints. Then they started looking around for what to do for information security. They met up with a little consulting company called Securify—

“Really?” I asked Doug. “They called it ‘Securify’?”

He shrugged. Kroll-O’Gara had bought Securify eight months back, and were busily directing all inquiries about information security to the consulting arm of the Securify body, of which Doug was vice-president. I had been hired into the tiny but growing engineering organization. But the ultimate end-game, I was told, was to spin the information security group, where I worked — the former Securify — back out as a start-up, given that start-ups were hot.

“So,” I asked, “we’re going to use our computer security consulting practice to figure out what people need, and then grow a company around whatever we build?”

“Basically,” Doug said. “Though at this point, the real trick will be getting the board to agree on everything.” He sighed. “The company’s been on such a buying spree, trying to be the big security behemoth where there’s never really been one, that they’re letting themselves be a little distracted at the moment. Kroll was a global detective agency that had been around for something like thirty years, very well-entrenched with a lot of good customers, and O’Gara was an armored car company that traced its history back to the Nineteenth Century. The Kroll-O’Gara board is split between them, so you can imagine how conversations go sometimes.”

A tiny, dark pebble dropped into the pool of my new joy. The ripples it made would echo in my head for nearly a year before I would finally come to terms with how much trouble I was in. I give myself credit for understanding almost immediately what was wrong with the situation, and I forgive myself for not running full-tilt in the opposite direction. My life would simply become too exciting to walk away from.

“Hey, Doug,” I said. “Remember in Cryptonomicon, when one of the guys is comparing the kinds of people you get in tech start-ups to the different races from Lord of the Rings?”

Doug nodded. I went on. “You have Dwarves, who go down into the mines everyday doing the hard work and making the cool tools, occasionally digging out some magical thing that can change the world.”

“Or burn it down,” he said.

“Then you have Elves, who are the sort of snobby, elitist, high-minded architects of grace and beauty. You have Men—” I looked around. “—and occasionally a couple of women, who are the social creatures, making all the deals and organizing the armies. Occasionally you’ll come across a Wizard, who sweeps in looking like a homeless person, draws something on a whiteboard that blows everyone away, and then vanishes into the night. You’ll end up with a couple of Hobbits, who’ve never been out of Hobbiton and have no idea how things actually work and who’ll only survive if they can learn how to roll up their sleeves and dig with the dwarves, deal with the men, and communicate with the elves.” I paused to take a breath.

“Yes,” said Doug. “And your point?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Just got carried away. My point is — first, is that true?”

He coughed a laugh. “Absolutely.”

“So what we have is a company that’s half controlled by a bunch of debonair spy people in pressed suits, smoking cigarettes and thinking abstractly about problems, and you have a bunch of gritty, hammering out armor and chomping on cigars and talking about how much blowing-up their cars can take before getting blown up.”

“I don’t see what you’re—”

“It’s elves and dwarves. The spy people are elves, and the armor people are dwarves. That’s…that’s a gigantic problem.”

“Why is that a problem?”

“Elves and dwarves do not get along,” I said, “never ever. Never will.”

Doug was unperturbed. “We shall see,” he said. “Right now, what do you think about dinner? Jim can join us.”

“Definitely.” I’d been looking forward to catching up with Jim. “How is he?”

“Jim is doing well.” Then with great deliberation, he said, “We have something we have been working on. Would you like to hear about it?”

“Very definitely,” I said.

We met up at the only micro-brewery in Mountain View, Tied House, where Jim and Doug told me what they were up to — what they had been plotting between themselves for years, since way back in what by that point felt like the distant, fog-enshrouded past when we’d been working together at the game company. You won’t believe it. I didn’t.

Wait: I need to back up a step. I haven’t even told you exactly where I’d found myself.

I thought I knew what I’d be doing when I headed out from Austin to the San Francisco Bay Area — what specific job I’d be doing, I mean. I was told one thing, but once I arrived I was told that I would be doing something else, to be explained to me in a few days. Some people were traveling at the moment and wouldn’t be back until the next week, so they wanted me to get settled first, maybe take on a few little jobs here and there while I got to know the place.

Sounds like a relaxing time. But the drive out? It was intense.

It was the perfect topper to all my driving days back in Austin. I loved driving so much that it was how I used to procrastinate, while working at the game company. When it was late, and I needed inspiration to keep going, I would take Sixth Street across town to Red Bud Trail, and drive around in those hilly, moody neighborhoods out there until I spotted a deer. You could usually find several, frozen just off the road, if you kept your eyes open. Once I saw one — a symbol of what, I couldn’t say — I’d feel like I could turn around and come back.

The long, rolling drive out of Austin toward El Paso was an epiphany. Why had I never done it before? Because I’d always been told it would be boring. It wasn’t. It was gorgeous.

I hit El Paso as the late-summer sun was setting. Once you’re west of El Paso, you’re in another state. As a Texan it felt odd, knowing that I’d left my home state behind. Luckily, by the time west Texas dumps you into New Mexico, you’re halfway through New Mexico. I pushed on, given that the third state in my journey was not too far away.

Around midnight, in the middle of nowhere, I was channeled off the empty freeway by a diagonal line of cones into what looked like a truck weighing station where military men stood in small clusters, talking. Some held rifles.

I stopped where it looked like they wanted cars to stop. Holy crap, I thought, am I in a good-enough state to be driving at this point? As I rolled my window down, a man barked, “Where were you born?”

“Carswell Air Force Base, sir,” I said crisply, surprising myself.

He pointed forward while stepping back, circling his other hand to tell me I should move on, so I did, back out into the borderless darkness.

I made it about another hour, to Tuscon Arizona, before giving in to a motel, but six hours later I was back on the road with a full tank of gas and about $22 to get me through the day. I had some snacks, and some water; I could survive until I landed in Los Angeles, about the same time that my Austin bank would close for the day, which was when the rest of my moving expenses would be made available to me in my account.

My dad had recommended that I drive all night and sleep during the day, to avoid the heat. He didn’t know how much I enjoyed the heat. “You don’t want your car breaking down out there,” he’d said. But I had a cell phone and $22, and I wasn’t going to kill a day trying to sleep in Arizona. The drive through the great American desert was excruciatingly beautiful, vast expanse after vast expanse, punctuated by the occasional long rise up into what eventually turns out to be a low hill, after which the land opens back out and you coast on down into the next long, low valley to come.

I stopped at the General George S. Patton Memorial Museum & Gas Station with enough money to fill my tank and maybe grab a snack, though that had been pretty optimistic of me. There was a lot I’d be learning, including how much gas cost in California.

Unfortunately, the only shade for perhaps forty miles in any direction was underneath the gas pump handles. That’s where I surprised a bee, who was probably only looking for a place to cool off for a moment, which stung me.

It didn’t hurt much, but I’d already spent all but $1.70 of my money and couldn’t afford anything to ease a bee sting in any case. But what the hell, I’d suck it up.

Once I got back on the road, I started to notice my finger swelling where it had been stung. Then over the next twenty minutes, the swelling began to spread, from finger to knuckle to the meat between thumb and forefinger. Pulling out my hand-held recorder, I began to tell whoever might find my car on the side of the road about the foolish thing I’d done. If only I hadn’t filled my car all the way up — I could probably still make it to LA on less, right? — or had waited to drive at night, or had simply put everyone off another day before leaving so that I’d be traveling with the cushion of the many thousands of dollars that waited for me only a few hours in the future from where I was clearly about to die, on the side of the road, more than twenty miles from the nearest sign of civilization, not even a shotgun shack, as two-thirds of my hand inflated.

Then as the swelling continued to move, it seemed to lose its energy, diminishing overall. Over hours it faded, and as the low little hillsides cresting the end of every valley grew higher and higher, I finally popped out the other side of one especially tall one and thought, Ah, so that’s as far east inwards as the rain really goes. It was as if I’d punched my way through from desert to dreamland. The ground was lush, like I’d always heard that so much of the land outside of Texas could be. As each successive valley had even more green on the ground, the air rapidly cooling, the views out my dusted windows began to show signs of that most expected of scenery infestations, the suburban communities. They dotted, then they speckled, then they covered.

Throughout, I was talking — mostly crazy things, I’m afraid, muttering to myself. I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to the tapes, though I have gone so far as to digitize them.

My descent into Los Angeles was the insanity’s last attempt to grip me. As I shot into the city proper, a horrible rhythmic noise echoed in my little car. I honestly couldn’t tell if it was the freeway that was awful, its enormous concrete plates all bowed in nearly exactly the same way, forcing a terrible DRUM-DRUM-DRUM sound into the tires and up through the car’s frame and into my forearms by way of the steering wheel, or if the car had simply taken all the abuse it could and was determined to shake itself to pieces.

Then I landed, in the languid late afternoon, at an apartment complex in north LA, ringed with palm trees, where I met up with an old friend. He and his wife had moved out to California, though they’d targeted Hollywood, not Silicon Valley. They calmed me. It turned out to have simply been a crappy freeway; my car was fine. They took me to a bank machine, where I found that I’d suddenly gone from having less than two dollars to holding on to a lot of money. I bought us dinner, and we laughed for hours — Holy crap, can you believe it? We’re here! Isn’t that amazing? It is; it really is — until one or two or all three of us fell asleep.

In the morning, I woke alone. I locked the door, went out to my car, and made the last, patient leg of the drive, six hours up the incredible coast. The air was like nothing I’d ever felt before, literally cool, while the sun shined bright all day long over green grass, waving in ocean breeze.

I had come through something, somehow. I was no longer going to California. I had arrived.

I still haven’t told you what I was driving out there to do, or what I would then find out they really wanted from me.

I wrote this almost exactly fifteen years ago, in the summer of 1999, coming back from having auctioned off my grandfather’s belongings on a hot Texas day. It has far too many semi-colons, but I have better things to do than to mess with the text. With the exception of some misspellings, here it is as I wrote it then.

Mom woke me up at 6:30 in the morning. I thought, “What are we doing getting up this early? The auction doesn’t start ’till 10.” But when people started showing up a half-hour later, I knew it was going to be a busy day.

Walking around the house — for all anyone knew, just another curious local interested in an old man’s lifetime of collections — I felt increasingly distant. Every knick-knack and bauble, laid out to fill the yard, were vessels of memory, reminders of summers spend in grandparental solitude.

My mom and dad used to send me off to Weatherford for a week or two between school years; grandmom and granddad weren’t very “hands-on” folks, so I had the run of the house. Everything reminded me of the summer of my childhood and the autumn of my grandparents’ lives. The little red bird perched on the wavy lampshade by wire-formed feet; the porceline figures of women sewing, reading, hugging children; the countless glass bottles smelling faintly of perfumes from more than half-a-century ago; they were natural extensions of my grandparents, their personalities made external. I buried my grandfather’s body several weeks before, but over a long, hot Texas morning we auctioned off his soul.

Of particular interest were the tools and the relics: the things which, as a child, I wasn’t allowed to touch. There were probably five complete workshops worth of wrenches, pliers, hammers, saws, brackets, braces, bolts, and screws. There were enough weed eaters and mowers and edgers and blowers to start a landscaping company.

Most of the relics I didn’t even know existed until the auction had already been announced — and unfortunately, once something had been inventoried for the auction, it couldn’t be taken out. This included the single-shot shotgun, a little 410, once used by my great-grandfather, Sherwood Henry Pearcy, on his farm at the turn of the century. My grandfather’d kept it cleaned and oiled, ready for use, and it was found leaned up against his bed the day he died. The prize, though, was the 18-inch-long Nazi dress dagger, tightly sheathed in leather, that granddad had said he’d pulled off an officer in World War II. It disturbed me a little, but it was beautiful. It was emblazoned with swastikas on pommel and hilt, weighted for decoration but long and sharp and precisely manufactured enough to go through a person’s belly and come out his back as though cutting through the air. I had no weapons at the time; I’m not much of a weapon person. But I wanted that rifle, and I wanted that dagger.

My father, since his dad died, has been distant. Knowing how weird I felt walking around among personal belongings, labeled for sale, I knew I couldn’t imagine how my dad might feel about it. He’d told my mom to throw everything that wasn’t spoken for into the auction, though she cautioned him that he might regret it later. But dad shut down a few months ago and it’ll be awhile ’till he starts caring about things again.

Since we couldn’t pull them from the auction, we set high minimums on the dagger and the rifle; if the bidding didn’t reach the minimums, then we’d keep the weapons. Mom wanted me to get a bidder number anyway and bid on the rifle. I’d just bid until the bidding stopped and then we’d pay the auctioneer his 20% cut, calling it a draw.

I was given a post in the front yard, where the more valuable items were arrayed on two long rows of folding card tables. A stranger asked me what I was doing there, and I confessed I was close family.

“Is stuff going missing?” he asked. No, I didn’t think it was, though I feared it might; granddad had a lot of cool stuff. Mostly, though, people just didn’t know how to handle good, quality things. I don’t mean this as a slam at “country-folk” in general or the populace Weatherford in specific; I’ve gotten my favorite books back from best friends with the spines all torn out and not so much as an apology to go with it. Leading up to the auction, people were doing really stupid shit — picking up mechanical clocks and shaking them, for example. I mean, damn! You don’t shake things driven by delicate gears. Luckily, mom had thought to take the pendulum out so everything was cool. Still, I didn’t see anyone trying to pocket anything, and I didn’t notice anything go missing, and it wasn’t for lack of keeping my eyes open.

Also, the auctioneer gave us some tips on how to keep people from taking advantage of the situation. “Unplug all the phones,” he advised. “People like to save up their long-distance calling for an estate sale, then when everyone’s outside . . .” This was enough to make me a little paranoid. How cheap and petty, I thought, to take advantage of another person’s grief that way.

Before the auction started, my mom came out with grave news. “John Kennedy Jr. and his wife were just in a plane crash; they think they’re dead.” So that’s something else that happened that day. News quickly spread among the assembled throng as they picked through a century’s accumulation of stuff, most purchased before the dead man’s father had been made President.

The knife and the rifle — and various other rifles I didn’t care about — were kept in the auctioneer’s trailer. I could see them hanging up from my post on the front porch. Occasionally I’d see a good old boy pulling at the brim of his cowboy hat, inspecting the shotgun with a cell phone cradled between ear and shoulder. Talking to a gun appraiser or a knowledgable friend, I imagined.

I walked into the trailer when I could no longer see the Nazi dagger hanging from the trailer’s far well, only to be faced with an old man inspecting one of the bolt-action rifles — inadvertently aimed at me. I recoiled smoothly out of the doorway, though it made him jump a little. If the gun had been loaded, it probably would’ve gone off in his hands. I had a brief flash of that alternate world where a red blossom opened up on my right side, the imagined pain blinding me from further fantasy.

“Didn’t mean to startle ya,” he said.

“No problem,” I replied, gesturing as though pushing the rifle barrel aside. “I just don’t like to enter rooms to find guns pointed at me.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, forehead furrowed with genuine concern. “Didn’t even realize what I was doing.” He aimed the rifle out the trailer window as he completed his inspection. Goddamn, I thought, I don’t know how someone could reach such an advanced age without learning not to aim guns casually where people are likely to be.

Inside the trailer was a girl, maybe all of 14 years old, selling hot dogs, snacks, and drinks for the auctioneer. Everyone makes money how they can.

“Yeah, I dated a guy from there,” she told someone I couldn’t see. “Well, not ‘dated’ — we just went out a couple times. But he has no respect for women. After the second date, I was like, ‘You ain’t worth my time.'” I wondered where she would be in another 14 years.

My mom found a huge guy in the kitchen with the refrigerator door open, leaning in slack-jawed as though inspecting the interior.

“Excuse me, sir,” she said, tapping the “no sale” sign on the door. “This isn’t for sale.”

“Oh, I’m just coolin’ off,” he replied, staring blankly forward.

After we met up and exchanged stories, right before the mid-day break and the auctioning of the weapons, mom said, “At least the guy in the fridge didn’t have a rifle.”

“Did he have thumbs?” I asked.

In the end, we kept both gun and knife. Some guy bid up to $120 for it, and I bit $125 — even though I didn’t have to enter the bidding at all, with a minimum of $150, but my mom applied unnecessary pressure for me to do so.

The knife made it more than halfway through to its minimum bid of $900, but I’m not sure that was even a real bid as it was entered by the man running the auction, who knew the minimum. I think he just wanted to get it over with and inflated the bidding with a bogus entry. If I’m ever put in charge of two yards full of stuff to auction, I won’t want to waste time with stuff the family decided at the last minute not to sell.

Some people were a little bitter about it, though. I overestimated how much this auction meant to some people. I mean, to me this was just the culmination of a long period of family strangeness following a much longer period of family estrangement. But come four o’clock I was free to drive back to Austin. For these people, this was their life. This auction was very important to them for all sorts of selfish (or perhaps merely personal) reasons. Maybe I took it too lightly, all things considered.

“Cain’t believe you turned down $120 for that rifle!” one snaggle-toothed thin blonde woman hunted my mom and I down to tell us. The rest of those assembled were gathered around the rest of the rifle bidding in the back yard.

“Well,” mom said, “it belonged to his father.” She meant it belonged to my grandfather’s father.

“But it ain’t an antique! You can get that same guy down at the store for $99! And you turned down a hundred-and-twenty?”

“It is an antique,” my mother politely insisted.

“But you can get plenty just like it down at the store,” the woman said, “and they even got a star on the handle!”

Mom smiled at her dismissively. Myself, I couldn’t say anything. The previous night, I’d told mom that I wasn’t holding my tongue any more. When granddad was sick, I was the good grandson. When his sister died later that week, I put up with all the ridiculous things said by my peripheral relatives. When he died ten days later, I remained respectful even to the leering second cousin who told me — just feet from the site where I’d just lain my grandfather’s body to its eternal rest — what a good-looking woman my sister appeared to be.

Still, I just couldn’t bear to speak a word to these people for fear of the explosion that might come. I just smiled and nodded sympathetically, sort of a “those are the breaks, I guess we must be screwed” sort of look.

The overweight Nazi knife bidder informed me that he didn’t know what happened with the bidding on that one.

“I see them knives all the time on the eBay, always for ’round $300 or even $350.”

“Really?” I said, with a facetious tone of disbelief. He drew back with great apprehension, surprised that I didn’t just sheepishly hand over the knife, victim to his Internet-savvyness. I kept forgetting that in small-town Texas, the Internet was mostly something that rich folks did. When I heard other people mention the Internet that morning, it was always in the settling of an argument. “Well, but I read it on the Internet.” Something about the ‘Net carries the weight of truth. I’d chastised myself for my old prejudice about people living in small towns not knowing anything about the Internet, so it relieved me to hear an actual Weatherford resident expressing shock that another Weatherford resident had heard of eBay. Dang us city folk

I tried talking my mom into letting me take the knife with me, but she kept it, planning to drive it back to Kansas City to have it appraised.

Then there were the Masonic fezes, emblems of one of several secret fraternal orders grandfather belonged to. I mean, I couldn’t just let those go. I had to out-bid one of the many old Gertrude Stein-era lesbians who’d showed for the sale, but I got them. Twenty bucks.

The worst scene was near the end. A young blond girl, maybe 12 or 13 years old, had fallen in love with my old computer, a Mac SE that my parents had bought and used intermittently in the early-90s. It had a dot-matrix printer, a ton of software (including a shrink-wrapped copy of Microsoft Word) — it was ready to go.

How in love with it was she? She was sitting on the floor hugging it to her chest right before the bidding. Sadly, her parents stopped bidding at $20, so someone else got it for $25. She ran into the bathroom, crying, and refused to come out for some time. This is real, I had to remind myself; these were peoples’ lives. I remained quietly reverential through the remainder of the proceedings.

Something like a month earlier, the line began to form to see what would be the first Star Wars movie in 26 years. To say that emotions were high among the geek community, and even in American culture at large, would be an understatement.

Rick and I had spent a large, single-digit number of afternoons scouring the local toy stores for the new Star Wars action figures, those having been the currency of cool in our grade-school years of our youth. If you had a Sandperson, or a Jawa — or, later, Yoda — then you were pretty bad-ass. In fourth grade, I’d had a long, ongoing narrative going amongst all the toys in my room, and my Star Wars action figures figured prominently. When my parents finally made me pack them away so that I’d have one less reason to be “that uncool kid” in junior high, I’d been morose for weeks. I was thrilled to have gotten them back from my parents after all that time, and even more thrilled to see what great condition they were in.

I, of course, had two Yodas. No, I don’t remember how or why.

This all made it that much more important that Rick and I indulge what might well be a last hurrah, making regular sweeps for the rare figures. Because as much as it was feeling like it could be the beginning of something cool — I mean, it was Star Wars; how could you fuck that up? — there was also a sense in the air of an end coming. We were seven months from the end of the millennium, and the occasional bubbling-over of little pockets of insane cults over the course of the last ten years did nothing to dispel an overall concern that something bad might happen on the other side of the millennial boundary. It doesn’t make any sense, but if there was one thing I’d learned from my deep study of paranoia it was that it doesn’t have to make sense, it doesn’t. The global computer system crash promised by the Y2K Bug, the Japanese nerve-gas cult, the Web developers who thought a flying saucer would take their opiate-laced souls to another world — so many little things contributed to an uneasiness felt across the nation.

And still, we had new Star Wars, and as a person who’d made a serious practice of attending opening nights, typically with large groups of friends — when I saved 16 prime seats at the opening of Jurassic Park with nothing more than three extra sweaters I’d brought to do exactly that, after having been third in line to get into the theater, I thought I might be lynched; I was so relieved when Mentor and his wife showed up early to lay reasonable claim to that much entertainment real estate — I was going to be there. Unfortunately, I had a job. A lot of people did not, and were literally camped out in line for tickets. The theaters were wholly unprepared for the “gotta see it first” culture of the geeks, and eventually relented, agreeing to sell tickets weeks ahead of time just to get their sidewalks back, but they’d made it a condition of the advance sale that leading up to the sale, all the campers had to stay put in their the tents they’d erected in front of the theaters. If a tent was empty, you lost your place in line.

I’d been cursing my bad luck that the startup hadn’t yet been bought, so I was still gainfully employed, when I’d gotten the call: some buddies from Steve Jackson Games who’d worked in the warehouse were rotating through shifts in the fourth tent in line for tickets at Austin’s finest, newest theater at the time. If I’d agree to work a night shift, I could have some tickets, as many as four.

It would’ve been fine, if some other big geek hadn’t gotten drunk and fallen into the tent where I was sleeping, bringing his booted foot down upon my skull. I screamed, and he apologized — he was with the Ain’t It Cool News tent, and might not actually have been old enough to be drinking — before running off.

Over the next couple of days, I was in so much pain that I went back to my chiropractor. I usually saw the woman of the couple, but after she took a look at me, she sent in her husband.

“So,” he said, “you remember in school, how they taught you about continental plates? Right?”

“Uh-huh.”

He held his hands out before him, like he was grasping a globe. “Well, your head, your skull, is much like that. You have a lot of plates, and they all fit together neatly. What’s happened to you is that the plates aren’t perfectly seated right now. So we’re going to work on that.”

“Um, okay. Great.”

He looked me seriously in the eye. “Okay,” he said, and walked behind me, grasping my skull. His hands felt like silk-wrapped granite. He exhaled and he did something, and I heard a low-frequency tone shoot up to the inaudibly high then back down to a low background buzz. My head felt a full quarter larger than it had been. So much room for thoughts.

The doc walked around to face me. I started to move and he held out his hand. “Stay there for a few minutes,” he said. He looked exhausted, suddenly. What had just happened? “Just stay there.” I wiped his brow. “I think that worked — it worked well. Just don’t move for a few minutes. Let everything settle in.” Then he turned and he left and I never saw him again. His wife came back in after a little while, looked at both sides of my head, declared me awesome, and sent me in my way. I never saw her again, either, though we did have a fateful phone conversation not to far in the future, from California.

So I had my tickets, and I’d invited my friends — my best friend John, who I haven’t had a reason to talk about except to say that he kept me sane when I had few reasons to cling to sanity — and Robin, who I’d failed to sleep with several weeks earlier, and one of Robin’s friends, who I’d never met.

It was only as I passed Waco, the roughly halfway point between the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and Greater Austin area, wondering when I would next carve out the time to read the last half of Cryptonomicon, that I shook my head and realized that my midnight tickets for the new Star Wars movie were for that very night, and that regardless of how many days my pals had stuck it out in an REI tent just to be able to buy tickets, if I got in line thirty minutes before showtime, I’d end up with the worst seats in the place.

I stopped at home long enough to feed my cat, whom I’d come to love quite a bit, against my better judgement, then I busted on over to the theater where I was sixth in line for the midnight show’s general seating. John and Robin and her friend joined me about six hours later, and we chatted and laughed and snacked until they let us into the theater. I was riding a high after having motored through the rest of Cryptonomicon in the time I’d sat on my own, and it reverberated through my reflection on my life and my concern for my grandfather’s.

It wasn’t exactly crushing that it was such a terrible movie. Really, it was one more inexorable step towards an adulthood I’d too long delayed.

Then the phone call: my great-aunt, at 103, had passed away. That was sad, as she’d been bright and mobile up until six weeks before, when she’d broken her hip walking through a grocery story’s automatic doors, but granddad’s reasonable reaction to the passing of his last sibling was more concerning.

When granddad got the news, he panicked, had a heart attack. After hanging up the phone from the news, he’d stumbled over to the front door of the woman across the road — a feisty young woman in her late-60s, who’d already buried two husbands and who recognized from his stride and from his pallor what was going on. She’d called the paramedics without making a fuss. Unfortunately, Weatherford being as slow it is, all three of her adult children happened to be sitting at home scanning the police and emergency radio bands, and when the call went out for an ambulance to their mom’s address, they freaked out, racing over and blocking her driveway with their irregularly parked cars, preventing the arriving ambulance from being able to get anywhere close to my grandfather, who was being overlooked entirely in the clumsy comedy of three children harassing their mother about what could possibly be wrong with her. To their credit, they alternately helped the paramedics and stood off to the side saying nothing, once the truth came out.

Meeting up with family, especially in Weatherford, was always an odd occasion. My life and my interests were so different from everybody else’s, and it wasn’t like I could feel anyone reaching out to bridge the divide.

That’s not totally true. One man, a second-cousin about my age, tried to make friends by telling me how happy he was that he now lived in the suburb where I’d grown up, and how great it was that his neighborhood was almost entirely white people, with only a couple of Mexicans. His life was so empty that he found it to be a good use of time to sit out on his porch, staring down anyone with dark skin who might make the mistake of thinking they could drive through his neighborhood.

“I just want them to know we don’t need their kind here.” I kept waiting for him to break character and say, “Aw, I was just messing with you! Come on: shouldn’t anyone know better than that, nowadays?”

But no. Let no one wonder why I spent so much of my youth dreaming of a world, even in a galaxy far, far away, where it didn’t matter what kind of alien you were, as long as you didn’t give in to your dark side.

The day of the funeral, I was there to help check granddad out of the hospital. He’d been the youngest of eight kids, and now he was the last. Twice he told me of his desire to be done with life, gripping my arm much more strongly than I thought him capable.

He asked, “You ain’t against me, too, are you?” The skin on his hands were worn and crossed with creases, like a piece of paper that had been folded too many ways, too many times.

“I’m here for you,” I said, though not in the way he wanted me. It didn’t matter. Inside of a week, we’d be back in Weatherford to bury him.

In the meantime, the news came out that we were going to be bought by a company that I’d never heard of — that no one I knew had ever heard of, even though two of their executives were on the previous year’s list of richest Internet tech dudes. So, okay, they have money, and their success actually predated the Internet. They didn’t have a Web front-end for their big, successful software package, something about businesses and enterprise relationship management, and while they could’ve hired a bunch of a class of people who’d begun calling themselves Webmasters — a word that made me want to stand in the unpaved alley behind my little shack and slam my car door against my hand over and over — they instead wanted a tech-facing solution as well as a market-facing solution. By saying they were buying us, they’d have a story as to how they were going to set up a beachhead in the new Internet world, whatever that meant.

I started taking afternoons off from work. They weren’t going to need me anymore, and still I spent long hours wondering what I was supposed to do with myself. Eventually, I started walking. In Texas, going out for a walk anytime between late spring and early autumn was a commitment: you were either pacing yourself, presuming you knew how much it’d take you to get to where you were going, or you were on a suicide mission, aiming yourself at a distant target in the hopes that you’d eventually get there. I’d spent a lot of time on Texas summer suicide-mission walks, and as long as you kept going, and didn’t mind sweating, and always stopped to hydrate, it wasn’t nearly as bad for you as it might be otherwise.

In three hours, I’d walked from my place to Austin Books, the closest comic book store, and back. That trip was the first time I saw them selling old Star Wars toys. They had small cardboard boxes overflowing with loose-limbed and paint-worn Han Solo figures, lightsaber-less Obi Wan Kenobi figures, and other more elegant samples from a more civilized age. I bought nothing, taking in the air-conditioning and making my way home in the mid-day heat.

There was a convenience store on 45th Street, attached to a laundromat, where I stopped to rehydrate. I didn’t like buying bottled water — it felt too much like throwing money away — but I needed it. Behind me in line was a young woman of the typical Austin hippie variety, maybe twenty-two years old, with a young boy, maybe four or five years old. He was alternately trying to talk his mom’s ear off about Star Wars, or he was mumbling about something I couldn’t understand. She was tugging one ear and staring out the convenience store’s front window.

Finally, three people away from the cashier, I turned around. “Did I hear you say Yoda?” I asked.

His eyes grew wide, but he was too afraid to speak to me. He begged his mother to communicate for him.

“He loves Yoda,” she said. “He’s his favorite character.”

“Has he seen the new movie, yet?” I didn’t have the heart to criticize it in front of a child.

“No,” she said. “Haven’t, you know, had the time.” Which meant she hadn’t had the money. She pointed at the convenience store’s far wall, where it joined up with the laundromat. “Just washing clothes, trying to stay sane this week.”

“I hear you,” I said.

The boy was pointing furiously at a smear of green ink on his bicep.

“What’s that?” I asked. He looked confused, almost angry.

“Him,” he said.

“Oh! Yoda!” I said.

His mom winced. “He has these stamps.” She sighed. “A, ah, a friend of ours gave them to him. So he stamps himself with Yoda, but it’s hard to see. Hey: with that new movie out, there’s gotta be toys right?”

“Sure,” I said. “Tons of toys. Believe me, I went looking for them.”

“Cool! I mean, especially about the Yoda. That’ll be a huge relief. If I don’t get this kid a Yoda, I d0n’t know what’ll happen.”

He pulled hard on his mom’s peasant skirt and with loud whine asked, “When’s Roger coming back?”

She must’ve been long past her limit for hearing that question in a day, because she snapped.

“He’s not coming back!” she cried. “He’s not, okay? So just accept it! We all have to accept it, that’s what we do now, okay?” She put her hands to her face, sobbing. I paid for my water and got the hell out of there, walking too fast for the heat that surrounded me, because I knew something that she didn’t know, that I didn’t have the heart to say: that there were not any Yoda figures. Oh, he was a popular character, no doubt, but he wasn’t part of the first wave of figures. I hadn’t so much as seen a Yoda beach towel or anything.

Some strange set of symbols slid into place in my mind, imagining this kid suffering a great loss, one that had clearly crippled his mother, without some symbol of wisdom and serenity to form more fully in his head.

I opened up the box of Star Wars toys that I’d started keeping when I’d been eight years old, quickly laying my hands on my two Yodas. They were each identical, with the same robe and the same belt and the same orange snake around their neck and the same gnarled walking stick. They were in as perfect a condition as you could ever want. I picked one and raced in my car back to the laundromat, where I found the woman and her boy. She was staring off into space; he was rubbing the green splotch on his arm, his mind clearing churning.

I muttered under my breath, “Jesus Christ,” then I said, “I’ve got something for you.” She seemed confused. Then I explained as to how, yes, there were new Star Wars toys, but there were no Yodas. She doubted; I assured her; she grew an expression of fear, turning slowly to stare at her boy as I held out my hand to give him one of my Yodas.

“This was mine when I was a boy,” I told him. “You know about Yoda, right? He’s very wise. If you’re ever not sure what to do, you can ask Yoda, and he’ll give you the right answer.”

“Oh, thank you,” said the young mom, her boy’s eyes as big as they could be as he reached for the unexpected toy.

He’s going to break it, I told myself. She’s going to lose the little cane and he’ll melt part of the snake on a candle and the robe will go missing after the belt gets busted, but I couldn’t care less. What’ll be left, that small slug of brown plastic with a green, pointy-eared head, would be a wonder to him, an oracle. At least, that was my new hope.

She thanked me, began to offer to — I cut her off, smiling, backing away. I’d done what I’d come to do. I did not want to impose.

Three days later, peacefully in his sleep, my grandfather died.