Doug Larsen: A Portrait of My Grandfather

But I didn’t.

Mom was still completely crushed two days later, at the funeral. I stood in back of the church and looked at the sea of heads. There must have been a thousand people there. Behind me, Mom and Gramma and Aunt Wendy were hugging and crying again. The organ, which had been playing something soft and low, changed hymns. Uncle Kevin took Aunt Wendy’s arm, and my dad sidled up to me.

“Take your Grandmother’s arm,” he whispered to me. “Escort her down the aisle.”

I walked over to Gramma uncertainly. “Wanna go with me, Gramma?” I whispered.

“Thank you, dear,” she said. She wiped her eyes and took my elbow. “Your Grandfather loved you very much,” she whispered.

“I know,” I choked. “Me too. Him, I mean.”

She patted my arm and took a deep breath. “Let’s go.”

She stood very straight, and looked strong and forlorn as we walked forward to say goodbye to Grampa.

I was allowed one day off of school after the funeral, and then had to go back. I hated it. I sat through my computer class, not even bothering to listen, not even bothering to look at Tiffany Montgomery. She had some real tight pants on, and they hid her legs. I made a mental note to be sure to catch a look at her from behind as she was walking, though.

The teacher briefly mentioned virtual reality, and I thought about what Grampa had told me about virtual reality programming. We’d been sitting on his front porch one summer evening, enjoying ice cream cones, and the subject turned to software. “The programming is really complex, Greg-man,” he said. “Since it’s controlled by the user, it’s never the same program twice.”

“How’s it work, then?” I asked. I remember the flavor of my ice cream: peppermint candy.

He took a healthy lick of his. Maple nut. “Well, say you’re using Virtual Meadow, for instance. The program has a big section devoted to a 3-D view of the meadow. But all of the other stuff is in individual packets, placed at random in the program, waiting to be accessed by the user.”

“So, like, if I never look at the forest, the packets with the deer in the forest won’t be used?”

“Exactly.” He seemed proud of me, even though that was basic stuff. “You control the program to a much larger extent than any previous programs. And the Virtual Meadow experience is never the same twice.”

“What if you went in and did the exact same thing as last time?”

Grampa shook his head and smiled. “It’s impossible. You’d never be able to exactly duplicate the steps you took, how quickly you moved, where you looked, and when, and so on.”

I digested that and bit into my cone. “Cool.”

“Yeah,” Grampa agreed, putting his feet up on the porch railing. “From a programmer’s point of view, it’s fascinating. You’re using the same software package, but the linear history of how each packet is accessed will be different every time.”

“What if you use it one day, and really like what you did? Is it gone forever?”

“Pretty much,” Grampa conceded.

“Too bad you can’t look back at it and see why you liked it so much,” I commented. The cone was getting mushy, and I bit off the soggy part.

Grampa turned slowly and looked at me with great respect. “That’s an excellent idea! If you analyzed the ones you liked the best, you might find out some sort of pattern or color or series of packets that really strikes a chord with your brain. You could discover something new about how we react to that kind of stuff!”

I was glad I’d impressed him, but didn’t know where to go with it. “How do you do that?” I asked.

“Well,” he thought out loud, “I suppose you could take some digital tape and record each experience you have. Then you could look at it afterwards, and it would all be there in linear form.” He nodded slowly to himself. “Yeah. I think I’ll do that.”

That had been over a year ago. He had told me later that he was doing it, and was enjoying looking through the linear progressions and seeing the differences between them. It would actually be pretty cool, going through his last Virtual Meadow experience, because it was uniquely his. I missed him so much, that even something like that would feel like it was part of him.

I still couldn’t believe he was dead.

After class I wandered down the hall behind Tiffany Montgomery. Those tight jeans really showed off her hips and behind. I was so absorbed by her beguiling hip motion that I didn’t know that someone was watching until a thick wad of paper whacked me on the side of the head. I shook my head in surprise, and a chorus of jeering laughter pelted me.

“Hey, Walters!” a nasty voice cut through the noise. “Wake up, stupid!”

I turned to see Bruce Heber and some of his friends laughing at me. They were cool guys, or jocks, or both, and they never paid any attention to me unless they wanted to pick on me. I was an ideal target: fairly tall, so I made an impressive target, but very shy and uncertain, so I was an easy target. I couldn’t think of anything clever I could say, and wouldn’t have dared to say it if I had thought of something. I turned to walk away, and Heber shot forward and knocked my books out of my hands. My loose-leaf notebook hit the floor and burst open, showering papers everywhere. Without a word, I knelt down to pick up the mess. Laughing, Heber and his friends walked away, making sure they stepped on my stuff.

I wished I had a gun. I wished I was a trained fighter. But I wasn’t. I was a nerd, and I was used to this kind of humiliation. I pretended I didn’t see all of the people looking at me, and finished picking up my stuff. I saw Mary Adams and some of her friends—fairly nice girls, not in the cool, cruel crowd—looking on with some sympathy. I didn’t want sympathy, I wanted admiration, and they just made me feel like more of a loser.

I walked away as slowly as I could.

That Saturday, we went to visit Gramma to see how she was doing. I slipped away and went into Grampa’s office. He was always real organized, so I found the tapes without any problem. I chose his latest cassette, and picked up the Virtual Meadow disk, too.

I didn’t mention it to anyone—I just put the tapes in my pocket, and felt better knowing I had a little bit of Grampa’s personality with me. I figured I would go and play it sometime after school.

The mall downtown has some virtual booths, and I headed there before dinner a couple of days later. I was lucky that one was open, so I went in and slipped in Grampa’s cassette recording of his last Virtual Meadow experience. I know he really enjoyed them. I thought of that smile of his, and I smiled too, but I was sad. I was going to do what Grampa had done, but now I had to do it without him.

The meadow was really wonderful. Since I was experiencing Grampa’s sensations, I just stood still and let him take me wherever he wanted. Looking at it through Grampa’s eyes for the first time, I noticed it was quiet and soothing and peaceful. I strolled along, feeling the tall grass brush my legs. There was a grove of trees up ahead, and I could hear birds singing. A soft breeze blew against my face. Meadow flowers were blooming everywhere, and butterflies flitted around. I stood on top of a slight hill, and gazed at the scenery unfolding before me. Way in the distance, a river flowed, and I could see an eagle soaring above it. I strolled along farther, and saw a deer and her fawn standing just outside the grove of trees. They looked at me, and then turned and disappeared into the trees.

Some nice flowers were bunched together just to my left, and I headed over to smell them. Just beyond them, some shrubs were clustered together, and they had lilacs all over them. The scent wafted toward me, and I moved to admire them. I got close to them, and there was a movement in the shrubs, and oh my God there’s a man with a ski mask jumping out of the shrubs and he’s got a gun and no don’t shoot and the sound of the gunshot ruptured my eardrums and the blast caught me in the chest and I was on the ground and everything went dark!