Gabriel Roth - The Unknowns

The outside world is bathed in sunshine. I start to drive back to the airport, but when I reach the freeway I follow the signs for north, toward home. California’s interior is vacant and demoralized, and keeping my foot on the accelerator takes an effort of will. I drive for hours without stopping, until my throat is dry from the air conditioning and the fuel indicator dips into the red. Fuel indicators are calibrated so that actual emptiness is somewhere below the E mark. Everyone knows this and calculates accordingly, and so the real function of the interface is to ensure that you can’t tell exactly how much fuel is left. There is some value to this. I keep driving.

I WAKE THE NEXT morning with the aura of something bodily amiss that foretells a cold. The chaos in my head seems more urgent. For three hours I stifle it by playing Metroid Prime. I am frozen on the couch, my thumbs animated like dancing insects, when the phone starts jumping with what seems like unusual force. I am in that state of meditative bliss and frustration that characterizes progress up a video game’s learning curve: useful new gestures and strategies are moving from my conscious mind into my repertoire of automatic reflexes, freeing up the forebrain to tackle the next set of challenges. It’s a hypnotic process, and hard to withdraw from. I pause the game and answer the phone with a feeling of distracted hyperreality. I am in my apartment, I am on Tallon IV, I am in phonespace with my father.

“Eric, I need to ask you for something,” he says in a voice that I’ve never heard him use before. “I know you’re not interested in my business. It would have been great to have you on board, but that’s OK. But we’ve run into a little trouble, and we could really use your help. Not a job, I’m not trying to offer you a job again. I’m just — I’m in a tough situation, and I need your help, OK?”

Maya’s past is a mystery, but mine calls me on the phone to ask for things. “What kind of trouble?” I ask. Metroid Prime, with its elaborately playable 3D environment and its carefully modeled physics, seems realer than this conversation.

“Thanks, Eric,” he says. “It’s all the venture firms’ fault. I did everything right: I had a real good idea, a real winner, and I put together a great team, with tech people and office people and everything you’d need. And I wrote this business plan, which really went into a ton of detail, with charts and everything, showing exactly what we were going to do. You know what a business plan is, right?”

“So what happened with the VCs?” I say.

“They wouldn’t give us any money!” he says. “Most of them wouldn’t even meet with us, wouldn’t even hear our pitch. I don’t know how these guys make a living, honestly, if they’re not going to hear people’s ideas. The whole thing’s rigged. There’s no way for the startup, the small business, to compete.” For my dad to lose his faith in the marketplace is tantamount to a religious crisis.

“Wow, I’m sorry,” I say, although in fact I feel vindicated. “So what are you going to do?”

“Well, I’m all out of options!” he says, his voice ascending the scale of indignation. “I mean, I’ve got this lease on the offices, and the server space — you have no idea how much it costs to rent this server space! And meanwhile there’s the staff people waiting to get paid, and the contractors who designed the site, and we had to pay out the ass for the domain name.”

“Oh Jesus, Dad,” I say. “You staffed up before you had any funding?”

“I couldn’t exactly go into Kleiner Perkins and tell them they should be funding us if we’re not even a real company, could I?” he says, as though losing patience with a slow student. “You’ve got to spend money to make money. That’s how it works.”

“What money did you spend?”

“My money, Eric, money that I made. Plus I borrowed some from your grandfather. And I took out a second mortgage.”

Oh my God. “And now what have you got left?”

“I’m all out, aren’t I? I’m dry. And if I shut the whole operation down now, number one I’ll never get any of it back, and number two I’ve got all these debts that there’s no way for me to repay. I’m looking at Chapter Seven here. I know you didn’t want to come on board, and that’s fine, you’ve got other irons in the fire, I can understand that. But you don’t want to see the whole enterprise fold, do you?”

I am tired of this old man. “So what are you asking for?” I say.

There is a long pause, which I suspect is his attempt to convey how difficult this is for him, and then, in a rush, he says, “I need one point two million dollars.” The word million comes out miyon . “That’s what it’ll take to get this off the ground. We can’t count on a bunch of suits to give us the opportunity, I can see that now. We’re going to have to take it ourselves.”

After the events of this week, it’s a relief to feel unambivalent about something. “I’m not going to fund your business, Dad,” I tell him. “It’s not a good business. That’s why the VCs aren’t going to give you money either.” A blue bolt of pleasure travels up my spine. Does telling difficult truths always feel this good?

There is another silence, less deliberate this time. When he speaks again, his voice is quiet and somehow younger.

“That’s all right,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting you to say yes, I was just trying everything I could think of. Let me ask you something else. I’ll give up on the company, I’ll shut it down. The staff will be disappointed, but it’s OK. But I want to pay off these debts. The back pay for the employees, and the contractors’ bills, and the rest of the month’s rent. If I can pay that stuff off, then I won’t have to declare bankruptcy. And the mortgage, a couple months, just until I can pick up some teaching work again.”

“How much are we talking about now?”

“I can do it for two hundred thousand dollars,” he says. He’d worked out the figure before calling.

“I don’t know, Dad,” I say. “I’ll think about it.” Something strange is happening, some reversal of the natural order, in which the inheritance passes from the son to the father, and resources flow upward through the generations. I hang up the phone and return to the game, but my eyes keep slipping down to the clock on the cable box where the hours and minutes are piling up. Maya is leaving the office in her overcoat, walking the seven blocks to my house, past the yard with the pit bull and the empty lot where the mysterious planks of wood stand like soldiers in the earth. I should put down the controller, shower, hide the evidence of the wasted day, prepare myself to deceive her about where I’ve been. But when she lets herself in I am under attack by a swarm of birdlike ghosts. She comes up behind me and musses the back of my hair, then goes into the bedroom, where the console’s shots and explosions are muffled. Of course, her departure makes me anxious and I sacrifice the game and go to her.

We sit at the kitchen counter and eat Indian food. Not telling her that I met her father yesterday is surprisingly easy; I can see how people have affairs. I don’t tell her about my dad’s phone call either — maybe because, the first time he called, she asked me if he wanted money, and I’m not happy she turned out to be right. Other than deal with our fathers, all I’ve done since I saw her last is play Xbox.

“I think I’m pretty close to the end,” I say. “Finishing a game always gives me a weird fake-accomplishment feeling. It’s a lot like disappointment.” She’s bored: she doesn’t play with her fingernails or say uh-huh in a distracted way, but the spark of her interest is gone. Bored, she’s not magic anymore. For some reason I remember the imaginary dog she might have killed.