“You look so tired,” he said when he arrived. He sat down, hand tremoring. “I’m not going to have something. Are you going to have something? Maybe it’s better if we go walking. It’s better maybe.”
“We can walk if you like, Lars. Why don’t we go to the Café Norden? It’s nice there—and it’s nice to finally meet you.”
He had disappointing splotches of facial hair that gave a sense of “almost” growing on his face, and his head was shaved to a near shine. We left the hotel and walked down streets with unpronounceable names, diphthongs and exotic letter pairings—like Catalan blended with German. He was nearly six foot three, all his bulk stuffed in a crimson blazer and spandex denim. The shops were just opening. People were riding bicycles to work. It was not clear to me yet if I would invite Lars to dinner; I had been instructed by Alan to try Noma, what the lists considered the world’s best restaurant. You sucked live ants served on bark through a straw or bit into a nest of veal fibers, slurped parsley jelly and razor clams—Viking primitivism. My job demanded I sometimes consume things against my will. Looking at Lars, fiddling with his phone while he walked, I did not sense he would care if we skipped Noma altogether.
When we arrived in Amagertov Square, the pigeons and the students and the bicycles were amassed at the fountain and the water was turned off but all the heat lamps were on, glowing orange above the tables at all the cafés. We went inside and found seats near the corner by the newspapers. The waitress spoke brittle Scandinavian English and stood a little impatiently at our table. We ordered little sandwiches of smoked fish with turnips and tiny pickles and clear yellow beer to wash it down. I watched the barman sweep the foam from the glass after he poured it. He handed it to me and I licked the remaining foam from the sides of the glass and tasted the cold beer and watched life outside. It was mostly small talk until the beer kicked in.
“So, what is it that you are you thinking we should do?” His hand was still shaking and beer foam was sliding down the side of his glass.
I said, “Can you repeat your version of events again please. One last time.”
He recounted everything from the night of the hackathon, elucidated the nature of his relationship with Fung, and when he was finished I ordered us another round. I deliberately asked him to repeat the story again to see if he resisted further embellishment.
“We do not want any more sensation, Lars. The articles last week were enough. Now we need to project facts, eclipse bad news with new news. Do you understand?”
He was massaging his temples. “It’s less about the criminal possibility and more that what I have built may be diminished by this scandal. This is the thing.”
I sipped the beer and waited for him to go on.
“If Morgan Stanley wants to end the IPO then I guess this was for nothing. I will never get such a shot like this again. Everything, all of it—it all would have been a waste. I don’t want to change the world, I just want it to know who I am.”
He reached into his breast pocket and handed me his phone. “I have all the settings right. Do you want to try it, see for yourself?”
The surface was sticky and the home screen was a photograph of the Fibonacci sequence inside a conch shell.
“Do you know Chinese? Well I guess it doesn’t matter. Just say something into it in English, anything. It will come out in Mandarin. Hold down the zero key, just like this, and then speak a few words at a time, then listen for the Chinese to come out of the speaker. Just talk regular about anything and OneSpeak will do the rest.”
I spoke a few words, and the screen froze. Then the app crashed.
We did not go to Noma. I rebooked myself on an earlier 6:00 a.m. flight to Berlin the next morning. There were no directs to Portugal. I had a speech later in the morning, a confab of robotics engineers who had built a hitchhiking humanoid robot—hitchBOT—that they were about to let loose. Toronto to Los Angeles. I could go home after that.
When I landed back in Tegel for my connection, I thought about calling Alan to tell him what had happened with OneSpeak. I sat down in a café beneath the enormous departures board and began to draft an email to him, but once I read over it I deleted it. The menu noted, in footnotes, the items containing quinine. There were only forty minutes until boarding for my connection. I ordered a “vital” breakfast of muesli. My waiter said he was from Portugal, but he looked like Hugo Chavez.
“How long you stay Lisbon? Three days? Wow. Okay. They have a touristic center. You go there. Largest aquarium in the world, sharks! Museum of coaches. How you say. Ehhh, cars with wood. Cowboy times? Stagecoaches, yes! You go there. Oh, Lisbon…you walk around, so much there.”
Muesli came with some tart plain yogurt. There was a miniscule container of wildflower honey tucked amid the silverware.
On the TV a woman wearing turquoise eyeshadow was reporting live in front of the Bundestag, some story involving the words “spy” and “U.S.” I sat and typed an email to Hawthorne back at the office to see where we were with the Ugandans as “Ride Like the Wind” played over loudspeakers. I rode a people-mover to my gate, where there was a stand that sold frankfurters and steins of Schultheiss. I went into the Lufthansa business lounge and there were men in three-piece suits eating gummi bears and drinking cava. I rewrote the email about the malfunction to Alan and deleted it again.
*
My panic attacks began the morning of her funeral and a month later full depression set in. Dr. Weller put me on a trial regimen. Stick to a routine. Hire a nanny. Take a leave of absence. Take flowers to the cemetery but don’t take Colin yet. Take him to the cemetery more often. Consider selling the house. So, I hired a live-in nanny, a Filipina with grown children who bleach-washed the bathrooms mid-week, neatened his trophies, tucked paired socks into the drawers—kept Colin’s room as immaculate as Monica had, always tight hospital corners on the bed.
My goal was to try not to think. When I was away, I was a good enough father through texts. I would wait to hit send once the wheels left the tarmac. I don’t know why I would procrastinate until a single column of cell signal remained. By the end of the year, though, I was taking seven pills a day just to freeze the frame of my decline. Grief can bleed you into white nothing. Colin soon became symptomatic: tying and untying his shoes three times before school, looking for dirt in the house, insisting on new toothbrushes every night, drinking from the same sippy cup.
I simultaneously heeded everyone’s advice—returned to work too soon, took Colin to the amusement park, brought him out for pizza twice a week, sang to him, administered his pills, watched him fall asleep.
When he was six I told him the partial truth.
She won’t come home. She was so very sick. She is in a better place. I never mentioned the police.
I would wake up remembering little details, like that she quit law when she sold her first piece, oil on canvas, a long-range buffalo herd gnawing the Colorado plains, or what she thought such a sight might have looked like before they were all cold-blood slaughtered. Her exact words. By then, White & Partners was more or less a success. I was half Mexican and so my complete re-enfranchisement became her cause célèbre. I had found this amusing. She was a realist without the saccharine Norman Rockwell patina, her landscapes imbued with some bitter-end prehistoric gloom. Her father disapproved—of me and the painting, precisely which was most offensive to him I was never sure. He had an ulcer and a membership at Augusta, owed his wealth to sugar beets, and once sucker punched the bartender at the Savoy for smiling at his paramour, caught him with a martini shaker to the head. The poor Serb never stood a chance, he’d say. He told that story within the first ten minutes of meeting someone, up until his second heart attack. After that he was an invalid. He and Monica were not on speaking terms since she had become a working artist. Her mother faded away in a facility in the Berkshires for schizophrenics, where she had been remanded since the eighties. We saw her twice a year until she died months before Colin was born.