Monica had a vendetta against big commercial institutions. She purged the Virginia house of anything prefab, even flavored dental floss. She brought me to upstart salad chains with mission statements. She resented Starbucks—all the condescending flavor permutations—honey maples and winter mint mochas and spiced chai pumpkin, and so on. The year she died, for my thirty-seventh birthday, she bought a Breville burr grinder, eager that I dedicate myself to outperforming Big Coffee. I bought Rwandan beans online from a co-op. They came in vacuum-sealed silvery bags, hallmark sweetness and cocoa notes, none of the pitch-black aftertaste. Grind size twelve and 17.8 seconds to produce a double-shot. It took four months of trial and error to get the tamp down right—anywhere between twenty to thirty pounds of pressure, all in the wrist—any more and it’s over-extracted and tarry, any less it’s under-extracted and watery. Nothing less than 195 degrees for a good pull. The provenance of the beans, the digitally calibrated grind, human compression—there was no improvisation. Bad coffee agitated me. It was the product of human error, and it bothered me in the same way they filled the wine glass too full in bad restaurants. All avocational endeavors should be undertaken with the aim of mastery.
She had died shortly after I finally got it down, and since then every morning I used a butter knife to pry out the basket and break up the grinds with my fingers and sprinkle the grounds on random perennials, depositing the export from an impoverished nation into my yard, low-wage labor enriching the rose beds. She would have approved.
Colin and I still lived in the house, less than a mile from the CIA, where cell calls dropped at all hours without notice. We could hear the boom of jet engines echoing from the sky, flights in takeoff paths or final approaches, who knew which, just too high for contrails, and sometimes I stood at the window or the balcony and watched the red blinking wings vanish into the heights. A Baptist church stood across the street, and a bell rang on Sundays and the congregation of slacks and hats and pink dresses and little boat shoes filed in. Black crows perched on the crucifix atop the steeple every morning. I would see her painting in the backyard, the sycamores shedding their bark like English poplars do, the flaky bits nestling into the paint, and her blowing into the cobalt dollop like it was a dandelion and the bark just sinking deeper. The backyard was a total sanctuary—almost. Even with the birdsong and the vaulted trees blotting the traffic noise and the neighbors, which gave the space the feel of some distant artists’ colony, I could never forget we were less than ten miles from Washington.
Last night I came in from the balcony and went to Colin’s room to tuck him in.
“Hey,” I said, turning on the white noise machine. “Daddy is going to California tomorrow morning.”
I waited.
“It’s not even two days. You’ll be in school. You won’t even notice it.” I lifted his chin and said, “You won’t.”
He rolled over and turned away. I walked out and into the hallway, Atticus, our Maltese, in tow.
“Will you sit here with me?” he said.
Sit down with him, Mark, I heard Monica say, and I answered her back, sometimes, my lips moving.
*
Midflight, I felt faint and short of breath. I opened another button on my shirt and finished my drink and sucked the ice cubes. No one was watching. I placed the white pill beneath my tongue, chewed it down with ice. They kept their heads bowed, load-bearing fixation, sci-fi paperbacks and Sudoku pads and rainbow scatter plots and power point graphics, and I imagined their interior monologues, pieced together the unspoken commotion. There was just a collective hush and a jet-stream hum.
As the plane tilted north some of that syrupy, high-altitude light poured onto my lap.
When I opened my laptop, there were nearly a hundred unread emails. There were unread texts. “Guns, whiskey, and envelopes for at-risk Congressmen,” wrote Hank, referring to the National Rifle Association and Distilled Spirits Council, and the fundraising checks he was handing out to various chiefs of staff.
Condensation was spreading across the window. I saw what I thought was the Mississippi below. I had no written speech, only something from memory that I would unfurl at our meeting at the Four Seasons San Francisco. I looked up, put the paper down on my lap, finished the grapes, stacked the plastic cocktail cup into the Styrofoam tea cup. I pushed the call light button to order another tea and I tried not to think.
*
I figured I would do what I could with Lars and Fung. I contemplated how all of this might play out, which journalists to call for major interviews, and I devised a comprehensive mental list in under three seconds: which hypothetical piece would publish online, fungible content, how it would catalyze reprints and me-too pieces by other bloggers and print reporters who did not want to let a racing story get too far down the track without them pulling up alongside it, and all of that healthy content would surface instantaneously on Google, enliven the brand and recirculate around OneSpeak like a digital blood transfusion.
I ordered a Vodka drink and watched the ticker symbols on my seat screen march west, my shares climbing higher every forty-five seconds, and so on.
We were somewhere around Nevada, and I browsed the airline magazine, a collection of sponsored stories under three pages, all in blue-eyed prose, a Chicago steakhouse menu, poetically-named cocktails alongside an advertorial for a beige office park city in wherever North Carolina. Then I whipped up a throwaway sermon, something of a riff. We would talk to press, not avoid them. Control what was seen, a brand being just a consensus of perceptions. We would refrain from social media, for now. We would switch wardrobes. We would speak in new voices. We would instigate this metamorphosis with an in-depth feature, preferably with someone wan and bewitched by money, a tech blogger, probably.
I had this experimental idea that they could write an open letter to the investment community on Twitter. I could buy my own coffee plantation in Rwanda. The per capita income was $250 per year. The fee OneSpeak had agreed to pay my firm—$3 million just to think—would supply a year’s worth of income to 12,000 Rwandans. After overhead and taxes, given that I was the sole shareholder of White & Partners, I stood to clear $750,000 personally.
I glanced back at the advertorial. When Googled, you saw that it was really a dim pulse city along that corridor of I-95 where seventy-five is the speed limit and every mile or so ekes out new billboards for discount fireworks or cigar and perfume outlets or roadside motels with HBO for $32.50 per night. You could smell the hot tar of shredded tires in the breakdown lane, the cable technician shouting “Hello” through the screen door, and almost spot that trace of life within the mobile home, even at highway speed, hear his footsteps crunching the grass, see an old man’s face vanish from the screen door into a shadow and into a TV dinner and a flickering gameshow. The t-shirts are cardboard stiff, and you shake them out into that highway wind beneath the billboard, clothing pins twisting on the line like demonic sparrows. A mile away someone like you is pulling over at a gas station convenience store for diapers and screwcap wine, skinny latchkey kids chugging liters of Mountain Dew and smoking by the haul-away propane tanks locked up by the dumpster. Rows of household goods in bright packages, vacuum sealed bags containing things not ordinarily fried, energy drinks in violent colors. Oily men of all ages on parole, on the prowl, probation.