It was late Saturday morning when I got a call from my friend to meet on the avenue for lunch. Jaime gave me the full update on the project, the latest shenanigans and said he was finally getting his break. He already had his ticket and to board a cruise liner at a pier in San Francisco Sunday morning. He wasn’t even taking his cell phone, as he was sure it would be beeping with texts and calls and ruin his vacation. After lunch, he asked me to tag along and see his lab. Now that it was empty he could show it to me. He knew I was curious and as an excuse he said he left a few personal items he wanted to retrieve. No one would be there. He could now give me the tour of the place he’d been talking about for a year. I readily agreed.
I followed his car up the hills to what looked like an office space in front of a much larger cement structure with very few windows. That building had a fence around it and a manned security post. What looked like offices turned out to be one long, open laboratory with two counters running down the middle with sinks and empty stands, reminding me a bit of my high school chemistry class. Along each side were booths with desks and one small office where Jaime went to clean out several drawers of papers and desk paraphernalia, cramming them into a small knapsack he’d brought along. Then we went to the far end to a row of lockers where he collected two sweaters, a baseball cap, a coat and an old pair of shoes. These wouldn’t fit in the knapsack, so we walked the length of the lab again, looking for a garbage bag to carry these items. I lagged behind in silence, wondering what sort of equipment must have filled these counters when the lab was in business. He looked back and must have guessed what I was thinking as he said: "Ya, it was quite the sight yesterday morning, electron microscopes, centrifuges, test tubes, boiling flasks everywhere. It took thirty of us all day to move it out."
There was one piece of equipment still there. It was bright metal, the size of a large packing trunk and on some sort of special tabletop with layers of thick steel sheets and foam bolted together, looking very heavy and solid. Jaime spoke up again: "They couldn’t take that out in one day. There’s probably a thousand bolts to it. It’s our interferometer. We use it to measure the exact number and density of nanochips on our wafers. The slightest vibration can throw the laser measurements off by a mile, thus the table."
"Oh shit, why didn’t I think of it?" He walked up to the machine and began sliding levers and opening portals, one after another, until his arm went deep inside the guts of the unit and he pulled out two glass slides with what looked like twelve little pieces of slightly rosy plastic chips wedged between them, in neat rows of six, each about a centimeter square.
‘These are the control wafers. The machine goes out of calibration so often we have to keep checking it against a norm and these are it, our standard wafer, one hundred thousand Nanocomputers in perfect arrays, not programmed yet, except for operating systems."
"Shit, I can’t leave these here and no one’s next door."
He paused for a minute, deep in thought. "Hey Roland, remember that fancy safe you showed me in your father’s study, can you keep these there till I get back? I’m not going to delay my vacation two days over this. They’re valuable to us but there’s no data on them, so I suppose they’re harmless."
"I guess I could" I said. "Are they fragile?"
"No, not at all." As he said this, he unceremoniously pulled the two glass plates apart, dumped the chips on the table and whisked them with one hand into a paper envelope from his knapsack. He folded it twice and handed it to me.
"They’re tough as nails. It would take a hammer to damage one, and they’re waterproof also. It’s a plastic gel they’re minted on. Only stomach acids melt them. But they belong in a safe, so take care of them. It took one of us a month at the microscope on each one to make sure all the arrays and the counts were perfect."
‘So why did you need twelve?’
"Oh, overkill I suppose. We could have used just six, or even two. It’s a double blind test. The machine randomly picks one to see if the test chip is on the money and it does this every few tests so we know we’re good."
"I’ll lock them up as soon as I get home."
"Thanks, old pal," he said.
"Have a nice trip," I yelled out as he drove away.
The next few days were as uneventful as was most of my life. I’d deposited the envelope in the safe and with the closing of that door put the matter fairly out of mind. On Monday I had a brief talk with Naomi in the garden. She’d been feeling ill the last few weeks and I told her to see a doctor and if there were any costs involved I’d gladly pay the bills. When she returned Wednesday morning she looked even worse, pale, sunken eyes, a faint and tremulous voice. She still hadn’t seen a doctor and I told her to go immediately to the hospital which she assured me she would do, insisting she would drive herself. Wednesday was the day I paid her the weekly wages, so I went to the wall safe and took out a triple amount of money in case there were any immediate charges for the care she might need. While doing this I also took out the envelope and set it on my desk, forgetting to put it back in as I was so concerned with her sadly altered appearance. She thanked me with a weak hug as she left. I told her to call with any news as soon as she heard. With so few friends as I had in the world, the thought of losing one was terrifying.
That afternoon I think I passed the most melancholy hours of my entire existence. The fact that it was dark and raining outside only amplified it. I went back to my desk in the study, flopped on the chair and continued the sad train of thought of losing a friend, and why I had so few at this young stage of life, and the prospect of having even fewer as time went on. A strong feeling of loneliness and failure enveloped me.
To escape this gloom I reviewed my past with the slim hope of seeing my mistakes and correcting them. Here I was, twenty-seven, a recluse cooped up in this house with these books, my only interests. But it wasn’t always this way. In my first year at university I was popular and had many friends. Everyone on my dorm floor was a friend, party central, smoking pot every night and dropping acid every few weeks. In my second year, moving into an apartment on my own the social life slowed down to weekend events, only Jaime visiting more often. Three years later most of my college friends were gone, off to different graduate schools or jobs in faraway cities.
So much for my buddies. My history with women was even more brief. I’d had sex exactly twice in my life. The first time was during my second year at university, after a party, very drunk, with a girl equally so, an Irish girl in the math department with bright, long red hair. She was on some scholarship here from Dublin with a heavy brogue that intrigued me. She was at my friend Ron’s pad just a few blocks from where I lived, at a small gathering with about ten others on a Friday night. She was drinking straight whiskey from a tall glass, with just a few ice cubes floating on top to dilute it, sitting on the hardwood floor in a colorful plaid skirt, leaning against the side of his filled couch. I sat beside her, and we fell into a long and wild conversation on philosophy. Each time she got up to refill her glass I felt compelled by some stupid macho rule to get up and drink the same.
Before midnight we both needed air, and outside Ron’s apartment we decided to walk arm in arm over to mine, as she was far too drunk to drive home. Inside we quickly tore each other’s clothes off, had sex and passed out. In the morning as I was waking up, she was already dressing and with a quick kiss goodbye she was gone, not even leaving her number. So that was that.
The other episode, (I sound like I’m describing an epilepsy attack) was two years later and just a little more romantic. It ended just as abruptly, by a twist of fate. Her name was Jane. For several years she’d been in several of my courses in the Classics department. As there weren’t many students studying Virgil and Euripides these days we often ended up sitting next to each other in small classes and a relationship of sorts developed, sharing notes and light chit chat and mutual groans and laughs at the oddities of certain professors.
I sometimes wondered about asking her out on a date but I was shy, and it didn’t happen. She did sometimes visit my dreams though. She was very pretty, slender and tall, with an angular face and straight, light, brown hair and green eyes. Her voice and mannerisms were familiar and dear to me, and she was often the foil of my imaginary conversations.
On a rainy, winter night, a school night, I was sitting alone at a table in a popular, basement Italian restaurant just blocks from campus on Telegraph Avenue, about to order dinner. Suddenly I see Jane come down the stairs, drenched, and sit at the bar, more to get out of the downpour than anything else. But after a minute, drink in hand, she notices me and comes over to my table. There she sits, and we enjoy a long and most delightful dinner, full of conversation on a myriad of topics with glass after glass of wine and mellifluous talk about our lives, our hopes, our futures.
We were both too flush with happiness to end it with a check. So we transported our conversation to my place where the talk and the wine continued to flow, late into the night. After that we made love and it was beautiful. Later that week she received a call from L.A. Her father had had a stroke and she needed to get back, right away, and she did. I received one final call from her a week later saying she was pulling out of school to be a caretaker for her father, who was in bad shape. Once again I lost my slender grip and fell from the cliff, Palinurus like, not into the sea but into a deeper pool of books and facelessness.
So much for women. I thought again about my old dorm pals. First and foremost, Rich came to mind, magnificent, glorious in his disintegration. He lived at the very end of the hall and took partying to a far higher plane than anyone of us could have imagined. He drank beer constantly and dropped acid on a weekly basis, in far higher quantities than we would even dare. I was drawn to him like a moth to light and prided myself if I could do one-half of what he did. So he befriended me, as an acolyte of sorts. He’d bought a shaggy, dark carpet for his tiled floor and a coffee table around which we would sit on a Saturday night, roll joints and carve up windowpane acid. It was so strong that a single pane was a four-way hit and you needed an Exacto knife to cut it twice. But its nature, being a piece of cellulose on a glass table top was to sometimes tiddly wink the piece cut into the carpet where it was so small it was lost forever. The acid was cheap, five dollars a pane, so we just laughed and shrugged it off whenever this happened.
One Sunday, from a street fair, he brought back to his room a picture of a beautiful, half-naked female warrior, in caveman furs, brandishing a spear on a mountaintop at some unknown assailant. I think it was Raquel Welch. It was all in black and purple, and he didn’t know that it was a black light poster from the seventies. I told him so when I saw it and that if he bought a black light, it would glow for us in hidden splendor. He purchased one on Amazon that night and when it arrived he set it up, turned off the lights, and the picture glowed luminescent. He invited several of us into the room to admire it. As we sat there, drinking beer, I noticed a small shimmering speck of light in the carpet. I pointed this out to Rich and we noticed several more. It was the glimmer of our lost acid tabs. Apparently, they too were fluorescent and all our lost pieces, like lost sheep, were discovered anew. We were all on our hands and knees in a second, collecting them like excited children finding Easter eggs. We each ate a piece of our recovered fortune and enjoyed a long and boisterous night of laughter.
Such were my glory days and now they seemed long gone. I was having one of those rare moments of clarity, where I saw my life clearly, as in a mirror, the lonely path I was on and how far down it I’d gone, the years wasted, irretrievable, and how now it seemed too late to turn around or change, how completely lost I was to the world and all hope for myself.
It was a sort of negligence that was my greatest fault. I never cultivated friendships. Except for two people I hardly thought or cared for others. I never called anyone or looked for company. I was never the first to say ‘hello’ to anyone. And this branded me a loner, self-imposed, self-inflicted, stuck in this house, cheerless, unhappy.
I noticed the envelope on the desk before me. I opened it up carefully and took out one of the wafers, holding it up between two fingers to the light, admiring its rosy hue. I was amazed at how closely it resembled our old acid tabs, only slightly larger. I thought of Rich again. I put the tab squarely on my tongue and swallowed.
