by A. G. Riddle
Desmond sat for a moment, considering everything Dr. Janson had said. “Okay. Let’s assume I agree with your diagnosis. How do I fix it?”
“Well, that’s a tougher question. You didn’t get this way overnight, Desmond. Nor will your condition resolve quickly. It will take time. And some faith on your part. Hope is also a powerful thing.”
He encouraged Desmond to continue taking the medication and to establish a regular schedule of two visits per week.
The gloom Desmond felt was a sharp contrast to the euphoria around Silicon Valley. A new company seemed to go public every week, minting millionaires by the hundreds. Desmond was skeptical. Warren Buffett’s adage, “When others are fearful, be greedy; when others are greedy, be fearful,” seemed like good advice in the current environment. He invested his and Peyton’s money in bonds. With a small portion of his funds, he placed bets against companies he thought were poised for a fall. Having been inside a dot-com startup, he could evaluate their technology and read through the BS in the earnings reports and press releases. He spent his days listening to quarterly investor conference calls and researching companies.
Desmond’s bets failed at first. In the fall of 1999 and early 2000, he lost nearly half a million dollars. It seemed to him like the whole world had gone crazy. In 1999, there were 457 IPOs; most were high-tech companies. Of those, 117 saw their stock prices double on the first day of trading. And the euphoria wasn’t limited to new companies. On November 25, 1998, Books-A-Million announced an update to their website. Their stock increased over one thousand percent that week.
Some companies were using their stock to snap up every hot startup they could. Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5.9 billion in stock and GeoCities for $3.57 billion in stock. A Spanish telecom company acquired Lycos for $12.5 billion (a few years later, they would unload it for less than $96 million—a loss of over 99% of their investment). In January of 2000, AOL bought TimeWarner in the second-largest merger in history. During the Super Bowl that month, sixteen dot-com companies ran ads. They cost two million dollars each.
The stock market soared. And crashed, in March of 2000, with stocks falling as hard as they had risen. Over the next two and half years, stocks shed over five trillion dollars in value. People flocked to bonds, and Desmond’s bearish wagers paid off. Their nine-million-dollar fortune was nineteen at the end of 2000, fifteen after taxes. He played it safe after that, diversifying and buying only a few high-quality stocks.
Every week Desmond heard about another one of his friends who had lost their job or seen their company collapse. He felt for them. The memory of xTV’s sudden collapse and his days of pork and beans in the months after were still fresh in his mind. He did the only thing he could: he took folks out to lunch, always picked up the tab, and tried to connect people with jobs when he heard about them. Their stories were horrifying.
The layoffs were nerve-wracking affairs. Large groups would be led into conference rooms and told they were being let go; consultants handed out packets with details. In some cases, the consultants even surprised the HR people conducting the layoffs by handing them a folder with their walking papers too, right after the dismissals of everyone else.
The coffee shops that had teemed with bright-eyed entrepreneurs with the next big idea, written out on a napkin, were now packed with people working on their resumes, which they tweaked and proofread and scrutinized before printing them on thick paper stock so they would stand out. Startup execs who had been worth millions on paper found themselves broke, moving back in with their parents or in-laws. Many employees whose companies had gone public never made it past the lockup period to sell any of their shares before their companies folded.
Desmond watched it all in disbelief; it seemed the world had only two extremes: charging up the hill wide open, or free falling over a cliff.
He was in his own kind of free fall. Every month he grew less optimistic about his prognosis. The medication helped. So did the sessions with Dr. Jansen. But Desmond had plateaued. He wasn’t making any real progress.
Peyton was. He watched as she changed, little by little. She took pride in her schoolwork, was near the top of her class. She was blossoming, becoming an incredible woman. She was ready for something more. That worried him. He wondered if he could ever be the man she deserved.
Christmas 2000 came and went; they had a little tree in the home in Palo Alto Hills and kept up their tradition of ten dollars or less in gifts. Peyton cheated though: hers was a box with a model airplane inside.
“It’s great.”
“The airplane’s not the gift, Des.” She grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “Let’s go on a trip—back to Australia, to where you were born. Visit the remains of the home. Go to Oklahoma, where you grew up.”
He knew what she wanted: for him to visit the places that had caused him so much pain and somehow come to grips with what had happened and move on.
He agreed. He was desperate enough to try anything.
In Australia, he walked across the paddocks where he’d once played. He visited the thicket where he’d built the fort that day, even straightened the overturned rocks he’d set down eighteen years ago. The house was still there, or at least its burned remains. He stood in the yard, inside the fence, where he’d rushed into the fire. There was no breakthrough. He didn’t cry. He felt only sadness.
They stayed in a hotel in Adelaide for a week while he tried to find Charlotte. But since Desmond didn’t know her last name, it was impossible to find her. Over a hundred thousand people had been part of the relief efforts in the wake of the 1983 bushfires. And it had been almost eighteen years; she might have left the area, or left Australia altogether.
In Oklahoma City, they rented a car and drove south, through Norman, then Noble, and finally onto Slaughterville Road.
He pulled off at the home where he’d grown up. Orville’s home. It had been part of a farm once, but the farmland had been sold, maybe by Orville himself or someone who’d owned it before him.
The new owners had painted the home and put on a new roof. The asphalt shingles sparkled in the clear April day. A Chevy truck and a Ford sedan sat under a newly erected metal carport. A red Huffy bike sat on the front porch. It was about the size of the one Desmond had bought at the pawnshop—the bike Orville had threatened to take away.
The shed stood open. The old Studebaker was gone. Desmond’s eyes lingered on the patch of ground where Dale Epply had bled to death while he held the lawnmower blade.
Peyton put an arm around him.
“You want to go in?”
“No. I’ve seen enough.”
They drove past the grocery store that had sustained him, up Highway 77 into Noble. The small town hadn’t changed much. They ate at a small cafe on Third Street and walked the three blocks to the library.
A girl a few years younger than Desmond sat behind the counter, a mechanical pencil in her hand, a large book open in front of her. Another University of Oklahoma student, if he had to guess.
“Help you?” she asked.
“Nah. Just looking.”
He walked down the fiction aisle, Peyton close behind him. He spotted a few of the paperbacks he’d read as a kid: Island of the Blue Dolphins, Hatchet, Hyperion. He could even remember where he was when he read them.
The place had barely changed. The only addition was a wooden study carrel in one corner. It held a Gateway computer with a seventeen-inch monitor. A plaque on the top of the carrel read, Pioneer Library System Technology Center Provided in Loving Memory of Agnes T. Andrews.
It was the best thing he’d ever read in that library.
He took Peyton’s hand.
“Let’s go home.”
Chapter 74
In the plane’s cockpit, Avery stared in disbelief. Spain was dark except for a few glimmering lights in what she thought was Barcelona. They’d launched no fighters to pursue the Red Cross plane. Air traffic control hadn’t even engaged her. She wondered what was going on down t
here and how many people were left.
On the navigation screen their destination loomed: the Shetland Islands, north of Scotland. She’d never heard of the place. She wondered what they’d find there, at the GPS coordinates Desmond had provided. On the satellite map, there was only a forest. Was it a trap? Avery feared that it was. But she had no choice.
She engaged the autopilot, stood, stretched her legs, and walked back into the passenger compartment. Desmond and Peyton lay in sleeping bags, both facing forward, Peyton tucked into Desmond like a little spoon.
Avery leaned against the door frame and stared. She’d have to make a decision soon. A hard one.
On September the eleventh, 2001, Desmond sat in the light-filled living room in Palo Alto, Peyton at his side, both staring in disbelief. The news channel showed a live view of Manhattan. The people in the buildings were burning alive, just as Desmond’s family had on that day in 1983. This tragedy, however, wasn’t a natural disaster. It was an act of humankind—the worst kind of evil. The sickening, cruel slaughter of innocents.
“Something is very wrong with this world,” Desmond said.
“I couldn’t agree more.”
The US stock market stayed closed until September seventeenth—the longest closing since 1933, during the Great Depression. When it reopened, stocks tanked. The market fell 684 points—the largest single-day decline in history. By the end of the week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down over fourteen percent. The S&P lost almost twelve percent. Nearly 1.4 trillion dollars in market value was lost in that week alone.
While others were dumping American stocks, Desmond was buying. He returned to his criteria for identifying a successful company: a founder who instinctively knew what his customers wanted, and a tightly managed operation. He loaded up on stock in Amazon and Apple.
On the news every night, he watched sabers rattle and the world go to war. He was mad as hell too. He even considered applying at the NSA or CIA. But he barely had the energy to get out of bed. He seemed to get worse every month.
Peyton saw it—was worried about it.
“What if you start your own company?”
“Doing what? Why? There’s no point. I have no ideas. No drive to do it.”
“You could start a nonprofit. Child welfare. Find something you care about and go for it.”
He thought about it for a few weeks, researched it, and began volunteering at a group home in San Jose.
That helped him pass the time, but it wasn’t enough. Deep down, he knew the truth: he was never going to change. He would never be able to love Peyton the way she loved him—with reckless abandon. It wasn’t fair to her. She deserved more.
In the summer of 2002, he sat in Dr. Janson’s office.
“This isn’t working.”
“It takes time, Desmond.”
“I’ve given it time. I’ve been coming here for over two years now. I’ve tried medication, exercise, volunteering. Hell, we even retraced the tragic events of my childhood. I’m not getting better. I don’t feel any better than I did the day I walked in here.”
“Please realize that every person has emotional limits. Your… range may simply be very confined. It’s also possible that two years isn’t enough time.”
“You want to know what I actually do feel?”
Janson raised his eyebrows.
“Guilt.”
The man looked confused.
“I feel guilty because I know she’ll never leave me. And I’ll never make her as happy as she deserves to be.”
That afternoon, Desmond packed his things. The gifts from Peyton he placed very carefully in a large trunk. He scanned all their pictures, printed copies of them, and returned them to their frames. He waited in the living room, and when she got home, they sat on the couch, feet from each other, her nervous, clearly aware something was very wrong. He said the lines he’d rehearsed a dozen times.
“I have this vision of you in a few years. It’s summer. You’re sitting on your back porch, drinking a glass of wine while the kids play in the yard. Your husband is manning the grill. And he’s playing in the back yard with the kids, and he knows exactly what to do, because he played in his back yard as a kid with his dad, who loved him. You all eat together, and he knows exactly how to treat you because he grew up with an actual mom and dad and they treated each other right. He reads a story to the kids before he puts them to bed, because his parents did that for him. When they act up, he knows what to do by instinct, not because he read it in a book, but because it’s how he was raised, in a normal home. And he loves you. And them. Because he’s able to love, because he hasn’t drifted from one tragedy to the next in the years before he met you. Your life isn’t perfect, but it has a real chance to be, because one of you isn’t broken beyond repair.”
“Desmond, I don’t care—”
“I know you don’t. I know that you will stay with me wherever our road leads.”
“I will.”
“But I won’t let you.”
“Desmond.”
“I care too much about you, Peyton. You deserve to be happy.”
“I am happy.”
“Not as happy as you will be.”
She hugged him and cried more than he’d ever seen her cry.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Please stay.”
“I’ll stay the night.”
She looked him in the eye. “Stay until Monday. Please?”
He agreed. They were the most agonizing and joyous three days of his entire life. They made love every night. And twice each day. It was a long goodbye. It was painful—even he felt it. He couldn’t imagine what she was going through.
When he stepped out on the front porch Monday morning, she hugged him so hard he thought his ribs would collapse.
He pushed back just enough to look her in the eye.
“Will you do something for me?”
“Anything.”
“Don’t wait for me. Live your life.”
That set off a new bout of crying.
An hour later, he was driving south, the Airstream trailer in tow behind him.
He camped in Yosemite National Park, then Sequoia, and hiked through Death Valley. He read at night. And he thought long and hard about his next move. Each day, the solution became clearer. If he couldn’t save himself, he would save others. That was a goal he could get excited about. That was worth living for. Before, his idea of setting up a nonprofit or focusing on child welfare had been the right idea—but on the wrong scale. He wanted to do something big. He wanted to change the world—to help create a world where no one grew up the way he had.
He set up shop on Sand Hill Road. Rents there had once been the most expensive in the world. Now the former offices of a dozen recently closed venture capital firms sat empty. They were all decorated lavishly. Desmond negotiated as hard as he had with the pawnbroker for the bike so many years ago. He moved in the following week and began making calls, putting the word out that he had a new investment firm with a new focus. Thanks to the soaring stock market, he had eighty million dollars to spend. Capital was in short supply in the Valley. His inbox filled. The phone rang off the hook. But nothing was quite what he was looking for.
He named his firm Icarus Capital. In Greek mythology, Icarus was the son of Daedalus, the craftsman who built the Labyrinth. In order to escape the island of Crete, Daedalus created wings of feathers and wax for his son. He warned Icarus: If you fly too high, the sun will melt your wings. If you fly too low, the sea’s dampness will weigh you down. The story rang true to Desmond. The market’s exuberance and implosion were in league with the allegory of Icarus, but so was life. People who flew too high—who lived beyond their means and ability—were bound for failure. As were those who never took a chance.
Despite his belief that his emotional growth had plateaued indefinitely, Desmond interviewed several psychotherapists. One suggested he talk to a firm that was developing a novel therapy. It was experiment
al, he said, but worth checking out. The company was called Rapture Therapeutics.
Desmond was stunned when he heard the name. He still remembered it from SciNet; it was one of the three mysterious companies that had been funded by Citium Holdings and Invisible Sun Securities.
A week later, he sat in Rapture’s office in San Francisco. The company’s chief scientist held up a pill.
“This is a fifty-milligram antidepressant. You and I could both take the same fifty-milligram pill, and you might have four times the physiological reaction that I do. What’s the difference? It’s the way your body metabolizes the drug. How it processes it. For doctors, and for patients, that’s a problem.”
“What’s the solution?”
“Bypassing medicine altogether. At Rapture, we’ve built an implant that’s placed inside the brain. It monitors brain chemistry and releases chemicals the brain needs—when it needs them. Imagine a world without schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or depression—just to name a few. The market potential is nearly unlimited.”
“I’m interested. I’ve tried medication, but it hasn’t worked for me. What I’m most interested in is memory alteration.”
The scientist scrutinized him. “What do you mean?”
“I’m interested in erasing painful memories. Starting over, if you will.”
A pause.
“We don’t currently have a technology or procedure to do that, Mr. Hughes.”
“But you’re working on something.”
“Nothing we’re ready to discuss at this time.”
