This Eden

by Ed O’Loughlin

  I can afford that too.

  Why didn’t you tell me how much you were paying?

  It’s my money. This is my house.

  No it’s not, Alice. It’s their house – he looked at the letter again – the Mayfield Real Estate Investment Trust. They own it, not you.

  This is where I grew up.

  You said it belonged to one of your parents’ hippy friends.

  My parents were never hippies . . . She died last year, and her lawyer sold it out from underneath us.

  You should have told me that, Alice.

  She said nothing. He went on:

  We shouldn’t have stayed here, paying that kind of rent. We should have moved inland. Somewhere smaller and cheaper.

  This isn’t about money.

  He waved the letter at her.

  Of course it’s about money, Alice. It’s about the rent. And you lied to me.

  I didn’t lie to you. I told you how much rent I wanted you to pay. I never said it was half of the total. You just assumed that.

  If this house is so precious, why didn’t your parents buy it years ago?

  They don’t think that way. They left it too long, and then they found out they couldn’t afford it. Not with all the offshore money flooding into Vancouver. So I’m going to buy it for them.

  How are you going to do that? It must be worth millions.

  I’m working on a project for Inscape Technologies.

  He stared at her, incredulous.

  Inscape? You must be joking.

  I’m doing some coding for the OmniCent project. I answer directly to Campbell Fess.

  You hate Campbell Fess. You hate everything about him.

  I don’t hate his money.

  That’s what you hate most of all.

  He looked around the room, as if hoping for backup.

  Inscape . . . Jesus . . .

  He remembered the other letter.

  There’s another letter for you. Hand-delivered.

  He showed her the small, square white envelope, and her expression changed. She took it off him, ripped it open, read. He could see a few scribbled glyphs on a square of white card – numerals and letters.

  We can’t go on like this, he said.

  He had assumed, when he said it, that she’d put up a fight, that he wouldn’t have to stand there, just a guy who brought the pizza. But she was staring at the card in her hand. He tried again.

  It’s four in the afternoon and you’re ordering junk food. We never eat together anymore.

  She took the card to the chessboard. She reached out for a piece, stopped, let her hand fall to her side.

  You might at least have ordered your pizza from a different app, Alice.

  He was almost pleading now. But her face was screwed up as she stared at the chessboard. Numbly, she handed him her credit card. He took it from her, looked at it, then tossed it on the bed.

  You already paid through the app, remember? . . . Hey, are you listening to me?

  She didn’t answer. He gave people their food and then went away again. Most of them at least bothered to say thanks.

  Don’t I get a fucking tip?

  But she was looking out the window.

  I can’t take this anymore. You won’t talk to me. You avoid me. You treat me like I’m not here . . . Are you depressed, or something?

  Don’t shout at me.

  I’m not shouting.

  But he was.

  I’m asking you, she said, just leave me alone for now. We can talk later.

  Why? What’s the point of talking if you don’t tell me the truth? What do I even mean to you? Was I just another project?

  What?

  Why are we even together, Alice? Did you take me in because I look different from you? Because you wanted to prove that you think people like me belong in your country? Because you felt sorry for me?

  Now, at last, he had her attention.

  Is that really what you think of me? Is that who you think we are?

  Go fuck yourself, Alice. I’m tired of being patronised. I’m done.

  He didn’t mean it, of course, even when he said it.

  The last he saw of her, as he pedalled away, was her face at the window. He hoped that she’d be crying, and she was. But she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of watching him pretend to leave her. She was looking at the old payphone on the corner of the street.

  He worked an extra shift that night, even though it had started raining. He told himself that she would know that he didn’t really mean what he’d said. He knew she could be very literal, but she was also fair-minded: she would understand he’d had cause to be upset. They would find a way through this. He’d fired a warning shot, that’s all. It was what people did.

  When he got in, long after midnight, he thought of knocking on her door. But there was no strip of light beneath it, so he left her to sleep. Things would be better in the morning.

  The following morning, shortly after eight, two uniformed constables from Patrol District Four called at an address in Kitsilano. A young man answered the door. He was wrapped in a comforter. The police notes say that he looked tired, as if he hadn’t slept well.

  The young man confirmed that he was resident at that address and gave his name as Michael Atarian. He confirmed that an Alice Field also lived there, and was sleeping in her room.

  Constable Tyrone Chan told Mr Atarian that an unlocked mountain bike had been found that morning on the Lions Gate Bridge. It was registered with the 529 Garage as belonging to Lydia Alice Field, of that address.

  Mr Atarian said that Ms Field’s bike must have been stolen. He offered to wake her and ask her about it. The constables agreed. They watched him go down the hall and enter a room on the right. Then, without asking for permission, they came into the house and waited inside the door. They had done this sort of job before.

  The constables watched Mr Atarian come out of the first room. He was holding a credit card. He went on down the hall, checking each room in turn. The last door on the left was a bathroom. He knocked on the door, said the name Alice, waited a few moments and looked inside. Then he turned around to the constables.

  She’s not here, he told them, and sat on the floor.

  The Lions Gate suspension bridge joins central Vancouver to the North Shore and the mountains beyond. It’s a little over one mile long. Two hundred feet beneath it are the First Narrows, where the Burrard Inlet meets the Outer Harbour. The design is similar to that of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and it is likewise considered to be beautiful.

  In good weather, the traffic cameras on the bridge would show the whole sweep of its three-lane highway, as well as the pedestrian and cycle paths attached either side of it. But it was raining on the night in question, as you’d expect in Vancouver. In the footage which the cops showed to Michael, the raindrops are shooting stars, streaking white across the lenses of the cameras, burning up in the lights from the bridge. The yellow lights along the roadside, and the blue globes on the cables, grow dimmer with distance, then fade from view a hundred yards from the shore, swallowed by the fog and rain that are rolling into Burrard Inlet. The port and the city are lost in this fog. Two hundred feet under the bridge, the tide would, at the time in question, have been ebbing through the First Narrows at almost four knots.

  The southern end of Lions Gate Bridge is located in the heights of Stanley Park, a patch of coastal rainforest preserved from the encroaching city. Here, two large stone lions guard the entrance to the bridge, where the approach road curves north through the fir trees and cedars. At 3.11 a.m., a security camera at this end of the bridge sees a figure in a red hooded jacket emerging from a path in the forest, pushing a bicycle.

  A car passes, and, when it has gone, the figure crosses the road to access the pedestrian path on the seaward side
of the bridge. As the figure passes a security camera, the wind blows back its hood. The image is clear enough, despite the poor light and low resolution. At 3.13 a.m., Lydia Alice Field walked on to the Lions Gate Bridge and vanished in the rain and fog. Michael, watching the footage with the two constables, was able to confirm her identity.

  She did not reappear to any of the other cameras which cover both ends of the bridge.

  At 5.19 a.m., a police dispatcher received a call from a jogger who had found an unlocked bicycle propped against the railing, three hundred metres out from Stanley Park. Wanting to be helpful, the jogger added that he had looked over the parapet into the Narrows, two hundred feet below, but could see no sign of anyone in the water. By then she was miles away. Strait of Georgia, Salish Sea.

  There were interviews, formalities. When they were done, the police thanked Michael for his cooperation and told him they were sorry. They dropped him back to the empty house as the sun was going down. The constables waited at the curb to make sure he was OK. They noted that he stood for some time on the porch, staring at the door, before he opened it and went inside.

  Part One:

  Valley of Heart’s Delight

  Michael Atarian drove all the way from Vancouver to Palo Alto, California without stopping overnight. We know this from location data stripped from his phone. It shows several short breaks at gas stations, and a two-hour halt at a rest stop near Eugene, Oregon, that may have included a nap. It would have been hard for him to drive all that way without sleeping. He was in a bad state before he even set out, leaving right after the memorial service, though Alice’s family had asked him to stay.

  He may have been reluctant to stop, but he doesn’t seem to have been in a hurry. Instead of following Interstate 5 all the way from the border to Oakland, which would have been the quickest route from Vancouver, he turned off at Grants Pass, Oregon, and took Route 101 down the coast, passing through the Redwoods State Park. Maybe he wanted to look at the trees, but if he did, it was through the window of his moving car, the old Subaru station wagon he’d bought with Alice for trips to the mountains. He passed, again without stopping, through Eureka, Fortuna, Santa Rosa, San Rafael, skirted Sausalito, then halted at the rest stop beside San Francisco Bay.

  He stayed at this lookout for a long time, by his standards – almost an hour. There was a washroom and a store there, and he would probably have taken some time to look at the view – Alcatraz and Treasure Island, the Bay Bridge, downtown San Francisco. He was almost at the end of his journey. He needed only to get back in the car and drive across to the Presidio. This route would have taken him to Palo Alto in maybe an hour, if the traffic was good. He did have a smartphone. He could have looked this up.

  Instead, Michael doubled back, through San Rafael, then east and south and north again, all the way around San Francisco Bay, via Vallejo, Oakland, Milpitas, Sunnyvale, until he finally reached his destination, Palo Alto. He had driven five hours when one would have done.

  Why he did this, we don’t know. We don’t have the data. The old car had one of those early GPS satnavs that aren’t networked online. Alice had bought it, second hand, perhaps for that reason. It could only be hacked by manual means. Maybe Michael had bought an actual paper map in the gift shop at the lookout, and decided to follow that instead, tracing familiar-sounding place names, places that he’d heard about but had never been to. Fremont. Berkeley. Alameda. Or maybe he’d changed his mind at the last minute, decided to go back to Canada, then changed his mind again at San Rafael, tried to turn back, got lost, found himself in Oakland, then missed the Bay Bridge, and later the Dumbarton Bridge, so that he ended up blundering the long way to Palo Alto, all the way round the South Bay. Or maybe he was deliberately wandering, not using a map or the satnav, and he didn’t know how close he’d been to the end of his journey when he baulked at the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Inscape Technologies is based on the edge of Palo Alto, in a vast, tapering spiral of glass, concrete and steel. The shape of this building represents the eternal whirl of creation and destruction, the Heraclitean fire that inspires Inscape’s quest for disruption and rebirth. Or at least, that’s what it says on the corporate website. It also says that Campbell Fess, the company’s founder, visionary, CEO and largest voting shareholder, sketched the design for this building on the back of a prospectus for his first public share-offering. This is only partially true. Fess had in fact drawn an Escher staircase with a glass dome placed over it, but he couldn’t find an architect who could build it for real. The design that emerged from the subsequent compromise is shaped more like a whelk, or a coiled snake, or the sand casts that lugworms excrete on a beach. Fess named his creation The Gyre, because Ouroboros was already being used by a firm in Cupertino, and he’d got mixed up between Hopkins and Yeats. His office was up at the pointy end.

  Michael’s interview took place one floor below Fess’s office. There was only one interviewer, a senior Inscape employee whose name was Barbara Collins. The sign etched on her glass door said,

  VP: Special Projects, but Michael, who was too sleep-deprived to think straight, may have thought she was someone in human resources. Which, in a way, she was.

  Barbara Collins was a tall woman, burly but not fat, with a round, smooth face that could be mistaken for motherly. She didn’t wear make-up, and her stiff, medium-length black hair, only grey here and there, was usually tied back in a ponytail. At the time of this interview, she was fifty-three years of age, which was old for this industry, but she wore the cargo pants and varsity sweatshirt – in this case, Stanford – that could pass for its uniform.

  Barbara Collins did not go to Stanford.

  Barb Collins had a reputation for smiling at people in a way that they didn’t always like. Did Michael notice? Probably not. He was slumped in his chair, unshaven, wiped out by the drive from Vancouver. He was in the T-shirt and jeans he’d been wearing for three days. He didn’t need to put on a show for her. If he wanted the job, it was his.

  Barb Collins’s notes for Campbell Fess, attached to her covert WAV recording of the interview, say that Michael seemed dazed throughout their talk, staring past her shoulder at the Santa Cruz Mountains. Their conversation, transcribed from her recording, went as follows:

  We thought you’d be here a day ago, Mike.

  She would definitely have given the smile as she said that.

  I’m sorry. It took longer than I thought.

  I tried calling you. You didn’t pick up.

  My phone was off.

  Was it?

  She was still smiling, most likely.

  I didn’t know I was supposed to start right away. I don’t even know what you want me to do.

  Another thing that Barb Collins sometimes did was to lay her head to one side and look sincere and concerned. She would have been doing that now.

  Well, obviously, it’s because of poor Alice, Mike. Such a terrible loss . . . We’d hoped that you’d both come to Palo Alto when she moved down here full-time, but then . . . So, here you are, anyway.

  She never told me she was planning to move here. That doesn’t sound like her at all.

  I guess every home has its secrets.

  What did she do for Inscape, Ms Collins?

  Please, call me Barb . . . That doesn’t matter now, Mike. For now, we just want you to make yourself at home here.

  You know I didn’t write any of Alice’s code?

  We know that, Mike. We’ve seen your grades.

  I don’t belong here.

  Then why did you come?

  We can imagine him staring out of the window before he answers. Barb noted that he took his time.

  I had to go somewhere. And then you made me that offer. It’s a lot of money.

  You like the money, do you?

  It’s not for me . . . I need to buy Alice’s house for her family . . . It’s the only thing I can d
o for her, now . . . But I don’t think I’m the person you’re looking for. If you want to change your mind, that’s OK with me.

  In her brief for Campbell Fess, Barb Collins noted Michael’s honesty, his lack of interest in personal gain. He just wanted to buy a house for somebody else, because he figured he owed it to someone who was dead now, who would never know what he’d done. And yet this kid was willing to walk away from all the cash they were dangling in front of him. You don’t often see that, she wrote. On this kind of salary, most people would try to bluff for a few pay cycles before they were found out. He seemed to have integrity. In her view, this made Michael a risky hire. But Fess overruled her. He had other reasons for wanting Michael, but he didn’t tell Barb Collins what they were, not then. Fess always said that he liked to compartmentalise.

  Don’t worry about it, she said. We want to look after you. For Alice’s sake.

  She would have sounded sincere when she said this.

  But what do you want me for?

  We’ll get to that, Mike. Now isn’t the time. Have a rest, and look around this wonderful building. I’ll have someone show you the ropes. When you’re done here today, get yourself settled in your company house.

  I get my own house?

  Sure you do. Right here in Palo Alto. There are execs here who’d kill for the keys to that place.

  Then why am I getting it?

  We’ll get to that, Mike. When you’re ready.

  So, when I feel that I’m ready, I come and find you?

  No. When I feel you’re ready, I’ll come and find you.

  Michael’s new house was a bungalow in the Spanish colonial style, in a new subdivision on the edge of town. It had red roof tiles and cream stucco walls, and there was a shade over the driveway to protect cars from the sun. Out front, a row of newly planted oaks and magnolias, too small to cast shade, divided the lawn from the sidewalk. Inside, flies lay dead on the sills of shuttered windows. Sun slanted through a fanlight over the door.

  The front door opened directly into a lounge. Michael stood on the mat, in a haze of floating dust motes, and took in what he could see of the house. The place smelled of spiders and spores. A number of doorways gave off the lounge. At the back, a wire mesh door sieved his view of a porch. The furniture was mostly white, already sagging, made from chipboard with a plastic or wooden veneer. It was the same furniture that he thought he’d left behind with his life in Vancouver.