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38.

Back at home, I spread the cipher pages across the top of Megan’s vanity, my father’s smudged and cramped handwriting incongruous against the creamy white paint. When I put my nose close to the paper, I thought I could catch a faint whiff of our cabin, of the woodsmoke that seeped into everything we owned. My ciphering abilities were rusty, at best—translating all these pages was going to take weeks—but it was clear even in the first few laborious minutes that I had no choice in the matter.

I bent my head and went to work.

Jane -

If you are reading this, it means that things have not gone as planned; presumably, I’m no longer with you. As much as it pains me to imagine this being the case, I take some solace in the knowledge that you will be fine on your own. I’ve been preparing you for this all your life, and I’m sure you’re ready. Your intellect and self-sufficiency are a source of great pride forme.

Judging by the questions you’ve been asking me lately, I’ve surmised that you suspect that I haven’t told you the whole truth about us. These pages are my way of remedying this. I hope that, by reading them, you will be able to step into my shoes and see how and why I made the decisions that I did. And I hope that when we find each other again—and I have faith that we will—we can move forward from a place of mutual understanding.

I have coded these pages with our cipher so that no one but you can read them; when you are done reading, burn them.

The most important thing to know is this: Everything I did was for your sake.

Love,

Your father

****

You grow up in the suburban sprawl of San Lorenzo. Your home, beige stucco, sits in a field of concrete, surrounded by homes so identical that you sometimes can’t figure out which one is your own. The garages empty out early in the mornings, as parents commute to their jobs, and fill again after dark; in the hours in between, the streets are empty except for the occasional child on a dirt bike, doing wheelies in the abandoned driveways. Just a few generations back, this land was apricot farms. Now, the only trees visible for miles are the solitary hackberries planted at precise hundred-foot intervals along the main thoroughfares.

The ocean is forty-five minutes away and the forest is ninety; you never visit either.

Your father is a floor manager at a frozen meal factory, in one of the thousands of new postwar industrial buildings that populate the eastern edges of the Bay. His extremities—fingers, nostrils, ears—are blasted by chilblains, and his demeanor is just as cold. Your mother was a secretary, once upon a time, but quit after her diabetes diagnosis. She now spends her days in her room, with the curtains drawn, watching Guiding Light and As the World Turns . She is like the figurehead on the prow of a ship, a silhouette in bed, divorced from the world that she ostensibly oversees.

You are seven years old when your father decides to teach you how to play baseball. He buys you a glove and takes you out to a field and spends an hour throwing a ball to you. You fail to catch it even once; you flinch when it comes your way; you do not understand the mechanics of the too-big glove that keeps slipping off your hand. After a while you realize that your father is not throwing the ball to you anymore, he is throwing it at you, as hard as he can. And when it finally connects with your face, and you start to cry, he walks away in disgust.

After that, you are left to your own devices. You spend most of your time at the library, since your own home doesn’t have anything to read besides your mother’s old copies of Reader’s Digest . Besides, at the library you can avoid your father, who has started drinking heavily. When he does, he isn’t cold anymore: He is hot and loud and full of disdain, calling you boring and weak, calling your mother pointless and a leech. He doesn’t hit you—he mostly hits the walls—but you’re still afraid of what he might break.

It is 1962 and you are ten years old when your teachers start to realize that you are not a normal kid. ( Normal denoting the average intellect at your school, which is populated primarily by Neolithic boys who roll cigarettes in their sleeves and torture frogs for fun.) You score 167 on an IQ test; you win the chess tournament at the San Lorenzo community center, where you are the only person under the age of twenty-six; you read Plato and solve math puzzles for fun.

Your father is summoned to a meeting with the principal—your mother, sickly, won’t attend—where it is suggested that you skip ahead a grade or two. Your father resists this idea. “He’ll get bullied for being younger than everyone else,” he informs the principal, unaware that you are, already, being bullied, not for your age but for your general disdain for the mouth breathers with whom you are forced to share a classroom. They jump you a grade anyway.

Socially ostracized, you soldier through middle school, then high school, and when college applications come around you bypass the practical suggestions of the guidance counselor—inexpensive state colleges an hour or two away, Hayward and Sacramento and San Jose—and apply to every Ivy League you know of. You get into most of them, on the merits of your perfect SAT scores and 4.2 GPA, and choose Harvard, of course.

Your parents did not go to college. They do not understand why you feel compelled to fly across the country to a school where a year’s tuition is the equivalent of your father’s entire salary. He arrives home drunk after work one night and comes up to your room, where you are studying calculus. His breath in your face smells like gasoline. “Think you’re better than me, think that reading books somehow makes you smarter, but let me tell you…” He peters out then, coughing bile, unable to finish his thought. His hand, calloused and meaty, waves uselessly in the air, his eyes are damp and red; and you wonder if he planned to hit you.

“I am better than you,” you reply.

The one thing you can say about your education at Harvard is that it is thorough. You double major in applied mathematics and engineering, and then add one more in philosophy just to prove you can. It is 1969 now and you manage to avoid Vietnam because of your college studies; instead, you somehow find yourself involved in the development of ARPAnet, the Department of Defense–funded computer network protocol that is the genesis of the internet. (No one needs you killing gooks in Southeast Asia when you could be building the future of the military.) You toil in the windowless basement of the engineering department, surrounded by humming computers the size of refrigerators, enormous air conditioners blasting to keep all those electronics from overheating. Your classmates on the project are bespectacled and pocket-protected and cerebral, and you feel like yourself in their company for the first time in your life.

Sometimes, in that freezing basement—a peacoat thrown over your button-down and tie—you think of your father in his fingerless gloves, heading off every morning to his refrigerated warehouse. His cold room, slowly killing him; yours, launching you into the future. You wonder if what you feel for him is pity; but if you are honest, you mostly feel contempt.

Inside that space, you are part of a team of peers, but outside of it you don’t fit into Harvard at all. Even with a scholarship, you can’t fully cover tuition, and you have to wait tables at one of the final clubs in order to make up the shortfall. You come to loathe the inside of those halls. The future titans of industry with their side-slicked hair and marble-mouth elocution and cashmere sweaters with moth holes, who look straight through you as they demand that you bring them polished cutlery and chilled butter. The objects they claim as their own: So many objects! Tennis rackets and silver cigarette cases and leather valises and tweed sport coats. Varsity rings studded with jewels. Sports cars with removable tops. When you look at them—you, who own almost nothing, you, who know that what is truly valuable is what is between your ears and not what is in your wallet—you see nothing but waste.

Between the hours spent in the claustrophobic computer room and the hours spent in the even more stuffy final club, you start to crave fresh air. And so, in the little free time that you have, you start hiking. First, the trails on the edge of Cambridge, heavily trafficked parks with paved paths; and then, once you buy a thirdhand Ford, the quieter forests farther out of town. A two-hour drive from campus gets you to a swath of old-growth forest, and you are soon intimately familiar with its trails. You befriend a grizzled old conservationist there, and he teaches you basic forestry and survival skills. How to identify plants. How to build a shelter. Which mushrooms make a meal; which will kill you. Something about nature—how untamed and uncontrolled and unpredictable it can be—appeals to you. It’s the antidote to the ordered precision of computers, the laddered logic of philosophy. There is no quod erat demonstrandum in the woods.

By the time you finish your master’s, you have been profiled in Harvard Magazine as a pioneer in networked computing; and you also know how to trap and skin a rabbit.

After graduation, you get work as an adjunct professor in mathematics at Boston College, a job you soon discover that you loathe: the laziness of the students, their dulled minds incapable of grasping concepts that you find so obvious, the way they flirt in class instead of paying attention to your lecture. So when your former Harvard classmate reaches out and tells you about an opening at Peninsula Research Institute, you don’t hesitate.

Soon, you are back on the West Coast, working in the heart of nascent Silicon Valley.

Your parents are less than an hour away. You do not go to see them. You have failed to impress them, and so you cannot forgive them for being so small. Your mother will die before you turn twenty-four, and you will not go to her funeral.

Peninsula is an enormous research facility, and you find yourself part of a group of researchers who are prognosticating the utility of emerging new technologies. A few miles away, in Menlo Park, the hackers and hobbyists of the Homebrew Computer Club are inventing the new personal computers—including Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s Apple’s I and II—and so your group is tasked with figuring out what these things will be good for. It is the late seventies, the computers are still massive beasts capable of very little, and yet you are able see where it is all going. You are a firm believer in Moore’s Law: the prediction that the number of transistors on a microchip will double and the cost of computers will halve every two years. And so you can see what’s coming, sooner than anyone expects: exponential growth of computer power, and an equal reduction in size. Palm-sized computers that will make humans look like morons in comparison.

Your clients are the government, military, big business. You haven’t yet learned that these are the very last organizations who should be privy to this kind of power.

You love your job. Your working group comes from all over the States, from different backgrounds, and yet there’s an unmistakable mind meld that happens when you are together: as if you yourselves are a networked computer, everyone making their own contribution to the collective wisdom. It’s wildly exciting. You are part of the elite, one of the prophets, the tiny fraction of mankind who can see not just what is obvious but what is next. Finally, you are appreciated for being special, in the way you always suspected you were.

You still spend time in the woods when you can, but—consumed by your work—you find yourself doing this less and less. You try to compensate by buying yourself a convertible, so that when you drive to work in the mornings you can smell the trees and feel the wind against your skin. You aren’t completely divorced from the natural world—not yet.

And then, a year into your new life in the Bay Area, you meet someone. She is coolly beautiful, utterly composed, with a mind as sharp and brilliant as a diamond. She rarely smiles, but when she does, you fall in love with her instantly.

Her name is Theresa.