Chapter 2

I was a model, small time, back in the day. Started when I was around 7, back in 1991. Just local stuff, nothing very glamorous. Print ads for swim and resort wear for Caslon and Topshop. What passed for trunk shows at middle class department stores like Macy’s and the more upscale Hall’s.

Then at 10 my boobs started coming in and that complicated things. I was enormously pleased but, for some reason ad agencies and clients were reluctant to showcase an underaged sexpot. Lolita Discrimination, if you ask me.

But when I turned 15, I got some callbacks. I was tall enough to carry off my largish boobs and my corn-fed, blonde looks were a fit for the Midwestern demographic that the retailers were targeting.

Walker found some old scrapbooks when he was 8 or 9. Print ads, flyers, mini-catalogs ... all just local stuff. He was startled, he’d never thought of his mother as anything but Mom. Then, a year or so later, after he’d decided my body was intriguing, he returned to those old images with a different perspective.

(My attitude has long been that I’m no PTA mom, so I won’t apologize for a little frisson of enjoyment that Walker masturbated to me. And if I were a PTA mom, I still wouldn’t apologize. So there.)

Vanessa, with her classic Slavic beauty, is enjoying some time in the sun. Her restaurant, Euforia, is doing two turns a night. And she’s thinking of starting a lunch service. She’s flirting with a Euforia catering spinoff featuring that micro-regional cooking from Italy.

The local NPR station interviewed her a couple of times and that led to three appearances on PBS. She’s been courted to start a weekly podcast and even to live-stream from Euforia.

No question that it helps that she is so gorgeous. The camera loves her too. Whoever claimed that life is fair? The rich get richer and the beautiful ... well, she deserves every good thing happening to her.

“Yesterday is dead and gone And tomorrow’s out of sight And it’s sad to be alone Help me make it through the night.”

Robert ‘Bobsy’ Atwater explained things to me slowly. He’s a brilliant kid, in science-techie ways, but also perceptive. He understood I was dumb. Not IQ dumb, I’m pretty okay there. But ignorant in his genius slice of life. Almost everyone in the world would be compared to Bobsy.

“Okay, take Calico for example. Google started it a few years ago. Actually, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, did. Calico is still very hush-hush. R & D, but very few details leak out. I’ve tried to hack my way in, a lot of us have. No go.”

Bobsy was tall, around six feet three or four, soft body, thick glasses, prominent Adams apple. Skinny, shy, awkward. Trying not to stare at my braless boobs.

Bulldog had left us to go do Bulldog business after the introductions. He told me, “I know Bobsy’s grandfather. Good man.”

“Ah.”

He looked at Bobsy, “Pay Winter $1,500 a day. Plus expenses. First class.”

Bobsy looked startled. I would guess that he hadn’t even thought of compensation, didn’t in fact, think of many things that we non-genius folks do. He nodded briskly, pretending that he was merely agreeing to something that he’d already given serious consideration to.

I smiled inwardly, Walker still does the same thing from time to time. And still believes it fools Vanessa and me. Maybe it’s a boy thing.

And even though Bobsy is 23, I think of him as a boy. Unformed, living in an adult world. Prospering in a digital age because he was so fucking smart. Otherwise he’d be bagging groceries.

No one had taught Bobsy how to dress. New white sneakers with brown socks. Brown socks! Mom jeans, loose, that were too short. A white short-sleeved dress shirt, an oxymoron if there ever were one.

Poor guy, male pattern baldness already starting to stake out its claim. And those big, round eyeglasses. Pin a kick-me sign on the poor doofus.

Except this particular specimen was worth oh, about ... what’s bigger than a zillion?

Bobsy seemed to relax a little once Bulldog left. Mr. Bannerman can have that effect on people. Or maybe it was a generational thing. Bulldog and Bobsy’s grandfather would be contemporaries.

In any case, Bobsy seemed more at ease as he rechecked to make sure my boobs were still here. Which pleased me in a juvenile, non-professional way.

I half-listened to his explanation of why Calico was so difficult to hack. “The Pentagon’s easier.” The half that I did hear was twice as much as I wanted to know. And far more than I understood.

I held my hand up, palm out. Bobsy clamped his mouth shut. Good. I slid a standard contractual agreement, the $1,500 per day newly inserted, across my desk and handed him a pen.

He turned to the second page and signed it. Without having read a word. I showed him where to initial in three places. Done, done and done.

I sat back, more ready to listen now that the clock was officially ticking.

Bobsy: “It sounds crazy, but they’re looking for magic out there. Black Magic, you ask me.”

“How so?”

“Eternal life. Shorthand, the God Pill.”

“Well, I’d like to live longer. I mean, the usual caveats applying.”

“Would you take a God Pill if humans had been sacrificed to make it?”

Interesting question, really. When you think about it. I mean if the sacrifice part is already over and the pill is available ... well, slippery slope and all that.

“Sacrifice. Really?”

Bobsy sputtered on for a few moments, it was like listening to someone speaking in Scientific Tongues. I heard a couple of things I could understand, ‘rumors’ and ‘might be true.’ Followed by more Tongues. This time I was able to decipher ‘billionaires’ and ‘genius scientists.’

“Genius how?”

“Like they don’t make charts to measure those guys.” Then more Tongues, something about a lab in Fremont with ‘single gene mutation’ and ‘a worm’s genome’ followed by ‘modulated life span.’ The lab is Nelson-Eamons.

“They paid Hayes-Harris a fortune to access my corpus callosum patent.”

I would later learn that nerdy little Bobsy Atwater had earned $3.6 million for that particular privilege. Fucker. Nerdy fucker.

“Nelson-Eamons went on a hiring binge, top-drawer scientists, genetic engineers, research, security.”

He smiled, “They are also ruthless. They make examples of a few people. Just to show how serious they are.”

Broader smile. “They seem proud of the fear they instilled. Of course that means that even more people want to work there. Something is going on.”

The 23-year old frowned. At least I think it was a frown, hard to tell with his unformed features, “And then Nelson-Eamon went silent. Turned me away when I went back to their lab.”

As Bobsy grew more agitated, he talked faster, his voice going into High Whine, the sentences surging deeper into Tongues. But English occasionally seeped out, “So I asked my grandfather. He introduced me to Bulldog.”

Then Babble Tower time again ... bundles of nerve fibers, something called Singularity, connecting brain hemispheres, new neurons in the hippocampus...

I held up both palms. “Bobsy, I don’t understand 95% of what you’re saying. But that’s okay, I can find a translator. Nod if I have this part right -- Silicon Valley rich guys may be paying for illegal human experimentation. To extend life - their own lives eventually. And they may be using one of your patents in the process.”

He nodded, annoyed that he was spending time down at this level. But, as I was to learn, the connection between his grandfather and Bulldog Bannerman was enough to encourage him to put up with me.

“Have you gone to the police?”

He stared at me and laughed. “They couldn’t understand what they’re looking for. Couldn’t get a warrant. Couldn’t write a warrant. Not that any court could understand.”

“I’ll go to California on Monday.”

He nodded, still a little annoyed to be dealing with someone so slow, but a little mollified now that he had set something in motion. Me being the something.

Bobsy rambled on; the denser the subject became, the more he relaxed. Comfortable in his own comfort zone. I caught an occasional word or phrase.

I said, “Wait. What do you mean, cellular memory?”

He brightened. The dull student had asked the visiting professor a reasonable question. “Who says memory has to be located in the brain?”

“Huh?” Where the fuck else would it be? Big toe?

He smiled, “The immune system remembers.”

“Hmm.”

“Worms. Take worms. Worms that have been fed parts of other worms take on some of their characteristics.”

Oh good. Cannibalism.

Bobsy said, “So why can’t ... say, a kidney transplant result in acquired memories? Of course that’s just scratching the surface.”

“Of course.”

He switched topics. Or did he? “Nelson may be doing some sort of mind meld.”

Over time, I would record these rumors, suspicions, half-overheard snippets, that swirled around and about Nelson-Eamons. I began to think of them as Half Nelsons. So my mind colors outside the lines. Half Nelsons.

Pilar had shot a video of Vanessa and me dancing at her mother’s wedding party. We hadn’t noticed her so were completely surprised when she showed us the YouTube link.

We danced to In da Club -- 50 Cent -- and the hip hop beat had felt just right that festive night.

But Pilar’s editing lifted the tape to another level. Freeze-frame, cross-cutting, racking focus, whip pans, dissolves, closeups. Fast-cutting, motion blurs, then streams of stills with Vanessa and me frozen in motion for a second at a time.

All in tune, all in a precisely timed format that looked professionally done.

That little girl is something.

Vanessa’s silky, slinky, green dress flared up from time to time and her matching thong was visible in quick flashes.

That big girl is something.

I may fly Walker out to the Bay Area. He hasn’t been in California since he was too young to remember. I wouldn’t charge Bobsy Atwater, although he could not only afford it, but probably wouldn’t even notice it.

Ah, Bobsy. I’d been wrong about his never-been-kissed vibe. He lives with a 47-year old woman, Bunny Carville. She seems nice. Rather plain looking, not unpleasantly so. Seems fond of her little boyfriend. And makes no attempt to disguise the fact that she’s fucking Bobsy day and night.

Bunny knows more about tech than I do, but she’s not in the field. Associate professor of European History at the College of San Mateo, located, logically enough, where it says it is. A community college, but not everyone can teach at Stanford.

Where I’ll be meeting Mindy Montgomery to take her out to dinner. We both have a little fence-mending to do. With each other. She left Walker to attend Stanford, a move I not only understood, but fully endorsed. Almost fully.

She came back for a Thanksgiving visit with us. Just one day, the Wednesday before the holiday. Then it was on to New York to stay with Rebecca and Phillip.

She had called me, showing the proper courtesy, to ask if she’d be welcome. Having, if not dumped my son, at least left him. I told her, “You’ll always be welcome here, Mindy. Always. But Walker and Pilar ... they’re getting a little serious about each other.”

I knew, through her mother, that Mindy was dating two guys at college. No surprise there. What was surprising was that Mindy hadn’t taken my Pilar news seriously. Which was partly understandable given Pilar’s age.

Mindy wasn’t pissed, not exactly, when Walker pulled down one of our Murphy beds for her to sleep in. But she hadn’t really processed my Pilar comments and had expected to sleep with Walker.

Breeding tells. Mindy disguised her annoyance fairly well. Although Pilar and I caught it.

I drove her to the airport Thanksgiving morning and she ticked me off, just a little. “He shouldn’t be fucking her, Winter. God, she’s so young.”

I bit back my response, something I should do more often. I didn’t tell her they weren’t fucking because that wasn’t really the issue. Walker had moved on and Mindy hadn’t been expecting it. Plus, Pilar would be fucking my son. Sooner or later.

It hadn’t been a holiday argument, just an out of joint conversation. Mindy still loved us, and we reciprocated. It was just things were different now, had to be different with the two lovebirds, former lovebirds, separated by almost 2,000 miles.

And, despite my misgivings about Pilar’s age, I was glad she and Walker were an item. Healthier for him. Good to transition away from Mindy.

Rebecca called me a couple of days later to tell me not to worry about Mindy. Classy lady. She said, “Mindy will get over it, it’s a good wake-up call. The world doesn’t revolve around her.”

Well, I’ll see Mindy in a couple of days. Tonight I’m dining with Bobsy and Bunny. At her San Mateo apartment. Where Bobsy lives. He’d been living in the Four Seasons Hotel in East Palo Alto. Buying a house or an apartment apparently hadn’t occurred to him.