Intrigued, Gregory took the joint and inhaled a vapor so noxious that his affronted lungs ejected it in an explosion of coughing. “You paid for this?” he gasped, wiping his eyes.
“It’s harsh,” Athena conceded. “But wait for the high. It’s… effortless. Cordial. Like ripe peaches.”
Ripe peaches brought to mind Athena’s magenta talons pressing the skin of a peach almost to the point of bursting it, releasing the juice, but not quite. She passed him the joint again, and Gregory’s lungs grudgingly accepted a small hit.
“Did your dad record himself? At the end?” Athena asked.
Not the topic he was hoping for. “Of course.”
Thousands of people had uploaded （and, more recently, streamed） their deaths, hoping to grant survivors a glimpse of what lay beyond. But the “successful” attempts had all been fakes.
“… And?”
“And nothing,” he said. “The light went out.”
He knew these facts from his mother, having been asleep in his waterbed at the time of his father’s passing. But there had been a Beyond of sorts—an unexpected aftermath. Last month, his father’s longtime lawyer, Hannah Cooke, an unflappable personage their father had admiringly referred to as “The Vault,” summoned the family to her midtown office. Gregory attended remotely. In the meeting, Hannah disclosed the news that Bix Bouton had directed an enormous bequest to Mondrian, Christopher Salazar’s not-for-profit. Over gasped objections from Gregory’s siblings, Hannah laconically explained that in their father’s final year, when his ALS was known only to Lizzie, he’d been gripped by an imperative to contact Miranda Kline, the anthropologist. Kline hadn’t been heard from since eluding a decade before. But Bix had recently attended the wedding of Sasha’s son, Lincoln, a high-level counter, and quietly enlisted Lincoln’s help to find Miranda Kline. Lincoln traced her digital trail to Brazil, where it turned out she had died the year before, in 2034, at age eighty-four. Lincoln next tracked down Lana Kline, the daughter Miranda remained close to until her death. It was Lana who arranged a meeting with Christopher Salazar, who had helped her mother to elude back when eluding was still new. Bix met several times with Salazar in the last months of his life, unbeknownst to anyone, even Lizzie.
Gregory’s siblings blared their disbelief and lobbed questions at the Vault （who calmly asserted her ignorance of anything more than what she had told them）： Several times where? Several times when? Had Salazar been inside the Chelsea house? What common interests could their father possibly have had with him? Did this mean Bix had been working against his own interests—their interests, the interests of Mandala? Did it mean he regretted Own Your Unconscious? Had he renounced the Collective Consciousness? What had he and Salazar talked about? Had Salazar brainwashed their father in order to swindle him? Richard, normally the mildest of the four of them, shouted a demand for proof, his face wet with tears.
Their mother sat quiet throughout. Abruptly, she stood, startling even Gregory, who was watching on his phone. She was sixty-one and fashionable, having begun designing clothes when Gregory was in high school. “You’re forgetting yourselves, children,” she said. “Your father was a private man. We’re not owed an explanation for anything he did.”
“That story is bullshit,” Richard yelled—the first time Gregory had ever heard him curse. “There is no way Dad would’ve met with Salazar and not told me. No. Way.”
“Apparently, there is a way,” their mother said. “And given your reaction, I’m not surprised he kept it to himself.”
Gregory was glad not to be in that room. He, too, had wept while listening to the Vault, but not for the same reason Richard had. What pained Gregory was the thought of a dying man trying to repair, and atone for, a world he had inadvertently wrought. Gregory had never known that man, and wanted to.
Recalling all of this now, from within the warm orb of Eureka Gold, Gregory found himself newly, deeply affected. A dreamy silence had overcome the room, and in the vibrations of that silence, he identified a truth: He and his father were alike, after all.