Blue Screen

By Jim van de Erve

Overwhelmed by being laid off, Doug Hawkins goes from a successful career in high tech to being homeless. At the same time, his friend and boss Daniel Martin—who laid him off—tries to atone to Doug for what both of them see as an act of betrayal. But instead of saving his friend, Daniel risks all their trust and questions all that he

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atmosphere Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781646330751

Book preview

Part 1

1.

The Evergreen Point Floating Bridge stretched almost three miles over Lake Washington, from the high-tech suburbs to the east to the business-rich downtown Seattle to the west. It spanned a broad, watery vacuum in the middle of the city, and as I descended onto the floating deck from the east, I drove onto a thin ribbon of asphalt that was roiling in a driving rain. The wind was whipping the water to the north of the bridge into a violent chop, while the water to the south was perfectly smooth, because the bridge as it floated blocked the north wind and the waves, its broadside absorbing the fury. One side was tranquil, the other mad. The pavement was just a few feet above the surface of the water, so my car was just a few feet above the froth, rocking as I drove. The gusts blew giant plumes of water over the side rails, apparitions reaching out, great liquid paws trying to envelop my car. They blasted the windshield, groped at the chassis, scratching with their aqueous claws, then losing their grip and draining back into the lake. I was out in the open, engulfed by water, no cars around me, prey for the elements, shuddering with each thrust of the water. Sweat spread across my chest. I breathed hard, deep, but I couldn’t get the oxygen I needed. I breathed harder and deeper, and still I gasped. Blinking from lack of sleep, trembling from the pain of what had happened to me the last few days, I edged the car away from the chop. I could not escape the feeling of the bridge shaking unsteadily on the waves, I couldn’t ignore the fact that the surface of the floating bridge was slowly moving back and forth, three feet, four feet, five feet. My chest seized, my arms shook, and waves swirled in my mind, consuming me as the water rushing over the side rails of the bridge was consuming it. It could go down. It had almost sunk before. A storm decades earlier had almost severed the cables that anchored the 520 bridge to the bottom. The I-90 floating bridge several miles to the south had in fact gone down, half of it sinking in the Thanksgiving Day storm of 1990. That happened because of open portals, so they said, but the 520 bridge could sink, too, whether the portals were open or not. It wasn’t designed for the number of cars it carried. The bridge wasn’t designed to stand up to the kind of storms that Seattle could get, even though it was the longest floating bridge in the world. And besides, it was a floating bridge: it had no piers or supports, except at the ends, just cables tying it to the bottom. It hovered on the water, hundreds of tons of concrete and steel. It wanted to sink. I could feel the bridge twisting and shearing and deforming. I could feel the bridge buckling under the pressure as it floated on water a hundred feet deep—water cold, frenzied, and churning on the surface; pressured, dark, and vicious in its depths.

After I crossed the water, I continued to sweat, shake, and gasp. I drove downtown and to the Seattle Underground, a grunge club in a blank brick building in South Lake Union, an industrial area full of lumbering monoliths and empty, rain-soaked streets. The club had blacked-out windows, and its name was scrawled across the front in dripping red letters. It was the perfect place for Doug, an old friend of mine, to hang out. As I walked up to it, a couple opened the door, and light and music exploded onto the dark sidewalk, then extinguished with a snap when the door slammed shut. I opened the door, followed them, and was broadsided by a wave of hot rap from a live band, deafening and unending. I paid the cover to a guy with a blue splash of tattoos up and down both arms, grotesque muscles, and a fierce glower. I walked down steps into what was a basement with a high ceiling. In front of the band, dozens of people hopped and writhed and shoved one another and slammed into one another and threw their hands up to the mad rhythm of a merciless, grinding song. Behind them were the black-dressed angered, bobbing and rocking in somber desperation.

The bar in the back was clogged with drinkers four-deep charged by the pulsing electric. I didn’t see Doug and was about to turn around and leave when I spotted a guy at the end of the bar with a black cap, slumped over a drink, his back to me and the music. Doug often wore a faded black and orange San Francisco Giants cap, a relic from his days in the Bay Area. From the side I could see that he had a several-day stubble and deep creases in his face. Doug was thirty-five going on fifty. When I walked up beside him, he turned to me with eyes bloodshot and dull.

What the hell are you doing here? he asked, took a drink, and turned away.

I didn’t say anything. Doug and I had been best friends in high school. We’d worked and hung out together for years. I figured there were some things I didn’t need to explain.

He finally turned back to me. Trying to deal with your guilt, he answered for me. He smirked when he saw me examining him. And now you’re trying to see something you can use against me.

My life is falling apart, Doug, I said. I don’t have the energy to screw with you.

He snickered. Well, what do you know? He clapped his hands and smiled broadly. He looked at me in mock perceptiveness and then turned toward the crowd, spread his arms, and yelled, His life is falling apart!

The people around us turned to him. Doug handed the attention off to me like a circus ringmaster introducing a lion-tamer. The audience clapped slowly, methodically, wavering on their feet, as if the clapping were a collective mantra.

Doug was half-drunk, but only half. There was still plenty of bitter sober. Well done! he said as the others again turned their backs to us. You are living the irony at the core of life. How does it feel, Dan? Eh? He paused a moment and then added, Be honest, asshole.

He chuckled and then said, Just don’t expect me to make it better for you. You fucked me—now you’re getting fucked yourself. It’s a law of physics—an equal but opposite reaction. You’re going to take your own personal stroll through hell. He downed the last of his beer, slapped it on the bar, stood unsteadily, and then stabbed his finger in my chest. Good luck! he said with a snarl. He turned to walk away. I had found him, I needed to talk with him, damn it, I needed to square things with him, I needed to help him to help myself. The agony from the last few days was exploding in my chest, but he was walking away. I started to follow, I stumbled away from the bar, but he turned and leaned toward me.

No! he yelled and pushed me back. When you come out the other side, then we’ll talk. Until then, fuck off!

He turned and melded into the crowd that accepted him as one of their own and formed a wall against me. I shuffled back to his stool and sat. The anger in the music made my chest tremble. My head was dizzy in the acrid heat; the pungent sweat of the hard-hearted, blackened fans stung my nose. After a few minutes, I couldn’t stand it anymore and staggered to the exit through the crowd of vacant-faced gothic girls and punk guys dripping chains. I bounced off them, incapable of a straight line. I trudged up the stairs, opened the door, and walked through the gates of hell.

2.

I emerged from the fever of the Seattle Underground to the wet stone of South Lake Union. This was before the days of the proliferation of Seattle high-tech, before the sainthood of Amazon, when the neighborhood, just north of the downtown glitz, was filled with old, heavy, cold, blustery buildings. By now it was dark. A windblown rain sandblasted my face, digging at the crevices of my clothing, and the late October cold scratched at my chest, the mist sizzling on my forehead. I’d slept little for two days, and the rebuke from Doug left me dizzy. I was on a side street that got little traffic and few walkers other than those looking for the club. I heard a couple of footsteps behind me. Whoever it was had undoubtedly also been at the club and gotten their fill of desperation. I turned a corner and saw my Porsche and then heard the steps behind me turn the corner and quicken. I glanced back and saw two guys running toward me. I pulled the car keys from my pocket and ran behind the car, but before I could make it around the back, they threw me onto the trunk. I lost hold of the keys, and the guys ripped my wallet and cell phone from my chest pocket. They lifted me off the trunk and threw me onto the sidewalk, then threw my phone next to me. My shoulder plowed into the wet concrete. They started my car, revved it, and then shot away, the Porsche’s drive train winding high.

A hot poker gouged through my ribs. I tried to get my bearings, whether I was hurt badly, but I couldn’t tell, and I gasped harder than before to get my breath. The water on the sidewalk was soaking the seat of my denim pants, so I struggled to my feet, my ribs hurting like hell, and leaned my good side against the building. I picked up my cell phone, and tried to turn it on, but it was dead, the display was cracked. I dropped it. I started to shuffle back the way I’d come, the cold digging into my chest like the talons of a hawk clutching its prey. The only thing I could do was to move, stopping now and then, leaning against the building when I had to. I was dressed in a heavy shirt, fleece vest, and a parka coat that the wind played with. I wore heavy cross-trainer shoes that kept most of the water out, but not all.

I thought about going back to the club, but no, I couldn’t face the hostility. I tried to come up with someone I could call, someone who would help me, but there was no one. Everybody, from family to friends to work, had abandoned me. And they all had their reasons. A huge wave of disgrace swept over me, swirling and thrashing me, leaving me disoriented, devastated, without bearings, without a home. I was exhausted from lack of sleep and getting rolled. I didn’t have the strength to confront anyone. All I could do was to stagger down the empty sidewalk alone.

A couple of blocks away from me stood the brightly lit Cinerama Theater. I made for it as if it was my goal, as if having gone to movies there for years would entitle me to get help from them. As I neared it, I saw a couple walking through the parking lot toward the theater, huddled in crisp, new, long wool coats, under an umbrella. They were my kind. I walked toward them, wincing from the pain that flared in my ribs.

Excuse me, I said with a croak.

No! the man said forcefully and held out his arm against me. His face was twisted in a self-righteous snarl. I stopped and stared at them. They huddled closer and hurried past, glancing at me in disgust.

A policeman walked toward me through the parking lot. I trudged toward him, feeling a sense of relief. When I got closer, I saw that he wasn’t a policeman, but one of the theater’s private security guards. He had a big paunch and heavy jowls, but he wore his uniform with pride. He was a cop. Well, no. He was a rent-a-cop.

Hey, buddy, he said. His voice wasn’t fierce, it was routine. Leave the patrons alone, OK?

I need help, I replied, my voice shaky.

I can see that.

My car’s been stolen.

He nodded. Was it stolen from the theater parking lot?

I pointed toward the club. It stung to raise my arm. I groaned. No, down the street.

Well, I can’t really help you there. He looked closer at me and then added, What kind of car was it?

Porsche.

He smiled. So, you own a Porsche?

Yes, I said. A burgundy Boxster.

He chuckled and said, Well, pal, I hope you find that Porsche. You can park it next to your Ferrari at your mansion in Laurelhurst.

He sidled away, chuckling. I stood for a moment in confusion, not knowing which way to turn, not understanding why he said what he did or why the couple had been so disgusted by me. I shuffled away from the theater, crossed under the Monorail on Fifth Avenue, and headed into Belltown. A block and a half after the Monorail, I saw a couple of men talking low in the opening of an alley. One of them, dressed in a black leather jacket, turned toward me as I approached. Hey, buddy, you want some Oxy? he asked in a low hiss.

What? I said.

Hey, come here, man, he said with a smile and a nod of his head. He strutted toward me and opened his coat to reveal a sheet of small white pills. These will make you feel good. I shook my head. He added, Tell you what, because I’m a nice guy, I’ll give you one.

The other guy was a kid who was shaking and sweating. A car screeched around the corner behind us. The dealer turned and ran down the alley. The kid ran up the street. Two men jumped from the car and yelled, Police!

I walked into the alley. One of the men from the car, dressed in baggy black pants and a hoodie, ran past me, but another came up, grabbed me, and plastered me against a brick wall face first. My ribs howled, I groaned again; he ran his hands around my torso, down the insides of my thighs, and over my pockets. Then he turned me around and held my parka by the shoulders.

Who were you dealing with? he asked.

I wasn’t dealing with anybody, I replied, choking.

Don’t give me that bullshit! He wasn’t showing those pills to you for nothing. What were you buying and what was his name?

I wasn’t buying anything, I replied, leaning as far back as I could and cringing.

The cop glared at me and then took a step back. He let me go and I fell to the ground. The pain surged through me. Shit! he said and looked down the alley.

Officer, I said, my car just got stolen, and my wallet. I need help.

The cop shook his head and replied, Listen, buddy, stay away from drug dealers—and come up with a better story.

Something crackled on his radio, and he ran down the alley. I looked for someplace to get out of the rain. The wind carried with it a light, prickly rain that poked at the back of my neck. My pants were damp, and the wet was moving toward my core. There was an overhang in the middle of the alley, just beyond a second dumpster that had flattened cardboard boxes splaying out of it. A pile of overfull plastic garbage cans exuded the stench of rotten vegetables mixed with urine. There were no lights in the alley, and the lights from the pole lamps on the streets at both ends of the alley barely penetrated it.

I was alone in the middle of the sprawling, tightly packed city, where most of its inhabitants were safe in their impenetrable residences, with pillow-top mattresses, thick down comforters, and feather pillows in their personal spaces, each inch of which was warm and blissfully private. The buildings belonged to them. The streets belonged to the predators. Unfortunates like me were stuck in empty, wet, fecal alleys. I broke into a violent shiver that I couldn’t stop, so I started to walk. I had to keep moving. I walked out of the alley and continued down Bell Street. Most of the buildings on the first floor were stores, now dark, with either apartments, condominiums, or business offices above them. It was getting late, and there were few people out. When I came to Third Avenue, I walked toward Seattle Center and the gleaming arches of the Pacific Science Center. I was in the heart of Belltown, which was maybe seven blocks by twelve blocks, in the middle of hundreds of square miles of tightly packed city, yet still I was alone. The neighborhood was made up mostly of five- or six-story buildings, with a few twenty- to thirty-story high rises, and I could feel the people in the high-rise condos looking down on me, eyes in the sky following the slow trail of ants, Ant Farm redux, as they traversed the range of the streetlights and the lamps and the darkness between. I couldn’t see the people in their condos, but I was sure that they had powerful binoculars with which they were trying to ferret out who I was and what danger I presented.

Halfway down the block from the alley, on the other side of the street, four young guys were milling around, smoking cigarettes. They looked at me. One of them said something as they looked at me. I huddled into my coat and walked faster, then ran, stumbling through the agony. When I reached the next street, I turned right, then ran to the alley and ducked back into it. I pressed into the doorway with the overhang where I couldn’t be seen. After that, I turned to every sound, every clop of a shoe on the sidewalk, every whoosh of a car on the wet pavement. I pulled several flattened boxes out of the dumpster, and the top clanged down. As its hard, metallic bonk bounced off the brick buildings, someone walked by the alley. He turned his head toward me. I froze. He saw me. He saw that I was hiding, he saw that I was wet and cold and alone and desperate and vulnerable, but to him all that translated into dangerous, just as he was dangerous to me. He turned away and hurried past. I burrowed into the doorway and laid the flattened boxes on top of me. I heard shouts coming from Third Avenue, grousing back and forth, two or three drunken men. I heard a siren start to the south and slowly build with its wail until it approached behind me on Fourth Avenue, an aid car or a police car, I couldn’t tell which. Its wail grew to a fever pitch, ratcheting my nerves until it screamed past, its pitch dropping as it fled toward Queen Anne Hill. It receded into the distance and then died as though it had dropped off an edge.

I stared at the brick wall before me and saw my sister, Angie, when she was a teenager, long ago, squeezed into the backseat of a car speeding away from me, turning around and looking at me, her eyes pleading with me to forgive her.

A bottle shattered. The vision vanished. My stomach ached for food. I was cotton-mouthed thirsty. But I had worse things to fear, and every time I dozed off, I soon woke with a start, my eyes darting over the cobbles of the alley, knowing that the city was crawling all around me.

3.

When I woke in the Belltown alley, I looked up at a man standing over me in the morning light and recoiled in half-awake terror. I crawled backwards until I hit the building’s wall and leaned back against it, seeing an ogre in full attack.

Hey, it’s OK, man! he said, holding his hands out. I’m not going to hurt you.

He was in his late twenties and had a stubbled, olive-skinned face, with dark eyes beneath a Mariners cap. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and wore stiff canvas-like pants, a blue denim shirt, and leather work gloves. He smiled weakly as he looked down at me. He fished a couple of dollar bills out of his wallet, and a couple of quarters from his pocket, and gave them to me, saying, Here, take this.

I accepted them, though I really didn’t know why he gave them to me. When I put my hand down to raise myself up, pain shot through my ribs.

You OK? he asked.

Yeah, I’m OK.

I started to put the cardboard in the dumpster.

Don’t worry about it, he said. I’ll put it back. Just don’t come back here again. The boss really hates the homeless.

He walked over to a big produce truck, opened the back, picked up a box of vegetables, and carried it through a door.

I hadn’t slept enough to lose the dull sleeplessness. Exhaustion slowed me, hung on my thoughts, numbed my senses. The wind was gone, and the rain had reverted to the pissy Seattle rain that just kept coming, a slow wash, light and misty, persistent drips down my collar, a film on the sidewalk that had dampened my socks. My chest broke into a shiver. It rolled from my chest to the pit of my stomach, which had no fuel, gave no warmth; it grabbed the cold and absorbed it.

I couldn’t go home. I had no work to go to. I had no friends to call. But I had to go somewhere. I had to do something. I lifted myself off the pavement, walked to the sidewalk and across a street, into another alley, into a doorway. I stopped and started to pee, but the door in front of me opened, and an older man screamed, Hey, what the hell are you doing? I stopped, zipped up, and hurried away. You people are animals! he said.

I stumbled down the street toward Elliott Bay, and saw the Pike Place Market in front of me. I made for it like it was Mecca. Inside, the vendors were just opening. I greedily slurped from a fountain and then hit the market’s bathroom. It didn’t require a key or code. Then I walked between the stalls of produce. The tables were full of brilliantly colored fruits and vegetables that looked like they were lit from within; intense red apples and peppers, rich green zucchini and cucumbers, sun-bright squash and bananas. They were all arranged in perfect rows, clean and unblemished, their fragrance mixing with the marine air that streamed in from the open waters of Puget Sound. I took a deep breath. The hunger ache in my stomach flared. I slowly walked until I found a stall whose vendor was unloading a box from a car behind it. I slipped a big, perfect orange into the pocket of my jacket and drifted out of sight.

A simple but defining act. I was now a thief.

I crossed the street and tore into the orange. It was the best orange I had ever eaten, full of tartness and sweet. So much for remorse. I needed something else, but I had no idea what it was or where I would find it. I felt a dull ache in my head. As I walked toward Pike Street, my head started to throb. Then it pounded. My last cup of coffee had been the previous day’s morning. I staggered past a Starbuck’s on Pike. I was across the street from it, but even so the strong aroma of coffee wafted through the air and grabbed me by the throat. I needed caffeine. If my wife had been with me, we would have crossed the street, and gotten a double tall two-percent latte for her and an Americano for me. If Doug had been with me, he would have shaken his head and said, Friends don’t let friends go to Starbucks, and we’d go to a Tully’s down the street. But they weren’t there. Just thinking about them sent chills through my chest. I started to shiver, my teeth banging against themselves, and I turned away from the Starbuck’s. I didn’t have enough money to spend it on a cup of coffee.

I trudged to the side of the working people who were swarming in the Monday morning chaos. They streamed off buses, along the sidewalks, toward and into buildings; secretaries in short dresses or skirts, businessmen in suits or sport coats, the casual in jeans and shirts and coats by Eddie Bauer, Patagonia, REI, or Filson, the iconic Seattle brands. I tried to join the flow, but people skirted around me. They were moving with more purpose than I was, and although they didn’t want to get too close to me, some of them knocked into me with their shoulders. They were ducking in and out of the crowd. I was weaving back and forth, out of synch. They had earned their connection to the crowd. I had lost mine. The success that bound me to them and others of the mythical moneyed class had been severed, and so was the trust, as if my tale was emblazoned across my forehead, as if my failings were as obvious as my dirty, wet, torn, stained clothing. The few women who looked at me did so as if I were going to make advances to them, as if I were going to force them into an alley and jump them. The few men who looked at me did so as though I were going to beg for a handout, and they didn’t deal in that kind of currency. I annoyed some of them. I disgusted others. When our eyes met, they looked away as quickly as possible, they tried to tune me out, they looked down the street, or at the displays in the storefronts, or they just retreated into the special private zone of their own creation. They wished I would go someplace else, anywhere else, to a grittier part of town where I belonged, where I would be expected, where they didn’t go.

I knew full well what they were thinking. Failure petrified them. They were convinced that they didn’t fail because they refused to. They didn’t fail because failure was unacceptable. That was the equation that they applied to their no-holds-barred game of bottom-line-driven, high-stakes, high-energy business mud wrestling. Do not accept failure, and it will not happen to you. That’s what kept them going when they were exhausted and yet kept surging ahead.

But that’s not all they were thinking. They would not, they could not, accept failure in others, either. It was a simple mantra that successful people continuously intone: failure is unacceptable in anyone. It is the business meditation. And when a successful businessman met a homeless person, or a beggar, or a drunk or a druggie or a washed-up loser or a burned-out down-and-outer, and they were forced to recognize them, they simply intoned their mantra. Get a job. Be successful. You are a failure. You are unacceptable.

This was their town. They made it work. Their domains were the gems of the city. Their skyscrapers rose from the streets, multifaceted glass fields of brilliant blues and greens, cut clean and sharp like crystals, lifting workers and residents into a world of gloss and elevation, a futuristic Jetsonian landscape with all but the flying cars. It was all about the heights for them. It was about a grand vision of enjoying life and