Aidan 1982

"I'll bet you a dollar," Liam replied, "I could hit that one from here with a rock."

After graduating from the State University of New York at New Paltz with a computer science degree, Aidan went to live with Liam in New York City.

The brothers shared a two bedroom apartment on East 90th Street near Third Avenue. Liam loved the city and swore he could never live anywhere else again; Aidan was intrigued by its tempo and possibilities but believed that he moved too slowly to take advantage of it. By the time he decided on anything, it had already swept by in the stream.

Home was Montauk, New York, a village at the tip of Long Island where their father had designed and built half the expensive homes. Their mother, Alana, still lived there. It was what Aidan was used to and at times he longed to return, but there was no work in his field there, or anywhere on the East End of Long Island.

Liam had recently started a recruiting firm with one partner, an older man named Sol Heymann. He had a small office on Madison Avenue at 55th Street.

Aidan originally came to the city to look for a job in the field of software development. When he had been on a few interviews and received one dispiriting offer for thirteen thousand dollars a year, to train as a Cobol programmer with a bank, Liam made him a proposition. He suggested that Aidan come and work for him at a salary of $20,000.00 a year, and Liam would be responsible for finding projects for him.

People who saw them together were always surprised that the two were brothers. Liam was more powerfully built and dark-haired, with an intense, serious look. He was physically awkward, and did not dance or play sports. Aidan was sandy-haired and charming; he was an athlete and dancer and was constantly laughing and telling stories. Liam was ambitious and hungry for material things; Aidan liked to be comfortable but had no particular goals other than to write software and enjoy life.

Aidan accepted the job. Part of the benefit was that he could code in the languages that most interested him, Pascal and C, and could stay away from Cobol or Fortran. Liam was gambling that he could diversify the business in two ways. First, he had never had a technical employee and had so far only made full-time placements at his clients. He was betting they would buy Aidan's time at a markup that would give him a substantial profit over what Aidan's salary cost him. Secondly, he sensed that the mainframe world might be supplanted by two new developments, the Unix operating system and the new DOS-based PC's from IBM. Aidan knew both Unix and DOS.

Liam made a few phone calls and found a client, a Wall Street brokerage that was installing PC's for its traders and needed someone to support them and do some incidental coding to make applications share data. The firm made a six month commitment for Aidan's services.

Aidan would get home in the evening an hour or two before Liam. The brothers lived very independently of each other and Liam wouldn't usually bother to call if he wasn't coming home. Sometimes Aidan didn't see him for days. When Liam wasn't working at work, he was working at women with equal intensity. He had tried to involve his younger brother in the hunt. Aidan had joined him once or twice, but did not want to prowl with him any more because he felt that Liam used him as bait on these occasions. Liam had the looks but not the social ease; he relied on Aidan to charm women traveling in pairs and bring them within reach. Aidan felt like a procurer and anyway, was not as interested in conquest as his brother was.

Liam had a great love to whom he kept returning, but who seemed not to know whether she wanted him as a boyfriend or as a friend. Her name was Darcy Sisnowski. Liam had met her at NYU, where she was studying dance while he studied business administration; she was tall and graceful, with light brown hair and blue eyes. Every few months, she would show up at the apartment and stay for a week. She usually arrived good-humored and left irritated with Liam. Aidan had never seen two people trapped in such a profitless repetition, and he couldn't figure out what either of them saw in the other. He suspected that Liam was too boring for Darcy, and that Darcy was too smart to suit Liam. Darcy cared only for art, and Liam thought of nothing except business.

Given the hours which Liam worked, Darcy was often in the apartment without him, and she and Aidan became friends. Liam trusted Aidan, or at least was too unimaginative to worry about his brother stealing his girlfriend, and Aidan was too honest, or at least too little motivated, to try it. And Darcy wasn't interested anyway. She liked to talk to Aidan obsessively about Liam: What were his origins? Since Aidan and their younger sister, Jane, were so warm-hearted, how was it possible that Liam was so cold? Did he think Liam was capable of love? Aidan told Darcy that Liam must love her because why else would he continue on in their episodic relationship? Darcy had several theories, in which Liam's consistency towards her was either a performance or his response to a challenge.

Most of the time, Aidan felt his older brother wasn't interested in him, but sometimes Liam would set aside an hour or two to talk. Aidan would come out of these sessions feeling dazzled, as if he had just been in the too-bright sun. He suspected, with Darcy, that he had just been the audience for a performance which Liam couldn't usually be bothered to give. Also, much of Liam's attention to you consisted of talking about himself.

For example: "Do you think you and I really come from the same stock? We're so different physically and mentally." And he went on: "I've often thought we had different fathers. You look like John Molloy and I don't. I have a daydream in which I find our parents' wedding certificate and find that I was born before or three months after instead of a year like Mom says."

"That's absurd. Of course Dad was your dad."

"I've often thought Tom Harris was my father. I look more like him, at least like I remember him." Harris was an investment banker who had retired to the East End, a man who had been doing leveraged buy-outs before anyone coined the term. It was true that he had been at the house more or less continuously during their childhood; John Molloy had built several houses for him. Harris had died in 1972. He had been dark like Liam.

"Did you ever ask Mom?"

"I did once and she got really mad at me."

"But what did she tell you?"

"Alana"--he liked to call her that sometimes, as if she wasn't really his mother--"said I'm mad to have thoughts like that, that Dad is the only man she was with her whole life up to his death."

Aidan didn't want to think too much about who she might have been with since.

"They had a good marriage," he said.

"Nonsense. You were too young to know. They hated each other. Only convention kept them glued to each other. They didn't want to hurt the kids or shock the neighbors."

"We'll never agree on this. They loved each other madly."

"They fought like cats and dogs."

"They fought sometimes like everybody does. But they really loved each other."

In August, Aidan took a four day weekend and caught a Trailways bus up to Hopeworth, the town in western New York State where their younger sister, Jane Deirdre, had just finished her freshman year of college.

She met him at the station and took him to dinner at Valerie's Diner in downtown Hopeworth. She was obviously nervous.

"Stop beating around the bush," he said smiling. "You have something to tell me. You've met somebody."

Wallflower Jane was stocky and shy but very smart. She had straight black shoulder-length hair and honest blue eyes. Aidan forgot about Jane too easily when he wasn't with her but felt much closer to her than Liam when he saw her.

"I have but its not who you think."

"I don't think anything in particular, Thing."

In childhood they had a game in which she was a shapeshifter named Thing and he was a creature called the Sand Prince. They played it for hours at a time over many years. They would go out on the beautiful, unpeopled stretch of beach near their home in Hither Hills and Aidan would pretend that he could wrap the beach around him like a cloak. Jane would make believe that she could turn herself into driftwood. Liam refused to play and they named him "Dark Brother."

Only Aidan was permitted to call Jane Thing.

"I'm living with a woman," she said carefully and Aidan's mind raced. "You were living with two girls before," he almost responded, but asked, "You mean...."

Jane tried again. "I'm in a loving relationship with a woman."

Aidan was holding his sister's hand; he had a talent for doing the right thing without thinking. "Are you happy?"

"Its like a fairy tale. She's waiting at home for us. I can't wait for you to meet her."

"Let's go right now."

"Finish your food. And there's one more thing. I've decided to use 'Deirdre', not 'Jane'."

"Okay, Thing." He liked Hopeworth. It was one little orderly street overwhelmed by hills and light. Aidan liked being places where you could see more sky than concrete.

"This is a pretty place."

"I never thought so before." They were still holding hands as they walked to her apartment.

Aidan liked Victoria Sawe at first sight, and Victoria Sawe disliked him. Aidan knew, and appreciated her all the more for it. She was the kind of fierce, honest person he felt comfortable around--you always knew where you stood with her. He felt she disliked him for the right reasons: not from jealousy, nor from malice, but simply because that was her default setting. Victoria didn't trust you until you proved you were no threat. She didn't seem worried about herself--Aidan knew Victoria could protect herself, even before he knew about her guns and occasional violence--but was constantly scanning for threats to Jane. (He was going to have to work at calling her Deirdre.)

He knew that people had tormented and hurt Jane and that, much as he loved her, he hadn't always protected her. In school, he had been popular and the other kids had cut Jane from the pack. Jane had always seemed unaware that Aidan had never risked his own popularity to protect her. Instead, it had been Liam, who detested Jane, who bloodied people's noses if they made fun of her.

Aidan knew immediately that his sister would be safe with Victoria Sawe. There could be no question about it; Victoria, who stood a head taller than her and had a lithe, taut look, was hyper-competent. She was the kind of woman who knew her way around an automobile engine, pitched overhand and could tag an insolent batter, or back down a schoolyard bully.

It helped immensely that Sea Lion, the game of trireme warfare she had designed, was one of his favorites. He had spent hours playing it with friends in college.

Jane knew that everything was fine when Ewas--her name for Victoria--went down to smoke a cigarette and Aidan went with her. She leaned out the second story window and looked down on Aidan's unruly blond hair and Ewas' baseball cap. They were arguing volubly about whether Steve Jackson's game Ogre was unbalanced. Aidan had bummed a cigarette off of Ewas. His accommodation to health was never to purchase his own and never to ask strangers for cigarettes.

Aidan liked their little one-bedroom apartment, which he said seemed "very lived in". It was full of Ewas' things--quilts, painted pieces from role-playing games, and plants. Jane had only books. Her Apple II computer was set up on a desk next the queen-sized bed, and Ewas' Kaypro lived on a table in the cluttered living room. Ewas designed games and rules supplements which were distributed by other people.

Ewas , at her desk, logged on to Compuserve for her email, while Jane and Aidan took Juno, a red setter dog, for a walk down the street. "Ewas also writes science fiction novels," Jane said. "She hasn't published anything yet, but she has some contacts with writers who play her games. Next month we're going to North Carolina for a workshop." He hugged her. "This is the best you've ever been, Thing. God bless you."

He told Jane about Liam's theory that their parents had been unhappy and she said: "He's crazy. They had the best marriage in the world."

He slept on the couch under one of Ewas' quilts. The next morning, she went out to do some marketing and Jane showed him some programs she had been writing in Turbo Pascal. That afternoon, Jane guided him through the Colman College campus, and Ewas picked them up in her blue Volkswagen Bug and drove them into the hills west of town, where they hiked for a few hours. Ewas had a staff, with a wizard's head carved in the wood, and she constantly poked at things and turned over rocks. Jane was in a happy, quiet reverie, looking with big eyes at everything, just like she had as a child. Aidan photographed Ewas standing atop the firetower at the summit, her hand shading her hazel eyes.

He returned to New York City on the bus. The city seemed particularly dark and filthy after Hopeworth; only the evening light over his apartment building belonged to the same world. He went out on the fire escape to enjoy it and thought of the lines from Eliot:

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

Liam came home and asked after Jane. Since she had not yet told Alana about Ewas, Aidan had agreed not to say anything. Once Alana knew, Jane wanted him to tell Liam, with whom she had no relationship.

He told Liam instead about the Pascal code Jane was writing. "She's much further ahead in it after six months than I am after getting a computer science degree. She's instinctively found some things I never thought of. I think Jane's twice as smart as I am."

"Then I suppose she's four times smarter than me," said Liam.

Aidan got a phone call from a girl named Emily Taft who had just graduated Hopeworth and was working as an assistant at a television station. She had been one of Jane's roommates the prior year and stayed in touch with her through the other, Lisa Steinberg. He took her out and felt vaguely attracted to her, though there was nothing in particular about her he liked. She was only moderately intelligent, a snob, and very interested in material things. "Daddy is a slumlord," she said. She smelled great, had light brown hair and keen brown eyes flecked with green; Aidan liked her eyes best of all. He and Liam double-dated and after, Emily said of Darcy, "She's kind of pretty." The remark offended Aidan, who thought Darcy was beautiful. He attributed it to Emily's intense vanity. She wasn't nice to anyone except in a stale, conventional fashion. She wanted to work in television in the worst way, had the looks to be on the air but not the presentation. She had done a daily news broadcast on the Colman College radio station and Jane said that she constantly fluttered her lines.

One night, the two couples ended up at Roseland. Afterwards, Aidan was never sure why, since neither Liam nor Emily could dance. He or Darcy--more likely Darcy--must have suddenly had a passionate desire to waltz. Emily observed bitterly that she had signed up for a tap-dancing course upon arriving in New York City but the instructor had asked her to leave, as she was throwing the rest off. Most of the night, Liam and Emily sat at a table in the corner, drinking vodka, while Aidan and Darcy danced under the shifting spotlights, surrounded mainly by couples twenty or thirty years older than themselves. Aidan was an excellent dancer. Darcy was drunk, but you could hardly tell it, as she was so graceful. "I wish Liam was more like you," she whispered into Aidan's ear. "You wish he could dance?" "I wish he was more like you."

Aidan knew he was making his brother jealous but for once he didn't care. He felt obscurely angry at Liam, but knew every reason he hit upon--like Liam's sarcasm to Darcy--was an excuse. Every time he returned to the table, Liam had a cutting remark for him. If Liam had been with any other woman, they would have left hours ago, or would not have come. It was part of his ongoing disaster with Darcy that he did what she wanted, but held himself out of the essence of it.

Emily also felt bitter to be in a place where she did not show to advantage. She and Liam seemed to like each other too much, to be engaged in a conspiracy of sarcasm. Finally, Aidan sat with Emily from duty, but could not get her to dance. Darcy reached her thin-fingered, beautiful hands out to Liam and drew him onto the dance floor. But a few minutes later he returned angry, followed by a sorrowful Darcy. She was trying to make light of something but they wouldn't say what.

He had been out twice prior with Emily but had never touched her save to accept her kiss on the cheek. Tonight, when he took her home to her apartment on East 59th Street (paid for by Daddy, he was sure; it was so much larger and nicer than his own), she invited him up and attacked him eagerly, as if to lay claim to something which had almost evaded her at Roseland. He had been with three women before but never one who enjoyed sex so much. Aidan performed his usual trick of thinking about something else until Emily was apparently satisfied. She fell asleep and he went out to her living room and watched an old B movie, Attack of the Monolith Monsters, on her television.

After that, they made love whenever she wanted, for nearly two months until she broke off with him. He was completely surprised, as he enjoyed her company, and hadn't seen any trouble brewing. They had never had an argument, though they never talked about anything either. On the whole, he would rather be with her than not. He asked her why and Emily said:

"You don't care about our love-making."

Aidan protested that he enjoyed it and she replied, "You're the only man I've ever been with who doesn't care about sex. You never come on to me; its always up to me to start anything. And then it always seems like you're thinking about something else."

Emily wasn't emotional, but she enjoyed dramatic moments. Her voice quivered as she said, "I want a man who's always at me."

A few weeks later, Liam, who was on the outs with Darcy again, asked if Aidan if would mind if he dated Emily. Aidan didn't think he had any grounds to object. For the next few weeks, it was very disconcerting to encounter his ex-girlfriend coming out of his brother's bedroom on Saturday mornings. Still, it was apparent that Liam and Emily were well-suited to each other; both were vain and aggressive. He supposed Liam was the kind of man who would always be at Emily. Actually, Emily wasn't at all sure about Liam, as she later told Aidan, because she also wanted someone who had a more loving nature than she did. But for once, she was not mistress of the timing. Liam reconciled with Darcy, and dropped Emily in a rather casually cruel way, by failing to return phone calls. Emily called the apartment for the fourth time and got the truth from Aidan. She said, "Its my turn to sniff shit for awhile."

Aidan got an account on CompuServe and began exchanging email with Jane every day. She would leave code for him on a server at Colman, and he would watch her ideas expanding on his screen. She had written a number of programs, but the one which interested him the most simulated a series of index cards. You could fill them out individually and then display them back to yourself in any order-- page through them, or search on any word occurring in them. But the most interesting feature was that you could create a persistent link from any card to any other. You could use the software to create disorderly collections of knowledge, and then impose order on them. It was a very neatly written program, small, with tight code and an excellent user interface. Jane referred to a collection of cards as an "idea pile".

The day job was becoming very boring; Aidan was installing the same software and answering the same user questions over and over. He asked Liam to find him something else, and Liam asked him to wait four or five months, while a steadier relationship was established with the client. Aidan sought Jane's permission to introduce her program to the world. She agreed. He took the software, which he named Ideapile, and showed it to a few of his online acquaintances, including a gray eminence in Vancouver who had been one of the co-creators of the Unix operating system. Everyone told him that Jane had made something new and interesting, so Aidan modified the code to create a version which could manage a maximum of 100 cards. He wrote a text file displayed on the screen at boot-up which said the software was shareware and could be registered for thirty-five dollars. If you registered Ideapile, you would receive a version which could handle an almost unlimited number of cards (for the fun of it Aidan created a five thousand card pile without appreciably affecting performance.) He rented a p.o. box at the local post office, and wrote a little manual, which he reproduced at a copy shop. He began systematically uploading Ideapile to every bulletin board he could find. In a matter of weeks, checks began arriving; there seemed to be a lot of favorable buzz about Ideapile on the boards and on Compuserve. At Jane's request, he listed her as J.D. Molloy on the boot-up screen.

He had initially begun distributing Ideapile as a proof of concept, and he didn't keep any of the first money to come in. The checks were all made out to J.D. Molloy, and he sent them on to Jane. He received an email in return which said in its entirety: "Wow."

Liam was preoccupied with business---he was in the process of forcing his partner out--and he was used to Aidan sitting all evening at his Apple II, so he didn't know anything about Ideapile until Aidan sought advice from Rick Bauer, Liam's attorney, who was also a friend and freque