Collin's trip to Las Vegas back in 1997 was courtesy of Mira MiLady's Oven Roasted Chicken. One of his guilty pleasures in life was reading Inventor Today magazine, a publication that could almost be considered trash pulp for the MENSA crowd. It's glossy pages were plastered with badly pixilated images of new invention patents juxtaposed to articles on how to balance family and spurts of inventive seclusion or how to best protect your patent when shopping it to companies. A fortune hunter's guide for the pseudo-genius.
Toward the back of the magazine, crowded in a classified section, was a simple announcement from Mira MiLady calling all inventors to create the better rotisserie oven.
Collin spent a week just before the end of his junior year of high school, plotting and experimenting briefly, jotting and later transcribing his notes into a proposal. He entered the contest and won second place: A free week's trip to Las Vegas.
Collin's father laughed when he first broke the news.
"Only you could win a contest to make a better oven and you haven't so much as turned the one on in our house," his father guffawed over a pot roast dinner. His father, James Bainbridge, was wiry and even a little sallow. And James Bainbridge was deadly serious, all the time. He was the corporate attorney for a pharmaceutical maker that was perhaps the sole reason Gannis Falls existed. It's massive research facility and plant a sprawling edifice on the wooded outskirts of town, and employer of nearly half of Gannis Falls.
Collin had never expressed any interest in mechanical engineering before, and knew only the principles behind ovens and convection heating. But his hubris was in overdrive at the time – how hard could it be to design a better rotisserie? He tilted the interior of the oven, warped the metal skeleton to better conduct the heat waves more evenly over the flesh of the chicken. Nothing major, but it worked. And he won second place, the week's trip to Las Vegas.
His father's legal acumen managed to bend Mira MiLady's rules to allow the prize to be granted to an 18-year-old. Give the boy the cash equivalent and let him do of it as he will, or you will find yourself in court for uncompensated design improvements. It was a cold, nearly sinister statement his father made to the company's legal team that Collin would never forget. But it somehow also made him feel closer to a man who was both distant and monarchic his entire life. Collin mused how he ever came to be; that one fanciful thought most children have about their own parents. The idea that mom and dad could copulate, would ever copulate, do possibly copulate, was profound and vaguely disturbing. But for Collin, the notion that his parents had sex was simply alien; the very idea his father was capable of passion, that he could drum up lust or physical hunger, or that his father even loved Collin's mother enough to constitute arousal seemed like a dichotomy to his very nature.
Mr. James Bainbridge was a cardboard cutout in Collin's life. But still, the very gesture of helping his son circle past legal hurdles to claim his award from the chicken makers was enough to give Collin a momentary pause, reconsidering the figurehead who was his father.
On spring break of that year, Collin found himself embarking on a solo trip to Las Vegas. And in his bemused wanderings between rows of chiming and clattering slot machines, Collin stumbled into what became his driving inspiration that led to the end of the world.
****
The Durden homestead harkened images of carefully decorated wedding cakes, all ruffles and soft white layers and chalky icing. The moonlight only added an ethereal density to the house.
There were no lights on, Melissa most likely having climbed into bed already. But she did invite him, didn't she? There was an open invitation, even a suggestive look in her eyes that said come tonight.
Collin ambled the car by the mouth of Melissa's gravel driveway, his tires crunching the delta of scattering stones against asphalt.
He remembered evening dinners at the Durden house, his father often invited over to hammer out legal problems late into the night. The late Alan Durden was one of the executives at Fromahn Pharmaceuticals and often consulted with Collin's father when new drug patents were needed or when hungry trial attorneys targeted the drug maker for potential class action lawsuits.
Melissa and Collin were actually pretty close during those early childhood years, all through elementary school. It wasn't until they both reached the middle school years that the estrangement began, as their circles of friends pared and isolated from each other.
But Collin still relished those early years, those dinners when he and Melissa would giggle and eat fun foods like pizza or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and then Collin would be forced to play with her Barbie Dolls and pastel colored cars and doll mansions until they both crashed, and he would wake the next morning in his own bed as though he and Melissa only played together in some dreamland.
Collin pieced together these scattered memories, and it sometimes amazed him just how often his life intersected with hers. They were memories he suppressed as she grew distant from Collin during the sixth grade, as her circle of friends were focused on the early bloomers, the cute and the perky; the kids that were the desires of budding sexuality. Collin was quiet and gawky and had trouble nurturing friendships with kids his age who saw him as smart and off-putting, even then. Coincidently, at the same time, Mr. Durden was elevated to another position, dissolving those late night huddles with Collin's father as a need. Soon after, his own genius began to emerge, the fugues into biology books and chemistry sets and passions for things on a molecular level, all of which effectively isolated him from even his tenuous friends.
There were no lights on, Melissa most likely having climbed into bed already. But she did invite him, didn't she? There was an open invitation, even a suggestive look in her eyes that said come tonight.
Collin ambled the car by the mouth of Melissa's gravel driveway, his tires crunching the delta of scattered pebbles against asphalt. He turned the key, turned off the car, and listened for a long while as the car popped and settled as the cool night air seeped beneath the hood. His eyes never broke their stare at the Durden house, and he could never remember what had been going through his mind. But any action whatsoever failed Collin in those moments.
Then a light came on. It was soft, orange and filled what little of the room Collin could see in heavy shadows. And it flickered. Candle light. Oh my, he thought. Collin got out, closed his door as gently as possible, although the metallic thud still carried across the vast Durden property, and again still without thinking, he trotted his way to Melissa's lighted room.
Among the shadows, a figured moved to the window. It didn't take much for Collin to make out his obsession, propping down against the sill, her hands bracing it on the outside so she could lean out. Collin reached the house; Melissa's window was above the wraparound porch, just out of his reach.
"I didn't think you'd come tonight," Melissa commented, and even in the darkness, Collin could discern her humored expression.
"Impulse, Melissa. That's not typically something I follow either." Collin scanned the house and eyed the white post reaching up to the roof above the porch. It looked sturdy, and he felt strong enough to leverage himself to what could amount as a landing to her window. He stalked to the post and wrapped his arms tight around its wooden form and launched upward. His legs followed, and Collin scooted upward as Melissa giggled and leaned out her window into the moonlight to watch his progress.
