Palo Alto is the setting for Eric Doss’s student life and a brief but consequential search after he stops returning to his dorm. Stacy Doss recalls that he had sometimes disappeared on solitary excursions, and wonders whether he has gone hiking nearby; Richard Doss eventually finds him still on campus, sitting beneath a tree at four in the morning. The location holds both possibilities at once: the landscape of a presumed escape and the place where Eric has remained, withdrawn from everyone around him.

College Life and the Missing Days

After Eric appears depressed for several days, he does not return to his dorm for a couple of days and misses a major test, behavior his roommate, Chad Soo, considers sufficiently unusual to report. Chad contacts the family and speaks with Stacy. Milo Sturgis later calls Stanford and talks to Chad, who mistakenly believes he is speaking with Palo Alto police. The inquiry links Eric’s absence from his room to his family’s concern, while leaving open whether he has left the area at all.

A Familiar Pattern of Disappearing

Stacy initially downplays Eric’s absence: even when he lived at home, she says, he would sometimes go off by himself. Dating back to ninth or tenth grade, he cut school, took his bicycle, and disappeared for a day. He later told her that he had spent those hours in used-book stores, playing pool on the pier, or listening to trials at the Santa Monica courts. As an adult, he sometimes stayed away overnight, prompting arguments with Richard, who wanted to know where he had been while Eric refused to explain.

That history gives Stacy grounds to consider a less alarming possibility when Eric is missing in Palo Alto. On an earlier overnight absence, she had found him folding a nylon tent in his room, with a backpack and provisions including potato chips, candy, and pepperoni sticks. She suspects he may have gone hiking, since the area around Palo Alto offers places to get away from city lights. Her conjecture draws on Eric’s former love of astronomy and the telescope and expensive filters he once owned, but she does not know where he is or why he has gone.

Found on Campus

Richard eventually reports that he has found Eric at four in the morning, sitting under a tree in an out-of-the-way spot on campus. Eric has been there a long time and refuses to tell his father why. The discovery resolves the immediate question of whether Eric has left the campus: he has not. It does not explain his withdrawal, and his missed exams become secondary to Richard’s request that Alex Delaware see him.

Richard brings Eric back to Los Angeles by plane. Palo Alto therefore marks neither a confirmed hiking trip nor an explained disappearance, but the place where Eric’s isolation is discovered and his father’s attempt to reach him begins. The contrast between Stacy’s imagined open-air retreat and Richard’s account of Eric sitting motionless beneath a tree gives the setting its narrative significance: it is a plausible landscape of escape, yet the facts reveal only a young man who has stayed put and will not speak.