Dead On Arrival

by Matt Richtel

“Yes, another terrible code name from the company that brought you Project X,” Denny said. He hoped she’d smile but she wasn’t there yet.

  “Bottom line, Jackie, we’re studying memory.”

  She met his eye and saw truth there. He let her gaze at his sincerity until she looked down.

  “What makes one image or memory stick? What causes it to fade? If you want to be blunt about it”—he was gaining steam—“we’re trying to get people to remember better and share more of the things they see on the Internet.”

  “Things?”

  “Advertisements. Video, banner, click-thrus, YouTube videos, et cetera. It’s all about recall and sharing, whether they’re taking something viral, like a song or a sell-crafted Nike ad, or remembering the narrative or image of a Lego set, car, washer and dryer. No one liked my idea of calling this project Hippocampus, and then we’d name our headquarters the Hippo Campus.”

  Hippocampus, the memory center of the brain.

  “Lantern, Jesus.” He shook his head.

  Despite herself, she smiled.

  “Look, Jackie, it’s not that novel. It’s a neuroscience twist on the basic Silicon Valley business model.”

  He stated the obvious: the entire Silicon Valley business model was built on getting people to see and respond to advertisements. Services like Google, Facebook, Instagram—go down the list. They were “free” and, in exchange, they sought attention. Fairly, this was the attention economy, the eyeball economy. And, more recently, the sharing economy; brands, whether corporate or individual, created things to be tweeted, liked, commented on, a fluid, amorphous river filled with baited fishing poles, bobs and flies and lures to be swallowed. Denny glossed over this stuff because it was simply understood.

  “What’s new is we figured out how to do it,” he said. “Or we’re figuring out how to do it.”

  “That’s the data you’ve had me looking at.”

  “I can’t say this strongly enough: I’m not sure we can do this without you. You filter information in a way other people don’t, or can’t. You have an unusually creative way of synthesizing data.”

  She studied his face for contradictions and transgressions like a child deciding whether there was still such a thing as unconditional love. She knew how Dr. Martin must have felt sometimes; used. Somehow, he seemed able to navigate it. He dug for truth on his own terms and figured out exactly the right thing to say and do. She could dig, too.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” No sooner had Jackie said it than she hated having done so; it showed her vulnerability. So she added, “I deserve a hell of a lot better than that.”

  “You do, Jackie. But we’re playing around in a gray area of”—he looked for the word—“ethics. I didn’t want to . . .” Another long pause.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t want to compromise you or put you in a bad position, or make anyone more vulnerable than they need to be.”

  “I don’t need your protection.”

  “Come to the desert,” Denny said. “See for yourself.”

  “What’s in the desert?”

  “You really do have to see it to believe it. Will you just trust me?”

  “Just to be clear”—she tilted her head to the side, looking virtually coquettish—“you want me to trust you, despite having lied to me, and to trust a secret project spawned by a multibillion-dollar company more powerful than the government and that only subverts its ‘do no harm’ motto when it suits the stock price?”

  “When you put it that way,” he said, smiling, “yes.”

  Twelve

  “What’ll it be?” a bartender at a cheesy Irish pub in JFK’s international terminal asked. He had a fresh tattoo on his beefy forearm of a New York Giants helmet that looked red around the edges. Melanie put a hand on Lyle’s shoulder, silently urging him not to get into the man’s diabetes or possible tattoo infection. Lyle flinched.

  “Patrón, double, straight,” he said.

  “My man,” said the bartender. “Silver, okay?”

  Lyle nodded absently; sure.

  “Peño . . .” Melanie said.

  “He’s paying,” Lyle responded, gesturing with a jerk of his neck to Michael, the Tanzanian representative who stood near the front of the pub looking at a menu on a stand, giving Lyle and Melanie a wide berth. Michael had thought it would be a grand gesture to invite Melanie, particularly after Lyle had said that a chief reason he didn’t want to make the trip is because he’d just gotten settled in a new place with Melanie.

  But the pair had been bickering since San Francisco. Michael was starting to wonder whether Dean Thomas had been right that Lyle was unstable to an extent that outweighed his tremendous value. Michael, standing at the menu, snuck a peek at the picture he’d taken to keeping in his right front slacks pocket. Even though it was a still shot, Michael could picture the man on the ground, panting, as if a dog gasping for breath.

  “Make it two?” the bartender asked Melanie as he poured Lyle’s drink.

  “I’ll have two. She’s fine,” Lyle said.

  “What the hell has gotten into you, Peño?”

  Lyle stared at his glass. Melanie exhaled. “I’ll have a seltzer”—she looked at Lyle—“because I want to sleep on the plane, not because I’m taking your shit.”

  “Lemon?” the bartender asked.

  “Sure.”

  The bartender sent a flash of anger at Lyle. This guy had no idea how good he had it. His wife was a knockout. Not like cheerleader knockout, which in the bartender’s simplistic female taxonomy was the top of the food chain, but wife knockout. Her red hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she wore a baggy maroon V-neck sweater that, by contrast, gave her skin a pale tint. Originally, she’d purchased the sweater for Lyle but he’d shrunk it enough in the dryer that it no longer fit in the shoulders.

  Lyle drained his shots in two drags. Held the glass up to the bartender.

  “Are you still serving food?” Melanie asked.

  The bartender pulled a menu from under the counter and slid it forward. “The au jus gets raves. Comes with fries.”

  “Perfect. We’ll have two. I’m ravenous,” she said. “Can you put them in before we have another round?” To Lyle: “Like you said, Peño; Michael’s paying. We might as well have a last decent meal.”

  “Go home, Melanie.”

  “Peño! What the fuck!”

  “It’s not safe for you where we’re going.”

  “So, Lyle, this is new, this is fascinating.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ve got all kinds of psychological flaws, but being bossy isn’t one of them.”

  “There you go, that’s the spirit, Melanie.”

  “Jesus.” She’d never heard him like this, not quite. But she had felt it building. For well more than a year, he’d been changing. She just assumed it was because he’d been to one tragedy after the next, one more village, one more filthy apartment building with stricken children; such things would take their toll on anyone. She’d tried to be sympathetic. She knew in her heart what Lyle confessed to her with his eyes: love, real connection, genuine passion—it made up for everything else. Nothing could be more trite but, simply, true, this physician healed himself by feeling connected. Those weren’t words he’d have used. But she knew and he knew she knew. And yet, for all her efforts, he became increasingly beyond reach. She stared at him staring at his glass. “I’d chalk this up to whatever horror is on those pictures Michael’s carrying around in his jacket but you’ve been like this for . . . weeks.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No. No, Lyle, you’re right. For six months.”

  “Like what?”

  “Um, reserved, distant, surly, angry, sullen, terse. Ring a bell?”

  Lyle grimaced. Maybe it had been after he returned from that well poisoning in South Korea, an ugly bacteria caused by a local official who had embezzled money intended for sewage treatment and invested it into ounces of gold. A week o
f sullen behavior followed, then two, then halfway through the third, Melanie, sick of it, went dancing with her friends until 3 a.m. on a Thursday.

  “Nice outfit,” was Lyle’s single rejoinder in the morning, looking at her skirt next to the bed.

  “I have a right to defend myself,” Melanie responded, the sympathy squeezed out of her voice.

  “Against what?”

  “Invasion of the body snatchers. I want to help you. I’m here to help you. But I have a life and I won’t let you take my hand and yank me over a cliff.”

  In the months that followed, she’d vacillate between trying to reach him and making sure she continued to exist. She indulged an entrepreneurial bug and signed up for an evening class at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Things at home didn’t feel hostile, more like that proverbial frog in simmering water that would eventually boil.

  Lyle looked at Melanie over his empty shot glass.

  “So why are you here, Mel?”

  “Because I’m looking for you.”

  It was a striking thing to say, especially the plaintive way she said it. He turned to her, even though doing so meant he was abandoning his stubborn self-imprisonment.

  “I can’t find you in our home, our bed, not in our conversations, not at the lab,” Melanie said. “I’m going to see if I can find you . . . I don’t know . . . in Africa, in a tent, surrounded by . . .” She had tears in her eyes. Lyle cleared his throat. She was softening him and he was fighting it.

  “By . . . all that sickness.” She chose the word over disease. “You shine there, you are magnificent, when you are called upon. I don’t think you can hide from me there.”

  She put her hand on his knee. Lyle felt warmth course up his thigh. He looked for the bartender, a lifeline. Melanie squeezed his leg. The bartender appeared with two heaping plates of French dip and fries.

  He wanted to beg her to go home. She shouldn’t be going, not now, and not on this one. He looked at her, desperate to say something, and, yes, God, she was beautiful, particularly with this pink hue to her skin, and even with a slight puffiness around her blue eyes. Lyle tried to get words out—don’t go—and instead took his last gulp of booze and felt defeat.

  Fourteen hours later, they landed in Amsterdam for a brief layover before flying to Arusha. Before touchdown, Lyle had awakened with his head on Melanie’s shoulder and seemed to have forgotten whatever was fueling his mood. Until he got his bearings. Then, fully awake, he withdrew from Melanie, smiled thinly, asked Michael to hand him the briefing folder. He looked at the pictures and the medical reports. He immediately homed in on the anomaly, the thing he’d noticed when Michael had first told him what was happening near the border. This wasn’t ordinary, this situation. He pushed his reading glasses back on his nose and let himself dive into the folder.

  And Melanie let him get away with it even though she sensed he was retreating into the work as much as embracing it. This was, she thought, a legitimate excuse, to let things settle down. Maybe she’d discover him again.

  Not likely. Not with the secret he was keeping from her.

  Thirteen

  “Are those two giraffes . . .” Melanie’s voice trailed off.

  “It’s a wonder the first time you see it,” Michael said. “Now you understand men.”

  They traveled south through the plains in a yellow Land Cruiser, open top, the size of a small bus. It was an angular thing, exposed metal bars, a safari vehicle but without any of the fancy signs or branding of a commercial company. Government issue. To the left, under an acacia tree, two giraffes held the bizarre pose. One had mounted the other.

  “Men? They’re not mating,” Melanie said.

  “Nope. Guess again.”

  She shrugged.

  “The one on top just beat the other in a fight. His reward is this expression of dominance.”

  “Prison rules,” Melanie said. “You see that, Peño?”

  He sat in a seat across the aisle, reading from a file. He glanced at Melanie. “I think you should go back to the hotel.”

  She looked away.

  “Dr. Martin. Tsetse,” Michael said. Lyle didn’t even notice the fly on his wide-brim beige hat gunning ultimately for his cheek. Michael stood and swatted the air, sending the fly on its way.

  “Lost when he’s working,” Melanie said. But she was making excuses—for him, and for herself. They’d had a brief layover in the Arusha Hotel after that exquisite landing near Kilimanjaro. Lyle had sat on the bed, eyes half closed. By that point, Melanie had given up trying to coddle him into conversation. But at one point she came out of the bathroom determined to confront him, bring her nuclear weapon and clear the air. Couldn’t do it. She’d been having trouble sleeping and felt like she might be getting a cold.

  The landscape was changing quickly. The dusty steppe took on high grass. Denser trees appeared. In the distance, it looked practically lush.

  “We’re not that far from the Selous Reserve. It’s where we’ve set up the perimeter,” Michael said to Lyle. Now Lyle looked up. A man in green fatigues stood beside a yellow police barrier. It looked like he was completely in the middle of nowhere, an oasis amid the brown grass and a felled evergreen. Hardly. Everyone in the truck knew that he was the last stop before death. The truck pulled beside him and slowed. Michael waved.

  “Jambo. This is the doctor,” he said. It was a formality. The man in fatigues was too young to have any say-so about anything. His mere presence intended as deterrence. Who would come out here anyway? “Have some more coffee,” Michael said to the soldier as they passed.

  Ahead, a small rock formation that would qualify in these parts as a landmark. Melanie watched a lizard scatter at the base of the rocks.

  “It’s going to sneak up on you on the other side,” Michael said. He was saying: Brace yourself.

  Lyle looked at the late-afternoon sky, pinky blue, yellows bent through the prism of wispy clouds. He scanned the rocks. Muddy water pooled at the bottom right. Maybe someone had washed there. Or people had used it for a restroom. One of the problems he often saw was that sick people did what they had to do where they had to do it—like pissing and shitting—and disease fed on it.

  They rounded the corner. A small village emerged, thatched huts bisected by a footworn orange-colored dust road, more like a path. They saw the man in the middle of it. He was on all fours, crawling their direction, trying to, breathing like a dog hit by a car. An aid worker or nurse in a white suit tried to help him by the arm.

  “He’s the one I need to see,” Lyle said.

  The stake in the far right corner of the medical tent had loosened. Other than that, the setup was reasonable, nothing profound, as might be expected. Six victims in beds, four along one wall, two along another, getting saline drip. Two empty beds betrayed the fate of their most recent inhabitants; sweat and bowel stains, the bodies’ last expressions. It irked Lyle that there still was insufficient manpower here six days after the first patient showed up.

  Michael, an edge in his voice, said something in Swahili. A nurse who looked like a beekeeper in all his garb quickly cleaned up one of the empty beds by tossing the sheets and pillow into a plastic bag. A few minutes later, the moaning man Lyle had seen outside became the makeshift hospital’s latest inhabitant.

  By then, Lyle had already scrubbed in a bowl of soapy water and gloved and put on a respirator. Melanie remained in the truck. She was a nurse by training, but the risks here outweighed any help she might offer, especially before Lyle got a grasp. Besides, he’d practically begged her to stay put. In the tent, he leaned down and felt the faint pulse of a woman of truly indeterminate age; he figured her between thirty-five and sixty. Disease and sun mottled her skin, bleached her night-dark pallor near pale, obscured the truths her face might tell.

  “How many days?” he asked the nurse.

  “Four hours.”

  Lyle blanched.

  A straw rested by her lips. She lacked the strength to suck or move it. A red
-and-yellow scarf tied around her forehead hung damp with sweat it couldn’t absorb. The Iraqw people, Lyle had read in his file, typically lived farther north. This was among their southernmost tributaries. He could see from the slightly narrowed shape of the woman’s eyes the Asiatic genetics shared eons ago. Spittle on her chin suggested she’d been coughing. He picked up the chart by her bed and could make out the numbers even if he couldn’t read the words. Last her temperature was taken, it had been 103.8. Another number stood out: 51. Must be her age. He patted her arm and she briefly opened her eyes and he smiled.

  He stood from his bench and turned to the man from the road. He kept trying to stand up. With each tiny effort, he violently coughed. You didn’t need an x-ray. Lyle could practically see the fluid in the guy’s lungs. The nurse struggled with him for a second to put on a mask and the man finally succumbed, lacking the strength to fight.

  The nurse said something and Michael interpreted. “The son of the local chieftain.”

  His smooth round head shone with perspiration. He leered at Lyle and set loose with coughing. Lyle understood. This man wasn’t accustomed to being defeated. Lyle lowered his eyes and gestured to the side of the bed. May I sit? He took the nonanswer as an okay. He sat. He took the man’s long arm and felt for a pulse at the wrist. Ordinarily, ill-advised, not a good place to test. But Lyle didn’t want to reach for the man’s neck. He got what he needed: 185.

  “Saline, please,” Lyle said to no one. He would bet that this man’s pulse didn’t get that high facing a mother lion. With Michael’s help, he asked questions and learned the man had been sick for a day. And didn’t want help. Lyle said he understood; he wanted to help the older folks, he said, and the children. He listened and watched and thought. Not Ebola. Maybe Lassa fever.

  “You have many mice?”

  “This is Africa,” Michael said.

  “Sir, how many dead—like you?” Lyle asked.

  “Like him?” Michael asked.

  “Young?”

  Four. Out of a village of only sixty.