Devil's Plaything

by Matt Richtel

  “But the password is blank. Looks like you’re the one who has to fill it in,” she says.

  I get a bad feeling. Not just because the day is definitely presenting a second strange mystery, but because only a handful of intimates call me “Nathaniel.” When I hear my full name, I know I’m in trouble—or in love.

  “Come down and we’ll try to open it over a drink,” Pauline says. “What better have you got going on a Thursday night? Besides, how often does life present you a genuine mystery? I’m intrigued, and thirsty.”

  I hear in her voice that playful and intense tone that makes Pauline engaging, effective, and dangerous—professionally and personally.

  I look at Grandma. Is there even a remote chance that the contents of the drive could explain the shooting in the park?

  I tell Pauline I’ll come by shortly and we hang up.

  I think about what happened in the park. Maybe the cops are right to speculate we took potshots from a maniac. Though that doesn’t explain the phone call I received. Have I pissed someone off?

  I think about the stories I’m working on. The Porta Potti piece notwithstanding, it’s hard to fathom any of them could be cause for attack.

  One is a magazine piece about Stanford neurologists placing precision magnets on people’s heads to diminish chronic pain. Another pertains to research at Johns Hopkins that uses brain imaging to show that a driver using a cell phone cannot simultaneously focus both on the road and a conversation; the structure of the brain, unlike the structure of a computer chip, does not lend itself well to multitasking. A third story is about Grandma herself. The editors at Elder Care magazine asked me to chronicle my relationship with Lane as she “matures.” The story has been personally intense to report, or, rather, it was—before Grandma’s mercurial descent. Before she really devolved, our conversations about her life had given me some insight into the bond between us and her own struggles settling down as a young woman.

  I kiss her on the forehead. Her eyes open and she grabs my hand, startling me.

  “He’s at the dentist,” she says loudly.

  “Who, Grandma?”

  She withdraws her hand. She’s frightened.

  “Who is at the dentist? The man in blue?”

  She taps her forehead.

  “He’s inside here now.”

  “Grandma?”

  I look her squarely in the eyes. I see the essential life in her narrow blue pupils being corroded by the glassiness of dementia. Less than a year ago, she had her full wits. I thought little of it when she returned one day from the condiment station in the dining hall with a stack of napkins but forgot utensils. It seemed only a few weeks later, she spent so long in the bathroom that I knocked on the door, let myself in, and found her holding a new roll of toilet paper, stymied by how to slip it onto the silver holder on the wall.

  “Grandma Lane, I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  “Who is the man in blue? Did we see him today? Maybe when we visited the dentist? Remember? Was he the same man in the park? Can you tell me?”

  She slowly closes her lids.

  I wait ten minutes for her to wake up. I stroke her arm. I replay the shooting. I hear the popping of bullets. I see the phantom in the trees. I sense in my memories the anxiety that comes with post-traumatic stress disorder. I feel the impotence of running and hiding. I scour the bumpy topography of my brain for clues: what had I missed? Did the car have a bumper sticker? Was it a California license plate?

  Answers elude me.

  I kiss Grandma one more time.

  I turn off the light, and leave to decrypt a mystery package.

  Chapter 5

  Excepting Grandma Lane, there are three important women in my life. Two of them are still alive.

  The dead one is Annie. She was my first true love. I fell for her just out of medical school. When I first heard her laugh, the sound was like music. Our connection was immediate and felt transcendent. Within moments of meeting her, I was hooked.

  Annie ultimately betrayed me, or I betrayed myself. Our love was a figment. Annie drowned a few years ago in a lake in Nevada, leaving me disillusioned about the difference between true love and its hot pursuit. So I tell myself.

  Spicy foods, like jalapenos, produce capsaicin. It’s the chemical that challenges and thrills taste buds. There’s a theory that we crave spicier foods when we age because the capsaicin desensitizes us little by little, burrito by burrito, eventually killing our taste buds. Annie was my capsaicin overdose, my flavor destroyer. Since she died, no emotional connection has tasted strong enough.

  But I have had true friendship. The second woman in my life is a witch. Her real name is Samantha Leary. She’s a spiritual healer, masseuse, Earth Mother, New Age nut. She’s like a sister to me, a really strange older sister who keeps pushing the tofu. She and her baseball-loving, technology-obsessed, socially awkward and mildly autistic husband, Dennis—everyone knows him as Bullseye—are the grounding forces in my life, fellow regulars at the local pub, bar-seat therapists.

  Lately, they’ve gotten an earful about Pauline, the woman behind door number three.

  A serial entrepreneur, she started Medblog two years earlier to become, as she put it, “the medical news-centric love child of CNN and the New York Times subsequently orphaned and raised by Twitter.” Now she’s my editor and source of rent money. Pauline aims high. She succeeds. She’s the Internet anthropomorphized; always moving, and ever faster.

  She’s lithe in a way that makes her 5 feet, 10 inches look taller. Her shoulder-length, light brown hair bounces when she walks, like in a shampoo commercial. In grad school, she’d appeared on the cover of Wharton’s catalogue, holding a chalice from a triathlon she’d won, and smiling sheepishly as if to say: yes, it’s that easy.

  Friends introduced us a year ago. I immediately wondered if my romantic taste buds had at last been revived. Then, a month ago, Pauline and I had a “carnal run-in.” That’s what I’ve deemed the feverish sex in her office. Afterwards, I promptly withdrew my emotions and (briefly) telecommunications access, uncertain what our tryst meant—particularly to my essential source of income.

  Seemingly bemused, she sent me a list of “100 great excuses for not getting entangled,” including: (#17) Kissing involves germs, and (#44) Stability leads to boredom and death and (#100) You’re a class-AAA commitment phobe.

  For now, I’m just Pauline’s employee, one who is deeply conflicted about my feelings for the boss.

  But I realize something more concrete about her when I arrive at the Medblog office to check out the mysterious package: Pauline is missing.

  The office is located in the South Park neighborhood, near the San Francisco Giants ballpark. This is a dot-com ghetto and gold rush territory. Founded as a housing development 150 years ago, its upgraded townhouses now serve as home to the wide-eyed frontierspeople of the Internet. Backed by venture capitalists, they operate a new generation of publishing, technical, and software companies. They also consume their weight daily in quadruple nonfat caramel lattes. The area oozes with an old-West optimism fueled by recent MBAs who think the only problem with Google is that its founders didn’t think big enough.

  Medblog resides in two small rooms in the back of a Victorian turned four-company office. I walk down a tiled hallway, and through a small window inset in Medblog’s door, I see the lights are off.

  I knock. No answer. I try the handle. The door is open. I poke my head inside.

  “Pauline?” I ask.

  No answer.

  I run my hand along the inside of the cool, smooth wall to my right. I find the light switch, and I flip it on.

  Along the wall opposite me is a doorway to back rooms flanked by built-in floor-to-ceiling shelves made of dark-stained wood, covered with books, mostly medical texts and how-to-succeed business tomes. Along the left wall sits a beautifully refinished antique oak desk, topped by neatly stacked papers and a sleek metallic iMac computer. The screensave
r shows a mother chimp cuddling a baby, a photo Pauline took a couple of years ago in Tanzania.

  A second desk stands along the right wall. Hardwood floors stretch between the desks, partly covered by a handsome area rug woven with orange, brown, red, and yellow squares. I detect a manufactured crisp scent, lemonish, doubtless a tribute to Pauline’s slightly obsessive commitment to having the place cleaned regularly.

  All-in-all, this modestly appointed office is the 21st-century newsroom. And it is the bane of the traditional newspaper and magazine empire, which have relatively gargantuan cost structures and things like printing presses and full-time employees with health-care benefits.

  And it is devoid of Pauline.

  I close the door and walk to the back rooms. I find no Pauline in the bathroom, nor in the data closet filled with racks of servers and hard drives that process and store Medblog’s data.

  I return to the main room and pull out my phone. I call Pauline. I get voice mail. I text her: “Where r u?”

  I balance a prickling of panic with a reality check. The fact that the door of the office was left unlocked could well mean that Pauline has gone for a moment to get something from her car. Or that she’s gotten us a drink or had some other fanciful impulse. That would be more like her than not.

  Or, after the events of the day in Golden Gate Park, it is not too much to think more conspiratorial forces are at play.

  What if something’s happened to the first woman I’ve met in years who doesn’t think my worldview needs to be realigned by a shrink or shaman? She says she wouldn’t change a thing about me except the part where I use wanderlust as an excuse not to go on a second date. And she seems to help keep my brain in check. Once when Pauline and I were sitting at a downtown café, a woman plopped at the table next to ours, Giants baseball cap pulled down low, clutching to her chest a big purse made of black fabric. A surgical scar ran from the woman’s wrist to her triceps, dotted around its edges with other tiny pink scars. They were textbook shrapnel wounds. Through careful straining, I could make out that the bag contained a heavy, thick battery, something that might power a small generator. I’d once survived a bombing at a café and I whispered my concerns to Pauline, trying to sound like I was making a joke. She introduced herself to the woman, who turned out to be a mechanic, injured once by an exploding combustion engine that spewed debris and hot oil. Pauline hired her to maintain her BMW, and to remind me, as she put it, “to err on the side of not being crazy.”

  That’s what she’d tell me now, with a smile and a gentler prod of her index finger to my ribs, as I look around the empty office. I’m sure she’ll return shortly from whatever errand she’s on, and I can go back to keeping the perfect package at arm’s length.

  I shrug off my backpack, pull out her swiveling ergonomic chair and sit to take stock.

  On her desk sits a pile of manila file folders. The folder’s tabs have headings like “Q1 financials” and “Competitive analysis.”

  Also on the desk, in an elegant silver frame, is a black-and-white 4-by-6 photo of a twenty-something guy, smiling, hollow-cheeked, bowl haircut. Pauline’s brother, Philip, an addict who battles fiercely against the lure of crystal meth.

  Beside the frame is a calendar filled in neat script with daily meeting reminders. I’d not have noticed except that it’s turned to September—last month. September 27 stands out. It’s circled in thick red pen.

  What I notice most on her desk is what I don’t see: an envelope addressed to me, with the heading “for your eyes only.”

  I wonder if I should call the police. And say what? My boss is late to meet me for drinks?

  I call her again. I get voice mail.

  I gaze blankly at Pauline’s computer. Next to it stands a veritable squirt-tub of hand sanitizer. Hardly a sign of a hypochondriac, this is standard office furniture these days. In yesteryear, proper office decorum might have included offering a visitor a taste of alcohol. Now it entails offering them a squirt. I push down on the dispenser and wind up with an excessive gob in my right palm. I rub it into my hands and start to swivel in her chair, turning a circle, contemplating my next move.

  I see the envelope.

  Its edge juts out haphazardly from between two thick medical dictionaries on the bookshelf. In this otherwise neat office, it looks like someone stuck the envelope there in a hurry.

  I walk over and pull it out. As Pauline described, the address is written in scribbled hand. It reads: “Nathaniel Idle, Highly Evolved World Traveler.” Pauline hadn’t mentioned the traveler part.

  No return address or postage graces the envelope.

  Inside it, I find the thumb drive. I pop it into her computer.

  Onto the monitor appears a login screen. At the top of the screen, it says: “password protected.” The user name is filled in “Nathaniel Idle.” The password is empty. All just as Pauline described it.

  Into the password line, I type: “Annie.” For years, I used my ex as a password like a secret I was keeping with my computer about the power Annie still held over me. It fails.

  I then try HippocratEATs. Hippocrates is my incurably hungry cat. No luck.

  I try variations on my own name, then “LaneIdle,” and “W1tch” a password I remember once using. It fails too. And I’m not sure why I’d think any of them would succeed, given that I have no reason to believe anyone knows my passwords.

  I wonder at the significance of “Highly Evolved World Traveler.” Is this some gimmick sent by a butt-kissing overseas company or public relations firm?

  “Even from behind you look frustrated,” a voice says.

  It belongs to a man who speaks in deep tones.

  I turn. The visitor is short and bulky with a thick jaw.

  He is dressed to kill. Except for his shoes.

  Chapter 6

  “Frustrated,” he adds. “And definitely not Polly.”

  He wears a smooth brown suit that costs more than I care to guess, but on his feet are flip-flops that I know for certain from personal experience go for $6 at Walgreens. His hands and face seem rugged. His accessories—a short but carefully shaped hairstyle and expensive suit—scream refinement. I place him in his late thirties.

  “That makes two of us who aren’t Pauline,” I say.

  He chuckles. “Is she around?” he asks. He’s pointedly relaxed, aggressively nonchalant, like his footwear.

  “I’m wondering the same thing.”

  He steps in and extends a hand.

  “Chuck Taylor, just like your high-tops.”

  I stand and extend mine. He shakes with a strong grip that he lets linger an extra beat.

  “Nat Idle.” I pause, and feel a need to explain myself. “I’m a freelance writer here.”

  “I know who you are.”

  Our eyes briefly meet. There’s a mild sty beneath his left eyelid that undercuts his aura of perfection.

  He sees my gaze fall on the small blue words tattooed at the edge of his neckline, just above the line of his crisp white shirt. They read: “Semper Fi.”

  “Grandpa was at Anzio, Dad at Quang Tri City,” he says. “I sat at a desk in Kuwait when the smart Bush ran things.”

  He smiles, revealing whitened teeth.

  “It’s gotten competitive out there if Pauline’s retaining the military,” I say.

  “Actually, we’re retaining her.” He reaches into the inside breast pocket of his suit and pulls out a worn brown wallet, stuffed thickly. From it he extracts a business card and hands it to me. It reads: Chuck Taylor. Defense Investment Corp.

  Another venture capitalist, one of the high-risk investors who troll the region’s labs, campuses and garages for fresh ideas and entrepreneurs to back. He belongs to the breed’s military subset. For decades, the military has invested in myriad Silicon Valley technologies that have few or speculative military applications. Sometimes with spectacular returns. Witness the birth of the Internet.

  “You’re investing in Medblog?” I ask. I’ve known P
auline has been looking for funding.

  “I thought she’d disclosed it already. I saw something brief in the Wall Street Journal,” he responds. “We’re taking a small minority stake.”

  “The help are the last to know.” Unless this deal’s a big one, I don’t know that Pauline would tell me about it, particularly in light of our choppy communications the last few weeks.

  “When I get involved with a new company, I like to stop by unannounced,” Chuck says. “Polly usually works late. She’s got that quality we venture capitalists love in entrepreneurs in that she will work nonstop until she keels over from exhaustion.”

  He glances at her computer, where the password screen remains.

  He pulls out his phone. “Under natural law, she’s not allowed to ignore the calls of an investor.”

  He dials. The phone goes to voice mail. He shrugs. We stand in silence, which I finally interrupt.

  “What’s Uncle Sam’s interest in Medblog?”

  He smiles; he’s gotten this question a million times.

  “You want the canned answer?”

  I shrug. Why not?

  “We need to be a real-time army. We need the best and latest information and we need to disseminate it quickly. The site could help us develop better ways to distribute up-to-date medical information to troops—perhaps over mobile devices.”

  “That is canned.”

  “To be honest, I’d also love to see the site make money. I don’t want to be totally passive here. I want higher traffic, more eyeballs.”

  The Bay Area vernacular; our currency is attention span.

  “Get me some scoops, would ya?,” he continues, trying to sound friendly. “I like your writing a lot, but your posts can be snarky. Not just yours, y’know, but the whole nature of blogging. I know that it’s fast-twitch and all that. But there’s a place for serious journalism to change some of the ugliness in this world.”

  I feel my defenses rise and want to say: Will do. Just as soon as bloggers get paid enough to write the stories that take time and resources.