Hooked

by Matt Richtel

  A line of Anderson’s mourners began an orderly exit. In one of the nearby cul-de-sacs of the massive cemetery I noticed one car staying put, and out of the way—a beat-up green Honda with a ski rack and its driver slunk behind the wheel.

  Erin Coultran was lurking.

  11

  I expected Erin to hit the throttle when she saw me, but she didn’t. She did start rolling up her window. Then she paused and stared at me through dark glasses with purple frames, seemingly lost in analysis.

  “Get in,” she said, with a sudden sense of purpose.

  We drove in silence away from the procession. She didn’t like a crowd—certainly not this one. We parked by a tombstone proclaiming “Frisky” to be a “cat above.”

  “When you mourn, you really like your privacy,” I said.

  “So how did you first learn that the cop had nearly killed the Malaysian girl?”

  I’d done it enough times myself to know when I’d been Googled.

  I reached into my breast pocket. I felt the small square picture. Maybe it would jog Erin’s memory. Then again, maybe Annie was all in my imagination and there was no jogging to be done.

  I kept the picture tucked. And, seeing no harm in it, I told Erin the Aravelo story from the beginning. I had friends from medical school who worked at San Francisco General, a take-all-comers urban triage center. They often gave me tips about interesting health issues that they felt (1) wouldn’t be of interest to the mainstream press, or (2) wouldn’t be fully understood and explained by someone without a medical background.

  Erin said, “So are you a doctor?”

  “I’m a nonpracticing, ill-qualified, not-up-to-date, medical school graduate.”

  “So you are a doctor.”

  Signs of life. She seemed to smile without moving her lips. She’d removed her glasses, revealing eyes deep brown and magnetic.

  I explained that my doctor friends started seeing a spate of young Asian women with HIV. It was clear they were prostitutes. The trick was finding where they worked. It turned out that the brothels were actually advertised under various euphemisms in the neighborhood papers. I called for an escort, and was given an address in the Sunset District. From there, I did the basic grunt work of journalism. I met several prostitutes, including Azlina Hathimar, also known as Daisy. They’d been shipped over from Malaysia and Vietnam and were essentially buying freedom through the sex trade.

  “So why didn’t they go to the police?” Erin asked.

  “Some of their johns were cops and they didn’t know who to trust.”

  “Fucking police,” she said, looking away.

  I had planned to go to the cops myself, but events overtook us. I’d gone back to the brothel to do more reporting, arriving not long after Patrolman Aravelo had dealt out his beating. I’m not sure Azlina would have survived if I hadn’t gotten there and begun treating her; her pimps might not have bothered to call for an ambulance.

  “So now you’re investigating the café explosion? You’re looking for another project?”

  She started the car.

  “Where are we headed, Erin?”

  “Cole Valley. I’ll take you back to your car later.”

  It was a different Erin than the one who’d fled at the tutoring center. This one was driving, literally and figuratively. This one seemed highly capable.

  Erin held out a ballpoint pen. It looked like it had been chewed in half.

  “What do you make of this?”

  “I diagnose you with raccoons.”

  “Andy did that. With his teeth.”

  I had no idea who Andy was, or why Erin was telling me about him.

  “Andy killed himself two weeks ago,” she said. “They say he walked off the bridge. He’s the last person on earth I would ever have expected to do that.”

  “Who’s ‘they,’ Erin?”

  She just shook her head.

  “Andy was your boyfriend?”

  “Not exactly. He was so kind, and funny. He . . . Two months ago, he . . . started getting these terrible headaches.”

  I had seen water bottles on the backseat. I twisted my body around to grab a couple. On the seat and spilling onto the floor were a jumble of clothes, discarded food wrappers and balled-up paper, and a worn Bible. Unlike Annie, Erin apparently didn’t gravitate to order.

  “Back up,” I said. “Can you give me some basics?”

  I wasn’t asking because I particularly cared, but I realized the best thing I could do was to keep Erin talking. Maybe she’d say something that would help me get closer to understanding the café’s connection to Annie—if there was one.

  Maybe I could just get a better handle on Erin.

  She said she’d been working at the café for two years when she met Andy Goldstein, tall and lanky with a glob of sandy blond curly hair that some days looked like an overfertilized plant. He taught fifth grade at a private school. During the school year, Andy would occasionally stop by after the final bell to put the day—and the brats—behind him. He joked that he believed in the healing power of root beer.

  Erin and Andy grew extremely close. They used to go to the skateboard park and talk above the background noise of boarders testing their courage against the pavement, though sometimes Andy earnestly told the kids he was a scout for MTV to see which ones got more courageous and focused and which were more mistake prone. Andy had theories about everything; he swore to Erin that you could tell the quality of a Chinese restaurant by its rice. He also insisted that the world could be broken down into two groups of people based on their elevator-riding habits—there are those who press the button of the floor they want only once, and those who press it again each time the elevator makes a stop. Andy was strong, and centered, and made her laugh and feel calm. “When I was with him, it always felt like it was Sunday afternoon,” Erin said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Safe enough to nap.”

  Andy had planned to spend summer break from school traveling in Vietnam and Thailand, but decided instead to finish up a master’s thesis. Waitress and patron grew very close, until Andy started acting strange.

  “Andy became . . . excitable for a few weeks, and then tired. He turned irritable, and mean,” she said. “He freaked at me for screwing up his latte.”

  He knew something wasn’t right. He said he was having restless sleep and strange, vivid dreams. “He was almost relieved when the headaches came,” she said. “It gave him something more concrete to talk to the doctors about.”

  The initial tests didn’t show cancer, but they were inconclusive. Then he went to see a neurologist who’d used some sophisticated tests that found something weird. Erin never got a full explanation, but there was at least reason for hope.

  Two days later, he jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge.

  I tried to recall my basic training in psychology and neurology. Andy was irritable. He had vivid dreams. Suicidal ideation. Evidence of a psychotic or schizophrenic break? I remembered that it did typically happen to people in their thirties. But it didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the story.

  What didn’t seem unusual was that his death took place at the bridge. The spot has one of the highest concentrations of suicides in the world, a fact that has inspired intense debate over whether San Francisco should erect a guardrail that would make leaping more difficult. Critics said it would be a costly eyesore, which made me wonder whether my fellow San Franciscans had any right to claim, as they often did for sport, that they were less superficial than the fine people of Los Angeles.

  I asked Erin if she’d told the police about Andy.

  “I talked to them just after the explosion.”

  “Lieutenant Aravelo?” I asked.

  “You too?”

  “Yeah.” I grimaced. “It’s tragic, Erin, and I’m sorry. But I don’t see what this has to do with the explosion, or anything else.”

  She shook her head. “It’s a strange coincidence.” Her voice was distant, but resolute. “Somethin
g went wrong at that place—I mean, at the café.”

  I let the proposition run over me. Her tone implied a certainty lacking from her substance.

  “Erin, when I first ran into you—ran after you—back at the tutoring center, you said, ‘You’ve got the wrong person.’ Then you asked me what my sin was. Why would you say those things?”

  Erin shrugged. “I guess I felt guilty.”

  “Guilty?”

  “That I survived,” she said softly.

  Then she said, “There’s something I want to show you.”

  12

  Cole Valley is situated just above Haight-Ashbury, famed home of the 1960s love-in turned semicommercial zone for hawkers of tie-dyed T-shirts. Cole Valley, by contrast, owns up to its yuppiedom. There are more than a few Audi A4s owned by holders of Pottery Barn credit cards.

  It was also home to Andy’s apartment, a mélange of milk crates used as bookshelves, mismatched and multicolored furniture, and a hammock. On the wall above a television from 1970 was a poster of Einstein. Garage-sale chic. Fashion du Math Professor. Erin served us tea in plastic drinking glasses with logos from the annual Bay to Breakers 10K run.

  Erin explained that she had a key to Andy’s place and that she was getting the time and courage to clean it out.

  She held out a photograph. He sat at a campsite. The sun seemed brilliant overhead, but it was almost outshone by Andy’s goofy grin. He had scruffy blond hair, and his clothes looked like quick pickups from the Salvation Army. Andy was easygoing.

  “I’m not a doctor,” I said, repeating my earlier admonitions.

  “You finished medical school. And you’re obviously smart. I just want to understand what happened. Listen to my story.”

  I suddenly didn’t have the heart, or the patience.

  I fumbled in my breast pocket. I felt the picture. I put it on the table. It was 3-by-5, the way they used to make them, with a white border. Annie was standing on a rock, with Lake Tahoe behind her.

  “She’s beautiful,” Erin said. “Is that the woman who handed you the note?”

  I told her I didn’t know. She picked up the photo.

  “I’ve never seen her.”

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  “Sorry.”

  Our eyes briefly met but Erin looked quickly away. I picked up Annie’s picture and slipped it into my pocket. I felt the need to escape the memory. I turned my gaze to the Bic pen.

  “It’s not that tough to chew through a pen.”

  I regretted it the moment I said it. I sounded sarcastic. What did I mean? It wasn’t tough to chew through a pen, but why would anyone do so—stress or an aggressive oral fixation?

  “Andy rarely had a bad mood. He was the kind of guy who could fall asleep on the floor watching TV and not get up until morning. But about two months ago, he came into the café saying he’d had a sleepless night. He talked about watching infomercials. He was hyper. He did a pretty funny impression of a guy selling mood-improvement tapes for dogs.”

  Then it stopped being funny. He didn’t sleep the next few nights.

  “Was he doing anything differently? Was he drinking more caffeine? Was he stressed out about something? Did he change his exercise regimen?” I asked.

  “No. He got pretty scientific about it too. We were reading the nutrition labels on everything he ate.”

  “What about his daily routine?”

  “He did seem more intense.”

  “Intense? Like agitated—from lack of sleep?”

  Erin took a sip of her tea. “I guess he was really focused on his research.”

  I noticed Erin had a way of not answering some of my questions directly.

  Andy was finishing a master’s project about the habits of kids who are in joint custody of divorced or separated parents. He was looking at the impact on kids of moving between homes each week. He wound up amassing a decent group of students he corresponded with over the Internet.

  “You’re telling me that a grown man was corresponding via e-mail with kids? Did Andy tick some parent off? Could he have been threatened?”

  Nope, Erin said. She said Andy had asked for and received permission from every family he worked with, under the auspices of the university.

  Besides, she asked, how could that possibly explain the headaches?

  I considered her question. Why Andy had been sleepless was not clear. The fact that he was agitated and had headaches was easier to understand. It was simple physiology. When a body doesn’t get enough rest, its systems don’t regenerate. To function, it relies increasingly on adrenaline. A kind of fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in. The body loses rhythm, and the mental functions follow.

  When I looked up again, Erin had put a laptop on the table. She turned the screen in my direction. On it was a single word, “ping,” typed thousands of times.

  “One night when he was feeling sick, I came over to watch a movie, and wound up spending the night on the couch. I found Andy on the front stairs, typing away. He was typing the word ‘ping’ over and over. He said he’d been at it for hours, just passing time.”

  I noticed that the laptop’s space bar was indented and cracked.

  “I asked Andy about that, and he said that he must have been pressing too hard on it,” she said.

  I wondered if Andy had written any diary entries that might explain his frame of mind.

  “That’s what I want to know,” Erin said, suddenly animated. “There’s a diary file, but I don’t know the password to get in.”

  That’s what Erin really wanted from me—to get some help looking at Andy’s private thoughts. I was always struck by people’s carelessness around technology. We e-mail off-color jokes and naked political views across a medium that records every conversation forever. Even when we try to erase what we’ve done, we leave traces and footprints. Or, in public settings, we talk on our cell phones about the most intimate matters. Maybe we really don’t care. Or maybe we all secretly just want to get caught—at being ourselves.

  I fiddled around with the computer for a moment, trying to open the file. The guy was dead, so I wasn’t infringing upon his privacy. As it turned out, I couldn’t have infringed upon it if I’d wanted to; I lacked the expertise to open the file.

  I couldn’t really imagine what Andy, or his laptop for that matter, had to do with the explosion at the café, but I also could understand Erin’s desperate curiosity—and I wasn’t much above grasping at straws myself.

  “Mind if I borrow it for a day or two?” I said. “I have someone I can show it to. A wiz at technology.”

  I told her about the story I was working on—about the impact of cell phone radiation and the brain. I’d been consulting Mike Thompson at Stanford Technology Research Center. He could speak to that topic and just about any other thing having to do with technology.

  “Is there anything else you think I should know?” I asked.

  Erin seemed so sure something had gone wrong. Was there something else driving her instincts? Something she was purposefully holding back?

  Erin had a faraway look. She shook her head no.

  “My husband was an alcoholic.”

  “Your husband?” I asked, trying to make sense of her apparent non sequitur.

  “Ex,” she said. “When he was on the bottle, he became a different person. Like night and day. It was the same thing with Andy.”

  “Like he was drunk?”

  “No. That’s not what I mean. I just mean that Andy turned into a different person over the last six weeks of his life. I knew him. Even if he was getting sick, he wasn’t the same person. He was . . . hijacked.”

  “I don’t mean to dismiss your instincts, Erin, but I do know that tumors can really impact mood. So can changes in brain chemistry. That’s the essence of depression.”

  I asked her for the name of Andy’s neurologist. She handed me a business card for Murray Bard, MD, and said he’d been recommended to Andy by Simon Anderson. Andy had become good friends with
Simon at the café, and sometimes would babysit Simon’s kids over in West Portal.

  “Simon could get anyone to do whatever he wanted,” Erin said. There was a quickening in her voice, like the way I’d sound when making an excuse to an editor.

  “And Simon was friends with a neurologist?”

  “Simon knew everyone.”

  I offered to take a cab back to my car, but Erin insisted on driving me back to the cemetery. I grabbed the Dell laptop, and we headed out the door. Just two paces out, I nearly tripped on my face. A workman was fixing the lights in the apartment hallway, and I was so distracted and tired I hadn’t noticed his wires. I shouldn’t have overlooked him. He was a burly man with an overgrowth of curly hair for a beard. He grunted dissatisfaction at me.

  “Walking is not for the meek of heart,” Erin said.

  Suddenly she let out a big laugh, and the mood brightened. I hadn’t heard a laugh that pure in a long time.

  But laughs like that can be deceiving. Recovering my balance, I was struck by an idea—after dropping off the laptop, I could take a detour that might bring Erin and the café into better focus.

  13

  Erin decided to join me on a drive to Stanford Technology Research Center to drop off the laptop. I needed to go there anyway to pick up some papers for my dreaded cell phone/brain story. The deadline taunted me.

  I’d gotten used to being on time for everything—Silicon Valley had a way of doing that to you. There were timepieces everywhere. Not watches or clocks necessarily, but cell phones, PDAs, pagers—every one of them gave you an up-to-the-minute digital readout. One friend of mine claimed he didn’t wear a watch, as if to suggest he was too mellow to be constrained by time. The real reason was he had seventeen other gadgets to keep him honest.

  Erin and I faced a forty-minute drive directly south to Palo Alto, the heart of the Valley. It’s made up of people with a wicked combination of two seemingly disparate skills: math and marketing. They’ve managed to get their inventions into every home, car, pocket, and company in every industrialized nation.