Hooked

by Matt Richtel

  Thursday, 10:10; saw art flick with e. (playful). I ask you: is the definition of an art movie anything that has moral ambiguity . . . another run-in with d-wad. Only reason he runs the dept is no one else wants it. Position does not equal wisdom.

  Sunday, midnight or thereabouts. head cold. Hate taking meds. Can’t let it keep a fellow down tho. Got research done at Sunshine, napped in car for an hour, bowling with S. (2nd gm = 210).

  I mostly skimmed, until I got toward the end. I was drawn by a couple of entries with a word in all caps. It read:

  Dinner with the wiz over bridge. parked in the headlands. YOWZA.

  Then a week later.

  Friday night in san anselmo on wiz’s dime. Ate lobster and a fat choc souffle and one thing led to another. Are you kidding, asks I? An unequivocal no. woke up at 8 and didn’t get out of bed untl 2.

  Then:

  bought the new j. mayer at Amoeba. Copied for wiz and got smiles and admonitions (cool!). Worked out with free pass at gym du gorilla. Told e id meet for dinner then bagged out. deadlines, deadlines

  I did a search back through the document. I found the first entry that mentioned the wizard.

  Wednesday: 6—book shopping in am. Afternoon at the ’shine. met book writer of kids’ fantasy. proofread my summary; too many adjectives says he. Helpful grammatical wizard. (face man)

  I turned it over in my head. “e” could be Erin; who was the Wizard? Simon Anderson? He was a book writer. Had something happened between the Andy and the Wizard? Was it obvious?

  The computer beeped. The battery life was waning.

  I looked toward the end of the diary. The entries seemed to reinforce Erin’s reports. Toward the end, more capital letters caught my eye.

  Wiz sick too. Headaches. He’s pissed. Or something to do with a new flame? Who is Tara? Whatever, whatever WHATEVER.

  The computer beeped again. I looked at the clock. There was still time to get to the Santa Cruz PD. I’d have to finish probing Andy’s personal life later.

  My head was spinning. I couldn’t shake the tremors and nausea. Other than exhaustion, no ready diagnosis came to mind. They say a lawyer who represents himself in trial has a fool for a client. They also say: Physician, heal thyself. Why are doctors expected to be more adept self-service professionals than attorneys?

  The clerk at the Santa Cruz Police Department must have been thirsty—there were five empty diet Coke cans on her desk. Maybe the caffeine was why she gave me her full attention. Or I looked just as brutalized as I felt and she took pity. Maybe it helped my cause that, moments after I arrived, Officer Ears walked by and said hello to me. “Give this fella our top-notch service,” Ears told the clerk, with a smile. The clerk listened to my plea but said that unless I knew the case number, she probably couldn’t give me the name of the cop who investigated Annie’s death. I did have the exact date. She clicked and clacked around her database. She told me the search would take more time. After five minutes more of poking around, she said she could she call me when and if she found something. I gave her my cell phone number.

  I pointed the car back to San Francisco, and phoned Danny. He sounded particularly professional as he informed me the police wanted to interview me. He asked me if I wanted to meet him so he could escort me into the station. I said I would think it over. Then he hit me with the bombshell. He said the police knew I’d been hanging out with Erin and that was problematic.

  “They found explosive residue at her apartment,” Danny said.

  “Someone was attempting to blow her place up?”

  “Someone was using her place to make explosives.”

  A few minutes later, a couple of miles out of town, my phone rang.

  “Where are you?” Erin said. “You’re really not planning to leave me here, are you?”

  “You need to turn yourself in.”

  “I didn’t blow up the café. I swear to you. Nathaniel. Please. I am begging you. You have to believe me.”

  “They found explosives at your apartment.”

  “No.” She was crying.

  “Who are you working for? Who are you working with?”

  “Please come get me,” she said, now sobbing. “I can explain.”

  36

  I called Samantha and asked her and Bullseye to meet me at the acupuncture studio in Daly City in ninety minutes, explaining I needed their help.

  Then I drove to the Santa Cruz bus station, where Erin had said she’d be waiting, and indeed, she was standing outside, looking like she had nothing left to give, or lose. I asked her to remove her jacket and I did my best imitation of someone at airport security. I let her get in the car.

  “Start talking.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Is Annie alive?”

  “I swear to you, I have no idea. I’ve never met Annie. I’ve never seen Annie. I think you’re losing it, Nathaniel.”

  “Romp Studios.”

  For a moment, silence.

  “How do you know about that?” Suddenly sharp.

  I reached into my wallet and pulled out the arson report Danny had found.

  Erin was crying again, but she finally started talking. “The third year of my marriage got really brutal” was how she started her story.

  It wasn’t so much that her husband hit her, which he didn’t do all that often; it was what the future held: a lifetime in purgatory. He wanted kids and she secretly took the pill.

  “The bloodline stops here,” she said.

  She stopped talking to her mother and any friends who might hold a mirror up to her. She devoted herself to church, where she was befriended by two women, one of them a mother of five kids who was sickly sweet but fire and brimstone. The woman blamed everything on forces destroying families.

  “I don’t know why, but I confided in her. About everything—about taking birth control, and having trouble in the marriage. I wanted absolution, or maybe to get caught,” Erin said.

  The woman invited Erin to join her on a crusade—to sneak late at night into a small office park on the outskirts of town. A back office belonged to Romp Studios. The woman first asked Erin to go, then threatened to tell her husband about the birth control if she didn’t.

  “So you were forced?”

  “I swear I wish I could say that. I took a gasoline can and poured it over everything. I went crazy. I told myself that the men who hired women to do sex movies were just like my husband.”

  When she was caught, Erin said, she copped a plea and turned state’s evidence.

  “It made me hate myself even more,” she said quietly. “I was a pawn in everybody’s everything. I ceased to exist as a person.”

  My gut told me that Erin was telling the truth. It didn’t exonerate her; she was capable of great violence. Maybe something at the café had set her off again.

  “Tell me about Simon and Andy.”

  “Will you help save me?”

  “You made your bed, Erin.”

  “I didn’t do anything. The cops want me. Aravelo’s been calling me every day. But I swear to you I’m innocent.”

  So Aravelo had been on to Erin. Of course. I was interested in the why.

  “Did Simon and Andy have an affair?”

  Erin nodded. By then it came as little revelation.

  At first Andy was babysitting for the Andersons. She thought the two men had writing in common. She denied to herself that Andy seemed drawn to Simon—because she saw Simon as such a jerk and Andy as such a good friend. It dawned on her slowly that Andy was probably gay. That might explain why their own physical relationship was so short-lived. He finally confided in her—about Simon, and how it wasn’t his first encounter with a man. Simon seemed relatively safe; married and interested only in conquest. Still, Andy was hurt when Simon blew him off completely. Erin said she felt betrayed too.

  “And then he started getting angry, and tired, and mean,” Erin said.

  “Was Simon having headaches too? Or acting strange?”
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  She shrugged. “Yeah, I think. Maybe. Andy said something was bothering Simon. I don’t know.”

  “Was there someone named Tara at the café?”

  “No. What are you talking about?”

  “I need to know.”

  “He slept with a lot of people. I’ve never heard of Tara.”

  She seemed genuine in her uncertainty about the woman Andy had mentioned in his diary.

  “You’re not telling me everything.”

  “What do you want from me?” Erin said. “Andy had been my best friend. And then suddenly he wasn’t. He was a stranger.”

  “And you blamed Simon.”

  “How else can you explain it? How else can someone who is your best friend in the world turn against you? He was the first and only person to really understand what I was trying to become. He let me be weak. He didn’t press. He didn’t take advantage. Then he got sick, and frantic, and . . . he died.”

  “That’s why you did it.”

  “No.”

  “You lit those fires, didn’t you?”

  “No, Nathaniel.”

  “Just admit it, Erin.”

  “Stop! Stop it!” she said. “You’re acting just like Andy.”

  I already was on the edge when my cell phone rang. It was the clerk from the Santa Cruz Police Department. She had come up with the name of the officer who investigated Annie’s death. Suddenly, upon hearing the name, I realized there was no one in the world I could trust.

  37

  The first time I almost died from delirium, I was seven years old. I was sleeping on sheets with bright red fire trucks soaked through with sweat. My temperature had hit 105 degrees. I was so sick and delirious that I didn’t have the strength to cry. Luckily, my mother came to check on me. She called the doctor, who told her to pack me into a bathtub of ice. I remember looking up at my mother from the bathtub and thinking: She really loves me.

  The symptoms I felt acutely in Santa Cruz were not letting up, so I put Erin behind the wheel and scribbled directions to the Daly City studio. I lay down in the backseat and used a pair of gym shorts for a pillow. I was a six-foot nerve ending. I felt each bump in the road, each piece of gravel embedded in my skin. The sounds of passing cars became feverish images.

  Annie sat on the dock. Her feet dangled over the water. She held a mouse by its tail. A dark figure took shape below the water. It leapt. It broke the surface of the water in a splash. It snagged the mouse in its mouth. It was me.

  “No!” I screamed.

  I felt a hand on my face. “It’s the liver,” said a voice.

  I opened my eyes. Samantha was touching my cheek. Her other hand was probing my body. Like a doctor checking a child for an appendix.

  “C’mon, sweetie. We’ll get you fixed right up.”

  I tried to protest. We had to go. There was no time for acupuncture or whatever the Witch had in mind. In my delirium, my subconscious had been at work. Some things had begun to fall into place—as unbelievable as they seemed. On wobbly knees, I walked to the trunk, pulled out the computer.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Erin took a step toward me. So did Samantha. I surveyed my compatriots. Samantha, granola and tofu incarnate. Bullseye, a human protractor with jagged edges. Erin . . . a striking balance—between dignity and vulnerability. Wasn’t she?

  I stumbled. Erin moved forward quickly. She held out her hands. I took them. What was wrong with me?

  “I’m sorry I doubted you,” I said.

  She squeezed my hands.

  I felt a spasm of pain in my head. I collapsed.

  38

  Samantha’s alchemy defied all the conventions I’d learned growing up. It mocked my medical training. True, medical students learn respect for the unexpected. The divine. The weird. That’s one reason the most oft-heard phrase among doctors is: “I can’t rule anything out.”

  Doctor, is it possible this surgery could lead to com- plications?

  I seriously doubt it, but I can’t rule anything out.

  Doctor, can some self-taught spiritual guru reeking of herb-based deodorant poke needles into my back and pull me from the brink of collapse?

  I seriously doubt it, but I can’t rule anything out.

  I lay on an acupuncture table in Samantha’s studio.

  The walls had a maroon hue. Soft light shone from a lamp with a white Japanese shade. A foot table near the door held incense and a CD player.

  She pressed the play button on the CD player. The room came alive with the ethereal sounds of flutes and a distant wind. I had a hazy memory of Bullseye carrying me onto the table.

  I pushed up on my palms.

  “I have to go, Sam,” I said. “There’s no time.”

  My instinct told me I had to move, to act. But my brain was too foggy to remember or piece together why. The laptop, it had to do with that, and the café, and Erin and me wanted for murders that someone else committed. Rotten police, and a gnawing feeling that, given all the violence, Annie really was dead, and not from an accident but as part of some conspiracy I couldn’t see and that now was visiting me. But it hurt too much to try to put it together.

  She put a hand on the back of my neck. She held it there. For more than a minute. I relaxed my arms, my resolve melted.

  “Let go now,” she said.

  My bare chest felt cool against crisp white sheets. The music began to make its way into my consciousness. I flashed back. To the dozens of other times Samantha had worked her witchery. I always was conscious of the first pinpricks. They reinforced my skepticism. But slowly, I would focus instead on the music. The notes carried me away. I would float along with them, imagining them as animate objects, mostly animals, like brightly colored elephants and chimpanzees and flying fish.

  Eventually, I laughed. No matter the stress in my life. Samantha said it was the proof that I’d let go of the stress. Spit out the poison from my viscera and cleared my eyes, nose, throat, gullet, and windpipe.

  Can the Witch save me?

  I can’t rule anything out.

  Samantha put the first pins into me. I blanched. It was more painful than I remembered—white heat puncturing my taut outer casing.

  I flashed on the cages. Rats locked up, ignited into a funeral pyre. Samantha put a pin inside my elbow. I nearly jumped off the table.

  She again put her hand on the back of my neck. Her fingers rough, but pointed. They found their button. Slowly, I felt calmer. She kept her hand there. She put a needle into the fold behind my knee.

  I began to feel the music flow like syrup. My lips turn slightly upward into a smile. The Witch was in control. “Time to let you cook.”

  I barely heard Samantha’s words. It meant she had filled me full of needles, and set them to conduct vibrations and heat. The pins were connected through thin wires to an electrical system. It made some pins warm and others vibrate. Crazy, but I didn’t question the Witch.

  I heard her leave the room.

  As she left the room, I entered a tunnel filled with soaring harmonies. I saw floating notes and strange animated creatures on the horizon. Time passed. Seconds. Minutes. A millennium.

  Eventually, I felt the door open. I must, I thought, be fully cooked. I smiled limply and didn’t bother to open my eyes. Samantha would tell me when it was time to come back to life. I felt a hand graze the back of my neck. Then grip it. Rougher than usual.

  “Where is the laptop?” said a man’s voice.

  Samantha?

  I began to lift my head. First slowly, in a haze. Then with a jerk. I didn’t get very far. The hand around my neck pinned me to the table.

  That’s when I experienced a stab of excruciating pain.

  Whoever was pinning me down had pushed an acupuncture needle into the square of my back.

  “There isn’t much time,” the man said, sounding almost gentle. “Where is the laptop?”

  Andy’s laptop, I thought. Hadn’t I given it to Bullseye?

  He pushed the need
le deeper. I screamed.

  39

  Suddenly, blessed relief. The man steering the needle extracted it from the middle of my back. Mercy. Pain’s most wicked incarnation.

  Someone was holding down my neck, while someone else restrained my feet.

  “Andy’s laptop. Where is it?” said the man holding on to my neck.

  He took a needle and reinserted the tip into the base of my neck. I could feel it break the skin, and for an instant I imagined the cells dividing. But he didn’t push very hard, just enough for me to feel my muscle’s desperate resistance.

  “What happened to Annie?” I breathed out.

  He responded by applying pressure, slow but persistent. I saw a flash of white. I realized it was only the start. He could hit a major vessel and, at some point, my spinal column.

  I looked to my right. I could see a pant leg, blue fabric. I reached for it and pulled, weakly attacking. He twisted the needle, and I pulled back, the leg moving easily outside my grasp.

  “We’ll tell you what you want to know when you tell us where the computer is,” said the person holding my feet.

  I recognized the voice, just at the same moment that I realized something about the person holding down my head. On his arm, near his elbow, was a red rash, scaly. Psoriasis. It all jibed with what the clerk from the Santa Cruz Police Department had told me.

  They were partners. Velarde had been the behemoth cop who had investigated Annie’s drowning. He was doing the intravenous work on my neck while Danny Weller tightened the grip on my feet.

  Amazingly, Samantha’s treatment had actually had an impact. I was feeling the most clearheaded I’d been in days.

  “This is making me sick,” Velarde suddenly said, easing off. He pulled out a pair of cuffs and locked my right arm to the table.

  “What are you doing?” Danny asked him.

  “This New Age shit is making my brain hurt.”

  Velarde turned off the CD player and put on the radio. He tuned in to a light rock radio station. I was going to be tortured to the soaring sounds of Celine Dion.

  “This one is for Timmy Aravelo,” Officer Velarde said. The cop I’d helped put in jail for battery. He began twisting a needle on top of my right shoulder—preparing it for deep insertion and a direct shot into muscle.