by Matt Richtel
It’s Hippocrates, my loquacious black-haired cat, who welcomes me with plaintive meows and a whirl around my ankles.
I flip on the light and notice the pile of mail on the entryway table. I wonder if therein lies letters sent by the Internal Revenue Service, long ignored. I’ll check later.
I inhale the antiseptic smell from the regular cleaning visits Polly paid for a year in advance. I hate this place. It embodies Polly’s pragmatism, with the energy-efficient stainless steel appliances, and a collection of furniture that would be mismatched if it didn’t work together perfectly. And it’s devoid of Polly’s romantic side, which I won’t deny she absolutely had. It was once represented here by an eclectic collection of art—from expensive paintings and trinkets she’d picked up in her various travels to a mural that covers one wall on the floor below me and that depicts a little girl sitting on a bench reading a Nancy Drew book and waiting for a train. Only the mural remains. The rest of the stuff went back to Polly and some to her brother, a recovering meth addict.
I walk to the maroon couch that I once imagined would be central to our family hearth. Gone is the refinished antique brown coffee table that once stood in front of the couch. In its place, a red jumper for Isaac to bounce, bounce, bounce. There’s a pack of blocks with alphabet letters, a gift from a magazine editor, that I’ve yet to open.
I plop on the couch and wish for the energy to make it upstairs to the loft. My wish is unmet. When I wake up again, still in my clothes, my phone tells me it’s 10:15. In the morning. Another extraordinarily long sleep. A concussion can manifest as depressive symptoms.
The best thing for me to do is work and I don’t want to do it here in this stately vacuum. I slug coffee. I pour myself into the shower and let scalding water bring me further to life. I shave, don fresh jeans and a plain light blue T-shirt. I pick up my tattered backpack, and the compromised laptop inside of it, and set forth for Sandy Vello.
But the other mystery woman intervenes.
As I approach my office on Polk Street, I see Faith standing under the awning of Green Love, avoiding a drizzle.
13
I’m half a block away from her when she looks up and, a millisecond later, seems to register that it’s me. In that moment, her face changes—from pensive to warm, but manufactured.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“That you must be pretty concerned to have taken off work and to show up at my office in person.”
“That I’m not the sort of girl who loiters in the doorway of an environmentally conscious sex shop.”
The line, though it feels pre-packaged, is delivered with enough poise to catch me off guard. She points in the window to a particularly well-endowed male prosthetic. Hung over it is a piece of string holding a sign that reads “BPA Free.”
“Sure, it has no toxic plastics,” she says. “But is it solar-powered?”
“Wind. You have to use it outside during a category five storm.”
Her brown eyes twinkle and she smiles, then resolves it. To protect herself against the January morning chill, she wears a puffy brown jacket that says thrift, not fashion, and that sits high on her waist. Her white wool gloves, the fabric cut off the tips, show her slim fingers, nails unpainted. Her jeans hug her legs. I’m struck by an image; I can see her managing a staff at a nice restaurant, quietly controlling her environment, wielding influence, making something in her image. I want to meet her again under regular circumstances and take her out for a drink and feel weightless.
“What do you do for work, Faith?”
“You said you usually take someone out for coffee before grilling them.” Another clever line, confident on its face, but she seems only to eek out the last couple of words. Under her eyes the thin lines of sleeplessness.
“Come on up to my office and let’s talk about the burly man who tried to throw me under the subway.”
She pauses, maybe trying to figure out if I’m joking.
“For just a sec. I don’t have a lot of time and I want to show you the diner. Do you have a car?” I nod, a vague signal, approximating agreement. We walk upstairs in silence.
Inside, I pick up a narrow, manila-colored reporter’s notebook and slip it into my back pocket. From my backpack, I pull out the Mac and set it on the desk.
“Faith, do you know much about computers?”
She’s taking in my office. “Not really. Are you having trouble?”
Yeah, as in: someone hacked into my computer and programmed it to tell me about the death of a former reality-show-contestant-turned-employee of PRISM Corporation. I look up at Faith, who looks at my futon. I see her glance at the Minnie Mouse nightlight plugged into the socket and wonder when I got afraid of the dark.
“Is this where you sleep?”
I ignore the question. “I ran into Sandy Vello.”
She looks at me. “Who?” Genuine.
“Never mind. I need five minutes to check email. Pull up a futon.”
A sound comes from Faith’s jacket pocket. She extracts her phone. Her ringtone is Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” She sends the call to voice mail. “Do you have a bathroom?”
I show her to the hallway.
While she’s gone, I call up my email. I type in my password, and while my messages load, wonder who else might be reading over my shoulder. This idea doesn’t particularly startle me; on some level, I long ago accepted our Internet habits are a fishbowl being scrutinized by ne’er-do-wells—on a continuum from advertiser to nosy kid to blackmailer. There are creepy implications, no doubt, but most of what they’d discover is how mundane is our humanity.
In my in-box, there is nothing new, or at least interesting. I pull Sandy’s contact info from my wallet. I scratch her a quick email. “Sandy, great meeting you yesterday. I’d love to hear your story, as would my readers. I’ll respect all boundaries. You around tomorrow? Coffee or beers on me. Nat Idle.”
I search under Sandy’s name again, looking for something that might explain this odd duck. I try her name in various combinations with “criminal record,” and “PRISM,” and “youth volunteer.” Empty, empty, empty. “Sandy” and “Youth Guidance Center” and “Twin Peaks.” Empty, mostly. On the San Francisco Examiner web site, there’s a mention of yesterday’s group fight and lockdown at the juvenile jail, noting it’s the most recent in a series of “behavioral flare-ups,” according to warden Doc Jefferson. One twelve-year-old is hurt and hospitalized. But no mention of Sandy.
Faith has returned. She remains in the doorway.
I close my laptop. I used to tote the machine everywhere, but the iPhone lets me get my data on the go, when the signal works, so lately I’ve been less inclined to carry a Mac that can be stolen or weigh me down. For that matter, the iPhone, thanks to its bevy of apps, has proven a worthy replacement for lots of little investigative tools, not just a camera. I’ve downloaded a program that turns it into a flashlight, a ruler, a scanner. When it can write clichés, I’ll be obsolete myself.
But today, my Swiss army knife of phones may not suffice. I drop the laptop into my frayed backpack and sling it over my shoulder.
As Faith and I walk in a relatively comfortable silence to my car, I recall a scientific oddity I’d recently learned from a researcher at Berkeley who studies the science of physical attraction. She said an unexpectedly big predictor in what causes mates to fall for each other is similar head size; the more alike the size and shape—as a ratio and proportion of the body—the likelier the physical connection. I blogged about this trivia in a brief post about the return of phrenology, the long-since dismissed science that valued putting a ruler up to the cranium. Is that what I find so irresistible about this siren named Faith? Is she a medium too?
“The diner’s in the Mission. Potrero and Twenty-fourth,” she says, climbing into the Audi. “You could take Van Ness.”
She glances in back and sees the car seat. We each gaze for a beat at the blue-and-gray seat restraint. I notice I have failed t
o remove a rectangular manufacturer’s warning still attached by a plastic band to the base; it warns me the company isn’t liable unless the seat has been correctly strapped in.
“I told you about my nephew.”
It rings a bell, though my memory of everything said the night of the subway accident remains fuzzy. I pull into light traffic on Polk, and turn onto Pine.
“Timothy,” she continues as I take a left onto Van Ness, just sneaking through a yellow light. “He goes to school at Mission Day, and when I drop him off there, I usually stop at Glazed Over. That’s the diner.”
I don’t respond. I’m looking in the rearview mirror.
“Nat?”
An aging black Mercedes guns it to make it through the light and follow my left onto Van Ness. I’d noticed the car double-parked a few spots behind me when Faith and I pulled into traffic. Correction: I hadn’t so much noticed the car as its driver, and his familiar shiny bald head.
“The luncheon,” I say.
“What?”
I don’t say what I’m thinking: at the lunch where I’d received the magazine award, there was a man with severely oily skin, possibly seborrhea, and a thin strip of grayish hair over his ears that looked like wings. He sat at one of the front tables. He followed me into the hallway and told me I dropped my phone. Same oily skin and hair wings.
I slow the car so that he can’t help but pull up close behind me. But I can’t get a good look at him because he seems to catch my glance and look down.
“See that guy behind us?”
She turns. “In the Mercedes?”
“Do you recognize him?”
We’re driving thirty miles an hour, the speed of the thickening traffic. To our immediate right is a delivery truck—white body, bold black lettering on its side and an image of some cute animals wearing red-and-black checkered bibs. I make out the word “catering.” In front of it is a tan Lexus SUV.
“It’s hard to see his face,” Faith says. “Maybe he’s texting.”
I punch the accelerator and the horn. The truck driver slows, which is the desired effect. I squeeze in front of it, rudely and dangerously, jackknifing between it and the Lexus, prompting a chorus of horns. Once through, I again punch the accelerator so that I’ve effectively taken a sharp right turn onto Post Street. The Mercedes is locked in traffic behind me.
I pull into a loading zone in front of a neighborhood deli. I realize I’d at least half expected Faith to scream. She’s sitting as far from me as she seems physically able, recoiled into the door, arms crossed.
“You’ve got a child.” It’s a condemnation what father would act so suicidal?
“Enough.”
“What?”
“Enough, Faith!”
“Okay. Let me talk.”
14
She looks down. I assume she’s trying to escape the moment, but then realize she’s glancing at the center-console cup holder. In it sits a days-old, half-drunk cup of coffee that has dribbled dark remnants down its side.
“Where are your wipes?”
“What?”
“Every parent has baby wipes in their car.”
She swivels her head to look in the back.
“C’mon, Faith.”
She nods and takes a deep breath. “That really freaked me out—what happened at the subway.”
“And?”
“And I went to Glazed Over yesterday morning to see if he was there.”
“The guy you suddenly remembered knowing.”
“They said they hadn’t seen him.” I can’t tell if she’s tacitly acknowledging that her behavior has been odd or just ignoring my critical tone.
“So you’re convinced it was the same guy from the diner.”
She nods.
“What’s his name?”
“Alan.”
“How well do you know Alan?”
“I talked to him with some regularity at the diner. But he’s disappeared.”
“Since the subway incident.”
She nods. She says that she got concerned because people who worked at the diner were concerned, having not remembered a day when Alan failed to buy a cup of coffee or at least linger at the tables out front among the sometimes trendy set. I can picture the kind of place and the San Francisco patrons, hybrids to the core in every aspect of their lives; they arrive in a Prius, loose from the back a labraschnoodle—one-third each chocolate lab, schnauzer and poodle—and sit with it outside sipping half-caf low-fat lattes. I’m not so different—well, substitute Isaac for the pup.
“Faith, I suppose I appreciate your concern for him but I don’t get why you’re taking such an interest.”
She looks at me. “You think you’re the only paranoid one?”
“Meaning what?”
“I looked you up. You get involved in some weird things.”
“What in the world does that have to do with you? What were you doing at the subway, Faith?”
She looks out her window but remains silent. The dashboard clock moves from 11:12 to 11:13.
“Faith.”
“He, Alan, asked me to be at the subway.”
At last, a ring of truth.
“So you lied to me.”
No response.
“Why, Faith?”
“Why did I lie to you or why did he want me to be at the subway?”
I smirk.
“I’m not entirely sure why he wanted me there. He said he needed my help getting your attention but I swear to you that I’m not sure why.”
“You’re not telling me the whole story.”
“Help me find him so we can both understand the whole story. We’re here. The café’s just a block up on the left.”
Her pause seems resolute. I’m making progress. I can afford to wait.
Here is Twenty-fourth and Potrero, which is not just an intersection but also a metaphor for one. This is where old-world, working-class San Francisco meets new money and tastes. Mexican groceries, tamale shops, trinket and clothing stories with piñatas and large inflatable animals dangling from their awnings anchor down a tenacious working-class culture. But they intersperse now with the occasional martini bar, an ice-cream joint that sells bourbon-and-oatmeal-flavored organic scoops, and a café that seems to draw from both worlds, the Glazed Over.
Three sturdy wooden tables grace the front, with napkin holders and tins of sugar packets aligned neatly in their centers. At one table sits a woman in formfitting jogging attire and a wool hat, sipping a bowl-sized cup with two hands, braving the chill or inured to it by runner’s high and caffeine. A leash attached to her right arm leads to her feet and an Australian shepherd with furtive eyes.
Through a big front window pockmarked with smudges, I see a setting no bigger than a studio apartment with a handful of tables. Behind the counter stands a stoop-shouldered Latina in her fifties wearing a hairnet, sipping an energy drink in a narrow can. And behind her, dozens of doughnuts lay in racks separating the front from a kitchen in back.
Faith walks to the counter, where I notice the barista has a thin haze covering her dark brown eyes. It might be early onset of macular degeneration, which would be consistent with the condition’s higher incidence in Latin women; it’s caused, I’ve read, by their disproportionate participation in working-class jobs—and their long hours, dim light, overall poor conditions.
Before Faith speaks, the woman turns, uses tongs to pick up a fragrant maple doughnut, whirls back and sets the doughnut on a napkin on the counter. “Coffee with enough room for extras?” the woman asks, lightly accented. Must be Faith’s regular order.
“Thanks, and one for my friend,” Faith says. “But first, I wanted to ask about Alan. Big Alan.”
“I didn’t see him, like I told you. Not for two days. He’s usually here when we open.” She places the top on Faith’s coffee.
“Maybe he’s out of town,” Faith ventures.
“I work with Alan,” I interject. “We’re on an important project and I h
aven’t been able to reach him by phone. Do you know how I might get ahold of him?”
She shrugs. “Maybe Tony knows.” She walks around the racks and pokes her head into a doorway to the kitchen. Faith looks at me. “That’s the best you can come up with?”
“Award-winning investigative journalist in action.”
We watch through the doughnut racks as the barista talks in Spanish to a man in back holding a large ball of dough. She returns. She stamps her feet in the doorway, sending up a light dusting of cake flour.
“You work with him?” she asks me. “On computers?”
I nod. Good information. “I’m really stuck.”
“You work with him but you don’t know where he lives or how to reach him?”
Checkers just became chess. I’m contemplating which piece to move when Faith reaches into her front pocket. She extracts a twenty-dollar bill. She puts it on the counter. The woman shakes her head.
“The truth is that I’m worried about Alan. He’s sick,” I explain, then pause. I’m woozy, looking for my words. “I like to drink.”
“What?” Faith says.
“I mean, he likes to drink,” I correct. “Alan’s a drinker.”
“Are you okay?”
I nod. I’m fine. But I’m surprised myself by my slipup with pronouns. The barista blinks a couple of times.
“I know you can’t stop people from drinking but you can try. You have to try.”
“He lives down the street,” offers the barista without a smile. “In an apartment over the phone store. That’s what Tony says.”
A line has formed behind us. The barista turns and snags a second maple doughnut and sets it in front of me on a napkin. She takes Faith’s $20 and walks to the register. She deposits the money but doesn’t return with change.
Faith and I exit. She turns to the right, walking with purpose. “How do you know Alan’s a drinker?” she asks.
“A hunch. But that was more of a sympathy play than anything else. Is he—a drinker?”
