The Cloud

by Matt Richtel

  I shake my head. “We’re going two blocks up on the right.”

  Traffic’s thin. Faith drives cautiously; she uses her blinker to switch from the middle to the right lane, even though the nearest car, a beige Jaguar, is four car lengths ahead of us. Dull sun peeks through light clouds, a temperate winter day in the sixties.

  “What did you tell me, Faith?”

  “I revealed all. You don’t remember my extraordinary revelations?”

  I manage a laugh. “Refresh me just a little.”

  “I told you about my fascination with going to the zoo, and with the anteaters.”

  “This I absolutely don’t recall. You’re sure you were talking to the guy with the head wound?”

  “They can suck up thirty thousand ants a day. Nature’s vacuum.”

  “That’s why they fascinate you? Bad experience at a picnic with ants?”

  She clears her throat. “Because everyone’s got a purpose. No matter how different they seem.”

  Oddly, something does ring familiar about the zoo, maybe because the motel was directly across the street. There’s something deeply familiar too in the way we’re talking, an emotional accord.

  “I’ll give you a recap later. Do you remember telling me about your ex?”

  I shake my head. Does she mean Annie or Polly?

  “You told me about the night she ended it—over Chinese food and two empty fortune cookies.”

  I wince. The night my life careened off the rails at a restaurant in Pacific Heights. I can see the waiter with the injured ankle limping back to our table, holding a big white plate with a fortune cookie. It’s Polly’s second cookie, the first having been devoid of a fortune. Polly, usually so composed, has tears in her eyes. I shiver at the thought of the ensuing conversation, and because I can’t remember describing it to Faith.

  “Take a right here.”

  Set back off El Camino, there’s a gated building made of fashionable concrete and steel. It’s accessible from the side street we’ve turned onto. On the gate, a stately sign reads: “Woodland Learning Center.” In the yard stands a woman, arms crossed, studying me.

  28

  “Please pick me up in an hour.”

  Faith pulls over. She puts the car in park. “I’m joining you.”

  “Nope.”

  She blinks several times quickly, and bites the inside of her cheek. I smile tightly, trying not to betray how much I want to make her laugh or feel comfortable. Based on my track record with the opposite sex, whatever is going on with this enigmatic beauty, it ends very badly.

  “An hour.”

  “Don’t use your cell phone.”

  “What?”

  “Last night. Did I say anything about how someone might be monitoring our calls and emails?”

  “Something to that effect.”

  “If you need to call me, or someone, speak in generalities.”

  I’m thinking about the evident surveillance skills of whoever hacked into my computer to suggest the premature death of Sandy Vello and, also, the man in the Mercedes. It should just be common practice nowadays: assume someone is monitoring you and act accordingly.

  I step out of the car. The woman in the yard now holds open the gate. She wears a dress with flower patterns, something modest but from a bygone era of feminine attire. She’s got shoulder-length blonde hair and a tic in her right eye.

  I hear Faith pull away. The woman’s eye twitches three times. She juts her chin toward the street. “That’s where Kathryn died.”

  I walk into a yard that looks like the miniaturization of an Ivy League campus. A stone walkway bisects grassy patches, the one on the right planted with a massive oak. On the side of the two-story school grow vines that are at once overgrown and chaotic and pruned to look this way. It’s no wonder this elementary school harks to hallowed institutions; in Silicon Valley, parents expect kids to matriculate directly from sixth grade to Harvard or Stanford, or else.

  Jill gestures for me to sit on a bench cut from stone. It looks out on the street.

  “We’re a pair.” She sits. “My nervous tic and your black eye. Did you upset someone with tough reporting?”

  “Journalists are the most distrusted profession, after lawyers. It’s really not fair. Lawyers get paid so much more and can afford reconstructive eye surgery.”

  The crow’s-feet beside her eyes crinkle with a slight perfunctory smile. She smoothes her dress and folds her hands on her lap.

  “I’ve read about you and I trust you. But there’s not very much to tell and I can’t imagine why you or anyone would care after all these years.”

  “Would you mind indulging me? I’d be much obliged.”

  “She walked into the street.”

  I don’t respond. It’s one of the hardest skills to learn in journalism: waiting through the moment a source wants to be prodded to the more important moment when they start to express themselves on their own terms.

  “Volvo,” she finally whispers. “I never cared about cars. I could barely tell one from the next. But I had this idea that I’d like a black Volvo. They looked so sleek with a spaceship dashboard and they have this reputation for being so safe, so heavy, filled up with air bags. But that was the catch, I guess.”

  I wait.

  “It came around the corner. It wasn’t even going that fast.” She swallows hard. “They’re just so heavy.”

  “Volvos.”

  “This wasn’t a school then. It was a private home. Kathryn’s girlfriend lived here. They were playing. They weren’t chaperoned but the mom was inside, generally keeping tabs, and they were plenty old enough to know not to run into the street.”

  The picture starts to form in my head and I’m both fascinated and desperate to push it away. As if she’s at a far distance, I hear Jill’s voice, faint, describe how seven-year-old Kathryn opened the swinging gate of the white picket fence, then ran into the street. A witness on the corner said the girl was laughing, carefree.

  “As near as we could figure out, it was a totally impulsive act, like Kathryn was a baby again.” Jill looks at me. “You know how little kids can be, just acting on a whim, exploring their space, totally unaware of the consequences. They can take on the most terrible risks with such complete innocence.”

  I feel a terrible weight on my chest, like I could suffocate. I see the phosphenes—dancing static.

  “I got to talk to her before she died,” I hear Jill say. “I mean, she was alive in the hospital, but not conscious. I’m sure she heard me.”

  I feel a tear slide down my right cheek, then one on my left, and I let them be.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I haven’t been getting much sleep.”

  “There wasn’t anyone to blame. The family who lived here was so devastated and apologetic they moved to the East Coast, their own penance. The Volvo driver, a nice young man studying engineering at Stanford, refused to drive for years. There wasn’t a bad actor. Maybe that’s why my marriage fell apart; Hank and I had no common enemy, no proverbial fall guy.”

  “I’m sorry.” I look down and see my fists balled tightly.

  “Maybe some good came of it. This school, after all.”

  “School?”

  “It’s done wonders helping kids in this area who don’t have the same resources as the ritzy set. I’ll put a fine point on it: the children from East Menlo and East Palo Alto get world-class instruction, generally a free ride, and the first batch have gone on to colleges. It’s been a success story. We all couldn’t be more thankful to Andrew.”

  “Andrew. Sorry, I’m having trouble keeping up.”

  “I thought that’s why you were here.”

  “Sorry, I’m . . .”

  “Oh,” she says with some recognition. “Maybe you don’t realize the connection. I’d been working for Andy, Andrew, about two years when Kathryn was killed.”

  She studies me and can see I’m still lost. A look crosses her face that suggests she’s getting lost
too. My lack of comprehension is starting to unnerve her.

  “Andrew Leviathan.”

  “Andrew,” I repeat. “You worked for him when Kathryn . . . when it all happened.”

  “I was an executive assistant. Maybe overqualified for the job. But he paid so well. He became a mentor to me, really to all of us.”

  I’m swimming, the miasma of concussion mixed with shock. How did Andrew Leviathan become part of this mystery? How does the magnate who just gave me a magazine award connect to a woman and her run-down daughter and to a dead man who nearly shoved me in front of a subway?

  My phone rings, a timely interruption. I look at the screen; it’s a number in the 650 area code, nearby.

  “Go ahead.” Jill waves a hand.

  “Hello, this is Nat.”

  “Hi, this is Andrew. Leviathan. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.”

  I hold my breath, miasma swirling.

  “Nathaniel?”

  “Hi, Andrew.” I look at Jill as if to say speak of the devil. “This is a long shot, but I’m in the area and I’m wondering if I might have a few minutes of your time.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Just ten minutes would be great.”

  He pauses. “I get my afternoon mocha at Peet’s on University. I’ll be there a little after three. What’s it about? Did my check bounce?”

  I force a thin laugh. “I just need to pick your brain for a story. It’ll be quick and painless and you’ll feel like your brain was hardly picked.”

  “That’s remarkably vague.”

  I laugh again, this time genuinely. “Being obtuse is part of my award-winning technique.”

  “See you there.”

  I turn to Jill. She looks at me with concern. “I hope you won’t make a big deal of this with him, with Andrew. He’s built a half dozen schools but he’s modest about his work. So if you wind up writing about his contributions, please don’t make him out to be a hero. He hates that kind of thing. Is that what you’re writing about?”

  I nod, albeit absently. I look across the street. Faith sits in the Audi, reading something in her lap. I glance at my clock phone. It’s 2:15. Plenty of time to get to Andrew but there’s a stop we need to make first.

  I stand. “Can we play the name game?”

  She shrugs, not sure what I mean.

  “Alan Parsons. Know him?”

  She blinks twice, rapidly. She scratches her right shoulder. She bites the inside of her cheek.

  “It rang a bell for a second but I can’t place it.” She cocks her head. “Maybe it’ll come to me. When I start talking about what happened here—the accident—it tends to override the rest of my brain.”

  “Totally understandable. May I contact you again?”

  “Of course.”

  I turn to her, as she stands. “Can you remind me when Kathryn died?”

  “Two thousand. March eleventh.”

  “And how long after that did the school open?”

  “In the fall. Remarkable, right? Andrew makes up his mind and he can change the world.”

  She takes a few steps and opens the gate for me. “You never quite feel like you’re out of the woods—with kids.”

  “How so?”

  She’s distant and doesn’t respond.

  “Jill?”

  “Those suicides—over at Los Altos High School.”

  “I don’t know about . . .”

  “Three kids last year—copycats, I guess. They stepped in front of trains.”

  I remember reading the speculation that the children, coming from highly educated upper-middle-class families, couldn’t cope with the intense pressure to succeed.

  She says: “When I saw it, I thought: as a parent, you can never pause to celebrate. You never know when they’ll do something . . . childlike.”

  She looks away. This is too much for her.

  I turn back to Faith. She glances up, catches my eye, then looks down herself. I’m surrounded by people who cannot look me in my darkening, purplish eye. I doubt it’s because of the oddity I’ve become, with the swelling.

  It’s because too many people in my life are lying to me, and not for the first time.

  29

  My first true love, Annie, was an illusion. I met her just after medical school. She professed to cherish me with abandon, to get lost in me the same way she became overcome with emotion when she saw a puppy on the street or a baby elephant at the zoo. She hooked me completely. But true connection petrified her and she made a folly of it. She left me without even saying goodbye.

  Then along came Polly. Unlike Annie, her self-confidence and zeal for life were real. She could be vulnerable but she ran her relationships with the same efficiency she ran her start-ups with, things mapped out and executed. Life was an exciting enterprise, growing quarter after quarter. Until it didn’t.

  “You’re going to be fine and Isaac’s going to be fine,” she told me with the utmost confidence when it became clear that things were coming to an end. I was sitting on the edge of her bed, looking not at her, but through slats in the shades as traffic passed by.

  What a lie.

  “You’re going to get yourself run over.”

  The voice shakes me back to the present. I’m standing in the street next to the Audi. Faith studies me like I’m some bizarre creature from the deep that she’s watching on the Nature Channel. I wonder what lies she’s telling me.

  “Your eyes are glazed over and you’re standing in the middle of the street.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “And I’m an African princess who can make you millions of dollars if you email me your social security number.”

  I walk around to the passenger side and climb in.

  “I need to get to an Internet café.”

  “Who is that woman?”

  I see Jill standing at the gate, glazed over, like me.

  “She’s mysterious clue number seven.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You tell me, Faith. Who is she?”

  Faith punches the accelerator and the powerful Audi practically jumps twenty yards onto El Camino, the thoroughfare. Faith puts on a left blinker. “Usually I’m communicating better than this with someone when I start sleeping with him.”

  I swallow my retort: So why did we spend the night together? What are your motives, Faith?

  Her phone rings. It’s sitting in the cup holder between us. I pick it up. The caller ID says “Carl_L.”

  “Ignore it, please,” Faith says.

  I replace the phone. Faith takes a sharp right and pulls to the curb. We’re sitting in front of a cubbyhole of a café. In the window, a teenager sits at a counter, tooling away on a computer.

  “I’ll wait here.” Faith picks up her phone as I step out of the car.

  Behind the café counter, a man in his fifties cradles a book about quantum physics. He’s probably one of the overqualified engineers that this region can periodically thrust into low-paying jobs when the start-up economy tanks.

  He looks up. “Shatter the orbital?” he asks. Diagnosis-wise, he’s quick on the draw, a rare out-flanking that makes me feel flush. I decide not to mention the hunch in his shoulder that I suspect comes from a mild case of kyphosis, an outward curvature of the spine. I order a large coffee and twenty minutes of Internet time.

  I also ask to use the café fax. The man shows me an antiquated machine in a cubicle near the back where there is a stapler, hole punch, copier, and a sign: “Business Center.” From my back pocket, I pull the piece of paper I found on Alan’s desk. I make a copy of the Chinese characters. I fax them to Bullseye.

  At the front of the café, I settle in next to the teenager locked in eerie focus as he shoots cartoonish birds from a slingshot at a target, the casual game du jour. For a moment, I imagine what his brain must look like, coursing with dopamine, the sensory cortices lit up.

  I settle my hands over the smudge-stained keyboard and look at the thin screen,
as if preparing to mount a horse. Into Google, I call up a Chinese-English translator. I spend a couple of minutes trying to figure out how to enter in the Chinese characters but find myself stymied. I’ll let Bullseye handle this part of the goose chase.

  I return to Google. I enter “Alan Parsons” and hit return. Big shock: I get infinite hits, many for the rock band of the same name. I try “Alan Parsons” and “Computer,” and get an equal number of responses.

  I need my bad guys to have very unique names, or at least not be named after popular eighties rock bands that, adding insult to injury, I always disliked.

  I try “Alan Parsons” and “Andrew Leviathan.” There’s nothing of interest. I’m fishing.

  “Andrew Leviathan” and “Sandy Vello” come up empty, and so does “Andrew Leviathan” and “PRISM,” the corporation where the reality-show star works.

  I put in “Andrew Leviathan” and “China.” Tens of thousands of hits. I click on the first several, which are news stories from local newspapers, and one in the New York Times, in which the Silicon Valley icon has commented on the importance and challenges to technology entrepreneurs of breaking into the Chinese market.

  “It’s the Valhalla, the ethereal empire beneath the sea,” he says of China. “It’s the promised land, but you can’t figure out how to get there, or if it’s even real.”

  Andrew is a peculiar breed of source that journalists love. He is a “quote monkey,” someone who can be counted on to say things in such a pithy and accessible way that the quotes elevate a mediocre story to a compelling one.

  And yet, for a quote monkey of such brilliant success, Andrew is relatively sparsely quoted. He’s picked his spots carefully. Perhaps not surprising, though. The biggest venture capitalists and others here follow a predictable course in their relationship with the press: they court journalists when it serves their ends in growing their first businesses, grow bored and squeamish of the relationship with media when their businesses boom and when reporters start asking tougher questions, and then, when they are so big that media can no longer harm their efforts, reestablish ties with a few reporters they trust.

  It’s this last bit of the evolution that fascinates me; they establish close ties with the media again because they want, more than anything else, a legacy. The riches—the stately house in picturesque Atherton, the $140,000 electric car, the co-owned jet kept at the Palo Alto Airport—all start to feel empty and they chase instead history’s stamp of approval.