The Cloud

by Matt Richtel

  I exhale and lay my head against the side of the car seat. I feel the plastic edge press uncomfortably against my temple. I ignore it. I close my eyes and I see Polly. She opens the fortune cookie and discovers it is empty inside. She manages a bitter half laugh.

  “How appropriate,” she says. “My future looks bleak.”

  “Señor.” I hold up my hand to the waiter with the gimp knee. “Another fortune cookie for the fine lady.”

  He nods and disappears into the kitchen.

  “I have something to tell you, Nathaniel.”

  Polly looks down. I follow her gaze to the water-stained tablecloth beneath her glass, seeing the damp trail as it bleeds slightly into the two folders Polly has brought to dinner, one with preschool applications and the other aimed at helping me set up a 401(k).

  “I have a tumor.”

  I push my neck forward. I’m not sure I’ve heard her correctly.

  “You know how I’ve had trouble sleeping, the headaches, that mistake I made in my presentation last week at the investment conference . . .”

  “That’s just the pregnancy, the hormones.”

  “The baby is fine, Nathaniel.”

  “Stop it.”

  “You’re going to be a father. You’re going to be a great one. You’re going to teach him how to throw and catch and make great but judicious use of adjectives and, you’ve got to promise me, to also add and subtract. He’s going to need some practical teaching along with your romantic leanings.”

  “Polly . . .”

  She looks at me now, square. I know this look, the one she gives investors when she’s reached her bottom line.

  “It’s in my brain, and its Stage Three and it’s inoperable, at least until this bundle is born, and they can’t do chemo because it could . . .”

  Almost as if from a distance, I hear myself say: “We can make another baby, another time. We have a lifetime. When the life of the mother is at stake, the baby takes second position.”

  “There’s a chance we’ll both survive, a reasonable chance. We’ll schedule an early C-section so I can get care as soon as possible.”

  “How can you be telling me this now!” Less question than accusation.

  “It happened so fast. I found out two days ago. I’ve been in disbelief and denial.” She shakes her head, almost bemused. “I wonder if you’re right: maybe all the deal making on my cell phone radiating my brain. Don’t let our baby boy press the device to his head.”

  The limping waiter appears with a plate bearing a second fortune cookie. I wave my hand. We need privacy. I hate this man, the bearer of the empty fortune cookie.

  He sets down the plate and scurries. Polly reaches for the cookie. She’s got tears rolling down her cheeks. She cracks open the fragile brown pastry.

  She holds it in her hands. It’s empty. Just like the first.

  “Bad batch.” She smiles a smile I’ve never seen before. It looks 90 percent effervescent but, at the same time, terribly empty, a 100 percent black void.

  In the present, I see only intensifying drizzle, the foul San Francisco fog, the shroud of death, weather just like the night that Isaac was born.

  I picture the ambulance unloading Polly at the emergency room after she’s passed out in the family room of the loft I later inherited. They rush her to labor and delivery for a C-section a month earlier than planned.

  “Isaac,” Polly says as she goes under, then goes terribly pale. She gasps. Beeping, shouts, I’m pushed aside.

  I went to medical school. I should be able to do something. I’m not just a writer, not just a romantic, a chaser of conspiracies and weaver of disparate ideas, a synthesizer, blogger, storyteller, seducer of sources and readers. I’m not just a neurotic who can identify medical conditions like some Jeopardy! savant. I should be able to do something. But all I can do is diagnose Polly’s cardiac arrest, and watch in slow motion.

  After that, it’s all a dream. Isaac appears, crinkly and pink, but not pink enough, white, if I’m honest. I touch his pale arm, waiting for the wailing. A nurse gently pushes my arm away while sterilized hands and blazing figures in blue and green scrubs bob and weave and take the fight to the death. In the midst, helpless with my medical degree, a chronicler of life and conspiracy, I pull out my phone. I snap a picture of Isaac’s first and only moments on Earth. That is my helpless act, a memory, I tell myself, to share with Polly when the world rights itself.

  There’s a knocking sound.

  I spring upright.

  The man with the crooked smile stands at the window. He wields a knife he’s been using to tap the glass. In his T-shirt and off-center San Francisco Giants cap, with his crooked smile, he’s the devil-may-care.

  Polly is dead. Isaac never had a chance.

  What can this man possibly do to me now?

  49

  I open the door. At his silent urging, I reach into the front seat and snag the Juggler and hand it to him. I stand. I pull the brain images from my back pocket.

  “There’s more,” he says.

  “Of course. But not here.”

  Knifepoint aside, he’s more genial than I remember, stocky, but an ambler, like a guy trundling to get a beer from the fridge.

  I walk a step in front of him, hands jammed in pockets, where I feel my keys and the phone they mingle with. Weapons? Hardly.

  It’s anger that wonders these things, not hope. The future no longer matters.

  I walk up a modest grade, soil and chunky rock beneath my feet, trees becoming denser as we ascend Mount Davidson.

  “Where’s Faith?”

  “Safe and very comfortable. Comfy.” He’s trying out the vernacular. “She spent the night at the Mandarin. Keep walking.”

  The Mandarin. One of San Francisco’s nicest hotels.

  I trudge, my feet sinking slightly into the damp soil, winding up the hill into what is becoming a veritable rain forest, surrounded by thickening English and cape ivy and blackberry bushes. It’s the lush green, primitive San Francisco that lies beneath the crisp green money and the organic lettuce. My vision glazes over but in my mind’s eye I can clearly see the whole mystery, not the mystery involving Leviathan, Faith, Alan Parsons, the girl killed by the Volvo, the Juggler—that remains hazy—but my own mystery.

  Polly died the night Isaac was born. Isaac died hours later. I plummeted into disbelief and grief. I poured myself into work. I became surrounded by sympathy, even from the cops who once hated my zeal for undoing authority. Every compassionate touch felt like a burn. I can see now the Witch pleading with me to come to terms with my loss, trying everything. That’s why she wanted to share an office with me, so she could monitor me, cajole me, albeit gently and with her witchery. She lit candles, offered temple massages and patiently, without comment, took down the picture of Isaac that I’d emailed myself from my phone and printed out and, inexplicably, tacked to the wall.

  Finally, relenting, I agreed to see Wilma, a therapist. Less Witchery, more Freud. I said I was going because I just didn’t feel like myself.

  For months, I wouldn’t talk about Polly. Our relationship was so brief that she never really happened, we didn’t happen, Isaac hadn’t really come into this world, just stopped by in transit, so what was the point in talking about it?

  But in the last few weeks, right before the subway incident, I started to feel something different. Grief. Raw emotion. I started to see Polly and Isaac not just as another dream deferred but as a connection severed, one I’d spent a lifetime trying to make. I left med school because the practice of medicine was too barren and impersonal. I’d pursued writing, a lifetime of poor-man’s poetry through prose. And I’d found my muses in Polly and Isaac.

  Then I got smacked in the head. Concussion. The fresh wounds of realization paved over by blunt-force trauma. My new neurons of grief commingled with nine months of denial, giving rise to a twisted fiction in which I’m separated from Polly, living in her former house, driving her car, but somehow still connected to
her and Isaac, whose toy bouncer remains unused on the floor of my living room.

  I hear voices—from the present.

  I’m standing at the crest. I hear the man with the knife only a step behind me. In front of me, ten steps away, stands Faith. She wears a puffy jacket but still wraps her arms around herself to ward off the chill. Next to her stands a man who looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t quite place him. Then I can.

  Looming above them, the monster cross. We’re at its feet, supplicants and sinners.

  “Gils Simons,” the man says. He takes two steps forward, extends a hand, as if he might shake.

  I look back to Faith. She’s unshackled, evidently not a prisoner. Is she here of her own free will? What is real?

  I look out in the distance to the far edge of Mount Davidson. Soft fog, weather’s most passive-aggressive state, blankets what could be a majestic view of downtown and the bay. I close my eyes. I wobble. I picture myself juggling all the lies and half-truths, the ones that I’m being told and the ones I’ve been telling myself. I’ve juggled at the expense of experiencing something real, and static, and true. I cannot juggle anymore. I fall to my knees.

  Faith says to the two men: “Would you mind if I handle this?”

  50

  When her hand touches my shoulder, it releases a memory, her hand on the same shoulder, we’re naked, clawing and releasing. My head remains down, neck exposed, like the night we made love in a beachside motel. Faith has transformed from seductress to executioner.

  I’m coming, Isaac.

  I hear her crouch next to me. I open my eyes to see her knees, clad in jeans, hit dirt.

  “Nothing funny,” one of the men says, voice nearly swallowed by the wind. Head still bowed, I can see the two men’s feet, one wearing worn work boots with frayed shoelaces pulled tight on the tongue and Gils Simons’s brown loafers, tasseled and as out-of-place as he seems to be.

  I feel Faith’s eyes on me. She shifts from my side so that she’s facing me, her knees only modestly indenting the hard, wet earth. She reaches for my hands, held limply by my sides. I withdraw them at her touch.

  I see one of the work boots step forward.

  “Can’t you see how hurt he is?” Faith says. “He’s no threat to you.”

  Faith reaches for my hand again and I relent. She cradles my fists in her palms. She says: “They need to make sure that you’ve not given away their secrets.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Nathaniel, you need to assure them of that.”

  “I’m not comfortable with this.” The voice belongs to Gils Simons, deep and resonant, accustomed to being listened to.

  I look up. Faith and the man with the crooked smile have turned to Gils, the French-born right-hand man of Andrew Leviathan. With our attention directed at Gils, I feel Faith slip something into my right hand. It’s cold and blunt, metal, with ridges. It might be a pocketknife. In my fist, I can conceal all but its tip. A weapon?

  “Stand up,” Gils says. “This is ridiculous. This is Silicon Valley, not the old West.”

  “How do you execute people in Silicon Valley?” I manage to speak. “Shot at dawn by teenagers trained on the Wii?”

  “Execute?” Gils sounds surprised or bemused. “We threaten lawsuits, Mr. Idle. We bring lawsuits. We ruin reputations. We guard our trade secrets very carefully. We can even use our influence to have criminal charges brought if it looks like someone has used illegal means to steal our intellectual property. The AG here loves to brag about putting away people who undermine American competitiveness.”

  I look at the man with the crooked smile and a knife.

  “Lawyer? Is the knife his copy of the Constitution?”

  “It’s gratuitous and he’ll put it away. But it’s understandable that Steven wanted it for defensive purposes, Mr. Idle. You’ve shown yourself to be impulsive and dangerous. The way he remembers it, you attacked him in a dark alley, and, at least according to my sources in the police department, are being sought in connection with a fire at a juvenile detention center.”

  “Don’t forget how I started global warming and shot JFK.”

  “Your zealous efforts to steal our intellectual property and expose our marketing plan have crossed the line well beyond even the most generous description of free press and investigation journalism. Look, Mr. Idle, I don’t understand why you’ve come undone, I just know that it’s a complete and tragic unraveling.”

  I wince. He’s right. I’m suffering an acute case of post-traumatic stress disorder. I lost my son and his mother and my vision for the future. I’ve been chasing ghosts. My hold on reality is thin enough that I’m wondering if he’s making sense. Did I invent a conspiracy and pursue it because I’ve, as he said, come undone? But I feel the object that Faith snuck into my hand. It’s a tangible reminder that I face a real threat or, at least, a mysterious and dangerous situation.

  “You’ve developed technology that makes kids dumber,” I mumble. “The Juggler. If I expose that, which one of us will the jury convict?”

  “He crazy.” It’s the man with the crooked smile.

  “You blew up the learning annex.”

  Gils steps forward, asserting himself. Until this moment, I’ve been too bewildered, too fatalistic, to bother examining him. Now I notice the nondescript visage of an accounting type, his don’t-notice-me short haircut and outdated windbreaker, frugality and conservatism incarnate, the money guy behind Leviathan’s empire. He hates whatever he’s gotten himself caught up in.

  “I don’t want to listen to any more of this nonsense, Mr. Idle. The Juggler, which, by the way, is an embargoed trade name, helps kids navigate the modern world. They can become masters of the cloud. It’s cutting-edge, bleeding-edge, technology. And more than that, it’s fun. We’re going to introduce it first, on our terms, into an overseas market, then see where we go from there. By the way, this is all off the record. And, besides, you’ve got much bigger problems right now.”

  “Like which publication I’m going to sell the brain images to—the ones that show the degraded frontal-lobe capacity of test subjects in a juvenile jail. That is a serious problem. Just think of the competition for the . . .” I feel Faith’s hand on my arm, squeezing. I’m pressing my luck.

  “First of all, the way we read the images, they are inconclusive,” Gils says. “The real-time MRI technology has its limitations and the neuro-chemical blood testing remains primitive. We’d hoped they’d offer proof of the neurological value of our work so that we could responsibly market the benefits. But we will choose our words more carefully in our advertising. We absolutely will not go further in our claims than the research allows, and on that point, Mr. Idle, you may someday get permission to quote me.”

  I’m having a lot of trouble following and as much trouble caring. This has been the neurological rhythm the last few minutes; the recognition of my loss of Isaac and Polly anchors me in a pit—complete capitulation to the world and its forces—and then I poke my head up and out, prompted by some primitive impulse.

  “The explosion at the annex,” I say.

  “Nearly killed my support staff. After all we’ve given to that place. The diesel pump was faulty,” Gils says. “We’ve already expressed our grave concern with the annex. Can you imagine what a lawsuit would do to their already faltering finances? We’re all just so glad no one was hurt.”

  “Uh-huh, and Faith kidnapped herself.”

  “This is absurd.” Gils is now just dismissive.

  “They didn’t,” Faith says. “I went of my own accord.”

  I look up at her, bewildered. “Outside the jail? After the explosion? I don’t believe that.”

  I look at Gils. “You’re in cahoots with Chinese investors. You test software here, manufacture the Juggler abroad and sell it in the East—China, Japan—then bring it to the U.S.”

  “And? That’s some kind of conspiracy?” The executive-turned-investor bends on his haunches. “You really smacked your head. Am
I right?”

  I don’t respond.

  “Faith told us about the subway. You suffered a major concussion. You’re totally out of touch. It’s robbed you of your common sense and your ability to discern truth from imagination. You’re making connections and seeing things that aren’t there.”

  “I’m bringing Leviathan down.”

  I see Gils’ body tense at the mention of the name of the man he once partnered with to build one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic companies.

  “He has nothing to do with this. If you print that, you can’t imagine the pain you’ll suffer.”

  “From a lawsuit.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Gils is truly exasperated. “Nathaniel, this is the future. We’re giving the next generation great tools, facilitating an extraordinary new world. We’re doing in Silicon Valley what we’ve always done.”

  “Getting rich.”

  He shrugs, as if to say, And your point is . . . ? He stands. He turns to the man with the crooked smile and the knife, now tucked in his back pocket.

  “Make sure he gets someplace warm.”

  “Count on it.”

  Gils brushes his hands against his pants and starts walking down the mountain.

  51

  We wait a minute in silence.

  “Which one do you think is his?” asks the henchman.

  Arms crossed, he’s looking through the trees at the St. Francis Woods mansions. This is where Gils must live. So we met here because it was convenient for the executive, and not because it was a secret execution spot?

  “I’m freezing,” Faith says.

  “Then go.”

  “We can go?” she asks.

  “It’s a free country.” He half laughs. He likes saying this.

  He turns and starts walking south, making crunching noises as his boots hit the concrete at the cross’s base. Presumably, he parked at some other access point. He pauses and turns back.