by Matt Richtel
My story is right where I left it. I read. It is not merely lucid, but gripping. In the push of a plastic button, I can send this to one of a handful of major publications—Wired or the New York Times Magazine. Maybe at last leap to the New Yorker or Atlantic.
I write a short pitch I can send to editors. I choose the New Yorker. The pinnacle. I fashion an email to an editor I know there in passing. I paste the pitch into the email. In the summary line, I write “No malice.”
I put my finger on the send button. I start to push. I stop.
I picture Leviathan’s wife, on her knees, pleading with me, connected to him.
I look at the baby bouncer. Protective foam packaging remains attached around the metal bar that encircles the bouncer.
I wipe my eyes. I stand. I walk up the majestic stairs to the bedroom, pausing halfway on the landing to take in a breathtaking view of San Francisco, and a giant neon glare of a Google ad appended to the side of a building.
It’s nearly 8. There might still be time.
I quickly change my clothes, wash my face, and I hustle down to the car.
60
Just like I remember, she walks with the allure of a model but utterly without pretense. Like an apologetic model, wearing a baggy jacket, hands stuffed in the pockets.
She sees my car parked in front of the school. I roll down the passenger-side window. She hesitates, then walks over.
“I just dropped off Timothy.” She clears her throat. “It’s nice to see you.”
“I know a place where we can get a doughnut.”
She blinks. Faith must be wondering whether I am referring to the joint where she used to meet Alan Parsons.
“Not that place. The one I’ve got in mind is seedier. It got a C from the health inspector. Which keeps away the crowds, so it’s usually empty. It’s a nice place for small talk.”
She leans forward and takes the door handle. She looks somewhere distant. “I’m not her.” She looks at me. “I’m not anyone. Not anyone else.”
I swallow. Some kind of acceptance, an effort to swallow my past, parts of it.
My fortune be damned.
Faith climbs into my car.
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FLOODGATE
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Introduction
In 1972, political operatives were caught bugging Democratic party headquarters at the Watergate complex. It was the nation’s greatest political scandal.
Child’s play. In 2012, the political scandal has gone viral.
1
August 21, 2012
8:07 p.m.
I toss back the shot glass and feel fire in my throat, just at the moment that the bar ripples with displeasure. It’s a murmur gaining enough steam to rise above the thump-thumping of the Clash from the jukebox. Someone yells, “Sack the barkeep.”
In my periphery, I sense that the cause of collective concern has something to do with what’s on the TV. Without fully taking my eyes from the glass, I half gaze to my right into an upper corner of the bar, home to the gargantuan flat-panel television.
It’s ordinarily tuned to sports. But someone must’ve hit the remote control. Now the TV shows a news channel, broadcasting a presidential campaign event. One of those town-hall meetings, where everyday Americans ask questions that sound way too polite to express how the polls indicate they’re really feeling about the two candidates, the country, their lives.
I turn back to my empty glass. I let my eyes glaze. I consider what I’d ask if called upon at the town hall:
Hello, my name is Zach Coles. I used to work at the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper, where I got paid to expose hypocrites like you and your corporate cronies. Then the economy imploded, I got laid off, and I do administrative office work that barely pays the bills. My question: Which of you has a plan that would get me my job back?
I can’t muster a smile at my own lies. Much of the time, my erstwhile newspaper job involved writing corporate earnings stories and doughy profiles for the business section, though I did have my share of kill shots. More than most. And I really lost the job not because of the economy, or not entirely because of it, but also thanks to the possibly heavy-handed way I once dealt with a spineless editor who shied away from tough stories and precise language. If you consider threatening an editor with physical violence to be too heavy-handed.
The bar returns to its sense of order, the channel evidently having been returned to its rightful place on ESPN.
I feel a guy sidle up next to me on one of the torn red vinyl seats that line the decrepit wooden bar. He settles in.
“Vodka?”
It takes me a second to realize he’s talking to me.
“Gin.”
“Brave man.”
I pick him up in the corner of my eye. He’s as big as I am, which I wouldn’t mention but it doesn’t much happen. Rather, we’re the same volume, different shape. I’m Laurel, he’s Hardy. More like hearty. Bouncer shoulders, wrestler chest.
I sense that he’s sizing me up too. Happens a lot when people see a wiry six-foot-six dude with a thick head of wooly hair and a beard that looks like seventies shag carpeting.
“Combination of burned-out taste buds and self-loathing—the gin thing.”
Hearty nods to the bartender.
“Ketel One and another liver buster for my friend.”
Bartender cups an ear. Can’t hear over the music. My big bar mate points to the clear bottle of vodka he wants and then at my glass.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of your generosity?” I ask, still locked on my glass.
“Tough economy.”
“Amen.”
I’m not remotely in the mood for conversation. Just might say something like: don’t think your drink is buying conversation. I’m doing a sudoku puzzle in my head.
The guy inhales his vodka. But he puts the glass down gently with chunky, ruddy hands.
“Want to add fifteen hundred dollars to your bank account?”
I sip my gin, feel the sleazy sizzle in my throat like I’m getting tattooed along my larynx, and realize just how much self-loathing. I don’t look at him.
He says: “It’ll take less than five minutes and everyone keeps their pants on.”
Now I turn and briefly take him in. Late thirties, with droopy, confident eyes. A gummy face, jowls, like his cheeks got liposuctioned. Short haircut. Stretched taut over his square shape, he wears a sport coat made of thin fabric, which for some reason makes me think it must be tan. It’s hard to tell in the dark, and the ear-splitting jukebox seems to diminish my ability not just to hear clearly but to see as well.
I don’t have a regular bar. This one, the Pastime, is semi-regular, recommended by a journalist acquaintance who frequents here and swears by its antisocial atmosphere.
“No thanks,” I say. “I don’t do shakedown work.”
I’m just assuming that’s his aim. People see a big guy with a devil-may-care drinking problem and insufficient funds for a haircut and shave and assume anything goes.
“It’s got to be ignominious,” he says.
“The vodka drinkers always use the big words.”
His vocab has almost perked me up but I’m unusually grouchy, which is saying something. I don’t feel like giving him the satisfaction of asking him what he’s talking about.
“Making coffee, filing manila folders, collating. Do you do collating as an administrative assistant?” he says.
Just like that, it’s a whole new conversation—one where the stranger buying the cheap swill knows that I recently took a bottom-rung job as an administrative assistant because the first ten career options weren’t hiring and because paying rent beats living in my trunk.
“Headline: Loob Award-winning journalist whose righteous indignation leads to newsroom violence is now forced to pay rent by collating,” he says.
“Loeb.” Not Loob.
The Gerald Loeb Award is the highest
honor for business journalism. I won it five years ago, for the second time, at the Chronicle—before the economy imploded, cratering—among other things—newspapers, and causing layoffs of even award winners, especially the ones that once punched an editor for excising from a profile of a corrupt corporate executive a much-loved adjective.
Hearty leans in. I can smell the fish taco he ate sometime in the last hour. “There’s a computer thumb drive in a safe in your boss’s office. Probably in a folder. I’ll give you fifteen hundred dollars to bring it to me.”
He pulls out his wallet and spreads the bills, showing me hundreds of dollars.
“This computer drive has special meaning for me. It’s an easy job. You have the key to his office or can get it, then find your way into the safe.”
He doesn’t seem sure what to make of my slight grin. Am I bemused? Bored?
“Three grand. Final offer.”
“Absolutely, positively, no fucking way on Earth.”
He tilts his head to the side, then brings his thumb to his mouth and chews on a nail. I glance long enough to see the bent and bumpy cartilage of a nose that’s learned from experience.
“Figured you’d say that.”
He reaches into his wallet and pulls out a photo. He holds it beneath the edge of the bar. I can make out a school photo of a boy, probably six years old.
“This young man would appreciate if you brought me the thumb drive.”
“If the kid wants the thing, he can ask me himself.”
He half laughs. “I will kill Ezekiel if you don’t bring it to me.”
I squeeze the gin glass and wonder: if this guy knows me as well as he thinks he does, then he knows that I’ve got anger management problems that manifest as physical violence, including twice in a newsroom. Once over an editor changing an adjective.
I set down the glass.
“I’m not humoring you anymore.”
I stand up. I turn around to go.
“Meredith Canter,” he blares.
I freeze.
Before I turn around, he walks up behind me.
“You broke up six years ago. She broke up with you, actually.”
I turn to face him. “Guess what?” I say. He looks up at me—from six inches below.
“What?”
“I’m a tinderbox.”
“She broke up with you six years ago. In a café in Santa Cruz. Love of your life.”
“Righto. And I haven’t seen her since. I’ve talked to her voice mail twice—on her birthday. I don’t care who you are or what you want, but I won’t get it for you or be intimidated by the fact that you know how to use the Internet or talked to some people who know me. Don’t be fooled by my beard. Underneath here is someone who fights with enormous precision.”
He holds up the picture of the boy. The bar is thumping with an old Scorpions song that I once loved to hate, and I’m feeling the effects of four shots of gin.
“Roughly eight months after Meredith split up with you, Ezekiel was born.”
I take a deep breath. I’m doing the sudoku puzzle in my head.
“Bring me the computer thumb drive in twenty-four hours.”
Hearty nods, turns, and slithers toward the door.
2
I turn back to the bar and finish my gin, and then his vodka. I reach for a half-drained Heineken that looks to have been abandoned. The bartender shakes his head, smiles cordially, points to the door.
I rub the side of my face and feel pretzel remains in the craggily brown nest adorning my chin. I brush them off. Life has grown, what’s the word Hearty used—ignominious. Or tedious, pathetic, whatever is the right word when you drink other people’s swill and scratch out a living filing other people’s manila folders.
I look down the bar and catch the eye of my journalist acquaintance, Nat Idle. Nat’s a bit sentimental for my tastes but he’s a world-class journalist, picks up things, like the clear fact that I’d crossed words with some paunchy dude. Nat’s looking at me with a head tilt, wondering: everything okay? I nod. I’m not in the mood for a partner. Besides, Nat’s got a pregnant girlfriend, and doesn’t need to get involved with this kind of jerk. I wonder if I once had a pregnant girlfriend, namely Meredith, before she dropped me.
I go after Hearty.
I’ve never liked running because it makes me look like a punch-drunk ostrich. So I walk/run/lope to the door, parting gawking revelers, seducers and their prey and push through the red door with the circular window.
I don’t see Hearty.
I look at my grandfather’s Rolex, the first thing I’d take with me in a fire and last thing I’d pawn when it comes to that.
It’s 8:50.
I see Hearty. He’s poked his head and arm out of the driver’s-side window of a sedan that is parallel parked half a block away between an SUV and a Bug. He removes a flyer tucked under his windshield wiper. He tosses shredded flyer parts onto the pavement and rolls up the window.
I drunken-ostrich-lope toward the car.
He starts inching the car back and forth to extricate it from the parking spot.
With help from a streetlamp, I see his eyes widen as I jump onto the sedan. In the air, I twist my body so that I land on my butt. I can feel the hood dent under 260 pounds of thin fat man.
I slide off the sedan.
Hearty is out the door.
He’s reaching into his internal jacket pocket. Gun? Knife? iPhone?
I lurch for the door and smash it into him, sandwiching his thick corpus against the car frame.
He smirks, unhurt. Standoff. Does either of us want to take the next step toward rolling around on the cement and trading broken noses?
“Zeke,” I say.
“You see, I speak the truth.”
“Gutter name. My grandfather was Ezekiel. Zeke. He killed my great-grandfather, a violent pedophile bastard and the mouth of the filthy river that became our gene pool.”
“But you hate the name Ezekiel.”
“Which also was the name of my great-grandfather, the pedophile. Of course that bitch would name her son Zeke. So, no, I don’t think you’re lying.”
He says: “Meredith does seem like a bitch.”
This is the part where I have no control. I lean my hairy bowling-ball cranium back and snap it forward right into Hearty’s nose.
Satisfying crack of forehead against cartilage followed immediately by a momentary trip to the planetarium inside my eyelids. When my vision rights, I see Hearty buckle and regain his balance, smile slightly, practiced at taking a blow, nonplussed by the blood bubble that grows and pops and sends a trickle underneath his nose.
I know then I’m being set up, even before I feel the physical presence behind me.
I don’t have time to turn around before some mallet or bat or baton wallops the back of my leg, just above the knee.
Hairy Neanderthal down.
I cross my arms over my head to stave off the next shot but it never comes. I dive for the feet of the soon-to-be savagely attacked bat wielder.
Then I hear the click.
Gunplay.
“Stop,” Hearty says.
I stop. Beyond the threat of having my brain bisected by shrapnel, I appreciate the mature tone in his voice. It says: we’re all adults here.
I look up. Hearty points a pistol in my general direction.
“I understand that what I’m about to say is something you will take great offense with,” he says.
“With which I will take great offense.”
“You’re predictable. You did exactly what we thought you would. Exactly.”
He wipes his nose on his soaking sleeve.
“You wanted me to know that you can take a thumping to the head.”
“That we’re smart and extremely tough. Take that into account when doing the math on your son’s life.”
I start to stand.
“Stay down,” he says.
“Ignominious—word of the day.”
With
out getting a good look at the bat wielder, I see him take off. The street is dark and empty.
“What’s so special about the computer file?” I ask.
“To you: it’s worth fifteen hundred. Minus my medical bill.”
The offer for three thousand must be off the table. Either way, I’m probably in the red.
“And if I get you the file, you’re going to spare the life of some boy who may or may not exist and who may or may not be named Ezekiel and who is absolutely, positively, almost certainly not my son.”
“Absolutely, positively, almost certainly.”
He lowers himself into the car. He starts the engine. He leans out the window.
“Bring it back to this bar. Same time tomorrow.”
I have to move so he won’t run me over.
3
My neck hurts a lot more than my bat-smacked leg. The neck pain is a chronic condition caused from squeezing my Sasquatch body into something called a smart car. I won it in a raffle and am required to drive it for a year or give it back. On the side of the car it says: VitaWater: Smart Water Gets You Places.
Inside of it, I look like one of those model ships in a bottle—in this case, an aircraft carrier stuffed into an airplane-sized bottle of whiskey.
I drive it because I can’t afford a car but I could afford $1 for a raffle ticket at the Fillmore Street Fair. I thought it was a raffle for the woman in the VitaWater sash. She had reminded me of Meredith, not just the long brown hair and the long thin legs, but the sidelong glance, like I held some powerful allure but also seemed deeply out of place in this world. Meredith, the true love of my life, used to give me the same look, before, like the guy said, she sacked me over iced coffee.
Did Meredith bear my kid? Do I have a reproduction running around? Did the Zeke-name skip a generation?
I’d call information on my cell phone to get Meredith’s number but I haven’t paid up on the prepaid calling plan. I’ll use the phone at the office of Sandoval Political Consulting, where I currently work, collating and filing. A visit to the office kills two birds: use the Internet and phone to track down Meredith; do a little discovery to find out what kind of computer thumb drive is worth killing for.
