The Cloud ni-3

by Matt Richtel

  On my browser, I pull down the list of sites I’ve recently visited. There is no evidence of a Sandy Vello obit. I pull down the “History” menu and get a similarly unsatisfactory result. It stands to reason. I found Sandy Vello through a Google search, so my history shows my visits to the search engine and the terms I’ve searched.

  It’s just after 9 p.m. and I should absolutely be resting my brain and body. But I need to take my computer for a thorough diagnosis.

  It’s time to pick up a carnitas burrito, then visit Bullseye, the Witch’s husband, a computer geek who doubles as a bar-stool statue.

  Destination: the Pastime Bar, my regular pub and a black hole of San Francisco real estate that managed not to gentrify.

  11

  The foreboding thick wooden door, pockmarked with small nicks and cuts, looks like the entrance to a gulag. Inside, the low lighting, far from facilitating intimacy, makes it almost hard to see the details in someone’s face. The jukebox plays vinyl. From the eighties. The black vinyl-covered stools hail from the seventies. Some of them are torn and duct-taped, others just torn.

  Out front, there is an unkempt neon sign with the “A” and the “M” missing. So it reads: p sti e. The Pastime Bar, one of my personal seven wonders.

  For years, it was my regular watering hole. I’d visit almost nightly when I lived a few blocks away, in Potrero Hill. It’s an aptly named neighborhood, with such steep inclines that the Victorian row houses looked sloped to the side, particularly after a couple of pints.

  But since Isaac was born and I gave up my old apartment to live in Polly’s downtown flat, I’ve come less often.

  “Idle!” Jessica the Bartender exclaims when I walk in the door.

  Most of the smattering of regulars turns to look, all of them old friends or whatever you call a fellow bar regular. Family? Enabler? No one else joins in to remark on my first visit in at least a month. This is the Pastime. Such affection could cost you status, or, at least, emotional and physical energy.

  At the far end of the bar sits Bullseye. When I first enter, I see he’s sitting almost impossibly motionless, neck craned slightly up and to the right so he can stare at ESPN showing on the flat-panel TV, which is the sole reminder this bar exists in the current century. When the bartender calls my name, Bullseye, grudgingly, lolls his head to look my way. Unkempt brown hair hangs over his wide forehead, almost straggling over his eyes. His shoulders hunch. He wears a gray hooded sweatshirt, sans logo. He continues watching me, like I’m a zoo creature he’s already bored of observing, until I’m sidled up next to him on the adjoining stool.

  “You look like shit.” He means this as an endearment. He and the Witch represent opposite sides of the same coin. Mother and Father. Nurturer and Go Screw Yourself. And I cherish his economy and lack of pretense.

  “Where’s Sam?”

  He shrugs.

  “Then I suppose we’re bypassing the pleasantries?”

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  He nods to the bartender to set us up with a round. In the background, I hear someone smack the top of the jukebox to get it to play. The stubborn jukebox doesn’t respond. I pull my laptop from my endangered black backpack. I put it on the counter.

  “My computer is lying to me.”

  I see a flicker of interest in Bullseye’s flat blue eyes. For him, computers are so much more interesting than most people. He can speak their language and, more to the point, doesn’t have to speak at all.

  I power up and tell him about the disappearing obituary. He listens impassively, partly because that’s his disposition and partly because he’s gotten used to the idea that I come bearing tales of coincidence and conspiracy. Maybe the Witch has already regaled him with the subway incident, my latest brush with the surreal. As I talk, Bullseye pulls the computer nearer.

  “Log files,” he says.

  I sip my Anchor Steam while Bullseye deftly lets himself into my laptop’s innards. He opens the browser, goes into the “View” tab, then clicks on a menu item called “Source.” Hundreds of lines of computer code appear on my screen. The language looks to me like random strings of numbers and letters. Bullseye scrolls slowly down the list, stopping at one point halfway through, cocking his head to the side, and then scrolling down again.

  “What time did you see the obituary page?”

  I consider it. “Last night. Ten-ish.”

  He closes the file and the browser. Then he clicks on the file menu on the top of my main screen, scrolls down the menu and opens “System file.” Another list appears of hundreds of lines of equally incomprehensible code. Bullseye scrolls down slowly, pausing at a couple of points. I’m struck that his intensity and manner come across much like the ED doctor looking dispassionately at my brain images.

  The jukebox finally starts playing “Werewolves of London.”

  Bullseye scoots the cursor over to the left side of the screen, prompting a vertical menu to appear with my various programs, like Skype and iTunes. He clicks on the icon for “Google Desktop,” which searches the computer the same way plain-old Google searches the Internet. Why hadn’t I thought to do that?

  He enters “Sandy Vello” into Google Desktop. The search engine returns no results.

  “Hmm,” he says.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “There are three possibilities. One is that someone hacked into your computer and loaded a fake web page onto it. When you Googled this woman’s name, a program directed you to a file kept locally.”

  “Rather than to the public Internet.”

  “Right.”

  “So is that local file still on my computer somewhere?”

  “I suspect not. Any decent programmer would be able to program the file to delete itself after you looked at the web site.”

  “Which is why you didn’t find it?”

  “The second possibility is that someone was remotely controlling your computer and directed your search for Sandy Vello to a non-public web site.”

  “What do you mean, ‘remotely controlling’?”

  “They logged on to your machine while you were logged on to it, and at the right moment, inserted a link to a private web page that looked to you like it was on the public Internet. Do you use a Wi-Fi network at your office?”

  “Yep. It’s secured. Password is Isaac’s birthday.”

  He shakes his head. “C’mon, Nat. Really?” This type of simplistic, easy-to-hack password is just the kind of thing that really gets Bullseye’s goat.

  “Sounds like a sophisticated attack.” I know this may well not be true, but one of the most basic journalistic techniques is to play mildly dumb and put the responder in a position of authority.

  “Sophisticated enough.”

  “You said there were three possibilities. What’s the third one?”

  He doesn’t respond. He’s looking at the TV again.

  “Bullseye, what’s the third possibility?”

  “That you imagined the whole thing.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You saw a web page that doesn’t actually exist. You’ve finally gone completely nuts.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Not remotely.”

  “You’re making a joke.”

  “I can be very funny.” He almost looks me in the eye, then turns to Jessica the Bartender. “Can’t I be very funny?”

  “Not in my experience.”

  He turns his attention back to me. “I think I’ve got proof that it’s one of the other two possibilities.”

  He opens the system file again and scrolls down the lines of code. About two-thirds of the way down, he stops at a line that has no code on it at all.

  “This spot probably corresponds to activity that took place on your laptop this morning.”

  “But the line is empty.”

  “Which is what’s odd. It looks like something’s been erased.”

  We stare at it in silence. Then he scrolls halfway up the page-to another b
lank line of code. “This probably is the activity that took place last night.”

  “So there are anomalies in my computer at the time I looked for web pages. It seems circumstantial.”

  “Not to a computer person. This is pretty direct evidence of anomaly. Whoever did this is pretty good but either was in a hurry or sloppy and didn’t totally cover their tracks.”

  “Would I find the same thing on my phone?” I ask. I remind him that I found the obit on that browser too.

  He shrugs. “I don’t know much about the phone system.”

  He takes a swig of beer and I do the same.

  “What should I do?”

  “Sleep is good.”

  “How does that help me find who did this?”

  “Sam says you need to get some sleep. She says you’re having trouble coming to terms with your. .” He pauses-“with your personal life.”

  It’s another unusually social thing for Bullseye to say, bordering on caring. I’ve suspected for a while that he’s missed my regular visits to the Pastime and he blames not just Isaac’s birth but also the struggles I’ve had dealing with Polly. I’m about to remark on his newfound empathy when my phone rings. I look at the phone and see a blocked number but I answer anyway.

  “This is Nat.”

  “This is Faith.”

  She’s speaking in a deliberately low voice, affecting the same tone that I used earlier.

  She laughs. “You sound so serious when you answer the phone. Is that part of the journalist aura?”

  I feel a slight rush, the neuro-chemical dopamine telling me this voice means something to me.

  “Prepare to be grilled.”

  “You’ll want to hear what I have to say first. I’ve got good info.”

  “Really?”

  “About that big guy who fell on you.”

  “What about him?”

  “I’ve seen him before.”

  12

  I put up my finger to Bullseye, indicating I’ll be right back. I stand, experiencing a head rush that is too strong to have resulted from a pint of Anchor Steam. I let it pass as the song “Night Moves” by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band starts playing. Someone boos. I start walking to the front of the bar.

  “Nathaniel?”

  “You talked to the bum at the turnstiles. You gave him money.”

  “What?” I can’t tell if she doesn’t understand and can’t hear me.

  I push through the Pastime’s thick and bruised wooden door and feel brisk wind when I walk out onto the desolate sidewalk.

  I’m struck by a sudden change in strategy. I need to let Faith tell me what she’s going to tell me before I offer her my theory or any helping hand. I don’t trust her, particularly in light of the apparent revelation that she’d seen the burly bum.

  “Can you hear me?” I ask.

  “Hold on.” I hear her put down the phone. When she returns, less than a minute later, she says: “Did I hear Bob Seger playing in the background?”

  “The one and only.”

  “If you’re listening to that, you really did take a blow to the head.”

  I want to return with a joke but I can only think she’s smart enough to be dangerous and intellectually stimulating and I wonder if I can always tell which one of those traits is more alluring to me.

  “I should have started by asking how you’re feeling,” she says.

  I flash for a second on a curious bit of neuroscience done by chronic pain researchers at Stanford University. They found that intense feelings of passionate love can provide substantial levels of pain relief; when someone who is in love is subjected to painful stimuli-like having a hot compress put on their arm or leg-he or she reports feeling significantly less pain than someone not in an intense relationship. It shows not only the subjectivity of pain but also the intensely chemical nature of attraction. The researchers compared love to cocaine. Faith makes me feel like I’ve swallowed an upper.

  “Been worse,” I answer. “You said that you’ve seen the guy before?”

  “Like you said, I gave him money. Upstairs, in the subway. A couple of dimes.”

  “I thought so.”

  “You thought so?”

  A fair question. Should I tell her the truth: that she was so beautiful that she nestled immediately into my memory banks when I first saw her at the turnstiles? Instead, I tell her that over the last twenty-four hours I’ve spent some time trying to re-create the incident from the night before and that I thought I recalled seeing her and the mountainous man interacting.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this last night?” I ask.

  “Honestly?”

  “That’s what I’m looking for in a relationship. By which I mean a passing relationship with a complete stranger.”

  She laughs a honey drip.

  “Honestly, I was pretty shaken. I was worried you were very hurt. I didn’t really understand if you’d been in a fight or what was going on.”

  She sounds sincere enough. It’s certainly possible that someone experiencing acute trauma would blank out on details. There’s ample research that shows that when a fight-or-flight response kicks in and releases stress hormones, it overrides the short-term memory. But I’m also skeptical of the coincidences and of what feels like her careful use of language.

  “When you said you’d seen him before, did you mean at the turnstile?”

  She doesn’t respond.

  “Faith?”

  “No.” She sounds distracted. “At a diner in the Mission where I go for coffee. I’ve seen him hanging out.”

  I pause to make sure I’ve heard her correctly. I hear noise in the background. She says: “I need to go.”

  “Wait!” It’s more threatening than I want to communicate. I soften. “Please. I suffered a concussion.”

  “Seriously? I thought you said you were okay.”

  “I feel okay but the doctor says it’s serious. So I’m trying to understand what happened out there.”

  “Can we talk about it tomorrow?”

  “No, I. .”

  “I’ll show you, the diner-where I know him from.” More sound coming from her background. Then a whisper: “I’ll take you to the diner. Tomorrow.” She hangs up.

  I stare at the phone. I consider dialing Faith again but something tells me such a call would cause her a problem. With who? Boyfriend? Husband?

  I tell myself: Stop spinning theories. You lack the brain power to make sense of this. As if on cue, my head pulses, begging me to sleep. I’ll capitulate. I’ll head to my luxurious downtown loft that is as hollow and empty as the emotions it stirs in me.

  “Remember to pay the electrical bill or the sunshades won’t open in the bedroom and you’ll be consumed by darkness.”

  It’s more than a year earlier, and Polly and I sit in the main room of the loft on the handsome maroon couch beneath a massive painting. The painting doesn’t have any definitive image but I tend to see a fish kissing a laundry basket. Polly tosses me the keys to the loft.

  “Polly, I can’t take this. I don’t want it.”

  “You can’t live in your apartment. It looks and smells like Chernobyl. You’ll eventually be arrested by the health department and child protective services. Our offspring cannot learn that it’s okay to store food beneath the floorboards.”

  I loose a bitter laugh.

  “If you weren’t so generous, this would be a lot harder.”

  “Nat, life takes strange turns. We’ve talked about this. You can make this work.”

  “If I can keep the sunshades open.”

  She laughs her captivating laugh. She looks tired and I know how hard this has been on her but she’s never shied away from pragmatics and her truth.

  The memory slips in and out of my head as I put my key into the steel lock of the tall wooden door of the penthouse loft. I’m struck by a chill and immediately attacked.

  It’s Hippocrates, my loquacious black-haired cat, who welcomes me with plaintive meows an
d 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.