by Matt Richtel
I scramble back into the hallway. I sprint into the darkening air to the last two doors on the right, covering my mouth. I ignore the heat wave growing by degree with each step. I reach a door two rooms away from the one pouring the lion’s share of the smoke and now, I can see, licks of orange flame.
“Help!” A voice rises over the gurgles and pops. I blink away the heat and peer through the door. Sandy stands at the other end of a room. Trapped.
Between her and me is a wooden desk, or what remains of it. It’s fully enflamed. It’s on its side, blocking her path to the door. Outside, more trouble. A burning delivery van, white and wide-load, like the one I saw driving up here earlier, pressed against the building. Its nose is smashed into a gas pump. A diesel pump. The explosion explained? Instant guess: bad man from Chinatown drives van into pump?
I focus back on the narrow room where Sandy stands. It’s separated from the one next to it only by the shattered remains of a glass wall. It dawns on me what I’m looking at, and standing in the doorway of: an observation room. The glass wall allowed whoever sat in this narrow room to look at whatever was happening in the much larger room just to my left, the one that is consumed with flames. I squeeze my eyes shut to protect my retinas, dispel the heat. I open them and look at the enflamed room and see only a puzzle of images: long cafeteria tables with lines of burning laptops on top of them; on the far end, a pile of handheld devices that look from here like portable video game players; walls painted with murals, going up in flames, including an image of an imposing but smiling ninja juggling a half dozen balls, his black ponytail curling up in flames. Below the Ninja, tinged with flames, I can make out the painted words: “Masterful Juggler.”
A computer at the far end of a table pops with a mini-explosion. On the floor, in the far corner, a freestanding little kids’ basketball hoop burns. It looks like a scarecrow, demonic.
I pick up a scent, something unnatural.
Chemical fire. Something powerful and deliberate. The smashed diesel pump a decoy? An ostensible accident and an excuse for a fire?
I look back to Sandy.
“Are you okay?” I shout. She gives me a “what the fuck are YOU doing here” look. She turns away from me. She lifts a chair, like she’s going to clear away the jagged glass left in the window so she can make her escape, then drops the chair. She looks at me. “Save yourself!”
A minute ago, she yelled for help. Now she’s showing she’s got it all taken care of, bravado in front of a journalist, even now. I hear sound coming from the hallway behind me, voices, feet. Friend or foe? Before I can check, Sandy lifts the chair again, spins it through the jagged window glass, creating a wide berth. She’s got an exit. She’s not taking it. Instead, she’s throwing a metal storage box out of the observation room. Then another. They’re filled with folders.
Sandy looks at me.
I feel a hand on my shoulder.
34
I whirl around. I’m met with a firefighter, a woman two inches taller than me, decked out in a flame-retardant brown jacket with yellow racing stripes. Freckle-dotted face, blurred skin on her upper neck near her right ear from a burn graft.
“Easy.” She puts a hand on my back.
I look back at the narrow window in the observation room. Sandy’s disappeared.
“I need to get in there.”
“I don’t think so.”
She takes my right arm with a firm grip, not hostile. I pull out of it and step inside the observation room, but I’m actually looking inside the eerie computer-center-cum-recreation-room. Sandy had told me previously the company was teaching kids to multitask. If that’s all this was, why the fuss, or the deliberate fire?
I peer inside, through intensifying smoke turning from gray to black. I make out a pile of cell phones on the corner of the table, glowing with fire, maybe explaining the metallic odor. On the floor, next to the table’s edge, burns a train set, the wooden bridge somehow having escaped the fire. I can’t take my eyes from it, when I feel the grip again on my right arm, stronger now, and then one on my left. Two firefighters. They practically pick me up and turn me around.
One of them puts a mask on my mouth and I inhale fresh oxygen. I gulp. The mask is pulled away, and they march me back down the annex hallway. The smoke starts to clear, giving way to chaos. Outside, men in uniform are corralling excited youth, seemingly with success, though one firefighter holds a sulking kid in a headlock. The female firefighter at my side offers me more oxygen. I greedily accept.
“What’s your name?”
I pause. “Nat Idle.” Instantly, I think: I shouldn’t have given my name. I can’t think. No telling how much new damage I’ve done my brain by depriving it the full measure of oxygen the last five minutes.
“Can you take a deep breath for me?”
I do. I cough but not excessively.
“You’re going to be okay. Can you spend a moment talking to an investigator?”
It dawns on me that she’s not checking my health status, at least not exclusively. She’s wondering what I was doing at the origin of the fire. Maybe, or I’m being overly sensitive; my ability to make sense is flickering.
“Sure. Of course. May I have water?”
She nods. With a hand on my back, she gently pushes me toward the top of the stairs that lead to the parking lot. A few feet from the top of the stairs, a gaggle of emergency personnel gather around equipment and a snoozing Siberian Husky. I scan for Faith. Not among the kids being marched down the stairs. Not among the cops and firefighters milling and working at the front of the building. I crane to see down into the parking lot. Clumps of people, cars making their exit. No discernable Faith.
“Wait here.” The firefighter makes sure I’m looking at her. I nod. Amid the group near where I’m standing, one firefighter says something to another, then they both laugh. From their relatively calm demeanor, I sense this isn’t a calamitous fire. It’s localized in the back, controllable, but still doubtless to get a lot of press attention given the setting. The firefighter who escorted me walks a few steps away, presumably to get me water or find an investigator or both. With her back to me, I take a few tentative steps down the stairs that lead to the parking lot. I run.
Seconds later, I’m at the Audi.
Still no Faith.
She’s resourceful. Right? Got herself to safety. Or did she flee? Again?
I manage a five-point turn amid emergency vehicles and point the car down a long entrance road that seemed innocuous on the way in. At the far end of my only escape route stands a cop directing a handful of others trying to depart to park on the side. No one exits without an interview.
I pull down the visor and glance in the mirror. I look like a coal miner. I hear a tap on my window. Outside stands a cop with a rosy nose. My options stink. I can ignore him and try to zip past the car ahead of me, fly onto the road, attempt to outrace any officer who might not like that idea. Lose.
I roll down my window. I reach for my wallet and pull out a press pass. It identifies me as a freelance writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s long since expired. I’d asked for it two years ago when I did some semi-regular blogging on medical issues for the business section of their web site, SFGATE. I’d asked for the press pass mostly because I wanted something quasi-official to put on my windshield if I was ever in a parking pinch. The only two times I tried to use it for that purpose, I got parking tickets.
“Nat Idle. I write for the Chron. I’m late to file.”
He glances at the pass. “You ever write about the Giants?”
“I wish. Great beat. You get free hot dogs.”
He takes in my sooty face. “You were in there?”
“Trying to get a look.”
He’s lost interest. To him, this situation is bad luck, an annoyance that may keep him from getting home in time for dinner, not a conspiracy. I look at the maximum-security wing. It looks intact, not impacted by the localized explosion. “Pull over to the right and the
guys will ask you a few questions and you can go.”
“Got it.”
I watch him wave to the cop ahead of us to let me through to another little grouping of cars awaiting exit interviews. I pull between a station wagon and a bus. Their drivers prattle on their phones. No one comes to interview me. I look over my shoulder. No one’s watching. I slide into drive, slip between the cars, hit the open road, accelerate, don’t look back.
I feel tightness, smoke inhalation and something I can’t name-not physical-an emotion, or lots of emotions, threatening to explode out of the sealed Ziploc bag that is my chest. I look in the rearview mirror. No cops. But still. I’m acting with wild impulse, like the little girl in Palo Alto who walked into traffic. No wonder, maybe: I’ve taken a serious beating to my frontal lobe. I’m responding, reacting, darting from whim to whim, following bright lights and curious clues, being led around by my nose, without filtering anything through a mature and experienced brain. I’m playing a serious adult’s game with a seriously regressed brain.
I turn left onto Market, thinking I might lose myself on a side street. But more impulse. I take a left onto Twin Peaks, the winding road that leads to a 360-degree view of this majestic city, and of one seriously powerful brain beam. Just to the west, the Sutro Tower, a looming radio transmitter that delivers us our virtual lives via radio and TV and that, near as any responsible scientist can tell, doesn’t also deliver brain tumors as I figure it must in my most muckraking moments. Shy of the top of Twin Peaks, I pull into a gravel road marked “No access,” and take a turn so I’m out of view of the main road. I step from the car and I wretch.
Dark smoke curls in the sky to my left, above the learning annex and prison, blocked from sight by a half mile of mountain and rolling topography. Dead ahead, the Golden Gate Bridge. To my right, the Bay Bridge. Escapes everywhere I can’t take because my brain-not geography or even circumstance-holds me captive.
I glance at the Audi’s passenger seat, at Faith’s knit hat. Is she right that I have no idea how or who to trust?
I glance in the backseat. At Isaac’s car seat.
I drop my head back and I loose a guttural yell, a jumbled cacophony of energy, a deformed baby universe exploding from charcoal lungs.
I try to yell again, let out whatever is in there, but it feels forced. I close my eyes, think, open them.
I pull my phone from my pocket. I scroll through the address book until I find what I’m looking for. I put the cursor on her number, and I hit send.
“Hello,” a woman answers.
“Polly?”
“Who?”
“Goddamn it, Polly. Please.”
“Did you call earlier?”
I don’t recognize this voice.
“Where’s Isaac?”
“What?”
“Where is my son?”
“You’ve got the wrong number. I’ve told you before. Please don’t call here again.”
The phone goes dead.
I’m staring at the device. Hot tears on my cheek. Where’s my son? I can’t believe Polly would do this. I can’t believe she’d change the number. Not now. Or did she do that earlier, and I forgot? Why? What could I have done to have deserved this humiliation? I can’t let go, right, is that what she’d say? I treat relationships like stories, pulling and tearing at them until I’ve left nothing but scorched Earth?
And is this why I can’t trust-because Polly took everything from me without warning? Am I right not to trust?
I cock my arm back, device in hand, ready to fling it down the mountain. It rings.
“Polly,” I answer.
“I’m sorry I lied to you,” a woman’s voice says. “My heart is true.”
Not Polly, Faith.
35
On the downward sloping hillside in front of me, a white rabbit takes two awkward bounces, pauses, bends its neck down and licks its leg, hurt. Behind it, in the distance, rises downtown, gray and white buildings like a mouthful of crooked, dangerous teeth.
“Where are you, Faith? Lied about what?”
“I’m fine. Check Mission Day.”
“Mission Day?”
I hear a shuffling on the other end. A male voice says: “See, she’s okay.” I recognize the voice. It’s the man from Chinatown. “But she need your help.” He leaves the “s” off “needs.”
“Who is this?”
Laughter. “They’re going to think you started the fire.”
“I’ll let the police know where to find you in Chinatown.”
“Tell them to look for the Chinese man. That should make it no problem.”
“What do you want?”
“Did you get those files?”
Files? Does he mean the ones Sandy has?
After a pause: “I got them.”
“I need them.”
“Did you kidnap Faith?”
Deep laugh. “Kidnap? This one does whatever she wants. But let’s make a trade. Two hours?”
“I’m not sure what you’re proposing. What kind of trade?” Faith for the files? What are they? But I’m trying to buy time.
“Meet at Baker Beach.”
“Let me talk to her.”
“Two hours. You know the place?”
“What? I can’t hear you.” It’s not true.
“Baker Beach!”
“My phone reception gets very shaky in this area. . and I. .” I hang up.
It’s impulsive and it won’t buy me more than a few seconds. I need even those. What was Faith talking about when she said “Mission Day”?
Using my phone, I Google the phrase. It’s an elementary school, fancy web site, private institution advertising the “Growing intellect through imaginary play.” The school where Faith’s nephew goes. Timothy, right? So?
I study the web site, struck by another simple possibility. Faith is trying to tell me to watch out for her nephew. She’s told me that she tends to care for him because her sister is unreliable, kooky. Maybe Faith’s sending me simple code; she’s innocent and merely worried about a loved one.
But if she’s so innocent, what did she lie about?
The phone rings. It’s Faith’s number again. I pick it up.
“Hello? Are you there?”
I hang up, feigning poor reception, buying more time, keeping a modicum of control in this uneven relationship. The phone rings again. I send it to voice mail. Less than a minute later, my phone beeps, letting me know that I’ve received a voice mail. I listen. “You don’t have the files but you’ll get them. You have until tomorrow morning or say goodbye to your Faith.”
For a dude speaking broken English, he’s stumbled into some solid wordplay.
But is the threat real? Will he hurt Faith, or is she helping him? Is she kidnapped or complicit?
Sandy, did you survive and take the files with you? What’s in them? Did it relate to that surreal computer lab burning inside the learning annex? Maybe Sandy was targeted for her work at PRISM or maybe for her work at the prison, or both.
I call the main number for the prison. I ask for Doc Jefferson, the warden, who obviously is not available. I leave my name, number and affiliation: the guy who did the freelance story for the New York Times about the organic farm. He’ll call me back at half past never.
I look out at the field, and let my eyes glaze over. The sun has begun to set. It’s chillier than I realized. I feel the all-over body ache that adrenaline has been masking. My head pounds. I sit in the driver’s seat. I close the door. I turn on the engine, put on the heat, tilt my seat back.
Reclined, I let my mind drift and I find it settling on a June day a year earlier when I was nearly felled by a stuffed turtle. Polly and I stood in an aisle at Target in South San Francisco, looking at car seats. I wore Bermuda shorts, which would be suitable for June anywhere on the planet except for damp, gray San Francisco, where summers come to die. Polly glances at my attire and shakes her head.
“You’ll dress our son for the weather, not the ca
lendar.” She smiles as I walk toward her to take her hand and assure her that I’ll dress our son accordingly. A projectile comes flying through the air. Instinctively, I duck out of the way. Polly nearly doubles over with laughter. When I get my bearings, I see I’ve dodged a stuffed green turtle that lies on the floor next to me. A humiliated mother stands next to her four-year-old son, who’d thrown the furry critter.
“His dad’s been teaching him to play catch.” The woman scoops up the stuffed critter.
Polly looks so sad.
“What’s the matter, Polly?”
“C’mon, Nat. You know. Things don’t always work out the way you dream they will.”
It’s the last thing I picture before I fall asleep in the front seat of my ex’s ex-Audi. In my dream, I’m sitting at the restaurant with Polly. She has something important to tell me. But there’s something odd about her that takes a moment to place. She’s wearing a costume on her head. It’s an elaborate rubber dinosaur mask. She’s a triceratops. I know this because I’ve recently bought a book for our unborn son and fantasized about memorizing the names of extinct beasts, like I once did with my dad.
The waiter with the rusty ankle limps over, carrying a white plate with a single brown fortune cookie. He’s replacing Polly’s first cookie, which was empty of a fortune.
“This one will be better.” He puts down the plate.
Polly puts one of her beautiful, slender fingers on the table. She lifts the cookie.
“We should talk,” she says. Or that’s what I think she says; it’s hard to hear under the mask.
“Open it, Polly.” I’m so excited.
She cracks open the cookie. Inside, a tiny dinosaur. It smiles, like only a baby dinosaur can, with tiny, perfect teeth. “Hi, Daddy.”
I reach out to grab the little guy. I want to brush the spikes on his tiny little head. I’m startled awake by ringing. It’s dark outside. I’m suffocating from car heat. I notice the dashboard says 6:30 p.m. I reach for my phone. It’s Bullseye.
