The Cloud ni-3

by Matt Richtel

  When do I get some fucking answers?

  Then I hear the footsteps.

  Sandy’s back.

  I snag a couple of the grainy brain images, fold them haphazardly and stick them in my back pocket. I make a minimal effort to pull the strewn folders into a tighter pile. Sandy won’t expect someone to have broken into their house. She’ll think some random act of violence or nature befell her car.

  I turn on my haunches. I see what I’m looking for. Beyond the dining room, there’s an open doorway. I suspect it leads to the living quarters in this narrow troll house. I hope it leads to inside stairs and the exit that will lead me outside to drive away to freedom with the curious evidence I carry in my back pocket. And I’ve got something to trade Faith’s kidnapper, or cohort.

  I quickstep to the opening. At the doorway, I discover a short hallway, in the shape of a T. Three doorways, one each a few steps to my left and right and a third, the same distance, dead ahead. No staircase. Maybe behind one of the doors. I choose the one to the right. I reach it in two strides. It opens toward me. Closet. Linens and toilet paper, meticulously organized. I push it shut, realizing as I move to the middle door it didn’t completely close. It’s a minor hitch I don’t have time to remedy, as I open the middle door. Bathroom. I pull the door closed.

  As I open the third door, the one to the left, I know I’m not going to find a staircase. The architect of this troll house means to see me caught and crushed. My intuition gets confirmed by moonlight peering through slats in the window shades lightly illuminating a bedroom.

  I hear the front door open, then close.

  I need to muster the courage to walk out into the troll house, explain myself to Sandy, make this situation much more rational. She’s not nefarious, just narcissistic and in trouble. She needs a friend and I just need to think through my approach. But how nice, I think, to just lie down on the queen-sized bed, facedown, come what may.

  I take two steps to the right and, quietly as I can, pull open the right side of a two-door closet. In the center, a shelf holds sweaters and shirts stacked neatly. To the left and right, shoes line the floor, pants hung on a low bar, nicer shirts hung on the upper bar. I step inside.

  I push aside pants and shirts on my far right. I press myself against the corner. I pull the door closed.

  I extract my phone and put it on mute. The only rational thing I’ve done within the hour. I close the phone. Then my eyes.

  Inside my closed eyelids, I see Polly and the fortune cookie, the night that my life’s roads diverged and somehow I was led to this closet, a dead end, serious peril, and, I realize, some nagging sense that I’m not sure I care anymore.

  41

  “A boy.”

  Polly’s eyes glisten, which I assume mean she’s sad. But she’s also wearing this smile, a 60 percenter. Polly’s got the fullest range of smiles of anyone I’ve ever met. She’s like the Baskin Robbins, but with smiles. She can take investors and customers on a stock-market ride of emotion, guide them just where she wants them by turning her lips up and down by infinitesimal degrees only the heart can measure.

  When she nears 65 percent, I see the residue of Willow Tree mushroom from the mu shu vegetables in the corner of her mouth. Why can I remember this and not, precisely, the rest?

  “Fungus. On your lip.”

  She wipes it off. She turns the smile dial down to 45 percent. This is not good news. I see the condensation on her water glass, the damp stain on the red tablecloth, the cracked empty shell of the fortune cookie on the small white plate. In the corner of my eye, I see the waiter with the left ankle limp plodding our direction with the cookie’s replacement.

  “Boy?” I know what she means and I can’t believe it.

  “You’re having a son.” She’s up to 70 percent but the eyes still glisten.

  “I thought we weren’t going to. .”

  “You know I’m more organized than that.”

  I know she is. Of course she was going to find out. But I’d have thought it would be a joint decision. It’s not like her to find out without me. The limping waiter nears, extending the white plate with care befitting royalty. My majestic woman, my queen mother, deserves nothing less.

  “That’s amazing. Amazing. Amazing! I will immediately get baseball mitts and have someone teach me how to teach him to throw a slider. I peaked out at curveball. Though you know that you shouldn’t learn to throw junk before the age of one. It can hurt development of the wrist.”

  The waiter sets down the second fortune cookie in the middle of the table. Polly eyes it and dials it back to 28 percent. For Polly, this is a frown. She reaches for the cookie and covers it with her hand.

  “What? Is he. . is the boy healthy?”

  She picks up the cookie. She cradles it. “Completely. Gestating beautifully. Five months of crinkly perfection, currently snarfing sixteen pounds of digested lemon chicken.”

  “Then we should drink. I’ll drink for three.” I look at her face, looking at the cookie. “What’s the other shoe? Drop it, already.”

  “Nat, we’ve always been. .” She’s still looking down. “Different kinds of people.”

  My heart drops a thousand feet from the apex of news about my unborn son. “So. And?”

  “There are lots of different ways to raise a family.”

  I’m frozen. I don’t want to ask her what she means. I want time to stop. That’s because I know Polly. And I know that she doesn’t bring subjects up for discussion. By the time she raises a serious issue, she’s already figured out how to resolve it. Whatever she says next is going to make me very unhappy.

  She looks down into her hands. With two thumbs, she cracks the second fortune cookie. We look down at it, stunned by what we see there.

  “I’m so sorry.” Her smile has dipped below zero.

  “What?” This I whisper aloud. In the present. “You’re leaving me.”

  Standing in the closet, I open my eyes. Then close them again. I can’t seem to remember how the rest of the conversation goes. I close down and I look at the cookie she’s opened and I can’t believe my eyes either.

  I hear a noise. It’s coming from the present. I open my eyes. The closet door swings open. I see a burly former Sandy Vello, the very-much-not-dead reality-TV wannabe, holding a rifle.

  I say: “What did I do wrong?”

  42

  “Journalist?” I very nearly laugh when Sandy says it because it sounds like she opened the closet and saw a totally random animal species, maybe armadillo.

  She steps forward, gun very much aimed at my chest. She’s half in darkness, dimly lit across half her face by the moonlight peeking through the slatted shades.

  “You packing?”

  I assume she’s asking me if I’m armed and again, despite the myriad forces working against me, I also nearly laugh at her deliberate and dramatic language. She’s playing to a nonexistent audience.

  I hold up my hands, surrendering.

  “I can’t risk that you’re armed. Turn around.”

  I do so. I feel her left hand pat my pants pockets, front and back. I like my chances if I whirl around and tackle her at the knees. She’d be unable to shoot me given the angle and size of the weapon. For that matter, I’m not sure she has the willpower or desire to shoot me, or anyone. She’s a narcissist, not a killer. But narcissists have extraordinary powers of rationalization.

  “Don’t think about it. I’m well within my rights to shoot you.” She smacks the butt of her rifle against the back of my head. The blow is meant as more of an admonition than an effort to knock me unconscious. But it’s a sufficient surprise that I buckle against the shelves and start sliding to my knees. I blink, orient.

  Instant message to self: don’t underestimate Sandy.

  “Journalist. Where am I now? Isn’t that the story you said you were doing?”

  “I can help you, Sandy.” I’m still facing away from her. My hands brace loosely against a pile of neatly folded sweaters. I pu
ll myself up.

  “Where I am now is pointing a gun at your back. That’s where I am. You can quote me.”

  At rifle-point, she marches me to the dining room. She watches me closely as she moves to the other side of the table, turns a chair around so that she’s straddling it, sits. She rests the rifle on the dining-room table, finger laced through the trigger.

  “We printed out pictures of Donovan and pasted his picture on the tree and Clyde taught me to shoot.”

  “Donovan?”

  “Stop playing stupid. I’ve never bought that act from you.”

  Donovan. The guy from the reality-TV show.

  “Clyde says I’m the best shot he’s ever seen for a beginner. He says I’ve got the kind of focus that could’ve made me a sniper.”

  “I can help you,” I repeat.

  “I don’t want any press. And I’m not just some volunteer teacher, a guidance counselor at juvy. And if you print that, I’ll come after you with lawyers. This is a stepping-stone.”

  I look at her, trying to make sense of the situation. Does she have any idea what she’s involved with?

  “You work for the men from China. You’re supposed to test me,” she says.

  I shake my head. “Which men?” I see Sandy’s index finger tighten on the trigger. It’s a good reminder of the reality I face. Under other circumstances, I might be able to manipulate Sandy, but she’s pushed well beyond her limits. She’s got red skin around her eyebrows and at the edge of her hairline-without a doubt where the fire at the learning annex singed her. She’s likely plenty scared, or should be. Scared plus narcissistic equal danger.

  “Look at my arm, Sandy.”

  I start to push my jacket up on my left forearm. My captor lifts the rifle. I hold up my hands, surrender. I explain I want to show her my own wounds. I remove my wool gray jacket, lay it on the floor. I hold up my arms, palms down.

  “You need to do forearm curls,” Sandy says.

  “It’s my own fire damage.”

  The hair on the back of my hands has been singed to curly nubs. I brush my left forearm, causing some of the dried brush to flake away.

  I start to talk.

  I explain that I’d come to talk to her more at the annex, arriving just in time to see her nearly engulfed in flames. Obviously, I was beyond piqued, so I looked back through my notes, found her references to Clyde and then tracked down his house.

  She fairly interjects any number of plausible objections, such as why I would have then smashed her car and snuck into the house.

  “I’m a freelance investigative journalist.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I got a tip that something strange was going on at PRISM.”

  “Tip?”

  “Donovan.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “He’s obsessed with you, Sandy. He can’t stand the success you’re having. He still wants to bring you down.”

  Sandy cocks her head. She starts to laugh.

  “Donovan?”

  “Rodent Nuts.”

  “How stupid do you think I am?”

  “Sandy.”

  “They bring people like me onto reality shows not because we’re good-looking or physically fit. It’s because we think we’re more important than the next guy and the way we prove it is by calling out their bullshit and trying to humiliate them more than they humiliate us.”

  It’s surprisingly solid self-awareness.

  “I’m calling your bullshit, journalist. Start saying something true or I’ll exercise my right to shoot you on my private property and then turn it into an awesome interview with Nancy Grace.”

  I take a deep breath. “Alan Parsons. He wanted to bribe Andrew Leviathan.”

  I’m surprised to hear the sentence come out of my mouth. I’m not sure if it’s true or just sounds right or how, in either case, I made the connection.

  “The rich Silicon Valley guy? What’s he got to do with. .”

  I cut her off. “Alan tipped me off about you and PRISM. You know Alan? Big guy, drinker. He found out about the technology, but needed me to get him more information.”

  I watch her eyes carefully when I mention his name again but she indicates zero recognition. She doesn’t blink or avert her gaze. She doesn’t know him.

  “Alan was working with Faith.”

  “Damn it, start making some sense.”

  I continue. I explain that Alan suggested I look into a story involving Sandy and PRISM and some dangerous new technology. She clenches her jaw. I wait for her to say something but she doesn’t. I try to think about what I actually know and what I might surmise. I start thinking aloud, trying to put any of the pieces together.

  “It’s technology for kids. So they can do more multitasking, juggling, like you told me.”

  “It’s a huge market. So what?”

  “Sandy, you’re misunderstood.”

  “What do you mean?” She loves any sentence revolving around her.

  “You got hired by PRISM because you understand people and how to communicate ideas to kids. They wanted you to work with kids at the learning annex to get them to test the technology. They thought you could reach the kids, be a good entree, ’cause you’ve got some notoriety and had spent some time in jail yourself as a youngster. They ultimately want to see what it does to their brains. But they also thought they could get you to keep dirty secrets. That’s not your way of doing things. You’ve got your own code.”

  She chews on this.

  “It’s a joint effort between the Chinese government and Andrew Leviathan.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  I continue thinking aloud. “He built some amazing software, and PRISM is building the hardware. It’s a classic relationship; the software gets made in the United States, and low-cost Asian manufacturers build it, import it, pay licensing fees to the American innovator. In this case, the technology is marketed as a way to help kids multitask, to make their brains stronger so they can deal with the onslaught of data in the digital world. Text messages and instant messages, Facebook status updates, phone calls, tweets, all of it. The idea is to build better brains-21st-century gray matter to digest all the machine chatter.

  “I told you that already. It was off the record.”

  “But it has a side effect.” I’m building steam. “It actually. .” I pause to let myself think before I mutter it. “It retards development.”

  I think about the pile of files on the ground in front of the fire, the MRI of the frontal lobes. I can’t tell anything from the grainy pictures that have no other identifying information than a few letters and numbers on the back.

  From anatomy class eons ago, I picture the frontal lobes. They’re beige but with a grayish tinge if soaked in formaldehyde. Like the rest of the brain, they’re deeply contoured, tiny hills and valleys of essential gray matter. But they stand apart from the rest of the brain. They make us human by allowing us to organize information, set priorities, establish control over our lives, or try to. They let us, to borrow Biblical language, establish our dominion over our world. And they develop last, often not fully formed until people are in their thirties or even forties. Without them, we remain impulsive, childlike, likely to have trouble establishing priorities. It’s no mystery, I think, I’m acting somewhat irrationally given a concussion that has temporarily set back my frontal lobe a few development cycles.

  “What happened to your eye?” Sandy asks.

  The question hardly sounds maternal but it’s curious in a way that suggests she’s softening.

  “I went to Chinatown to follow a lead and got clobbered by a thick guy with a crooked smile. He looked like a bouncer at a prison nightclub.”

  “Steve.”

  Steve. “You know him?”

  “Not really. He hired me, and ran interference with management at PRISM. Kept the parents from being a pain in the butt. How much is he paying you? He pays well.”

  “PRISM isn’t running this operation?”

  �
��I report to Steve. I think you do too.”

  “I swear to you, Sandy. He’s my enemy.”

  “He’s always talking about security breaches and how he used to deal with them in rural China. Likes to use the word ‘electrodes,’ and sounds stupid when he says it. Clyde says I shouldn’t buy a word of it. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he put you up to this to see if I’m violating my confidentiality agreement.”

  “He tried to set you on fire. And me.”

  I hold out my singed forearms. She looks at them, unconvinced. I know that look, something like pity and skepticism. I feel like I engender that look more than is healthy.

  We’re at an impasse.

  “I see a counselor.”

  “What?”

  “Her name is Wilma. I see a counselor named Wilma.” I’m now talking for Sandy’s benefit as much as for mine. My sentences feel just shy of revelation. I’m remembering that once a week I go to Wilma and, after many months of sitting across from the gangly counselor in a high-backed chair in a boxy office, I resigned myself to lying, cliche-like, on a stiff couch. But I can still sense Wilma’s looking at me with pity and skepticism when I recite the goings-on of each week. I remember my latest homework assignment for her: I’m supposed to define the word “loss,” or some inane exercise like that. How has this memory eluded me the last few days? What else have I forgotten or misunderstood or misplaced since Alan Parsons slammed my head onto the subway pavement? Didn’t it happen when I was heading home from Wilma’s office?

  “Admitting you see a shrink-is that supposed to make me sympathetic? Just because you’re weak doesn’t make you an ally.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Sandy.”

  She smiles, a kilowatt grin. It’s the kind of raw response she craves.

  “Clyde returns tonight, in a few hours. He’s been in Wyoming shooting photos of some rich family on a luxury camping trip.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Should be home anytime and he won’t hesitate to shoot you. Actually, he probably won’t shoot you but he will blacken your other eye.”