Matt Richtel - The Cloud

“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 and 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.

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.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“That you must be pretty concerned to have taken off work and to show up at my office in person.”

“That I’m not the sort of girl who loiters in the doorway of an environmentally conscious sex shop.”

The line, though it feels pre-packaged, is delivered with enough poise to catch me off guard. She points in the window to a particularly well-endowed male prosthetic. Hung over it is a piece of string holding a sign that reads “BPA Free.”

“Sure, it has no toxic plastics,” she says. “But is it solar-powered?”

“Wind. You have to use it outside during a category five storm.”

Her brown eyes twinkle and she smiles, then resolves it. To protect herself against the January morning chill, she wears a puffy brown jacket that says thrift, not fashion, and that sits high on her waist. Her white wool gloves, the fabric cut off the tips, show her slim fingers, nails unpainted. Her jeans hug her legs. I’m struck by an image; I can see her managing a staff at a nice restaurant, quietly controlling her environment, wielding influence, making something in her image. I want to meet her again under regular circumstances and take her out for a drink and feel weightless.