Matt Richtel - The Cloud

I’m shaken by a buzzing noise. Faith reaches into a small purse and pulls out a phone. She looks at the bright green-and-white square of the screen, her caller ID. She clenches her jaw. She hits a button, sending the caller to voice mail. “It’s almost eight.” She puts the phone back in her purse. A second later, it buzzes again. She ignores it.

“Do you need me to step outside so you can take a call?” I’m looking at her in the pinkish light from the neon sign on the dessert store.

She cocks her head. “You’re kind.”

She leans forward, pauses, then she kisses me on the cheek. I’m flooded with a sensation that moves from the top of my concussed skull to my Achilles’ heels ragged from basketball and then zips up and settles in my loins. She pulls back, reorients slightly, and she kisses my lips, lightly, like the brush of a fingertip.

“I trust you.” Her words hover just above a whisper.

“Faith. .”

“I just wanted to get that out of the way.”

But I’m thinking about something else. The buzzard is out of the car and walking to the alley.

We watch in silence as he disappears into the alley.

“Faith, may I wax melodramatic?”

“Wax.”

“It’s now or never.”

“That is melodramatic. But what’s it mean?”

I’m surprised to hear myself laugh. It’s both a real emotion and a desire to connect. I shouldn’t. She’s a gigantic question mark with full lips and deep eyes and no obvious medical condition.

From my pocket, I pull the pre-paid mobile phone that I purchased an hour earlier. I tell Faith my plan: I’m going to walk by the Mercedes and put the phone onto the car windshield. When the man returns, he’ll find the phone and we’ll give him a call and try to elicit some information. Who is he? What does he want?

“That’s the plan?” Faith sounds surprised, in an underwhelmed kind of way.

I half nod.

“What’s to keep him from throwing away the phone or ignoring our call or hearing your voice and tossing it?”

I don’t say: 1) I want him to feel like he doesn’t have all the cards; and 2) her questions are all spot-on and I don’t have the answers.

Instead, I say: “Now or never.”

She puts her hand on my arm. “What am I supposed to do?” Implicit in her question: what is she supposed to do if something happens to me?

“Get in the driver’s seat in case.”

“This makes no sense.”

From a compartment between the seats, I snag a black pen and reporter’s notebook and stuff them into my back pocket. I step out of the car into a light drizzle, San Francisco mist. It’s momentarily refreshing, then chilly. I consider opening the trunk to grab a sweatshirt but there’s no time. I walk a few steps, then jog toward the Mercedes, hewing as close as I can to the buildings, imaging somehow I’ll become invisible if I can blend into the grayish stone exteriors of Chinatown in the dark.

As I jog, I’m squinting at the mouth of the alley. But for a second, I see the inside of my brain. I imagine blood pouring into the sensory cortex, supporting my vision, and dopamine cascading into my nucleus accumbens, my pleasure centers, giving me a rush. I see the little white spots on my frontal lobe, the concussion, which might explain the slightly blurred vision. Or maybe that’s just an effect from the drizzle.

I am standing at the Mercedes. I whip out the pre-paid Motorola phone from my front pocket, nearly fumble it, have to bend down to catch it. I stand, look at the mouth of the alley. No buzzard sighting. No one else on the street.

I glance at the intersection where I’ve parked. I can’t see my car. I squint. Blood to sensory cortex: where is my car?! Then I see it, just where I left it. Had it disappeared, ghost-like, then reappeared, or was my brain flickering on and off?

I pull out my iPhone. I scramble through dozens of apps I’ve downloaded; a game where I shoot birds at buildings, a program that turns my phone into a mirror, a calorie counter. I find the flashlight app. I click it open. Lights blasts from the phone. I direct it to the passenger window and look inside the Mercedes. On the leather passenger seat, there sits a to-go container, open, half-eaten onion rings inside. Intrepid investigator. I’ve discovered the reason he has oily skin. In the cup holder in the center console, there sits a pack of menthol cigarettes. The backseat is empty. I peer at the mouth of the alley. It’s empty too.

Frontal lobe to Nat: Do something and then run away?

I place the pre-paid phone on the passenger-side windshield. I look at it, gathering drizzle. I lift the slippery wiper blade and place the phone underneath. On an impulse, I put my hand on the passenger side door handle and pull up. It’s unlocked. I open it, causing the inside light to go on. I snag the damp phone, wipe it on my shirt, toss the phone inside, onto the onion rings. I start to close the door. My eye catches a receipt taped to the outside of the food box. I pull it off. Scrawled on it, “buffalo burger, onion rings.” Circled in pen, the word “Bill.” The buzzard has a name.

“Buzzard Bill,” I mutter.

I peer at the alley mouth. I sense movement. The light is changing, playing with the shadows, something or someone emerging from the shadows. In one motion, I push the car door shut and fall to the ground. Thankfully, the car’s inside light goes off instantly.

I don’t know if the movement was Buzzard Bill, or someone else, or my imagination. Where to escape? I look at the sidewalk behind the car. It’s unlit but wide open. Exposed. I look to the front. Same bad news, and then some worse news. At the intersection ahead, I see taillights ignite. My taillights. The Audi pulls out and disappears to the right. Faith has left. Again. For good reason this time? Did she see Buzzard Bill and freak? Did she get a mystery call?

I look directly behind me at the darkened stairwell with shiny, wet steps that bisect the storefronts.

Crab-like, I hustle to the stairwell. I press up against the wall. At the stairwell, I pause; if I slink up the stairs, I’ll be fully exposed. I listen to my heartbeat, fast and regular, comforting me, weirdly, a reminder that I’m largely intact. I take two slow breaths to slow down my heart and my mind.

I hear the Mercedes door open. It closes hard and heavy. Buzzard Bill is in a hurry. I hold my breath and crab-scamper up the stairs. The engine turns over. Car in gear, tires on wet pavement, he’s out.

I remember the reporter’s notebook in my back pocket. Hadn’t I planned to write down the license plate? I feel self-recrimination that, suddenly, dissolves into laughter. A momentary outburst. Relief. I’m safe. More neurotransmitters flooding my brain. Neurological goodness. What would be great would be to feel this way all the time-the feeling of escape, and completion, but without the near-death antecedent.

I glance around. I’m on the top step of the entrance to an apartment building. An intercom system hangs just below eye level with a list of residents, lit dimly from an internal light. Most of the names are in phonetic Chinese, like Chu, some with native characters.

The rain has picked up. I hope the buzzard has reached for a soggy onion ring and found a mysterious phone. He’s deciding whether to pull over and find something telling about it-the owner, address book-or to toss it out the window, maybe figuring it for some kind of surveillance device that tracks his whereabouts, or, alternatively, gunning it back to Chinatown to find whoever put it there.

I’m also trying to imagine what happened to Faith. Why not ask? I pull my own phone from my pocket. I call her. The phone rings and rings. No answer. I leave a message. I contemplate calling the pre-paid phone but decide it’s too soon. He may come right back here before I can get my bearings and make sense of this place.