Matt Richtel - The Cloud

“I didn’t. .”

“Not by you. I make my own decisions about who I sleep with. You’re right about being unsafe, and I don’t like being taken advantage of by whoever is making me feel that way and I have just as much of a right as you to figure out what’s happening as you do.”

Fair enough.

“Did I say anything else of value or interest?”

“Ouch.”

“What?”

“You said ‘ouch.’ I got a little aggressive with my fingernails.”

She smiles. It would seem shy, demure, if not for the subject matter, which she’s raised.

“Sorry.” She laughs lightly. I look out the passenger-side window at the blurring greenery on the hillsides of Atherton. I don’t want her to see the degree to which she has me off balance.

“Next exit,” I say.

She pulls onto Sand Hill Road, a freeway exit that can’t but help make you feel poor. Literally seconds from the off-ramp stand a series of modest, nondescript offices that house this region’s barons, the investors who seeded Google and Facebook and the rest.

“What happened last night, Faith?”

“I told you.”

“How did we wind up together at the world-class motel?”

She explains that she watched the bald man come out from the alley and climb into his Mercedes. Fearing he’d see her, she took off, intending to return for me. And she did, but it took longer than expected because of the one-way streets in the area. Plausible enough. When she finally pulled up, she says, she saw me knocked down. She honked and watched a husky Asian man disappear into the alley.

“When I got to you, you were mumbling stuff that didn’t make sense.”

“About conspiracy?”

“About Isaac. You said you were sorry for hugging him too hard.”

She helped me to the car. It was her idea to go somewhere we couldn’t be easily tracked. She says it didn’t dawn on her until we got near the motel that I was definitely not all there.

“You talked about the first time you’d seen a dead body.”

In the present, I look out the car window and see we’re passing the Stanford Shopping Center.

“Take a left on El Camino.”

I have a vague recollection of telling her about my first anatomy class. The woman whose body we dissected had died at eighty-six years old with an interesting backstory. She’d suffered bone cancer and intended to take her own life by parachuting from a plane. Before she climbed into the airplane, she took a sedative, went to sleep and never woke up. It shook me that death can be so cruel that, even when you plan to embrace it on your terms, it can wrestle away the upper hand.

“Why would I tell you about that?”

“You were telling me you understood why I got so shaken when I saw Alan’s body.”

We pass a bookstore, a furniture store, a salad place I’ve been for a work lunch where they pride themselves on serving sixteen variations of lettuce. They frown upon the use of salad dressings, which, the menu notes, dilute the fresh, earthy flavors of the greens.

Faith says: “You don’t remember.”

I shake my head. “We’re going two blocks up on the right.”

Traffic’s thin. Faith drives cautiously; she uses her blinker to switch from the middle to the right lane, even though the nearest car, a beige Jaguar, is four car lengths ahead of us. Dull sun peeks through light clouds, a temperate winter day in the sixties.

“What did you tell me , Faith?”

“I revealed all. You don’t remember my extraordinary revelations?”

I manage a laugh. “Refresh me just a little.”

“I told you about my fascination with going to the zoo, and with the anteaters.”

“This I absolutely don’t recall. You’re sure you were talking to the guy with the head wound?”

“They can suck up thirty thousand ants a day. Nature’s vacuum.”

“That’s why they fascinate you? Bad experience at a picnic with ants?”

She clears her throat. “Because everyone’s got a purpose. No matter how different they seem.”

Oddly, something does ring familiar about the zoo, maybe because the motel was directly across the street. There’s something deeply familiar too in the way we’re talking, an emotional accord.

“I’ll give you a recap later. Do you remember telling me about your ex?”

I shake my head. Does she mean Annie or Polly?

“You told me about the night she ended it-over Chinese food and two empty fortune cookies.”

I wince. The night my life careened off the rails at a restaurant in Pacific Heights. I can see the waiter with the injured ankle limping back to our table, holding a big white plate with a fortune cookie. It’s Polly’s second cookie, the first having been devoid of a fortune. Polly, usually so composed, has tears in her eyes. I shiver at the thought of the ensuing conversation, and because I can’t remember describing it to Faith.

“Take a right here.”

Set back off El Camino, there’s a gated building made of fashionable concrete and steel. It’s accessible from the side street we’ve turned onto. On the gate, a stately sign reads: “Woodland Learning Center.” In the yard stands a woman, arms crossed, studying me.

“Please pick me up in an hour.”

Faith pulls over. She puts the car in park. “I’m joining you.”

“Nope.”

She blinks several times quickly, and bites the inside of her cheek. I smile tightly, trying not to betray how much I want to make her laugh or feel comfortable. Based on my track record with the opposite sex, whatever is going on with this enigmatic beauty, it ends very badly.

“An hour.”

“Don’t use your cell phone.”

“What?”

“Last night. Did I say anything about how someone might be monitoring our calls and emails?”

“Something to that effect.”

“If you need to call me, or someone, speak in generalities.”

I’m thinking about the evident surveillance skills of whoever hacked into my computer to suggest the premature death of Sandy Vello and, also, the man in the Mercedes. It should just be common practice nowadays: assume someone is monitoring you and act accordingly.

I step out of the car. The woman in the yard now holds open the gate. She wears a dress with flower patterns, something modest but from a bygone era of feminine attire. She’s got shoulder-length blonde hair and a tic in her right eye.

I hear Faith pull away. The woman’s eye twitches three times. She juts her chin toward the street. “That’s where Kathryn died.”

Iwalk into a yard that looks like the miniaturization of an Ivy League campus. A stone walkway bisects grassy patches, the one on the right planted with a massive oak. On the side of the two-story school grow vines that are at once overgrown and chaotic and pruned to look this way. It’s no wonder this elementary school harks to hallowed institutions; in Silicon Valley, parents expect kids to matriculate directly from sixth grade to Harvard or Stanford, or else.

Jill gestures for me to sit on a bench cut from stone. It looks out on the street.

“We’re a pair.” She sits. “My nervous tic and your black eye. Did you upset someone with tough reporting?”

“Journalists are the most distrusted profession, after lawyers. It’s really not fair. Lawyers get paid so much more and can afford reconstructive eye surgery.”

The crow’s-feet beside her eyes crinkle with a slight perfunctory smile. She smoothes her dress and folds her hands on her lap.

“I’ve read about you and I trust you. But there’s not very much to tell and I can’t imagine why you or anyone would care after all these years.”

“Would you mind indulging me? I’d be much obliged.”