Matt Richtel - The Cloud

Research suggests that people who are capable of great focus, like great athletes, tend to have thicker myelin sheaths, a coating on their neurons. So they’re less distracted by extraneous information. I wonder, knowing it’s totally impossible, if my sheaths, such as they are, suffered when I hit my head-first at the subway station, then against a sledgehammer fist in Chinatown.

Focus, Nat. Sandy disappears around the corner.

I run across the gravel road. I hug the door of the garage, then find myself at the base of the stairs. I glance into the darkness. I hear the blaring car alarm in the distance as I look up the steep concrete stairs, many of them, leading to glass-door entrances on two floors. I sprint up.

I reach the first glass-door entrance. Inside, it’s dark. I try the handle. In the darkness, inside, I see a nondescript baby’s face. It’s an illusion, I know. I blink and it’s gone. So much to lose. I open the door. I peer inside. I can make out a small room, fitness equipment-a home gymnasium, smelling of disinfectant. Not what I’m looking for.

The car alarm goes dead. It’s momentarily dead quiet before I hear the crickets. Not much time.

I sprint up another dozen stairs to the top floor. Inside is bathed in light, a wide-open floor plan. To the right, a kitchen. Folksy, tidy, from another era. An upright toaster, polished to the point of gleaming, sitting on a seventies-style Formica counter. The counter divides the kitchen from a dining room, with an ice-clear chandelier and flame-shaped lights hung low over an empty table. A floor of outdated tile in the dining room gives way to a single step down and fluffy beige carpeting of the family room. Sleek couch covered by a blanket, glass coffee table, worn leather recliner.

Then, all at once, all the atmospherics become ancillary, tertiary, totally fucking irrelevant. In the middle of the floor, in front of a fireplace, I see what I’ve come for.

Files. Folder upon folder. They’re lying on the beige carpet. Most of them, at least. A handful lie on the stone fireplace stoop. And I can make out the remains of manila inside the fire, behind a metal curtain. Embers too, and a brief whisk of orange from dying flame.

I stop and listen. Nothing from outside. Maybe Sandy’s exploring. Maybe she found my car. I shut the door. I hustle to the living room. I juke around the coffee table and skid to a stop next to a pile of folders that represents the only unkempt spot in this Marine’s tightly-kept quarters.

Woozy, I bend over to grab the folder on the top. Affixed to it, near the right bottom quarter, there’s a white label with a long number, maybe ten digits. I open the folder.

I’m looking at a brain.

It’s a grainy printout of an MRI. The image shows a side shot of the front upper quartile of the brain, the frontal lobe. Along the left side, a scale bar indicates the size of the image. It seems relatively small, maybe belonging to a toddler or child, if my currently concussed memory of neurology is accurate. But beyond that, I couldn’t begin to explain what I’m looking at. I’m not sure even a seasoned radiologist could discern something of value from this murky reproduction. Some areas of the printout seem darker than others, and, in a few spots, there are whiter splotches. This might indicate different regions of blood flow or activation. It might mean someone has a lousy laser printer.

I pull open the manila folder, hoping to discover something to explain this image. But there’s nothing else. As I fumble, though, I notice some scribbling on the back of the piece of paper with the MRI image. It reads: “Group II,” and “62 percent.”

I fall to my knees and begin scrambling through the folders, opening, exploring, tossing, looking for something to make sense of this. More folders with more numbers and more grainy pictures of brains and more percentiles on the back. I swirl to the bottom of the file, seeking meaning. I throw a file toward the fire, then another. I reach the bottom, finding no explanation. I look up at the dying embers and feel the violent pulsing inside my head. I’m so royally pissed off, sitting in this unkempt stew of meaningless brain images, helpless, stirring and swirling evidence that has no meaning.

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.

“Aboy.”

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.