Matt Richtel - The Cloud

I notice she doesn’t ask about Isaac. She seems increasingly reticent about doing so. I would never ask her but I think she regrets never having had children. She’s professionally maternal, without her own offspring.

I drag myself to the hallway, where there is a full bathroom, replete with shower, accessible by keypad. We, the office tenants of the second floor, keep it locked to dissuade vagrants and the patrons of the retail shop that resides on the floor below us. It’s a sex shop called Green Love that sells sex toys and paraphernalia that are made using sustainable and eco-friendly manufacturing processes and natural resources. Their tagline: Guilt-free ’gasms.

At the bathroom door, I key in Isaac’s birthday, essential numbers, eminently hackable, my stand against an overly complicated world. I open the door and inhale mildew not fully overcome by the floral-scented candle the Witch set on the toilet.

In the mirror, I see the product of a long day, followed by a very bad night, mitigated by a decent haircut. At Samantha’s prompting, I managed to get to a barber earlier this week, in time for tomorrow’s magazine award luncheon. I look my age, give or take. I wonder what Faith saw when she looked at me; I’ve got symmetrical features and a prominent nose, looks that, I’m told, resemble some actor who regularly plays the ethnic-looking detective. I never had problems getting the girl. Just keeping her.

In the recessed medicine cabinet, I find Tylenol and take three tablets. I wash them down with tap water I drink from a plastic San Francisco Giants cup.

I twist my head in a variety of directions so that I can see the back of my skull in the cabinet mirror. This proves (obviously) impossible and absolutely comical, enough so that I actually laugh out loud when I nearly fall over trying to reflect the image of the cut on the back of my head off of an aerosol can so that I can see it in the mirror.

I return to my desk and snag my laptop. It’s brushed stainless steel with the Apple insignia on the cover, a model that once was far outside my price range, but it’s a cast-off from Polly, the ex in the astronomical tax bracket. I carry the computer to the futon, sit, and Google the symptoms for concussion. I know the answer before the Internet spits forth its wisdom-sharp impact, brief loss of consciousness, headache, nausea. But I also know the treatment: rest, fluids, watch for dizziness, changes in vision and, above all, get checked by a doctor.

I should do so but I can’t stand the idea of spending hours in the emergency room to be told what Dr. Internet already told me. Besides, I’m almost an actual doctor myself. Almost, not quite. And I’m so tired. I’ll just close my eyes for a second.

I dream of Isaac. He’s sitting in a red train at the playground. He’s got bouncy brown curls that he didn’t seem to inherit from me or Polly and that I’m aching to run my fingers through.

“This train is bound for glory,” I say, arms wide, aping to elicit a reaction. He grins a grin that could cure all ills.

I lean down and whisper with mock seriousness, “Little Man, I’m going to tell you a secret. Do you want to hear a secret?”

He nods, expectant. I lean in to tell him the secret, when I hear a woman’s voice. “Time to go, lambkins.”

It’s Polly. She’s standing in front of the train, prim in a blue business suit but with her straight brown hair cut at shoulder length, casual, irresistible. Suddenly, I’m filled with dread.

“Be careful of the train, Little Man!” I scream. “The train!”

Terrified, I jerk awake. Gray daylight floods the office, a horn blares from the street below, my mouth tastes of flour paste, my head thick. I’ve closed my eyes and slept all night. And I think: the train. Of course. So obvious. Just as my concussion doesn’t require diagnosis by an MD, so my dreams don’t require expert interpretation by Dr. Freud. I’ve nearly been run over by a subway and I dream of a train taking Isaac, his mother acting as conductor, or something like that. I can only hope my journalism is clearer and less cliched.

I pick up my phone. I pull up Polly’s number on the phone. I hold my finger over the touch pad. My digit trembles. I scowl and reach for my wallet, which sits on the floor. From it, I pull the piece of paper with Faith’s contact info. Just my luck: the phone number is smeared from last night’s rain but is sufficiently legible to allow me to make out four of seven numbers and have reasonable guesses at another two. I try several permutations, getting three wrong numbers, a couple of disconnected lines and one voice mail that asks me to leave my message at the beep but doesn’t say who the number belongs to. Maybe it’s Faith. I leave a short message asking her to get back to me, explaining that I’m the guy from the train station and that I hope I have the right number.

I am able to read Faith’s email address, which is not as rain-smeared, and send her a note asking her to get in touch.

I also leave a message with a friend at the San Francisco Police Department. In the past, my stories have often put me at odds with the cops, but I’ve had a much warmer relationship with them in recent months. I attribute that to my career notoriety or, perhaps, career legitimacy. In my voice mail, I tell Sergeant Everly that I’ve had a run-in with a mountain dressed up as a man and would love to run it by him.

I feel the dull ache from the back of my head and finger the sticky wound, reasonably healing. I open my laptop, struck by an impulse: maybe somewhere along the line I’ve got a connection to the dead woman, Sandy Vello, that would make sense of last night’s attack.

I find something odd. Two weeks ago, my anti-spam program filtered out an email from Sandyvello@hotmail.com. It reads: “Please contact me regarding a private matter.” Then another, eleven days ago. Same sender. “Mr. Idle, contact me please regarding a private journalistic matter. This is serious. We have one month to stop the launch.”

Launch?

Was Sandy Vello trying to reach me, and then she got killed? I do the math. The second note came the very day she was killed. Was someone trying to prevent us from connecting?

A quick double-check of her obituary reminds me that she lived west of Burlingame, probably in the hills somewhere, and volunteered regularly at the learning annex of the Twin Peaks Youth Guidance Center. It’s actually a jail for San Francisco’s underage have-nots, pranksters in a minimum security wing as well as young men guilty of extreme violence far before their time, locked in cages that many in the city would be stunned to know share their pricey real estate. Next door is the annex, which I visited a few years ago for a story about the small organic farm the adolescent prisoners were tending in the yard.

I register the time, 10:30. I slept forever, I think, as an alarm bell rings inside my head. I’ve got an hour to be in Palo Alto, a forty-minute drive at least, to shake hands before the magazine award. I have to shower, find the tie and a clean shirt before composing my acceptance speech as I speed down Highway 101.

Then maybe a visit to the learning annex to see if I can justify the award.

Itry not to envy other people. Andrew Leviathan, the man presenting me the award today, makes that very difficult. Where even to begin? The billions, the philanthropy, patents, brilliant anthropologist wife whose perpetual smile feels like an ignition switch to every man in the room, his apparently complete absence of pathologies, or the escape. How can you not start with the escape?

It was 1979, Romania, the cold war still in full effect. Andrew was a mere teen, and already on the cusp of being a singularly dangerous 21st-century cubicle soldier. The Eastern bloc, through its selection of the best and the brightest, had identified gangly Andrew as the preternatural math whiz who could make Mother Russia’s supercomputers more super than evil America’s. And he probably could have, but instead, given full access to their system, he introduced a noxious digital virus into Mother Russia’s digital heart, like Luke Skywalker aiming lethal bursts into the Death Star. Andrew’s was not a deadly shot, only nearly, and the young man got caught.