Matt Richtel - The Cloud

I drop his gaze to situate myself in the chair, letting the silence stir up inside him. I look at him, then glance around the room, playing a role of confident interrogator that, even in my most officious moods and with the most inane corporate-relations flacks, feels manufactured. He’s got a couple of diplomas on his textured white walls and a picture of a beached whale being encouraged by the cheers of children.

I tell him my name as I pull from my wallet my driver’s license and business card. It’s intended to show I’m unafraid to reveal myself. I tell him that I tend to do investigative pieces and that he can look up online my recent award to get a sense of the kinds of stories I write. He doesn’t much study my license and business card, which I generally find to be a sign that he trusts what I’m telling him. Or maybe he knows who I am already, but I doubt it. In either case, he’s ready to bargain.

I pull my notebook from my back pocket.

“What do you want?”

“Where is she?”

He shrugs. “I have no idea. Did you say this is for an article? Which publication?”

Already, in an instant, I can feel the momentum shifting against me. I’ve got little to go on.

“She’s worried about her nephew, Timothy.”

He clenches his jaw.

“You’re using him.” I’m being deliberately vague.

He averts his eyes slightly to the left.

“Did you mess him up with the Juggler? Is he part of the testing?”

His gaze hardens, then he looks at me quizzically. I’ve overextended myself.

“Alan Parsons sent me.”

Several rapid eye blinks. It’s not that he knows about Alan Parsons. Far from it, I realize. Rather, he senses I’m either a fraud or someone on a fishing expedition who cannot rightly threaten him. Something bad happened between him and Faith, but I’ve got no clue what that is.

I stand. I lean forward on the desk. For the first time, I peer through the picture window behind his desk. I’m looking into a large grassy play area, the courtyard, with serpentine brick walkways, a wooden playground in the far corner anchored by what looks to be a large sunken ship, and dotted in spots by benches. I can’t take my eyes off a boy sitting alone on a bench, holding a toy airplane in his right hand, pretending to make it fly over his head.

I pull my gaze back to the bureaucrat. I’m seething with anger but with little way to channel it. A gut impulse strikes me. Where logic and rational argument fails, I need to use emotion. I need to appeal to something rhetorically irrefutable.

“I’m also Faith’s boyfriend.”

I deliberately lean another millimeter forward, like I just might jump over the desk. “Cut the merde.”

“What?”

“It’s French Day, asshole.”

The crazy-guy look in my eyes must perk him up. It can’t be my pronunciation. He holds up his hands, palms out. “ She came on to me .”

I feel prickles. Revelation coming. I let my body recede that extra millimeter to suggest I’m willing to listen.

“That’s not how she tells it.”

“This is not for an article. It’s off the record. And I know the distinction between off the record and ‘for background.’ ” He uses air quotes around the words. “She used me.”

“You’re going to hate losing this job.”

“Her nephew doesn’t belong at this school. I told her that. We owe it to our families to make sure every student contributes to making this the most competitive learning environment, and creative one. I gave him a chance and he’s squandered it.”

I remember hearing his voice and words on Faith’s voice mail, telling her she is running out of time. Demanding, threatening.

“That doesn’t give you an excuse to threaten her.”

“You’re her boyfriend, so you know exactly what she’s about. She picks at weak spots and exploits them. But that’s beside the point. By the time I was. .” He pauses, looking for the words. “By the time I was spending time with her, I’d already agreed to give her nephew a chance and to provide a scholarship. He needs a chance too. Our relationship, brief as it might have been, has nothing to do with the issue of her nephew’s education.”

I’m scrambling to stitch together his clues. I can almost picture my resource-starved working memory, my little closet filled with precious near-term intellectual capacity, churning like the engine room in the Titanic . An idea starts to form, and it’s darn simple: Faith seduced this guy in order to get her troubled nephew admission and a free ride into the best school in the city. This doofus happily went along for the ride, then got pissed when the ride ended, leading to threatening phone calls.

I try it out on him. I act surprised, a little hurt. I ask him whether Faith started sleeping with him as a way of getting her nephew into school? And, now that he’s in the school, she’s withdrawn?

He doesn’t answer. But he seems to indirectly accede by asking: “So you’re here as boyfriend, not journalist?”

I ignore him. I think I’ve begun to understand Faith’s secret, or at least the first part of it.

“You told Alan Parsons about this? You gave him ammunition to use against her.”

“Get out of my office.”

Another insight. He didn’t tell Alan Parsons. Then, another silent A-ha. He has no idea about Alan Parsons. Alan was a hacker who got to know Faith at a coffee shop. Alan needed Faith’s help to seduce someone else-namely, me. So he hacked into her email or computer or whatever, and figured out Faith had her own weak spot, something to exploit: she had slept with a school administrator to help her nephew. Alan essentially blackmailed her to help get my attention on the subway platform. If she didn’t go along with it, he’d expose her seduction of this imbecilic dean of admissions.

It’s a theory, at least.

The doofus reaches for the landline phone. I lean over and I hold the receiver in place, daring him to turn this into a physical confrontation.

“If you kick Timothy out of school, I’ll. .” I pause. I don’t like the gravity and cliched nature of the threats poised on my tongue. I can’t say them and mean them.

“You obviously don’t have kids, Mr. Idle.”

I blink, stung. I drop his gaze and glance out the picture window behind him. On the bench, the boy flies the airplane over his head, amused, captivated, free, healthy, alive.

“My son is Isaac.” A whisper, or maybe I just think it.

“If you had kids, you’d understand that you should let this go. Faith is a big girl looking out for her nephew. Your threats aren’t helping him or her. But I’m willing to let this go. End of story. Okay?”

“Excellent decision, Carl.”

I look again at the boy with the airplane. I suddenly can’t breathe. I take a step backward, let myself out the door. And then I’m running down the hallway. Sprinting.

It’s the most lucid I’ve been in days. It’s the first time my head has cleared. I can see the memory fragments now, talking to Polly over the fortune cookie, then discussing that night with Wilma, the therapist, getting my homework assignment. Focus on what you’ve lost. Blink, I see the hospital, Isaac born, tiny, Polly so pale. The chaos and the doctors.

I’m outside, down the path, between the out-of-place trees on the front of the out-of-place school. I’m sitting in the Audi. I pull out my phone, turn it on, hear the urgent beep demanding it be plugged in. I dial.

“What do you want?” the voice answers.

“Now.”

“I told you: tonight.”

“Now, or I go to the police. And the press. I know everything.”

He doesn’t respond.

“Twin Peaks?”

“No.” He doesn’t continue.