Matt Richtel - The Cloud

“Where?”

“Mount Davidson. Rainy now. No one will be there. At the cross. Thirty minutes.” The phone dies.

I’m sure he’d prefer a nighttime exchange. Faith for my information, and the brain images and the Juggler. At night, it’s dark, free of witnesses, easier to dispatch us. During the day, I’ve got a better chance.

Don’t I?

Do I care? No.

I can see clearly for the first time since my head smashed onto the subway platform why my life has come undone. No, I can see it clearly for the first time in much longer than that, maybe eight months.

I’ve got to outrun the memory. I’m willing to die trying.

Fog so dense it requires windshield wipers greets me at the foot of Mount Davidson. It’s more of a huge hill, really, accessible by a cul-de-sac at the edge of St. Francis Woods, one of San Francisco’s ritziest neighborhoods. The mansions here defy the urban space limitations elsewhere in the city.

A ten-minute winding-trail walk up the mini-mountain leads to the top. There, when the fog permits, you get a splendid view of downtown and the East Bay. But the bigger payoff is the massive cross looming over Mount Davidson, an unlikely and imposing 103-foot concrete crucifix built in the 1930s, its upper edge popping just above the high trees on San Francisco’s highest hill.

In the late 1990s, it was nearly felled by city residents who disliked the church-and-state implications of a massive religious symbol mounted on public lands. It was preserved through a deal with the Armenian Church, which rewrote the narrative to make this not just any cross but a memorial to Armenian genocide in Turkey.

And in the 1970s, Clint Eastwood nearly died here at the hands of a serial killer in the first Dirty Harry movie.

If it was good enough for Clint, it’s good enough for me. Not a bad place for an agnostic to meet his own end.

I park in the cul-de-sac in front of a home with a massive oval front window. I push open the heavy door of an Audi I have no business driving, or, rather, that I certainly can’t afford. Not on my own. I see the nick in the driver’s-side door, just below the handle, where, just a month before Isaac was born, Polly got woozy and hit a cement wall pulling out of a parking lot. It was the last time I remember her driving this car, or any other. I look in the backseat at the car seat, empty.

I should be coming up with a plan. I should find a sharp stick with which to defend myself. I should figure out how I’m going to confront Andrew Leviathan and Gils Simons. There are a thousand things I should do.

I open the back door. I slide in next to the car seat. From the tag still hanging off the side I can see that it’s made by Graco. The plush gray fabric is so clean, unstained, pristine. There’s a rubber band still around the clasps that would hold in place my precious cargo.

Would. In theory.

This car seat has never been used.

I lean my head next to it. I close my eyes. I see Polly sitting at the Chinese restaurant, her smile at 40 percent, sad, poised to tell me something, holding her empty fortune cookie. I shake my head, making the image disappear.

I pull my phone from my pocket. I know it is almost dead for wont of a recharge. But I push the power button anyway. An Apple emerges onto the screen. Then it beeps and shows me an image of a battery near empty with a red sign, indicating five percent left.

Five percent may be all I need.

From my contact list, I call up Polly’s phone number. I press it to dial. I put the phone on speaker. I hear the phone ring only once. It answers: “This number is out of service.”

The phone dies.

Out of service. The last time I called, when I was at the hospital getting my concussion checked, a woman answered and didn’t recognize my voice. She asked me to stop calling. She must be tired of me calling her, asking for Polly. She finally put the number to bed.

I exhale and lay my head against the side of the car seat. I feel the plastic edge press uncomfortably against my temple. I ignore it. I close my eyes and I see Polly. She opens the fortune cookie and discovers it is empty inside. She manages a bitter half laugh.

“How appropriate,” she says. “My future looks bleak.”

“Senor.” I hold up my hand to the waiter with the gimp knee. “Another fortune cookie for the fine lady.”

He nods and disappears into the kitchen.

“I have something to tell you, Nathaniel.”

Polly looks down. I follow her gaze to the water-stained tablecloth beneath her glass, seeing the damp trail as it bleeds slightly into the two folders Polly has brought to dinner, one with preschool applications and the other aimed at helping me set up a 401(k).

“I have a tumor.”

I push my neck forward. I’m not sure I’ve heard her correctly.

“You know how I’ve had trouble sleeping, the headaches, that mistake I made in my presentation last week at the investment conference. .”

“That’s just the pregnancy, the hormones.”

“The baby is fine, Nathaniel.”

“Stop it.”

“You’re going to be a father. You’re going to be a great one. You’re going to teach him how to throw and catch and make great but judicious use of adjectives and, you’ve got to promise me, to also add and subtract. He’s going to need some practical teaching along with your romantic leanings.”

“Polly. .”

She looks at me now, square. I know this look, the one she gives investors when she’s reached her bottom line.

“It’s in my brain, and its Stage Three and it’s inoperable, at least until this bundle is born, and they can’t do chemo because it could. .”

Almost as if from a distance, I hear myself say: “We can make another baby, another time. We have a lifetime. When the life of the mother is at stake, the baby takes second position.”

“There’s a chance we’ll both survive, a reasonable chance. We’ll schedule an early C-section so I can get care as soon as possible.”

“How can you be telling me this now!” Less question than accusation.

“It happened so fast. I found out two days ago. I’ve been in disbelief and denial.” She shakes her head, almost bemused. “I wonder if you’re right: maybe all the deal making on my cell phone radiating my brain. Don’t let our baby boy press the device to his head.”

The limping waiter appears with a plate bearing a second fortune cookie. I wave my hand. We need privacy. I hate this man, the bearer of the empty fortune cookie.

He sets down the plate and scurries. Polly reaches for the cookie. She’s got tears rolling down her cheeks. She cracks open the fragile brown pastry.

She holds it in her hands. It’s empty. Just like the first.

“Bad batch.” She smiles a smile I’ve never seen before. It looks 90 percent effervescent but, at the same time, terribly empty, a 100 percent black void.

In the present, I see only intensifying drizzle, the foul San Francisco fog, the shroud of death, weather just like the night that Isaac was born.

I picture the ambulance unloading Polly at the emergency room after she’s passed out in the family room of the loft I later inherited. They rush her to labor and delivery for a C-section a month earlier than planned.

“Isaac,” Polly says as she goes under, then goes terribly pale. She gasps. Beeping, shouts, I’m pushed aside.

I went to medical school. I should be able to do something. I’m not just a writer, not just a romantic, a chaser of conspiracies and weaver of disparate ideas, a synthesizer, blogger, storyteller, seducer of sources and readers. I’m not just a neurotic who can identify medical conditions like some Jeopardy! savant. I should be able to do something. But all I can do is diagnose Polly’s cardiac arrest, and watch in slow motion.