Matt Richtel - The Cloud

After that, it’s all a dream. Isaac appears, crinkly and pink, but not pink enough, white, if I’m honest. I touch his pale arm, waiting for the wailing. A nurse gently pushes my arm away while sterilized hands and blazing figures in blue and green scrubs bob and weave and take the fight to the death. In the midst, helpless with my medical degree, a chronicler of life and conspiracy, I pull out my phone. I snap a picture of Isaac’s first and only moments on Earth. That is my helpless act, a memory, I tell myself, to share with Polly when the world rights itself.

There’s a knocking sound.

I spring upright.

The man with the crooked smile stands at the window. He wields a knife he’s been using to tap the glass. In his T-shirt and off-center San Francisco Giants cap, with his crooked smile, he’s the devil-may-care.

Polly is dead. Isaac never had a chance.

What can this man possibly do to me now?

Iopen the door. At his silent urging, I reach into the front seat and snag the Juggler and hand it to him. I stand. I pull the brain images from my back pocket.

“There’s more,” he says.

“Of course. But not here.”

Knifepoint aside, he’s more genial than I remember, stocky, but an ambler, like a guy trundling to get a beer from the fridge.

I walk a step in front of him, hands jammed in pockets, where I feel my keys and the phone they mingle with. Weapons? Hardly.

It’s anger that wonders these things, not hope. The future no longer matters.

I walk up a modest grade, soil and chunky rock beneath my feet, trees becoming denser as we ascend Mount Davidson.

“Where’s Faith?”

“Safe and very comfortable. Comfy.” He’s trying out the vernacular. “She spent the night at the Mandarin. Keep walking.”

The Mandarin. One of San Francisco’s nicest hotels.

I trudge, my feet sinking slightly into the damp soil, winding up the hill into what is becoming a veritable rain forest, surrounded by thickening English and cape ivy and blackberry bushes. It’s the lush green, primitive San Francisco that lies beneath the crisp green money and the organic lettuce. My vision glazes over but in my mind’s eye I can clearly see the whole mystery, not the mystery involving Leviathan, Faith, Alan Parsons, the girl killed by the Volvo, the Juggler-that remains hazy-but my own mystery.

Polly died the night Isaac was born. Isaac died hours later. I plummeted into disbelief and grief. I poured myself into work. I became surrounded by sympathy, even from the cops who once hated my zeal for undoing authority. Every compassionate touch felt like a burn. I can see now the Witch pleading with me to come to terms with my loss, trying everything. That’s why she wanted to share an office with me, so she could monitor me, cajole me, albeit gently and with her witchery. She lit candles, offered temple massages and patiently, without comment, took down the picture of Isaac that I’d emailed myself from my phone and printed out and, inexplicably, tacked to the wall.

Finally, relenting, I agreed to see Wilma, a therapist. Less Witchery, more Freud. I said I was going because I just didn’t feel like myself.

For months, I wouldn’t talk about Polly. Our relationship was so brief that she never really happened, we didn’t happen, Isaac hadn’t really come into this world, just stopped by in transit, so what was the point in talking about it?

But in the last few weeks, right before the subway incident, I started to feel something different. Grief. Raw emotion. I started to see Polly and Isaac not just as another dream deferred but as a connection severed, one I’d spent a lifetime trying to make. I left med school because the practice of medicine was too barren and impersonal. I’d pursued writing, a lifetime of poor-man’s poetry through prose. And I’d found my muses in Polly and Isaac.

Then I got smacked in the head. Concussion. The fresh wounds of realization paved over by blunt-force trauma. My new neurons of grief commingled with nine months of denial, giving rise to a twisted fiction in which I’m separated from Polly, living in her former house, driving her car, but somehow still connected to her and Isaac, whose toy bouncer remains unused on the floor of my living room.

I hear voices-from the present.

I’m standing at the crest. I hear the man with the knife only a step behind me. In front of me, ten steps away, stands Faith. She wears a puffy jacket but still wraps her arms around herself to ward off the chill. Next to her stands a man who looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t quite place him. Then I can.

Looming above them, the monster cross. We’re at its feet, supplicants and sinners.

“Gils Simons,” the man says. He takes two steps forward, extends a hand, as if he might shake.

I look back to Faith. She’s unshackled, evidently not a prisoner. Is she here of her own free will? What is real?

I look out in the distance to the far edge of Mount Davidson. Soft fog, weather’s most passive-aggressive state, blankets what could be a majestic view of downtown and the bay. I close my eyes. I wobble. I picture myself juggling all the lies and half-truths, the ones that I’m being told and the ones I’ve been telling myself. I’ve juggled at the expense of experiencing something real, and static, and true. I cannot juggle anymore. I fall to my knees.

Faith says to the two men: “Would you mind if I handle this?”

When her hand touches my shoulder, it releases a memory, her hand on the same shoulder, we’re naked, clawing and releasing. My head remains down, neck exposed, like the night we made love in a beachside motel. Faith has transformed from seductress to executioner.

I’m coming, Isaac.

I hear her crouch next to me. I open my eyes to see her knees, clad in jeans, hit dirt.

“Nothing funny,” one of the men says, voice nearly swallowed by the wind. Head still bowed, I can see the two men’s feet, one wearing worn work boots with frayed shoelaces pulled tight on the tongue and Gils Simons’s brown loafers, tasseled and as out-of-place as he seems to be.

I feel Faith’s eyes on me. She shifts from my side so that she’s facing me, her knees only modestly indenting the hard, wet earth. She reaches for my hands, held limply by my sides. I withdraw them at her touch.

I see one of the work boots step forward.

“Can’t you see how hurt he is?” Faith says. “He’s no threat to you.”

Faith reaches for my hand again and I relent. She cradles my fists in her palms. She says: “They need to make sure that you’ve not given away their secrets.”

I don’t say anything.

“Nathaniel, you need to assure them of that.”

“I’m not comfortable with this.” The voice belongs to Gils Simons, deep and resonant, accustomed to being listened to.

I look up. Faith and the man with the crooked smile have turned to Gils, the French-born right-hand man of Andrew Leviathan. With our attention directed at Gils, I feel Faith slip something into my right hand. It’s cold and blunt, metal, with ridges. It might be a pocketknife. In my fist, I can conceal all but its tip. A weapon?

“Stand up,” Gils says. “This is ridiculous. This is Silicon Valley, not the old West.”

“How do you execute people in Silicon Valley?” I manage to speak. “Shot at dawn by teenagers trained on the Wii?”

“Execute?” Gils sounds surprised or bemused. “We threaten lawsuits, Mr. Idle. We bring lawsuits. We ruin reputations. We guard our trade secrets very carefully. We can even use our influence to have criminal charges brought if it looks like someone has used illegal means to steal our intellectual property. The AG here loves to brag about putting away people who undermine American competitiveness.”