Matt Richtel - The Cloud

She tries to take my hand and I neither resist nor embrace her. I stand. I turn. I feel a muddy patch beneath my feet, the ground indenting, my heart with it. I know the symbolism of this walk, back to the inherited Audi, on with life. Polly got two fortune cookies, both empty, like her future and Isaac’s future, our future. The one I embark on with my next step.

“Please tell me what’s going on,” Faith says.

In my right hand, still clenched, I feel the metal object that Faith handed me and that I’ve forgotten about entirely. I open my hand and see, as I’d expected, a pocketknife, a modest weapon that Faith had imagined for who knows what purpose. It falls into the mud.

I take the next step.

“May I drive, Nathaniel?”

I click open the car and climb into the driver’s seat. Warm air blows from the dashboard vents.

“I’ll take you to Timothy.”

“I slept with the admissions director at his school.”

I don’t respond.

“He sought out my advice because he was thinking of getting out of his job. He seemed, frankly, pathetic. I honestly just needed some release and I dated him. It was his idea to take Timothy into the school, or maybe I planted the seed. When I broke it off, he said he might force Timothy out of the school.”

I slow the car to allow a woman to cross the street. She has the same crazy, lazy look as her muzzled pit bull.

“I don’t know how Alan figured it out but he essentially blackmailed me. It was gentle. Not an outright threat. But he said that if I helped him get your attention, he’d pay me $1,000 and help me with my problem at school. Reading between the lines, he was suggesting he could make my problem with Mission Day School worse too. Carrot and stick.”

“Hacking.”

“What?”

“You said that Alan seemed to know a lot about you. Of course he did. He might’ve monitored your email, or hacked your voice mails. He knew what was going in your life-my life.”

“Why? What is all this?” Stricken, understandably.

I turn left onto Market, one of the city’s arteries. In a veritable monotone, I tell her: I had a pregnant girlfriend named Polly. She contracted brain cancer, a particular kind called anaplastic astrocytoma. Stage Three. It comes on fast and it doesn’t quit. It weakened her so severely she couldn’t nourish the baby. And it created a deadly conundrum. Starting chemo would kill the baby, but removing Isaac prematurely came with its own severe risks. In the end, there was nothing modern medicine could do.

I take a right onto Clipper, a steep slope downward into Noe Valley, then the Mission, the fog lightening slightly.

A whisper: “I’m so sorry. I lost one too. A very late miscarriage, a very early marriage.”

I let her revelation sink in. “They kidnapped you,” I finally say.

“It would be hard to prove.”

Something compels me to look in the rearview mirror. A few cars back, I think I make out the Mercedes. It disappears to the right, onto a side street.

“At the fire at the annex, the man Steven asked me to go with him. And I said I would do so. Actually, I told him that if he touched me, I’d scream. He said: ‘Please, I could use your help.’ I obviously knew he wasn’t that helpless but the way he asked made me realize that I could. .” She pauses.

Silence.

“Faith?”

“I’m not stupid. I’m aware of the effect I can have on people, specifically, men. I guess I like the hurt ones because I know they need something besides a trophy kill. I’ve become expert at discerning injury, emotional need. I see it everywhere. Where it’s absent, I run.”

“That bully is hardly vulnerable.”

“Maybe not physically vulnerable, to a man. But I could see that, if necessary, I could manipulate him. I wanted to know the answers too. You were acting like a crazy man.”

“Where did they take you?”

“To the Mandarin Hotel. I met Gils Simons. We called you, and then they gave me a room and my cell phone to call Timothy and whomever else I wanted. I think they must have drugged me. They told me I could go, but I fell asleep and I slept hard.”

“You gave me a pocketknife.”

“To use against Gils Simons. He, by contrast, has no emotional needs. He’s like a calculator, a computer, an adding machine with a toupee.”

“That’s a toupee?”

“Might as well be. The guy’s a mannequin.”

In spite of myself, I laugh, albeit lightly. My first half laugh of the new era.

“As near as I could tell,” Faith says, “they are excited to launch some new product. It’s some new toy or video game they’re testing here and they’re beginning to sell in China, with the blessing of the government there. Steven is the liaison to the Chinese. He takes that role very seriously. He thinks you’re ruining the launch or stealing the secrets or something like that. Are you?”

I shake my head no. I don’t really know the answer to her question.

I take a slow right onto Folsom. A block back, the Mercedes materializes. I lose sight of it around the corner and it doesn’t reappear as I head straight on Folsom past the clumps of day-workers gathered on the corners.

A few minutes later, I’ve arrived at Mission Day School.

Faith hustles to unbuckle her seat belt and open her door. “I’m going to figure out how to pay the tuition, if I have to go even further into debt. Timothy’s thriving here, in a relative sense. But I’ve got to get out from under this jerk.”

She stands at the door. She kneels down. She looks at me until I relent and meet her gaze. She blinks her brown eyes and I realize that, even though she senses her power to connect, physically and emotionally, she doesn’t know its depths. I want to make her smile. And she wants to say something. She opens her mouth, only a tad, then pauses, her perfect lips hung in space. Maybe she’s waiting for me. I’m waiting too. I’m waiting to say what I know I feel: give me a few weeks and then let’s get coffee and a doughnut and see what we can do about having an honest connection, the first I’ve had in nearly a year.

I have the feeling she wants the same thing.

“Goodbye, Faith.”

“Are you having a threesome with state-sponsored terrorists?”

This is the question that greets me when I get to the entrance to the office. Rather, it’s the question on the meticulously hand-painted sign in the window of Green Love, the politically correct and eco-friendly sex shop that never fails to remind me I’m not nearly the weirdest tenant in the building.

I can’t help but read a flyer in the window below the provocative question. It explains that some “mainstream sex lubricants” use petroleum-based oils that can “line the pockets of Middle East terror states that treat women as chattel.” The flyer goes on to urge the use of sex products “sold here” from certified fair-trade communities in Latin and Central America and also from local artisans.

If I ever get horny again, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be looking for lubricant made in someone’s bathtub in Sonoma County. But then, how could I ever look myself again in the mirror over the bed if I wasn’t making love, but terrorism?

I look over my shoulder and I see no sign of the bald buzzard or other lurkers. And a minute later, I’ve trudged up the stairs and see that the door to my office is ajar.

Almost without a pause, I push open the door. Inside, I see the one person who might pose the biggest threat. At least emotionally.

Samantha, my Witch, my sister-in-arms, sits cross-legged on the floor. Her head is back as if looking at the heavens but her eyes are closed and, even if they were open, the most exotic or mystical thing she could see is a water stain on our ceiling that looks vaguely like a tarantula eating a strand of spaghetti.