Мэтт Рихтел - Dead on Arrival

They drove Denny’s Tesla the few miles west to town on the empty stretch of highway to Hawthorne.

They found a booth in the back of a diner. The torn pleather upholstery scratched at Jackie’s calves. They shared a tuna melt and soggy fries. Denny told her how Lantern had yielded unpredictable results. Sometimes, memory retention was through the roof, other times like it had been that morning. Denny handed her more spreadsheets. “No need to look now. Maybe tonight in the luxurious confines of the Days Inn.” He paused. “You look skeptical, Jackie.”

“It’s a lot to take in. May I change the subject?”

“What’s on your mind?”

“I realized I don’t know much about your background.” She already knew about it, but she wanted to hear him tell it.

Denny told her his path. Montana roots, then MIT for undergrad and a programming Ph.D. that he didn’t finish. He and a classmate launched a startup doing compression software to make video delivery faster and it got acquired and “I could’ve retired, financially, but, emotionally, I don’t know, was a lot emptier than my bank account.”

Jackie looked at him over her coffee, urging him silently to continue.

“Silicon Valley’s big secret,” he said. “After you make money, it becomes so hollow, even insulting, and then you want legacy.”

“How is Lantern legacy?”

He laughed. “Good point,” then really laughed, like he was discovering the joke. “Silicon Valley’s even bigger secret is that we get rich, want to create a legacy, and then get distracted on some side project that consumes us because it’s almost impossible to create a legacy. So, in the end, we conflate legacy with power. Influence.”

“Which is not legacy?”

“They are hard to disentangle.”

Jackie smiled.

“No family?”

He shook his head. “How about you?” he asked. “Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley for a Ph.D. What about the stuff not on your résumé? Hobbies, life dreams?”

Jackie felt simultaneously nauseated and giddy. She hated this topic but she had deliberately led the conversation this direction. She suspected he knew and he would betray it.

“Just the classes.”

“With the genius doctor. And family? Just you and your sister?”

He knew.

“Our grandmother raised us.”

He nodded. She blinked back tears.

“Like you said the other day: you don’t like to talk about it.”

“Why are you asking me if you know?”

“I don’t know know. I sense something, Jackie, I’d have to be a dim-witted asshole not to see you’re lugging something around.”

Jackie put her hand to her cheek. Had she imagined a gust of wind?

“We don’t have to—”

“Let’s get out of here,” Jackie said.

“Where to?”

“I’ll show you.”

Mostly in silence, Jackie directed Denny to and up a winding dirt road to the north of town. It was the very definition of desolate. When the road started to climb, there was a lone sign: overlook. Denny snaked on the winding road. Three-quarters of a mile later, Jackie pointed to the pullover spot on the right. Jackie exited the car without speaking and walked to the edge of the brown-and-red-dusted cliff. Denny shuffled up behind her.

“How did you know this was here?”

“Fancy program called Google Maps. Very impressive, that Google.” Before he could laugh, she said. “Do you trust me?”

“Jackie, of—”

“You asked about my family. It’s very personal.”

“We don’t have to—”

“There was an incident,” she interrupted him again, “and I was remanded to my grandmother. We both were.”

“You and your sister?”

She nodded grimly. “Right.”

“And that’s off-limits?”

Jackie looked across the plain. It was a vast stretch of brown with jags of green, a blip of town at their two o’clock, some neon sign blinking red. Now Jackie was practically leaning over the side. Denny took a rapid step forward. He reached for her.

“You trust me,” Jackie said, flatly. She sounded like she might be speaking to herself.

“This is weird, Jackie.”

“She killed herself, my sister. Marissa.”

She looked at Denny and saw that he’d blinked rapidly; whatever else he’d known about her, he hadn’t known that.

“Jumped from a high place.”

He nodded. She appreciated that he didn’t say something stupid, like I’m so sorry .

“Jackie, I’m really grateful that we’ve found each other.”

His tone startled her. He wasn’t the touchy-feely type, quietly jocular at most.

“May I explain why?”

“Because I’m helping you solidify your legacy.”

“Well, that.” He laughed, taking the edge out of the situation. “Because I spend most of my time in superficial relationships. Work, not at work. Don’t worry, I’m not hitting on you.” She thought he might laugh again to take the edge off but he remained serious. His eyes looked a touch wet, and the skin beneath them drooped slightly with age. He cleared his throat. “Anyhow…”

“I feel the same,” she said. The truth was she wasn’t sure if she did. She desperately wanted to trust Denny. Desperately. More than that, she wanted him to trust her. Much of the time, she felt he did.

“Jackie, may I ask a question?”

Her silence spoke assent.

“Do you trust yourself?”

He could see it jarred her, like she’d felt wind. She swallowed hard. “I think so.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

Again, she didn’t answer. Her thoughts had traveled to Dr. Martin. She thought of him as someone who knew his way, who could make hard decisions, measure cause and effect, detect the world’s nuances.

“There’s Lantern,” she said.

“C’mon, Jackie, it’s windy up here.”

That night, she fell asleep in the Days Inn with the spreadsheets on her chest. She dreamed of playing chess, but the pieces were vividly colored, and they had bared teeth. In her dream, she felt a presence behind her. She turned and there stood Dr. Martin, eyeing the board. She sat up sharply in bed. It was 4 a.m. and she felt wide awake. She thought about her conversation with Denny and she was struck that, at the time, her mind had drifted to Dr. Martin. She was fascinated by him and even though she understood there was something cartoonish in that—like she had idealized him, romanticized his genius—he had played an extraordinary role in her life.

She googled the office hours for Lyle Martin and wondered if he was back from Africa. She stared at his picture and imagined that he would understand her and fantasized until she felt back asleep and dreamed of screwing him until they collapsed in exhausted satisfaction.

That next morning, the study subject looked crack addled. Lucid, cogent, but nearly toothless. Maybe he’d recovered in time. He poked the tablet, visiting poker sites, playing free hands. He knocked on the glass and asked for $100 in ante money and Denny declined, saying it would upset the experiment and the toothless guy cursed and kept on with it. At one point, Jackie looked up from the spreadsheets and she noticed a change. The man had a dumb smile on his face. His eyes had glazed.

“Denny?”

“What’s up? Do you realize they’re going to give that guy the death penalty?”

“What guy?”

“Who shot up the army base. We’re getting to be like Mexico with the narcos, lawless, chaotic.” Now Denny looked up from his newspaper at the man locked into his computer screen. “I can’t help but feel like we’re responsible, in part, for the violence.”

“Who?” She was only half listening to Denny as she watched the toothless man become more and more entranced.