Dead On Arrival

by Matt Richtel

  She thought about what Denny wanted from her. She was supposed to make sense of these patterns and help figure out how to maximize memory retention. She sensed strongly that was a bunch of bullshit. She needed more information. Thinking about how angry this all made her, the helplessness of it all, caused her to gnaw absently on the tip of her thumb until it bled. This was the sort of situation that always vexed her. A few times in her teens, she’d even done little pranks, minor infractions, toying around with trying to understand the right course of action, the appropriate course, the moral one. Like hacking into the computer of a teacher accused of harassment and sending an incriminating e-mail from his e-mail account. Was that right or wrong? Years earlier, she’d swiped a tip jar from a café in high school, a split-second decision that had left a school bully accused. Then she’d piled on to him by giving testimony she’d seen him do it. Who wouldn’t believe the tearful recounting by the girl who had been forced to live with her grandmother after she’d witnessed that terrible thing?

  Right, wrong? So nuanced. Especially when there wasn’t time to think it through. The one thing that gave her solace is that, it seemed, the whole world was struggling with it. Tensions flaring all over the place, the pace speeding up, conflicts, shouts, talk shows, separatists and police, dangerous decision points, escalating forward. It felt like the wind picking up steam, a tornado coming. Instead of even trying to figure out what was right, people buried themselves in their devices. People talked to you while looking at their phones, lost in entirely different realities. It was like the world was, like her, missing situational awareness. Like a blind pilot heading into a mountain. Not seeing, not hearing, as she had not seen and heard, once that diminutive sixth grader sitting on the back of the upholstered couch, watching through the sliding glass window. The argument lived inside of her.

  You’re a son of a bitch, Alan. A philandering Son. Of. A. Bitch.

  More like Husband of a Bitch.

  You’re blaming me?

  Listen to you, foul-mouthed harpy. You thrive on this, crave it, invite it. Beg for it. You’re a genius, all right, at creating a poisoned universe. Right in your own cackling image.

  Fuck you.

  I’m surprised you didn’t engrave me an invitation for me to fuck her in front of you.

  I’ve seen enough premature ejaculating from you.

  I’m done, Denise. Done.

  I’ll tell you when we’re done.

  What are you doing?

  Till death do us part, Alan.

  What the hell are you doing?

  Get up, Jackie, get up. Move. Move! Help them! Reliving the memory, blood dripped from the tip of her thumb where she counted to ten, and she breathed with each number. Eight, nine, ten. She sucked the blood and tasted it and spat it onto the comforter.

  When Jackie finally got out of bed at nearly two in the afternoon, it was pouring. She felt overcome with loneliness and walked, drenched, to the movies and went to a romantic comedy about a loveless executive who fell for the Amazon delivery driver; Jackie abandoned the movie halfway through. That’s when she saw the car. It was one of those small electric vehicles. She couldn’t make out who was hunched behind the wheel. And she might not have noticed the car, or the driver at all, had it not made a mistake. While walking home, she turned onto Pine, which was a one-way street. The car turned to follow her, going the wrong direction. When Jackie heard the honks, she saw the car and realized it had been the same one she’d seen outside the movie theater, parked earlier. Just something she’d noticed, maybe having appreciated the crisp green color.

  Jackie picked up her step. When she got to her apartment again, she noticed the car stopped across the street on the corner. She thought about calling 911. Was that the right move? Were her antennae lying to her?

  She looked out the window and thought about the terrible movie she’d seen and about the powerful executive waiting at her front door for the Amazon delivery driver to bring her a new electric toothbrush or whatever else she’d ordered. Soon, she was ordering things just so she and this down-to-earth driver could chat. Jackie looked at her door. Then she looked out the window and saw the same car sitting there in the pouring rain. It drove away.

  She closed her eyes and had a thought about what might make her feel better. It was a passing thought, and laughable at that. A few minutes later it returned to her. She let herself give life to the thought: she wanted to talk to Dr. Martin. She wanted to thank him, no, that wasn’t quite right, or not all of it. She wanted to talk to this genius, listen to him, or tell him what was happening and seek his counsel.

  Sitting there, no doubt deluded by darkness and the narrative afterglow of a rotten romantic comedy, she told herself that Dr. Martin—Lyle—saw things as they were, not as they were packaged or dressed up. He was someone who would meet her halfway, be unthreatened by her power, maybe truly enticed by it. She could just tell. Maybe it was fate that he’d saved her, something more than random events that had brought them together on that airstrip in Nepal.

  After a bit of considering the idea, dismissing it, considering, dismissing, she called up the UCSF Internet page and looked for the class site. And she gasped. This couldn’t be right.

  Dr. Martin’s lecture section had been canceled.

  “Due to unforeseen circumstances, the lecture has been postponed indefinitely. Students will be credited with a pass.”

  She felt crestfallen. This wasn’t right. She knew Dr. Martin had gone to Africa and that class had been off for a few weeks. This was something else. She surfed around looking for news about whether he’d gotten sick. Nothing came up. She felt agitated, surprisingly so. She considered doing some hacking into Dr. Martin’s personal accounts, to snoop just a tad, thought better of it. So unfair to Dr. Martin. She went to the window and saw that car again. She came back to her computer and, unable to stop herself, decided to snoop on the UCSF servers. It was a task beyond her flavor of expertise computer-wise, but well within her grasp of social engineering. This was, after all, how most actual hacking happened, not by powerful computers breaking encryptions but by sweet-talking nerds who talked their way through dim-witted tech support people. Jackie called the UCSF after-hours computer support team, described herself as Dr. Martin’s administrative assistant having problems accessing the shared calendar with a key conference coming up tomorrow, blah, blah, blah. She flirted with the guy on the other end of the phone, talked about how ditzy she could be, wound up getting the password for Dr. Martin’s calendar, which in turn gave her a very good guess at Dr. Martin’s e-mail address. She figured it was the same as for his calendar. She was in.

  She figured she had about ten minutes to look in his system undetected but she only needed about one. She saw what she needed in the first e-mail. It was from the dean and it had come that morning. Dr. Martin hadn’t seen it yet. “Dr. Martin, per my previous correspondence, you need to move your things out of the office immediately. I will give you until the middle of next week before I consider legal means. In the meantime, you may no longer sleep in the office under any circumstances. It is unbecoming and, regardless, violates our code of conduct.”

  Jackie scrolled back through several previous messages and could see oblique references to inappropriate behavior on the “Africa trip,” and suggestions of administrative leave by the dean. Dr. Martin hadn’t responded to any of them, but Jackie could see that he’d read them.

  She returned to the first e-mail, the one warning Dr. Martin to vacate the premises. She looked at it for the better part of an hour. Her hands balled into fists, her jaw tight enough to prompt a headache. She felt her muscles twitch.

  Finally, she hit reply and wrote:

  Dean Thomas,

  I am sorry that our relationship has so deteriorated. I also do not appreciate your threats. It seems odd to me that you would be so antagonistic to one of your educators. That attitude is such a far cry from your solicitous attitude toward corporate funders, including those pharmaceutical
interests trying to buy access to our budding clinicians. Wearing my doctor hat, I diagnose you with a serious case of hypocrisy.

  It had been no secret that the dean had been accused of fund-raising with abandon, giving rise to ethical questions at the medical school. The mayor and many in the city loved the dean for having overseen the massive expansion of a high-tech campus. But many on the campus saw her for what she was, someone awaiting a CEO position at Genentech or a competitor and in line for a massive payday. The last thing she needed was an enemy like Dr. Martin. Jackie decided to make her knife thrust a tad less subtle.

  Dean Thomas, I did your bidding in Africa, trying to save lives, and you repay me by stripping me of my ability to educate the doctors of the next generation. I hope you will reconsider your hasty threats or I will not hesitate to share my experiences as someone who has been thrown under the bus to serve outside interests.

  Sincerely,

  Jackie hit send and then deleted the initial e-mail from the dean. Dr. Martin, perhaps, would never see this correspondence. She doubted he was a dogged user of e-mail anyway. She felt euphoric. She’d gotten off her perch of indecision and given a boost to the man who had once saved her life.

  Of course, she couldn’t know that Dr. Martin was the one who asked in the first place for some administrative leave. She couldn’t know the emotionally dark place he’d inhabited, or why. She pictured a defeated version of this great man, her distant crush and savior who, if she was honest with herself, she craved to be seen as his equal, someone who saw her, understood her, wouldn’t put her into a terrible position. Now left to sleep on his couch at the office? And even that being taken from him?

  She stared into the dark for a long time, pondering, exploring her feelings, taking her time with an idea, rolling it around in her brain—until she felt a surge of certainty.

  She slipped out the back door of the apartment building and took an Uber in pouring rain to UCSF on Parnassus. This was the old medical-school campus in San Francisco’s inner sunset neighborhood, and right near Haight and Ashbury. Much of the medical enterprise had moved down to Mission Bay, where the lecture halls were, but the main adult emergency room and hospital remained on Parnassus. So did some of the faculty and adjunct offices, infectious disease among them, and for good reason: often, when an infectious disease specialist was needed, he or she was needed in the hospital to consult with a virulent and unusual case.

  Jackie took the elevator to the fifth floor in the elevator adjoining the main hospital. The setting was a far cry from the majestic new campus. This was drab and boxy, merely functional. She was looking for number 503 and figured that she’d found it when she saw from a distance down the hallway the doorway in the corner, the proverbial corner office that Lyle deserved. Colorful papers and patient reminders were carefully taped to the doorway. But that one was marked 501 and had a sign for dr. jen sanchez. The department’s darling, Jackie knew. She was the one with the sweet digs.

  Jackie turned to the left, and ten feet down she found 502, right beside the echoing stairwell, and clearly a little box. Jackie felt a pang for Dr. Martin at this inglorious place; he deserved so much better.

  It was so much worse when she pushed open the door.

  Twenty-Nine

  The smell. She recoiled. She wondered if it was disease. Was this the odor of bacteria consuming a human body? No, she quickly realized, it was the stench of ancient pizza. From the looks of the remains in the open box on the table in the small entry room, a meat lover’s special. She repressed a gag.

  “Dr. Martin?”

  There was just enough light from the hallway behind her, and a sliver of moon from a window across the tiny office to illuminate the mess of food remains, scattered papers, and was that a camping stove? And the light also showed the way to an opening to a second room.

  She shuffled by the desk and thought, Let him be okay.

  For all Jackie’s awareness, her great skills at piecing together the world, she would not have sensed how strange it was for her to be here, how impulsive. She was grasping at straws. The Google thing, Denny, the man in the car, they’d tapped into that core part of her that was emotionally flummoxed, off balance, so much less composed than she showed the world. Now she was on the verge of coming undone altogether, torn apart with uncertainty. But that’s not what she told herself. She thought, as she walked into the open doorway of the second room, Now I know what to do. I can help this man who needs my help.

  There he was, in a heap. On the couch, an arm draped to the side with his hand near a half-empty bottle of clear alcohol and a piece of paper.

  “Dr. Martin?”

  “I’m retired. Call me Lyle,” he muttered. He didn’t bother to look up.

  “Lyle?”

  “Retired,” he muttered again. “Honorifics no longer applicable.”

  She turned on the light. The office reminded her of the austere habitat of a shrink she once visited: a chair, coffee table, and the couch where Lyle was flopped facedown. On the table, several empty bottles and what appeared to be a half-eaten burrito.

  “Uhhhh!” Lyle made an anguished sound like a vampire consumed by sunlight.

  She turned it off. She didn’t want to see him like this; he didn’t deserve to be seen like this. What remained were silhouettes.

  “I’ll clean it myself,” he said. “Please. Go away.”

  “I’m not the cleaning crew.”

  “It’ll be a new career path for me.”

  “Let me get you some water.”

  She glanced around for a bottle or cup. She couldn’t make out much. Some of the books on the built-in shelves had been scattered to the floor, like someone had casually pulled them off. On the table, she could make out a plastic cup. She picked it up and sniffed the contents and shivered with disgust. Cheap swill.

  “Are you hungry?”

  No answer. She couldn’t imagine what had dragged him to this abyss. She also knew, in her gut, she knew, that she couldn’t ask him outright. That wasn’t how these things worked. Not with the proud and brilliant. She knew because she wouldn’t respond to direct questions, either. She’d been low. She understood Dr. Martin, and he probably would understand her.

  “May I take a liberty?” she said, and she sat.

  “Have a seat.” He laughed, some odd private joke because she was already sitting. He was half mad, at least half, she thought.

  “You are a great man.”

  Lyle turned his head, slightly, curiously, like a bird hearing a sound, such that he could make out her edges through the hair. She wondered if he imagined her as an apparition or dream.

  “Are you good or evil?” he asked.

  “What happened in Africa?” she asked.

  “Africa?”

  “Tanzania?”

  “How do you know about that? Am I dreaming?”

  He was obviously drunk and exhausted, but she wasn’t sure he could be quite that out of it to not know whether he was dreaming. His question almost sounded metaphorical, like Is this all a dream? She went with it. “Yes.”

  “To dream, the impossible dream. . . .” he sang, and then said, “Well, then let me tell a story.”

  “You tell beautiful stories.”

  “Once upon a time, there was a man who decided to be an infectious disease doctor and he had this idealistic vision that he could take on viruses and disease and find cures and then you know what would happen?”

  “The world would be a better place.”

  “He’d get laid.”

  She laughed.

  “Don Quixote tilting at viruses,” he continued, slurring. “Holding them off from attacking all the people he was protecting, including the princess. Year after year, he tilted, and the viruses kept coming and that was interesting and good work, tilting or not. And then the young doctor, who wasn’t so young anymore, heard something behind him. He turned to see all the people he arrogantly told himself he was defending from the viruses.”

  Lyle l
ooked down at the bottle standing on the carpet and tipped the vodka back and forth idly. Then he picked up the piece of paper and clutched it.

  “They were killing each other,” he finally said. “Shooting, maiming, terrorizing, drinking and driving, stealing each other’s land, finding tax loopholes and racking up speeding tickets, building narco empires, filing lawsuits and countersuits, cloaking themselves as decent and moral and, all the while, doing more damage than any virus. Just one big difference.”

  “Dr. Martin?”

  He roared, “At least the virus declared itself: I am here to kill. I will consume you. It was forthright with its intentions. It was true. Not the people. Not the princess!”

  Another long pause.

  “People, they put you in the worst positions, y’know.” He sighed. “Anyhow,” he said, facedown, harder to hear now, “the doctor had picked the wrong side. Obviously. So he retired and decided, just now, that he might become a janitor.”

  With that, Dr. Martin seemed to make one last effort to raise his head. He shrugged, out of energy, nothing left to say. He fell back down and started to snore.

  Jackie felt momentarily dazed and realized she’d been holding her breath. The moment had captivated her. It had, in a certain manner, seduced her. She felt such kinship and intimacy.

  Whatever fantasy she’d had before that she and Dr. Martin were on the same page had now been multiplied, practically exponentially. What a man.

  “Let me tell you a story,” she whispered. He was out cold now.

  “Once upon a time there was a girl. I bet you can guess, that girl was me!” She laughed slightly at her own silly little joke. Then she cleared her throat and swallowed quickly. “Her parents fought and fought and fought. Her dad drank and cheated and her mom drank and yelled and hit and probably cheated, too.”