Dead On Arrival

by Matt Richtel

  The machine, the Lantern machine she’d help perfect, had stunned her electrical system, effectively erasing her very short-term memory, the last six hours of her life, give or take, leaving her with the worst hangover of her life, not a headache, but a veritable blackout.

  “I loved him,” Jackie said. She wiped her face, removing a tear. “What he stood for.”

  “I’m not sure he told you what he stood for,” Alex said.

  “He did, Alex. Everything. He was like a fathe—”

  “Not now. Okay.” Alex turned to Jackie. “You’re not going to stop this.”

  “Wait a second. You . . .” Jackie took a step backward, images spinning in her mind. “Did you . . . did you put me in that chamber? What did you do to me?”

  “What did I do to you?”

  “What did you do to Denny?” Jackie demanded. “You poisoned him.”

  “You’re insane,” Alex said.

  “Don’t you dare put this on me!”

  “Time to put this project on hold,” Alex muttered.

  Jackie looked at the woman’s face and couldn’t tell if she saw sincerity or setup. She felt herself swimming in lost time; images and sounds of the opera. She’d been Lanterned. She had her suspicions of what had happened here today, but only glimpses in a world gone dark, bits of evidence from the hours preceding her date with Google’s latest technology. What had really happened? She felt a gust of wind and ran for her car.

  Present Day

  Thirty-Three

  The ring woke Lyle at last.

  “Dr. Martin?”

  “Right.”

  “This is the front desk.”

  “Okay, got it. What time is it?”

  “Eleven fifty. We rang at ten, then knocked and then finally—”

  “In the what?”

  “What?”

  “Morning or night?” It was completely dark in the room, the curtains pulled tight.

  “Morning. Are you . . . are you okay, sir?”

  “Yes. Thanks for the call.”

  Lyle started to set the phone on the cradle. He pulled it back.

  “One more question, young lady.”

  “Of course. We’re here to help.”

  “Where am I?”

  “Steamboat. Springs. The Sheraton. Are you sure . . .”

  Lyle, the phone now nestled between his left shoulder and his chin, had stopped listening. He ran his hands over the undershirt on his chest and down over his hips, feeling for sensation. The woman on the phone had asked something about whether he wanted coffee or orange juice delivered to the room. She sounded worried about him. “Coffee,” he said, and he reached over and set the phone in its cradle.

  He closed his eyes and studied his dull headache. Was he sick? Maybe he’d just overslept. Maybe he’d dipped too deep this time into the over-the-counter sleeping medication. His kingdom for the prescription pad back.

  Wasn’t he here for a conference? He swung his legs off the side of the bed and fought a wave of nausea. It was brief. He steadied himself. He felt another symptom, a sore of some kind inside his mouth, on his tongue. He ran his finger along its right side and could feel it was raw, like he’d bitten it. He lay there, exploring these odd sensations in his body, exhaustion but it felt like more than that. Less than five minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Lyle stood and pulled open the curtains, which were vertically striped with brown and gray, and immediately regretted it. It wasn’t just light but bright white, new snow white. Now he pictured arriving at the hotel, late at night, or early in the morning, in the cold. He’d gone right to bed. The small room, with quaint accents, spoke to what he figured must be precious real estate here on the edge of the ski mountain.

  He opened the door to discover a woman in a smart gray pantsuit. She held a silver coffee tray in her arms but awkwardly so, and she had no name tag. At that moment, Lyle correctly deduced she wasn’t a bellhop or waiter bringing room service. She must be a manager, Lyle thought, from the way she looked past him and into the room.

  “I’m fine,” he said, “much better now that I’ve got coffee.”

  “On the house,” said the woman. “May I bring it inside?”

  “Sure,” he said. Let her knock herself out. Over the last few years, as he’d had more to drink and taken more pills to sleep, he’d grown accustomed to friends and family occasionally peeking in. It was funny, in a way, the way they’d always walk into his studio apartment on Divis and look around as if they were somehow looking around his liver for spots.

  She put the tray with the coffee decanter and newspaper on the nightstand beneath a lamp with a wide-brim opaque oval shade. Lyle watched the room through her eyes as she scanned his jeans on the floor, and the suitcase left near the foot of the bed, the bedspread strewn. The woman, trying to look nonchalant, glanced at the darkened mouth of the bathroom.

  “Do you need to use it?” Lyle asked.

  “No, I—”

  “Just kidding. May I ask, do you know which floor the I.D. conference is on?”

  “Conference?”

  “Sorry, infectious disease.”

  She straightened. “I don’t think . . .” She paused. “We had an orthopedist conference last week, y’know, the guys who help the skiers and their knees, but I don’t think we have anything this week. I could be wrong, or maybe the event is at a different hotel?” She ended it with a kind of question mark, as if she had somehow made a mistake.

  Lyle thanked her and watched her go. He looked at his invite, which suggested he had the right place. Had he written down the date wrong or misunderstood it? That wouldn’t be unlike him, he realized. He’d really sunk the last few months. That’s why he’d wanted to come out here and try, at least, to restart. Maybe it just wasn’t to be. How could he have made a mistake like that?

  For some reason, each time he reached for an answer, he found himself humming the words from a song. It was Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” which talks of a man losing faith and getting up and finding “a reason to believe.” In the last year, after a beer or two, Lyle would watch the video on YouTube of a concert from Germany where Springsteen had crushed it. Lyle kept the video bookmarked and now, for some reason, he couldn’t get it out of his head.

  He looked down at the newspaper, Steamboat Today. The main story had to do with a prediction that El Niño would mean a glorious wet winter for the mountain town. This qualified here for front-page news. At the bottom of the page, a teaser about a shootout in Oregon caught Lyle’s attention. He turned to page 3 to read about this, yet another, tragedy: a group of separatists had killed three federal marshals before being beaten back in a massive gun exchange. Inside the group’s compound, police found a cache of weapons that one official described as “rivaling that of the Portland police force.” There were plans the group had tried to shred, but failed, that showed alliances with groups in two other states, Idaho and Minnesota, partly over grievances with the appointment of federal judges that group professed to dislike.

  Lyle closed the paper. Maybe he was better off in retirement; the frickin’ human race.

  Twenty-four hours later, Lyle landed back in San Francisco. He felt for the most part bewildered. He also wondered if his use of all those sleeping pills and the recreational booze had truly begun to eat away at his cognition.

  Back in his studio apartment, he listened to the sounds of twentysomethings eating barbecue on the patio across the street and vowed he’d stop drinking for a day or two. He unpacked what little he’d taken. Put the Nebraska album on his old turntable and sat down on a beanbag chair, trying to shake the feeling he’d been put through the spin cycle in a dryer. It would go away in a few hours, he told himself, looking to put the whole damn failed experiment of going to Colorado behind him.

  That’s when he found the note in his back pocket.

  Thirty-Four

  At first, Lyle assumed it must have been something he’d written in an altered state and decided to ignore it. After
all, it made no sense. He tossed it in the tin pail he’d gotten at the garage sale where he met the last person he’d slept with. Her name was Papyrus and she was at the garage sale exploring an old fishbowl but, really, it became clear, had stopped while walking by to explore Lyle. Extremely nice, extremely sexual, woman, and young, which is how Lyle thought of anyone in their late twenties. It lasted three nights, until Lyle had, as much as he could through a sexual encounter, exorcized his fury at Melanie.

  That was two years ago, give or take, and the garage sale remnant had given him a memento and symbol for his ugly existence. He was throwing his life away, everything he’d believed in or wanted. Every time he looked at that damn thing, he thought of the woman he’d slept with, nice enough for sure, but decidedly not Melanie, and his life decidedly not the one he’d invented and that he’d been driven from—mostly by himself.

  Now, he realized, reclining in his aging blue beanbag chair, he again faced a fork in the road, one he felt like he’d already taken. A week ago, he set aside all his reticence and decided, finally, yes, he would attend the infectious disease conference and stick a toe into his former life. For the most part, he had told himself, it was because he needed the money. He couldn’t go on forever on dwindling expenses, even in a studio where the rent didn’t rise because he gave free medical counsel to the older woman who owned the building and lived on the top floor. There was more to his motivation than mere money. Little by little, he’d forgiven Melanie for having a one-night stand that, remarkably enough, produced offspring (or maybe it was more than a one-night stand but that’s what she claimed). And maybe the person he was forgiving was himself for having gotten so withdrawn in the first place that Melanie had wanted to feel some control over her life and lashed out. Maybe he had been sabotaging the whole thing. Could he blame her?

  He blamed humanity. Lyle had learned and studied, trained and taught, all in the name of staving off disease and infection. And humans thanked him by killing themselves off. How many patients had he seen who put themselves into perilous positions with their own behavior? Even when it wasn’t his direct charge, he’d wander through the hospital and see the diabetic who had eaten himself into disease, the car wreck victim who had texted herself off the bridge, the gunshot victim who had fired first.

  When he got the invite to Steamboat, he at first dismissed it. But the organization, the woman who ran it, stroked his ego and hit the right buttons. Maybe that had been a cruel joke, too. He’d have to go back and investigate and call them, find out if he fucked up the date somehow or they duped him or what. It really was strange. But, regardless, the trip, having failed, usurped by bad planning and a miasma of strange and hazy memories from a distant mountain town, put him in the position of having to get up some gumption again. If he was going to get his ass out of this dwindling situation, he was going to have to make it happen. Where was that energy going to come from?

  He fell asleep in the chair and woke up in the middle of the night with a crook in his neck. He ignored it and walked over to the trash bin and pulled from the refuse the crumpled piece of paper. He recognized his own handwriting:

  Beware channelopathy/seizure pandemic. Google? You’re not imagining.

  Over and over he read it. He knew it meant something, just knew, and he had no idea what.

  He finally got to sleep at four in the morning and dreamed vividly of playing a game of laser tag in the snow. The dreamy sleep left Lyle feeling grateful—it had been a long time since he’d been visited by such rest, without assistance—and his exhaustion lifted. That morning, at the coffee shop around the corner from his house, he turned on his vastly outdated Mac and read the news and then succumbed to curiosity and looked up channelopathy. His research confirmed what little he remembered. Channelopathies are diseases that can lead to brief periods of paralysis and are associated with problems in the ion channels, which are gatekeepers of cells.

  Already, he was baffled, partly because he’d exhausted his knowledge on the subject.

  He surfed around and reminded himself that an ion is an atom or molecule that is electrically charged, either positively or negatively, depending on the mismatch inside of it between electrons and protons. Ions like sodium and potassium would flow through the openings in the cell, creating tiny but ultimately powerful electrical impulses that stimulate electrical pulses in the body to fire muscles and nerves.

  Lyle looked up from his laptop and rubbed his eyes. This was mind-bending stuff, more the bailiwick of physicists than doctors. Around him, he eyed a half-dozen fellow patrons buried in their laptops and phones and then returned to his own.

  As he read across various websites, feeling very much vexed, at least one thing did become clear to him: why he’d written seizure next to channelopathy. In fact, these were two very different ideas, but they both did implicate electrical pulses and both could involve temporary paralysis. Both could lead to acute memory loss. In the case of seizure, the electrical storm could complicate or even erase the memory for up to six hours prior to the event.

  And neither of them, at least on its face, had anything to do with pandemic.

  He did a search for “pandemic” and “channelopathy,” and another using “epidemic” and then matching the various words with “seizure” and came up empty.

  He combined the searches with tech, and tech-born, and empty, empty, empty.

  What the hell was this note in his pocket?

  He stood up to leave and was bumped into by a woman walking with a coffee in her hand and her face looking down at the cell phone in her other hand. She spilled her coffee. “I’m sorry,” she said, without even fully looking up. “No problem,” Lyle said, finding it mostly funny. Ever the clinician, he noticed the swelling red around her nose. She had a cold. It left him with an idea that he didn’t put a fine point on until a step or two later. Absently, he sat again at a bench and fired up his laptop and confirmed what he’d been thinking: channelopathies sometimes involved an autoimmune attack. This idea, autoimmunity, was much more in Lyle’s wheelhouse and he understood better what he was reading. Sometimes, the body’s own defenders would attack the body itself, as in diabetes or arthritis or other autoimmune disorders, and then become more dangerous than any foreign invader.

  Lyle had been out of the game a few years and knew that giant leaps were being made in the understanding of the immune system. He knew whom to ask about it, too, but the very idea gave him a stomachache. No way he was going back to Jen Sanchez. She’d had the corner office when he’d had his ignominious fall and, in passing, he knew she’d just kept climbing floors and corner offices. He sensed she’d always scorned him, maybe even conferred with Dean Thomas in their dislike of him, so no way he was going to talk to her. And then he laughed.

  Talk to her?

  Of course he wasn’t going to talk to her.

  Was he really thinking of going on a goose chase? Was he following his medical muse again?

  He slammed shut his laptop so vigorously that a college student sitting next to Lyle said, “Easy there, pardner,” as if Lyle had just screeched at his child in public. Lyle laughed again, this time more bitterly. He walked out of the café, backpack over his shoulder, trying to erase the gnawing of his impulses, the weird, persistent Springsteen soundtrack coming in over the top, and to just take in the world. He inhaled the dry-roasted smoked pork from the barbecue place on the corner, across from his studio, and felt a craving he hadn’t felt in months. It wasn’t a good use of money, not now, but, hey, maybe some mysterious pandemic is coming, he smirked to himself, so why not blow the last of the savings on barbecue.

  He stood in line with the twentysomethings, listening to them roar about the latest media moment, having to do with this group of separatists in Oregon. After a few of them had been shot, a grassroots movement had started encouraging gun owners to march on Capitol Hill and make a show of The People and their right to defend themselves. A million Americans with automatic weapons, an open-carry bonanza. “A
dare,” was how one commentator put it. They were calling it the Million Gun March. Would the government dare to arrest or confiscate or confront tens of thousands of law-abiding citizens? That’s exactly what the government said it would do “and you’re goddamned right,” said one of the techies standing in line for barbecue. “It’s time to put this thing to rest once and for all.” Meaning: the macho gun culture. To which his girlfriend responded: “Government’s thugs, too. I went to the range the other day.”

  Amid this intensifying talk-show moment, a minor spectacle erupted when a car without a driver circled the block.

  Only of late had these bulbous Google cars started making the rounds in San Francisco. Most of the testing had been done on the roads of Mountain View, the Silicon Valley city Google called home. Now, though, the technology had come far enough that the company branched out. To mild fascination, the car passed the barbecue place and then, to whistles and cheers, executed a perfect U-turn and then an even more perfect parallel parking job. It landed right in front of Lyle’s apartment. The crowd went wild, and then Lyle watched with his own fascination as everyone around him took pictures of the thing and started sending out the image to various social media. So lost was the person in front of Lyle that she didn’t move forward in line and Lyle shrugged and got in front of her.

  He stared at the self-driving car. Google, channelopathy, now a self-driving car in front of his house?

  He ate his barbecue and returned to his apartment, overcome with malaise.

  A week passed this way, one of the strangest that Lyle could remember in his life. He felt that he was in a stupor, an almost clinical heaviness, and that, simultaneously, he was emerging from one, a long, deep emotional slumber. An impulse lingered to scrape away the dead skin that he felt like covered every inch of him. The note he’d now taped to his cheap, white refrigerator symbolized his struggle to molt. He wanted to understand it and yet the idea repelled him.