by Matt Richtel
Jackie cracked the window.
“Frankly, Alex, I don’t care about any of your ugly business, except for one thing: You will,” she hissed, “leave Dr. Martin alone.”
She hit the accelerator, screaming backward, gravel crackling beneath the tires.
Thirty-Seven
Minutes later, Lyle leaned against a worn utility pole that leaned slightly to the left. A metaphor for Berkeley itself, he thought, staring at a light-gray-and-white house at the corner of Milvia and Francisco. A steeply angled roof covered the small- to medium-size house with a tall red chimney pointing skyward. Lyle pictured two bedrooms upstairs, one for the boy and one for Melanie. The pockmarked lawn cracked brown with drought. Naturally, Melanie wouldn’t waste water. An interior light showed the back of a couch. It suggested someone was home, a proposition reinforced by a Honda in the driveway. Homey, Lyle thought, and winced. The road not taken. The road sprinted away from.
He walked his bike up a concrete path to the wooden stairs to the porch. He glanced upward at a circular window on the second floor, dark inside; his eyes then diverted almost magnetically to wires that laced the space between the house and the house next to it. In a tangle, the wires connected to Melanie’s house in the back corner and then to the house next door on its roof and so on throughout the block. Lyle followed the wires back to the utility pole and wondered whether these were telephone or Internet or electricity or maybe all of the above. His eyes were so heavenward that he didn’t hear the front door open, nor Melanie walk down the stairs and gawk at him as he gawked at the wires.
“I know that look,” she said.
The sound startled him. He looked up and saw Melanie holding a toy robot. It was in her left hand, a cavity in the red robot’s belly open. In her other hand, a screwdriver.
“Peño?”
“Melanie.”
A red sweater buttoned below her neck hugged her shoulders. The long, plain gray skirt told Lyle she’d probably worked that day. The moment he saw her, he ached.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She dipped her chin and half smiled, eyes widening, her nonverbal way of saying What brings you, Lyle? Say something.
“It’s a beautiful place,” he said.
She laughed out loud. “Peño,” she said again. It was an ice-breaking moment, part of an unspoken language in which she, just by saying his nickname, was calling out the oddity of him showing up, without explanation, and then staring at her electrical wires and commenting on her house. Perfectly Lyle.
“Is this about the text? I thought that was just spam,” she said.
This shook him back to the concrete. “Text?”
Behind Melanie, a face appeared at the screen door. It was a boy, little more than a toddler. “Mommy?” Stout with bangs. Not Lyle’s kid, Lyle thought, and winced. Melanie caught it. “Be right there, sweetie. Can you wash up for dinner?”
“K.”
She turned around and looked for a cue from Lyle. Did he want to talk about the Elephant at the Screen Door?
“Text,” he urged.
“You texted me: Kill your phone before it kills you.”
“What?”
Melanie set down the robot and screwdriver and pulled her phone from her pocket. She scrolled the large-screened device and held up the phone to him.
Kill your phone before it kills you.
“You didn’t send this?”
“When did it come?”
“Ten days or so ago. Middle of the night.”
Lyle gritted his teeth in focus. He hadn’t remembered sending it. Was that when he was in Steamboat? What did it mean?
“There’s another one, shortly after. It’s even weirder.” She handed him the phone.
He read the text: Must find brilliant woman from last UCSF class.
He shook his head. Nonsense. But it tickled in his brain just the way random clues tickled him.
“Why are you here, Lyle?”
He met her eyes and then couldn’t look at her anymore. Her tenderness overcame him. She had a hero’s compassion with a survivor’s backbone. How long had he been blind to this strength? He mustered the courage to say what he wanted to say. He looked down.
“Who is this woman? From your class. Were you having an aff—”
“Me. No way. You have no right—” He stopped. This wasn’t why he’d come, not to fight.
The last class, he remembered, had happened prior to that fateful Africa trip. It lodged painfully in his craw. He’d put Melanie at risk by allowing her to come with him, then humiliated her on the airplane by diagnosing her pregnancy, and, as much as any of that, he well might’ve blown his analysis about what was ailing the small village. He’d said it was man-made. On what basis? Whimsical, cynical half-baked sophistry.
But she’d cheated on him, not the other way around.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Lyle? Are you sick?”
“When did I lose it?” he blurted.
“What?”
He fought himself, his pride, his urge not to ask or delve into his own bullshit. He never tried to make it about him. It was about the patient, disease, pathology. Maybe he was those things now. He made himself ask.
“When did I give up?”
“Wow,” she said, then almost immediately: “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say that. What’s happened, Lyle?”
He shook his head. I don’t know.
She looked over her shoulder, wanting to make sure they were alone.
She started to say something and then thought better of it. “Do you want to find some other time to talk?”
He looked to her in that moment like a patient who just wanted to be given a shot. Get it over with.
“I’ve thought about it a ton,” she said, “when it all went to shit.”
She told him about a weekend they’d had in a yurt near Santa Cruz. It had been a few weeks after Lyle had been asked to speak at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. While he was there, the talk got called off because of a shooting at a nearby school. Lyle remembered that part well enough. After the shooting, he had been witness to an argument among several researchers at the CDC, one of whom had a student at the school. The kid was okay but the mom was enraged. Enraged, she’d railed against the gun culture. Another researcher took offense and railed back. They’d nearly come to blows. On the way out of the parking lot, the second researcher, giving the middle finger to the first researcher, plowed into the security hut and, while unhurt, totaled his car.
“That’s when your withdrawal really intensified,” Melanie said. “I’m not sure if what happened in Atlanta had anything to do with it. That’s what I thought. But then I started to wonder whether that was convenient and it might not be us—”
“But—”
“Listen, Lyle, I appreciate that you devoted your life to helping people and then found that people weren’t always reciprocating, weren’t always helping themselves—that they were hurting themselves.” She saw that he wanted to interrupt again. She held up her hands. “You must’ve known that all along. It’s always been a razor’s-edge fight. So I suspect it was something in you, or us. Relationships live on the razor’s edge, too. The great passion had subsided for us, the easy part. It was work, all of it; you got overwhelmed.”
“No, I—” He stopped. He didn’t have an immediate answer. Just more questions: How do I get it back? How do I work through this soup?
Something very bad is going to happen, Melanie. I need to figure out how to stop it. He hated those words and didn’t know how to ask for help.
He couldn’t get any words out.
“Maybe you should talk to someone,” Melanie said.
“No—”
“Just listen. You’ve got this powerful brain, the most powerful brain. That power, any power, has a flip side. It might be that you’ve gotten off track. I think that’s what happened in Africa. You said there was a conspiracy, some terrible man-made thing. But there
was no conspiracy or anything like that. Just a disease that you didn’t want to—”
“Something’s going to happen.”
Now she smiled with such love and caring that it couldn’t possibly be seen as patronizing even though she was filled with pity. “Lyle . . .”
A car pulled into the driveway, crackling gravel beneath the tires as it came to a stop. Melanie stared at the car and then turned as the screen door opened behind her.
“Daddy!” the boy said.
“Sweetie, he’ll be right inside. Can you go wait for us?”
The boy somehow understood she really meant this particular request. “K,” he said again, and he disappeared.
From the boxy silver car stood a tall man in a T-shirt. He walked around the front of the car with a basketball under his long arm, wearing shorts.
“What happened to your eye?”
“Elbow,” the man said. “I gotta take up chess.” He smiled at Melanie and then offered Lyle a guileless nod. Dark stubble peppered his chin. “Eh, who am I kidding? I stink at chess.”
“George,” he said. “Are you a neighbor?”
“Lyle. I’m . . .”
“Oh, of course.” Recognition took over his face. He nodded again, a second greeting, this one with a certain respect for the situation. “Nice to meet you, Lyle.” He cleared his throat. “Don’t let me interrupt, and I want to go inside and see Evan.” This was guileless, too. It gave Lyle what would be his tiniest solace when he thought about this later. At least Melanie wasn’t with a jerk. Now all he could think was, Holy shit, she’s got a boyfriend or husband or live-in whatever, maybe the father of her child, or not? The screen door closed behind the man.
“Peño.” She looked at him and he was impassive, that same ingrown look that had gotten them here in the first place.
“It’s a beautiful family.”
Tears dripped down Melanie’s cheeks.
He knew what it meant. He wasn’t the victim here.
A numb subway ride home. It wasn’t that Lyle hadn’t been expecting this when he went to see Melanie. He had been expecting anything, nothing. He had let himself walk into a situation unexposed. If he could have seen himself at a distance, with perspective, he might’ve realized how valuable that was, how necessary and, more than that, how much it was like the old version of Lyle. He walked into situations unexposed, dangerous ones, emotionally fraught ones, deadly ones, and he led with his curiosity and an essential faith things would work out. Now, on the subway, his openness left him blown apart.
“I hope they kill every one of those jerks,” a woman said to another woman sitting in a seat next to and beneath where Lyle stood with his bike. She was evidently referring to the proposed show of arms on Capitol Hill.
The other woman had her arms wrapped around herself, as if cold. She squeezed her arms. “I wonder if this is what it feels like before a civil war? You don’t see it and then it’s all of a sudden there and people are picking sides.”
The woman who had made the comment looked at her phone. Lyle glanced over her shoulder at the political website she read. He couldn’t make out the particulars but could tell it was a firebrand, lamenting and attacking the other side. The woman read and clucked her tongue and muttered to herself, bemused and irritated by what she read, increasingly furious at the other side. It brought him back to Melanie and her description of the weekend in the yurt where she said he’d lost it. That was easier for Lyle to think about than the image of the boy and the man. The yurt. Lyle could only distantly recall it. When he did, he pictured himself that weekend as a lightbulb that was flickering, losing energy, petering out. Or maybe the better analogy was to a dying star; pulsing with dead energy, poised to explode into nothing.
People got on and off the train at the last stop in Oakland. The metal tube hummed and shimmied beneath the bay. Lyle held tight to his bike’s handlebars. He found void and shadows when he tried to understand what had piqued him so much that weekend in the yurt. Melanie blamed it on that painful trip to the CDC in Atlanta. En route home at Hartsfield-Jackson airport, he’d waited three hours in security, which had been all backed up because of the shooting, and then missed his plane. Stuck there, he’d sat and watched the security guards and found he was imagining them as immune-system cells, carefully looking about the way b-cells and t-cells, the immune system’s two power brokers, combed the body and targeted foreign invaders. What a system, arguably the most sophisticated in the body. The defenders roamed freely, instantly sensing danger and then sending waves of soldiers to attack. Not just that: the soldiers adapted. They would, at the rate of a supercomputer, try out a trillion different combinations of proteins to figure out which could kill the invader. It required a system this powerful to survive in a world with a trillion different possible invaders, from flu to cancer to random toxins. A mad scramble for survival, the immune system scrapping it out against the bacteria or virus, each desperate to survive.
Any system so powerful, though, had a dangerous side. No great survival mechanism or instinct goes without its dark sibling. Autoimmune disorders had blossomed, or, at least, we were seeing more of them. Our great defense system, the man on the wall, turning around out of control and blowing everything inside the village to shit.
At the Atlanta airport, Lyle watched the guards and thought about soldiers, police, vigilantes, armed youth, the suburban dads who, terrified, shot some kid on-site, asking questions later. On the flight, he hardly slept. He could feel a generalized fear, stoking people to defend themselves, the way that the immune system defends itself, then becoming so deadly effective, so out of control, that the mechanism turned inward.
Why had he been devoting everything to help people who were turning on one another?
Thinking back to that time, as he sat on the subway, Lyle wondered if he’d, in a way, done exactly the same thing. He’d withdrawn, protecting himself by disengaging only to discover that he’d actually destroyed the good parts of his life and himself, too. Depression, sadness, he knew the literature, they, too, were outgrowths of survival mechanisms, like the fear and anxiety that warn us of danger, remind us of situations where we’ve been harmed and could be so again, but toxic and even deadly when spun notches out of control. Had he protected himself and ground to a halt as a result?
Melanie had told him that intimacy and love were the true medicine. He’d never have used those words. But damn it if he didn’t know she was right. The antidote in the micro, the antidote in the macro. Hard to let in when the perimeter defenses get jacked to the sky.
Lyle got off at the Civic Center and burst with energy on his ride to the apartment, not joy but grinding, an effort to exhaust himself. Lost in himself, he didn’t see the driverless car tagging a few paces behind.
He considered the new piece of evidence: the text he’d sent Melanie about a brilliant student. On its face, that sounded as bizarre and vague as the pandemic thing. First of all, it was three years ago, and there were myriad brilliant students in the UCSF medical classes and he knew almost none of the ones in a giant lecture. They sat out there and he stood up there. Sometimes, one would ask a question or he’d meet a few in office hours. He couldn’t remember a single student from that particular semester, well, maybe his graduate assistant. Emily, he thought with a last name that started with S or C. Maybe worth a contact.
Back at home, he went to the refrigerator to see what modest remains he’d left himself. He opened the creaky door and, no sooner had he done so, shut it. He stared at the front of the fridge. In the middle hung a magnet advertising a local pizza place. Last time that Lyle had seen that magnet, it held the note that he’d written himself about the pandemic.
The note was gone.
Lyle heard a gunshot and pasted himself to the ground.
Thirty-Eight
In the ten seconds that followed, Lyle felt a deep connection with and understanding of the veterans he had treated during his residency. That wasn’t a gunshot. It had been a tire po
pping out his window. Yet he’d heard a gunshot, like the Vietnam vets he had seen at the VA wincing at as little as the click of an unfolding chair. What made it strange is that Lyle couldn’t recall being amid gunfire.
Then he could.
He pushed himself up into a push-up position and saw bursts of gunfire. Flashes of light against the snow. He cascaded across a fleeting montage: a body in orange on a tarmac; a cavernous building echoing with footsteps; a stricken child. He tried to hold on to the images. They evaporated.
He walked to the cupboard over the dish rack and unscrewed the cap on a bottle of Black Label, mostly drained. He poured a finger, finished it, poured a second and walked to a recliner in the open area that served as a living room across from the kitchen, staring for a long time at the distant magnet on the refrigerator.
What happened to the note?
His phone buzzed. He saw a text from a number he didn’t recognize. It was just a link. Spam, he immediately thought, and then the second message arrived from the same number. It read: We’re not imagining things. I’m using a new, temporary cell phone. You can get me here. Eleanor.
The pilot. Apparently fearing some digital scrutiny. Lyle clicked on the link she’d sent him. It brought up a newspaper article. The headline read: odd night leaves sgt. in critical.
The outlet was called Steamboat Today, the mountain town’s local newspaper. The article said that a police sergeant remained in critical condition after crashing his cruiser into Lindy’s Mountain Art. The local police said they were investigating the late-night crash and stood by an officer with a spotless record.
The first big snow of the season took other casualties, including a woman whose car overturned on the highway north of Steamboat. Authorities also said they believe that may have been the night of a still-unexplained shooting involving a local hermit, Dwayne Summerset, an avid gun collector found at his secluded home. And an isolated fire broke out at the Sleepy Bear Mobile Home Park, taking the life of a resident there and may, authorities said, have been caused by a storm that appears to have caused electrical problems.