Devil's Plaything

by Matt Richtel

  He’s touched a nerve. I left medicine to write about things that interested me and that mattered. I do that a lot less than I’d like. I suppose that’s because the journalism economy has come undone, banished to unprofitability by the Internet and awaiting rebirth—and because I’m no longer sure what matters. Anyhow, all news will soon be delivered solely through rapid-fire twitter feeds from seven-year-olds using their native emoticons.

  I smile thinly and nod.

  “Let me know if you need sources,” he says. He explains he has powerful friends in various industries and military branches if I need help with a story.

  We’ve reached the end of our obvious common ground. We fall silent. The light tension is broken by the shuffling of feet and heavy breathing.

  Pauline enters at high speed. She carries a bottle of wine and two glasses. When she sees us, she comes to an abrupt stop, caught off guard by our presence, or our pairing.

  It’s the first time I can recall seeing Pauline this disheveled.

  In an instant, she straightens and smiles.

  “Why if it isn’t the two most important men in my life.”

  Like Chuck, she is overdressed for a dot-com ghetto. Her fearless designer T-shirt looks like one of those paintings where the artist got drunk and threw colors against the canvas. The shirt, like her knee-high skirt, fits snugly against her form. Her hair sprays out of its ponytail and her brow glistens with perspiration.

  “The chief executive materializes,” he says.

  She winces. “The CEO just turned her ankle.”

  She’s wearing low heels with straps that clasp around her ankles.

  “Did you jog here?” Chuck asks.

  “I move as quickly as possible under all circumstances.”

  “Nat tells me you two plan to have a drink,” Chuck says.

  It strikes me that, from his perspective, all has returned to normal.

  She looks at me. “Did you bring the snacks?”

  “I failed you miserably.”

  “Then you can reschedule,” Chuck says. He looks at Pauline. “Could you spare a few minutes to talk about . . . that one issue?”

  She walks to the desk. She sets down the wine bottle and glasses. She tucks a few loose strands of hair behind her right ear. She smoothes her T-shirt.

  “Boring financial stuff,” she says to me. “Rain check?”

  “Sure.”

  I feel Chuck’s eyes and look up to see him studying us.

  “Don’t forget your file,” Pauline says to me. She reaches across me, leans over the keyboard and pulls the drive from the computer. It seems like she’s being deliberately nonchalant about the drive, making sure to send no message at all to G.I. Chuck that it bears any significance. She hands it to me, and for an instant, I feel her arm brush mine.

  “Any luck with it?” she asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Call me later if you want to brainstorm. I’m sure the secret is somewhere inside that complicated head of yours.”

  She looks at Chuck and says: “One of the best bloggers in the business.”

  She smiles and clears her throat. “Call me later,” she reiterates. For an instant, she looks unusually vulnerable, like she did when she wobbled in.

  My cue to go.

  I grab my backpack, walk out and down the hallway, and take two steps outside, then pause. The air is still but crisp, high clouds obscuring the stars, conditions portending rain. I smell something irresistible like french fries and then realize that’s exactly what I’m detecting. It’s coming from a man sitting cross-legged on a nearby park bench under a streetlight, eating from a McDonald’s bag, reading something intently on his phone. E-mail and McDonald’s, two of modernity’s most powerful lures. If they can somehow combine the concepts into a wireless french fry—wi-fry?—or maybe one that can be delivered wirelessly, we’ll all die within a few years on our couches, obese and blissful.

  I walk back inside and poke my head back into the office. Pauline looks up and smiles but I quickly shift my eyes to the venture capitalist.

  “Chuck? May I have a quick word?”

  “Sure.” Then looks at Pauline. “Back in a sec.”

  He follows me outside.

  “You want a raise? I don’t even own the place yet?”

  He wants to buy us, me. “You said that you’d be willing to lend a hand if I needed help on a story.”

  “Go on.”

  I’m thinking about the shooting and the phone call. Can I get help from Chuck, who professes to have friends in high places?

  “Someone keeps calling me from a private number. I’d love to figure out who it is.”

  Until that moment, he is looking me in the eye. For a moment, he looks away. “This is for a story?”

  “An anonymous tipster calls, leaves information, hangs up,” I lie. “It could be nothing. But serious journalism often requires you to drop down a bunch of rabbit holes.”

  “I probably can’t do much. But I know one guy who does telecommunications intel. What’s your phone number? I’ll have him check it out.”

  I pull out my wallet and extract a business card.

  Without taking his eyes off the card, he says: “You seem to know Pauline well.”

  I clear my throat.

  “Does she look okay to you?” he continues. “She seems off her game.”

  I shrug.

  He extends his hand and we shake. We part, awkwardly.

  I head to the car. In my pocket, a thumb drive. In my head, bewilderment. I need refuge, answers. Beer.

  I live nearby in Potrero Hill. It’s a neighborhood of steep inclines, a place best suited for donkeys and sherpas. Architecturally, it has an industrial feel, the ghost of a manufacturing past paved over with residences built for people who can’t afford Pacific Heights, the Marina, or sunnier and flatter neighborhoods.

  Like much of San Francisco, Potrero is populated by transplants and transients, devoid of local roots and memories—people looking ahead in life, not behind, the embodiment of manifest destiny. Like the pioneers who settled this place, we can’t move any further west, the Pacific Ocean intervening, but we can keep upgrading our devices to feel like we’re in constant motion.

  My home and home office are contained in a one-bedroom flat on Florida. Two blocks away is the Pastime Bar, where I did my residency and fellowship, specializing in studying the effects of Anchor Steam and quasi-wry bar commentary on the brain of a single male.

  I drive to the bar, park in front, and wander to the bar’s door, uninviting to the point of foreboding. A veritable prisoners’ entrance. It’s thick and covered with numerous coats of cheap brown paint, peeling and frayed, graced with a single bumper sticker, haphazardly placed years ago, that reads: “Get Yer Beer Googles.” There are eyeballs in the misspelled words, two o’s and eyebrows over them. Tacky and stupid. Home.

  I peer through the circular submarine window, I see a half dozen regulars. The Witch and Bullseye anchor the seats on the bar’s far right, their regular spots.

  The Witch turns around. Maybe she senses my presence—she claims such powers. I back out of her view.

  I’ve lost the energy to analyze the last three hours of my life: the shooting, the mystery thumb drive, and the weird military dude. Plus, if I go inside, I become the source of entertainment, the circus monkey, the unmarried guy spinning tales from the real world—while everyone else gulps down the drama along with hops and barley, plus a shot of envy and superiority.

  In my car’s backseat, I spy my albatross: the ratty black backpack that carries my laptop—and that I tote wherever I go like an oxygen tank. It’s my mobile blogging unit. Call me old-fashioned, but when I need to research and file an on-the-go news update from a press conference, roadside or (yes, it happens) bathroom stall, I prefer to type on a full keyboard, not the touch-screen phone like the fancy prepubescent competition.

  Time to take the laptop home for some answers.

  Ten minutes later, I’
m on my couch. From the backpack, I extract my computer. I insert the mystery drive. I retype the passwords I tried earlier, and new ones. No use.

  I feed Hippocrates.

  I call Magnolia Manor. A nurse tells me that Grandma is sleeping.

  I consider calling Pauline. Tomorrow.

  I should call my parents and tell them what’s going on with Grandma. Maybe they have counsel. Probably not.

  Besides, I don’t need to hear Dad talk about the latest deal in the Sunday circular and Mom try and wake from the dead at a phone ringing at 11 p.m. in Denver, which is the clinching excuse. I try the laptop one more time. Several more passwords fail.

  I fall asleep on the couch, my gray matter spinning with questions. Eight hours later, I wake up with one answer.

  Chapter 7

  “Galapagos,” I mutter groggily.

  I open my eyes to find I’m lying on my back on the couch, akimbo, one leg dangling on the floor. I’m wearing vertically striped red boxer shorts and a white sock on my right foot, having shed the rest of my clothes progressively through the night. Something smells rancid, and I quickly identify its origin. Next to my discarded T-shirt, a furball. This is a distinct message from Hippocrates: “Clean my litter box.”

  I look at the cat, who lounges on the top edge of the couch.

  “In the future, I’d prefer e-mail,” I mumble.

  I walk to the dining-room table and sit at the laptop, the mystery thumb drive still loaded into it. Into the empty password slot, I type, “Galapagos.”

  The drive arrived in a package addressed “Highly Evolved World Traveler.” I’m hardly that, but I did once go on an extravagant journey—to the Galapagos—and recently blogged about a particular moment on the trip.

  Shortly after my ex-girlfriend Annie drowned in a lake in Nevada, my close friends chipped in to send me to Ecuador so I could get away from my grief, and from the fast-paced wired world that had left me so off-balance.

  Standing at an observation point on Culpepper Island, one of the islands that make up the equatorial paradise, I watched a swallow-tailed gull land on the back of a snoozing sea lion. The bird called out majestically. Two other gulls lazily glided down to stand atop the unperturbed lion.

  Standing beside me was a mother and her son, who looked to be about ten. He said: “The bird has a loud ringtone.”

  At that moment, I started to regain my perspective. I recently wrote about it for Medblog after Pauline asked her freelancers to craft items about our personal perspectives on medicine. Her idea is that the new era of journalism demands that readers develop personal bonds with writers. The point of my post was that in our pursuit of beauty, from Botox to hyperbaric oxygen chambers, we shouldn’t confuse real beauty with the digitized, synthetic version thereof. It’s pseudo-intellectual babble, and Pauline subsequently makes fun of it but refuses to let me take it down because she says it’s “adorable,” and “what you get when you fail to put any thought into your posts.”

  I stare at the computer screen and the word “Galapagos” I’ve typed. I hit “enter.” It doesn’t work.

  I try “Darwin.” It fails. I type “Culpepper,” then “CulpepperIsland.” Nada.

  I stand, don my other sock and T-shirt, and walk to the refrigerator. It is covered with magnets collected from various public relations campaigns (e.g., Genentech’s Stick It To Cancer), which hold up take-out menus. In the mostly empty fridge, a bit of manna: a half-drunk two-day-old Starbucks quadruple-shot latte that I heat in the microwave. Simple life rule: never, ever waste a drop of a $5.45 coffee.

  I sip it and take in my bachelor palace. I once described it to a skeptical Pauline as “mismatch couture.” Beneath the dining room table is a red area rug that, I concede, wears the scars of Hippocrates’s upchucks insufficiently cleaned. Against the far wall sits the beige couch. Next to it, there’s a green recliner that the Witch and Bullseye gave me when they outgrew their ’70s furniture. It doubles as a shelf for magazines and various remote controls. Above the chair, unframed, I’ve tacked two posters: a picture of Denver Bronco quarterback John Elway hoisting a trophy, and the print of a painting by Edgar Degas. It is called “Cup of Hot Chocolate After Bathing.” I’m an intellectual: I love cocoa after a hot shower.

  A doorway on the wall to my left opens into a small hallway leading to bathroom and bedroom large enough for a bed and a TV.

  Fueled by espresso and bearing a bowl of instant cinnamon/apple-flavored oatmeal, I return to the table. Into the password spot, I type, “Galapag0s,” substituting a zero for an o, in keeping with some password protocols that call for at least one character to be a number.

  On the screen it reads: “Password accepted.”

  I pause, a spoonful of oatmeal frozen in my mouth, and barely have time to marvel at my success before a letter materializes.

  Dear Mr. Idle,

  Please forgive the cryptic nature of this missive. I’d be much obliged if we could meet face-to-face. I’d propose Thursday, Oct. 30, at 3 p.m. at the playground at Hayes and Buchanan. I’ll recognize you. I’d rather not elaborate on the subject matter here other than to say: please keep your grandmother safe.

  No police. In this instance, they may not like my kind any more than they like yours.

  It goes without saying that email and phones can be easily traced.

  - lp

  I read it a second time, then a third.

  My first observation has less to do with substance than style. The writer has a strong command of language, his or her syntax proper, devoid of slang. The sender’s initials are “lp,” which on its face means nothing to me.

  Then I focus on the substance.

  Keep your grandmother safe.

  “From whom?” I ask aloud. “Or what?”

  I have to wonder: Does this confirm that the park shooting was not random? And does it suggest the target was not me, but Grandma Lane? Or is she paying somehow for my sins—a proxy for the venom I apparently invited in the park? How and why could that possibly be? The woman is as harmless as a declawed kitten.

  Isn’t she?

  She’d said something about having once done “bad things.”

  More questions: Why would someone go to such lengths to set up a meeting? Why password protect it, why this password, and how could anyone have been sure I’d guess it?

  It is Thursday already. I glance at the computer’s clock, which tells me that it is 6:57 a.m. Half a day away from the appointed meeting time. Do answers come then?

  I look back at the message and notice something about it that I missed. There is a digital paper clip at the bottom of the file. I move my cursor over it, and I click twice. Onto the screen pops a message asking me if I’m sure that I would like to download this file onto my computer.

  I hesitate. Could it be a virus? Or more information than I can handle?

  I click to open the file.

  A new message appears. It tells me that the file I’ve tried to download is password protected. It asks for my user name and password.

  “Give me a break.”

  I use the same ones that got me this far; no go. I make several attempts to guess at a user name and password. Nothing takes.

  The best thing I can do at this point, I realize, is show the thumb drive to Bullseye. He’s a computer expert and can tell me if there’s a way to get around the password or determine the user name.

  I call Magnolia Manor to check on Grandma. The nurse transfers me to the office of Vince, the jerk who runs the assisted-living facility.

  “Hello, Vince. Why wasn’t I put through to my grandmother’s room? What’s going on?”

  “You tell me, Mr. Idle.”

  “Vince, I’m coming over there right now. I need to know now if she’s safe.”

  “I’m not the one endangering her,” he responds.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Even under less stressful conditions than these, officious Vince has a way of pinning my sense of humanity and humor to the ground,
then putting it in a choke hold.

  He explains that Grandma woke up agitated and mumbling.

  “You want to tell me what happened last night?” he asks.

  “Did Lane say something happened?”

  “I’m inferring that you had an incident in the park.”

  “Is that what she said, Vince?”

  He laughs. “This is precisely what I expect from a Sunday Irregular.”

  I have no idea what he means or why he’s attacking.

  “I can handle you being a jerk but I’d prefer if you at least make sense,” I say.

  “You think you can show up here every other weekend, tell her about your meager career conquests, play an occasional game of Scrabble, and get credit for caring for her, or knowing how to?”

  “Vince, I’m not paying you for shitty psychoanalysis.”

  “Did you suddenly start paying me?”

  At last, I think, I understand what is eating Vince.

  “Truce,” I say. “Please, Vince.”

  I take his silence as assent.

  “We were attacked by a stranger,” I say.

  “Attacked? In the park?”

  “In a grove, an open field, while we were walking.”

  “Was she hurt?”

  I explain that the cops came, and checked her out, and determined we didn’t need an ambulance.

  “Did they catch the guy?” he asks.

  “No.” I make a mental note to call the police and get an update.

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “No,” then add after a pause. “Why do you ask?”

  He laughs again. “I care about the people who live here—their safety is everything to me.”

  “I would’ve told you about it last night, Vince. But . . .” I pause, then continue . . . “you weren’t around.”

  I’m struck with the most paranoid thought that Vince, so tired of my late payments, has decided to kill off the Idle clan.

  “I was away on business,” he says.

  I decide to take that at face value and move to the more pressing issue.

  “You said my grandmother is agitated. What was she saying?” I ask.