Devil's Plaything

by Matt Richtel

  Chapter 64

  “I always knew, Grandma.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “I did?”

  “Of course. That’s why you threw up on the snake. You knew that Harry was watching us. You knew that you had a secret inside of you and you wanted to get rid of it.”

  “By throwing up?”

  Grandma laughs. “You know the truth now. You can die in peace.”

  “I don’t want to die. Polly needs a maple donut.”

  “Dying is part of life. Vince is right. Aging is a beautiful thing if you can see it in the right light.”

  “I’m not aging. I’m dying!”

  “Oh, good point,” she laughs. “Then you’d better swim.”

  “What?”

  “Up. Toward the oxygen.”

  Epilogue

  “If it’s Halloween, I’d like a Milky Way.”

  “Halloween was a few weeks ago,” I say.

  “You’ve got a bandage on your head. You’re dressed up like you got wounded in the Pacific,” Grandma responds.

  I laugh. I do have a head wound.

  I’m laughing anyway because Grandma Lane just exchanged a few sentences with me that seemed somewhat connected with one another. Grandma’s brain is eroding. But less quickly than it was two months earlier. The effects of the heavy interaction with the Human Memory Crusade have started to wear off. Partly because the document I discovered on the boat suggested one basic healing method: cut down on computer use. Or, at least, less multitasking.

  We’re strengthening her organic memory by keeping her stimulated through conversation, human interaction, rest, and a course of antibiotics.

  It’s not fancy alchemy. It’s the reasoned response to a hippocampus that was attacked by a virus, like a computer virus, or wildfire, loosed inside her brain.

  Health-wise, I’m recovering myself, from a condition that I think might be clinically called “mostly dead.”

  I’d like to say that my grandmother saved my life. I’d like to say that she reached me in a telepathic dream state and urged me to swim to safety while I was dying in the wreckage of the exploded and sinking Surface to Air. I did hallucinate that she was talking to me. But I didn’t act on it and save my own life. The truth is some kindly Samaritan dragged me to safety, pumped my lungs, and then waited for the emergency medical folks to show up and do the rest of the lifesaving.

  More good news: the cops seemed to feel that the wayward journalist has suffered enough.

  When I got home from the hospital a few days later, I discovered a Porta Potti on the street outside my flat. It was intact; not burned to the ground. I received an anonymous phone call a few days later. The caller explained that the cops had planned to burn it to the ground but had called a truce in light of my larger medical issues and the fact that it appeared I was for once pursuing some actual, meaningful journalism.

  They left the Porta Potti as a reminder to “stop writing crap about your local community.”

  Clever as ever.

  Now I’m sitting with Lane at her nursing home and I’m about to make an introduction.

  “Grandma, I’d like you to meet someone.”

  “That would be nice.”

  I look up at Polly. She’s wearing a sundress as befits both the uncharacteristic warmth of this November day and the fact she’s uncharacteristically sensitive about the changes to her body. She’s not yet showing the baked bean in her oven but she’s being cautious anyway.

  She walks to Grandma’s bedside.

  “I’d like you to meet the newest Idle,” I say.

  “You’re married?” Lane responds.

  “No,” Polly says. “Not even if he wanted to.”

  We haven’t even discussed it.

  Polly looks at me and smiles. “Who said his last name would be ‘Idle’?”

  “I don’t understand,” Grandma says.

  I take her hand and put it on Pauline’s belly.

  Grandma holds it there. I’m watching her eyes. Her pupils widen. She looks at Polly’s stomach, then at me and back at the belly. She pulls her hand back and then puts it back down again. She looks at me and I see her eyes start to glisten.

  “Grandma?”

  Her lips wrinkle into a slight smile even as her eyes fill with more tears.

  “You’re going to be a great-grandmother,” I say.

  She clears her throat, recovering. “I taught you to drown.”

  I laugh.

  The door to Grandma’s room opens. Vince enters.

  “Visiting hours are over,” he says sternly.

  I shake my head with irritation. “We just got here, Vince . . .”

  “Just kidding. You people are so sensitive.”

  For better or worse, I talked Vince into retaining his position. Here’s why: it wasn’t just Vince who got duped; it was all of us. We all were too distracted, selfish, self-absorbed, technology-obsessed, and indulgent to be paying attention the way we should have to the residents of Magnolia Manor—to our grandparents and elders.

  The Human Memory Crusade happened right under my nose. In fact, at some point, I apparently signed a consent letter allowing Grandma to participate in the program. So distracted was I with my life that I hadn’t been paying attention or asking the right questions. I was in fact asking a lot of questions in my life and about the world and the cops and various journalistic sources—I was asking Google all kinds of questions and asking it to perform all kinds of search queries—but not asking about the people I most care about, or should have. I let the computer babysit Grandma. How much blame can I give Vince?

  I’m less forgiving, obviously, of Biogen, Adrianna, Pete, and Chuck—of the Human Memory Crusade and ADAM.

  But only slightly less forgiving.

  I lack the heart to implicate Adrianna because I’m worried about Newton. And I can’t nail Pete to the wall because he’s raising his own family and will spend the rest of his life recovering from wounds that nearly killed him, cost him his spleen, and punctured a lung, and from the damage he did to his marriage from an affair with Adrianna.

  I still manage to write a blockbuster story that explains the role of military investors in developing technology to erase and write over memories of old folks, some veterans and, as Chuck alleged, heavy multi-taskers. I expose the plot to create Internet 2.0 using fallow brain space.

  The government stops the transfer of military and corporate secrets encoded in the brains of five veterans scheduled to attend a sporting event in China.

  At least I thought the story was a blockbuster. For two days, the press went nuts with the story. The New York Times put it on its front page. But then the whole thing seemed to evaporate, victim of the rapidly diminishing half-life of the public attention span. Part of the problem was my thin evidence: no laptop or paper trail, no remains from the server farm, no testimony from Adrianna or Pete Laramer. I can’t find any evidence or example of average Americans or heavy multi-taskers whose brains have been compromised. I discover no evidence of a database of people experiencing accelerated memory loss.

  But anecdotally, I see the phenomenon all around me. People forgetting things, having to look up their whereabouts, addresses, and phone numbers. And the incidence of dementia continues to accelerate, reaching effectively epidemic proportions.

  I do find evidence of the government investing in a handful of Internet sites, casual game sites and media operations like Medblog. But all the investments seem to have rational explanations.

  Maybe Chuck was getting ahead of himself.

  Falcon went ahead and bought Biogen without incident.

  Still, Medblog, where we first published the story, wins a prize. Polly gives me two new titles: Boyfriend and Senior Writer. I now make $85 per blog post. I buy new sneakers. She says she’ll spring for the college fund.

  “Let me know if you need anything,” Vince says.

  I nod.

  The Human Asparagus waves and almost manages a smile on
his still-officious visage and walks out.

  Polly kisses Grandma on the cheek. “Whether or not your grandson convinces me to marry him, your great-grandson will take the Idle name. I wouldn’t mess with this family’s beautiful and strange legacy. What do you think about that?”

  Grandma looks at us. She cocks her head. She looks like she’s going to say something. She pauses, gears grinding.

  “Another Idle,” she finally pronounces. “I know something about that one.”

  “What’s that, Grandma?”

  “What?”

  “What do you know about your great-grandson?”

  She smiles.

  “Oh,” she says. “He’s going to be very curious.”

  Here are the first two chapters of

  THE JUGGLER,

  the sequel to DEVIL’S PLAYTHING,

  to be published by

  Harper in 2012.

  Chapter 1

  I stare into the dark tunnel and find myself imagining how it would look to Isaac.

  To an eight-month-old, the shadowed subway opening wouldn’t seem ominous but a grand curiosity. Shards of reflected light frame its entrance like shiny pieces of broken glass. Would Isaac try to touch them? Would he finger a droplet of misty water rolling down the jagged wall and put it on his tongue?

  The cavern wouldn’t frighten my son. It would excite him with possibility and mystery.

  A horn blares and I flinch. The night’s last express approaches. I’m without company on the below-ground platform but I am joined by a wicked aroma. It’s coming from a green, paint-chipped metal trash can that I’m guessing from the scent contains the carcass of an extremely dead sandwich. The trash can sits along the wall, beneath a dimly-lit poster advertising a service that promises to turn your mobile phone into a day-trading terminal. “Buy Low, Sell High, Commute Profitably.”

  Isaac would love little more than exploring the contours of the iPhone with his mouth.

  I turn back to the track and squint across the platform. I’m looking for the woman with the triathlete’s calves. I saw her upstairs at the turnstile, a brunette with darkly-tinted skin wearing a skirt and a look of compassion. A burly beggar approached her and she gave him some money and a kindly, worried smile.

  How come all the beautiful women who look like they were born to heal the damaged are going a different direction than me on the train?

  Would she be a great mom?

  Would she be impressed that tomorrow I become this year’s recipient of a national magazine award for investigative reporting? Would she help me feel impressed?

  A rumbling roars from the tunnel. It’s not yet my train, the K, but the nearing Express, expressing.

  Over the din, I hear rustling from behind me, something heavy hits the pavement. A boot step, then another. I turn to see a mountainous man in a leather jacket materialize from the darkness, stumbling towards me. He’s the picture of a San Francisco drunk, downtrodden but wearing a fashionable coat with collar upturned, curly beard, and dark shades. Bum doubtless with a blackberry, and a limp.

  I’m tempted to ask him if he’s okay as the train whooshes out of the tunnel into the station.

  The drunkard lunges, or trips. He careens toward me, leading with his arms as if pushing through a revolving door.

  He’s going to fall into me and then both of us onto the tracks.

  Powerful palms crash against my chest, fingers claw my sweatshirt, his jacket slick with January rain. I begin to fall backwards, not two feet from the edge. I grab his beefy forearms to try to break the hold at his vulnerable wrist joints, or steer us sideways. I fail. I stumble backwards. The train’s warning horn explodes: move or die!

  I feel it pass too close behind me, air-brushing my scalp.

  Isaac. My son. Will I see him again?

  One last tactic.

  I give in. I try to pull the drunk on top of me. Our momentum abruptly changes. We fall not backwards into the train, but straight down to the pavement. My coccyx slams onto my backpack, which in turn smashes into the ground. My spine unfolds, neck extending toward the concrete. I brace for impact.

  Crack. I see an instant of light, then one of black, then a hazy return to the moment. I smell something like burning tires. Then cologne. I feel intense pressure on my chest.

  The mountain man lies on top of me. But I’m alive. The base of my skull must have hit the edge of the cement but just after the train passed, sparing my life.

  I frantically push and kick the mountain from atop me. I claw the cement, then roll over, panting in downward dog. I run a triage check. Limbs moving, no obvious fractures. I feel sticky warmth at the back of my skull, a cut but not deep and shy of the heavy capillary-bed on top of my head that would bleed profusely and require stitches. I attended med school a decade ago before quitting the profession to become a journalist, but I remain fluent in the vernacular and anatomy of survival.

  I look up to see the drunk. He’s ambling awkwardly, his gait a demi-sprint. He holds his arms close to his chest. He disappears into a darkened stairwell. From his pocket, something falls, a piece of paper, onto the damp cement.

  “Don’t move. You might be hurt,” says a voice from my right.

  It’s the brunette, the one from the turnstile. Where did she come from? My vision remains unfocused.

  I blink hard and look for words.

  “Breathe,” she says. She kneels and extends an arm and puts fingers on my shoulder. She’s shaken too.

  Her touch brings attention to the acute pain near my deltoid. The strap of my ratty black backpack must’ve given me a nifty friction burn. But it also probably spared me a rougher fall. The pack, which follows me everywhere, contains an overflow of magazines and notes, the flora and fauna from which journalism sprouts and, tonight, a serendipitous back pillow.

  I exhale, emerging from shock. I’m out of acute danger. Overcome with intense relief.

  I run back a reel of the last minute. I picture the man coming at me, falling but somehow purposeful, his face camouflaged.

  “Say something,” the brunette encourages. “Did you know that guy?”

  “Scleroderma,” I mutter.

  “What?”

  I don’t express my thought: the drunk’s skin was pulled tight against his forehead and around his eyes. Scleroderma means “tight skin.” Its presence can indicate a rare disease of the organs, very rare, so these days it is much more likely to indicate a visit to the dermatologist; this drunk recently had an injection of botox that tightened his wrinkles. Rich drunk.

  My scrutiny is a sign of my own condition: excessive medical analysis. Some people focus on faces, or names. I remember pathologies. My not-very-exciting sixth sense is seeing illnesses and physical conditions, a vestige of my medical school training. Jaundice, clinical water-retention, lazy eye, gout, misaligned spine, all the herpes variants, emphysema cough, flat-footedness (the obsessive medical labeler can identify it even when the flat-foot is wearing shoes and walking by). Even though I’d abdicated a career in medicine for one in medical journalism—after realizing I lacked the intensity and rigidity to be a good doctor—I can’t shake associating humans with their conditions.

  “It doesn’t feel right,” I say.

  “What? Your head?” The brunette asks.

  “That too.”

  I stand, feeling her fingers fall away. I wobble, get my footing, walk unsteadily to the piece of paper that fell from the mountain’s leather jacket. I pick it up.

  It is lined and legal sized, creased and smudged with black grease. I unfold it and discover two names written in blue pen. One name is Sandy Vello. Doesn’t sound familiar. The other name does.

  “What is it?” the brunette asks.

  I point to my name on the piece of paper. She shakes her head, uncertain what I’m talking about.

  “This is my name?”

  “What?”

  “Nathaniel Idle.”

  “I’m Faith,” she says, still not getting it: My nam
e was on a piece of paper that fell from the pocket of a man who nearly turned me into subway smoothie.

  “That wasn’t an accident,” I say.

  “Do you think you need an ambulance? I suspect you’re in shock.”

  I look at Faith. She’s biting her lip with perfect teeth, her head tilted, concerned, compassionate, empathic. My eyes lock on her for a millisecond more than is appropriate. I am struck by an urge to make her laugh. But it’s overwhelmed by a more powerful compulsion.

  I look at the stairs where the dangerous mountain disappeared. I sprint after him.

  Chapter 2

  I bound up a steep set of metal stairs. They’re slippery and dimly lit from a tract on the low ceiling.

  I’m near the top when I’m hit by a wave of light-headedness and nausea, and feel my toe slide, causing my leg to collapse underneath me. I brace myself with my palms against one of the cool stairs but not in time to keep my knee from smacking one of the edges. A burst of pain just shy of agony shoots forth from my right patella. I look down and curse my cheap canvas high-tops and their cheap rubberized soles that offer traction approximating ice slippers.

  I hear footsteps behind me. I glance over my shoulder and see Faith staring up at me.

  “You’re hurt,” she says. “Wait.”

  I ignore her and stumble to the top of the stairs.

  I’m looking down a long, empty tunnel, ending in the well-lit maw of the subway station. I start running again but with a decided hitch in my step. The knee pain is sufficient enough that halfway down the hallway I have to pause, take a deep breath, and start hopping on my left foot.

  A few seconds later, I’m at the entrance to the station. My eyes adjust to the wide-open space, with cathedral-like high ceilings, illuminated by bright light. Very bright. Another wave of nausea, one I can’t suppress. I put my hands on my knees and let out a heave, albeit mostly a dry one. I take a couple of deep breaths, and stand.

  I focus again in the cavernous station. It’s all but empty. In front of me, five ticket machines line a distant wall. To my left, stairs lead down the tracks for trains heading to the beach, the direction I wasn’t traveling. To my right, four turnstiles provide exit and entrance. Next to them, in a rectangular, thick glass cage that stretches nearly to the ceiling, sits a man in blue cap, gray hair overflowing, sideburns tricking out the sides of his face, eyes turned down, lost in paperwork.