Hooked

by Matt Richtel

  “He’s not a good man,” Danny said.

  Danny said that the two men had long been rivals. Aravelo had twice blocked Danny’s promotion. Then Danny had been put on one of the shadow homicide teams and the competition between the men had intensified.

  “He’s got a little fiefdom. They’re tough guys. Make their own rules. Anti-intellectual,” he said.

  Their conflict, it struck me, was of minor importance to me. I asked Danny what he’d learned about the café. He said he had some things he’d prefer to tell me about when we got together, then asked if there was anything from my end. I told him about the laptop, and about Andy getting sick before the café exploded. This too seemed to surprise him, and he digested it slowly.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Something early—like breakfast.”

  We agreed.

  “Nathaniel. Between now and then, I recommend that you don’t trust anybody.”

  23

  You know what you need?” Erin asked.

  “Human contact?”

  “I was thinking tea.”

  She sat down beside me. She began kneading the webbing between my thumb and index finger. “It’s relaxes the shakras,” she said.

  Her hands were graceful. Her fingernails were grown out slightly and groomed. I realized how feminine she could be. Even soft?

  It’s the last thing I thought before I fell asleep and drifted away. On a tiny island of ice.

  I sat cross-legged on my frigid block. Floating, in cloudy blue water. It would have been the Arctic, except for the black panthers, each sitting on an island of ice. Some glowered at me, others tended to themselves, licking paws and resting on their haunches. They were waiting for me to make a mistake. I was shivering, frigid. My arms felt like stalactites of blue ice.

  A panther howled, then leapt. Standing on my chest, it said, “Bring me a chocolate milk shake, Turtle. I’m waiting.”

  Had I screamed aloud? It was dark. I was on the couch in the log cabin. I’d been out for two hours. It wasn’t enough. I was still shaky after spending twenty minutes in the shower. The stress of the previous two days was catching up. The body can withstand much more than we give it credit for; witness the thirty-hour stints that doctors typically do in the first two years of residency. But the doctor knows the shift will end. A sustained period of stress without expectation of its conclusion adds an even higher dose of the fight-or-flight neurochemicals. A dangerous dose.

  Erin had cooked a feast—a roast, mashed potatoes, string beans. She said it was the comfort food of her midwestern youth.

  “It’s even better if you’re wearing pants,” she said.

  We sat down and had our first real chance to talk. Erin had grown up in East Lansing, Michigan, the daughter of a high school teacher and a church deacon. He was loving, but a disciplinarian and patriarch. He was outwardly nice to everyone but she knew how he felt about the people who lived in the black ghetto. “Yes, sirs” and “Thank you, ma’ams” were the family’s vernacular. Her mother was a closet intellectual who didn’t talk to her husband about the books she read. Several times when Erin was a girl, she discovered that her mother had put the cover of a romance novel around the subversive literature she was actually reading. When she was younger, Erin gravitated to the certainty of her father’s path. But she said that, predictably, her own life’s experience began to contradict her dad’s rigidity.

  To try to keep on the straight and narrow, she quit the University of Michigan after a year and married her high school sweetheart. He was in her father’s mold—to a fault.

  “My friends and I called him the Bible Belter.”

  “Religious guy?”

  “Because he belted me,” she said. She smiled when she said it, like she was remembering something she couldn’t believe ever actually happened.

  She blamed herself, lashed out at everyone else, then eventually had an awakening. To her mother’s great sadness, she moved west. She tried to figure out if there had been some impulse or interest she’d been repressing. Like a lot of other people; Haight-Ashbury may have turned into a veritable outdoor trinket mall, but people still flocked to San Francisco to find themselves. There were far more southern and midwestern black sheep than you could squeeze into a VW microbus. They were part of the “to-do list” generation—people who got into new thing after new thing, from rock climbing to hot yoga to night golf. Sometimes in the same day. And sometimes it seemed they didn’t really pause to enjoy the thing, they just liked marking it off the list.

  For Erin’s part, she experimented with the various Left Coast trends. She’d gotten political, attending various rallies and, in particular, women’s rights functions. The women’s socially conscious dance troupe in the Mission—where I’d first tried to find her—was the latest.

  “Can socially conscious dance only be performed by vegans?” I asked.

  She laughed. “It’s centered around free-form, nonviolent movements. Although one month we practiced a routine where we attacked a domestic abuser—in rhythm. I developed a killer imaginary karate chop.” She paused, turning contemplative. “I hate hypocrisy. I used to think it was Congress, or the church. But it’s all over. Some of my friends are left-wing bigots. They hate any idea that challenges their way of thinking. They refuse to think. I wonder if I’ve strayed too far.”

  “From God?”

  “Maybe. Maybe more generally. There are all these false idols. We think we’ll be happy if we find the right cause or pursuit or hobby. Maybe it’s more complicated than that. With religion, I—we—just wanted answers. But then I substituted answers with questions. One experiment after another. One serpent after another. Isn’t it the opposite side of the same coin?”

  She said she’d been trying to create a more tangible personal philosophy. Her current idea of courage was going to a horror movie by herself. She’d done it once, a Nicole Kidman ghost flick that terrified her so much that she spent part of the movie in the lobby. Going to a romantic comedy alone, she said, didn’t qualify as love.

  She said she’d had a few relationships, including a short but intense one with Andy that had wound up in a deep friendship. She joked she was taking her romantic cues from the cell phone industry. She’d started to measure a relationship’s potential in terms of a phone’s two LED indicators: strength of connection and battery life, and a good start would be if both were over 80 percent.

  Then she asked about Annie. I told her about our relationship. When I described the boating accident, Erin briefly put her hand on my forearm. It wasn’t exactly maternal, or romantic. Maybe she was just steadying herself. She asked if I was over Annie.

  It was my own personal $64,000 question. Was I stuck in the past? The grief counselor I went to see after Annie died gave me a context for my relationship with Annie that I’ve alternatively embraced and rejected, depending on my mood, and how many beers I’ve had. Louise said Annie was my first experience with real intimacy. She was the mother duckling. I was the baby duck. She’d imprinted me. According to Louise, I overglorified Annie because I hadn’t seen the extent of her flaws. It usually took two beers to deem the theory psychobabble.

  I told Erin about my forays into dating since Annie. I’d had a bunch of short flings; the longest relationship had been six months with a woman I’d met at a cocktail party hosted by the Democratic Party. She was a lawyer, pretty, and devoid of humor.

  “She used to say things like, ‘This wine isn’t as full-bodied as I’d expected.’”

  “She’d better have been very full-bodied herself to get away with that,” Erin said.

  “I’m over Annie’s death,” I stated abruptly, feeling mostly sure of myself. I didn’t add: I’m not over the loneliness that comes from her absence, but I have to believe someone else can make me feel that excited—that connected.

  Erin seemed to have the ability not to overanalyze, but at the same time it struck me that she didn’t believe the last thing I’d said. Then, quickly, I thought: Maybe I’m p
rojecting. Maybe I’m still not sure I can feel true love with someone else.

  “I’ve been wondering,” Erin said. “Why did you happen to come into the café the day everything happened?”

  I thought about it for a second, and found myself smiling.

  “Would you believe: drapes.”

  A year earlier, my parents had visited. They’d been aggressively passive-aggressive in expressing horror over the state of my bachelor pad. They mentioned that adulthood required some basic amenities, like a real set of dishes and something other than a green flannel sheet tacked to the windowsill to keep out the morning sun. They’d given me a gift certificate to Pottery Barn. For some reason, the day the café exploded, I had played basketball, then gone to Pottery Barn near the café, having decided I was ready to embrace curtains.

  “And whatever the heck they represent,” Erin said.

  It was funny, but I felt a wave of sadness. When a woman had put a note on my table at the café, I wondered if my future had finally arrived.

  Erin and I had polished off a bottle of red wine. She put her head back on the couch and closed her eyes. In a moment, she was asleep. Her head lolled to the side, hitting my shoulder. Her hair smelled faintly of a purple flower I couldn’t name. Even consumed with memories of Annie, it was impossible to deny Erin’s allure. Objective beauty, heightened by effortless conversation. I closed my eyes too, hoping to join her in sleep. But I felt the familiar vibration in my pants. My phone was calling. I gently pulled my shoulder out from Erin. I extracted the albatross and looked at the number. I felt a bright burst of adrenaline. I thought: I wonder if I’ll ever sleep again.

  24

  The caller ID read: Offices of Battat and Bard. The neurologist who treated Andy, and whom Leslie hooked me up with, getting back to me at 9 p.m., when doctors ended the workday. I let him off early and turned off my phone. I craved sleep. But the call had done its damage.

  Suddenly, I was thinking about all the questions, the sudden urgency of my life. Notwithstanding Annie’s death, I’d lived the comfortable, relatively slow and lazy American life. Being a journalist was like being a stem cell. I was an unformed, infant organism, waiting for some subject or article or two sides of a debate to define me. What was my purpose?

  I sometimes thought about a quote from John Adams, the founding father. I could never remember his exact phrasing but it went something like: Be soldiers and politicians. So your children can be lawyers, doctors, and businessmen. So their children can be poets, musicians, and artists.

  The first generations build infrastructure, the later ones, with bellies full, write rock and roll and look for truth. The inheritors of stability would go where their fathers hadn’t gone. They’d write “Stairway to Heaven,” or articles on medical journalism. Nothing earth-shattering and plenty of time for soul-searching naps.

  Erin stirred. She mumbled something sleepily, put a kiss on the side of my cheek, and said good night. I felt the memory of adolescent angst, the disappointment when you realize the girl’s going to get out of the car without you getting a kiss. It was pushed aside by another surge of adrenaline. The café explosion made everything fresh again. Restless, I pulled out my laptop and began to surf through memories, beginning with the Santa Cruz boardwalk. Or, at least, its Web site.

  It was an April day on which Annie and I had gotten crepes. A beachside palm reader told Anne’s future: She would come into money. What did you expect for $3.50?

  I clicked off the boardwalk Web site and found the site for the San Francisco Opera. Annie and I had giggled so loudly during the first act that we had to excuse ourselves.

  I began to slide and squirm my way across cyberspace, driven by spasms of nostalgia. Memory linked to memory, minutes into hours, our relationship evolving in bits and bytes. A site for every occasion—the Lake Tahoe Inn, where we spent a Saturday night by the fire playing Scrabble; the Berkeley Bowl, where we listened to Jimmy Buffett and ate pot brownies; Squid Row, a fresh-fish market where we bought swordfish and learned how to blacken it—something we were so proud to have figured out we made it at least once a month.

  Squid Row. One of those rare dark memories. We’d gotten fish there the night Annie had threatened to break up with me, after her father told her about the NotesMail deal.

  I found myself at the Web site for Kindle Investment Partners. Still posted there, at a link you had to know how to find, was Annie’s obituary from the Palo Alto Daily. I read it for the umpteenth time. Glenn Kindle’s creeping venom could be felt even on the company Web site—a grand tribute to the man’s extraordinary public side.

  There were links to recent news stories about his successes, and those of the companies he had backed. But since Annie’s death, his fortunes had languished, at least in relative terms. He wasn’t hitting the billion-dollar jackpots of the dot-com boom, and he wasn’t getting the kind of attention he’d grown accustomed to. He was still funding high-tech start-ups and preparing IPOs, but he was no longer the hero whose picture appeared on the cover of Business Week. Not entirely forgotten, just radically downsized.

  The latest story posted to the site was about his relationship with Ed Gaverson—once one of the wealthiest Americans, whose fortunes had tumbled considerably in recent years. The company Gaverson ran, Ditsoft, had miscalculated demand for its software and watched its stock fall 90 percent in recent years. A puff piece in U.S. News & World Report discussed how Kindle and Gaverson had started a consortium of big technology and telecom companies—including search engines and cable and telephone providers—aimed at spurring 100 percent consumer adoption of the Internet. They were promoting what they were modestly calling the Next Next Big Idea.

  Glenn Kindle and Ed Gaverson made hundreds of millions of dollars building computers and the programs that run them. So why do they want to start giving away technology for free?

  Kindle, a venture capitalist whose fortunes rose and fell with the dot-com boom, and Gaverson, the mercurial founder of Ditsoft, are fast friends—and sometimes business rivals—with a novel idea. They believe that in the not too distant future, computers, mobile phones, handheld devices, and other gadgets will be free—and so will the Internet access that connects them together.

  The pair have argued that government- or advertising- subsidized growth of Internet infrastructure will fuel advances in American productivity—spurred by the reliance in every facet of life on automation and inexpensive devices. They and their powerful corporate allies have rallied some interest in Washington by arguing that America’s per-capita penetration of high-speed Internet adoption is 8th in the world, risking the country’s competitiveness.

  Kindle and his pals have profit on their minds too. They believe future returns will come when people use those devices to buy goods and services over the Internet, download video games and music, or watch advertisements while they surf the Net.

  A tagline of their concept might fairly be: First connect, then collect.

  Kindle prefers a loftier explanation. “Teach people to fish and they will eat. Connect them and they will create more efficient, as of yet unimagined ways to harvest the oceans—and the heavens,” he told a gathering at Stanford Business School earlier this year.

  Among the companies helping to advance the concept are major Internet search engines. One search company, AmericaSearch, has floated the idea of offering free wireless access in major downtown areas in exchange for sending users advertisements targeted to them based on their location. The mobile phone companies too have been flirting with delivering not just text-based but voice-mail commercial messages.

  But a prevailing question is how much of their idea is science and how much is fiction—and New Age marketing-speak—born of an effort to help them reclaim their mantle atop the technology economy.

  I closed the link.

  I had to—to keep my eyeballs from exploding. It wasn’t Glenn Kindle I hated. It was that tiny part of him that was manifest in Annie. My fists balled and an old fantasy
surfaced—me holding Annie’s father by the feet over the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge. I hit my fist rhythmically on the desk.

  I jumped out of my skin. Not from anger. From the hand on my shoulder.

  “It’s 3 a.m.”

  It was Erin.

  “I’m just . . . ”

  “You’re obsessing.” She looked at the computer. “Is this site important?”

  I looked at the screen. It was a story about a recent award given to Kindle Investment Partners by the American Society of Software Engineers. It wasn’t important in the slightest. It was . . . distraction. It was crap. Erin closed the computer, took my hand, and pulled me toward the bedroom.

  “I never visited.”

  She looked at me quizzically.

  “The place where Annie died. I never went back—after it happened.”

  She got into bed next to me. She took my hand. “You can visit . . . ”

  I finished her thought. “But you can never go back.”

  Perhaps. But what if the past came back to me?

  She said, “Tomorrow is going to be a big day.”

  25

  It was raining. I felt myself slip in and out of consciousness. Was it another watery dream?

  If so, my dreams had gone from surreal—to very real. My face was wet. I opened my eyes and bolted upright. Erin stood beside the bed, dressed and armed with a glass of ice cubes. One was aimed at my face.

  It should have been funny, but I felt a surge. I tried to get a grip. Was I really upset? More likely still tired. I shook my head—like a dog after a visit to the ocean—to reorient.

  I’d had five hours of sleep during which Erin said I tossed and turned and chattered. I woke up as I’d gone to bed, fully clothed.

  We drove in silence to San Francisco. I dropped her off at her car so she could run errands while I went to breakfast with Danny. I glanced at the headlines through the plastic of the newspaper magazine racks while I waited for him at Mel’s Diner. “Police Stumped by Café Explosion” (Chronicle); “Cops: Terrorists Didn’t Rock Tea Time” (Examiner); “Feds Lend Weight to Café Investigation” (Oakland Tribune); “Did We Bring It Upon Ourselves?” (Weekly).