Hooked

by Matt Richtel

  “That’s the name of the encryption program,” I said.

  “Yep. Very tidy. Very sophisticated. It is in stealth mode—blocking attempts to access GNet. But whenever the program is activated, the encryption is opened too—and therefore activated.”

  I leaned forward.

  “Meaning you didn’t get into the program either?”

  “Dude, give an old dog a little credit.” Then he added, with a smile, “But just a little credit.”

  I waited for the punch line.

  “I didn’t break the encryption code. But I did manage to find the signature of its author.”

  “The author’s identity?”

  “Sort of a tagline you typically find associated with a program. It can tell you something about the author. Or the company.”

  I nodded.

  “I printed it out,” he said. “This stuff is typically jargon, or an oblique identifier, so it typically doesn’t tell you much. Seems to be the case here.”

  He opened the piece of paper. I looked at it. I felt that little bit of me still tethered to reality had just become unglued.

  28

  Forty-eight hours earlier, just before the world exploded, a woman handed me a note that saved my life. Written, seemingly, in the handwriting of my true love. There had been no way to make sense of it.

  Maybe I’d imagined the whole thing, maybe it hadn’t been her handwriting at all. Or maybe it had been a ghost—a specter in a red Saab.

  Until that moment, I didn’t have any reason to favor any of these explanations.

  “I’ve been in the Valley a long time,” Mike said, stabbing his index finger at the words on the piece of paper. “I’ve never heard of this.”

  But I had. I knew it well. I knew exactly what it meant. The name on the paper, the name of the company, or person, or memory that had written the encryption scheme on Andy’s computer.

  Strawberry Labs.

  Annie’s childhood dog. Strawberry. The Labrador retriever.

  The past had returned.

  29

  After Annie died, I took brief custody of Strawberry Too, the Lab Annie had named after her first dog. But my apartment was too small and the dog liked to throw up. I reluctantly put S2 up for adoption. I tried to make it symbolic of my getting over Annie’s death, but it wasn’t that neat.

  One thing Annie’s death brought me was the idea for a magazine story that turned into my next foray into medical journalism. I wrote about the neurology of grief. Researchers had begun to use magnetic resonance imaging to identify the parts of the brain used when we experience all different sorts of emotions, including grief. They mapped reactions as people thought, felt, and remembered in real time. The research tried to hone in on to what extent grief emanates from the limbic cortex, where we think emotions originate, or the hippocampus, where we form memories. It was the nascent study of the neurobiology of attachment. If we identified its origin, could we mitigate the pain of loss?

  The signs of Annie’s passing were everywhere, and not all of them I could have predicted. One day two men in suits knocked on my door. They introduced themselves as IRS investigators and said they’d come on a routine matter. They asked about my employment status. Specifically, if I’d ever worked for Kindle Investment Partners.

  “No, I’m an ex.”

  “Ex-employee?”

  “Ex-boyfriend.”

  I told them that I had dated Annie for just over a year. I was about to launch into the story of her death—the abridged version.

  “We’re sorry for your loss,” the taller one said. “And you never worked for her—in a professional capacity?”

  I explained to them that I’d graduated from medical school and was trying to make it as a freelance journalist. The tall one cut me off.

  “Just one final question. Did you ever travel to New York with Ms. Kindle?”

  A stab of pain. The Empire State Building. The Kiss. I nodded.

  “And you weren’t working for Kindle, or Vestige. Did you deal with their accounting?”

  Vestige. That was the company we’d visited in New York. It had been one of the start-ups owned by Kindle Investment Partners. I assured them I never worked for either company.

  “When you were in New York, did you attend a meeting regarding Vestige—pertaining to the company’s pending public offering?” the tall one asked.

  I remembered the meeting. I’d attended long enough to give Annie some documents she’d left in the room. I told them I’d stopped in to the meeting for a few minutes to say hello. They seemed satisfied.

  “Like I said,” the tall one said. “We’re sorry for your loss.”

  “Can I ask . . . ”

  “As you know, the Kindles have a substantial amount of wealth,” he explained. “The government just wants to make sure everything is in order.”

  “It’s routine,” his partner added.

  In the morning, I called Kindle Investment Partners. Glenn Kindle and I both loved his daughter. I didn’t like the man and he didn’t like me, but for the sake of her memory, I wanted to make things right between us, and find closure. It was the least I could do for my nearly future father-in-law.

  That didn’t happen. I couldn’t even get him to come to the phone, not for at least six more weeks. That’s what the receptionist at Kindle Partners told me, in her usual hyperprofessional tone. When I told her who it was, she softened considerably.

  “Oh, Nat. I’m so, so sorry. Annie was such an amazing person.”

  Diane, Kindle’s receptionist, had been at the funeral, but we hadn’t had a chance to talk. She explained that Mr. Kindle was taking time off to grieve and had sequestered himself in Europe. I thanked her.

  “Diane. One quick question. What if I have a question about Annie’s affairs? Could he be reached then?”

  No, Diane said, not even then, but there was one option.

  “You could try Dave Elliott.”

  Dave’s office was in a high-rise building that looked out over the Bay Bridge. It separates San Francisco from Oakland, the “haves” from the “have to commutes.” The bookshelves behind Dave’s desk were sparsely appointed with a few law books with the spines intact, like they’d never been cracked open. A putter leaned against his desk.

  “I’ve got a 2:15,” he said.

  I looked at the clock to the right of his desk. It was two o’clock.

  “I’ve got a 2:05.”

  “What can I do you for?”

  I told him about the IRS. He took it in.

  “Thanks for the tip, buddy. I’ll check into it. Have Tim validate your parking at the desk.”

  The words and tone were friendly enough, but I felt simmering anger. I asked him what the IRS wanted. Had something happened with Vestige? He told me it was almost certainly routine, but neither of us was fooled by my question. I was pissed about Annie’s death.

  “I charge two hundred dollars an hour for law,” he said, smiling. “Twice that for psychotherapy.”

  Dave looked as his clock. He launched into a fairly simplistic description of Kindle Investment Partners, the venture capital game, Annie. Her reputation as a rising star in the community caught me by surprise.

  “In the venture circles, they said she’d bring glory to Kindle Investment Partners. Her technology instincts were amazing—marketing, engineering, everything. Start-up companies wanted to work with her. Competitors feared her.”

  “Annie?”

  “The Smiling Assassin.”

  It rang false.

  “People like that attract attention. Even after they’re gone.”

  “Were you in love with her too?”

  He chuckled.

  “C’mon, buddy. This is the big leagues.”

  “Meaning what?”

  He let the bad taste swirl around in my mouth.

  “You and Annie had a great thing. I’m not blind. You were something special to her. You provided her with a real texture, romance. I think it’s something you s
hould be proud of.”

  I considered shoving the putter two feet into his colon, but he kept pulling me back from the edge.

  “Listen. You’re going to find something terrific again. It’s in your blood—finding real connections. If you want to chat more, don’t hesitate to call. In fact, why don’t you give me a call if you ever want to hit the Olympic Club for a round.”

  It was a part of Annie’s world I’d just as soon have left behind, but when it haunted me again just a few weeks later, it was my own damn fault.

  30

  A month later, I called Annie’s close friend, Sarah Tenner. “Nat,” she said when I called, like she’d never heard the name before.

  We met at a bar. The one thing that I hadn’t been able to do was give myself permission to let go. I just couldn’t get over the hump. Annie seemed to haunt me all the time. I told Sarah I loved her eulogy to Annie. She softened, and we toasted to our lost love.

  “Annie was far from perfect,” Sarah said. “You damn well know it.”

  “She did occasionally have a hangnail,” I said.

  “Let yourself focus on her failings. It’ll help you move on. She could be competitive, manipulative, even a bitch sometimes, a little nuts.”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re being pathologically naïve.”

  We got drunk on martinis and reminisced. Sarah urged me to move on. She said that’s what Annie would have wanted. She pointed out that we’d only dated for a year.

  “I knew Annie my whole life. I loved her as much as any friend. But I am trying like hell not to lionize her. She didn’t deserve that.”

  It was the difference between friendship and true love. Sarah and Annie’s other friends couldn’t see what I saw, or feel what I did. The intensity of two people in love can only be admired from the outside, not shared or even fully appreciated. I felt like a dope, but I unloaded on Sarah all the things I missed about Annie. It was a laundry list of small moments and big emotions, a dripping whiny poem.

  Sarah looked me in the eye. “I know this is hard. That’s the way these things are. But Annie was not as much of a romantic as you think. She would have wanted you to move on. I know that’s what she wanted. Because she told me so. You made her feel something she’d never experienced before. She was fascinated by you. She said that whatever happened to you two, she wanted you to be happy.”

  “Meaning she expected something bad to happen?”

  “That’s not how I took it. She meant, like, if you guys should break up, or whatever. She meant that she considered you so special. Some kinds of affection transcend whatever tragedies befall a relationship.”

  Sarah added, “There’s someone I think you should meet.”

  A month passed before I took Sarah up on her offer.

  Her name was Julie. She was one of those lucky few creatures whose double helix was tailor-made for this particular period on the planet earth.

  She was five feet ten inches tall, thin, with breasts that preceded her by just enough to demand attention, but not enough to cost her credibility. She had shoulder-length blonde hair—of a shade that suggests playful and easily underestimated. She looked like something that Hugh Hefner would put on the cover of an issue about Girls Who Make Everyone Want to Emigrate to America.

  Julie had, in no particular order, been in the Peace Corps, a singing quartet that toured Eastern Europe before the fall of the Wall, a trivia game show in which her family had won $5,200—and the most overhyped trip ever in the history of game show prizes.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “They put you up in the Motel 5?”

  “Motel 5?”

  “It’s like a Motel 6. But you have to bring your own cock- roaches.”

  She was the kind of woman who made you want to make her smile, who smiled even if you didn’t deserve it. She smiled.

  It was easy conversation. She didn’t mind me one bit. When I told her I liked to play midnight golf (sneaking onto the course at night and hitting glow-in-the-dark balls), she said, “I’d like to try that. We should go sometime.”

  “So how well did you know Annie?”

  “Didn’t have the privilege,” Julie said. “A real tragedy what happened to that girl. How well did you know her?”

  I hoped the ache in my chest didn’t show.

  Two months after that, I went to an oyster bar with Rochelle, a piano teacher when she wasn’t doing public relations for the local cable company. She was thirty-two, but the important number was her blood alcohol content, and mine. She plied us both with booze, we made small talk. One segue led to another that led to her apartment.

  I’d never bothered to consider bringing a condom. I took the one offered from her bedside drawer with a feeling of inevitability. Afterward, she went into the bathroom to freshen up, and I wiped away a tear. Three months after Annie died, I thought, and I’m in purgatory, fighting back tears while some woman’s tabby cat sniffs at the bottom of my still-socked feet.

  And so it went. I was sappier than I should have been, than I’d ever expected to be. Angrier.

  I eventually found some solace in a woman—not one wielding a bouquet, but a needle. The weapons of the good witch Samantha.

  I first experienced her powers about six months after Annie died. Shiatsu massage. Sam laid hands on the leverage points of my tired corpus—the insides of my knees, my ankles, my beltline, and the bony outline of my jaw. Then shot me through with bolts of energy. I graduated to acupuncture, the needle.

  Sam knew I was skeptical of the New Age arts. She knew I thought massage was something you got on a hard plastic table at an athletic club. Then she made me a believer. Her treatments were as real as anything I’d learned in Western medical school. They put my world in slow motion. She helped me find something I’d never looked for, or considered. Silence.

  When she was done with me on those Sunday nights, and sent me out in the world, it was okay that things were quiet. It was okay that Annie wasn’t there, that she was not coming back. And I could see her more clearly; I could see the imperfections that her abrupt, tragic end often distracted me from.

  I escalated to meditation, slack-jawed breathing, and acupuncture. I didn’t quite become some nut and berry picker and eater. I remained a sometimes judgmental red-blooded American male who believed that the greatest salve to any problem was two shots of tequila and a compact disk compilation of U2’s greatest hits.

  Sam and Bullseye weren’t my only friends. They weren’t even the people I spent the most time with. That would have been the fellows from the YMCA. The misfits of Monday, Wednesday, and Friday basketball between 4:30 and 6 p.m. Gym rats. Guys with delusions of great athleticism. And delusions of great social skills. They played imaginary games of one-on-one with visions of supermodels inside their heads. But they had a perverse sense of loyalty to others of their species.

  And there was a neighbor. Sanjiv Bubar, a manager of Ant Hill Records. Not that a tiny store hawking used rhythm and blues albums (actual vinyl) needed a manager, but that was his title. Music, by the way, wasn’t his deepest passion. His real love was making model airplanes.

  He would knock on my apartment door long after the infomercials had taken over the airwaves. I’d find him standing there, stinking like glue and holding a facsimile of a Navy experiment that had flown only two missions over Prague in World War II.

  Sanjiv had something in common with the others—with Samantha and Bullseye, and the gym rats. They had hit a plateau in life. They weren’t striving or fighting. They had settled in, and they were more or less contented with it, living a life without judgment—of me. If they were judging themselves, they were doing it outside of earshot.

  Not like my medical school friends. I still kept in touch with them, but I’d fallen out of their pace. I couldn’t muster the energy to care the way they did, or maybe to feign caring the way they did.

  One night, I came home late from the Past Time bar and found Sanjiv standing in the doorway of my apartment loo
king grave. Someone had jimmied into my apartment and robbed the place. The cops said it was going on in the neighborhood, a sign of a new collective dependence on crystal meth.

  Gone were several of my big-ticket items: a PlayStation 2, a microwave, stereo, computer, monitor, and printer. All replaceable, except for the work I’d failed to back up. The place was a wreck. Whoever had broken in, the cops said, was probably looking for pot and prescription drugs.

  As I looked around the place, I noticed Sanjiv standing beside the refrigerator. I watched as he picked up the picture of Annie and me on the Santa Cruz boardwalk that lay amid the ruins on the floor. He looked at it. He thought I wasn’t looking at him, but still he seemed self-conscious when he decided not to put it back on the refrigerator. He slipped it into a drawer in the kitchen. The drawer that keeps the tape, and glue. The thumbtacks. The Tic Tacs. The pictures of dead girlfriends.

  I think he was thinking it was time I stopped building replicas of Annie in my mind. Something must have resonated. Maybe it was the tenderness in Sanjiv’s decision. I left the picture in the drawer.

  Time started to pass normally, no longer at the pace of grief, maybe even faster than it had before. The fog of Annie finally started to clear, after two years.

  I got a toehold with my writing, and I amassed a small body of work, including something that actually made me proud.

  At San Francisco General Hospital, an elderly (but not decrepit) man had come into the emergency room wearing a black baseball cap with a red Safeway logo on it. He complained of headaches. The doctor, who happened to be a friend from medical school, took off the cap. And found maggots crawling around an exposed part of the man’s brain. The insects were actually saving the man’s life.

  Evidently, the man had gotten into a car wreck months earlier and had cracked open his skull. But whether through age or early dementia or ignorance, he’d not gone to the hospital, despite having exposed a tiny portion of his frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for emotion and judgment, among other things. It is possible to live without the lobe intact, as lobotomies attest. It was very likely the missing lobe clouded his judgment so much that he never bothered to go to the hospital.