Hooked

by Matt Richtel

  Dave pulled up a chair. It belonged to a second desk, this one small, to the left of the window. On the desk sat a laptop. Dave wore a crisply pressed royal blue shirt tucked into gray slacks. He was just about as I’d left him after our last conversation, but with a bigger forehead. He’d lost a lot of hair.

  He picked up a putter leaning against the small desk and started twirling it.

  I’d have to navigate Dave carefully. I couldn’t guess what he knew, but I certainly couldn’t reveal anything about Annie, under the presumption that he and I weren’t allies.

  “What can you tell me about Strawberry Labs?”

  “Synthetic berry manufacturing plant?” he said, then paused. “Sorry, bad line. You look like you’ve got something pretty serious on your mind.”

  “Are you still working for Glenn Kindle?”

  He nodded. Sure, he was working for Kindle Investment Partners. He couldn’t really disclose whom he was working for, or specific cases. But he’d be happy to talk about some general legal matters if I wanted to come back during business hours. All boilerplate. It would have been mind-numbing even without the creeping headache and nausea. I reached into my pocket and popped an Oreo into my mouth.

  “What about Vestige?”

  “Vestige? Is that still on your mind? Listen, I’ll tell you there was a small settlement to the IRS. It’s public anyway. But I really can’t discuss any individual cases.”

  I pulled out my cell phone.

  “I’m going to call the police. I’m going to tell them to pay a visit to you and Glenn Kindle.”

  It was a ridiculous bluff, given that I was wanted for questioning. But I needed to know what Dave knew, and he caught on just a second too late.

  He said, “Do you really think that’s the wisest thing to do—given your predicament?”

  He paused, gears grinding.

  “You’re going to look pretty silly just calling the cops for no apparent reason. You seem tired, Nat. My professional advice—and please don’t take this the wrong way—is you’re acting a little strange.”

  If I was reading him right, he had just admitted that he knew much more than he was letting on, and now he was trying to cover. “Predicament”: Did he mean the café? Or my illness? Or Annie? And why wasn’t Dave calling the cops himself? I couldn’t focus.

  “Let me tell you my theory,” I said.

  “I really do need to be getting home.”

  “Someone associated with Glenn Kindle—maybe Glenn Kindle—is loading computers with . . . a program. Some dangerous program. It causes people to . . . to get sick.”

  He started laughing.

  “The program acts like speed somehow. It affects the attention span, like . . . focus . . . It involves serotonin. The dopamine receptors. It makes computer use more compelling. You get a buzz. You get”—and then I found the word I was looking for—“addicted.”

  Me, Andy, maybe Simon Anderson. We’d been buzzing. Something was frying our brains. I’d had trouble pulling myself away from my laptop; the endless late-night surfing, the excitability, then withdrawal—nightmares, exhaustion, tremors, aggression, irritability. Hadn’t that been Andy’s problem? And Annie said I could be calmed with Ritalin, a kind of stimulant, the medication used to treat attention deficit disorder. Maybe that’s how the rat test fit in—an experiment to see whether the rodents would choose a certain kind of electrical brain stimulation over food.

  “I see what you’re talking about.”

  Was it revelation time?

  Dave said he didn’t know anything about a dangerous program, and launched into a monologue about the addictive power of computers. When people get an e-mail or a phone call, they get a little jolt of adrenaline—a burst of excitement from the sound and image and also the prospect of receiving something new. The absence of that activity creates a vacuum, and boredom. That’s why people feel compelled to place a phone call whenever they’re driving along in a car; because they’ve gotten so accustomed to the burst of brain activity that they feel bored when not stimulated.

  It hit me. “And you’re trying to perfect this?”

  “Jesus, Nat.” He laughed. “I have no fucking idea what you are talking about.”

  “But you just . . . ”

  “I thought we were talking about modern life. We get conditioned to use our gadgets, right? What do they call it—a Crackberry?”

  He was playing me, giving me a nugget, something to think about, then acting like it was an innocuous observation. I extracted a powdered sugar doughnut from my jacket.

  “Nathaniel, I’ll be honest. You’ve always been a little dramatic. I thought so when you were with Annie. You romanticized that thing. She wasn’t near what you cracked her up to be. Now you’re talking this computer nonsense. Next you’ll be saying people installed some mythical dangerous program on your computer, or that they’ve been tracking your whereabouts on your cell phone, and listening to your calls. C’mon; do you really think a computer can do what you’re describing?”

  He sat down in front of the laptop on his desk and started clacking the keys. He couldn’t imagine how such a thing as I was describing could work, he said. Could I show him what I was talking about?

  Indeed, how could such a thing work? I watched him tap away on the keys. The screen couldn’t communicate directly with the brain, could it? He stood. “Show me,” he said.

  I approached warily. He had put the putter down, and it didn’t look like he would attack me.

  I looked at the computer and saw the Web page he’d called up. It was a story in the Chronicle about the café. A big text box denoted “breaking news.” It reported: Local pair sought in café explosion.

  “What the fuck? Why this story?”

  “Why not, buddy?”

  I sat at the computer. I clicked on the link and started reading. And suddenly, a buzz. A painful pulsing in my fingertips, like I’d been shocked. A humming in my ears. That headache. My gut—I shook my head. I fought for air. I turned to the side and threw up. More like projectile vomited.

  “Spare me.” Dave, looking at his shoes. “These are Allen-Edmonds.”

  I’d never had a migraine. I’d treated them, though. It’s like a vise around the brain. The slightest movement, or light, radiates pain.

  My gut seized. I fought to inhale—to satisfy primordial urges. This can’t be happening. A computer can’t do this. I slammed the laptop shut. I gripped its sides, tried to lift my head. I raised it an inch. I threw up again.

  “It’s on this thing,” I coughed.

  “You’ve got the flu, buddy.”

  “What’s on this fucking computer?”

  I felt a wave of fury. I pulled myself up and steadied myself on the table’s edge. I stepped toward Dave. The corner of my eye saw him pick up a rock paperweight. Was it to defend, or attack?

  He cocked the paperweight and swung.

  46

  The jagged edge of a rock arced toward my head. I leaned forward and turned. The object slammed just below my armpit, into the lat and the ribs. It was excruciating. His momentum propelled him forward and he was nearly on top of me. He cocked his arm again.

  I realized I was holding the laptop, which I’d instinctively grabbed for protection. Just as Dave brought the rock down, I held up the computer like a shield, and it took the brunt of the second blow. Dave stumbled to a knee. I turned and swung the laptop. It was blind, but furious, and it hit its mark—the side of Dave’s cheek, just as he was turning to look up at me. He wailed and put his hands to the side of his face.

  If there wasn’t so much fury, and so much at stake, it all might have been comical. Men don’t know how to fight. They just know how to threaten to fight. Shoving matches on basketball courts and soccer fields don’t count.

  Dave rose. He had his hand on a large gash on his cheek. I held my side. Warm and sticky. We both stood there gasping. What to do next?

  “You tried to kill me,” I said. “You’re trying to kill me.”
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  “I’m defending myself against a psycho. Look at yourself.”

  Dave picked up a phone on his main desk and pressed a button. “Building security,” came a voice over the speakerphone. “This is Bob.”

  “I need help. I’ve got a hostile visitor,” Dave said.

  Intervention was something I couldn’t afford. When security showed up, Dave had a lot to lose too, but not as much as I did. Annie was out there somewhere. Panting, I took a last look at Dave and ran through the door.

  I took the stairwell. I’d watched too much television and had some vague instinct that, if you escaped in an elevator, you risked being met at the bottom by men toting guns. When I got to the bottom, I peeked through the stairwell door at the guard’s desk, and found it empty. He must have been attending to Dave. What story was Dave making up?

  Moments later, I climbed in my car. I drove away from the building and into a dark, empty street. I heard a siren and dropped my head below the window. When the sound passed, I accelerated again. I drove a half mile to the Bay Bridge. I merged onto it and let the gorgeous span carry me away from the sirens, the muck, the frenetic madness of a twenty-first-century city wired to the hilt.

  I steered with my right hand. With my left, I gently prodded the sticky shirt fabric at my right side—at the edge of my rib cage. I’d taken a good gouging. Just how much more than a flesh wound I couldn’t conclude, not without jamming my foul paws into my wound and causing so much pain that I would swerve and make it much worse by driving my car off the bridge. It hurt to breathe in too deeply, suggesting a possible cracked rib.

  The good news was I wasn’t pouring blood or passing out. The muscle is well supplied by vessels and so a more direct hit would have caused a lot more blood loss, at least. It could be a mixed blessing. Less bleeding but slower healing. In either case, faster driving. That’s what the following cars’ repeated honks were telling me.

  I focused on the road. I’d come to the end of the Bay Bridge and found the beachhead to America. Road signs pointed in a million directions—Oakland, Sacramento, San Jose. I took Highway 580, an artery that would lead through the flatlands to Highway 5, the eventual path to Las Vegas. Boulder City. Annie.

  I reached for the phone and dialed Leslie Fernandez, my former classmate and lover turned neurologist.

  Presuming the computer had somehow attacked my brain, it didn’t take an almost-doctor to understand what Annie had been getting at. My brain needed artificial stimulation. Something to take the place of the laptop that had . . . somehow ravaged my own onboard computer. Just how their dirty trick worked would have to wait. My immediate goal was triage.

  “It’s Dr. Fernandez,” she said when she answered.

  “Leslie.”

  “Lover boy.” Her voice rose.

  “Lover boy needs another favor.”

  “Sigh. What’s up?”

  “Leslie, I need a Ritalin prescription. A hundred pills, at least 20 milligrams.”

  “Nat?”

  “I also need Augmentin. Or whatever is the strongest all-purpose antibiotic going these days.”

  Silence.

  “There’s a Walgreens in Pleasanton,” I said.

  “Are you okay? Are you . . . using?”

  I laughed, but I shouldn’t have. What I was asking wasn’t illegal—doctors prescribe for each other all the time—but this was serious.

  “No. Leslie. Please, no lectures right now. You’re not compromising anything. You’ve got to trust me.”

  “Okay, lover boy.” Not convinced. “I’m here if you need me.”

  “Actually, one more thing.”

  “Footsie?”

  “Norepinephrine and dopamine,” I said. “Remind me.”

  “Neurotransmitters. Catecholamines.”

  “Check.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “They’re stress hormones, right? Corresponding with intense situations. Indicated by a rush.”

  “Norepinephrine is that and more. In terms of stress, it contributes to controlling primitive functions—activating fight- or-flight: dilating pupils, constricting blood vessels, increasing heart rate. Dopamine is more involved in the pleasure centers of the brain, and also with compulsion and desire.”

  “Like it controls cravings?”

  “Or is indicative of them. Why are you asking me all this?”

  “Science experiment. Listen, I gotta run.”

  “Don’t hang up,” she said at elevated decibels.

  She asked me if this had to do with Dr. Bard and my earlier call. I told her I didn’t have time to talk about it, but now she was concerned. She made me swear that I wasn’t sick or doctor-shopping, an indirect way of asking me again if I was an addict looking for prescriptions from friends. It was not uncommon for medical students to get hooked and dose their way through life. She was still skeptical when we hung up.

  I pulled into a Denny’s north of Lake Merritt, an area of Oakland just bad enough that it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if some guy walked in and took a bath in the sink. Cleaning out a gash might be tougher to explain. Fortunately, the bathroom was empty when I walked in, except for a pair of piss-stained jeans lying on the floor beside the urinal. I held my breath, pulled back my shirt, and tried to pretend it wasn’t me, but rather some emergency-room stranger whom I’d have treated as a medical student. I put my finger inside the fleshy wound and saw that the stranger was in for good news. The paperweight had grazed his side, missing any major arteries and not breaking scapula or rib. He needed a good cleaning, a bandage, and, it went without saying, hydration and bed rest. A good cleaning would have to do.

  Thirty minutes later I arrived at Walgreens. Behind the counter stood a diminutive pharmacist with Coke-bottle glasses.

  “Have you taken this before?” she said, handing me the Ritalin.

  I nodded.

  She reached for a second bag. She looked at me, then looked back at the writing on the bag.

  “You have to eat when you take this,” she said. “It’s a very powerful antibiotic. It can cause nausea and a number of adverse reactions.”

  On the counter, I laid down cash from the $300 I’d pulled from an ATM at the front of the store.

  Moments later in the parking lot, I twisted open the Ritalin and poured two tiny white pills into my hand—double even a high dose. I washed them down with a gulp of warm Pepsi from a bottle sitting in my passenger seat.

  What to expect? Would the headache suddenly subside? Or I’d gain newfound clarity? Or be able to sleep? It seemed like a long shot, given that Ritalin is an upper, sort of. It is used widely to treat attention deficit disorder. The concept is that people with ADD have trouble focusing. They appear to be excitable. The theory, though, is that their brains are low on dopamine, and they look for stimulation. They crave excitement—or drama. The Ritalin supplements their brain chemicals. Again, in theory, it allows the brain to not have to scour for new forms of excitement and, in turn, new ways to generate adrenaline. It’s an upper that actually can have a calming effect.

  Without feeling any immediate difference, I started the car and pulled onto the highway. Would Ritalin have saved Andy Goldstein? Was there technology on his laptop that actually caused him to suffer symptoms like attention deficit disorder?

  More to the point: Would Ritalin save me? Had I contracted some irreversible syndrome?

  He had left me with a million questions. Dave was obviously dirty. Did his computer make me sick? Why not him? Had he suggested that my own laptop computer had been tampered with? How and when might that have happened? That night after the café exploded, I’d come home to find the power on on my laptop and the computer unplugged. It struck me as odd, but not out of the question, that I’d left it that way. Was it all a haze of fatigue?

  Was Dave just making conversation when he said people get addicted to talking on the phone in a car? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed clear that he was right. The act of responding to the beep of a call,
or an incoming e-mail, is at the very least Pavlovian. You hear the sound, you respond, you get a reward—a message, an input of information, the promise of something exciting. But is that physiological? Does our brain chemistry get molded and refined, like muscles responding to a repeated task?

  I thought about the jungle, how humans adapted to survive it. Through random mutation and trial and error, we changed to cope with physical challenges and solve problems in the wild. Was the same thing happening in the digital age? Were our brains evolving to cope with the modern jungle—the computer, the environment in which we interact every day? One thing was clear: Stimulation was everywhere, and growing. It wasn’t just phones and computers. It was CNN and Fox News; the screen includes a talking head, a news scrawl at the bottom, and a colorful graphic. Soon enough, they’d stamp a farm report on the anchor’s forehead.

  Our brains were being asked to cope with an onslaught of information pushed at us rapid-fire.

  I picked up my cell phone.

  The phone.

  Dave had asked if I was paranoid that my phone had been equipped with a tracking device. A message, or another random taunt? Who was tracking me? Danny Weller? Was he dead?

  I looked closely at the phone, but wasn’t sure how I could tell if it had a device on it. I took the conservative route. I opened my window and did something I’m sure 99 percent of cell phone users have had fantasies of doing. I tossed the phone onto the highway.

  I still had the blonde angel’s super-secret spy phone. I called Bullseye. When he answered, I chose my words carefully just in case someone was listening in.

  “How’s Sam?”

  “She’s been fully awake for twenty-nine minutes.” Ever the mathematician.

  “Lucid?”

  “Ticked off,” he said, expelling a rare laugh. “I reminded her about her Zen philosophy of life, and you know what she said? She said, ‘They shouldn’t have fucked with a witch.’”