by Matt Richtel
I should do so but I can’t stand the idea of spending hours in the emergency room to be told what Dr. Internet already told me. Besides, I’m almost an actual doctor myself. Almost, not quite. And I’m so tired. I’ll just close my eyes for a second.
I dream of Isaac. He’s sitting in a red train at the playground. He’s got bouncy brown curls that he didn’t seem to inherit from me or Polly and that I’m aching to run my fingers through.
“This train is bound for glory,” I say, arms wide, aping to elicit a reaction. He grins a grin that could cure all ills.
I lean down and whisper with mock seriousness, “Little Man, I’m going to tell you a secret. Do you want to hear a secret?”
He nods, expectant. I lean in to tell him the secret, when I hear a woman’s voice. “Time to go, lambkins.”
It’s Polly. She’s standing in front of the train, prim in a blue business suit but with her straight brown hair cut at shoulder length, casual, irresistible. Suddenly, I’m filled with dread.
“Be careful of the train, Little Man!” I scream. “The train!”
Terrified, I jerk awake. Gray daylight floods the office, a horn blares from the street below, my mouth tastes of flour paste, my head thick. I’ve closed my eyes and slept all night. And I think: the train. Of course. So obvious. Just as my concussion doesn’t require diagnosis by an MD, so my dreams don’t require expert interpretation by Dr. Freud. I’ve nearly been run over by a subway and I dream of a train taking Isaac, his mother acting as conductor, or something like that. I can only hope my journalism is clearer and less clichéd.
I pick up my phone. I pull up Polly’s number on the phone. I hold my finger over the touch pad. My digit trembles. I scowl and reach for my wallet, which sits on the floor. From it, I pull the piece of paper with Faith’s contact info. Just my luck: the phone number is smeared from last night’s rain but is sufficiently legible to allow me to make out four of seven numbers and have reasonable guesses at another two. I try several permutations, getting three wrong numbers, a couple of disconnected lines and one voice mail that asks me to leave my message at the beep but doesn’t say who the number belongs to. Maybe it’s Faith. I leave a short message asking her to get back to me, explaining that I’m the guy from the train station and that I hope I have the right number.
I am able to read Faith’s email address, which is not as rain-smeared, and send her a note asking her to get in touch.
I also leave a message with a friend at the San Francisco Police Department. In the past, my stories have often put me at odds with the cops, but I’ve had a much warmer relationship with them in recent months. I attribute that to my career notoriety or, perhaps, career legitimacy. In my voice mail, I tell Sergeant Everly that I’ve had a run-in with a mountain dressed up as a man and would love to run it by him.
I feel the dull ache from the back of my head and finger the sticky wound, reasonably healing. I open my laptop, struck by an impulse: maybe somewhere along the line I’ve got a connection to the dead woman, Sandy Vello, that would make sense of last night’s attack.
I find something odd. Two weeks ago, my anti-spam program filtered out an email from [email protected]. It reads: “Please contact me regarding a private matter.” Then another, eleven days ago. Same sender. “Mr. Idle, contact me please regarding a private journalistic matter. This is serious. We have one month to stop the launch.”
Launch?
Was Sandy Vello trying to reach me, and then she got killed? I do the math. The second note came the very day she was killed. Was someone trying to prevent us from connecting?
A quick double-check of her obituary reminds me that she lived west of Burlingame, probably in the hills somewhere, and volunteered regularly at the learning annex of the Twin Peaks Youth Guidance Center. It’s actually a jail for San Francisco’s underage have-nots, pranksters in a minimum security wing as well as young men guilty of extreme violence far before their time, locked in cages that many in the city would be stunned to know share their pricey real estate. Next door is the annex, which I visited a few years ago for a story about the small organic farm the adolescent prisoners were tending in the yard.
I register the time, 10:30. I slept forever, I think, as an alarm bell rings inside my head. I’ve got an hour to be in Palo Alto, a forty-minute drive at least, to shake hands before the magazine award. I have to shower, find the tie and a clean shirt before composing my acceptance speech as I speed down Highway 101.
Then maybe a visit to the learning annex to see if I can justify the award.
5
I try not to envy other people. Andrew Leviathan, the man presenting me the award today, makes that very difficult. Where even to begin? The billions, the philanthropy, patents, brilliant anthropologist wife whose perpetual smile feels like an ignition switch to every man in the room, his apparently complete absence of pathologies, or the escape. How can you not start with the escape?
It was 1979, Romania, the cold war still in full effect. Andrew was a mere teen, and already on the cusp of being a singularly dangerous 21st-century cubicle soldier. The Eastern bloc, through its selection of the best and the brightest, had identified gangly Andrew as the preternatural math whiz who could make Mother Russia’s supercomputers more super than evil America’s. And he probably could have, but instead, given full access to their system, he introduced a noxious digital virus into Mother Russia’s digital heart, like Luke Skywalker aiming lethal bursts into the Death Star. Andrew’s was not a deadly shot, only nearly, and the young man got caught.
The morning he was to be hanged, the executioners came to his cell to find him gone. He’d bribed one of the guards by promising that, if he was set free, he’d hack into a Russian state bank and have $100,000 wired to the guard’s family living in New Hampshire. That wasn’t the fancy part. Once he was loosed, Andrew snuck into a local news station, got onto a computer, hacked into the country’s central weather mainframe, and managed to set off a warning of a rare and imminent attack of cyclones. In the chaos, he piloted a plane out of the country.
The rest, in a nutshell: Italy, then New York, then Berkeley, where he got a PhD in computer engineering, then Palo Alto, where after a few entrepreneurial fits and starts, he created EDGE, the algorithm that helps you find things on the Internet and that is the kernel upon which Google and everyone else that really matters on the Internet builds their business.
He’s now standing at a podium, the creator of the New Media Award for Public Service Journalism, telling a humble version of the escape story, minus anything self-aggrandizing, but it is plenty aggrandizing of me, embarrassingly so.
“I sat in that six-foot by six-foot dank Romanian jail cell, an atheist devoted only to numbers, and I prayed. I asked God for a journalist,” Andrew says. “I prayed for someone who would tell truth to the world.”
I look up at the three dozen tables filled with Friends of Andrew, faces held rapt over their pear soup. There is no way that I can follow this guy. I’m wearing rumpled clothes from the just-in-case bin I keep at the office, having taken a rushed shower in the bacteria-smeared bathroom in the hallway, and then bought a tie from the Green Love shop. If you look too closely at the faint horizontal image on the tie, you can make out a couple having sex standing against a tree. On the plus side, at a distance, the blue tie simply looks nicely patterned, and, plus, it’s made of hemp. I pull my sport coat closed and button it over the tie.
“And we don’t just need a free press that is permitted and encouraged to expose injustices big and small. That is not enough,” Andrew continues. He’s physically sturdy, a cyclist, I’d guess, with a fitness room in his basement, but with gray dominating his still-full hair, a presage of the frailty that will creep up on him in ten years. “We need individual journalists like Nathaniel who aren’t afraid to take on the jailers of the truth.”
He launches into my boilerplate biography: my upbringing in Colorado, my medical-school training, a summary of my stories about how digi
tal gadgets can have an addictive quality that, if not managed, can lead to a short attention span and disrupt our ability to effectively create, and analyze, information. Affect our memory and our capacity to connect with other people.
As he makes me sound worthier than I am, I scan the room looking at the faces of the captivated. They are taking in the Silicon Valley icon, the immigrant who symbolizes the essence of the meritocracy that the region considers its defining characteristic, and someone who can write a check that in a nanosecond changes the fortunes of their start-up or foundation. They also, apropos of nothing, have the usual range of medical conditions. A woman in the front row in a smart blue suit can’t suppress a deep cough consistent with the tail end of walking pneumonia, less throaty than bronchitis; two tables away, a retiree curled unnaturally over his lunch like a question mark looks to have camptocormia, a bent spine we now know to have degenerative origins, not psychological ones, as once thought. Across from him sits a rail-thin man with angular features and a bald head so shiny that I wonder about seborrhea, excessive secretion of the sebaceous glands. Oily skin.
And then there’s the man in the doorway. It’s not pathology that catches my eye, but the long, black leather coat, which seems out of place inside in midday Palo Alto, and, more so, the stare, the crew cut, like AstroTurf, covering the big, square head. Arms crossed, he’s looking at me intently, right until I look back at him. He averts his eyes. He curls out of the doorway.
“Before I sum up,” Andrew says, “I want to take a brief moment to do some unctuous politicking with the people who really set me free in this lifetime. To my beautiful and stalwart wife”—a few in the crowd coo—“thank you. And to my first Silicon Valley partner, Gils Simons, an operational genius, many thanks for turning ones and zeroes into a fortune, and for continued friendship.”
I look at Gils. He’s a fifty-year-old bland Boy Scout, tight haircut, sweater vest, the quintessential organizational guy who was the behind-the-scenes straight man responsible for the boring business side of early Leviathan Ventures while Andrew played mad digital scientist.
Andrew pauses. “Nathaniel, Nat, if I may,” he then says after his beat, and I can feel him looking at me. I look back at him from my seat at the front table. “It has not been easy for you. You’ve fought through great personal and professional obstacles the last few years to remain devoted to your craft and to the pursuit of truth. While the rest of us have blindly embraced technology, me as much as anyone, you’ve shown us its limitations and even its potential dangerous side effects.”
He looks at the audience, another pause, this time to reinforce the idea that he, one of the Internet’s pioneers, appreciates a skeptic. I think: I wish Faith could bear witness—not Polly, I realize with some mild surprise, but the compassionate brunette from the subway.
“I give you Nat Idle, the recipient for this year’s award in public health journalism. He is the essence of the journalist that I, a seventeen-year-old hours from being hanged, prayed to God to deliver.”
As I stand, I feel no particular joy; this pomp and rhetoric is less about me than about Andrew reinforcing the value of an award he created.
The crowd claps as I shake Andrew’s smooth, confident hand.
At the podium, I clear my throat. “When I was seventeen, I was a hacker too. I spent a summer trying to break into Jane Messersmith’s brassiere.”
Bad line, but big laugh from a sympathetic audience.
“Abject failure. If only I could’ve convinced her we were in for an attack of cyclones, she might’ve huddled with me on the couch.”
“Andrew,” I direct this to him. “We should work together in the future.”
Smaller laugh. Time to get back to the prepared remarks, such as they are.
I thank Andrew and his wife, Catherine, and the audience.
“Hundreds of thousands of years ago, humans trolled the jungles, living amid the trees, running from tigers, and chasing rabbits,” I begin. “Today, our jungle is a seventeen-inch monitor where we run from bad banner ads and instant-message interruptions from our bosses, sprint to keep up with tweets and Facebook status updates, use always-on connections to chase deals from mountaintops or even bathroom stalls.”
Time for the numbers. I point out that the households in the United States consume on average 33.8 gigabytes of information, the equivalent of 100,000 words delivered in text, audio, video, graphics, constant bursts of data. I explain that one question driving my journalistic efforts has been a simple, dumb question: What does it mean that our environment has transformed virtually overnight into pixilated, liquid screens, delivering danger and opportunity every millisecond?
“We once adapted to the jungle by walking upright or brachiating.” I launch into a stock line. “So how are we adapting to the digital jungle, for good and for ill?”
Lots of nods from the audience. I take them in with a pause. I feel a wave of light-headedness, a lukewarm hot flash. I take a deeper breath. Andrew approaches the podium, and hands me water. I sip.
“I’m not accustomed to public speaking.” I’m too close to the microphone, prompting an echo. “I try the old trick of imagining the audience naked, but then I get worried because I can’t figure out where you’d all carry your iPhones if you don’t have pockets.”
Laughter, but thin—people are ready for their salmon. I thank everyone again, promise to spend my award money on a new flat-panel television with Internet access, then return to the head table. I sit between Andrew, who is listening intently to a blue-haired octogenarian talk about how much has changed in her lifetime, and Catherine, who leans in closely to me.
“I don’t trust people who are comfortable speaking publicly, what’s-his-name excepted.” She nods toward Andrew. I smile, as she adds: “Are you feeling okay?” It’s not the kind of question you ask in polite company, which means I must look terrible.
“Head wound.”
“Really?”
“Just overwhelmed. Journalists are accustomed to being pilloried, so this kindness takes some getting used to.”
I excuse myself and make my way around the crowd absorbed in lunch, silverware clinking on plates and voices mixing like a dissonant symphony. Out in the hallway, I expect to see the guy with the long leather coat, but no sign of him. I wonder if I imagined him before. I did see him, didn’t I?
“Excuse me.” A voice from behind me. I turn. I blink to focus on a man I vaguely recognize. It’s the man with the shiny head I saw sitting near the front of the room. With bony fingers, he extends a phone.
“You dropped this on your way out.” It’s my iPhone.
“You okay?”
I nod and take the device. “Thanks.”
I walk to the restroom and toss cold water onto my pale face. My body pulses with a dull ache, not just physical but also emotional: loneliness; maybe the absence of my son or someone to share this moment with. Instinctively, I lift my phone from the counter, and realize I’ve missed three texts from an “unknown” number.
I tap the screen. The first message is cryptic. “I got your message. Are you feeling okay? I remembered something.”
The second message continues the first. “Something weird. Call me.”
The third message is shorter. “Faith.”
6
I hit send on the phone number provided in the second text.
“I can’t talk,” Faith answers with a whisper after the third ring. “In class.”
Class?
“I can’t talk either. In bathroom.”
She laughs. “Nathaniel Idle? From the subway?”
“To be clear, I’m not in an actual stall.”
“Call me later. Please.” She clicks off.
I look in the mirror again, and see staring back someone who looks flushed by a schoolboy infatuation.
The rest of the lunch passes relatively quickly, the assembled having paid their homage to Andrew and, by extension, some rumpled journalist, and they need to get back to fin
ding acquirers for their start-ups. As I walk out, Andrew approaches me just as he gets intercepted by an admirer, a small woman, fortyish, with a wave in her hair and thick glasses.
“Mr. Leviathan . . .”
“Andrew, please,” he gently corrects her.
“Andrew, my son is Ralph Everson, from the second class at the Montessori. Your contributions have meant the world to him. He’s still struggling but he’s turned the corner.”
“Ralph.” He pauses, senses my gaze and looks up at me for an instant, a rare moment in which I’ve seen him caught off guard. Can he be expected to remember every child his contributions have helped? “I’m so glad he’s benefiting from the program.” He recovers. “Can we discuss momentarily? I want to bid farewell to our honoree, and give him a hard-earned check.”
“Of course, Mr. Leviathan. I mean, Andrew.”
He shakes her hand.
He steps toward me, leans in and near-whispers a self-effacing goodbye.
“Please forgive me if my speech was a little too much. It sounded less sentimental when I wrote it in the shower.”
“Mine sounded a little funnier when I wrote it on the car ride down.”
He gives me a firm handshake and a check for $1,000, which I take with a silent nod of sincere appreciation. It’s new backpack time. He pats me once on the back in parting. He’s a few inches more than six feet, mildly taller than me, but his gesture seems to come from high above, like you’d get from Dad or an elected official. I’d like to like him and can’t identify why I remain on the fence.
I see his eyes gaze over my shoulder. “Gils, hang on a second.” Gils, I notice, is sadly devoid of obvious medical quirks. He’s a first-generation French immigrant but with the distinct lack of panache.