The Cloud

by Matt Richtel

  “Bomb!” Sandy yells.

  I flatten myself and cover my head. I think: Isaac. I see an image of my crinkly baby. Pink, then pale, then blue. Not breathing. What’s wrong with him? He’s so still. I’m paralyzed. Is this how it ends?

  I hear footsteps. They’re coming from the outside, shuffling, maybe down the stairs. Definitely down the stairs. Our attacker in full escape; I thought he said he’d protect me.

  I look up. I can’t help myself. I should be retreating. I should cover my head but, impulsively, I look up. I peer at the object that flew through the window. The supposed bomb on the floor, between the entrance to the house and the dining-room table. It’s small, wailing like an alarm clock. And it’s not a bomb. Not even close. It’s a cell phone. Not just any cell phone. I know it. I bought it. It’s the cheap-ass Motorola phone I put on the seat of the black Mercedes.

  “Not a bomb,” I yell. “A phone. A diversion.”

  “What?”

  I get an idea. I pull on my sneaker and say: “It’s just a cell phone with the alarm going off. He’s getting away.”

  “Fleeing like a little girl.” Triumphant.

  “Not if you get a shot at him from the front window.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  “Sandy, what’s to stop him from going back to his car and getting some actual bomb, or whatever, a gun?”

  She starts moving. Peering between the refinished legs of the table, I see her feet churn toward the front of the house. My cue to move. I slink around the back end of the table. I lift my head to see her absorbed, pushing aside a rocking chair that sits beneath a square window at the front of the narrow house. I snag one of the Jugglers from the countertop. Sandy sets down her shotgun, then looks back at me. Just before she sees me, I lower the Juggler and lift my phone. Into it, I shout, “Intruder.” I mouth to Sandy: “911.”

  Sandy turns back to the window. She opens a lock on the side and begins to turn a crank at its bottom. Her hand slips, betraying nerves. I can imagine the collision in her brain of neuro-chemicals and ego, the ego compelling her to show her moxie, the chemicals urging her to fall to the floor and remember she’s not a super-secret spy but a physical-fitness devotee caught up in something well beyond her resolve.

  The window pops open. I start moving quickly to the door. I reach it and twist the door handle, my silent hopes answered when it turns, unlocked. Sandy lifts the rifle, fumbles it, and seems to hear my movements behind her. My own mordant curiosity—some preternatural inquisitiveness that the Witch would say borders on a death wish—prompts me to pause and see what Sandy decides to do, rather than duck from the window. She starts to raise the weapon in my direction, then hesitates. I do not. I step into the darkness.

  Keeping my head down, I fly down the wooden stairs slippery with night, trying not to fall and pretending I may not get shot. Within seconds, I’m on the ground, beside the garage. Then: Bang!

  Sandy’s pulled the trigger. I look up the side of the house. I’m nearly directly below her, but slightly around the corner of the house. I doubt she’s aiming at me. The angles don’t work. So what, or who, is she aiming at? I peer across the road into the mini-forest. Tall trees, dense, underbrush. No movement. I’m guessing Sandy isn’t shooting at anyone at all. She’s announcing her presence.

  And doesn’t she have to reload? I sprint across the road into the underbrush, duck beneath a leafy limb, step onto a rock and feel my knee twist. I stumble forward, drop the Juggler, demi-dive after it, find myself lying on the ground, my head nestled beside a puddle.

  I pause. I wait for the pulsing pain to pass. I listen. Silent night. I picture Polly, teary-eyed, holding the fortune cookie, and Isaac, pale in the delivery room, chaotic sounds and nurses and doctors circling, a cacophony of shouting but, for me, everything going terribly silent. My baby boy born, Polly prone on the delivery bed, pale, my dreams on the cusp. Something’s gone terribly, terribly wrong.

  I stand. I don’t look back. I stop listening. I don’t care. Shoot me, Sandy, if you will. Capture me, buzzard, if you can.

  I sprint in the direction of my car, then stumble, sprint, stumble, sprint, the Juggler somehow in my hand, slippery, the grainy brain images in my pocket.

  I reach the Audi. I climb into the car. I whisk it in a tight circle. I pull up to the metal gate, step out of the car, open it, am about to climb back into the car when I hear it. Rustling. To my right, in the darkness and trees. I see it, don’t I? An angry red light. It’s the tip of a cigarette, ten feet deep in the trees, held head-high. I flash on an image from a few hours earlier; a packet of cigarettes in the front seat of the car of the buzzard. In the present, I don’t bother to strain to make out the face behind the cigarette—or to discover if I’m imagining things or not. I drop into the driver’s seat and I gun the car, fishtailing through the gate, then swerving more as I pull a hard left onto the main gravel road.

  Seconds later, I pass the house, again without incident. I’m free. Has the buzzard sprung me? Or taken pity?

  I pull out my cell phone and, numb-fingered, dial, my brain bursting with questions and theories, not just about the Juggler and the conspirators behind it, but about the reasons my life fell apart. My cozy dream shattered, in a moment over an empty fortune cookie, the pieces strewn over the last agonizing nine months. The phone rings. I picture Faith, the compassion of a nurse, nubile movements of a dancer, the fraudulence of a stage actor. Still, I’m feeling something. It’s deep. It’s affection, a genuine crush. It’s the first time I’ve felt it, maybe that I’ve felt anything, since . . .

  My thoughts are interrupted when a man answers my cell.

  I say: “I have what you’re looking for.”

  45

  From his groggy silence, I infer skepticism. Maybe I’m projecting. I actually don’t have what he’s looking for. Not all of it. But I have a reasonable bluff. “Brain images,” I say. “And the Juggler.”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “Now!”

  “Too late.”

  The dashboard clock reads 12:30.

  “Then I’ll go to the police.” Another bluff.

  “I’ll call you back.”

  Click.

  The tires jitter. I’ve moved too far right and I’m sloping down on the slanted edge of the gravel road, pointed at the stump of a once proud redwood. I swerve left. Righted, I gun the car and I exit the rural subdivision, leaving behind Clyde’s fixer-upper, Sandy, maybe Buzzard Bill, a mess of clues I’m starting to connect, I hope.

  When I hit the paved road, I take a sharp left. I’m headed in the direction of Highway 280 North, and home. As I reach the highway, the on-ramp appears to split into two unfocused ghost images. For an instant, I can’t tell which of the two ramps is the one that leads me home and which is a blurred vision borne of exhaustion that will lead me to slam my car into the wall.

  I pull the car hard to the left. I need sleep. Now. I cross under the highway interchange, still not seeing any other car lights. I keep my trajectory west, heading toward the sharply rising hills that separate the highway from the Pacific Ocean. It’s even more rarified real estate here; big lots peppered with ancient trees, some with grazing deer and fenced horses, accessed, like the house I’ve just escaped, by narrow gravel tributaries.

  It’s one of those off-roads I seek.

  Less than a mile up the canyon, I find the one I’m looking for. It’s a turn to the left over a creek bridge onto a road that serpentines up a hillside. But I can see as I slow, nearing the turnoff, that, just beyond the bridge, there’s a spot to park. It’s just barely visible from the road, and only if you happen to be looking closely for, say, a slumbering journalist. I pull into the spot, turn off the car, and then, nearly, the phone. I don’t want to be tracked here. But with my finger poised to power off the device, I remember one last task.

  I read the text from Jill Gilkeson: I remember Alan Parsons. Call me.

  It’s too late for that. It’s nearly 1 a.m.

/>   I type: “Sorry 4 delayed response. I’ll call in morning.”

  I hit send.

  I start to power off the phone. It beeps with an incoming text. “Im up.” I hit send to initiate a call, trackers be damned.

  “I haven’t slept well in years,” she says by way of answering the phone. I blink back a tear. In my exhaustion, I feel connected to this woman.

  “Alan Parsons.”

  “An amazing teacher. A genius.”

  “Of computers.”

  “Right. Andrew was so good to him but, if I remember—and please don’t quote me on this—Alan just couldn’t keep it together.”

  “Back up. I’m having trouble keeping pace.”

  She laughs, like, of course. “By the way, why are you awake right now? I guess journalists get focused on their stories, but this isn’t all that interesting. Is it?”

  “I’ve experienced loss too.” It’s out of my mouth before I realize I’ve said it. I wonder if I’m establishing empathy as a tactic, or something rawer. In the brush, I see movement. I flinch. Is it a deer or my imagination?

  I kill the fog lights. I don’t know if I want to see what’s out there before it visits me. Come what may.

  The defeated woman on the other end of the line starts talking. She takes me back to when Andrew Leviathan started building new charter schools on the Peninsula. His goal, she says, was to give opportunity to at-risk students but also talented teachers who the public school system might not embrace. Alan Parsons, she says, was one such teacher. He was a computer whiz, engaging, bright, and thirsty. A drunk, he wound up dropping from Stanford’s computer science PhD program, where he’d been a favorite among undergrads he taught. There was some chatter that Alan did a bit of corporate espionage and hacking to support his booze habit and that he tended to get playful when wasted. He could be a recreational hacker and a devastatingly good one. There was a rumor that Alan, virtually joyriding on gin, once hacked into Pentagon computers and made it look like a warhead had gone missing.

  Andrew, the tech-savvy savior, came to the rescue. Andrew hired Alan to do tech support at one of the first charter schools. And, so long as he remained sober, to teach one class.

  “How to multitask?” I ask.

  She laughs. “That word barely existed then. But, if it did, Andrew wouldn’t have allowed it in the school.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Andrew wouldn’t even let computers into class. I only remember this because it seemed so odd. He said the school could teach the logic of how computers work, programming skills and capabilities, but wouldn’t allow screen time.”

  It rings familiar. Polly mentioned at some point in our discussion of future school options for Isaac that some Montessori programs keep technology at a distance. But it doesn’t sound consistent with the Andrew I’ve been learning about. He’s been pushing heavy technology use; it’s in his blood, and maybe that blood is bad. I’m hypothesizing that he’s been simultaneously developing insidious Juggler technology on the sly while creating a public face that limits use of technology in schools. Why?

  “Jill, was Andrew involved in the Juggler project?”

  “Haven’t heard of it. But I didn’t know Alan all that well.”

  She says that, as far as she could recall, Alan couldn’t stop drinking. He was fired. But the two men kept up their ties. She says that she seems to vaguely recall Alan’s name coming up recently; she thinks Andrew might have contacted him again.

  “If you’re looking to do a story on Andrew’s generosity, I think you could include the part about Alan.”

  “Alan died recently.”

  She doesn’t respond. She can’t stand hearing about death.

  “I need to go,” I say. I really do. I can’t see for exhaustion. And, I realize as the adrenaline starts to fade, I’m ravenous.

  “Get some sleep.”

  “Jill?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I ask you one more thing? It’s about your daughter.”

  Silent ascent.

  “Did she ever have contact with Mr. Leviathan?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Alarmed.

  “Sorry. Terrible turn of phrase. I meant: was he generous with her too, in terms of his time or his commitment to education?”

  “Oh.” She pauses. “Not really.” Another pause. “Other than the after-school program.”

  “Program, like . . .”

  “Glorified babysitting, for kids of employees. Board games and computer games. Early ones. The kids got to play with all kinds of toys the big brains in R and D were developing.”

  Internal alarm bells, a burst of adrenaline. I let it pass so I don’t betray the zeal of my curiosity and frighten her. She fills in the silence.

  “She must’ve gone for near two years. She really craved it, hanging out with the other kids. It was a little wonderland. It brought her alive, in a way.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m really not comfortable talking about her. Suffice it to say, Mr. Leviathan’s a saint. Now, I’ve got to try to get some sleep myself.”

  End of interview.

  “Sleep well, Jill.”

  Click.

  My phone beeps. I look at the screen. There’s a notification: tomorrow afternoon, I’m due at the courthouse to meet with tax authorities.

  I turn off the device. I drop it into the center console. I trade it for an energy bar that I devour. Dinner, breakfast, whatever it is at this point.

  I recline. I close my eyes, craving sleep, seeing puzzle pieces. I form a picture: Andrew Leviathan, through his partner and intermediary, Gils Simons, has sold or is otherwise exporting to China some technology that entertains kids and professes to help them multitask, turn them into cloud masters. But it actually hurts their brains. Does it hurt development of their frontal lobes by overloading them with data? They’re not mastering the cloud, or successfully juggling it, they’re winding up in one.

  I suspect Andrew had been testing the technology for years.

  Recently, Alan Parsons stumbled onto their plot and he tried to blackmail Leviathan, his former benefactor. He first tried to reach me by a fake email address for Sandy Vello. I overlooked or ignored or didn’t see it. So he used Faith to help seduce me into his efforts. But why? Why did he need my help? Was he afraid Leviathan would come after him, and is that exactly what happened?

  Where does Buzzard Bill fit in, and the stout man with the crooked smile in Chinatown? My guess is that each is acting as muscle but exactly for what and whom?

  And what more is there to Faith? Is she safe?

  I see a memory fragment. I’ve awakened in the hotel room with her, after a night of feverish sex in a concussed state. I open my eyes to find her staring at me, eyes glistening, real emotion. In my mind’s eye, in the present, her face transforms into Polly, eyes glistening, sitting over an empty fortune cookie. “I have something to tell you,” she says. “Brace yourself.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek to shatter the memory fragment. I feel a sob deep inside my chest, rising. I see its origin: a black void inside me, creeping from my head into my body, a fast-spreading emotional malignancy, like a fresh bloodstain.

  I fall asleep.

  I wake up with a start when I hear the tapping on the window.

  46

  My first thought: someone needs an endocrinologist. My second: that someone is a cop.

  He stands at the driver’s-side window. Blue and brown uniform, no cap. And no facial hair. Zero. His face looks ice smooth. It’s a relatively rare hormone imbalance, low testosterone, unless he shaves every forty-five minutes.

  Nonchalant, he holds a black baton in a beefy right hand that does not lack in testosterone. I open the driver’s-side door. Behind the cop stands his motorcycle, sun bouncing off the black gas tank.

  “Not a cool place to sleep one off.” His voice matches the detached coolness in the air. He’s not picking a fight, just giving both my first and last warning.
A bird chirps. In the tree above us, a gray gnatcatcher stops on a leafless limb, then darts upward into a crisp, cloudless morning. From the angle of the sun, it might well be ten in the morning.

  I swallow hard, tasting foul, lumpy paste.

  “I’m sorry, officer. I worked late, got too tired to drive 280.”

  He cocks his head. I look at the underside of his nose, a likely spot to see hair growth if his face is capable of it. No little sprouts. He clears his throat, wanting my attention undivided.

  “You need to get home to your family.”

  “No family, officer.”

  He furrows his eyebrows. Those he has. I see him look in the backseat and I turn. He’s eyeing the car seat.

  “I could give you a field sobriety test.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sober. One thousand percent. I’m . . .” I run out of words. “You’re right. My family needs me.”

  “I’ll be back in five minutes to make sure you’re gone.”

  I turn on my phone, which tends to be the first thing I do every morning for the mini adrenaline burst, a wisp of dopamine roughly equivalent to a whiff of coffee, right before the first sip. With an impolite beep, the device lets me know that the battery is low. And there’s one voice message. “Tonight. More instructions later.” It’s spoken in the choppy tonality and grammar of a non-native speaker.

  I turn off the phone to give it the rest it needs.

  I curl my head in a circle, feeling the crackling in my upper vertebrae, the awakening crinkles of the folds of skin around my neck, the paraspinal muscles and fatty tissue at the base and sides of my neck.

  I feel a peculiar sensation. I pause, head leaned at three o’clock, to make sure I’m not mistaken. I’m not. I feel lucid. Clearheaded. I look outside and see colors as vivid as I’ve seen in days. I take in the brown pre-spring nubby leaf buds on the tree branch, and the dusty red bricks stacked at the base of a wheelbarrow near a wooden gate. I’m seeing the world in high-definition again.