The Cloud

by Matt Richtel

  A hollow, urgent sensation grips my intestines. Hunger. And then a more demanding pressure just lower down from my bladder. I need to pee and eat.

  I angle down the rearview mirror so I can stare back at myself. I know that look. I’m rested. And determined. Nine hours of sleep have done some healing magic that no medication could do for my concussed brain. I can imagine the white spots that dotted my frontal lobe beginning to dissolve. In their place, healthy tissue and priorities. Time to tick the first item off the to-do list.

  The Mission Day School stretches a half block, a stately and brown brick facade, then cuts sharply and handsomely off on each end so that the building forms the shape of a U.

  A string of neatly aligned trees, transplanted from some forest north of the Golden Gate Bridge, ornament the shallow front lawn behind an ornate black metal fence.

  A plaque next to the front gate reads: “K–8, Curriculum Vitae. For Life.”

  The stately edifice is out of place in a part of the city, the outer Mission, where everything is out of place. Worn concrete-surfaced playgrounds surrounded by chain-link fences abut trendy small-plate restaurants serving $16 finger food abut $2 million three-story stand-alone hipster pads abut the barred windows of “deluxe” low-rise shoebox apartments renting for $625 a month to single moms, Mexican day-workers and their families, and slam poets.

  In the idle Audi, parked across the street from the Mission Day School, I gulp a three-shot espresso drink called a Depth Charge and an egg-and-cheese croissant sandwich from a nearby hole-in-the-wall café. I’ve closed Bullseye’s laptop, which I used to visit the school’s web site. In a nutshell, Mission Day is an elite school, regarded as one of the best in California at using alternative teaching methods to “foster a generation of 21st-century leaders.” This is Andover and Choate, San Francisco style, costing parents $30,000 a year.

  This is where Faith’s nephew goes to school. It doesn’t add up. Faith says that her sister suffers a mental disorder and lives a disheveled life. And she says that her nephew has inherited some emotional instability. I recall his name is Timothy and she described him as having Asperger’s syndrome and as being disruptive in class. How does the family pay for tuition at Mission Day? It seems doubtful that the nephew has earned a scholarship if he’s a source of in-class tension.

  I initially wondered if Andrew Leviathan had anything to do with the school but can find no evidence on the Net that he has a relationship to Mission Day. Is he connected to Faith?

  Meantime, I do see a different connection between Mission Day School and the events of the last few days. In glancing at the roster of the school administrators and finding the name Carl Lemon. “Carl_L.”

  He’s a former corporate lawyer turned director of admissions. There’s an image of him but it’s not a picture. It’s a caricature that was drawn, it says, by one of the school’s students (all of the administrators’ images are caricatures). The one for Carl makes him look mid-thirties: close-cropped curls on the top of his head, maybe light-dark skin, a loose tie, a thin smile. He likes giving out tardy notices in the hallway.

  From my glove compartment, I snag a notebook and a pen. I see a little boy walk through the front door. I look back at my car seat. I picture Wilma and hear her give me my homework assignment: focus on the image of the nuclear family you romanticized. Let yourself mourn its absence and passing. Think about “loss.”

  “You’re getting somewhere,” I recall Wilma saying as I exit the last time. “See you next week.”

  It’s the last thing I remember clearly before I head to the subway on the fateful night this mystery began to unfold. I vaguely recall standing on the subway platform, picturing how Isaac might view the entrance to the subway, how my little guy might view as intriguing the ominous black subway tunnel glistening with condensation.

  I flash back further, months earlier, to the night of the Fortune Cookie, and the revelation from Polly that changed my life. “Nat,” she says, her smile at 40 percent, “I have something to tell you. Brace yourself.” In the present, her words sting so much that I instantly blink them away. The memory feels more vivid than it has felt in days, like the colors outside the car where I woke up this morning. I can’t think about this now. I’m close to answers.

  I spring out of the car, leaving the empty car seat behind me.

  I stand in the pristine hallway with smooth arches sloping to form a high concave ceiling. A stern-looking woman in her mid-fifties approaches. She wears a sleeveless blouse with a sweater tied around her waist.

  “Peux je vous aider?”

  I shake my head, confused. My best move is to go on the offensive.

  “I’m heading to administration.” Purposeful, just shy of angry.

  “It’s French Day. We ask parents to participate.” I’m being scolded.

  “Gracias.” The only non-English word that comes to mind.

  She points to the right and shakes her head.

  Carl Lemon’s brass nameplate identifies his heavy brown door. I knock, causing the slightly ajar door to open. Behind a desk sits a man wearing suspenders and who has been flattered by the caricature on his web site. His brown curls have begun to recede, foretelling an eventual sharp widow’s point in the center of his spacious forehead.

  “Mr. Lemon.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “I’m here about Faith?”

  “You’ll need to make an appointment.”

  He looks down again at whatever he’s working on, summarily dismissing me. He’s serious to a fault.

  “I’m with the press. On a big story involving your school.”

  “If you don’t leave, I’ll call security.” Still looking down.

  “I relish the opportunity to talk with them.” Now he looks up. I continue. “Where is Faith? What have you done with her?”

  He blinks.

  “So get security.”

  “Come in. Shut the door behind you.”

  47

  “Who are you?”

  I realize my arms are crossed, an emotionally defensive posture, which is not the message I’m looking to send. He needs to feel like he’s backpedaling, mostly because I’ve got only bluster, not information. If he feels threatened, he might start offering a confession as part of a conditional surrender. I’ve seen it work in interviews before. I’ve also seen it miserably fail.

  I lift an expensive brown wooden chair from its perch near the wall to my right and carry it to the edge of his desk. I can feel its leg dragging, bunching the image of the African women carrying the swaddled child that is woven into the area rug beneath me. He winces. Why on Earth would Faith want her nephew to attend school here?

  I drop his gaze to situate myself in the chair, letting the silence stir up inside him. I look at him, then glance around the room, playing a role of confident interrogator that, even in my most officious moods and with the most inane corporate-relations flacks, feels manufactured. He’s got a couple of diplomas on his textured white walls and a picture of a beached whale being encouraged by the cheers of children.

  I tell him my name as I pull from my wallet my driver’s license and business card. It’s intended to show I’m unafraid to reveal myself. I tell him that I tend to do investigative pieces and that he can look up online my recent award to get a sense of the kinds of stories I write. He doesn’t much study my license and business card, which I generally find to be a sign that he trusts what I’m telling him. Or maybe he knows who I am already, but I doubt it. In either case, he’s ready to bargain.

  I pull my notebook from my back pocket.

  “What do you want?”

  “Where is she?”

  He shrugs. “I have no idea. Did you say this is for an article? Which publication?”

  Already, in an instant, I can feel the momentum shifting against me. I’ve got little to go on.

  “She’s worried about her nephew, Timothy.”

  He clenches his jaw.

  “You’r
e using him.” I’m being deliberately vague.

  He averts his eyes slightly to the left.

  “Did you mess him up with the Juggler? Is he part of the testing?”

  His gaze hardens, then he looks at me quizzically. I’ve overextended myself.

  “Alan Parsons sent me.”

  Several rapid eye blinks. It’s not that he knows about Alan Parsons. Far from it, I realize. Rather, he senses I’m either a fraud or someone on a fishing expedition who cannot rightly threaten him. Something bad happened between him and Faith, but I’ve got no clue what that is.

  I stand. I lean forward on the desk. For the first time, I peer through the picture window behind his desk. I’m looking into a large grassy play area, the courtyard, with serpentine brick walkways, a wooden playground in the far corner anchored by what looks to be a large sunken ship, and dotted in spots by benches. I can’t take my eyes off a boy sitting alone on a bench, holding a toy airplane in his right hand, pretending to make it fly over his head.

  I pull my gaze back to the bureaucrat. I’m seething with anger but with little way to channel it. A gut impulse strikes me. Where logic and rational argument fails, I need to use emotion. I need to appeal to something rhetorically irrefutable.

  “I’m also Faith’s boyfriend.”

  I deliberately lean another millimeter forward, like I just might jump over the desk. “Cut the merde.”

  “What?”

  “It’s French Day, asshole.”

  The crazy-guy look in my eyes must perk him up. It can’t be my pronunciation. He holds up his hands, palms out. “She came on to me.”

  I feel prickles. Revelation coming. I let my body recede that extra millimeter to suggest I’m willing to listen.

  “That’s not how she tells it.”

  “This is not for an article. It’s off the record. And I know the distinction between off the record and ‘for background.’ ” He uses air quotes around the words. “She used me.”

  “You’re going to hate losing this job.”

  “Her nephew doesn’t belong at this school. I told her that. We owe it to our families to make sure every student contributes to making this the most competitive learning environment, and creative one. I gave him a chance and he’s squandered it.”

  I remember hearing his voice and words on Faith’s voice mail, telling her she is running out of time. Demanding, threatening.

  “That doesn’t give you an excuse to threaten her.”

  “You’re her boyfriend, so you know exactly what she’s about. She picks at weak spots and exploits them. But that’s beside the point. By the time I was . . .” He pauses, looking for the words. “By the time I was spending time with her, I’d already agreed to give her nephew a chance and to provide a scholarship. He needs a chance too. Our relationship, brief as it might have been, has nothing to do with the issue of her nephew’s education.”

  I’m scrambling to stitch together his clues. I can almost picture my resource-starved working memory, my little closet filled with precious near-term intellectual capacity, churning like the engine room in the Titanic. An idea starts to form, and it’s darn simple: Faith seduced this guy in order to get her troubled nephew admission and a free ride into the best school in the city. This doofus happily went along for the ride, then got pissed when the ride ended, leading to threatening phone calls.

  I try it out on him. I act surprised, a little hurt. I ask him whether Faith started sleeping with him as a way of getting her nephew into school? And, now that he’s in the school, she’s withdrawn?

  He doesn’t answer. But he seems to indirectly accede by asking: “So you’re here as boyfriend, not journalist?”

  I ignore him. I think I’ve begun to understand Faith’s secret, or at least the first part of it.

  “You told Alan Parsons about this? You gave him ammunition to use against her.”

  “Get out of my office.”

  Another insight. He didn’t tell Alan Parsons. Then, another silent A-ha. He has no idea about Alan Parsons. Alan was a hacker who got to know Faith at a coffee shop. Alan needed Faith’s help to seduce someone else—namely, me. So he hacked into her email or computer or whatever, and figured out Faith had her own weak spot, something to exploit: she had slept with a school administrator to help her nephew. Alan essentially blackmailed her to help get my attention on the subway platform. If she didn’t go along with it, he’d expose her seduction of this imbecilic dean of admissions.

  It’s a theory, at least.

  The doofus reaches for the landline phone. I lean over and I hold the receiver in place, daring him to turn this into a physical confrontation.

  “If you kick Timothy out of school, I’ll . . .” I pause. I don’t like the gravity and clichéd nature of the threats poised on my tongue. I can’t say them and mean them.

  “You obviously don’t have kids, Mr. Idle.”

  I blink, stung. I drop his gaze and glance out the picture window behind him. On the bench, the boy flies the airplane over his head, amused, captivated, free, healthy, alive.

  “My son is Isaac.” A whisper, or maybe I just think it.

  “If you had kids, you’d understand that you should let this go. Faith is a big girl looking out for her nephew. Your threats aren’t helping him or her. But I’m willing to let this go. End of story. Okay?”

  “Excellent decision, Carl.”

  I look again at the boy with the airplane. I suddenly can’t breathe. I take a step backward, let myself out the door. And then I’m running down the hallway. Sprinting.

  It’s the most lucid I’ve been in days. It’s the first time my head has cleared. I can see the memory fragments now, talking to Polly over the fortune cookie, then discussing that night with Wilma, the therapist, getting my homework assignment. Focus on what you’ve lost. Blink, I see the hospital, Isaac born, tiny, Polly so pale. The chaos and the doctors.

  I’m outside, down the path, between the out-of-place trees on the front of the out-of-place school. I’m sitting in the Audi. I pull out my phone, turn it on, hear the urgent beep demanding it be plugged in. I dial.

  “What do you want?” the voice answers.

  “Now.”

  “I told you: tonight.”

  “Now, or I go to the police. And the press. I know everything.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “Twin Peaks?”

  “No.” He doesn’t continue.

  “Where?”

  “Mount Davidson. Rainy now. No one will be there. At the cross. Thirty minutes.” The phone dies.

  I’m sure he’d prefer a nighttime exchange. Faith for my information, and the brain images and the Juggler. At night, it’s dark, free of witnesses, easier to dispatch us. During the day, I’ve got a better chance.

  Don’t I?

  Do I care? No.

  I can see clearly for the first time since my head smashed onto the subway platform why my life has come undone. No, I can see it clearly for the first time in much longer than that, maybe eight months.

  I’ve got to outrun the memory. I’m willing to die trying.

  48

  Fog so dense it requires windshield wipers greets me at the foot of Mount Davidson. It’s more of a huge hill, really, accessible by a cul-de-sac at the edge of St. Francis Woods, one of San Francisco’s ritziest neighborhoods. The mansions here defy the urban space limitations elsewhere in the city.

  A ten-minute winding-trail walk up the mini-mountain leads to the top. There, when the fog permits, you get a splendid view of downtown and the East Bay. But the bigger payoff is the massive cross looming over Mount Davidson, an unlikely and imposing 103-foot concrete crucifix built in the 1930s, its upper edge popping just above the high trees on San Francisco’s highest hill.

  In the late 1990s, it was nearly felled by city residents who disliked the church-and-state implications of a massive religious symbol mounted on public lands. It was preserved through a deal with the Armenian Church, which rewrote the narrative
to make this not just any cross but a memorial to Armenian genocide in Turkey.

  And in the 1970s, Clint Eastwood nearly died here at the hands of a serial killer in the first Dirty Harry movie.

  If it was good enough for Clint, it’s good enough for me. Not a bad place for an agnostic to meet his own end.

  I park in the cul-de-sac in front of a home with a massive oval front window. I push open the heavy door of an Audi I have no business driving, or, rather, that I certainly can’t afford. Not on my own. I see the nick in the driver’s-side door, just below the handle, where, just a month before Isaac was born, Polly got woozy and hit a cement wall pulling out of a parking lot. It was the last time I remember her driving this car, or any other. I look in the backseat at the car seat, empty.

  I should be coming up with a plan. I should find a sharp stick with which to defend myself. I should figure out how I’m going to confront Andrew Leviathan and Gils Simons. There are a thousand things I should do.

  I open the back door. I slide in next to the car seat. From the tag still hanging off the side I can see that it’s made by Graco. The plush gray fabric is so clean, unstained, pristine. There’s a rubber band still around the clasps that would hold in place my precious cargo.

  Would. In theory.

  This car seat has never been used.

  I lean my head next to it. I close my eyes. I see Polly sitting at the Chinese restaurant, her smile at 40 percent, sad, poised to tell me something, holding her empty fortune cookie. I shake my head, making the image disappear.

  I pull my phone from my pocket. I know it is almost dead for wont of a recharge. But I push the power button anyway. An Apple emerges onto the screen. Then it beeps and shows me an image of a battery near empty with a red sign, indicating five percent left.

  Five percent may be all I need.

  From my contact list, I call up Polly’s phone number. I press it to dial. I put the phone on speaker. I hear the phone ring only once. It answers: “This number is out of service.”

  The phone dies.

  Out of service. The last time I called, when I was at the hospital getting my concussion checked, a woman answered and didn’t recognize my voice. She asked me to stop calling. She must be tired of me calling her, asking for Polly. She finally put the number to bed.