The Cloud ni-3

by Matt Richtel

  “What’s your job?”

  “To protect you.”

  “Protect me from what?”

  “Mostly yourself.”

  I reach the hilltop. Behind me, I see a flash of light, a silver grill, reflecting sun. The car seems to leap over the top of the hill, one lane to my left. I swerve hard to my right. The car, a sport utility vehicle, speeds past me. A gas guzzler, not Bill.

  I hear and feel gravel beneath the tires and swerve hard left to straighten the car and avoid sending me and slumbering Faith to our deaths. I watch the innocuous SUV disappear ahead of us. False alarm, high-risk paranoia at high speeds.

  “Mr. Idle?”

  “Do you work for Leviathan? Does this have to do with the girl who got hit by a car a decade ago?” I pause, working out my thoughts. “Was it not an accident? Was Leviathan somehow responsible? Is he involved in something with the Chinese? Maybe involving Gils Simons, the old team back together again?”

  “You’re confounding things. You’re all over the place. Pointedly, you’re not stable.”

  I look down the ravine into the southbound lane. A pack of a half dozen cars pass, tightly packed. Human nature abhors a gap.

  “Getting attacked twice in one week has a way of doing that.”

  “True, but you haven’t been the same for months.”

  “Cut the bullshit.”

  “Not since. .” He pauses.

  “You know you’ve got a skin condition. It’s why your scalp gets so oily.”

  “Not since your family fell apart.” He matches my non sequitur with one of his own. A hot sensation courses through my body, sizzles my brain in an instant of light. I blink. I’m swerving again to the right onto the gravel at the highway’s edge, and pull the car back to the left.

  I feel a hand on my knee. I look down to see Faith, waking up but still half asleep, alarmed.

  The man says: “You’re dangerous now-to yourself and others. You need to focus. You’ve lost the ability to trust or to know who to trust. Are you honestly trusting that trollop?”

  “Who?”

  “To get what she wants, she’ll do anything, with anyone.”

  Faith sits up, rubs her eyes, looks at me, like, what the hell is going on?

  The man presses on: “Can you honestly tell me that your brain is working correctly? Can you tell me you’ve seen things clearly since your utopian fantasies were set ablaze? It’s why you see Wilma, right?”

  Wilma. Dr. Jurgenson, a friend and source. I get together with her periodically to talk about life, stories, whatever. What’s she got to do with this?

  “Leave my family out of this.” I want it to sound like a threat but it’s plaintive.

  “Mr. Idle, you’ve completely lost your grip on reality. You can no longer tell the good from the bad.”

  Another hot flash. Isn’t that just what Leviathan said while we were having coffee?

  I don’t respond.

  “Vello,” the buzzard says. “She’s the key. Find her. Immediately.”

  “The key to what?”

  “Whatever you do, don’t print anything until you talk to me. I want to help. I’ll be watching, or call me on this phone. I can be a good source but if you print lies you’ll do the world a great disservice, and you’ll make us very, very angry.”

  “Us?”

  “Vello. Twin Peaks,” he says, “and one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Wave.”

  I look in the rearview mirror. No cars. I hear a honk. I look down on the northbound lane. A black Mercedes flies by. The phone goes dead.

  I look to my right and see the exit for Edgewood Road. I slam the brakes, fishtail violently, but manage to make the exit.

  “Nathaniel, what the hell are you doing?” Faith demands.

  I take a quick left at a stop sign, cross under the freeway and speed onto the highway going south.

  32

  “Who was that?”

  “Who is Carl?”

  I’m flooring it, southbound, chasing a phantom. He’s nowhere to be seen.

  The speedometer sneaks to ninety.

  “Slow down.”

  No sooner has she said it than I see the flashing light in the rearview mirror, a quick end to my high-speed chase. I pull over, put my hands on the wheel, wait for the cop to lumber to Faith’s window. When he pokes his beak through, I see the quarter-inch pink surgical scar across the center of his thick neck-from the removal of a mass of some kind. He asks for my license and registration.

  Faith interjects: “It was my fault. I’m so sorry.”

  He looks at her. Demurely, she lowers her eyes, then glances up at him, touches her fingertips to her lips. It’s like physical double entendre: on one level, contrite; on another, raw erotica.

  “Your fault?”

  “I. . I’m embarrassed.”

  “I’ve heard it all. Tell me.” She’s got him.

  “I told my brother I had to pee, badly.” She glances at me, then back at the cop. “When I start pleading in the little girl voice, it can be tough to ignore me.” She smiles, then lowers her eyes again. The cop takes my license and registration, pretends to give a long look, doesn’t bother to check his on-board computer, and leaves me with a stern warning.

  “There’s a rest stop a mile up,” he says to her. To me, he adds: “Lighten up on the accelerator.” He walks to his car and pulls off.

  “I really do have to pee.”

  “You’re dangerous.”

  “I’m not the one chasing ghosts at high speeds.”

  No longer. Ghost long gone. I pull onto the highway.

  “Who is Carl?”

  “You’ve been going through my phone.”

  “He called while you were asleep.” Small lie.

  “Did you talk to him?”

  I shake my head.

  “He’s an ex.”

  “Ex-boyfriend, ex-lover?”

  “More or less. I don’t want to dwell on the past.”

  “If he’s still calling, it doesn’t sound like it’s in the past.”

  I see the sign for the rest stop. I decelerate onto the ramp. Just to the right, there’s an enclave nestled against trees with a public restroom in a bland concrete building. I park. Faith grabs her phone and hops out of the car.

  I watch her disappear. My head throbs. I unfurl the vanity mirror to see how damaged I look. A folded piece of paper slides from the visor. I unfold it to find a picture of Polly that appeared more than a decade ago in a magazine published by the Wharton School. Polly had been featured among female graduates of the business school with a headline, “Attacking The World With Style.” In the picture, Polly wears that smile of hers that seemed to say: Today, I ran a triathlon and founded an Internet start-up, now let’s go make love all night and don’t you dare tire out on me.

  I feel stung with a sensation well beyond sadness.

  The door opens, startling me, and I drop the picture on the seat. I look at it, so does Faith.

  Where did the picture come from? Did I leave it? Someone’s fucking with me. I toss the picture into the back.

  “I’m not interested in dwelling on the past either.”

  “Nat.” She kneels on the seat, facing me.

  “Sandy Vello.”

  “What about her?”

  “That’s our present and our immediate future. Give me your phone.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t use mine. I want to call Sandy.”

  I’m using Faith’s phone because I’m worried that someone is following my activities on mine. It’s also why I’m not using my laptop. Still, I’m sure it can’t be hard to track me. I must continue to assume we’re not alone. Faith hands me her phone.

  I plug in Sandy’s number and hit send. As I wait for an answer that doesn’t come, Faith puts her hands on mine, holding my shaking fingers.

  “My sister’s a collector,” she says.

  I withdraw my hand and end the call.


  “A collector of what?”

  “Everything. Stuff she buys on the shopping channel, or gets at garage sales, junk mail, containers from places she gets take-out food, everything. In her flat, you literally have to wade through crap to get from room to room.”

  I start the car. Faith untucks her legs, sits, fastens her seat belt. Time to head onto the highway, heading north again, in the direction of the Twin Peaks Youth Guidance Center, where some buzzard turned self-proclaimed guardian angel has urged me to track down a TV diva. Beats dwelling on the past.

  I’ve heard of this psychological collecting condition, if not a neuro-chemical one. They tend to believe that the things they collect might someday come in handy and so they don’t toss anything. The condition, like so many that humans suffer, isn’t that hard for most of us to connect to, if we really think about it. Who among us hasn’t struggled over whether to hang on to an old wallet or ragged T-shirt, wondering whether it might provide some future use?

  I hit the accelerator and we pull out of the rest stop.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “She, my sister-Melanie-has trouble taking care of her son, my nephew, Timothy.”

  “Okay.”

  “Pull the car over.” Pointed.

  “Why?”

  “I’m trying to tell you something.”

  “So tell me.”

  “I’m trying to tell you about me.”

  “I need to pull the car over for that?”

  I do the opposite, I merge onto the highway. She doesn’t speak for a moment. I look over at her, head slightly hung, exasperated. I feel at once like I’m on my first date with this woman and like I’ve dated her for years. I can read her emotions, and feel desperate to connect to them. And just as desperate to escape them.

  I look in the rearview mirror at the thickening highway traffic. Where’s Bill? Does he have a crew, a team? In the yellow roadster? Or the pickup truck jacked two feet off the ground, or the white van with tinted windows and no front license plate?

  “Faith?”

  “You don’t trust anything, or anybody.”

  I laugh. “You set me up at a subway, haven’t been totally clear on why that is or how it happened, lead me to a dead man, then manage to be lingering when I get knocked unconscious, pick up the pieces and seduce me into saying and doing who knows what while I’m still half dead.”

  “Jesus. What happened to you?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “What happened that you lost all your trust in people?”

  The blood drains from my face. I can feel it, the cells slipping from my ears and cheek and neck and draining into my aching stomach. I want to tell her to fuck herself when I feel my phone buzz.

  “Hold the wheel.”

  “What?”

  I withdraw my hands from the wheel and pull out my phone. Faith takes the wheel and I read my text. It’s from Bullseye. It reads: “Chinese characters = interesting.”

  I tap back: Means what?

  I take back the wheel. “How’s that for trust? I let you drive.”

  She sighs.

  “Nathaniel, when I first saw you on the subway you looked at me and I thought: Encyclopedia Brown.”

  I glance behind me at the cluster of cars. The van with the tinted windows flies out of it and passes me. Its side reads: “Broom Town-Floor Care Specialists.” Maybe.

  “You’ve got curious eyes, passionate, but they’re boyish and innocent. Even if I’d not been asked to intercept you, I’d have wished we’d met. Every woman wants to meet a man who wants to understand her and will dig deep to do it.”

  “You’re an actress with an unusual relationship with someone named Carl.”

  “I’m a transition specialist who is low on work.”

  I take the exit into Glen Park, a former working-class-neighborhood-abutting-the-freeway-turned-trendy-San-Francisco-enclave. I turn up O’Shaughnessy, heading to Twin Peaks and Sandy. As we wind tree-cornered hillsides on the city’s southern edge, patchy cloud cover gives way to a foggy carpet.

  “You think you can’t trust an actress? I’ve done a few commercials, and do you know why I started acting?”

  It’s rhetorical, but I shake my head. She says that when she discovered her nephew’s struggles with learning, she did a bunch of reading and learned the best way to focus kids is with pretend play. The idea, it seems, is that kids get so entranced in a pretend world-whether acting like they’re tossing a ball to one another or pretending to be animals on an adventure-that it teaches the brain to stay on a single subject and develops neural networks accordingly.

  She decided to take an acting class. A director who would drop in occasionally spotted her and asked her to be in a commercial.

  “Yeah, well, we could use an actress right about now.”

  “What?”

  “Can you play a delivery driver, or an aggrieved mom so desperate to see her incarcerated son that it distracts the guards and gets me inside this place?”

  We’re at the entrance of juvenile hall. To our left, the high-gate of the maximum-security entrance, a cop again parked out front. To our right, the driveway to the learning annex, dominated by a white wide-load delivery truck lurching just in front of us. It continues through the parking lot, along an access road that abuts the right side of the annex.

  I park between a roadster with a roadrunner painted on the door and a school bus, probably ferrying students to afternoon programs here.

  “Where are we?”

  Figuratively, we’re at the point where I take Sandy by the neck and start to demand answers. I step from the car, smooth down my shirt, a reflexive maneuver I imagine enhances my professionalism. I pull sunglasses from a shirt pocket and don them.

  “I’ll stay in the car.”

  “Join me.”

  Faith sighs. She steps from the car, lips pursed. Each time she accedes to go along with me, I trust her less. But this time she’s going to come in handy. She can be partner and decoy to allow me to find and focus on Sandy.

  Just then, a better option for breaching the learning annex presents itself. The building explodes.

  33

  A siren wails.

  I orient. Black smoke swirls in the form of a twister from the back of the annex.

  “The delivery truck.”

  “What?” I can read Faith’s lips but can’t actually hear over the siren or stunned eardrums.

  I sense movement and turn to see a police cruiser and a van careening up the driveway behind me, followed by the din of another oncoming siren.

  I run up the concrete staircase leading from the lot to the heavy annex doors. As I near them, they swing open. A mousy woman I think I recognize from my previous visit bounces out, blinking, waving. “I’m sending them this way.” I don’t take her meaning until the first boy juts through the doorway. Then another, then a stream. Most in their early teens wearing blue uniforms. Hooting and hollering. Mingled with them, a few younger kids in street clothes. No Sandy. Something tells me she’s in there, in the back, where smoke mingles with gurgles and pops.

  I press myself against the open door, avoiding the scrum. Waiting for my moment. It comes shortly, a lull in the dense parade. I head into the stream, and the annex. Inside the doors, ordered chaos. The mousy woman directs a thinning group of boys to safety. Their diminishing numbers, coming from a set of double doors that lead to the inside, suggest most have cleared out already.

  The mousy woman looks at me. Then her eye catches an oversized teen carrying two cans of paint-arts-and-crafts class, I think-but she clearly sees the tools of imminent prank or vandalism and, comically, snags the boy’s huge arm in her own wiry talon. I whisk by her, skirt a handful of blue-clad boys, slip into the guts of the annex.

  Temporary walls and smoke. A long hallway, beneath the cavernous ceiling, bisects classrooms separated by some cheap material, rollers at the bottom that give the place a hollow, tinny feeling. I peek into the room on the right. A
library. Books on the walls, the floors, a bookshelf yanked down. I’m about to turn away when I see the boy. Under a table, rocking, a book in his lap that he’s reading or cradling. “Hey!” No recognition, his eyes remain down. I take a half dozen steps to him. He looks up. Says something.

  “What? You’ve got to go.”

  “It’s mine.” He pulls the book to his chest. An illustrated Treasure Island.

  “You have to get out. It’s all yours. Take it with you.”

  I cough, once, twice, a couple of more times for effect. The thickening smoke will be dangerous in another few minutes.

  Then: Boom! A mid-sized explosion comes from the back of the building. Like an appliance erupting, something localized. The boy crawls out, stands, sprints past me, clutching the book. I follow him back into the hallway. He heads to the exit. I head the other way, now not a soul in sight. Smoke pours from a room near the back. And within it, a figure, walking, emerging. I blink. Is it a boy? He looks translucent, an apparition. Isaac?! I blink again. The image is gone, just my imagination coming out of the smoke. I wretch out a cough. A thin carpet of gunpowder-colored smoke coats the high ceilings, resolving into a gray fog as it floats lower to the ground.

  I’m about to pass the next room on the left. Better check. Inside, a small kitchen, refrigerator, microwave, bag lunches on a folding table, a break room for the staff. No boys. Move on. A few steps more down the hallway, the next room on the right. An open doorway. Inside, folding tables and chairs, easels around the edges, pails on the tables filled with pencils, pens and markers, paint cans in the corner on a drop cloth. No boys. Nothing to see here. But then, my eye catches something on the outside, through the windows. A hulking figure, a stout man wearing a blazer, carrying a briefcase. He looks out of place. I know his actual place: an alley in Chinatown. The man who blackened my eye. He’s moving by the window, quickly, looks up, must sense me, staring in my direction. Can he see me? He semi-smiles, cocks his head.

  There’s another explosion.

  The stout man propels forward, like a projectile, but still on his feet. He’s not felled, not even thrown, just accelerated, toward the front of the building, like a bad special effect in a 3-D movie. I duck to avoid a smattering of shattered glass. I reorient, not really in danger, the explosion having come from the outside, the back of the building. I’d bet my fees for a hundred blog posts that’s where Sandy is.