by Matt Richtel
“Want to know what the Chinese characters mean?”
36
“No.” I sit up. Woozy. Shake my head for bearings.
He doesn’t respond.
“Not on this phone, Bullseye. Meet me Where the Sun Don’t Shine.”
He pauses, then says: “Now?”
“If not sooner. Please. Bring a laptop.”
“Fuck you.” He’ll be there.
I hang up. One Sunday five years ago or so, I had tickets to a San Francisco 49ers game at Candlestick Park. I offered to take Bullseye. Samantha, his wife, my witch, implored him to go because, she said, he needed to explore light from some source other than the bar’s televisions.
“Get some Vitamin D. It’ll improve Ida and Pingala.” Those aren’t people, she informed us, but rather, energy centers associated with the Chakras. In plain old English, she wanted him to get some sun.
“Are you kidding?” Bullseye muttered. “Candlestick is the place the sun don’t shine.”
She laughed. “I always thought that was your wildly hairy butt.”
For years, it became a joke at the bar. Candlestick, frigid and wet, like the city but more so, was the place Where the Sun Don’t Shine. “Shove it Where the Sun Don’t Shine,” someone would mutter and someone would say, “Bullseye’s hairy ass?” and someone else would say, “Candlestick!” Begetting another round.
Groggily, I start the car. In the sky, I discern no residue from the fire. No dark cloud over the area of the juvenile facility.
On my way to the highway, I pass the Youth Guidance Center. In front, five cop cars and two fire trucks. No lights and sirens. It’s inert here. I drive back down O’Shaughnessy, and turn on the radio. I try the various AM stations to hear various iterations of the same brief report about the fire at the Youth Guidance Center. Authorities say it was an unfortunate accident but a small, localized fire that injured no one and did modest property damage. Sandy must have survived.
I enter the highway. Minutes later, I detour through the drive-thru at In-and-Out Burger, order a double-double animal style, fries and a chocolate shake. I inhale them and ten minutes later, exit the highway again just south of San Francisco. Just ahead, on the edge of the bay, looms a football stadium majestic in its setting and outdated in every conceivable way, structurally and in terms of its amenities. But it serves my purpose now in that it’s devoid of humans, lonelier than after a loss to the Cowboys. I pull into one of the gravel overflow parking lots and leave on my fog lights. Five minutes later, Bullseye pulls up in his baby, a meticulously restored 1972 Cadillac with crack-free red leather seats, an impeccable eight-track tape player, and dice hanging from the mirror.
Knowing that Bullseye likes to exert as little energy as possible, I unhook my seat belt and walk to the Caddie. I’m met with an unpleasant surprise. Samantha sits in the passenger seat. Her shoulders are wrapped in a ceremonial Indian scarf. She holds a deck of cards.
Bullseye opens the door a crack and shrugs, a kind of apology; he knows that I can’t deal right now with Samantha’s witchery, or the filial worry that seems to accompany all of the recent attention she’s given me.
“Hi, Witch. No time for tarot.”
“Solitaire.” She smiles warmly. I doubt her words; she wouldn’t be here if she didn’t have some healing plan up her sleeve.
Bullseye steps from the car and pulls the seat forward so I can climb in back. Samantha looks at my scared and charred face, now bathed in the car’s interior light. Her smile disappears. She looks down at her cards. What does a big sister tell a little brother who keeps screwing up?
“Let’s hear it, Bullseye.”
He sits back down and shuts the door, reaches under the front seat and lifts a razor-thin Apple laptop. It’s open, the rectangular screen projecting a grayish green light in the car. He hands it to me, and I settle back with it in the seat. I see a graph.
Along the left are six Chinese characters and so too along the bottom. In the middle of the graph there are words to describe the intersection of the characters. I think I get that this means the interpretation of these symbols depends on the meaning of the individual Chinese characters, which themselves may have different meanings.
“From the Net?”
“Hacker friend from Beijing.” In his tone, an atypical pride.
I look more closely at the possible meanings. At the bottom left of the graph, the meanings are so bizarre as to be worthless. The first reads: “Circle Haircut,” then “Round Hemisphere Clown.” One in the middle reads: “Fast Turtle Balance.” They take only slightly more meaning as the graph moves to the right. The one on the farthest tip means “Brain Balance Drug,” and “Earth God Drug.”
I pause from reading when I sense movement in the car. Samantha steps out of the front seat, pulls it back, climbs next to me. She puts her right hand on my forehead, as if taking my temperature. She holds it there.
“What’s interesting about this, Bullseye?”
“The gestalt-something my friend explained but that I didn’t write down.”
I wait for him to go on, and after a beat, he does. “It’s a potent drug.”
“What is?”
“He said if he had to interpret these characters, aside from what they denote, they seem to symbolize a transformation. Something that changes people.”
“Like a psychedelic?”
“Like something that turns you into God.”
I clear my throat, thinking.
“The hacker told me: picture a giant brain balancing the Earth.”
“Balancing,” I mutter. Then, just a bit more loudly: “Juggling?”
Bullseye shrugs.
I’m feeling warm. I look up. Over the red leather top of the front seat, he extends a yellow Post-it. On it, he’s written a phone number and address in Palo Alto.
“Where you can find the hacker.”
“In Beijing?”
“He’s doing security work in the valley, on an H1-B.” Temporary work visa.
I take the note and notice the letters and numbers he’s written look fuzzy around the edges. I blink hard.
“Why do you encourage him?” Samantha asks her husband.
“I find it entertaining.”
“He’s broken.”
“Chasing things is how he heals himself.”
“Hey. I’m right here.”
I expect Samantha to respond to my protestation with something like, Yeah, but you’re not really here. You’re not all here. You’re not dealing with your life. It’s not just the concussion, and the black eye, the black face, the urgency of investigation, not trusting. It’s the void, she’d say, that black space inside your head, pulsing with orange and red on the outside, not caused by concussion. But something else, or the absence of something else. C’mon, Nat, you know what I mean.
Why did Polly change her phone number?
I look at Samantha, who I notice now has one hand on each side of my head, cradling it upright. Energy work.
“So chase,” she says.
I nearly manage a smile.
“What?” she asks.
“Did you just mind-meld me?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I wriggle my head to get it out of the Witch’s grasp. “Okay. I’ll chase.”
I know where to start. It’s not at the hacker’s house. I look at Bullseye. “Can I take your Mac?”
He shrugs his ascent. I need it because I need to find the address of my next stop. And I need to set a trap.
37
Bullseye’s taillights disappear. In my mind’s eye, I see that void again, the black one surrounded by orange-and-red fire that the Witch planted, or exposed, or that I allowed to surface. I blink so that it’ll recede again. Whatever I’m chasing will lead inside that void.
And I think: how melodramatic.
I walk to the Audi, open the trunk, pull out my own laptop. I power it up and sit in the front seat. I open a browser, then realize t
hat, unlike with Bullseye’s computer, mine has no Internet card. That’s relatively easily solved, I hope, by one of the handful of restaurants and homes on the hillside near the ballpark. I drive less than two minutes to a diner, the Niner Diner, and luck into an unsecured Wi-Fi connection called “FIRSTNTEN.” I sit in the lot. A lone night owl sits in the diner.
I log in and I search for “Budget hotel Marin, CA.” I find a link to a site advertising nine hotels under $44. This turns out not to be true but it’s beside the point. This is just a head fake. I click on two of the hotels, choose one, then put its address into Mapquest. Then I ask for directions to the hotel from “my present location.” I get a map. I close the computer.
I have no intention of following the directions. But I suspect someone else will.
I have ample reason at this point to believe someone is monitoring my phone or computer activity. Or multiple someones. It’s a reasonable assumption given the fact that I’m dealing with someone who managed to get my computer to post an obituary for the very-much-alive Sandy Vello.
I open the computer again. I need to give whoever is watching reason to believe I’m unaware of the surveillance. Into the browser, I type: “Faith Aver.” I get the usual thousands of hits. One seems relevant. The link connects me to a San Francisco agency booking “local talent” for TV commercials/billboards/print ads. The web site features a dozen head shots, including one of Faith. I click on it to get a brief bio: “Get Faith. This versatile brunette can play a vivacious girlfriend or alluring young wife or mother. Suggested for use in advertising restaurants and bars, home-care products, or in office settings. Quick on her feet, Faith has experience with improv and can flow on the set. Resume on request.”
Left out: scene-stealer, scene-fleer, can play vixen or victim.
I click to ask for her resume. It brings up an email box. “I’m interested in hiring Faith to do some commercial work,” I write. “Please send her resume.” I leave my email.
I close the computer. I can’t afford to sit too long, now that, thanks to Mapquest, I’ve given whoever is watching me “my present location.” Besides, maybe they already know my location from my phone, which I power off.
I open Bullseye’s computer, which I doubt anyone’s tracking or peering into. Into Google, I type “Sandy Vello” and hit return. The third link is for a page with cast bios for Last One Standing. I click the link and get brief biographies and photos of a dozen of the Season III “personalities.”
The first belongs to “Donovan,” a guy who evidently is too cool for a last name. Sandy mentioned him. He’s got long brown bangs but short-cropped hair on the sides, which taken together looks like the work of two competing stylists, one from the eighties and the other from the fifties. He’s sneering. His bio says: “Donovan graduated cum laude from Princeton, spent four years on Wall Street, earned enough to buy a mansion in Northern New Jersey, then moved west. In Season III, he was the runner-up, after pulling out of the dramatic finale with a leg injury.”
I click on “Where is Donovan now” to learn he’s founded Silver Spoon Investing. It’s an investment firm that promises to help families invest their fortunes while teaching their kids how to think about investing in one-to-one seminars.
I’m going down a digital rabbit hole. I click back two screens to get back to the main bio page-when I’m startled by a skidding sound coming from outside the car. A monster-sized SUV pulls into the diner’s gravel lot. It passes me, pulls around the left side of the building, skids on gravel as it stops outside my view. I turn on my own car’s ignition in case I’ve got to make a quick exit. I wait.
No one appears. The driver, I’m guessing-maybe a regular or employee-has disappeared through a side door. My head pulses. I dim the light on the computer monitor, thinking maybe my concussion has made me more sensitive to the crisp resolve of the backlit screen against the darkness of my surroundings.
Car still on, I study the bio page. At the bottom, alphabetically, I find Sandy Vello. I’m about to click on her bio when I’m struck by another of the show’s “performers.” Clyde Robichaux. I recognize the name from my conversations with Sandy. What did she say about him? I can’t quite retrieve the memory.
From his picture, Clyde seems out of place. He looks kind, almost apologetic, big dark eyes-soft and watery-with the thick jowls and puffy cheeks of someone with a large head. He wears a suit that his neck bulges through, like a tree puncturing sun-baked soil. He’s got light brown skin, an ethnic mix of white and something Asian or Latin American. Pock scars dot his upper cheeks, a residue of adolescent acne I always associate with creating humility-in a good way-in adults who once suffered it.
His bio describes a former Marine who saw action in the first gulf war and a “survivalist” who worked as a cameraman for another reality show called Wild Man, where the host and one-man crew visited remote areas and documented a month living off the land. In the third season of Last One Standing, it looked like “muscle-bound Clyde might hook up with fiery Sandy Vello until, in one of the show’s most dramatic moments, she was caught double-crossing her would-be beaux.”
I’m momentarily appreciative of the seductive nature of the language. It’s like the reality-TV producers have done for words what McDonald’s did for burgers and fries-made them irresistible at the expense of substance. Made them appealing and provocative on the most primitive level. And the competition for attention on the Internet has sharpened further the skills of these 21st-century chefs of pre-packaged sound bites. It’s fast-food for language.
I click to find out where Clyde is now. “Clyde joins adventure travel groups as a photographer and videographer through WildPhotos.com. When not hanging from cliffs with his camera, he lives the simple life in Northern California.”
I click on his web site. It features dozens of extraordinary pictures-a woman white-water rafting, a man with rifle leveled at a tiger, and a family of four standing on a rock outcropping so high up that I can see the clouds hundreds of feet below them. Beside the photo, there’s a smaller inset image of a man hanging by harness attached to a sheer cliff by rope and caribiners. A caption says: “Clyde goes all-out to shoot the Cohens in the Klamaths.”
I look for contact information but the only option is to send an email.
I open a new browser window. Into the address line, I type “whois.net.” The site lets you check who registered a particular web site, often giving contact information. Since most web site registrants don’t realize the information is public, they tend not to mask their contact info. So the site can be a bounty for the otherwise stumped journalist.
Indeed.
The registration for WildPhotos.com lists Clyde’s address in Redwood City. I put the address into Google Maps. As the location of his residence appears on the screen-in the hills above Silicon Valley-I hear another car approaching on the diner’s gravel driveway. Instinctively, I duck. I turn my head to see what’s approaching and find my gaze too low to see out the back. Instead, I’m looking dead into Isaac’s car seat. Somehow, a piece of Styrofoam peanut packaging has lodged in the side of the seat, maybe, remarkably, from when the seat was still new.
The peanut’s shape looks a bit like a single hippocampus-half of the hippocampi, which is the gateway to memory. It’s a region in the middle of the brain where neurons form when we have new experiences. The neurons are the seeds of new memories that, with passing time, spread out to the rest of the brain, encoding the new experiences as long-term memories and learning. I stare at the peanut until it becomes blurry. I feel something tugging at my own memory centers, more than tugging, pulling, demanding my attention. My head pulses in beats, arrhythmically, with the sound of the car skidding along the gravel.
It’s like I know something so important but I can’t remember what it is. It’s in that void inside my head, surrounded by strange colors.
I close my eyes. I picture a rat. It’s this pudgy gray fellow with a long rat tail and pink around the eyes. On its head, it w
ears electrodes. I saw it when doing a story about memory research at the University of California at San Francisco. The researchers measured electrical activity in the brains of rats. They were watching new neurons form and travel to different parts of the brain. The researchers discovered that when rats have new experiences, they can only encode long-term memories-the only way those new neurons travel to the rest of the brain-during substantial periods of downtime. It was both a revelation and a confirmation of the obvious: when a brain doesn’t rest, it doesn’t have time to record memories.
I need to rest. Have I been chasing ghosts and irrelevancies at the expense of remembering something critical?
It feels like my brain flickers on and off, like Wi-Fi or bars on a phone.
Do I know some truth and can’t remember it? What is it? A connection between Andrew Leviathan and Sandy Vello and a little girl who walked into traffic, and PRISM and a God drug, and Faith?
Is my chase leading me to truth?
Or is it obscuring truth by denying me downtime to record my own memories, my own truth?
Or, as Bullseye and the Witch suggest: Is chasing what heals me? Is this all nonsense, cooked up by a concussed brain?
I sit up. I look at the newly arrived car, a late-model pickup, its brake lights still gleaming. Two men sit in the front seat conferring.
I don’t have the answers. Sandy Vello has some of them, at least.
I look back at the web site with the address of the registrant for WildPhotos, Clyde’s address, presumably. There’s a phone number. I dial it.
At the first ring, someone answers. “Hello, Clyde?”
I catch my breath. It’s Sandy’s voice.
I hang up.
I put the car in drive.
38
After a twenty-minute drive south on a darkened Highway 280, I glide past the Farm Hill Road exit, which leads to the residence of a former Marine and reality-TV wannabe. Before I stop there, I’ve got more traps to lay.