Hooked (23 page)

59

T
he
Monkey
was a fifty-six-foot houseboat. And it had gone missing. It wasn’t in its prescribed slip in Callville Bay Marina. Annie had already made her escape.

I stood with my fists balled in the dusk, looking out over massive Lake Mead.

“It left half an hour ago. You can still see it,” a voice said.

From behind a bait stand walked Erin. She pointed on the horizon. You could still make out the
Monkey
in the distance, crawling away. I began scanning the marina, but listened to Erin.

“You’re alive,” she said. “That’s a very good start.”

“Did you see Annie?”

“The boat was pulling away when I got here.”

I could feel Erin come up to me from behind. A shirtless man was cleaning chum from a skiff with an oversized outboard motor. I walked toward him with Erin.

“What are you going to do?”

I turned to face her.

“They framed you.”

“Who did?”

“They planted evidence in your apartment. They—” I said, stopping short. I didn’t have it in me to tell her she’d pulled the trigger, that she’d been the physical tool used to detonate a bomb. A right time would come. “They used you. The same people who . . . killed Andy.”

The implications washed over her face. She was the victim, and yet had been suspected of killing people she loved. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was, that we’d hit the bottom, and that we were going to go home soon. But I’d arrived at the shirtless man. I pointed to the
Monkey
. I offered him the contents of my wallet—$82—for a water taxi.

“Do the police know?” she asked.

“Not yet. Where’s Bullseye?”

“I left him in the hotel, sitting in the lobby, talking on the phone to Samantha, listening to her talk.”

I climbed onto the taxi.

“I’m coming with you,” Erin said, suddenly searing with strength.

I convinced Erin to wait for me on the dock—that I needed to do this next part alone—and jetted out to the
Monkey
. I climbed onto the houseboat and found Annie sitting in the common area. She didn’t look surprised to see me. I’d been obsessing over what to say, and still, when I saw her, I couldn’t find words. How had it gone so wrong? She finally broke the silence.

“Turtle. You have to understand. I loved you. I
love
you. You were the only person who ever understood me for what I am . . . for what I could be.”

The old Annie.

“Stop it, Annie. It’s time for the truth. Please help me understand.”

“Who knows you’re here?”

“No one.”

A lie—not just about Erin. Mike had given me another GPS device for my car in case I went missing. With a couple of hundred bucks and a little technical expertise, you can make the CIA look like a bunch of Luddites.

I’d started putting the facts together on the drive. Maybe the effects of the computer were finally wearing off, allowing me to process. Somehow, Simon Anderson had learned Annie was alive. That must have been what Andy meant when he said Simon was upset about someone named Tara. He was trying to bribe the family again. They had to act, taking him out, along with others they’d experimented on, and destroying the rest of the evidence of their lab tests. Annie and Dave had been partners, piggybacking on Glenn’s connections, but going further than he imagined. They planned to undo him all along, I guessed. From her phone, she’d sent a text message to Dave, urging him to barge in on the meeting with the executives. I recounted it for Annie, just above a whisper. She shook her head, in a quasi-admission. “My father and Dave were behind it,” she protested, unconvincingly. This topic bored her.

She walked to me and put her arms around my waist. She looked into my eyes.

“I got him good, didn’t I?”

I pushed her away.

“You’re disappointed in me,” she said, soft, sad.

I couldn’t reconcile the Annie I’d known with Annie the Conquerer, Annie the Smiling Assassin. It was too simple to describe her behavior as multiple personality disorder. A changeling was more like it. Different shades and shapes and angles, changing light and darkness. But there was a unifying force: selfishness. Annie wanted what she wanted when she wanted it. She felt utterly sincere about her passions. What did she want now? My help escaping? I didn’t say anything and silence descended. Suddenly she looked so old, like my grandmother, undone, mourning the loss of Grandpa.

“No, you can’t love this. You couldn’t love this,” she said, with a touch of self-pity, then an edge. “You thought I was pretty. You liked the sex, right? The sex was great. You thought I was witty and smart. What does all that mean?”

Remarkably, she wanted affirmation. It was like the tone she used to muster when she got jealous.

“Not true, Annie. You made me feel something I’d never felt before. I
still
feel it,” I said. “True love. Whatever happens, whatever happened.”

“You mean that?”

She was a killer, I had to remind myself. But we had loved each other. It’s what people pray for, what they die for. Someone who makes them feel all the highs and depth that emotion has to offer. The divine. The feeling of being needed, and understood. Better than any drug. Because you share it.

“Yep. You
made
me feel it,” I said.

I leaned against a railing and realized what my gut had been telling me for hours.

“I wasn’t your first true love, Annie, was I? I was your beta test.”

The epiphany prompted a ringing in my ears. There was another sound. Police sirens approaching the marina.

“Subliminal advertising. On the computer you gave me. When you gave me the desk, and the quill pen.”

I took a step toward her. “You put something on the computer you gave me. You programmed me, like you programmed Erin to blow up the café. Like you programmed the rats. You manipulated my feelings. You made our love neon. You made it bigger than life. You made me into an addict.”

She closed her eyes. She responded softly.

“Why do you think you couldn’t see my flaws? It was primitive. Simple. Subliminal advertising, pictures of me, positive messages.”

“Messages and pictures? Those are the bases of our relationship?”

“I watched when you were most drawn to me, what I was wearing and saying. I took high-definition pictures dressed the same way, and loaded them onto your computer. I posed naked. I took pictures of us in bed. I created images with short phrases like ‘I love turtle’ and ‘Annie = happiness,’ random images with me wearing Denver Broncos T-shirts, and eating your favorite foods. I loaded an audio file with my name and played it at very low and high frequencies. A hundred experiments. Every time you were on the computer, you were flashed with the images, when you surfed the Web, checked sports scores, sent e-mail, shopped, played Scrabble with your grandmother.”

It seemed, at last, like something real. Yet on some level, it rang false. Intellectually I could grasp what had happened; it was the most profound, inescapable assault. I was fighting myself—head and heart. Blow for blow. My own realization undermined by incredulity.

“Bullshit! It’s not that simple. You can’t deny what we felt. I loved you even after your vicious computer was gone. You can’t take that away from me.”

Annie took my hand. I pushed it away.

“I used to watch you when you were on the computer, wondering what you liked more, me or my digital incarnation.”

“You were manipulating me? I was nothing to you—an experiment.”

Silence.

“Then you put something on my laptop five days ago too?”

“No.”

“No?!”

“You didn’t have me tortured?! You didn’t order those cops to torture me?!”

“Dave.” Quietly. “Dave hated you. He was jealous. After the café . . . He . . . ”

“It doesn’t make sense. Why would you save me from the explosion? You never cared about me. Why save me?!”

Annie plopped onto the couch. I practically sprang toward her. She recoiled.

“Because you loved me too,” I said. “You can’t
imagine
what we felt, Annie. You can’t invent it. You can’t digitize it. You can’t fake it.”

She paused.

“I will grant you that no one ever made me feel the way you did,” she said.

“You will
grant
me?”

“When we first met, I couldn’t believe you felt that way about me. How I started to feel. How the whole thing made me feel. I couldn’t trust it,” she said. She’d sewn up the psychology nice and tight.

“It was real. It was the goddamn real thing! You were
it
. I loved you from the moment I laid my eyes on you. I loved your laugh. I loved your smile. I loved your passion.”

“That’s why you were perfect.”

“Because I was inspired by you?”

“Because you’re a romantic. Because you’re the kind of person who leaves a career in medicine to become a writer. Because you wrote me poetry—the goofy kind that rhymes. Because you believe in intense emotion.”

“Stop rationalizing!”

My yell rocked the boat.

I heard a rush of cascading water. Speedboats were getting close. The police.

Annie stood, her eyes widening. She ran out of the far door of the cabin, onto the deck. I followed her into the pitch black. She moved to the front of the boat. Police headlights were coming. I could hear voices. I moved close enough to see Annie’s face. She’d turned hard. “If they frame me, I’ll go to jail forever.”

“Frame you? Jesus.”

“They don’t get it,” she said. “They’re missing it.”

“Missed what?”

“
You’re
still missing it. My father is finished. He was small-time. I didn’t need him, or his precious executives. They were convenient. They gave me structure and resources but I hung those flailing hypocrites out when I realized their use had passed. They don’t know a damn thing about real connection, especially my father. Anyway, this won’t stop anything. People want the connection. They need it. They crave it. It’s what matters. It’s already out there.”

“It’s over, Annie.”

She walked to the railing. She paused, then softened just a bit. I swear I saw a tear.

“A few months before I went away, I had lunch with Sarah,” she said, sounding suddenly rational. “I told her that if something were ever to happen to me, I wanted you to be happy. I wanted you to find someone to be with. I mean that still. I want you to be happy.”

I smirked.

“Erin seems quite amazing. See how easy it is to replace me?”

Annie had closed her eyes. She opened them again.

“I have to go. This time, no tricks,” she said. “Will you try to save my life?”

“What?”

“You know how to save lives. You told me on our second date. Can you save mine? Will you?”

Annie was not impervious to pain. She could dress it up all she wanted, but the thing we felt, however engineered, meant something to her. I meant something.

“You’re right, you know,” I said.

I heard a voice on a bullhorn. “Stop your engines.” The police were almost near enough to climb on board.

“Right about what?”

“I didn’t love you. I could never have loved you.”

Annie flinched. That flinch I’d seen when her father told her she’d have to disappear.

“STOP THE ENGINES. NOW.”

Annie climbed onto the railing. Her voice was childlike—a whisper.

“Will you save me?”

I heard the police climb into the boat.

I grabbed her arm.

“Don’t forget me. Don’t forget how we made each other feel.”

She caught my gaze, then leapt. Gravity broke my grip and I scrambled to the railing. When she hit the water, she looked up at me, churning her arms, and she smiled.

60

T
he boat exploded in lights and chaos. I pointed an onrush of police to the spot where moments before I’d seen bubbles. It took less than a minute for the first officer to dive in. A hand restrained me from diving in myself, or maybe I was just paralyzed.

The hand belonged to a familiar arm—that of Lieutenant Aravelo.

“We tracked you to Vegas. You and your friend have a lot to explain.”

“Yeah, us meddling kids,” a voice said.

It was Erin.

Aravelo scoffed.

“They wanted me to identify Annie,” she said.

I stared into the water, and pointed.

Erin put her hand on my shoulder. She let it slide down my arm, onto my forearm. She took my hand and gently rubbed the webbing between my thumb and forefinger.

EPILOGUE

S
ome people consider the extraordinary beauty of our world to prove the existence of God. How else to explain the aspects of nature so perfectly suited to human comfort and joy?

But another explanation is that humans and our surroundings evolved together for millions of years. Of course we see our world as beautiful; we’ve been growing in concert with it, fitting together with it, and surviving thanks to it. Nature may not be evidence of the divine, but, rather, the ultimate living room in which our rear ends and the couch have been forming together for our entire existence.

What is distraction? What is true?

Three months after Annie disappeared for the second time,
American Health Journal
published my article on the scientific basis for the physiologically addictive qualities of computers. It either was unintentional or subconscious poetry that inspired me to sit down in a café (not the one that exploded, at least) to read the finished product in print.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON E-MAIL

by Nat Idle

A small but growing body of evidence suggests that human interaction with computers is altering brain functions, and affecting mood and productivity, not necessarily for the better.

While the science is nascent, it indicates measurable impact on neurotransmitters from the continual stimulus-response feedback loop created when people send and receive information from computers, cell phones, and other digital gadgets.

The issue first emerged three months ago, after a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist and his cohorts were discovered to have allegedly developed technology aimed at maximizing the stimulatory effects of computers. The financier, Glenn Kindle, is awaiting trial on murder charges in the deaths of experiment subjects, and has pleaded innocent, asserting that his company was trying to understand and develop new ways to enhance the computing experience.

The larger issue, of whether the brain could be impacted by computer interaction, now seems answerable in the affirmative, though the research is largely derivative. One early study at Michigan State University mapped images of people’s brains while they were playing video games and was able to demonstrate that players’ brains look similar when stimulated to those of individuals with compulsive aggression disorders.

Allegedly, cohorts of Glenn Kindle were involved in rat experimentation to see if the rodents would abandon food in favor of feeding the pleasure centers of their brains with electrical stimulation thought to be similar to that experienced by heavy computer users.

A perhaps more telling initial indication of the possibility and prevalence of computer-based addiction is anecdotal. Around the country, psychologists and counselors are reporting a growth in the number of people professing “addiction” to their computers and Internet use. This phenomenon—entailing people feeling a compulsive interest in surfing the Internet, checking voice mail, and using their phones, often at the same time—had previously been considered to be an act of volition.

In light of the arrest of Mr. Kindle, and his company attorney, David Elliott, there is some concern that a more traditional form of addiction is plausible. Indeed, some counselors have begun treating the activity like a physical compulsion, urging if not complete disconnection for users, then limited interaction—relegated even merely to work hours—to try to mitigate the impact of the stimulus-feedback loop.

The medical theory behind computer-based addiction has some parallels to attention deficit disorder. The constant digital stimulation created raises the level of certain neurochemicals. When the stimulation ceases, the body craves elevated levels of chemicals. Yet it has been difficult to determine precisely how the technology might work, and thus impact the brain. Complicating the pursuit of answers is the bizarre fate of Kindle’s daughter, Annie Kindle. Glenn Kindle’s attorneys assert the young woman was the mastermind of the computer-stimulation technology. But this allegation has been difficult to substantiate; around the time of her father’s arrest, Ms. Kindle disappeared—diving into Lake Mead to evade authorities. She is presumed dead.

Also anecdotal has been an appearance of what some counselors are calling a new round of cases of extreme computer addiction—hundreds of people who seem so entranced by the computing experience that it is cutting into every aspect of their lives. Characteristics of the “illness” entail frequent, compulsive multitasking, and a pressing urge to fill life with stimulation or distraction. Sufferers feel bored in the absence of something to do, and tend to seek out a focus, an activity, even an intense discussion—the kind of emotional spur that Freudian thinkers would refer to as drama.

Curiously, the emergence of this strain has coincided recently with what computer experts are saying is the appearance of a new variant of computer worm; like many worms, it causes pop-up advertisements, but these images are subliminal, flickering only briefly on the screen.

Counselors say that if people feel their computer has contracted the worm, if they increasingly feel unable to understand why they are constantly drawn to their gadgets, they may be under powers greater than their control. The only choice at that point, experts said, is to unhook.

At that point in the story, the text was interrupted by a graphic—a visual conceived by my editor, Kevin—that showed a mystical beam of particles traveling from screen to brain. It prompted me to laugh aloud.

“Medical journals don’t have a reputation for being that funny,” a woman’s voice said. Erin took a seat at the table next to me in the café. She wore the uniform of someone who had just been on a jog, her hair in a ponytail.

“You get your comedy from the
New York Times
,” I reminded her.

A few weeks earlier, Erin had introduced me to a game she’d invented called “How’d They Die?” She would read me an obituary and I would have to guess the person’s cause of death.

I was hanging out with Erin a lot, and even learning to appreciate her interest in free-form dance.

M
y physical symptoms induced by the computer had faded, actually, very shortly after I disconnected myself from the loaded laptop. Samantha helped, throwing some wicked spiritual voodoo my way, though I took a decided break from acupuncture, and Bullseye aided my healing with what he referred to as his holistic beer-and-big-screen-TV treatment.

My feelings about Annie took a predictable path from disbelief to anger, and then wound up in a less expected place. While I no longer romanticized Annie herself or wanted her to return—I’m done dating sociopaths—I continued to wrestle with the feelings she stirred. How could I distinguish between the healthy version of passion and the destructive version of the same thing? Once you’ve felt such connection, real or imagined, how do you not yearn for it again?

Maybe alcoholics feel just that way—forever knowing the most beautiful taste in the world will kill them. How does any of us know if the short-term obsessive pursuit of something we love—working, nutritional eating, following celebrity love lives and daily news developments, gambling, exercising, reading—comes at the expense of long-term happiness?

What is true, and what is distraction? What is love?

Maybe it depends for each of us on how we metabolize emotion and experience, or simply what we choose to believe. With each passing day, I gain a little wisdom that lets me recognize which people and experiences are my own fifth of Jack Daniel’s.

The next love will be less great, and greater.