The Cloud (11 page)

22

W
e watch in silence as he disappears into the alley.

“Faith, may I wax melodramatic?”

“Wax.”

“It’s now or never.”

“That is melodramatic. But what’s it mean?”

I’m surprised to hear myself laugh. It’s both a real emotion and a desire to connect. I shouldn’t. She’s a gigantic question mark with full lips and deep eyes and no obvious medical condition.

From my pocket, I pull the pre-paid mobile phone that I purchased an hour earlier. I tell Faith my plan: I’m going to walk by the Mercedes and put the phone onto the car windshield. When the man returns, he’ll find the phone and we’ll give him a call and try to elicit some information. Who is he? What does he want?

“That’s the plan?” Faith sounds surprised, in an underwhelmed kind of way.

I half nod.

“What’s to keep him from throwing away the phone or ignoring our call or hearing your voice and tossing it?”

I don’t say: 1) I want him to feel like he doesn’t have all the cards; and 2) her questions are all spot-on and I don’t have the answers.

Instead, I say: “Now or never.”

She puts her hand on my arm. “What am I supposed to do?” Implicit in her question: what is she supposed to do if something happens to me?

“Get in the driver’s seat in case.”

“This makes no sense.”

From a compartment between the seats, I snag a black pen and reporter’s notebook and stuff them into my back pocket. I step out of the car into a light drizzle, San Francisco mist. It’s momentarily refreshing, then chilly. I consider opening the trunk to grab a sweatshirt but there’s no time. I walk a few steps, then jog toward the Mercedes, hewing as close as I can to the buildings, imaging somehow I’ll become invisible if I can blend into the grayish stone exteriors of Chinatown in the dark.

As I jog, I’m squinting at the mouth of the alley. But for a second, I see the inside of my brain. I imagine blood pouring into the sensory cortex, supporting my vision, and dopamine cascading into my nucleus accumbens, my pleasure centers, giving me a rush. I see the little white spots on my frontal lobe, the concussion, which might explain the slightly blurred vision. Or maybe that’s just an effect from the drizzle.

I am standing at the Mercedes. I whip out the pre-paid Motorola phone from my front pocket, nearly fumble it, have to bend down to catch it. I stand, look at the mouth of the alley. No buzzard sighting. No one else on the street.

I glance at the intersection where I’ve parked. I can’t see my car. I squint. Blood to sensory cortex: where is my car?! Then I see it, just where I left it. Had it disappeared, ghost-like, then reappeared, or was my brain flickering on and off?

I pull out my iPhone. I scramble through dozens of apps I’ve downloaded; a game where I shoot birds at buildings, a program that turns my phone into a mirror, a calorie counter. I find the flashlight app. I click it open. Lights blasts from the phone. I direct it to the passenger window and look inside the Mercedes. On the leather passenger seat, there sits a to-go container, open, half-eaten onion rings inside. Intrepid investigator. I’ve discovered the reason he has oily skin. In the cup holder in the center console, there sits a pack of menthol cigarettes. The backseat is empty. I peer at the mouth of the alley. It’s empty too.

Frontal lobe to Nat: Do something and then run away?

I place the pre-paid phone on the passenger-side windshield. I look at it, gathering drizzle. I lift the slippery wiper blade and place the phone underneath. On an impulse, I put my hand on the passenger side door handle and pull up. It’s unlocked. I open it, causing the inside light to go on. I snag the damp phone, wipe it on my shirt, toss the phone inside, onto the onion rings. I start to close the door. My eye catches a receipt taped to the outside of the food box. I pull it off. Scrawled on it, “buffalo burger, onion rings.” Circled in pen, the word “Bill.” The buzzard has a name.

“Buzzard Bill,” I mutter.

I peer at the alley mouth. I sense movement. The light is changing, playing with the shadows, something or someone emerging from the shadows. In one motion, I push the car door shut and fall to the ground. Thankfully, the car’s inside light goes off instantly.

I don’t know if the movement was Buzzard Bill, or someone else, or my imagination. Where to escape? I look at the sidewalk behind the car. It’s unlit but wide open. Exposed. I look to the front. Same bad news, and then some worse news. At the intersection ahead, I see taillights ignite. My taillights. The Audi pulls out and disappears to the right. Faith has left. Again. For good reason this time? Did she see Buzzard Bill and freak? Did she get a mystery call?

I look directly behind me at the darkened stairwell with shiny, wet steps that bisect the storefronts.

Crab-like, I hustle to the stairwell. I press up against the wall. At the stairwell, I pause; if I slink up the stairs, I’ll be fully exposed. I listen to my heartbeat, fast and regular, comforting me, weirdly, a reminder that I’m largely intact. I take two slow breaths to slow down my heart and my mind.

I hear the Mercedes door open. It closes hard and heavy. Buzzard Bill is in a hurry. I hold my breath and crab-scamper up the stairs. The engine turns over. Car in gear, tires on wet pavement, he’s out.

I remember the reporter’s notebook in my back pocket. Hadn’t I planned to write down the license plate? I feel self-recrimination that, suddenly, dissolves into laughter. A momentary outburst. Relief. I’m safe. More neurotransmitters flooding my brain. Neurological goodness. What would be great would be to feel this way all the time—the feeling of escape, and completion, but without the near-death antecedent.

I glance around. I’m on the top step of the entrance to an apartment building. An intercom system hangs just below eye level with a list of residents, lit dimly from an internal light. Most of the names are in phonetic Chinese, like Chu, some with native characters.

The rain has picked up. I hope the buzzard has reached for a soggy onion ring and found a mysterious phone. He’s deciding whether to pull over and find something telling about it—the owner, address book—or to toss it out the window, maybe figuring it for some kind of surveillance device that tracks his whereabouts, or, alternatively, gunning it back to Chinatown to find whoever put it there.

I’m also trying to imagine what happened to Faith. Why not ask? I pull my own phone from my pocket. I call her. The phone rings and rings. No answer. I leave a message. I contemplate calling the pre-paid phone but decide it’s too soon. He may come right back here before I can get my bearings and make sense of this place.

The phone’s clock reads 9:10. I sit down. It’s quiet enough that I can hear the drizzle. I’m not sure of my next move, so it’s as good a time as any to reflect on the events of the last twenty-four hours:

A gangly, oily-headed man sits in the audience of my awards presentation, then hands me my phone. Had it really fallen from my pocket, or had he somehow taken it and tinkered with it? The next morning, he shows up at my office, trying to follow me and Faith. We evade him, then discover the corpulent corpus of Alan Parsons, the mountain man who nearly felled me at the subway. On his desk, the phone number for a woman with a dead daughter. And a second reference to February 15. Hours later, after I’ve met with still-living narcissist Sandy Vello, the man appears again, this time ostensibly drawn there following Faith.

Faith is beautiful and cautious, scared and confident, irresistible and unpredictable. Why did she kiss me?

And what does any of it have to do with Chinatown? There were Chinese characters on a piece of paper I found on the dead man’s desk. The words have something to do with computers, and so does Sandy Vello. Does it relate to a dead girl named Kathryn Gilkeson? And do all these roads lead to the alley across the street?

One way to find out.

It’s 9:15. I take deep breaths to let a few more minutes pass and make sure the street is as quiet as it seems, and to see if Faith has returned.

9:20. The street is quiet. My car has not returned. I’ve lost Faith.

9:23. I look across the street, at a restaurant on the corner with a pair of enormous chopsticks hanging in the window. It’s a tourist trap, and an emotional one. I flash again on my fateful dinner with Polly, the night I associate with two fortune cookies changing the course of my life. I picture the waiter, his limp left leg, the first empty fortune cookie cracked like an empty egg, water condensed on the outside of Polly’s glass. She’s not sharing my Tsingtao; she’s pregnant. I picture the red tablecloth, damp around the bottom of the water glass. Polly’s smiling a sad smile. She says she wants to tell me something. But I can’t quite remember what she said, or how she said it. I grit my teeth. I look down at my phone.

9:28. Enough.

I stride onto the sidewalk, then across the narrow, empty street, my steps lit intermittently by storefront neon. I reach the mouth of the alley. On the wall next to it, I see the plaque I’d been unable to read earlier from a distance. On its top, Chinese characters. Beneath, a translation: C
HINA
-US H
IGH
-T
ECH
A
LLIANCE
.

I can’t tell if it refers to the dark-windowed office to my immediate right, or something located in the guts of the alley.

I peer into the dark maw.

I see the red glow of a cigarette tip.

23

“W
ho are you?” The voice is accented, the “r” swallowed.

A hefty man steps forward. He’s half a head taller than me, square cranium that’s a bit too large for his body, short-cropped hair, flat nose consistent with his Asian DNA but squished to the right. The right edge of his upper lip looks crooked, a jigsaw puzzle. Big head, slightly exaggerated nose and mouth. I almost gasp from mild thrill. I’ve never in person seen a case of acromegaly, a chronic disorder caused by too much growth hormone.

“You walk like someone who has fame or money.” He reaches to his mouth, pinches the cigarette with thick fingers and flips it against the wall. “Are you famous? If so, I’d like to know you.”

“Not famous.” I half step backward.

“Then it’s the other option.”

“What?”

“You’ve got money. I like money.”

Before I can react, he grabs my shirt. I pull back sharply, extricating myself. But I slip. I fall backward, bracing my hands beneath me. I land, feeling a pop in my elbow.

I feel hands on both my feet, pulling me into the alley. I can’t resist him. My arms, awkwardly bent behind me, prove no match. I cut my losses and put my hands under my already fragile head, skidding.

Then I see lights. A car appears to our left, bouncing along the uneven, one-way street.

When I look up again, I realize I’m lying just inside the alley entrance, the man having slid up my torso, knee on my chest. He rips at my jeans, going for my wallet?

I say: Take whatever you want. But I’m trying to figure out how to hit his solar plexus or the nerve-rich hollow above his collarbone.

He raises his balled right hand, a beefy flesh hammer. He cocks it. It arches downward. I at once buck against his weight and cover my face with my hands. I picture my concussed brain, like an infant, curled up, vulnerable.

“I have a son,” I mutter, or think.

The car lights get closer. A horn blares. The man’s hand crashes down. A supernova explodes inside my skull, then swallows itself.

24

“I
’m seeing phosphenes,” I say.

I sit on a ledge next to infant Isaac. He looks different than I remember him, more teeth and hair. We’re thousands of feet in the air, cloud level. He wears white overalls with alligators on them. I picked them out at a Babys“R”Us in South San Francisco with sticky floors a few months before he was born. Between us on the ledge, a white plate holds two fortune cookies. One is cracked open and is empty.

“I realize you have no idea what I’m talking about.”

“Of course I know about phosphenes,” my tiny son responds. “I’m little but I’m not stupid.”

“You can talk?”

He puts his adorable index finger on his nose and wiggles it absently, an infant discovering his personal space.

Phosphenes are the product of electrical static inside our brains. When neurons fire—which happens pretty much all the time—they are accompanied by electrical signals. The signals throw off static, just like any electrical signal, a veritable neurological white noise. If you’ve ever closed your eyes tightly, you can see a matrix of light; that’s the static. You can see it too with your eyes open, often against a black backdrop.

At this moment, I’m seeing phosphenes in spades, my brain murky and white with static, like I’ve blown a circuit.

“Isaac, am I going to die?”

“I dunno. I’m just a baby. But I do know she’s been lying to you.”

“Who?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Faith? Sandy?”

“Yes.”

“Which one?”

“And you’re lying to yourself.”

“About what, Isaac?”

No answer. I look down at the brown cookies on the plate, understated little bows of pastry and prescience.

“Wake up, Daddy. Before the damage is irreversible. Besides, she’s calling out your name.”

25

“N
athaniel, you’re not serious.”

“Again.”

I open my barely cracked eyes and see a tacky white ceiling, cheap square paneling. Then hair. It’s light brown, long and loose, strands tickling my forehead.

Faith sits astride me. A sheet covers her shoulders. Behind her, on a bureau, sits a cheap television set, flat-panel, from the 1990s, a CRT. I’m in a hotel—no, motel.

“How about if we take a break and get you to the hospital?” the nymph asks.

I shake my head. No. I hate hospitals. “Am I dreaming? I was just dreaming.”

“You’re awake. And you’re having real, live, great sex. Apparently again.”

26

I
try to lift my head but pain and drool keep it pasted it to a pillow. I smell starch and taste glue.

Fighting pain, angered by it, I sit upright. I feel momentarily refreshed, alive, and then intensely dizzy.

Dim gray light comes through the edges of closed curtains covering square windows to my right. A brass-poled lamp stands in the corner. Beneath it, a stiff patterned-cloth recliner is piled with clothes. To my right, on a faux wood nightstand, a square plastic stand holds an advertisement for Roger’s Motel at Ocean Beach. It shows a picture of a motel with a red awning offering “free Wi-Fi” and “free coffee and donuts 7–9.” It instructs: “Dial 0 for the best motel service in San Francisco.” The scuffed and boxy beige landline phone sitting beside it looks like it was bought from a garage sale a generation ago.

My phone sits next to it, looking by comparison like a spacecraft from far in the future.

I look straight ahead, at the bureau with the TV. Behind it, there’s a rectangular mirror with a note written in red lipstick:

back soon.

drink water.

f.

I elongate so I can glance to see myself in the mirror. My right eye is puffy and half-closed, flooded with blood-carrying cells to rebuild the hammer-fist-struck tissue. My elbow aches with distended ligament.

I turn to the side of the bed and I dry heave.

I have no memory of how I got here or when. I’m pretty sure I remember having sex. I called it therapy, and so did Faith.

I slide my feet onto the floor. I stumble to the bathroom, and fumble to extract a paper cup from its sterile paper wrapping. I gulp tepid water, refill and repeat. Even without turning on the light, I can see in the mirror light streaks of red on my chest and arms. Fingernail marks. Faith doesn’t mess around or, rather, she does and with more animation than I might’ve guessed.

I hear buzzing coming from the other room. I wade back through my fog to the bedside, lift and look at the phone resting in the palm of my right hand, notice the screen go briefly out of focus. If I didn’t have a concussion before, I’ve got one now.

A notification tells me I’ve got a voice mail. More brain radiation, I think, as I listen to the message.

“I can tell you more about the juggler thing. Back at the Ramp tonight? Same time.”

It’s cryptic but recognizable. Sandy Vello. The juggler thing. Something having to do with technology and kids.

The motel door swings open. In the doorway stands Faith, breathing hard, her hair wet and flat on her head. She holds a cardboard tray with two coffees and a pastry. I realize my first reaction is not curiosity but hunger.

“Pants,” she says.

“Pastry first, then explain what you mean.”

“Get dressed or you’re going to have to run to the car naked.”

“You’re even kinkier than I remember.”

“He’s coming.” She reaches onto the chair by the door and tosses me a ball of my clothes.

“Who?”

“Let’s go. Now!”