The Cloud (20 page)

45

F
rom his groggy silence, I infer skepticism. Maybe I’m projecting. I actually don’t have what he’s looking for. Not all of it. But I have a reasonable bluff. “Brain images,” I say. “And the Juggler.”

“Tomorrow night.”

“Now!”

“Too late.”

The dashboard clock reads 12:30.

“Then I’ll go to the police.” Another bluff.

“I’ll call you back.”

Click.

The tires jitter. I’ve moved too far right and I’m sloping down on the slanted edge of the gravel road, pointed at the stump of a once proud redwood. I swerve left. Righted, I gun the car and I exit the rural subdivision, leaving behind Clyde’s fixer-upper, Sandy, maybe Buzzard Bill, a mess of clues I’m starting to connect, I hope.

When I hit the paved road, I take a sharp left. I’m headed in the direction of Highway 280 North, and home. As I reach the highway, the on-ramp appears to split into two unfocused ghost images. For an instant, I can’t tell which of the two ramps is the one that leads me home and which is a blurred vision borne of exhaustion that will lead me to slam my car into the wall.

I pull the car hard to the left. I need sleep. Now. I cross under the highway interchange, still not seeing any other car lights. I keep my trajectory west, heading toward the sharply rising hills that separate the highway from the Pacific Ocean. It’s even more rarified real estate here; big lots peppered with ancient trees, some with grazing deer and fenced horses, accessed, like the house I’ve just escaped, by narrow gravel tributaries.

It’s one of those off-roads I seek.

Less than a mile up the canyon, I find the one I’m looking for. It’s a turn to the left over a creek bridge onto a road that serpentines up a hillside. But I can see as I slow, nearing the turnoff, that, just beyond the bridge, there’s a spot to park. It’s just barely visible from the road, and only if you happen to be looking closely for, say, a slumbering journalist. I pull into the spot, turn off the car, and then, nearly, the phone. I don’t want to be tracked here. But with my finger poised to power off the device, I remember one last task.

I read the text from Jill Gilkeson: I remember Alan Parsons. Call me.

It’s too late for that. It’s nearly 1 a.m.

I type: “Sorry 4 delayed response. I’ll call in morning.”

I hit send.

I start to power off the phone. It beeps with an incoming text. “Im up.” I hit send to initiate a call, trackers be damned.

“I haven’t slept well in years,” she says by way of answering the phone. I blink back a tear. In my exhaustion, I feel connected to this woman.

“Alan Parsons.”

“An amazing teacher. A genius.”

“Of computers.”

“Right. Andrew was so good to him but, if I remember—and please don’t quote me on this—Alan just couldn’t keep it together.”

“Back up. I’m having trouble keeping pace.”

She laughs, like, of course. “By the way, why are
you
awake right now? I guess journalists get focused on their stories, but this isn’t all that interesting. Is it?”

“I’ve experienced loss too.” It’s out of my mouth before I realize I’ve said it. I wonder if I’m establishing empathy as a tactic, or something rawer. In the brush, I see movement. I flinch. Is it a deer or my imagination?

I kill the fog lights. I don’t know if I want to see what’s out there before it visits me. Come what may.

The defeated woman on the other end of the line starts talking. She takes me back to when Andrew Leviathan started building new charter schools on the Peninsula. His goal, she says, was to give opportunity to at-risk students but also talented teachers who the public school system might not embrace. Alan Parsons, she says, was one such teacher. He was a computer whiz, engaging, bright, and thirsty. A drunk, he wound up dropping from Stanford’s computer science PhD program, where he’d been a favorite among undergrads he taught. There was some chatter that Alan did a bit of corporate espionage and hacking to support his booze habit and that he tended to get playful when wasted. He could be a recreational hacker and a devastatingly good one. There was a rumor that Alan, virtually joyriding on gin, once hacked into Pentagon computers and made it look like a warhead had gone missing.

Andrew, the tech-savvy savior, came to the rescue. Andrew hired Alan to do tech support at one of the first charter schools. And, so long as he remained sober, to teach one class.

“How to multitask?” I ask.

She laughs. “That word barely existed then. But, if it did, Andrew wouldn’t have allowed it in the school.”

“What do you mean?”

“Andrew wouldn’t even let computers into class. I only remember this because it seemed so odd. He said the school could teach the
logic
of how computers work, programming skills and capabilities, but wouldn’t allow screen time.”

It rings familiar. Polly mentioned at some point in our discussion of future school options for Isaac that some Montessori programs keep technology at a distance. But it doesn’t sound consistent with the Andrew I’ve been learning about. He’s been pushing heavy technology use; it’s in his blood, and maybe that blood is bad. I’m hypothesizing that he’s been simultaneously developing insidious Juggler technology on the sly while creating a public face that limits use of technology in schools. Why?

“Jill, was Andrew involved in the Juggler project?”

“Haven’t heard of it. But I didn’t know Alan all that well.”

She says that, as far as she could recall, Alan couldn’t stop drinking. He was fired. But the two men kept up their ties. She says that she seems to vaguely recall Alan’s name coming up recently; she thinks Andrew might have contacted him again.

“If you’re looking to do a story on Andrew’s generosity, I think you could include the part about Alan.”

“Alan died recently.”

She doesn’t respond. She can’t stand hearing about death.

“I need to go,” I say. I really do. I can’t see for exhaustion. And, I realize as the adrenaline starts to fade, I’m ravenous.

“Get some sleep.”

“Jill?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask you one more thing? It’s about your daughter.”

Silent ascent.

“Did she ever have contact with Mr. Leviathan?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Alarmed.

“Sorry. Terrible turn of phrase. I meant: was he generous with her too, in terms of his time or his commitment to education?”

“Oh.” She pauses. “Not really.” Another pause. “Other than the after-school program.”

“Program, like . . .”

“Glorified babysitting, for kids of employees. Board games and computer games. Early ones. The kids got to play with all kinds of toys the big brains in R and D were developing.”

Internal alarm bells, a burst of adrenaline. I let it pass so I don’t betray the zeal of my curiosity and frighten her. She fills in the silence.

“She must’ve gone for near two years. She really craved it, hanging out with the other kids. It was a little wonderland. It brought her alive, in a way.”

“How so?”

“I’m really not comfortable talking about her. Suffice it to say, Mr. Leviathan’s a saint. Now, I’ve got to try to get some sleep myself.”

End of interview.

“Sleep well, Jill.”

Click.

My phone beeps. I look at the screen. There’s a notification: tomorrow afternoon, I’m due at the courthouse to meet with tax authorities.

I turn off the device. I drop it into the center console. I trade it for an energy bar that I devour. Dinner, breakfast, whatever it is at this point.

I recline. I close my eyes, craving sleep, seeing puzzle pieces. I form a picture: Andrew Leviathan, through his partner and intermediary, Gils Simons, has sold or is otherwise exporting to China some technology that entertains kids and professes to help them multitask, turn them into cloud masters. But it actually hurts their brains. Does it hurt development of their frontal lobes by overloading them with data? They’re not mastering the cloud, or successfully juggling it, they’re winding up in one.

I suspect Andrew had been testing the technology for years.

Recently, Alan Parsons stumbled onto their plot and he tried to blackmail Leviathan, his former benefactor. He first tried to reach me by a fake email address for Sandy Vello. I overlooked or ignored or didn’t see it. So he used Faith to help seduce me into his efforts. But why? Why did he need my help? Was he afraid Leviathan would come after him, and is that exactly what happened?

Where does Buzzard Bill fit in, and the stout man with the crooked smile in Chinatown? My guess is that each is acting as muscle but exactly for what and whom?

And what more is there to Faith? Is she safe?

I see a memory fragment. I’ve awakened in the hotel room with her, after a night of feverish sex in a concussed state. I open my eyes to find her staring at me, eyes glistening, real emotion. In my mind’s eye, in the present, her face transforms into Polly, eyes glistening, sitting over an empty fortune cookie. “I have something to tell you,” she says. “Brace yourself.”

I bite the inside of my cheek to shatter the memory fragment. I feel a sob deep inside my chest, rising. I see its origin: a black void inside me, creeping from my head into my body, a fast-spreading emotional malignancy, like a fresh bloodstain.

I fall asleep.

I wake up with a start when I hear the tapping on the window.

46

M
y first thought: someone needs an endocrinologist. My second: that someone is a cop.

He stands at the driver’s-side window. Blue and brown uniform, no cap. And no facial hair. Zero. His face looks ice smooth. It’s a relatively rare hormone imbalance, low testosterone, unless he shaves every forty-five minutes.

Nonchalant, he holds a black baton in a beefy right hand that does not lack in testosterone. I open the driver’s-side door. Behind the cop stands his motorcycle, sun bouncing off the black gas tank.

“Not a cool place to sleep one off.” His voice matches the detached coolness in the air. He’s not picking a fight, just giving both my first and last warning. A bird chirps. In the tree above us, a gray gnatcatcher stops on a leafless limb, then darts upward into a crisp, cloudless morning. From the angle of the sun, it might well be ten in the morning.

I swallow hard, tasting foul, lumpy paste.

“I’m sorry, officer. I worked late, got too tired to drive 280.”

He cocks his head. I look at the underside of his nose, a likely spot to see hair growth if his face is capable of it. No little sprouts. He clears his throat, wanting my attention undivided.

“You need to get home to your family.”

“No family, officer.”

He furrows his eyebrows. Those he has. I see him look in the backseat and I turn. He’s eyeing the car seat.

“I could give you a field sobriety test.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sober. One thousand percent. I’m . . .” I run out of words. “You’re right. My family needs me.”

“I’ll be back in five minutes to make sure you’re gone.”

I
turn on my phone, which tends to be the first thing I do every morning for the mini adrenaline burst, a wisp of dopamine roughly equivalent to a whiff of coffee, right before the first sip. With an impolite beep, the device lets me know that the battery is low. And there’s one voice message. “Tonight. More instructions later.” It’s spoken in the choppy tonality and grammar of a non-native speaker.

I turn off the phone to give it the rest it needs.

I curl my head in a circle, feeling the crackling in my upper vertebrae, the awakening crinkles of the folds of skin around my neck, the paraspinal muscles and fatty tissue at the base and sides of my neck.

I feel a peculiar sensation. I pause, head leaned at three o’clock, to make sure I’m not mistaken. I’m not. I feel lucid. Clearheaded. I look outside and see colors as vivid as I’ve seen in days. I take in the brown pre-spring nubby leaf buds on the tree branch, and the dusty red bricks stacked at the base of a wheelbarrow near a wooden gate. I’m seeing the world in high-definition again.

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.

C
arl 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.”