Authors: Matt Richtel
D
eath is a blonde with a gun. She looks familiar.
Soft light surrounds her. It attaches to her skin like bread crust. It bends and warps when she rubs salve on your wounds. When she puts the pill on your tongue. When she rights your limp body.
She says, “This will help you sleep.”
Maybe everyone sees the same vision.
Then she leaves. But not before she puts something in your lap.
A cell phone. Even in death, a phone.
T
he pharmaceutical industry has figured out sleep. It’s dreams they can’t do a damn thing about.
Sleeping pills do a great job of shutting down the brain; unfortunately, that’s not the essence of good rest. When dolphins sleep, they shut down half their brain while the other half stays alert. It’s partly because in the ocean the predators work taxicab hours; it’s also so the dolphins can play. So too, our brains get refreshed by the surreal romps of our deepest journeys into sleep.
I had descended into a dreamless, timeless place as bleak as death. But you don’t wake up from death, or, if you do, it probably doesn’t hurt as much as the pain I felt when I found myself in the fetal position on the bloodstained floor of Samantha’s studio.
I peeled open an eye. The heavy grog of hangover encircled my brain. Suddenly pierced by a shooting pain when I shifted the weight from arm to back. “Holy Mother Shit,” I groaned.
I fell back on my stomach, turned my head to the right, and said, “Still ticking.”
Images suddenly returned in chunks.
Gunshots. Velarde falling. A sandal, beneath a jeans-clad leg. A cool hand—turning my face to the side. Hazel eyes, exploring. Then blackness.
Did the blonde angel subdue Velarde and Danny? Did she kill them? I put my elbows on Samantha’s table. I breathed deeply, sucking in the sweet, stale air of combat. More images came this time, held together with synaptic rope. The woman cleaned and sterilized my wounds, removed my manacles, gave me pills. I told her I’d seen her before. In response, she’d handed me a cell phone.
“We’ll call you,” she said. “Rest.”
We. Who was we? Who was she?
I looked on the floor at a mobile phone. A perfectly innocuous Motorola phone, flipped open. Was I expecting a super-secret spy cell phone? “Damn,” I said in the direction of the phone. “I’m going to have to bend over to pick you up.”
I reached left hand over right shoulder to diagnose the damage administered by Weller and Velarde. The muscle movement brought a kaleidoscope of pain, but I could move without collapsing.
I felt the spot near the base of my neck, where Velarde had gone to town. It was covered with a piece of gauze, taped inexpertly to my back and neck. I took stock. I wasn’t suffering blood loss and hadn’t taken a hit to any major organ. Someone had sterilized my wounds. Besides, I thought, Samantha probably had sterilized the needles to begin with. The wounds wouldn’t kill me, I thought. I had probably passed out not from imminent threat of death or even shock, merely from pain.
I slowly bent over, picked up the cell phone and studied it. Looking for . . . I wasn’t sure what, nothing in particular, which is precisely what I found.
The phone was turned on. On the display, the clock read 6:15 p.m. Could it be that I’d been knocked out for only two hours? Or was it two hours plus one full day? I closed the phone and reached to put it in my pocket. Until I realized I was wearing boxer shorts—no pants. Where were they?
In the corner, in a pile, along with my wallet and phone. Right where I’d left them all when I undressed to get acupuncture.
What had happened to Samantha? And to Erin? Didn’t Velarde say that she was knocked out. Or worse?
With adrenaline trumping pain, I donned pants and shirt. I opened the door to Samantha’s small studio. Outside of it was an anteroom—a small waiting area where Samantha’s clients would read yoga magazines on an overstuffed orange chair, and where she would sit, meditate, and wait for them to cook.
As I peeked past the door, I braced for the worst. I felt another burst of adrenaline. There sat Samantha on the big orange chair, her head hung to the side, eyes shut.
“Samantha!”
She didn’t stir.
I stepped toward her. I grabbed her wrist, felt for a pulse, and found a strong one.
“Give me five more minutes, Bullseye,” Samantha slurred quietly.
She seemed to be in a heavy drug sleep, the likes of which I’d probably been in minutes before. I desperately wanted to shake her awake and ask her what she’d seen, but I didn’t think I’d get much useful information. I also thought it better to let her sleep. I put my hand on her cheek.
That’s when I noticed the key. It was dangling from a string around Samantha’s neck. I didn’t remember Sam ever carrying a key that way. I reached forward and supported the key in my fingers. From its logo, I could see that it belonged to a Ford.
I walked to the front door of the studio—a mere three steps given the office’s diminutive size. I looked out onto the dirt parking lot of the industrial complex. It was, as it had been when I’d arrived, empty, with one exception: a Ford Explorer, evidently belonging to the key dangling from my ring finger.
It was a curiosity, then a sudden source of anger. Who the fuck was playing with me, and why?
“What the hell?”
The answer, once again, came from my pants. The mystery phone was ringing.
As I opened the flip phone, I remembered the strangest feeling. Déjà vu. I felt like I’d been in that exact moment a thousand times before. I tried to shake off the sensation, and put the phone to my ear.
“Hello,” I said tentatively. “This is Nat.”
“Turtle,” said my formerly dead true love. “I’ve missed you so much.”
I
’d had reunions with Annie before. Often on a bench in Golden Gate Park. I would sit with a bag of sunflower seeds. One seed for me. One for the squirrels. Two for me. Two for the squirrels.
I was the picture of contemplation, pity, and piety. I exuded a kind of contrition—like if Annie were watching from the afterlife she would know I was living with the proper cool reflection of one who has lost a true love.
But she wasn’t in the afterlife. She was fifty yards away and walking toward me, her smile broadening with each closing centimeter. Even when we locked eyes, she wouldn’t run. I would finally stand. But wait too. Savoring. Then, at last, she wouldn’t contain her legs. She’d sprint into my arms.
“This isn’t possible,” I’d whisper into her hair.
“I’m here, Turtle,” she’d say. “It’s really me.”
I’d bury my head in her hair. Then she’d laugh. We’d kiss while the squirrels stood on hind legs and applauded with their paws.
I had the fantasy a thousand times in the months after Annie disappeared. It was usually a variation on the same theme—though one component of the story always seemed to change. The explanation for how Annie had returned to me. How she had survived her slip and fall into the Pacific.
I could never conjure any suitable explanation. So I left it to nebulous and fantastical: She had hit her head and been carried to safety by dolphins; or she had been kidnapped by sailors on a foreign cargo ship and made a harrowing escape in the shark-infested waters off New Zealand.
The explanation for her presence was hazy and unimportant. But the moment we reconnected—
that
I had always imagined in exquisite detail. It was ripe with joy and, above all, laughter. Nothing at all like the way it actually happened.
A
nnie,” I said, then paused. “Is it really you?”
“Are you alone?” she said.
That voice. I’d know that voice in a wind tunnel, with my ears stuffed with both cotton and the drummer from Nirvana.
I looked around the parking lot. Was she asking if there was anyone around me? Not that I could see.
Before I answered, I paused. I took one more look at my surroundings. Was any of this real? Maybe I’d actually entered the afterlife, and it looked a lot like an industrial park.
“Annie,” I said.
“It’s me, Turtle.”
“Am I dead?”
Annie swallowed hard.
“No. We’re not dead.”
I looked up at the sky.
“This isn’t possible.”
“It’s really happening. But we don’t have much time.”
“Annie, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know whether we’ll talk again. So I’ve got to say this: I’ve missed everything—your hands, and the way you smell when you get out of the shower, and . . . ” I paused, then continued. “I take that back. I like the way you smell and look all the time and under all circumstances; even if you never bathed again, you will still be the greatest-smelling person ever.”
A laugh. She laughed, but only lightly, thinly. Still, I felt the heart tremors.
“Nat, there’s no time. Are you alone?”
“You’ve got to tell me what’s going on. Where are you? How long have you been . . . out there? Annie, did you save me at the café?”
“I need to know if you’re alone, Nat. Can we speak freely?”
I felt a blush of admonition drench my skin. I felt woozy. This was cornered Annie.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m in danger, Nat. We’re both, obviously, in danger.”
I felt my knees weaken.
“Did you find the Explorer?”
I looked at the black sport utility vehicle, then at the key in my hand. I told her I’d found it.
“Annie—I need something. Explain . . . how did you not contact me? All these years?”
Before she could answer, I added, “Were you in a coma?”
“When I see you. I’ll explain everything. Why I couldn’t see you. And we’ll have chocolate shakes, and I’ll fall asleep with my head in your lap, and we can dream.”
My heart grew three sizes. But still I wanted to demand answers. I wanted to scream for an explanation. My mouth was almost too dry to speak.
“You need to be in Nevada—tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “There’s a map—in the glove compartment. With precise details.”
“Nevada,” I said, with not nearly the shock I was feeling.
“Boulder City. Not far outside of Las Vegas. It’ll take nine hours. Nat, no airports or police. It’s too dangerous.”
That one part I pretty much had figured out. Especially as it related to the police. Just hours ago, they were using a scythe to play pin the tail on my donkey. The phone nearly slipped from my hand. It was slick with perspiration. I wiped it off, and switched hands and ears.
Annie said, “We’re taking care of your friend. We’re protecting her from them.”
“Friend.”
“Erin,” Annie said. “She’s very pretty.”
I recognized Annie’s tone of voice. Jealousy. I’d heard it dozens of times during our relationship. Never merited, and always preceding an argument. Its presence here was preposterous, but there wasn’t time to be defensive. That could wait, at least, until I brought up the other woman in my life.
“Samantha,” I said. “What happened to Sam?”
A pause. Like Annie put her hand over the phone. I heard muffled voices, then Annie returned.
“She’ll be fine. She’ll have a headache for a few hours,” Annie said, then added without a segue, “I love how much you care about people around you.”
The overture was lost on me. I was stuck on an earlier sentence. We’re taking care of her, Annie kept saying.
We?
Then a shooting pain.
I felt myself lose footing, my legs buckled, the earth slithered underneath me, the onset of another shrieking headache.
“Something’s wrong with me, Annie. I don’t know if it was the acupuncture, or . . . it’s something that’s been going on for a couple of days. Since the explosion.”
“What are you talking about?” she said, sounding earnest and intense.
“My head. It’s—it feels like it’s exploding.”
“Nat, focus. I need you to tell me when it started. Are you disoriented? Nauseated?”
“Yes. A couple of days ago. I’m thinking it’s post-traumatic stress disorder, but bad. Or . . . what?”
After a brief pause, she spoke. “Dammit. Goddammit. Let me think for a second.” She paused again. “Can you get hold of some amphetamines—like Ritalin, or even crack? Low, low doses of crack would be fine.”
Ritalin. The stuff people take for attention deficit disorder? Crack? Me?
“You’re just tired, Nat. If you can’t get something stronger, fuel up on sugar and caffeine. It’ll keep you going.”
Sugar and caffeine.
I wanted to go back in a time machine.
“Are you qualified to prescribe sugar?”
I was hoping for a connection. I got the opposite—a disconnection.
“I have to go now,” she said, her tone intensified. “Nathaniel, I need you to bring that man’s laptop.”
I gulped for air.
“We can trade it for our freedom.”
Our
freedom.
“I can’t wait to see you, Turtle. Don’t forget the laptop. It’s everything.”
The line went dead.
I stood up. Blood, what was left of it, took the A train from brain to extremities. I paused to let dizziness pass. I looked at Samantha, still slumbering, then I staggered toward the Explorer.
Annie was alive. How could that be? But I heard her, the warmth, coupled with that toughness I’d had so much trouble grasping in our year together. More of that than I remembered. Still, it was Annie, and her whereabouts were locked inside the mystery Ford.
As I put the key into the door lock, I was struck by an impulse. Fighting the pain in my neck, I leaned under the car. I looked at the underside. Did there appear to be anything out of the ordinary, or dangerous? Like a bomb?
Nothing looked suspicious.
I pressed my hands against the ground in the form of a push-up. I rose to my feet. A phoenix—with blue canvas high-tops. Annie was waiting. So was Erin. I opened the car door. “I’m rebounding,” I said.
I climbed into the car, and was struck by the antiseptic smell of leather scrubbed clean. Without hesitation, I reached for the glove compartment. I opened it and found a cream-colored envelope. Inside that, a map—of Nevada. It was in black and white, except for the circle in blood-red pen around Boulder City. A town apparently so small that it was denoted by the littlest typeface on the map. It wasn’t far from Hoover Dam and Lake Mead.
There was a typewritten note on the edge of the paper. It instructed me to be in Boulder City the following afternoon. I had almost twenty hours to get to my destination. I glanced back at the paper—at the few additional words typed there. “Will call with an address,” it read. The note wasn’t signed, it was stamped with the image of a turtle.
On autopilot, I carried Samantha to the car and set her in the back seat, where she continued to metabolize sleeping medicine. I started the car.
Sometimes my moments of creative clarity happened in the middle of the night. Other times in the shower. Once during a particularly depressing series of one-night stands eighteen months after Annie’s disappearance, while I was mid-coitus with a woman who made bracelets by enclosing colorful plastic around strands of human hair. This time, it happened when I was in reverse.
I was thinking about the sound of Annie’s voice, just the mere, extraordinary sound of it, and her instructions: to bring the laptop, to stay awake eating sugar and caffeine. I was navigating the behemoth SUV out of the lot. I hit the brakes.
The car stopped. My mind careened forward. I was struck by a series of seemingly unrelated images. Andy’s laptop, which everybody seemed to be craving, his headaches, and apparent addiction to uppers. The caged rats, with the holes in their skulls. Someone was experimenting on rat brains, measuring their brain activity.
Eat sugar,
said Annie.
Drink caffeine. Better yet, take uppers.
I had my first guess at what might be happening.
I reached into my jeans. I felt what I was looking for—the tattered and bloodied piece of notebook paper I’d taken from inside a cage at Strawberry Labs. Along the left side of the paper were written numbers, which I knew to be names: A1, A2, up to A15. Then B1 to B5. Some with C and numbers.
At least three dozen. More than I had seen. Missing, and presumed dead.
Beside each name were four columns. One read “food,” the next, “stim”; the next two had the headers “NOR” and “DA.” I couldn’t be sure what that meant, but I had a strong guess. Norepinephrine and dopamine. Neurotransmitters, measurable through urine sample. They helped control attention span and impulsivity.
Also, the rats had shaved heads, consistent with the placement of electrodes. Like someone also had been measuring their brain waves. Attached to B4’s wires had been two words, “stim” and “wave.”
Stimulation? Brain waves?
Food? Stim? The concept rang familiar. Wasn’t it a classic experiment? What would rats choose, food or stimulation? But why? What did that have to do with this?
“No way,” I said, almost in the form of a question, then answered myself. “Not possible.”
I flashed on the image of Andy’s laptop, its space bar cracked and indented. He typed the word “ping” over and over. Like a rat clawing at a lever to obtain more stimulation. Was Andy doing something similar? Could the computer have been acting as a stimulant? Could it elevate anxiety and adrenaline—to dangerous levels? Could it be elevating mine?
“Not possible.”
I reached for the super-secret spy phone. I fumbled it in my slippery hands, looking for the feature that told me what numbers I’d received calls from. Annie’s number was listed as blocked.
I scrolled the menu looking for anything else that could tell me her whereabouts. Was there a way to find her—immediately? Not in twenty hours, when it might be too late. I looked in the mirror. A chalk outline of a face looked back, eyes peering through whiskers and disease.
I dialed directory assistance and asked for the number for Glenn Kindle. Unlisted. I tried Kindle Investment Partners. I found myself at the voice mail of Glenn’s administrative assistant, Diane McNulty. Good old Diane. She wasn’t around either. I called the operator again and asked for any Diane McNultys in the surrounding area. There was a listing in Redwood City, a few miles north and a few tax brackets south of Palo Alto.
Before I knew it, I’d been connected to Diane’s number. And shortly thereafter, I heard another voice from the past.
“Hello.”
“Diane?”
“This is she.”
“Howdy, Diane McNulty,” I said, employing the politician’s trick of repeating a name. “It’s Nathaniel Idle—Annie’s old boyfriend.”
There was a pause.
“Hi, Nat. My goodness. How are you?”
Warm. Like a grandmother who just wanted to invite you in off the porch and give you a cold glass of lemonade.
“Diane. I need to find Glenn,” I said abruptly. “It’s essential that I reach him.”
Again, a pause. “I’d be happy to get a message to him tomorrow. Can you give me a call at the office?”
I sunk my head into my shoulders. She was a smiling Cerberus, a dog at the gate happily wagging her tail, but whose protective powers were not to be underestimated in the slightest.
“Can I reach him tonight?” I said. “I can’t impress upon you how important this is.”
“Oh, I don’t think so, Nat. He’s in transit to Las Vegas. He’s speaking at TelCom, the annual trade show with telecommunications companies,” she said. “I bet you’re calling about Ed Gaverson. Aren’t you still a reporter of some kind?”
Ed Gaverson. The founder of Ditsoft, Glenn Kindle’s friend and sometime business rival.
“Isn’t it a tragedy? On top of the world—and he does . . . that. . . ?” she said, lowering her voice. “This is all off the record, of course.”
I was a juggler, a spinner of plates, a sword swallower, with someone sharpening knives already ingested. Something happened to Gaverson?
“I need to talk to him about . . . Annie,” I said.
“Oh, Nat,” she said quickly, innocently. “I know how hard that was for you. I promise to let him know right away you’d like to chat. Is it the anniversary?”
Diane had no idea what I was talking about. I wasn’t sure if, and how much, I should tell her. What if I told her about Annie, and she told Glenn or whoever had Annie fighting for her life?
Who else would have Annie scared to death?
“How can I reach Dave Elliott?” I asked.
“Oh yes, that’s a good idea. He’s in downtown San Francisco.”
A hop, skip, and a jump. I turned the car around and pulled out of the parking lot. In the rearview mirror, I again caught a glimpse of my face—illuminated by fading sun. The light accentuated the red lines burned into my eyes. If I didn’t get answers soon, would I even survive long enough to see Annie?