Authors: Matt Richtel
T
he jagged edge of a rock arced toward my head. I leaned forward and turned. The object slammed just below my armpit, into the lat and the ribs. It was excruciating. His momentum propelled him forward and he was nearly on top of me. He cocked his arm again.
I realized I was holding the laptop, which I’d instinctively grabbed for protection. Just as Dave brought the rock down, I held up the computer like a shield, and it took the brunt of the second blow. Dave stumbled to a knee. I turned and swung the laptop. It was blind, but furious, and it hit its mark—the side of Dave’s cheek, just as he was turning to look up at me. He wailed and put his hands to the side of his face.
If there wasn’t so much fury, and so much at stake, it all might have been comical. Men don’t know how to fight. They just know how to threaten to fight. Shoving matches on basketball courts and soccer fields don’t count.
Dave rose. He had his hand on a large gash on his cheek. I held my side. Warm and sticky. We both stood there gasping. What to do next?
“You tried to kill me,” I said. “You’re trying to kill me.”
“I’m defending myself against a psycho. Look at yourself.”
Dave picked up a phone on his main desk and pressed a button. “Building security,” came a voice over the speakerphone. “This is Bob.”
“I need help. I’ve got a hostile visitor,” Dave said.
Intervention was something I couldn’t afford. When security showed up, Dave had a lot to lose too, but not as much as I did. Annie was out there somewhere. Panting, I took a last look at Dave and ran through the door.
I took the stairwell. I’d watched too much television and had some vague instinct that, if you escaped in an elevator, you risked being met at the bottom by men toting guns. When I got to the bottom, I peeked through the stairwell door at the guard’s desk, and found it empty. He must have been attending to Dave. What story was Dave making up?
Moments later, I climbed in my car. I drove away from the building and into a dark, empty street. I heard a siren and dropped my head below the window. When the sound passed, I accelerated again. I drove a half mile to the Bay Bridge. I merged onto it and let the gorgeous span carry me away from the sirens, the muck, the frenetic madness of a twenty-first-century city wired to the hilt.
I steered with my right hand. With my left, I gently prodded the sticky shirt fabric at my right side—at the edge of my rib cage. I’d taken a good gouging. Just how much more than a flesh wound I couldn’t conclude, not without jamming my foul paws into my wound and causing so much pain that I would swerve and make it much worse by driving my car off the bridge. It hurt to breathe in too deeply, suggesting a possible cracked rib.
The good news was I wasn’t pouring blood or passing out. The muscle is well supplied by vessels and so a more direct hit would have caused a lot more blood loss, at least. It could be a mixed blessing. Less bleeding but slower healing. In either case, faster driving. That’s what the following cars’ repeated honks were telling me.
I focused on the road. I’d come to the end of the Bay Bridge and found the beachhead to America. Road signs pointed in a million directions—Oakland, Sacramento, San Jose. I took Highway 580, an artery that would lead through the flatlands to Highway 5, the eventual path to Las Vegas. Boulder City. Annie.
I reached for the phone and dialed Leslie Fernandez, my former classmate and lover turned neurologist.
Presuming the computer had somehow attacked my brain, it didn’t take an almost-doctor to understand what Annie had been getting at. My brain needed artificial stimulation. Something to take the place of the laptop that had . . . somehow ravaged my own onboard computer. Just how their dirty trick worked would have to wait. My immediate goal was triage.
“It’s Dr. Fernandez,” she said when she answered.
“Leslie.”
“Lover boy.” Her voice rose.
“Lover boy needs another favor.”
“Sigh. What’s up?”
“Leslie, I need a Ritalin prescription. A hundred pills, at least 20 milligrams.”
“Nat?”
“I also need Augmentin. Or whatever is the strongest all-purpose antibiotic going these days.”
Silence.
“There’s a Walgreens in Pleasanton,” I said.
“Are you okay? Are you . . . using?”
I laughed, but I shouldn’t have. What I was asking wasn’t illegal—doctors prescribe for each other all the time—but this
was
serious.
“No. Leslie. Please, no lectures right now. You’re not compromising anything. You’ve got to trust me.”
“Okay, lover boy.” Not convinced. “I’m here if you need me.”
“Actually, one more thing.”
“Footsie?”
“Norepinephrine and dopamine,” I said. “Remind me.”
“Neurotransmitters. Catecholamines.”
“Check.”
“What’s going on?”
“They’re stress hormones, right? Corresponding with intense situations. Indicated by a rush.”
“Norepinephrine is that and more. In terms of stress, it contributes to controlling primitive functions—activating fight- or-flight: dilating pupils, constricting blood vessels, increasing heart rate. Dopamine is more involved in the pleasure centers of the brain, and also with compulsion and desire.”
“Like it controls cravings?”
“Or is indicative of them. Why are you asking me all this?”
“Science experiment. Listen, I gotta run.”
“Don’t hang up,” she said at elevated decibels.
She asked me if this had to do with Dr. Bard and my earlier call. I told her I didn’t have time to talk about it, but now she was concerned. She made me swear that I wasn’t sick or doctor-shopping, an indirect way of asking me again if I was an addict looking for prescriptions from friends. It was not uncommon for medical students to get hooked and dose their way through life. She was still skeptical when we hung up.
I pulled into a Denny’s north of Lake Merritt, an area of Oakland just bad enough that it wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if some guy walked in and took a bath in the sink. Cleaning out a gash might be tougher to explain. Fortunately, the bathroom was empty when I walked in, except for a pair of piss-stained jeans lying on the floor beside the urinal. I held my breath, pulled back my shirt, and tried to pretend it wasn’t me, but rather some emergency-room stranger whom I’d have treated as a medical student. I put my finger inside the fleshy wound and saw that the stranger was in for good news. The paperweight had grazed his side, missing any major arteries and not breaking scapula or rib. He needed a good cleaning, a bandage, and, it went without saying, hydration and bed rest. A good cleaning would have to do.
Thirty minutes later I arrived at Walgreens. Behind the counter stood a diminutive pharmacist with Coke-bottle glasses.
“Have you taken this before?” she said, handing me the Ritalin.
I nodded.
She reached for a second bag. She looked at me, then looked back at the writing on the bag.
“You have to eat when you take this,” she said. “It’s a very powerful antibiotic. It can cause nausea and a number of adverse reactions.”
On the counter, I laid down cash from the $300 I’d pulled from an ATM at the front of the store.
Moments later in the parking lot, I twisted open the Ritalin and poured two tiny white pills into my hand—double even a high dose. I washed them down with a gulp of warm Pepsi from a bottle sitting in my passenger seat.
What to expect? Would the headache suddenly subside? Or I’d gain newfound clarity? Or be able to sleep? It seemed like a long shot, given that Ritalin is an upper, sort of. It is used widely to treat attention deficit disorder. The concept is that people with ADD have trouble focusing. They appear to be excitable. The theory, though, is that their brains are low on dopamine, and they look for stimulation. They crave excitement—or drama. The Ritalin supplements their brain chemicals. Again, in theory, it allows the brain to not have to scour for new forms of excitement and, in turn, new ways to generate adrenaline. It’s an upper that actually can have a calming effect.
Without feeling any immediate difference, I started the car and pulled onto the highway. Would Ritalin have saved Andy Goldstein? Was there technology on his laptop that actually caused him to suffer symptoms like attention deficit disorder?
More to the point: Would Ritalin save
me
? Had I contracted some irreversible syndrome?
He had left me with a million questions. Dave was obviously dirty. Did his computer make me sick? Why not him? Had he suggested that my own laptop computer had been tampered with? How and when might that have happened? That night after the café exploded, I’d come home to find the power on on my laptop and the computer unplugged. It struck me as odd, but not out of the question, that I’d left it that way. Was it all a haze of fatigue?
Was Dave just making conversation when he said people get addicted to talking on the phone in a car? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed clear that he was right. The act of responding to the beep of a call, or an incoming e-mail, is at the very least Pavlovian. You hear the sound, you respond, you get a reward—a message, an input of information, the promise of something exciting. But is that physiological? Does our brain chemistry get molded and refined, like muscles responding to a repeated task?
I thought about the jungle, how humans adapted to survive it. Through random mutation and trial and error, we changed to cope with physical challenges and solve problems in the wild. Was the same thing happening in the digital age? Were our brains evolving to cope with the modern jungle—the computer, the environment in which we interact every day? One thing was clear: Stimulation was everywhere, and growing. It wasn’t just phones and computers. It was CNN and Fox News; the screen includes a talking head, a news scrawl at the bottom, and a colorful graphic. Soon enough, they’d stamp a farm report on the anchor’s forehead.
Our brains were being asked to cope with an onslaught of information pushed at us rapid-fire.
I picked up my cell phone.
The phone.
Dave had asked if I was paranoid that my phone had been equipped with a tracking device. A message, or another random taunt? Who was tracking me? Danny Weller? Was he dead?
I looked closely at the phone, but wasn’t sure how I could tell if it had a device on it. I took the conservative route. I opened my window and did something I’m sure 99 percent of cell phone users have had fantasies of doing. I tossed the phone onto the highway.
I still had the blonde angel’s super-secret spy phone. I called Bullseye. When he answered, I chose my words carefully just in case someone was listening in.
“How’s Sam?”
“She’s been fully awake for twenty-nine minutes.” Ever the mathematician.
“Lucid?”
“Ticked off,” he said, expelling a rare laugh. “I reminded her about her Zen philosophy of life, and you know what she said? She said, ‘They shouldn’t have fucked with a witch.’”
I laughed, sending a seizure of pain down my side. It was worth it.
“Bullseye, you remember what to do?” We’d discussed it only briefly when I’d handed off Samantha.
“I’m a walking computer. I remember the slugging percentage of every member of the 1912 Black Sox.”
If only our survival depended on us winning a trivia contest.
“Make sure to call Mike. It’s a lot to ask of him, but I think he can pull it off.”
“Done and done.”
I put the phone down. Then picked it up again. A second call was nagging. To Lieutenant Aravelo.
Maybe he wasn’t a bad guy after all. I desperately needed the help of someone in power. But if I was wrong, and a call to Aravelo diminished even a fraction of the chance I would see Annie again, it wasn’t worth it.
I instead used the spy phone to remotely check my voice-mail messages. There was only one, a return call from Annie’s friend Sarah. There was something urgent in her voice. I overrode my instincts and called her back. Perhaps she was in trouble, or I could delicately elicit something useful.
“Nat? Is that you? Hold on.” She cupped the phone and yelled, “Turn down the fucking television! Dammit, this is important.”
Same old Sarah.
She bypassed pleasantries and explained that my message had worried her. I’d sounded strange.
“You sound a little freaked out yourself. Are you okay, Sarah?” I refused to commit to tone, let alone substance.
“What’s going on? You said you had a question about Annie?”
“Yeah, something about Annie. I’m seeing ghosts.”
Long pause.
“You never got over her, did you?”
“Are you still tight with Glenn?”
“I see him around. Why?”
The tit-for-tat was fruitless. But she knew something. She was nervous. But she wasn’t giving it up.
“Be careful, Sarah. Something bizarre is going on. I don’t really know what. But I just want you to stay aware.”
“You’re scaring me, Nat. Frankly, you sound . . . a little weird.”
“That I’ll stipulate to in court.”
We said good-bye and I looked into the glare of oncoming lights stacked upon lights stacked upon lights. I took my first deep breath. I felt calmer. Maybe it was the Ritalin, or the distance from the fight. I glanced at the lanes around me, filled with discomfited commuters. They were San Francisco’s most determined strivers. Unable to afford homes or rent in the city, they had spread into suburbs stretching as far east and south as they could stand to drive home each night. Like me, they probably had a bucket seat full of snack foods and a desperate yearning. To my right, I found myself drawn to the driver’s side window of a white Civic. I could make out what looked to be a middle-aged woman with a thick head of dark hair. She must have felt my presence. She turned her head and caught my gaze. She nodded, commiserating. She turned her eyes back to the road.
I was settling in for the long drive into the Central Valley of California and then to Nevada when I was startled by a shrill ring from the super-secret spy phone. It was Bullseye.
“I’m coming,” he said. “But I’ve got company.”
B
y midmorning, I could see it rising in the distance. The Las Vegas Strip. It looked peaceful, like any downtown before the commerce got plugged in for the morning. Its denizens were doing what they did every day about this time: sleeping in. Drenched in sweaty slumber and dreaming about what might have happened if they’d just dislodged themselves from the table thirty minutes earlier.
The town was getting more potent still. I’d read that in recent months, the New York-New York casino had installed a new blackjack table that doubled as a video poker machine. There was the opportunity to play the two games simultaneously, for those not jacking up their adrenaline, and losses, at a fast enough clip.
My poison was caffeine. I got an industrial-strength cup and pulled into the airport. Bullseye was waiting.
“You look like shit with a hangover,” he said.
He stood by the baggage claim. Holding out a laptop.
“Where’s the company?”
He gestured over his shoulder.
I directed us to the bathroom—to chat in private. It was the kind of melodrama that I figured would drive Bullseye nuts. He feared nothing that wasn’t highly mathematically likely. So it probably didn’t worry him that someone might be tailing two plainclothed idiots who were meeting in the Las Vegas airport to exchange a laptop.
But I wasn’t taking any chances.
In the bathroom, he gestured for me to join him in the full-service stall closest to the left wall.
“Bad odds,” he said, shutting the door of the cramped stall behind him.
“How’s that?”
He wiggled to the side of the toilet opposite me. He had cups under his eyes and the skin on his chin had begun to break out.
“If you’re worried about someone discovering and killing us, you should pick a middle stall. Gives us better escape options.”
I couldn’t tell if he was serious.
“What if we’re trying to keep someone from listening in?” I said. “This way we’re not surrounded on both sides.”
“Better odds.”
He thrust out Andy’s laptop. “Here.”
It was in just the shitty condition I’d last seen it. I turned it over in my hand and put my foot on the toilet.
“Did everything else go smoothly?”
“Ask him.”
“Yeah, just ask me yourself, dude,” came a voice from outside the stall.
I popped open the stall door.
“What’s the good word?” Mike said.
I shook my head. There stood Mike, the biggest computer geek in the world, wearing a flower-print Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and flip-flops.
“This is the worst covert operation I’ve ever seen,” I muttered.
Mike said that when Bullseye called for help, he figured I might need some in-person assistance. But the real reason for his presence was plain. Mike was a monthly visitor to Vegas anyway, and his gambling yen earned him free nights at Caesars Palace. They didn’t know he was trying to count cards, and he didn’t care that he wasn’t doing well enough to make the trips profitable.
“Do I have time to get to the tables?” he asked.
“Big mistake,” Bullseye replied. “The odds are better at craps.”
“Not if you show the proper discipline. You’ve got to factor in the human element. What is the likelihood
I
can walk away with a profit?”
Bullseye flashed a perverse smile. He had found a friend.
“Shall we side bet on who has better success—presuming you set your potential losses to me in escrow. That way you won’t be tempted to give them to the blackjack dealer.”
I was amazed. I’d never heard Bullseye talk this much in his life—and at this most inopportune time. I interrupted, reiterating that we needed to track the laptop. I’d outlined my idea to Bullseye before, and Mike said he had come through on the technology side.
“If I don’t make it back here,” I said, “try to pull the trigger anyway.”
Ten minutes later, I was headed southeast.
I was ecstatic to see Annie, but also obviously confused, and angry. I’d always known there was a darker part of her, the part that freaked out when I broke the chair or when she got stressed about work. Had I underestimated that? No. Something horrible must have happened to her. Annie needed my help, and she’d have it soon enough.
Erin’s image left nagging uncertainty too. She seemed strong, but also vulnerable and uncomplicated. Yet she’d survived the explosion, having been previously implicated in a fire. The big-boned housecleaner at Simon Anderson’s said she’d seen a woman working on the family’s electrical system. Erin was there when the rat house exploded.
The cell phone rang.
“Are you close, Turtle?”
“Less than an hour.”
Annie gave me specific directions to a condo complex on the south edge of town. I tried to concentrate but was blown away by the sound of her voice. It was in this world but still surreal.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“I bet you’re even hotter now that you’re dead.”
That laugh.
“Hurry. We don’t have much time.”
When I asked her to tell me what was going on, she said she had some important things to take care of and would explain when I arrived.
“Nathaniel. You can’t imagine the story I’ve got to tell you.”