Authors: Matt Richtel
I
t danced across Jeremy’s Bar and Grill. It floated above the din of romancing couples. It froze me over my Guinness. Her laugh was pure, confident, free.
I didn’t usually drink alone. But I didn’t usually come to small mountain towns to make major life decisions either.
Kings Beach is three hours northeast of San Francisco. It calls itself a beach. I always thought “beach” implied “ocean.” But it’s really lakeside, on the north side of Lake Tahoe.
The town is a stretch of modest motels and eateries, and places that rent out kayaks in the summer and skis when the sun gives way to snow. It’s a fun family spot, or, in my case, a temporary resting place for mixed-up graduate students.
The laugh belonged to a slender brunette with shoulder-length hair and a dark hue to her skin, as if one of her grandparents had been Asian. It might not have been beauty to everyone, but it was my definition. She looked soft, passionate, and kind, or maybe eager to please.
Her friend was another matter.
As they approached, I realized that the only open bar seats were right beside me. That gave me only seconds to act, and I did. I quickly turned away from them, raised my beer to my lips, and began staring intently at a baseball game on the TV. Had I reacted a moment later, they would have seen me staring at them. I’d have been locked up for leering, and, worse, I’d have lost the advantage of feigned indifference. A finger tapped my shoulder. The friend. “Are these seats taken?” she asked. Her tone discouraged anything more than a “yes” or “no.”
“They’re all yours,” I said, turning to face them fully. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”
The woman of my dreams smiled and said, “Thanks.” Her friend sensed my interest and leveled a preemptive strike. “It’s girls’ night out, so we’re not doing the flirting thing,” she said, adding with at least a touch of softness, “Now return to your beer.”
I hadn’t planned on drinking more. Now I had no choice. I ordered another beer. I made small talk with the bartender and watched the game. I talked to a couple sitting to my right who, after spending six hours together on a mountain bike ride, were plenty happy for a third-wheel diversion.
I glanced at myself in the bar mirror—hoping for something less than haggard. In terms of pure physical attractiveness, I’m in the 80th percentile, but with wide fluctuations. I’m five feet eleven inches, fit, stocky, with more torso than leg. I’m an ethnic mutt—dark brown hair and a strong nose. I sometimes invited comparisons to the ethnic character actor of the moment. The observer would always seem to add, “in a good way,” in a tone that made me wonder. The X factor in my looks is my haircut. With a good one, I creep up to the 90th percentile. With a bad one, I’ve seen the low 70s.
When I looked away from the mirror, I noticed I had at last caught a break. My beauty’s friend stood and headed to the bathroom. I waited the customary ten seconds and pretended to discover the friend’s absence.
“Are we allowed to talk now?” I said. “I want to respect the Geneva Convention and all other applicable rules.”
“Only if we’re very quiet,” she whispered. “I can’t spend another afternoon in detention.”
I had read an article by some dating guru who advised you should wait for the woman to introduce herself. That way she’s the one expressing interest. But this woman deserved better than parlor games, and I didn’t have much time. “Nat,” I said.
“I’m Annie.”
I said, “I have an escape plan. Do you think it would be hard to tunnel through the bar?”
Annie picked up her drink—something red in a short glass. “Don’t mind Sarah. She’s just trying to protect me—from jerks, and men who don’t know a real lady only escapes using duplicity and lies.”
She smiled.
“Break it up, you two,” came an approaching voice. Sarah was back, and she wasn’t interested in our relationship going any further. “You were warned, young man. No conversation of any kind.”
Annie shrugged. Was it indifference or resignation? She picked up her jacket too. “See ya,” she said.
“You’ll thank me later,” said Sarah, and they started walking away.
I couldn’t think of any way to stop them that wouldn’t have made me seem like a desperate, obsessive loon. Then, just before they hit the door, Annie stopped awkwardly—if I had to guess, caught by thought or indecision—spun back, took two steps toward me, and just on the edge of earshot said, “Pink salamander,” or at least that’s the way it sounded. And she was gone.
If it was a salutation, it was lost on me, ditto if it was a coded message. I spent half a day looking in phone books, around town, and down alleys for a hotel, bar, restaurant, or anything else named the Pink Salamander, or any conceivable derivation of the name. The closest I came was a tattoo and nail salon called the Chameleon, whose frumpy, heavily pierced proprietor said she appreciated my “Don Quixote” quest but said I’d keep searching in vain until I found a relationship with God.
I spent another day driving around town, hoping to “run into” Annie. I spent an inordinate amount of mealtime at Jeremy’s Bar and Grill. I asked around. No Sarah, no Annie, no luck.
I’d already extended my stay by one day. I had to give up. I packed up the 4Runner and began the rationalizations. She wasn’t that pretty, she was a passive follower of her friend, or she didn’t find me attractive enough. So what was the point?
In at least one respect, the trip had been a success. I’d decided to undertake a major career change—and to abandon my pursuit of becoming a doctor. I’d finished medical school two months earlier. I had to admit to myself that I hated the training.
The question I had spent the better part of a week in the mountains contemplating was whether to go ahead with a residency. Instead, I was thinking about becoming a medical journalist. Writing about public health issues, and trading pragmatism and respectability for the idea of helping to change things, and gaining relative control over my time—at least compared to playing doctor. The fact that I faced $100,000 in debt and was still considering journalism suggested to me I had just the kind of idealism necessary to make such a career blunder.
At town’s edge, heading home, I drove by the entrance to the marina and was struck by a last-ditch thought to check the boat slips—salamanders living on the cusp of both land and water.
The slip rental office was at Ernie’s Tackle and Dive Shop. The seemingly very stoned employee said he couldn’t give me information on boats and their slip homes without the approval of a manager who was due in shortly. The idea of going slip to slip seemed one step too many, particularly given the numerous launch points around the lake.
I waited for the manager and tried on dive masks.
A voice said, “At last, my knight in shining scuba gear.”
The
Salamander
, slipped nearby, was the boat on which Annie and Sarah had been bunking.
“I was really hoping we’d meet again,” I said.
“Me too,” said Annie.
F
or our first date, I had suggested a funky Mexican bar in the Mission District. The food was authentic. So was the mariachi band, which could cover the silence should wit evade us.
I am not generally superstitious, but when I was walking to the bar to meet her, I found a nickel with a jagged edge on the sidewalk, picked it up, and, figuring it five times more powerful than a penny, made a wish and threw it over my left shoulder. I’m pretty sure I was mixing rituals. I was clearer about the wish. There had to be someone who would let me lose myself so completely in a moment that I was no longer watching from the outside. Hopefully, that person liked margaritas.
Annie wore a snug, sleeveless T-shirt, looking confident enough to err on the side of casual.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said. “The traffic on 101 was murder.”
Annie commuted to Palo Alto, the suburbs of San Francisco. The rest of the world knows it as Silicon Valley.
I set a drink in front of her. “Let us toast to a world where children don’t go hungry, the homeless live at the Four Seasons, and the freeways have no stop-and-go traffic,” I said.
She told me the basics. She was twenty-six. She grew up in San Francisco. She graduated from a fancy northeastern college. She wasn’t big into dating because people took her laughter to indicate passion and she wound up with suitors whom she preferred as friends. She said she might try to steer future dates onto dire topics to forestall joviality.
“Like phobias.”
She laughed. “I actually have one: Q-tips in the ear,” she said.
“Fear of indented brain?”
“Not so much that. The inside of my head is the only private place left on earth.”
“How about something that makes you sad?”
She had one of those too: the last thirty seconds of
Saturday Night Live
, when the credits roll and the cast is waving. She said it meant the host’s dream week has come to an end and the workweek was coming.
Annie said she worked at her dad’s investment firm, Kindle Investment Partners, to test the idea that she had a knack for putting money in small companies and turning them into big ones. It wasn’t something she felt particularly suited to. She said her father felt otherwise. He was, she said without bragging, one of the Valley’s most potent venture capitalists. When she talked about work, she sounded tired.
“So what would you be doing if you weren’t getting rich and creating technology to change the world?” I said.
She chewed on it.
“Well, I majored in computer science.”
“And your enthusiasm for it runneth over.”
“I don’t know, maybe I’d be a shrink. I got a minor in psychology,” she said, then her eyes turned more whimsical, like she was discovering an idea. “I’d be a veterinarian.”
“Or a combination—pet psychiatrist,” I said. “I had a dog once who could have used a few hours on the couch.”
“You always know where you stand with animals. Feed me, love me. Feed me. Feed me,” she said. “They’re easier to trust than people.”
“People need to eat too.”
“It would be amazing to be with someone incorruptible.”
I told Annie my basics. I had grown up in Denver, the son of generous but middle-class government employees. I spent every possible weekend in the mountains—backpacking, climbing, fishing. Partly, I loved the outdoors. Partly, I needed escape. “My brother was all-everything.”
“I’ve got one of those,” she said.
“Brother?”
“Shadow. My father. He’s got big plans for me. He calls me his ‘Smiling Assassin.’ Do I look like I’m smiling?”
“More like grinning.”
“He thinks I’m like him. He says I’m made of steel,” she said, then lowered her voice an octave. “‘Annie, the Kindles are conquerors!’”
“You dress beautifully for a Hun.”
“I’ve got you right where I want you,” she said.
Annie was a great listener. Her eyes rose and fell with each revelation.
I told her about the incident that helped undo my medical career. During my third year of medical school, I’d been on a rotation in the pediatric oncology ward, and I’d grown close to a nine-year-old boy suffering from leukemia. On Wednesday afternoons, I found an extra hour to hang out with Jacob, usually spent playing Chutes and Ladders.
Then he contracted pneumonia, which in his weakened state would have killed him within two weeks. The attending doc thought we should let nature take its course, but I argued we should use antibiotics to kill the lung infection and then hope for remission of the cancer. It wasn’t unreasonable, but I’d learned of the pneumonia one day after I’d missed my regular Wednesday board-game ritual with Jacob, and, guilt-ridden, I disagreed vigorously with the doctor in front of the parents. He asked me to step into the hallway and told me I was too attached—medicine’s code word for “unprofessional.”
Annie’s eyes were wide. “What’d you say?”
“Well, I kind of compared him to Dr. Kevorkian.”
Annie started laughing.
“You called your boss a murderer.” She sounded impressed. “That’s either really courageous or really stupid.”
“The parents agreed with me. They gave the antibiotics. The boy lived two more months.”
I got a hefty reprimand, not for Jacob’s death, of course, but for protesting too much.
The more I told Annie my story, the less I focused on her, and the more on the remains of a plate of petrifying nachos. But I was hyper-aware of her reactions. It felt like she was embracing my worldview, endorsing it. It was a change from the majority of people, including friends, who saw my decision to quit medicine as failure. Sometimes I had to fight off sharing their perceptions. I looked up. Annie held my gaze. “I’m glad you came to find me in Tahoe.” She looked down. “I’ve been looking for you too.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek, and I melted into the linoleum.
We strolled past the taquerias and the five-and-dime stores. “Few places are as romantic as a darkened alley,” I said, taking Annie’s hand as we stepped into a small separation between two buildings. We launched into a kiss. She took my hand and wrapped it around her back, and I pulled her into me.
“You’re not okay to drive,” I said when we came up for air.
She pulled out her cell phone, excused herself, and dialed a number. When she returned, we resumed kissing, until a horn honked. Outside of the alley, a dark BMW sedan had pulled up.
“My ride,” she said.
She held my hand as she opened the door, then she climbed into the dark car and it pulled away.
I
was still dazed from the explosion when I headed home to my apartment on Potrero Hill, a neighborhood whose industrial roots had become overgrown by residents. During the Internet boom, there hadn’t been enough housing to accommodate the gold-rushing twenty-somethings and so they bled into Potrero.
Across the street from my apartment was Meatless Ray’s, an organic grocer featuring tofu-based homeopathic remedies and meat substitutes. Next door, tucked into a veritable shoebox of a retail space, was a Laundromat whose owner sold computer tech support services on the side. This was post-boom San Francisco, a city fighting to return to greatness, jacked up on wheatgrass and e-mail attachments.
But the establishment I loved most was the Past Time bar; three blocks from my apartment, and open until 4 a.m., the bar itself was unremarkable, but the clientele left an impression, particularly Dennis “Bullseye” Leary, and his wife, Samantha.
There is every reason to believe, as some suggest, that the Learys cross over the fine line into certifiable. I preferred to think of them as colorful. They are, at least, savants. You’ve got to give credit to anyone who can name the lifetime batting average of every starting player to ever spend more than two seasons with the San Francisco Giants.
That was Bullseye. His strength was math—doing it and memorizing it. His weakness was just about everything else. He wasn’t much at the big things, like holding down a job or practicing regimented hygiene. The small things challenged him too. Once, during a game of darts, he misfired so badly that he hit a waitress standing at about forty-five degrees to the dartboard. Bullseye.
The unconfirmed understanding at the bar was that Bullseye once owned a Chevron gas station, made a decent chunk of money, and went into retirement after a series of loud disagreements with the corporate office.
Samantha had her own specialty. She is, in New Age parlance, a spiritual healer. Samantha has a knack for laying hands on someone to cure headaches, sports injuries, and work-related aches. Some people call it acupressure. We just called her the Witch.
Samantha could tell someone’s mood—where it had been, and where it was headed. She also professed to be able to rid houses of ghosts and specters, though since their actual presence is tough to prove in the first place, this remained a subject of intense and ongoing bar speculation. You could always recognize Samantha from blocks away, thanks to the loud homemade knit hats she wore that she claimed regulated her temperature.
Samantha and Bullseye argued too, once viciously for days over whether he was obligated to her in the afterlife, should it exist. Sometimes it seemed they didn’t like each other at all, they just loved each other. It was a relationship that regularly tested their self- and mutual acceptance; after all, Samantha gave massages, platonically but vigorously rubbing people’s bodies and spirits, and if I had been Bullseye, I’d have thrown a lot more tantrums than he did.
On their worst days, the Learys provided comic relief. On their best, they were real friends. After Annie died, I pulled back from a lot of my old buddies—-a mutually agreeable separation. I needed a hiatus from my life, and from what became persistent and well-meaning efforts to set me up with new women. My old friends needed a break from the heaviness that enveloped me. Many were in their medical residencies anyway, and their lives revolved around work and sleep. Samantha and Bullseye filled the void. Often, they just listened. Tonight, they were in for an earful.
“Bonds went two for four,” Bullseye said when he saw me. “That’s not the interesting part.”
Bullseye doubtless had heard what happened at the café. But he couldn’t have known I was there. So the fact that he ignored my torn shirt and shorts was just par for the course for his social skills, not an extraordinary example of the theme. “Division of labor,” I said. “I’ll get the beers and you tell me the interesting part.”
“He walked in the tenth,” Bullseye explained. “Therefore, his on-base percentage is the highest not just for any player this late in the season, but for any player at any time after the first month of a regular season.”
I set down a round of beers. “I was at the Sunshine Café.”
Bullseye didn’t say anything, but I could feel him shrink his head back into his neck the way it did when his left brain was poked with a stick. Samantha put her hands on my knees, studied my face, and then dove into a full-fledged bear hug.
“I survive the explosion only to be asphyxiated in my local bar.”
“Breathe through your mouth. It will release the toxins.” She finally released her hug.
I told them about the explosion and its aftermath.
“You’re
sure
it was Annie’s handwriting?” Samantha asked.
All I could do was shrug. I could have sworn the looping script was hers, but how could that be possible?
“Isn’t that place in Annie’s old neighborhood?”
I nodded. “I had a basketball game and an errand in the Marina. I rarely go to that café anymore. We used to have Sunday brunch there.” It came out slightly defensive.
Samantha knelt in front of me.
“So maybe Annie was in the back of your mind, sweetie. You were shaken by the explosion and it opened a portal in your memory. It was another level of consciousness.”
“Mumbo-jumbo,” said Bullseye gruffly.
I thought I caught a whiff of judgment in Bullseye’s eyes. He had met Annie only once, but professed a dislike of her immediately. I heard from someone else at the bar that he had described her as a “Peace Sign,” seductive, but bigger on symbolism than substance. There was a class distinction Bullseye just couldn’t abide, or maybe he thought my love was a little too intense for his mathematical view of the world.
The further I got into the story, the less it made sense. If I believed that the explosion was an accident, then I couldn’t possibly explain the warning I’d been given.
But the idea of someone blowing up a neighborhood café seemed nothing short of insane. What could it possibly have to do with Annie?
We had two more rounds in virtual silence. At some point, Samantha sat on Bullseye’s lap and fed him peanuts while he watched the game. I finally slinked out. Was someone trying to blow me up? Or was someone trying to save me?
Or both.