Authors: Matt Richtel
I
n English,” I said.
“How’s that?” said Mike.
“Explain in English what happened to the computer. Slowly. Like I’m the village idiot.”
I was sitting straight up on the couch now, my posture mimicking my curiosity. Erin picked up the change in my mood and sat down next to me.
“There’s a piece of software on your computer . . . ”
“Actually, it’s not my computer.”
“Whoever’s computer this is has a piece of software I haven’t seen before,” Mike ran over my interruption. “In the operating system, it has the name GNet.”
“Like the letter ‘G’ then the word ‘Net’?”
“Yep,” he said. “It may not be a big deal. Can’t really tell.”
Erin put her ear next to mine. It wasn’t speakerphone, but it would have to do.
I said, “If it’s not a big deal, then how come you bothered to mention—”
He cut me off again. No one is more assertive than a geek who is in control of a technical situation.
“The program didn’t catch my attention. It’s the encryption scheme.
That’s
what caught my eye. It’s pretty sophisticated. Multiple layers and encryption keys. Seemingly unnecessary. Like locking your diary behind a vaulted door protected by armed guards.”
I listened, tried to digest, then fell back on a classic journalism technique. I repeated what he said back to me—in my words. This accomplished two goals: It helped me understand, and it slowed him down.
“What you’re saying is that there is some possibly unusual program on the computer.”
“Affirmative.”
“And it is being protected by a definitely unusual, and very impressive, different program that we’d need a supercomputer to crack.”
“You got it, dude,” Mike said.
“What else can you tell me?”
Mike said he had a better idea.
“Why don’t I show you?” he said.
I told Mike I’d come down to Palo Alto the next morning for coffee.
He seemed mildly energized by the prospect of looking into the matter further, but he didn’t ask why I was inquiring, or about anything else related to the computer. It surprised me a little. Mike was different from a lot of geeks. He did care about context, and he wasn’t consumed exclusively with bits and bytes. He wasn’t at all a bad communicator. But he also had no inkling about the potential significance of this computer.
Potential significance.
Maybe there wasn’t any at all.
“So Andy’s computer has an unusual program on it?” Erin said.
“That’s the way it sounds.”
“So what does that mean?”
Maybe the program was innocuous. Maybe it was a video game—that Andy had protected with a password. Who knew? I gave the look that would embody such a response. Namely: a blank stare. This had become utterly overwhelming, a buffet of uncertainties. Erin laughed.
When she walked away, I gave a surreptitious look in her direction. She wore jeans with a red flower embroidered on the right back pocket. I wanted to trust her. I felt like I was starting to, but I knew almost nothing about Erin Coultran. Nothing biographical, or geographical, or educational. We’d spent a day together in the foxhole. But, outside of knowing she was composed when it mattered most, I didn’t have a clue.
I added it to the list. Of things I didn’t know, but wanted to find out about.
I twirled my torso around to put up my feet. I then took the ultimate prerequisite step toward falling asleep in the modern age, and turned off my mobile phone. It didn’t take; I turned the gadget back on again. Unfinished business tugged.
When I dialed, I tried to orient myself. Was Sergeant Weller one of the good guys? As he had done in the past, he put me immediately at ease.
“I need an eleven-letter word. The clue is ‘lactose and wimpy.’?”
“Aren’t you on the taxpayer’s dime?”
“That’s why it’s urgent I get the answer immediately. So I can get back to eating doughnuts. Hang on a sec,” he continued. “Lemme get somewhere a little less within earshot of the chain of command.”
It was more than a sec.
“Milquetoast,” I said. I’d counted it on my fingers. Eleven letters.
“We are going to become good friends.”
Danny asked me if we were going to get together at six, as planned, and I told him I needed to take a rain check. We agreed to meet in the morning. I told him where I was and with whom.
“The waitress?” he asked, sounding surprised.
I told him we needed to get somewhere quiet. He didn’t say anything. It struck me that, looking at it from his perspective, the idea of me and Erin hanging out might not just be confusing, it might be suspicious. After all, we were two survivors of the explosion, who had discovered each other, and were holed up in a remote location. To try to mollify Danny’s concerns, I told him that I had a lot to fill him in about, starting with my dressing-down by Aravelo. Again, he seemed genuinely surprised. I was less surprised by what he said.
“He’s not a good man,” Danny said.
Danny said that the two men had long been rivals. Aravelo had twice blocked Danny’s promotion. Then Danny had been put on one of the shadow homicide teams and the competition between the men had intensified.
“He’s got a little fiefdom. They’re tough guys. Make their own rules. Anti-intellectual,” he said.
Their conflict, it struck me, was of minor importance to me. I asked Danny what he’d learned about the café. He said he had some things he’d prefer to tell me about when we got together, then asked if there was anything from my end. I told him about the laptop, and about Andy getting sick before the café exploded. This too seemed to surprise him, and he digested it slowly.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Something early—like breakfast.”
We agreed.
“Nathaniel. Between now and then, I recommend that you don’t trust anybody.”
Y
ou know what you need?” Erin asked.
“Human contact?”
“I was thinking tea.”
She sat down beside me. She began kneading the webbing between my thumb and index finger. “It’s relaxes the shakras,” she said.
Her hands were graceful. Her fingernails were grown out slightly and groomed. I realized how feminine she could be. Even soft?
It’s the last thing I thought before I fell asleep and drifted away. On a tiny island of ice.
I sat cross-legged on my frigid block. Floating, in cloudy blue water. It would have been the Arctic, except for the black panthers, each sitting on an island of ice. Some glowered at me, others tended to themselves, licking paws and resting on their haunches. They were waiting for me to make a mistake. I was shivering, frigid. My arms felt like stalactites of blue ice.
A panther howled, then leapt. Standing on my chest, it said, “Bring me a chocolate milk shake, Turtle. I’m waiting.”
Had I screamed aloud? It was dark. I was on the couch in the log cabin. I’d been out for two hours. It wasn’t enough. I was still shaky after spending twenty minutes in the shower. The stress of the previous two days was catching up. The body can withstand much more than we give it credit for; witness the thirty-hour stints that doctors typically do in the first two years of residency. But the doctor knows the shift will end. A sustained period of stress without expectation of its conclusion adds an even higher dose of the fight-or-flight neurochemicals. A dangerous dose.
Erin had cooked a feast—a roast, mashed potatoes, string beans. She said it was the comfort food of her midwestern youth.
“It’s even better if you’re wearing pants,” she said.
We sat down and had our first real chance to talk. Erin had grown up in East Lansing, Michigan, the daughter of a high school teacher and a church deacon. He was loving, but a disciplinarian and patriarch. He was outwardly nice to everyone but she knew how he felt about the people who lived in the black ghetto. “Yes, sirs” and “Thank you, ma’ams” were the family’s vernacular. Her mother was a closet intellectual who didn’t talk to her husband about the books she read. Several times when Erin was a girl, she discovered that her mother had put the cover of a romance novel around the subversive literature she was actually reading. When she was younger, Erin gravitated to the certainty of her father’s path. But she said that, predictably, her own life’s experience began to contradict her dad’s rigidity.
To try to keep on the straight and narrow, she quit the University of Michigan after a year and married her high school sweetheart. He was in her father’s mold—to a fault.
“My friends and I called him the Bible Belter.”
“Religious guy?”
“Because he belted me,” she said. She smiled when she said it, like she was remembering something she couldn’t believe ever actually happened.
She blamed herself, lashed out at everyone else, then eventually had an awakening. To her mother’s great sadness, she moved west. She tried to figure out if there had been some impulse or interest she’d been repressing. Like a lot of other people; Haight-Ashbury may have turned into a veritable outdoor trinket mall, but people still flocked to San Francisco to find themselves. There were far more southern and midwestern black sheep than you could squeeze into a VW microbus. They were part of the “to-do list” generation—people who got into new thing after new thing, from rock climbing to hot yoga to night golf. Sometimes in the same day. And sometimes it seemed they didn’t really pause to enjoy the thing, they just liked marking it off the list.
For Erin’s part, she experimented with the various Left Coast trends. She’d gotten political, attending various rallies and, in particular, women’s rights functions. The women’s socially conscious dance troupe in the Mission—where I’d first tried to find her—was the latest.
“Can socially conscious dance only be performed by vegans?” I asked.
She laughed. “It’s centered around free-form, nonviolent movements. Although one month we practiced a routine where we attacked a domestic abuser—in rhythm. I developed a killer imaginary karate chop.” She paused, turning contemplative. “I hate hypocrisy. I used to think it was Congress, or the church. But it’s all over. Some of my friends are left-wing bigots. They hate any idea that challenges their way of thinking. They refuse to think. I wonder if I’ve strayed too far.”
“From God?”
“Maybe. Maybe more generally. There are all these false idols. We think we’ll be happy if we find the right cause or pursuit or hobby. Maybe it’s more complicated than that. With religion, I—we—just wanted answers. But then I substituted answers with questions. One experiment after another. One serpent after another. Isn’t it the opposite side of the same coin?”
She said she’d been trying to create a more tangible personal philosophy. Her current idea of courage was going to a horror movie by herself. She’d done it once, a Nicole Kidman ghost flick that terrified her so much that she spent part of the movie in the lobby. Going to a romantic comedy alone, she said, didn’t qualify as love.
She said she’d had a few relationships, including a short but intense one with Andy that had wound up in a deep friendship. She joked she was taking her romantic cues from the cell phone industry. She’d started to measure a relationship’s potential in terms of a phone’s two LED indicators: strength of connection and battery life, and a good start would be if both were over 80 percent.
Then she asked about Annie. I told her about our relationship. When I described the boating accident, Erin briefly put her hand on my forearm. It wasn’t exactly maternal, or romantic. Maybe she was just steadying herself. She asked if I was over Annie.
It was my own personal $64,000 question. Was I stuck in the past? The grief counselor I went to see after Annie died gave me a context for my relationship with Annie that I’ve alternatively embraced and rejected, depending on my mood, and how many beers I’ve had. Louise said Annie was my first experience with real intimacy. She was the mother duckling. I was the baby duck. She’d imprinted me. According to Louise, I overglorified Annie because I hadn’t seen the extent of her flaws. It usually took two beers to deem the theory psychobabble.
I told Erin about my forays into dating since Annie. I’d had a bunch of short flings; the longest relationship had been six months with a woman I’d met at a cocktail party hosted by the Democratic Party. She was a lawyer, pretty, and devoid of humor.
“She used to say things like, ‘This wine isn’t as full-bodied as I’d expected.’”
“She’d better have been very full-bodied herself to get away with that,” Erin said.
“I’m over Annie’s death,” I stated abruptly, feeling mostly sure of myself. I didn’t add: I’m not over the loneliness that comes from her absence, but I have to believe someone else can make me feel that excited—that connected.
Erin seemed to have the ability not to overanalyze, but at the same time it struck me that she didn’t believe the last thing I’d said. Then, quickly, I thought: Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe
I’m
still not sure I can feel true love with someone else.
“I’ve been wondering,” Erin said. “Why did you happen to come into the café the day everything happened?”
I thought about it for a second, and found myself smiling.
“Would you believe: drapes.”
A year earlier, my parents had visited. They’d been aggressively passive-aggressive in expressing horror over the state of my bachelor pad. They mentioned that adulthood required some basic amenities, like a real set of dishes and something other than a green flannel sheet tacked to the windowsill to keep out the morning sun. They’d given me a gift certificate to Pottery Barn. For some reason, the day the café exploded, I had played basketball, then gone to Pottery Barn near the café, having decided I was ready to embrace curtains.
“And whatever the heck they represent,” Erin said.
It was funny, but I felt a wave of sadness. When a woman had put a note on my table at the café, I wondered if my future had finally arrived.
Erin and I had polished off a bottle of red wine. She put her head back on the couch and closed her eyes. In a moment, she was asleep. Her head lolled to the side, hitting my shoulder. Her hair smelled faintly of a purple flower I couldn’t name. Even consumed with memories of Annie, it was impossible to deny Erin’s allure. Objective beauty, heightened by effortless conversation. I closed my eyes too, hoping to join her in sleep. But I felt the familiar vibration in my pants. My phone was calling. I gently pulled my shoulder out from Erin. I extracted the albatross and looked at the number. I felt a bright burst of adrenaline. I thought: I wonder if I’ll ever sleep again.