Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [14]
I peer through the circular submarine window, I see a half dozen regulars. The Witch and Bullseye anchor the seats on the bar’s far right, their regular spots.
The Witch turns around. Maybe she senses my presence—she claims such powers. I back out of her view.
I’ve lost the energy to analyze the last three hours of my life: the shooting, the mystery thumb drive, and the weird military dude. Plus, if I go inside, I become the source of entertainment, the circus monkey, the unmarried guy spinning tales from the real world—while everyone else gulps down the drama along with hops and barley, plus a shot of envy and superiority.
In my car’s backseat, I spy my albatross: the ratty black backpack that carries my laptop—and that I tote wherever I go like an oxygen tank. It’s my mobile blogging unit. Call me old-fashioned, but when I need to research and file an on-the-go news update from a press conference, roadside or (yes, it happens) bathroom stall, I prefer to type on a full keyboard, not the touch-screen phone like the fancy prepubescent competition.
Time to take the laptop home for some answers.
Ten minutes later, I’m on my couch. From the backpack, I extract my computer. I insert the mystery drive. I retype the passwords I tried earlier, and new ones. No use.
I feed Hippocrates.
I call Magnolia Manor. A nurse tells me that Grandma is sleeping.
I consider calling Pauline. Tomorrow.
I should call my parents and tell them what’s going on with Grandma. Maybe they have counsel. Probably not.
Besides, I don’t need to hear Dad talk about the latest deal in the Sunday circular and Mom try and wake from the dead at a phone ringing at 11 p.m. in Denver, which is the clinching excuse. I try the laptop one more time. Several more passwords fail.
I fall asleep on the couch, my gray matter spinning with questions. Eight hours later, I wake up with one answer.
Chapter 7
“Galapagos,” I mutter groggily.
I open my eyes to find I’m lying on my back on the couch, akimbo, one leg dangling on the floor. I’m wearing vertically striped red boxer shorts and a white sock on my right foot, having shed the rest of my clothes progressively through the night. Something smells rancid, and I quickly identify its origin. Next to my discarded T-shirt, a furball. This is a distinct message from Hippocrates: “Clean my litter box.”
I look at the cat, who lounges on the top edge of the couch.
“In the future, I’d prefer e-mail,” I mumble.
I walk to the dining-room table and sit at the laptop, the mystery thumb drive still loaded into it. Into the empty password slot, I type, “Galapagos.”
The drive arrived in a package addressed “Highly Evolved World Traveler.” I’m hardly that, but I did once go on an extravagant journey—to the Galapagos—and recently blogged about a particular moment on the trip.
Shortly after my ex-girlfriend Annie drowned in a lake in Nevada, my close friends chipped in to send me to Ecuador so I could get away from my grief, and from the fast-paced wired world that had left me so off-balance.
Standing at an observation point on Culpepper Island, one of the islands that make up the equatorial paradise, I watched a swallow-tailed gull land on the back of a snoozing sea lion. The bird called out majestically. Two other gulls lazily glided down to stand atop the unperturbed lion.
Standing beside me was a mother and her son, who looked to be about ten. He said: “The bird has a loud ringtone.”
At that moment, I started to regain my perspective. I recently wrote about it for Medblog after Pauline asked her freelancers to craft items about our personal perspectives on medicine. Her idea is that the new era of journalism demands that readers develop personal bonds with writers. The point of my post was that