Devil's Plaything - Matt Richtel [4]
Thirty years ago, Grandma takes me for a weekend to the ocean in Santa Cruz. Babysitting while my parents shepherd my older brother through his appendectomy. Just the two of us. Grandpa Irving, the devoted accountant, stays at home to work.
My parents, Grandma tells me later, overload her with rules. No cotton candy, no late-night television, and no filthy ocean, especially since I’m not familiar with water.
For two days, adventure, sugary snacks and wading in the tide. Grandma makes friends with a retired lifeguard who teaches me how to wade and hold my breath under water. At the time, she later recalls, I told her that I learned how to drown.
She says: “Let’s not tell your parents about the swimming.” It’s our first secret.
A light breeze kicks up, chilling my bare arms—and my exposed toe. I take the sweatshirt I’ve had tied around my waist and lay it gently on my ward.
“Lane, who is the man in blue?”
“I’m tired.”
“Earlier you said ‘A train can’t breathe.’ What did you mean by that?”
No response at first.
“I’d like soup,” she finally says.
It is like talking to a child who knows words but not their meanings.
My phone vibrates. I whip it from my pocket. It’s a text message. Is it the maniac again? I open the message. It reads: “emergency in blogosphere. call asap.”
The message is not from a mystery sender, not from a hybrid-driving outpatient. It’s from Pauline Sanchez, the woman who pays my bills. She’s the editor at Medblog, a medical news and information Internet site that pays me $120 a day for three postings.
The nature of her message, despite its drama, isn’t particularly compelling. Pauline is a news junkie, an information monger, a data speed-freak. She speaks in headlines. From her message, I infer only that she’s trying to get my attention. Maybe she’s upset I haven’t posted in the last eighteen seconds.
Maybe she wants to talk about a searing physical chemistry between us that she wants to experiment with—but that I’m holding at arm’s length.
I am about to put the phone back in my pocket when I realize that the best thing I can do is freeze.
“Drop it,” a voice says.
Chapter 3
Two police officers stand at the tree line, bathed in headlights.
They have guns drawn, pointing in my direction.
It takes a moment to disabuse the two cops of the idea that I should be targeted. But I can see why they’d take aim.
I’m crouching beside a terrified octogenarian not long after shots rang out and, likely, someone called dispatch with distress calls. Plus, I stand in dim light holding a small silver object.
“Your only crime is your phone is outdated,” one cop says, chuckling, as he holsters his gun. In San Francisco, you can get grief for carrying an obsolete gadget without a permit.
The officer is named Everly. He’s thin, with an unruly moustache and pockmarked cheeks from adolescent acne. The other cop is a paunchy woman with thinning hair; Officer Thompson has alopecia, female-pattern baldness.
When people meet someone new they tend to focus on faces or names. I see pathologies. My annoying sixth sense is associating humans with their past, present, or possible future conditions, a vestige of my medical-school training. Parkinson’s, Bell’s palsy, cirrhosis, psoriasis, pigeon-toes, halitosis, hairy tongue, or the ever-reliable attention deficit disorder, which is somewhat subjective, and maybe everyone has it in modern life, so it’s a solid fallback.
The balding cop checks Grandma’s condition and deems it unnecessary to order an ambulance.
Everly asks for my identification. Then the evening goes from dangerous to frustrating.
“It’s the one and only Nathaniel Idle,” he chirps to his partner. “The Journalist Type.” He says “journalist” the disgusted way a health nut might use to refer to inorganic produce not grown locally.
I’d characterize most of the stories I write as quasi-medical journalism—fluff pieces about aging, beauty, nutrition and the biotech companies investing in sparing us the ignominy of our natural decline. This is how I pay my bills.
But I keep my sanity writing investigative