Lyle had been out of the game a few years and knew that giant leaps were being made in the understanding of the immune system. He knew whom to ask about it, too, but the very idea gave him a stomachache. No way he was going back to Jen Sanchez. She’d had the corner office when he’d had his ignominious fall and, in passing, he knew she’d just kept climbing floors and corner offices. He sensed she’d always scorned him, maybe even conferred with Dean Thomas in their dislike of him, so no way he was going to talk to her. And then he laughed.
Talk to her?
Of course he wasn’t going to talk to her.
Was he really thinking of going on a goose chase? Was he following his medical muse again?
He slammed shut his laptop so vigorously that a college student sitting next to Lyle said, “Easy there, pardner,” as if Lyle had just screeched at his child in public. Lyle laughed again, this time more bitterly. He walked out of the café, backpack over his shoulder, trying to erase the gnawing of his impulses, the weird, persistent Springsteen soundtrack coming in over the top, and to just take in the world. He inhaled the dry-roasted smoked pork from the barbecue place on the corner, across from his studio, and felt a craving he hadn’t felt in months. It wasn’t a good use of money, not now, but, hey, maybe some mysterious pandemic is coming, he smirked to himself, so why not blow the last of the savings on barbecue.
He stood in line with the twentysomethings, listening to them roar about the latest media moment, having to do with this group of separatists in Oregon. After a few of them had been shot, a grassroots movement had started encouraging gun owners to march on Capitol Hill and make a show of The People and their right to defend themselves. A million Americans with automatic weapons, an open-carry bonanza. “A dare,” was how one commentator put it. They were calling it the Million Gun March. Would the government dare to arrest or confiscate or confront tens of thousands of law-abiding citizens? That’s exactly what the government said it would do “and you’re goddamned right,” said one of the techies standing in line for barbecue. “It’s time to put this thing to rest once and for all.” Meaning: the macho gun culture. To which his girlfriend responded: “Government’s thugs, too. I went to the range the other day.”
Amid this intensifying talk-show moment, a minor spectacle erupted when a car without a driver circled the block.
Only of late had these bulbous Google cars started making the rounds in San Francisco. Most of the testing had been done on the roads of Mountain View, the Silicon Valley city Google called home. Now, though, the technology had come far enough that the company branched out. To mild fascination, the car passed the barbecue place and then, to whistles and cheers, executed a perfect U-turn and then an even more perfect parallel parking job. It landed right in front of Lyle’s apartment. The crowd went wild, and then Lyle watched with his own fascination as everyone around him took pictures of the thing and started sending out the image to various social media. So lost was the person in front of Lyle that she didn’t move forward in line and Lyle shrugged and got in front of her.
He stared at the self-driving car. Google, channelopathy, now a self-driving car in front of his house?
He ate his barbecue and returned to his apartment, overcome with malaise.
A week passed this way, one of the strangest that Lyle could remember in his life. He felt that he was in a stupor, an almost clinical heaviness, and that, simultaneously, he was emerging from one, a long, deep emotional slumber. An impulse lingered to scrape away the dead skin that he felt like covered every inch of him. The note he’d now taped to his cheap, white refrigerator symbolized his struggle to molt. He wanted to understand it and yet the idea repelled him.
He lost himself, or tried to, reading about the so-called Million Gun March. This looked like it actually might happen: a million gun owners promising to show their solidarity through a peaceful congregation at the Washington Mall. The news sites and blogs blared and stewed with support and condemnation. Each vitriolic emotion and editorial more kindling, each more marketing. Politicians were being asked to take sides, to back gun owners or the government, as if these were somehow in opposition.
Alternately, maybe analogously, Lyle weighed his own internal conflict. What to do about this mystery? Whether to act? He vacillated, seesawed, up and back, as he read the Internet, walked the line to discovery, retreated, let ideas wash over him. Eventually, he found the e-mail invite asking him to speak in Steamboat at a conference. It was sent by a woman named Jennifer Babcock, the executive director at IDEA, which evidently stood for Infectious Disease Exploration Association. So it said at the end of the e-mail and on the group’s website. Lyle e-mailed Jennifer Babcock and called a number on the website that went to her voice mail. The website gave Lyle pause. It listed membership organizations that weren’t referenced elsewhere on the Internet, and IDEA itself didn’t exist elsewhere on the Internet. Jennifer Babcock described herself in her initial e-mail as a Ph.D. in immunology but he couldn’t find such a person online, either. She signed her e-mails J.B. Lyle gave up, irritated.
He considered calling Melanie, felt a desperation to visit her, looked her up online, and found she had moved to the East Bay, or was working there, anyway, at Alta Bates hospital. He sat on the information, letting it sink in with everything else.
Then, on the seventh day, his phone rang with an unfamiliar number. Bored, irritated with his entropy, he answered.
“Hello,” a woman’s voice said.
“Yes.”
“Um, I’m sorry to bother you.”
“I’m not interested in a time share,” he said randomly and was about to hang up.
“It’s about Steamboat,” the woman said.
Lying there on his bed, he felt piqued enough to rise up on an elbow. He looked for words.
“Are you there?” the woman said.
“Are you the one who invited me to the conference?” Lyle asked. “I’ve been meaning to call. I think we had a miscommunication.”
It’s true, he’d wanted to get in touch but he feared he’d screwed the whole thing up or maybe he knew on some level that something more insidious was going on and he was still weighing whether and how to confront it.
“What? No. I’m not sure how to start this but please don’t hang up.”
A pang of vague, distant recognition struck Lyle, followed by an acute burst of adrenaline. Did he know this woman’s voice?
“I’m listening,” he managed.
“My name is Eleanor Hall. I’m a pilot. I found your phone number in my back pocket, with a note. I think it’s important.”
Thirty-Five
Two hours later, a vivid yellow winter sun fading, Lyle walked down the chipped cement steps in the stairwell of his apartment building. He’d showered, put on a decent shirt and a gray sweater, and combed his hair. To go meet a woman who claimed to be a pilot, whom he couldn’t be sure he’d ever seen, let alone met, and who had a tale to tell as strange and familiar as his own.
They’d picked neutral ground, located between where each lived near Duboce Park. It was a café—known for its coffee and New York–style pizza—that each of them, coincidentally, frequented. When they’d gotten off the phone, Lyle googled Eleanor Hall and found a photo from a corporate website that indicated she was indeed a pilot. Her image gave Lyle the same feeling as her voice, that she was somehow familiar. Light hair and a trusting smile, and, if the photo was relatively recent, a few years younger than Lyle. Attractive. Maybe that was why Lyle combed his hair. But when was the last time he wanted to impress anyone?