At the bottom of the stairwell, he unchained his bike from the small storage area, tightened the leather pedal straps around his sneakers, and took off on Divisidero. He loved riding his bike, the terror of imminent death notwithstanding. San Francisco had one of the highest rates in the state of drivers killing pedestrians and bikers. No wonder, given that this city, as much as any other, mixed a driving culture with a walking one. Lyle rode and kept a keen eye.
He saw the driverless car.
It looked like the very one that had been parked outside of his house when he’d been eating barbecue. Now it crawled along, three cars behind Lyle. An empty driver’s seat and the thing cruising along as if pulled by a puppeteer. These cars were becoming more common but it was still eerie, Lyle thought, and pedaled on. A few blocks later, the car seemed to get stuck in traffic as Lyle climbed up the steep part of Divisidero, right before it transforms into Castro, and took a left onto Waller. The looming California Pacific Hospital stirred a memory of doing a consult for a patient with dengue fever. It had been one of those gratifying moments when Lyle’s contributions, modest though he felt them, saved a nice young man.
The autonomous vehicle crept over Waller and took a left but, this time, Lyle, lost in thought, didn’t see it was continuing in his same direction.
At Duboce Park, Lyle dismounted and watched toddlers and their nannies disgorging for home. The chill had come after a drought-blessed, dry day, the sea breeze picking up and detectable even this far inland if you put your nose to the air. Lyle stopped a few blocks shy of the café to think. This putative pilot had said that she’d found a note in her back pocket with Lyle’s phone number and the words: Call Dr. Lyle Martin about Steamboat. You’re not imagining.
He might well have blown her off, at least initially, had it not been for the phrasing: You’re not imagining. It’s what he had written to himself in his own note.
On the phone, he’d started to ask her what she was imagining and she suggested they meet and she’d elaborate. He was having the same impulse and so that was that. He locked up at a bike stand on the corner and pressed himself to consider what he remembered from the flight to Steamboat. He recalled settling in, downing some Benadryl, maybe a lot of it, falling asleep. As he recounted it, he wasn’t sure that’s what happened.
“Dr. Martin?”
He turned to see a woman looking at him quizzically. She held car keys in her hand and had a newspaper tucked under her arm.
“Lyle,” he said. “Captain Hall?”
She nodded and half smiled. “So we googled each other and we each use honorifics on first reference. Please drop mine too,” she said. “Eleanor.”
He wanted to look away from her, given that it was impolite to stare, but felt like he was having déjà vu. “Like we’ve met,” she said. “Right?”
For a moment, his heart fluttered with fear and uncertainty.
“There’s a table. I’ll grab it.”
They sat beneath a vibrantly colored painting that looked at a distance like the state of Texas smeared by a rainbow. The uncomfortable plastic green chairs matched the yellow and green paint. The pizza slices kept this place in the game, and Lyle and Eleanor each had one, the special, prosciutto and basil. Each had professed to have been here before and Lyle wondered if that’s how he knew her. He tried not to stare. She didn’t touch her pizza, and he tried not to wolf his or pound his beer.
“So you’re a pilot,” he broke the ice.
She nodded like she was still gathering her thoughts and figuring how to express them. The voice of a popular soprano rocker came over the coffeehouse speakers. “I’ve been grounded, temporarily,” Eleanor started and then paused. “Sorry, you’ll have to forgive me; this is a little strange.”
“Grounded?”
“There was a problem with the landing in Steamboat.” She smiled and shook her head. “So I’m told.”
“Sorry, I thought you said you were a—”
“Right, the pilot—on the flight. I was. I just can’t remember much about it. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”
“Wait. I’m right there with you. The flight, I can’t quite grab onto it. Small wonder, though; I slept through most of it, knowing me.”
A silence descended. These were two proud people, clearly, certainly not used to having things so out of reach or feeling fundamentally helpless. Lyle guessed that Eleanor hadn’t slept much lately and was surprised to also surmise that she was carrying grief.
“Can I tell you a story?” Lyle said.
“Um, sure.”
“My biggest med school mistake.”
It had been in his first year at Penn, he explained, a class in basic anatomy, involving the poking and probing of a cadaver. His dead body was called Ms. Phillips. “She’d been a schoolteacher, my partner and I were told.” Lyle explained, “I got it into my head that she hadn’t died, as we’d been told, from sudden cardiac arrest but maybe from a more chronic disease. I saw signs of malignancy. It was no big revelation but as I was pacing back and forth, lost in an internal dialogue, I was drinking coffee and I…”
“You spilled it into her body?”
“Poetically, at least, into the stomach.”
She actually laughed, which he’d hoped for. Then she clipped it back. She was in no mood for laughing.
“That’s how I feel now, like something doesn’t add up and, well, at the risk of absolutely destroying the metaphor, that I’m Ms. Phillips, the dead teacher, and someone has spilled coffee inside of me.”
“You’re right. You absolutely destroyed the metaphor.”
Now he laughed, if briefly, cleared his throat.
“Can I see your note?” he asked. “With my phone number?”
She hesitated. Was he going to take it and run? She wasn’t sure why he would, it’s just that it constituted concrete evidence. She pulled it from her pocket and laid it on the table, careful to keep a finger on it. Lyle nodded thoughtfully. He pulled a pen from his backpack and, on a napkin, copied the words he saw on the note.
“Same handwriting,” she said.
“Looks like I did give you that, after all.”
Outside, Lyle noticed a man looking in the window who looked a tad familiar, too.
“What is it?” Eleanor said.
“That guy…”
She turned around and followed his glance but no one was there. “What guy?”
“He was just…” Lyle stopped. “He’s gone, I guess.”
It was dusk now. This moment, and the mood, seemed to sober Eleanor, leaving her uncertain again what Lyle was about, even how sane. “So tell me your version of the story,” she said.
He told her about how he was supposed to attend this conference and he woke up in Steamboat at the Sheraton and there was no conference. Besides that, his brain had gone fuzzy on him and he couldn’t remember exactly how he’d gotten to the hotel, pieces missing. “Like someone slipped me a roofie.”
“I had the same feeling,” she said. “Almost like…” She paused. “It reminded me of when I’d had a seizure.”
When she said it, she could see Lyle perk up.
“You find that interesting,” she said.
He reached into his back pocket and felt for his own note, the one he’d written himself about seizure. But it wasn’t there. He’d left it on the fridge. He explained about the note to her. He asked her what she’d meant when she said it felt like a seizure, explaining that he’d never experienced one himself.