“Are there ways to prevent or short-circuit a seizure?” Lyle asked.
“Like phenobarbital?” Her eyes went wider now as she mentioned the barbiturate. Lyle knew that some of these drugs could be used to slow or prevent seizure but that wasn’t what he was asking. Of course, he wasn’t thinking he’d give everyone in the world a barbiturate, if that even would work. Now he was startled by what she must be thinking: he might be trying to get drugs. Or maybe she was going to make it look that way, to herself, even others.
“Is everything okay, Lyle?” she asked.
He gritted his teeth. She wasn’t going to make this easy. He felt the old irritations bubble; she was playing three-level chess—one level being gamesmanship—and he didn’t want any part of it. Fatigue overtook him.
“Anyhow, thanks for your time,” he said.
Outside, he couldn’t breathe. Forces he couldn’t name grappled for control of his body and brain. He leaned against a wall with paralysis, physical, emotional, spiritual. He knew what he needed to do. He knew what he had to do. A growling sound escaped his throat. A passerby moved inches away on the sidewalk. Lyle looked at his hands white with blood loss as he held furiously to the paper with the names. It took everything not to rip it to shreds.
He put it in his pocket. He pulled out his phone.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Melanie.”
“Lyle? I’m right in the middle—”
“Please.”
“Lyle, okay, hold on.” He could hear Melanie cup her hand over the phone. “I need five. Can you just take ice to the guy in 210?” She withdrew her hand from the phone. “Is everything okay?”
“No.” Lyle had moved himself to the backside of the building, opposite a parking structure. Were he paying attention, he could see the water and across the bay in the direction of Melanie.
“I’m in a room. I’ve got five minutes. What’s the matter, are you sick?”
“I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“Melanie, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for—”
“Everything, all of it. It is on me.”
He heard first silence and then the sound of them crying for both of them. He invited the sound in. He closed his eyes. A minute passed.
“I love you, Mel. I will always love you.”
Sobs overcame her.
“I’m happy for you,” he said. “You have a beautiful family.”
“Thank you, Peño.”
At a café off the promenade, Lyle ignited his laptop. He pulled out the piece of paper with more than two hundred names. As the machine booted, he closed his eyes and listened to the memory of Melanie crying. He’d owed her an apology for more than three years. He probably owed her three years’ worth of apology. He owed it to himself too. At some point, whoever was to blame—him—no longer mattered. He felt the poison, the toxins, release from his body. He looked at the computer screen.
He typed the first name into Google.
Two hours later, two things were clear to Lyle. This was not a smart strategy. Second and more important: he was eager to keep going. The feeling reminded him of the old days, when no clock or skeptic deterred him. His idea had been to call up the names, look at current jobs and their pictures, which almost all of them had in some form or fashion. He’d hoped that one of them might trigger recognition. Or he’d see, or intuit, a pattern. Maybe one of them worked with Google cars. Had a Steamboat connection. Involvement with seizure research. Along those lines, there had been one former student, Dr. Mischa David, who worked at the Epilepsy Center at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Lyle spent a few minutes poking around about her and decided nothing else about her struck him.
Another woman, Jackie Badger, was unusual in that she had not followed a medical path and had, as far as he could tell, no further medical training. She worked at Google as an engineer. There had been no other information about her and the tiniest image. So he’d moved on.
Now he was only on the H’s.
He stood up and stretched. Walked outside and stared at people walking by. Most of them lost in their devices.
In the middle of a promenade stood a lone protester with a placard. It pictured a separatist with an automatic weapon. It read turncoat.
“Look up!” demanded the protester as he nearly got knocked into by a student reading his device. The student bounced off like a pinball and kept on. Lyle looked at the placard and the man holding the weapon. He had a memory flash that left him wobbling. A man with such a gun, shots fired, a body in a doorway. He clung to the image, tried to. It wavered, flickered. Shifted. A woman, standing with her phone. Clicking on it. Short hair, a hat. Flicker, flicker. Then again, two children in the backseat of a car.
Flicker. Gone.
He practically ran back to his laptop. He sat and clicked away. He called up the picture of Jackie Badger. He enlarged it. He held his breath. Dark hair, a light face. He cocked his head, tried her face on with different color hair, a hat, a worried look, a smile. He was sure he didn’t know her. Same as he didn’t feel like he’d known Eleanor when he met her at a café, but, on some level he did know her.
Just like he knew this woman.
He looked around and, outside, saw a man with a fish-looking face peering at him through the window.
Forty
Outside the café, the fish-faced man didn’t run this time. Instead, he sat on a half wall near the bike racks, arms crossed. Lyle approached him, feeling immediate irritation. The guy wreaked of smugness and self-satisfaction. A cowboy wannabe looking for a gunfight. Not just metaphorically; the guy wore a puffy windbreaker that Lyle intuited hid a gun in a back holster. There were probably five conceal-carry permits in San Francisco, and surely this guy didn’t have one. So he was some mix of stupid and dangerous and scared, or just 100 percent stupid, and yet Lyle felt undeterred.
“You’re the copilot,” Lyle said.
“The correct phrase is first officer, Dr. Martin.”
A shiver of distant recognition braced Lyle. He knew that obnoxious tone from somewhere. The man stood nearly a half foot taller than Lyle but less than that with the hunched slant of his shoulders. His eyes bulged, red tinged.
“Good timing,” Lyle said. “Is it Jeremy?”
Jerry gritted his teeth, then tried to affect a cool-guy smirk. “I’ll let you figure my name out.”
“Jerry,” Lyle said guilelessly.
“Very good, Lyle,” Jerry said. “Now what the hell is your game? You and Eleanor trying to bring me down, is that it?”
“Let’s go talk about it, Jerry. And you can tell me why you’re following me. Did Jackie send you?”
Lyle watched Jerry’s face squeeze in irritation, like he had no clue what Lyle was talking about. This guy is too stupid, Lyle thought, to fake confusion. Stupid, and dangerous. Armed.
They sat in Jerry’s red Miata on a side street and talked. The car was twenty years old, at least, and impeccable. A police scanner tucked in a compartment below the radio squawked with static and an occasional report. Lyle told much of the same story he’d told Eleanor—being on the flight, not remembering much. Jerry half listened, less interested it seemed to Lyle in figuring out what happened than in looking for flaws. Lyle patiently talked, waiting for his turn to listen, which is why he was here. Jerry didn’t seem interested, though, in sharing. So Lyle had to infer Jerry’s story, and his appearance outside the café, from his salty questions.