“Sure.”
I feel Chuck’s eyes and look up to see him studying us.
“Don’t forget your file,” Pauline says to me. She reaches across me, leans over the keyboard and pulls the drive from the computer. It seems like she’s being deliberately nonchalant about the drive, making sure to send no message at all to G.I. Chuck that it bears any significance. She hands it to me, and for an instant, I feel her arm brush mine.
“Any luck with it?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Call me later if you want to brainstorm. I’m sure the secret is somewhere inside that complicated head of yours.”
She looks at Chuck and says: “One of the best bloggers in the business.”
She smiles and clears her throat. “Call me later,” she reiterates. For an instant, she looks unusually vulnerable, like she did when she wobbled in.
My cue to go.
I grab my backpack, walk out and down the hallway, and take two steps outside, then pause. The air is still but crisp, high clouds obscuring the stars, conditions portending rain. I smell something irresistible like french fries and then realize that’s exactly what I’m detecting. It’s coming from a man sitting cross-legged on a nearby park bench under a streetlight, eating from a McDonald’s bag, reading something intently on his phone. E-mail and McDonald’s, two of modernity’s most powerful lures. If they can somehow combine the concepts into a wireless french fry — wi-fry? — or maybe one that can be delivered wirelessly, we’ll all die within a few years on our couches, obese and blissful.
I walk back inside and poke my head back into the office. Pauline looks up and smiles but I quickly shift my eyes to the venture capitalist.
“Chuck? May I have a quick word?”
“Sure.” Then looks at Pauline. “Back in a sec.”
He follows me outside.
“You want a raise? I don’t even own the place yet?”
He wants to buy us, me. “You said that you’d be willing to lend a hand if I needed help on a story.”
“Go on.”
I’m thinking about the shooting and the phone call. Can I get help from Chuck, who professes to have friends in high places?
“Someone keeps calling me from a private number. I’d love to figure out who it is.”
Until that moment, he is looking me in the eye. For a moment, he looks away. “This is for a story?”
“An anonymous tipster calls, leaves information, hangs up,” I lie. “It could be nothing. But serious journalism often requires you to drop down a bunch of rabbit holes.”
“I probably can’t do much. But I know one guy who does telecommunications intel. What’s your phone number? I’ll have him check it out.”
I pull out my wallet and extract a business card.
Without taking his eyes off the card, he says: “You seem to know Pauline well.”
I clear my throat.
“Does she look okay to you?” he continues. “She seems off her game.”
I shrug.
He extends his hand and we shake. We part, awkwardly.
I head to the car. In my pocket, a thumb drive. In my head, bewilderment. I need refuge, answers. Beer.
I live nearby in Potrero Hill. It’s a neighborhood of steep inclines, a place best suited for donkeys and sherpas. Architecturally, it has an industrial feel, the ghost of a manufacturing past paved over with residences built for people who can’t afford Pacific Heights, the Marina, or sunnier and flatter neighborhoods.
Like much of San Francisco, Potrero is populated by transplants and transients, devoid of local roots and memories — people looking ahead in life, not behind, the embodiment of manifest destiny. Like the pioneers who settled this place, we can’t move any further west, the Pacific Ocean intervening, but we can keep upgrading our devices to feel like we’re in constant motion.
My home and home office are contained in a one-bedroom flat on Florida. Two blocks away is the Pastime Bar, where I did my residency and fellowship, specializing in studying the effects of Anchor Steam and quasi-wry bar commentary on the brain of a single male.
I drive to the bar, park in front, and wander to the bar’s door, uninviting to the point of foreboding. A veritable prisoners’ entrance. It’s thick and covered with numerous coats of cheap brown paint, peeling and frayed, graced with a single bumper sticker, haphazardly placed years ago, that reads: “Get Yer Beer Googles.” There are eyeballs in the misspelled words, two o’s and eyebrows over them. Tacky and stupid. Home.
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.