Hooked (12 page)

30

A
month later, I called Annie’s close friend, Sarah Tenner. “Nat,” she said when I called, like she’d never heard the name before.

We met at a bar. The one thing that I hadn’t been able to do was give myself permission to let go. I just couldn’t get over the hump. Annie seemed to haunt me all the time. I told Sarah I loved her eulogy to Annie. She softened, and we toasted to our lost love.

“Annie was far from perfect,” Sarah said. “You damn well know it.”

“She did occasionally have a hangnail,” I said.

“Let yourself focus on her failings. It’ll help you move on. She could be competitive, manipulative, even a bitch sometimes, a little nuts.”

I shook my head.

“You’re being pathologically naïve.”

We got drunk on martinis and reminisced. Sarah urged me to move on. She said that’s what Annie would have wanted. She pointed out that we’d only dated for a year.

“I knew Annie my whole life. I loved her as much as any friend. But I am trying like hell not to lionize her. She didn’t deserve that.”

It was the difference between friendship and true love. Sarah and Annie’s other friends couldn’t see what I saw, or feel what I did. The intensity of two people in love can only be admired from the outside, not shared or even fully appreciated. I felt like a dope, but I unloaded on Sarah all the things I missed about Annie. It was a laundry list of small moments and big emotions, a dripping whiny poem.

Sarah looked me in the eye. “I know this is hard. That’s the way these things are. But Annie was not as much of a romantic as you think. She would have wanted you to move on. I know that’s what she wanted. Because she told me so. You made her feel something she’d never experienced before. She was fascinated by you. She said that whatever happened to you two, she wanted you to be happy.”

“Meaning she expected something bad to happen?”

“That’s not how I took it. She meant, like, if you guys should break up, or whatever. She meant that she considered you so special. Some kinds of affection transcend whatever tragedies befall a relationship.”

Sarah added, “There’s someone I think you should meet.”

A month passed before I took Sarah up on her offer.

Her name was Julie. She was one of those lucky few creatures whose double helix was tailor-made for this particular period on the planet earth.

She was five feet ten inches tall, thin, with breasts that preceded her by just enough to demand attention, but not enough to cost her credibility. She had shoulder-length blonde hair—of a shade that suggests playful and easily underestimated. She looked like something that Hugh Hefner would put on the cover of an issue about Girls Who Make Everyone Want to Emigrate to America.

Julie had, in no particular order, been in the Peace Corps, a singing quartet that toured Eastern Europe before the fall of the Wall, a trivia game show in which her family had won $5,200—and the most overhyped trip
ever
in the history of game show prizes.

“Let me guess,” I said. “They put you up in the Motel 5?”

“Motel 5?”

“It’s like a Motel 6. But you have to bring your own cock- roaches.”

She was the kind of woman who made you want to make her smile, who smiled even if you didn’t deserve it. She smiled.

It was easy conversation. She didn’t mind me one bit. When I told her I liked to play midnight golf (sneaking onto the course at night and hitting glow-in-the-dark balls), she said, “I’d like to try that. We should go sometime.”

“So how well did you know Annie?”

“Didn’t have the privilege,” Julie said. “A real tragedy what happened to that girl. How well did you know her?”

I hoped the ache in my chest didn’t show.

Two months after that, I went to an oyster bar with Rochelle, a piano teacher when she wasn’t doing public relations for the local cable company. She was thirty-two, but the important number was her blood alcohol content, and mine. She plied us both with booze, we made small talk. One segue led to another that led to her apartment.

I’d never bothered to consider bringing a condom. I took the one offered from her bedside drawer with a feeling of inevitability. Afterward, she went into the bathroom to freshen up, and I wiped away a tear. Three months after Annie died, I thought, and I’m in purgatory, fighting back tears while some woman’s tabby cat sniffs at the bottom of my still-socked feet.

And so it went. I was sappier than I should have been, than I’d ever expected to be. Angrier.

I eventually found some solace in a woman—not one wielding a bouquet, but a needle. The weapons of the good witch Samantha.

I first experienced her powers about six months after Annie died. Shiatsu massage. Sam laid hands on the leverage points of my tired corpus—the insides of my knees, my ankles, my beltline, and the bony outline of my jaw. Then shot me through with bolts of energy. I graduated to acupuncture, the needle.

Sam knew I was skeptical of the New Age arts. She knew I thought massage was something you got on a hard plastic table at an athletic club. Then she made me a believer. Her treatments were as real as anything I’d learned in Western medical school. They put my world in slow motion. She helped me find something I’d never looked for, or considered. Silence.

When she was done with me on those Sunday nights, and sent me out in the world, it was okay that things were quiet. It was okay that Annie wasn’t there, that she was not coming back. And I could see her more clearly; I could see the imperfections that her abrupt, tragic end often distracted me from.

I escalated to meditation, slack-jawed breathing, and acupuncture. I didn’t quite become some nut and berry picker and eater. I remained a sometimes judgmental red-blooded American male who believed that the greatest salve to any problem was two shots of tequila and a compact disk compilation of U2’s greatest hits.

Sam and Bullseye weren’t my only friends. They weren’t even the people I spent the most time with. That would have been the fellows from the YMCA. The misfits of Monday, Wednesday, and Friday basketball between 4:30 and 6 p.m. Gym rats. Guys with delusions of great athleticism. And delusions of great social skills. They played imaginary games of one-on-one with visions of supermodels inside their heads. But they had a perverse sense of loyalty to others of their species.

And there was a neighbor. Sanjiv Bubar, a manager of Ant Hill Records. Not that a tiny store hawking used rhythm and blues albums (actual vinyl) needed a manager, but that was his title. Music, by the way, wasn’t his deepest passion. His real love was making model airplanes.

He would knock on my apartment door long after the infomercials had taken over the airwaves. I’d find him standing there, stinking like glue and holding a facsimile of a Navy experiment that had flown only two missions over Prague in World War II.

Sanjiv had something in common with the others—with Samantha and Bullseye, and the gym rats. They had hit a plateau in life. They weren’t striving or fighting. They had settled in, and they were more or less contented with it, living a life without judgment—of me. If they were judging themselves, they were doing it outside of earshot.

Not like my medical school friends. I still kept in touch with them, but I’d fallen out of their pace. I couldn’t muster the energy to care the way they did, or maybe to feign caring the way they did.

One night, I came home late from the Past Time bar and found Sanjiv standing in the doorway of my apartment looking grave. Someone had jimmied into my apartment and robbed the place. The cops said it was going on in the neighborhood, a sign of a new collective dependence on crystal meth.

Gone were several of my big-ticket items: a PlayStation 2, a microwave, stereo, computer, monitor, and printer. All replaceable, except for the work I’d failed to back up. The place was a wreck. Whoever had broken in, the cops said, was probably looking for pot and prescription drugs.

As I looked around the place, I noticed Sanjiv standing beside the refrigerator. I watched as he picked up the picture of Annie and me on the Santa Cruz boardwalk that lay amid the ruins on the floor. He looked at it. He thought I wasn’t looking at him, but still he seemed self-conscious when he decided not to put it back on the refrigerator. He slipped it into a drawer in the kitchen. The drawer that keeps the tape, and glue. The thumbtacks. The Tic Tacs. The pictures of dead girlfriends.

I think he was thinking it was time I stopped building replicas of Annie in my mind. Something must have resonated. Maybe it was the tenderness in Sanjiv’s decision. I left the picture in the drawer.

Time started to pass normally, no longer at the pace of grief, maybe even faster than it had before. The fog of Annie finally started to clear, after two years.

I got a toehold with my writing, and I amassed a small body of work, including something that actually made me proud.

At San Francisco General Hospital, an elderly (but not decrepit) man had come into the emergency room wearing a black baseball cap with a red Safeway logo on it. He complained of headaches. The doctor, who happened to be a friend from medical school, took off the cap. And found maggots crawling around an exposed part of the man’s brain. The insects were actually saving the man’s life.

Evidently, the man had gotten into a car wreck months earlier and had cracked open his skull. But whether through age or early dementia or ignorance, he’d not gone to the hospital, despite having exposed a tiny portion of his frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for emotion and judgment, among other things. It is possible to live without the lobe intact, as lobotomies attest. It was very likely the missing lobe clouded his judgment so much that he never bothered to go to the hospital.

Meantime, his lobe had gotten infected, which should have killed him, but maggots got there first and began feasting off the bacteria. They kept it from spreading. It was a fascinating conundrum for the doctors of San Francisco General. They had to clean his wound, without allowing bacteria to take hold. They succeeded, and had a great cocktail party story.

Until the doctor told me something else of interest: The man’s wife was in the early stages of dementia. After his car accident, she had called the insurance company, which was obligated to send a care worker out for an in-home visit. It failed to do so, even after she called several more times (then forgot about it, thanks to her own dementia).

The couple was not alone in their experience. Thousands of elderly Californians were not getting the follow-up home care they were entitled to under their insurance policies. According to lawsuits, at least four people had died in the previous two years as a result.

After two months of investigating, I wrote a story in the
California Medical Journal
. The story, I was told, prompted the state legislature to put the heat on insurers.

My stories fed on one another. Work and life took on a rhythm, and an honesty. There were fewer downs and ups. There weren’t the great joys or pits I’d once known. Maybe I was growing up.

Or, just maybe, I was being lulled to sleep.

31

W
here is Strawberry Labs?”

“Would you believe I might actually know that?” Mike said. “Nat, this isn’t for a story you’re working on, is it?”

“I need to know where it is.”

“I was curious myself. I couldn’t find any mention of it on the Net.” He typed a few sentences or commands into his keyboard. “But I did do some IP mapping.”

Mike said that the author of the encryption software hadn’t left any further information in his signature. The signature didn’t say the who, what, or where of its author. But the encryption program did provide some indirect evidence of the author’s whereabouts.

“Indirect evidence? C’mon, Mike.”

“Whenever someone signed on to GNet, they had to get through the encryption program. To do so, they signed on through a remote server.”

“A computer located at Strawberry Labs,” I said.

“I can’t tell you the physical location of Strawberry Labs. But I can tell you the Internet address—I can tell you in rough terms the Internet protocol address used by the company.”

He paused.

“You want some ibuprofen?”

I realized I was gripping my neck and rubbing.

“I’m good,” I said.

He shrugged.

“When people sign on to the Internet, they do so from a location that has a unique set of numbers. That set of numbers corresponds typically to an Internet service provider.”

“Like America Online.”

“Like Felton Community Net.”

“Felton,” I said. “South of San Jose.”

He nodded.

Felton.

I wouldn’t even have to stop for another tank of gas.

I asked Mike not to say anything about his findings, mumbling something about it being part of an investigative story. I grabbed the laptop and exited Stanford Technology Research Center. On the hood sat Erin. Before I was barely within earshot, she said, “I thought we were in this together.”

I muttered, “I thought we were too.”

What should I say? What could I say?

At the least, she had neglected to tell me she was accused of felony arson. It didn’t seem like a small detail to leave out, given the prominent role fire suddenly was playing in our lives. At the most, Erin had actually committed felony arson, several times.

“My phone went dead,” I said.

I sent an e-mail and it bounced back; my phone battery went dead; I didn’t get your voice mail, how weird!

If we owe nothing else to the great advances in telecommunications of the twenty-first century, we at least should give it credit for availing us of a myriad of new excuses.

I might as well have told Erin the dog ate my peanut butter and honey homework.

“It rang five or six times every time I called,” she said, paused, then added, “Spare me,” in a resilient tone I hadn’t heard from her before.

“I didn’t want to miss the appointment with Mike.”

“I was worried about you. Jesus.”

I studied Erin’s face. Worry, fear. What else?

“I figured you must have come down here,” she said. “I wasn’t sure where else to look.”

“You just figured I’d come down here?”

“What’s your problem?”

“What’s my problem? My problem is I want to know what the hell is going on.”

She balled her fists together. Her eyes flickered.

“We’re on the same side here, right?”

She looked at my arm, which I had folded over Andy’s laptop. “I want to know what’s on the computer too. Did he open the diary? Let me see it.”

The diary. Of course. I should have looked in Mike’s office—so I might know if there was anything of interest before Erin made her appearance. I put the laptop in the trunk.

“Let’s check it out when we get there.”

There are silences and then there are silences. The forty- minute drive to Felton started innocently enough, then grew into a silence of the professional variety. Cold, seeping Arctic air. My side wasn’t born quite of animosity, but of safety and strategy. I was waiting for an opening to explore, to get a feel, without pressing. Per Danny’s admonition, I should have been aiming to keep my conversation with Erin relatively normal, but the best I could muster was a thinly veiled pout.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” she finally said.

“My head feels like a steel drum at a Bob Marley concert.”

The phone rang/vibrated. Battat and Bard. The offices of Murray Bard. Neurologist. Andy’s doctor.

“Hello, Dr. Bard.”

Dr. Bard made a brief attempt at pleasantries, asking if I’d been a classmate of Dr. Fernandez and whether I was still located in the city. I answered in the affirmative to both questions, technically not a lie even though when Dr. Bard asked about my location he was almost certainly referring to where I practiced medicine.

“I’m between consults,” Dr. Bard said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m calling about Andy . . . ”

I looked at Erin. She mouthed, “Goldstein.”

“. . . Andy Goldstein.” Then I switched languages—into doctor.

“Headaches. Insomnia. Rapid cycling of moods. Came in for an EEG.”

Dr. Bard took a memory break. He saw hundreds of patients. Without a chart in front of him, they didn’t entirely exist.

“He jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge about three weeks ago.”

He responded after a pause. “I remember him now. Thin gentleman. Hyper. Not surprising for a meth addict.”

Erin hadn’t told me anything about Andy using drugs.

“He told you about that,” I said, with open-ended intonation.

“Dr. Idle?” said Dr. Bard. “I can’t remember—what were you treating Mr. Goldstein for?”

“I wasn’t his doctor. Just a friend.”

“If you want to come by, I can pull his chart. Call my receptionist to set up a good time.”

“Wait, Dr. Bard. I could really use your insights here.”

“Please say hello to Dr. Fernandez for me.” He hung up.

Erin had been watching me anxiously.

“What was wrong with Andy? What did they do to him?”

They.

“You didn’t tell me Andy was taking drugs.”

“What?”

“Was Andy a drug addict, Erin? What aren’t you telling me?”

“Andy? Drugs? No way. What kind of drugs?”

“Meth. Uppers. The kind of thing that keeps you up all night and makes you walk off a bridge.”

Silence.

“What’s going on, Erin?”

“Nat, Andy was . . . my best friend. I knew everything about him. He was totally straitlaced,” she responded, her voice rising. “Drugs were not his . . . ”

“His what?”

“His vice. His vice. He didn’t have a single vice in the world, okay? Andy was a good, loving, kind, generous man.”

She leaned back and turned her head toward the window.

Half an hour of silence later, we arrived in Felton, which looked more like a movie than a town. I felt like I was on Lot B of Disney, where they shoot scenes of a quaint downtown, shopkeepers spending their coffee break raking leaves.

I went to the one gas station and asked the one middle-aged full-service attendant for directions to the, hopefully, one Internet service provider. Felton Community Net. It was just a few blocks away, the portly man said.

When I pulled up to it, I said to Erin, “I’m sorry in advance for what I’m about to ask.”