The Cloud
THE CLOUD
MATT RICHTEL
To the eMs: Meredith, Milo and Mirabel. Muses.
I can see clearly now the rain is gone
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
—Johnny Nash
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
—George Orwell
Contents
Twelve Years Ago
B
efore it was chips in Silicon Valley, it was fruit. Orchards dominated the landscape here, a tapestry of cherries, apricots and plums, eventually giving way, acre by acre, to semiconductors and their spawn.
Manufacturing, labs, suburban offices, open-air Eichler homes and their knock-offs added enough concrete and density to cause a modest rise in the average temperature. It was sufficient to make the climate less than perfect for farming. But, no matter, the conditions remained plenty hospitable for the entrepreneurs, investors and engineers who combined forces to make magical electronics the region’s chief export.
On this lazy March afternoon, a fruity fragrance carries on the light wind, a throwback to more pastoral times. Two girls frolic in the front yard of the Menlo Park house with the white picket fence. Without warning, the brown-haired one with the scrawny arms and purple blouse seems struck with an idea, and suddenly bolts.
She opens the white gate, seeing something, hearing something, something otherwise unseen, and runs into the street, like a fawn or an impulsive child half her age. She never sees the Volvo, nor its driver.
“An inexplicable catastrophe,” the
Palo Alto Daily News
bemoans the next day. “It is the likes of which our cozy and insulated part of the world has been so often, thankfully, spared.”
“What, we may ask ourselves over and over without ever getting a satisfactory answer, can possibly explain this tragedy?”
Roiling change, the complex swirl of progress, a future seductive and foreboding. What can possibly explain this tragedy?
THE CLOUD
Present Day
I
stare into the dark tunnel and find myself imagining how it would look to Isaac.
To an eight-month-old, the shadowed subway opening wouldn’t seem ominous. It would be a grand curiosity. Shards of reflected light frame its entrance like shiny pieces of broken glass. Would Isaac try to touch them? Would he finger a droplet of misty water rolling down the jagged wall and put it on his tongue?
The cavern wouldn’t frighten my son. It would excite him with possibility and mystery.
A horn blares and I flinch. The night’s last express approaches. I’m without company on the below-ground platform but I am joined by a wicked aroma. It’s coming from a green, paint-chipped metal trash can that, from the scent, must contain a day’s worth of half-eaten fruit and the carcass of an extremely dead sandwich. The trash can sits along the wall, beneath a dimly lit poster advertising a service that promises to turn your mobile phone into a day-trading terminal. More garbage. “Buy Low, Sell High, Commute Profitably.”
Isaac would love little more than exploring the contours of the iPhone with his mouth.
I turn back to the track and squint across the platform. I’m looking for the woman with the triathlete’s calves. I saw her upstairs at the turnstile, a brunette with darkly tinted skin wearing a skirt and a look of compassion. I watched her put some money in a cup at the feet of a figure sitting in the shadows upstairs, and she turned away with a kindly, worried look.
How come all the beautiful women who look like they were born to heal the damaged are going a different direction than me on the train?
Would she be a great mom?
Would she be impressed that tomorrow I become this year’s recipient of a national magazine award for investigative reporting? Would she help me feel impressed?
A rumbling roars from the tunnel. It’s not yet my train, the K, but the nearing Express, expressing.
Over the din, I hear rustling from behind me; something heavy hits the pavement. A boot step, then another. I turn to see a mountainous man in a leather jacket materialize from the darkness, stumbling toward me. He’s the picture of a San Francisco drunk, downtrodden but wearing a fashionable coat with collar upturned, curly beard, and dark shades.
I’m tempted to ask him if he’s okay as the train whooshes out of the tunnel into the station.
The drunkard lunges, or trips. He careens toward me, leading with his arms as if pushing through a revolving door.
The train’s warning horn explodes.
Powerful palms crash against my chest, fingers claw my sweatshirt. I stumble backward toward the track. I flail to cling to his beefy forearms.
I feel the train pass behind me, airbrushing my scalp.
Isaac. My son. Will I see him again?
One last tactic.
I yank the drunk on top of me. Our momentum abruptly changes. We fall straight down to the pavement. My backpack slams into the ground. My spine unfolds.
Crack.
I see an instant of light, then one of black, then a hazy return to the moment. I smell something like burning tires. Then cologne. I feel intense pressure on my chest.
The mountain man lies on top of me. I think: The base of my skull hit the edge of the concrete platform, but after the train passed. I’m alive.
I frantically push and kick the man from atop me. I claw the cement, then roll, panting in downward dog. I run a triage check. Limbs moving, no obvious fractures. I feel sticky warmth at the back of my skull, a cut but not deep, and shy of the heavy capillary bed on top of my head that would bleed profusely and require stitches. I attended med school a decade ago, before quitting to become a journalist, but I’m still fluent in the anatomy of survival.
I look up to see the drunk. He’s ambling awkwardly. He holds his arms close to his chest. He disappears into a darkened stairwell. From his pocket, something falls, a piece of paper, onto the damp cement.
“Don’t move. You might be hurt.” The voice comes from my right.
It’s the brunette, the one from the turnstile.
I blink hard. She’s blurry.
“Breathe.” She kneels and extends an arm and puts fingers on my shoulder.
Her touch brings attention to the acute pain near my deltoid. The strap of my ratty black backpack must’ve given me a nifty friction burn. But it also probably spared me a rougher fall. The pack, which follows me everywhere, contains an overflow of magazines and notes, the flora and fauna from which journalism sprouts and, tonight, a serendipitous pillow. Lucky I left my laptop home today, for its sake and mine.
I exhale.
I picture the man coming at me, falling but somehow purposeful, his face camouflaged.
“Say something,” the brunette encourages. “Did you know that guy?”
“Scleroderma.”
“What?”
I don’t express my thought: the drunk’s skin was pulled tight against his forehead and around his eyes.
Scleroderma
means “tight skin.” Its presence can indicate a rare disease of the organs, very rare, so these days it is much more likely to indicate a visit to the dermatologist; this drunk recently had an injection of Botox that tightened his wrinkles. Rich drunk.
My scrutiny is a sign of my own condition: excessive medical analysis. Some people focus on faces, or names. I remember pathologies. My not-very-exciting sixth sense is seeing illnesses and physical conditions, a vestige of med school. Jaundice, clinical water retention, lazy eye, gout, misaligned spine, all the herpes variants, emphysema cough, flat-footedness. The obsessive medical labeler can identify the flat-footer even when the condition hustles by, wearing shoes. Even though I’d abdicated a career in medicine for one in medical journalism—after realizing I lacked the intensity and rigidity to be a good doctor—I can’t shake associating humans with their conditions.
“It doesn’t feel right.” I look in the direction the man stumbled away.
“What? Your head?”
“That too.”
I stand, feeling her fingers fall away. I wobble, get my footing, walk unsteadily to the piece of paper that fell from the man’s leather jacket. I pick it up.
It is lined and legal sized, creased and smudged with black grease. I unfold it and discover two names written in blue pen. One name is Sandy Vello. Doesn’t sound familiar. The other name does.
“What is it?” The brunette puts a hand on my arm.
I point to my name on the piece of paper. She shakes her head, uncertain what I’m talking about.
“This is my name?”
“What?”
“Nathaniel Idle.”
“I’m Faith.” She’s still not getting it: My name was on a piece of paper that fell from the pocket of a man who nearly turned me into a subway smoothie.
“That wasn’t an accident.” I clutch the piece of paper in both hands.
“Do you think you need an ambulance? I suspect you’re in shock.”
I look at Faith. She’s biting the edge of her bottom lip with perfect teeth, her head tilted, concerned, empathic. Early thirties, jet-black hair, arched eyebrows, soft features, irresistible grace of the genus Beautiful Person. My eyes lock on her for a millisecond more than is appropriate. I am struck by an urge to make her laugh. But it’s overwhelmed by a more powerful compulsion.
I look at the stairs where the man disappeared. I sprint after him.
I
bound up a steep set of metal stairs. They’re slippery and dimly lit from a track on the low ceiling.
I’m halfway up when I’m hit by a wave of light-headedness and nausea, and feel my toe slide, causing my leg to collapse underneath me. My knee smacks the edge of a stair. A burst of pain shoots forth from my right patella. I look down and curse my cheap canvas high-tops and their cheap rubberized soles that offer inexpensive-chic—and traction approximating paper plates.
I hear footsteps behind me. I glance back to see Faith.
“You’re hurt. Wait.”
I ignore her and stumble to the top of the stairs.
I’m looking down a long, empty tunnel, ending in the well-lit maw of the subway station. I start running again but with a decided hitch in my step.
At the station entrance, my eyes adjust to the wide-open space, with cathedral-like high ceilings, illuminated by bright light. Very bright. Another wave of nausea, one I can’t suppress. I put my hands on my knees and heave spittle and hot breath.
I stand and focus again on the cavernous station. In front of me, a handful of ticket machines line a distant wall. To my left, stairs lead down the tracks for trains heading to the beach, the direction I wasn’t traveling. To my right, turnstiles provide exit and entrance. Next to them, in a rectangular cage of thick glass that stretches nearly to the ceiling, sits a man in blue cap, gray hair overflowing, wooly sideburns, eyes turned down, lost in paperwork, or the paper. Oblivious.
There is no drunk or homeless man. There are no fellow travelers besides Faith, who I hear behind me.
I hobble to and through the turnstiles. Beyond them, a set of majestic stone stairs.
I walk ten yards to the top of the stairs. Outside, I inhale cool air, grateful for it, and peer into the darkness dotted by brake lights, headlights and a stoplight at the corner just to my right. It’s just past 10 p.m., rainy, cold, windy. There’s an empty bus parked for the night in front of the subway terminal, and a Volvo in the passenger pickup zone; its driver sits behind the wheel mesmerized by whatever is on his smart phone.
I return to the turnstiles and knock on the glass cage. The blue-capped man takes a deliberate few seconds to look up, communicating his superiority.
“Excuse me. I was attacked—on the inbound platform.”
In his beefy hand, a Snickers. He swallows a bite that causes a hitch in his throat. He lets me back through the turnstiles and we start labored communication through a small opening in the glass cage.
“What happened?” He’s trying to sound interested but projects weariness, chocolate and nougat on the tips of his front teeth.
“Did someone just come through here? Big guy wearing a leather jacket? He had a beard and maybe a limp.”
“You were mugged?”
Was I mugged? I paw my right front jeans pocket and feel the outline of my phone. My wallet is still in the right back pocket.
Not mugged.
“Your bag is open.”
It takes a second for me to realize that he means my backpack. I turn around and see a few papers have scattered on the ground in the station.
Faith, having reappeared, has scooped up several of the straggling sheets. I turn back to the agent.
“Some guy nearly pushed me into the tracks. Can you call the police?”
“Nothing’s missing?” He hates the idea of the bureaucratic time sink involved with reporting a non-mugging.
“You must have surveillance cameras.” Maybe they got a good look at the falling mountain and me.
I turn to Faith, who stands just a few feet away, holding my papers. Part of me is wondering what she’s doing, why she followed me, and where she came from, why she’s wearing a skirt after dark in rainy mid-January.
“You must have seen him, Faith.”
“You should sit down. You look a little green.”
“I’m okay. I’ll get it checked.” I strongly suspect I won’t. It doesn’t take a former medical student to recognize I’ve got a head contusion and maybe a concussion.
“Your backpack has taken a mortal blow.” She pauses. “Seen him? Who?”
“The guy who toppled me over. You passed him in the tunnel, or he passed you. You each appeared out of nowhere, simultaneously.”
She looks momentarily stricken. “I’m sorry.”
I need another approach.
“I usually don’t interrogate a woman when I first meet her. Usually, it’s a cup of coffee, or a beer, maybe dinner, and only then do I start treating her like a witness or suspect.”
She laughs. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.” For a millisecond, she lowers her brown eyes and then looks back up. She smiles reassuringly.
“What’s on your sweatshirt? Did you get sick?”
I look down at the stain just above the left shoulder.
“Or did your baby get sick?” she asks.
What’s with this woman? Does she know something about me?
“I’ve got a nephew,” she explains. “When he was a baby, that’s right about the spot where he liked to press his face when I fed him.”
I look again at the splotch on my shoulder, and feel light-headed again, momentarily unreal. This prescient woman is right. I’ve got feeding casualty on my shoulder. Isaac. My son. I’ll see him again. I manage a smile. “Masticated avocado I bet. From the mouths of babes. Right onto my shoulder.” Note to self: buy stain remover.
“I take it your baby is not in his or her twenties.”
I feel my eyes mist. “Eight months, give or take. He spits up like an Olympian.”
I cannot possibly be connecting with a woman, not now, not given my track record in relationships. I’m a romantic Hindenburg: promising takeoff, brief smooth sailing, splat. It’s probably not the time to blurt that out, or disclose my dysfunctional personal life and worldview. I’m no longer with Isaac’s mom, and he’s with her. And I’m far from at peace with the whole thing.
“They’re out of town. Visiting her parents.”
“Who?”
Good job, Nat. Instead of confessing your romantic failings, you mutter non sequiturs. “Never mind.”
“Anyhow.” Faith hands me the papers she’s gathered. “I’ve got to catch a cab and get home.”
“Wait. Please.” I’m coursing with a dozen questions, chiefly: What did Faith see? I ask her if she can spare five more minutes to help me deconstruct what happened on the platform. She acquiesces, with a light flavor of impatience, denoted by fidgeting fingers and diminished eye contact. She tells me that she bought a single-ride fare, made a quick phone call, then headed down to the tracks to get the K. When she arrived, she saw the huge guy fall down toward me. She couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or not, but she could tell it was a major impact. “He squished you,” she says.
It’s not particularly helpful. And I’m definitely testing her patience when I ask again if she doesn’t remember seeing the man or can tell me anything about his physical demeanor. I observe that he was clutching his chest as he departed; did she notice? Was he limping?
Finally, I ask her about the piece of paper that fell from the man’s pocket, the one with my name on it and the other name—Sandy Vello. Did she see it fall?
She shrugs. “Maybe it’s yours. Maybe it fell out with all the rest of this stuff.”
“Meaning what?”
“Your backpack droppings were everywhere. You’ve got a mishmash of things. You took a pretty good hit to your head. It can shake your sense of reality.”
She smiles, the same compassionate but sad smile she gave the beggar when I first saw her at the turnstile. A beggar in the shadows. I’m about to ask another question, but she turns to go.
I blurt out: “Please take my card, in case you think of anything about that guy. And can I at least have your info, in case I need to follow up?” I tug two business cards from my wallet.
She takes and studies one. It reads: “Nat Idle: By the Word.” She tucks it into her coat pocket. She scribbles something on the back of the other card and hands it back.
“Can I offer you cab fare?” I ask.
“I’m good. Take care of yourself.”
She walks through the turnstiles and into the darkness.
I look at the ten numbers on the card.
Then I look at the scrap of paper I’ve been clutching this entire time, the one with my name and the other one, Sandy Vello.
I don’t recognize the handwriting. It’s certainly not mine. I know this didn’t come from my backpack. Still, am I making more of this than it is? But, if so, isn’t that my stock-in-trade? I’ve built a business and a life pursuing mysteries—little, medium and occasionally big. Just like Isaac, everything is a curiosity to be examined, touched, tasted, understood. I’m a toddler with a pen.
But there’s something else: real anger. I could’ve died.
I indulge myself in that for a bit, but then my thoughts return to someone else. I’m wondering about this Sandy Vello. What if she’s a target too? What if she has a kid, spouse, partner, or general desire to live?
I walk back to the top of the majestic stairs and pull out my phone. It’s a first-generation iPhone, which in these parts makes me a Luddite, joke fodder, recipient of sad looks on public transportation. I call up an Internet browser and finger in Sandy Vello’s name. In the customary minute it takes for the results to load, I watch a man on a bike pedal by, undaunted in the rain, a dog in his back saddle wearing a yellow slicker. Watching makes my knee ache and I wonder when I’ll get back on a basketball court, my thirty-seven-year-old joints and weather permitting.
Google returns its wisdom, 171,000 related web pages’ worth. Big help, Google.
I run the same search but for recent news. I get a hit. Sandy Vello has been in the news lately. Ten days ago, she was hit by a car in Woodside, a suburb in the hills half an hour south of San Francisco. She was killed.
I’m reading an obituary.