The Cloud (15 page)

33

A
siren wails.

I orient. Black smoke swirls in the form of a twister from the back of the annex.

“The delivery truck.”

“What?” I can read Faith’s lips but can’t actually hear over the siren or stunned eardrums.

I sense movement and turn to see a police cruiser and a van careening up the driveway behind me, followed by the din of another oncoming siren.

I run up the concrete staircase leading from the lot to the heavy annex doors. As I near them, they swing open. A mousy woman I think I recognize from my previous visit bounces out, blinking, waving. “I’m sending them this way.” I don’t take her meaning until the first boy juts through the doorway. Then another, then a stream. Most in their early teens wearing blue uniforms. Hooting and hollering. Mingled with them, a few younger kids in street clothes. No Sandy. Something tells me she’s in there, in the back, where smoke mingles with gurgles and pops.

I press myself against the open door, avoiding the scrum. Waiting for my moment. It comes shortly, a lull in the dense parade. I head into the stream, and the annex. Inside the doors, ordered chaos. The mousy woman directs a thinning group of boys to safety. Their diminishing numbers, coming from a set of double doors that lead to the inside, suggest most have cleared out already.

The mousy woman looks at me. Then her eye catches an oversized teen carrying two cans of paint—arts-and-crafts class, I think—but she clearly sees the tools of imminent prank or vandalism and, comically, snags the boy’s huge arm in her own wiry talon. I whisk by her, skirt a handful of blue-clad boys, slip into the guts of the annex.

Temporary walls and smoke. A long hallway, beneath the cavernous ceiling, bisects classrooms separated by some cheap material, rollers at the bottom that give the place a hollow, tinny feeling. I peek into the room on the right. A library. Books on the walls, the floors, a bookshelf yanked down. I’m about to turn away when I see the boy. Under a table, rocking, a book in his lap that he’s reading or cradling. “Hey!” No recognition, his eyes remain down. I take a half dozen steps to him. He looks up. Says something.

“What? You’ve got to go.”

“It’s mine.” He pulls the book to his chest. An illustrated
Treasure Island.

“You have to get out. It’s all yours. Take it with you.”

I cough, once, twice, a couple of more times for effect. The thickening smoke will be dangerous in another few minutes.

Then: Boom! A mid-sized explosion comes from the back of the building. Like an appliance erupting, something localized. The boy crawls out, stands, sprints past me, clutching the book. I follow him back into the hallway. He heads to the exit. I head the other way, now not a soul in sight. Smoke pours from a room near the back. And within it, a figure, walking, emerging. I blink. Is it a boy? He looks translucent, an apparition. Isaac?! I blink again. The image is gone, just my imagination coming out of the smoke. I wretch out a cough. A thin carpet of gunpowder-colored smoke coats the high ceilings, resolving into a gray fog as it floats lower to the ground.

I’m about to pass the next room on the left. Better check. Inside, a small kitchen, refrigerator, microwave, bag lunches on a folding table, a break room for the staff. No boys. Move on. A few steps more down the hallway, the next room on the right. An open doorway. Inside, folding tables and chairs, easels around the edges, pails on the tables filled with pencils, pens and markers, paint cans in the corner on a drop cloth. No boys. Nothing to see here. But then, my eye catches something on the outside, through the windows. A hulking figure, a stout man wearing a blazer, carrying a briefcase. He looks out of place. I know his actual place: an alley in Chinatown. The man who blackened my eye. He’s moving by the window, quickly, looks up, must sense me, staring in my direction. Can he see me? He semi-smiles, cocks his head.

There’s another explosion.

The stout man propels forward, like a projectile, but still on his feet. He’s not felled, not even thrown, just accelerated, toward the front of the building, like a bad special effect in a 3-D movie. I duck to avoid a smattering of shattered glass. I reorient, not really in danger, the explosion having come from the outside, the back of the building. I’d bet my fees for a hundred blog posts that’s where Sandy is.

I scramble back into the hallway. I sprint into the darkening air to the last two doors on the right, covering my mouth. I ignore the heat wave growing by degree with each step. I reach a door two rooms away from the one pouring the lion’s share of the smoke and now, I can see, licks of orange flame.

“Help!” A voice rises over the gurgles and pops. I blink away the heat and peer through the door. Sandy stands at the other end of a room. Trapped.

Between her and me is a wooden desk, or what remains of it. It’s fully enflamed. It’s on its side, blocking her path to the door. Outside, more trouble. A burning delivery van, white and wide-load, like the one I saw driving up here earlier, pressed against the building. Its nose is smashed into a gas pump. A diesel pump. The explosion explained? Instant guess: bad man from Chinatown drives van into pump?

I focus back on the narrow room where Sandy stands. It’s separated from the one next to it only by the shattered remains of a glass wall. It dawns on me what I’m looking at, and standing in the doorway of: an observation room. The glass wall allowed whoever sat in this narrow room to look at whatever was happening in the much larger room just to my left, the one that is consumed with flames. I squeeze my eyes shut to protect my retinas, dispel the heat. I open them and look at the enflamed room and see only a puzzle of images: long cafeteria tables with lines of burning laptops on top of them; on the far end, a pile of handheld devices that look from here like portable video game players; walls painted with murals, going up in flames, including an image of an imposing but smiling ninja juggling a half dozen balls, his black ponytail curling up in flames. Below the Ninja, tinged with flames, I can make out the painted words: “Masterful Juggler.”

A computer at the far end of a table pops with a mini-explosion. On the floor, in the far corner, a freestanding little kids’ basketball hoop burns. It looks like a scarecrow, demonic.

I pick up a scent, something unnatural.

Chemical fire. Something powerful and deliberate. The smashed diesel pump a decoy? An ostensible accident and an excuse for a fire?

I look back to Sandy.

“Are you okay?” I shout. She gives me a “what the fuck are
YOU
doing here” look. She turns away from me. She lifts a chair, like she’s going to clear away the jagged glass left in the window so she can make her escape, then drops the chair. She looks at me. “Save yourself!”

A minute ago, she yelled for help. Now she’s showing she’s got it all taken care of, bravado in front of a journalist, even now. I hear sound coming from the hallway behind me, voices, feet. Friend or foe? Before I can check, Sandy lifts the chair again, spins it through the jagged window glass, creating a wide berth. She’s got an exit. She’s not taking it. Instead, she’s throwing a metal storage box out of the observation room. Then another. They’re filled with folders.

Sandy looks at me.

I feel a hand on my shoulder.

34

I
whirl around. I’m met with a firefighter, a woman two inches taller than me, decked out in a flame-retardant brown jacket with yellow racing stripes. Freckle-dotted face, blurred skin on her upper neck near her right ear from a burn graft.

“Easy.” She puts a hand on my back.

I look back at the narrow window in the observation room. Sandy’s disappeared.

“I need to get in there.”

“I don’t think so.”

She takes my right arm with a firm grip, not hostile. I pull out of it and step inside the observation room, but I’m actually looking inside the eerie computer-center-cum-recreation-room. Sandy had told me previously the company was teaching kids to multitask. If that’s all this was, why the fuss, or the deliberate fire?

I peer inside, through intensifying smoke turning from gray to black. I make out a pile of cell phones on the corner of the table, glowing with fire, maybe explaining the metallic odor. On the floor, next to the table’s edge, burns a train set, the wooden bridge somehow having escaped the fire. I can’t take my eyes from it, when I feel the grip again on my right arm, stronger now, and then one on my left. Two firefighters. They practically pick me up and turn me around.

One of them puts a mask on my mouth and I inhale fresh oxygen. I gulp. The mask is pulled away, and they march me back down the annex hallway. The smoke starts to clear, giving way to chaos. Outside, men in uniform are corralling excited youth, seemingly with success, though one firefighter holds a sulking kid in a headlock. The female firefighter at my side offers me more oxygen. I greedily accept.

“What’s your name?”

I pause. “Nat Idle.” Instantly, I think: I shouldn’t have given my name. I can’t think. No telling how much new damage I’ve done my brain by depriving it the full measure of oxygen the last five minutes.

“Can you take a deep breath for me?”

I do. I cough but not excessively.

“You’re going to be okay. Can you spend a moment talking to an investigator?”

It dawns on me that she’s not checking my health status, at least not exclusively. She’s wondering what I was doing at the origin of the fire. Maybe, or I’m being overly sensitive; my ability to make sense is flickering.

“Sure. Of course. May I have water?”

She nods. With a hand on my back, she gently pushes me toward the top of the stairs that lead to the parking lot. A few feet from the top of the stairs, a gaggle of emergency personnel gather around equipment and a snoozing Siberian Husky. I scan for Faith. Not among the kids being marched down the stairs. Not among the cops and firefighters milling and working at the front of the building. I crane to see down into the parking lot. Clumps of people, cars making their exit. No discernable Faith.

“Wait here.” The firefighter makes sure I’m looking at her. I nod. Amid the group near where I’m standing, one firefighter says something to another, then they both laugh. From their relatively calm demeanor, I sense this isn’t a calamitous fire. It’s localized in the back, controllable, but still doubtless to get a lot of press attention given the setting. The firefighter who escorted me walks a few steps away, presumably to get me water or find an investigator or both. With her back to me, I take a few tentative steps down the stairs that lead to the parking lot. I run.

Seconds later, I’m at the Audi.

Still no Faith.

She’s resourceful. Right? Got herself to safety. Or did she flee? Again?

I manage a five-point turn amid emergency vehicles and point the car down a long entrance road that seemed innocuous on the way in. At the far end of my only escape route stands a cop directing a handful of others trying to depart to park on the side. No one exits without an interview.

I pull down the visor and glance in the mirror. I look like a coal miner. I hear a tap on my window. Outside stands a cop with a rosy nose. My options stink. I can ignore him and try to zip past the car ahead of me, fly onto the road, attempt to outrace any officer who might not like that idea. Lose.

I roll down my window. I reach for my wallet and pull out a press pass. It identifies me as a freelance writer for the
San Francisco Chronicle
. It’s long since expired. I’d asked for it two years ago when I did some semi-regular blogging on medical issues for the business section of their web site, SFGATE. I’d asked for the press pass mostly because I wanted something quasi-official to put on my windshield if I was ever in a parking pinch. The only two times I tried to use it for that purpose, I got parking tickets.

“Nat Idle. I write for the Chron. I’m late to file.”

He glances at the pass. “You ever write about the Giants?”

“I wish. Great beat. You get free hot dogs.”

He takes in my sooty face. “You were in there?”

“Trying to get a look.”

He’s lost interest. To him, this situation is bad luck, an annoyance that may keep him from getting home in time for dinner, not a conspiracy. I look at the maximum-security wing. It looks intact, not impacted by the localized explosion. “Pull over to the right and the guys will ask you a few questions and you can go.”

“Got it.”

I watch him wave to the cop ahead of us to let me through to another little grouping of cars awaiting exit interviews. I pull between a station wagon and a bus. Their drivers prattle on their phones. No one comes to interview me. I look over my shoulder. No one’s watching. I slide into drive, slip between the cars, hit the open road, accelerate, don’t look back.

I feel tightness, smoke inhalation and something I can’t name—not physical—an emotion, or lots of emotions, threatening to explode out of the sealed Ziploc bag that is my chest. I look in the rearview mirror. No cops. But still. I’m acting with wild impulse, like the little girl in Palo Alto who walked into traffic. No wonder, maybe: I’ve taken a serious beating to my frontal lobe. I’m responding, reacting, darting from whim to whim, following bright lights and curious clues, being led around by my nose, without filtering anything through a mature and experienced brain. I’m playing a serious adult’s game with a seriously regressed brain.

I turn left onto Market, thinking I might lose myself on a side street. But more impulse. I take a left onto Twin Peaks, the winding road that leads to a 360-degree view of this majestic city, and of one seriously powerful brain beam. Just to the west, the Sutro Tower, a looming radio transmitter that delivers us our virtual lives via radio and TV and that, near as any responsible scientist can tell, doesn’t also deliver brain tumors as I figure it must in my most muckraking moments. Shy of the top of Twin Peaks, I pull into a gravel road marked “No access,” and take a turn so I’m out of view of the main road. I step from the car and I wretch.

Dark smoke curls in the sky to my left, above the learning annex and prison, blocked from sight by a half mile of mountain and rolling topography. Dead ahead, the Golden Gate Bridge. To my right, the Bay Bridge. Escapes everywhere I can’t take because my brain—not geography or even circumstance—holds me captive.

I glance at the Audi’s passenger seat, at Faith’s knit hat. Is she right that I have no idea how or who to trust?

I glance in the backseat. At Isaac’s car seat.

I drop my head back and I loose a guttural yell, a jumbled cacophony of energy, a deformed baby universe exploding from charcoal lungs.

I try to yell again, let out whatever is in there, but it feels forced. I close my eyes, think, open them.

I pull my phone from my pocket. I scroll through the address book until I find what I’m looking for. I put the cursor on her number, and I hit send.

“Hello,” a woman answers.

“Polly?”

“Who?”

“Goddamn it, Polly. Please.”

“Did you call earlier?”

I don’t recognize this voice.

“Where’s Isaac?”

“What?”

“Where is my son?”

“You’ve got the wrong number. I’ve told you before. Please don’t call here again.”

The phone goes dead.

I’m staring at the device. Hot tears on my cheek. Where’s my son? I can’t believe Polly would do this. I can’t believe she’d change the number. Not now. Or did she do that earlier, and I forgot? Why? What could I have done to have deserved this humiliation? I can’t let go, right, is that what she’d say? I treat relationships like stories, pulling and tearing at them until I’ve left nothing but scorched Earth?

And is this why I can’t trust—because Polly took everything from me without warning? Am I right not to trust?

I cock my arm back, device in hand, ready to fling it down the mountain. It rings.

“Polly,” I answer.

“I’m sorry I lied to you,” a woman’s voice says. “My heart is true.”

Not Polly, Faith.