Devil's Plaything

place to enter the user name and password. She says the user name is already filled in with the words “Nathaniel Idle.”

“But the password is blank. Looks like you’re the one who has to fill it in,” she says.

I get a bad feeling. Not just because the day is definitely presenting a second strange mystery, but because only a handful of intimates call me “Nathaniel.” When I hear my full name, I know I’m in trouble — or in love.

“Come down and we’ll try to open it over a drink,” Pauline says. “What better have you got going on a Thursday night? Besides, how often does life present you a genuine mystery? I’m intrigued, and thirsty.”

I hear in her voice that playful and intense tone that makes Pauline engaging, effective, and dangerous — professionally and personally.

I look at Grandma. Is there even a remote chance that the contents of the drive could explain the shooting in the park?

I tell Pauline I’ll come by shortly and we hang up.

I think about what happened in the park. Maybe the cops are right to speculate we took potshots from a maniac. Though that doesn’t explain the phone call I received. Have I pissed someone off?

I think about the stories I’m working on. The Porta Potti piece notwithstanding, it’s hard to fathom any of them could be cause for attack.

One is a magazine piece about Stanford neurologists placing precision magnets on people’s heads to diminish chronic pain. Another pertains to research at Johns Hopkins that uses brain imaging to show that a driver using a cell phone cannot simultaneously focus both on the road and a conversation; the structure of the brain, unlike the structure of a computer chip, does not lend itself well to multitasking. A third story is about Grandma herself. The editors at Elder Care magazine asked me to chronicle my relationship with Lane as she “matures.” The story has been personally intense to report, or, rather, it was — before Grandma’s mercurial descent. Before she really devolved, our conversations about her life had given me some insight into the bond between us and her own struggles settling down as a young woman.

I kiss her on the forehead. Her eyes open and she grabs my hand, startling me.

“He’s at the dentist,” she says loudly.

“Who, Grandma?”

She withdraws her hand. She’s frightened.

“Who is at the dentist? The man in blue?”

She taps her forehead.

“He’s inside here now.”

“Grandma?”

I look her squarely in the eyes. I see the essential life in her narrow blue pupils being corroded by the glassiness of dementia. Less than a year ago, she had her full wits. I thought little of it when she returned one day from the condiment station in the dining hall with a stack of napkins but forgot utensils. It seemed only a few weeks later, she spent so long in the bathroom that I knocked on the door, let myself in, and found her holding a new roll of toilet paper, stymied by how to slip it onto the silver holder on the wall.

“Grandma Lane, I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Who is the man in blue? Did we see him today? Maybe when we visited the dentist? Remember? Was he the same man in the park? Can you tell me?”

She slowly closes her lids.

I wait ten minutes for her to wake up. I stroke her arm. I replay the shooting. I hear the popping of bullets. I see the phantom in the trees. I sense in my memories the anxiety that comes with post-traumatic stress disorder. I feel the impotence of running and hiding. I scour the bumpy topography of my brain for clues: what had I missed? Did the car have a bumper sticker? Was it a California license plate?

Answers elude me.

I kiss Grandma one more time.

I turn off the light, and leave to decrypt a mystery package.

Chapter 5

Excepting Grandma Lane, there are three important women in my life. Two of them are still alive.

The dead one is Annie. She was my first true love. I fell for her just out of medical school. When I first heard her laugh, the sound was like music. Our connection was immediate and felt transcendent. Within moments of meeting her, I was hooked.

Annie ultimately betrayed me, or I betrayed myself. Our love was a figment. Annie drowned a few years ago in a lake in Nevada, leaving me disillusioned about the difference between true love and its hot pursuit. So I tell myself.

Spicy foods, like jalapenos, produce capsaicin. It’s the chemical that challenges and thrills taste buds. There’s a theory that we crave spicier foods when we age because the capsaicin desensitizes us little by little, burrito by burrito, eventually killing our taste buds. Annie was my capsaicin overdose, my flavor destroyer. Since she died, no emotional connection has tasted strong enough.

But I have had true friendship. The second woman in my life is a witch. Her real name is Samantha Leary. She’s a spiritual healer, masseuse, Earth Mother, New Age nut. She’s like a sister to me, a really strange older sister who keeps pushing the tofu. She and her baseball-loving, technology-obsessed, socially awkward and mildly autistic husband, Dennis — everyone knows him as Bullseye — are the grounding forces in my life, fellow regulars at the local pub, bar-seat therapists.

Lately, they’ve gotten an earful about Pauline, the woman behind door number three.

A serial entrepreneur, she started Medblog two years earlier to become, as she put it, “the medical news- centric love child of CNN and the New York Times subsequently orphaned and raised by Twitter.” Now she’s my editor and source of rent money. Pauline aims high. She succeeds. She’s the Internet anthropomorphized; always moving, and ever faster.

She’s lithe in a way that makes her 5 feet, 10 inches look taller. Her shoulder-length, light brown hair bounces when she walks, like in a shampoo commercial. In grad school, she’d appeared on the cover of Wharton’s catalogue, holding a chalice from a triathlon she’d won, and smiling sheepishly as if to say: yes, it’s that easy.

Friends introduced us a year ago. I immediately wondered if my romantic taste buds had at last been revived. Then, a month ago, Pauline and I had a “carnal run-in.” That’s what I’ve deemed the feverish sex in her office. Afterwards, I promptly withdrew my emotions and (briefly) telecommunications access, uncertain what our tryst meant — particularly to my essential source of income.

Seemingly bemused, she sent me a list of “100 great excuses for not getting entangled,” including: (#17) Kissing involves germs, and (#44) Stability leads to boredom and death and (#100) You’re a class-AAA commitment phobe.

For now, I’m just Pauline’s employee, one who is deeply conflicted about my feelings for the boss.

But I realize something more concrete about her when I arrive at the Medblog office to check out the mysterious package: Pauline is missing.

* * *

The office is located in the South Park neighborhood, near the San Francisco Giants ballpark. This is a dot- com ghetto and gold rush territory. Founded as a housing development 150 years ago, its upgraded townhouses now serve as home to the wide-eyed frontierspeople of the Internet. Backed by venture capitalists, they operate a new generation of publishing, technical, and software companies. They also consume their weight daily in quadruple nonfat caramel lattes. The area oozes with an old-West optimism fueled by recent MBAs who think the only problem with Google is that its founders didn’t think big enough.

Medblog resides in two small rooms in the back of a Victorian turned four-company office. I walk down a tiled hallway, and through a small window inset in Medblog’s door, I see the lights are off.

I knock. No answer. I try the handle. The door is open. I poke my head inside.

“Pauline?” I ask.