“Joke. Here ya go: apple, tree and high chair.”
He looks up. “One more time, please.”
“Apple, tree and high chair.”
“You said ‘high chair.’ ”
“I did.”
“Apple, tree and
“You’re sure?”
He nods. “Do you have kids?”
“A son. Nine months. He’s in the DustBuster phase.”
“He likes to clean up?”
“He likes things that make noise and have buttons.”
He nods. “Let’s get you a CT scan.”
The reason I know he’s worried is that I wait a mere fifteen minutes to get my head examined by the massive white imaging machine.
The results come half an hour later from the resident and the attending doctor, a short woman with intense blue eyes and sandy blonde hair pulled back tightly in a bun, revealing tiny pimples dotting her forehead. Maybe rosacea.
She slaps the scan on a light tray on the wall. I know immediately what I’m looking at when I see the small white dots on a region of my brain that stretches across the front of the inside of my skull.
“This tells us to worry but not panic,” she says. “The white dots show us blood spots, which is not good news. This is a serious concussion. But I don’t see any evidence of hemorrhage or really troubling tissue damage.”
“What can we do about it?” I ask, though I know the answer.
“As you may know, there’s not much. Rest, but serious rest, not a lot of physical activity. I don’t think we need to admit you. At this point, you’re not looking at long-term damage but your short-term functioning could well be impaired. How much do you know about the frontal lobe?”
“It’s what keeps me from acting like a two-year-old.”
She smiles. “Right. Impulse control, and lots of other things. It’s the last part of your brain to develop and it’s essentially what lets you modulate everything else, the control center.”
I nod. “I already tend to have an impulsive streak.”
“In all seriousness, you should watch to see if you’re feeling emotionally taxed, having trouble making decisions, more impulsive than usual. This is nuanced stuff to measure, but we’d want to follow up on that. How’s your pain now?”
“I’m fine with Advil and a really soft pillow.”
“Use it. Really.”
I leave the hospital in the dark.
As I climb into my car, I realize I’ve had another short-term memory lapse. I’ve not gotten back in touch with Faith. I dial her and get voice mail. I ask her to call. From the trunk, I yank out my laptop. With it in my lap, I drive to a residential corner where I find a network connection I can Bogart. I log in and I search for “Sandy Vello,” and “obituary,” and lots of other variations that might give me the same information about her that I got last night and this morning on this same computer. But the obituary is not there.
It’s absolutely official: the narcissistic reality-show contestant is not dead. Again.
For a West Coast-based journalist whose stories often have to do with technology, I’m remarkably not technology savvy. I’m the opposite of that. (For instance, I couldn’t understand the need for instant messaging. What, email not instant enough for you?) In short, I’m not particularly sure where to look on my computer for the phantom traces of the obituary-to prove it was there, and erased, and, further, that I’m not imagining things.
But the traces must be there. After all, I don’t really suspect I’d imagined the obituary because I’d have had no way of knowing that Sandy volunteered at the jail. And, beyond that, I’ve got a concussion, not a case of the crazies.
On my browser, I pull down the list of sites I’ve recently visited. There is no evidence of a Sandy Vello obit. I pull down the “History” menu and get a similarly unsatisfactory result. It stands to reason. I found Sandy Vello through a Google search, so my history shows my visits to the search engine and the terms I’ve searched.
It’s just after 9 p.m. and I should absolutely be resting my brain and body. But I need to take my computer for a thorough diagnosis.
It’s time to pick up a carnitas burrito, then visit Bullseye, the Witch’s husband, a computer geek who doubles as a bar-stool statue.
Destination: the Pastime Bar, my regular pub and a black hole of San Francisco real estate that managed not to gentrify.
11
The foreboding thick wooden door, pockmarked with small nicks and cuts, looks like the entrance to a gulag. Inside, the low lighting, far from facilitating intimacy, makes it almost hard to see the details in someone’s face. The jukebox plays vinyl. From the eighties. The black vinyl-covered stools hail from the seventies. Some of them are torn and duct-taped, others just torn.
Out front, there is an unkempt neon sign with the “A” and the “M” missing. So it reads: p sti e. The Pastime Bar, one of my personal seven wonders.
For years, it was my regular watering hole. I’d visit almost nightly when I lived a few blocks away, in Potrero Hill. It’s an aptly named neighborhood, with such steep inclines that the Victorian row houses looked sloped to the side, particularly after a couple of pints.
But since Isaac was born and I gave up my old apartment to live in Polly’s downtown flat, I’ve come less often.
“Idle!” Jessica the Bartender exclaims when I walk in the door.
Most of the smattering of regulars turns to look, all of them old friends or whatever you call a fellow bar regular. Family? Enabler? No one else joins in to remark on my first visit in at least a month. This is the Pastime. Such affection could cost you status, or, at least, emotional and physical energy.
At the far end of the bar sits Bullseye. When I first enter, I see he’s sitting almost impossibly motionless, neck craned slightly up and to the right so he can stare at ESPN showing on the flat-panel TV, which is the sole reminder this bar exists in the current century. When the bartender calls my name, Bullseye, grudgingly, lolls his head to look my way. Unkempt brown hair hangs over his wide forehead, almost straggling over his eyes. His shoulders hunch. He wears a gray hooded sweatshirt, sans logo. He continues watching me, like I’m a zoo creature he’s already bored of observing, until I’m sidled up next to him on the adjoining stool.
“You look like shit.” He means this as an endearment. He and the Witch represent opposite sides of the same coin. Mother and Father. Nurturer and Go Screw Yourself. And I cherish his economy and lack of pretense.
“Where’s Sam?”
He shrugs.
“Then I suppose we’re bypassing the pleasantries?”
“I’ll drink to that.”
He nods to the bartender to set us up with a round. In the background, I hear someone smack the top of the jukebox to get it to play. The stubborn jukebox doesn’t respond. I pull my laptop from my endangered black backpack. I put it on the counter.
“My computer is lying to me.”
I see a flicker of interest in Bullseye’s flat blue eyes. For him, computers are so much more interesting than most people. He can speak their language and, more to the point, doesn’t have to speak at all.
I power up and tell him about the disappearing obituary. He listens impassively, partly because that’s his disposition and partly because he’s gotten used to the idea that I come bearing tales of coincidence and conspiracy. Maybe the Witch has already regaled him with the subway incident, my latest brush with the surreal. As I talk,
