I stand. “Can we play the name game?”
She shrugs, not sure what I mean.
“Alan Parsons. Know him?”
She blinks twice, rapidly. She scratches her right shoulder. She bites the inside of her cheek.
“It rang a bell for a second but I can’t place it.” She cocks her head. “Maybe it’ll come to me. When I start talking about what happened here-the accident-it tends to override the rest of my brain.”
“Totally understandable. May I contact you again?”
“Of course.”
I turn to her, as she stands. “Can you remind me when Kathryn died?”
“Two thousand. March eleventh.”
“And how long after that did the school open?”
“In the fall. Remarkable, right? Andrew makes up his mind and he can change the world.”
She takes a few steps and opens the gate for me. “You never quite feel like you’re out of the woods-with kids.”
“How so?”
She’s distant and doesn’t respond.
“Jill?”
“Those suicides-over at Los Altos High School.”
“I don’t know about. .”
“Three kids last year-copycats, I guess. They stepped in front of trains.”
I remember reading the speculation that the children, coming from highly educated upper-middle-class families, couldn’t cope with the intense pressure to succeed.
She says: “When I saw it, I thought: as a parent, you can never pause to celebrate. You never know when they’ll do something. . childlike.”
She looks away. This is too much for her.
I turn back to Faith. She glances up, catches my eye, then looks down herself. I’m surrounded by people who cannot look me in my darkening, purplish eye. I doubt it’s because of the oddity I’ve become, with the swelling.
It’s because too many people in my life are lying to me, and not for the first time.
29
My first true love, Annie, was an illusion. I met her just after medical school. She professed to cherish me with abandon, to get lost in me the same way she became overcome with emotion when she saw a puppy on the street or a baby elephant at the zoo. She hooked me completely. But true connection petrified her and she made a folly of it. She left me without even saying goodbye.
Then along came Polly. Unlike Annie, her self-confidence and zeal for life were real. She could be vulnerable but she ran her relationships with the same efficiency she ran her start-ups with, things mapped out and executed. Life was an exciting enterprise, growing quarter after quarter. Until it didn’t.
“You’re going to be fine and Isaac’s going to be fine,” she told me with the utmost confidence when it became clear that things were coming to an end. I was sitting on the edge of her bed, looking not at her, but through slats in the shades as traffic passed by.
What a lie.
“You’re going to get yourself run over.”
The voice shakes me back to the present. I’m standing in the street next to the Audi. Faith studies me like I’m some bizarre creature from the deep that she’s watching on the Nature Channel. I wonder what lies she’s telling me.
“Your eyes are glazed over and you’re standing in the middle of the street.”
“I’m fine.”
“And I’m an African princess who can make you millions of dollars if you email me your social security number.”
I walk around to the passenger side and climb in.
“I need to get to an Internet cafe.”
“Who is that woman?”
I see Jill standing at the gate, glazed over, like me.
“She’s mysterious clue number seven.”
“What does that mean?”
“You tell me, Faith. Who is she?”
Faith punches the accelerator and the powerful Audi practically jumps twenty yards onto El Camino, the thoroughfare. Faith puts on a left blinker. “Usually I’m communicating better than this with someone when I start sleeping with him.”
I swallow my retort: So why did we spend the night together? What are your motives, Faith?
Her phone rings. It’s sitting in the cup holder between us. I pick it up. The caller ID says “Carl_L.”
“Ignore it, please,” Faith says.
I replace the phone. Faith takes a sharp right and pulls to the curb. We’re sitting in front of a cubbyhole of a cafe. In the window, a teenager sits at a counter, tooling away on a computer.
“I’ll wait here.” Faith picks up her phone as I step out of the car.
Behind the cafe counter, a man in his fifties cradles a book about quantum physics. He’s probably one of the overqualified engineers that this region can periodically thrust into low-paying jobs when the start-up economy tanks.
He looks up. “Shatter the orbital?” he asks. Diagnosis-wise, he’s quick on the draw, a rare out-flanking that makes me feel flush. I decide not to mention the hunch in his shoulder that I suspect comes from a mild case of kyphosis, an outward curvature of the spine. I order a large coffee and twenty minutes of Internet time.
I also ask to use the cafe fax. The man shows me an antiquated machine in a cubicle near the back where there is a stapler, hole punch, copier, and a sign: “Business Center.” From my back pocket, I pull the piece of paper I found on Alan’s desk. I make a copy of the Chinese characters. I fax them to Bullseye.
At the front of the cafe, I settle in next to the teenager locked in eerie focus as he shoots cartoonish birds from a slingshot at a target, the casual game
I settle my hands over the smudge-stained keyboard and look at the thin screen, as if preparing to mount a horse. Into Google, I call up a Chinese-English translator. I spend a couple of minutes trying to figure out how to enter in the Chinese characters but find myself stymied. I’ll let Bullseye handle this part of the goose chase.
I return to Google. I enter “Alan Parsons” and hit return. Big shock: I get infinite hits, many for the rock band of the same name. I try “Alan Parsons” and “Computer,” and get an equal number of responses.
I need my bad guys to have very unique names, or at least not be named after popular eighties rock bands that, adding insult to injury, I always disliked.
I try “Alan Parsons” and “Andrew Leviathan.” There’s nothing of interest. I’m fishing.
“Andrew Leviathan” and “Sandy Vello” come up empty, and so does “Andrew Leviathan” and “PRISM,” the corporation where the reality-show star works.
I put in “Andrew Leviathan” and “China.” Tens of thousands of hits. I click on the first several, which are news stories from local newspapers, and one in the
“It’s the Valhalla, the ethereal empire beneath the sea,” he says of China. “It’s the promised land, but you can’t figure out how to get there, or if it’s even real.”
Andrew is a peculiar breed of source that journalists love. He is a “quote monkey,” someone who can be counted on to say things in such a pithy and accessible way that the quotes elevate a mediocre story to a
