On their return from the desert, Denny dropped Jackie off at her apartment late on a Friday. Saturday, she couldn’t get out of bed. That was saying something. It was not comfortable—an actual Murphy bed with a mattress that the landlord must’ve gotten at Goodwill. Even Google money these days couldn’t buy much in San Francisco, $2,700 a month for a studio.
From the bed, she stared at the IKEA desk lodged beneath her second-story apartment window. Specifically, she looked at the router. It belonged to Comcast, her Internet provider. Lately, there had been messages on her phone telling her that she needed to replace the router. She thought about how Comcast was providing her faster Internet service, for free. Why was that? She thought about how phones had gotten bigger and pixelation denser, and how all the images were coming faster. And all of it was developed by industries built on keeping people connected ever longer. That was the business model: eyeballs. Was she sitting at the computer like that toothless old man, dumbly drooling to the digital drumbeat?
One other thing stuck in her craw. During her visit to Lantern, her phone service had been spotty and when she returned home, she’d discovered that she’d had three calls from private numbers. No voice mail. Probably robocallers. She decided to ignore them.
Jackie stretched her arms over her head and looked at the outdated “The Clash” wall calendar. The clownish look on the face of Joe Strummer, the front man, always made her laugh and she really wanted to laugh right now. She could hear the voices over the years telling her she was too precise, too intense, too careful. How else to get to the bottom of things?
She thought about what Denny wanted from her. She was supposed to make sense of these patterns and help figure out how to maximize memory retention. She sensed strongly that was a bunch of bullshit. She needed more information. Thinking about how angry this all made her, the helplessness of it all, caused her to gnaw absently on the tip of her thumb until it bled. This was the sort of situation that always vexed her. A few times in her teens, she’d even done little pranks, minor infractions, toying around with trying to understand the right course of action, the appropriate course, the moral one. Like hacking into the computer of a teacher accused of harassment and sending an incriminating e-mail from his e-mail account. Was that right or wrong? Years earlier, she’d swiped a tip jar from a café in high school, a split-second decision that had left a school bully accused. Then she’d piled on to him by giving testimony she’d seen him do it. Who wouldn’t believe the tearful recounting by the girl who had been forced to live with her grandmother after she’d witnessed that terrible thing?
Right, wrong? So nuanced. Especially when there wasn’t time to think it through. The one thing that gave her solace is that, it seemed, the whole world was struggling with it. Tensions flaring all over the place, the pace speeding up, conflicts, shouts, talk shows, separatists and police, dangerous decision points, escalating forward. It felt like the wind picking up steam, a tornado coming. Instead of even trying to figure out what was right, people buried themselves in their devices. People talked to you while looking at their phones, lost in entirely different realities. It was like the world was, like her, missing situational awareness. Like a blind pilot heading into a mountain. Not seeing, not hearing, as she had not seen and heard, once that diminutive sixth grader sitting on the back of the upholstered couch, watching through the sliding glass window. The argument lived inside of her.
You’re a son of a bitch, Alan. A philandering Son. Of. A. Bitch.
More like Husband of a Bitch.
You’re blaming me?
Listen to you, foul-mouthed harpy. You thrive on this, crave it, invite it. Beg for it. You’re a genius, all right, at creating a poisoned universe. Right in your own cackling image.
Fuck you.
I’m surprised you didn’t engrave me an invitation for me to fuck her in front of you.
I’ve seen enough premature ejaculating from you.
I’m done, Denise. Done.
I’ll tell you when we’re done.
What are you doing?
Till death do us part, Alan.
What the hell are you doing?
Get up, Jackie, get up. Move. Move! Help them! Reliving the memory, blood dripped from the tip of her thumb where she counted to ten, and she breathed with each number. Eight, nine, ten. She sucked the blood and tasted it and spat it onto the comforter.
When Jackie finally got out of bed at nearly two in the afternoon, it was pouring. She felt overcome with loneliness and walked, drenched, to the movies and went to a romantic comedy about a loveless executive who fell for the Amazon delivery driver; Jackie abandoned the movie halfway through. That’s when she saw the car. It was one of those small electric vehicles. She couldn’t make out who was hunched behind the wheel. And she might not have noticed the car, or the driver at all, had it not made a mistake. While walking home, she turned onto Pine, which was a one-way street. The car turned to follow her, going the wrong direction. When Jackie heard the honks, she saw the car and realized it had been the same one she’d seen outside the movie theater, parked earlier. Just something she’d noticed, maybe having appreciated the crisp green color.
Jackie picked up her step. When she got to her apartment again, she noticed the car stopped across the street on the corner. She thought about calling 911. Was that the right move? Were her antennae lying to her?
She looked out the window and thought about the terrible movie she’d seen and about the powerful executive waiting at her front door for the Amazon delivery driver to bring her a new electric toothbrush or whatever else she’d ordered. Soon, she was ordering things just so she and this down-to-earth driver could chat. Jackie looked at her door. Then she looked out the window and saw the same car sitting there in the pouring rain. It drove away.
She closed her eyes and had a thought about what might make her feel better. It was a passing thought, and laughable at that. A few minutes later it returned to her. She let herself give life to the thought: she wanted to talk to Dr. Martin. She wanted to thank him, no, that wasn’t quite right, or not all of it. She wanted to talk to this genius, listen to him, or tell him what was happening and seek his counsel.
Sitting there, no doubt deluded by darkness and the narrative afterglow of a rotten romantic comedy, she told herself that Dr. Martin—Lyle—saw things as they were, not as they were packaged or dressed up. He was someone who would meet her halfway, be unthreatened by her power, maybe truly enticed by it. She could just tell. Maybe it was fate that he’d saved her, something more than random events that had brought them together on that airstrip in Nepal.
After a bit of considering the idea, dismissing it, considering, dismissing, she called up the UCSF Internet page and looked for the class site. And she gasped. This couldn’t be right.
Dr. Martin’s lecture section had been canceled.
“Due to unforeseen circumstances, the lecture has been postponed indefinitely. Students will be credited with a pass.”
She felt crestfallen. This wasn’t right. She knew Dr. Martin had gone to Africa and that class had been off for a few weeks. This was something else. She surfed around looking for news about whether he’d gotten sick. Nothing came up. She felt agitated, surprisingly so. She considered doing some hacking into Dr. Martin’s personal accounts, to snoop just a tad, thought better of it. So unfair to Dr. Martin. She went to the window and saw that car again. She came back to her computer and, unable to stop herself, decided to snoop on the UCSF servers. It was a task beyond her flavor of expertise computer-wise, but well within her grasp of social engineering. This was, after all, how most actual hacking happened, not by powerful computers breaking encryptions but by sweet-talking nerds who talked their way through dim-witted tech support people. Jackie called the UCSF after-hours computer support team, described herself as Dr. Martin’s administrative assistant having problems accessing the shared calendar with a key conference coming up tomorrow, blah, blah, blah. She flirted with the guy on the other end of the phone, talked about how ditzy she could be, wound up getting the password for Dr. Martin’s calendar, which in turn gave her a very good guess at Dr. Martin’s e-mail address. She figured it was the same as for his calendar. She was in.
She figured she had about ten minutes to look in his system undetected but she only needed about one. She saw what she needed in the first e-mail. It was from the dean and it had come that morning. Dr. Martin hadn’t seen it yet. “Dr. Martin, per my previous correspondence, you need to move your things out of the office immediately. I will give you until the middle of next week before I consider legal means. In the meantime, you may no longer sleep in the office under any circumstances. It is unbecoming and, regardless, violates our code of conduct.”
Jackie scrolled back through several previous messages and could see oblique references to inappropriate behavior on the “Africa trip,” and suggestions of administrative leave by the dean. Dr. Martin hadn’t responded to any of them, but Jackie could see that he’d read them.
She returned to the first e-mail, the one warning Dr. Martin to vacate the premises. She looked at it for the better part of an hour. Her hands balled into fists, her jaw tight enough to prompt a headache. She felt her muscles twitch.
Finally, she hit reply and wrote:
Dean Thomas,
I am sorry that our relationship has so deteriorated. I also do not appreciate your threats. It seems odd to me that you would be so antagonistic to one of your educators. That attitude is such a far cry from your solicitous attitude toward corporate funders, including those pharmaceutical interests trying to buy access to our budding clinicians. Wearing my doctor hat, I diagnose you with a serious case of hypocrisy.
It had been no secret that the dean had been accused of fund-raising with abandon, giving rise to ethical questions at the medical school. The mayor and many in the city loved the dean for having overseen the massive expansion of a high-tech campus. But many on the campus saw her for what she was, someone awaiting a CEO position at Genentech or a competitor and in line for a massive payday. The last thing she needed was an enemy like Dr. Martin. Jackie decided to make her knife thrust a tad less subtle.
Dean Thomas, I did your bidding in Africa, trying to save lives, and you repay me by stripping me of my ability to educate the doctors of the next generation. I hope you will reconsider your hasty threats or I will not hesitate to share my experiences as someone who has been thrown under the bus to serve outside interests.
Sincerely,
Jackie hit send and then deleted the initial e-mail from the dean. Dr. Martin, perhaps, would never see this correspondence. She doubted he was a dogged user of e-mail anyway. She felt euphoric. She’d gotten off her perch of indecision and given a boost to the man who had once saved her life.
Of course, she couldn’t know that Dr. Martin was the one who asked in the first place for some administrative leave. She couldn’t know the emotionally dark place he’d inhabited, or why. She pictured a defeated version of this great man, her distant crush and savior who, if she was honest with herself, she craved to be seen as his equal, someone who saw her, understood her, wouldn’t put her into a terrible position. Now left to sleep on his couch at the office? And even that being taken from him?
She stared into the dark for a long time, pondering, exploring her feelings, taking her time with an idea, rolling it around in her brain—until she felt a surge of certainty.
She slipped out the back door of the apartment building and took an Uber in pouring rain to UCSF on Parnassus. This was the old medical-school campus in San Francisco’s inner sunset neighborhood, and right near Haight and Ashbury. Much of the medical enterprise had moved down to Mission Bay, where the lecture halls were, but the main adult emergency room and hospital remained on Parnassus. So did some of the faculty and adjunct offices, infectious disease among them, and for good reason: often, when an infectious disease specialist was needed, he or she was needed in the hospital to consult with a virulent and unusual case.
Jackie took the elevator to the fifth floor in the elevator adjoining the main hospital. The setting was a far cry from the majestic new campus. This was drab and boxy, merely functional. She was looking for number 503 and figured that she’d found it when she saw from a distance down the hallway the doorway in the corner, the proverbial corner office that Lyle deserved. Colorful papers and patient reminders were carefully taped to the doorway. But that one was marked 501 and had a sign for dr. jen sanchez. The department’s darling, Jackie knew. She was the one with the sweet digs.
Jackie turned to the left, and ten feet down she found 502, right beside the echoing stairwell, and clearly a little box. Jackie felt a pang for Dr. Martin at this inglorious place; he deserved so much better.
It was so much worse when she pushed open the door.