Two hours later, a vivid yellow winter sun fading, Lyle walked down the chipped cement steps in the stairwell of his apartment building. He’d showered, put on a decent shirt and a gray sweater, and combed his hair. To go meet a woman who claimed to be a pilot, whom he couldn’t be sure he’d ever seen, let alone met, and who had a tale to tell as strange and familiar as his own.
They’d picked neutral ground, located between where each lived near Duboce Park. It was a café—known for its coffee and New York–style pizza—that each of them, coincidentally, frequented. When they’d gotten off the phone, Lyle googled Eleanor Hall and found a photo from a corporate website that indicated she was indeed a pilot. Her image gave Lyle the same feeling as her voice, that she was somehow familiar. Light hair and a trusting smile, and, if the photo was relatively recent, a few years younger than Lyle. Attractive. Maybe that was why Lyle combed his hair. But when was the last time he wanted to impress anyone?
At the bottom of the stairwell, he unchained his bike from the small storage area, tightened the leather pedal straps around his sneakers, and took off on Divisidero. He loved riding his bike, the terror of imminent death notwithstanding. San Francisco had one of the highest rates in the state of drivers killing pedestrians and bikers. No wonder, given that this city, as much as any other, mixed a driving culture with a walking one. Lyle rode and kept a keen eye.
He saw the driverless car.
It looked like the very one that had been parked outside of his house when he’d been eating barbecue. Now it crawled along, three cars behind Lyle. An empty driver’s seat and the thing cruising along as if pulled by a puppeteer. These cars were becoming more common but it was still eerie, Lyle thought, and pedaled on. A few blocks later, the car seemed to get stuck in traffic as Lyle climbed up the steep part of Divisidero, right before it transforms into Castro, and took a left onto Waller. The looming California Pacific Hospital stirred a memory of doing a consult for a patient with dengue fever. It had been one of those gratifying moments when Lyle’s contributions, modest though he felt them, saved a nice young man.
The autonomous vehicle crept over Waller and took a left but, this time, Lyle, lost in thought, didn’t see it was continuing in his same direction.
At Duboce Park, Lyle dismounted and watched toddlers and their nannies disgorging for home. The chill had come after a drought-blessed, dry day, the sea breeze picking up and detectable even this far inland if you put your nose to the air. Lyle stopped a few blocks shy of the café to think. This putative pilot had said that she’d found a note in her back pocket with Lyle’s phone number and the words: Call Dr. Lyle Martin about Steamboat. You’re not imagining.
He might well have blown her off, at least initially, had it not been for the phrasing: You’re not imagining. It’s what he had written to himself in his own note.
On the phone, he’d started to ask her what she was imagining and she suggested they meet and she’d elaborate. He was having the same impulse and so that was that. He locked up at a bike stand on the corner and pressed himself to consider what he remembered from the flight to Steamboat. He recalled settling in, downing some Benadryl, maybe a lot of it, falling asleep. As he recounted it, he wasn’t sure that’s what happened.
“Dr. Martin?”
He turned to see a woman looking at him quizzically. She held car keys in her hand and had a newspaper tucked under her arm.
“Lyle,” he said. “Captain Hall?”
She nodded and half smiled. “So we googled each other and we each use honorifics on first reference. Please drop mine too,” she said. “Eleanor.”
He wanted to look away from her, given that it was impolite to stare, but felt like he was having déjà vu. “Like we’ve met,” she said. “Right?”
For a moment, his heart fluttered with fear and uncertainty.
“There’s a table. I’ll grab it.”
They sat beneath a vibrantly colored painting that looked at a distance like the state of Texas smeared by a rainbow. The uncomfortable plastic green chairs matched the yellow and green paint. The pizza slices kept this place in the game, and Lyle and Eleanor each had one, the special, prosciutto and basil. Each had professed to have been here before and Lyle wondered if that’s how he knew her. He tried not to stare. She didn’t touch her pizza, and he tried not to wolf his or pound his beer.
“So you’re a pilot,” he broke the ice.
She nodded like she was still gathering her thoughts and figuring how to express them. The voice of a popular soprano rocker came over the coffeehouse speakers. “I’ve been grounded, temporarily,” Eleanor started and then paused. “Sorry, you’ll have to forgive me; this is a little strange.”
“Grounded?”
“There was a problem with the landing in Steamboat.” She smiled and shook her head. “So I’m told.”
“Sorry, I thought you said you were a—”
“Right, the pilot—on the flight. I was. I just can’t remember much about it. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”
“Wait. I’m right there with you. The flight, I can’t quite grab onto it. Small wonder, though; I slept through most of it, knowing me.”
A silence descended. These were two proud people, clearly, certainly not used to having things so out of reach or feeling fundamentally helpless. Lyle guessed that Eleanor hadn’t slept much lately and was surprised to also surmise that she was carrying grief.
“Can I tell you a story?” Lyle said.
“Um, sure.”
“My biggest med school mistake.”
It had been in his first year at Penn, he explained, a class in basic anatomy, involving the poking and probing of a cadaver. His dead body was called Ms. Phillips. “She’d been a schoolteacher, my partner and I were told.” Lyle explained, “I got it into my head that she hadn’t died, as we’d been told, from sudden cardiac arrest but maybe from a more chronic disease. I saw signs of malignancy. It was no big revelation but as I was pacing back and forth, lost in an internal dialogue, I was drinking coffee and I . . .”
“You spilled it into her body?”
“Poetically, at least, into the stomach.”
She actually laughed, which he’d hoped for. Then she clipped it back. She was in no mood for laughing.
“That’s how I feel now, like something doesn’t add up and, well, at the risk of absolutely destroying the metaphor, that I’m Ms. Phillips, the dead teacher, and someone has spilled coffee inside of me.”
“You’re right. You absolutely destroyed the metaphor.”
Now he laughed, if briefly, cleared his throat.
“Can I see your note?” he asked. “With my phone number?”
She hesitated. Was he going to take it and run? She wasn’t sure why he would, it’s just that it constituted concrete evidence. She pulled it from her pocket and laid it on the table, careful to keep a finger on it. Lyle nodded thoughtfully. He pulled a pen from his backpack and, on a napkin, copied the words he saw on the note.
“Same handwriting,” she said.
“Looks like I did give you that, after all.”
Outside, Lyle noticed a man looking in the window who looked a tad familiar, too.
“What is it?” Eleanor said.
“That guy . . .”
She turned around and followed his glance but no one was there. “What guy?”
“He was just . . .” Lyle stopped. “He’s gone, I guess.”
It was dusk now. This moment, and the mood, seemed to sober Eleanor, leaving her uncertain again what Lyle was about, even how sane. “So tell me your version of the story,” she said.
He told her about how he was supposed to attend this conference and he woke up in Steamboat at the Sheraton and there was no conference. Besides that, his brain had gone fuzzy on him and he couldn’t remember exactly how he’d gotten to the hotel, pieces missing. “Like someone slipped me a roofie.”
“I had the same feeling,” she said. “Almost like . . .” She paused. “It reminded me of when I’d had a seizure.”
When she said it, she could see Lyle perk up.
“You find that interesting,” she said.
He reached into his back pocket and felt for his own note, the one he’d written himself about seizure. But it wasn’t there. He’d left it on the fridge. He explained about the note to her. He asked her what she’d meant when she said it felt like a seizure, explaining that he’d never experienced one himself.
“I haven’t had one for twenty years. I do remember, because my mom told me I said it, that I felt like I lost a puzzle piece of my life.”
Lyle chewed on it silently until she asked him to let her in on the secret. He smiled again. “Bad habit of mine,” he said, “retreating into my brain to look for puzzle pieces myself. I’m thinking about the different kinds of seizures.” He told her about the small subset of powerful seizures that involve considerable memory loss, accounting for the loss of six hours or more preceding an electrical storm. By way of an answer, her blue eyes settled on him with an arched brow communicating: So what exactly are you saying?
He shrugged, communicating: Yeah, maybe what you’re thinking.
“Like I had a seizure, or we all had a seizure, and we all forgot landing in Steamboat?”
“Or flying there. Right, well, that just sounds insane. It sounds insane, right?”
“For a guy who is not a psychiatrist, you’ve got a pretty clear handle on the definition of insanity.” She smiled and so did he. “But, yes, it sounds insane.”
“What else don’t you remember, Eleanor?”
“Is that a serious question?”
“In a poorly worded, roundabout way. I mean: How much is missing for you? Do you remember flying, pulling into the jetway, or whatever you normally do?”
No, she told him, for the most part, no. She felt like she had memories of all that stuff but they were tenuous.
“I recall becoming aware that I was parked at the terminal. There had been a communications glitch.”
“You remember that?”
She closed her eyes as if grasping for it. “The truth is, it’s what I was told.”
She explained that she received a call when she had returned to San Francisco—her home base—and was told to come in for a meeting. She blinked rapidly and she held tightly to the beer mug such that Lyle wondered if she might crack the porcelain.
“You’re holding something back.”
She cleared her throat. “A passenger died.”
He’d come to expect almost anything at this point, given what had happened the last few days. Still, this caught him off guard. Eleanor’s eyes started to water and she willed away the tears.
“It’s my first duty,” she said.
“A passenger died?”
“I’m being officially investigated for dereliction of duty,” she said. “If anyone knew I was here right now . . .”
He waved his hands. Of course he wouldn’t say anything. “My word but I—”
“I can’t be seen talking to you because it would look like I’m monkeying with an investigation. But I am here; you’re damn right I’m here. I had nothing to do with a passenger’s death.”
“Someone is saying that?”
“No, not exactly. I . . . why do you keep looking over my shoulder?” She sounded exasperated.
“Sorry, rude. I’m feeling paranoid. Some guy keeps walking back and forth out there and I—”
“If you’d rather—”
“I’m sorry, go on.”
She explained to him that a passenger named Milt Vener had died. He was an old guy and sometimes people died on planes. It had happened to her twice before, once owing to a stroke and another time, relatedly, to a blood clot. This time, though, blunt force trauma.
“Someone hit him in the head,” she said.
Lyle felt again the ripple of familiarity like déjà vu that disappeared as quickly as it came. Then a moment of panic in which he wondered if he’d hit an old man on the head. This was all lost on Eleanor who seemed now intent on getting her story out. She said the investigators for the airline and the FAA had been very formal, giving her little information. They’d treated her in two meetings and a brief preliminary one by phone as if she hadn’t been a valorous twenty-year veteran.
“The only hint I’ve had where they might be going with this is that they’ve asked a lot of pointed questions about my first officer. His name is Jerry Weathers, and they’ve—”
“Say it again.”
“What?”
“Jimmy Weathers?”
“Jerry.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Why?” She studied Lyle. “Who cares?”
“I’m having one of those moments.”
She nodded, and described the first officer as lanky, all elbows, full head of brown hair, a bit of buggy eyes. “Bit like a fish,” he said and, just as he said it, she said the same thing.
“You know him?” she said.
“I think he’s been walking around outside.”
Eleanor moved so quickly that she very nearly whirled around. Her elbow hit her water glass, sending the last drops spinning. She turned back to Lyle. “Damn it, are you serious?” She quickly lowered her voice to try to limit what already was too much attention caused by her spill.
“Seems to describe the guy. He’s gone, I think. I don’t see why you’re so—”
“Have you been listening?” She leaned in so close he could smell her soap and the touch of perspiration and tension seeping through. “I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t know if he’s playing me in some way, or what he’s up to.”
Lyle got it now. This first officer might be turning on her, but for the life of Lyle none of that made sense.
“I’ve got to go,” she said.
“Please, wait.”
She shook her head. She looked at the doorway to the right of the counter, the hallway to the bathroom, and a back door. Lyle felt a terrible urge to say I can help you but he didn’t know if it might come off as patronizing when that wasn’t what he meant at all. Most of all, he didn’t know if he was capable of helping her when he couldn’t help himself or even decide if he wanted to. He watched the pilot walk away and felt an immediate sense of loss. It was the very feeling he’d had for years crystallized into a moment—he should be doing something or saying something because life was slipping away—and being unable to do anything about it. There was nothing he could do about it now.
Outside it was fully dark. Lyle absently got on his bike and let a million questions slide around his brain without focusing on any particular one of them. With the sun down, the early evening took on a decided winter chill. He was glad he’d put on this wool sweater. He pedaled along the west side of the park on Scott, figuring he’d go left on Fell. He saw the driverless car.
It crept along behind him in modest residential traffic. At the corner of Oak, a thoroughfare with thickening traffic, Lyle thought about Occam’s razor and the likelihood of the simplest explanation. Maybe there were just a lot of these cars around. He took a right onto Oak, heading east, away from home, just to test the theory. A quarter way down the block, he looked back and saw the driverless car take a right too. Okay, thought Lyle, still nothing certain, given Oak’s popularity. A car horn exploded.
The driver was warning Lyle that, distracted, he’d swerved into the lane. The human driver shouted something Lyle couldn’t hear. Lyle stopped along the edge of the far right lane. The fracas and pace and bouncing headlights of the cars speeding Oak disoriented Lyle. The feeling jostled him, sparked a memory of Steamboat, the cold and dark, that he couldn’t quite grasp. He looked into the fray of oncoming lights and couldn’t see the bubble car now. Had it disappeared?
Then, boom, there it was again, nearly on him, just a car length back. It had been hidden behind larger vehicles. The bubble neared. Fear jolted Lyle and he pedaled again.
Lyle willed himself to take a deep breath. He went right on Steiner. The traffic thinned. Lyle kept a modest pace. He craned over his right shoulder. The bubbly autonomous vehicle turned right on Steiner. So dutiful, it used its blinker and slithered onward, a perfect citizen, an innocuous robot, a guileless storm trooper. Lyle sped up. Then screeched the brakes when a car door opened. He swerved, righted himself, then at Duboce Avenue he went left and made a quick right on Sanchez Street; glancing behind him, he took another right on Fourteenth.
The driverless car went right too. There could be no doubt. This seemed to Lyle to be of zero interest to anybody but Lyle. Either these cars had become so common no one noticed, or everyone was so consumed with their own thing that they’d not have noticed a pink elephant following Lyle. He pedaled until he came to an alley and took a sharp right into it, then stopped. The car followed him. Lyle dismounted his bike.
The car slowed. It looked to Lyle like a bubble with a brain.
The car inched forward, and Lyle stepped in front of it. He scanned the attached houses across the street, a short, stark white one decorated with purple perennials attached to a taller greenish-gray house with exterior metal staircases. Was anyone in the window to bear witness? No such luck. Lyle pulled out his phone. He called up the video function and hit record.
The car had come to a complete stop ten or so feet from Lyle. He couldn’t help imbue it with human characteristics. In this case, Lyle decided that it had made a decision. It wasn’t going to run him over. He walked to the front of the car, his video still recording. Lyle, careful not to move out from the front of the car so that it might have an escape path, peered inside. He nearly laughed when he saw the cup holder. Maybe autonomous vehicles got thirsty. Other than that, the bulb of technology wanted for anything human. Sterile, beige leather seats matched either side of an instrument panel between. A trough stood in place of the dash with more gadgetry beneath it.
Lyle looked up at the black eye on the top.
The car lurched forward.
Lyle lunged out of the way. Off went the car. Just a roll of the wheel at first and then a sincere acceleration.
Lyle looked around. Did anyone see that? Did he see that? The car disappeared down Lloyd, took a right and by the time Lyle hopped on his bike again, it had disappeared. He didn’t stop riding until he’d reached City Hall. He took his bicycle onto the train with him. No car would follow him here. Not that he particularly cared. He was thinking of the Google car the way he’d think of a patient’s medical symptom, not as something to wish away but as a key piece of evidence. What was the car telling him?
Mostly, it was reiterating to him what his note had told him: he wasn’t imagining things. Second, it was telling him that whatever strange situation he’d stumbled into involved a powerful actor, powerful enough to involve a driverless car. How powerful did that make someone?
It did give him two disparate pieces of evidence to connect, and disparate clues were of immense value to Lyle when he’d taken on medical mysteries. The more disparate the better. Someone from central California with a pronounced stiff neck and sound sensitivity could have valley fever. Talk about disparate: here was this driverless car and then there was the note on his refrigerator. The note referred to seizures and channelopathy and Lyle had trouble seeing any Venn diagram with an overlap between these disease states and a Google car.
The note mentioned Google. And now the car. What was someone trying to do?
Draw him in?
Warn him?
Taunt him?
To what end?
Lyle looked through rows of commuters at the map on the wall over the door. He knew where he was headed and hadn’t fully admitted it to himself, or the reasons why. He could see the stop on the map, downtown Berkeley, Shattuck Avenue. He was going to find Melanie. His jaw tightened. The last time he saw her might’ve been eighteen months earlier. She’d stopped by his house with a bag of groceries. “Green things,” she said, “to help your liver process.” It was loving, painful, and patronizing. She’d looked around his house like a detective. “I’m here if you need me,” she’d said and closed the door quietly.
The time before that had been their last screaming fight—her screaming at him to wake up and him fighting with silence. Then her acceptance had set in.
What inspired this visit?
The question slithered over and around his brain, a deadly snake in his valley of denial. He stared absently at a woman clicking on her tablet and considered the question. He was going to warn Melanie, right? Warn her about what? A note he’d written to himself? He shook his head and knew that to be too simplistic. He swiveled his head and watched the man sitting next to him pecking at a game on his phone, transfixed. So, Lyle thought, maybe I’m going to ask her if she’d heard of anything like this potential pandemic; she’s a nurse, and one of the most well-read and thoughtful people anywhere. If it’s out there, she’ll know.
He shook his head and watched another man wearing headphones while staring at a phone he held so close to his face that it couldn’t possibly have been good for his eyes. It was oddly peaceful, Lyle thought, all these people so lost in their virtual worlds that Lyle could just stare at them, lapping up and observing the world without interference or conflict. No risk of interaction. Then he had a sudden thought about what he was going to ask Melanie. The question sent a tremor through him. He tried to will the question away and it clung and festered and he knew instantly he couldn’t deny it.
I’m going to ask her why I can’t do it anymore.
I can’t figure anything out. I don’t know how to try. Then he smiled, a private smile, because he knew even that wasn’t quite it. He settled back in his seat and let his shoulders relax. He was going to let the thing reveal itself to him, this powerful motivation leading him east. He looked back at the man sitting next to him lost in a game that involved shooting blocks that, when he hit them, turned into stars and soared and then turned into points.
A drip of drool gathered on the corner of the man’s lip.
Lyle closed his eyes, searching broken, blurry memories from his trip to Steamboat, and disparate clues.