Dead On Arrival Read online

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Better days ahead.”

  “What did you say you do at Google?”

  He looked at the door, wondering how he was going to just get past this person.

  “You won’t feel a thing, Dr. Martin.”

  Then, for some reason, he found himself staring at her hat. There was something odd about it; hadn’t he thought so all along? It looked like wool, sort of, but it had these metallic strands built into it. Gold colored. Gold, right? Like that rectangle he’d found on the flight deck door.

  He felt his phone buzz again. Did she say she’d gotten a signal? He pulled out his phone and thought about Melanie. She was out there, and her son. He reached the door and caught a glimpse of what was out there. Jerry lay on his back in the snow; in the pickup, Eleanor’s face was buried in the steering wheel, where she must have been—

  Lyle’s phone buzzed. He swiped at it and saw the image of the cover of an album that he’d been listening to when he fell asleep on the plane.

  Everything went black.

  Part IV

  Nevada

  Twenty-Seven

  During that first trip to the Nevada desert to see Lantern, Jackie spent two mornings watching study subjects interact on the computer through the thick, soundproof two-way mirror. She and Denny would be on one side and the subject on the other, using a phone or tablet, sitting at a table or a recliner, whatever felt comfortable. The instructions to the participants were open-ended and simple: visit any sites you like, however you’d spend your time on the Internet—Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, the New York Times.

  “Porn?” asked the first morning’s subject, a lanky woman who commuted a hundred miles to work at Walmart. “I’m kidding!”

  Jackie felt kinship with her. Something sad in the corners of her mouth, a telltale sign of bleached short hairs over her lip. The woman loved Twitter. Her first stop that morning had been to see what was trending. A monitor in front of Jackie mirrored what the subject was doing. A second monitor showed Jackie a handful of changing external variables, including the speed of the Internet connection being fed to the study subject, frame rate of the images, the pixelation. Denny sat behind her reading a hard copy of the local newspaper. It was an uneventful ninety minutes. Nothing particularly stood out. On the memory test, the woman fared little better than a control. They broke for lunch.

  Upstairs in the warehouse-like setting of Google’s Lantern offices, Denny excused himself to the restroom and Jackie looked out over the office setting. It struck her as odd. The pair of Alexes was gone. Maybe it was because it was lunch. Still, the Ping-Pong table looked unused. She counted six cubicles in two pods. Only a single computer monitor gleamed with electricity. Most of the cubicles looked empty. One included a stack of manila folders. Jackie had taken a step in its direction when she heard Denny’s footsteps.

  They drove Denny’s Tesla the few miles west to town on the empty stretch of highway to Hawthorne.

  They found a booth in the back of a diner. The torn pleather upholstery scratched at Jackie’s calves. They shared a tuna melt and soggy fries. Denny told her how Lantern had yielded unpredictable results. Sometimes, memory retention was through the roof, other times like it had been that morning. Denny handed her more spreadsheets. “No need to look now. Maybe tonight in the luxurious confines of the Days Inn.” He paused. “You look skeptical, Jackie.”

  “It’s a lot to take in. May I change the subject?”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “I realized I don’t know much about your background.” She already knew about it, but she wanted to hear him tell it.

  Denny told her his path. Montana roots, then MIT for undergrad and a programming Ph.D. that he didn’t finish. He and a classmate launched a startup doing compression software to make video delivery faster and it got acquired and “I could’ve retired, financially, but, emotionally, I don’t know, was a lot emptier than my bank account.”

  Jackie looked at him over her coffee, urging him silently to continue.

  “Silicon Valley’s big secret,” he said. “After you make money, it becomes so hollow, even insulting, and then you want legacy.”

  “How is Lantern legacy?”

  He laughed. “Good point,” then really laughed, like he was discovering the joke. “Silicon Valley’s even bigger secret is that we get rich, want to create a legacy, and then get distracted on some side project that consumes us because it’s almost impossible to create a legacy. So, in the end, we conflate legacy with power. Influence.”

  “Which is not legacy?”

  “They are hard to disentangle.”

  Jackie smiled.

  “No family?”

  He shook his head. “How about you?” he asked. “Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley for a Ph.D. What about the stuff not on your résumé? Hobbies, life dreams?”

  Jackie felt simultaneously nauseated and giddy. She hated this topic but she had deliberately led the conversation this direction. She suspected he knew and he would betray it.

  “Just the classes.”

  “With the genius doctor. And family? Just you and your sister?”

  He knew.

  “Our grandmother raised us.”

  He nodded. She blinked back tears.

  “Like you said the other day: you don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Why are you asking me if you know?”

  “I don’t know know. I sense something, Jackie, I’d have to be a dim-witted asshole not to see you’re lugging something around.”

  Jackie put her hand to her cheek. Had she imagined a gust of wind?

  “We don’t have to—”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jackie said.

  “Where to?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Mostly in silence, Jackie directed Denny to and up a winding dirt road to the north of town. It was the very definition of desolate. When the road started to climb, there was a lone sign: overlook. Denny snaked on the winding road. Three-quarters of a mile later, Jackie pointed to the pullover spot on the right. Jackie exited the car without speaking and walked to the edge of the brown-and-red-dusted cliff. Denny shuffled up behind her.

  “How did you know this was here?”

  “Fancy program called Google Maps. Very impressive, that Google.” Before he could laugh, she said. “Do you trust me?”

  “Jackie, of—”

  “You asked about my family. It’s very personal.”

  “We don’t have to—”

  “There was an incident,” she interrupted him again, “and I was remanded to my grandmother. We both were.”

  “You and your sister?”

  She nodded grimly. “Right.”

  “And that’s off-limits?”

  Jackie looked across the plain. It was a vast stretch of brown with jags of green, a blip of town at their two o’clock, some neon sign blinking red. Now Jackie was practically leaning over the side. Denny took a rapid step forward. He reached for her.

  “You trust me,” Jackie said, flatly. She sounded like she might be speaking to herself.

  “This is weird, Jackie.”

  “She killed herself, my sister. Marissa.”

  She looked at Denny and saw that he’d blinked rapidly; whatever else he’d known about her, he hadn’t known that.

  “Jumped from a high place.”

  He nodded. She appreciated that he didn’t say something stupid, like I’m so sorry.

  “Jackie, I’m really grateful that we’ve found each other.”

  His tone startled her. He wasn’t the touchy-feely type, quietly jocular at most.

  “May I explain why?”

  “Because I’m helping you solidify your legacy.”

  “Well, that.” He laughed, taking the edge out of the situation. “Because I spend most of my time in superficial relationships. Work, not at work. Don’t worry, I’m not hitting on you.” She thought he might laugh again to take the edge off but he remained s
erious. His eyes looked a touch wet, and the skin beneath them drooped slightly with age. He cleared his throat. “Anyhow . . .”

  “I feel the same,” she said. The truth was she wasn’t sure if she did. She desperately wanted to trust Denny. Desperately. More than that, she wanted him to trust her. Much of the time, she felt he did.

  “Jackie, may I ask a question?”

  Her silence spoke assent.

  “Do you trust yourself?”

  He could see it jarred her, like she’d felt wind. She swallowed hard. “I think so.”

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  Again, she didn’t answer. Her thoughts had traveled to Dr. Martin. She thought of him as someone who knew his way, who could make hard decisions, measure cause and effect, detect the world’s nuances.

  “There’s Lantern,” she said.

  “C’mon, Jackie, it’s windy up here.”

  That night, she fell asleep in the Days Inn with the spreadsheets on her chest. She dreamed of playing chess, but the pieces were vividly colored, and they had bared teeth. In her dream, she felt a presence behind her. She turned and there stood Dr. Martin, eyeing the board. She sat up sharply in bed. It was 4 a.m. and she felt wide awake. She thought about her conversation with Denny and she was struck that, at the time, her mind had drifted to Dr. Martin. She was fascinated by him and even though she understood there was something cartoonish in that—like she had idealized him, romanticized his genius—he had played an extraordinary role in her life.

  She googled the office hours for Lyle Martin and wondered if he was back from Africa. She stared at his picture and imagined that he would understand her and fantasized until she felt back asleep and dreamed of screwing him until they collapsed in exhausted satisfaction.

  That next morning, the study subject looked crack addled. Lucid, cogent, but nearly toothless. Maybe he’d recovered in time. He poked the tablet, visiting poker sites, playing free hands. He knocked on the glass and asked for $100 in ante money and Denny declined, saying it would upset the experiment and the toothless guy cursed and kept on with it. At one point, Jackie looked up from the spreadsheets and she noticed a change. The man had a dumb smile on his face. His eyes had glazed.

  “Denny?”

  “What’s up? Do you realize they’re going to give that guy the death penalty?”

  “What guy?”

  “Who shot up the army base. We’re getting to be like Mexico with the narcos, lawless, chaotic.” Now Denny looked up from his newspaper at the man locked into his computer screen. “I can’t help but feel like we’re responsible, in part, for the violence.”

  “Who?” She was only half listening to Denny as she watched the toothless man become more and more entranced.

  “Google, us, the tech world.”

  Now she looked at him. “Why?”

  “The theory is nothing all that revelatory but I guess it’s still heretical, at least in these parts. Thanks to the Internet, people have access to all this information but they seem to be gravitating to ideas that reinforce their worldviews. Maybe that’s why we’re getting more extreme, more partisan.”

  Denny noticed that her right fist had balled. This conversation really bugged her.

  “Jackie?”

  “Things are moving so fast.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Everyone getting spun up. It’s really . . .”

  “Dangerous. We’re speaking the same language.” Now he was looking again at the man behind the two-way mirror. “Anyhow . . .” He paused. “Now you see it. Look at him, he’s fully in the zone.”

  Jackie looked at the computer monitor that showed the man was staring at Willie Mays’s famous over-the-shoulder basket catch in the World Series. He watched it four times in a row. Slowly, dumbly, he clicked a button to share the image. Then he navigated “related” YouTube videos and watched highlights from a Yogi Berra interview. He smiled and laughed quietly to himself.

  “Is he drooling, Denny?”

  “Hard to tell. Anything odd on the Internet speeds?”

  “Similar to yesterday,” Jackie said. “Mostly, maybe a half a percent here or there.”

  “Now watch this,” Denny said. He exited the room and a few seconds later, he entered the room with the toothless subject. Denny shook him on the shoulder and the man startled back to awareness. Denny offered him some water and asked him if he’d take a test about what he’d seen. Sure, the man said. Through the two-way mirror, Jackie and Denny watched him take a test on the Internet about some of the images that had appeared on the periphery of the screen and also automatically generated questions about the subject matter of his Internet experience. What did Yogi Berra say? Then there would be multiple-choice questions about his exact wording with four different options.

  The man fared okay on the memory test. Not spectacularly, but better than perhaps someone with his rotted demeanor and background would suggest.

  They escorted the man out.

  “Are you okay to drive?” Jackie asked him.

  “Of course,” the man answered, seeming offended. Then he looked around, shook his head, looking confused. “Do you guys work for the VA?”

  They looked at him.

  “Are you okay?” Jackie repeated.

  “I goddamned told you I’m okay.” He seemed to get his bearings. “That was way more fun than last time.”

  “Last time?” Jackie asked.

  “You might have us confused,” Denny said.

  “Whatever. Just gimme my money. I’ll do that one anytime.”

  Denny handed him a check.

  They stood in the dirt lot and watched the man drive away in a pickup. Something was bothering Jackie and she couldn’t put a fine point on it.

  “Jackie?”

  “He looked dazed.”

  “One of the things we’d like to do, obviously, is minimize the intensity factor,” Denny said. They walked back inside. Jackie thought the wording choice sounded unusually like corporate bullshit from Denny. “He seemed to enjoy himself.”

  She couldn’t deny that.

  “Have you considered monitoring pulse or using basic medical data, something shy of the MRI.”

  “Good idea,” Denny said. “Hey, let’s get out of here and discuss more on the road. I left some stuff downstairs. Can you hang here for a sec?”

  Denny left and headed back downstairs and Jackie shuffled her feet and glanced around the top floor. But no sooner had Denny disappeared than Jackie poked her head back outside without shutting the door behind her. She realized what had been bugging her as the dazed man had driven off in his pickup. She looked in the distance toward the other Google complex, the one with the big antennae and the runway. What had gotten her attention was the fact that between that complex and the one where she was standing was a well-worn side road. It extended from the front of the building where she stood and then grooved the desert until it reached so far toward the other Google setting that she could no longer make out the rutted earth.

  So what?

  Jackie poked her head back inside the building and looked it over. She headed to the nearest cubicle. She passed her hand over the empty desk to see, as she suspected, not even a hint of dust or use. She went to the cubicle beside it. On this one sat a telephone but the cord wasn’t plugged in. She looked around and, hearing no immediate reappearance of Denny from the back, made her way to the cubicle on which she’d earlier seen manila folders. She leafed through them. Empty. Nothing in them.

  She walked to the cubicles where she’d previously seen the two workers, Alex and Alex. There were ports to plug in laptops, but neither had laptops plugged in now. So maybe this was a skeleton crew, and they were planning expansion. Maybe wasted space? That didn’t seem like Google.

  She bent down and looked on the floor. It was carpeted with that cheap corporate carpet, brown. That didn’t interest her. She was looking for signs of life, scuffing, wrappers from energy bars, pen caps tossed and left around. There was som
e of that. So maybe this was just a slow day.

  Still it nagged her. She glanced around the room. For a moment, she felt a light wind blow and wondered where it had come from, and she realized it was her imagination. She knew what it meant: she wasn’t sure who or what to trust. All it took was a little gust to throw her off.

  From the floor below, Denny stood in one of the experiment rooms looking at a computer monitor. He watched Jackie on a closed-circuit video feed and pursed his lips. Denny glanced at his phone screen. He pulled up his contacts and found Adam Stile, the goofy engineer in his group. Denny fired off a text and stuffed the phone back in his pocket.

  Twenty-Eight

  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?