Devil's Plaything (2 page)

D
ense foliage envelops my feet. I take two dozen loping steps away from Grandma. I trip.

I rise to my knees and say a silent agnostic's prayer of thanks for cortisol. It's the fight-or-flight hormone secreted by the adrenal glands that heightens the senses.

It explains why I can make sense of my surroundings despite the quick onset of twilight. To my right, I make out Grandma's shape propped against the tree, motionless.

I wade a few more steps, moving parallel to the line of eucalyptuses, protected by it. I crouch where I can look through another gap between the big trees at the grove containing the assailant. More movement, I think.

Then I'm sure.

A shadowy figure exits the left side of the distant tree enclave.

I crouch, suddenly fearful he might not be escaping but still on the attack. Is he circling around the other way?

Squinting. C'mon cortisol!

Based on our past experiences, our brains try to make sense of situations with imperfect information. Through the darkness, I piece together that a figure is carrying an elongated bag. I can see he's trotting to a car parked at the edge of the grove; he opens the trunk, tosses in the duffel bag, climbs into the driver's seat. Shooter seems lumpy, amorphous; brain concludes he is muscular and wearing a hooded sweatshirt. Car has distinctive wide back; brain sends message: Prius.

Police sirens blare. They can't be half a minute away. Brake lights from the Prius pierce the dusk. The car lurches forward and starts to pull away. I stumble through the tree line, knowing I couldn't possibly create enough cortisol to allow me to make out a license plate, let alone fly through the air, bring the car to a screeching halt and make the driver apologize to Grandma.

I stop and watch the Prius drive away. And I almost laugh at the idea of our nearly quintessential San Francisco death: gunned down by the driver of an environmentally friendly car—and who has the courtesy to call my mobile to make sure I'm dead.

“The Idles live to see another day,” I tell Grandma.

“I know you. I taught you to drown,” she says.

I laugh, a release of adrenaline, my hands shaking.

Thirty years ago, Grandma takes me for a weekend to the ocean in Santa Cruz. Babysitting while my parents shepherd my older brother through his appendectomy. Just the two of us. Grandpa Irving, the devoted accountant, stays at home to work.

My parents, Grandma tells me later, overload her with rules. No cotton candy, no late-night television, and no filthy ocean, especially since I'm not familiar with water.

For two days, adventure, sugary snacks and wading in the tide. Grandma makes friends with a retired lifeguard who teaches me how to wade and hold my breath under water. At the time, she later recalls, I told her that I learned how to drown.

She says: “Let's not tell your parents about the swimming.” It's our first secret.

A light breeze kicks up, chilling my bare arms—and my exposed toe. I take the sweatshirt I've had tied around my waist and lay it gently on my ward.

“Lane, who is the man in blue?”

“I'm tired.”

“Earlier you said ‘A train can't breathe
.
' What did you mean by that?”

No response at first.

“I'd like soup,” she finally says.

It is like talking to a child who knows words but not their meanings.

My phone vibrates. I whip it from my pocket. It's a text message. Is it the maniac again? I open the message. It reads: “emergency in blogosphere. call asap.”

The message is not from a mystery sender, not from a hybrid-driving outpatient. It's from Pauline Sanchez, the woman who pays my bills. She's the editor at Medblog, a medical news and information Internet site that pays me $120 a day for three postings.

The nature of her message, despite its drama, isn't particularly compelling. Pauline is a news junkie, an information monger, a data speed-freak. She speaks in headlines. From her message, I infer only that she's trying to get my attention. Maybe she's upset I haven't posted in the last eighteen seconds.

Maybe she wants to talk about a searing physical chemistry between us that she wants to experiment with—but that I'm holding at arm's length.

I am about to put the phone back in my pocket when I realize that the best thing I can do is freeze.

“Drop it,” a voice says.

T
wo police officers stand at the tree line, bathed in headlights.

They have guns drawn, pointing in my direction.

It takes a moment to disabuse the two cops of the idea that I should be targeted. But I can see why they'd take aim.

I'm crouching beside a terrified octogenarian not long after shots rang out and, likely, someone called dispatch with distress calls. Plus, I stand in dim light holding a small silver object.

“Your only crime is your phone is outdated,” one cop says, chuckling, as he holsters his gun. In San Francisco, you can get grief for carrying an obsolete gadget without a permit.

The officer is named Everly. He's thin, with an unruly moustache and pockmarked cheeks from adolescent acne. The other cop is a paunchy woman with thinning hair; Officer Thompson has alopecia, female-pattern baldness.

When people meet someone new they tend to focus on faces or names. I see pathologies. My annoying sixth sense is associating humans with their past, present, or possible future conditions, a vestige of my medical-school training. Parkinson's, Bell's palsy, cirrhosis, psoriasis, pigeon-toes, halitosis, hairy tongue, or the ever-reliable attention deficit disorder, which is somewhat subjective, and maybe everyone has it in modern life, so it's a solid fallback.

The balding cop checks Grandma's condition and deems it unnecessary to order an ambulance.

Everly asks for my identification. Then the evening goes from dangerous to frustrating.

“It's the one and only Nathaniel Idle,” he chirps to his partner. “The Journalist Type.” He says “journalist” the disgusted way a health nut might use to refer to inorganic produce not grown locally.

I'd characterize most of the stories I write as quasi-medical journalism—fluff pieces about aging, beauty, nutrition and the biotech companies investing in sparing us the ignominy of our natural decline. This is how I pay my bills.

But I keep my sanity writing investigative stories. And they periodically run me afoul of the cops.

Two of my stories led to arrests of local cops. One—about the high rate of HIV infection among prostitutes—identified an officer in the vicious beating of one of the hookers. The other story nailed two cops for their role in a cover-up of an explosion at a San Francisco Internet café.

More recently, I worked on a story involving police and torched Porta Pottis, which, I suppose it goes without saying, bordered on the absurd. In recent months, there was a rash of fires set to portable johns outside construction sites. I learned this one morning when I was jogging and witnessed a simmering stinkfest of erstwhile blue walls. Moments later, two city workers arrived to clean up the mess. They informed me this was the ninth incident of potty pyromania; the fires appeared, they said, to stem from a battle for city funds between cops and firefighters. Allegedly, cops were igniting latrines to force their firefighting brethren to ignominiously extinguish the fetid flames (though it would also seem to make the firefighters more valuable, but maybe I'm overthinking).

I wound up making a few bucks breaking the pun-filled extravaganza in the
San Francisco Chronicle
. It seemed like good clean fun, that is until the State Attorney General launched a full-throated investigation, publicly asserting the scandal could lead as high as the Chief of Police. Then, two weeks ago, someone left a message on my doorstep: a charred piece of plastic and a note saying, “Quit writing crap about crap or get wiped off the earth.”

Cops hate me, or at least the ones whose cleverness peaked in high school do.

The upshot of it all is that I can count on not being able to talk my way out of a speeding ticket, or on getting an extra dose of skepticism when I explain that Grandma Lane and I were nearly gunned down by a phantom in the park.

The officers' sympathy wanes further when Grandma has trouble confirming my account.

“You're very fit but you have too much facial hair,” she says to Officer Everly when he asks her to describe what happened.

When he asks her whether she also saw a Prius, she says, “My husband drove a Chevrolet.”

Fortunately, the cops can't deny the damage I point out has been endured by the eucalyptuses we used for cover. A cursory look in the dark for bullet remains proves fruitless.

By this time, two more cop cars have arrived, as have a handful of onlookers. One humpbacked cop I suspect suffers scoliosis strings yellow tape around the distant grove of trees. I inquire as to whether the grove has produced any evidence—shell casings, footprints, tire tracks. But the cops want to ask all the questions.

“What did the phone caller sound like?” Everly asks.

“Digitized. Masked somehow.”

Everly digests this placidly.

“Have you ticked someone off with one of your stories?” he asks. “Was the man taking aim from a Porta Potti?”

“Very funny.”

But of course, the possibility has tiptoed across my journalistic psyche, which by definition has a penchant for seeing conspiracy. Was this attack something other than random gunplay?

The cops finish taking our statements, or mine. Grandma sits in the back of a police car, arms crossed, lost somewhere else, doubtless hungry.

“There are lots of crazy people in the park,” says Everly in dismissing me. “Maybe you should be careful what circumstances you put your grandmother in.”

I hold my tongue.

The cops are nice enough to us—or at least to my grandmother—to drive us over to my car. We pile into my aging Toyota. As we drive back to Magnolia Manor, I gently press Lane on what she remembers, and about the “man in blue” and why she sensed danger. She's unresponsive, fiddling with a mobile phone given her by the home. She uses it not to place calls—it doesn't even get service—but to play simple games, sometimes obsessively, where she organizes falling blocks or guides mice through a maze.

“I'm okay,” she finally says, defiantly.

“It's hard for you to remember things, Grandma. I understand that.”

She's fallen quiet again.

“Hey, who wants a fruit roll-up?” I ask.

It's an ongoing joke, or was. I carry a well-traveled green backpack full of snacks to feed Grandma's unpredictable food demands and keep up her calorie intake. Before her mental faculties started to go up in smoke, she'd retort with a demand for some exotic foodstuff, like a braised rabbit sandwich, smile, wink, and then settle happily for the cherry fruit roll-up, Snickers, peanut-butter cracker.

This time, she places a frail hand on my right forearm. She looks at me.

“What is it, Grandma Lane?”

She clears her throat.

“Nathaniel, there's something I should tell you.”

“W
hat, Grandma?”

No response.

We've arrived at the gates to her retirement home. I pull to the side and put my car in park. The metal dinosaur still hums reliably, despite its age. I want to see Lane's eyes and I'm tempted to put on the inside light but decide it might feel like scrutiny. Nothing is surer to derail her. We sit shadowed by street light.

“What do you have to tell me?”

“I'm sorry,” she repeats.

“What are you sorry about?”

“I did a bad thing.”

“What bad thing?”

No response.

“Grandma Lane, you said there's something you have to tell me.”

“It's catching up. It's caught up. Things from a long time ago catch up, right? Eventually.”

“I don't know. Maybe. Depends on what things, Lane.”

“I did a bad thing,” she repeats.

She looks grave. But I'm never sure these days whether to put any value in her ramblings—or how connected her ideas are. Under the circumstances, this one bears further investigation.

“Are you saying that you did something bad that is catching up to you?”

“Well, I'm sure that's true, Nathaniel.”

It's a platitude. One of dementia's symptoms is that its sufferers tend to respond with stock answers, relying on automated, practiced responses to supplant more sophisticated processing.

I reach for her hand and take it in mine. She resists for an instant, and then relents. Beneath skin withered by time and pocked with age spots, I feel strength coming from her fingers, the flexor digitorum and her other forearm muscles. Grandma's still in there and kicking.

“Grandma Lane, please. Are you keeping a secret from me? Do you want to talk about it?”

“Don't pester me!” An outburst.

I fall silent, hoping stillness will bring calm, lucidity. I can't tell if there's substance to her muttering—or continuity to it.

She looks up at the home.

“They have a fitness room and soft pillows on the couches,” she says. “But it's strange there.”

The Manor is a castle-like structure that not only is anomalous for San Francisco's inner Sunset District, it is indeed eerie. It looks beamed from mythical Transylvania, a cryptically imposing edifice with a spire cloaked in fog.

Its ancient façade makes its innards all the more contrary. Magnolia Manor provides retirees with the highest-tech amenities. Residents have wireless access, dozens of new computers and printers, handheld game devices. In the activities room, dozens of withered octogenarians often sit nose-to-screen playing virtual golf or talking in videoconferences with their grandchildren.

Of late, many of the residents, including Grandma Lane, are using the technology to share their life stories. They sit in cubicles and talk into microphones to record tales of the 20th century. Low-cost cameras attached to the computers capture grainy digital images of the storytellers. This project is called the Human Memory Crusade. It's ambitious, this transferring of our grandparents' fading memories into a database.

I drive in through the gates.

“I give up trying to get into that head of yours, Grandma. For now.”

At the Manor's front desk, we get our first break of the evening.

“You're lucky Vince isn't here,” the nurse says. “You're way past curfew.”

Vince Alito is the home's director and autocrat. He hates me, or acts like it. He browbeats me for being an insufficiently dedicated grandson and for our family's failure to make timely payments for Grandma's bills, including for “extra” services, like car rides and cable television access in her room, and, of late, a bigger monthly bill reflecting her graduation into assisted-living care. She gets to stay in the same room but requires more frequent attention.

With my dad living in Denver, I've taken primary duty for Grandma's care, becoming the face of the family. I'm also responsible for transferring money each month from Grandma's meager trust to the assisted-living facility, and timely bill paying has never been my strong suit. Still, the chip on Vince's shoulder is hard for me to understand. Once I said to him: “Usually, I don't irritate someone that much until they've known me for a while.” He responded: “I'm a quick study.”

I am relieved but also a little surprised by Vince's absence; he's a retirement-home fixture, synonymous with this quirky, sometimes sad, place.

I take Grandma to her room. I sit by her bed and read to her from Mark Twain's
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
while she falls asleep. At one point, she jars awake and smiles.

“Get married and have a family,” she says. “You're not getting any younger.”

Grandma Lane never used to give me advice—certainly not to conform. One time, she asked me to take her to a Tracy Chapman concert so she could see what all the hype was about. Just before the encore, she leaned into me and whispered that she and I were birds of a feather—“iconoclastic romantics,” she said.

Nearly a decade ago, she was the first person I told I was quitting medicine to be a journalist. I was well more than $100,000 in debt when I exchanged stethoscope for reporter's notebook. The medical life felt too rote, black-and-white, like I was a glorified auto mechanic, performing Jiffy Lube diagnoses of the corpus. Journalism let me roll around in life's gray areas and emotional muck.

“Question your government and your spouse. Trust your hairstylist and your gut,” she told me at the time.

But she's right; I'm not getting younger.

At thirty-four, I'm a standard bearer for what pundits call The Odyssey. I'm exploring still, enjoying it some, not like I used to. Critics who like to see life packaged up neatly would say I'm thrilled by the chaos, using an endless search for a perfect landing spot as an excuse to not settle down. Some of those critics are close friends and family.

Physically, I'm aging more traditionally. I'm having more trouble getting up and down a basketball court. My five-foot, eleven-inch frame isn't metabolizing snack foods the way it used to. My haircuts come less frequently. But when I have a good one—haircut—I can pass myself for my late twenties. I have a strong nose, like Grandma. Pauline, who runs Medblog, says women find me attractive because I listen. With a little carpentry, she says, I could make someone a good husband.

My phone rings.

It's Pauline. The phone clock reads 8:52.

“I was just thinking about you,” I answer. “Your phone must be reading my mind.”

“You didn't respond to my text. Under company rules, you can only do that if you're dead.”

“What if I was busy avoiding death?”

“What?”

“I'll tell you later. What's up, boss?”

“You've received a mystery package.”

I don't know what she means and I'm feeling impatient and desperately uninterested in work. I shouldn't have answered the phone.

“It's a manila envelope,” she continues. “On the front, it says: ‘Nathaniel Idle. For your eyes only.' It's written in thick blue ink and rotten cursive, the kind of penmanship you'd find on the prescription pad of a drunken doctor. Or a sober one, actually.”

She intends a joke. I don't laugh.

“Nat, do I detect you've lost your sense of humor?”

She sounds hurt.

“Long day.”

“Everything okay?”

I look at Grandma. “Fine, now.”

“I'm insatiably curious about the package. There could be some incredible scoop on the thumb drive,” she says.

“Thumb drive?”

Pauline laughs. “Did I forget to mention that I opened the package? Inside is a two-gig memory stick. I hope you're not going to nail me for mail tampering. I did it in the interest of journalism. And I was bored.”

I finally laugh. “Pauline, you are one seriously impatient quasi-journalist.”

“Birds of a feather.”

“So put the drive in the computer. See what's on it.”

“Thanks, Hercule Poirot. I did that. It's encrypted.”

I sigh. “What do you want me to do about that?”

“I assume you know the password.”

“Why's that?”

She explains that when she puts the mysterious memory stick into the computer, a screen pops up with a place to enter the user name and password. She says the user name is already filled in with the words “Nathaniel Idle.”

“But the password is blank. Looks like you're the one who has to fill it in,” she says.

I get a bad feeling. Not just because the day is definitely presenting a second strange mystery, but because only a handful of intimates call me “Nathaniel.” When I hear my full name, I know I'm in trouble—or in love.

“Come down and we'll try to open it over a drink,” Pauline says. “What better have you got going on a Thursday night? Besides, how often does life present you a genuine mystery? I'm intrigued, and thirsty.”

I hear in her voice that playful and intense tone that makes Pauline engaging, effective, and dangerous—professionally and personally.

I look at Grandma. Is there even a remote chance that the contents of the drive could explain the shooting in the park?

I tell Pauline I'll come by shortly and we hang up.

I think about what happened in the park. Maybe the cops are right to speculate we took potshots from a maniac. Though that doesn't explain the phone call I received. Have I pissed someone off?

I think about the stories I'm working on. The Porta Potti piece notwithstanding, it's hard to fathom any of them could be cause for attack.

One is a magazine piece about Stanford neurologists placing precision magnets on people's heads to diminish chronic pain. Another pertains to research at Johns Hopkins that uses brain imaging to show that a driver using a cell phone cannot simultaneously focus both on the road and a conversation; the structure of the brain, unlike the structure of a computer chip, does not lend itself well to multitasking. A third story is about Grandma herself. The editors at
Elder Care
magazine asked me to chronicle my relationship with Lane as she “matures.” The story has been personally intense to report, or, rather, it was—before Grandma's mercurial descent. Before she really devolved, our conversations about her life had given me some insight into the bond between us and her own struggles settling down as a young woman.

I kiss her on the forehead. Her eyes open and she grabs my hand, startling me.

“He's at the dentist,” she says loudly.

“Who, Grandma?”

She withdraws her hand. She's frightened.

“Who is at the dentist? The man in blue?”

She taps her forehead.

“He's inside here now.”

“Grandma?”

I look her squarely in the eyes. I see the essential life in her narrow blue pupils being corroded by the glassiness of dementia. Less than a year ago, she had her full wits. I thought little of it when she returned one day from the condiment station in the dining hall with a stack of napkins but forgot utensils. It seemed only a few weeks later, she spent so long in the bathroom that I knocked on the door, let myself in, and found her holding a new roll of toilet paper, stymied by how to slip it onto the silver holder on the wall.

“Grandma Lane, I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Who is the man in blue? Did we see him today? Maybe when we visited the dentist? Remember? Was he the same man in the park? Can you tell me?”

She slowly closes her lids.

I wait ten minutes for her to wake up. I stroke her arm. I replay the shooting. I hear the popping of bullets. I see the phantom in the trees. I sense in my memories the anxiety that comes with post-traumatic stress disorder. I feel the impotence of running and hiding. I scour the bumpy topography of my brain for clues: what had I missed? Did the car have a bumper sticker? Was it a California license plate?

Answers elude me.

I kiss Grandma one more time.

I turn off the light, and leave to decrypt a mystery package.