Devil's Plaything (24 page)

I
'm scraping my hippocampus for memories of the shadow man who flitted in and out of my life, making brief cameos and little concrete impression.

Did I sense something about that man at the time? Did I intuit the import of Harry, the Pigeon-man who was Grandma's true love?

Did I deliberately bury this instinct? Was it too strange for a child to contemplate? Or record as memory?

I honestly can't remember.

I'm aware of the failings of my own memory, its fragility.

Something else strikes me. Perhaps I wasn't particularly aware of Harry's periodic presence. But perhaps I
was
aware of something else: the changing moods in my grandmother.

Sometimes she seemed happier. Sometimes she sang a little bit more, seemed purer and less distracted. Sometimes, so inspired.

Were those the times Harry was near?

Did I sense that Grandma led a double life? Or that she needed more than one thing to keep her happy?

Does it scare me to feel so connected to her malady?

I
stand at the doorstep of Polly's flat. Sleep deprivation and delirium should have me shrouded in my own personal fog. But I feel alive with both hope and misgivings.

The door is unlocked. Polly is too trusting. She shouldn't be so cavalier and open in such a dangerous world. The house is quiet.

“Polly?” I call upstairs, then down.

No response.

I drop my backpack and start to run. I speed up the stairs to her bedroom.

The bedside light is on. On the bed lies Polly, a pillow clutched to her chest. She's sleeping, then hears me, and starts to stir.

“You're okay,” I exclaim. Utter relief.

She rubs a beautiful eye with the back of her hand.

“Why wouldn't I be? My God,” she says and pulls herself into a sitting position. “What ran you over?”

“It's no biggie. I got attacked by the U.S. military and the biotech industry. A day in the life of a blogger.”

She blinks, the vulnerable Polly. Tears in her eyes. “Would you mind making me some tea?”

I make her rosebud herbal tea, which she says she's been craving all night. It's just past midnight. We sit on the love seat across the wall from her bed. Dim light from a lamp gives the room a hollow feeling. Polly, chilly, wraps herself in a blanket.

I've sensed for days something has been bothering her. “You're not telling me something.”

“You're right.”

“Are you part of it?”

“I told you about my brother.”

“Philip. Crystal meth.”

“I love him so much. I've taken care of him. I always will.”

“What did he do? Is he involved in this thing?”

She looks at me quizzically.

“I know you think I'm some corporate drone, a crazed MBA looking to change the world and charge a lot of money for it, but . . .”

I don't know where she's heading. “Polly . . .”

“I'm not that. I am waiting for the right thing to invest myself in, not just my business.”

“Are you part of the Crusade? Are you in league with Chuck?”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“Then what are
you
talking about?”

“Nat, I really wanted you to come to this on your own. I didn't want to put pressure on you. I know who you are and I have no need to change that.”

I'm baffled.

“Please, Polly. Tell me what's going on.”

She smiles.

“There's someone I want you to meet.”

I look around.

She takes my hand with her cold grasp. She stretches out my fingers and extends them toward her belly.

“Meet your son.”

Lightning in my head. An explosion of quiet emotion, like watching the aurora borealis inside my brain. In the last couple of days, I've learned the fragility of memory. I know immediately I will never forget this moment.

“But . . .”

“It only takes once.”

I look at her, incredulous.

“Accident. We took precautions.”

“The night . . .”

“September twenty-seventh,” she says.

I know that date. She'd circled it on the calendar in her office.

“But you already know it's a boy?”

It's not medically possible to know that so soon.

“I just know,” she says.

I smile.

Part of me must have suspected. Maybe it explains my garrulous confessions to Grandma the last few days about my feelings for Polly.

I start to say something.

“Don't,” she says. “I'm going to have him. We'd love you to be part of our lives in some capacity, but I can handle this. I've handled lots more.”

I put my arms around her.

“Don't say anything,” she whispers. “Sleep on it. You'll need a few nights. I did.”

We walk to the bed, and climb under the covers. I put my arms around her, and I collapse into sleep.

In my dream, I am attending a funeral. I look at the program and am surprised to learn I am supposed to deliver the eulogy. I don't even know who has died. The name of the deceased is not on the program. I am standing in line to view the open casket. I approach, feeling sick.

When I get to the casket, I see that it is me lying inside. I turn around and see my grandmother waiting in line behind me to view my body.

“They've got a string quartet outside,” she says. “They're wonderful.”

“I'm dead?”

“Don't be so dramatic.” She smiles. “You've already died a thousand times and you've never taken it this hard before.”

I
wake up to discover I'm having sex. I am so groggy that I don't realize when it began, only that Polly has made her intentions eminently clear, and nature takes its course.

“Pregnancy has left me with a craving for sex and pork ribs,” she says after we finish.

I laugh, and wince. Even smiling is causing pain to ripple through a corpus that for two days has been through a menu of near misses by fire, bullet, and knife, chloroform, scarf, and flashlight.

“Nat, I'm not asking for anything and I'm not negotiating.”

“I know.”

“But I have to tell you the truth.”

“Okay.”

“You're not a great blogger.”

“And a good morning to you too.”

She laughs.

“What I mean is that you're a great long-form journalist. You dig into stories and pursue them. You're not meant for this medium.”

“I can post more often.”

“I'm not negotiating our future,” she reiterates. “I'm telling you the truth.”

“Polly . . .”

“Stop. Let's start telling each other the truth, about everything.” She raises her eyebrows, like,
Okay?
She continues: “What were you talking about last night, about the crusade and Chuck and your paranoia? Were you just being you, or is it something real?”

I nod.

“Let's hear it. Please. I need to talk about that right now.”

“Over breakfast.”

“You shower. I'll make coffee.”

I peel my body away from hers and slide from under the sheets. With early-morning sun soaking in through the blinds, I watch Polly plop her feet onto the plush area rug that covers her polished wood floor. She walks to the bathroom. When will pregnancy change her body? Can I get used to this?

Over cantaloupe and Frosted Flakes, I tell Polly the tale of the last few days. She is curious, concerned, nearly incredulous.

She comes around to me and surrounds me with a prolonged hug.

“You and Lane are safe.”

I let myself relish the feeling of her slender arms around my neck.

“This is nice,” I finally say. “But I'm going to have to break away at some point this morning to get some answers and mete out some vengeance.”

She withdraws. She sits next to me and studies me.

“Chuck was involved,” I say.

“Speaking of Chuck, he backed out,” she says. “An investor no more.”

“He did? But he'd already committed.”

“He had a due-diligence clause that let him escape. He said he couldn't make the numbers work. He said he wanted to go back to focusing on his primary interest.”

“Which is what, being strange and duplicitous?”

“Innovating and refining core Internet technologies,” Polly said, making air quotes with a pair of fingers.

“Polly, I'm sorry. But not completely.”

“Yeah, well, he made it worth my while. He gave us seventy-five thousand dollars for our trouble. He said he felt he'd led us too far down the road.”

I stop chewing mid-bite. That's quite a forfeiture. I've never heard of anything like that. Polly says she hasn't either. In exchange for the money, Polly says she has signed a strategic partnership that gives Chuck and his military investors a first look at any new technological developments or distribution methods.

“I'll do some digging and see what I can find out about him,” she says.

We fall silent.

“Go find Copernicus,” she says.

“Newton?”

“Newton.”

She disappears to the bedroom, and returns with the keys to the Cadillac. I need to get my own car fixed if I'm going to have a family. Or get a better car.

“Polly. I've been fighting my feelings for you. But they're real. More so than I've felt with anyone since . . . They're the real thing.”

“Sleep on it again.”

I take the keys.

“Can I borrow your cell phone?” I ask.

“This is how it starts. You get me pregnant, then you want to share cell phones?”

“And a joint bank account and the early-bird special at House of Pork Ribs.”

She laughs. “I'm as terrified as you are.”

I wonder if that's so.

I drive to the basketball court. I think about what I told Polly, and how much remains unanswered. Or maybe it's straightforward as Chuck has made it seem. Biogen and Pete and the U.S. military collaborate to create a computer program that will enhance memory. They test it with old folks and veterans. It doesn't work. It queers memory, erases it, writes over it.

The conspirators decide to get rid of the evidence, including my grandmother. She's the proverbial Demented Octogenarian Who Knows Too Much. It just all seems too pat, and with so many holes.

What is the meaning of the paper Pete handed me? What happened to Pete? Did he survive? What happened to the man in his library?

I realize I'm not sure I'm even angry. Just curious. And with a new uncertainty: Can I afford to delve into this any further? If I do, I risk myself and my safety as the father of the zygote growing inside Polly.

The basketball court is empty. I wait outside in the car, staring and thinking. After fifteen minutes of coming up without any new answers, I decide to call for backup. It's just past 10 a.m. Bullseye, while a night owl, should be up. I call and tell him about the piece of paper I got from Pete, with the lists of memories, and the “1/0” at the top of the page.

“Isn't that computer language?” I ask.

The list itself seems to have binary pairs—Kennedy/Nixon, or polio in family/no polio.

Bullseye takes in the evidence in silence. I consider telling him about Grandma's abduction, the revelations from G.I. Chuck, my impending fatherhood. But these things can wait. Bullseye tells me he'll think about the implications of binary pairs and call me back. I suspect he's going back to sleep.

It's sunny, but deceptively chilly. I exit the car and walk to the basketball court.

I look up at the building where Newton and Adrianna live. From the third story, I see a face peer through a window.

Adrianna has surfaced.

I
walk to the front door of the dilapidated apartment building and she meets me there and buzzes me in.

“Sunscreen,” is the first thing the mysterious scientist says to me.

“What?”

“Even in October the rays are poison.”

“I don't think you'd be planning to kill me if you're trying to spare me from getting skin cancer.”

“Don't say anything else until we get upstairs.”

In silence, we take the elevator to the third floor.

She is medium height with a build that is tough to determine given her baggy clothes: sweatpants and a sweatshirt with a Brown University logo. Her hair is pulled back tight in a short ponytail. Her skin radiates, like she could model moisturizer. Her eyes are intensely bloodshot. She's got abrasions on the knuckles of her forefinger and index finger. The fancy medical term: scabs. Possibly, she's been in a fight. Or maybe I've got to stop making inferences from meager medical insights.

When the elevator opens, two boys sprint past us. “Hey!” Adrianna yells.

The boys screech to a halt. “Sorry,” one of them says.

“First person who runs over a baby or old person does not go to the movies Friday,” she responds.

She stops in front of apartment 3H and opens the door. I walk into a low-rent apartment decorated by someone with money and particular taste.

To my right, an entire wall is consumed with a painting made up of black-and-white triangles. Sitting in front of it is a sleek gray couch. Same with the austere metal end tables on either side of the couch. Everything here screams geometry.

On the wall to my left, two startling wall hangings: framed multi-colored photo-images of the DNA double-helix.

“Family portraits,” Adrianna says.

I turn to look at her.

“That's me on the top and Newton on the bottom. Molecular images blown up. You can pick the colors of your own chromosomes.”

“Newton's your son?”

“I take care of him. Have a seat.”

I take the couch. She takes a leather chair across from me that's so stiff-backed it looks like a torture device.

“Thank you for everything you've done,” she says.

“What have I done?”

“You decrypted the package I sent you and you came to my assistance. You're the hero.”

“Then why do I feel so lost?”

“In my experience, there is no worse feeling than having incomplete information.”

“True. Let's start with where have you been?”

“Can I tell you about the Human Memory Crusade, and the software, ADAM 1.0?”

“Please.”

“Is this on the record?”

“Hell yes.”

“Could we do it off the record?”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise I won't say anything.”

“Aren't we on the same side?”

“I'm on the side of my family.”

“Off the record.”

She sips from a mug. “Coffee?” she asks. I shake my head.

“Newton's mother is a flight attendant who doesn't like to stay in one place more than forty-eight hours,” she says. “Newton was being raised by his grandmother. But she's forgetful and frail and I do most of the mothering, for him and a few others in this building. As Newton's grandma got more forgetful, I got interested in applying my doctoral training to more practical ends.”

She explains that she got permission inside Biogen to explore using computers to complement traditional and emerging anti-dementia medications.

“The idea was to stimulate the right neuro-chemicals with both drugs and physical interaction. Like building muscles using both steroids and exercise.”

She explains that the initial experiments were promising. They found people who had little or no experience using computers, mostly older folks. As these folks started to use computers, Biogen took functional MRI images of their brains. The images showed that computer users experienced heavy blood flow to parts of the brain associated with the discovery of information and the hunt for knowledge.

“We absolutely succeeded in strengthening neural connections. It looked very much like we were building up the brain.”

“What went wrong?”

“I'm not sure. When we use computers, our brains often are in a mode of discovery. We are hunting, whether for information on the Internet or opening an e-mail. That's not necessarily a bad thing.”

“But?”

“In the real world, we hunt for a purpose—for food, a job, a relationship. At the end of the hunting period, we consume something or retain it.”

“Don't we do that with information from the Internet? Don't we retain what we need and can use?”

“That's just what I assumed.”

I sense excitement in her. Science is her comfort zone.

“When we started to see problems with some test subjects, I saw another mechanism at work,” she says.

She explains that some people who use computers heavily get caught in the loop of constantly hunting and discovering in a way that appears to diminish their capacity to retain information.

“We use a search engine too much and we become a search engine ourselves. I call it ‘neuro-rabbit holing.' Our brains become like Alice in Wonderland, searching forward for answers, swirling and chaotic.”

“You're saying this is more than merely a cultural phenomenon, or habit. We no longer remember phone numbers or driving directions or contact information because we store it all in computers, but you're talking about something different. You're saying our brains are changing.”

She clears her throat, and looks down. “Some are affected more than others.”

“What about cortisol?”

“What about it?”

“Don't treat me like an idiot. I know that it accelerates the process.”

She stands and walks to a window facing the basketball courts. She talks with her back to me. “Sorry. You're right. It does. Separate mechanism, exacerbating the problem. When we get distracted by too much multitasking, cortisol gets released, killing memory cells in the hippocampus. It can spread like a forest fire.”

“Or a wildfire.”

She turns around. She looks at me quizzically, hesitating. “That term works. Regardless of what you call it, it seemed like the most remote theoretical possibility.”

“How did Pete Laramer and Chuck Taylor get involved?”

“I knew Pete from various research conferences. I brought him into the project.”

She's biting the inside of her left cheek, and she scratches her head. From her scalp drift several white flakes. Could be dandruff or dry scalp caused by the changing climate. Or maybe its seborrheic dermatitis, which is chronic, but can be triggered by stress.

“You and Pete were lovers?”

She waves her hand, as if to say it's none of my business. It is shy of an admission, but I'm onto something.

“Is Pete okay?” I ask. “Is he alive?”

She looks down. She shakes her head. “I don't know.”

“And Chuck?”

She hesitates.

“I know he's involved,” I say. “He told me. What's his part?”

“Pete brought him in. Chuck brought investment dollars, access to veterans clinics, clout. He seemed to get the project moving. But I don't know much about his investment entity.”

Adrianna looks me directly in the eye. She's aching to be seen as sincere. Her pupils are extremely bloodshot, painfully red.

“Doing neurological tests on people without their permission is at least a civil violation, and probably a criminal one,” I say.

“I'm not proud of what happened. But I didn't advocate for any of it.”

“How widespread were the tests?” I ask. “How many old people at how many nursing homes got their memories scrambled? How many veterans at how many VA clinics? Who else?”

She puts her hands out, urging me to calm down. She's right; I need information, not confrontation.

“There were fifteen sites in all—domestically, at least. More, worldwide. With a few exceptions, they were in communities with tech-savvy populations. I'm not at liberty to disclose the exact locations. They've all been closed down.”

I'm flummoxed. Adrianna is turning into a hostile witness, or, at least, she's a practiced one.

I stand, baffled, hoping to find a way to express myself that doesn't involve hurling insults or pieces of expensive art.

“You know how much you love Newton?”

“Don't bring him into this.”

“That's how much I love my grandmother. You poked her brain with a stick. You aged her. You tested her without her permission. You stole a part of her life and you wrote over her story.”

She blinks several times rapidly.

“Adrianna, you're not telling me everything.”

After a pause she says: “You just told me that you love your grandmother?”

“Of course.”

“So you understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Sometimes you cut your losses. The Human Memory Crusade is dead. ADAM is dead. Falcon will buy Biogen. Bluntly, and I'm sorry to say this: a few old people and veterans endured accelerated memory loss, but they were suffering dementia before. In the grand scheme, it's water under the bridge.”

“Bullshit,” I spit out. “That logic doesn't follow. The applicable logic is that I love my grandmother and
therefore
I'm going to find out what happened to her. Then you and everyone else involved are going to jail.”

“For what? For giving retirement communities new computers and a chance for residents to record their memories? Everything was done with their full support.”

“Except the part where you fried brains.”

“You'll have to prove that and, in seeking to do so, invoke all kinds of risk.”

“I intend to.”

“Dammit!”

Her outburst could power a windmill. I step backwards.

“I take care of Newton. You take care of your grandmother. Maybe there's someone else special in your life. They are all that matter now.”

“If you felt that way, why bother contacting me in the first place?”

She starts walking to the door. Without looking at me, she says: “I accomplished what I wanted, and with your help. This thing has been shut down.”

“You won't help me expose this?”

“I've resigned from Biogen. I'm moving on.”

I catch up with Adrianna and I take her arm and spin her around.

“Where have you been for the last few days?”

She looks down.

“I went somewhere safe.”

“Without Newton? Where?”

She shrugs. “I have a friend with a houseboat. No big deal.”

I look her in the eye.

“What did they give you?”

“What?”

“You have morphine eyes. Dilaudid eyes.” Powerful sedatives. “Did they kidnap you? That's what I think.”

“What? No.”

I can see it now. Adrianna was working at the imaging clinic—the one that fronted as a dental office and disappeared. She was working at cross-purposes to the bad guys, maybe trying to thwart them. One day, Grandma was visiting the clinic and she saw the strongman drug Adrianna. He wore a blue surgical mask to hide his identity—the Man in Blue.

The Man in Blue strangled Adrianna.

“Did he drug you, try to smother you? Did my grandmother witness that?”

“No. No. No.”

Her eyes betray less certitude.

“They held you somewhere,” I continue. “Did they threaten your life? Or Newton? What did they want from you—just your silence?”

“Please leave. Please.”

“Someone broke into your office. They violated your world. Is a tough, smart scientist going to shrug, forget about the whole thing, and settle in for a nap?”

She stands mute.

I pull from my pocket the piece of paper I got from Pete Laramer. I thrust it in front of her.

“What is this?” I demand.

“I'm begging you to let this go. It's over.”

“Not for my grandmother.”

“It is. She'll recover. She'll get back to her baseline.”

“So you say.”

She pulls open her door.

“Nathaniel, can I ask you a question?”

“Fuck you.”

“Don't you have anyone?”

“What?”

“Don't you have anyone that is more important to you than this story? Don't you have anyone who needs you more than you need to pursue some nuanced gray area of truth to write a few blog posts about?”

“Like I said.”

“What?”

“Fuck you.”