The Cloud

34

I whirl around. I’m met with a firefighter, a woman two inches taller than me, decked out in a flame-retardant brown jacket with yellow racing stripes. Freckle-dotted face, blurred skin on her upper neck near her right ear from a burn graft.

“Easy.” She puts a hand on my back.

I look back at the narrow window in the observation room. Sandy’s disappeared.

“I need to get in there.”

“I don’t think so.”

She takes my right arm with a firm grip, not hostile. I pull out of it and step inside the observation room, but I’m actually looking inside the eerie computer-center-cum-recreation-room. Sandy had told me previously the company was teaching kids to multitask. If that’s all this was, why the fuss, or the deliberate fire?

I peer inside, through intensifying smoke turning from gray to black. I make out a pile of cell phones on the corner of the table, glowing with fire, maybe explaining the metallic odor. On the floor, next to the table’s edge, burns a train set, the wooden bridge somehow having escaped the fire. I can’t take my eyes from it, when I feel the grip again on my right arm, stronger now, and then one on my left. Two firefighters. They practically pick me up and turn me around.

One of them puts a mask on my mouth and I inhale fresh oxygen. I gulp. The mask is pulled away, and they march me back down the annex hallway. The smoke starts to clear, giving way to chaos. Outside, men in uniform are corralling excited youth, seemingly with success, though one firefighter holds a sulking kid in a headlock. The female firefighter at my side offers me more oxygen. I greedily accept.

“What’s your name?”

I pause. “Nat Idle.” Instantly, I think: I shouldn’t have given my name. I can’t think. No telling how much new damage I’ve done my brain by depriving it the full measure of oxygen the last five minutes.

“Can you take a deep breath for me?”

I do. I cough but not excessively.

“You’re going to be okay. Can you spend a moment talking to an investigator?”

It dawns on me that she’s not checking my health status, at least not exclusively. She’s wondering what I was doing at the origin of the fire. Maybe, or I’m being overly sensitive; my ability to make sense is flickering.

“Sure. Of course. May I have water?”

She nods. With a hand on my back, she gently pushes me toward the top of the stairs that lead to the parking lot. A few feet from the top of the stairs, a gaggle of emergency personnel gather around equipment and a snoozing Siberian Husky. I scan for Faith. Not among the kids being marched down the stairs. Not among the cops and firefighters milling and working at the front of the building. I crane to see down into the parking lot. Clumps of people, cars making their exit. No discernable Faith.

“Wait here.” The firefighter makes sure I’m looking at her. I nod. Amid the group near where I’m standing, one firefighter says something to another, then they both laugh. From their relatively calm demeanor, I sense this isn’t a calamitous fire. It’s localized in the back, controllable, but still doubtless to get a lot of press attention given the setting. The firefighter who escorted me walks a few steps away, presumably to get me water or find an investigator or both. With her back to me, I take a few tentative steps down the stairs that lead to the parking lot. I run.

Seconds later, I’m at the Audi.

Still no Faith.

She’s resourceful. Right? Got herself to safety. Or did she flee? Again?

I manage a five-point turn amid emergency vehicles and point the car down a long entrance road that seemed innocuous on the way in. At the far end of my only escape route stands a cop directing a handful of others trying to depart to park on the side. No one exits without an interview.

I pull down the visor and glance in the mirror. I look like a coal miner. I hear a tap on my window. Outside stands a cop with a rosy nose. My options stink. I can ignore him and try to zip past the car ahead of me, fly onto the road, attempt to outrace any officer who might not like that idea. Lose.

I roll down my window. I reach for my wallet and pull out a press pass. It identifies me as a freelance writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s long since expired. I’d asked for it two years ago when I did some semi-regular blogging on medical issues for the business section of their web site, SFGATE. I’d asked for the press pass mostly because I wanted something quasi-official to put on my windshield if I was ever in a parking pinch. The only two times I tried to use it for that purpose, I got parking tickets.

“Nat Idle. I write for the Chron. I’m late to file.”

He glances at the pass. “You ever write about the Giants?”

“I wish. Great beat. You get free hot dogs.”

He takes in my sooty face. “You were in there?”

“Trying to get a look.”

He’s lost interest. To him, this situation is bad luck, an annoyance that may keep him from getting home in time for dinner, not a conspiracy. I look at the maximum-security wing. It looks intact, not impacted by the localized explosion. “Pull over to the right and the guys will ask you a few questions and you can go.”

“Got it.”

I watch him wave to the cop ahead of us to let me through to another little grouping of cars awaiting exit interviews. I pull between a station wagon and a bus. Their drivers prattle on their phones. No one comes to interview me. I look over my shoulder. No one’s watching. I slide into drive, slip between the cars, hit the open road, accelerate, don’t look back.

I feel tightness, smoke inhalation and something I can’t name-not physical-an emotion, or lots of emotions, threatening to explode out of the sealed Ziploc bag that is my chest. I look in the rearview mirror. No cops. But still. I’m acting with wild impulse, like the little girl in Palo Alto who walked into traffic. No wonder, maybe: I’ve taken a serious beating to my frontal lobe. I’m responding, reacting, darting from whim to whim, following bright lights and curious clues, being led around by my nose, without filtering anything through a mature and experienced brain. I’m playing a serious adult’s game with a seriously regressed brain.

I turn left onto Market, thinking I might lose myself on a side street. But more impulse. I take a left onto Twin Peaks, the winding road that leads to a 360-degree view of this majestic city, and of one seriously powerful brain beam. Just to the west, the Sutro Tower, a looming radio transmitter that delivers us our virtual lives via radio and TV and that, near as any responsible scientist can tell, doesn’t also deliver brain tumors as I figure it must in my most muckraking moments. Shy of the top of Twin Peaks, I pull into a gravel road marked “No access,” and take a turn so I’m out of view of the main road. I step from the car and I wretch.

Dark smoke curls in the sky to my left, above the learning annex and prison, blocked from sight by a half mile of mountain and rolling topography. Dead ahead, the Golden Gate Bridge. To my right, the Bay Bridge. Escapes everywhere I can’t take because my brain-not geography or even circumstance-holds me captive.

I glance at the Audi’s passenger seat, at Faith’s knit hat. Is she right that I have no idea how or who to trust?

I glance in the backseat. At Isaac’s car seat.

I drop my head back and I loose a guttural yell, a jumbled cacophony of energy, a deformed baby universe exploding from charcoal lungs.

I try to yell again, let out whatever is in there, but it feels forced. I close my eyes, think, open them.

I pull my phone from my pocket. I scroll through the address book until I find what I’m looking for. I put the cursor on her number, and I hit send.

“Hello,” a woman answers.

“Polly?”

“Who?”

“Goddamn it, Polly. Please.”

“Did you call earlier?”

I don’t recognize this voice.

“Where’s Isaac?”

“What?”

“Where is my son?”

“You’ve got the wrong number. I’ve told you before. Please don’t call here again.”

The phone goes dead.

I’m staring at the device. Hot tears on my cheek. Where’s my son? I can’t believe Polly would do this. I can’t believe she’d change the number. Not now. Or did she do that earlier, and I forgot? Why? What could I have done to have deserved this humiliation? I can’t let go, right, is that what she’d say? I treat relationships like stories, pulling and tearing at them until I’ve left nothing but scorched Earth?

And is this why I can’t trust-because Polly took everything from me without warning? Am I right not to trust?

I cock my arm back, device in hand, ready to fling it down the mountain. It rings.

“Polly,” I answer.

“I’m sorry I lied to you,” a woman’s voice says. “My heart is true.”

Not Polly, Faith.