Free The Cloud by Matt Richtel

say first. I’ve got good info.”
    “Really?”
    “About that big guy who fell on you.”
    “What about him?”
    “I’ve seen him before.”

12
    I put up my finger to Bullseye, indicating I’ll be right back. I stand, experiencing a head rush that is too strong to have resulted from a pint of Anchor Steam. I let it pass as the song “Night Moves” by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band starts playing. Someone boos. I start walking to the front of the bar.
    “Nathaniel?”
    “You talked to the bum at the turnstiles. You gave him money.”
    “What?” I can’t tell if she doesn’t understand and can’t hear me.
    I push through the Pastime’s thick and bruised wooden door and feel brisk wind when I walk out onto the desolate sidewalk.
    I’m struck by a sudden change in strategy. I need to let Faith tell me what she’s going to tell me before I offer her my theory or any helping hand. I don’t trust her, particularly in light of the apparent revelation that she’d seen the burly bum.
    “Can you hear me?” I ask.
    “Hold on.” I hear her put down the phone. When she returns, less than a minute later, she says: “Did I hear Bob Seger playing in the background?”
    “The one and only.”
    “If you’re listening to that, you really did take a blow to the head.”
    I want to return with a joke but I can only think she’s smart enough to be dangerous and intellectually stimulating and I wonder if I can always tell which one of those traits is more alluring to me.
    “I should have started by asking how you’re feeling,” she says.
    I flash for a second on a curious bit of neuroscience done by chronic pain researchers at Stanford University. They found that intense feelings of passionate love can provide substantial levels of pain relief; when someone who is in love is subjected to painful stimuli—like having a hot compress put on their arm or leg—he or she reports feeling significantly less pain than someone not in an intense relationship. It shows not only the subjectivity of pain but also the intensely chemical nature of attraction. The researchers compared love to cocaine. Faith makes me feel like I’ve swallowed an upper.
    “Been worse,” I answer. “You said that you’ve seen the guy before?”
    “Like you said, I gave him money. Upstairs, in the subway. A couple of dimes.”
    “I thought so.”
    “You thought so?”
    A fair question. Should I tell her the truth: that she was so beautiful that she nestled immediately into my memory banks when I first saw her at the turnstiles? Instead, I tell her that over the last twenty-four hours I’ve spent some time trying to re-create the incident from the night before and that I thought I recalled seeing her and the mountainous man interacting.
    “Why didn’t you tell me about this last night?” I ask.
    “Honestly?”
    “That’s what I’m looking for in a relationship. By which I mean a passing relationship with a complete stranger.”
    She laughs a honey drip.
    “Honestly, I was pretty shaken. I was worried you were very hurt. I didn’t really understand if you’d been in a fight or what was going on.”
    She sounds sincere enough. It’s certainly possible that someone experiencing acute trauma would blank out on details. There’s ample research that shows that when a fight-or-flight response kicks in and releases stress hormones, it overrides the short-term memory. But I’m also skeptical of the coincidences and of what feels like her careful use of language.
    “When you said you’d seen him before, did you mean at the turnstile?”
    She doesn’t respond.
    “Faith?”
    “No.” She sounds distracted. “At a diner in the Mission where I go for coffee. I’ve seen him hanging out.”
    I pause to make sure I’ve heard her correctly. I hear noise in the background. She says: “I need to go.”
    “Wait!” It’s more threatening than I want to communicate. I soften. “Please. I suffered a concussion.”
    “Seriously? I