Free Devil's Plaything by Matt Richtel Page B

coordinate.”
    I swallow this. What is the point of the super-secret phone if we’re not using it to talk?
    â€œHow is your leg?”
    â€œI’ve gotten into worse scrapes in the schoolyard.”
    â€œYou should get it checked.”
    â€œGotta run,” he says.
    Good luck with that, I think. We hang up.
    I check the clock on Chuck’s phone. It’s 9:50. I’ve still got half a day to get to the mystery meeting in San Francisco’s low-rent district. It doesn’t feel like enough time to reconstruct Grandma’s shattered memory. But it’s worth a try.
    I open Grandma’s door and inside I find a surprise: Vince. He looks equally surprised; he is kneeling next to Grandma’s bed, as if he’s been looking underneath. He quickly stands.
    â€œI’ve got to hand it to you, Vince,” I say.
    â€œWhy’s that, Mr. Idle?”
    â€œCleaning under the bed of individual residents seems somewhat beneath your pay grade.”
    â€œAll hands are on deck plugging in space heaters in the first-floor rooms,” he responds. “Winter cometh, and our central heating is acting up.”
    I examine Vince, whom I’ve privately nicknamed the Human Asparagus. He has a ’70s hairstyle, puffy and curly on top tapering into his neck, and a thin torso that widens out slightly through his hips. When he walks, he looks like a single shuffling stalk. His skin has a dark hue that suggests a lineage that is one-quarter Asian or southern European. He’s got a perpetual light cough that provides me mildly entertaining internal debate. I vacillate between thinking the cough stems from any number of disorders—from hay fever and postnasal drip to reactive airway disease—to instead thinking it’s kind of somatization: in other words, a deep-seated psychological tool used to communicate his sense of being put-upon and always under duress.
    â€œI’m kidding,” I say.
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œAbout your dedication to cleaning under beds.”
    â€œMeaning what?”
    â€œIt looks to me like you’re snooping around Lane’s room.”
    He turns his head, and I follow his gaze toward the edge of the bed, where he’d been kneeling. Nestled between the bed and the nightstand is a white space heater.
    â€œYou need to cool down, Mr. Idle.”
    â€œYou need to stop treating me like I’m something you found in a bedpan.”
    â€œNo wonder Lane is agitated,” he says, then adds after a pause, “given the attitude of her visitor.”
    I let go of Grandma, and I step toward Vince.
    â€œPlease go,” I say.
    He pulls his lips into a tight smile, then looks at Grandma.
    â€œAre you okay, Lane Idle?” he asks. It sounds genuine and tender.
    â€œNot too bad, Mr. Van Gogh.” She’s long since nicknamed him after the painter.
    Vince looks at me like he wants to say something. But he shakes his head and leaves.
    â€œThat one would never cut off an ear,” Grandma says. “He likes to hear himself talk too much.”
    It’s a rare moment of lucidity. Maybe I’ll be able to get Grandma to tell me about the man in blue or about someone named Adrianna.
    I guide her to the bed, where she sits, mute, hands folded in her lap. I look around the antiseptic room. It’s tiny enough to make me wonder if society, through our boxy retirement rooms, is preparing our elderly for the comfort of a coffin.
    On the wall across from Grandma’s bed is a framed poster of a train from the 1950s winding through snow-capped German Alps. Grandma loved trains. She said that train travel made it feel like the world was standing still so that you could, for a few moments, catch up with it.
    On her dresser sit three small silver picture frames. One image shows me and my brother in matching overalls, taken when he was four and I was two. A second shows Grandma in her mid-fifties, wearing her karate gi , the