Free A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention by Matt Richtel

the relatives downstairs, talking about it. She had put her hands over her ears and held them tightly, trying to make it all go away.
    A bit later, Jackie climbed into bed and pulled Jim’s heavy terry- cloth robe over herself. Eventually, unable to sleep, she took NyQuil. And then there was a pitter-patter of feet, and Stephanie crawled into bed and they sort of slept the rest of the night under the robe that smelled like Daddy.
    In the morning, Jackie disengaged from the family that had gathered to pay respects and take her to the mortuary. She went into the bathroom, got in the shower, and sobbed. Heaved. Leaned against the wall, let the grief out. She reappeared thirty minutes later, drained, back in a modicum of control.
    Then, at the mortuary, they put her through the same paces as they had Leila, just an hour earlier. Jackie filled out paperwork and picked out a casket.
    “Can we see him?”
    Jackie wasn’t particularly religious. Jim was a confirmed Catholic. But he and Jackie weren’t into anything organized. Jackie had a general belief in God, tempered by a scientist’s view of the world. As often as not, though, she relied on herself. She was the rock, a role she’d always taken to and sort of relished.
    “I always felt like I was the shoulder.”
    Jackie walked into the viewing room. Jim lay on a gurney, covered with a comforter. Not a sheet, which struck Jackie, but a comforter, light-colored with a flower print. They pulled back the cover.
    Dried blood trickled from Jim’s ear. His right eye was missing. She touched his chest and head and hair. He was cold. She thought: He looks pretty good, given what they told me about the accident .
    She whispered: “Good-bye.”

CHAPTER 7
    THE NEUROSCIENTISTS
    I ’M A TREE FREAK.”
    A twenty-foot-high triangle palm stretches up from its pot in the middle of the main floor of Dr. Gazzaley’s studio loft. The palm divides the kitchen from the living room, which has a sleek black couch and a small Japanese maple in the corner.
    The couch faces a gas fireplace, a light blue flame burning. Over it hangs a glossy painting called Three Oaks with three trees floating in the air against a yellow backdrop. The puffy trees look like brains.
    Alternative rock with an electriconic beat pulses through the loft.
    “The band is called Metric,” says Dr. Gazzaley. It’s a new track, which is one of his rules when it comes to music: He won’t put a song that’s been out for more than a year on the playlist. “I’m very into new bands.”
    Dr. Gazzaley pushes a button on the fireplace. A screen descends until it covers the top half of the fireplace, including the three oaks. It displays high-definition images shown from the projector hanging from the ceiling across the room. It’s also connected to the PlayStation 3 so that he and his girlfriend, Jo Fung, can play video games, their current favorite being Assassin’s Creed.
    Checkerboard windows stretch from the floor to nearly the loft’s roof. They look to downtown San Francisco on a clear, chilly night. The street below the loft hums with activity, twenty-somethings giddy on martinis. This is the Mission District, a gentrified hotbed of sushi, tapas, hip Mexican restaurants, and upscale furniture stores.
    Inside the “Gazzloft,” the energy is starting to heat up. Tonight marks the party’s fourth anniversary, and the host certainly wouldn’t miss this Friday, even though he’s already logged a huge day.
    It began in Florida, where yesterday he spoke to a group—“the college of neuropsychopharmacology, something like that,” he says. He could be excused for being tired. He got up at three a.m. California time. As soon as he flew home, he met an NBC crew, which asked him to scan the brain of a multitasker for a segment for Dateline and the Today show.
    “I’m always in a hurry,” Dr. Gazzaley says. And he doesn’t do anything halfway. “I don’t like to take on anything I can’t blow away.”
    He says