On the right path

Crisp cool air stabbed into her lungs with every inhale, scratching her throat along the way, but she loved it. It wasn’t often that the heat and humidity of southern Florida gave way to cooler temps. Most days, a run like this feels like swimming through hot soup. This morning, she felt energized. Maybe today she’d improve her turtle-like pace.

She felt like a jack rabbit, as fast as the cars buzzing down the six-lane parkway to the right of the path, as powerful as the alligators that surely lurked in the retention pond to her left. She scanned the ripples and shoreline for signs of a gator. Her mind wandered to the time her husband made fun of his sister for strolling right up to a wild alligator by a similar retention pond. Which reminded her of the bookstore up that way and she wondered if they were buying used books again. Her mind continued along its winding path as she approached the end of the pond, where the pavement took a hard 90-degree curve to the left behind a tall strand of bamboo. She had wandered so far into her own head that she failed to watch for bicyclists coming the other way or to prepare to jump out of their way if they did.

She rounded the turn with the full force of a sprint triathlete taking the lead. Her foot snagged. Her leg pulled back. Up was down and down was up as she tumbled to black top. She felt its rough surface dig into her knee, hip, then elbow. She knew she was now lying on the pathway, but the world swirled around her. As she lifted her head, she caught sight of a figure lying on the ground. Dressed all in black. Lifeless? Her eyes failed to focus. The world still swam around her and darkness took her.

When she opened her eyes again, it seemed like only seconds had passed. Her entire right side thrummed with pain. Slowly she lifted her head again, steadied her rise with her hands and arms and slowly stood. She winced at a jolt of pain as she put weight on her right leg. She almost didn’t perceive the soft thud at her feet as something on her person fell to the ground.

She looked around. There was no one. No mysterious black figure lying on the path. When she looked down at her feet, there on the pavement was a brick of cash. With a sticky note. “You saw nothing,” it read.

What the hell?

Am I being punked? Was there someone on the path? How long was I out? Where did the person go? There was a person, right? The world began to steady. The path, the bamboo, everything came into focus. She turned around to look for witnesses, anyone. No one. She kept turning until she came back to the path before her, putting her arms out to steady herself and stop the spin. She looked down again at the path. Nothing but gravel and leaves and the cash. Her eyes darted around. There had to be something. Some clue. If even a tree root that could explain her trip. Just as she was about to give up, she noticed a bit of unnatural black in the thick of the bamboo. It was a small black book, the kind you might see in the pocket of a 1970s ladies’ man.

What the actual fuck?

She picked up the notebook and held it in her hand a minute, feeling its weight, turning it over and back, noticing the worn edges of the pages. “What the hell,” she said aloud. She opened it and began flipping through. On some pages, she saw random strings of letters and numbers in precise, compact handwriting. On others, obvious names and phone numbers. And still others featured tiny sketches of geometric figures and mathematical equations. Some pages were a jumble as if the author wrote one note as one normally would, and then, running out of space in the book, doubled back to add bits and pieces in the margins and empty spaces.

She wanted to take the notebook back to her apartment and analyze its contents. Surely the key to finding out what happened on the path lay in that notebook. She gathered the brick of money and the sticky note, pulled her cell phone from her left hip pocket and replaced it with her new finds. She put the little black notebook into her other hip pocket and winced as it created a new bolt of pain. She held her phone in her hand. Plenty of people carry their phones on their runs. Nothing suspicious here.

In the privacy of her apartment, she set the money onto the sideboard as she passed it, plopped her bottom on the couch and began inspecting every page of this mysterious black notebook. Tending her wounds would come later, she thought.

Netflix, ^wp!nou4li9

Twitter, i$h!p534

What kind of person actually uses high-security, nonsense passwords, but writes them down in a book that could get lost?

Leroy Malifance, 555-1212

Sarah Conner, 555-4224

One name stood out to her. Someone had retraced it several times with different colored inks. Black. Blue. Red.

Simone Rushtee.

Only instead of a phone number, the name is followed by a jumble of letters, numbers and symbols.

She googled the name and got a listing for rushed T-shirt services, a jersey-knit dress and a Salman Rushdie. Dead end. Then she turned to Facebook. Nothing. Then Twitter. She searched @Rushtee and got the profile of a man who looked to be a motorcycle club member in Indonesia. Probably not what she’s looking for. Then she tried @SimoneRushtee. In the profile photo circle of the first and only listing was a gray, monotone placeholder. She clicked on the profile. The cover image was a stand of bamboo. Under the name, there was no description, no tweets. Just a recent “date joined” and a location: Cape Coral, Florida. She closed her laptop in disbelief. Simone Rushtee was in the same town as her. She got an idea and flipped open the laptop again. She logged out as herself, and in the login space that came up, she typed in a new username: SimoneRushtee. And the series of letters and numbers from the black notebook. There, below the “What’s happening?” box, three little words:

You found me.