The Weirdness(4)

“Why don’t you just call him?” Denver had said. “Instead of sending e-mails and texts?”

Billy had responded with a kind of tsking sound. “That wouldn’t do any good. Jørgen’s one of those guys who never actually uses his phone to, like, receive a phone call. If you can’t reach him by text you might as well just hang it up.”

“You could try,” Denver said, an uncharacteristic pleading note entering her voice.

“I don’t know how to put this without it sounding bad?” Billy said. “But that idea has just basically no value.”

The conversation began to go downhill from there.

“Look,” Anil says, after Billy has explained enough of this. “Just cut to the chase.”

“The chase,” Billy says. He knocks back the new shot that the bartender has set up for him. He wipes his chin with the back of his hand. “The chase is that at the end of it she said she just wanted me to say one thing. She just wanted me to tell her that everything was going to be okay and that things were going to get easier from here on out.”

“Okay, yeah,” says Anil. “And you responded by saying—?”

“I responded by saying that it would be ethically unsound for me to make a claim, for the purposes of comfort, that I couldn’t be certain was true under the present circumstances.”

Anil opens his mouth and then shuts it again. Finally he offers this: “No offense, man, but you’re a fucking idiot.”

“I’m aware.”

“Fucking,” Anil says, ticking it off on his thumb. “Idiot,” he concludes, ticking this one off on his pointer finger.

“Thank you, Anil, I heard you the first time. And Denver and I will sort it out. I just—I just want to give her a couple of days to cool off.”

“Right, right. ’Cause that’s what everyone loves when they’re upset. To be left alone.”

“I haven’t exactly been leaving her alone. I’ve called her, like, six times. If I left her alone any less I’d be stalking her. And no one wants that.”

“No one wants that,” Anil agrees. He holds his shot up to one of the exposed halogen bulbs above the bar, contemplates the play of light in the alcohol for a moment, then throws it back. “It’s too bad,” he says, once it’s gone. “I liked Denver.”

“Don’t say it in the past tense like that,” Billy says.

Anil shrugs.

“I liked Denver, too,” Billy says. He did. Or he does. Fuck the past tense. He thinks back to June, the night they met, on the rooftop of some art space in the Bronx, a program of experimental video screenings. One of the videos was hers, a work in progress called Varieties of Water. Twenty-five minutes of river foam, swirling drains, trash floating in city gutters, lake surfaces. Backyard pools thrust into abstraction by the activity of children’s play.

Watching it, Billy had been mesmerized. By the end of it he felt like he had learned things about pattern and light, about perception, about nature, about humans, about himself. She’d been sitting in a metal folding chair just past the edge of the screen and every once in a while he’d look away from the film and his attention would settle on her. She reminded him a little bit of the ballet students he’d sometimes see hanging around Lincoln Center: tiny, wiry arms jutting oddly out of her loose sweatshirt, her face a little severe. During the entire duration of the video she’d kept her eyes shut.

Once the screenings had wound up and the crowd began to separate into clusters of conversation he made his way over to the very outer rim of her orbit. She thanked a few people quietly and then popped some kind of multi-tool out of a pouch on her belt and went to disassemble the stand for the projection screen, efficiently breaking it down into components that fit into a single black nylon bag. He edged up to her and looked at all the shit clipped to her belt. Some kind of folding blade, a stubby flashlight, a green iPod Nano, a few photography-oriented gizmos, a ring of keys larger than he’d ever seen on someone who wasn’t a janitor. She’s like—a female Batman, Billy thought. Batwoman? He had no idea whether there was such a character or not. Whether there was such a character was not the point. The point was that Billy was fast figuring out that she was talented, pragmatic, and competent: pretty much exactly the kind of woman who he typically felt terrified about approaching. But the video had filled him with a sense of spirited determination, and so he took his best shot.

“I liked your video,” he mumbled.

“Thanks,” she replied automatically, without really pausing in the process of packing things into the bag.