Sea of Tranquility(26)

“Sure.”

“That was to measure attentiveness. Your score was high. Tell me, do you agree with your test results? Can you pay attention?”

“Yes,” I said. I was pleased as I said this, because I’d never really thought of myself in this way before, but it seemed to me that I’d been paying close attention my entire life. I hadn’t been successful at very many things, but I’d always been good at watching. That was how I knew my ex-wife had fallen in love with someone else, just by being attentive. There were no obvious clues, just a subtle shift in— but the HR person was talking again, so I reeled myself in from the past.

“Wait,” I said. “I know you.”

“From before this meeting, you mean?”

“Talia,” I said.

Something changed in her face. A mask dropped. Her voice was different when she spoke again, less amused by the world. “I go by Natalia now, but yes.” She was quiet for a moment, looking at me. “We went to school together, didn’t we?”

“End of the cul-de-sac,” I said, and for the first time in the interview, she gave me a genuine smile.

“I used to stand at the Periphery for hours,” she said, “looking out through the glass.”

“You ever go back there? To the Night City?”

“Never,” she said.





3


Never to the Night City. The phrase had a rhythm that pleased me, so it lodged itself in my head. I thought of it often in my first weeks on the job, because the job was terminally boring. The hotel had retro pretensions, so I wore a suit cut in an antique style and a peculiarly shaped hat called a fedora. I walked the halls and stood watch in the lobby. I paid attention to everyone and everything, as instructed. I’ve always enjoyed watching other people, but people in hotels turned out to be surprisingly boring. They checked in and checked out. They appeared in the lobby at odd hours, asking for coffee. They were drunk, or they weren’t. They were businesspeople, or they were with their families on vacation. They were tired and frazzled from their journeys. People tried to sneak in dogs. In the first six months I had to summon the police only once, when I heard a woman scream in a hotel room, and even then I wasn’t the one who did the calling; I called the night manager, who called the police for me. I wasn’t there when the woman was carried out by paramedics.

The job was quiet. My mind wandered. Never to the Night City. What had Talia’s life been like there? Not great, obviously, any idiot could see that. Some families are better than others. When her family moved out of the Olive Llewellyn house, some other family moved in, but I found I couldn’t remember this other family beyond a general impression of dereliction. At the hotel I saw Talia only occasionally, passing through the lobby on her way home from work.



* * *



—

In those days I lived in a bland little apartment in a block of other bland little apartments on the far edge of Colony One, close enough to the Periphery that the dome barely cleared the roof of the apartment complex. Sometimes on dark nights I liked to cross the street to the Periphery, to look through the composite glass at Colony Two glittering in the distance. My life in those days was as bland and limited as my apartment. I tried not to think about my mother too much. I slept through the days. My cat always woke me in the late afternoons. Around sunset I ate a meal that could reasonably be called either dinner or breakfast, put on my uniform, and went to the hotel to stare at people for seven hours.

I’d been at the hotel for about six months when my sister turned thirty-seven. Zoey was a physicist at the university, and her area of expertise had something to do with quantum blockchain technology, which I was never able to understand although she’d made several good-faith efforts to explain it to me. I called to wish her a happy birthday, and realized in the beat before she picked up that I hadn’t congratulated her on receiving tenure. Which was when, a month ago? I felt a familiar variety of guilt.

“Happy Birthday,” I said. “And also congratulations.”

“Thank you, Gaspery.” She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.

“What’s it like?”

“Being thirty-seven?” She sounded tired.

“No, being tenured. Does it feel different?”

“It feels like stability,” she said.

“So what are your birthday plans?”

She was quiet for a moment. “Gaspery,” she said, “is there any way you could come to my office this evening?”

“Of course,” I said. “Of course.”

When had she ever asked me to her office? Just once, years ago, when she first started there. The university wasn’t that far away from my apartment, but also it was fundamentally a different universe. When had I even seen her last? It had been a few months, I realized.

I called in sick to work and then lay on the sofa for a while to bask in my sudden freedom. Marvin, my cat, climbed heavily onto my chest, where he stretched out his legs and fell asleep purring. The night extended before me, all those magnificently empty hours shining with possibility. I dislodged Marvin, showered and put on nice clothes, stopped by a bakery for four cupcakes—red velvet, which I hoped was still Zoey’s favorite—and by seven p.m. the sun was setting in a wash of oranges and pinks on the far side of the dome. I’d lived for a year in Colony One and the dome lighting still looked like theater to me. Were cupcakes enough? Should I buy flowers? I bought a bouquet of something unflashy and yellow, and was at the Time Institute gate by seven thirty. I took off my dark glasses for the iris scan and was still holding the glasses awkwardly in my hand six iris scans later, when I found Zoey pacing in her office. She didn’t look like a woman celebrating a birthday. She took my flowers with a distracted air, and I could tell from the way she set them on her desk that she’d forgotten about them by the time they left her hand. I wondered if someone had just broken up with her, but Zoey’s romantic life had always been a forbidden topic.