He shovels and groans with pleasure. She cooks almost as well as her father now. Maybe as well as her mother too.
“What does today entail?” he asks.
“Home.”Real life, as she thinks of the flat she shares with Niamh south of the river. A world where she doesn’t need to check if anyone is following her or listening in to her conversations. Where she disappears into her research, a mind without a body. Where Orson doesn’t exist. The dissonance is making her insane.
“How is Niamh?”
“Busy.” In the winter Niamh is going back to Dublin to teach. The obvious solution, under any other circumstance, would be to come here. But to be obvious is to be in danger.
It can’t go on.
“And your brother?”
“We’ll see, won’t we.”
A hum of traffic rises from the street. On the countertop, a speckled ladybug flicks to the granite surface. Orson cups a hand around it, lets it crawl onto his thumb.
Yes. This is worth all the excruciation of asking the difficult question. If he can be this, for her, forever. He blows lightly on the beetle’s wings, and it takes flight.
“I remember your mom said, when your brother was little, he would always ask her where she was going, and she would start lying to him and saying things like the moon or a pirate ship.”
The bell rings and Viola lingers in the safety of the kitchen, allowing Orson to cross to the door, peek through the spyhole, and then, plausibly alone, retrieve a loaf of fresh bread.
“I can’t wait for you to meet him.”
When the door to Lola’s flat opens, she looks like a photograph of herself that has been washed out by years of sunlight. Sebastian is shocked to find the color dyed out of her hair, skin luminous pale, wafer-thin and manicured in stiff, fashionable jeans. She crosses the threshold and throws her arms around him, the familiar smell of her sweat mingling with something new: floral and expensive.
“Did you find it okay?”
“More or less.” It had taken several long, branching tunnels to get here from the plane. He imagines himself for a moment as she must see him: towering and lanky with long hair tied up in a dark, greasy bun. Travel itches his skin.
Her roommate (pixie cut, purple lips) doesn’t introduce herself but hugs him as well. He has seen enough photos of her to know who she is, but avoids saying or even thinking her name because of all the consonants. Neem? Nyam? “I knew you guys looked alike,” she says, “but it’s kind of amazing, you have the same… hand gestures.”
“What do you need?” Lola asks.
“A shower,” he says.A drink, he thinks.
Easily, she slips back into the role of anticipating his needs. A towel, a coffee. Turn the left handle, not the right handle; the hot and cold are backward. She has made up a bed for herself on the couch, insists that he take hers. When she closes the door behind her, it is an odd feeling to be alone (naked) in her room, and he feels somehow unsteady to be here on her good graces. He assesses the space. There are no clothes that are not cut to her shape, no boxers or beard oils. It’s a relief.
When he is changed, they step out together under the low London sky, walk down a street lined with open-faced brick buildings, women with shopping bags, old men stepping slowly onto lofty red buses,languages he has never heard before being shouted by young boys on the streets, everyone slouching under the release of a Saturday night. He wonders, with her new, anemic hair, if people can still tell that the two of them are the same.
“Are you jet-lagged?” she asks.
“Not really.”
“Are you hungry?”
“I mean, sure,” he says, though he feels an odd detachment from all of his senses. The outside air or perhaps their presence on the street (in public) has snapped him into the reality of the situation; he is here, he is walking next to her, they are walking together with all of the life shared and unshared between them. She strides up the street with the slight mania of a tour guide, pointing out obvious things to him.The architecture around here is very mixed, andThis park is really nice.
He’s not sure what he expected from London, but it wasn’t this. The houses have a plain unpretentiousness about them. The streets are no more remarkable than streets anywhere, punctuated by occasional plastic bags and dog shit. The people look like people anywhere, except maybe better dressed. In short, he likes it more than he expected to; instinctively, he feels deeply at ease. Perhaps more so even than Lola, who won’t stop apologizing for things that have nothing to do with her.Sorry, they’ve been doing this construction for months now, andThe sirens are really loud here.
“It’s cool,” he says. The place she takes him is light-filled and sanitized and full of white people. It serves sandwiches with vegan mozzarella and a sauce that he has never heard of. “Go-chu-jang,” he reads.
“It’s spicy,” Lola says proudly. “It’s Korean.” But she orders a smoothie. Green Machine.Machine.How can a smoothie be a machine?Who comes up with this stuff?When she speaks to the waiter, her vowels move forward in her mouth. It is strange to hear her voice, how different it sounds here.
“So!” she says, as though they are just beginning. She smiles at him.
“I still can’t get over your hair,” he says.
