“Hello,” he said, blocking all the light in the university cafeteria.
“Hello,” she said.
“I have an olive for you,” he said, and offered a plastic tub of black glistening ovals.
He was strange. He was big, tall, blue, and loud. Already he shimmered. He carried olives and a bundle of books. One book was in Latin, another in Sanskrit.
“I feel I can’t say anything to you I’ve said before,” he said, sitting down.
She was frozen. His dust in her eyes, his smell in her nose. She heard something in the soft edges of his voice that she reached for and it powdered like rust from iron, red and dry and crystalline.
“Do you want to dance?” he said.
“Here?” She felt her word waver in his direction, a wagon train, a hunting party.
“Everything seems smaller now I’m home,” he said. “I’ve wanted to talk to you for such a long time, ever since we were children. Have another olive. What’s wrong?”
She shrugged. His purple shirt was unbuttoned to show a white chest with dark springy fur, and his eyes, light blue, already danced as he leaned forward across the table. She watched him deftly shape each dangerous word, “Biology, ornithology, geology,” as he stared at her. “Galapagos? No, no.” He laughed and waved out of the cafeteria windows toward students on the concourse. “Or maybe I should tell you in order what has happened to me?”
She leaned away. “Sure. Everything.”
“No. Not yet.” He stirred a finger in the air, his eyes closed. “Let me think.”
Everything because everything was swimming in silver. She wiggled her toes in the green rainy light coming through the window. She felt like dancing. She was dancing. Wiggling her toes in hard sand, the sky full of butterflies, and Charles, across from her, was explaining the dangers of mercury, the overpopulation of the world, climate change, refugia, and the near extinction of mountain gorillas and the big cats.