To not be one of them to his client, Jeremy made his face flat. It was nearly the end of the day, and he sat with Tyrell, and Tyrell had been meeting strangers online whom he wanted to see in person. He talked to them about how to beat a video game, and Jeremy could see they shared an idiom that evaded him—Alliance, Horde—so he must not use the terms in a sentence. He’d only manifest his ignorance.
“This is meet to beat,” Tyrell said.
“Or run away?” he said.
He wondered the same of Alexandra.
He had thought the child meant something about them.
Tyrell was enumerating quests. Win one, advance. He wanted to advance. He wanted to put particular maps behind him.
Jeremy recognized it as a classic problem of Cathexis. Conquer universes. Universes have conquered the father. “Perhaps, though, you think the metaphor pins down the meaning more precisely, only to find by definition it means something else.”
“Mr. Jordan?”
“What if there’s always another quest?” he said. And he didn’t have the answer.
When Tyrell’s session ended, he found himself dialing, found himself bridging a later hour in London. His fingers carried themselves with an intelligence beyond his better instincts.
“Isn’t this breaking the rules?” the voice said.
“We never got to codifying,” he said.
Work up to Alexandra, he figured. Listen. He was a good listener.
“Well, I suppose Alexandra talks to Angeline.”
“The girlfriend.”
“The girlfriend,” Genevieve said.
A conversation sometimes picks up knots in accumulating utterances. They were coming faster. He waited to ask the question, then decided he couldn’t ask the question. Because what if he was right? He’d still want to stay, want Alexandra to.
Genevieve was speaking about Angeline still, it seemed. They were supposed to go together—both liberals, both Americans in London, both on that particular dating website—but Angeline had posted pictures of them without permission. Angeline invoked symbols as though prima facie. The Arab Spring. The Persian Awakening. Angeline would say, “For people like us, thirty, forty years ago.” She was angry Genevieve didn’t Cathect her politics. She said remember the slogan silence = death.
Jeremy thought of the day at the beach, the belch of ocean and his son’s laugh skipping a wave. Alexandra snapped them, showed them a just-passed moment on her phone, and there was pride in her pride of them. A gull’s cry died in its soar above.
“What’s the worst that could happen if strangers knew the happiest part of your life?” Jeremy said.
Genevieve paused. “Anything you say can and will be used against you.”