The next afternoon, Lyle watched Bri Freeman undraw borders with the names of the past. Her hair was smooth, and one of her fists was a port and the other palm, skimming the air, was a ship, and she was talking about a time when most people had never seen people from other countries, other towns, and here is a cosmopolitan city. She was telling the story of a new human consciousness.
“Maybe mountain was only a word you could conceive of as a large rock,” she said. “In the technology of traversing space, the imagination changes. There is more to hold in it.”
After the conference, he took her out for drinks at a place that served booze in plastic cups. He brought back blue drinks, drinks with schnapps and curaçao to torture her. They sat at an uneven table pushed up against the wall paneling in the back of the bar. He apologized again for his father the night before. He explained this was a guy who hung an Italian flag in the living room above the television set, and he’d never even been to Italy.
Bri shrugged. With her mother, too, the notion of home was complicated. The disgust was complicated. Her mother saying of politics there, the villagers with their witchcraft. Bri said they’d never been religious. Her mother had come to the United States and gone to business school. She worked in HR. “And she was always trying to prove her transformation,” Bri said, eyes going distant. “I didn’t learn the language until college. But I suppose anyone wants to belong.”
“And look at you in spite,” Lyle said.
She shrugged again. He reached across the table. There was spilled wax hardened and greasy on the surface. “You were always the more gifted academic,” he said.
She squeezed his hand. “Never was,” she said, “a competition.”
He withdrew his hand, stared hard into the jukebox under shitty overhead lights. He thought of her at the conference that afternoon. He thought of how she’d always been so sure. It had never been in grad school that the explanations, clauses of qualifications, questions of whether one was or was not an internalist would cause Bri to lose track of her conclusions in the recitation of the facts that were her premise, all those pages blurring as they had in him. The massiveness of his admiration made him frantic, but he took a sip of his drink. “You’re a success,” he said.