When she’d bought the plane ticket to New York, she had not imagined receiving his words on a screen, but perhaps it was better than all the years of no Shel whatsoever. Alexandra had walked through the fish smells, wafts of fried dumplings and garbage, windows of golden, hanging poultry. The New York storefront had a cardboard sign on its glass door: lucky seven web coffee. Inside, she’d bought a spongy cake with a frosting mouse and given the woman behind the counter a ten for internet minutes, receiving in return a piece of paper with handwritten numbers, a log-in code.
A square of light appeared on the screen, words blinked and disappeared. Hello, it said, and then it didn’t. Announce yourself, it said, and then it didn’t. Hit the keys-ies if you pleasies.
Alexandra, she typed.
You alone?
I’m alone.
All the way, one hundred percent, to the bottom alone?
No one but the lady with the code. She kept her hands on the keyboard. She wanted her minutes, seconds.
Xiaoliang is all right.
Where are you?
I can’t tell you that. I’ve survived this long on being only what I told.
You told me if I came here, you’d name a place.
New plan. If you want to obviate classes of problems in coding, you need to be able to anticipate hypothetical miscalculations.
The cake’s glassy, unblinking eyes focused on her chest. Alexandra hadn’t taken a bite. A girlish laugh came from behind the counter. Xiaoliang was watching a soap on a small screen leaned up against a jar of change and holding a piece of spongy bread in between a folded paper napkin. The woman’s face was screwed into a knot, and she turned it into her elbow, sneezed.
How did you know I’d log on now?
I could explain. At the same time, learning the difference between dog and cat when there are wolves can just equate to all the better to be eaten, my dear. Tell me. Did you get out of that job?
Alexandra did not know why it, her life, did not transmit to her brother, why the good feel of it didn’t seep through. She blamed it a little on the thin developments of telecom that tendered silent shouts landing afar. But it was also the way his virtuosic fear rattled the settled substrate of her life, upturned the glossy surface she had mastered, so that what was left was the halting thinness of a teenage self.
Not yet, she typed.
Yet is a human arrogance. It implies you can predict. Today there’s a seventy percent chance of precipitation in Reno, Nevada, and that you’ll wake up tomorrow. Laughable.
She suggested in smaller increments. Not a dinner but lunch. Not lunch but ice cream. A cup of coffee. There was a place nearby. They could sit in a place where the only thing between them was a jar of flowers. Instead he was saying hedge fund managers would become subscription computer programs. The AP wire would be written by robots. Half of what she saw on Cathexis was generated by shadow governments weaponizing complacency and impulses.
The symbols on the screen began to seem strange to Alexandra, ancient. The sounds stopped coming into her mind from them. They were just twenty-six motifs shifting in light. Her stomach was curling in on itself, and she didn’t know what he was saying, but there was a feeling to it like the moment before a dropped object hits the floor.