The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [39]
He worked in the music industry, he told her. “But I get bored easily,” he said. “Now if I had money, I’d do a lot of crazy shit,” he said, “like Howard Hughes kind of shit.”
“What did Howard Hughes do?”
“You know, he produced these crazy movies, he was an engineer and flew planes, he broke all the world records for airline speeding.” He snickered. “Now that made sense that he had money. But usually it’s the wrong guys who have the money. They have it but they don’t do things with it.”
He was looking at her sideways, wary, not entirely looking at her, but musing about her, she could feel it. Something about him made her comfortable. Was it that, despite his whole cool act, he was afraid?
“What about you? What are you up to?”
Isolde, as always, was slightly taken aback. “Oh, I’m working on a project to connect artists around the world,” she said.
He seemed amused. “Uh-huh.” But seeing as she didn’t elaborate, he quickly returned to the subject of himself.
“The music shit’s fine. I like music, the weird shit, the stuff no one else likes and that you can never sell, but what I’m really interested in is science.”
“Science?”
“Yeah, science is my hobby.” He was obviously trying to seduce, his arrogance mixed with innocence. But Isolde was also beginning to think he had a propensity to ramble.
“Hey,” she said. “Should we walk a bit?”
He seemed surprised. “Okay,” he said.
They began walking toward the Plaza San Martín.
“Do you live around here?” Isolde asked.
“Yeah.”
“Where’s your apartment?”
“Back that way. It’s my parents’ place. I moved back in after the crash.”
Living with his parents, this surprised her.
They had arrived at the grassy slope that tumbled down from the Plaza San Martín.
“See, here,” he said, pointing to a grassy patch. “This is where the first slave market was held.” He snickered. “Should we honor the sacred ground?” He sat. She followed suit.
“Anyway, systems theory is my latest thing,” he said.
Oh, boy, here we go again, she thought.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s this idea that everything is organized into systems. Everything, all around us. And there are systems within systems.”
“What’s an example of a system?” she asked.
“Well, society is a system. So is your brain. Each system has an inertia, meaning a structure that stays the same, though it’s also a dynamic thing in constant interaction with everything around it. When a system is stable, it absorbs a disruption, receiving stimuli and readjusting its structure. Of course, this means that systems have these very complicated feedback processes. A whole complex chain of causes and effects is triggered until the system reworks itself into a new stability, which might have been entirely unforeseen by the researcher.”
She was letting the images bloom in her brain. “Okay, but does it ever happen that a system can’t absorb a disruption?”
“Yeah, sure. When a system is functioning well, it absorbs a disruption. But when it’s close to a threshold of instability, a disruption can turn the whole thing around, like the example of the drop that overflows the glass or the revolution of a society.”
“And then what happens?”
“Two options. Either the system reconfigures itself entirely, or it ceases to exist.”
But Isolde couldn’t just go on sitting there, listening. Her impetuousness got in the way. She turned and rolled on top of him.
“Hey, wait a second,” Diego said, laughing, “shouldn’t I be on top?”
She fell to the ground again.
“Was it that exciting what I said?” he asked.
He leaned over and kissed her. It was a kiss like the one at the party with a lot of tongue. She closed her eyes—deliciousness, the whole world recedes—then opened them again, aware of the tumbling grass, the towering trees