The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [62]
I nodded. I felt extremely happy to be sitting here in the nerd bar, listening to Leonarda talk about Humboldt, the nerds in the background, the couple with sexual vertigo at the far end of the bar.
“So I was saying that obviously this geographical location is having its effects on you. Really, I think it’s great how you’re interacting with your environment.”
She stopped for a second and stared. She looked sad. And then suddenly she was crying.
“What? What is it?” I asked.
“No, forget it. You didn’t want to see me.”
She had taken off her glasses. “My face looks wrong without the glasses, doesn’t it?”
“It looks beautiful,” I said. “The glasses are protection.”
“Yeah, you’re right”—putting them back on—“the glasses are protection.”
The night was getting away from me. It acquired a slant. Next we were dancing, then climbing across the red-and-black furniture, chasing each other. She made a wrong turn. I caught and kissed her.
The night cracked open further. We were in a car, speeding along dark roads outside the city. The star hacker who had broken into the U.S. security system was driving. Two other nerds were with us. We stopped, stepped out.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“By the river,” Leonarda said.
“I don’t see it.”
“It’s over there.” Leonarda pointed ahead. We were walking across a plain lit by tall lamps that gave off a greenish glow.
“It’s like a sports field,” I said.
The air was full of moisture, soft and white. I looked over and saw the star hacker and his friends at a slight distance advancing in tandem. They looked ghostly, otherworldly, as if enveloped in a haze of light. Ahead was darkness, where the river was supposed to be. The river, I would finally reach it, stand on its shore, put my toes in that water. But instead of a shore, we arrived at a barrier of black, asteroid-shaped chunks of debris.
“What’s this?” I asked.
We stepped up onto the debris. There was a wall of it that toppled down as far as the water.
“This is so the river won’t devour us,” Leonarda said.
I looked down the coast. The massive debris was sprinkled along it as far as the eye could see.
“If this weren’t here, that whole field behind us would be deep in water,” Leonarda continued. “And not only that, but water would be creeping down those streets beyond it, filling all the alleys and basements, rising slowly to higher ground.”
I looked at her. I drank in the old enchantment, yet with a grain of salt.
Next we were alone, in a trucker joint, eating chorizos. Leonarda was starving.
“Your nails look nice,” I said. They were bright orange-red against the chorizo sandwich.
“Yeah, my mother did them.” Her mother, the glowering monster?
We were in a cab, going back to my house, passing the zoo. She leaned forward to talk to the driver. “Can we stop here for a second?”
The taxi pulled over. We were in front of Miguel’s house.
“Why?” I said. “What are you doing?”
“There’s a book I need. It’ll be quick.”
“Wait.” I looked at her intently. “If you’re not ready to go home, we can do something else. We can go dancing.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, sure. But let’s go in here for a sec.”
This was the moment to keep my head. “I’m not interested,” I said, not budging from the taxi seat.
Leonarda sighed with exasperation, reached over and grabbed my hand. I resisted, feeling at the same time that everything was slipping out of my grasp again.
“Hey, girls, what’s going on?” the taxi driver said.
“Nothing,” she answered, then turned to me. “I have to go in for two minutes. I swear, it’s important.”
We rang the bell. It was late, like three in the morning. He was awake. Or rather, it seemed he had