thief.
“Still with me?” Ella said, and he realized that he may have been staring into space for a while.
“Sorry, yes. I’m a bit wrecked from traveling all night.”
“Parties are a bit much under those conditions,” Ella said. “Let’s get out of here, and I’ll buy you a drink somewhere.” Ten minutes later they were at a pub around the corner, an old-time kind of place with a bright red door and a forest’s worth of wood paneling inside.
“So,” Ella said, when they’d slid into a booth. “Forgive me, but you look terrible.”
“I’ve been awake for two days.”
“That’ll do it, I suppose.” But she was giving him a certain kind of look. He had trouble with names and faces but didn’t have trouble recognizing the question she was refraining from asking. It was a look he’d been seeing more and more of lately.
“How did you end up at that party?” he asked, to distract her. He was acutely aware of the little plastic bag in the inside pocket of his jacket.
“My husband’s a theater director.”
“Small world.”
“The smallness of the world never ceases to amaze me.”
A waitress took their drink orders, and Paul excused himself to shoot up in the men’s room, not a lot, just enough to bleed a little chaos out of the world. He stood very still in the stall for five deep breaths before he returned to the table. He was calmer now, the sharp edge of the jet lag a little blunted. Everything was fine. No one needs to sleep every night. He could save a lot of time from now on, if he just slept every second night.
“So,” she said, “you’ve been busy since I saw you last.”
“Very. It’s been extraordinary.” He hadn’t expected success and still found it disorienting. “I stepped through the looking glass into a strange new world where people actually listened to my music,” he said. I couldn’t possibly have seen this coming, he told Vincent, in his head, I just took the opportunities that arose, I was hustling just like everyone else…The opportunities that arose, like you had no choice in the matter? I couldn’t have anticipated this life, he told her, and actually, why didn’t he ever try to contact her after they’d both left the hotel? Because of his guilt over upsetting her with the graffiti and stealing her videos, obviously, but maybe he should try to find her now? Maybe enough time had passed? The condition of having landed in an unimaginable life was something he thought she might know something about.
“It was such an interesting angle you came up with,” Ella was saying. He’d been half following along while she told him that she liked his work. “One sees so much video art, but that collaboration you did, the programmable soundtrack console, that was a wonderful innovation.” For two separate works of video art, Paul had composed twenty-four hours’ worth of music, arranged as a collection of thirty-minute pieces that could be programmed to play in whichever order the buyer preferred: a night owl might prefer something fast and sharp at three in the morning, for instance, segueing into calm around a five a.m. bedtime, while the early risers might prefer to walk into their living room and hear something bracing as the sun rose.
“Some of those video art projects need a soundtrack to be even halfway interesting, if we’re being honest here,” Paul said. The beer in front of him was a terrible idea. If he drank it, he would lay his head on the table and fall asleep.
“I was curious about your musical influences,” she said.
“Baltica,” he said. “Everything I do sounds like an electronica group called Baltica that used to exist in Toronto in the late nineties.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize you’d been part of a group.”
“I try to compose stuff that sounds different,” he said, “I mean I’ll really try in a concentrated way, and then I get to the end, I play it back, and it somehow always sounds like…” He stopped talking, and looked over his shoulder to cover his unease. “Do you think they have coffee here?” He was deeply shaken. He’d never told anyone about Baltica, and here he’d just blurted it out to her without hesitation.
“I’d imagine so.” She waved, and a waitress appeared at the table.
“A coffee, please.”
“Our coffee’s terrible,” the waitress said. “Fair warning.”
“I think I might want it anyway.”
“If I could possibly dissuade you,” she said. “I mean, if you insist. But I