the façade is as important as choosing something already weathered and worn. But it’s just a feeling, and he knows that if he were ever to articulate it, he would frighten people, so he says nothing.
Roger Middleton has grown up to be what people always thought he’d be: a college professor in khaki slacks and patched jackets, with an easy smile and a rangy walk that can take him from one side of campus to the other in under twenty minutes. Like many of the survivors of the big quake, he prefers his feet to other forms of transportation: bicycles aren’t dependable on cracking concrete, cars can’t swerve fast enough to avoid falling objects, but feet, ah, feet will see you to safety if there’s any possible way. He rents half a duplex off-campus, and every room is filled floor to ceiling with books, except the room where he sleeps. There, although there are books on the floor and books on the bed, there’s nothing on the walls that could possibly fall. Instead, the room contains several pieces of low furniture: two desks, a dresser, a bedside table.
There are three pictures on the bedside table. One of himself and his parents; one of himself and his current girlfriend; one of a girl with eyes like his, looking warily at the camera, as if she fears it might be getting ready to attack her. He keeps the picture to remind himself that he can never see her again; that together, they’re a danger to themselves and others. But he misses her. Even if he no longer hears her voice in his head when he’s going to sleep, even if he’s almost forgotten what it is to see the color red reflected through her eyes, he misses her. He supposes he always will. He hopes somehow that will be enough to pay for what they did, for the terrible space they made together, however little they intended to.
Roger steps around the corner, and there’s the source of the sound: a pile of books on the carpet, dislodged from their shelf by some quirk of the way they’d been stacked. Students are notorious for shoving books in any which way, and sometimes that creates unstable piles which inevitably collapse, replaying the earthquake in pages and volumes. This collapse happened in the Applied Mathematics section. Roger sighs, and stoops, and begins picking them up.
He has three books in his arms when he finds Dodger’s face staring at him from the floor. He grimaces and picks that book up as well, turning it over to reveal the title. You + Me: The Math of Social Networking, it proclaims, with her name below it in smaller but equally bold lettering. He wonders what color it is, if it’s as bright and candy-colored as he thinks. He wonders if she had any input on the cover design. She never finished her degree, but then, she didn’t need to; not in this brave new world of computers and startups and TED talks and people looking, always looking for the next big thing. She’s been doing her math in the real world since he came back to school three weeks after the quake and found her gone, leaving only a note stuffed into his mailbox.
ROGER—
GUESS IT’S YOUR TURN. IT’S ONLY FAIR. I DID IT LAST TIME. CALL IF YOU EVER NEED ME. I LOVE YOU.
YOUR SISTER.
She hadn’t bothered to leave a number, and that was like her, too: she assumed that even if he didn’t want to talk to her in the space they made between them, he’d know, or at least be able to find out, how to call. He doesn’t know if she was right about that. He’s never tried. Every time he thinks about it, he feels the ground shift beneath his feet, hears the masonry crashing around them, and remembers that it was their fault. They’re dangerous together. They shouldn’t be—all the laws of physics and nature and simple linear reality tell him they can’t be—but they are. He can’t risk it. No matter how much he wants to, no matter how much he loves her, he can’t risk it.
He puts her book back where it belongs, surrounding it with the other books in its category, and hopes, not for the first time, that she’s happy wherever she is. That she understands that he didn’t run away to save himself this time. He did it to save the world.