Page 12 of Alone With You in the Ether

“You look too young to be a docent.”

Everything he said was astutely informed, clipped and certain.

“I’m older than I look,” she informed him. It was a common mistake.

“How old are you?”

“Three years past my arrest,” she said whimsically.

He indulged his curiosity; she’d wondered if he would. “Arrest for what?”

“Counterfeit. Theft.”

He blinked, and she preened in his hitch of hesitation.

Then he glanced down at his watch.

“I should go,” he said, registering the time, or possibly the concept of time itself, which she had recently learned was a thing he thought a great deal about. He reached for the bag she hadn’t noticed at his feet, which had a motorcycle helmet strapped to it. The existence of a motorcycle explained the leather, even if it didn’t explain anything else. He closed his notebook and placed it in his bag, which was a nondescript backpack that had suffered moderate abuse. There was a textbook inside; a thick one, like Janson’s History of Art, and Regan shook her head.

If she were to paint him, she thought, nobody would even believe her.

She didn’t say anything as he slung his bag over his shoulder, though he paused for a moment just before he moved to pass her, toying with a thought.

“Maybe I’ll see you again,” he said.

She shrugged. “Maybe you will.”

She meant it, of course—the ‘maybe’ of it all. It seemed they were both saying that logistically speaking, it might happen again. Clearly their spheres of occupation had a tendency to intersect. That would technically be a coincidence. If and when it happened, Regan would have an actual reason to recognize him. (Rather than what she had now, which was just a sensation.)

He had such defined brows for someone with so many messy features. That, of course, and his mouth, which was unmissable. There was a defined dip on top, a crooked sort of slant to the shape of it, making it seem as if he were regularly caught between expressions. He definitely had some sort of oral fixation, Regan confirmed, watching his hand rise reflexively to his mouth. He’d said that he smoked, and that seemed right. Of everything she’d noticed about him, that seemed like the most (and perhaps the only) fitting detail. He seemed like the sort of person who liked having something between his lips.

He moistened them once, eyeing something that wasn’t quite her face, and then his teeth scraped lightly against the swell of his bottom lip.

“Bye,” said his mouth, and then he was gone.

Regan turned to the vacancy where Aldo had been, frowning to herself. Suddenly the room seemed less quiet, buzzing with disturbance, and she felt her mood adjust to the new frequency, deciding to opt for something else. Contemporary art, maybe. Pop art. She could stare at the bright colors of commercial vacancy for a while to find her footing. She had at least ten minutes left of her break, she thought, checking her watch and reacquainting herself with time.

Then she turned and walked out, the moment temporarily over.

Aldo had considered the prospectof the multiverse many times, given his work, but regularly felt there was something unnecessarily cerebral about it, and also slightly unsatisfying. For example, if, in the armory, he had been holding the innumerable threads of what could come next—if he had simply chosen one of them while other versions of him carried on relentlessly elsewhere—then time remained forcefully linear. What good was choice if he could still only have one outcome at a time? No, the better option wasn’t multiple Aldos talking to multiple Charlotte Regans. It was one Aldo, and one Charlotte Regan, and both of them encountering each other on some sort of geometrically predictable loop.

His phone buzzed in his pocket as he left and he slid it from his pocket, pausing on the steps of the Art Institute.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Rinaldo,” Masso said, “where are you today?”

“The museum.” Aldo glanced over his shoulder, eyeing where he’d been. “The armory.”

“Ah. Productive today?”

Aldo considered it.

It wasn’t as if Charlotte Regan hadinterruptedhim, necessarily. She had, of course, but not in any sort of obtrusive way. She was actually very quiet. Not her voice (she had a perfectly audible one) but her motions, her questions. He supposed some people might have called it elegance or poise, but he had never really understood those terms. It was more like there was a sliver of space between him and the outside world and she had unassumingly filled it, less like a piece fitting into the vacancy of another and more like liquid being poured into a cup.

“About average,” Aldo said.

“Well, it’s Friday, Rinaldo. Are you doing anything today?”

---