LAURENCE AND SERAFINA went to an organic burger place, locally sourced, etc., and Serafina talked about her emotional robots. “You won’t believe the heuristics. They recognize faces, but also they recognize each face’s habitual emotional states. They are getting the concept of moods. They are having moods. Moods are weird—it’s not just manifesting an emotion, or even sustaining an emotion, it’s like a disease state. Like the way we say you nurse a grudge.”
Serafina seemed to be letting go of the idea that Laurence was on probation. He’d gotten her a nice scarf, that matched her outfit by some fluke. He was practicing active listening. They’d had brilliant, sunburst-in-your-face sex a few times. Laurence did not talk about himself too much. He kept thinking about the Nuclear Option. He tried to judge when would be the optimal time to unleash it: These things work better if you build up to them, rather than as a desperation play. Laurence remembered his Grandma Jools, one of the last times he saw her alive, slipping the ring box into his ski-jacket pocket when nobody else was looking, and whispering in his ear, “Give this to whoever you end up marrying, OK?” And Laurence, still a little kid, realizing this was a solemn request, whispering back that he would do that.
Laurence had a conviction, in his loins, that he deserved to be dumped. Because he took Serafina for granted, while he was working fourteen-hour days on the Project, or because she was too excellent for him. But the whole point of being a grown-up and an uber-hacker is that you don’t get what you deserve. You get what you can get.
After burgers and shakes, he and Serafina went to see the new Tornado Surfer movie, and Patricia phoned just as they were debating what snacks to get from the concession stand. Patricia asked if this was a bad time, and Laurence said sort of.
“Oh, I can call back,” Patricia said.
“What was it?”
Serafina wandered off to look at yogurt-covered pretzels, probably annoyed at him for talking on the phone. Her long fingers lifted the packets of white twists, as though plucking flowers. Her nose twitched and she smiled, as if the pretzels had told her a joke. I will not let you get away, he said to Serafina in his mind.
“Just that my friends want to meet you. You know, my special friends. They know I told you my secret, and they want you to come over for dinner or something. Maybe Thursday?”
Laurence said yes right away. Whereas if he hadn’t been in a hurry to hang up so he could go back to being a decent boyfriend, he would have contemplated the prospect of an evening with Patricia’s “special friends” and maybe invented an excuse.
“Who was that?” Serafina said. Laurence said it was his friend from junior high, the weird one, which put Serafina in a position of being able to say she didn’t think Patricia was that weird.
The movie sucked. Afterward, Serafina and Laurence went back to Serafina’s place and had the best sex of Laurence’s life thus far, the kind where you bite each other hard enough to leave toothdents and you keep crashing into each other long after you would have sworn you’d already broken everything. They held each other, both of them vibrating, until Laurence had to pee. He had to remind himself not to flush after only peeing, because everyone was conserving water. When Laurence got back to bed, Serafina had fallen into a cold sleep, and her elbow jutted into him.
*
LAURENCE DIDN’T LOOK up from his workstation between the movie date and Thursday evening, because the Ten Percent Project was in permanent crisis mode and Milton was blowing up Laurence’s phone 24/7. Milton kept bringing up the idea, or rather the threat, of relocating Laurence and his team to a secure compound in the boonies so they could work with no distractions. As if Laurence wasn’t already driving himself insane. As if this wasn’t already his whole life.
Laurence had just enough time to run home, take a quick shower, and change before he had to be back in the Mission to see Patricia. They were meeting at some kind of used bookstore where one of the witches lived. Like, he was disabled or homebound or something, so he just spent all day and all night in his tiny bookshop, which Laurence suspected was illegal.
Laurence was the kind of sleep deprived where he saw LCD-monitor ghosts when he closed his eyes. When he was a couple blocks away from that bookstore, on the corner near the bacon-wrapped sausage cart, Laurence felt a panic attack starting. He was going to say the wrong thing, and these people would turn him into a knickknack. Like Mr. Rose.
“Practice your breathing,” Laurence told himself. He managed to get some oxygen into his brain, and it was like a temporary workaround for sleep deprivation. He was probably dehydrated thanks to this crazy heat wave, so he bought some water from the bacon-wrapped sausage guy. Then he made himself walk to the three-story mall with the Spanish-language signs. For Patricia, whom he sensed he really wanted in his life.