“Go,” one of the men at the next table muttered.
I glanced over, but neither one of them was looking at me. I stood up so fast that I nearly knocked over my coffee and headed for the door. Jasmine was at the end of the block, her hands jammed into the pockets of her hoodie. I followed at a safe distance, passing clusters of pedestrians with night-blurred faces. After a couple of minutes, Jasmine jaywalked across a busy street and joined a small crowd at a bus shelter. I crossed at a light, then doubled back and came up on her from behind, my eyes on the back of her head. She was smaller than I would have guessed from what I’d seen online, with the compact build of a gymnast. She looked down the street at an approaching bus and I saw her face in profile—heavy eyeliner, upturned nose, a small well-defined mouth. The bus pulled up and she climbed on nimbly, as if weighing nothing at all. A strong pair of invisible hands shoved me through the door, and I fumbled through my pockets for change. Jasmine was sitting alone near the back. I paid the driver and walked past several empty spots to her bench. She’d taken the window seat, leaving the aisle free. I hesitated a moment, then sat down beside her. She sighed and tilted her legs deliberately away from me as the bus started moving again. I tried not to think about her shaved pubis, the hummingbird tattoo on her thigh.
The bus rounded a corner and I exercised all the muscles in my lower body to counteract the subtle forces pulling us together. She opened her handbag and took out a book. I glanced over, my anxiety briefly eclipsed by shock. She was reading my novel, the one I’d published two years before—my title on the spine, my name under her hand. If she’d turned to the last page, she would have found a black and white photograph of me standing beside a tree, squinting unpleasantly at the camera. I thought back on the last twenty-four hours, the string of events that had led up to that moment. It was no coincidence. It meant something. I could see that she was well into the book, and leaned in as much as I dared, wanting to know what page she was on, the exact paragraph.
“Good book?” I asked. My mouth was dry and the words came out all wrong—a click followed by an explosive puhh.
Jasmine tilted further away, the book (my book!) open in her lap. She was ignoring me by listening to me. Suppressing a wild laugh, I cleared my throat and repeated myself.
“Is that a good book?”
Jasmine looked around at the other passengers, looked outside, looked everywhere but at me.
“The reason I ask,” I went on in a halting, shaky voice, “is that it’s mine. Well, not mine exactly, but—” Jasmine snapped the book shut and stuffed it into her bag. She stood, and when I didn’t immediately make way, she gave me a look of undisguised loathing. I muttered an apology and got up, allowing her to pass. Our bodies met for a moment (her elbow, my abdomen) and she carried on down the aisle. I sat down but she remained on her feet, holding a metal pole and staring straight ahead. When she alerted the driver that she wanted off, I stayed where I was. The puppeteer that had manipulated me onto the bus had abandoned me, my strings gone slack. The neighbourhood out the window looked rundown and neglected, with drug deals happening in front of shuttered pawn shops. Jasmine got off and started walking. The bus kept pace with her for a moment before leaving her behind. An old woman across the aisle stared at me, as if I’d sprouted mandibles and feelers. I moved over to the window and the lingering heat from Jasmine’s seat rose to meet me. I looked out at the darkened street, wondering what bus I was on, and where it would eventually take me.
The next day, I found a sleepy-looking girl with bleached hair performing in the pink room. The site was up twenty-four hours a day, with the girls working in shifts, taking coffee breaks as they would have in any other job, the live feed going dark whenever one of them disappeared with a paying customer. In the light of day, my humiliation on the bus felt like a simple misunderstanding, something Jasmine and I would laugh about when we got to know each other. I kept the laptop open, puttering around the apartment, making sure the screen was always active and pointed my way. Every time I went out to the balcony for a cigarette, the old man slammed his door. In the low-rise across the way, the pale man drifted from window to window, like a shark in an aquarium.
By late afternoon, the slamming was starting to get to me. A sarcastic brunette with short hair had replaced the blonde girl in the pink room, gesturing at the camera lewdly, almost mockingly, as the other users tried to provoke her into flashing them. I opened a parallel window and played game after game of solitaire until my right ear suddenly shut off, ghostly fingers sliding through my brain. A distinct, almost holographic image suggested itself between my eyes and the laptop screen: a small, dimly lit room, reproduced art on the walls, an open book in the foreground. A hand appeared and turned a page. Jasmine’s hand. My words funneling into her mind. The vision faded. Next door, the old man was either coughing or laughing. Shaken, I went to the kitchen to scrounge something to eat. When I came back, Jasmine was on the screen. My heart sped up as she singled out my avatar with a friendly hello. I had the feeling that her handbag was just out of sight, my book nestled inside like a favourite pet. I didn’t return her greeting, the medium feeling inadequate for what I had to say. As Jasmine’s shift wore on, she disappeared with paying clients from time to time and I waited patiently, knowing that they meant nothing to her. We had the deeper connection.
Around midnight, Jasmine sent a goodnight kiss to the camera before disabling her webcam. I changed into clean underwear and slipped a condom into my wallet. I could hear the low drone of the old man snoring next door and thumped the wall just hard enough to wake him. I filled a measuring cup with vodka and drank it quickly, like medicine, then checked the spyhole and stepped out of my apartment. By the time I’d made it down to the twenty-four-hour café, the alcohol was gently rocking me in its arms. I ordered a coffee and settled at the same table I’d sat at the night before, next to the window. A light rain started to fall. I leaped forward to the scene that was about to unfold: a moment of unease, my words coming out perfectly, her face growing thoughtful as she realized what I knew already, that the universe wanted us to be together.
It being a Sunday, hardly any pedestrians were out. The streets were wet and shining. I nursed my drink, eyes never leaving the window. By one o’clock I’d begun to feel conspicuous. By one-thirty, I understood she wasn’t going to come. As I walked home through the cold drizzle, criss-crossing the street to avoid occasional pedestrians, my disappointment twisted back on relief. In retrospect, I couldn’t imagine any realistic scenario in which my accosting Jasmine on the street ended well. Still, the next night I headed down to the café the moment she finished her shift. And the night after that. I could have gone directly to the building with the coloured rooms, but it felt important to wait for her in the exact spot I’d first seen her, as if that location alone held the power to render us visible to one another. Night after night, I travelled down to the café, and every time she failed to appear, I experienced the same bittersweet mingling of disappointment and relief. I didn’t want to see her, I wanted the possibility of seeing her. The fact that at any given moment, she could have been thumbing through my novel was enough. I would watch her. She would read me. There was reciprocity there. Whether she knew it or not, we had a relationship, and it bound us together as surely as a solemn vow.
CHAPTER TWO