‘She’s four years old.’
Donald had forgotten. Lately, time felt locked in a bubble. He wondered if his medication was causing that or if it was the workload. Whenever anything seemed… off any more, he always assumed it must be the medication. Before, it could have been the vagaries of life; it could have been anything. Somehow, it felt worse to have something concrete and new to pin it on.
There was shouting across the street, two homeless men yelling at each other in the rain, squabbling over a bag of tin cans. More umbrellas were shaken and more fancy dresses flowed into the restaurant. Here was a city charged with governing all the others, and it couldn’t even take care of itself. These things used to worry him more. He patted the capsule in his jacket pocket, a comforting twitch he’d developed.
‘She won’t go,’ his wife said exhaustedly.
‘Baby, I’m sorry I’m up here and you have all that to take care of. But look, I really need to get inside. We’re trying to wrap up final revisions on these plans tonight.’
‘How is everything going with that? Are you almost done?’
A file of taxis drove by, hunting for fares, fat tyres rolling across sheets of water like hissing snakes. Donald watched as one of them slowed to a stop, brakes squealing from the wet. He didn’t recognise the man stepping out, coat held over his head. It wasn’t Mick.
‘Huh? Oh, it’s going great. Yeah, we’re basically done, maybe a few tweaks here and there. The outer shells are poured, and the lower floors are in—’
‘I meant, are you almost done working with her?’
He turned away from the traffic to hear better. ‘Who, Anna? Yeah. Look, I’ve told you. We’ve only consulted here and there. Most of it’s done electronically.’
‘And Mick is there?’
‘Yup.’
Another cab slowed as it passed by. Donald turned, but the car didn’t stop.
‘Okay. Well, don’t work too late. Call me tomorrow.’
‘I will. I love you.’
‘Love you— Oh! Good girl! That’s a good girl, Karma—’
‘I’ll talk to you tomorr—’
But the line was already dead. Donald glanced at his phone before putting it away, shivered once from the cool evening and from the moisture in the air. He pressed through the crowd outside the door and made his way to the table.
‘Everything okay?’ Anna asked. She sat alone at a table with three settings. A wide-necked sweater had been pulled down to expose one shoulder. She pinched her second glass of wine by its delicate stem, a pink half-moon of lipstick on its rim. Her auburn hair was tied up in a bun, the freckles across her nose almost invisible behind a thin veil of make-up. She looked, impossibly, more alluring than she had in college.
‘Yeah, everything’s fine.’ Donald twisted his wedding ring with his thumb — a habit. ‘Have you heard from Mick?’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone, checked his texts. He thought of firing off another, but there were already four unanswered messages sitting there.
‘Nope. Wasn’t he flying in from Texas this morning? Maybe his flight was delayed.’
Donald saw that his glass, which he’d left near empty when he made the call outside, had been topped up. He knew Helen would disapprove of him sitting there alone with Anna, even though nothing was going to happen. Nothing ever would.
‘We could always do this another time,’ he suggested. ‘I’d hate for Mick to be left out.’
She set down her glass and studied the menu. ‘Might as well eat while we’re here. Be a little late to find something else. Besides, Mick’s logistics are independent of our design. We can send him our materials report later.’
Anna leaned to the side and reached for something in her bag, her sweater falling dangerously open. Donald looked away quickly, a flush of heat on the back of his neck. She pulled out her tablet and placed it on top of his Manilla folder, the screen flashing to life.
‘I think the bottom third of the design is solid.’ She spun the tablet for him to see. ‘I’d like to sign off on it so they can start layering the next few floors in.’
‘Well, a lot of these are yours,’ he said, thinking of all the mechanical spaces at the bottom. ‘I trust your judgement.’
He picked the tablet up, relieved that their conversation hadn’t veered away from work. He felt like a fool for thinking Anna had anything else in mind. They had been exchanging emails and updating each other’s plans for over two years and there had never been a hint of impropriety. He warned himself not to let the setting, the music, the white tablecloths, fool him.
‘There is one last-minute change you’re not going to like,’ she said. ‘The central shaft needs to be modified a little. But I think we can still work with the same general plan. It won’t affect the floors at all.’
He scrolled through the familiar files until he spotted the difference. The emergency stairwell had been moved from the side of the central shaft to the very middle. The shaft itself seemed smaller, or maybe it was because all the other gear they’d filled it with was gone. Now there was empty space, the discs turned to doughnuts. He looked up from the tablet and saw their waiter approaching.
‘What, no lift?’ He wanted to make sure he was seeing this right. He asked the waiter for a water and said he’d need more time with the menu.
The waiter bowed and left. Anna placed her napkin on the table and slid over to the adjacent chair. ‘The board said they had their reasons.’
‘The medical board?’ Donald exhaled. He had grown sick of their meddling and their suggestions, but he had given up fighting with them. He never won. ‘Shouldn’t they be more worried about people falling over these railings and breaking their necks?’
Anna laughed. ‘You know they’re not into that kind of medicine. All they can think about is what these workers might go through, emotionally, if they’re ever trapped in there for a few weeks. They wanted the plan to be simpler. More… open.’
‘More open.’ Donald chuckled and reached for his glass of wine. ‘And what do they mean, trapped for a few weeks?’
Anna shrugged. ‘You’re the elected official. I figure you should know more about this government silliness than I do. I’m just a consultant. I’m just getting paid to lay out the pipes.’
She finished her wine, and the waiter returned with Donald’s water and to take their orders. Anna raised her eyebrow, a familiar twitch that begged a question: Are you ready? It used to mean much more, Donald thought, as he glanced at the menu.
‘How about you pick for me?’ he finally said, giving up.
Anna ordered and the waiter jotted down her selections.
‘So now they want a single stairwell, huh?’ Donald imagined the concrete needed for this, then thought of a spiral design made of metal. Stronger and cheaper. ‘We can keep the service lift, right? Why couldn’t we slide this over and put it in right here?’
He showed her the tablet.
‘No. No lifts. Keep everything simple and open. That’s what they said.’
He didn’t like this. Even if the facility would never be used, it should be built as if it might. Why else bother? He’d seen a partial list of supplies they were going to stockpile inside. Lugging them by stair seemed impossible, unless they planned to stock the floors before the prebuilt sections were craned inside. That was more Mick’s department. It was one of many reasons he wished his friend were there.
‘You know, this is why I didn’t go into architecture.’ He scrolled through their plans and saw all the places where his design had been altered. ‘I remember the first class we had where we had to go out and meet with mock clients, and they always wanted either the impossible or the downright stupid — or both. And that’s when I knew it wasn’t for me.’