The same Lisa Wei who had sent the email invitation. Maybe because of the tone of her message, I had imagined someone my age. In fact she appeared to be around sixty—about as old as the house she lived in. She was a little over five feet tall, and she squinted up at me through lenses that looked like they should have been fitted to a telescope. She couldn’t have weighed much: I imagined she couldn’t go out in a windstorm without an anchor. But she was a small explosion of smiles and gestures. The first person she introduced me to was her partner, Loretta Sitter.
Loretta owned the house, but she and Lisa had lived here for more than thirty years. “We’re that rare thing,” Lisa said, “a Tau couple. We decided we’d take the test together, and if we didn’t place in the same Affinity we’d forfeit the fee and forget about it. But it turned out we’re both Taus. Isn’t that great?”
I said it was pretty great. Loretta was a little younger than Lisa and taller, her long, dark hair just beginning to go white. She pulled me into a hug, then stood back and said, “You look like you have something on your mind, Adam Fisk.”
I would eventually get accustomed to this kind of shoot-from-the-hip psychoanalysis, but I was new here, and it startled me. Something on my mind? I had quit my courses at Sheridan College, given notice to my landlord, and would probably be back in Schuyler, tail between my legs, before the week was out. But I didn’t want to say so. “Well,” Loretta said before I could answer, “whatever it is, forget about it for a couple of hours. You’re among friends.”
Thirty people made a tranche. It was rumored that Meir Klein and InterAlia set it up that way after the model of Neolithic tribes—thirty people supposedly being an ideal number for a social unit: big enough to get things done, small enough to be governable, and containing as many familiar faces as the average human psyche can easily sort out.
Maybe so. I met twenty-three strangers that night. (Some tranche members were away on vacation or otherwise too busy to attend.) Twenty-three faces and names were too many for my post-Neolithic brain to absorb all at once, but some were memorable. Some of the faces would become intimately familiar to me, and some of the names would eventually show up in newspaper headlines.
Lisa Wei led me to a long table in the dining room. “You’re late for the best stuff,” she said, “just pickings left,” but I wasn’t even remotely hungry; I took a lukewarm egg roll. She introduced me to a couple of stragglers also grazing at the table. “What I can do,” Lisa said, “is show you through the house and you can meet folks as we go, how about that?”
I was grateful to her for making me feel slightly less ridiculous. It wasn’t just that I was nervous about meeting strangers: I felt like an imposter. I was a Tau, but I’d probably be back in the States before the next scheduled tranche meeting, and I was uneasy about making friends I couldn’t keep. But as I trailed this small, effusive woman through her big, cheerful house, I began to feel genuinely welcome. Every room seemed to frame a mood, contemplative or whimsical or practical, and the people I met and whose names I struggled unsuccessfully to remember seemed perfectly suited to the house. When I was introduced to them they smiled and shook my hand and looked at me curiously while I tried not to let on that I was a one-timer bound for an Affinity-less quarry town in upstate New York. It made me bashful.
But I began to forget about that. I dropped into a half dozen interesting discussions. No one resented my presence, and when I added a few words people paid attention. I spent a few minutes listening to a guy with a faint Hungarian accent debating Affinity politics with a couple of other Taus in a downstairs room. The talk was too lively to interrupt, but Lisa took my arm and whispered, “That’s Damian. Damian Levay. He teaches law at the University of Toronto. Very bright, very ambitious. He’s written a book or two.”
He looked pretty young for a tenured professor, but he talked liked someone accustomed to an audience. He had issues with the way InterAlia exercised control over Affinity tranches and sodalities. “If being a Tau is a legitimate identity, aren’t we entitled to self-determination? I mean, InterAlia may own the algorithms, but it doesn’t own us.”
Lisa smiled as she interrupted him: “‘When in the course of human events…’”
“Don’t laugh,” he said. “A declaration of independence might be exactly what we need.”
“If not precisely a revolution.”
Damian looked at me and gave Lisa a quizzical glance. She mouthed something back at him—it might have been the word “newb.” I introduced myself and shook his hand.
As we walked away Lisa said, “Damian’s been with us for more than a year now. He’s one to watch. Pay attention to that one, Adam.”
A kind of happy exhaustion eventually set in. I made more friends over the course of an evening than I had made in the last six months, and every connection seemed both authentic and potentially important—the escalation from hi-my-name-is to near-intimacy was dizzying. Even the conversations I overheard in passing tugged at my attention: I kept wanting to say yes, exactly! or me too! Eye contact felt like a burst of exchanged data. Maybe too much so. I wasn’t used to it. Could anyone get used to it?
I had lost track of Lisa, but when she found me again she said, “You look like your head is swimming. I’m sure it is—I remember the feeling. Handed around like a new toy. It’s great, but if you need to get away for a few minutes—”
She showed me a room in the basement, furnished with a leather sofa and a big-screen TV. The only person in the room was a young woman who appeared to have Down syndrome. She wore a blue sweatshirt and drawstring pants, and she was watching SpongeBob SquarePants with the sound off.
“This is Tonya,” Lisa said. “Everyone calls her Tonya G. Her mother is Renata Goldstein—you met her upstairs. Tonya’s not actually a Tau, but we make room for her at the tranche gatherings. Because we like her. Right, Tonya?”
Tonya hollered out, “Yes!”
“Hey,” I said. “Enjoying the show?”
“Yes!”
“Can you hear it?”
She turned her head and fixed her eyes on me. “No! Can you?”
“Mm … no.”
“Watch it with me?”
Lisa gave me a you-don’t-have-to-do-this look, but I waved her off. “Sure, I’ll watch it with you. Some of it, anyway.”
“All right.”
Lisa patted my shoulder. “I’ll let Renata know you’re down here. She’ll check in in a little while. But Tonya will understand if you want to get back to the party—right, Tonya?”
Tonya nodded emphatically.
So we watched SpongeBob with the sound off. It wasn’t clear to me why Tonya preferred to see it in silence, but she rejected an offer to turn up the volume. And it was still funny this way. Tonya seemed startled when I laughed, but she inevitably followed with a big peal of laughter of her own. After a while I started making up my own dialogue for the characters, doing crazy voices, which she liked. “You’re joking!”
“I’m a joker,” I admitted.
“What’s your name?”
“Adam.”
“Adam’s a joker!”
Among other things.
The credits were rolling when I noticed that someone had come into the room. A woman, maybe my age, leaning against the doorframe, watching us. South Asian features. Close-cropped dark hair. A Chinese dragon tattooed in three colors around the meat of her upper arm. She wore a sleeveless blouse and faded blue jeans. A belt with a purple metallic buckle.