Or maybe that was something she had already learned. She was as solicitous of Geddy as he was of her, and I began to recognize their relationship for the small miracle it was. In her presence Geddy was calm, relaxed, engaged. There were moments when they almost seemed to forget I was in the car with them, to forget what they had so recently endured, and their talk grew soft and murmuring, confident as the sunlight that glittered from the pavement of I-90 East.
We reached their tiny Allston Village apartment after dark. I made repeated but futile attempts to reach Damian or Amanda or Trevor by phone, and I thought about calling the tranche house in Toronto, but in the end I didn’t: I was afraid of what Lisa might say. I was still awake well past midnight, sitting in the kitchen reading the news and watching moonlight inch across the linoleum counter, when Geddy joined me, in shorts and a white t-shirt with a wry, sleepy smile. He said he’d heard me moving around. I apologized for keeping him up. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m a light sleeper.”
He poured himself a glass of milk and sat at the table with me. The window was open, and a sudden breeze lifted the curtain and made him shiver. “You’re going home tomorrow,” he said.
“If I have a home to go to.”
He nodded. “I want to thank you for what you did for me.”
I shrugged.
“Seriously. I mean, you risked a lot. And now nobody will talk to you.”
“Seems like. But I’m a Tau, Geddy. Sooner or later, they’ll understand why I did what I did back in Schuyler. And they’ll forgive me.”
He blinked twice and said, “Is it really something you need to be forgiven for?”
We sat a while longer. He finished his milk and belched spectacularly. “I ought to go back to bed,” he said. “It’s late.”
But something, maybe nothing more than the cool spring air and the sound of a dog barking in the distance, had put me in a philosophical mood. “So what do you think,” I asked him, “is the world old or is it young?”
He looked startled. Then he smiled. “You remember!”
“Long time ago, huh?”
“Long time,” he agreed. “Long time.”
“So what’s the verdict, kiddo? Just between us grownups. Is the world old or young?”
He took the question seriously. “Well, Rebecca helped me figure that out. It’s about how it seems, right? How the world seems to people. Back in the dark ages the world must have seemed really old, like it was all, you know, Roman ruins and fallen empires. Like nothing big or good could ever happen again. Like you could stare at some crumbling aqueduct in the French countryside and wonder how it ever came to be built. But then there was the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and suddenly there were whole new ways of answering questions, and it made people feel like, no, they were at the beginning of something, a whole new world being born. Right?”
“I guess.”
“And when you and I were kids, I guess what worried me was, it was like people thought everything was over—religion was empty, science was useless, progress was phony: if you thought about the future it was like, you know, global warming and overpopulation and wars over food and water. Like the world was old, finished, used up.”
I said, “Those things are worth worrying about.”
“Sure, of course. But no one could do anything about them. No single person could make a difference or ever hope to, nobody with money wanted to risk it, nobody with real power cared to exercise it. It seemed like it was just … too late.”
“Isn’t it?”
“That’s what I learned from Rebecca. And New Socionome. When Meir Klein discovered social teleodynamics? That was a whole new way of looking at things. Like the Affinities—”
“To be honest,” I said, “I’m not sure that’s working out the way Klein hoped.”
“No, but it was only the beginning. The Affinities proved how powerful social algorithms could be. But the Affinities were, like, the Model T of socionomic structures. We’re building better ones! Evolutionary algorithms to enhance non-zero-sum exchanges of all kinds! A way to address the big problems!” He was starting to shout, the way he used to, years ago, when he talked about his enthusiasm-du-jour; but he caught himself and gave me a sheepish grin. “I don’t want to wake Rebecca. But it’s young, Adam. That’s the point. The world’s young! We’re at the beginning of something, and it’s big, and it’s scary, but in the end it might be—” He flung his arms wide, as if to embrace the whole spring night. “Beautiful!”
The next day I managed to secure a seat on a flight to Toronto. The woman who settled into the seat next to me asked whether I was beginning a trip or going home. “Going home,” I said, because it was the easiest answer.
And arguably true. Or not. Depending on how you defined “home.” After I cleared customs I took a cab to a downtown hotel and checked in for the night. My home address, of course, was the tranche house in Rosedale—it was where I lived when I wasn’t on the road—but I wasn’t sure I would be welcome there. So I spent another night alone, listening to the sound of the hotel elevators pushing air up and down their concrete shafts.
And in the morning I screwed my courage to the sticking point and called the house. When Lisa answered, I said, “It’s me. I’m back in town.”
A silence.
“Adam,” she said.
“Yeah. I wanted—” But what did I want? To pretend nothing had changed? Not possible. “Wanted to let you know I’ll be there soon.”
“You’re coming to the house?”
“Well, yeah. Of course.”
Which produced a more protracted silence. Then, “What time will you be here?”
“I don’t know. In an hour, say?”
“I suppose that would be all right. An hour.”
“Lisa,” I began. But she had hung up.
They say you never forget your first tranche house. In my case I had never really left it.
It looked as welcoming as ever, drowsing in the gentle heat of a spring afternoon. The lawn had been recently cut, the hedges trimmed. The big maple in the front yard was already putting out seed pods—years ago, Amanda had told me they were called samaras—and they fluttered around me as the wind shook the branches. Every step I took, I had taken a thousand or ten thousand times before. Along the paved walk, up the stairs to the porch. Fumbling in my pocket for the key. Needlessly, because the door opened before I reached it.
“Come in,” Lisa said from the cool darkness inside.
I stepped into the smell of baked bread, of wood polish, of the fresh flowers she had cut for the dining room table. Any other day, any other homecoming, Lisa would have taken me into her frail arms. Today she did not. She stood well back, cautiously, as if I had become radioactive. The house was quiet. Unusually quiet, even for a weekday afternoon. As if there had been some communal act of avoidance, a collective absence, perhaps orchestrated by Tau telepathy. “You can’t stay, of course,” she said.