Alexandra was leaning up against balustrade for the laminated bamboo stairs at Robert “Scrap” Scranton’s townhouse on the penultimate street of the good side of town, her extremities splayed with a careless insouciance that immediately recalled my post-college-commencement junket to Italy and the Female of the Dawn statue marking half of the burial site for Lorenzo de’Medici in his eponymous Chapel in Florence. The similarities were only neck high, though. She was smiling and cracking wise.

“Two friends met on the street after not having seen each other for some time. One of them was using hoary-looking wooden crutches.

‘Hello!’ said one to his hobbled friend. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Street-car accident,’ says the man on crutches.

‘When did that happen?’

‘Oh, about six weeks ago.’

‘And you are still on crutches?’

‘Well, my doctor says I can get along without them, but my lawyer says I can’t.’”

There was not much more than a smidgen of polite and affable tittering from the cluster of dapper yet prudently-dressed that were closest to her, listening. “The funny thing about that joke,” she said, “was that my great-grandfather said he heard that in Brooklyn from a sheik and a flapper on their way to a speakeasy when they had all happened to stop and check out a Thomas A. Edison Inc. display for the new light-o-matic and a wooden console radio,” Alexandra put in a brief fermata for effect, “in 1926.”

I hadn’t been looking for a pretext to insinuate myself into the conversation, but I had found this compelling in a way I couldn’t ignore even though it really wasn’t that funny. Clodhopping like the gangly dunderhead my old-fashioned by any standard mother had always said I was, I interjected “Lawyer jokes, entertaining the masses since Second Council of Lyon.”

Dammit, I thought, save that shit for Jeopardy.

Scrap and I used to work it the software engineering division for Near Earth Orbit Software, LLC, and our cubicles shared one wall that finally had a hole blown through it by a prank gone One Step Too Far. Or, so it said in our HR files. Scrap started there a few weeks before I did, and we had spent the first four and half months after I was hired primarily ignorant of each other with the exception of a twenty second argument involving two cups of coffee and only one packet of artificial sweetener, when words were had. It wasn’t until we caught each other sneaking down the back steps to the parking garage on the day of an all-office mandatory meeting that we became friends. He was gripping the door handle and about away when I rounded the bottom flight of stairs, and the surprised looks of guilt we each had turned into tiny evil grins and led to a two hundred dollar tab of Irish Car Bombs at The Curragh, natch.

I was late enough to the party that the proper adjective was no longer fashionable but moved on to gauche, and I had only glanced in the mirror at the faintly foxed skin on and around my nose in the rearview mirror of my car before walking in. When Alexandra turned her Klieg light stare in my direction, I was conspicuously conscious of my rather disheveled appearance. I hoped that, if I was lucky, I would carry the deportment of an assistant professor and not the lesser appearance of a mid-level associate programmer in a moderately successful tech company that called itself a startup but was–if I were to be forthright and not toe the prevaricative company line–almost fifteen years old and how the fuck can you call that a startup? Scrap says it’s an attitude like mine that puts the “ass” in associate, but I do outrank him; I was given a promotion after our last quarterly performance review, where the list my core competencies had ironically included, somehow, being a bridge builder, a quick thinker, and that I elicited work-value attitudinal readjustments in my peers.

At any rate, I was wearing standard-issue programmer garb: Mark McNairy pebble-grain leather and tweed panelled brogues, jeans, and a wrinkled brown second-hand corduroy jacket over an ironic t-shirt I was currently rethinking that said “You read my t-shirt (that’s enough social interaction for one day).” I was orbiting the edge of the group, halfway between the hallway and the living room which Scrap had decorated with a curious but interesting mix of suburban mobility semi-assembled bookcases and a somewhat threadbare, second hand but still dernier cri, sofa and loveseat. On the wall were original one-sheets for Jaws and Blade Runner, both signed by the directors and principal actors.

“You’re pretty funny,” Alexandra said. “For a dweeb.” She smiled after she walked down the stairs and into Scrap’s living room with a perambulatory flair. Behind her, I saw Scrap peek around the arched doorway to his kitchen. He flashed a quick look between Alexandra and me, then raised his eyebrow skeptically at me before receding back into the noise and steam of the hors d’oeuvres preparations. Oddly, I thought there may have been a trace of admonishment or a warning, like my own personal Laocoön eying a dubious gift.

“Hey,” I said, “you know what we would be if we walked into the other room?”

“I can’t wait to find out.”

“A pair o’ pathetic peripatetics.”

“Screw you.” she said, although laughing while she said it. And then, with a discernible measure of caution, “I suppose.”

I extended out my arm. I noticed the skip of a beat before she took it.

Given the eccentric but relatively bourgeois gentility of the interior of Scrap’s house, the backyard was peculiarly unkempt. The center a desert of dry dirt circumscribed by a pastiche of scattered islands of grass, Kentucky Bluegrass and Foxtail and Tall Fescue and Quackgrass, creeping provinces of Mouse-ear Chickweed and Yellow Woodsorrel, vines of Hoary Alyssum encroaching onto the slat-wood fencing. I imagined that if I were to break the second-floor bedroom window for egress to the roof and a bird’s-eye view, the yard would appear much like the Piri Reis map, circa 1510, that I had seen on display at the Walker Historical Arts Centre, safe in its hermetically-sealed and climate-controlled glass case.

Central to the topography was a set of lawn furniture, the black wrought iron type one would find in the entrance to a grocery store during the summer months. We sat down. The conversation, of a romantic or whimsical nature, was of the sort that did not seem interested in hasty answers. It did not care if one question led to five more nor if any of those five questions had an equivocal answer. The tempo and rhythm languidly building and receding, motifs scattered throughout.

Alexandra hesitated in the middle of a sentence about implied consequences of chaos theory on the Northern Thailand rice harvest after a particularly difficult monsoon season that included an invasive species of tadpole falling from the sky mixed in with the torrents of rain. And, simultaneously I felt the temperature of the air near my right ear click up a digit or two just before Scrapp encroaches.

“I see you’ve met my ex-wife.”

In the canon rounds of conversation, that tidbit had not as yet been noted. “I guess so, although I wasn’t aware until now. Hopefully her taste has improved.”

“LOL,” said Scrap, and he said it just like that, spelling out the acronym in a way that made me realize that we spent far too much time interfacing the world through a screen and a keyboard, “Well, don’t let her keep you up too late. She goes through men faster than I did socks when I was thirteen.” That quip earned him an empty plastic wine glass to the back of the head as he walked away.

Inescapably, the numbers ticking off on the face of my watch catch up with me. I tell Alexandra that it is time for me to fly. Near Earth Orbit has instituted a mandatory manager’s meeting on the third Saturday of every month, 7:00am.

“Give me something to remember this night by.”

I lean in to her, the two-body problem of our physics feels like it is unrestricted by Newton’s Laws. Closer and closer. And then I flew. The alacrity of my egress brushing past the party guests that had transformed, to me, in bystanders or even spectators.

8:00 pm on a Saturday. Five minutes before the waiter with the quarter-sized mustard stain shaped like Belarus on the upper left sleeve of his otherwise crisp white shirt loses his grip on the carafe full of ice water next to the table two spaces over–the one with the couple pulled in close together as if huddled together over a thin fire on a brisk Minnesota night, hands touching above a shared chocolate panna cotta that is starting to sag under the weight of their dreamy inattention, although even from my distance I could see the spark of a diamond on her finger and the tan line on his–Alexandra aggressively slaps the table and with a slight smile tinged by implications of two bourbons, neat, and the anamnesis of prior disregard, asks “Are we going to get somewhere with this?”

Alexandra has her hair tucked back behind hers ears. The effect is, as they say, dramatic, and there is a subtle wake of mascara circumnavigating the edges of her eyelids like wake from a miniature Victoria leading Magellan around the southern tip of the Cape of Her Irises. I can also see that the her smile is curling up to the right all way to her eyes, easily covering the short distance to the decussate wrinkles around them. She’s wearing the same dress as she did the first time I saw her, the black one with the red and white adornments. And she is wearing the shit out of it.

I was in the middle of surreptitiously trying to use my napkin to dig a bit of food out from between my teeth, acting like I was wiping my lips while I had a corner of the stiff cloth jammed in between my right canine and bicuspid and it took me a pause to respond. “Yeah, um, you know,” a last dig and a glance to see the offending crumb safely silhouetted on the stiff cotton, “I, uh, have this idea and when I decided to share it with Scrap he looked at like twelve monkeys crawled out of my ear and started a tango on my shoulder. Like I said, I had a reason to drag you out.” I don’t tell her it took me all day and two laps driving around the city before I decided to say anything at all. Robert used to call that “cranking the cojones,” but he isn’t here and even if he were I doubt that I would want his advice on this one. Scrap, I imagine, would probably have a series of opinions on what I was about to say, the least vulgar of which would have been “You’re a goddamned idiot." Or maybe just a simple “Fuck you.”

“I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise,” Alexandra says. Something about this is familiar, like I heard it in a movie or a play. She looks down to the checkered table cloth, and as I am  apparently suffering an acute bout of reticence I watch her gaze divagate down to the last crumbled bits of lefse and I can tell she is considering mentioning that we have committed mutually assured destruction almost twice over on the bread bowl. I need to say something. Neither one of us has even been served a salad yet. I forget what I had ordered for an entree, but hers was lutefisk with potatoes, mashed peas and bacon. I had no idea what lutefisk was, and in fact up until the moment she ordered it I had always thought the name was lutefish, and I’m still picturing our waiter who I have begun to call Comrade Condiment Sleeve Guy as I can’t remember his name bringing out a plate with Charlie the Tuna strumming a tiny zither on it.

“Sorry, Charlie,” I say.

“What?”

“Nothing. I mean, I was thinking about something.”

Scrap and I had been treated to lunch here, once, when the Western Region Central District Operations Director for Near Earth Orbit, Richard Bowman, visited the office in his search to replace the Branch Manager. If it were possible for a conversation to have a high enough jargon-induced degeneracy pressure to initiate the gravitational collapse of the English Language with its word density of “scalable,” “outside the box,” “take it to the next level,” “best practices” and the absurd “give it 110 percent,” that had been it. The entire meeting was a burlesque caricature of professionalism though, as Scrap had a Japanese-made Horikawa Attacking Martian toy robot in his briefcase that his grandfather had brought back with him after he was stationed in South Korea as a present for Scrap’s father in 1962, and Scrap had been holding it under the edge of the tablecloth, flipping the front casing open and flashing the still-functioning lights while mouthing “take me to your leader.”

I can almost feel Scrap smacking the back of my head to try and get my attention refocused. I try to pick up where I left off hours ago. Or seconds, I’m not sure. “I’m not one to, ya know, spurt off into bits of, well, ostentatious elocution,” and I think that under customary circumstances this would have been a risk but her smile advances to both sides.

And then, the five minutes are up. That carafe hits the polished-over-the-scuff-marked tile and karangs as loud as a snare drum.

It doesn’t shatter at first, the hardiness of its construction belying the sybaritic pretensions of the restaurant evidenced by the florid handwriting script of its menus and the price-per-portion-size that left medium-sized plates frankly a little on the empty side. Not that I was complaining. The Norwegian Salmon Gravlax with mustard sauce I am awaiting is more visually palatable than edible.

At the first ringing bounce of the carafe, it twists in the air and centripetally slings water out of its mouth in a Fibonacci sequence of fluidity that in that moment hovers in the air, a series of drops delicately arcing out, tracing a spiral in the air. There are glints of light refracting off of each one; reds, yellows and whites representing the variegated and telling conversations that must be taking place at the many tables. Entire paradigms and stories wrapped in surface tension.

As it expands, it seems that the spiral is a circle absolved of its responsibilities to gravity and physics. It evolves and is set free, a corruscating example of the golden ratio. The subtle arc of each drop described through sweet, aromatic air permeated with suggestions of redolence and tinctures from the kitchen nearby.

A second bounce, and the carafe hits on a corner, breaking the flowing sweep of the water as it jars quickly to the side, the sinuous flow of it’s dance with gravity interrupted. Change imposed. Microscopic fault lines fatigued past their absolutes, environmental stress too great to bear. The glass shatters, and I am conscious of Alexandra’s eyes fixed on me, waiting.

I realize, as I sit here, that the problem with lines in the sand is that they always get washed away when the tide rolls in.

“Alexandra,” I say. “Playing small was never my thing. We should forget about Scrap, forget about the finite limitations of life. We should get out of here.”