(New Photo Message)
Fortitude went out the window.
She clicked into the image: the first page from “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling.” Chiang’s familiar collection splayed open around a bookmark beside a utilitarian digital clock and a glass of water on a nightstand. A taut gray bedspread and a single pillow were just visible in the background.
Digital clock.
No lipstick on the glass.
Gray bedding.
One pillow.
A book of science fiction stories.
The data—fallible, but statistically likely—suggested that Bannister was a man.
Another message chirped onto her screen. Her repeated rush to read it was embarrassingly Pavlovian.
Bannister
I will.
She resisted the urge to respond. The artist—he—would continue their conversation if he wanted to. Which would hopefully be the instant that he’d finished “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling.” It shouldn’t be too long, if he started the story now. He clearly wasn’t in a painter’s studio or at a New York gallery show, so maybe he would.
His clock had read 11:25 p.m. He was on Pacific time.
West Coast time.
Not that it mattered.
She toggled back to the Monaghan chat. The thread had continued to fill without her, despite the hour; her childhood dinners and road trips had always been noisy, and distance and adulthood hadn’t dampened the Monaghans’ ability to argue, laugh, and participate in ten conversations at once. Now she scrolled up to track the subject of their current discussion. Her family was reviewing Wes’s extensive Galápagos photo roll: lumbering tortoises, marine iguanas, blue-footed boobies perched on rocks crusted with algae and salt spray, short-eared owls, and Darwin’s famous finches.
She sometimes scared away urban racoons from the garbage cans outside her apartment.
Wes
I got this shot of a penguin colony off Fernandina Island earlier today.
Adrian
How the hell do penguins survive living in the tropics? Aren’t the Galápagos Islands humid?
Wes
I’d be suffering if I didn’t spend most of my time in the water, yeah. But the Humboldt and Cromwell sea currents keep things cooler for them offshore.
Mom
Are you wearing enough sunscreen?
Adrian
Look at his nose in that glamor shot he took of himself with the tortoise. He’s obviously not.
Wes’s typing notification flickered while he equally obviously tried to avert their mother’s tirade on the importance of sun protection.
Erin jumped into the fray.
