Page 47 of Middlegame

It’s not the most stable thing he’s ever climbed. It’s far from the most stable thing he’s ever watched her climb, and he pauses a few rungs up to watch the way she makes the transfer to the bolted-on ladder, checking her grip and the angle of her transfer. She scrambles past the lip of the roof, disappearing. Then her head pops back over the edge, a bright smile on her face.

“Well?” she asks. “You coming?”

Roger hesitates. Roger takes a step back down the ladder. “Not yet,” he says.

Dodger’s face falls, excitement becoming confusion. Sometimes he feels like they’re still children in one another’s presence. He’s a grown man, needs his coffee and longs for cigarettes during the brief periods—like this one—when he manages to put them down; he’s progressed from high school girlfriends and eager over-the-shirt petting to having lovers who appreciate his facility for active listening and his practiced linguist’s tongue. But put him near Dodger and it’s all board games and climbing ladders to the roof. Things children do.

(They were supposed to grow up together: he knows that, on a deep, almost primal level, below the surface of conscious thought. They were supposed to grow up with their hands in each other’s pockets, compensating for one another’s weaknesses, encouraging one another’s strengths. That didn’t happen. For whatever reason, it didn’t happen, and now, when they’re together, it’s like they’re trying to accelerate through those lost years, using the cheat codes to get the experience without actually playing the game. He doesn’t like this sort of knowledge, which bubbles up from a source he can’t find; he doesn’t like not knowing his own mind. But more and more, he also knows this is the only thing that’s going to save them. He just wishes he could know from what.)

“It’s time for us to try,” he says. “Can you go to the far side of the roof?”

Her smile doesn’t return. Instead, her face goes blank, falling into the perfectly neutral expression he saw her direct at her opponent in that long-ago chess game. It gives nothing away; it might as well be the face of a porcelain doll.

“Are you sure?” she asks. “We just found each other, and—”

“We found each other two weeks ago. It’s time. If it’s over, it’s over, but we need to know,” he says. “Isn’t it better to find out under controlled circumstances than to have me roll my car and start screaming in your head during one of your classes?”

“I guess,” she says. Her face remains blank. “If it doesn’t work, you come up, okay?”

“Okay,” he says. She withdraws, head vanishing. He moves to the corner of the garden farthest from the ladder and sits on the brick retaining wall keeping the thin strip of potting soil and succulents contained. Bill hops down from the fence and strolls over to strop against Roger’s ankles, purring loudly, as if to make sure the human understands what he wants.

“I like self-petting kitties,” says Roger, and takes a few seconds to pet the cat, giving Dodger time to get to the far corner of the roof. Then he closes his eyes.

Skills can atrophy: he knows this, has observed this in himself. He can drive a car, but he’d be a disaster on a bike, and the last time he strapped on a pair of roller skates, he damn near broke his neck. If a thing isn’t used, it withers and turns inward, becoming difficult to coax out. So he’s not expecting the click to come instantly. He’s also not sure what this sort of proximity will mean. He’s closer to her—still—than he was on the day they physically met for the first time, and he’s touched her, which could have increased their quantum entanglement. The outlines of the experiment are outside of his control.

“Dodger, can you hear me?” he asks. “Are you there?”

There’s no response. It feels like he’s doing exactly what he’s doing: sitting with his eyes closed in someone else’s yard, stroking a cat and feeling increasingly ridiculous.

Maybe that’s the problem. This never felt ridiculous before. Even when it felt impossible, it didn’t feel silly: it felt like the world was working the way it had always been intended to work, running smoothly on all cylinders for the very first time. He reaches for the memory of that feeling, settling deeper into his stillness, letting go of everything, even the darkness behind his closed eyelids.

“Hey, Dodge,” he says.

There’s a snap. It feels almost like that second seizure back in high school, the one that knocked the world out of true for a single, painless second. It’s like getting struck by lightning and it’s like blacking out and it’s not like either of those things; it’s like his mind is a broken bone that’s been forcefully shoved back into position.

His eyes are still closed, but he can see light, and blurry blotches of color. Dodger blinks several times, and with each blink the world comes more into focus, until he’s seeing Derby Street from above, from a perspective he hasn’t shared in years. The world is recast in sudden, vivid color, and the edges of things are a little softer; Dodger doesn’t quite need glasses, at least not yet, but she doesn’t have the clarity of distance vision that would come with corrective lenses.

She lifts her hand, holding it up so she—and by extension, he—can see it. “Hi, Roger,” she says, and he hears her voice the way she hears it, distorted by bone conduction, and it’s exactly right; it’s like coming home.

He’s winded. He shouldn’t be, but he is. “Hi,” he says. He’s also grinning like a fool. He hadn’t been sure they could still do this. “I can see your hand.”

“I know.” She raises it, flexes the fingers, and then starts moving them, flashing a quick series of signs. “How many fingers?”

“Three, five, two, four, three, one—that’s not very nice, you know. If anyone sees you doing that, they’re going to throw something at you.”

“If people throw things for that in Massachusetts, I’m never going back there.”

“We’re polite on the East Coast.”

“You’re a liar, and I just wanted to check,” she says, and closes her own eyes.

Roger knows what’s coming: he takes a breath, opens his eyes, and says, “See, this is what the cat looks like when you’re color-blind.” Bill obligingly butts his head into Roger’s knee.

“Huh,” says Dodger, and she might as well be leaning over his shoulder, not speaking in the space behind his ears. “Look at that. You going to come up to the roof now? I don’t want one of my roommates deciding there’s something wrong with you and calling the police.”

“Is that really a risk?”

“Search me. I’ve never done this before.”