Quick Sketch
Those few days before official winter were our walking tour of the known world. We walked everywhere, at any hour. I was free in the city in a way I'd never been before. When we cut our walking to a third our normal speed, the particulars of neighborhood took on specific mass. I tried the experiment again this evening: walked a block as slowly as I could without attracting the attention of unmarked cars. A slow walk — too slow to be going anywhere— changes the way everything around me holds itself.
I didn't care where we were going. We were there already, under the shed sumacs, standing a fraction of an inch closer to one another than ambiguous. The game developed unspoken rules: we couldn't say certain things at certain times. We dressed too lightly for the weather. We spent minutes looking up into the bone filigree of tree branches, whose lacework against the winter sky became brilliant as stained glass. Sometimes on those walks with Franklin, one-third Ideological speed, I stopped moving altogether, needing to fix this, to find an outlet for the clarity springing up in me.
Todd still reached out at odd moments, took my hand, and shook it in both of his. He grabbed my fingers for no reason, his equivalent hopeless search for that unreachable fixative. The most he could convey of that one-word contradiction in terms was affection. He liked me; at the handshake instant, he again discovered and meant to take credit for me in our hands' press, the slow walk still ahead of us.
We favored a playground three blocks from the warehouse. By the time Todd took his first nightly break, the terrain was a children's Pompeii. Sometimes we tried the slide, hopelessly slowed by an autumn of tree gum. We compared old recipes for greasing. His involved sliding on squares of waxed paper, and he was on the verge of routing us to a store eight blocks away to buy some when I talked him into sense. More typically, we drifted instinctively to the swings. Expansive or expectant, however quickening the night, swinging seemed the thing. I would rock on mine, hardly kicking, dragging my feet in the gravel beneath. Franklin, male, shot for escape trajectory.
We would chatter or keep quiet — in those days they meant the same. One emblematic evening I watched Franklin pump to apogee and bail out, no doubt escaping one of those avuncular Flying Fortresses on a parachute that thighs sacrificed their stocking silks for. I calculated the parabola that had landed him between conflicts. We had a completely distorted historical view, he and I. By accident of timing, we thought this playground peace was the status quo.
Without Todd's weight for pendulum bob, his swing dampened to a stop. He got back on and called to me, "C'mere. Show you something." I hesitated, knowing the escalation. He motioned me into the sling, each leg over his, inside the chain. He helped my legs through, touching them with mute amazement. "For some reason shrouded in mystery," he explained, trying casually to pretend our thighs weren't touching, "this is called 'Swinging Double Dutch.'"
"You think you're teaching me something?" I challenged, pressing myself against him. "I was born knowing this." I relaxed and straddled him, looked deep into his face. Neither had done this before. Not since it started counting. And it hadn't counted until then, that moment of fragile pressure.
"Oh yeah? I learned how___" He fought to remain clear-headed, articulate, but even pretense took his breath. "I learned this… how to… before you even got your first inflatable slip."
"Right," I said, adjusting myself just enough to shatter his equanimity. He rolled his eyes at my little flick of friction. We synchronized our kicks, swinging in tandem, slowly at first, gradually gaining momentum. I could feel my vee riding a fraction of an inch above his. At the top of each arc we would press, pretending innocence, ignorance of contact. I kicked in rhythm, climbing a sapling on each upswing, and on each swing back, the sapling me.
At that moment, I would gladly have gone down onto the freezing grass and lost my last ten years all over again. I felt myself at my coat cuffs, against underwear, inside my silk collar come within seconds of anything. Cut loose, I was closer than ever to learning who this boy was. Rocking and straining, folding against him to our pulse, I had the chance to find out.
I felt it irresistibly unfold, but was surprised by the rapidity. At our arc's height, he kicked when he should have drawn in. A slight stiffening ran up his arms where I held them. Warm oscillation rippled across the gap to me — unforced, unconscious. A rush of conductance, animal-perfect rubato. Backwash erased all difference between us. No burst. Just sweet, spreading infusion, for one instant complete.
We went slack. Without kick-physics, the swing settled. Our pulse-pound, synchronized so briefly, fell into diffraction, dissipated in moire. I couldn't begin to guess what was in his heart at that moment, let alone my own. I climbed off without being asked. He said, "So they swung Double Dutch in your neighborhood, too?" He didn't dare look at me in the dark. Every second I spent with him was, even in the absence of hard fact, another slow assembling of artist's composite.
We turned back, the silent tactic. By the time we arrived at his machine warren, I was alone. He was attentive, arm around my shoulders. But back at the warehouse, when Dr. Ressler greeted us, a sign of collaborator's embarrassment passed from Todd to me: I had brought him over the edge with nothing but my body's graze through winter clothing, the rocking of a swing.
When I left, he rode the lift with me down to the street. The night ended like all its ancestors: a handshake, the only fingerprints he conceded. He was turning back to the office when I panicked. I grabbed and spun him by the elbows. He must have thought I was trying to embrace him, for he took me up, scolded me with a dismissive kiss. "So passionate as that?" He held me, resigning, admitting. His mouth near my ear, he spoke, incredulous. "Here again. At the mercy of strangers."
The Console Log
By then, I came and went as I pleased. Frank gave me a copy of the front key on long-term loan. Without incriminating anyone, I stole the sequence for the computer-room lock — the four letters M-O-L-E. I used the password freely until one evening, punching myself into the inner sanctum I was met by my sheepish friends and an angry Uncle Jimmy. Given his older cousin's crush on me, Jimmy would probably sooner have entrusted the company's safety to me than to Todd. But he was Operations Manager, and this was a clear-cut violation of, be it ever so ludicrous at this outpost, corporate security. He demanded to know how I knew the combination.
"I peeked over somebody's shoulder. Jimmy, it just seems silly to make them come punch me in."
Jim's bureaucratic bluster was undermined by recalcitrant kindness. "With the customers we have, if it had been anyone but me in here when anyone but you came in like that unescorted, he or she'd have put her or him in jail by now." I apologized, and Jimmy barked acceptance. He went through the apologetic motions of chewing out Dr. Ressler, the Night Manager, exacting a promise to change the combination right away.
When I showed up the following night, I buzzed for Franklin, smiling at the ridiculous return to pro forma propriety. Frank came to let me in, wearing that smirk beloved by mass murderers and the foreign service. Just as he was about to punch in the new code Dr. Ressler had set, he stepped aside. "Go ahead," he said. "I know you're dying to see how good you are."
I hadn't the first idea where to begin. Another four-letter word, reducing the possibilities to twenty-six to the fourth power: roughly half a million candidates. I had only two clues. Dr. Ressler was the designer. And Frank believed I could guess it or he would never have set up the riddle. It also helped to have him stand by humming the intervals that have run through Western music from Art of Fugue to Schönberg, with stops along the way at Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and others. Down a minor second, up a major third, down a minor second. I cupped my hand over the keyplate, guarding my guess. I punched in the four letter tune, transcribed from German notation, and the lock sprang open. Todd emitted his high-pitched trademark laugh and cuffed me admiringly. He trooped me into the computer room and paraded me before Dr. Ressler. "She's broken security again," he reported. "She's unstoppable."