can’t talk, you know? They can’t make a decent conversation.’ Lola was a student, or had been a student and was going to be a student again; but in between her studying she was travelling the country, seeing the places she’d never seen. She was from North Carolina, and her accent had that twang that said she couldn’t shake the place. All she had to talk about was the places that she had seen, the people that she’d met. She’d been in the Bay area for four weeks, and she’d not spent a night where she wasn’t cruising the bars. ‘Because soon I’ll have to go home, and when I’m back there, Jesus, there’s nothing compared to this. This is where I want to live, when I’m done with everything.’
She asked me what I did exactly at Bow. We were under the tightest of the tight non-disclosure agreements, but I was drunk, and I was tired, and I wanted to feel good about myself. I said, ‘I’m on the artificial intelligence team.’
‘Like from that movie?’ I didn’t ask which one. There were lots of movies.
‘Yeah, kind of,’ I said, ‘but we’re making something that’s actually practical. Something that will help us in our lives, you know? That’s the aim.’
‘So it won’t blow up the world,’ and she had this sarcastic tone, this sarcastic tilt of her head when she said it, like this was all stuff she’d heard before.
‘I’m pretty sure blowing us up would count as a project failure,’ I said. ‘No bonus for me if that happens.’ I could be charming, when I wanted to be. I remembered being charming before I met Laura. Hard for your body, your mind, to forget that stuff. Like muscle memory.
Another drink, and another. Her fingers stroked the hairs on my arm, up and down; and all I could think, not even in the back of my mind, but right at the front, right there, was how Laura’s fingers, when she did that same thing, felt coarser, slightly. Like the skin on her fingers was slightly harder because of the beating on the keyboard. In the action, I missed that roughness.
We took a cab out to the Bow campus. I never feel like I’m drunk when I am. There’s a proxy, almost, between myself and my true state. You could show me a video of who I am when I’m at my worst and I wouldn’t believe it. It would be like watching some blockbuster movie, where you know the action isn’t real, but that doesn’t stop you wondering where the truth ends and the computer graphics begin. When she asked if we could go back to mine, because her room-mates were home, I told her we couldn’t. Laura’s things were there. I didn’t want to have Laura’s things around us. I didn’t want her touching them, picking them up, interacting with them.
But, I told her, there was somewhere else we could go. The campus had crash rooms. Ten bedrooms in each block, rooms where staff could stay if we were working late. Like those Japanese hotel pods, bigger than a bathroom, but not by much. A bed and nothing else, basically, then a shower and a toilet to the side that was carved out of one single piece of plastic. Like being on an airplane, only with a mattress on the floor. Not exactly romantic. She didn’t seem to care, and apparently neither did I.
We kissed in the back of the cab. Her lips, tighter than Laura’s; her teeth getting in the way of mine, her tongue set back and lifeless, as if she wanted me to probe her mouth. Something medical about it all. Clinical. She grabbed the back of my head, and she moved her hand as if this was some really passionate affair, capital P, but in reality it was more like acting. I got distracted. I looked around, while we were kissing. She had her eyes clamped shut, so I could see everything, albeit through the slight blur of the alcohol: the lights fading off through the windows, the peeling leather on the back of the passenger seat. My eyes caught the driver’s as he stared in the rear-view, watching us; and there was this moment where it was like, we both knew that we were in the wrong, that we were looking at something we shouldn’t have been looking at; then I shut my eyes, a long blink of relief for my lenses, and when I opened them he had his eyes back on the road, and Lola was still letting my tongue find hers, offering nothing back to me at all.
I paid for the cab. She stood on the path, staring at the buildings, the grass. ‘It’s like Chapel Hill,’ she said, but I didn’t say anything in reply. I didn’t want to have to tell her how wrong she was. Bow was nothing like some university. It was tight and organized, and there was nothing organic about the way it was designed. No old buildings, no statues or monuments or anything that had been there for generations and generations of students and alumni. It was glass and steel, built to be this perfect workplace, all breathing exercises and walking paths. Some architecture firm designed it, not knowing who it was going to be for, and Bow was the company who lucked out. They didn’t commission it. That was always the difference between Bow and somebody like Google or Apple. Those other companies built their own campuses, because they could. Bow was, in the scale of things, small fry. It’s easy to pretend now that they were always a big deal, but that’s bullshit memory retconning. Truth be told, even those who worked there didn’t rate them for the most part. We didn’t use their software in our spare time, and most of us had just gotten iPhones, instead of using the piece of shit that Mark Ocean was having us trial, thinking Bow could compete in that same space. ‘Where do we go now?’ she asked.
We walked across the lawn. There was a pirate ship on the sign that pointed towards the building I worked in, an embossment of a galleon above the doorway, set into a thick green metal plate – everything to do with our department was themed around pirates, because of the noise they make, the arr; which itself came from our abbreviated way of saying Research and Development, Arr and Dee – but she didn’t notice those, and I didn’t explain them. I could feel the gulf setting in: that is, the time between when it’s decided that you’re going to go off somewhere and have sex, and the actual getting to the place to do the deed. It’s like spreading fog apart, because you sober up, and you start to wonder about whether it’s actually a good idea. I took her hand, body contact bringing the fog back together a little more, and I beeped in, getting her to run through with me at the turnstiles; then we went through the corridors, and I pointed out where things happened. She wasn’t really interested. I caught her putting her hand over her mouth, stifling a yawn. The energy required to stop me from yawning in reply was immense. I wished I had some coke or some speed or something. That would have made it easier.
The bedrooms were upstairs, in the East wing – God knows why we called them wings, because the building wasn’t big enough to justify that, not really – and the first couple of doors were locked. We went to the far end of the corridor. Not the one on the very end, because that was always taken first, always somebody staying in it, furthest away and quietest, but the seventh.
‘It’s nice,’ Lola said. Nice. The worst fucking word in the world. Mark Ocean had an embargo on it: Never use that word, because it’s so useless. It says nothing. Niceness is fundamentally blandness. Laura called my birthday present to her – the birthday before we broke up – nice. It was a pen. A fountain pen, ink cartridges. Good quality. Swiss. She made notes on everything. Wrote everything on paper first. She told me she used to have an ink pen at school, and she loved the care it made her take when she was writing stuff, so I thought, Well, one of those is a really strong idea. Presents are all about the strong ideas. I gave it to her, and in return? Oh Charlie, it’s really nice. That’s so thoughtful of you.
‘Do you want something to drink?’ There was a fridge in each room. A couple of beers, bottle of Californian white, some diet Coke, water.
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
‘I’m going to have one,’ I told her. I unscrewed a beer, held one out for her as well. It was so cold on my palm, and I held it a long time, while she looked at the room, and I looked at her. Discovered I was focused on her tits, in that moment. No eye contact for me.
‘I think actually that I might want to go home,’ she said then. ‘This is strange, isn’t it? This room, I mean.’ The whole thing
