Reunion

a dialogue

So. This is it, huh? Twenty-seven years.

Yeah. Twenty-seven years.

You having coffee?

I got an iced lemonade. I don’t drink coffee anymore.

Huh. Well, that makes one of us.

That’s funny. I remember you used to avoid caffeine like the plague.

And you used to guzzle it. A lot changes in twenty-seven years.

Right. Yeah.

So. How have you been?

Fine. You know. Living.

I hear you’re married, now.

Yeah. 

Any kids?

Joel didn’t want them.

Fair play to Joel.

What about you? Ever get married?

I did, yeah.

How’s that?

Shit. I got a divorce.

Oh. I’m sorry.

Don’t be. Well, you can be sorry about the first time, but not about the fact that I went and did it all again with a second woman. At that point it’s on me.

You know, for the longest time I used to wonder if you might be gay.

Ha. You and half of Alcott Secondary. Anyway. What do you do now? Wait, no, let me guess. Finance.

Not quite. I’m a programmer.

Ah. Still, that tracks. I met a lot of math people on the West Coast. Most of them thought they’d be teaching vector calculus one day, but now it’s banks, insurance, or Google.

In my defence, it’s actually a start-up. Not Google.

You should have led with that. Start-ups at least tend to be less involved in the race to murder our attention spans. Not to mention the planet.

Never lost those luddite tendencies, eh? I remember you used to rail against cell phones.

I still do. We once had such a thing as time to ourselves, you know. 

And yet I see you own an iPhone.

Sure. Times change. You change with them.

You still haven’t told me what you do now.

Now. Well, right now I teach piano by day and play in a jazz band at night. I don’t think that’ll last long, though. Never does. And I’m starting to get sick of the kids.

Didn’t stick with classics, in the end?

God, no. I mean, it was a nice world to live in, for a while. Astride with Plato and Achilles and all that. But, Christ, you can’t spend your whole life picking through ruins, arguing with all the other nerds whether some tit that fell off a statue was meant to belong to Demeter or Aphrodite.

I get that. Math is beautiful, but it loses some of its lustre when you realise just how far you are from the real geniuses. I realised that pretty quick.

Don’t tell me you’re going to try and claim programming is beautiful now.

Hey. It can be. You get to create your own little system, shape its rules just the way you want them. The computer never makes a mistake. But, sure, what you usually end up doing in the industry isn’t exactly captivating. I’ve moved around a lot for a reason.

It’s funny. I used to have this idea of you, when we were in high school. Like you carried around an entire world in your head.

Don’t we all?

Sure. But you had a special one. Sealed off from everyone else, not just because it’s yours, but because even if they could get a look at it they wouldn’t understand what they were seeing. A world of forms, maybe.

I dunno. I guess people just aren’t that deep.

Maybe.

I had this idea of you too, actually. Back then.

Really?

It’s a bit hard to explain.

Try.

It’s like you had this… hole in you. Not in a bad way, I mean, I’m not trying to say you were empty or whatever. 

That’s a relief.

I’m trying to put it into words. If anything, it was inspiring. You had all this passion, for all these different things, but no matter what you did you’d never quite be satisfied. There was some kind of deep hunger in you. A hunger for what, I didn’t know.

 A hunger. Hm. You might just be on to something there.

Glad I’m not illiterate after all. Actually, there’s something I always wondered about. I was just too nervous to ask back then.

And odds are I would have been too proud to answer honestly. Let’s see if I still am.

Okay. I’ll just say it. I used to think you might have been bullied at Alcott.

Is that so?

I mean, not like, getting beaten up for your lunch money. But more subtly. Y’know, snide remarks, the silent treatment, stuff like that. Because the other kids thought you were different in a way they didn’t quite get.

Right. Well, I wasn’t getting bullied. Remember, this was the nineties. We all grew up with John Hughes movies where the bleach-blond jocks were the bad guys. Nineties kids thought they were too cool to be bullies. They thought they were too cool for much of anything. Unlike kids today, I might add, who have gone back to being bullies, just in a different way from the bleach-blond jocks. No, I wasn’t bullied. But in a way you’re right. They could tell I was different.

Did that bother you?

No. We still believed in sincerity back then, at least a little. The Internet changed this. People didn’t look at themselves through everyone else’s eyes quite as much. It was a better time to be different.

You can’t know how funny it is, hearing you wax nostalgic about those days. Remember what you used to say about Walkmans and VHS tapes?

I’m not nostalgic! I still think we were better off when we gathered around record players and in cinemas. But now even more of what we used to have has died. The march of technology comes with its bright spots, sure, but in the end it’s a long procession of dying.

Hey, don’t forget who you’re talking to. I’m a part of that procession now.

Ah, hell. Nowadays I post my gigs on Instagram. I’m in no position to judge.

Do you mind if I ask you something?

I thought you already did.

I suppose. Anyway. Why didn’t you ever try to get in touch?

Ah. Get in touch. I could point out for starters that the same could be asked of you.

That’s true. I’ll answer first, then. I was afraid to.

Afraid to?

Afraid that you would have moved on from me. That I’d just be some quaint, boring thing from your hometown, easily forgotten about after you’d gone off to brighter horizons.

Brighter horizons. Ha. Well, I can say one thing for sure.

What’s that? 

I don’t think you understood me as well as you thought.

Probably not. We were eighteen.

Yeah. We were eighteen.

You still haven’t answered my question. 

Right, right. Why didn’t I try to get in touch and all that. Look, we’re… we’re in heady territory now. Life’s as long as it is short, and you can’t step in the same river twice.

That’s not an answer. That’s philosophising.

You’ve still got it, I see. That nose for bullshit. Okay, the God’s honest truth is this. I thought you’d be better off without me. The story I told myself is that you were on your way to some kind of greatness— cracking the next Enigma code, a theory of everything, whatever. And you didn’t need me coming in to muck it all up.

You wouldn’t have mucked it up. You wouldn’t.

Oh, you underestimate just how much I can muck a thing up. But that’s not the only story I had. The other one didn’t quite come true, but, well, do they ever? 

What was it?

You know what, I’ve gone and said too much already. Forget I mentioned it.

Come on. That’s not fair. I want to know.

Are you sure?

I’m sure.

All right. Okay. It went a little something like this. We went on a road trip that last summer, just the two of us, before we flew off to opposite sides of the country. To Big Sur, if I had my way. You remember how we used to talk about Big Sur?

Yeah. I remember.

Now I don’t know if this is quite true. But in my head, Big Sur was the nexus of everything good about the nineties.  The place where tanned empty-headed kids strode the beaches in too-big jeans, surfboards mounted on their jeeps, feeling like they could paddle around the whole wide world and never run into an iron curtain or some collapsing glacier. Their teeth were perfectly white and their hair had the easy softness of a thousand gels. They were the real flower children, not worried about a draft, hardly anything to protest, caught up in a summer-long party for rich kids— and they were all rich kids, rich in what matters, at least. The only internet they had was AOL and they used it for concert tickets and arthouse zines. And that’s where we would have gone. Doesn’t that sound better than working at Sears all summer?

It does. Yeah. But I needed to save for university.

Save, bah. Back then I reckon you could have paid tuition in good vibes and IOUs. Anyway, we would have gone down there, strolled the boardwalks, done the hiking trails, just got ourselves outside, yeah? We would have stayed in hostels with all the other messy-haired backpackers, maybe got a B&B with a nice waterside view at the end. At night we’d stay up watching old movies and we wouldn’t even rewind the tapes. And we’d smoke good, clean nineties weed— I bet they had it back then, you know, something that would mellow you out but leave you with a good handle on yourself—

I never smoked.

Neither did I, if you can believe it, but just go with it, it’s part of the story. And we would have spent two, maybe three months like that, nestled in our little paradise which was all the better because no one even knew it was a paradise. Me being my weird self and you being yours. And, hell, why not— it’s just a story, after all— maybe right near the end things would have changed just a little between us. Maybe something else would have happened.

…

I would have liked that.

Yeah. Yeah, me too. But that story’s twenty-seven years out of date. Oh, and there’s one more thing I forgot to mention. One more part of the story.

What’s that?

There wasn’t a fucking smartphone in sight.