A. Miller - The Faithful Couple

‘Yes,’ Adam said, ‘I’m in the office. I’m looking at her now. I suppose it’s her. I’m looking at her picture.’

‘What do you mean, you suppose?’

There was a pause at the London end, that air of vacancy and distraction that descends when an interlocutor is doing something else, typically involving a computer, sometimes a television with the sound turned down. The ghostly hiatus of the multi-gadget era, in which everyone is always half-elsewhere.

‘She’s got a photo on her profile page, it’s a funny kind of photo. I was saying — Neil, when I lost you — I was saying that I think it’s her. Can’t be completely sure but it looks like it’s her. I’ll send you the link.’

‘Don’t, Ads,’ Neil said. ‘Anyway, how the hell would you know what she looks like now?’

‘You might need to register.’

‘Just don’t.’

‘You don’t understand, she might be okay, she might be fine. Maybe she’s forgiven us, or, you know, she would forgive us, if…’

Neil sensed the panic coursing back. ‘Have you contacted her? Sent her a message or whatever?’

‘No. Not yet.’

‘Adam, don’t. Don’t contact her. Listen to me. Just don’t.’

He turned around. The semaphoring man had finished his phone call; two other men, whom Neil hadn’t previously noticed, and whose outnumbering presence might have troubled him if he had, rose like ghosts from a bench in the shadows beneath the tree to join him. All three walked away from him and up the boardwalk, towards the oil platform; its orange light pulsed through the tree’s upper branches. Neil found himself mindlessly waving farewell with his free hand, though the man could no longer see him and he and Neil were strangers.

Adam said, ‘What colour was her hair?’

‘What?’

‘In Yosemite. Come on! What colour was her hair?’

‘Sorry, can’t remember,’ Neil lied.

‘Yes, you can. You can, Neil. She’s a brunette in the photo but for some reason I thought she was fairer.’

‘What else does it say?’

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ Neil said, backtracking on his curiosity. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. I’m at a dinner. Local partners, total shysters. You should go too, Adam. Work on whatever it is you’re putting into the little box today.’

‘I’ll send you the link.’

‘I’m not interested.’

‘It says she lives in Taos. In New Mexico. You know, Georgia O’Keeffe.’

‘I said I’m not interested. I’m hanging up now, Adam.’

‘It says she has a brother.’

‘Adam,’ Neil snapped, ‘what the fuck is this about? I thought we were finished with this, I thought you were over this crap. I’ve tried, I have, but… What are you trying to do to me? It’s enough to —’

‘She had a brother, didn’t she?’

Neil breathed deeply. ‘Just don’t contact her.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m hanging up,’ Neil repeated, and he did, pressing the Disconnect button hard, hoping that Adam wouldn’t send him the link, since if he did, Neil might have to click through and look at the picture. Look at Rose, out there in New Mexico with Georgia Whoeverthefuck.

The traffic on the road between the boardwalk and the old city had picked up, rickety taxis alternating with late-model Mercs. Neil weaved through the vehicles, eager, suddenly, to be back in the private room with Azim and Elin. Since that night in the rain a year ago he had been sure that he and Adam could carry on, just somewhat differently, slightly recalibrated, maybe even for the better. Perhaps, after all, forgiveness could be provisional, a probation rather than an acquittal. He climbed the steps to the restaurant.

The bodyguards stood motionless against the wall. Elin was asleep in his chair, chin on chest. His sheath of family photos had fallen from his lap onto the floor; the laminated face of a small girl, eyes wide, was lying beside her father’s Italian shoe. Azim was eating kumquats. He smiled at Neil with his full mouth as he sat down.

Elin woke up when the maître d’ came in with the bill. Neil reached for his wallet to contribute. Azim half-wagged, half-pointed a finger at him. ‘Your money,’ he said, ‘is no good in my country.’

He and Elin laughed. Neil saw the joke, and laughed too, though it was Farid’s money, not his, that they were celebrating. Not even Farid’s, in fact, though they didn’t need to know that. He gave them nothing.

Adam wasn’t sure that Neil had rung off until he lowered the phone from his ear and saw the word Disconnected on the screen, below it the call’s duration, 7:47 . He wasn’t annoyed by his friend’s brusqueness; he wasn’t distressed by the photo. On the contrary, he felt vindicated, almost elated. The girl was real, and, since she was real, she might be able, somehow, to release him.

The immigration minister bustled through the office, accompanied by his condescending adviser, en route to somewhere more enclosed. Adam scarcely looked up from Rose’s profile. The warmest acknowledgement he could hope for was another ‘Good to see you’.

Heidi appeared at the entrance to his cubicle. He closed his browser and enlarged the briefing paper he was writing on the relative efficacy of state and private deportation squads. These documents were the extent of his discourse with the powerful. Adam knew that half the time they were destined to languish, unread, at the bottom of the minister’s overstuffed red box.

‘Coffee?’ Heidi said. ‘Last call.’

‘Can’t now,’ Adam said. ‘But later?’

‘How much later?’

‘Do you mean, what time do I get off?’

‘No, I mean, should I just ask someone else?’

Adam frequently coffeed with Heidi, up in the deathly canteen (his preference) or down in one of the overpriced chains (hers). Sometimes, in the summer, they would scrimmage through the tourists photographing the squirrels to eat their sandwiches together on the lawn in St James’s Park. Occasionally they went for an after-work drink at the ye olde pub in the alley near the ministry. Their boozing male colleagues loosened their ties, stuffed their non-drinking hands into their pockets and thrust out their hips; the women crossed one arm beneath their busts and sipped their gin and tonics; all of them shot prurient glances at Adam and Heidi, who were widely assumed to be having an affair — an impression that arose because they spoke to each other in the office, actual words, physical mouths and ears, and human-to-human contact had come to seem intrusive, verboten , a borderline molestation in the high email age.

‘Twisted my arm,’ Adam said. ‘But, look, I’ve got a meeting with Nick five minutes ago. After that, okay? If I haven’t strangled him.’

Nick walked past the cubicle in one of his trademark postman shirts, averting his gaze.

Adam did a rapid overheard-office-insult calculation: insultee’s walking pace multiplied by interval between insult and his appearance on the scene, divided by volume of insulter’s voice. Nick probably hadn’t heard. It was probably just their adultery that he was ignoring.

‘Close,’ Heidi said. ‘Careful.’

‘Always,’ Adam said, and smiled.

Too much. Heidi blushed, a picturesque Anglo-Chinese burnish. Adam looked meaninglessly at his screensaver: him and Neil at the Faithful Couple, scanned, uploaded and immortal.

Okay, they flirted. They flirted just enough to salve the blow to his ego from the loosenings and sags, the ambushing jowls. But nothing happened, nothing ever had, less even than with those two women on the Strand, and that had been nothing, too. It was mostly jokes, him and Heidi, wisecracks and one-liners, like him and Neil, you could say, plus an implicit mutual acknowledgement, the understanding that he needed to share with at least one person in the ministry: We are still two human beings, even here in the machine.