The First Slip

It did not happen again right away, which was, Iyla would later think, the cleverest thing about it. If the room had thinned a second time inside the next ten minutes, she would have packed up her things and gone to a doctor, or at least to a different café. But it didn't. The espresso machine resumed its feline complaints. The crypto men resolved their argument by both being wrong, loudly. Footnote was three blocks away, presumably asleep on a Heyer. Nothing, in the great democratic noise of a Saturday afternoon, was paying her any particular attention at all.

So she went back to the book. This was, she would also later think, the second-cleverest thing about it. Because where else was she going to go.

Jane had just begun her walk across the moors. Iyla knew this walk; she had taken it, in her way, four times before. She knew the stiles and the bracken and the specific texture of Charlotte Brontë's weather, which was always more honest than her plotting. She let herself sink into it the way she sank into a hot bath — by degrees, complaining slightly, and then all at once.

The wind came up off the page first. That was how she described it to herself afterward, when she was being careful with her words; at the time she didn't describe it at all, because describing requires a step back, and there was no step back to take. The wind came up off the page, and it smelled of wet heather and peat smoke, and it was cold in the particular way of English cold, which is a damp insinuation rather than an honest bite. Her left hand, the one not holding the pen, felt it first. Then her cheek. Then the small triangle of skin at her collarbone where her sweater had slipped, and which the café had absolutely not been blowing on a moment before.

She looked up — or thought she did; the looking up was the wrong direction, she understood later, the way in dreams you sometimes try to run and find your legs have been reassigned — and the café was there, around the edges, the way a frame is there around a painting you have stopped registering as framed. In the middle, where the book had been, there was a long grey slope of ground going down to a stone wall, and beyond the wall a road, and on the road a figure walking, small and dark and certain. The figure was not Jane. Iyla knew this immediately, with the unembarrassed clarity of dreams: the figure was just a woman walking, the way a book gives you a woman walking before it tells you her name, a placeholder shape into which the reader is invited to pour herself.

Iyla poured.

She was on the road. The road was real in the way the wobble of her café table was real — not pleasantly, not unpleasantly, just incontestably; a fact your body confirmed without asking permission of your mind. Her shoes — she looked down; she had not been wearing shoes worth looking down at, she had been wearing the soft battered things she wore to read in — were now half-laced boots, and the laces were wet. The hem of something heavier than her sweater dragged against her calves. The air did the thing air does on moors, which is to be everywhere at once and also coming specifically from behind you, and she felt her hair lift off the back of her neck and understood, with a small interior lurch that was not fear but the cousin of fear, that she had hair long enough to lift, which she did not, in the café, have.

Far off, across the slope, someone was calling a name. Not loudly. The way you call a name when you have already given up on being heard and are calling now mostly for the comfort of having called. Jane. Jane. It came across the heather thin and stripped, and Iyla felt — felt, with her whole chest, the way you feel a chord in a dark room — the specific human ache of a man who had ruined his life and was hoping, against the grain of everything he knew about the world, that the universe might extend him one undeserved courtesy.

Telepathy, she thought. Or its honest cousin. Oh.

It was the oh that did it. The oh was a thought, and the thought was hers, and the having of it pulled some small thread she had not known was attached to her. The road tugged. She tugged back, by accident, because thinking had been the wrong move; thinking had reminded her body that it was somewhere else. The moors went transparent. The wind went away first, then the smell, then the long grey slope, then the woman walking, who looked up at the last instant — Iyla would swear to this later, when she was being honest with herself, which was about half the time — and did not seem surprised to see her go.

The café snapped back the way a rubber band snaps back, which is to say painfully and at the place you were not expecting. Iyla was sitting at her table. Her tea was cold. Her pen was bleeding a small blue lake into the margin of page two hundred and something, because her hand had gone slack and forgotten its job. The crypto men were now discussing real estate. Brangela's drink was getting called for the third time.

She did not move for a long moment. She was inventorying. Hair: shoulder length, as it had been that morning. Shoes: the soft battered things. Hem: jeans, dry. Cheek: warm, café-warm, the warmth of a room with too many bodies in it and a heater that didn't know when to quit. The triangle of skin at her collarbone was no colder than the rest of her. She lifted her left hand and held it in front of her face and looked at it the way you look at a hand after you have hit your thumb with something, expecting damage and finding, irritatingly, none.

"Okay," she said, under her breath, to no one. "Okay."

She had not slept well. This was true; it was almost always true, and was therefore the kind of fact that could be made to carry a great deal of explanatory weight without complaining. She had not slept well, and she had been reading the same scene for the fourth time in her life, and she was the sort of reader who, by her own proud admission, did not read silently. Of course she had felt the wind. Of course she had heard the calling. That was reading. That was what reading was for. People who didn't feel the wind off the page were the same people who bought four thrillers without looking at them, and Iyla was not those people, and being not-those-people was, frankly, the central organizing principle of her personality.

A daydream. A very good one. The kind a person should be quietly proud of, and tell no one about, because telling people about your daydreams was the fastest way to learn that no one's daydreams were as interesting as their own, which was a depressing fact about the species that she preferred not to confirm on a Saturday.

She capped her pen. She uncapped it. She looked down at the margin, at the blue lake she had bled into the paper, and at the word telepathy? a few lines above it, and at the smaller we'll come back to this, and she felt, very faintly, the way her hair had lifted off the back of a neck that, in this room, in this chair, did not have hair long enough to lift.

"Daydream," she said, out loud this time, and the barista glanced over, and Iyla pretended to be reading.

She was reading. She was absolutely reading. She turned the page, with great and deliberate ordinariness, and she did not look at the margin again, and she certainly, certainly did not write what she was thinking, which was: the woman on the road saw me leave.

She did not write it. She thought it so hard her pen twitched, and she did not write it, and she sat in the loud ambient café with her cold tea and her bleeding book, and she told herself, with the firm patient voice she used on herself in difficult weather, that nothing had happened. Nothing at all had happened. She had simply, for a moment, paid attention.

Which was, Mr. Behr would have said, if she had been brave enough to ask him, exactly the problem.