Free The Unknowns by Gabriel Roth Page B

got one,” she says. “Ready?”
    “I am so ready,” I say.
    The rest of the evening glides along as if on rails. At some point we finish the drinks and effortlessly escalate to dinner. (“So are we gonna get dinner?” I say. “Hell yes,” she says, and we nod at each other to say
Nice job
.) In the restaurant, as the hostess leads us to the table, I set my hand lightly on the small of Maya’s back to indicate that she should go first, and this gentle first attempt at physical contact comes off without a hitch. It’s more crowded than the bar, but we’re off in a corner and the walls are hung with heavy velvet curtains. We sit down and, perhaps in response to my boldness with the hand-on-the-back thing, Maya throws me a fastball.
    “So did you hook up with Lauren?” she asks.
    “I did,” I say. “I hooked up with her.” I can handle this.
    “But you didn’t want to pursue it?”
    “I guess not. I don’t think either of us really saw it as something to pursue. Is she… did you talk to her about it?”
    “Not really,” she says. “I mean, I didn’t get the blow-by-blow.” She does not grin saucily as she says this.
    After the appetizers have been cleared I excuse myself, walk confidently to the bathroom, lock the door behind me, and allow my limbs to go slack, rolling my head alternately clockwise and counterclockwise as the dopamine of infatuation sloshes around with the alcohol in my brain. In the safety of the burgundy restroom, decorated with photographs of tailfinned American cars and decaying neocolonial palaces, I look back in wonder at the past two and a half hours. How did I learn to do this, and will I be able to sustain it when I get back to the table? At any moment the waiter will bring my plate of medium-rare steak strips with onions and potatoes. This infusion of protein and salt is exactly what my body wants; how thoughtful, how prescient of my past self to arrange it! While urinating I look in the mirror on the left wall and only half recognize myself: a smile is organizing my features into their most harmoniousproportions, and my usually sallow cheeks are flushed with beer and happiness. I pull off a couple sheets of toilet paper and dab at my forehead to take the shine off, carefully keeping the stream aimed into the toilet bowl.
    An hour later, we are figuring out what happens next. Part of me is convinced that there will never be a better time for us to have sex; another part desperately wants to get away before I can screw up. Of course, it’s not my decision.
    “So,” we say to each other outside the restaurant. Then she says, “I should be getting home,” and smiles beautifully. “Walk me to my car.”
    We pass the assortment of pedestrians—after-dinner yuppies, Latino adolescents, homeless alcoholics—who make up the Mission’s thriving urban street culture. A bearded panhandler with crimson skin mumbles at us, and some suicidal ebullience tempts me to ostentatiously drop a twenty-dollar bill into his Styrofoam cup, but I don’t, because tonight my superpowers are strong enough to defeat even my own personality.
    Here’s her car. It’s a red Acura, old, kind of beat-up, totally unexceptional, except that it’s hers and thus imbued with magic. I try to memorize it, as if it were a clue. “So this is it,” she says, and I turn to her, heart pounding, and our eyes lock and the world pours itself through a funnel and everything but us is revealed to be an illusion. Neither of us flinches. We hang here long enough to etch the moment onto the surfaces of our brains, so that in every one of the infinite possible futures we will each be able to remember exactly what the other looked like in the moment right before we started kissing, when we had no inkling of the world of trouble to come.

4
    Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers, programs written for them usually did not work.
    —Rodney Brooks,
Programming in Common LISP
    THE DESKS IN MY