They went out for Ukrainian food, which Perry had never had before, but the crepes and the blood sausage were tasty enough. Mostly, though, he was paying attention to Hilda, who was running down her war stories from the Multiple Origami fundraiser. There were funny ones, sad ones, scary ones, triumphant ones.
Every one of her stories reminded him of one of his own. She was an organizer and so was he and they’d been through practically the same shit. They drank gallons of coffee afterward, getting chucked out when the restaurant closed and migrating to a cafe on the main drag where they had low tables and sofas, and they never stopped talking.
“You know,” Hilda said, stretching and yawning, “it’s coming up on four AM.”
“No way,” he said, but his watch confirmed it. “Christ.” He tried to think of a casual way of asking her to sleep with him. For all their talking, they’d hardly touched on romance—or maybe there’d been romance in every word.
“I’ll walk you to your hotel,” she said.
“Hey, that’s really nice of you,” he said. His voice sounded fakey and forced in his ears. All of a sudden, he wasn’t tired at all, instead his heart was hammering in his chest and his blood sang in his ears.
There was hardly any talk on the way back to the hotel, just the awareness of her steps and his in time with one another over the cold late-winter streets. No traffic at that hour, and hardly a sound from any of the windows they passed. The town was theirs.
At the door to his hotel—another stack of the ubiquitous capsules, these geared to visiting parents—they stopped. They were looking at one another like a couple of googly-eyed kids at the end of a date in a sitcom.
“Um, what’s your major?” he said.
“Pure math,” she said.
“I think I know what that is,” he said. It was freezing out on the street. “Theory, right?”
“Pure math as opposed to applied math,” she said. “Do you really care about this?”
“Um,” he said. “Well, yes. But not very much.”
“I’ll come into your hotel room, but we’re not having sex, OK?”
“OK,” he said.
There was room enough for the two of them in the capsule, but only just. These were prefabbed in bulk and they came in different sizes—in the Midwest they were large, the ones stacked up in San Francisco parking spots were small. Still, he and Hilda were almost in each other’s laps, and he could smell her, feel wisps of her hair tickling his ear.
“You’re really nice,” he said. Late at night, his ability to be flippant evaporated. He was left with simple truths, simply declared. “I like you a lot.”
“Well then you’ll have to come back to Madison and check in on the ride, won’t you?”
“Um,” he said. He had a planning meeting with Luke and the rest of his gang the next day, then he was supposed to be headed for Omaha, where Tjan had set up another crew for him to speak to. At this rate, he would get back to Florida some time in June.
“Perry, you’re not a career activist, are you?”
“Nope,” he said. “I hadn’t really imagined that there was such a thing.”
“My parents. Both of them. Here’s what being a career activist means: you are on the road most of the time. When you get on the road, you meet people, have intense experiences with them—like going to war or touring with a band. You fall in love a thousand times. And then you leave all those people behind. You get off a plane, turn some strangers into best friends, get on a plane and forget them until you come back into town, and then you take it all back up again.
“If you want to survive this, you’ve got to love that. You’ve got to get off a plane, meet people, fall in love with them, treasure every moment, and know that moments are all you have. Then you get on a plane again and you love them forever. Otherwise, every new meeting is sour because you know how soon it will end. It’s like starting to say your summer-camp goodbyes before you’ve even unpacked your duffel-bag. You’ve got to embrace—or at least forget—that every gig will end in a day or two.”
Perry took a moment to understand this, swallowed a couple times, then nodded.