The Quiet Algorithm of Us

13 Return to the An House

They had not planned this level of progress. Progress is a word for committees anyway; people keep track of pulses. In the doorway of her old room, grown woman and grown man looked at a bed that had handled exams and flu and the night she’d realized galaxies were not interested in her consent.

“I can take the couch,” he said first, because he is not a barbarian. “It is still the same room so your parents can rest easier.”

Translation for the air only: she is twenty-three, I am thirty-five; I am careful with ages and spines; I can hold the line even when the line is under a duvet.

“You could,” she said, and saw the way the day gathered at the corners of his eyes; saw thirty-five and twelve and politics and the habit of weathering. Courage, like timidity, comes in silent envelopes. “Or,” she said, “it would be fine to sleep on the same bed.”

They looked at the dinosaur lamp to break the atmosphere. It looked back as if to say, I have supervised far worse.

“Okay,” he said, voice like someone carrying glassware.

They ran the usual choreography of strangers who are not quite strangers. Toothbrushes. The sacred civility of averting eyes when necessary. A shared decision to fight about the blanket temperature some scandalous decade from now, not tonight. Outside, the rain appointed itself ally. The storm wrote a steady essay on the roof about reasonableness.

Her room smelled faintly of old paper and the shampoo of girlhood. A calendar from university still hung with a self-satisfied April. A small stuffed rabbit remained at parade rest on the shelf because some things refuse to retire. The bed was honest, the sheets clean, the pillows diplomatic.

They lay side by side with the careful cheer of astronauts. A tidy half-meter of treaty remained in the middle. On her side, the dinosaur lamp sent a cone of warm yellow that made the room taste like biscotti. On his side, a small nightlight shaped like a moon switched on out of habit and refused to be bullied.

“Tell me something unproductive,” she said into the soft.

“The maple at home,” he said, “found a way to look smug.”

“It does that,” she said. “He Shun indulges it.”

He turned his head on the pillow. Her profile in that light belonged to someone who knew where all her pens live and what all her knives are for. The dimples had adapted to the lighting conditions and were now functioning as rogue satellites, sending signals he refused to misread.

“Tell me something unproductive,” he asked back.

“When I was ten,” she said, “I tried to teach the rabbit on the shelf to sit for exams.”

“How did it do,” he asked.

“Poorly,” she said. “It refuses to show work.”

They lay there and let the old house’s rituals adopt them. Pipes sang to each other like monks. The stair creaked exactly once to test discipline. Somewhere, Yulan folded laundry with a compassion that borders on policy. Jianming set an alarm and then turned it off because alarms do not outrank fatherhood. The storm pulled its blanket up.

Her voice arrived again, light as a spoon. “I used to count backwards from a hundred to fall asleep.”

He considered that. “That’s taxation, not rest.”

“I know better now,” she said. “I label and breathe.”

He exhaled in the new language of his week. “Ranran,” he said. First time in this room. Not the last. The name fit like a borrowed sweater that somehow belongs to you.