The what?

The clip is an amateur video of a woman with a messy ponytail, her face turned away from the camera. I can see a mark of flour on her cheek the moment before she completely ducks out of the spotlight.

She isn’t what I expected. When ordinary citizens call HRSP, it usually tells you more about them than about the people they are accusing —they want a conflict resolved, they hold a grudge, they want attention. But my gut tells me that’s not the case here.

Perhaps Genevra will turn up a hit after all. If Sage Singer can surprise me once, maybe she can do it again.

• • •

My car has, I am sure, the world’s last eight-track cartridge player. As I sit in traffic on the Beltway, I listen to Bread and Chicago. I like to pretend that everyone in all the cars around me is listening to eight-tracks, too, that the years have been rolled back to a simpler time. I realize how strange this is, given how much smaller the world has become as a result of technology and how my office has benefited from it. Even better, having an eight-track player isn’t just strange anymore; it’s retro.

I’m thinking of this, and whether I should tell my blind date that I’m so tragically hip I buy my music on eBay instead of iTunes. The last time I went out (a colleague who set me up with his wife’s cousin) I spent the whole dinner talking about the Aleksandras Lileikis case, and the woman begged a headache before dessert and took the Metro home. The truth is, I’m lousy with small talk. I can discuss the fine points of the Darfur genocide, but the majority of Americans probably can’t even tell you the country where that’s taking place. (It’s Sudan, FYI.) On the other hand, I can’t talk football, or tell you the plot of the last novel I read. I don’t know who’s dating whom in Hollywood. And I don’t really care. There are so many things in the world considerably more important.

I check the name of the restaurant against the note in my Black-Berry calendar and walk inside. I can tell it’s one of those places where they serve “precious” food—appetizers the size of a mushroom cap, unpronounceable ingredients listed for each menu item that make you wonder if someone sits around making these up: cod semen and wild-fennel pollen; beef cheeks, meringue grits, ash vinaigrette.

When I give the maître d’ my name, he leads me to a table in the rear of the dining room, a place so dark I wonder if I’ll even be able to tell if my date is attractive. She is already seated, and as my eyes adjust to the lack of light I notice that yes, she’s cute, except for her hair. It’s styled with a big pouf on the top, as if she’s trying to fashionably mask encephalitis. “You must be Leo,” she says, smiling. “I’m Irene.”

Дата добавления: 2015-10-21