Chapter 17
Chapter 17: The Real Question
He stayed the extra week.
This was a logistical fact that became, over seven days, considerably more than logistical. He moved from the conference hotel to a smaller place near Kensington Market — there was an apartment rental above a restaurant, the kind of short-term let that these neighbourhoods still had if you knew where to look, which Priya knew because Priya knew everything about the city's practical geography. He had a kitchen and a small table by the window where he could work, and he worked in the mornings and Nisha worked in the mornings, and they met in the afternoons with the specific ease of two people who had established a rhythm faster than either of them had expected.
She showed him the city.
She had not, in five years of living here properly, thought much about the specific quality of Toronto as a thing to be shown to someone. She knew it as a landscape she moved through — the studio, the coffee shops, Priya's apartment in the Annex, the west end where she'd grown up, the specific geography of her own life. Showing it to him made it different. She found herself paying attention to it the way you paid attention to something you were giving to someone.
She showed him the AGO on a Tuesday afternoon, specifically the Canadian art, specifically the room with the Group of Seven landscapes she'd been walking through since she was a child and had never once thought about as a design reference and now kept thinking about in terms of the new game's visual language. He stood in front of a Lawren Harris and was silent for two minutes and then said: "This is the tidal system. The way the light works. That's what I was trying to build."
She looked at the painting. She thought about Undertow and the coastal town and the water moving. "Yes," she said. "That's it exactly."
They ate dinner at Ancora on the Wednesday.
She hadn't planned this. Priya had, which meant Priya had made the reservation in her own name and then casually suggested the restaurant and then watched Nisha figure out what she'd done and not apologised.
"It's a good restaurant," Priya said, in the taxi on the way there, before Nisha said anything.
"You made the reservation before you suggested it," Nisha said.
"I made the reservation after I thought about it for three minutes and decided it was the right call. The occasion warranted it." Priya looked at her. "It's a restaurant, Nisha. Not a mystical event."
"It's the restaurant."
"It's a restaurant. One of many in this city. It will serve you excellent food and you will have a nice evening with a man who was seated at the wrong table there five years ago and turned out not to be wrong at all." She paused. "The narrative arc is satisfying. I'm leaning into it."
Nisha had looked out the taxi window. She had thought: Priya is right. She usually is.
They were a party of three — Priya had inserted herself into the reservation with the authority of someone who had been waiting five years for this dinner and was going to be at it. She sat across from both of them with the expression of a person at the theatre, taking everything in. She asked Jamie questions about Bright Fault with the specific thoroughness of someone running an evaluation, and Jamie answered them with the patient honesty she'd been watching all week, and somewhere between the appetizers and the main course Priya delivered her verdict with the subtlety of a thunderclap: she stopped asking evaluative questions and started talking to him the way she talked to people she'd already decided about.
Nisha watched this happen. She caught Priya's eye.
Priya raised her eyebrows slightly: well?
Nisha looked back at Jamie, who was in the middle of a story about the Undertow movement system that had somehow become very funny, and thought: yes. Obviously yes.
She looked at the restaurant. It was the same warm light. The same quality of a Thursday evening, though it was Wednesday. The table was not the window table they'd been at before — Nisha had checked the floor plan before they came, which she had not told anyone — but it was near it, and the view was the same King Street, and the restaurant was doing what it had always done: being the specific kind of place that understood it was where people's evenings could mean something.
She thought about order the wine and the feeling of a decision made and the specific courage of that twenty-two-year-old woman saying we'll find out.
She thought: we found out.
On the last morning before he flew back to Vancouver, she woke early.
Not with the anxiety of a thing ending — she had been careful about that, had been watching for it, had found that it wasn't there. The week had been good in the way that things were good when they were the beginning of something rather than the whole of it. She knew what came next: phone calls, a flight to Vancouver in November that they'd planned in outline, the work of two people who were figuring out a geography.
She was, she had discovered, not afraid of the work.
She made coffee — her apartment's coffee, which was considerably better than the hotel machine — and sat at the kitchen table and looked at her city in the early October light. The leaves had begun to turn since the convention; she'd watched it happening from the studio window all week, the specific reddening of the maples, the quality of light that changed as the angle dropped.
She thought about the new game.
She had been thinking about it differently since the week. The sound engineer, the recording studio, the voices from another timeline — she'd had the structure but the emotional problem at the centre had been provisional. She'd known it was about something but hadn't known what, exactly. She'd told herself it was about finding someone new and that had been true and she'd known it and hadn't admitted it, which was, she recognised, the same thing she'd done with Signal.
The emotional problem at the centre of the new game was: the voices in the tapes were from someone who had been looking for the protagonist the whole time, in the other timeline, through all the wrong recordings — and the protagonist had to decide whether to answer. Not whether the someone was real. Not whether the message was worth receiving. Whether she was willing to be found.
She thought: yes. That's it. She thought: that's the game.
She got up and found the notebook she kept for design notes — a Field Notes notebook, actually, which Jamie had left a spare of on her kitchen table two days ago with no comment and which she'd been using without remarking on it — and she wrote it down. The full shape of it, as it had arrived. Ten minutes, longhand, the kind of clarity that came when you'd been circling something long enough that it finally said its name.
She was at the end of the page when she heard him up in the other room.
He appeared in the kitchen doorway in the early morning with the particular quality of a person who had been in her apartment for four of the seven extra days and had, without either of them formally acknowledging it, stopped being a guest in the way guests were. He made coffee without asking where anything was because he'd learned where everything was. He looked at her across the kitchen with the warm morning expression.
"You're working," he said.
"I figured out the new game," she said.
"Tell me."
She told him. He sat down across from her with his coffee and listened with the full attention she had stopped trying to account for and had started to simply receive, and when she finished he was quiet for a moment and then said: "The protagonist deciding whether to be found. That's the whole thing."
"That's the whole thing," she said.
He looked at her with the expression that meant he understood what she was telling him, in the register beyond the game design. "She says yes," he said. "Eventually."
"Yes," Nisha said. "She does."
"How does it feel?" he said. "Knowing the shape of it."
She thought about this honestly. "Like the beginning," she said. "Which is the best part."
"I know." He turned his coffee cup. "I'm glad you found it."
She looked at him. She thought about all the things she'd found this week — not all of them new, some of them old, some of them things she'd been carrying and had now put down and replaced with something better.
"I'm glad you stayed the extra week," she said.
"So am I." He paused. "I'm going to miss this building."
"This building is extremely ordinary."
"It has a kitchen table where you figured out your next game," he said. "And very good coffee. And you." He looked at her steadily. "Especially the last one."
She looked at him. She thought: there it is. Still there. The warmth, the attention, the full-version openness. The person who showed up and stayed.
"November," she said.
"November," he agreed. "I'll book the flight today."
"And December I'll come to Vancouver," she said. "I want to see where Bright Fault is."
"It's a very ordinary office."
"Your apartment?"
"Also ordinary." He paused. "But it has a good view of the inlet."
"I'll evaluate it."
"I look forward to your evaluation." He finished his coffee. He looked at the clock on the wall. "I should pack."
"You should."
He stood. He looked at her across the kitchen table — at the Field Notes notebook and the coffee and the October light from the window and her, apparently; he looked at her the way he looked at things he was going to remember, with the particular quality of a person taking something in.
She looked back at him.
"This is the beginning," he said.
"Yes," she said. "It is."
"I'm glad it took five years."
She raised her eyebrows. "I'm not."
"I know. But—" He paused. "We both made things out of it. The games. We both built something from the gap." He paused. "I don't know that we would have made the same things without it."
She thought about Watershed and Signal and the message mechanics and Undertow and the tidal town. She thought about the games they had made about the same space from opposite directions, and the convention that had put them in the same room, and the way the misunderstanding had been its own kind of work — not wasted, not gone, but present in every game they'd made and some of what was good in them.
"That's an extremely generous read of the situation," she said.
"It's what it is, though."
She thought about this for a long moment. She thought: he's right, and I'm not going to say so, and he knows I'm thinking it.
"Pack," she said. "You have a flight."
He picked up his coffee cup to rinse it — he always rinsed things, she'd noticed, the reliable domestic consideration of a person who had been looking after himself for a long time and did it well — and crossed the kitchen, and as he passed her he leaned down and kissed her once, briefly, on the side of her head.
"November," he said.
"November," she said.
He went to pack. She sat at the kitchen table with the notebook and the coffee and the October light and the new game already beginning to grow in the direction she'd been heading all along.