But unlike Regan, whom he had not yet met, Aldo could be patient with the concept of nothing. Emptiness repulsed Regan, filling her with abject terror, but the concept of zero was something that Aldo had come to accept. In his field of expertise, resolution was difficult （if not fully impossible） to come by. Answers, if they were to arrive at all, took time, which was why Aldo’s specialty was constancy. He had a talent for persisting, which his medical records would confirm.
The night before he met her, Aldo had resigned himself to the fact that an epiphany might never find him, or that it wouldn’t matter if it did. That was the risk with time, that knowing things or not knowing them could change from day to day.
On that day, Aldo believed a certain set of things wholly and concretely: That two and two were four. That of the lean proteins, chicken was most accessible. That he was trapped within the constraints of a maybe-hexagonal structure of spacetime from which he might never escape. That tomorrow would look like yesterday; would look like three Fridays from now; would look like last month. That he would never be satisfied. That in two weeks, predictably unpredictable, it might rain, and therefore in changing, everything would remain the same.
The next day he would feel differently.
THE NARRATOR, A FUTURE VERSION OF ALDO DAMIANI THAT DOES NOT YET EXIST: When you learn a new word, you suddenly see it everywhere. The mind comforts itself by believing this to be coincidence but isn’t—it’s ignorance falling away. Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.
Someday, Regan will tell Aldo: It’s very human what you do, and at first, he’ll think, No, not true, because bees.
But then eventually he’ll understand. Because until that night, Aldo had been comfortable with nothing, but he would eventually learn because of her: It isn’t constancy that keeps us alive, it’s the progression we use to move us.
Because everything is always the same until, very suddenly, it isn’t.
THE NARRATOR: If I’d known I would meet Charlotte Regan in the morning, maybe I would have gotten some fucking sleep.
* * *
IN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM was a young man sitting cross-legged on the floor. He was sketching something in a notebook. Regan was initially distracted by his activity （painstaking） rather than his appearance （obscured from her position in the doorway）， but one thing led to another and eventually it became unavoidable to conclude he’d been given a sublimely terrible haircut. His hair, a brown-black salute of thick curls, exceeded poor management and elevated, in Regan’s mind, to institutional failure: a flaw in the construction. He kept sweeping parts of it back from his face, which struck Regan as a reflex of annoyance rather than pretension.
Remembering herself, Regan stepped further inside.
“Excuse me, you can’t sit there,” she began to scold, and then faltered, having lost her train of thought upon spotting whatever the man was drawing. Even from a distance, she could see it was a tight, precise geometric pattern, parts of it shaded or blocked out entirely. The whole thing was drawn with lines so consistent and deliberate that the ballpoint tip had dug into the pad below, leaving behind shallow channels and curling the leaf of the page.
“What are you drawing?” she asked him, and he looked up.
His eyes were a hazel dominated identifiably by green, a stark contrast to his skin. They were also slightly vacant, as if he were having some trouble dragging his attention away from something else.
“Hexagons,” he said, and then, with very little pause, “You don’t look like a Charlotte.”
She glanced down at the scripted lettering of her nametag. “I don’t go by Charlotte. Why hexagons?”
“I’m working on something.” He had an interesting voice; sharper than she’d expected, and slightly drier. Regan guessed that if he were to tell a joke, most people in the room would fail to catch it. “Is it even your name?”
“Yes,” she said. “Why would I lie? Also,” she repeated, “you can’t sit here.”
“I don’t know why you’d lie. I just know it doesn’t seem right.”
She opened her mouth to answer, then closed it. She’d always hated giving other people the sensation of being right.
“Why hexagons?” she asked again.
“I’m trying to solve something.” It was a slightly better answer than he’d offered before, though still not particularly illuminating. “It works better if I do something with my hands, and they’re easy to draw. And relevant. I’d smoke,” he remarked tangentially, “but I think that’d be frowned upon in here.”