He moistened them once, eyeing something that wasn’t quite her face, and then his teeth scraped lightly against the swell of his bottom lip.
“Bye,” said his mouth, and then he was gone.
Regan turned to the vacancy where Aldo had been, frowning to herself. Suddenly the room seemed less quiet, buzzing with disturbance, and she felt her mood adjust to the new frequency, deciding to opt for something else. Contemporary art, maybe. Pop art. She could stare at the bright colors of commercial vacancy for a while to find her footing. She had at least ten minutes left of her break, she thought, checking her watch and reacquainting herself with time.
Then she turned and walked out, the moment temporarily over.
* * *
ALDO HAD CONSIDERED THE PROSPECT of the multiverse many times, given his work, but regularly felt there was something unnecessarily cerebral about it, and also slightly unsatisfying. For example, if, in the armory, he had been holding the innumerable threads of what could come next—if he had simply chosen one of them while other versions of him carried on relentlessly elsewhere—then time remained forcefully linear. What good was choice if he could still only have one outcome at a time? No, the better option wasn’t multiple Aldos talking to multiple Charlotte Regans. It was one Aldo, and one Charlotte Regan, and both of them encountering each other on some sort of geometrically predictable loop.
His phone buzzed in his pocket as he left and he slid it from his pocket, pausing on the steps of the Art Institute.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Rinaldo,” Masso said, “where are you today?”
“The museum.” Aldo glanced over his shoulder, eyeing where he’d been. “The armory.”
“Ah. Productive today?”
Aldo considered it.
It wasn’t as if Charlotte Regan had interrupted him, necessarily. She had, of course, but not in any sort of obtrusive way. She was actually very quiet. Not her voice （she had a perfectly audible one） but her motions, her questions. He supposed some people might have called it elegance or poise, but he had never really understood those terms. It was more like there was a sliver of space between him and the outside world and she had unassumingly filled it, less like a piece fitting into the vacancy of another and more like liquid being poured into a cup.
“About average,” Aldo said.
“Well, it’s Friday, Rinaldo. Are you doing anything today?”
The gym was always quieter on Friday nights, which Aldo liked.
“Just the usual. Class this afternoon, and I have some work to do this weekend.” Exams to grade, which was never as bad as the outcry that followed. He’d also have to prepare a lecture for the following Monday.
He doubted his father actually thought he was going to do anything out of the ordinary; more likely, Masso was doing him the favor of reminding him what day of the week it was. All of this was Masso’s way of checking up on him, and Aldo did his father the favor of needing it. It calmed them both.
“And where are we today, Rinaldo?”
Aldo thought of the slope of Charlotte Regan’s hips. Her dress had an asymmetrical hem, full of sharp, neat lines. It suited her, seeing how she was also tall and full of lines. She reminded him of the buildings that had been constructed along the river. They were mirrors of the landscape, beautiful and sleek and discreetly reflective of the water itself.
“In a city,” Aldo said.
“A big city?”
“Yes.”
“And are we lost?”
“No.” Just dwarfed. “Hey Dad,” Aldo said, suddenly remembering something. “How long do people usually go to prison for counterfeit?”
“What, like bills? Counterfeit bills?”
He hadn’t thought to ask that, but he assumed so. “Yeah.”
“I don’t know,” Masso said. “Hard to imagine people still manage it.”
“True.” Masso sounded distracted. “Everything okay over there?”
“Ah … yeeeees, nothing to worry about.”
Aldo put on his helmet, throwing a leg over his bike. “Yeah?”
“Just … a shipment didn’t come this morning.” Masso barked something at someone, then returned to the phone call. “Where were we?”
“Dad,” Aldo said, “if you’re busy, you don’t have to call.”
“I know, I know. I like to.”
“I know you do.” Aldo looked up, a shadow coming over him. “I better go, Dad. It’s going to rain soon.”
By the time Masso and Aldo said their goodbyes, a few sprinkles had started. A Chicago autumn typically meant that sprinkles would rapidly become torrential rain. Aldo, who had grown up in the suburbs of Los Angeles and hadn’t known until moving to the Midwest that rain was something that could occur horizontally, was never adequately prepared. Maybe in the world where he’d asked Charlotte Regan to have coffee with him （something he didn’t drink and probably wouldn’t enjoy）， he had also taken the bus.