I shook my head. “That’s it.”
It was at this point that something strange happened.
Steffi Graf lost the 1991 Wimbledon final.
This was impossible.
I’d run that particular match over in my mind hundreds of times. I see every point as it happens, very clearly, without exception. Steffi Graf wins. She won. It’s a fact of history.
This had never happened to me before. Every match I’d ever re-created mentally had played out exactly as it happened in real life. I was never a single point off. I was shaken. My hands began to tremble.
“Are you okay?” the woman asked.
“I’m fine,” I lied, and did my best to compose myself. “Do you think Mr. Scarpio is coming?”
“I don’t think so, but if he does, please tell him to call home immediately.” And with that, she stood up and walked out of the diner.
I watched her cross the street and enter the arcade.
I’d walk over later to see if the mysterious woman said or did anything interesting, but I had to do something first. I went back over that tennis match in my mind, at high speed.
Steffi Graf won, just like she was supposed to.
I relaxed a little bit and ordered some food.
I was starving.
* * *
—
“Hey, you’re the meatball sub guy’s friend.”
I took the last bite of my three-cheese omelet and looked up into the familiar wide grayish-green eyes of the server who had shown a great deal of patience dealing with Scarpio yelling lines from the film Point Break, and who had seen that patience rewarded with an enormous tip.
“Guilty,” I said.
“I have something for you,” she said, then walked away from the booth toward the back of the restaurant.
I had no idea what she was talking about.
She returned about a minute later and handed me Alan Scarpio’s phone. “You left this last night,” she said, then hurried off to help another patron.
Either Scarpio accidentally left his phone in the booth after he’d played me the rhubarb sounds, or it had somehow slipped out of his pocket.
I stared at the cute dog photo for a moment, then realized his home screen wasn’t locked. If I wanted to, I could access Alan Scarpio’s phone with one simple swipe.
A few minutes later I called the server over and explained that the phone belonged to my friend, and I would do my best to let him know it was here. She told me she’d put it in the back office for safekeeping.
Once again I called the number that Alan Scarpio had given me, but this time there was no answer, and no voicemail option.
I waited until I saw the mystery woman leave the arcade, and then ran across the street to ask Chloe if the woman had mentioned anything about Alan Scarpio.
* * *
—
Chloe and I had almost gotten together once—or at least, that’s the way I choose to remember it.
It was a week or two after we’d met. Both of us were single at the time.
A mutual friend had an art opening, and Chloe and I were there, along with a handful of other people we knew from the arcade.
I had no idea how she felt about me, but I’d been attracted to Chloe from the moment we met. She was smart and funny, and into a lot of the same terminally uncool shit I was. And even though she might come across as somebody who doesn’t give a fuck, I could tell that she did. She gave all the fucks. She was deeply engaged and cared about a lot of things, you just needed to take the time to get to know her.
Chloe referred to herself as a “recovering musician.” She’d lived a completely different life from the ages of sixteen to nineteen as the singer and principal songwriter in a semipopular indie rock band.
Like Pavement with “Cut Your Hair” or Radiohead with “Creep,” Chloe’s band, Peagles, had a hit single that overshadowed a critically acclaimed full-length album. That song was called “MPDG （Manic Pixie Dreamgirl）。”
Chloe smashes the absolute shit out of a ukulele in the video. It’s really cool.
Although Peagles released only one album and an EP before they broke up, “MPDG” was a big hit, and that song’s ubiquity in movies and television shows meant that, unless she really wanted to, Chloe didn’t need to work for the next couple of decades.
* * *
—
After the gallery show, a couple of our friends suggested we head back to my place for a drink. My apartment was not only large and roommate-free, it was also right around the corner, and I always had booze.
There were six of us there, but I spent most of the night talking to Chloe and her friend Amanda. It was a great conversation. We talked about games, movies, comics, television, and whatever else popped into our heads. By the time I finally glanced over at the clock, it was one in the morning, and everybody else had gone home.