“Hear that clicking? That low hum?”
“Look, I don’t need a blow-by-blow about your cab,” Chris said. “I just need you to drive it. If we lose the bike, we’re in a mess.”
“Not me. I’m not in a mess.”
“I don’t have my wallet. If we lose the bike, you don’t get paid.”
Even if true, which it was not, this was an empty threat; he could pay with his phone, obviously, although this boomer driver might not know that. Chris had merely wanted to remind the driver that he was a, not i, and needed to shut up and do his job. A sullen silence briefly reassured Chris until he realized that a had signaled a lane change and was exiting the highway. “What the fuck are you doing?” he roared. The bike had become difficult to see.
“No money, no ride.”
“Of course I can pay you. I don’t want to, but I can.”
But a schism had occurred between a and i.
a ≠ i
a ←→ i
i
And so it was that Chris found himself alone on a sidewalk beside a stranger’s suitcase under a blazing sunset in what he recognized now as Daly City. He permitted himself a howl of frustration, prompting wary looks from commuters leaving the BART station. Then he calmed down. After all, he wasn’t the one with the problem, she was. Chris hadn’t spent a dime, the suitcase was in good order, and according to his phone, he was eight blocks from his grandmother’s house. She’d been begging him to come to dinner, and he was starving. Abuela often played chess in the evenings, but a quick exchange of texts confirmed that she was home, moments away from serving chicken stew to Chris’s cousin Gabriella, who was visiting from Fresno. This last bit of news slightly dampened Chris’s triumph; Cousin Gabby didn’t like him. Still, the good fortune of his soft landing buoyed him over eight hilly blocks, dragging the dysfunctional suitcase past identical houses whose individuality came in the form of extreme paint choices—hot pink, sno-cone blue—their psychedelia magnified by the sunset.
Abuela met him at the door of her gray-green house and folded him into a fragile embrace mentholated by the cigarettes she still smoked at eighty-six, despite haranguing from Chris’s father. Slender and delicate, she wore only Celine, elegant knits in blue and beige, thin gold chains at her neck. Her hair, from which any rumor of gray had been snuffed, was looped and pinned to the back of her head. She played chess every day, usually all day, and believed in sitting down to battle in full regalia. As a girl in Honduras, she’d been a champion, but as a mother of five in a hostile land, widowed at thirty-five, she’d had to give it up. Only when Chris’s father, her youngest, was in high school, “ashamed to come home,” as Abuela often complained, did she return to the game, and over time, her tournament winnings allowed her to quit working for the city and buy her small house. Then, in a senior swim-yoga class at the YMCA, Abuela became friendly with a woman whose son was involved with an alternate currency. She began, through him, to invest some of her chess winnings—and finally, her whole net worth—in Bitcoin. She’d cashed out at the top of the market, netting untold millions （untold because she would not tell）， some portion of which she’d sunk, anonymously at auction, into a painting by Piet Mondrian. To Chris, the artwork looked unexceptional: white squares and blocks of primary color. But for Abuela, its geometry was a bottomless source of meditative renewal. “When I am lost here, I take myself there,” she was fond of saying. “In two dimensions, problems are simplified.” The Mondrian hung, uninsured, in her living room; even alarmed, her house had been deemed too vulnerable by every actuary she consulted. Abuela refused to move.“These people don’t know a Mondrian from a meringue,” Chris had heard her say of her neighbors. “Look at the way they’ve painted their houses!”
Chris’s father refused to sit in a room with an uninsured Mondrian, and this standoff between mother and son meant that for two years, they’d gone exclusively to restaurants when his father visited from New York—often with Chris’s stepmother, Lupa, a wildlife photographer specializing in insects.